At-Risk Students, Bad Teachers, Failing Schools: Our Blinding Accusatory Finger Pointing
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart“The Scientist,” Coldplay
The absolute greatest gift of being a teacher by profession is accumulating throughout your career the young people gifted you by your classroom.
A few days ago, I was having lunch with a former student and current teacher, Ali Williams, who teaches English at a majority-minority, high-poverty high school in the school district that serves the county where I teach.
Among the ramblings of our nerdfest, we talked about language, about the challenges of trying to be a good teacher, and about the fields of psychology and sociology, a tension that has more and more fascinated me over a thirty-plus years career as a teacher.
For anyone who doesn’t know Ali personally or who has never spent time at her school or with her students (I have had several teacher candidates placed at the school and thus have observed there often), the reality today is that the students are likely and uncritically viewed as at-risk, the school is believed to be failing, and Ali could very easily be labeled a bad teacher.
Those pronouncements occur all across the state of South Carolina and the U.S.—an accusatory finger pointing that blinds political leaders and the public from the corrosive social forces that are reflected by students, teachers, and schools (but not created by those students, teachers, or schools).
Because the U.S. remains trapped within the lies of rugged individualism and believing the country is a meritocracy, the influence of psychology (mostly quantified claims about individual qualities and behaviors) is more readily and almost entirely uncritically andinaccurately embraced while sociology (often broad and descriptive explorations of social forces) is either ignored or carelessly discounted—often as “excuses.”
If we did deeper, another division is embedded in the disciplinary tension above—the power ofnumbers.
Numbers give the compelling appearance of objectivity and certainty while rich description offers complexity and uncertainty.
And the U.S. has a disturbing propensity for being a blowhard nation; we seem to like our columnists, radio personalities, and even presidential candidates to hold forth with the simplistic bloviating found among privileged white men who have never reconsidered anything, especially their own privilege.
The 10,000-hour rule, humans use only 10% of their brains, poor children have smaller vocabularies that wealthy children, high rates of black-on-black crime—each of these remains incredibly common claims throughout mainstream media, politics, and private conversations, but each is also bad numbers—at best cited in misleading ways and at worst simply wrong.
Numbers are compelling, especially when they can be used to promote “objectively” our worst prejudices.
If we focus on the black-on-black crime claim (which I believe is representative of this problem), that data are misleading because essentially most crime is within race (white-on-white crime is about 84% and black-on-black, 91%).
Crime is also strongly connected with poverty, and then poverty disproportionately impacts blacks.
In other words, a rich and detailed description of crime, one that is more accurate and not At-Risk Students, Bad Teachers, Failing Schools: Our Blinding Accusatory Finger Pointing | the becoming radical: