The Shame of America

It is sad enough to consider many of America's inner cities as pockets of poverty, one-parent or no-parent families, unemployment and crime. But what is worse is the gap of how well (or rather how poorly) kids from kindergarten through high school are educated.

"For many years, economically disadvantaged and minority students have been scoring lower than their white peers in terms of academic achievement. Closing this achievement gap has been a long-standing concern of parents, educators and policymakers" (Zhang and Cowen 2009 p. 24). The Bush Administration had Congress pass the "No Child Left Behind Act. But, it really has not done what sponsors had hoped it would do. The Act rewards schools whose students get higher test scores than before. But, test scores do not mean children actually learn. It only means they memorize for a brief period. The effort failed, and basically, here is one reason for that failure: "Failing schools had significantly larger proportions of minority students and larger proportions of minority population in their residing neighborhoods, indicating the recognized achievement gap between minority students and their white peers" (Zhang and Cowen 2009 p. 28). There it is in black and white (and brown)! Minority children's schools are failing them.

The problem of schools failing kids is most evident in the largest cities- like New York and Los Angeles- where the school populations are mainly minority, and where there is also a language problem. For one thing, African-American students tend to be more cut off from what some educators call "the real world", where there are role models to give them hope. The lack of such hope and no one to spark their interests in getting a good education leads to a higher-than-average drop-out rate: "Recent reports have found that 20 percent of older youth in Los Angeles and New York City are out of school and out of work--well above the national average of 15 percent. This translates to 200,000 disconnected young people in New York and nearly 100,000 in Los Angeles"(Moore 2005 p. 3).

Los Angeles is especially vulnerable to drop-outs and education failing kids because of the many non-English speaking families living there. In one school, beginning nearly ten years ago in South Los Angeles, efforts began to integrate non-English speakers into the community. At first, there were only a few, but now there are hundreds of foreign students who attend as many as 21 English-language classes. They come in ever larger numbers to this South Central Los Angeles school because for years they have been living in a confusing community where most of the population speaks a language they don't understand and where even written signs are just about impossible for them to decipher.

Without exception, per-pupil expenditure on inner city education is a fraction of the money spent on students in nearby suburbs which - again, without exception - refuse to share any of their abundant wealth" (Rutherford 2002 para, 10). In Los Angeles, the wealthy enclaves like Beverly Hills and some of the San Fernando Valley school districts can boast of good attendance and graduation rates because their student bodies are either snow-white or sprinkled with middle-class African-Americans and Latinos who have opted out of inner city schools for their children's sake. What does result in? 77 percent of Los Angeles' public school students are lower income.

It is easy to blame the problems on budgets, on politics, even on racism and neglect, and perhaps even on teachers with little patience or no understanding of inner city kids. But rather than generalities, here is one very specific deprivation: books and libraries. "Young children in impoverished sections of our cities need wide-open windows to the world of infinite variety beyond the walls that our society has built around their lives, and there are not too many windows quite so wide as those provided by spectacular resources in a well-endowed school library (Kozol 2000 p. 46). But, one can easily find teachers in South and East L A who claim that even if they had a decent library, some of their children cannot read English proficiently enough to borrow books.

Frustration shows in Los Angeles: "'I'm sick and tired of being 'sick and tired,' said Alberto Retana, an inner-city Los Angeles community organizer. He called the urban dropout problem a 'loud and disastrous social dynamic' that primarily is "about class and about race.' (Dervarics 2007 para. 3). Mr. Retana decided he had a mission and so he organized Los Angeles students and parents to push for more rigorous courses. For example, it seems self-defeating for a good education when in some high-poverty schools there were far more courses in cosmetology than chemistry.

Sad to say, classrooms became almost nothing more than warehouses for children until they become old enough to work or merely drop out of school. Without finger-pointing, what is happening is that the wealthy have moved to the suburbs or returned to middle-class enclaves ion metropolitan areas, opened charter and private schools, and drained the vast supply of good teachers- and money- from so-called "ordinary" schools serving mostly the underprivileged. And, yes, the facts are clear: inner city kids get lower quality teaching: "Nationwide, high- minority and low-income schools have twice the rate of inexperienced teachers as low-minority and high-income schools" (Rivera 2007 p. B3). This means the children most at risk of academic failure get the least amount of support.

With no support comes lack of interest in attending school. No wonder. If the pupils cannot understand English and all too few ESL classes are offered, if poor teachers are assigned to schools in high-crime or poverty areas, no wonder education is failing the students. Not just education, but the community and society as a whole.

There is no doubt that educators and politicians alike are aware of the problem. But there is an old saying- the squeaky wheel gets the oil first. And inner city schools have few spokesmen and little clout with the politicians who control the budgets. One has to remember that educators really have little input into local political budget talks. They come and talk at public hearings, but for the most part their arguments and their pointing out their needs are ignored or put off for some future session.

Now, in Los Angeles, there is the phenomenon of private so-called "charter" schools. For a price (and occasionally, scholarships for the brightest) parents can now feel "safe" that their children are getting a better education with stimulating teachers and well-appointed classrooms with the latest IT technology, which public schools cannot hope to match. The rich may not get richer these days, but their children surely get a better education than Latinos and African-American students do.

The current economic crisis with cities and states in debt will not provide help to inner city schools any time soon. Budgets are causing teacher layoffs, increasing class sizes, and even closing some schools. And you can bet this is not affecting the middle- and upper-class communities nearly as much as inner cities.

References:

Dervarics, C. (2007): "High School Dropout Problem

'About Class and Race,' Says Summit Participant"

Retrieved April 30, 2009 on

www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_7317.shtml

Kozol, J. (2000): "An Unequal Education. (inner-city school

libraries under- funded) School Library Journal,

May 2000 v46 i5

Moore, A. (2005): "New York and Los Angeles take steps to reconnect

with disconnected youth" Nation's Cities Weekly,

April 25, 2005 v28 i17 p3(1)

Rivera, C. ( 2007): "Better Teachers, but Still Too Few;

More classes in the state are being taught by

qualified instructors, but inner-city schools continue

to lag" Los Angeles TimesApril 12, 2007

Rutherford, E. (2002): "Black children still victimized by

'Savage Inequalities'" The Black Commentator

Oct. 3, 2002

Zhang, H., and Cowen, D. J. (2009): "Mapping Academic

Achievement and Public School Choice Under the

No Child Left Behind Legislation" Chapel HillNC:

Southeastern GeographerMay 2009. Vol. 49, Iss. 1