Everybody knows about widespread black educational failure but nobody is supposed to mention it. Are we really sure that that helps anyone? It sound like the view of sex in Victorian England -- an era with an immense prostitution industry. Covering things up can just lead to worse abuses."Sometimes, under the crush of deadline, we publish a story that could have been worded better. If the topic is particularly complex, like the federal No Child Left Behind education-accountability law, our task becomes even more difficult.
We simply blew it on one such story Aug. 24, and three readers called us on it.
We reported that seven Southwest Virginia schools failed to make "adequate yearly progress" under the No Child Left Behind Act. The following sentence is what drew the readers' ire, and rightly so: "Virginia Middle School didn't make AYP (adequate yearly progress) because its black students underperformed in their English classes. In addition, the middle school's students with disabilities underperformed in math."
Source
That the original story was written by a black writer is the amusing part, however. It was presumably the blackness of the writer that got it into print in the first place.
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Eh I dunno. The underachievment of students in majority-black schools has been a neo-lib talking point for the better part of a decade and a half. And it was part of the impetus behind NCLB, which was supported by a broad spectrum of politicians and opinion-makers from the far right to the center left. It's not like there's a media blackout on this issue.
ReplyDeleteI also think that it's helpful to layer rhetoric about race with explicit acknowledgments of how tangled up it is with socio-economic factors. Discussing how the two interact has the benefit of (a) being right (b) not lending succor to racists who would try to coopt the rhetoric of those of us who are genuinely concerned that identity-politics based policies and communitarian labor laws have ruined inner city schools.