One More Reason to Love NPR

Here's why: they have some smart talk about Latino kids.

Pedro Noguera, venerated and visionary teacher and professor of education at NYU, and Jeffery Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center discuss myths about Latino kids.

1 in 4 children under 5 is now Latino, so this has proven itself to be an increasingly relevant topic as the population grows. Noguera, in particular, offers some strong commentary when talking about the opportunity gap. He notes that Latino students have fewer opportunities to attend well-funded schools and that they are more likely to attend under-resourced schools - which seriously diminishes the likelihood of them attaining an excellent education. Right on. And let's change that, by the way.

Want to listen? Here you go.

More on Cool V. School

Mr. AB of From the TFA Trenches comments on the San Jose Mercury News article that I wrote about last week. The best part is this:

"Get this straight and send it to your friends: Children of color don’t devalue a good education and therefore fail to get it, they’re never given it and eventually, sensibly, stop caring.

By the time San Jose’s Latino population gets to high school, they will have endured nine years of being told they are failures, of listening to the devaluation of their home language, of watching all fun be stripped from their education, and of receiving sub-par instruction from inadequate teachers. It is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit that any child of color graduates from a high-challenge school at all."

Check out his entire post here. And thanks to dy/dan for the tip-off.

Snell v. Stern on Instructional Reform

A good article by Lisa Snell came out of Reason Magazine yesterday. It's a response to Sol Stern's (now infamous) criticism of school choice and a detailed analysis of how instructional reform has yielded little impact on the achievement rates of low-income and minority kids. As she notes, good instruction is essential (that's a given), but it is not The Answer to education reform; school choice is still necessary.

Definitely a thought-provoking read.

UK Paves Way for Education; US Latinos Lag Behind

Today's post is written by Nicole Matos, a student of Bryn Mawr College and an intern at Hispanic CREO. She can be contacted by e-mail at nmatos5@gmail.com.

UK school minister Jim Knight announced plans to require that every secondary school student, almost 6 million children, to have Internet access in their homes, according to Friday's article from the Guardian. The government will work with major IT corporations, such as Virgin and Microsoft, to make such services more affordable and schools will receive 100 million pounds to guarantee access for disadvantaged families. The major motivation out of this is to narrow the achievement gap between “pupils from the richest and poorest families”. This gap widened in the UK by 10% last year.

The initiative will help narrow the achievement gap in two ways. Firstly, it will level the playing field amongst students. At this time, more than one million UK children do not have access to a computer. Lacking the ability to do Internet research and other computer work at home, these students are at a great disadvantage when competing with their more technologically privileged peers. For these children, most learning and schoolwork is limited to school or a library, while more privileged students get to do it at home. Secondly, the initiative will narrow the achievement gap by creating a network for parents to receive “real time reporting,” online updates and communication from teachers and students.

A policy like this instated in the US would be a positive step forward to solving our own gap. A recent report done by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund shows that Latinos, especially Latino children, are lagging far behind their White counterpoints when it comes to having computer and Internet access. According to the report, only about 40% of Black and Latino children have Internet access, while 77.4% of White children do. Even at a higher income levels, Latinos still lag behind and Spanish speaking Latinos are not to “have strikingly low rates” of computer ownership and Internet access.

Technologically disadvantaged students suffer a vicious cycle where their lack of computer ownership and Internet access affects their educational success which, in turn, affects their future career success. A policy like this would be an exciting new way to get Latino children a better chance at academic success and would be a first step to getting Latinos on the right path to computer literacy.

Wednesday Issue: Hispanic Achievement and Acting White

Inspired by Eduwonkette's recent analysis of the "Acting White" theory, I've decided to do a small spin-off here. Although much attention has been paid to "acting white" within the Black community, there has been little discussion of how this mentality affects Hispanic students' academic achievement.

In his 2006 study, Harvard economist Roland Fryer and his colleague Paul Torelli released a study which showed that minority students' social popularity suffered when it was known that they were academic high-achievers. The researchers found that for Black students, popularity began to decline once students achieved a 3.5 GPA or higher, but for Hispanic students, the bar was even lower. Latino students began to lose standing with their peers once they attained a 2.0 GPA. This data led to the conclusion that minority students deliberately under-perform in school to avoid "acting white" and keep their social standing intact.

Below is Fryer's graph of how a GPA affects students' popularity (thanks to the Hoover Institution):





















Roland and Fryer make no hypotheses about why Hispanic students' popularity decline begins so much earlier than that of Black students. Thankfully, this leaves room for our further inquiry.

The following questions are important ones that need to be raised in our analysis of Hispanic student culture. They do not yet have answers, but are sure to result in important knowledge about attitudes towards academic achievement in Hispanic culture(s).

1.) Do Latino immigrant children and native-born Latinos share the same attitude towards academic achievement?

According to John Ogbu's theory, recently emigrated individuals - called voluntary minorities - often have more optimistic attitudes towards America and its various opportunities. They value education and hard work highly and therefore, are more likely to trust and do well within the school system. Therefore, it should follow that Latino immigrants are more academically successful than native-born Latinos. But is this true?

