Saturday, June 17: Commenter Carol writes:
“As for inner-city schools, my son attends a Baltimore City public school, and it’s interesting to note which children have two parents/middle class homes, and which children live in the projects down the street and have single moms. The vast majority of the 2-parent kids are well-spoken good students. They may not be the best-dressed in the latest and greatest, they may not have their hair done, the gold jewelry…but they have that foundation — and that’s priceless.”
Update II: Education blogger Joanne Jacobs writes: “I don’t think No Child Left Behind calls for equal results: It says that all children can achieve proficiency — and the definition of proficiency isn’t all that high in most states.”
Good point, and I should have stressed NCLB’s proficiency goal in the post, although I made brief mention of it. Some national educational organization released a bunch of data on proficiency levels, and I thought I’d bookmarked the link. I’ll post it as soon as I find it. By the way, I focused on the concept of “equality” in general because I believe it is the source of unrealistic expectations.
Later…Found it. Look at the achievement levels for white 8th grade students participating in the Trial Urban District. Notice the percentage in the Proficient category. Now look at the results for black students. A larger percentage of black students are in the Below Basic category.
The goal of NCLB is to move all underachieving students into the Proficient category, an ambitious endeavor, to say the least…
You can also look up results for each state. To pull up similar charts as the ones from the Trial Urban District, select the state, then scroll down and click any one of the “Achievement Levels” links on the right side. These charts don’t break out achievement levels by race, though. To get those, you’ll need to open the PDF documents linked under “Related Material.”
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Guess what? The No Child Left Behind law is failing its mission. Before I get to that, however, I have a few things to say.
There are academic achievement gaps between different groups of students. As a group, Asians tend to score higher on standardized tests than whites. Whites tend to score higher than black and hispanic students. Hispanic students tend to score slightly higher than blacks.
The gap that people talk about most is the one between blacks and whites. Given America’s past — enslavement of blacks and subsequent codified racial discrimination — these two racial groups will be locked in conflict until Christ returns. Nothing and no one else will come close to resolving it.
Diversity in itself is not a bad thing. Differences can be interesting, fun, or even exciting. Variety is the spice of life, they say. I recognize and appreciate different colors of skin and eyes, hair texture, body shapes and sizes, personalities and mannerisms, talents and motivation, and skills and abilities. I believe God has endowed each of us with something unique that only we can offer the world. The exhilarating part of growing and learning is discovering your gift, for lack of a better word. There is only one you, and God made you the way he did for a purpose.
Because of our fallen nature, however, we are prone to anger, envy, and jealousy. God made covetousness part of his law for a reason. The longing to possess what is not ours may cause us to neglect what is ours. This desire and lust can intensify, breeding anger and more discontent and polluting our hearts and minds to the point where we begin to believe we’re owed what belongs to others. This is why I think it’s wrong for so-called liberal Christians to support ill-defined ideas like “social justice” or wealth redistribution schemes, and then call them biblical. They clearly are not biblical but based on the faulty premise that government has an obligation to take another’s possessions and give them to “deserving” others.
But I digress.
The Civil Rights Project recently released a report on the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB). As predicted, the law is not working. The idea behind it — to bring all students up to the level of proficiency by 2014 — is a classically noble bit of social engineering. But in a country with diverse races, some which may possess greater abilities than others and emphasize achievement more than others, such an idea is impractical and unworkable. It should surprise no one that NCLB has not affected the gap between black and white students.
I was excited when I first heard about NCLB. Finally, schools would be held accountable for what they did and didn’t do. There’s no better motivator than accountability. I was skeptical, however, because I knew schools were not the only problem. In a column called Liberals and Their Advice, I wrote about some of my concerns:
While Democrats are drying the dinner dishes on the Titanic, hoping that tub won’t sink after all, Republicans are throwing out life jackets, offering parents real hope. Under President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, parents have the option of transferring their children to a different school if their neighborhood school fails for two consecutive years to meet a rigorous set of standards. There is no guarantee that even this policy will solve the education crisis, but it does provide incentives for school improvement.
