In the very same month that the United States elected its first African American president, the Children, Youth and Family Consortium, in pulling this symposium together, saw fit to declare that “institutional racism is at the bedrock of [educational] disparities.” There’s a terrific irony here, of course. But of far greater importance than any historically rich juxtaposition is this very sad fact: It’s hard to think of any animating idea less likely to improve American education in general and the achievement of minority and low-income children in particular than dwelling on embedded racism, regardless of how debilitating or overstated it may be. For how many decades have enormous numbers of like-minded educators and activists been making the same exact argument as made by CYFC? For how many decades has just about every issue in American education been funneled through “multicultural” and related prisms? And for how many decades have such preoccupations been party to not nearly enough kids learning how to read, write, and compute adequately? Or more precisely from the obverse, for how many years have many of the most successful schools been those which have concertedly focused, not on racially or ethnically grounded cultures and subcultures, but rather on what might be described as racially and ethnically nondescript, albeit demanding middle-class values? Places like KIPP schools, where teachers and administrators focus much more on whether boys and girls are working hard enough, and for enough hours each day, than on celebrating their various diversities and differences. Places of learning where the explicit aim is not on reinforcing the values and attitudes many children drink from in their homes and neighborhoods, but rather, on explicitly countering and overcoming some of them. Do I believe there is something real called “institutional” or “systemic” racism, and that it can make it disproportionately hard for many people (as the saying frequently used to go) “to get there from here”? Of course I do. My doctoral adviser in the old College of Education 30 years ago, Prof. Sam Popper, was a Parsonian, meaning I’m well versed in how everything is connected to everything else. For example, in the case at hand, it’s absurd to believe that centuries of slavery and Jim Crow no longer matter; that all of their old-time poisons have drained away. As a society, we’re infinitely fairer and better than we were, but I have no hesitation in acknowledging how rotten effects of a sometimes deplorable history can linger. But having said that, a pivotal and exceedingly practical question needs to be asked: How might educators translate belief in the supposedly crippling power of current-day racism into actual and everyday educational improvements? Short of fundamentally remaking American society in their preferred shape, and doing so pronto, how do men and women who embrace this view propose to significantly reduce achievement gaps? Bluntly put, making educational progress contingent on revamping society is futile. Or if you will, assuming that millions of children are unlikely to do well academically unless and until the United States gets its house in supposed order is equally defeatist. So what to do? How to better conceive the very large problem before us? Three quick points, if I might. First, common denominators in successfully educating low-income children are captured in the title of a recent book by journalist David Whitman: Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. The book explores how half-a-dozen unusually successful inner-city high schools across the country build and reinforce “character traits and middle-class values that inner-city adolescents can use to rise out of poverty.” The schools have rigorous academic standards as well as longer school days and academic years, but “key to their success is that they tell students exactly how they are expected to behave – and then supervise student behavior, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance.” The intense, universalistic ethos described here is incongruent, profitably so, with contrary notions of instruction in which institutional racism is thought to be controlling. Or, from another angle, while “No Excuses,” the rallying cry of schools like the celebrated six, can be unrealistic, it’s an infinitely better fight song and spur than suggesting to millions of young people that they’re inescapably and unfairly stunted from the start. Second, while I’m a strong voucher proponent, some partisans have been known to oversell them. Nevertheless, it’s accurate and fair to say this: Statistically controlling for everything that needs to be controlled for, low-income students, perhaps African American boys and girls especially, who attend private high schools are more likely to graduate than their counterparts in public high schools. For confirmation, read Paul Peterson. Not only is he a Harvard political scientist, but he grew up in Montevideo, Minnesota, making both his conclusion and qualifications unassailable. More than a mere policy issue, increasing educational options for low-income families is a moral issue for many people, of whom I’m very much one. And last, it’s frankly absurd to talk about achievement gaps without talking about family fragmentation, which almost certainly is more severe in the United States than anyplace in the industrial world. How could anyone, for instance, not believe that non-marital birth rates of 80 percent and higher in inner cities do not subtract enormously from what schools can generally accomplish? A profound example of the lengths to which many educators and others routinely go in evading this elemental fact of life is Richard Rothstein’s well-received book, Class and Schools. In many ways it’s a brilliant and persuasive argument about how cultural and social impediments, starting with poverty, can make it hard for poor children to keep up academically with middle-class children. But by some contortion, Rothstein hardly ever acknowledges how maybe, just maybe out-of-wedlock births and divorce contribute to poverty. Blind spots like this – or, more correctly, stubbornly averted eyes – have substantially more to do with educational failure than allegedly locked-in American racism. Mitch Pearlstein, Ph.D., is founder and president of Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis. His newest book is Riding into the Sunrise: Al Quie and a Life of Faith, Service & Civility.
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