blackedu

Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

Reflections of a black female scholar: I know what it feels like to be invisible

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

Cherise Smith, University of Texas at Austin

A new insurance commercial shows comedian Mindy Kaling embracing what it means to be invisible: As Kaling walks down the grocery aisle messily eating ice cream, she uses her “cloak” of invisibility to feel up the muscles of a handsome basketball player.

Kaling, who is of South Asian descent, successfully makes the point of how people look through her, until the punchline arrives: Nationwide Insurance sees her and will take care of her.

As a black female academic, I know only too well what it feels like to have people look right though you. Let me give one instance – from just a few weeks ago, when I felt unrecognized for who I am.

I approached the podium of the lecture hall at the university at which I am a tenured professor. It was the first day of class and the instructor of the previous course was still around, talking informally with her students. Looking around the podium, I noticed that the classroom was not equipped with a computer.

I asked my colleague, whom I did not know, if there was a computer hidden in the cabinet. She proceeded to instruct me: “faculty are provided computers, they bring their computers, and use a dongle to project on the screen.”

Her words told me she didn’t recognize me as faculty; she did not see me as professor.

So, I responded: “This faculty was provided a computer which she has brought. This faculty has not taught in a classroom that is not equipped with a computer before today.”

Without missing a beat, she said, “When the professor arrives, she’ll have the right set up. Are you the teaching assistant?” “I’m the professor,” I told her emphatically. She gave me a confused and befuddled look, before saying “Oh.”

Black academics are almost invisible

What’s the point of this anecdotal evidence, and does it have anything to do with race and gender? I bring this up to illustrate a larger problem which is a huge topic of conversation among black academics and other professionals across the country.

Actor David Oyelowo expressed a larger sentiment, when analyzing the “Selma” Oscar snub (in which only the film’s song won an award but its director and actors were not even nominated) recently, he said:

“We, as black people, have been celebrated more for when we are subservient; when we are not being leaders or kings or being in the center of our own narrative, driving it forward.”

Let me first put things in perspective: a recent American Association of University Professors (AAUP) study shows that around 25% of professors at doctoral degree granting universities are women.

However, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, at that same level of research institution, African Americans make up less than 5% of faculty and fewer than half of those professors are women.

The small number of African-American women academics makes us mostly invisible: if you can’t see us, you don’t have to engage with us or with our perspectives.

Such episodes have longer term consequences

While episodes of “misrecognition,” as the one that I experienced, may seem harmless, they are actually not so. Psychologists call them acts of “micro aggression.”

Micro aggression sends out messages that have serious long-term consequences
Fist image via www shutterstock.com

Micro aggression is the name given to behaviors that are a result of biases against marginalized groups. Such behaviors often leave people feeling uncomfortable or insulted.

One study states that “micro aggressions result in high degrees of stress for blacks because of denigrating messages: ‘You do not belong,’ ‘You are abnormal,’ ‘You are intellectually inferior,’ ‘You cannot be trusted,’ and ‘You are all the same.’”

The authors conclude that “feelings of powerlessness, invisibility, forced compliance and loss of integrity, as well as pressure to represent one’s group are some of the consequences.”

My colleague’s refusal to “see” me smacked of racial bias, conveyed through an act of micro aggression. My physical package as a middle-aged, professionally dressed black woman did not correspond with her idea of what a professor looks like.

She couldn’t see me as the leader of the class and couldn’t recognize me as a professional equal.

With a few short sentences, and, I assume, without malice, that colleague dismissed my experience, education, and training at the same time that she undermined my authority in front of 60 students.

Ignorance is not an excuse

Often such incidents get attributed to a youthful appearance. Upon hearing the story, my husband tried to point out how the “confusion” happened. Generally a pessimist, he is forever an optimist when it comes to matters of race – likely due to his own Anglo-Saxon background.

“Sweetie, you referred to yourself in the third person rather than in the first person,” he reasoned. “You confused her.” “Besides,” he continued, “you look young.” “Maybe you should take it as a compliment,” he suggested.

The course’s teaching assistant, having watched the entire episode, expressed somewhat similar sentiments. “That happens to me all the time,” she said and suggested her Latina background and youthful appearance, as an explanation.

That I was “misrecognized” might be a function of my outfit and my youthful appearance, she ventured.

I understand that none of us — neither Oyelowo, the Latina graduate student, nor I — is the victim of lynching or Jim Crow-era discrimination. Oyelowo starred in a well-received movie in a lead role.

My colleague was astute enough to see I was part of the university community, albeit as a graduate student rather than as tenured faculty. There was no harm done, and there was no foul play. Right?

Not exactly.

The consequences of such micro aggressions add up: they equal “death by a thousand cuts,” as one colleague calls them. They result in diminished mental and physical well-being, and they are shown to “increase the risk of stress, depression, the common cold, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and mortality.”

What in academic language is called micro aggression, is, in fact, experienced as “aggression.” This aggressive tendency comes from a shared experience among dominant white culture, namely, a refusal to see the import and impact of racism, as described by Jessica Nelson, Glenn Adams and Phia S Salter, researchers at the University of Kansas and Texas A&M University.

“Although popular and scientific understandings tend to portray ignorance as a lack of knowledge,” the researchers say, “this work emphasizes that ignorance itself is a form of knowledge that makes it possible to ignore or remain unaware of things that might otherwise be obvious.”

As with the law, ignorance is no excuse. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

__________

The ConversationCherise Smith is Associate Professor of Art History at University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Read the original article.

