Godheval

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Now imagine a child who has only ever known this fast-paced information-saturated environment, with television, internet, and video games providing instant stimulation. Where it is difficult for those of us who have witnessed the progression of information delivery systems to regress to slower formats, it may be near impossible for children who have only ever known this environment to do the same.

High speed, even instant, delivery of information has also created an environment in which people are accessing larger quantities of data from multiple sources. We have, out of necessity, learned to navigate tremendous amounts of information for the particular bits we need, to filter out – with varying degrees of success – that which we do not need. We are inundated by information – willingly and not – from everywhere, creating a veritable culture of information.

An analog can be found through comparing the everyday behavior of people in a major city to that of people in a smaller town. In a smaller town, people may take the time to greet and socialize with many, if not most, of the other people they encounter. Invariably, all things move at a slower pace – travel, commerce, conversation. A large city on the other hand is likely to be the opposite – faster driving, high-speed marketplace transactions, and shorter conversations conducted using faster speech. It is likely that the average person in a larger city will completely ignore the vast majority of the people they pass on the street, not necessarily out of any disinclination to communicate, but because they have learned – out of necessity – to filter out most people, due to there being so many of them. Were they to stop and talk to even a small percentage of those they passed, they would not get anything else done.

People from large cities who visit small towns often experience impatience and frustration with the slower pace. They may even become annoyed or flippant with the people of that town for being attentive, for conversing or providing a service more slowly. They are, unlike the citizens of the small town, accustomed to high-paced interactions, to multi-tasking, to people and information filtering. For the people of the small town, those from the city may seem to have short attention spans, or even to be rude.

In truth, their methods, and even reasons, for interacting with others are simply very different. A conversation for a person in a large city is just as likely to serve a very particular purpose as it is to be for socializing. Often times in a large city, one person approaches another out of a specific need, and once that need is fulfilled, or once it is evident that the other cannot fulfill the need, the person moves on. People from the city do not have shorter attention spans, they are simply accustomed to shorter and more purposeful conversations, as opposed to talking for its own sake. It is for this same reason that people in larger cities tend to be more cynical of those who approach them, as chances are good that the other wants something other than casual conversation.

Television – and more so the internet – have had the effect of bringing the “big city environment” into every setting where they are available. No matter where we are, we are able to communicate with many people – often simultaneously and often in short bursts – at the same time that we access and parse through huge amounts of information. We have the ability to accept or filter out as much or as little information as we want, and that time allows.

Many of the elder population, and those simply out of touch with these sweeping changes in the global society for other reasons, find it very difficult to jump right in and participate, as this new high-speed environment is completely unlike what they know. Conversely, children born into this environment cannot conceive of an environment of slow and sustained conversation, gradual acquisition of information, and overall delayed gratification. To those on the outside, these children may seem to have short attention spans, but actually they have learned to divide their attention amongst multiple people and activities simultaneously.

In the academic setting, where the concerns around ADHD are greatest, this apparent “attention deficit” may correspond to missed opportunities for learning. I would argue, however, that these missed opportunities do not represent any deficiency or disability on the part of the child, but the failure of educators and administrators to evolve their content delivery methods in accordance with the larger social shifts.

Many current educators have been teaching for a long time, their careers encompassing the shift from the slower-paced low-information climate to the high-speed information-saturated environment. They may or may not have personally evolved to be able to navigate the new environment, but either way, they are not likely to have changed their teaching methods, which have become routine, and in most cases conform to rigid district, state, and federal standards.

Because the environmental shift occurred in a relatively short time span, it likely caught educators and parents off-guard. In only a few years, they witnessed – but may not have consciously acknowledged – a major change in the needs of their students, new needs that could no longer be met by the old practices.

If children have been born into, or have become accustomed to navigating large amounts of information – information they they want to receive – in a short time, they are likely to be impatient where information they do not even value is being provided to them over a long stretch of time. They may, to teachers, parents, and psychologists – all invariably of the “old guard” – appear to have short attention spans, or an “attention deficit”.

Have you ever observed a young person comfortable within this new technology-saturated environment? Have you ever seen one text message on a cell phone, while communicating in 5 separate instant messaging windows on a computer, while playing an online video game, taking a break only perhaps to look up an FAQ for that game, or to post their progress on Twitter or Facebook? This is hardly an exaggeration, as even I – an adult who has managed to adapt to the sociotechnological shift – perform similar feats on a regular basis.

