Quotes
NCLB, Sec. 1001.3
NCLB purports to “[close] the achievement gap between high- and low-performing children,
especially the achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students, and between
disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers.
Richard Rothstein (2004)
Parents and policy makers “almost universally” blame schools: low expectations, poorly
designed curricula, chaotic environments and over-crowded classrooms, out-of-step
administrators, and, above all, woefully unqualified and untrained teachers:
After all, how much money a family has or the color of a child’s skin should not
influence how well that child learns to read. If teachers know how to teach…and if
schools emphasize the importance of these tasks and permit no distractions, children
should be able to learn…whatever their family income or skin color (p. 2)
Ogbu on Blacks’ Collective Identity, forged out of status problems:
White Americans created Black Americans as a separate and enduring segment of American
society through enslavement.
Lareau (2007)
A description of Lower Richmond School
Located on a narrow street in a large…city, the school looks forbidding: it is three stories tall and
is surrounded by a high, gray chain-link fence. [It] is old, with a dirty beige exterior and few
windows….To the side...of the school [is] an asphalt playground…in the front there are trees and
a patch of grass, but the children may not play in this area during school hours. Just inside the
entrance to the school, a security guard sits at a desk.
Louis Agassiz, Father of American Biology
It is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing
their black faces, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their long curved nails…I could not
take my eyes off their face [sic] in order to tell them to stay far away.
Adams: Education for Extinction (1995)
The design of school planners for Native Americans was “to turn Indians into carbon copies of
their white overseers.”
Paulo Freire (1985)
Language variations are intimately interconnected with, coincide with, and express identity.
Franz Fanon (1967)
Every dialect, every language is a way of thinking. To speak means to assume a culture.
At a 2009 conference of TED Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned about the "danger of the
single story":
…the danger of "show[ing] a people as one thing and only one thing over and over
again....[until]...that is what they become."
Chimamanda Adichie testifies to a truth that there is no "story": there are only "stories."
Outline for Galletta/Adams
Introduction: Achievement Gap History:
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Equality of Education Study and NCLB
History of “gaps” in U.S: Mexicans, Native Americans, Blacks
Richard Rothstein and replication of class in schools: Mann and Dewey / Bourdieu
(Spring, Bowles, and others): Do schools replicate or fail to address in equality…poverty
rates of 9% (White) vs. 43% Black/Hispanic (2007) with 27 and 26 point gap in reading.
Students are bound to their culture but schools are middle-class; Matthew Effect means
that if students enter school language deprived, they fail to make up the gap
Frameworks to understand academic disparity:
Cultural Capital/Social Reproduction of Bourdieu (1973, 1986) and Jean Claude Passeron:
embodied, objectified, institutionalized. Dominant social classes reproduce/replicate structures
that maintain their privileged position through values, things, education. These “goods” enable
children an upward mobility.
 Ogbu: oppositional identity, collective identity maintained via “status problems” like
slavery that “Other” the group, viewing them as inferior in every aspect, from clothes to
food to language, to music, to values and beliefs. Whites vilified Blacks in every aspect,
helping to create the “twoness” of identity noted by Dubois—the more Blacks tried to
adopt White ways and values, the more vilified they were by Whites. Leads to “Oreo”
phenomenon of Blacks who “act White.” Blacks in affluent areas have an intense
“twoness” from their working class background and middle class school experience.
 Galletta and Cross (2007) disagree with Ogbu’s “legacy of slavery” argument. They note
the many ways that Blacks valued education during and after slavery (list them) and see
the opposition springing from policies and practices of institutions like schools. The
experience of Black students on whom it dawns that they are not expected to achieve or
are graded differently and of their parents who feel, in the words of one, that the schools
are “killing our children.” The students develop a form of twoness described as “zigzagging” from one identity to the other.
 Oliver and Shapiro (1995) with William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of
Race (1978) see the gap that began as a racial gap as having morphed into a class gap.
They see the failure of the 1862 Homestead Act, the suburbanization of the 1930s –
1970s that created isolated inner-city ghettos, with a corresponding inequity in mortgage
lending practices that kept Blacks from buying homes from the 1970s on as catalysts for
the change: Blacks have been making up the difference in “income” as the move into
professions, but not in “wealth.” Cultural capital, then, is affected (explain).
