The synthesis of the divisions which exists in society result in segmentation which leads to stratification of society. For example, the specialization of labor results in further segmentation according to the size of a population in that it structures categories of people. Another division that exists in society is that of race. Race is a quintessentioal aspect of the cdivision tha have come to haollmark society. The sybtgesis approach to the order and conflict theories of society seeks to amalgamat e the various constituenceis into a synergistic whole. Interdependence is achieved with the realization the no one group is entirlely self sufficient. The conflict model manintains that change is an ubiquitous process which is the basis for the belief that conflict is endemic to all organizations.

In the world of order theorists the course with the segregationists began the segmentation of re gentrification.

The decision to make a moderately calibrated rate of change can only aggregate the situation of the process of syncretism. Conflict is manifested as a blockage in the demirge and chaos ensues.

To not act upon the inclination to the concept of equality…the polarization of public opinion would be self evident…stagnated and homogenized.

I meant to say that one book offers the perspective of an educator, the other, a journalist.

Adam

There are some other good resources that shed light on what has been discussed.

“Savage Inequalities” by Jonathan Kozol. (1989)

“Showing My Color: Impolite Essays on Race and Identity” by Clarence Page. (1996)

These two books contain some profound insights on the educational and racial climate in the U.S. One from educator, the

As for that Supreme Court ruling, I have been puzzled by it for months – the majority opinion actually cited Brown v. The Board of Education (1954) in support of their decision.

Thank you for permitting me to enter comments.

Southside (Chicago) Iron Irishman,

Adam

Anyway, so this kind of thinking has been reinforced again and again over time by racist and politically-motivated “scientists” who have either tailored the data to fit their preconceived notions (a big no-no in social research, not-so-ironically called bias), ignored data which contradicts those notions, or fabricated data out of whole cloth. (Seriously. The one who pulled that stunt was a prominent British researcher, so it wasn’t just us Americans.) But here’s the thing: when later researchers repeated the same experiments without bias, the data actually suggest very little connection between heredity and intelligence. Genetics is one of the factors involved, yes, but so are a smorgasbord of “environmental factors”, like proper nutrition, access to resources, challenge and stimulation, and so on. In other words, intelligence is *not* fixed, and *not* linked in any way to race.

But our (US) kids believe otherwise. Heck, most US adults believe otherwise. We believe that you’re either smart or you’re not, and that if you’re not you never will be. Tatum cites a number of key studies which show that when children *believe* they’re smart, they do well in school. When they don’t believe it, they do poorly.

So here’s the problem. Those of us who have been historically stigmatized by race in this country are encouraged to believe that we’re not smart. With effort, we can shake off this belief; this is why creating an identity-affirming, positive environtment is so crucial for students of color. Before integration, this task was fulfilled by black teachers, and also by the pre-integration black community where doctors and lawyers and scientists lived right alongside plumbers and janitors. The mentors were there, the encouragement was there, the examples of successful achievement were there.

After integration, most black teachers and school administrators lost their jobs, replaced by (primarily) white females. Tatum says the mismatch was worst in urban school districts, where currently students of color make up 76% of the population — and about 76% of the teachers are white women. I am in no way suggesting that all or even most of those teachers are racists — but a whole heck of a lot of them, particularly right after integration, were. And even the most well-meaning of the rest probably weren’t prepared to deal with students of color; teacher education programs didn’t start examining things like racial identity development or diversity training until the 70s. So what happens when a white teacher, whose sole exposure to blacks has come through the media, who has probably absorbed the quintessential racist notion that blacks and Latin@s are mentally inferior, and who may never have confronted her own white privilege, teaches a class full of black and Latin@ students? In short, the teachers don’t expect much of the students and don’t try very hard to teach them. Moreover, the students pick up on the teacher’s disengagement or hostility — and usually they pick up on *why*, too — and react by rebelling against her and anything she’s trying to teach.

(Note: I’m excluding Asians in this instance because Tatum notes they have a different problem — the model minority stereotype. They’re assumed to be inherently smart — and so teachers ignore them, thinking they never need help.)

