Black, Latino Students Perform at Levels of 30 Years Ago

In class I've stressed the importance of math and reading (and philosophy really, which sort of represents both). Now, this news from the Huffington Post:

Despite the hope that improving education for children of color would propel them to better life outcomes, Latino and African-American students are not being prepared in high school classrooms for brighter futures. While achievement levels have improved considerably for minority elementary and middle school students, educators say their academic performance drops during high school years. How prevalent is the achievement gap at the high school level? On average, African-American and Latino high school seniors perform math and read at the same level as 13-year-old white students.

Then there is this Department of Education chart stating the obvious.  

 Blacks drop out of school at twice the rate of whites and trail in double digits behind whites and Asians on the School Performance Assessment Program, a series of tests administered to students in third, fifth and eighth grades. Gaps persist on the Scholastic Assessment Test as well. Black males, for instance, trail whites more than 126 points on the mathematics part and by 104 points on the verbal portion of the exam given to college-bound students.

Let's keep in mind this study by Datnow & Cooper (1996):

Many African-American students enter school environments with less academic preparation than their majority counterparts. This lack of preparation often stems from the limited resources and lower expectations that characterize the schools they previously attended. This is contrary to the conclusion drawn by some of their classmates, who believe that African-American students's poor preparation stems from their limited intellectual capabilities. This misperception contributes to the difficulties faced by some African-American students in independent schools. On the one hand, they acknowledge a gap in their knowledge base and, in some cases, work twice as hard to compensate for that gap. On the other hand, for certain students, the gap is so wide in their knowledge base that although they work twice as hard as their fellow classmates, it takes several years before their hard work becomes evident in their academic performance.

What is the cause for this problematic gap? Deficient teaching? Family disintegration? Scholastic values? Social anomie?  Wrong values? Veiled (or perceived) discrimination? 

What can we do to change this situation?

Let's get to work!

This post closes next Monday at 11pm

A River of Waste

Following our discussion on animal farm. This documentary, A River of Waste exposes a huge health and environmental scandal in our modern industrial system of meat and poultry production. Some scientists have gone so far as to call the condemned current factory farm practices as "mini Chernobyls." In the U.S. and elsewhere, the meat and poultry industry is dominated by dangerous uses of arsenic, antibiotics, growth hormones and by the dumping of massive amounts of sewage in fragile waterways and environments. The film documents the vast catastrophic impact on the environment and public health as well as focuses on the individual lives damaged and destroyed. Don't miss it. Recommend it to your friends.

What is life?

A magnified virus

Regarding our discussion in class of what is a necessary condition for life. There is this, which connects with our discussion of the evolution of science:

First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a gray area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behavior of their hosts profoundly. The categorization of viruses as nonliving during much of the modern era of biological science has had an unintended consequence: it has led most researchers to ignore viruses in the study of evolution.

We have to also take into account other causal possibilities, for example, you would think that water is a necessary condition for life. According to astrobiologist  Benton Clark not so:

Life on Earth evolved with water, and so today life on Earth is dependent on that resource. But we cannot say that without water, life is impossible. On Earth, life has been able to adapt to the harshest environments, so it is possible that life may have found a way to survive on worlds that have no liquid water.

According to Clark, living organisms exhibit at least 102 observable qualities. Adding all these qualities together into a single - if exceedingly long - definition still does not capture the essence of life.


For the sake of problematizing, take a look at proposed conditions:

1. A network of inferior negative feedbacks (regulatory mechanisms) subordinated to a superior positive feedback (potential of expansion, reproduction).
2.  A systemic definition of life is that living things are self-organizing and autopoietic (self-producing). Variations of this definition include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous agent or a multi-agent system capable of reproducing itself or themselves, and of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle.
3. Living beings are thermodynamic systems that have an organized molecular structure.
3(a). Things with the capacity for metabolism and motion.
4. Life is a delay of the spontaneous diffusion or dispersion of the internal energy of the biomolecules towards more potential microstates.
5. Life is a way to "hydrogenate carbon dioxide," at least at its very beginnings, according to physicist Sean Carroll.
6. Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.
7. Life is matter that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates.
8. Life is self-reproduction "with variations."
9. Life is self-reproduction "with an error rate below the sustainability threshold."