<p>applicannot - I fail to see how that could possibly account for 13%+ gaps in graduation rate? </p>
<p>As the situation stands (at public unis, anyway), the first 1.5-2 years don’t need to be spent in your major. There’s plenty of time, without setting you back, to take remedial and intro level courses as a stepping stone to upper level (And it’s really not that big of a stepping stone, since some intro levels are harder than the upper level, interestingly enough haha). Physics 1 and Calc 1 are classes most people here take, and also ENGL101. Sure, engineering probably isn’t the best major for somebody who has gaps in knowledge to be pursuing - but in that case, wouldn’t you like, SWITCH MAJORS, instead of just dropping out? </p>
<p>I know you can’t discount years of poor schooling, and not having been in a bad educational system, I wouldn’t know I suppose, but in looking at the people I know personally (anectdotal, yes), none of them think classes are hard. They drop out or struggle because they don’t have the money, not because they don’t have the ability (with the exception of athletes). </p>
<p>Our school’s retention rate for URMs is actually higher than retention rate for whites, meaning they’re not dropping out after a year or two because the “shock of college” i sjust “too hard”, they’re dropping out as the loans mount, as the scholarships get cut, as tuition rises, etc.</p>
<p>Until we see this grad rate broken down in terms of how many flunk out versus how many leave on good terms (even then are they flunking out because of poor schooling, or because they’re working 30 hrs a week?), I don’t know if it’s even worth it to speculate and feel this article did an extremely poor job (for Newsweek) in terms of really examining the issue.</p>
<p>I live in suburban DC area now. I think what is telling is who goes to libraries, who brings books to appointments, etc. In my area, which has all the major races and ethnicities common in the US except for Native Americans from US, you see Asians, whites, and African immigrant blacks, and mixed black and white children in the library. Who you don’t see is the Central American immigrants (often labeled Hispanic) and non-recently mixed blacks. Now you may want to talk about economics but the African blacks and the recent Eastern European immigrants who come to the library are usually poor. The difference is who succeeds is not mostly economic but other factors. </p>
<p>I also agree with Momof2kids that parental involvement is crucial. All my kids have been involved in various competetive activities. Things like Odyssey of the Mind, Debate, sports, etc, etc. Those extra activities that help develop additional skills, teamwork, endurance, hard work, etc. are more usually done by kids from two parent households- why- because it takes a lot of work by the parents and if you have more than one kid, it is nearly impossible to drive all of them to all their meetings with only one parent. Having two parents is not only advantageous for academic and sports competitions but just for increased learning. I know that I am much more likely to engage my kids in more profound conversations and answer questions more fully when I am not the only parent parenting them. Even for the short times that my husband leaves compared to single parents, I can see the difference in me. Having to do everything increases my fatigue and is more likely to make me short with them. I have to think that having single parenthood along with the added stress of uncertain financial situation can’t possibly be a good effect.</p>
<p>I have no problem with colleges with into classes. I have no problem if kids test out of intro classes. I have a problem with a college that has remedial classes. What is that all about? College should not be a place for remedial work. Period. The sad fact is that colleges probably don’t care because it’s tuition income but I still can’t believe that in some small way all other paying families are paying for the labor costs involved in teaching remedial classes. College is pure and simple sink or swim time. College is not for grade 13, 14, 15 etc.</p>
<p>It seems a lot of people are awfully dismissive of the challenges of being an immigrant, especially one which is an ethnic minority but not an official URM minority. I’ve heard before on this board that the experience is practically indistinguishable from Mayflower whites even to the point that they enjoyed so-called “white privelege.” </p>
<p>In the same way people who don’t have some kind of personal connection to the African American experience should refrain from minimizing the impact of the cultural legacy of slavery, people who don’t have relatives who were immigrants of ethnic minority should not minimize the impact of discrimination and socioeconomic disadvantage of that group.</p>
<p>I wonder if some of these colleges attempt to conduct ‘exit surveys’ of those who leave without a degree. Regardless of all our theorizing here it’d be interesting to find the actual reasons why any of the students, of any race, decided to leave college sans a degree. Of course, once one decides to leave they may have little incentive to respond to such a survey but I hope various colleges at least attempt to determine what the particular issues were so that some of them might be addressed.</p>
<p>Quote:
But a bigger problem may be that poor high schools often send their students to colleges for which they are, in educators’ jargon, “undermatched”: they could get into more elite, richer schools, but instead go to community colleges and low-rated state schools that lack the resources to help them. </p>
<p>ellemenope, I have seen the opposite in our HS recently. High socioeconomic, full paying URMs with intact families and highly educated parents get the top admissions, over URMs with financial need or first generation status. I suspect this is a strategy that helps these colleges pull up their graduation stats for URMs.</p>
<p>Let’s not clump all minorities together or people together. PERIOD.</p>
<p>I am a black American (a first year) who attended a top private, prepatory high school. Both of my parents attended the best liberal arts college in the nation during the early 80s. Both graduated in four years, one with a physics degree and the other with an English degree. Both went further into their education, and it was EXPECTED of me to attend college. They were also first-generation college students.</p>
<p>Point is this: It has NOTHING to do with race. If anything, minorities have the ADVANTAGE when it comes to college admissions. It is about class/socio-economic background. So let’s not get racial.</p>