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, Equity, Matthew Lynch

4 Troubling Truths About Black Boys and the U.S. Educational System

Most people like to think that American K-12 schools, workplaces and courthouses are pillars of fairness, but statistic after statistic all point to a crisis among the young, Black men of the nation. This crisis begins in homes, stretches to K-12 educational experiences, and leads straight to the cycle of incarceration in increasingly high numbers. In America’s prison systems, black citizens are incarcerated at six times the rates of white ones – and the NAACP predicts that one in three of this generation of Black men will spend some time locked up.

Decreasing the rates of incarceration for black men may actually be a matter of improving educational outcomes for black boys in America. In his piece “A Broken Windows Approach to Education Reform,” Forbes writer James Marshall Crotty makes a direct connection between drop-out and crime rates. He argues that if educators will simply take a highly organized approach to keeping kids in school, it will make a difference in the crime statistics of the future.

While there are many areas of improvement that we could look at changing for more successful outcomes for black men, I will discuss just four indicators that illustrate the current situation for black boys in the U.S., with the hope of starting a conversation about what we can do to produce a stronger generation of Black young men in our society.

  1. Black boys are more likely to be placed in special education.

While it is true that Black boys often arrive in Kindergarten classrooms with inherent disadvantages, they continue to experience a “behind the 8-ball” mentality as their school careers progress. Black boys are more likely than any other group to be placed in special education classes, with 80 percent of all special education students being Black or Hispanic males.

Learning disabilities are just a part of the whole picture. Black students (and particularly boys) experience disconnection when it comes to the authority figures in their classrooms. The K-12 teaching profession is dominated by white women, many of whom are very qualified and very interested in helping all their students succeed but lack the first-hand experience needed to connect with their Black male students.

  1. Black boys are more likely to attend schools without the adequate resources to educate them.

Schools with majority Black students tend to have lower amounts of teachers who are certified in their degree areas. A U.S. Department of Education report found that in schools with at least 50 percent Black students, only 48 percent were certified in the subject, compared with 65 percent in majority white schools. In English, the numbers were 59 and 68 percent, respectively and in science, they were 57 percent and 73 percent.

  1. Black boys are not reading at an adequate level.

In 2014, the Black Star Project published findings that just 10 percent of eighth-grade Black boys in the U.S. are considered “proficient” in reading. In urban areas like Chicago and Detroit, that number was even lower. By contrast, the 2013 National Assessment of Education Progress found that 46 percent of white students are adequate readers by eighth grade, and 17 percent of Black students as a whole are too. The achievement gap between the two races is startling, but the difference between the NAEP report on Black students as a whole and the Black Star findings of just Black boys is troubling too. It is not simply Black children in general who appear to be failing in the basics – like literacy; it is the boys.

Reading is only one piece of the school puzzle, of course, but it is a foundational one. If the eighth graders in our schools cannot read, how will they ever learn other subjects and make it to a college education (or, in reality, to a high school diploma)? Reading scores tell us so much more than the confines of their statistics. I believe these numbers are key to understanding the plight of young Black men in our society as a whole.

  1. Punishment for black boys is harsher than for any other demographic.

Punishment for Black boys – even first-time offenders – in schools is harsher than any other demographic. Consider these facts:

What’s most troubling is that not all of the Black boys taken from their schools in handcuffs are violent, or even criminals. Increasingly, school-assigned law enforcement officers are leading these students from their schools hallways for minor offenses, including class disruption, tardiness and even non-violent arguments with other students. It seems that it is easier to remove these students from class through the stigma of suspension or arrest than to look for in-school solutions.

School suspension, and certainly arrest, is just the beginning of a life considered on the wrong side of the law for many Black boys. By 18 years of age, 30 percent of Black males have been arrested at least once, compared to just 22 percent of white males. Those numbers rise to 49 percent for Black men by the age of 23, and 38 percent of white males. Researchers from several universities concluded earlier this year that arrests early in life often set the course for more crimes and incarceration throughout the rest of the offender’s lifetime.

No wonder they aren’t in college…

These trends are not conducive to improving the numbers of young black men who are able to attend college. In fact, the numbers are dismal when it comes to black young men who attend and graduate from colleges in the U.S. Statistically speaking, black men have the lowest test scores, the worst grades and the highest dropout rates – in K-12 education, and in college too.  The recognition of this educational crisis has led to some strong initiatives targeted at young black men with the intention of guiding them through the college years and to successful, productive lives that follow.

This is why college motivation within and outside the black community is so vital for these young men. At this point in the nation’s history, they are in the greatest need for the lifestyle change that higher education can provide, and not just for individual growth, but also for the benefit of the entire nation. But in order to get there, black boys must experience the motivation to succeed well before college.

 

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Bullying

The use of homophobic slurs in sports: It’s for the athletes’ own good, right?

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Jennifer Fraser

“…male athletes in particular are held up as and expected to be paragons of a certain kind of masculinity, seen as the rejection of all that is coded ‘feminine.’ Exhortations that male athletes ‘be a man’ or ‘not act like little girls’ are even more pervasive in sports than they are in general culture. So it’s little surprise that a coach would use insults that imply his players are less than men to shame, humiliate and control them.” —T. F. Charlton

Homophobic slurs are an ideal way to stop young athletes from reporting abuse: if the coach regularly calls boys “pussies” or tells them to “grow some balls” or screams at them that they are “soft,” these boys are very unlikely to report because they worry that if they can’t hack such tough, masculine coaching, they might just be the feminized, degraded players the coach accuses them of being. Chances are good if you ask this kind of coach why he speaks to the boys this way, he will tell you that it’s to ‘toughen them up’. He will tell you that humiliating, taunting, and insulting, namely bullying, are effective tools to build athletic greatness. That’s how he was coached.

