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9486 in the collection
Murder City
Ohanian Comment: NOTE: Peter wasn't commenting on THIS article, but he could have been. Detroit is the shame of our nation. Travel the streets of Detroit and you won't believe you are still in the USA. Talk to someone like Rich Gibson, who knows Detroit intimately, and he will tell you that we can't call on parents o "get involved." In Rich's words, "Parents are just gone. Grandparents you can find, but they are exhausted and demolished people." In this context, "parents who prize education" is worse than empty rhetoric.
Comment by Peter Campbell
"Poverty Is No Excuse" Is No Excuse
http://transformeducation.blogspot.com/2006/06/poverty-is-no-excuse-is-no-excuse.html
"THE PROBLEM" with education is not really education. It's social and economic injustice, largely manifested as poverty, segregation, racism, and classism. As my post on McWhorter shows, there are a large number of blacks entering the middle class who are now turning their backs on low-income blacks in ways that are savage and disturbing. It shows the extent to which money, power, and privilege can be horribly corrupting forces.
"THE PROBLEM" with education is symptomatic -- literally -- of the disease of social and economic injustice. But the climate in this country is overtly hostile to this idea. It's very easy to see why: social and economic injustice gets distorted into the conversation called "Poverty Is No Excuse." It then gets further distorted by saccharine anecdotes of "the little black kid that could," the kid who -- despite the odds -- managed to graduate suma cum laude from Harvard. If you counted these little bromides up, they'd probably number in the dozens. So there exist in the public discourse on education several dozen uplifting stories about poor kids with crack-addicted mothers that made it. The moral? If they could do it, any person could. The same Horatio Alger story is applied to schools, e.g., KIPP. It goes like this: KIPP schools can take poor black kids, raise their test scores, and get them into elite prep schools. Moral of the story? If they could do it, any school could.
What's wrong with this logic? This is -- IMHO -- the most important argument to make right now RE: "THE PROBLEM" with education.
As I have been trying to argue, successfully or not, the logic behind these feel-good stories is faulty. On the individual level, the logic is faulty because NOT everyone can grow up with a crack-addicted mother and graduate suma cum laude from Harvard. If they could, these kinds of stories would never be told. We don't tell stories about the little kid who drank orange juice and then played baseball. Why not? Because every little kid can drink orange juice and play baseball. This is an UNREMARKABLE story -- a banal, commonplace, everyday event. But the reason we tell stories about poor kids with crack-addicted mothers that make it is because they are so incredibly rare. We say, "Wow! Did you hear that story about the poor kid with the crack-addicted mother that became the president of General Motors??"
Yet, for some extraordinary reason, our brains freeze up when we hear these stories. Somehow, we are simultaneously -- and paradoxically -- aware that (1) this is very rare and yet (2) if he could do it, anyone can. This makes absolutely zero sense logically. But we are inherently sentimental beasts, we Americans. So we eat this shit up because we are addicted to stories of inspiration. All we really want to do is feel good. Believing that this extraordinarily remarkable event is somehow reproducible may not make sense logically, but it makes us feel good to think that it might be possible. But feeling good is not the foundation on which public policy should be placed.
The same exact logic applies to "the little KIPP school that could." We see the story and say, "Wow! These black kids can do it. That must mean that every school and every poor black kid can do it!" But what does "do it" mean? In most cases of these feel-good stories, "do it" means higher test scores. In other words, the school is successful because it has raised test scores. This is the evidence that is presented as proof that it is successful. But higher test scores certainly does NOT mean better-educated kids. The Center on Education Policy released a report showing that non-tested subjects like art, music, and social studies are not being taught any more so schools -- including the little schools that could -- can focus exclusively on the subjects that are tested, i.e., reading and math. Translation? "Successful" schools are turning into test-prep factories.
KIPP counters this by showing that they offer a broad range of subjects -- including art, music, social studies -- and that their students are given opportunities to sing in the choir, play in the orchestra, etc. One would certainly expect that if kids spend from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. during the week, four hours on Saturdays, and a month during the summer that they would be able to be exposed to a broad range of subjects. KIPP students put in roughly 70% more time in class than typical public school students.
So we say, "Hurray! Every school should be like KIPP!"
But as I've argued again and again, KIPP can't scale. Right now, there are 45 KIPP schools with 400 teachers serving over 9,000 students in 15 states and the District of Columbia. 9,000 students out of the total population of 54,593,000 students in all of public K-12 schools means that KIPP serves 0.00016486% of the population. And yet, 0.00016486% of students makes us stand up and say, "This should work for the remaining 99.999835% of students!"
The average KIPP teacher is in his/her early 20's, is single, and has no kids. They are clearly very dedicated young people who are not only willing to work longer hours and on Saturdays, but who are ABLE to work longer hours and on Saturdays. Teachers with families simply can't do this. They have to go home, fix dinner, do the dishes, walk the dog, and help with their kids' homework.
Moreover, the "success" of KIPP is tarnished when you consider where the students come from. Interviews with KIPP teachers indicate that they refer mostly already high-achieving students to KIPP who come from intact families and whose parents are unusually involved in the school (Carnoy, M., Jacobsen, R., Mishel, L., & Rothstein, R. (2005). The charter school dust-up: Examining evidence on enrollment and achievement. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute and New York: Teachers College Press., p. 58).
So again - a TOTALLY remarkable, unique, unreproducible model is held up as the hope for all.
