Beyond Better Parenting by Jackie Schechter

Daniel Lobo AfAm 115: Urban Inequality and The Wire Professor William Julius Wilson Final Exam—Prompt #2 Beyond Better Parenting: The Need for Culturally Specific Inner City Education Reform as a Means of a Closing the Achievement Gap In an op-ed article recently featured in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman attempts to explain why American students perform poorly on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests reading comprehension and math and science skills for 15year-old students among the world’s leading industrialized nations. Armed with testimony from Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the assessment for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Friedman arrives at the conclusion that, rather than focusing on traditional channels for improving student achievement, such as increasing teacher effectiveness, we should focus on better parenting as a means getting American students up to par with their international counterparts. Friedman describes, “Schleicher explained to me that ‘just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.’” But, one must ask, what are the implications of such sweeping declarations about child rearing? The problem with over generalizing sentiments such as this one is that is that there exists a very real difference in culture between mainstream, middle-class America, and the lives of inner-city African Americans. These differences make it near impossible both for inner-city

African American parents to rear their children in the bourgeois way that Friedman would deem fit, and for these inner-city African American children to achieve academically. Culturally insensitive claims such as Friedman’s are aligned with the tendencies of those not familiar with inner city life to focus on what inner city residents are doing wrong, rather than what it is that is influencing their alternative set of values. If we are to make any progress in improving the academic achievement of inner city African American students, we must focus on education reform policies, for inner city schools specifically, targeted at correcting the effects of the structural disadvantages and illuminating the cultural realities faced by inner city African American families. Friedman’s approach does nothing to account for these structural disadvantages and cultural realities, which I will discuss in greater detail later, and therefore is obsolete in improving the academic prospects of inner city African American students. To begin, Friedman does not put enough emphasis on the importance of teachers in inner city schools. He states in his op-ed that “there’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers.” Though Friedman is right in highlighting teacher effectiveness as a means of improving student achievement, it is clear that he does not realize that in certain inner city school districts, a teacher doesn’t make a difference, she makes the difference. Furthermore, because of the distinct environment of inner city schools, in order to make an impact in inner city African American student achievement, it will take a very special breed of effective teacher to make the difference. In her work entitled Black Cultural Capital, Status Positioning, and the Conflict of Schooling for Low-Income African American Youth, sociologist Prudence Carter details such a distinct inner city school environment, highlighting the need for culturally aware teachers in

these schools. In this work, Carter conducts a study of 44 low-income, African American youth, ages 13 to 20, in Yonkers, New York. Carter’s data indicates that the differential values placed on both “dominant” and “non-dominant” cultural capital by students and educators ultimately affect the prospect of mobility for low-income African American students. “Dominant cultural capital” refers to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of powerful, high status cultural attributes, codes and signals. In laymen’s terms, this may include seemingly simple behavior such as looking a person in the eye when speaking to him, or speaking proper English. “Non-dominant cultural capital,” on the other hand, embodies a set of tastes, or schemes of appreciation and understandings, accorded to a lower status group, that includes preferences for particular linguistic, musical or interactional styles (138).1 Carter finds that these low-income African American students implement their non-dominant cultural capital in their socially marginalized group settings, such as in their distinct communities. They do this as a means of establishing their authenticity in these settings. At the same time, these students recognize that it is dominant cultural capital that grants mobility in mainstream culture that lies outside of their own communities, such as in school and work environments. In fact, Carter found that most of her subjects did in fact have dreams of attending college and leading successful mainstream lives. Carter concludes that truly successful inner city students, meaning students who are able to gain acceptance in their home communities as well as in mainstream institutions such as school, must be able to perfect the balancing act between these two forms of cultural capital. In order to help these disadvantaged students strike this balancing act, inner city schools must have teachers that are more culturally in tune with and sensitive to the non-dominant 1

Carter, Prudence. 2003. “Black Cultural Capital, Status Positioning, and the Conflict of Schooling for Low-Income African American Youth.” Social Problems 50(1): 136-155.

