La fin du meilleur ami

Le New York Times, sous la plume d'Hilary Stout rapporte que la dernière fantaisie des sociologues de l'éducation aux Etats-Unis est d'interdire aux enfants d'avoir un(e) meilleur(e) ami(e).

Dans combien de temps chez-nous ?




A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding


FROM the time they met in kindergarten until they were 15, Robin Shreeves and her friend Penny were inseparable. They rode bikes, played kickball in the street, swam all summer long and listened to Andy Gibb, the Bay City Rollers and Shaun Cassidy on the stereo. When they were little, they liked Barbies; when they were bigger, they hung out at the roller rink on Friday nights. They told each other secrets like which boys they thought were cute, as best friends

Today, Ms. Shreeves, of suburban Philadelphia, is the mother of two boys. Her 10-year-old has a best friend. In fact, he is the son of Ms. Shreeves’s own friend, Penny. But Ms. Shreeves’s younger son, 8, does not. His favorite playmate is a boy who was in his preschool class, but Ms. Shreeves says that the two don’t get together very often because scheduling play dates can be complicated; they usually have to be planned a week or more in advance. “He’ll say, ‘I wish I had someone I can always call,’ ” Ms. Shreeves said.

One might be tempted to feel some sympathy for the younger son. After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.

For many child-rearing experts, the ideal situation might well be that of Matthew and Margaret Guest, 12-year-old twins in suburban Atlanta, who almost always socialize in a pack. One typical Friday afternoon, about 10 boys and girls filled the Guest family backyard. Kids were jumping on the trampoline, shooting baskets and playing manhunt, a variation on hide-and-seek.

Neither Margaret nor Matthew has ever had a best friend. “I just really don’t have one person I like more than others,” Margaret said. “Most people have lots of friends.” Matthew said he considers 12 boys to be his good friends and says he sees most of them “pretty much every weekend.”

Their mother, Laura Guest, said their school tries to prevent bullying through workshops and posters. And extracurricular activities keep her children group-oriented — Margaret is on the swim team and does gymnastics; Matthew plays football and baseball.

As the calendar moves into summer, efforts to manage friendships don’t stop with the closing of school. In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing “friendship coaches” to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven’t yet gotten to know.

“I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, the camp’s director. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.”

But such an attitude worries some psychologists who fear that children will be denied the strong emotional support and security that comes with intimate friendships.

“Do we want to encourage kids to have all sorts of superficial relationships? Is that how we really want to rear our children?” asked Brett Laursen, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University whose specialty is peer relationships. “Imagine the implication for romantic relationships. We want children to get good at leading close relationships, not superficial ones.”

Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child’s self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships — everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up. If children’s friendships are choreographed and sanitized by adults, the argument goes, how is a child to prepare emotionally for both the affection and rejection likely to come later in life?

“No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a treacherous and betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a treacherous and betraying friend,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist who is an author of the book “Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children.”

“When a teacher is trying to tone down a best-friend culture, I would like to know why,” Dr. Thompson said. “Is it causing misery for the class? Or is there one girl who does have friends but just can’t bear the thought that she doesn’t have as good a best friend as another? That to me is normal social pain. If you’re mucking around too much in the lives of kids who are just experiencing normal social pain, you shouldn’t be.”

Schools insist they don’t intend to break up close friendships but rather to encourage courtesy, respect and kindness to all. “I don’t see schools really in the business of trying to prevent friendships as far as they are trying to give students an opportunity to interact socially with other students in a variety of different ways,” said Patti Kinney, who was a teacher and a principal in an Oregon middle school for 33 years and is now an official at the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”

Ecole, des temps difficiles à venir

Le débat médiatique sur la violence à l'école est fascinant à suivre car les journalistes et les acteurs de ce débat (à l'exception de quelques chercheurs) évitent de se poser des questions simples : quels sont les protagonistes des actes de violences ? Comment peut-on les caractériser ? Quelles sont leurs motivations ? Ont-elles des points communs ?

Il est vrai que se poser ces questions conduirait immanquablement à recevoir des réponses. Certaines comportant le risque de contredire la vulgate sur laquelle s'est bâti le fragile consensus entre le gouvernement libéral et les syndicats marxistes qui codirigent l'éducation nationale.

En outre, le simple constat du réel est en contradiction flagrante avec l'idéologie dominante tant dans les syndicats que dans la profession journalistique.

