as i said before, his core finding seems pretty innocent...he attempted to analyze a broad social phenomenon, but only had data for a small aspect of that phenomenon - then analyzed the data and found the impact limited to extreme minority situations for blacks and also found that the most popular low-achievers, in a W-sorta-way, were white kids at prep schools. go figure...
i finally got around to reading fryer...i can see the utility of his basic premise...i will need to revisit the scope of policy implications - but his basic observation of the data could be interesting - it's the interpretation that is likely to be problematic for the following reasons:
The Encarta website is taking advantage of the OPENSOURCE CLIMATE created in recent years (30+). This link constitutes an invitation to REWRITE - for a huge audience the massunderstandings of our time and our history. This could be interesting.
In a paper written with P. Torelli, Roland Fryer tackles the dreaded "acting white" syndrome. If you were to look at the press coverage of the article, you'd expect that Fryer and Torelli's paper breaks the back of the unbelievers--people like me, Ed Brown, and Dunovant.
Earl links to an article written by lit professor Stanley Fish, arguing that composition students should be taught HOW to write as opposed to WHAT to write about.
One of the biggest problems that students have that I can see as both a parent and a college professor is that they don't know how to logically construct an argument using the English language. While black, brown, and poor kids of various ethnic backgrounds are hit hardest, this is an AMERICAN phenomenon.
I don't see this is as being an either-or thing. You should be able to teach content and form simultaneously. But what Fish is talking about is something a lot deeper than just giving people various models of essays. We should expect freshman comp students to be able to logically structure an argument. We shouldn't expect them to come out of that class knowing Ellison. Form should rule.
The entire basis of Brown vs. Board of Education was wrong in my opinion. Instead of arguing that black kids felt bad about themselves because they went to black schools, Thurgood et al should have argued that they weren't getting the resources. Black self-esteem isn't a significant problem...though the existence of stereotype threat is a signal exception. So while browsing for something else I come across the following abstract:
Ethnic identity was conceptualized into three categories: (1) unexamined, (2) searching for identity, and (3) achieved ethnic identity. Analyses of data collected from 12,386 adolescents showed that ethnic identity is an important qualifier of the relationships between independent variables of ethnicity and gender, and dependent variables of global self-esteem, academic self-confidence, and purpose in life. Whites and Native Americans had lower ethnic identity, and Blacks and Hispanics had higher ethnic identity. Asians and repondents of mixed ethnicity had intermediate levels of ethnic identity. The greater the ethnic identity, the higher the self-esteem, purpose in life and self-confidence. This mechanism applies to ethnic minorities and to women among whom achieved ethnic identity may blunt the negative effects of social denigration and stereotyping, and it applies to whites, too. The paper argues that multiculturalism in the schools can increase ethnic identity.