tendencies that their students may exercise. This is currently not happening in all schools. Carter references a study done by Karl Alexander, Doris Entwise, and Maxine Thompson (1987) who found that teachers’ own middle-class social origins exercise a strong influence on how they react to the apparently low social capital attributes of their students. In particular, low-status and minority pupils experience their greatest difficulties in the classrooms of high-status teachers who evaluate these pupils as less mature and less capable. This can occur even though the student may have mainstream ambitions that he cannot realize on his own because his nondominant cultural capital acts as a hindrance. Therefore, teachers who are not in tune with and sensitive to the non-dominant cultural capital that reigns supreme in the habitus of an inner city student run the risk of allowing that student to give up on himself, as anthropologists Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu find. The student may even come to oppose the idea of education altogether, associating it with a cultural capital that he does not and cannot ever have. This is demonstrated in The Wire with the character of Namond, who, despite being a bright student, opposes the idea of learning. When placed in Bunny’s special class, Namond realizes that his educators are negatively viewing his non-dominant cultural capital and setting lower expectations for him because of it. As a result, he intentionally acts out in class and refuses to learn by their rules, representing what may be a common reaction amongst many inner-city African American students in a similar situation. In addition to the juxtaposition of the non-dominant cultural capital of inner city students against their culturally unaware teachers, Fordham and Ogbu expose another unique element of inner city schools: the non-dominant cultural interactions that take place between peers. In their work Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White,’ Fordham and Ogbu determine that, because African-Americans have a cultural legacy of being economically

and academically oppressed by mainstream America, African American students have come to develop what they call an “oppositional cultural frame of reference.” This oppositional cultural frame of reference is the process of African-Americans identifying certain aspects of society to be the prerogatives of bourgeois white Americans, thus determining these aspects of society to be incompatible with their own cultural identity. “The oppositional identity and oppositional cultural frame of reference enter into the process of minority schooling through the minorities’ perceptions and interpretations of schooling as learning the white American cultural frame of reference which they have come to assume to have adverse effects on their own cultural and identity integrity” (182).2 As if this were not unfortunate enough, this process causes minority students to see school as a subtractive process that will take away from their own cultural capital and identity. As a result, they come to oppose academic achievement as a means of retaining what they have determined to be their true identity, their non-dominant cultural capital. Once inner city students have considered school to be a subtractive process, they begin to oppose anyone who aligns himself with that subtractive process, viewing him as a traitor to the non-dominant cultural identity that he should assume as a member of the inner city. As Fordham and Ogbu elaborate, “at the social level, peer groups discourage their members from putting forth the time and effort required to do well in school and from adopting the attitudes and standard practices that enhance academic success. They oppose adopting appropriate academic attitudes and behaviors because they are considered ‘white’” (183). Therefore, not only are low-income, inner-city African American students facing a disadvantage in culturally insensitive teachers, but also they face a disadvantage through that very culture itself, as it is inherently opposed to 2

Fordham, Signithia and John U. Ogbu. 1986. “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White.’” Urban Review 18: 176-206. Henceforth page numbers in parentheses.

mainstream ideas of educational achievement. This condemns those exceptional inner city students who do manage to take an interest in school to be caught in an unnecessary crisis of identity: excelling in school ostracizes them from their peers, while not succeeding in school makes the attainment of their mainstream ambitions impossible. This idea of associating education with acting white, and the resulting identity crisis for certain students, would not exist if these students had culturally aware teachers who would be able to link education to the students through their non-dominant culture. If a teacher is able to make all of her students realize the importance of education, no student would be ridiculed for trying to pursue it. Aside from the complex cultural workings of inner city schools, inner city students are forced to endure structural elements of the inner city itself that adversely affect their academic performance. These elements include violent crime and homicide, mass incarceration of young, black men, and pervasive single-parent households. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey provides empirical evidence of this in his study, The Acute Affect of Local Homicides on Children’s Cognitive Performance. This study estimates the effect of exposure to local homicide on the cognitive performance of children ages 5-17 in Chicago neighborhoods. Sharkey finds the strongest effects in African-American students. Among African-Americans, the strongest results show that exposure to a homicide in the block group, a span of area smaller than a census track, that occurs less than a week before the assessment reduces performance on vocabulary and reading assessments by between ~0.5 and ~0.66 SD, respectively (11733).3 These results infer that African-American students systematically have to deal with extraneous aspects of inner city life that still bleed into their academic lives and further hinder success, suggesting the need for 3

Sharkey, Patrick. 2010. “The Acute Effect of Local Homicides on Children’s Cognitive Performance.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107: 11733-11738.

