A math education professor at Brooklyn College contends in a recent academic article that “meritocracy” in math classes is a “tool of whiteness.”
Laurie Rubel implicates both meritocracy and “color-blindness” as ideological precepts that hold back racial minorities from succeeding in math classes in an article for the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Mathematics Education.
Rubel, who taught high school math for nine years before becoming a professor, argues that while meritocracy is commonly linked to hard work and talent, it also “functions as a tool of whiteness” because it “ignores systemic barriers and institutional structures that prevent opportunity and success.”
Color-blindness, too, can be an issue for math teachers, according to Rubel, who asserts that “Teachers who claim color-blindness—that is, they claim to not notice the race of their students—are, in effect, refusing to acknowledge the impact of enduring racial stratification on students and their families.
“By claiming not to notice, the teacher is saying that she is dismissing one of the most salient features of the child’s identity and that she does not account for it in her curricular planning and instruction,” Rubel adds, citing education theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings.
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5 comments:
If teachers were honest, they wouldn’t have to say they were being “color blind” because they wouldn’t have had to dumb down everything to begin with.
It seems that every failure, and I mean EVERY failure, from fatherless families to welfare dependency to teenage violence to a majority of black men in prison or getting ready to go (or just leaving) to their poor level of education or their misogynistic and violent culture, is now the fault of white people.
THIS is why they will never be anything other than dependent on the white man to save them from their weaknesses and behavior.
THEY are the only ethnic group that openly claims that they NEED white people to GIVE them things - money, jobs, housing, medical care, daycare, and preferential treatment, just to survive! After over FIFTY YEARS of handouts, what do they have to show for it?
Right.
Stop believing SOMEONE ELSE is responsible for making your child a good adult. SOMEONE ELSE should check their homework and read to them. SOMEONE ELSE should be watching your 12 year old kid to make sure he isn't on the corner at midnight on Wednesday. SOMEONE ELSE needs to tell them that beating bi**hes up, selling drugs, getting pregnant and dropping out of school is BAD for their future and it ain't white people holding them back.
It's THEMSELVES.
SOMEONE ELSE needs to tell them that they are not the next LeBron and school is IMPORTANT (and not just a place to go in the daytime).
When we are at the point where NUMBERS are racist and LEARNING about numbers is also racist, we are deep into the rabbit hole.
Grow up stupid and pay the price. Just make sure YOU pay the price and don't be looking around for white people to fix the results of all of your very bad decisions.
Which is EXACTLY what black people do now.
I have my own problems. I, like millions of others, can't afford to bail you out of a life of bad decisions at the same time you are telling us how much WE (??!) are messing YOUR life up....
Look in the mirror.
you're thinking about it all wrong. The whole point of the lowering of academic standards in colleges is a simple consequence of rising tuition rates and falling enrollment. Colleges , like SU- pass themselves off as high-minded scholars who disdain money- but you and I know that is crap. SU and all other schools are a simple business. You give me cash, I give you a stupid piece of paper that says you achieved something so you can show it to potential employers.
The whole "standards are evil/ patriarchy/ oppression thing is just a story they are telling themselves and their little darlings.
Whatever happened to MLK Jr's "dream" that one day his children would be judged by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin? The government, black leaders, and higher education continue to institutionalize racism. It has gotten to the point that using skin color, as long as it isn't white (racism) is preferred by these groups and organizations. It appears that MLK Jr. didn't really represent the views of the people he was leading. Today, it would appear he would be an enemy of the black agenda.
The lives of children subject to the multigenerational poverty of body, mind and spirit of the adults who raise them stand a chance of one in a hundred thousand of rising above those deficits through some miracle that has yet to be identified. Perhaps people who have been the recipients of that blessing should be the ones whose lives should be held up as positive examples, while those who advocate throwing money at paradigms of education and social services that are and continue to be abject failures should stop trying to give life support to a system long deceased, step aside and take heed of reality.
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