POOR SCORES AND FIFTY YEARS AGO
"Segregation
of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race,
pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children
the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment -- even though the
physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may
be equal."
- Brown v. Board of Education, Argued 1952,
Ruled upon 1954.
by
JUDITH HANEY
USNewsLink/August 4, 2002
No matter where you come down on the subject of
public education and tax payer assisted private education (school vouchers), you have to
admit that the nation is as divided on the issue as it was in 1954. when public schools
were ordered integrated by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.
The plain and simple truth is, within the past
fifty years, Brown v. Board of Education has failed to achieve the parity and equity it
sought for poor and minority children living in urban areas of the United States.
The reason the landmark desegregation ruling
failed to meet its noble objective is because the underlying problem of poverty was not
simultaneously addressed and overcome.
Our democracy cannot achieve integration,
and positive cultural assimilation of its underclass's, without affording those classes a
hand up into the mainstream. In that regard the United States of America, as a great
democratic experiment, has failed and failed miserably.
Presently, throughout the
nation, what white and black parents have in common is that they both have fled from the
schools where an overwhelming number of poor children brought from their homes all of the
baggage that most poor kids bring to school: low verbal skills, discipline problems and
bad attitudes about learning. Many middle class black parents have chosen to send their
children to virtually all white private schools, where they will be isolated from poor
kids and their self described "ghetto" culture.
The biggest problem in urban
schools is not the teachers but the culture that comes with poverty.
The research of Richard
Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation backs up what most teachers know: "On the whole,
high-poverty schools just don't work," Kahlenberg says.
It is much easier for
politicians and education bureaucrats to blame teachers for the differences in performance
between poor kids and middle class kids than to look at the devastating effect poverty has
on success in school.
It is much easier for them to
look at test scores from suburban schools, where property values freeze out the poor, or
private schools, where tuition does the same thing, and declare those schools successful
when, in fact, they may be full of complacent, lazy teachers and administrators making
their reputations off the educational backgrounds of their students' parents.
Bush's stated goal is "to
leave no child behind," but, ironically, that is just what his education plan will
do: leave hordes of the poorest kids isolated in schools that will become hopelessly
dysfunctional, while taking credit for rescuing a few kids here and there by getting them
to better public or, with vouchers, private schools.
Fundamentally the public issue
yet to be resolved in a bi-partisan manner by congress is not test scores, or school
vouchers, but why so many poor children are left behind and how to change public education
so as to avoid it in the future.
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