is there lots of pressure for suburban students to excel?

[pstokely]

can even inner city students even excel?

[HEyHEY]

1. I think it depedns on the parents

[noiretextatique]

2. there is lots of support

like qualified teachers, decent facilities, and books. and inner city students can and do excel, sometime with very little support. parents do make a difference, but of course...that's not the whole story. bush's parents could not make him interested in excelling...he was too unmotivated.

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. Pressure?

There's a lot of pressure put on the teachers to get their students to pass state exams -- but mostly, the teachers are angry about the pressure and stress that it's putting on the kids. Elementary school kids are facing these exams by throwing up on exam days and teachers are trying to reduce stress by telling the kids that the test doesn't matter. This sends mixed messages and my own daughter confessed to me that when she was in elementary school, she couldn't concentrate on the exam so she went "Christmas treeing." That's when you fill in the circles in the exam to form a design.

She had a learning disability and until her reading abilities developed enough, those exams were sheer torture. Thank God with the help of after school tutoring and lots of encouragement, she overcame her problem. I don't even want to know what would have happened if she had been in a private school where they really don't have the facilities for these kinds of things -- unless the school was specialized for disabled children, which would have hurt her growth in all other ways.

[Rabrrrrrr]

4. pstokely - why start this thread, when you've another one

you started roughly five hours previous, to which you've also not responded.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=251049

I don't understand what your issue is here. Sounds like you have no regard for inner city kids. If you're trying to raise issues about systemic injustice in the way schools are funded, then raise that issue, becuase it is a good one; so far, you're offering class warfare of the "inner city kids have no motivation and aren't pushed to excel, bu those precious suburban kids have too much pressure on them to excel." Maybe that's what you really want to say. If you don't mean that, then you need to reword your questions, because intended or not, that's what you are saying.

[noiretextatique]

5. it's really quite idiotic, actually

this kind of simplification. one could argue that some inner city kids actually have MORE pressure to excel, given their economic circumstances, and conversely, that some suburban kids have LESS pressure to excel, given their economic circumstances.

[Rabrrrrrr]

8. Yes, idiotic. And dishonest.

Why not just say it "Is the problem with black/minority people that they aren't motivated, or is that white people are so much more motivated that it looks like black/minority people aren't motivated?"

If one is gonna be offensive anyway, might as well be truthful about it.

[markses]

6. Since you've simply reversed your question

I'll post the same response:

I went to an "inner city" high school (which is, of course, generally used as code for "heavy minority population") in New York City in the late-80's-early 90's. The conditions were abysmal, despite the great effort of skilled educators. Constant shortages of materials - and I mean basic materials like books (in some classes we shared, which made homework somewhat difficult), not the multimedia learning centers enjoyed by many RICHER suburban high schools. There was also the problem of gangs and violence, which didn't really bother me all that much, since it was part of the culture and something you rolled with, but clearly hurt other students.

It is not a question of "lack of motivation" on the one hand, or excess motivcation on the other. It is a question of broad social conditions, which include race and class, moneys and resources being contributed, and family involvment in education (which is itself often determined - though never fully - by racial and economic conditions). Just as a small example. One of the things that struck me immediately upon entering a friend's home for the first time was a lack of books. There was not a book to be found anywhere in the apartment. Now, my parents are great lovers of books, and we had bookcases all over our apartment filled with books. So, when I didn't see a book in my friend's apartment, I got a strange feeling of absence. If my friend and I had been switched at birth, I would have had a much different educational experience, as would he. My parents were lower end bourgeouisie - poor but too dumb to know it - striving after high culture with Kant, Hegel, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein. My buddy's parents were working class, and simply not concerned with such things.

The obvious retort: The social conditions are not absolutely determinative. Some people emerge from them, so why can't all? (Implicit: Must be their fault!) This Horatio Alger bullshit never made sense to me. Only in this social fantasy do we take the obvious exceptions to the norm and raise them to a level of moral lesson. Never in science has such an approach been taken! Never has such a counter-inductive method produced such vehement generalities! If a million people get sick from a disease, and all but ten die, do we point at the ten and say "A-HA! Why didn't the REST of you get better! Are you unmotivated, or do those of us who didn't get sick at all just have stronger immune systems?" An absurdity. Now, we might study how those ten survived, but only for the purpose of ending the million deaths - Not for the purpose of scolding the dying. Yet this is the procedure taken in American political discourse, the heady moralism of the blessed healthy.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. Excellent post, Markses

I spent my high school years in an outer suburb of Minneapolis, and believe me, there was NO pressure to excel, only pressure to be just like everyone else. The athletes got weekly recognition at pep fests and annual recognition at awards day, which took place during the school day, and which all students were required to attend. The academic achievers were recognized at an evening reception to which only they and their parents were invited. If you were an academic achiever, you had to atone for it by being active in sports or cheerleading, or else you were socially unacceptable.

(When coaches tell me that their student athletes get better grades than average, I tell them that the high achievers have probably joined the team in self-defense to avoid being stereotyped as nerds.)

When I taught on the college level, I found that the majority of suburban students were academically unmotivated: they wanted grades, preferably without having to learn anything. They wanted to be certified as employable by major corporations or as admittable to law or business school. They had no intellectual curiosity and actively avoided opportunities to expand their horizons.

Their parents sometimes encouraged this attitude. I had parents tell students that they shouldn't go on a study abroad program, because if it meant graduating a year later, then they would lose tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime income. One family even sent their daughter on a three-week Hilton-to-Hilton group tour of Asia (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in three weeks) as consolation for not letting her attend a Japanese university for a year.

Their whole focus was money and Stuff. Knowledge and ethics and appreciation of the arts had no place in their lives.

I found that on the whole, students from cities, whether affluent or poor, had more intellectual curiosity. Maybe it's because they're forced to confront diverse ways of life and thinking from their earliest years. The students who grew up in poverty, whatever their race, were terrific kids, because in that environment, the kinds of mediocrities who coast into college from prestigious suburban high schools would never make it past tenth grade in an inner city school.

Jesse Jackson once said something like, "We'll know that racism is dead when a mediocre black person has as much of a chance to succeed as a mediocre white person."

You could rephrase that as "We'll know that classism and anti-urban bias are dead when a mediocre working class student from the inner city has as much of a chance to succeed as a mediocre upper middle class student from a gated community."