outliers

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008) is subtitled The Story of Success, because Gladwell sets out to look at successful people, how they achieved that success, and what factors outside their control helped (or hindered) them on the way to success. He looks at professional hockey players and other athletes. He looks at Bill Gates. He looks at school children and lawyers. From my perspective his conclusion is that every successful person has a series of advantages and/or opportunities that don’t come to most of us; there is some unearned, usually structural advantage—often several of advantages—that successful people have that the rest of us don’t. Therefore, Outliers is a thoroughgoing critique of idea that meritocracy exits.

For example, in Canada, where many professional hockey players grow up, children’s hockey is organized by age group. If you will be 12 during the calendar year, whether in January or June or December, you will play in the 12 year-old league. If you turn 12 in December, compared to children born in the first few months of the year, you will be 10 or 12 months behind in development. So, when it comes time to select the best of the 12 year-old league, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage, because you’re likely to be less physically developed than most of your peers. The best of any particular age group tend to get more playing time, more coaching, and just play more hockey. Thus, when you get to the 13 year-old league, not only are you behind your peers physically, but also in terms of experiencing and training. This gap widens at every age group—is it any surprise that most of the Canadian national hockey team is born in the first three months of the year? According to Gladwell, the great majority are.

This is a great illustration of an arbitrary advantage, given to some and not to others, that leads to the difference between success and failure at something, in this case hockey. Gladwell describes similar structural and systemic advantages and disadvantages in all kinds of situations until, after telling a story about a “brilliant immigrant kid [who] overcomes poverty and the Depression, can’t get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability,” he says: “I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story . . . . [S]uccess doesn’t happen that way. Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.” Successful people are “a product of the world in which they grew up.

Gladwell goes further, explicitly critiquing the way our culture clings to “the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we chose to write as a society don’t matter at all,” thereby wasting huge a amount potential talent:

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes and who doesn’t.

Gladwell implicates us all. “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success . . . with a society that provides opportunities for all. ”

Societal responsibility for helping our children succeed and for helping all people realize their potential is an important message. If Gladwell had left I there—pushing us to accept our responsibility and calling out to change the arbitrary nature of success in the current structures—the book would have been a useful and even profound call to improve education and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, rather than change society to acknowledge the talent and skill of more of us, for Gladwell the solution seems to be to deny ones culture in the name of being successful by the standards of our current structures. Looking at Korean Air pilots and their historically disproportionately high crash rate, Gladwell literally argues that “to be a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity,” a deep respect for authority that he admits “runs throughout Korean culture.” Similarly, for Marita, a twelve year-old girl in a special school called KIPP (Knowledege is Power Program) in New York City. “[T]he cultural legacy she has been given does not match her circumstances . . . . Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekend and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace them with KIPP.” That is, Marita needs to give up her culture because her culture isn’t giving her “what she needs.”

This attitude is classic cultural deficit reasoning (see the work of Tara Yosso and my entry on a lecture she gave in San Francisco). The idea, often put forward by well-meaning liberals, is that the poor (usually non-white) unfortunates, who don’t have the advantages that middle-class white kids have, can be saved by assimilating, by learning and adopting white middle-class culture. That this ignores the strengths, abilities, intelligences, and experiences the rest of the world brings to every situation doesn’t seem to register. This perspective looks at what people don’t have (i.e., they don’t have middle-class white culture), rather than what they do have (i.e., cultures and practices and abilities all their own). It also ignores the racism, sexism, classism, and other oppression that people outside dominant groups endure and the way that identity is fundamentally shaped by those forces.

A much better approach would recognize that everyone comes with strengths and weaknesses and would celebrate the incredible diversity of our cultures and abilities. It would foster talents we currently don’t even call talents. Creating true opportunity for more people to be successful in our culture means acknowledging the wealth that all people bring to school and work and politics and life.

Tim Wise on Van Jones’ resignation

No it’s not all about race, but it’s a lot about race. Check out Wise’s writing on the issue--cogent, insightful, and well-researched, as usual.

even babies discriminate

Check out this Newsweek article. Aside from the interesting studies on children and their behavior, the article points to what seems obvious to me, but apparent isn’t to many: white people don’t talk about race enough and pretending that race doesn’t exist as a social reality actually perpetuates its existence.

race matters

Almost a year after Barrack Obama was elected president the debate about what his being the nation’s first biracial president means rages on. Simplifying and generalizing the arguments (always a precarious thing to do): some say it signifies a step beyond race to some place where we do not have to worry about it, where race has nothing to do with how we see and judge people; others admit the importance of Obama’s election, but also speak of the continued racism that people of color face and to statistics about the disproportionate number of people of color living in poverty, failing in our schools, suffering from toxins in their neighborhoods, sitting in prison, and generally dealing with the very real effects of institutional and systemic racism in our society.

