Publishers Weekly Review

The new book got a short review in Publishers Weekly. It says:

Buck’s proposed solutions are implausible—and almost risible: one, since “humans are tribal,” some students should be in “an all-black environment that includes black teachers and principals,” the other to replace individual grades with “regular interschool competitions, supplemented by small rewards for winners on a group basis.”

The book does not say that students “should” be in an all-black environment. Here’s the full context of what I actually wrote:

It may be the case that some students would thrive if allowed to choose an all-black environment that includes black teachers and principals. As John McWhorter points out, “Black children often can be weaned off of that acting white tendency in small all-minority schools. . . . When you have a school with, you know, at most a few hundred students, most of them or all of them black, and you have teachers who are deeply committed and set high standards, then you see that there is a representative number of excellent black students and a lot less of the idea that to do well in school is to step outside of your culture, because after all, in such schools there are no white people to define yourself against.”

Thus, we should be tolerant of educational experimentation; it’s not as
if our nation’s inner-city public schools have a stunning record of success that would thereby be jeopardized. Take, for example, the occasional black entrepreneur wishes to start up a black charter school with the aim of providing a nurturing environment for black achievement, or the voucher programs that allow mostly black inner-city children to choose a school best suited to their needs and aspirations. These educational opportunities may allow at least some black children to enter schools that place a higher value on academic achievement.

That’s it for that point. What I have in mind are schools like the Urban Collegiate charter school in Little Rock, a new school that was approved in December 2009.

The woman pictured above is trying to do her best to target an under-served population — inner-city black boys. I am aware of the ideological reasons that some people oppose charter schools, but it strikes me that such a school rises way above the level of laughable. She (and others like her) should at least have the chance to open a school — maybe she’ll have success where others have failed. That’s all that I was saying in the book.

Next, the idea of academic competitions originated with James Coleman, one of the most prominent sociologists of the 20th century. Coleman observed that while students regularly cheer for their school’s football or basketball team, they will poke fun at students who study too hard: “the boy who goes all-out scholastically is scorned and rebuked for working too hard; the athlete who fails to go all-out is scorned and rebuked for not giving his all.”

But this is odd, is it not? Why are attitudes toward academics and athletics so different? Sports are more fun than classwork, of course, but that does not explain why success would actually be discouraged in class.

Coleman theorized that athletes are not competing against other students from their own school. Instead, they are competing against another school. And when they win a game, they bring glory to their fellow students, who get to feel like they too are victors, if only vicariously. But the students in the same class are competing against one another for grades and for the teacher’s attention. Naturally, that competition gives rise to resentment against other children who are too successful (just as students will hate the football team from a crosstown rival).

In Coleman’s words, the scholar’s “victories are purely personal ones, often at the expense of his classmates, who are forced to work harder to keep up with him. Small wonder that his accomplishments gain little reward, and are often met by such ridicule as ‘curve raiser’ or ‘grind,’ terms of disapprobation having no analogues in athletics.”

Coleman’s suggestion was that if you want the students’ attitudes toward their studies to resemble their attitudes toward sports, you should minimize the role of grades—which involve competition against one’s classmates. In his words, we need to get rid of the “notion that each student’s achievement must be continually evaluated or ‘graded’ in every subject.” Instead, such grades should be “infrequent or absent,” and should be replaced by “contests and games” between schools, such as “debate teams, music contests, drama contests, science fairs, . . . math tournaments, speaking contests,” and so on. Then, the students in any one class or school would have a greater incentive to encourage their fellow students to study hard, and to take pride in their fellow students’ success.

In Coleman’s words, “I suspect that the impact upon student motivation would be remarkably great—an impact due to the fact that the informal social rewards from community and fellow-students would reinforce rather than conflict with achievement.”

The idea of academic competitions has also recently been floated by Malcolm Gladwell, who said the following to Time Magazine:

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that in inner-city schools, the thing they do best is sports. They do really, really well in sports. It’s not correct to say these schools are dysfunctional; they’re highly functional in certain areas. So I’ve always wondered about using the principles of sports in the classroom. Go same sex; do everything in teams; have teams compete with each other. I’d like to try that. I don’t know whether it will work, but it’s certainly worth a shot, and we could learn something really useful.