Florida Adopts Different Standards For Students Based On Race

The OP wasn't clear. I'm not sure which way it was. One quote seemed to suggest one thing, and another quote seemed to suggest something different.

For the record, I'm not in favor of lowering the standards for any group. Grade level standards should be the same for everyone. How those standards are taught should be data driven, and then tailored for each student to reach mastery of grade level students.

If a certain common group of students is failing, then it makes sense to look for a common cause, and method of fixing it. Data should be ongoing and if a large percentage of those students need varied instruction but other individuals belonging to that group don't, then each student should be taught in the way that will best help them meet grade level standards.

 

You need to look at it at the micro-level so you focus your resources on the right solutions. If the single-parent households are failing, then maybe you need more afterschool programs. If the bilingual kids are the ones failing, then maybe you need to improve English education. If the girls are failing or the black kids are failing or the short kids are failing, you can look at what's different for their environment than the other kids.

You can't come up with solutions unless you can analyze what's causing success and failure. And while you want to do it on a local level, you also want to see if there are national trends because then you can identify solutions that have worked in one place to try them in others.

There are multiple factors in any given data. While it doesn't mean that they are at that income level because of their race, it doesn't mean race is not one of many factors. But you have to know that to be able to come up with policy solutions to address it.

It wouldn't cause damage. IF a race is underachieving, and you identify that is the primary driver as opposed to income, then you at least can start trying to figure out what the cause is. If you don't know, you're going to throw resources trying to fix a problem (income) that isn't driving the performance problem. It's a total waste of resources in that case.

But there is plenty of difference in the cultural environment of different races. Racism is just one of many examples. Maybe you have lots of white teachers and black students, and that is causing underperformance if the two groups have problems with each other or because the teachers can't relate to the students or whatever else. There are thousands of possibilities - genetics is not really relevant.

 

For the record, I knew you weren't advocating for different standards, just different methods. I am still not convinced that racial data proves anything we don't already know, that people from low income families struggle on education, in general.

 

What they ought to track is the education level of writers and/or editors at jonathanturley.org.

 

I'd much rather they based their standards on the parents' tax returns instead of race; that seems much more of a driver whether they will be involved in the kid's life and academics.

 

Actually there have been studies on it, and the data does help. The fact that something that was called ebonics isn't just slang but actually has lingual structure based on West African dialects crossing with English, helps teachers identify the differences and adjust their teaching in order to help students become successful in standard English usage, and meet grade level standards.

It's also useful to know where problems will arise in some spanish speaking students because of some words used in problems such as the difference between lemons and limes which might have the same word in the native language. Understanding where the problems might be helps a teacher prepare to prevent the problem or make corrections.

But there have been numerous studies done and there is a correlation. There have also been studies done about impoverished learners especially where vocabulary exposure is concerned and those things go across the board for low income students.

 

You can't come up with solutions unless you can analyze what's causing success and failure. And while you want to do it on a local level, you also want to see if there are national trends because then you can identify solutions that have worked in one place to try them in others.


But aren't you basically saying the cause of their failure or success is based on their race?

How does racial statistics help, though? I just don't understand. What can you pull from a stat that shows 80% of black children are failing, 70% of Hispanic children are failing, and 90% of Asians are succeeding? If you cross-examine the data, wouldn't you see that these failing kids are from low income neighborhoods? How does knowing their race help you tailor your lessons on a district or state level? Shouldn't teachers look at their students success and failure and tailor their lessons based on their individual class, rather than the state or nationwide trend of a particular race? 2

Then why are we measuring success/failure rates based on race? Certainly there are dozens of other factors that are more relevant to a person's success and failure.

When you look at failure rates relative to income level and you see that the higher income levels are vastly exceeding the lower income levels in educational achievement, why does it become necessary to throw their race in to the picture? I understand on a class level you want to tailor your class to help those kids understand lessons, but I still think race is an unnecessary variable when determining educational success. They aren't stupid because their brown, their stupid because they came from a poor family that didn't stress the importance of education because they were too busy struggling to make ends meet.

 

Of course there is a correlation, I stated earlier (maybe it was a different thread) if you come from a bad neighborhood, your school is bad, if your school is bad, your neighborhood is likely bad. You can't improve your school because you can't improve the quality of the neighborhood, and you can't improve the neighborhood because no one wants to come to a bad neighborhood with a bad school.

We know that the majority of the impoverished people in this country are black or hispanic, so naturally there is a correlation between race and educational disparities. When ice cream sales are high, so are death by drowning rates. Correlation does not equal causation.

 

Correct but certain lingual patterns students may use do have to do with race, nationality, etc. more than just poverty.