education policy reform that also corrects other inner city disadvantages, outside the realm of education. Aside from the factors that hinder student performance, there are further inner city complications on the parental end that make it impossible for “every parent” to be able to rear their child according to Friedman’s ideology. Sociologists Lawrence Bobo and Victor Thompson demonstrate this truth quite harshly in their study, Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment. Bobo and Thompson show that over the past thirty years, the United States has gone on an incarceration binge, a binge that has fallen with radically disproportionate severity on the African American community. Specifically, the incarceration rate of the US far exceeds that of any other Western industrial country, with a rate of 762 per 100,000 citizens in 2008 (326).4 Black males are wildly overrepresented in this large prison population. In 2007, they represented 39 percent of incarcerated males in state, federal and local prisons, despite only comprising 12 percent of the total adult male US population (326). This is compared to the underrepresentation of white males in US prisons, as white males constitute only 36.1 percent of the prison population, while comprising 65.6 percent of the total male population. Black males also comprised 43% of those serving on death row in 2004. In fact, Bobo and Thompson find that one in nine African American males between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars (327). These alarming statistics explicitly point to a very real, simple fact of inner city families: many households are single parent households, making the task of child rearing inherently twice as difficult. With child rearing only being one of the many parental duties that fall upon the 4

Bobo, Lawrence D. and Victor Thompson. 2010. “Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice

and Punishment.” Pp. 322-355 in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, edited by Hazel R. Markus and Paula Moya. New York: Norton. Page numbers henceforth in parentheses.

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shoulders of single parents, it should be understandable that single parents living in the inner city are not able to rear their children as well as the parents of higher performing middle-class students. When short-term subsistence is constantly on the mind of an inner city single parent, it becomes that much more difficult for her to see the long-term benefits of her childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s education, which may result in less of a scholastic interest for the parent. But, the question that must be asked here is, why exactly are so many young black males being incarcerated, resulting in more single parent, inner-city households with lesser achieving children? As Bobo and Thompson cite, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson attributes at least part of this overrepresentation of black males in prison to differential black involvement in crime. This differential black involvement in crime reflects the interplay of key economic, political and cultural factors. As they state: Wilson (1987) shows that massive economic restructuring, in the form of the deindustrialization of the American economy (i.e., shift from heavy goods manufacturing to a service-oriented and information processing economy) and the de-concentration of industry (i.e., a shift of goods manufacturing from cities to suburban or ex-urban rings), combined to create new, persistent, and intensely high rates of poverty and unemployment for inner-city African Americans, particularly those of low education and skill levels (331). This analysis sheds light on the differential black involvement in inner city crime. Because they were the most underachieving students, for reasons that are now clear, it is black inner city adults that are most adversely affected by the hyper-poverty that permeates the inner city. This hyperpoor environment coupled with pervasive inner city unemployment and lack of employment

networking opportunities, presented in Mary Waters’ Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities, grants an inner city resident greater incentive to participate in elicit activity that will provide him with the income he does not have access to legitimately in the inner city. As inner city students familiarize themselves with this reality, they become at risk of falling into this same cycle. We see this throughout The Wire, as numerous young characters cycle through the drug game. One character worth noting is Michael, who comes from a singleparent household because his father is in prison. Michael goes from being a perfectly capable student to a homicidal drug dealer as a means of supporting his younger brother. But, his pattern of violence follows the Stringer Bell model, where violence is used as a means of economic subsistence. With all of these odds stacked against inner city African American students, they will be condemned to living lives identical to those of their parents unless there is widespread reform of the one aspect of their lives with the potential to break the cycle: the supposed great equalizer, the American education system. Yet, the greatest fallacy of the American education system is the persistence of the achievement gap among minority groups. According to Education Weekly, the achievement gap shows up in grades, standardized-test scores, course selection, dropout rates, and college-completion rates, among other success measures.5 In order to correct this injustice and improve the life prospects of inner city African American students, we must commit to repealing current, ineffective education policies that are perpetuating the problem, as well as commit to implementing seemingly controversial education reform policies that will account for the disadvantages of inner city students.

Education Weekly Website. http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/

