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4 Short Articles on Education & Racial and Ethnic
Inequality and Diversity—Count as 1 Rdg. for Papers
and Rdgs. Notes
As Texas Gets More Diverse, Educators Grab The Bull By
The Horns
As Texas Gets M http://n.pr/1fKzAr
http://w w w .npr.o
by Melissa Block
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297719334/as-state-diversifies-texas-educators-grab-the-bull-by-the-horns
April 01, 2014
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Students participate in orchestra practice at Dr. John Folks Middle School in suburban San Antonio.
Melissa Block/NPR
Texas is in the midst of a population boom and demographic sea change. It's grown faster than
any other state and has more than doubled its population in just 40 years, from 11 to 26 million people.
And overwhelmingly, the fastest growth is among Hispanics who now make up 38 percent of the
state's population and will be the largest single group in Texas by 2020.
Majority Minority State
When demographer Steve Murdock started tracking this trend decades ago he was met with
resistance.
"At first there was a lot of denial," Murdock says. "I like to say that I've become increasingly brilliant
over time."
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Murdock was named state demographer by Gov. Rick Perry in 2001. He drove all over the state and
what he saw was clear: Texas was zooming toward becoming a majority minority state.
"People would say, 'That'll never happen; you're wrong,'" he says.
But it did happen — in 2005. Now, Murdock warns that unless the growing Hispanic population are
given access to opportunities, Texas overall will become poorer and less competitive. The state will
spiral downward.
"The reality is that the future of Texas will be tied to its minority populations and how well they
do is how well we will do," he says.
The key to that future, Murdock says, is better education which leads to higher-paying jobs.
Staggering Growth
That's playing out at Dr. John Folks Middle School, in the far northwestern suburbs of San Antonio.
It opened this past August and was built with explosive growth in mind. There are almost 600
students now and that number is expected to double within five years. About 60 percent of the
current student body is Hispanic.
This school is part of the Northside Independent School District, the fourth largest in Texas, which is
growing by nearly 3,000 students every year. Right now the district opens roughly three new schools
every year as the population expands farther and farther away from the city.
It's up to school district superintendent Brian Woods to try to manage the staggering growth.
"It's a little scary. It's one of those things that wakes you up at 3:30 in the morning," Woods says.
"How are we managing this? And are we doing the things we need to do, far enough out, to plan for and
manage growth?"
Overwhelmingly — as with the state overall — that growth has been Hispanic. He says the district
has gone from a primarily Anglo student population to a vast majority Hispanic student population.
Which means when Woods' son goes to his Northside elementary school each day, the faces there
reflect the new Texas.
"The school that he attends is very diverse — racially and ethnically, and from a socio-economic
standpoint. And that's just the norm for him. It would never occur to him, I think, to see the world any
other way," Woods says. "I think if you went and looked in his classroom, he would probably be among
the, say, 20 percent of students who are Anglo."
Do More With Less
Most of the growth in the Hispanic population in Texas is not from immigration of people across the
border from Mexico. Instead, it's driven by people coming from other states or moving within Texas.
The Hispanic numbers grow, too, because the population skews younger with a higher birth rate. It
also tends to be more economically disadvantaged with higher poverty levels.
For superintendent Woods, that means he needs more resources and staff to meet the needs of
disadvantaged students. So he was dismayed three years ago when the Texas legislature slashed $60
million out of his budget. He had to cut almost 1,000 staff positions at time when his student
population was ballooning.
"To ignore the changes in our state and to ignore public education and health care as
infrastructure projects, is really to set the state up for dismal times in the out years. These are longterm issues. The great 'Texas Miracle,' to borrow a George Bush phrase, cannot last if we don't fund
infrastructure," he says.
Bad Boys Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity
Ann Arnett Ferguson -
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How do schools identify African American males as "bad boys"?
Statistics show that black males are disproportionately getting in trouble and being suspended from
the nation's school systems. Based on three years of participant observation research at an elementary
school, Bad Boys offers a richly textured account of daily interactions between teachers and students to
understand this serious problem. Ann Arnett Ferguson demonstrates how a group of eleven- and
twelve-year-old males are identified by school personnel as "bound for jail" and how the youth
construct a sense of self under such adverse circumstances. The author focuses on the perspective
and voices of pre-adolescent African American boys. How does it feel to be labeled "unsalvageable"
by your teacher? How does one endure school when the educators predict one's future as "a jail cell
with your name on it?" Through interviews and participation with these youth in classrooms,
playgrounds, movie theaters, and video arcades, the author explores what "getting into trouble" means for
the boys themselves. She argues that rather than simply internalizing these labels, the boys look
critically at schooling as they dispute and evaluate the meaning and motivation behind the labels
that have been attached to them. Supplementing the perspectives of the boys with interviews with
teachers, principals, truant officers, and relatives of the students, the author constructs a disturbing
picture of how educators' beliefs in a "natural difference" of black children and the "criminal
inclination" of black males shapes decisions that disproportionately single out black males as being
"at risk" for failure and punishment. Bad Boys is a powerful challenge to prevailing views on the
problem of black males in our schools today. It will be of interest to educators, parents, and youth, and to
all professionals and students in the fields of African-American studies, childhood studies, gender studies,
juvenile studies, social work, and sociology, as well as anyone who is concerned about the way our
schools are shaping the next generation of African American boys.
