When Will We Learn
Angry Black Lady at Balloon Juice really gets annoyed with the author of a Forbes magazine article, Gene Marks, who presumes to tell poor black kids in Philadelphia how to succeed.
Among his suggestions are to use technology, like the ‘Net and the resources of the schools and public libraries. Maybe Mr. Marks lives in an area where all of these things are available, but at last report the cities are in financial trouble – there are no frills in the schools, and the libraries are shrinking in hours and resources.
Poor people can’t afford Internet access or cable, when they are working to put food on the table and keeping the lights on in the house.
Another point that is lost, is that the largest group of poor children are not black, nor are they found in cities. Rural white children are an extremely under-served segment of the population. When the support programs are gutted, they are ones taking the biggest hit as a group.
Over at Digby’s a basic truth is resurrected: Income inequality policy is the key to education policy. Economic status is the key factor in the success of children in school. This has been known and ignored for decades.
How do you fix the schools? Jobs! How do you fix Social Security? Jobs! How do you fix the economy? Jobs! Anybody else see a pattern developing?
3 comments
One of the things that I learned, teaching at all-black schools both in the inner city and in a rural area, was that as a white guy it was not my place to tell black people how to “fix” their problems. Doing so was condescending and reeked of being “Massah”, and all they’d do would be to puff up and tell me to f*ck off. Turns out that having more melanin does *not* cause your brains to evaporate, and black people are quite aware that they have problems both of culture and of external racism that white people seem unaware of, and when white people come in and make these incredibly condescending prescriptions of nonsense, that’s just another example of that racism — a racism that says that blacks are children and aren’t capable of recognizing and solving their own problems.
FWIW, there *are* real problems in black culture that impair school performance, *beyond* economic restrictions, one of the most important impairment being “thug culture” that’s so popular among many young black men especially (thus why there are twice as many black women in college as there are black men). But the black community knows this. And they’re the ones who are going to have to solve it, because any solution I come up with, as a white guy, is going to be simplistic nonsense with little relationship to the actual reality that black people live every day.
– Badtux the Multicultural Penguin
The only fix I see these days is the one in “the fix is in” … which it certainly seems to be.
Until employing poor people makes the wealthy wealthier in a way that even the wealthy can understand, no one in authority today… R or D after his/her name… will do a damned thing about jobs. This is largely because we no longer live in a democracy. It does not matter to the rich what the poor need, because the rich can always obtain for themselves the best government money can buy.
Hell, I attended segregated elementary schools, then integrated schools is grades 7,8, and 9, then back to a segregated school in Texas for 10, finally back to integrated schools to finish up.
Every group has its own problems, but the Texas ‘football boys’ are every bit as thuggish as anything you will see in a black urban school, with the major difference being, the black schools generally don’t approve of the thugs.
But none of that changes the reality that you can’t really learn science without the labs, or any course without the books. When individual teachers have to supply necessary materials out of their own pockets to meet the minimum requirements to teach a course, the system is broken. And that happens in white suburban schools, not just black schools.
I was on an Equal Employment Opportunity board [my boss ‘volunteered’ me because he didn’t want to be the token Native American] and I spent a significant amount of time explaining to the chairman why his good-hearted attempts to recruit more minority employees were in fact ‘dummy messages’.
The county was under a Federal court order to increase minority hiring because of a history of discrimination that would have been approved of by George Wallace. The problem was that none of the senior people in the county knew anyone of color. They all lived in the suburbs, while the minorities generally lived in the city.
No one was looking for a special deal, they just wanted a chance, and you couldn’t get that through to the people in power. The programs they came up with ‘to remedy the historic pattern’ were designed to make the people in them suspect, which wasn’t solving the basic problem.
Improving the economy, improves tax revenues, which makes improving the schools possible. Money isn’t the total answer, but without it, not much is possible. If you can find money for private ‘comprehensive achievement tests’, there should be money for a school library and up-to-date textbooks.
Like you say, Steve, government by, of, and for the 1% couldn’t give a rat’s ass about jobs.