In recent weeks the debate was inflamed by the arrest, in his own home, of noted scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who publicly asserted that he had been the victim of racial profiling. The arresting officer denied the idea and refused to apologize, saying he had no reason to do so. The president weighed in; the papers and talk shows are having a field day. Predictably and revealingly, in a poll, about 3/4 of African-Americans said they thought race was a factor in the arrest; 2/3 of whites said it wasn’t; it is the privilege of the over-class to ignore the world in which the under-class lives.

There is hardly a better moment to read Cornell West’s 1993 classic Race Matters. In essays entitled “Nihilism in Black America,” “Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity,” “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” and more, West incisively and profoundly analyzes racism in the U.S. His carefully constructed prose elucidates complex ideas and stimulates further thought. He speaks truth to power in a way that is both provocative and obvious, frequently making me wonder why I hadn’t seen his point before that moment.

Among many, the idea that stands out for me at the moment is that African-Americans are intrinsically part of our national culture. They’ve been on the continent almost as long as white people. Our society has evolved with the contributions of both black and white people. To the extent that there is a “white” culture and a “black” culture (categories that clearly include a great deal of variety and individuality within them), they have evolved together, contributing to one another in both many, many ways. African-Americans are as “American” as the rest of us.

It is obvious to me that, as the title to this book suggests, race still matters in the U.S. and around the world. The sooner that white people in the U.S. accept and publicly acknowledge this reality, the sooner we will be able to take true steps to equality.

small links round up

South Africa Isn’t Post-Racial Either
In a thoughtful essay, Robert Jensen writes about his visit to South Africa, the racism he saw there, and what he learned about confronting it.

The White Supremacist in Us
Rinku Sen, Executive Director of Applied Research Center and Publisher of ColorLines, writes about the connection between recent killings and our white supremacist culture.

Inspired Bicycles – Danny MacAskill 2009
In this video, Danny MacAskill does almost unbelievable things with his bike. There’s some question why he’s still alive.

torturing democracy

Torture is wrong. Our nation and our president should say that and act like we believe it.

Sherry Jones and Carey Murphy have created a documentary called Torturing Democracy reporting on the use of torture by the US government since 9/11. truthout.org has a good entry on the film and on what we should do to move on from the strange and very seriously messed up place the US is now in with regard to torture.

race and recession report

The Applied Research Center has put out a report entitled “Race and Recession: How Inequity Rigged the Economy and how to Change the Rules,” telling the story of the way our current recession disproportionately impacts people of color. The report uncovers root causes of long-term racial inequities that fed into the economic crisis and proposes structural solutions to change a system that threatens future generations.

See a video about the report and down load it at: http://www.arc.org/content/view/726/136/.

the art of critical pedagogy

Let us begin by rethinking the position that urban schools are failing. . . . When one set of schools [in high-income communities] is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools [in low-income communities] is not, we have predetermined the winners and losers. . . . Urban [low-income community] schools are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

This in the second paragraph of Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s brilliant book, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. It’s brilliant because it is based in the experience of actually teaching our country’s youth, on working day in and day out with high school students in Los Angeles and Oakland. Most of the book is Duncan-Andrade and Morrell detailing several educational projects on which they’ve worked, describing their experiences as they try to put their belief in critical pedagogy into practice, and explaining what they learned.

As grounded in experience and practice as they are, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell know the theory, too. In chapter two, they give the best overall summary of the work and writing of the major names in critical pedagogy—Freire, Shor, Darder, McLaren, Giroux, hooks—I’ve seen. In addition, they discuss the efforts of a few “lived examples of critical pedagogy to emphasize that critical pedagogy is more than just a teaching strategy—it is a personal, financial, political, emotional, and spiritual commitment to prioritizing the needs and liberation of people who are suffering under various forms of oppression”: Carter G. Woodson, Lolita Lebrón, Franz Fanon,Reies López Tijerina, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Subcommandante Marcos. (If this list and the words used to describe these people intimidate you, you’re a normal human being. The authors make it less intimidating as they describe how they put those words into practice in the work they have done and continue to do.)

Before they do that, they lay out their understanding of the urban public school context in which students try to learn and in which teachers try to teach. They argue that “urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone has to fail in school,” belief supported by racist and classist ideology. Currently, the line is that “educational failure is the result of cultural deficiencies on the part of the student, the family, and the community—de facto, educational attainment is attributed to cultural superiority or assimilation into culturally superior ways.” Regardless of the reasons, the result serves the dominant culture in our country, because “some people must fill the least desirable places in society, and it is important that they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, at the very least, that there is a formal mechanism to justify their place there.” The attack on students’ esteem and confidence is self-perpetuating and circular: if you’re made to feel stupid, you do worse on tests because of your lack of belief in yourself.

