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A PR Pro’s Plea to TV Journos – Don’t go Geraldo Like WWMT

January 25, 2012 3 comments

WWMT Pulls a Rivera

A colleague of mine recently had an unfortunate experience with WWMT Channel 3 here in West Michigan.  One of their reporters burst into the offices of Patriot Solutions with cameras rolling and accusations flying.

It offers a “teachable moment” to point out two problems I see public relations professionals encounter with their counterparts in the news media:

Problem 1 – Not Doing One’s Homework

The basis of the investigation is that Patriot Solutions is classified as a “service-disabled, veteran-owned company.”  WWMT noted that the disability rating of the owners is “0 percent,” so they are alleging some sort of fraud.

The problem is, as the National Veteran-Owned Business Association could readily tell you, having a “0 percent” disability doesn’t mean that a veteran wasn’t disabled as a result of their service to their country.  What it means is that their disability is not at a “compensable level” – meaning it doesn’t “substantially [limit] one or more major life activities.”

So, for example, a veteran could have a “0 percent” disability rating if they suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder but are able to make it to work every day and lead a relatively normal life despite suffering from mental health issues.

Problem 2 – Asking Questions One Knows Can’t be Answered

What WWMT did with their ambush interview was put Patriot Solutions in an impossible position: every journalist worth his/her salt knows that any employer has to decline to comment on private personnel matters.  It’s against the law – employees have privacy rights.  Same with patients; showing up at a hospital and demanding information on someone being treated is a HIPAA violation.  Further, the same is true of students; their privacy is protected by FERPA.

Veterans of the Marine Corps and the Army (which the owners of Patriot Services are) deserve respect and fair treatment as much as all other citizens (if not moreso).  What WWMT essentially did was attack these individuals during business hours and demand that they cough up sensitive, personal medical information because its reporter doesn’t know how to use the  Google Machine.

Dick move, WWMT.  Dick move.  Hopefully they do the right thing and nix the piece before they do more damage.

The Top 11 Things you Actually Need to Know About Pinterest

January 17, 2012 7 comments

The Pinterested

Detroit Free Press Technology columnist Mark W. Smith recently described the workings of the nascent social network Pinterest to readers in a column titled “Pinterest: 11 Things to Know About the Surging Social Network.”  Unfortunately the column focuses on practical and factual things.

Here’s what you will learn from using Pinterest:

  1. Pinterest is Like Falling Into a Display at New York & Company:  No, really.  The network is nearly 60 percent female.  If you have a  Y chromosome, you’ll feel like a salmon swimming upstream trying to find content for your socially-apportioned gender role.
  2. “The Secret” Lost out Big-time:  You know “The Secret?” – the faux-scientific motivational program that misapplies the law of attraction, encouraging adherents to cut out pictures of the things they want (as to help them with the “wanting” process which will magically attract those things to them) and plaster them on “Vision Boards?”  Well, guess what Pinterest is? – I guess Rhonda Byrne didn’t have “Coding” on her vision board.
  3. Women love Makeup: No, they really do.  It represents about 50 percent of the objects they pin (if you include photos of female celebrities they want to look like).
  4. You Never Knew There Were This Many Storage Solutions: Seriously.  Who knew there were so many ways to organize, sort, and compartmentalize our junk?  For some reason the next popular fetish after airbrushed celebrities is complete and total order in one’s closets and drawers.  This probably relates to our Purtian roots.
  5. Men are Perverts: Sure everybody knows men think about sex once every five nanoseconds, but Pinterest helps illustrate just how much men think about sex by plastering your board with “tasteful” nude photography from “art” from The Pinterested (that’s the name I’m coining for Pinterest users since I can’t seem to find an official one elsewhere).  Did you know incorporating paint, key lighting or toile into a photo is all it takes to render it not porn?  You do now – so get to work.
  6. Pinterest is not for People With Eating Disorders: Between all of the celebrity idolization and tasteful nudes, anyone with body issues is going to relate to the social networking site like a moth relates to a hot lightbulb.
  7. People Love Nostalgia:  Pinterest isn’t just for looking at the present and future of things we covet – it’s also for all of the things we’ve coveted in the past, from Underoos to black and white pictorials depicting celebrities of yesteryear.
  8. Food can be Pornographic:  While Pinterest seems to be relatively free of photos of cats, it’s not immune to its share of food porn.  Pinterest has photos of food for every stripe of culinary fetishist: from the tasteful and well-lit collages, to dirty, grainy amateur shots.
  9. America Needs More Free Counter Space:  There is apparently a deficit more serious than the one being addressed by the legislature in the Debt Ceiling debate – and that national shortage is on available horizontal space upon which to place tshotchkes.  No one has enough display shelves to hold all of the cutesy little projects you can complete yourself with just three trips to Michaels.
  10. Women Think Men pay Attention to Their Hairdos:  Given all of the how-tos, close-ups, and slideshows of the intricacies of the latest hairstyles the female users post – I can only assume they’re laboring under the delusion that men actually pay attention to what their hair looks like.  Bizarre!
  11. We Love Advice we Rarely Take:  One in five photos on Pinterest is an illustration of an aspirational/inspirational quote from someone notable.  Unfortunately, instead of following the advice we’re all collecting images of the material objects that will fill the gaping consumer voids we’ve all been trained to carve out since infancy.