And children born into it are far more efficient than I could hope to be. Would you consider such incredible multi-tasking an attention deficit, or could you perhaps acknowledge that these individuals have a talent for dividing their attention between multiple people, across several tasks, and all at high speed and with lightning efficiency?

This is something that I intend to investigate further, for if my hypothesis is correct, and ADHD is a misdiagnosis, then a great deal of time, money, and resources are being allocated towards a dead end.

However, there are reasons to suspect that even were my hypothesis to be verified, or even if it illuminated some new possibilities for ADHD diagnosis and treatment, that the current approach would not change at all. Why? Because like everything else, ADHD has become a market – a market that has produced billions of dollars for pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

Some data from the Centers for Disease Control:

• Using a prevalence rate of 5%, the annual societal ‘‘cost of illness’’ for ADHD is estimated to be between $36 and $52 billion, in 2005 dollars. It is estimated to be between $12,005 and $17,458 annually per individual.
• There were an estimated 7 million ambulatory care visits for ADHD in 2006.
• The total excess cost of ADHD in the US in 2000 was $31.6 billion. Of this total, $1.6 billion was for the treatment of patients, $12.1 billion was for all other healthcare costs of persons with ADHD, $14.2 billion was for all other healthcare costs of family members with ADHD, and $3.7 billion was for the work loss cost of adults with ADHD and adult family members of persons with ADHD.
• ADHD creates a significant financial burden regarding the cost of medical care and work loss for patients and family members. The annual average direct cost for each per ADHD patient was $1,574, compared to $541 among matched controls. The annual average payment (direct plus indirect cost) per family member was $2,728 for non-ADHD family members of ADHD patients versus $1,440 for family members of matched controls.

Source: CDC

The preoccupation with an imaginary “deficiency” overlooks a real social shift, one that if acknowledged and adapted to, could enable parents, educators, and society as a whole to better meet the evolving needs of children in the short term, and for the whole of society in the long term.

Some questions whose answers might inform my hypothesis:

1. Is ADHD as prevalent, or does it even exist, in low-technology environments?

2. Are children diagnosed with ADHD proficient in the use of data technology (text messaging, internet, video games)?

3. Is the proportion of students diagnosed with ADHD higher in larger cities than in small towns?

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Did you catch that?  This man – a teacher responsible for the education of a diverse range of students – plainly equated troublesome behavior with ethnicity.  As if somehow “95% Hispanic” serves as some sort of qualifier for for bad behavior.  What was stranger to me than this blatant racism, was the fact that this white man felt comfortable enough around me – an African-American – to lay his prejudice out in the open.  Had it been an isolated incident, maybe I could attribute it to misspeech on his part, or my own misinterpretation.  Alas, it was not.

The second instance came today as he and a colleague discussed several students, and then the seventh grade student body as a whole.  This time he let slip that he expected that in a matter of years his tax dollars would be paying for their – his students’ – food stamps.  The colleague quickly interjected that sometimes the worst kids turn out to be decent members of society, that you “never know”.  Even removing the racial implications of a mostly political statement, this is a teacher – who by profession needs to be an optimist – projecting how his seventh grade students (12 year olds) will be costing him money in the future.  And his colleague, under the guise of a more open-mind, implied a necessary distinction between people who use food stamps and “decent members of society”.  This same fellow, upon giving me a ride after school, in talking briefly about the city’s public transportation, mourned how it seemed that only “derelicts” with “holes in their pants” ride the buses.  “Why can’t the buses be for everyone?”, he lamented.

I ride the bus – more so when I was back east – and invariably the majority of riders have been of lower socioeconomic status, and are predominantly non-white.  I tend to equate categorical condemnations of lower social classes with sweeping judgments of people of color, being as though people of color are disproportionately poor.  This requires no stretch of the imagination on my part.  Where affluent or “successful” members of color are held aloft as evidence to the contrary – that in fact it is about class, not race (still a morally defunct point of view) – those people of color, for their attitudes, for their “non-threatening” demeanor, represent the opposite of general perceptions of people of color as a whole.  So yes, it is about class, but in the minds of people like these – like the teacher who equated Hispanic with deviant behavior – race and class might as well be the same.

