PJ Media

What Liberals don’t want you to know about black educational issues:

“Findings from this study also indicate that Black students and parents have a strong mistrust of Whites based on cultural transmission, treatment of Blacks in the job market, and collective mistreatment. Because Black parents taught their children to be careful of teachers (whose ideas, words, and actions could not be trusted), schooling was rarely evaluated in terms of its pragmatic function and more often evaluated in the context of Black-White relations. This is a noteworthy finding that involves deeper exploration. Ogbu argues for a pragmatic trust from Black parents and students that would allow these students to overlook race relations and see teachers as knowledge and skills experts and schooling as a means to a future social and economic end. Given that many Black parents are sending their children to school with conflicting notions of attaining academic success while keeping a critical eye on the “keeper of knowledge” (i.e., White school personnel), one could argue that it seems quite logical that Black students’ cynical attitudes toward schooling based on their minority status in the United States negatively inform their academic performance. Ogbu’s notion of a pragmatic trust might be too much to ask of the Black community, given Blacks’ history of mistreatment and “mis-education” in America.

The data also showed that Black students believed they were intellectually inferior to Whites and harbored feelings of self-doubt, hence, they often eliminated themselves from higher-level courses. Also, Ogbu found that teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about Black students contributed to these feelings of inferiority. Even though teachers did not openly say that Black students did not work hard, they implied it in their actions. For example, some teachers admitted not assigning homework in their skills and college-prep classes (lower-level courses), which were primarily populated with Black students, because they believed the students would not do the work. Teachers also expected and demanded less work from these students during lessons than they did from students in their honors and AP classes. The teacher data are consistent with similar findings in the literature related to tracking and beliefs and stereotypes about Black students, particularly in lower-level courses (Irvine, 2003; Oakes, 1985; Nieto, 2004). As mentioned earlier in the essay, these findings raise the question of whether or not Black students’ “low-effort syndrome” is informed by teachers’ perceptions of them or whether teachers’ attitudes toward and beliefs about Black students are informed by Black students’ display of minimum effort. This critical issue, which Ogbu raises in this section of the book, warrants further investigation.” Harvard University, Dorinda Carter