Friday, December 9, 2016
Minorities and preformance
I have read a few studies that say that minorities, specifically african americans and hispanics, preform worse academically, but I take issue with that statement. Although as a whole that may be true, the reasons that the researchers sight as why minorities preform worse is that they do not have the access to resources or the same home environment as Caucasians or Asians. To me, that seems, not a symptom of being of a low economic status. I am sure if you had two wealthy kids of different races and two poor children of different races and compared their test scores, the wealthier children would preform about the same and the poor children would preform about the same. Often times race is a large part of the american conversation and I often don't fee that it needs to be as prevalent a topic as some people make it out to be. Because if you tell minority kids that they will preform better, they will experience learnt helplessness and actually preform worse when they may very well have succeeded.
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I agree with you and it is interesting how we tend to hold up Asian-Americans as the pinnacle of want an immigrant should be. We think of them as being academically successful and we attribute this to them valuing education and being hard working. There was a CNN article that refuted this by saying that the vast majority of Asian-Americans were intellectuals who fled from communist China and Vietnam. They were from the upper class and had the resources to enhance their kids' educational experience with tutors and other educational opportunities. This was vastly different from other immigrants, for example Mexican immigrants. Most Mexican immigrants are from the poor classes and do not have the resources Asian immigrants had. Therefore, it's not and inherent trait but socio-economic background that fueled asian-american success.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/lee-immigration-ethnic-capital/index.html
That's what I'm saying. I completly agree with you. And of course it's not a reflection of all people of a certain race but it's just a was to resources.
ReplyDeleteExactly. Race is important, in that we need to talk about why people of a certain race are less likely to have access to the resources they need, but simply saying that certain students perform better or worse because of their race seems to suggest that it's an inherent trait, which, as we saw in that one documentary, isn't true at all.
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