After a teacher meeting with the parent of a troubled student, there were two more interesting bits.  Immediately afterwards, my mentor teacher felt it necessary to point out how unlike her mother the student was – the mother by my best guess Hispanic, while the girl could’ve simply passed for “white”.  This made it clear to me that the issue of race hovers right there at the forefront of his consciousness, as it does it for me because I noticed too, but probably for use in completely different trains of thought.  During lunch, a third colleague – a smarmy science teacher – suggested that there was something “off” about the mother, but didn’t elaborate.  The mother, from what I saw, was incredibly anxious, speaking quickly and sometimes unintelligibly – and I assumed that it was because she had been called into a meeting and surrounded by teachers and administrators for a jury-style reprobation of her daughter.  I have no doubt that she internalized any criticism of her daughter as a personal rebuke, and to her credit, she remained humble throughout the entire affair.  I suspect that the science teacher, who classified the mother’s behavior as some permanent aspect of her personality, assumed that something else was to blame. Perhaps she too was keenly aware of the difference between mother and daughter.

When I first arrived out West, my intuition signaled something unusual, something “off” (at least compared to what was I used to back East) in terms of the social dynamics.  In the east there is an unspoken bond between people of color, perhaps a mutual understanding of a shared plight.  It is nothing so overt as a guaranteed pledge of support in anything, or even the promise of a conversation, but rather a nod or a prolonged eye contact that suggests a connection.  This phenomenon is particularly prominent where people of color are the extremely visible minority in any given situation – eyes will scan the room anxiously for another pair like their own, and reflect an obvious relief upon finding one.  The nod again, this time with more conviction.

What my intuition signaled,  and it took me awhile to rationalize – was that this phenomenon – this unspoken bond – was completely absent here.  The conditions were right, at least for African-Americans, because we are the extreme demographic minority – something like five percent – so the comfort nod, the conciliatory eye contact, should have been givens.  But as I scanned the parking lots, the supermarkets, the barbershop, the malls, the connection was conspicuously absent.  My yearning gaze was met with blank stares and awkward glance-aways.

As I rationalized the possible reasons for the stark difference between eastern and western social dynamics, I thought about the demographic differences.  In Philadelphia, my home town, African-Americans make up at least half of the population.  Reflecting the national distribution, most are in the lower socioeconomic class.  For white people in Philadelphia – the majority of which are middle-class, “poor” and “black” are perhaps the two most threatening categories of people, if for no other reason than the sheer size of their memberships.  Philadelphia has a long history of racial tension between black and white, most of which today bubbles beneath the surface and manifests primarily in the political arena.  On the other hand, there is virtually no derisive buzz – at least not in the local media, in the local bars, or in the political forum about Latinos – under the pretext of “immigration” or any other.

Even before I arrived here in the West, it was well-known to me that immigration was a hot button issue here.  It was also well-known to me that Latinos of any background – particularly Mexicans – were the significant population of color, analogous to African-Americans on the east coast.  So it came as no surprise to me that “poor” and “Hispanic” would constitute the largest threat to middle and upper class white people out here.

So my speculation has been that African-Americans in the West, much like Latinos and Asians in the east, for their non-threatening numbers and significantly improved socioeconomic distribution, have been afforded a sort of “hostility waiver”.  In other words, they are acceptable so long as they do not grow too large, act too radically, or cost the average taxpayer too much in social programs.  A controlled minority is a tolerable minority.  Those Hispanics on the other hand…

This demographic and social dynamic shift offers an explanation for the teachers’ comfort in expressing subtle and blatant racism in my presence.  Perhaps in their experience, to whatever extent African-Americans are not a problem, they are welcome “into the fold”, that precarious place where they may comfortably share in – or at least quietly acquiesce to – white people’s disdain for those troublesome Hispanics – or, rather, those indecent food stamp users, bus riders, and struggling twelve year olds.

Perhaps I am projecting here, but could those blank stares and awkward glance-aways I mentioned earlier – the severing of the “color-connection” – reflect the quiet shame of complicity? For my part, the decision to remain silent in the face of such bigotry and classism is a calculated one. My mentor teacher’s assessment of my performance – and the grade that comes from it – will be little more than a gauge of his personal opinion of me. While I have had thoughts of unleashing “Godheval”, I realize that even switching mentors wouldn’t guarantee me a different situation in another school. I suspect, even, that his attitude, and those of his colleagues, are entrenched in the political views of the state as a whole. So for now this post will have to suffice in terms of any public display of indignation.  And more importantly, I will reach out to the students personally, in every attempt to counteract the endemic prejudice and pessimism of the faculty.