One such type of ineffective education policy that must be reversed to stop the perpetuation of the achievement gap is punitive federal funding policies through such programs as No Child Left Behind. Policies that punish “underperforming” schools not only perpetuate the underperformance of certain schools, but also provide greater incentive to disregard the social, cultural and psychological needs of students in pursuit of better test scores that will reap more funding. One such disregard of student need that results from punitive federal funding is the practice of social promotion. Social promotion is the practice of promoting under-achieving students to the next grade, despite inadequate academic performance. Certain schools may exercise social promotion as a means of keeping their own dropout rates lower, as students who are repeatedly being held back from promotion are more likely to drop out of school. The federal government will perceive schools with lower dropout rates as higher achieving, therefore, these schools will find it easier to receive the certification necessary for better federal funding. The problem with social promotion is that promoting an under-achieving student not only dooms that student to fail, but also increases the burden of teaching for future teachers. If a student was already performing below grade level, he will only fall further behind if he is promoted—while his peers will advance in ability. The frustration that this promoted student will feel from his apparent lack of ability may provoke him to act out in the classroom, disrupting lessons and distracting his peers. Furthermore, the falsely promoted student will have a greater likelihood of dropping out in the higher grade he is placed in. We see this in The Wire with Dookie, who drops out of school to be a drug dealer after being socially promoted to high school. Not only do scenarios such as this one diminish a student’s own life prospects, but it also adversely affects the new school that he may have been placed into, as their dropout rate increases, making it more difficult for that school to receive federal funding. As the vicious cycle

is perpetuated, much of the burden is placed upon the teachers of inner city schools, as every new academic year brings to the teachers a new group of students who are not prepared for the material required by the curriculum and the test. As Professor William Julius Wilson points out in a conversation with Sylvie Laurent, many ghetto schools serve as dumping grounds for some of the most incompetent teachers.6 If the teacher happened to be effective to begin with, she can only remain effective for so long while put under the stress of the environment of these inner city schools. Another adverse policy that must be prohibited if we are to make any progress in mending the achievement gap is the practice of tracking. Tracking is the process of separating students according to academic ability. Students should all be held to the same expectations, as holding some students to lower expectations will most certainly diminish their performance, if not discourage them altogether. As successful charter schools have demonstrated time and time again, if we school hold all students to the same expectations, they have the ability to achieve and exceed those expectations. Holding a certain student to lower expectations because of past performance causes that student to believe that those expectations are all he is capable of achieving, if he even retains that much confidence in himself, which is simply not true. Proponents of tracking claim that keeping underachieving students in the same classrooms as higher-achieving students holds the higher-achieving students back. But, putting under-achieving students in lower tracks does nothing but admit that our education system is broken, and rather than fix that broken system, we are going to try and lighten the fall for underachieving students by getting them through school with lower standards. The burden of lower achieving students 6

“Can Obama save the American pubic school?”: A conversation with Sylvie Laurent and William Julius Wilson. Course Website.

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should fall on the shoulders of the schools, not the underperforming students. Teachers have a responsibility to hold every student to the same standard, and ensure that each student reaches at least that benchmark of expectation. Furthermore, tracking explicitly perpetuates the achievement gap, as it is low-income minority students who are typically the lowest performing students. Once these disadvantaged students initially perform poorly because their schools are not correcting for these disadvantages, they are then put into lower tracks, never to attain the same success as their white counterparts. This is a blatant injustice, and until it is corrected we can never begin to close the achievement gap, as inner city African American youth will continue to be destined to the situation of poverty passed on by their parents. But, the achievement gap canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be closed simply by correcting past injustices. We must implement more progressive, culturally aware education policies that explicitly address the disadvantaged situation of inner city African American youth, so that they can not only stop falling behind, but also advance further. As much as this may bother those such as Sylvie Laurent, a reform of inner city schools will require that these schools begin to make a shift towards the charter school model by adopting charter school methods that so often prove successful for inner city students. One such change would be for inner city schools to end tracking and establish high expectations for their students, across the board. If district schools set high expectations for all of their students early on, those students will progress with those expectations in mind. An example of this would be the quintessential emphasis on college that charter schools impress upon their students. By demonstrating the importance of college early on for their students and making sure these students realize that college is a possibility for them, charter schools are able to produce students that readily prepared for higher education. Because every student is held to this same

standard in many charter schools, no one student feels any less capable than the next. This is the type of attitude that needs to be adopted in inner city district schools to minimize the risk of student dropouts and classroom disruptions. Furthermore, higher expectations will instill in more students dominant cultural ambitions, which may serve to motivate these students, regardless of support they may or may not be receiving at home. Concurrently, teachers must be more culturally in tune with the non-dominant culture that permeates the home environments of their inner city students. They must be equipped to infiltrate the minds of these students via these nondominant channels, in order to instill in them dominant, seemingly realistic ambitions. Presbeluski is a shining example of this type of teacher in The Wire. After accepting that many of his students participate in gambling as a form of inner city leisure, Presbeluski uses this activity in his classroom as a means of teaching his students probability. As unconventional as this may have seemed to his superiors, this is the only instance where we see Presbeluski’s students fully engaged with the material they encounter in class. It is the first time that we see them learning. In addition to establishing high expectations in inner city schools, efforts must be made to extend the length of the school day and academic year in these schools. The reason for this is quite simple: the longer the students are in school, being positively influenced, the less opportunity they have to be negatively influenced by their community environments. It has been determined in numerous studies that the achievement gap widens in the summer, as the children of higher income households are being “concertedly cultivated,” through their participation in mentally stimulating activity, while their lower income peers, without the means necessary to participate in such stimulating activity, are falling behind.7 Extending the school year for inner 7

Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods. Berekeley: University of California Press. Chapters 1 and 12.

city schools will help African-American students close the gap by keeping them productive and stimulated for a longer amount of time. Providing inner city students with an array of subsidized, mentally stimulating summer activities would serve as an excellent auxiliary to such a policy. But, as has already been stated, the most influential factor in the education of an inner city student is his teacher. Ineffective teachers breed ineffective students, so any policy that allows ineffective teachers to continue teaching must be challenged. Therefore, as a means of ensuring that inner city students are granted the opportunity to have effective teachers, teacher tenure must be eliminated and replaced with a system that pays teachers based on performance. As drastic as this may seem for some, it is absolutely necessary in order to make substantial progress in closing the achievement gap. Teacher tenure is an outdated policy. At its conception, when unconventional teacher practices were frowned upon, teacher tenure was crucial in securing job security for innovative teachers. But, in today’s day and age, innovative teaching strategies are often encouraged, especially if they are producing good results, making the original goal of teacher tenure near obsolete. At the current moment, teacher tenure has devolved into a means for teachers’ unions to push their own agendas and for ineffective teachers to keep their jobs. Paying teachers based on performance provides teachers with greater incentive to have the best interests of their students at heart, by rewarding them with higher pay if they demonstrate this through effective teaching. It represents a win-win situation both for teachers and students. Many of the policy changes that I have proposed would not be very difficult to implement, in my opinion. In fact, I am happy to say that some of them are currently coming to fruition today. We are seeing better allocation of federal funding for schools through incentivebased initiatives such as Obama’s “Race to the Top,” a competitive grant gives schools greater incentive to strive for improvement, rather than punishing schools that aren’t improving. That

being said, many of the harmful education policies that I have discussed continue to be practiced today, at the expense of inner city African American students. The greatest obstacle in reversing such policies will be the stark partisanship that exists in education politics. As Laurent demonstrated in his debate with Professor Wilson, supporters of district schools often oppose any policy remotely reminiscent of charter schools, viewing investment in charter schools as subtractive from district schools. Compounding this obstacle are teachers’ unions, who are much more concerned with their own prerogatives rather than the interests of their students. As Professor Wilson points out, teachers’ unions are much more preoccupied with protecting even the most incompetent teachers. That being said, I understand that it is not the mission of teachers’ unions to protect ineffective teachers. But, the fact remains that tenure all too often allows ineffective teachers to continue teaching, which is clearly harmful for students. Unless teachers’ unions realize how harmful their activity can be for inner city African American students, especially, policies aimed at reversing the achievement gap will not come to fruition. If we are to improve the international academic standing of America’s children, we must begin by improving those who are struggling the most. The achievement gap tells us who those students are. The only way we can begin to correct the lack of achievement with these lowperforming students is to accept the fact that life for inner city African American students is different. Put more specifically, it is unnecessarily more difficult. Once we have realized how, and, more importantly, why that is, it is our responsibility to create education policy changes for these students that will at least mitigate the effects of their disadvantages on their academic prospects. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, and we have a responsibility to make sure this is the case for all of our nation’s youth. I hope that by now it is clear that this is going to take much more work than simply blaming the parents.

Works Cited Carter, Prudence. 2003. “Black Cultural Capital, Status Positioning, and the Conflict of Schooling for Low-Income African American Youth.” Social Problems 50(1): 136-155. Fordham, Signithia and John U. Ogbu. 1986. “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White.’” Urban Review 18: 176-206. Sharkey, Patrick. 2010. “The Acute Effect of Local Homicides on Children’s Cognitive Performance.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107: 11733-11738. Bobo, Lawrence D. and Victor Thompson. 2010. “Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice and Punishment.” Pp. 322-355 in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, edited by Hazel R. Markus and Paula Moya. New York: Norton. Education Weekly Website. http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/ “Can Obama save the American pubic school?”: A conversation with Sylvie Laurent and William Julius Wilson. Course Website. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods. Berekeley: University of California Press. Chapters 1 and 12.