O’Dwyer Runs Afoul of Wikipedia in Effort to Defame PRSA

January 15, 2012 3 comments

Jack O'Dwyer's Conspiracy Theories

In his zeal to advance his attack on the Public Relations Society of America my favorite curmudgeon Jack O’Dwyer has finally discovered Wikipedia.

Unfortunately O’Dwyer doesn’t really understand it, and now he’s attacking the Wikimedia Foundation and Jimmy Wales because of the articles on “public relations” as well as its “history” and the fact that Wikipedia strongly discourages PR pros from contributing directly to the vaunted online encyclopedia.

To this end, Phil Gomes with Edelman started a group on Facebook called “Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement” or CREWE.  It’s already made some excellent strides toward creating policy and procedure that everyone can follow for contributing to the entries in Wikipedia.  As he frequently does (which makes him a fantastic case study in how to be a spokesperson for an organization), Jimmy Wales actually joined the discussion on CREWE and has been active in helping address the concerns that some of the public relations pros have had with Wikipedia.

Unfortunately O’Dwyer’s lack of comprehension has led him to again don his tinfoil cap and allege a conspiracy where none exists.  He mistakenly believes Wikipedia is deliberately ignoring or censoring mentions of a disputed account of the Tylenol Case Study (it’s not).  He also described many of the standard conventions of Wikipedia entries as significant in the case of the entries on PR and its history (unaware that they’re automatic configurations).

O’Dwyer took it upon himself to edit these entries and when his entries were rejected for publication, he cried foul and demanded action (both publicly and trying to run up the chain of command inside Wikipedia rather than appealing directly to the editors that removed his contributions).

Here’s the response he received from Jimmy Wales (which I was so amused by that I published a sensational tweet about it, something I was rightly chastised by Wales for):

“Jack, I am unsure what you are asking for here. If you want to have a meeting with people to argue that your site is reliable, then I don’t think the NYC chapter is the right organization to do that, since they would have nothing to do with that. 

I checked our internal email system to see why you might think your email was ignored. It turns out that it was forwarded to Jay Walsh who has been on vacation. But nevermind, you have my ear now so if you can explain more clearly what you are asking I can try to help.

Your email to us claimed that you had been blocked from Wikipedia, but the volunteer who processed your email pointed out internally that that isn’t true – your account has not been blocked.

What did happen was that an embarrassingly bad edit you made to an article was reverted. The edit was blatantly promotional about a book that, news sources say, you are “supporting”. Is this a client? 

In any event, in this case, we have a lovely example of how the system works and how NOT to try to edit Wikipedia and WHY I think paid advocates should not edit articles directly, ever.” – Jimmy Wales, January 10 at 12:15pm

Too right.  O’Dwyer’s conspiracy theories aside, here’s what is ACTUALLY happening:

1. People don’t CARE about the definition of Public Relations, or the history of PR.  That’s why there is a dearth of content – it’s not a deliberate lack of inclusion from Wikipedia.  That’s also why there is a dearth of books on the subject (outside of textbooks or tactical manuals).  They care even less about the “Council of PR Firms” – another entity O’Dwyer complains about a lack of content for.  That’s one of the downsides of crowdsourcing – it produces content skewed populist (which is why the Wikipedia entries for Tim Tebow and Beyonce have more in-depth content).

2. Content published by public relations pros gets deleted by Wikipedia editors as a direct result of the non-transparent and dishonest way PR people have used Wikipedia in the past.  Unfortunately a combination of avarice and ignorance on the part of PR pros created a very hostile relationship with Wikipedians so that they are very mistrustful – I don’t blame them.