Donc, la presse comme les enseignants ne peuvent rendre compte de la réalité de la vie scolaire avec des mots simples et des constats compréhensibles pour la majorité des parents.

Il n'existe dans cette situation qu'une seule réponse acceptable par les dictateurs vertueux qui font la loi dans les établissements : « accroître les moyens ».

Par analogie, on peut comparer la situation de la violence dans les écoles à celle d'un malade victime d'une blessure infectée et que les médecins tentent de guérir par des doses massives d'antibiotiques sans oser nettoyer la plaie, cause de l'infection.

Quelle peut-être l'évolution de la situation ?

Faute de mesures, il est probable que nous allons assister à un phénomène bien connu aux Etats-Unis, celui du white flight. Les parents, faute de voir leurs besoins en sécurité pour leurs enfants satisfaits par l'Etat et la communauté éducative, font voter avec leurs pieds. Changer leur progéniture d'école, migrer vers l'éducation catholique sous contrat, voire créer leur propre école ou, enfin, déménager vers des zones plus tranquilles.

De l'autre côté de l'Atlantique, les rêves totalitaires des intégrationnistes des années 1960, encore au pouvoir chez nous, se sont fracassés contre le réel. Les écoles libérées des contraintes imposées par les tribunaux ont commencé à répondre aux attentes des parents et non plus à celles des idéologues de gauche.

Le résultat ne s'est pas fait attendre. Les parents blancs ont commencé à retirer leurs enfants des établissements où les conditions de vie pour eux étaient insupportables. Puis ont suivi les parents qui trouvaient que le niveau moyen de l'enseignement ne correspondait pas à leurs attentes et aujourd'hui, les derniers enfants insistent auprès de leurs parents pour rejoindre les établissements où sont leurs copains.

Aujourd'hui, sur toute l'étendue des Etats-Unis, les écoles publiques sont en voie de reségrégation. Ce phénomène est facilité par l'enrochement local des écoles et la concentration des populations selon des quartiers racialement différenciés.

Il reste le cas des écoles desservant une communauté où cohabitent des groupes raciaux différents : Blancs et Noirs ou Hispaniques et Noirs. Dans ces cas, les écoles ont aussi tendance à regrouper des élèves d'un même groupe racial mais les organisations corporatistes noires portent plainte en justice et les juges contraignent les autorités scolaire à imposer une répartition sur des critères géographiques stricts et non pas sur les préférences raciales des enfants.

Le prix à payer par les collectivités locales est lourd car, confrontés à l'obligation d'envoyer leurs enfants dans une école à majorité noire, les parents préfèrent opter pour le privé ou, très souvent, à déménager.

Ce phénomène a été bien décrit le 20 avril 2010 par la journaliste du Washington Post Stephanie McCrummen dans un article qui est très révélateur également des conventions idéologiques de la gauche américaine. Il est intéressant de lire les commentaires des lecteurs.

Ruling on racial isolation in Miss. schools reflects troubling broader trend


TYLERTOWN, MISS. -- During her elementary school years in this rural Mississippi town, Addreal Harness, a competitive teenager with plans to be a doctor, said her classes had about thesame numbers of white and black students. It was a fact she took little note of until the whitekids began leaving.

Some left in seventh grade, even more in eighth, and by the time Harness, who is African American, reached Tylertown High School, she became aware of talk that has slowly seeped into her 16-year-old psyche -- that some white parents call Tylertown "the black school," while Salem Attendance Center, where many of her white classmates transferred, is known as "the white school."

"In my class of 2012, there's just seven white girls now," said Harness, raising her chin slightly. "The ones that left, they think Salem's smarter because they have more white kids, but it's not."

Last week, a federal judge ruled that a school board policy here in Walthall County has had the effect of creating "racially identifiable" schools in violation of a 1970 federal desegregation order. Although the case is unique in some ways, it fits a broader trend toward racial isolation that has been underway for years in American schools and has undermined the historic school integration efforts of the civil rights era.

More than half a century after courts dismantled the legal framework that enforced segregation, Obama administration officials are investigating an array of practices across the country that contribute to a present-day version that they say is no less insidious.

Although minority students have the legal right to attend any school, federal officials are questioning whether in practice many receive less access than white students to the best teachers, college prep courses and other resources. Department of Education lawyers also are investigating whether minority students are being separated into special education classes without justification, whether they are being disciplined more harshly and whether districts are failing to provide adequate English language programs for students who are not fluent, among other issues.