Unfortunately, there are many studies that reveal this kind of coaching harms athletes and fails to make winning teams. According to University of Toronto experts in the use of emotional abuse in sports: “One of the barriers to the implementation of an athlete-centered approach is the assumption, held by many sport practitioners, that holistic development comes at a cost to athletic performance.” However, there is “no empirical evidence” to back this belief up.[1] One of the greatest misconceptions in the sporting world is the belief that being hard on athletes makes strong teams.

As long ago as 1983, psychiatrist Dr. Alice Miller exposed a poisonous pedagogical approach as having devastating effects on children. Her study, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence has been so influential that a new edition was released in 2002. Essentially, Miller argues that care-givers who use abusive approaches, whether physical or emotional, harm children in significant ways even though they claim to have “the child’s best interests” in mind.[2]

Poisonous pedagogy underpins the argument that coaches need to yell, swear, humiliate and demean athletes in order to get the best out of them and for their team to be successful.

I resigned from a school where homophobic culture was widespread and tolerated in the basketball program. To give some examples of the culture: one day, while the Senior Boys Basketball team were competing in the Provincial Championships, one of the coaches wrote an email to all faculty at the school using a homophobic slur: “Boys lose by 11 with a soft second half performance.” This is a team where the term “soft” is hurled at the boys on a regular basis at practices. The messaging is that the abuse is deserved because the boys are failing to achieve masculine hardness (with all of its sexual overtones likely not lost on adolescent boys or in sports culture in general). One of the coaches would yell at students that they were “soft as butter”; according to Google’s online urban dictionary, “soft as butter” is an “expression to describe an absolute pussy who makes the most cowardly person look like a hero.”[3] Fourteen students came forward to report that taunting and insulting language was eroding their confidence and killing their love of the game. They were clear that homophobic slurs were harmful to them.

The use of misogynistic or homophobic terms to humiliate teenage boys is both widely discussed and well documented in sports journalism and abuse literature. However, as the coaches themselves said in their responses to the student allegations of bullying, in a School culture where using this language is seen as “normal” it was difficult to know when they’d crossed the line. And far more insidious and poisonous are the students’ beliefs, when exposed to repeated humiliation, as they recorded in their testimonies, that perhaps they deserve it because they are “soft.” And to bring it full circle, the worry that they are in fact soft stops them from asking for help or protection.

When Rutgers’ basketball coach Mike Rice was exposed as using homophobic slurs, there was significant outcry and he was fired. In Yahoo Sports in April 2013, sports reporter, Erik Adelson says that when the video of Mike Rice abusing players was aired: “social media exploded with horror and one resounding question: Why didn’t anyone fight back?” He looks beyond Rutgers University to multiple athletics programs for his answer and concludes that the question of why athletes tolerate abuse has “a one-word answer: fear.”[4] Athletes, boys in particular, are afraid that if they speak up, they will be accused of being “soft”.

In an article that responded to the Mike Rice scandal, T. F. Charlton examines the phenomenon of athletes not reporting on abusive coaches:

We should hardly be surprised, then, that players don’t speak up about abuse — and even, as in Rice’s case and many others, actually defend abusive behavior. Male and female players alike model the message they receive: that coaches who violate their emotional and physical boundaries do so for players’ good, and players who don’t handle this stoically aren’t up to snuff.[5]

Only one player on the Rutgers University Scarlet Knights risked speaking up against Coach Mike Rice before the video was played on ESPN. Homophobic coaching must be stopped. As T. F. Charlton argues:

“Instead of teaching young athletes to accept and shoulder abusive coaching as being ‘for their good,’ let’s teach them — and remind ourselves — that they have a right to not have their emotional and physical boundaries violated. Let’s provide an institutional structure that is proactive about preventing and addressing abuse and protects athletes and staff who speak out about it.”[6]

As a society, we will never eradicate bullying until we create a culture of support and remedy for those who find themselves in a cycle over which they have little or no control. Just like children who bully are not tolerated, coaches who bully need to be removed instantly from their positions until they are able to stop, get a clean bill of health from a psychologist, and hopefully return to their job. We would never let a teacher with a highly contagious disease near students. Likewise, we should never let a coach or teacher who suffers from a bullying or other psychological disorder to interact with students as their tendencies may well be passed on.

As one student recounted in his testimony at my former school: “I worry that I might become like [two of the coaches]. I’m scared I will snap and coach like them. It’s a really big worry for me. I have the fear that being abused, I’ll abuse others.” Another student reports that when coaching his little brother’s team, he found himself resorting to the same abusive practices to which he had been subjected. When his behaviour was pointed out to him by the adult with whom he was coaching, he felt terrible. Nevertheless, it was still a struggle for this bullied player to stop emulating the abusive coaching style he had learned as a younger player. He wanted to be seen as tough, hard, and successful after having that beaten into his mind over and over again at practices and games.

This honest admission by teenagers about how they have been negatively impacted is extremely concerning especially in terms of the students who normalize bullying behaviour, do not speak up against it or turn a blind eye when they witness it happen. Perhaps this is why there is a bullying epidemic not only in schools, but also in the workplace. For further discussion of emotional abuse in athletics, see Fraser’s forthcoming book, Teaching Bullies: Zero Tolerance on the Court or in the Classroom.

 

[1] Ashley E. Stirling and Gretchen A. Kerr, “Abused Athletes’ Perceptions of the Coach-Athlete Relationship”, Sport in Society Vol.12.2, March 2009: 227-239.

[2] Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux: 2002.

