The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

This is one of those topics that will always pop up about every 13 months or so (I propose the creation of a Black discussion calender where never dying issues like light skin/dark skin, interracial marriage, Kwanzaa and the usage of the N-word can be plainly laid out–because you know the conversation is coming.) Anyway, here is what has been going on at the Rio Vista Elementary School in San Bernardino, CA:

African-American-themed lessons will help blacks achieve

By SHIRIN PARSAVAND

The Press-Enterprise

The 14 students in third-grade teacher Rosemary Hyder’s class sit beneath posters of influential blacks such as civil rights icon Rosa Parks and inventor Lewis Latimer. They start school each day by chanting a series of positive statements ending with these words:

“I will respect my parents, my teachers and myself. I will use my knowledge to stay in school and make a new and better world. I am great! My education will make me even greater!”

The morning affirmation in Hyder’s class at Rio Vista Elementary School in San Bernardino is one part of the Sankofa Initiative, a trial program to determine whether lessons infused with African and African-American culture will help black students.

Proponents say the approaches in Sankofa, used on a more limited basis in other district classes, make black students more engaged in school and should result in higher academic achievement. But some researchers say there is little evidence to support the use of what proponents call “culturally relevant” lessons to improve achievement.

The district is planning other strategies to improve prospects for black students, whose test scores and graduation rates lag behind other racial and ethnic groups — as they do throughout the nation’s schools. (more…)

Since this idea has been tried already, I think that it would be foolish for me to ask you “Do you think that something like this would work?”

This same thing was tried in Prince Georges’ county, Maryland back in 1993. Educators became so zealous in their efforts to boost up the self-esteem of Black students (something b.t.w. is the responsibility of parents and family) that gross exaggerations of Black history were very common in associated text books. Nevertheless, the curriculum was still approved.

Problems with much of the approved curriculum soon emerged, and Superintendent Edward M. Felegy suspended five social-studies guides for further review. Good thing, too: Reading them, one discovers that slaves chopped sugar cane in the American Southwest; that Croatians (instead of Croatan Indians) served as the heretofore unknown levelers of the “Lost Colony” in Roanoke, North Carolina; that the English fought the British in the American Revolution; and, according to one illustration, that colonial mothers had access to electric ranges in their kitchens.

Yet these errors – some of which could be reasonably attributed to poor copy editing, though this raises its own troubling questions – only break the surface of a much deeper problem. The tenth-grade world-history manual, for instance, drenches itself in black nationalist historical revisionism. The guide starts by allowing the word “African” to slip in and out of its racial connotation enough times to ensure that ancient Egypt comes across as an exclusively black nation, a theory widely disputed by Egyptologists. The authors then cite the notorious Portland Baseline Essays, George James’s Stolen Legacy, and other questionable reference points to reinforce their claims and state, predictably, that “Egypt was supreme in the leadership of civilization … Egyptian culture survived and flourished under the name and control of the Greeks.”

By relying so heavily on these Afrocentric authorities, the curriculum appears more intent on engaging in racial polemics than on teaching history. Approximately 5 per cent of the world history manual’s 164 pages, for instance, is devoted to making the case for black African migrations to the pre-Columbian Americas, an idea dismissed by most archaeologists and Mesoamerican experts.

The article continues…

A team of researchers led by University of Michigan psychologist Harold W. Stevenson offers some helpful guidance on this question. Stevenson found that academically, Asian students beat their American counterparts hands down. No surprise there. In an interesting twist, however, the researchers gauged how students perceived their own performances. While the Asian students found lots of room for improvement, the Americans were quite content. Supporters of self-esteem theory were left scratching their heads.

Even the chairman of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, Henry Louis Gates Jr., now says that self-esteem theory lacks foundation. “When Laotian students in California ace their exams, it isn’t because the curriculum reinforces a rich sense of their Laotian heritage,” he told a Modern Language Association audience. (source)

Teaching Black children about their history is aways a good and much needed thing to do. The problem with this plan here is when the public school seeks to use this history in an attempt to play the wise ol’ African village chief. Instilling self-esteem/self-worth in the primary role of the family.

I cannot be but so hard on the San Bernardino public school system here because if the other side of the equation (the parents) seemingly are not doing what they are supposed to do, and these teachers are paid to teach, what else can they do to successfully do their job?

Nevertheless, this is a line that should not be crossed.