Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Stephan Thernstrom, Abigail Thernstrom ISBN: 0-7432-0446-8 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.81 (16 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Liberal-lefties see the (half-) light
Comment: Hamlet without the Prince
- a half-realistic attempt to understand and rectify Black educational failure
A review of:
Abigail & Stephan THERNSTROM
No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning
New York : Simon & Schuster. Pp. xv + 334. ... .
By:
Chris BRAND, Edinburgh (Research Consultant for Woodhill Foundation, USA).
This book is remarkable. It offers a practically oriented survey of the U.S.A.'s 40-year struggle to close the Black-White gap in educational attainments. Yet its many passably sound conclusions for improving schools will be of interest not for their originality but merely because of their adoption by two liberal sages -- one at the Manhattan Institute, the other at Harvard. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom are well known for their anti-racism, concern for the wretched of the earth and -- as they insist here -- their horror at Black children lagging educationally behind Whites to a degree they repeatedly call "dismal", "disastrous", "heartbreakingly disappointing", "shocking" and "catastrophic" - the gap being even greater today than in the 1980's despite thousand-billion-dollar American expenditures. So politically correct are the authors that, in their bar graphs, Whites are assigned the colour black while Blacks are given grey and 'Latinos' have their bars left white. Somebody at the 'New York Times' may thus listen to them.
Shock will certainly be the reaction of the many liberal-left readers likely to scan 'No Excuses' - few will actually read it for it is poorly organized and repetitious and comes to so many 'right-wing' conclusions. The Thernstroms' review does not attribute Black failure to poverty. The authors are properly impressed with Black 'embourgeoisement': one third of America's Black children now grow up in suburbs without this doing much for their academic attainments; and the Thernstroms note that the Black-White gap is actually bigger in middle-class children and that it is fully present by age 6 (so scarcely attributable to the schools themselves). Agreeing with (though never mentioning) race-realist Arthur Jensen, the authors write: "After taking full account of racial differences in poverty rates, parental education, and place of residence, roughly two thirds of the troubling racial gap remains unexplained." They reject the views that educational tests are generally biased and that schools need to show more multicultural sensitivity: they admit the successes in America of Oriental and indeed of Sikh and Pacific Islander children. Anyhow, Black children are happy in American schools, showing higher self-esteem despite lack of emotional support at home. Nor do teachers show 'biases', 'stereotypes' or 'low expectations' - at least, no more than can be expected from Black children's low attainments. These cannot be blamed on low investment: resources are little related to school performance generally; and, anyhow, Black state schools actually enjoy 8% higher funding. Equally irrelevant are class sizes and having plenty of White children in the classroom -- though the Thernstroms want teachers with higher vocabulary scores (as near as they ever get to admitting the importance of IQ) and allow schools may need to raise salaries by 20% to achieve this objective (while admitting this is likely to help White kids more than Blacks). Nor were Head Start-type programmes ever much help (except to a few White children and doubtless to the many White graduate operatives employed on the programmes) - and the authors amusingly show how educationists tried to disguise the failures (e.g. by making the race-realistic 1966 Coleman Report so fat that no-one except tenured social scientists would be likely to read it).
What then is to blame for the "shocking" racial gap, and what is to be done? Essentially, 'No Excuses' answers 'culture' - both at home and at school. Black children apparently lack 'cognitive stimulation' in the home, where Black graduate parents keep fewer books than the average White family, and where children spend more hours weekly watching TV than they have hours of school instruction. At school, the Thernstroms tell moving anecdotes of institutions (usually charter schools) which have uniforms, discipline, phonic reading methods, arithmetical tables, a 4-hour-longer-than-normal school day, Saturday working, rolls of honour and expulsions - resembling British grammar schools of the past though with the addition of Maoist school chants (e.g. 'We stay focused to save time', 'We follow the teachers' instructions') and school outings to baseball games. In a further bid to bring back educational selectivity, the authors favour 'self-tracking' - as did my 1996 book 'The g Factor' (which the Thernstroms show no sign of having read but which the leftish U.K. government of 2004 is now backing ...).
Yet how do the authors know that their favoured 'cultures' are not so much causal to success as a happy by-product of having higher-IQ children around the place - and quickly getting rid of any lower-IQ kids who fail to perform? The sorry answer is they don't. Whereas the Thernstroms' documentation of non-explanations (para. 2, above) uses published studies, their traditionalist conclusions derive chiefly from their visits to schools and hearsay. Moreover, even if there were studies which controlled for IQ when asking whether TV watching was linked to poor attainments and chanting Maoist slogans was linked to high attainments, the Thernstroms would not have been able to use them. From their p. 4 onwards, they inform readers that they "assume the racial gap is not an IQ story", that they know (whether from evidence or authority is unclear) that "innate intelligence is not the explanation" and that they "believe" IQ is not the problem. The sheer variety of these epistemic stances gives pause for thought. Why not just have a look and see? Why not read 'The g Factor' - whether Arthur Jensen's 1998 version or my own? Since the authors actually end up favouring school tracking, why not base themselves on the best authority for it? It is a riddle inside an enigma shrouded in a mystery why the Thernstroms keep up IQ-avoidance while abandoning every other sacred cow of the liberal left. One can only presume the religion of PeeCee and its need for token gestures provides the explanation - together with the authors wanting to keep their taxpayer-funded jobs in New York and Boston.
FINIS
Rating: 4
Summary: pretty good attempt at topic
Comment: It seems like the Thernstrom's really put alot of effort into this book like they did with America in Black and White. What I really liked about the book was that it offered more then just information about educational problems but also offered solution such as changing the teacher's unions and with schools like Amistad and KIPP which have done great jobs of educating disadvantaged children. The Thernstrom's also put an emphasis on culture between blacks, Hispanics and Asian families to try to explain their academic differences though it is really too generalized of an approach to look at racial differences since there is a large varaition within a single racial group (there are high performing Hispanic groups like Cubans and low performing Asian groups like Laotions and Cambodians). The Thernstroms also do a good job of attacking conventional ideas on improving education such as spending more mone, racial isolation and teacher quality and how these areas have not lived up to their promises.
Rating: 2
Summary: An incomplete dialogue...
Comment: The Thernstroms are correct when they assert that the racial gap in learning is our biggest problem in education today. But their examination of the causes and solutions is incomplete and slanted. I admire them for tackling these tough issues, but their expansive dialogue needs to be met with equal plausibility from alternative views.
To start, I recommend "Young, Gifted, and Black" by Teresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard. The Thernstroms state that low performance of African-Americans is the fault of "the special role of television in the life of black children and the low expectations of their parents." Perry argues that the African-American community has a long history (back through slavery) of valuing education and having high expectations for their children.
The Thernstroms are correct that parents of any race should not accept excuses for school failure. Asa Hilliard is right that our educational system consistently produces systemic impediments to achievement by students of color.
When this dialogue comes together, a few things stand out: Our schools must do a better job of educating students of color. Families and communities of color must come together to increase the achievement of their children. Schools, communities, and families must take collective responsibility.
However, blaming the victim and suggesting small-scale solutions (like charter schools) are inappropriate and inadequate. Engaging in a meaningful dialogue about these issues and possible solutions is critically important.
 |
Title: AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE: One Nation, Indivisible by Stephan Thernstrom ISBN: 0684844974 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 02 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
 |
Title: FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell ISBN: 0761501657 Publisher: Crown Forum Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
 |
Title: Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement by John U. Ogbu, Astrid Davis ISBN: 080584516X Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
 |
Title: Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 by Charles Murray ISBN: 006019247X Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
 |
Title: The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch ISBN: 0375414827 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
