Devilish Delewarian Dave Huber sends along a fascinating op-ed from a Virginia teacher about the clash between smarts and street smarts in tough schools:
A few weeks ago, I arrived at school to see a police car with flashing lights parked in the driveway. Nearby, two black girls were rolling around on the ground, pummeling each other as a cop tried to pry them apart. One had threatened the other with a knife the night before, and now the girl who had been threatened was getting even with her fists.
Meanwhile, the usual group of 15 to 20 black and Hispanic guys were standing on the public sidewalk smoking and doing their best to affect the hard-core gang-banger thug look...
Taking in the scenes, I couldn't help thinking of Bill Cosby and the controversy he stirred in Washington, D.C., with his recent comments at Constitution Hall during a 50th anniversary celebration of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling...
Cosby was criticized for being too hard on the less fortunate, but let me tell you, the black students in my AP English classes are even harder. To them, the fighting and posturing that morning was nothing but out-and-out "ghetto."
Teacher Patrick Welsh notes that adults have such a hard time getting past their concern that anything and everything is a sign of alienating blacks that they're afraid even to promote Alexandria as a city looking to attract families. Since when is wanting a safe, family-friendly environment attractive only to whites? And if that wasn't depressing enough, Welsh references a book about Philadelphia life that was one of the most depressing books I've ever read:
University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson, author of the book "Code of the Street," told me that the guys who think studying is selling out "are caught up in a street culture that is in opposition to middle-class values, which they see as white. Through their clothes and language and behavior they think they are dissing conventional society."
This book described black students who were virtual prisoners in their homes because never going outside was the only way they could avoid violence for their "selling out" and "acting white." Welsh has seen a similar effect in Virginia, where an agenda driven by those who refuse to value education has affected the state exams as well:
In many ways, [unprepared and unmotivated] kids drive the academic agenda of schools. Take the Virginia Standards of Learning exams. They were initiated as a desperate quick-fix effort to close the gap between low-income minority kids and middle-class kids. The thinking was that if schools like T.C., with a large number of minority students, were labeled as failing, teachers and administrators would suddenly feel pressured to transform these kids into scholars. In fact, the performance of minority students on the SOLs has been so poor that the tests have been made easier to avoid a political uproar over disproportionate numbers of minority students not getting diplomas.
In the national debate over education, it's fashionable and politically safe to blame the schools for poor test scores and self-defeating attitudes. Inner-city schools, the argument goes, don't have as many resources as schools in the more affluent suburbs. But Alexandria has the highest per-pupil expenditure of any school system in the Washington metropolitan area. Since T.C. is the Alexandria's only public high school, every kid is offered the same opportunities.
Emphasis mine. This is not all about the money. And Welsh does see hope for the future:
I've taught long enough to have the children of former students in my classes, and in almost every case, even when I remember the parents as being thoroughly into the street culture, I've found that their children are much more serious about school than the parents were. It's as though the parents eventually learned, even if too late, that being scholarly wasn't the sellout they thought it was and have done everything they could to make sure their children got that message. At least, that's what I think.
I hope it's that, and not that the ones who figured it out in time were the only ones who lived long enough to have kids.
Posted by kswygert at July 6, 2004 05:08 PM