The Rich Get Richer; the Rest of Us Are Blind - Part II

Now, really, groupthink and bandwagon effects on museum attendance or a city's ability to attract tourists are far less significant than how they can actually affect people.

I was listening to an episode in Season 2 of Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent podcast, Revisionist History, discussing a study by two Vanderbilt University professors examining the fact that white students are far more likely, 2 times more likely, in fact, to be placed into gifted and talented education (GATE) programs than black cbildren. ("Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment")  They look at a large sample of elementary school students and equalize for test scores, income, health of parents, age of children entering kindergarten – age, class, health of parents.  None of these factors bear any significance of the disproportionate placement rates. So what gives? 

What the researchers found is, like underrated cities or paintings, black students were also overlooked for nothing intrinsic to the students themselves, i.e., the relevant factor of intelligence and capability.    It had nothing to do with the child's ability, but the teacher's ability, to see. 

For white students, black and white teachers are just as likely to assign them to (GATE) programs. But for black students, a white teacher was 50% less likely to assign black students to receive gifted and talent services.  50%!   Remember that adage about black people having to be twice as good?  

It's not about the viewed, but the viewer. 

So what’s really going on?  Well, take almost any object and it would that our expectations can, simply put, cloud our judgment.   And it’s not always simply a matter of chauvinism, prejudice or lenses that are sinister in that way.  (I said, not always). Perhaps our brains seek experiences that confirm the expectations?  Perhaps, social creatures that we are, we seek to have the same experience as other and feel that experience in the same way?   Another way to put it, we look for the same things. 

So we may, like a teacher unfamiliar with black children or traveler simply seeking “an art museum experience” look for well-known, widely identified qualities, traits and entities.  For example, I know that just sounding black, which, look, is probably going to happen is you grow up in a predominantly African American milieu, is just not considered to be a correlate of exceptional intelligence, though sounding British generaally is.  This is not a casual example.  Considering  that I am black, I know I  see differently in really crucially different ways from many of my education colleagues.   

The educators who fail to place - misplace- the myriad gifted black children* and other children of color are essentially blind.  There's a fair debate about the causes of this "blindness ".  But  there's no debate about the cost.  

In Paris, travelers may corral themselves into the Louvre and take an hour just to see one painting.  Or, you may book a second trip to Paris before visiting Cape Town or Rio once.   Or…

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When I moved to suburban Riverside in 8^th grade the my middle school disregarded all my previous academic records and placed me in the “regular” classes.  At my mother’s insistence they allowed me to take the GATE test, which I passed, and after that I pretty much enrolled in all the honors and AP classes my high school then made available.  Sure, I was smart.  But no smarter than Patrick, who absolutely should have shared more classes with me than simply Mr. William's Health Science in 9th grade.   Why didn't more teachers see him?

That said, I was definitely, definitely less gifted, in the realm of language, than Mike.  Mike was a sharp mind, a brown kid – was he Puerto Rican? Black and Samoan? Mexican?  I don't actually remember.   But what I do remember is that he could cut you with words 100 ways.  No anecdote is adequate.  No teacher saw enough in him to say, you’ll be joining us in honors and AP, and maybe he didn’t have a parent who advocated the way my mother did.  My freshman year at Cal I learned that Mike was stabbed to death in a street fight.  Was Mike  likely to l have had a different outcome if he had been given the opportunity take the same classes  that I did and get on the same college track? The question answers itself.

The story of Mike is a long way from Paris and the Louvre.  It’s actually closer to home, though, considering I'm a teacher.  And so, maybe we can all be mindful to make sure the rich – artworks, cities, people – earn their fine regard.  

And, more importantly, that we do our best to see the unheralded in as much glory as we can possibly see or, at least, imagine.

*I want to say right now that even the notion of separating kids and tracking them along the  lines of perceived "giftedness" is problematic and I believe I work against in my education work. Still, there's going to be MIT and Caltech. College may be an appropriate time for that sorting  to happen, secondary and primary education is absolutely not the time.