FAUX RACISM BY MARILYN PENN
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In a letter to the editor posted in last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine, the writer had this to say:
“Thank you Nikole Hannah-Jones for making plain how antiblackness and the effort to subjugate black and brown people and those deemed “other” are enduring subtexts to all our fights around education. There is a direct line from efforts to eradicate the language and culture of native people to the substandard education offered to the formerly enslaved and our ‘no excuses” or test-obsessed charters today….The underlying theory is that schools sort students into winners and losers, that parents want to seek competitive advantage so their children are on top and the means for gaining advantage as well as the results are highly racialized to maintain white supremacy.” (Beth Glenn, Director , Education Justice Network, ( NYT 3/12/17)
Ms. Glenn is obviously unaware that as of 2014, it is Asian “other” students who constituted 73% of the enrollment at Stuyvesant, 62% at Bronx Science and 61% at Brooklyn Tech. So much for white supremacy at those public schools in New York where performance is judged by merit, not by race. Asian parents traditionally resist putting their children into English as a Second Language class where students often languish unsuccessfully for years. They do not consider that their native language is “eradicated” when their children learn the native language of the country where they live. They properly understand that language is a vital necessity in the path to educational and professional success. No black or Latino children today are formerly enslaved but that desire for victim status is a giveaway to Ms Glenn’s mode of thinking and her inability to grasp that “no excuses” is another reality and a character building tool for gaining a foothold in a competitive society
Sadly, black and Hispanic enrollment at these special schools is in single digit percents and surprisingly, the minority with the highest poverty rate among New York’s races is also Asian. Rather than complain about disadvantage, they seem determined to instill the values of hard work, perseverance, willingness to do what is necessary without feeling aggrieved or looking for cop-outs. Unfortunately, too many who determine policy at the Board of Education seem to be more n line with Ms. Glenn’s unproductive attitudes. Standards constantly get lowered so that students who are deficient in English and Math get pushed ahead anyway, though too many drop out and only 65% graduate from high school on time. Currently, students can appeal the grade on their Regents exam if they have taken the test twice, passed the course and scored between 62 – 64; the new proposal is to further lower that to 60. Compare this with the graduation rate of 85% for Asians and 82% for whites. New York has just eliminated a required literacy test for its teachers, further dumbing down the standards for working in the field of education along with the possibility of acquiring one.
Rather than learning valuable lessons from the example of Asian immigrants, our Board of Education seems determined to take the road that Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson coined the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” With people like Ms. Glenn at the helm of institutions devoted to improving the education of minorities, we can be certain that always finding racism at the root of failure will guarantee more of the same. How ironic that after 8 years of a black man occupying the highest office in the land, people still prefer to hang on to outdated perceptions of prejudice rather than encourage their constituents to follow the lead of their Asian classmates, get serious about school and work twice as hard as before, the one sure way to gain advantage and get ahead.
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