[3] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Soft%20as%20butter

[4] Erik Adelson, “Why do College Athletes Tolerate Abuse?” Yahoo Sports, April 2013: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaab–why-don-t-college-athletes-call-out-abusive-coaches–222535612.html

[5] T. F. Charlton: “Why do athletes tolerate abusive coaches? In locker rooms, insubordination is a worse crime than abuse of authority. Unless that changes, nothing else will.” Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/why_do_athletes_tolerate_abusive_coaches/

[6] T. F. Charlton: “Why do athletes tolerate abusive coaches? In locker rooms, insubordination is a worse crime than abuse of authority. Unless that changes, nothing else will.” Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/why_do_athletes_tolerate_abusive_coaches/

_____

Jennifer Fraser has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and is a published writer. She is presently teaching creative writing and International Bacclaureate literature classes at an independent school in British Columbia.

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Matthew Lynch published in Bullying

The use of homophobic slurs in sports: It’s for the athletes’ own good, right?

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Jennifer Fraser

“…male athletes in particular are held up as and expected to be paragons of a certain kind of masculinity, seen as the rejection of all that is coded ‘feminine.’ Exhortations that male athletes ‘be a man’ or ‘not act like little girls’ are even more pervasive in sports than they are in general culture. So it’s little surprise that a coach would use insults that imply his players are less than men to shame, humiliate and control them.” —T. F. Charlton

Homophobic slurs are an ideal way to stop young athletes from reporting abuse: if the coach regularly calls boys “pussies” or tells them to “grow some balls” or screams at them that they are “soft,” these boys are very unlikely to report because they worry that if they can’t hack such tough, masculine coaching, they might just be the feminized, degraded players the coach accuses them of being. Chances are good if you ask this kind of coach why he speaks to the boys this way, he will tell you that it’s to ‘toughen them up’. He will tell you that humiliating, taunting, and insulting, namely bullying, are effective tools to build athletic greatness. That’s how he was coached.

Unfortunately, there are many studies that reveal this kind of coaching harms athletes and fails to make winning teams. According to University of Toronto experts in the use of emotional abuse in sports: “One of the barriers to the implementation of an athlete-centered approach is the assumption, held by many sport practitioners, that holistic development comes at a cost to athletic performance.” However, there is “no empirical evidence” to back this belief up.[1] One of the greatest misconceptions in the sporting world is the belief that being hard on athletes makes strong teams.

As long ago as 1983, psychiatrist Dr. Alice Miller exposed a poisonous pedagogical approach as having devastating effects on children. Her study, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence has been so influential that a new edition was released in 2002. Essentially, Miller argues that care-givers who use abusive approaches, whether physical or emotional, harm children in significant ways even though they claim to have “the child’s best interests” in mind.[2]

Poisonous pedagogy underpins the argument that coaches need to yell, swear, humiliate and demean athletes in order to get the best out of them and for their team to be successful.

I resigned from a school where homophobic culture was widespread and tolerated in the basketball program. To give some examples of the culture: one day, while the Senior Boys Basketball team were competing in the Provincial Championships, one of the coaches wrote an email to all faculty at the school using a homophobic slur: “Boys lose by 11 with a soft second half performance.” This is a team where the term “soft” is hurled at the boys on a regular basis at practices. The messaging is that the abuse is deserved because the boys are failing to achieve masculine hardness (with all of its sexual overtones likely not lost on adolescent boys or in sports culture in general). One of the coaches would yell at students that they were “soft as butter”; according to Google’s online urban dictionary, “soft as butter” is an “expression to describe an absolute pussy who makes the most cowardly person look like a hero.”[3] Fourteen students came forward to report that taunting and insulting language was eroding their confidence and killing their love of the game. They were clear that homophobic slurs were harmful to them.

The use of misogynistic or homophobic terms to humiliate teenage boys is both widely discussed and well documented in sports journalism and abuse literature. However, as the coaches themselves said in their responses to the student allegations of bullying, in a School culture where using this language is seen as “normal” it was difficult to know when they’d crossed the line. And far more insidious and poisonous are the students’ beliefs, when exposed to repeated humiliation, as they recorded in their testimonies, that perhaps they deserve it because they are “soft.” And to bring it full circle, the worry that they are in fact soft stops them from asking for help or protection.

When Rutgers’ basketball coach Mike Rice was exposed as using homophobic slurs, there was significant outcry and he was fired. In Yahoo Sports in April 2013, sports reporter, Erik Adelson says that when the video of Mike Rice abusing players was aired: “social media exploded with horror and one resounding question: Why didn’t anyone fight back?” He looks beyond Rutgers University to multiple athletics programs for his answer and concludes that the question of why athletes tolerate abuse has “a one-word answer: fear.”[4] Athletes, boys in particular, are afraid that if they speak up, they will be accused of being “soft”.

In an article that responded to the Mike Rice scandal, T. F. Charlton examines the phenomenon of athletes not reporting on abusive coaches:

We should hardly be surprised, then, that players don’t speak up about abuse — and even, as in Rice’s case and many others, actually defend abusive behavior. Male and female players alike model the message they receive: that coaches who violate their emotional and physical boundaries do so for players’ good, and players who don’t handle this stoically aren’t up to snuff.[5]

Only one player on the Rutgers University Scarlet Knights risked speaking up against Coach Mike Rice before the video was played on ESPN. Homophobic coaching must be stopped. As T. F. Charlton argues:

“Instead of teaching young athletes to accept and shoulder abusive coaching as being ‘for their good,’ let’s teach them — and remind ourselves — that they have a right to not have their emotional and physical boundaries violated. Let’s provide an institutional structure that is proactive about preventing and addressing abuse and protects athletes and staff who speak out about it.”[6]

As a society, we will never eradicate bullying until we create a culture of support and remedy for those who find themselves in a cycle over which they have little or no control. Just like children who bully are not tolerated, coaches who bully need to be removed instantly from their positions until they are able to stop, get a clean bill of health from a psychologist, and hopefully return to their job. We would never let a teacher with a highly contagious disease near students. Likewise, we should never let a coach or teacher who suffers from a bullying or other psychological disorder to interact with students as their tendencies may well be passed on.

