Word: fergusons
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Meanwhile, many black parents, who themselves struggled to prove their worth, are reluctant to put their kids through the same bruising experience and so don't push them as hard. Ferguson's research showed that black families often have fewer learning resources, such as books and computers, at home than do white families of similar incomes. Moreover, as relative newcomers to their communities, black families tend to lack access to the informal networks white parents use to trade intelligence about the best teachers, classes and strategies for guaranteeing success. As a remedy, he suggests having teachers establish a good rapport...
Frequently, Ferguson says, teachers misread signals from black students. "The course work is rigorous at these schools, even in nonhonors classes, and I think many of these kids are struggling," he explains. "Some of the behavior that others infer as laziness is really a way of playing it off. If the work is hard and they're not doing well, in the students' minds it's better to act like they don't care rather than acknowledge that they're trying hard and still can't do it." The problem becomes more damaging when teachers interpret such behavior as indifference...
Enter Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor who canvassed junior high and high schoolers from Ann Arbor and 14 other integrated, middle- and upper-middle-class communities four years ago and developed a more nuanced explanation for the middle-class gap, as well as some specific prescriptions for bridging it. Looking at the affluent districts, Ferguson found that blacks and whites there weren't as homogeneous as they appeared at first glance. For starters, blacks were less affluent. Only 21% of blacks were upper middle class or higher, whereas 73% of whites were. Academically, there were...
...Talk about it, and they might even vote for you: the government owes its fourth election win in part to candidates like Ferguson, a 30-year-old former campaigner against gay adoption who snatched Labor's key seat of Bass, in northern Tasmania; Louise Markus, a pentecostalist social worker who captured Greenway, on Sydney's northwestern fringe; and Family First, a three-year-old party of Christians whose second preferences boosted the Coalition vote in several marginal seats. David Marr, author of the anticlerical squib The High Price of Heaven, likely had tongue in cheek when he noted recently that...
...winnable by both sides." Labor has missed out on that vote because it's failed to articulate firm core values, says University of Melbourne sociologist Kevin McDonald, who contrasts the Howard government's clear "vision of moral purpose" with Labor's "absence of a defining message." Says M.P. Ferguson: "If Labor ever wanted to represent a cross-section of Australia on some of the more difficult moral issues, they have left that constituency behind...