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Considering these things brought me to the idea of designating speakers of African-American Vernacular English as what Education calls “English Language Learners (ELLs), meaning that they should participate in programs teaching English as a second language (ESL).  Thirteen years ago, the Oakland Unified School District passed a resolution that said that “Ebonics” – coterminous with  AAVE – would be recognized as a language distinct from English, and that speakers of AAVE would be eligible for programs geared towards ELLs.  At that time – mind you I was eighteen years old, uneducated, and self-righteous, a dangerous combination – I dismissed the Oakland resolution as so much nonsense.  At that time, and well into my college years, I maintained that there was no such thing as AAVE, that it was little more than slang, or at my most thoughtful  that it was a variation of English that resulted from socioeconomic inequality.  For those reasons I thought it should not be recognized as a language, and I thought that doing so would only perpetuate a situation where African-Americans were not learning Standard American English.

It has been a frequent occurrence of late for me to come to a position in my adult life that is the complete opposite of my position in earlier years, and every time it has occurred I have been able to attribute the difference to the profound ignorance of my youth.  By this I do not mean that I “came around” to an “adult” way of thinking, but literally that I was ignorant – I simply did not have the information needed to even take a position on a given issue.  Such is the case again with AAVE and its recognition as a language.  Imagine my dismay to discover that my own attitudes towards AAVE were rooted in racism – a subtle form of racism that devalues something due to its association with a group of people.  Regarding AAVE not as a language, or worse, as some mutant or inferior variant, stems from the institutionalized idea that African-Americans and their culture are some perversion of humanity or American culture.

If you reject that idea outright, consider how you or others use the word “ghetto” – invariably to refer to something of inferior quality.  And although the term came into use first to describe ethnically homogenous neighborhoods – especially Jewish ones – in the common parlance of today, “ghetto” refers to low-income African-American neighborhoods.  So, if “ghetto” in some way equates to African-American or “black”, and it is used to describe something inferior, then what does that say to you?  Think about it carefully.  It is also similar to the current trend of referring to unfavorable things as “gay” – equating homosexuality with the negative.  AAVE, for its association with African-Americans, is regarded as inferior.

What I failed to understand thirteen years ago when the Oakland “controversy” first made headlines, is that recognizing AAVE as a language did not preclude African-American students learning Standard American English.  This was a misunderstanding shared by Jesse Jackson, who I mention here only for his questionable designation as an important “black leader”.

Jackson said:

“I understand the attempt to reach out to these children, but this is an unacceptable surrender, borderlining on disgrace. It’s teaching down to our children.”

[...]

“They cannot get a job at NBC or CBS or ABC unless they can master this language, and I’ll tell you they can master it if they are challenged to do so.”

These words indicate that Jackson – along with so many others – completely misunderstood the OUSD resolution.  Far from “surrender”, the resolution was empowering to African-American students in a number of ways. As stated by TESOL – the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages:

TESOL affirms that the variety of English known as African American Vernacular English, Black English, Ebonics and sometimes by other names, has been shown through research to be a rule-governed, linguistic system, with itsown lexical, phonological, syntactic and discourse patterns and, thus, deserves pedagogical recognition.

The Board notes that effective educational programs recognize and value the linguistic systems that children bring to school. Their programs use these linguistics systems as an aid and resource to facilitate the acquisition of Standard American English. Research and experience have shown that children learn best if teachers respect the home language and use it as a bridge in teaching the language of the school and wider society. Likewise, if the children’s cultural and social backgrounds are valued, their self-respect and self-confidence are affirmed and new learning is facilitated.

Because language and thought are closely related, the achievement disparity between African-American and Euro-American students, sometimes falsely attributed to genetic differences, likely has more to do with the language disparity.  If African-American students are speaking and thinking in AAVE, but are being assessed academically in Standard American English, then it is only logical to expect that those students would be at a disadvantage – the same disadvantage faced by students of other languages.

