Kids the country over are going back to school.
Except here in St. Louis.
Black citizens have called for a back to school walk out in order to protest a series of drastic measures taken to reduce bureaucracy by a reform school board. This conflict has captured the headlines at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Riverfront Times for sometime now. Given that the first parents meeting at my son and daughter's charter school only had around ten black parents out of fifty (the school is majority black or close to it), I thought it'd be helpful for me to get the cobwebs out of my head by getting some of my thoughts on schooling down on paper so to speak.
* No one is talking about pedagogy.
Here in St. Louis the problem is bureaucracy first and foremost. Too many schools, too many broke down teachers, too many fatcat staff members. The solution? Get rid of them. For someone like John Ogbu (who made the argument that the reason black kids weren't performing was because they equated academic success with acting white) the problem was oppositional culture. The solution here? Civilize the kids.
The central problem to me is that the kids aren't being taught the types of life lessons that make them good independent citizens. Because school doesn't teach them how to take over the world they tune out. Men more than women, non-white kids more than whites. The pedagogical issue isn't brought up, unless we're talking about corporations bringing it up to address their worker shortage. All the talk about bureaucracy and parents and black culture misses the point.
*Radical and Conservative solutions are required.
The pedagogical changes I call for won't take place over night. People have to organize for them, and call for them, but this is a long term goal. In the short term we must engage in incremental change, and use self-help tactics designed to give our kids the prerequisite skills until we don't need to anymore. Kids aren't succeeding at math? Create math after-school programs. Kids not doing well in reading? Have comic book reading day, to get kids interested. These are stopgap measures, but measures that must be employed until the revolution comes.
*Black Parents are not to blame
It is ultimately our responsibility to make sure our kids learn, particularly if we understand the forces arrayed against them. But responsibility and blame are not equivalents and should not be treated as such. I refuse, for example, to blame black parents for not coming to the parent teacher meetings at my daughter's school. they SHOULD be there, but our kids aren't underperforming solely because parents aren't there.
*The Long View is difficult given our view of black politics
Hearing that Sharpton is in town made me want to throw up. He helped to plan a march on the city capital today designed to get airplay and to let the mayor know how the "black community" feels. The type of mass spectacle that attracts him like flies to shit does not lend itself to the type of political organizing that can transform communities and schools. It gets people excited, and riled up no doubt. But it leads to JUST ENOUGH energy that Sharpton and his folks can use it to get kickbacks in the name of "the community."
Posted by at September 8, 2003 09:32 PM | TrackBackI send my daughter and son to a Charter School. Has its own problems though (no mechanisms of real accountability except market-inspired ones--"if you don't like it pull your kid out"). Bush's Leave No Kids Behind Act is problematic for two reasons--it is too focused on tests (but this is hard to get around), and it is largely unfunded. Schools need the money to pay the teachers and get the equipment necessary to teach the kids. States just don't have the money to do it. And given that other schools will have the right to pick and choose who to accept it's not hard to figure out that creaming is going to be pervasive.
I think vouchers may be workable. Someone has to show me how they'd help communities rather than simply individuals, and then they'd have to show me some statistically significant differences in outcomes.
Posted by: Lester Spence at September 9, 2003 05:17 PMRon Harris's articles in the Sept. 6th and 7th St. Louis Post-Dispatch were interesting and provocative. I was surprised, though, that even he seems to overlook the issues of immigrants in the St. Louis Public Schools today.
In the Sept. 7th article Harris writes "only three of the district's 94 schools - Buder, Oakhill and Warner [sic] elementary schools - are predominantly white." Warner is actually Woerner Elementary.
I don't know enough about Woerner, but I know that Buder and Oak Hill (where my soon-to-be mother-in-law teaches) are both predominantly immigrant, English-as-a-second-language students. Most are from Bosnia, although there are some from Afghanistan and Somalia.
Most of the non-immigrant students at those schools are African-American - so indeed there are no really 'white' schools in the St. Louis Public Schools today. Immigrant issues are easily overlooked in this debate, despite that the Bosnian community is huge in St. Louis.
Incidentally, both Buder and Oak Hill are overcrowded schools.
Posted by: Joe Frank at September 11, 2003 08:36 AM
I support Charter Schools and School Vouchers, because I think that the only solution for Black students. We've tried everthing else, why not try Charter schools.
Posted by: Willis Papillion at September 9, 2003 03:04 PMI think Pres. Bush, 'No Child Left Behind Act", offers some hope to educating black students---for once failing schools, will be penialize and force to do better, or lose their funding. Also, parents now have a choice, and can send their child to another school and/or Charter school/ school vouchers.