 Moje and Martinez (2007) look at Hispanics and the gap in terms of “home-front” where
they forge a Hispanic identity and “contact zones” where they must develop a second
identity to function in the dominant culture; the home front can then become a “contact
zone” with unfortunate cultural consequences
 Lareau (2007) sees middle class children as having differential advantages due to the
cultural repertoires they inherit that correspond to the values of the school and the larger
world. Controlled, concerted cultivation vs. The Accomplishment of Natural Growth
makes the lives of middle class children like Melanie Handlon and Garrett Tallinger
different from the lives of Billy Yanelli and Tyrec Taylor.
Historic Discrimination, Deculturalization, and Institutionalized Racism
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Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) discusses the “harder argument” of
18th and 19th c. scientists for polygeny, that Blacks were a separate species, supported in
works like Plato’s Republic which describes individuals as coming into the world with
souls of lead, silver, gold, and assigns individuals to inferior and superior positions
(which Plato called a “noble lie).
Charles White’s 1799 Account of the Regular Gradation in Man outlines physical
differences to support idea that Blacks are closer to the “brutes.”
Louis Agassiz (quote), father of American biology, had no political agenda but felt that
Blacks were not the social equal of Whites.
Cyril Burt took Spearman’s g to a more complex level in his testing of a “ludicrously
small” sample of Liverpool schoolboys with 12 tests of mental functioning; his statistical
factor analysis made the pseudo-science seem valid as he reasoned that poor boys
performed worse b/c they come from less intelligent stock.
Adams’ (1995) Education for Extinction tells the story of Lakota Sioux children like Ota
Kte (Plenty Kill) transported to Carlisle, PA where they had their hair shorn, clothes
changed, lived in a world of angles and straight lines, in militaristic encampments, where
the food was insufficient and different, and disease spread—all in order to “turn Indians
into carbon copies of their White overseers.”
Sarah Michaels’ (1981) “Sharing Time: Children’s Narrative Styles and Differential
Access to Literacy” tells the story of Mrs. Jones trying to teach a white, middle-class
discourse style (topic-centered) to Deena, a Black first-grader who tells the story of her
new coat in a topic-associative style.
Smitherman (1998) echoes Paulo Freire (1985) (quote) and Franz Fanon (1967) (quote)
to discuss the significance of linguistic capital. She details the history of Ebonics as both
“transformation and liberation” as both a West African and English language (Saussure)
Delpit (1998) acknowledges the importance of Standard English for the larger world but
advocates teaching Ebonics.
Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, and Todovora (2008) echo both Moje and Martinez
(2007) and Smitherman (1998) and Delpit (1998) in their finding that the most significant
factor in academic achievement is not parental education and occupation, but L-2
acquisition. The pressure put on immigrant children to learn the new culture and language
can cause a “deculturalization by attrition.”
Collins (2003) in “Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and
Black Feminist Thought” presents “Standpoint Theory” – Gender, race, and class
mutually construct one another (intersectionality) and a particular group who share
similar experiences and interests creates a group location in hierarchical power relations,
leading to group knowledge (standpoint) that both reflect and react against the power
relations of the dominant group. Group-based identity helps shape the individual’s world:
one is not defined solely by race, class, or gender but by an intersection of these. So, for
example, the boundaries around “African-American woman” are malleable and
permeable, fluid.
Miscellaneous
The first of many schools for blacks was actually opened before the end of the war. In September
of 1864, Mary Peake, an African American who taught for the American Missionary Society,
opened a school in Fort Monroe, Virginia to school African Americans. Emphasis was placed on
freedmen teaching themselves and establishing their own educational institutions, and the exslaves were only too happy to comply. John W. Alvord, the Bureau's inspector of schools
observed that "[t]hroughout the entire South an effort is being made by the colored people to
educate themselves. In the absence of other teaching they are determined to be self-taught; and
everywhere some elementary text-book, or the fragment of one, may be seen in the hands of
negroes" (Anderson 6).
