Update III (5/23): I am SHOCKED that this piece made it into a newspaper. It’s the ugly, barely-reported truth. 
Update II: I forgot to mention a study that showed black students from intact “religious” families perform better in school than their counterparts.
Also, choice is key. Libertarian Andrew Coulson notes that “the school system itself affects parents’ and students’ attitudes towards education. The current system gives parents no power, no control, no responsibilities. When parents can choose their kids’ schools – better yet, when they HAVE to choose their kids’ schools – they become more savvy and more involved.”
See his post at Cato-at-liberty on poor and marginally educated parents choosing schools for their kids. I reviewed a book of essays about the late libertarian Milton Friedman. One essay discussed private schools in Third World countries. I wrote:
The existence of private schools for the poor [in Third World countries] tends to weaken the argument against school vouchers that poor parents are unable or unwilling to pay for their children’s schooling. [James] Tooley proposes that, in the absence of government intervention, “grass-roots privatization of education†might possibly spring up in the United States as it has in developing countries.
Also see Measuring Catholic school performance.
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Sometimes, the truth needs to be uttered by one of your “own” before you believe it or act on it.
A group called Policy Bridge, a non-profit organization in Ohio, released “The Rap on Culture” (PDF), a 16-page report on “anti-education” in the black subculture. Perhaps the report and subsequent discussions finally will convince blacks with children that they’ve got serious issues to deal with, and white guilt-tripping, taxpayers’ money, and government intervention will get you only so far.
[Although the study focused on black students in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, the findings apply to black students all over the country. Given the disparities in graduation rates, test scores, etc., it's not difficult to extrapolate from the data.]
“The Rap on Culture” focuses on a huge contributing factor in black student underachievement: destructive elements in the subculture, namely, a virulent “anti-intellectual†strain that all but guarantees the academic achievement will never close and may end up increasing as black children grow up to be adults who can’t compete in a global economy.
Yes, It’s All About Race
Whenever I say that underachievement, criminality, illegitimacy, generational poverty, and a tendency toward government dependency (and not just welfare; an entitlement mentality also is a form of dependency) are caused by something within black subculture, somebody somewhere calls me a self-hater.
(The researchers and many others use the word “culture†to describe the black community. I use “subculture†because we are part of the overall American culture. Black Americans are not a unique culture; we are uniquely Americans, and characteristics and features developed through the years and/or retained through oral tradition are subcultural, not cultural.)
But when black liberals say it, preferably backed by numbers and cold hard facts, suddenly it takes on new meaning. Perhaps it’s the way I say it, or that I say it, or that I say it in public space. Who knows, who cares. The kids — and not ignorant adults — are my main concern.
“The Rap on Culture,” which proposes the cause and cure for black student underachievement, begins on the right note:
The furor over radio talk-show host Don Imus’ slurs aimed at the Rutgers women’s basketball team sparked a national discussion of the racist and sexist language and imagery that pervade hip-hop and rap music and the urban culture. What seems to have been largely ignored in this debate are the anti-education messages that have led so many African-American youth away from the academic achievements exemplified by the talented Rutgers women. It’s interesting that this uproar over urban culture has erupted at a time when Congress prepares to debate whether to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted in 2002 to improve educational opportunity and accountability. In pushing his plan for education reform in 2001, President Bush spoke of the need to end the “soft bigotry of low expectations.†What if those “low expectations†not only refer to schools and teachers who fail to hold minority students to high standards of academic achievement, but also describe a devalued view of education in the black community itself? What if something about the culture enveloping black students, particularly those in low-income, urban environments, impedes academic progress?
Of course, the “what if†propositions are rhetorical. There is a devalued view of education in the black community. There is something about the subculture that works against excellence in education. It fosters a strain of “anti-intellectualism†or “anti-education,†a term used by the researchers. Blaming poverty or white racism or discrimination is easier and less embarrassing, but it is futile. Even poor students of other races outperform black students from upper-income households.
The researchers are honest enough to admit the issue is race, not class or poverty. They write:
“Talking about social class is much easier in this country than talking about race; it doesn’t pick at a scab covering centuries of pain,†they write. “Defining the achievement gap in largely economic terms may make for an easier discussion, but it may have contributed to a sense of hopelessness when it comes to education reform: If you want to ensure that all children achieve academically, then it would seem that you first need to eliminate the challenges of poverty. That view, without a doubt, is outside the ability of schools to fix and contributes to a sense that the problem of low educational attainment is intractable.â€
As the researchers note, trying to “fix†poverty is a waste of time if the goal is to narrow the achievement gap. It is not the government’s job nor does it have the power to fix poverty. Some people are and will remain poor because they refuse to do any better. Unfortunately, such people continue to procreate, dooming children to at least a childhood of poverty. (As adults, they can overcome it.) What in the world can the government do to motivate people to get off their butts and go to work or stop making babies if they’re unmarried and don’t have jobs? Not much.