 

Florida's message to African Americans and Hispanics: you'll never be able to compete with Asians and Whites, therefore we'll lower the bar for you.

disgusting

 

The problem with your schpiel is that you're not following the rabbit hole down far enough. Why as a percentage are the majority of impoverished people in this country black? When you get that answer, ask why that is and when you get that answer ask why again. Continue asking why and eventually you get to things called segregation, racism, slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow. These problems didn't start yesterday, this has a long history and pretending they never happened doesn't make it so. It's only a gigantic mystery to people who claim not to see color but actively support a system that uses it to maintain a balance of power in this country.

Now you want to solve this problem? How about starting with the way education is funded. If you live in a poor neighborhood, whether white or not, your schools are going to suck because your property tax revenues are lower than they'll be in a good neighborhood. There's a gigantic ripple effect to that. This is not some great mystery here.

 

The standards are asking for a much faster improvement in the performance of black and hispanic student populations than it does of white and asian student populations.

 

Of course, Asians don't tend to speak Spanish, and Hispanics don't tend to speak Farsi, but we all know this. Lingual patterns are not based on race, they are based on region. You can put a white person in Honduras, with Honduran "parents" and he is going to come out sounding like he is from Honduras.

 

soft bigotry of low expectations

 

As I stated earlier, race as a variable for determining success was relevant 30 years ago. They ended up in these low income communities because of segregation, discrimination, etc., but they remain there not because of their race, but because of the quality of education. Therefore, race is an indirect factor. They aren't poor because they black, they are poor because they can't get an education to get out of the neighborhood, they can't get out of the neighborhood because the school is terrible, they can't improve the school because the neighborhood is trash, the neighborhood is trash because the school is trash!

This is exactly what my "spiel" is about. It is the neighborhoods and the schools that determine the rate of success, not race. You have to bring the schools to the same level to give anyone a chance. But we can't underestimate the importance of the family when it comes to educational success, you can send a kid to school 6 hrs a day, but if he goes home and sits in front of the TV, doesn't do his homework, and doesn't study he is going to struggle to succeed, not because he is black, but because he doesn't have a family around or some kind of authority and structure around to teach him the effects of being under educated.

 

And to overcome the handicap of the inequality of family support, you need to provide extra resources to those kids. And, to do that, you need to identify them and put a discrete target on them, which is what this categorization by race does.

You could put one target on a school and say x% of kids must be at grade level, but they might achieve that by writing off the hardest cases and concentrating on the kids who already have help. You can say, 'well, all kids should succeed' but that doesn't give you a lot of leverage to manage, especially when the reality is that the school falls far, far short of that. By putting targets on schools by race, they incentivize a focus on improvements on the hardest cases -- a black population with handicaps in wealth, family cohesion, and cultural emphasis on education. I can agree the lack of performance is not about race in that it's not a genetic handicap, but lack of performance is race-correlated because the circumstances of these black families have been unfavorably influenced by their race in the past. To pretend it's just about money or just about individuals is to operate with blinders on. This is something Florida schools can do to engage these discepancies in society and reverse them with proactive engineering.

 

I didn't intent to come off that way. I am well aware that throwing money at things doesn't make the problems go away, e.g. stimulus dollars.

We all agree race and educational success are correlated, that doesn't imply causation. I think you at least see what my points are though, that race is not the direct indicator of educational success, that yes, discrimination, slavery, oppression, Jim Crow laws, and more have put African Americans in an unequal position before. However, it appears now that the cyclical hole they find themselves in now is caused by their environment. In low income environments you may have Africans, whites and Hispanics all in the same area, so if a statistic shows that the white are just fine and the Hispanics are catching up, we would be ignoring the x% of whites that came from that same environment, because we would be looking at a stat that shows they are doing just fine. Race stats don't benefit us here, the real tool is the environment/income level statistic. And then there are many factors that determine success from that, for instance: You may be from a bad neighborhood because your family just moved here, your parents stress education so that you can have a better life, but someone living on the same block with parents who are rooted there may not stress education.

Do they stress/not stress education because they are black/white/asian?

I am rushing to respond as I haven't done much work today, so I apologize for the lack of editing and run-on sentences.

 

Race isn't the only demographic tracked. Should we track nothing?

 

I think it's a worthwhile data set.

If a school of 100% Asian students passes 80% of their students and a school of 100% black students passes 78% of their students, statistics tell us that the school full of black students is actually doing a better job educating. What are they doing that is helping black students pass at a higher rate than normal and what is the other school doing that is leading to Asian students passing at a lower rate?

The data is relevant and if you support performance pay for teachers you should support micro targeting of the data.