As one student recounted in his testimony at my former school: “I worry that I might become like [two of the coaches]. I’m scared I will snap and coach like them. It’s a really big worry for me. I have the fear that being abused, I’ll abuse others.” Another student reports that when coaching his little brother’s team, he found himself resorting to the same abusive practices to which he had been subjected. When his behaviour was pointed out to him by the adult with whom he was coaching, he felt terrible. Nevertheless, it was still a struggle for this bullied player to stop emulating the abusive coaching style he had learned as a younger player. He wanted to be seen as tough, hard, and successful after having that beaten into his mind over and over again at practices and games.

This honest admission by teenagers about how they have been negatively impacted is extremely concerning especially in terms of the students who normalize bullying behaviour, do not speak up against it or turn a blind eye when they witness it happen. Perhaps this is why there is a bullying epidemic not only in schools, but also in the workplace. For further discussion of emotional abuse in athletics, see Fraser’s forthcoming book, Teaching Bullies: Zero Tolerance on the Court or in the Classroom.

 

[1] Ashley E. Stirling and Gretchen A. Kerr, “Abused Athletes’ Perceptions of the Coach-Athlete Relationship”, Sport in Society Vol.12.2, March 2009: 227-239.

[2] Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux: 2002.

[3] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Soft%20as%20butter

[4] Erik Adelson, “Why do College Athletes Tolerate Abuse?” Yahoo Sports, April 2013: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaab–why-don-t-college-athletes-call-out-abusive-coaches–222535612.html

[5] T. F. Charlton: “Why do athletes tolerate abusive coaches? In locker rooms, insubordination is a worse crime than abuse of authority. Unless that changes, nothing else will.” Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/why_do_athletes_tolerate_abusive_coaches/

[6] T. F. Charlton: “Why do athletes tolerate abusive coaches? In locker rooms, insubordination is a worse crime than abuse of authority. Unless that changes, nothing else will.” Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/why_do_athletes_tolerate_abusive_coaches/

_____

Jennifer Fraser has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and is a published writer. She is presently teaching creative writing and International Bacclaureate literature classes at an independent school in British Columbia.

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, Education Leadership

The economic argument for ethnic studies

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest column by Jim Estrada

Our nation is undergoing a cultural evolution as a result of an ethnic population explosion. In a blink of the eye, Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos have grown to 54 million in 2015 and are projected to reach 132.8 million by 2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Much of this growth will come from natural childbirth among U.S. citizens, not immigration as many in the U.S. have been led to believe to believe.

But what else do we not know about our nation’s largest and fastest-growing ethnic neighbors? Simply stated, very little!

We have a substantial information gap in the USA’s educational curricula regarding our nation’s non-European white populations. Exposure to accurate unbiased information about them, their histories, and contributions to our nation can lead to a better understanding of their increasing influence and contributions as the fastest growing consumers, K-12 students, taxpayers, voters, and members of the workforce. This gap represents a glaring need, as they are already the “majority” of the population in many metropolitan areas across the nation.

According to the Selig Center at the University of Georgia, consumer spending among Latinos increased appreciably and grown at a faster rate than that of the overall U.S. population. Since 1990 the nation’s Hispanic buying power grew dynamically. In sheer dollars, their economic clout rose from $212 billion in 1990, to $489 billion in 2000, to $978 billion in 2009, and was estimated to reach over $1.5 trillion by 2015.

To effectively interact with this diverse and fast-growing ethnic group, mainstream society must become better informed of its members’ histories, cultures, and contributions to our nation. Already, U.S. Spanish-language media has recognized the historical void in positive programming images and limited news coverage related to the Latino segment of U.S. society and is addressing that need. In a world of increasingly diverse information sources and content, Spanish-language media is demonstrating that cultural relevance works; and more importantly, that it is profitable—for itself and its advertisers.

Questions many non-Spanish speaking professionals and managers need to answer are: “Do you possess the necessary skills to deal with the growing influence of this ethnic population on your “bottom line”? Is the traditional white-Eurocentric “one size fits all” approach to marketing and advertising still profitable?” If the answer is no, then the next question must be: “Are the nation’s educational systems, companies, government, and non-profit organizations prepared to invest in preparing experts who can provide them with culturally competent professionals?”

There are many thoughts on how to create cultural competency. The logical place to start is in our nation’s school systems, which are charged with expanding the knowledge base that affect the goals and objectives of our society and the marketplace. The most successful private companies and public service delivery sectors must increase their number of culturally competent, career-specific, degreed individuals when creating a diverse employee team that more accurately reflects the demographic changes occurring in our population.

Due to these rapidly changing demographics, employers must increasingly rely on employees who demonstrate knowledge of their respective organization’s diverse consumers and possess the cultural proficiencies to manage new brands or services, communications, and outreach initiatives that address the organization’s integrated operational and marketing efforts. Having culturally competent “aces” in all the right places insures increased market share, profits, and sustainability in an increasingly diverse and competitive marketplace.