The Walthall County case fell under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, which is still monitoring more than 200 mostly Southern school districts for compliance with desegregation orders dating to the 1960s and '70s. Justice officials said they have sometimes found that local school boards have adopted policies that undermine those orders, a situation that some experts say reflects a misguided sense that civil rights concerns are somehow a thing of the past.

Studies have shown schools drifting back into segregation since the 1980s, when the federal government became less aggressive in its enforcement. The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that school districts cannot make racial balance a policy goal unless -- as is the case in Walthall -- they are attempting to comply with a federal desegregation order.

"School boards are constantly under pressure from privileged parts of their districts, and if there isn't any counterbalance of civil rights enforcement policy, you can easily end up with a set of decisions that increase segregation," said Gary Orfield, director of the civil rights project at the University of California at Los Angeles. Its studies that show that 38 percent of black students and 40 percent of Latino students attend public schools that are more than 90 percent minority.

In Walthall County, an area with sprawling green lawns and hot pink azaleas near the Louisiana border, the main employers are the county and small factories that make truck pallets and military uniforms. The school district has three attendance zones serving about 2,500 students, with 64 percent of them black and 34 percent white.

In recent years, the school board, which has three black and three white members, approved hundreds of requests from mostly white parents to transfer their children out of their zoned school, the majority-black Tylertown, to Salem, which has since the early 1990s become a majority white school.

White parents sometimes defended their requests by explaining that they live closer to Salem. More frequently, though, they employed the vague reason that their kids would be "more comfortable" at Salem, whose academic record and course offerings are similar to Tylertown's.

"I didn't realize it was getting to the point anyone should worry about it," said Jay Boyd, the school board president, who is white. "I just thought we need to do what's best for students -- if they're happy, let them go to Salem. Who's it hurting?"

A federal judge answered that question last week, ruling that the transfers created "racially identifiable" schools in the district. The judge also found that Tylertown's elementary schools were concentrating white students into certain classrooms, a practice some school officials have defended as necessary to avoid white flight from the county.

"We said we're going back to where it was before 1970," said Clennel Brown, who heads the local NAACP branch that complained to the Justice Department. "When the white parents say 'more comfortable,' to me it's saying 'I don't want my child to be influenced by black children.' "

Although the court ruling did not explicitly address the question of intent, Brown and others here noted that the transfers by white families gathered speed several years ago, after Tylertown, which was the official black high school under the old segregated system, got its first African American principal since desegregation in 1970. At Salem, which was the white school in the Jim Crow era, the principals have always been white.

Brown and others also noted that at Tylertown, white children and parents rarely attend graduation ceremonies, and that white students have often held a separate prom out of town. Until recently, Salem voted for separate black and white homecoming courts.

Boyd, the school board president, reluctantly acknowledged that racism probably played a role in the transfer requests. "I thought that was a thing of the past," he said. "You live and you learn."

The court order mandates that the white students who transferred to Salem, with some exceptions, must return to Tylertown next school year, a situation that has upset students and teachers. Many say that despite the school board policy, both Tylertown and Salem remain more integrated than many schools across the country. Tylertown is 76 percent black and 22 percent white; Salem is 33 percent black and 66 percent white.

Over the years, white and black students and teachers have formed friendships and in other intangible ways reaped some benefit from the very diversity that the court ruling is attempting to protect.

"I have felt we had something very special here," said Lyshon Harness, an African American who is an assistant teacher at Salem and a relative of Addreal Harness.

"Last night," added Judy Walters, an assistant teacher who is white, "I heard someone saying on TV that we're 'hillbillies from Mississippi,' saying we need to move on. But you go up north, and it's real bad."

Indeed, in a nation where housing patterns remained profoundly shaped by race, many schools could easily be categorized by the dominant racial group attending them. Walthall County got particular scrutiny because of its desegregation order and because the board adopted policies that had the effect of sharpening the racial identity of their schools.

The ruling has led some white parents in Walthall County to reconsider the systemic effects of individual choice. Roger Ginn, a white parent whose children graduated from both Tylertown and Salem, said he'd always considered the transfer issue a simple matter of student happiness, not race.

La société industrielle n'est pas généreuse

Une récente étude du New York Times sous la plume de Sam Dillon révèle au grand public ce que les chercheurs savent déjà depuis longtemps : tous les efforts du gouvernement américain pour réduire l'écart entre les résultats scolaires des Euro-Américains de ceux des Afro-Américains ont échoué. On peut aussi ajouter que l'écart entre les enfants d'origine nord-asiatique et ceux provenant du sud du Rio Grande reste toujours aussi élevé.