Poverty is correlated with academic underachievement, but the relationship between underachievement and a subculture of “anti-education†is much stronger. For more information on anti-intellectualism, see John McWhorter’s excellent book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (which the researchers also cited in the study). McWhorter is a black college professor who works with all races of students and has observed concrete differences between black students and everyone else. I won’t rehash or summarize it here. Buy the book.
Recommendations
Among the proposed solutions to the subcultural problem of anti-education are these:
- Creating a distinct category under No Child Left Behind for black boys
- Extending the school day and school year in “distressed communitiesâ€
- Attracting more black male teachers to serve as “role models†with incentives
- Setting aside funds for programs designed to keep black boys from dropping out of school
(Potential problems with these recs: Civil Rights Act violations. Will the funding be set aside for racially exclusive programs, or will policymakers use code words like “underserved” and “underrepresented”?)
And finally, in the second set of recommendations, the researchers get to what’s really important:
- Parents (and teachers) need to raise expectations
- Parents need to be more involved with their children’s education
- Turn off that darn TV!
Is this necessary:
- Teachers need to be free to come up with creative approaches to teaching black boys
Perhaps. And even further down in the recommendations, although it should have been at #1:
- Schools must set and insist on high standards of conduct in the classroom. Students must be orderly and respectful. (See Self-Regulation Skills and the Academic Achievement Gap)
Because the majority of black kids in this country are born to illegitimacy and grow up in homes and neighborhoods without residential fathers, a necessary parental element is lacking. Because of this subcultural slackness, the government, once again, has to step up as savior to black people. When will it end?
I suppose that in the end, it doesn’t matter who is doing the saving as long as kids are saved.
Post-Civil Rights Pessimism
I can’t say that I’m hopeful about blacks turning inward to deal with these issues. With at least two generations of blacks having come of age since the Civil Rights era, re-educating and training people to rely on themselves and clean up their own messes is an insurmountable task. Government, especially the federal government, is perceived to be fixer of all ills. Despite what people say in public, it’s strongly believed behind closed doors.
How does one convey to a entire generation of blacks that they must look to the government to do no more than keep law and order, clean the streets, pick up trash, make sure contracts are honored…that sort of thing? How does one teach people to develop a healthy distrust of government intervention and involvement in their lives when they’ve been weaned on it as if it were a lactating mother?
In a society where the stigma against a big belly and no ring has disappeared like so much vapor, how does one convince young people to stop fornicating and making babies while unmarried? Or to build stable families, when their parents and grandparents weren’t married? Instead of passing down the kind of values that will push their kids to success, they’ve passed down a plethora of pathologies that require them to play catch-up for the rest of their lives.
Mini-Lecture
Family is where it begins and ends, not government programs. Men and women – individuals who make babies with no intentions of getting married – bear a huge portion of the blame. Such negligent and slothful behavior sets up the unfortunate children for a lifetime of deprivation. And I’m not talking about lack of food or lack of clothing. Without a father in the house, children are practically sitting ducks for all kind of ills: criminality, drug use, incarceration, academic underachievement, and on and on. Without a stable, intact family, these children have no nest, so to speak, in which to grow and develop and learn the values that will help them become people who in turn value marriage and education.
Black people have only themselves to blame, not the white man who enslaved their forefathers, not the white sales clerks who look at them “funny†in stores, not Republicans, nor any other white person who lives today or who has ever lived.
I focus so much on family instability because I believe it is the most pressing issue facing black Americans today. Almost every racial disparity is linked to it in some way. It is the height of hypocrisy for black people to demand anything from anybody when they don’t give their own children what they need.
Addendum: Typos? I’ll correct them this afternoon. Gotta jet…
Update (1:03 p.m.): A commenter writes:
“I came across your blog a few months ago and have become a faithful reader because I finally found someone “like me†who believes as I do. I am a young(31), Christian, black teacher of 1st graders (majority black also), who is in the rare minority of women of my race who are both married and waited until after marriage to have my first child.
“I have very strong views on this topic. I agree that it is sad that blacks want government to do everything for their kids except have the sex for them to conceive them. I’m very fired up, but I’ll try to be brief! On a daily basis, I see kids in my school cursing, talking loud, not prepared with basic school resources such as pencils and homework, and showing a general lack of self worth. I also see many angry parents cussing out staff on a weekly basis. Saying all that, we have 5 parents in our PTO, but we have a school of over 400 kids. Parents, not government, have to make the change; but they don’t want to. We also have a government office in our school because so many of our parents and the community are on assistance. Any hour of the day, I can look outside my classroom door and see young girls, with strollers, going to an appointment.”