Ethnic studies are important to the fast-growing non-white segments of our country’s population for a variety of psychological and social reasons; but from an strictly economic point they may of equal importance to non-minority individuals who must become culturally aware of those who are already affecting their professions and careers—as well as related revenue streams.

Our nation’s educational institutions must address this critical need for preparing tomorrow’s multi-culturally trained workforce, for especially in the marketplace (and workplace) “adapt or perish” remains nature’s inexorable imperative.

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Jim Estrada is a nationally recognized expert in ethnic marketing, communications, and public relations. The author of the award-winning book, “The ABCs and Ñ of America’s Cultural Evolution,” has provided his counsel to the most respected corporations and nonprofit organizations in the USA. A former TV newsman and corporate executive, he attended San Diego State University, Boston College, and Harvard Business School.

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Matthew Lynch published in Equity, Policy & Reform, Secondary Education

Will the pending ESEA actually move funding backward?

By Derek Black of Law Professor Blogs Network

Last week, Nora Gordon focused on one of the more technical aspects of the pending Senate bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: the supplement not supplant standard. The standard requires that Title I funds for low income students only be used to supplement the resources that state and local entities were already providing those students, not supplant them. Gordon summarized the new revisions and her sense of their importance:

The larger legacy of the Every Child Achieves Act may well be how it cleans up supplement not supplant, a little discussed and often misunderstood fiscal rule with a big impact on how schools actually spend the $14 billion of NCLB Title I funds. The proposed legislation makes two important changes: (1) it requires districts to show they are distributing their state and local funds across schools without regard to the federal funds that each school receives; and (2) it increases local autonomy over how to spend Title I funds.

The problem she says is that:

Under current law, those Title I schools that do not operate school-wide programs must demonstrate that every single thing they buy with Title I funds helps only the neediest students, and would not be purchased with other funds absent the federal aid. In my research, I’ve found this rule often has the unintended consequence of preventing districts from spending money on the things that might help those students most, pushing schools to work around the edges of their central instructional mission. They buy “interventionists” instead of teachers, or “supplemental” curricular materials rather than “core” ones, and are discouraged from investing Title I funds in technology.

Gordon is correct that the supplement not supplant has been a disaster.  As I wrote in The Congressional Failure to Enforce Equal Protection Through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 90 B.U. L. Rev. 313 (2010),

Although well meaning, the prohibition on supplanting has not met its goal. In fact, in a recent report, the GAO recommended eliminating the supplement-not-supplant standard altogether. The GAO concluded that the standard has become almost impossible to enforce. Enforcing the standard requires too much speculation about what a school district would have spent on education and also requires extremely detailed tracking of spending in thousands of school districts. In short, the prohibition on supplanting funds relies on unreliable projections and unusually labor-intensive work. Possibly for these reasons, the Department of Education has effectively stopped attempting to enforce the standard, treating it as a non-priority. The standard, however, remains the law and a measure that well-intentioned schools may expend effort attempting to meet.

But at this point, the question is not whether we should discard the current supplement not supplant rule.  The question is what we should replace it with.  It is far from clear that moving toward more district autonomy (so long as they provide data) fixes the funding inequities and inept state and local funding effort that Congress needed to tackle with supplement not supplant and other related standards.

The new fix in the pending bill is a compromise that dodges that fundamental problems, and has the potential to incentivize backsliding by state and local districts unless other new protections are added.  Yes, the new bill would provide more information on funding inequality from states so that we can see what they are doing.  But that data is generally available anyway.  The challenge is that data’s complexity, not its unavailability.  So the new freedom for states looks like a give away that runs the risk that states will engage in the very behavior it formerly sought to prohibit (even if Congress and the Department of Education never did a good job of prohibiting it).  Under the proposed new approach, federal money could even more easily become part of districts’ general operating budget, which would allow the money to be seriously diluted or state and local dollars to decrease when federal dollars are available to fill the gap.

So what should we do in reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act?  I laid out the solutions in painstaking detail in the article noted above.  But in short, the Elementary and Secondary Act should 1) demand comparability of resources both within and between districts and 2) distribute federal funds to incentivize states to meet student need (get states to progressively fund high poverty schools), and 3) incentivize integration and punish segregation.  The first two proposal are intuitive, but the third is also necessary because the existence of segregation provides the platform for inequality and drives up the cost of delivering an equitable education in high poverty schools.  Unfortunately, there are longstanding headwinds against these solutions, which explains why the Senate’s proposed supplement not supplant approach does so little.

Get my full explanation of how to fix ESEA here.

 

This post originally appeared on the Law Professor Blogs Network and has been republished with permission.

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, Equity

When researchers ask for data on penalization of black kids, schools resist, cover up

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

 

Muhammad Khalifa, Michigan State University & Felecia Briscoe, University of Texas at San Antonio
Students of color are more likely to be suspended. Rod Library, CC BY

That students of color bear the brunt of the zero tolerance discipline policies in schools has been well-established. What is not so well known is that some school administrations are actually complicit in this act of racial disciplining.

Nationally, students of color are more likely to be suspended than white students. On average, black boys are suspended four times more than white boys. Latino students are also suspended more frequently than white students, and female students of color are also disciplined more frequently than white female students.

The policy ‘problem’

But this is not all. A recent study that we conducted over a period of two years in Texas found that schools were in fact negligent when it came to addressing such practices of disciplining. The study covered four school districts in Texas with a population of nearly 200,000 students.

As researchers, we have been studying this issue since 2010. But what prompted this study was the suspension of one of the researcher’s sons from school. The child was given a US $500 court citation. And when we showed up for our court appointment, we saw that all the children were either black or brown. Did it mean that white children never fought in school?