Literacy was an emblem of what was for blacks their greatest hope and for whites their greatest
fear-- participation of blacks in democratic process and consequent political power:
During the nineteenth century, no group in the United States had a greater faith in
the equalizing power of schooling or a clearer understanding of the democratic
promise of public education than did black Americans...Practically every black
voluntary group, almost all black politicians, rated the improvement of
educational opportunities near the top of priorities for their people. (Tyack 110)
Slaves were, therefore, highly motivated to transgress the boundary between illiteracy and
learning, despite the great danger in which this placed them; to become literate, they were
willing to risk their well-being and their lives. Gordon Buford's master "threatened 'to skin them
alive'" if he and other slaves attempted to become literate; the master of James Lucas hanged his
most competent slave for teaching spelling; Tom Hawkins' master cut off his thumb after
discovering that the carriage driver learned to read and write while driving the master's children
to school (Williams 18).
Viewing this issue of oppositional collective identity through the lens of Patrician Collins
application of standpoint theory to Black women offers interesting insight, since the journey of
women as a minority, and Black women as a "twice-removed" minority, intertwines with the
journey of minority male and female students. For Collins, standpoint theory permits black
women to represent themselves in ways they can take pride in, ways that resist the racist and
sexist images that are imposed on them by whites, by men, and by those who have not
recognized that they, too, view the world from a particular standpoint. Collins sees that even
within a standpoint exist various "group locations" and various power relations in the hierarchy;
she calls on individuals within a group to challenge themselves to "foster similar angles of
vision" so that they can influence and change unjust power relations in the larger world (Collins,
p. 201). Standpoint epistemology gives black women a means of interpreting what Dubois would
have seen as the "twoness" of their experience: they can begin to understand their position in the
world from the perspective of those who oppress them as well as from their own subjugated
position: "Black women are 'outsiders within,' having enough personal experience as insiders to
know their social order, but enough critical distance to empower critique" ("Feminist
Epistemology").
Fryer, in ironic ways, confirms what Ogbu asserts--that Black students, like Black
women, share a particular standpoint as "outsiders within," particularly within schools where
they do not constitute a majority; but this is true even within segregated schools that are
themselves "outside within" the larger White American culture. If recognizing their standpoint
enables women to interpret their dual experience--and thereby to process and gain from it--the
same holds true for Black students within their standpoint in the hierarchy of a school and of the
culture. Collins' understands the malleability of a hierarchy, and she employs the heuristic of
intersectionality and fluidity to convey its pliancy. She recognizes that all groups are
hierarchically related to each other and "intersect" at various points, so that one group can never
claim complete privilege; there is such fluidity, in fact, that it is difficult ever to concretize and
label "one" group to whom epistemic privilege might be assigned. The other component of her
heuristic is to acknowledge the fluidity that marks individuals within a group, each one of whom
belongs to various groups whether s/he is aware of this or not. It may be that only through seeing
themselves as fluid members of a number of standpoints that Black students can gain a foothold
to maneuver the larger hierarchy in which they live: in this way, Black males can see process
their experience as a group, as can Black females. Yet their intersection with others on the
hierarchy connects them to peers outside of their racial and ethnic category. Perhaps as student
learn of their shared standpoints with those of a similar social class, those with similar talents,
those with similar family backgrounds, they will find not simply a "foothold," but a series of
footholds, stairs that empower them to move with agility up and down the larger hierarchy. Like
Ogbu, Fryer describes the phenomenon of underachievement in terms of identity. He warns that
Over the long run, the group [with lower achievement] faces the danger that its
most successful members will no longer identify with its interests, and group
identity will itself erode. To forestall such erosion, groups may try to reinforce
their identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the
group (p. 58).
As Collins articulates standpoint theory--that one's "identities" are fluid and intersect with those
of others--she offers a uniquely ironic "solution" to the issue of underachieving minority
students. If the problem of oppositional collective identity among students can be resolved by
their discovering who they [really] are as they intersect with others, then the epiphany of Ashley,
a youth researcher quoted in Guishard (2005), becomes even more poignant: "...I know for sure
that I believe in the standpoint theory. Who I am matters." She finds her identity affirmed when
she realizes and engages her standpoint. Like her, other students can find a path toward
themselves by their simultaneous solidarity with others in their group, as well as their
connectedness to a larger "whole" of individuals. When this occurs--the finding of one's true
identity--the "opposition" based on fear and separateness, may finally begin to dissipate.