Race and the Achievement Gap
Joanne Jacobs takes a look at Stuart Buck’s Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation.
Buck’s an interesting guy who brings both credentials and experience to the issue. He’s a classical musician, lawyer (Harvard) and scholar who writes on legal as well as education issues. He’s a white dad of six, including an adopted black son from Haiti.
Buck’s view seems to be that the very action (racial integration) that was intended to increase black students’ achievement instead discouraged their academic success.
But don’t think for a minute that Buck is against desegregation. And he’s not saying that all black kids should be in all-black schools. He’s arguing for school choice.
Rod Dreher interviews him here and here. Buck’s new book looks into the history of the negative view that some black kids have of doing well in school– in other words, the origins of the idea that being a good student is “acting white.”
In part one of the interview, Buck says:
I would put it like this: Segregation was like a cancer. But a powerful anti-cancer drug may have side effects — such as crippling nausea. You have to try to address the side effects, not sweep them under the carpet simply on the ground that anything is worth it to fight cancer. At the same time, I didn’t want any reader to think that because I pointed out a side effect, I was somehow in favor of cancer.
According to Jacobs:
While desegregation was the right thing to do, Buck writes, it destroyed schools that had been centers of black aspiration and pushed black students into white schools where they were treated as outsiders. Working hard, achieving and pleasing teachers became seen as “acting white.”
While some deny that “acting white” is a real problem, Buck cites research showing that high-achieving black students are stigmatized by other blacks in racially balanced middle and high schools, but not in all-black schools.
Buck suggests that one solution to the “acting white” problem is eliminating competition among students in the same school and focusing instead on competition between schools. Grades would be eliminated as well. Now, that’s just a crazy idea, for reasons too obvious to enumerate.
But to be fair, Buck bases his idea on the work of James Coleman who, Buck points out, noted the very different reactions students had to their own star athletes and star scholars.
But Jacobs offers an alternative view. Her experience indicates that students can cheer each other on for earning good grades.
In Silicon Valley, Hispanic students who do well are called “schoolboy” or “schoolgirl,” which is a put down. (Nobody says “acting white,” because the top performers tend to be Asian.) I saw Downtown College Prep, the Our School high school, create a college-prep culture. Students cheered each other at weekly assemblies for raising their grades, making honor roll and doing homework. The school is nearly all Hispanic: The good students and the bad students come from similar family backgrounds.
A couple of years ago, Connie Schultz wrote about the same kind of thing. The Shaw High School marching band in East Cleveland, Ohio (a school system in which I once taught) not only performed well in national competitions, they valued academics, too. These kids, from one of the poorest cities in America, were on the honor roll and the merit roll. Everyone in the band knew the grades of everyone else because their band director read them aloud. They encouraged each other.
It seems clear to me that two of the keys to students’ academic success are teachers with high expectations– like the Mighty Cardinals’ Donshon Wilson– and schools that have managed to create a culture of achievement.
Buck would agree. In the Dreher interview, he quotes journalist Jonathan Tilove:
. . . . Brown’s most profound irony may be that answers to closing the achievement gap lie buried in the history of the schools that Brown’s implementation destroyed. Glittering amid the ruins, the answers are straighforward[sic]: Dedicated teachers. Strong principals. Order. Discipline. High expectations. Community and parental support. What is astonishing, Siddle Walker says, is how many black children attended schools during segregation that delivered on these objectives, and how few do so now.
[...] discussed Buck’s book here and here. Categorized under: Book Reviews, Education. Tagged with: Acting White, Books, [...]
[...] previously discussed Buck’s book here. Categorized under: Achievement Gap, Book Reviews, Race. Tagged with: Achievement Gap, Book [...]