But, according to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, the equation of performance in school and intelligence is false. For, if

school achievement were an accurate measure of intellect, achievement patterns would more closely mirror the random distribution of intellect that genetic scientists report in human populations. Instead, the results of schools are quite predictable. . . . With remarkable consistency, schools serving low-income, non-white children disproportionately produce the citizens who will spend most of their adult lives in the least desirable and least mobile socioeconomic positions (prison, low-ranking military positions, and service labor).

The few urban students who do well are “asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of the school in exchange for access to college.” Therefore,

urban education reform movements must begin to develop partnerships with communities that provide young people the opportunity to be successful while maintaining their identities as urban youth. This additive model of education focuses on the design of urban school culture, curriculum, and pedagogy that identifies the cultures and communities of urban students as assets rather than as things to be replaced.

This “approach provides pedagogy and curricula that lend immediate relevance to school in the lives of urban youth. It also works to break the cycle of disinvestment of human capital in urban communities by crating graduates who recognize their potential agency to improve urban centers, rather than seeing them as places to escape.” Duncan-Andrade and Morrell see critical pedagogy as a win-win for students, teachers, and society as a whole, because “rather than presenting the community as a place to rise above, schools must equip themselves to draw from the knowledge that students bring with them to school—knowledge that is often not in their textbooks but is acquired from the streets, family cultural traditions, youth culture, and the media.”

They are critical of the results we’ve seen so far from multicultural education because it has “failed to deal with the conditions of modern urban life.” They argue persuasively “for pedagogical practices situated in critical analyses of the role of urban schools in social inequality.” We should “shift the rhetoric of failure from young people and caring teachers onto an inequitable system designed to concretize failure in poor communities.”

Finally, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell “believe that urban students should go to college at rates equal to their more affluent counterparts” and that a

schooling environment that foregrounds the relationship between education and the most pressing conditions in the community, an education with relevance, is most likely to produce notable increases in college eligibility. . . . [T]he desired outcome in critical pedagogies in urban education is multiple and . . . it must impact academic achievement, identity development, and civic engagement. . . . To often, we believe, critical pedagogies focus on the rhetoric of social critique to the exclusion of the development of sophisticated literacy and numeracy skills.

These academic skills frequently come “at great personal and social costs that include alienation from family, language, community, and progressive social values.” Therefore, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work focuses maintaining a sense of community and culture for students, while still promoting rigorous academic skills, by setting those skills in the community and cultural context. Literally, they ask the students what problems or questions are important to them and then develop the curriculum around those issues.

All this made connections for me with the writing of bell hooks, especially in Where We Stand: Class Matters in which she talks about her experience of going to college and being alienated from her home culture by the college culture and the resulting disorientation of being caught between two the two. (For more, see my entry on hooks’ book.) The connection is expected, since Duncan-Andrade and Morrell begin their work with hooks and other related writers as the foundation upon which they build. Indeed, they are trying to do the work that such writers recommend.

As I mentioned above, after contextualizing their work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell spend the bulk of the book describing their work with students in urban schools. In the final chapter, “Toward a Grounded Theory of Praxis,” they try to draw conclusions from their experiences, point to areas that need more research and exploration, and make suggestions about teacher education. Importantly, they also talk about love. In a section called “Pedagogy, Love, and Revolution” they write about “revolutionary love” and its potential to change both students’ lives and the larger world. From my perspective, real love—that includes celebrating successes and correcting errors and facilitating the development of the person each student wants to be—for your students is the foundation of good teaching. It doesn’t mean that you like every student the same or that every student likes you. It means that you love them and treat them with the respect and compassion you treat all your loved ones. It means that you treat your students the same way you treat your own children. This is a beautiful, dangerous, and somewhat radical stance—and that is right where I want to be.

up where we belong

Gail Thompson interviewed 121 out of 136 (89%) teachers at a large urban high school asking them about their school, their colleagues, their students, the parents of their students, the quality of their own work, and their ability to be effective teachers. She asked the teachers to respond to prompts like:

• “I consider my current school site to be one of the best public schools in this district”
• “I believe that most of the teachers at this school are outstanding educators”
• “The majority of my students come from decent homes”
• “I care about my students’ academic and personal welfare both inside and outside of school.”