L'étude sur une longue période des résultats scolaires de ce que les chercheurs commencent à appeler « des groupes continentaux », à défaut d'utiliser un mot plus connu, mais chargé d'une connotation désagréable aux oreilles de la gauche universitaire et de la presse comme le New York Times, révèle des écarts stables.



C'est décourageant pour les enseignants aux Etats-Unis qui consacrent des sommes très importantes à l'enseignement des groupes sous la moyenne sans que cela ne produise des résultats.

A ce stade de la discussion, aucune explication n'est offerte par les médias et le gouvernement à cet écart persistant, sinon à une sous culture qui découragerait l'étude chez les groupes sous la moyenne.

Il est donc prévisible que toutes les mesures qui seront prises sont condamnées à l'échec car elles n'osent pas analyser les vrais facteurs à l'origine de ces écarts.

Or il suffit d'ouvrir les ouvrages récents écrits par les spécialistes des sciences de l'éducation ou de la génétique des populations pour découvrir quels sont ces facteurs.

Tant que le poids du politiquement correct ne libérera pas la parole des éducateurs, rien de sérieux ne pourra être fait pour améliorer l'éducation et les chances de succès de ces enfants. C'est comme un médecin tentant de lutter contre une maladie dont il n'ose pas évoquer la cause ni prescrire des médicaments qui révéleraient qu'il la connaît.

En Europe nous connaissons la même situation dans nombre de zones dites « difficiles ». Faute de statistiques autres que celles de la criminalité, il est difficile d'appréhender la magnitude des écarts.

Comme la société industrielle est sans pitié, elle conditionne largement le succès des individus à leur capacité à réussir dans le processus de sélection scolaire et social. Il est donc prévisible qu'une frange importante des nouvelles générations ne sera pas compétitive et restera en dehors. En conséquence, le seul moyen pour compenser cet incapacité à s'intégrer de ces nouvelles populations sont des mesures coercitives, comme par exemple la mal nommée « discrimination positive ».

Dernière chose. Ne cherchez pas à lire en français les ouvrages scientifiques américains qui traitent de ces questions. Aucun éditeur n'a pris le risque de les traduire.

No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap


The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.


Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap.”

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

The results no doubt will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other adjustments. “We still have a lot more work to do,” Mr. Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law’s accountability model itself.

Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely due to a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower-scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.

The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, were up modestly in reading, and were considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were quite a bit higher than those of students of the same age a generation back. Still, the progress of younger students tapered off as they got older.

Some experts said the results proved that the No Child law had failed to make serious headway in lifting academic achievement. “We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

But Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan’s predecessor under President Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law.

“It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously,” Ms. Spellings said. “The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight — it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability-type approach.”

Whether anyone knows how to extend the results achieved with younger students through the turbulent high school years remains an open question.

The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trends, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released on Tuesday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.

The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation’s high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law, which requires states to administer annual tests in grades three to eight, but only once in high school.

The 2008 score gap between black and white 17-year-olds, 29 points in reading and 26 points in math, could be envisioned as the rough equivalent of between two and three school years’ worth of learning, said Peggy Carr, an associate commissioner for assessment at the Department of Education.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written about raising successful black children, said the persistence of the achievement gap should lead policymakers to seek new ways to increase low-performing students’ learning time.

“Where we see the gap narrowing, that’s because there’s been an emphasis on supplemental education, on after-school programs that encourage students to read more and do more math problems,” Dr. Hrabowski said. “Where there are programs that encourage that additional work, students of color do the work and their performance improves and the gap narrows.”

But he said that educators and parents pushing children to higher achievement often find themselves swimming against a tide of popular culture.

“Even middle-class students are unfortunately influenced by the culture that says it’s simply not cool for students to be smart,” he said. “And that is a factor here in these math and reading scores.”

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents more than 60 metropolitan school systems, said that much of the progress among the nation’s minority students has been the result of hard work by urban educators, not only since the No Child law took effect but for decades before.

“N.C.L.B. did not invent the concept of the achievement gap — much of the desegregation work in the ’70s and ’80s was in fact about giving poor, Hispanic and African-American kids access to better resources and curriculum,” Mr. Casserly said. “You do see from these results that in that period, the gains were steeper. It wasn’t being called an achievement gap, but that was what that was about.”