Tatum cites some really powerful anecdotes here to illustrate the problem, and a couple of devastating (to me) studies. The one that really jumps out at me is a series of studies by social psychologist Claude Steele, conducted in the late 1990s/early 2000s, illustrating something he calls “stereotype threat”. In one experiment at Stanford, the researchers took high-achieving black and white students matched them in pairs by SAT score. Then they put each pair into a stressful standardized testing situation and told the students it was a “diagnostic” of their intellectual ability. The white students outperformed the black students. Then Steele gave the same test to a new group with a different set of instructions, explaining that it wasn’t meant to measure intellectual ability, just a survey of their problem-solving skills. Under this condition, the black and white students performed equally well.

What the researchers eventually concluded (after repeating the test many times in different variations) was that when tested on something “stereotype-related”, students experienced greater anxiety and performed more slowly (which on a standardized test means finishing fewer questions, and a lower score). For example, the students reread the questions and rechecked their answers more often on the “intellectual” version of the test than on the “non-intellectual” version. This led Steele to believe that they were conscious of the “blacks aren’t smart” stereotype, and were literally trying harder — too hard, considering it had a negative impact — to prove themselves. The disparity got even worse when, prior to the test, the students checked off a box indicating their racial group membership. When there was no checkbox, or when the box came after the test, the black students performed better.

(Similar studies have been performed with women, BTW, re gendered stereotypes on math performance.)

OK. So getting back to the point: *are* black students worse-off now than they were before integration? In terms of material resources, no, they’re way better off now. In terms of certain measures of achievement, like literacy and high school graduation and college attendance, they’re way better off now. (But so are all American students, regardless of race.) In terms of less-quantifiable measures of achievement — no, I don’t think black students are better-off now. I think it’s a lot *harder* now for black students succeed in spite of racism, because they’ve lost a crucial weapon: a supportive environment. Not across the board, of course; some schools are better than others, some teachers are better than others, sometimes the lack is made up by family and/or subculture (for example in the case of African immigrant families, who are performing just as well as whites by some academic measures — I hate citing Wikipedia but this is where I first saw it). But in general, I think it’s harder now for black students to succeed academically. They’ve exchanged the overt racism of segregation — which was easy to fight, relatively speaking — for the more insidious subtle racism of integration, which takes a much heavier toll on the mind. And in the context of education, I think that toll is manifesting in the form of the racial performance gap on standardized tests, a gap in college attendance and quality of college attended (*Tatum notes that in a survey of 25 “selective” colleges in ‘98, black students averaged only 7% of the population), and probably a whole lot of other measures as well. Overall, I believe the greater racism students of color have endured since integration has retarded their progress. They might be doing better, but if not for racism they’d be doing *much* better. That so many *do* succeed under these conditions is a real testament to those students, IMO.

And let me reiterate — I am *not* advocating a return to segregation. I think that overall, we’re *all* better off for the chance to interact with other cultures, regardless of race. But it’s clear that whatever we (African-Americans, I mean in this case) may have gained materially, we lost even more psychologically when we gave up the support system that once existed in black schools. I still think integration is worth that price, but we must acknowledge that the price is being paid.

::whew::

There’s a lot in your comments, Rachel, so I’m going to focus on what seems to me (correct me if I’m wrong) to be the core: *are* black students worse-off now than they were before integration?

It’s a really tough question to answer because I don’t know where or how to find info on achievement before integration. That was part of the problem — black schools in those days were so under-resourced that I doubt anyone tried to collect such data, or analyze it. (To be fair, I’m not sure that kind of thing was done for white schools either; that was kind of before our current “assessment”-obsessed paradigm.) So I don’t know what black HS graduation rates, or literacy rates, were back then. I think you’re probably right in that those rates have been improving in recent years, which is good, and that integration provided black students with a heck of a lot more access to resources than they got before. I read Beverly Tatum’s new book, CAN WE TALK ABOUT RACE?, and she cites a few figures to illustrate how bad it used to be. Citing another book (Clotfelter’s AFTER BROWN: THE RISE AND RETREAT OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION, 2004, currently on my “hold” list at the library), she mentions that in 1945 in Mississippi, there were over 2000 old-fashioned one-room, one-teacher schools, and 95% of the black students in the state were in them. 54% of the white teachers in that state were college grads, but only 10% of the black teachers were. In Durham, NC, in 1950, most white schools had gyms and art and music rooms. No black schools did. Of the two high schools in Durham at the time, the white one had 136 pieces of lab equipment and the black school had 21.