To be fair, deteriorating government schools are not entirely to blame. Other factors include lack of parental involvement, a culture of anti-intellectualism and affirmative action, which is just a euphemism for “lowered standards.†Parents have to take some responsibility for their children’s subpar academic performances, and parents and schools must hold children to higher standards.
Read Bush education policy to miss goals: Harvard study. The writer does a nice job summarizing the study.
In what I’m sure has generated lots of hate mail, an article titled, Culture, Discipline, and the No Child Left Behind Act, comes closest to explaining why NCLB is not working and why the gap between diverse students is not likely to be closed or narrowed until a significant cultural shift occurs:
Banfield warned school reformers that their proposals to improve student learning were bound to run into a brute fact— large numbers of children in the United States were the product of “lower-class culture.â€
To be clear, by “lower class†Banfield did not mean “poor.†… [L]ower-class culture has a live-in-the-moment ethos. Thus, youths reared in lower class culture tend to find school difficult because their parents failed to help them develop the mindset that enables them to sit still and learn.
…
The idealism of “No Child Left Behind†is on a collision course with reality. NCLB aims only at the institutional side of the schooling formula; it does not, though, attempt to elevate “lower class†culture or turn all parents into good nurturers. Nor, quite frankly, is it clear how NCLB or any policy could.Schools, especially those serving large numbers of children whose parents don’t well prepare them for learning, cannot possibly see to it that 100% of children reach proficiency. To insist that they do is to imagine that a government institution can obliterate the effects of culture and parental child-rearing.
The writer also mentions the importance of long term planning and setting goals. Did you know that the Seattle Public Schools implied that long term planning was a racist idea? I briefly blogged about it in this post. And these people are teaching your children. A cached copy of the dumb statement has since been removed from the Google archives.
While there are no quick and clear-cut solutions to this cultural problem, it’s not as complicated as it’s made out to be, either. First, family stability does affect children and is correlated with life outcomes. Seventy percent of black children are born to unmarried mothers and tend to be raised in female-headed households. Such families, by definition, are unstable. The point of mentioning this is not to focus on single parents per se, but on the endemic and generational lack of emphasis on academic achievement that is perpetuated in these families.
This leads to my second point. There is a poisonous strain of “anti-intellectualism” coursing through the subculture generally speaking. People can deny it, offer a couple of fleeting anecdotes to try and prove me wrong, curse me out via e-mail, talk about me like a dog on other blogs, or whatever makes them feel better. As a black person who’s grown up in a black family and with black friends and acquaintances and spends time around black people of various socioeconomic classes, I know what I’m talking about.
(For the uninitiated, I recommend John McWhorter’s Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage In Black America.)
Actor and conservative Joseph C. Phillips writes about the tendency to focus on sports, for example, at the expense of academics in his book, He Talk Like A White Boy.
Another example: Instead of facing enormous problems in the “black community,” including the epidemic of fatherlessness, the NAACP is “studying” tripe like the paucity of black characters on sitcoms! Does this sound like a people concerned at all about educational excellence and intellectual competitiveness? To be fair, the NAACP is a bit of a joke, and I doubt that many blacks consider it influential. At least I hope not. 
I ranted and lamented about this in Turn Off That Idiot Box!, to no avail, I’m sure.
I don’t know whether it’s just the black American subculture that’s the problem or something about people of African descent in general. I’m inclined to believe it’s the subculture. (Incidentally, black American subculture is part of the American culture, so don’t be fooled into believing that it is heavily influenced by the African continent.)
Third, we’re almost two generations past the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, and the idealistic among us envisioned a future Utopia where all the races would get along and have an equal amount of stuff — however you want to define “stuff.” This became the goal, and falling short of this goal is evidence to some people that the Civil Rights “dream” has not been achieved and that racism is “institutionalized” and must be eradicated by any means necessary, hence, race preferences and quotas.