2.) To what extent does the "acting white" stigma affect low-income, middle class, and wealthy Latinos? Does one group experience more pressure than others to under-perform?

3.) For immigrant Latinos, does the desire to assimilate into American culture have positive or negative effects on academic achievement?

There are a number of ways to assimilate into this culture: on the one hand, Latino students could swing towards the "acting white" mindset. On the other hand, they could swing to the other side (see above: voluntary minorities). Which actually plays out in real life?

"Acting White" and Student Motivation

Eduwonkette has an absolutely dead-on analysis of the NYC Dept. of Education's new cell phone plan and how it relates to the theory of "Acting White." I was going to leave this comment on her own site, but quickly realized that it was turning into a blog post of my own, so here goes:

Eduwonkette,

I agree with you that the battle is not getting kids to believe that education leads to better opportunities.

So here ARE some the issues that need to be addressed:

1.) Promoting a "college culture." At the affluent high school which I attended, everyone had their reach schools and safety schools picked out by spring of their Junior year. At the urban high school where I was a teacher, I had my senior students coming to me in February asking how to apply to college. There is a great lack of information in urban communities about the process of applying to college. This needs to be addressed - not just by a few assemblies for 11th graders, but by teachers, coaches, and other influencers constantly reinforcing the college message. These adults need to talk about college, their experiences, and what it takes to get in. English teachers (which I was), have a special role in this, as they can prepare their older students for the application process by assigning application essays as part of the curriculum. The students get writing practice AND learn about the admissions process - win-win.

2.) Students need to know real people who have gone to and benefited from college.

Sadly, when I surveyed my students, very few of them had friends and relatives who had graduated from 4-year colleges. So although they knew that a college education could give them better "future opportunities," that idea was a very vague concept. Students need to be able to have role models who they can point to and say, "Wow, if he hadn't gone to college, he would never have been so successful." If they have legitimate examples of the types of opportunities that college provides, this can help keep them focused on attending. And these shouldn't be from "phone messages" from the NYC Dept. of Education. They need to be from real people in their own lives. Mentoring, like you said, is essential.

3.) Students need to be able to understand the connection between their work inside school (and their behavior outside school) and their future education.

I wish that I was making this up, but when I was in the classroom, literally dozens of my students with sub-2.0 GPAs and sub 600 scores on the SATs insisted that they were eligible to attend prestigious 4-year colleges. It was not fun to explain to them the actually reality of their situation.

I think that this was caused by two things that plagued my school in particular. Firstly, teachers' bizarre and inconsistent grading were the main cause. There were numerous teachers in the school (this was well known), who would simply give everyone A's, because they didn't want to fail anybody and have to explain it to their parents. There were also teachers who assigned random grades, usually because they weren't actually teaching and had their students watch movies or do irrelevant worksheets nearly every day.

So many of my students never understood or respected the value of a grade, until they met me (or so I like to think). I remember that my first semester, almost half of my students came complaining to me about why they had failed when they had handed in 2 assignments (we had about 30 assignments per quarter). Why didn't they just get an A, since they had shown up to class and done some work?

It took a lot of effort to get them to see the correlation between their academic effort, personal behavior, and their grades. But they eventually got the message - almost all of them, anyways. And what helped is that every week, I posted their grades on the wall (anonymously, of course), so that they could see that, "Hey, I did well on my quiz, so my grade went up!" or "Wow, I missed two homework assignments, so my grade went down."

The other problem within my school was that so much attention was focused on building up kids' self-esteem, giving them second chances, and basically being their cheerleaders that nobody told them, "Hey, you are going to have to really work to get into college." There needed to be a better balance between the "You Can Do It!" mentality and the reality of how the college admission process works. And FYI, I'm not just thinking of the admissions process of highly selective schools - just of schools in general.

These are the three most prominent that I have seen in my career, but I am sure that there are others. What additional tools do you think urban students need to prepare them to do well in school and be admitted to college?

- Anne

A Gap Here, A Gap There..

Much news is being heard about yesterday's Achievement Gap Summit in CA, but I like the points that Philip of the Education Policy Blog makes in his post about the many other "gaps" in our society that contribute to the achievement gap. This is the first time that I have seen these "gaps" listed out in a concise yet effective way.

I agree with Philip - I think most would - and I'll also add my two cents as a former teacher. In the schools where I taught in Philadelphia and DC, I saw the impact of these gaps each and every day. They affected what I taught and how I taught it, how I related to my students and how they related to me; overall, they were a huge influence in my classroom. I would imagine that many inner-city teachers experience the same.

Yet despite this fact, these "gaps" were never discussed in my teacher training. My traditional education classes didn't address the issue and neither did my inner-city specific TFA training. If these "gaps" were discussed at all, it was in the most cursory way; for example, I remember being told "Your students might be too poor to afford food, so keep some pretzels in your room." But did we discuss that issue any further? Unfortunately, we did not.

On a classroom level, our current and future teachers must be better prepared to understand these "gaps" and how our society's general ills will affect themselves and their students. On a societal level, I see a real need for partnerships between educators and people from other industries and institutions. Teachers, who deal with these gaps every day, must be heard on these issues and their ideas for change must be taken seriously.