Anne Arnett Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies and Women's Studies, Smith College.
- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/16797/bad_boys#sthash.YoCJEVe2.dpuf
http://www.press.umich.edu/16797/bad_boys
Why Asian American kids excel. It’s not ‘Tiger
Moms.’
By Fred Barbash
Washington Post
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/08/forget-tiger-moms-asian-american-studentssucceed-because-its-expected-say-scholars/?hpid=z5
April 8, 2014
Why do Asian American students outpace everyone else academically?
The most publicized attempt to answer that question — a few years ago, by Yale Law School
professor Amy Chua — set off a controversy that rages to this day.
Chua’s answer, originally set out in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion article “Why Chinese
Mothers are Superior,” was that “tiger mothers” were prepared to coerce kids into doing homework
and practicing the piano, in part by calling them names. Chua held herself and her academically
successful children out as examples.
But a new study published in the journal “Race and Social Problems” by two California scholars takes
on Chua, suggesting that with all the economic resources at her disposal — she and her husband are
Yale professors with highly-educated parents — her children’s success is just as likely the result of
socioeconomic and cultural advantages, generally cited by scholars as the main reason some children do
better than others.
The authors of “The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for
Asian Americans” are Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at the Univ. of
California at Los Angeles, currently on leave at Nanyang Technological University, and Jennifer Lee,
professor of sociology at the Univ. of California at Irvine.
A better way to understand Asian American academic success, they write, is to look at families who
don’t have resources and succeed nonetheless.
That is exactly what they’ve done. And their findings are pretty straightforward: Young Asian
Americans have all kinds of good role models to emulate. Their communities and families make sure
they get extra help when they need it. Their families, even on limited resources, manage to seek out
and move to neighborhoods with good schools. And they aspire to success with specific goals in mind:
medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy. And they aim for the best schools.
It’s not about coercion or some mysterious ethnic gift, they write. It’s about the way they view
their horizons, with extraordinarily high expectations — so high that kids who don’t rise to the
occasion feel like “black sheep” and “outliers.”
Zhou and Lee studied Chinese American and Vietnamese American communities in Los Angeles
without a lot of financial resources or parental higher education — factors that tend to skew other
academic studies of success. They focused on two groups: the so-called “1.5 generation” — foreign-born
immigrants who came to the United States prior to age 13 — and second-generation families. They
conducted 82 face-to-face interviews to get a picture of why these communities are doing so well in
advancing their children through high school and college.
Here’s what they found: Although their means are limited, Asian families in the study choose
neighborhoods carefully to make sure schools offer honors and advanced-placement courses. To do this,
parents use the “Chinese Yellow Pages,” which the researchers describe as “a two-inch thick, 1,500page long telephone directory that is published annually and lists ethnic businesses in Southern
California, as well as the rankings of the region’s public high schools and the nation’s best
universities.” They also make sure their kids get plenty of supplementary help such as tutoring.
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These families have incredibly high standards, according to the study. If kids come home with a 3.5
grade-point average, parents are disappointed that it’s not 4.0 — and they show it.
If a child gets into, say, Cal State, the question is why they didn’t make it into Stanford.
If a son or daughter comes home and settles for a bachelor’s degree, they’re made to feel less
accomplished because they don’t have a PhD.
Both groups in the study, Zhou and Lee reported, adopt a similar “frame for what ‘doing well in
school’ means: getting straight A’s, graduating as valedictorian or salutatorian, getting into one of the
top UC (University of California) schools or an Ivy, and pursuing some type of graduate education in
order [to] work in one of the ‘four professions’: doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, or engineer. So exacting is
the frame for ‘doing well in school’ that our Asian respondents described the value of grades on an
Asian scale as ‘A is for average, and B is an Asian fail.’’’
Such high standards have positive and negative impacts, the researchers found.
If expectations are that high, many young people will try to meet them. They will get into Stanford
and they will get that PhD.
The downside is that those who fall short — the ‘A-minus’ student’ — wind up feeling alienated
from their ethnicity. In short, they feel less Asian and more, well, American.
They describe a young man named Paul who chose to be an artist instead of following the path
prescribed by his parents. He called himself “the whitest Chinese guy you’ll ever meet.”