But the goal itself was unrealistic. Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, is the best you can do in a free, capitalist country; otherwise, you have to start discriminating in the other direction to ensure that people with vastly different talents and skills end up with equal outcomes. Such a notion is legally, morally, and logically unsustainable. (Equal has become an idol, by the way.)
The emphasis should be on opportunity. If people don’t seize it when it’s right in front of them, which I argue it is most of the time in a country like the United States, they can’t blame “the system.”
I wrote about diversity earlier for this reason. While I believe that generations immediately after Emancipation had a lot of catching up to do, we are too far past slavery for that excuse to work anymore. In my admittedly lay and amateur opinion, I don’t think we can even blame Jim Crow for the achievement gap and other ills. Many ethnic groups throughout the world at some point in the history of the world have been discriminated against, demeaned, enslaved, subjugated, beaten, and killed. There is nothing unique about the “African American” experience in this regard.
What is unique about the “African American” experience is that we live in a country that has bent over backwards to make amends for past injustices. That some people are “left behind” is not evidence of racism. I believe that in 2006, it is imperative that blacks understand this and embrace the idea of self-help, self-improvement, and accountability for our lot in life as individuals.
Let me tie this jumble of ideas together. True diversity means that we’re different physically, mentally, intellectually, psychologically, etc., and for whatever reason, differences between racial groups are real and discernable.
Living in a capitalist, competitive, technologically advanced, and free society means that some people will be left behind, especially when objective standards are applied. One racial group may have more members fall short of those standards, and that’s when all the social engineering, standards-dropping, and blame games begin.
This blogger doesn’t have the answers. My only quest is to urge people to look within before looking without. If your child is failing or under-achieving, why? What can you do that doesn’t involve blaming George Bush or your great-great-great grandfather’s white owner? Do you encourage achievement in the home? Is it filled with books and other learning materials, or is it filled with vapid DVDs and the sounds of vacuous TV shows? Is the TV on from the time your kids get home from school until they go to bed, or are they required to complete their homework and engage in activities that stimulate and develop the intellect?
It’s a shame that individuals often don’t realize how much power and control they have over their own life outcomes and those of their precious children! If they only had the courage to harness this power.
Related posts:
- Acting White
- Montgomery County Dumbs Down ‘Gifted’ Programs
- Prince George’s County: Grade F
- Are Government Schools ‘Hiding’ Blacks’ Test Scores?
- I’m A Libertarian on Education
Update: Commenter Annie tells us about a conversation she had with a former prosecutor. He told her why he wouldn’t pick someone like her for a murder case with a black defendant. More important is the kind person he would select for such a case, based on experience and common sense:
You’re a single woman who lives downtown. You work for a do-goodey nonprofit. You’re clearly university educated. Everything about you screams, ‘bleeding heart liberal who’ll vote to acquit if she feels sorry for the guy.’ †(Wrong, and wrong again.)
“So who WOULD you want on your jury?†I asked.
“An old black guy with a hat on. Give me some 60-70 year old black guy in clothes that are downmarket but that he’s taken the trouble to iron carefully, wearing a hat. He grew up during Jim Crow. He knows what racial suffering was about. It’s his neighborhood that kids like the defendant are destroying, and he DOES.NOT.WANT.TO.HEAR about how the kid simply had to hold up the store and shoot the cashier because mama couldn’t afford to buy him a pair of Air Jordans.â€
Commenter Cedjan writes:
It sickens and saddens me to see a grown Black male (not worthy of being called a man) living with his Momma, when I know he isn’t trying to better himself. These guys spend their time making babies that they will never support and existing on the fringes of society.
I speak from experience, and I know I’m not alone. I’ve got a brother and cousins and know many other Black males who are just existing and taking up space. They act foolishly because usually their mothers enable them to, and have enabled them to all their lives. There are no fathers to speak of…I wish it wasn’t so, but it is. No amount of money or social programs will fix this problem. Liberal thinking has destroyed the Black family.