Since then, however, a process has emerged for PR people to contribute content to Wikipedia (some excellent detailed suggestions for PR pros are provided by Wikipedian JMabel here):

  1. Learn about Wikipedia (particularly spend some time observing the discussion forums where the specifics of entries, contributors and contributions are debated).
  2. Be open and transparent.
  3. Post your suggestions for contributions to the “Talk” section of a Wikipedia entry and appeal to some of the Wikipedians who have contributed to that entry or similar entries to consider your content for inclusion.
  4. Freely license any intellectual property (images, video) you’d like included under either a Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL) or a Creative Commons license.  If you want something on Wikipedia – you can’t retain a traditional, exclusive license to it – because it will invariably be re-used by others for a variety of purposes (which is a good thing).

3. Wikipedia is decentralized and lacks a hierarchy – which is the POINT.  As he’s accustomed to bullying his way to preferential treatment, O’Dwyer actually attempted to go right up the chain of command at the Wikimedia Foundation and have his way:

“E-mails to NYC WP leaders inviting them to my office have been ignored. E-mails to Wikimedia are ignored and someone told me in a live WP chat that only volunteers handle the media.” – Jack O’Dwyer, January 10 at 11:57am

4. Dexterity is the point of wiki tools; after all, the etymology of the word is Hawaiian for “very quickly” – which is why it was chosen by Ward Cunningham for the first “Wiki” he created back in 1995.  This has two very important ramifications for how content will appear on Wikipedia:

  • It must be DIGITAL.  Any sourcing for Wikipedia must go to either webpages or digital versions of photo, video and documents.
  • It must be OPEN.  As a crowdsourced innovation, Wikipedia allows for democratic participation by all – and that means that everyone gets to see not only the final product but the sausage-making that took place to get there.  That’s why it’s important for ORIGINAL sourcing to be used as opposed to secondary sourcing.

What we Learn

O’Dwyer is failing at interacting with Wikipedia because he tried to link to content in the subscriber-only section of his website, and rather than publish his sources online – he wants to try to coax someone into his office to pore over the mouldering stacks of paper documents and books he has.  Not only that, but O’Dwyer doesn’t understand that he can’t simultaneously profit from his paywalled content AND have people actually read it – you have to choose one or the other.

This should be instructive to anyone who wants to be successful in the digital world: in order to spread, content must be freely shared and easily-accessible.

The Internet in many ways rebooted our world to Year Zero; by that I mean the credibility and reputation earned by certain organizations over the past thousands of years of human interaction were rendered less important.  The web, instead, bases reputation and credibility on MERIT.  That’s why Wikipedia is searched and cited far more than Encyclopedia Britannica.  O’Dwyer stridently attempted to cash in on his years of print publications, but the editors of Wikipedia would have none of it:

“WP needs to acknowledge O’Dwyer’s as a “reliable” source since we are the only ones ever to cover PR Seminar, the 65-year-old very important “secret society” of top corporate and agency execs. ” – Jack O’Dwyer, January 10 at 11:57am

A hilarious footnote to this whole situation is that O’Dwyer has continued to use the CREWE group to wage his war against PRSA, and he’s been specifically asked to stop doing this by the moderator of the group and several of its members because it’s irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand (he’s not just posting irrelevant replies, he’s been publishing irrelevant wall posts).  Sigh.

What we Learned From the Passing of a Best Friend Carried on the Fleet Feet of Social Media

January 13, 2012 Leave a comment

The Passing of a Best Friend Carried on the Wings of Twitter

A sad note that marred an otherwise unseasonably-warm and dry week in Grand Rapids was the death of a blogger’s dog after a careless right turn by a man driving a truck who then left the scene (even though he later admitted to being aware that the distraught owner was trying to flag him down; I also refuse to believe he didn’t know he’d hit something).

The dog’s owner wrote a moving essay about the experience that has touched all of us.  He also provided an example of forgiveness and compassion that I’ll think long and hard about for the rest of my life.

