Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The reason for exploring all this American Dream stuff is the poor performance of Black students on achievement tests. Are the tests measuring the right things?
The modern White American Dream seems to be clean, indoor, meaningful work that pays well enough for an apartment with high-speed WiFi and a Light Rail Pass, such as sitting in a cubicle at a non-profit, saving the whales. For that, students need basic arithmetic, reading, writing and not much more, certainly not college level expertise. Any American who shares that dream – Asian, Hispanic, Black, Native American, Muslim, Jewish, or refugee – needs the same skills. Any high school should be capable of teaching what they need to know and our traditional achievement math and reading tests should be capable of measuring it.
What about people who don’t share that Dream, who reject it? Those people don’t do well in those White Dream schools because the skills being taught aren’t relevant to their futures. Those students become a stereotype (which doesn’t fit every rebel but fits enough to have a grain of truth or the stereotype wouldn’t be useful) of Black Male Troublemakers, disrupting the school, fighting with others, preventing everyone else from learning.
So what is those rebels’ dream? What skills would they prefer to learn, to succeed at their Dream?
If the Young Black Man Dream was as silly as the hateful racists claim – free sex, free stuff, free time – then the required skills would not be the same level of math and reading skills required for the White American Dream. Instead, young Black men would need verbal skills to convince fat White chicks to bed them and to hand over their welfare checks. They would need to speak English poorly enough to get along with their peers but well enough to convince probation officers that they were doing nothing wrong when the police arrested them. They would need pattern recognition skills to decipher gang colors and tattoos to avoid trouble. They would need enough arithmetic to make change from selling drugs and buying bullets. Yes, I’m intentionally being absurd to illustrate the point: all students want to learn things they think will be helpful in their future lives as they imagine them. The question is: how do Black male students imagine their future lives?
So back to education: if you are a young Black man and the school isn’t teaching skills relevant to your Dream – whatever Dream that is – then naturally you’re be bored stiff in class after about 8th grade. You’ve learned all the useful knowledge the school has to offer – the rest isn’t relevant to your Dream. Bored, restless, disciplined, disrespectful, fighting . . . and doing poorly on tests: do we have a discipline problem, or a Dream problem?
Should we accommodate the Dream? Or try to change it?
Joe Doakes
It’s way past time to change the terms by which we define “the dream”.
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