<p>As long as our society keeps telling kids that they all “need to got o college,” this problem will continue to exist. And HS administrators who praise teachers when their failure rate is VERY low, and give them grief when it is high, no matter that the students have not done their work and earned zeroes. (and believe me, there are a lot of zeroes out there.) As a teacher, I have been threatened with my job because I had too high a failure rate ( and before you say that is right, I am NOT talking about a 50% failure rate, lor even 15% - this year, our department’s 5% failure rate is considered too high.) And so wel have meetings after meetings about what the teachers have to do to make the kids be successful. So now, we have ZAP (Zeroes are Prohibited) where the teacher must track every student’s zeroes and at the third, fill out a long form, have the student sign it and make lunch arrangements, call the parent, get the form to the front office and assign the kid time during lunch to do the work that wasn’t completed. One of my classed had 23 kids not complete their homework (which should have taken 15 minutes to do, if that.) Let’s see, with them taking away our cobnference periods every other day, and overloaded classes, and really, time to teach - just when do we have the time to do this? The kids have learned they don’t have to do the work, because we keep bailing them out. And if we don’t we are in trouble. That’s the practicality fo the situation. The teachers all think we should just give kids the zeroes and failing grades so they learn that they have to do the work in order to succeed. Instead, we get no support for that, and have been so beaten down that we have no choice. Or, many jsut stopped giving homework so they don’t have to deal with this. And bitd, there were no Honors Colleges. We all earned the same diploma in college. That right there should tell you what is going on. Whatever happened to “We need plumbers and contractors and electricians, etc.?” Now it’s you HAVE tio go to college whether it is the thing for you or not. And some kids need longer to mature before they can truly succeed in college.</p>
<p>“people who don’t have relatives who were immigrants of ethnic minority should not minimize the impact of discrimination and socioeconomic disadvantage of that group.”</p>
<p>Descendant of twentieth-century Jewish immigrants here. My grandfather started out selling blankets door-to-door in Chicago before working his way up to a pushcart and then a store. My grandmother and her six siblings lived behind her father’s fruit stand. They arrived speaking only Yiddish, with (in my grandfather’s case) about a third-grade education. I know all about being an ethnically disadvantaged white immigrant, and I still think it doesn’t belong in the same sentence as chattel slavery and Jim Crow.</p>
<p>"Barrons, please don’t misconstrue the point. No clear thinker minimizes the effect of anti-social behavior by [some of] the poor and by persons who unfortunately generally disassociate themselves from egaliltarian societal norms (like valuing eduction). But as I was reminded on a recent weekend visit to Virginia, racial segregation in public education was allowed to fester stubbornly in some areas until the 1970s, implicitly helped along by some school officials and politicians. "</p>
<p>And you know what, I’m willing to say that many if not most of those kids got more out of their underfunded schools than similar kids going to desegregated schools today. I doubt they were as disrespectful, distracted and generally disinterested as many of their progeny today.</p>
<p>This is a discussion that needs to continue - no matter how uncomfortable it is. I believe all school districts are struggling to close the gap. I agree with a previous post that something other than race may be more effective when evaluating the stats. Do we have the political stomach to do what needs to be done? I do not have the answers but we need to do something.</p>
<p>H and I take responsibility for our children but there is no denying that we are all affected when other parents do not enforce the basic principles necessary to function in society.</p>
<p>You show it in your own life and then demand it from your kids. Then you place your kids in a school district with other parents that do the same.</p>
<p>Out of line for speaking the truth?? Sorry but we have had too much fear to speak the truth for too long. The problems in most schools today have nothing to do with the schools in some areas nearly 50 years ago nor with lunch counters. That’s a copout and useless rhetoric based upon eternal victimhood. I’m talking about the here and now. What I have seen indicates the problem is not the quality of the teachers or the classrooms or grounds. Thus endless talk about hiring better teachers or building better classrooms is just avoiding the issue. Too many kids and maybe their parent(s) just don’t give a crap about school. In my old town of Madison which has a history of very good integrated schools they are seeing the same problems with underachievement and behavior issues as the proportion black students rises. None of the inputs changed except for the students.</p>
<p>Close friend of mine is a social worker in the NY City public schools. She has a laundry list of reasons for why kids fail, why schools fail, why schools can’t teach, etc. I defy you to characterize these as racial:</p>
<p>1- better intervention for low birth rate babies which results in more fragile preemies surviving. She sees kids who have been behavioral problems since they were 6 months old. They have medical issues, hearing problems, speech problems, difficulty with “executive functioning”, etc.</p>
<p>2- the Special Ed lobby insists on these kids being mainstreamed. So instead of specialized classrooms designed for kids with these needs, they are sitting next to your kid in class. But your kid is a typical 2nd grader- she can be quiet when the teacher is speaking, she can take direction, she can stand in line, she can raise her hand when she wants to speak. But she’s surrounded by kids who can’t do that, and the teacher and aide at the front of the classroom preside over near bedlam every day.</p>
<p>3- Babies born to drug addicted mothers (of all races.) Try being the kindergarten teacher of one former crack baby. Now multiply.</p>
<p>4- Teacher’s unions which protect the needs of the union, union officials, educational/industrial “complex” over the needs of the students.</p>
<p>These are not racial issues, these are societal issues. I’m not talking victimhood. There are schools in West Virginia and Kentucky which are 100% white, non-immigrant, which are every bit as lousy as a minority school on the Southside of Chicago. Drugs, drugs, gangs and drugs.</p>
<p>So I take exception to your linkage of Brown v. Board of Education to the problems of failing schools. To claim that blacks were better off before the schools were integrated is a cop-out.</p>