I’m happy to say that a large majority of them responded in ways that we would like; that is, most of the teachers agreed that they worked in one of the best schools in the district, that their colleagues were outstanding teachers, that their students live in decent homes, and that they care about their students. Further, most of the teachers believe they are making a difference for their students, that they are using innovative and pedagogically sound instructional practices, and that their students would rate highly as a teacher. Based on these answers and despite all the problems that we know exist in public schools, we can at least feel that teachers in those schools have the right attitudes and that they believe in themselves, their schools, and their students.

A deeper look at all the questions (52 in all) she asked reveals a more complicated picture.

• When asked if they would want their “own children to attend this school” only 29% agreed.
  80% of the teachers agreed that some of their “colleagues do not have high expectations of their students.”
• 64% “believe that parents or guardians are largely to blame for students’ low achievement.”
  Nearly 40% of the teachers didn’t “believe that all students deserve a college preparatory curriculum.”
• And, when asked if students are largely to blame when they “fail to pass a test or fail an assignment,” 57% of the teachers agreed.

Thompson also surveyed the students in the same school. She asked them to respond to statements like:

• “Most of my teachers are good teachers.”
• “Most of my teachers are willing to give me extra help during class if I need it.”
• “I wish I had better teachers.”
• “Most of my teachers are fair about discipline.”
• “I believe most of my teachers care about me.”

As we would hope, most students answered that their teachers are good, fair, caring and willing to help, yet there were marked differences between the way Blacks, Latinos, and Whites (the groups that made up 90% of the student population) responded. Significantly less percentage of the Black and Latino students (56% and 57%, respectively), for instance, thought most of their teachers cared about them than White students (70%).

Even more important, student responses were different from teacher responses in ways that, I believe, should make teachers sit up and pay attention. For example, 97% of the teachers said they care about their students, but as we just saw, less than 70% of the students felt their teachers cared about them. 91% of teachers said they “make the curriculum relevant” to their students’ lives, but only just over half of the students agreed with similar prompts about their courses.

While differences between student and teacher perceptions is a big part of the story of Up Where We Belong, the book Thompson wrote based partially on her surveys, the real punch comes from the voices of the students from focus groups she conducted with them to follow up the surveys. The students tell us what happens when their teachers make them feel stupid or discipline them unfairly or just don’t seem to care. They also describe what a powerful force for good a caring, skilled teacher is when he or she believes in his or her students. Those stories, combined with Thompson’s own experiences as one of “America’s stepchildren”—a term, she uses “to refer to African Americans, Latinos, Southeast Asians, Native Americans, and sometimes even low-income whites, because members of these groups are often marginalized and treated as second-class citizens in schools and the wider society”—make the book immanently readable, emotionally effective, and compellingly motivational.  The result is a persuasive argument for the educational reform “lessons” Thompson learned through her work:

• Lies, subterfuge, and denial are “weapons of mass destruction” that impede school reform and harm many students, especially America’s stepchildren.
• Some people in high places don’t really want achievement gaps to be closed.
• Too many influential people still don’t believe that Americas’ stepchildren are capable of academic excellence.
• Oppressive school settings, inadequate teacher preparation programs, and a lack of support will continue to drive new teachers out of the profession.
• As long as their voices, needs, and concerns continue to be ignored, teachers and students will find creative ways to derail school reform efforts.
• At best, school reforms that are based on high-stakes testing will produce “tuna” that looks like Star-Kist but is not the real thing.
• Because of resistance and racial prejudice, it is difficult for African American and Latino school administrators to improve the status quo in K-12 schools.

Books about education reform come in all shades of ideology; Thompson’s is useful and different because it is based, and sets the standard for successful reform, on what the students themselves say. Too often, student voices are not part of this discussion. Thompson listens to students and helps us all hear what they say. Let us hope that the Obama administration is listening, too.

high school equity link

The broad-based coalition, Campaign for High School Equity, has created what it calls the “Plan for Success,” which seeks to prepare “every student for graduation, college, work, and life.”

Every school year, about 1.2 million students drop out of our nation’s high schools, leaving almost one of every three freshmen without a high school degree four years later. While roughly 70 percent of all high school students graduate on time, African American, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native students have only a 58 percent or less chance of graduating from high school with a regular diploma. In addition – and contrary to the model minority myth – many Asian Americans also face barriers in education.

The Campaign for High School Equity’s inaugural publication, A Plan for Success: Communities of Color Define Policy Priorities for High School Reform, makes a compelling case for the need to invest in high schools and provides a blueprint for meaningful reform. Its recommendations include a call to:

• Make all students proficient and prepared for college and work;
• Hold high schools accountable for student success;
• Redesign the American high school;
• Provide students with the excellent leaders and teachers they need to succeed;
• Invest communities in student success; and
• Provide equitable learning conditions for all students.

Download the plan at: http://www.highschoolequity.org/files/PlanforSuccess_0.pdf