Educational Proficiency of Black Students Lags Behind

Some folks have no faith in the educational system, but Urban Prep Academy on Chicago's south side must be doing something right. Once again, 100% of its 2012 graduating seniors are heading off to college in the fall. And by the way, this school is the only all-Black, all-male public prep school in Chicago!

This is the third year in a row that the school has achieved the feat thanks to hard working teachers and parents and of course...the amazing students.

The school started with kids whose futures had been left for dead by their public schools: Only four percent of the school's incoming freshmen were reading at grade level when they arrived on campus.

http://www.urbanprep.org/

A local effort that takes place in Cypress Hills (a rough section of Brooklyn...), also had success.

New York City’s College Access and Success Initiative (CAS), focuses on improving the odds of success for young people who have graduated from failing high schools, are recent immigrants, or who have dropped out and then attained a GED.

Begun in 2004, it demonstrates how colleges and community organizations can integrate education and youth development to improve student success.

The challenges are great. Three-fourths of CUNY

community college freshman require remediation,

and these needs are greatest among those who, like

CAS students, have attended a weak high school or dropped

out and passed the GED (Foderaro 2011). Clearly, stronger

preparation will be necessary to enable these students to

succeed in college. In particular, GED programs will need major

reform before they prepare students effectively for college

(Garvey & Grobe 2011).

The full report:

http://www.jff.org/sites/default/files/BestOfTwoWorlds_032112.pdf

I was literally just saying to my husband yesterday that if I never hear the comment that good teachers leave because they don't get bonuses or whatever again it would still be too soon.

Good teachers don't leave because they don't get bonuses. They leave because they are treated like crap by kids/parents/admin/the public and treated like incompetent people rather than professionals. They are abused in subtle ways - good at management? Get all the hard to handle kids piled in your class so worse teachers don't have to try to manage them. Really strong reading teachers? Get all of the struggling readers and ELL students while the other teachers get stronger readers. In both cases, guess whose ridiculous data will look better? The worse teacher with the easier kids. THAT is why good teachers leave - abused and disrespected.

The child trauma approach is beginning to be used:

NYT wrote:

By David Brooks New York Times September 27, 2012

In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a study on adverse childhood experiences. They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured.

The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking. People with an ACE score of 4 were seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults than people with an ACE score of 0. They were six times more likely to have had sex before age 15, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, four times as likely to suffer emphysema. People with an ACE score above 6 were 30 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Later research suggested that only 3 percent of students with an ACE score of 0 had learning or behavioral problems in school. Among students with an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51 percent had those problems.

In Paul Tough’s essential book, “How Children Succeed,” he describes what’s going on. Childhood stress can have long lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.

Tough interviewed a young lady named Monisha, who was pulled out of class by a social worker, taken to a strange foster home and forbidden from seeing her father for months. “I remember the first day like it was yesterday. Every detail. I still have dreams about it. I feel like I’m going to be damaged forever.”

Monisha’s anxiety sensors are still going full blast. “If a plane flies over me, I think they’re going to drop a bomb. I think about my dad dying,” she told Tough. “When I get scared, I start shaking. My heart starts beating. I start sweating. You know how people say ‘I was scared to death’? I get scared that that’s really going to happen to me one day.”

Tough’s book is part of what you might call the psychologizing of domestic policy. In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure, like poor neighborhoods, bad nutrition, schools that are too big or too small. But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning — the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.

Attention has shifted toward the psychological for several reasons. First, it’s become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress. Schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, are among the best college prep academies for disadvantaged kids. But, in its first survey a few years ago, KIPP discovered that three-quarters of its graduates were not making it through college. It wasn’t the students with the lower high school grades that were dropping out most. It was the ones with the weakest resilience and social skills. It was the pessimists.

Second, over the past few years, an array of psychological researchers have taught us that motivation, self-control and resilience are together as important as raw I.Q. and are probably more malleable.

Finally, pop culture has been far out front of policy makers in showing how social dysfunction can ruin lives. You can turn on an episode of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” about a train wreck working-class family. You can turn on “Alaska State Troopers” and see trailer parks filled with drugged-up basket cases. You can listen to rappers like Tyler, The Creator whose songs are angry howls from fatherless men.

Schools are now casting about, trying to find psychological programs that will help students work on resilience, equanimity and self-control. Some schools give two sets of grades — one for academic work and one for deportment.

And it’s not just schools that are veering deeper into the psychological realms. Health care systems are going the same way, tracing obesity and self-destructive habits back to social breakdown and stress.

When you look over the domestic policy landscape, you see all these different people in different policy silos with different budgets: in health care, education, crime, poverty, social mobility and labor force issues. But, in their disjointed ways, they are all dealing with the same problem — that across vast stretches of America, economic, social and family breakdowns are producing enormous amounts of stress and unregulated behavior, which dulls motivation, undermines self-control and distorts lives.

Maybe it’s time for people in all these different fields to get together in a room and make a concerted push against the psychological barriers to success.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/opinion/brooks-the-psych-approach.html

This article discusses how prepared NYC students the pass the Regents tests are for college:

http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/regents2012.pdf

It doesn't break the numbers out by hue, income, or any other criteria. As a result it provides a nice comparision group (i.e. baseline) for studies that do wish to type about such correlations.

Like this one: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20121024/new-york-city/most-black-latino-students-unprepared-for-college-study-says

whynot_31 said:

Sunday's NYT contained an article that discussed the skills gap between children of poor parents, and those of professionals. Vocabulary was the the focus:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolchildren-a-poverty-of-words.html?_r=0

bias reporting. Asians here in NYC are unlike their Californian counterparts are mostly from poor backgrounds and their parents aren't educated.

yet they do very well.

also Caribbean and African kids do better too.

then native black and hispanic kids.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissions-test-highlights-a-racial-divide.html

Policy Briefing: Keeping Middle School Students on Track for High School Graduation

December 5, 2012

4:00 PM

Free

The middle school years, from grades 6-8, are an important stage in a child's social and educational development and lay the foundation for a student's long-term academic success. This CCC Policy Briefing will discuss ways educators are working to identify struggling middle school students and support them in preparing for a successful transition to high school and beyond graduation.

The scheduled speakers include:

•Michael Selkis, Director, School Development and Support, and Director/Network Leader, FHI 360 Partnership Support Organization

•A representative from the New School for Leadership and the Arts (MS 244, Bronx)

•Calvin Hastings, Senior Director for Middle School Quality, New York City Department of Education

READ MORE.

Event Location

Citizens' Committee for Children

105 East 22nd Street, 7th Floor

New York, NY 10010

to RSVP: http://action.voices.org/site/Calendar/?view=RSVP&id=104161&autologin=true