To achieve the tipping point, we have to trash the logic that underlies the "Poverty Is No Excuse" crap. Certainly some kids can pull themselves up out of the inner-city despite the tremendous odds. Certainly some great schools have formed and will continue to form in poor neighborhoods and attract motivated teachers, students, and parents to work together to improve the educational outcomes of poor kids. KIPP is a good example of this. But the dozens of examples of personal success pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of personal failures. The 45 KIPP schools make up a tiny fraction of the thousands and thousands of schools where children are ground up and spat out. So why do so many poor kids fail? Why are so many poor children chewed up and spat out?
Clearly, kids can't wait for us adults to figure things out. We obviously need to craft both short and long-term stategies. TFA, KIPP, etc. are short-term strategies. We have to get at the source of the problem if we are serious about leaving no child behind.
Murder City
By Henry Payne
Detroit
This past summer, comedian Bill Cosby came to Motor City and invited 700 men to an east side church. His aim? To combat violent crime by encouraging more parental involvement. "We've got to get these parents to get fired up," he told a reporter afterward.
Last month, Congressional Quarterly released a report detailing the central problem Mr. Cosby is trying to address: violence. Detroit isn't just another violent city. According to the CQ report, which analyzed statistics compiled by the FBI, it is now America's most dangerous city. Its murder rate of 47 per 100,000 residents is well above Chicago and New York.
[Bill Cosby]
It is little wonder then that Mr. Cosby is making Detroit a centerpiece of his national campaign against black crime.
Detroit is 81% black and, according to the Census Bureau, one-third of its residents live below the poverty line. The nuclear family is all but nonexistent in the city. In 1960, 25% of black residents were born to single mothers. By 1980, that number had climbed to 48%. Today, over 80% of Detroit's black children are born to single-parent households. Just one in nine black boys is raised with a father.
According to academic research, over 50% of black men in Detroit are high-school dropouts. In 2004, 72% of those dropouts were jobless. By their mid-30s, 60% have done prison time. Among black dropouts in their late 20s, according to a University of California, Berkeley, study, more are in prison (34%) than are working (30%).
Some have said that Detroit is in the throes of committing cultural suicide. It may be more accurate to call it a cultural homicide. One murder victim this year was 34-year-old Lakeisha White. She was eight-months pregnant with a baby boy, and the mother of two other children, when she was gunned down. Brian Carter, just 16, was shot and killed earlier this year while standing on a street corner. Another victim, a 49-year-old man, was walking his four-year-old nephew to a neighborhood pharmacy when a bullet found and killed him.
Notwithstanding the crime, city officials responded to CQ's report by attacking it. "The city is as safe as any other major American city," Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick declared through a spokesman. Police Chief Ella M. Bully-Cummings, whose four-year tenure has coincided with a 15% rise in homicides, said CQ had a "skewed methodology" that forced Detroit to come out on top of nearly 400 cities studied nationwide with populations over 75,000.
It's true that there is a bright spot on Detroit's landscape -- a newly restored downtown. With the help of nearly $15 billion in public and private development funds, downtown Detroit has become a one-square-mile wonder.
Today, there are jobs to be had in the riverfront core of the city. Quicken Loans has established its headquarters there, along with 4,000 jobs. General Motors and Compuware as well as three casinos and two professional sports teams have all moved in. The streets are stirring with people, small shops and restaurants.
Crime in the downtown area is down by 33% since 2001 -- thanks, a Wayne State University study found, to the "vigilance of law enforcement agencies," which along with private security guards, have about 2,000 people patrolling streets near the renovated squares and graffiti-scrubbed buildings.
Of course, outside of downtown there are the other 138 square miles of the city. There it's a different story. The city's population peaked in the 1950s, after decades of multiethnic urban migration. At the time crime rates were stable, even in a blue-collar city rife with racial tension. That changed with the social welfare policies of the 1960s. Detroit erupted into riot in 1967, and in the years that followed violence never abated. In 1966 the murder rate stood at 13 per 100,000 residents. By 1976 it had climbed to 51 per 100,000 residents and has hovered there since.
Downtown is an island in a city with one of the lowest median incomes ($29,000) in America. The city's middle class -- black and white -- has vanished. Downtown Detroit brings in 74,000 middle-class workers every day, but only 6,500 people actually live there. The workers have little reason to stay. Detroit public schools are the worst in the state, and local politicians oppose school choice, even turning down a $250 million gift from education philanthropist Robert Thompson, who in 2003 wanted to fund new charter schools.
The one-two punch of family disintegration and middle-class flight has left Detroit unable to address its problems. New York tackled crime in the 1990s because voters, many of them middle class, elected Rudy Giuliani and other leaders to combat crime and reform the city's police force. Homicide fell, to six per 100,000 residents from 30 per 100,000. Likewise, in Southfield, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, middle-class blacks are a majority of the population and display little tolerance for unsafe streets. The murder rate there is 1.3 per 100,000 residents.
In contrast, Detroit's city council is elected at large, so neighborhoods have no direct representation and therefore little ability to force change through the ballot box. The one exception is downtown, where business coalitions form a powerful constituency that can affect change other neighborhoods cannot.
Ultimately, Detroit's future may depend on whether Bill Cosby is right in saying that we need to get parents fired up. To Detroit's west is Dearborn, Mich., a city with a population that's 30% minority Arab. Here children -- many of whom are first generation immigrants who can't speak English -- are raised in a vibrant culture where family is paramount and education prized.
Last year, Dearborn's population of 100,000 suffered just two murders.
Mr. Payne is a writer and editorial cartoonist for The Detroit News.
— Henry Payne with comment by Peter Campbell
Wall Street Journal
2007-12-08
http://transformeducation.blogspot.com/2006/06/poverty-is-no-excuse-is-no-excuse.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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