Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
There's this huge achievement gap between whites, "traditional" African-Americans, and Latinos. Sorry about the "traditional," but it needs to be there. In many instances if you look at top colleges you find that the ranks of their African-Americans are the children of immigrants. The children of black immigrants often pattern very much like the children of non-black immigrants. It's really African-Americans whose ancestors were here in 1950 that have an achievement gap. And yes, it's huge.
The question is, What to do about it? Nobody wants to just ignore it. That's a huge civil rights issue. It's one of the main goals of NCLB. Cosby's been weighing in on it for decades and it's what his dissertation was about, in a kind-of/sort-of way. 'Fat Albert' as a way of helping to close the achievement gap. Whatever.
The achievement gap is across the board. It's in reading, although it's often smaller there. It's in math. It's in science. It's there in writing. And it's there in technology.
Some is access--that's true for technology as well as math. Not in the classroom, but at home. I've seen schools where every kid gets a laptop and you know what? It hasn't done a damned thing to close the achievement gap--even in technology. Some of it's just that giving a 9th grader whose seldom used a computer a laptop when their middle-class white peers have had a computer since they could push the on button doesn't help them catch up without direct instruction and insanely boring exercises. It helps for individuals, but we're all about the group.
It doesn't matter that poor whites have pretty much the same achievement gap. It matters very little that the Latino achievement gap is also impressive--and distressingly bimodal (but hey, we only use averages--all that standard deviancy ... deviariousness ... deviashessness ... deafness ... whatever, let's just stick to the mean). Screw individuals. It's the group achievement scores and grades that matter and since there's a group difference and we define groups by skin color it must be racism. If we don't look at standard deviations we have no chance of looking at skew and run terrified from ANOVA like it's a supernova.
It's all about closing the achievement gap. Give the AA kids iPads and you give them all the technology-literacy tools that they need to become fluent writers and math whizzes. They're empowered with the latest thinking tools.
Heaven help the poor teachers. And I can only imagine what the insurance bill's going to be.
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