MVP:

Found at the bottom of page 15 and top of page 16 in “Scenes of Silencing”

“In the face of these social realities, principals and teachers nevertheless continue to preach, without qualification, to African-American and Hispanic students and parents a rhetoric of equal opportunity and outcomes, the predictive guarantees of a high school diploma and the invariant economic penalties of dropping out. Although I am no advocate of dropping out of high school, it is clear that silencing—which constitutes the practices by which contradictory evidence, ideologies, and experiences find themselves buried, camouflaged, and discredited—oppresses and insults adolescents and their kin who already “know better.”

I found this example of silencing particularly intriguing vis-à-vis the article of Murray and Naranjo, “Poor, Black, Learning Disabled, and Graduating,” which focused on the positive outcomes of educators and parents encouraging and placing an emphasis on students receiving their high school diploma. Granted, in Murray and Naranjo’s study, the authors did not conclude that educators and parents must promote high school graduation with the promise of “equal opportunity” upon completion of their diploma, yet the students who referenced their favorite teachers or counselors often cited their motivation as a factor in their success. After reading the data comparing the employment dropouts from wealthy neighborhoods in NYC to high school graduates in the poorest neighborhoods in “Scenes of Silencing,” I’m discouraged to think what I can do as an educator to encourage these “adolescents and their kin who already ‘know better’.”