We knew this was part of what is now known as the school-to-prison pipeline for children of color. It led us to take on a scholar-activist role.

Most schools and districts claim to be following “race-neutral” discipline policies. School officials even point to their race-neutral suspension and expulsion policies to show how they are “fair” with students of all race and ethnic subgroups.

However, researchers have found that the problem lies in the application of these policies.

For example, black students are more likely to be suspended for breaking subjective school rules such as a lack of respect for teachers than for objective ones, like having a weapon. Researchers point to cultural stereotypes and misunderstandings from a primarily white teaching force as the reasons for the “disciplining gaps.”

Data on discipline

Our recent study found that some schools are, in fact, negligent and even defensive when it comes to addressing the problem of school discipline practices and the discipline gap.

The kind of responses we got when we asked for school districts’ discipline data resembled a “corporate cover-up.”

Some school administrators resisted our attempts to provide information under the  Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and some others released data that were not helpful. For example, in the discipline data submitted by a school district, we were not able to discern the race of the children who had been suspended or expelled from school.

Some schools have been found to be negligent about school disciplining issues. Student image via www.shutterstock.com

It is hard for us to imagine that schools are not keeping track of usable disciplinary data, considering that in recent years, widespread attention has focused on the disciplinary treatment of black boys and other students of color. President Obama has even initiated My Brother’s Keeper, a national program intended to help black and Latino boys succeed.

Responses from schools

Our biggest surprise was finding out that districts perceived our request for data as a threat. We found that school administrations became secretive, defensive and even more protective of the data. It seemed to us that districts were essentially complicit in the process of oppression of youth of color.

Even the districts that provided the data were very defensive when informed of the discipline gaps that occurred in their schools. For example, when presented with data in his district, one data administrator responded, “Well, other districts in Texas are higher than us” and “We are not far off from the state average.”

It was very troubling for us to see schools reacting in this way, especially when lives of youth were at risk. These responses were unacceptable and deflected the district’s responsibility.

In the end, only one school district, out of four, instituted a district-wide program for the principals of their schools to learn more about the racial discipline gaps. It was the only one to take steps on how to begin reducing and eliminating racial discipline gaps at both the school and at the district level.

As we conducted the study, we also realized that there is no national legislation that prompts schools to address disparities in education. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and other national legislation have at least attempted to draw attention to racial disparities in achievement, no legislation exists that actually compels schools to address the problem.

This is unfortunate, given the close connection between the academic achievement gap and the discipline gap.

What must be done?

It is important that schools make policies and goals for racial and ethnic groups more explicit. For example, a goal for “75% proficiency for students in math” is not as impactful as “75% proficiency for each student subgroup based on their racial, gender or language-based identity.” The reason we say this is: what if the population of a school is 25% Latino and that happens to be the same population of nonproficient math students?

At the policy level, what is needed is intensive training on implicit racial bias in most districts. In addition, school districts should be required to report overall suspension rates and discipline gaps within each of their schools.

Furthermore, state or federal policies must begin to regulate both the collection of discipline data and the rate of compliance of schools.

Parents too need to pay more attention. Parents of color and from other subgroups should begin to identify which schools are more likely to suspend students of color.

All this together can be a powerful impetus for districts and schools to attend to this problem. Otherwise, disciplining practices will continue to have devastating consequences for our kids.

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

________________________________

Muhammad Khalifa is Assistant Professor of Educational Administration at Michigan State University.

Felecia Briscoe is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at The University of Texas at San Antonio

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Read the original article.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Teachers

Spend less time searching for classroom resources

A teacher’s job does not end when the school bell rings. From grading papers and prepping classroom materials, to creating lesson plans and seeking out professional development opportunities, to say that educators have a lot on their plate would be an understatement.

Finding classroom resources and quality training has been an even more arduous task with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. According to a report from the Center on Education Policy, a majority of educators are creating new curricula independently—more than two-thirds of districts reported that their teachers were designing their own curricula to meet the new standards.

This has left many teachers looking for tools that can help them find high quality lesson plans, worksheets and other resources to aid their instruction. The process of sifting through irrelevant content can be a drain on educators, who are often spending their own money on classroom materials and resources. Educators need an effective and affordable way to find peer-reviewed content so they can spend less time searching and more time focused on the classroom.

Unlimited Resources, On-Demand

Teachwise Inspire, a new online platform for educators, can most easily be described as the “Netflix” of teaching resources. For a low monthly subscription, members gain access to unlimited, on-demand classroom and professional development resources, eliminating the potential for buyer’s remorse.

The online tool currently includes 28,000 teacher-reviewed, teacher-approved K-12 resources that are aligned to the Common Core and connected to curriculum goals. Content is curated in partnership with Lesson Planet based on their rigorous review criteria. The platform allows users to easily search for resources by subject area, grade level, and specific standard-alignment so they can find exactly what they are looking for. Members also have the ability to rate and review resources, making it easy to see how other educators are using the resources in their own classrooms.

There are also professional development videos and coursework for teachers, with topics ranging from behavior management to implementing new teaching strategies.

Save Time and Money

Teachers spend too much time and money finding resources to use in the classroom. Teachwise Inspire is an affordable tool that can give educators back some of that time, allowing them to focus on their number one priority—students.

Basic membership is available at a monthly cost of $7.99, and for a limited time is available for a seven-day free trial.  To sign up for the free trial, educators can visit inspire.teachwise.com.

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation

Data secrecy violating data democracy in D.C. public schools

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) is soon to vote on yet another dramatic new educational policy that, as described in an email/letter to all members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) by AFT President Randi Weingarten, “would make it impossible for educators, parents and the general public to judge whether some of DCPS’ core instructional strategies and policies are really helping District children succeed.”

