Young African-American Boys Are In Crisis - And Nation Is Silent
Dr. James A. Williams is on a mission. “We have a crisis in this country,” he says, “and no one is talking sense about it.” Williams is not a rebel. He is the superintendent of the Buffalo Public School System. But, he says, “We’re all part of the problem. There’s too much business as usual, too much bureaucracy and not enough action.” The crisis? Young American men who are African American and born into poor and working class households. These young boys are not making it. According to figures developed by the Schott Foundation, in an economy that requires more and more education, only 42 percent who enter ninth grade graduate from high school. The old blue-collar jobs that used to provide a family income, secure employment, health care and pensions are disappearing.
These are children increasingly raised by a single parent. Too often they are starved from the start — of adequate nutrition, adequate health care, adequate learning stimulants that are vital for young minds. They go to overcrowded schools stocked with inexperienced teachers. In school, they face discrimination in discipline and in being slated for special-ed courses. They are underrepresented in advanced-placement courses that are key for college. Some will overcome these odds and make it out. Most will not. They are headed toward jail, not toward Yale.
Williams argues we have to change what we’re doing if we want to offer them any hope. The schools — even the schools that he leads — are failing them. “Their No. 1 problem,” he says, “is that they cannot read. If you can’t read, you cannot succeed.”
Congress is gearing up for the debate about the No Child Left Behind Act. The debate is virtually irrelevant. The act mandates testing that inadequately measures school performance. But measuring failure doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a reform plan to fix what isn’t working.
For Williams, any plan like that requires reforms that simply aren’t on the table. “Look at our school year,” he says. “We’ve got a school year that is still based on an 18th century agrarian model. In 1962, I went to school for 180 days per year, and algebra was the requirement for getting into college. Today, these kids go to school for 180 days per year, but we require calculus to get into school. We add more and more units, but not more and more time.” So schools cut art, music, physical education.
Worse, Williams says, we’ve got a school day that doesn’t make much sense. Between lunch and breaks between classes, we have one of the shortest school days of effective learning in the industrial world.
We need longer school years and far better teachers, and teacher education. We need less discrimination in spending, in discipline, in advanced placement. Some of this costs money. But, Williams says, we’re not spending the money we currently have well. For example, our broken health-care system is killing school budgets. Health-care costs are going up 10 to 15 percent a year, far outstripping normal increases in public funding.
My own sense is that we can’t simply load the blame on the schools. These kids face long odds from day one. In the crucial early years — from the time of conception to age 3 — when the mind is largely forged, they are shackled. One in five children is raised in poverty in this rich country, with no systematic program to ensure prenatal care, health care, day care, parental education. We’ve got too many babies raising babies who don’t have the resources or the knowledge of how to take care of their children. We should be mobilizing intervention on the front side of these lives. Instead, we spend more on police, crime and prisons on the back end.
This is a national crisis — a tragedy of terrible and costly consequence, in lost hope, lost lives, a lost sense of our own decency. And yet virtually no one is talking about it. To his credit, John Edwards has used his presidential campaign to call attention to the working poor in America. But generally, candidates are told to focus on the middle class that votes, not the plight of poor young boys who don’t. We hear a lot more about rescuing middle class homeowners in bad mortgages than we will about giving poor inner-city children a fair start. Congress is more concerned about retaining the tax breaks for the middle class than about extending the child tax credit to the children of working poor people. Williams says it is time for an end to the silence. This country desperately needs to heed his call.
© Copyright 2007 Sun-Times News Group
Reverend Jackson,
While I appreciate your passion and your agenda, please be notified that the entire country is in crisis and the energy of leadership would be better spent addressing the large enchilada. The national situation for black youth, black people, all people, schools, jobs, police state, prisons, economics, health care, infra structure, etc., etc., etc. cannot be addressed in isolation. These problems are all relative to the road we’ve chosen to follow behind the great decider, although, they are all, as well, deeply embedded in the national consciousness of fear and economic inequality, which did not just rear its ugly head 6 years ago.
Thank you.
Jesse:
I was surprised at that 42% figure - I had no idea that graduation rates were so low. Tinkering with the length of the school year, the amount of time spent per day in class, and so on, cannot solve such a monumental, systemic problem, in my opinion. A seismic shift is needed. Their classrooms are crowded, the student/teacher ratio would be considered unworkable in this country, and so on, but Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, etc. kids kick butt when its time to take tests and they do well in the work force as professors, doctors, scientists, etc. It’s all about culture. May I humbly suggest that you take up the study of the Buddha Dharma and start injecting some of the teachings of the Buddha into your inspirational talks? If centuries of Christian teachings has led to a 42% graduation rate, it’s time for a meaningful shift in African-American culture. Look to the culture of discipline, not to the culture of belief. And that goes for the rest of the U.S. as well. European-Americans are falling behind as well, getting their clocks cleaned by Asians. Our loosey-goosey culture requires an influx of discipline. No country is stronger than its weakest link, and if one of our demographic groups is graduating at a dismal rate, we’re all in trouble. If African-Americans and European-Americans are to avoid a pitiful future, they need to become more familiar with the Buddha Dharma. It is the driving force behind the academic and professional success of the Asians in this country - the Asians are so Buddhist that most of them don’t even know it, like fish unaware of the water. You are a leader, reverend. In ten years, you could turn African-American boys into disciplined, highly successful and very happy young men. Do you have the courage to look for wisdom outside of the Bible? For the sake of all of us, I certainly hope that you do. Do it for the kids - they deserve far better than what they’ve got so far. And you would look great wearing the robes of a Zen priest!