The Incident

There were witnesses to the tragic accident and the reaction of the driver of the truck.  As is increasingly the case, those witnesses had access to smartphones and tweeted what they had witnessed.  One witness, who I’m proud to call a friend, took action and captured information about the truck and its driver.  The truck was a work vehicle, so it was emblazoned with the name of the business – and the witness also managed to get (and tweet) the license plate. Read more…

How to Hack the New Facebook Profile – Updated

January 5, 2012 Leave a comment

[Updated] Facebook again changed its front page (as social networking platforms are wont to do), which means that the dynamics for hacking the front page have changed yet again.  Here’s how to have fun with (or for marketing/pr types – how to “leverage/maximize”) the new Timeline Profile:

1.  Make sure you have the new Timeline.  Your profile should look like this (with the small profile icon and the large, horizontal background):

The New Facebook Timeline Profile

The New Facebook Timeline Profile

2.  If you don’t – you can get instructions on how to sign up for the new Facebook Timeline here.

3.  If you’re graphically-inclined, the world is your oyster.  A lot of clever people have come up with interesting ways to utilize the new profile.  If, like most of us, you’re not graphically-inclined – there are already a number of tools to create customizable background images.

Mashable has an excellent pre/review of them here “Facebook Timeline Customization: 5 Tools for Killer Cover Photos”.  Thus far my favorite one that I’ve used is CoverCanvas; it’s the one I used to create the above image for my background. Read more…

Iowa is a Terrible Test Market – Why do we let it Pick Presidential Candidates?

January 3, 2012 3 comments

[Updated] It’s 2012, and the presidential primary season is upon us.  In reality, it’s been upon us for the past year – the news media seems to have the same proclivity for stretching out presidential campaign season as retailers have for stretching out the holiday gift buying season.

Plenty of others have written about our arcane and stupid primary process, but I thought I would put a different spin on the argument that Iowa should not be allowed to screen the roster of presidential candidates:

From a Marketing/Public Relations/Advertising perspective, the population of Iowa makes for a terrible focus group.

Iowa is completely unrepresentative demographically of the diversity that exists in the US.  In fact - it’s such a skewed population that it doesn’t even have a test market in the top 50 (unless you count markets shared by other states).

No marketer would risk taking a product to market nation-wide based on how it plays in Iowa – so why do we let them vet presidential candidates?  Check out this selection of demographic indicators: Read more…

FedEx Deserves a Black Belt in Crisis Management for Response to Viral Video

December 22, 2011 Leave a comment

Earlier this week, a YouTube video from a security camera made the rounds showing a FedEx employee carelessly tossing a package (containing a computer monitor) over a fence to deliver it.  As of today, the original has over 4 million views and opportunistic content-scrapers who have re-posted to their own profiles have garnered hundreds of thousands more.

Huge public relations crisis, right?  Nope.

FedEx delivered a master class  in crisis communications with its response that should be taught in PR classrooms.  Check it out:

Let’s break down what happened (which is an affirmation of the principles articulated by Arthur W. Page):

  1. They responded quickly.  They didn’t wait for the situation to reach a tipping point; only two days passed between the uploading of the original video and the response.  Can you imagine the kind of effort it takes during the heaviest delivery season to negotiate and organize a well-crafted video response to a negative customer service experience for a global corporation?  Right now the response video is the #2 video, right under the original negative video which is #1.  It has over 116,000 views – six thousand of those were accrued in the time it took me to draft this blog post, so it’s gaining traction.
  2. They told the truth.  At no point did they try to write it off as an isolated incident, a hoax, or try to blame a third party contractor or regional human resources department.  They embraced it.
  3. They made it right with the customer (a YouTube user with the alias ‘goobie55′).  Before anything else, they reached out to the party affected and fixed the situation.  Unfortunately, goobie55 has not (yet) done the right thing – which is to post an update to the video noting FedEx’s response – hopefully that will still happen.
  4. They took it seriously.  FedEx knows how quickly information is shared online and they responded swiftly with senior management.  They didn’t let the situation linger unanswered or task local staff to handle it.  They also likely used all the resources in their arsenal – which may have included a traditional public relations pitch campaign (given the over 150 articles covering the response).
  5. They internalized the problem.  According to FedEx Senior VP Matthew Thornton, they are also are now sharing the video with employees as a case study in why careful handling of packages is important.
  6. They gave the organization a face.  You could hardly find a better face for the organization than VP Matthew Thornton; the nonverbal communication is fantastic.  He’s in a shirt and tie (no suit coat), with thick-rimmed glasses and a similarly-thick mustache – he looks like a working-class executive who is personally-invested in the company and doesn’t shy away from rolling up his sleeves.  Though he’s likely reading from a prompter, Thornton is convincing nonetheless.  In a way he projects the feel of a small business owner who knows well how accountable he is to his customers.
  7. They had a track record to stand on.  This is perhaps the most important part of any crisis is what happens BEFORE the crisis – something that can’t be emphasized enough.  Every organization needs to make quality service and products a priority (which should go without saying, but it doesn’t – plenty are operating on an old model of sub-standard quality upholstered in glitz and style).  No crisis response, no matter how eloquent, can save an organization that sucks at what they do from a high-profile example of their suckage – the companies that conduct themselves that way are only able to do so because they’re a monopoly (think AT&T or Comcast).

