Thursday, February 3, 2011

Black History Month Heroes: Trevor Garfield from "187"

The United States of America in 2011 is an interesting place to live, especially if you are an educator. White and Asian students seem to be enjoying excellent tutelage from Crusading White Pedagogues (CWP), though the goal of every teacher is to close the racial gap in learning. Black kids are posting low graduation rates, test scores, grade point averages (GPA) and low scholastic aptitude test results.

They do however, have high rates of disciplinary problems and many all-Black schools have a high rate of teenage moms up for casting on MTV's Teen Mom show

If white kids and Asians continue to excel, won't that only perpetuate the racial gap in learning? To rectify this problem, organizations like Teach for America are recruiting the top graduates from Ivy League schools away from Wall Street and law school to instead accept two-year contracts to bring CWP-style teaching to the inner cities of America.

Heroism - as we learned - is something Black and Hispanic people in America do at a rate double that of lowly white people. It was deduced in that entry that roughly 88 percent of teachers in America are white, though 44  percent of the students K-12 are non-white (As an aside, in the South, more than 50 percent of students get free lunches, a number that will only increase as the non-white population rises).

Perhaps if only more Black people were teachers, then Black pupils would put up better academic results. Maybe if people are segregated by race in homeroom with positive mentors of the same race, then academic results will improve.

Maybe. Right?

Atlanta City Schools currently are under probation for a lack of institutional control  after a huge cheating scandal led overwhelmingly by  Black teachers, principals and the Board of Education was uncovered. A panel was held in Atlanta to discuss how to save an ever growing lost generation of Black students who have a greater chance of landing in prison then they do graduating from college. Spike Lee said Black male teachers are needed to offer positive role models to Black school children:
On Monday, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan renewed his call for more black men to pick up the chalk and teach.


Joined by filmmaker Spike Lee, Duncan issued the invitation during a town hall meeting and panel discussion hosted by Morehouse College and moderated by MSNBC contributor Jeff Johnson. The event was part of the Department of Education’s TEACH campaign, designed to raise awareness of the teaching profession and get a new generation of teachers to join the ones who are already making a difference in the classroom.
This might be the only way left to finally eradicate the racial gap in learning, though an invisible barrier that Disingenuous White Liberals (DWL) strenuously deny exist – IQ – stands in the way of this noble goal.
Perhaps this barrier to achieving a leveling of the racial gap in learning can explain why so few Black male teachers are found in classrooms. How many Black males graduate high school? How many Black males graduate college?
The AP reports that Duncan told the crowd that black males make up less than 2 percent of the country’s 3 million teachers, and that the nation is facing a severe teacher shortage as the current workforce ages. Addressing the racial disparities in education will demand a national teaching corps that’s equipped to understand and meet the needs of black and Latino kids, and educators play a unique role in influencing and shaping young people’s lives. It’s a message Duncan is diligent about slipping in whenever he can. Latino and black males make up just 3.5 percent of America’s teachers, Duncan’s said.

At a speech Duncan gave at a gathering of the National Council of La Raza last year he told the crowd: “I want to encourage you to develop a new generation of Hispanic teachers. Twenty percent of all public school students in the U.S. are Latino. But only 5 percent of their teachers are Latino. In Chicago, the numbers are just as lopsided—41% of students are Latino but only 15% of teachers are Hispanic.”

For all the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s education reform policies, this is a legitimately, unequivocally positive message to send to young people. There is a body of research that suggests what is perhaps fairly intuitive: a teacher’s race matters, and kids of color take in information differently when there’s a teacher of color at the front of the room.
Recently, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced TEACH, a national campaign to increase the number of African-American and Latino males being prepared as PK-12 classroom teachers. Nearly 40 percent of public school students are African-American or Latino. In many school districts this statistic hovers above 90 percent. Yet, less than 8 percent of the nation's teachers are African-American and fewer than 4 percent are Hispanic/Latino. In schools inside central cities, 73 percent of teachers are white. In urban schools outside of central cities, 91 percent of public school teachers are white.
Teaching is a glamorless,  thankless position entailing long hours in exchange for anemic compensation. Basically a teacher is a paid volunteer and we all know how volunteer rates by race play out. But, really, why so few Black male teachers? Could it be a vicious cycle of IQ denial that has created this quandary?:
The shortage of black male teachers compounds the difficulties that many African American boys face in school. About half of black male students do not complete high school in four years, statistics show. Black males also tend to score lower on standardized tests, take fewer Advanced Placement courses and are suspended and expelled at higher rates than other groups, officials said.