I think Rev. Jackson says some valuable things. And like him I think the overall solutions are solving poverty, maximizing education for all, providing a minimum standard of health care for all and bringing back the living wage job.
Still the playing field is tilted in a way that the poorest of the poor, often blacks and women, are the most severely disadvantaged.
I work in a medium KS community and I do worry about black and hispanic boys and girls as well as the poor white kids. Racism is an argument over who takes last is a society but it is real and profound.
I worry about a counter-culture where little is expected and little is given in relationships. By that I mean girls _expecting_ that they will have sex before marriage and a baby without marriage. Guys buying in to it, too, and little children implicitly understanding that “daddy” is a guy of changeable identity. While I am not insisting that marriage is the only way to raise children, it provides (when the parents have decent job prospects and can bring a benefit package to the household) an infrastructure of security for a family.
My little state has proudly okayed a gambling bill at the state level. This amounts to more service industry jobs of minimal pay and no bennies. People at the top make the money; people at the bottom barely survive. When you get too old or too sick to stand a job that involves repetitive actions, physical stress there’s not any safety net for you. Your life just gets more uncertain.
Ultimately, Rev. Jackson is correct to worry about the young blacks and while government social programs provided are probably necessary they are not sufficient. I sense that some leadership will need to come from black communities themselves and in the speeches of Jackson, Bill Cosby and Juan Williams the black community strives to figure out what that should look like.
Since my state is mostly white, I see some of the same issues being acted out among poor whites. A failure to become educated, poor baseline medical and dental health care, minimum wage service jobs that are physically difficult and mentally dulling (ie fast food, housekeeping services, wait staff jobs, Big box stores) and have no real benefit packages. Often I see white women with several children (3ish) with 1 to 3 different fathers and she’s raising them alone or with a guy that is not the kids’ father. The mothers and their partners had personally difficult times is school and unlike those of us who arose from lesser circumstances through education, they do not have a similar hope or expectation. They may be mostly illiterate and unsure how to start their child reading. They may be working two jobs and just find it hard to spend any time sitting on a couch with their little one to learn to read.
You don’t hear _any_ talk about whites wanting to help these poor white, though.
It is hard to completely sell all parents and children on what education can do for them. Multi-causal problems require multi-pronged solutions.
I think reparations would at the very least go a long way towards solving this crisis. Tavis Smiley said not long ago something to the effect of “If you make Black America better you make America better.”
Imo, reparations are not only a moral imperative which in the long run and if done properly would greatly heal America’s racial wounds, they are also an investment in Her own people.
It’s about more than just “discipline” or having everyone convert to Buddhism or some other religion. While many of the problems facing the black community are from within, many are also external. Jim Crow and slavery aren’t exactly ancient history. We need to deal with that history first.
No Child Left Behind is a ploy to do the OPPOSITE of
“Allocate educational resources where they are needed”
They reframe the argument as:
“Reward schools for their performance”
Which effectively means that schools who need to give more to their students are given less. Somehow, I suppose that the extra funding which goes to the high-testing schools will “trickle-down” to the low-testing schools.
That is like saying: “We need to give money to rich people, because they know how to ‘make more money’”
America has most of it’s citizens on a futile treadmill of educate, to work, to spend, to borrow, to work, to spend etc. Most of us don’t really bother to question wether the whole system is flawed beyond repair.
African-american boys CORRECTLY percieve that their is only a tiny space at the back of the treadmill reserved for them and that only the most committed, resiliant and self-denying of them will ever be allowed to take a place in the middle much less up front. One quick look at the state of their schools proves them right.
What the rest of us don’t understand is that our corporate masters have every intention of throwing the rest of us off the treadmill and into the street should we fail to provide them with sufficient profit.
There are homeless veterans and homeless people with masters degrees. Our health care system is a joke and our colleges are packed with adults trying to find career paths that don’t involve jobs that can be shipped to india.
Our planet is overheating and white suburban america is still driving every kid to school in his/her own mommy-driven SUV.
Maybe we need to rethink the whole system and fit the economy to what HUMANS need rather than try to cram these boys onto the economic treadmill that is already overcrowded, spewing toxins, a health hazard and requires regular doses of Prozac to endure.
Shouldn’t we wonder about an educational system that provides verbally-challenged George Bush as president and walking heart-attack Dick Cheney as VP? That was the best our universities could provide us?
If the economic winners of America require Paxil, Viagra, and Ambien to survive thier lives image the toll on the losers. Let’s rethink the whole system. I think those boys may be right to step off the treadmill; let’s give them something better to step up to.
True pangolin, and too much school kills ones love of learning.
School funding is based on the property taxes collected in that particular district, in all 50 states. Until this changes the systemic class warfare entrenched in our government and businesses will continue. The education system favors the upper middle class and the upper class. So long as racism is used as the basis of this set up, the people most affected by this atrocity will continue to remain divided. This will allow the continuation of the upper classes successful class war against the poor. The war on poverty started by Nixon is really a war on the poor and uneducated. If a large group of people remains uneducated they can controlled easier. WAKE UP AMERICA.