As per Weingarten: “Over a year ago, the Washington [DC] Teachers’ Union filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see the data from the school district’s IMPACT [teacher] evaluation system—a system that’s used for big choices, like the firing of 563 teachers in just the past four years, curriculum decisions, school closures and more [see prior posts about this as related to the IMPACT program here]. The FOIA request was filed because DCPS refused to provide the data….[data that are]…essential to understanding and addressing the DCPS policies and practices that impact” teachers and education in general.

Not only are such data crucial to build understandings, as noted, but they are also crucial in support of a functioning democracy, to allow others within a population concerned with a public institution test the mandates and policies they collectively support, in theory or concept (perhaps) but also via public taxes.

Regardless, soon after the DC union filed the FOIA, DCPS (retaliated, perhaps, and) began looking to override FOIA laws through “a radical new secrecy provision to hide the information that’s being used to make big decisions” like those associated with the aforementioned IMPACT teacher evaluation system.

Sound familiar? See prior posts about other extreme governmental moves in the name of secrecy, or rather educational policies at all costs, namely in New Mexico here and here.

You can send a letter to those in D.C. to vote NO on their “Educator Evaluation Data Protection” provisions by clicking here.

As per another post on this topic, in GFBrandenburg’s Blog — that is “Just a blog by a guy who’s a retired math teacher” — Brandenburg did leak some of the data now deemed “secret.” Namely, he “was leaked,” by an undisclosed source, “the 2009-10 IMPACT sub-scores from the Value-Added Monstrosity (VAM) nonsense and the Teaching and Learning Framework (TLF), with the names removed. [He] plotted the two [sets of] scores and showed that the correlation was very, very low, in fact about 0.33 [r-squared=0.13], or nearly random, as you [can] see here:”

 

vam-vs-tlf-dc-2009-10

In the world of correlation, this is atrocious, IF high-stakes (e.g., teacher termination, tenure, merit pay) are to be attached to such output. No wonder DCPS does not want people checking in to see if that which they are selling is true to what is being sold.

In Brandenburg’s words: “Value-Added scores for any given teacher jumped around like crazy from year to year. For all practical purposes, there is no reliability or consistency to VAM whatsoever. Not even for elementary teachers who teach both English and math to the same group of children and are ‘awarded’ a VAM score in both subjects. Nor for teachers who taught, say, both 7th and 8th grade students in, say, math, and were ‘awarded’ VAM scores for both grade levels: it’s as if someone was to throw darts at a large chart, blindfolded, and wherever the dart lands, that’s your score.”

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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This post originally appeared on the blog VAMboozled! and has been republished with permission.

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, Equity, Policy & Reform

Bilingual Education: 5 Reasons it should be Required

By Matthew Lynch

This generation of K-12 students is growing up in a society that is increasingly bilingual.  While foreign language requirements have long been a core requirement for high school graduation—second language classes at an earlier age would improve overall fluency for most students.  It’s time to introduce second-language concepts to the youngest of K-12 students, and here are just a few of the reasons why:

1. Bilingual Children have an Academic Advantage.  Studies in language development show that when young children have more exposure to all languages at an early age, it actually gives them a distinct academic advantage throughout life. There is often an argument that students should first master the English language before branching out to others – but why can’t both be taught simultaneously? Bilingual children are able to focus more intently on the topics at hand and avoid distractions from academic pursuits. They are also able to demonstrate higher levels of cognitive flexibility, or the ability to change responses based on environment and circumstances.

2.  Bilingualism Improves Life-Long Learning Skills. For children to truly see the full potential multi-lingualism has on learning, exposure to non-native languages should actually begin long before Kindergarten.  However, even children who learn their first Spanish words at the age of 5 can benefit from dual language curriculum. Learning is learning. The more that children can take advantage of new concepts, the more in tune their brains will be to all learning throughout life. Some studies have also found that the aging of the brain is slower and the employment rate is higher in adults with bilingual capabilities. Why not set kids up for success and strengthen long-term brain health while we are at it?

3. It Helps to Remove International Language Barriers.  There are also the cultural benefits to children learning two languages together. The children who come from English-speaking homes can lend their language expertise to friends from Spanish-speaking homes, and vice versa. Contemporary communication technology has eliminated many global barriers when it comes to socialization and even doing business. It makes sense that language boundaries should also come down and with help from our K-12 education system, that is possible.

4.  It Leads to Collaborative Learning.  Dual language programs show students a broader world-view, whatever the native language of the student, and lead to greater opportunities for collaborative learning. We should not limit what children learn based on outdated principles masked in patriotism.

5. Early Bilingual Education Increases Fluency in Later Years. It generally takes 5–7 years to be proficient in a second language.  Second-generation Hispanic children raised in the United States usually learn to speak English very well by adulthood, even though three-quarters of their parents speak mostly Spanish and are not English proficient.  However only 23 percent of first-generation immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries—those that began learning later in life, say they speak English very well.  Pew Hispanic Center statistics have shown that 88 percent of the members of the second generation—those children that were introduced to English at an early age, described themselves as strong English speakers.  This phenomenon should apply to children who speak English as their first language as well.  In other words, U.S. students should be introduced to a second language at a young age in order to be fluent by adulthood.  In fact, I believe that all K-12 students should have Spanish and English fluency by graduation.

By implementing bilingual options even younger, K-12 students stand to benefit long-term – both academically and in life. There really should be no reason why these students are not introduced to a second language as early as Kindergarten.

What is your opinion on mandating bilingual education programs in the future?

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