They tell of one young woman they interviewed, Sarah, who when asked whether she feels
successful compared to her friends who are not Chinese, pauses “as if she had never considered that
comparison before and finally replied, ‘If I were to look at my white friends of that same age range, yes
I’m more successful. If I were to look at all of my friends, yes, I would say so.’”
They write:
Sarah is not unique in this regard; none of the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese
respondents considered measuring their success against native-born whites (or native-born blacks for
that matter). Rather, they turn to high-achieving coethnics as their reference group — a finding that
highlights that native-born whites are not the standard by which today’s 1.5- and second-generation
Asians measure their success and achievements.
…So strong is the perception that the success frame is the norm among Asian Americans that the
1.5- and second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese who cannot attain it or choose to buck it find
themselves at odds with their immigrant parents and with their ethnic identities.
While acknowledging the benefits of this “success frame,” Zhou and Lee are not entirely happy
with it. They say they would prefer that academic prowess no longer be “coded as an ‘Asian thing.’”
Then, they write, “Asian American students may be more willing to measure their success against
a more reasonable barometer, which may result in a boost in self-esteem and self-efficacy.”
At The Elite Colleges - Dim White Kids
by Peter Schmidt
Published on Friday, September 28, 2007 by The Boston Globe
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Autumn and a new academic year are upon us, which means that selective colleges are
engaged in the annual ritual of singing the praises of their new freshman classes.
Surf the websites of such institutions and you will find press releases boasting that they have
increased their black and Hispanic enrollments, admitted bumper crops of National Merit
scholars or became the destination of choice for hordes of high school valedictorians. Many are
bragging about the large share of applicants they rejected, as a way of conveying to the world
just how popular and selective they are.
What they almost never say is that many of the applicants who were rejected were far more
qualified than those accepted. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and
Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections
who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.
Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the
whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are
white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.
Five years ago, two researchers working for the Educational Testing Service, Anthony
Carnevale and Stephen Rose, took the academic profiles of students admitted into 146 colleges
in the top two tiers of Barron’s college guide and matched them up against the institutions’
advertised requirements in terms of high school grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, letters
of recommendation, and records of involvement in extracurricular activities. White students
who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such
campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their
ethnicity or race.
Who are these mediocre white students getting into institutions such as Harvard, Wellesley,
Notre Dame, Duke, and the University of Virginia? A sizable number are recruited athletes who,
research has shown, will perform worse on average than other students with similar academic
profiles, mainly as a result of the demands their coaches will place on them.
A larger share, however, are students who gained admission through their ties to people
the institution wanted to keep happy, with alumni, donors, faculty members,
administrators, and politicians topping the list.
Applicants who stood no chance of gaining admission without connections are only the most
blatant beneficiaries of such admissions preferences. Except perhaps at the very summit of the
applicant pile - that lofty place occupied by young people too brilliant for anyone in their right
mind to turn down - colleges routinely favor those who have connections over those who don’t.
While some applicants gain admission by legitimately beating out their peers, many others get
into exclusive colleges the same way people get into trendy night clubs, by knowing the
management or flashing cash at the person manning the velvet rope.
Leaders at many selective colleges say they have no choice but to instruct their admissions
offices to reward those who financially support their institutions, because keeping donors happy
is the only way they can keep the place afloat. They also say that the money they take in through
such admissions preferences helps them provide financial aid to students in need.
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But many of the colleges granting such preferences are already well-financed, with huge
endowments. And, in many cases, little of the money they take in goes toward serving the lessadvantaged.
A few years ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education looked at colleges with more than $500
million in their endowments and found that most served disproportionately few students from
families with incomes low enough to qualify for federal Pell Grants. A separate study of flagship
state universities conducted by the Education Trust found that those universities’ enrollments of
Pell Grant recipients had been shrinking, even as the number of students qualifying for such
grants had gone up.
Just 40 percent of the financial aid money being distributed by public colleges is going to
students with documented financial need. Most such money is being used to offer merit-based
scholarships or tuition discounts to potential recruits who can enhance a college’s reputation, or
appear likely to cover the rest of their tuition tab and to donate down the road.
Given such trends, is it any wonder that young people from the wealthiest fourth of society
are about 25 times as likely as those from the bottom fourth to enroll in a selective college, or
that, over the past two decades, the middle class has been steadily getting squeezed out of such
institutions by those with more money?
A degree from a selective college can open many doors for a talented young person from a
humble background. But rather than promoting social mobility, our nation’s selective colleges
appear to be thwarting it, by turning away applicants who have excelled given their
circumstances and offering second chances to wealthy and connected young people who have
squandered many of the advantages life has offered them.
When social mobility goes away, at least two dangerous things can happen. The privileged
class that produces most of our nation’s leaders can become complacent enough to foster
mediocrity, and less-fortunate segments of our society can become resigned to the notion that
hard work will not get them anywhere….[cut last 2 paragraphs due to space reasons]
Peter Schmidt is a deputy editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of “Color and
Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action.”