Educators said black male teachers expose students to black men as authority figures, help minority students feel that they belong, motivate black students to achieve, demonstrate positive male-female relationships to black girls and provide African American youths with role models and mentors.
We need more Black male teachers, just like we need more Black males to stop fathering children out-of-wedlock and to finally pay child support. America simply needs Black male teachers!
Where can we DWLs go to find positive examples of Black teachers ready to engage the gritty Black underclass that white flight has left behind and CWP’s have failed to educate? Why, Hollywood of course!
Samuel L. Jackson starred in an underrated classic 187 (playing Trevor Garfield) that deals with a dedicated Black male teacher bent on reforming inner city schools, no matter the costs:
Trevor Garfield is a black high school science teacher at Roosevelt Whitney High School, a high school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. A gangster student to whom he had given a failing grade threatens to murder him, writing the number 187 on every page of one of Garfield's textbooks. The administration ignores the threat, and the thug ambushes Garfield in the hallway, stabbing him in the back and side abdominal area multiple times with a shiv.


Fifteen months after surviving from the ordeal, Garfield, now a substitute teacher, has relocated to John Quincy Adams High School in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, but the trouble starts again when he becomes a substitute to a rowdy, unruly class of rejects, including a Chicano tag crew by the name of "Kappin' Off Suckers" (K.O.S.). Their leader, Benito "Benny" Chacón, a menacing felon attending high school as a condition of probation, makes it clear to Garfield that there will be no mutual respect between them.


The tension mounts when a fellow teacher, Ellen Henry, confides that Benny has threatened her life, an action against which the administration of the school refuses to take action, fearing legal threats. Ellen and Garfield develop a close friendship that approaches the beginnings of a relationship, but which is stymied by Garfield's diffident and destabilizing behavior, likely arising from PTSD and his confrontations with the K.O.S.. Garfield's past also garners him the unwanted admiration of Dave Childress, a burned-out, alcoholic history teacher who carries and keeps guns at the school.
Why can’t the real world produce Black male teachers with the tenacity, drive and educational dedication of Garfield? Where can they be found in the real world?

 Most DWLs have never set foot in an inner city school, walked through the metal detectors, talked to the multiple resource officers on hand to keep law and order at the school or seen the worn-out faces of white teachers who entered that same building full of optimism and hope only to be broken by a reality no one dares acknowledge.
At the end of 187, this reality is shown for all to see. For a few fleeting moments, though, Samuel Garfield represents a Black Fictional Hero: a Black male teacher dedicated to teaching inner city even if it costs him his life.

Until he decides to play Russian Roulette. Isn't that what the traditional majority of America has been doing under Black Run America? Every time a concession is made, the hope that the inevitable "And Then?" won't follow is akin to playing a treacherous game of Russian Roulette.

CNN video on Black teachers can be watched here





11 comments:

Anonymous said...

So Latino students need Latino teachers and black students need black teachers in order to succeed? Well I guess we should give these young men and women what they want and return to racial segregation.

Obviously 2 plus 2 equals 4 just doesn't sound authentic comin' outta whitey's mouth. Maybe after a few years we can compare the performance of all the different racially segregated schools but I don't think blacks would ever want to see those statistics.

Anonymous said...

First.

Anonymous said...

Well, to be fair I saw only one male teacher in all my years at several elementary schools. However, throughout junior high and high school males represented perhaps 5% of teaching staff and nearly all of them were really coaches "teaching" remedial classes. My positions coach in football was black, and he taught health. I didn't have a male teacher until my junior and senior year, and that was for AP physics and AP biology. They were both white, really cool guys who even years later I go by to say hello once in a while. Considering that only 50% of black males graduate from high school, which is a prequisite for college, the odds dictate that there will be virtually no black male teachers.

Anonymous said...

It is not interesting times nor interesting places where one wants to live.
This article states that students take in information differently when the teacher's race is different than theirs. Race matters. Yes that's right in this country race matters always.
The Supreme Courts' ruling to integrate schools in this country has proven to be one of the worst of the worst of their many bad rulings, actually destroying what was the greatest educational system the world has even known.
And in schools now, black teachers help the students cheat by supplying answers to test or giving students copies of the test to have or by just giving the student a passing grade when the student fails the test anyway.

Anonymous said...

"Yes that's right in this country race matters always. "

But shouldn't the white dominant culture demand that blacks assimilate and not live a black-separatist life? Don't most blacks want to see the destruction of white America? To eliminate the teaching of white presidents and white history from the curriculum?

Isn't it dangerous for blacks to be left to their own mischief, knowing that they are not capable of self-rule (history proves this)? Why do we allow black teachers to speak negatively about whites in public schools? (because they do). Why should blacks have separate schools and be able to push their anti-American and anit-white agenda at the expense of white taxpayers?

Black teachers are interested in keepin' it real for black children, to make sure they are fully indoctrinated with the legacy of slavery, of oppression, to always keep whites on the hook for their "condition" and state of poverty. They are the ones most responsible for keeping blacks in a deep hole.

Black teachers want to make sure that tests and the school curriculum are not too demanding or "biased" and to always accommodate for black low IQ and anti-intellectualism. Black male teachers need to be present to help take the place of the absent black fathers.

Black teachers must push the lie to whites that black children would be just as successful if only it weren't for those pesky problems of "poverty" and "oppression".

Black teachers and administrators do not want for blacks to ever "give up on the dream" that blacks will receive financial reparations one day.

All blacks will lose if black children fail to keep the hustle going, but whites need to end this failed experiment.

Andrew E. said...

SBPDL,

I found your blog via Auster's View From The Right and have been reading it for a short while now and have dipped into your archives as well. I think you have an important site that adds significantly to the discussion.

I just read your post on National Signing Day and like most Gen Y white, American men I have followed college and professional sports most of my life but began to pull away a few years ago. And for reasons largely rooted, implicitly not explicitly, in the issues you discuss on your blog. Thanks for making explicit and systematizing the vague thoughts and feelings I've had on this subject the last 5-8 years.

I see in this entry you say that 44% of K-12 students are non-white meaning whites make up only 56%. I didn't know this. This is shocking to me. It's a statistic like this that makes me feel my country is lost. Hopefully, you'll find a way to work this stat into further posts in order to hammer it home to your readers as you do with other factoids about BRA.

I read recently on your blog, though I don't recall which entry, a magnificent point you made about how Turner Classic Movies will eventually have to be shutdown as providing a positive view into pre-BRA. YES. Watching old movies (and reading old books) is one way I maintain my sanity in these insane times. To see what America once was in these wonderful films with virtually all-white casts brimming with pride and confidence in itself, they are a great source of hope for traditionalists. A hope that what once was can sometime again be.

Thanks again.

Douglas said...

More black teacher? I doubt that would help. Southside High School outside of Selma in 1980 was a disaster. There were more kids sleeping than listening as the teachers droned on and on and on and on. Yes, the teachers were black.

If only we had hope for a bright future for America.

Anonymous said...

Samuel L. Jackson's character in this movie was a real hero.

I wish he could of killed more of those assholes.

Objective Black Man

Anonymous said...

Trying to educate blacks has been one of the worst failures in history. How much of the nations wealth has been squandered trying to polish there turds?

Anonymous said...

Ha-ha. Reminds me of a black teacher I had in high school. He was nice enough, always saying "keep yo' hands of my stack"(i.e.: money). I, along with one white girl were the only whites in the class with about twenty five black kids. I realized quite early that the teacher thought us whites were smarter than the black kids and in fact the both of us exempted the exam. None of the black students did though. The teacher had to dumb down the class(business math) to about a third grade level so that the black kids could have a chance at passing. If this had been the same scenario in all my high school classes I would have been class valedictorian.

Anonymous said...

While I was in high school I had a black teacher who let some "urban youths" stay at his house, hoping to get them on the right track. One night they decided to rob him, cut his throat and leave him for dead. Miraculously, he survived. I hope other potential do-gooders will read blogs like this so they don't have to learn these lessons the hardest way, like he did.