The only improvement I might have made is to have Thornton add an action item at the end of his video (you can provide hyperlinks within YouTube videos very easily) that invited any other customers with a bad experience to immediately share, or link directly to the process for resolving disputes, it so it could be fixed.  But that’s just me nit-picking.

Hopefully a lot of people are able to learn from this – kudos to FedEx.

Seeking Advice From Journalists who Made the Leap to “Brand Journalism”

December 21, 2011 Leave a comment

The Public Relations Society of America asked me to write a little piece on Brand Journalism for a series they’re doing on trends for 2012 (“#PRin2012: 12 Trends That Will Change Public Relations“).

As a follow-up, I’d love to hear from journalists who recently made the jump to public relations who perform a similar journalistic role for their company/organization – reporting on its “news.”

If you’re a news professional who now reports on a company/organization’s news in a PR role and you’re interested in sharing your insights, please visit this form (I will gladly keep your personal information confidential and attribute your comments anonymously if you request).

AllThis Seeks to Test the Adage “Any Press is Good Press” With Dick Move

December 21, 2011 Leave a comment

Internet startup AllThis drew fire recently after it was discovered (by writers like Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing) that the site scraped content (including profile photos) from the social media profiles of prominent tech pros and created profiles for them in its service.

The service seeks to sell ten-minute chunks of “time” with individuals that are bid on in an auction by other users.  The implication is that the time of these experts is available for sale to the highest bidder (though they would have to claim their profiles in order for the transaction to actually take place).  It’s tantamount to defamation for any tech writer considered to be a journalist who needs to appear to be impartial because it implies their attention (read: coverage) can be bought (David Pogue of the New York Times was disciplined for a similar practice – offering PR pros a chance to learn how to pitch him at a seminar).

Another implication nurtured by the way the company handled its launch is that these tech figures endorse the service … which is similarly problematic.

It’s pretty hard to imagine that AllThis didn’t intend for either of those implications to manifest, or that the structure of their service wouldn’t nurture them.

For its part, AllThis claims that it didn’t intend for either of those things to be the case and that the profiles were created when other users expressed interest in the time of the figures (who include some of my favorite tech figures like Tom Merritt and Leo Laporte).  That isn’t necessarily problematic in and of itself – but the execution is where the problem lies.

As Joel Housman extensively documents on his blog – AllThis scraped his profile details and images (which is copyrighted content) and used that to sell its service.  It’s the equivalent of me cutting-and-pasting content from someone else’s blog and hosting it on my site, siphoning away some of the traffic from their site to raise awareness of my own – only removing it when they object.

Dick move.

It will be interesting to watch this story to see if the adage “any press is good press” holds true for AllThis.

If I Wasn’t a Rich White Kid – Ruminations on Gene Marks

December 19, 2011 1 comment

One of the greatest gifts [curses] white people have is the ability to forget or take for granted the numerous advantages they’ve had in life. I’ve certainly been guilty of this many more times than once in my life.

The same is true of the tech-savvy.  We take for granted all of the things we learned and the many teachers and lessons we had along the way.  We perform highly-sophisticated tasks as rote, and because they are rote to us – we often forget that they’re most definitely NOT rote to others.  That’s why I grind my teeth whenever my co-worker asks me something about basic HTML code.  I forget all of the lessons I’ve learned since I first typed a string of it.

This is what led to Gene Marks of Forbes writing a piece (“If I was a Poor Black Kid”) offering a well-intentioned but misguided prescription for success to the inner-city black youth readers of Forbes (doubtless there are many of them):

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have. (“If I Was a Poor Black Kid,” 2011)

Writers far better than I have already responded (and I recommend you read their pieces over mine: Kashmir Hill, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cord Jefferson, Baratunde Thurston) but I couldn’t let this go, because of the problems inherent in how Marks closes his essay:

Technology can help these kids.  But only if the kids want to be helped.  Yes, there is much inequality.  But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.

