With Mexican American Studies back in the news, the discussion over whether the program helped or hurt its students has been reopened. Were minority students better off for being taught ways Hispanics have gotten a raw deal in this country, or does that just make them angry and discouraged, leaving them worse off than if their history of second class citizenship wasn’t emphasized in MAS classrooms?
According to a recent study, programs like MAS help improve minority students’ self esteem and their chances of success in school. The study looked at a group of middle school students in a majority-minority middle school in Arizona—55 percent Hispanic, 18 percent black, 11 percent Native American. Researchers asked students if they believed America is a place where people who work hard have an equal chance of succeeding—in other words, if they believed the U.S. is a meritocratic society. When they were sixth graders, students who believed they lived in a meritocracy had relatively high self esteem and were less likely to indulge in risky behavior than other students. But by the end of the seventh grade, those students had lower self esteem and increased risky behaviors compared to students who didn’t buy into the idea that they lived in a meritocracy.
The cautious conclusion the researchers draw from their results is that “system justification,” the belief that social, economic and political systems around them are inherently good, cause minority students to internalize the discrimination directed at them and view their low societal status as their own fault. As one teacher put it,
“[Minority] students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”
According to its authors, earlier research came to similar conclusions.
While the sample was relatively small, [Erin Godfrey, lead author of the study] said the findings are informative and mirror prior research. Indeed, previous analyses have found that system-justifying beliefs are associated with lower self-esteem in black adults and lower grade-point averages for Latino college students.
All of this brings us back to Mexican American Studies. The program spotlighted the history of prejudice and oppression directed at Hispanics in the U.S. No question, giving that kind of instruction to Hispanic students can make us advantaged white folks feel uncomfortable. It’s nicer to believe we attained our positions in society on our own merits, not because we had a societal leg up on others. Our consciences rest easier if we don’t hear a lot of talk about our deep, wide, far-reaching social inequalities. But if the study’s conclusions are accurate, easing our consciences by encouraging a sanitized version of American history, sociology and economics in school is detrimental to students who are on the receiving end of the inequity. When minority students understand that obstacles have been put in their path, and in the path of their parents and their parents’ parents, the weight of believing “It’s all my fault” is lightened. Realizing that the societal playing field is uneven and they’re the ones who have to run uphill makes it easier to internalize the feeling that they are in fact “created equal” with others who have greater advantages. That knowledge may lead to the desire to run a little harder, to show themselves and the world, “Yes I can” (possibly with a little “I’ll show you, you son of a bitch!” thrown in).
In other words, the very qualities of the MAS classes its skeptics maintain are destructive to students are actually some of the most constructive aspects of the program.
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2017.
Yesterday I read your thoughts on the MAS trial, then the comments. Today I read The Atlantic article regarding our belief that somehow we live in a meritocracy.
I zoomed back to post a link to The Atlantic piece, but you were quicker.
Here’s to hoping your readers learn a few things from the study cited in The Atlantic.
And also, the MAS classes were taught in english, so how is that even relevant to anything?
Another shining example of why TUSD and other so called public educations are mired down in idiocracy and mediocrity. It is truly an atrocity.
Let me get this straight, David. You have in past blogs expressed skepticism that desegregation works, and have even tended to excuse American schools lapsing back into “separate but equal” schools as a way of coping with the persistent patterns of econominally and racially segregated housing in our nation. When it comes to discussing TUSD, our largest local majority-minority district, you have time and time again passed up opportunities to help build public awareness of inequitable conditions in the district’s schools and you have repeatedly, vigorously opposed students who are being academically ill-served in their local public schoos being allowed to take their per-pupil funding and apply it in private schools that produce better academic results for the students who attend them.
Yet you believe that it helps minority students to learn of past injustices and know that they belong to a class of people that have been oppressed in this country. (Actually, though it is true that this nation has systemically advantaged people of certain heritages, economic classes, religious affiliations, and skin colors at different points in its history, it is fallacious that racial classes as a whole should be regarded as “oppressed” or “oppressors.” Laborers of every skin color and nationality have been oppressed in this country, and in certain contexts, members of every racial category have been oppressors. From the dawn of time there have been wars and unjust seizures that have resulted in changed borders and dispossessions. If we really wanted to undo all the injustices, persecutions and dispossessions on this continent, we would have to remove all people of European descent, including descendants of the Spanish who intermarried with Native Americans. Then we might have to start weighing and considering who was right and wrong in inter-tribal wars among pre-conquest Native Americans. By the time we were done there would be no human beings left, just the animals, who, as, Peter Singer points out, have been much abused and exploited by humans.)
Returning now to your argument here, in which you once again play the Democratic Party trick of portraying yourself as a great crusader against racial injustice while conspicuously failing to support any specific administrative actions, allocations of funds, or policy implementations that REMEDY the problems in the here and now, you tell us you think it will help minorities self-esteem to learn that they belong to an oppressed and exploited racial class.
Personally, I think effectively eliminating oppression and discrimination and inequitable conditions in schools wherever and whenever they occur would help minorities — and all others — more. But some have a need to divert attention from real actions in office, real policy solutions, real funding allocation decisions, and real contemporary conditions in real local schools.
So they write blog posts like this.
The controversy that developed over ethnic studies programs, was like so much of the noises about education, NOT about the education of young people. It was a right wing political bludgeon only. Another of the “scare the heck out of ’em, so we can ride in and save y’all from all those evil, ‘socialists, commie, revolutionary, Spanish speakers’ “, tactics that even Joe Arpaio finally was caught for.
Such a biased article defending cleptocracy that makes insurance too costly to afford. Fuck this page.