The "Achievement Gap"

For today's reading on the achievement gap and education debt, we will discuss the video below, as well as an article from the Everyday Feminism blog. The reading addresses that white women have benefited the most from affirmative action. Research confirms the argument that gender was a "blindspot" in the original design of affirmative action policies.

Ch. 33, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” Gloria Ladson-Billings
Ladson-Billings addresses the “achievement gap,” a catchphrase to describe the difference in academic performance between White, minority, and lower socio-economic status students. This gap has been found to be most significantly affected by race and ethnicity, with a brief review of some of the potential causes. Ladson-Billings suggests avoiding too much focus on the gap, because most of the solutions are short-term in nature, and instead to look at the longer standing “educational debt” akin to the financial national debt. This debt is seen as the underlying cause of much of our national problems with regard to achievement, and that addressing it is necessary to truly have desegregated schools, as well as to come closer to fully realizing equality in the United States.

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What do stereotypes of immigrant criminalization and mass incarceration communicate about race/gender/class?

42. “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation,” Rubén G. Rumbaut and Walter Ewing Although some of you may not have access to the book, the information in that short reading is available from the American Immigration Council . In a post-9/11 climate of fear and ignorance, assumptions have flourished that immigration and criminality are associated. However, systematic evidence shows that crime is not caused or even aggravated by immigrants to the United States, regardless of their legal status. Crime rates in the nation have declined even at the same time that immigration rates have increased. Among all ethnic groups in the United States, immigrants have lower incarceration rates than those who are native-born. For all ethnic groups, incarceration rates are highest among high school dropouts, yet immigrants who are high school dropouts have lower incarceration rates than other high school dropouts. Although immigrants’ risk of incarceration increases the l...

Amplifying the Voices of Immigrant Students

We continued our discussion of intersectional education issues, this time particularly for undocumented Latinx students. Ch. 34, “Academic Resilience Among Undocumented Latino Students,” William Perez, Roberta Espinoza, Karina Ramos, Heidi M. Coronado, and Richard Cortes Undocumented Latino youth face additional risk factors and sources of stress above and beyond the challenges of biculturalism they share with documented Latino youth. Perez et al.’s study examines the role of protective resources in mediating the academic achievement of 110 undocumented Latino high school, community college, and university students across the United States. They found that even in the presence of multiple sources of psychosocial risk (high school employment, low parental education, large family size, and alienation resulting from undocumented status), personal and environmental resources increased resilience and improved academic performance. Students with lower risk factors (protected) an...

Controlling Images of Asian and Asian American Women

For today's reading on the "controlling images" and racialized femininities of Asian American Women, you watched a video (included below) to get a historical understanding of early media images. In class we watched the following video for a more modern perspective. To bring the conversation into a current context, an article about "the Asian mean girl" might be productive.

Communicating Gender, Race, and Class: 2020

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