Institutional Racism

performance, self-regulation, and also can prompt aggression. People can do more
together than they can alone. Social life is a form of collaborative activity, and an
important feature of human life. When goals and objectives become shared, they offer a
person and the social units he or she is a part of major advantages over if he or she
was working alone.
Under performing groups in schools often report that they feel like they do not belong
and that they are unhappy a majority of the time. Steele offers an example, explaining
an observation done by his colleague, Treisman. It was observed that African American
students at Berkeley did their work independently in their rooms with nobody to
converse with. They spent most of their time checking answers to their arithmetic in the
back of their textbook, weakening their grasp of the concepts themselves. This
ultimately caused these students to do worse on tests and assessments than their white
peers, creating a frustrating experience and also contributing to the racial achievement
gap.
Purpose
When students feel
that what they are
doing has purpose,
they are more likely
to succeed
academically.
Students who
identify and actively
work towards their
individual,
purposeful, life goals
have a better chance
at eliminating
disengagement that
commonly occurs in
middle school and
continues into later
adolescence. These
life goals give
students a chance to
believe that their
school work is done
in hopes of achieving
larger, more longterm
goals that
matter to the world.
This also gives
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