So yes, in terms of resources, teacher training, equipment, etc., integration benefitted black students greatly; I think that’s undeniable. It’s also almost certain that academic achievement has improved in several respects since then — though a lot of that is simply because American society has changed in so many ways since then. More of us *need* to graduate from high school now, since you can no longer get by without at least a GED or diploma. More of us *need* to be literate, since we’re now an information/service-based economy instead of a manufacturing/farming one.

It’s also clear that there have been gains in the most recent couple of decades — though again, it’s hard to say what this is attributable to. The achievement gap has been closing since the 1980s — but a lot of that is affected by changes in housing patterns and general economic improvement since the 80s. Back in the 80s blacks were disproportionately concentrated in cities due to white flight; those cities were poor because the white folks took a lot of income and property tax revenue with them; and the national economy was so sucky that all schools in poor districts suffered (wealthy districts could afford to take care of their own needs, but poorer districts relied more on federal funding, which was sorely lacking). I can remember when New York City was pretty much bankrupt, during my childhood here in the 70s. Most of the schools here suffered as a result — under-resourced, with unsafe facilities, and violent due to the crack epidemic and widespread poverty… it hit predominantly-black and -Latin@ schools harder, but *all* the schools in the city were pretty bad back then. And all of this is a far cry from the New York I live in now, which is run by a billionaire and is rapidly becoming a playground of the wealthy, too rich for the poor to stay in.

So have there been improvements post-integration? Obviously, yes. But are those improvements *due* to integration? That’s a tougher call. The improvements could just be because we’ve become a wealthier, more economically stable, better-educated country overall since then.

So I’ll focus on the thing that concerns me most: the achievement gap you mention. Black and Latin@ students graduate from HS less often than white and Asian students; B&Ls get into college less often, and into community colleges (as opposed to 4-year schools) at a disproportional rate. This is partly because *poor* kids go to community college at a disproportional rate — got this one from Tamara Draut’s STRAPPED: WHY AMERICA’S 20- AND 30-SOMETHINGS CAN’T GET AHEAD, which looks at how the middle and lower class has been increasingly blocked from access to wealth over the past 20 years. (Good book.) And the kicker: high school exit exams and SAT scores, which have pretty much become the standard by which our K-12 educational system is judged. I remember reading Herrnstein & Murray’s THE BELL CURVE a few years ago, in which they argued that B&L kids did more poorly on standardized tests because, basically, they’re not as smart. (It was couched in a lot of rationalization about cultural differences, but that was pretty much the size of it.) This touches directly on something that I mentioned before — black students’ attitudes toward achievement. I think this is where we’ve seen the biggest loss since integration, and here’s where Tatum’s recent book is especially helpful.

For one thing, she dissects the racist roots of our cultural attitude toward intelligence. Digression — I can remember recently having a convo with a mainland Chinese friend who’s a hardcore mathematician doing research in a Wall Street corporation (for a six-figure salary). We were talking about the whole “girls can’t do math” ideology. She raised an interesting point — during her childhood in Shanghai, she was always told by her family to “get smarter” (emphasis mine). There was no sense of innate abilities or intelligence; the assumption was that if you weren’t good at something, it was because you weren’t trying hard enough or weren’t learning it right. She said she was amazed to come to America and meet so many people who labeled themselves as “not smart” or who dismissed their own abilities as some kind of finite, unchangeable thing — “people like me aren’t good at stuff like this”, end of story, Q.E.D., no need to keep trying. She said her family would’ve considered this kind of thinking preposterous.

Tatum pretty much takes the same line on the subject. She points out that this philosophy of intelligence — that it is hereditary and unchangeable — is uniquely American, and that it’s been largely shaped by the eugenics movement, which had a vested interest in labeling certain ethnic groups as mentally deficient or superior. For example, she describes how early social scientists used the first IQ tests — which were designed by a Frenchman named Binet who explicitly warned that they should *not* be used as the sole measure of intelligence, and that they be used as a signifier of intelligence *at that point in a person’s life* (Binet believed that intelligence could improve over the course of time; he designed the test for the sole purpose of early-identifying kids who might need extra help to improve). But an American named Goddard used the test — and nothing but the test — as the core of a new screening process for Ellis Island immigrants, to weed out the “mentally defective” who might weaken the American gene pool. In 1912, Goddard’s team identified 83% of Jews, 87% of Russians, 80% of Hungarians, and 79% of Italians as “feeble-minded”. They were deported as a result.

Hmm. This is getting long, and I don’t think Wordpress does autosaves. Gonna break this up.

Respectully,