Now here you may be thinking that it’s a stretch to compare African-American students who speak AAVE, which is by definition a different form of English, to students from other countries who speak languages completely unlike English.  To say that a student who only speaks Spanish is in the same position as the student who speaks AAVE would be a stretch, and so that’s not at all the point I am trying to make.

The fact – and this is perhaps the essential point of this essay -  is that different students, varying by background, economic status, and other factors, for their differences have different needs.  When it comes to language differences, educators recognize that English-language learners arrive in their classrooms at different levels of proficiency in speaking English.  Most school districts identify and categorize students within different proficiency levels, ranging from “pre-emergent” – meaning that they do not speak any English – to “proficient”, meaning that they have a mastery of English equal to that of native speakers.  There are varying levels between pre-emergent and proficient, such as basic, intermediate, and advanced.  Most districts test their ELLs to determine their level upon entering school, with the expectation that they show adequate progress and within a few years time reach English proficiency.

The Oakland resolution intended to take this same approach with its African-American students, that is, to ensure that they had access to those resources that amend the language disparity between AAVE and SAE.  It is a given that students with no knowledge of English have a special need for English acquisition, but what is taken for granted is that all students born and raised in America should speak and have mastered standard American English, an idea that completely ignores the cultural diversity of the United States, including the different languages that are spoken here.

Beyond recognizing AAVE as a separate language for theoretical purposes, I suspect that were students who speak AAVE as their first (or only) language to be tested for English proficiency the same way as students from other countries, we may find that many of them test below the “proficient” designation.  Ordinarily it is up to parents to tell the school districts whether or not their children will need ESL accommodations, but because those needs may not even recognized by the parents – let alone school administrators – many students are held to the proficient standard even where they are not proficient.  Where AAVE is dismissed as a mere dialect or slang, the needs around English language acquisition are ignored, and the achievement gap is attributed either to economic differences or genetic deficiency.

Thirteen years after the Oakland resolution, even though I find myself doing a 180 degree turn and supporting it instead of denouncing it, there are a few places where my thoughts still diverge, and where I still maintain some of my earlier positions.  The Oakland resolution stated that AAVE has a basis in the the languages of West Africa, particularly the Niger-Congo languages, and it is for that reason that it should be recognized as a separate language and not a mere dialect.  I found this argument difficult to accept thirteen years ago, and I have my doubts about it today, but the difference today is that I recognize it as an argument for linguists, and withdraw from taking any position.  I am convinced still that AAVE is rooted in socioeconomic inequality, in particular, the numerous institutional barriers between African-Americans and access to educational resources.  Starting with slavery, African-Americans were only expected and allowed to learn enough English to fulfill their roles as servants, and propagating into the present with the fact that African-Americans remain disproportionately in the lower economic class, which invariably means diminished access to quality education.

The difference in my perspective now is that I understand that the “hows” or “whys” of AAVE are irrelevant.  Only the “what” is important – that AAVE is a separate language.  Even were we to continue to regard AAVE as a mere dialect, it would not change the fact that a language barrier exists, and that resources need to be directed towards bringing AAVE-speakers to proficiency in Standard American English.

While I am not suggesting that making the necessary connection between AAVE and ESL is a one-shot solution for closing the achievemnt gap, I think that in recognizing and addressing the disparity, we can expect the same positive results shown by speakers of other languages.  To ignore the language barrier, and continuing to attribute achievement differences exclusively to economic – or worse, genetic – causes, is to deny students – and future citizens – an equal opportunity to succeed.

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This would be another place where I disagree with Republicans, as I am certain most of them would rather leave all educational matters to the jurisdiction of the states.  Nevermind that the states have had jurisdiction all this time and have proven themselves in many cases – like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and many southern states – to be unworthy of the responsibility.

Corruption is everywhere, and the education sector is no exception.  From little crimes like low-level school administrators pocketing money intended to go towards programs and technology, to the larger scale offenses of companies like Edison sucking the money out of Philadelphia’s education budget only to effect absolutely no improvements, the public education system needs a watchful eye to ensure that all efforts are focused on improving the quality of our schools.

So I hope that this education stimulus is not merely another instance of throwing money at a problem, but a signal from President Obama that more attention will be paid to improving education nationwide.  It is vital that every penny of the $150 billion be tracked and accounted for if the stimulus is to have any lasting effect.

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