One can literally parse through each sentence of Marks column and come up with a laundry list of obstacles to the tasks he so blithely outlines (insinuating they’re relatively easy to follow).  For the sake of time, I’ll just address the first paragraph in detail.

“I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible.”

No you wouldn’t.  That would require that you had the luxury of time to devote to things as non-essential to survival as “grades.”  It assumes you have some place warm, safe and dry to go back to every night after school (it also mistakenly assumes the school you go to is also warm, safe and dry).  It assumes that you’re not moving every couple of months as your parents (or whomever is raising you) are kicked out of rental dwelling after rental dwelling.

Taking a step further back, it assumes you actually want to be successful at life (which requires experience with examples of success in life that plant the seeds of aspiration in us).  It also assumes you understand that there is an important series of steps that must be completed in order to achieve that success.  It also assumes that you don’t make any poor choices in between each of those steps (like commit a crime – which is basically a life sentence for a youth of color in a way it isn’t for white kids).

Taking a step forward, “good grades” don’t necessarily mean good education.  Thanks to the standardized test-driven curricula we have, it often means that you develop unimportant skills (like memorization and regurgitation – an utter absurdity in the era of Wikipedia access on our smartphones) learning relatively ineffectual information (like what a bunch of old, white academics near retirement think should be ‘common knowledge’).

I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently.

No you wouldn’t.  That assumes you understand the importance of reading.  It assumes you can overcome the derision of peers for seeking such an absurd goal.  It assumes you have the time and resources to accomplish this end (and that humiliation doesn’t preclude you reaching out to someone to teach you how to read).  It assumes your parents know how to read and would think or have time to pass along the value of reading to you (and reinforce it at home).

What amazes me about my fellow honkeys is that they think children of color are somehow supposed to inherently have far more discipline, self-control, and patience than their own children.  By that I mean, while they can’t get their own kids to clean up their toys or keep from throwing tantrums in line at the grocery store; they expect the children of the socioeconomic underclasses to be miniature adults with fully-formed pre-frontal cortexes capable of long-term decision-making and reasoning and able to always delay short-term gain for the benefit of long-term gain.

I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city.

Cracker, please.  Brock Lesner wouldn’t last five minutes at that school.  You would care.

Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options.

Which assumes that’s common knowledge.  It also means that these students are fluent in the language and culture of academia.  Oh yes, academia has a language and culture – and it’s distinctly white.  Here are just some of the conventions of white academic culture that are often missed:

  • Attendance is important and counts beyond the points the teacher gives.  It can also buy the credibility necessary to ask for an extension on an assignment, or overlook a minor mistake on a test question.
  • Constant communication with the teacher is important; it shows you’re paying attention, and can earn you an excused absence from class if your car breaks down.
  • Participation in class discussion is important – it shows you’re paying attention and that you read the assigned text.  It’s often something you’re also graded on either explicitly or implicitly.
  • There are conventions for every type of work you have to do in a class.  Papers have them.  Tests have them.  Presentations have them.  Knowing where to access resources to better understand these conventions is an important skill not easily developed.  Take tests as one example: it’s not built into our genes to understand that it’s important to venture a guess just in case you get credit, or to skip the hard questions and come back to them later, or to check the wording of other questions in the test for answers to others.
  • Appearance is important; understanding how prone everyone (and I mean everyone – even teachers) are to stereotyping and prejudice based on nonverbal communication is a skill some rich white people (*cough*Trump*cough) figure out – to say nothing of how hard that is for poor black kids to learn.

This also mistakenly assumes inner-city kids are aware of options for their future beyond being a musician or pro ball player.  Even white kids have trouble envisioning other options because of the limited exposure they have to career fields; some have postulated this is why education is such a popular major in college - because it’s one of the only career fields students understand well as a result of continuous exposure to teachers as role models.

With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

Yeah but doing well in a lousy school doesn’t increase your opportunities much; you still carry that stigma to every class with you.  Not only that, but you’re completely unprepared for the workload you will encounter when you try to advance to higher education.  Just look at higher education completion rates; only 55 percent of those who go for higher ed degrees successfully finish them.

Beyond the oversimplification of the problem, inherent in this conclusion is a very ugly component of upper-crust white American sentiment toward all others: …so, uh, what about the kids who aren’t smart enough to go for it?

The answer is that the majority of White America is basically okay with those kids ending up in prison or dead (fates they would never tolerate for white children if they were happening as routinely as they do for children of other races).

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