The bottom line is that while every vestige of racial discrimination has not been eliminated, today's discrimination cannot go very far in explaining the problems faced by a large segment of the black community. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
As science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education researchers, we anticipate that efforts to restore the damaged global image of the U. S. will double down on an enduring paradigm which positions STEM education as operating in service of U. economic and military supremacy. We see this "return to normalcy" as a failure of leadership in this moment. It assumes that the status quo was desirable or healthy for students and communities and represents a massive missed opportunity to reimagine the deeper purposes of STEM education, and education more broadly. In fact, one reason for our current situation is the hyper focus on a nationalistic STEM pipeline that does not train professionals or educate students toward our collective social and ecological well-being. On June 10, a self-described "multi-identity, intersectional coalition of STEM professionals and academics" organized a one-day strike to withhold scientific labor to confront anti-Blackness in their fields. This campaign to # ShutDownSTEM recognizes that the ideology of white supremacy permeates all of the nation's institutions, including our existing system of STEM education, whether or not they claim to embrace diversity.
Training a Future Generation of Scientists EXITO provides students with the scientific skills and understanding they need to pursue careers in a variety of biomedical fields including psychology, chemistry, biology, social work, and many more. We work to create an environment where students can experience a sense of belonging and develop their identity as scientists as they pursue research that will help make the world a more just and equitable place. Take a look around and learn more about the BUILD EXITO program!
They cultivate students' imagination, creativity, empathy and solidarity. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic exposes a fundamental contradiction in the underlying logics of higher education. We teach future STEM professionals a false reality, one in which the worlds of science and technology — and those of economics, politics, culture and ethics — exist separately. Relationships between these artificial silos are mentioned in passing, perhaps through an outdated ethics requirement that most students rightly brush off as the "easy" checkbox in their otherwise rigorous curriculum. Students are subsequently launched into their careers unprepared for the moral, cultural or political dimensions of their professional practice, and thus unprepared to transform the inhumane systems in which they will work. Fortunately, some brave medical professionals have taken a stand even as their field threatens to marginalize them. These cumulative conditions are increasingly placing science professionals at risk for careers of anguish and declining mental health.
That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce "African Americans: College Majors and Earnings. " It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor's degree in art or psychology and social work. James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled "Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism. " Agresti writes: "Among all of the afflictions that disproportionately impact people of color, violence may be the worst. In 2018, blacks comprised 13% of the U. S. population but roughly 53% of the 16, 000 murder victims. " The clearance rate for murders, where a suspect was identified and charged, declined from 92% in 1960 to 62% in 2018.
For example, in Chicago, the clearance rate fell from 96% in 1964 to 45% in 2018. In Baltimore, the 2019 clearance rate was 32%. In 2015, when Baltimore experienced the highest per-capita murder rate in its history, the average homicide suspect had been previously arrested more than nine times. When crimes remain unsolved, it gives criminals free range and black people are their primary victims. By the way, most law enforcement occurs at the local level. The governments at these local levels are typically dominated by Democrats. According to statistics about fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure; 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes; 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes; and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life. "
Teaching students narrow and apolitical views of science also hides the fact that the everyday practice of STEM routinely involves moral decision-making. This point is clearly revealed by the dilemmas health care practitioners face and the forms of protest they have been compelled to enact during the pandemic, as well as by the recent effort of mathematicians to expose the role of their discipline in racist policing practices. What if we were to invite children into science and math as pluralistic practices of making sense of the world that have always been tied to values, histories and places? What if we built from their cultural ways of knowing and their deep ethical sensibilities to develop complex views of natural systems as tied to complex views of social systems? In one science education project, researchers, educators, families and community-based organizations have developed models of field based (outdoor) inquiry led by "should we" questions that engage children in investigating human decision making in their families, neighborhoods, and in our broader social systems alongside evidence and growing understandings of phenomena in the world.
In Washington, D. C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students -- a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading. "Below basic" is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night's rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing. In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks.
Across the U. S., the push to reopen schools is predicated on troubling beliefs about schools and families. Time at home is assumed to result in "learning loss" because our institutions measure learning and achievement by standardized test scores, and do not consider students' families as a source of education. Besides chasing test score gains, the driving goal for reopening schools is facilitating parents' return to work — regardless of the health consequences for all involved. However, this summer's powerful protests against police violence and racism have pushed our public discourse to go beyond these misguided calls for a return to normalcy and reopening of the economy. The COVID-19 pandemic exposes the United States — the nation often upheld as the leader in scientific innovation — as unable (or unwilling) to use its vast resources to care for its people at the most basic human level. Yet the country rapidly mobilized its military and police to repress outrage against deep, persistent and violent anti-Blackness.