"Some people will say you are blaming the victim" he said "But from where I sit, being on the school board, being a pastor, we have gotten away from the African American community having a culture, an environment that says education is important." -- Rev. Albert Gallmon, President of the Minneapolis NAACP branch, as quoted by the Star Tribune, August 1, 2003 in Schools Face Alarming Racial Gap.
I know that many African-Americans and even some European-Americans do not share Albert Gallmon's view that white European-Americans generally place a higher value on getting a good education than black African-Americans. Gallmon is simply parroting the central argument used since the mid-1960s by school districts when the NAACP took them to court. Until recently the NAACP has taken the position that differences in outcomes between black and white students are largely a reflection of an unequal distribution of resources between black and white schools, unequal effects of curriculum tracking, and other school policies and practices. Putting blacks and whites together in the same schools is a necessary step, but not sufficient to give blacks access to educational facilities on the same basis as whites. -- See "Evidence that school policies matter" http://educationright.tripod.com/id173.htm In a lawsuit brought by the Minneapolis NAACP branch against the state of Minnesota in 1995, the NAACP lawyers advanced the theory that black children were being denied an adequate education due to a high concentration of poverty among blacks. That is basically the "culture of poverty" theory which school boards began to use as defendants in lawsuits brought against them by the NAACP during the 1960s. The settlement of the 1995 lawsuit in 2000 also required the state and west metro school districts to set up an inter-district program that is remarkably similar to the school "choice" programs offered by states in the Deep South during the mid-1960s (also know as voluntary desegregation plans). In a 1994 essay, "K-12 Education on the Wrong Track," -- published at http://educationright.tripod.com/id39.htm -- I noted, "The connection between poverty and low IQ scores was demonstrated by three educational researchers, Greg Duncan at Northwestern University and Jean Brooks-Gunn and Pamela Klebanov at Columbia University, in a study of 483 low-birth-weight children from birth to age five. The data indicates that intellectual development can be delayed to a large degree by environmental factors associated with poverty. The deeper and more persistent the poverty, the greater the IQ-lowering effect. When comparing IQ test scores of Black and White children from families with similar economic situations, White children outscored Black children by an average of 3 points: not a significant difference. [Especially considering average differences in educational attainment]-- Secondary source: Rowen, Carl T. (1996). The Coming Race War In America pp. 281, 292-3; Little, Brown & Company. "The conclusions reached by Duncan, Brooks-Gunn and Klebanov about the impact of a child's environment on their intellectual development runs counter to the notion promoted by authors of The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve proposes that an IQ score gap of at least 15 points exists between Whites and Blacks because of a higher concentration of stupid genes being passed along by Black people, and that poverty is mainly a consequence of stupidity." Duncan, Brooks-Gunn and Klebanov also found no evidence to support the idea that whites place a higher value than blacks on getting a good education. They found that high income parents of all "races" who placed their children in day care programs generally chose more expensive day care programs than low income parents. -Doug Mann TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
