But Is Anybody Listening?

Today, Cynthia Tucker proclaims, "Black Students Must Stop Deriding Scholarship as White", and suggests that home environment may be playing an enormous role in student performance. This brought to mind a speech I once read by Thomas Sowell, The Education of Minority Children, in which he describes the failure of the M Street School, which had outstanding standards of scholarship prior to school integration but which collapsed into poor performance after the mid-1950's.

For those who are interested in schools that produce academic success for minority students, there is no lack of examples, past and present. Tragically, there is a lack of interest by the public school establishment in such examples. Again, I think this goes back to the politics of education.

Put bluntly, failure attracts more money than success. Politically, failure becomes a reason to demand more money, smaller classes, and more trendy courses and programs, ranging from "black English" to bilingualism and "self-esteem." Politicians who want to look compassionate and concerned know that voting money for such projects accomplishes that purpose for them and voting against such programs risks charges of mean-spiritedness, if not implications of racism.

I don't share Sowell's blanket condemnation of "trendy" ideas, or the concept that politicians and others only support the trendy ideas because they want to look compassionate. Not all reforms which sound "trendy" are necessarily bad, and permitting people to avoid meaningful reform by denouncing proposals for reform as "trendy" would only contribute to the problems that Sowell wishes to resolve.

Part of the problem is that some of the trendy ideas, such as small classroom size, make intuitive sense - even if studies of small classrooms don't bear out their supposed fruits past the earliest grades. I agree with Sowell, that our nation's public schools seem loathe to seek out educational solutions that work, and that educational "advocates" often advance changes such as small classrooms which, although they sound good at a superficial level, are not empirically supported and don't require any fundamental change to the system which might actually improve the underlying problems. ("We'll keep doing exactly what we're doing - but with fewer kids in the classroom.")

More recently, Thomas Sowell wrote several editorials on educational achievement, including "School Performances", in which he decries the notion that inadequate school funding is behind disparities in performance, and School Performances: Part II, in which he outlines the importance of parental support, and a school's stress of educational fundamentals (over the "fads, fun and propaganda for political correctness" he deplores).

Having received most of my K-12 education in Canada, I have never been able to buy into the notion that school funding is behind the educational woes of most of the nation. Certainly, there are some states which fund their schools at appalling levels, and beyond a certain threshold a lack of funding will cause a collapse of educational quality. But my academically oriented Canadian high school received substantially less funding per pupil than, for example, the Detroit schools of the day. While growing up, I also got to hear my mother's comments about her own experiences teaching in equally funded but academically disparate elementary schools in our home town - a context which can leave little doubt that the import a family places on educational achievement is often the most important contributing factor to a child's academic success.

In Detroit, 47% of adults are functionally illiterate. While I am sure that Thomas Sowell would quickly point out that his own parents were able to provide support for his educational achievements despite their own lack of education, I am sure he would also concede that you cannot magically transform a failed school system by wishing for additional parental support from parents presently who neither have nor value academic skills. And while the "achievement gap" is often depicted as a race issue, that is a distraction from the fact that there are kids of all ethnicities who are caught in the same trap. Some will show the force of character and self-discipline necessary to break out - but most won't.

How many billion dollars are we presently spending to reinvent Iraq's schools? Upgraded facilities, new textbooks, new teaching techniques - little, if anything, of the old system left in place? Meanwhile, our nation's legislators impose meaningless reforms and standardized tests on public schools which, at least to my eye, seem to be far less about improving public education, and far more about creating a context to justify the additional shift of public funds to support private and parochial school education.

And why is it that these issues only appear of import to African American columnists, when closing (or failing to close) the so-called "achievement gap" has profound implications for our nation?

Comments