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Re: Reading, Writing, Race, May 16.
As an educator and parent, I think it's unfortunate that most articles about achievement gaps blame teachers. Teachers work harder than ever, but we can do only so much. When students arrive for kindergarten unprepared, most will play catch-up until they are well into high school, if they make it that far. Why are they unprepared? Parents or other caregivers have sent them to us that way.
It's unrealistic to expect that teachers, who spend, at most, seven hours with these children, can make up for the rest of the day. Few students succeed despite inadequate parenting. Do we have some students who go home to a supportive family, yet still fail? Absolutely. However, by an overwhelming majority, successful students have parents who partner with teachers in their children's education.
It's unpopular these days to speak of personal responsibility. However, parents who sue school systems must realize the part they are playing in their children's failures.
We must hold parents accountable.
I was outraged by the May 16 front-page article regarding the so-called "achievement gap." I do not believe the educational system is to blame. I am a graduate of Seminole High School, and all three of my children attend Ridgecrest Elementary, a predominantly black school that happens to harbor the elementary gifted program. I am also a teacher. I have never been in a classroom where the same lesson was not taught to the entire class. All students receive the same material.
I believe home is where the problem lies, both black and white homes. Education is still primarily the responsibility of the parents. Educators place the information in the hands of students, but it is the parents who have to ensure that the students are working and making an attempt to grasp the material at home. Parents are failing their kids, not schools.
Re: Reading, Writing, Race.
Considering the title of your article, it's ironic that an important factor in the "gap" between white and black educational success wasn't mentioned. Kids who come from families that have not had the luxury of a good education themselves are apt to speak poor English.
When "she ain't got no" and "I seen" and "I be going" is the language learned at home and is not corrected at school, reading becomes difficult and writing becomes a horror. This "slang" is not the language of our school texts, it is not the language on the FCAT, it is not the language on the SAT or the GRE, and it is not the language of better-paying jobs. Whose fault is it that poor English is an almost sure path to a minimum-wage job? I don't care. How do we change it is what's important.
Easiest to change are teachers, who bend over backward wanting to be polite and who are often afraid of offending students or being told that they aren't sensitive to diversity, or worse, that they are racist. It's a teacher's job to prepare students for the best jobs life has to offer. Failing to help them speak the best English possible is helping to doom them to being in the 63 percent who drop out. Faculties might get together and discuss the kindest approaches.
As the insightful teens in your articles point out, home life makes the biggest difference in success and failure. Absolutely, parents of all backgrounds want their children to succeed. Knowing how to get there is the stumbling block - without the tools for betterment, the cycle continues.
Too much political correctness may be keeping the poor populations where they are. We need to say: "Do you want a better life for your children? Then come to classes at your neighborhood rec center and learn "good job' English and a few parenting skills." It might take a little time for people to buy into the idea that this isn't "white" English, but "success" English. If our educational, political and community leaders want the gaps to close, they should quit pointing fingers and trying to drive teachers from their jobs (teachers shouldn't have to be parents, too) and do the face-to-face, ground-level work that needs to be done. If a kid doesn't speak well, a tough life will follow.
The cause of the achievement gap between blacks and whites in our schools is not the teachers or bias, but parents who do not read to their children or see that they do their homework and attend classes regularly.
Poverty also has little to do with the achievement gap. I am a single mother who raised two boys on a very small income, but books and reading were an important part of their lives. My older son did well in school, attended St. Petersburg Junior College for two years and then graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in nuclear engineering. My younger son was president of the National Honor Society at St. Petersburg High School and then graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in communications and educational media. He and his wife later got master's degrees.
Our schools and the teachers are doing their best to teach all the students. I believe the responsibility for children's achievement falls on their parents, and the gap won't change until parents face up to it.
Recent commentaries acknowledging the anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision have been mostly of a celebratory nature, although I'm not sure exactly what's being celebrated.
In most major social measurements, including such areas as declining academic performance and falling church attendance, as well as advancing secular pathologies such as unwed births, sexually transmitted diseases and fatherless homes, the past 50 years have not been good to America's black families.
Black politicians, social commentators, attorneys, academics and other professional "blamers" have thrived in the post-Jim Crow era. The people they claim to represent have not.
Of special interest is the front-page story in the Times about basic academic performance of black students in Florida's public schools. The story's authors leave little hope for the reader, other than some anecdotal results experienced by educators at a single Hillsborough County school. The overwhelming evidence pointed in the opposite direction.
In a recent school year, Hillsborough school buses traveled 23-million miles attempting to advance the notion that forced busing would improve educational opportunities for black students.
The cost of that transportation system, including the various deferred expenses we've not yet incurred, could have paid the tuition at some of America's premier institutions, but that wouldn't have satisfied the impulses of the social science advocates. For them, this isn't about education; it's about race.
After turning our nation's courts and the bulk of our social institutions on their respective heads for the last 50 years in the crusade for equality, its promoters have precious little to show for our nation's collective sacrifice when measured in hard numbers, as opposed to feel-good sentiments.
Re: Court-ordered sexism, by Robyn E. Blumner, May 16.
"Why is a father who gets up and goes to work every day in order to provide his children with a decent standard of living seen by the courts as less nurturing than the parent who stays home, enjoying the fruits of that labor?"
First, let me respond by saying that I most certainly appreciate my husband's deciding with me that he would be the one to get up and make the sacrifice of enduring the rat race in order that we all (not just myself or the kids) have a decent standard of living. His is not an easy job, and I am aware of that, having been in the workforce myself before having our children.
However, a decent standard of living is not entirely gained through earning decent wages, and certainly nurturing is not obtained through any financial means whatsoever. My husband nurtures the children when he comes home. Nurturing is a personal interaction, one that I hope neither of us should ever be deprived of. But to take it even further and imply that the parent who stays home is "enjoying the fruits of that labor" is absolutely ludicrous. It also is stereotypical and entirely demeaning.
My husband enjoys the fruits of my labor when he comes home to a clean house, a decent meal (even if he helps with some of it) and, most important, nurtured children - children who love and respect him and me because I took the time to teach them how to do that and why it is important. Children who have a love of learning because I take the time to read to them, play with them and teach them. While I enjoy the financial fruits of my husband's labor, he most certainly enjoys the fruits of my nurturing labor. We both give and receive - we both chose this arrangement - and to imply otherwise is insulting.