Yet Another Way Affirmative Action Hurts

From Yahoo News:

Black and Latino students may be getting less critical, but helpful, feedback from teachers than their white counterparts, a new educational study indicates.

“The social implications of these results are important; many minority students might not be getting input from instructors that stimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement,” study researcher Kent Harber, a Rutgers-Newark psychology professor, said in a press release.

This positive bias in feedback to minority students may be contributing to the achievement gap between white and minority students, a stubborn national problem, Harber said.

The study “tested” 113 white middle-school and high-school teachers in two public school districts, one middle class and white, and the other working class and racially mixed. Both are located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area.

Harber and colleagues developed a poorly written essay that they gave to the teachers to grade, under the pretense that it was the work of a student. In some cases, the teachers believed the student was white, in others black and in others Latino.

The teachers believed their feedback would go directly to the student.

The researchers found that, indeed, the teachers were prone to give more praise and less criticism if they believed a minority student had written the paper, as opposed to a white student.

The researchers also considered the support the teacher received from colleagues and administration. This turned out to be an important factor if the teachers believed the student was black, with only teachers who lacked support showing the bias. However, when teachers thought the student was Latino, they showed the bias toward positive feedback regardless.

“These results indicate that the positive feedback bias may contribute to the insufficient challenge that undermines minority students’ academic achievement,” the researchers conclude.

The study appeared online April 30 in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Of course, the teachers may believe that minority students have had a tougher time in life, and that a poor essay represents a reasonable effort for them. But this pervasive belief that minority students are not “up to” the intellectual demands that white students can handle has more bad consequences than we can count.

Faked Photo Used to Play Race Card, Smear Mequon Police

When the Spanish language paper El Conquistador ran a story about supposed racial profiling of Hispanics by the Mequon police, they supported the story with a photo that quickly proved to be fake.

The cops pictured leading an Hispanic-looking man away were not Mequon cops.

But a patch on the shoulder of the two cops in the photo showed them to be Mequon cops.

Badger Blogger has done a splendid job of showing exactly how the photo forgery was done.

How did El Conquistador respond? They said:

I heard the radio segment today concerning the front page photo simulating an arrest of a suspect by officers wearing Mequon Police Department patches in El Conquistador Newspaper front page. It was an oversight in our part not to include “Photo Simulated.” The simulation was provided in essence to testimony provided by Steve Graff, Chief of Police in Mequon....

That’s an interesting attempt to put the best face on the issue.

What the caption to the photo should have said is “Photo Forged.”