Urban Parental Disinterest May Cause Our Children's Educational Destruction

Twenty three years ago, as officers in the Detroit Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists we began to craft a way to start building a farm team of young minority journalists. But we noticed something very alarming as we worked to create the weekend journalism workshop series for those students.

What we encountered was the fact that far too many young minority minds were only receiving a marginal education. Many of the young minds we were seeking to enhance were instead barely performing at a reading or writing composition level one or two grade levels below their current grade.

Now, twenty-three years later what was a small storm front facing young black students in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Philadelphia and too many others is a full term hurricane decimating their future.. We are heading backward with far more deadly results than even the Ku Klux Klan, the white Aryan

Race separatists and the neo-Nazis could have imagined if they had, had a hand in it. But they have not.

We have unleashed that weapon on ourselves. We have learned to not care, to not be involved and to look the other way.

I have to wonder, just when is the right time to speak up about hundreds of thousands of our young people who are growing up in school systems that have walked away from their responsibility to educate. When is it the right time to come correct to save our children from being permanently trapped behind a wall of educational enslavement?

When is it permissible to say that for twenty years or more, many urban educational systems headed by blacks, are still pointing fingers at the white man as the reason why our children, will not only not graduate, but will forever be trapped on a plantation of low expectations, and even lower self esteem?

We have been looking the other way for too long. We have been pretending that we were going forward as a people and we really are going in reverse.

Sure, some of our children will make it out. There are the parents who care, even if only one parent is the head of the household. Sure there are exceptions to the rule, because one parent or two children or three teachers or four schools expected more of each other, and understood that their children's future, their student's future, the survival of the race, was more important than trying to find blame.

Right about now we better be sending our own wake up call to ourselves or we are in danger of becoming extinct.

For instance, Detroit has a public educational system that would have shamed Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. What would this change agent for equal educational opportunity say today, fifty plus years after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down segregation and open up full educational opportunity?

Fifty years later, we have begun to stop caring. Fifty years later we have worked ourselves into our own demise, and we can't point fingers at anyone but ourselves.

Do we wake up in mid-March when parents begin to decide where their children will attend school the next school year? If you are a Detroiter and you are one of the unlucky 10,600 students who will be displaced because you attended one of 34 schools that will shut down, do you begin to care now?

What about in April, as students and parents begin to make crucial decisions on where the next step of educational matriculation will occur. But wait it may not include the 33,000 students who left the Detroit Public School system from 1999 to 2003, or the 9,500 who left just this year. With a graduation rate of 45 percent in Detroit alone and far too low graduation rates in other urban cities around the country, we can't afford to wait.

Our children are being lynched, and many of their parents have walked away from their responsibility to care. Our school leaders who run the system and who are more concerned about providing income for the system than providing educational options for our children have built the platform for their demise, and our own people who live in our neighborhoods have helped supply the rope, because we've become too busy to care. We have become too busy to spare a few minutes a month or even a weekend a year for a child.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to mobilize even if it is only on your block.

Now is the time for our communities to raise up a new generation of civil rights giants who were the grandmother or aunt who volunteered at the school, or the church deacon or block club leader who pooled their club's money to buy books for the school.

We have to stop making excuses and start making action. We control our children's freedom. We control our children's achievement. We control our children's destiny. If black people can rise from slavery as a race we can certainly use the best weapon out: our own drive to insure educational freedom for all of our children.

Right now. Today make a decision to march for your children's future. Look in your child's eyes, your grandchild's eyes, your younger brother and sister's eyes, or your neighbor's children's eyes and let them know you will stand for them. Let them know that the talking is over, the excuses are over, the pointing fingers and "blame game" is over.

Tell them "I will not allow you to fail and mean it. Hanging out on the neighborhood street corner in June is not an option. Jail is not an option. Death by drugs and crime again is not an option.

In May, we must march for our children's future. The place: every neighborhood and every school in our urban cities. The goal: the guarantee of our children's future. Rev. King's Dream cannot die because of lack of interest. Our children are counting on us caring. Their faith must become our action.

Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. View NuPac on the web at www.nupac.info. Kevin Fobbs is also Outreach Communications Vice Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and daily host of The Kevin Fobbs Show on News Talk WDTK - 1400 AM in Detroit as well as co-founder of the Jackson, MI-based American Conservative Values Television Network. Listen to The Kevin Fobbs Show at www.wdtkam.com.

Absolutely a serious problem - speaking as a literary volunteer at our local schools. Breaks my heart when a child tells me that no one at home will listen to him read.

um. what is the point of having CableOne and the internet in every classroom, when Little Jane and Johnnie cannot read?

the OLD ways worked.
Let us go back to them.

I used to live in an area with a heavily Jewish demographic, a quite wealthy area. When there was an event night at the school, there were more parents than kids crowded into the classroom. There would be nowhere to sit. The parents all would have videocameras and not only Mom and Dads were there, but Grandmas and Grandpas.

A few years later my son attended a school in a minority area for a year. I went in for parents night, and I was the ONLY parent in the entire classroom. The teachers practically swooned over me, they were so happy to see me.

I'd never seen anything like it.

After a few months I got to know the teachers - they confided in me they had no hope for their students to have successful lives. One privately told me she was sure the majority of students in the class would be dead or in jail by the time they were 20. The teachers seemed like they were struggling against the inevitable.

The government schools are accomplishing precisely what they were always INTENDED to accomplish: produce a huge population of passive, insecure wage-slaves--passive and insecure because reading is at best a chore, and they have no clue how to learn for themselves. School--all school, public and private--is the biggest, most expensive, and most destructive hoax in human history. School is more destructive than the Nazi death camps and the Soviet Gulag combined. Nobody was ever hoodwinked into believing that a death camp was a Good Thing. Nobody ever chose a neighborhood because "the Gulag around here is excellent." More souls have been destroyed by the hoax of "school" than in Auschwitz, et al. combined.

Now. Now is the time to say it. Now is the time to do something about it.

When is it permissible to say that for twenty years or more, many urban educational systems headed by blacks, are still pointing fingers at the white man as the reason why our children, will not only not graduate, but will forever be trapped on a plantation of low expectations, and even lower self esteem?

Most government paid administrators and teachers are saying that it's because parents aren't teaching their children well enough. But teachers are supposed to be effectively teaching the kids. Fiction books about boys who burn down restaurants to save the ground owls is not good teaching. Women's studies classes under other names for 11 to 15-year-old girls is not good teaching. Bits and pieces of the MMPI in school assignments are not good teaching materials.

Public education teachers say that parents aren't attending enough night events in the schools. That's beside the point and has nothing to do with the problem. And with the femininst/romanticist/corporate policy of making all men and women work full time, parents won't attend those night events anyway.

Parents, if your children are not in private schools, tighten your belts. And homeschool them. Take your kids away from the clutches of social engineers. Let teachers compete on the free market and earn pay that's commensurate with their real merits.

Bill Cosby recently said a very profound thing that indicates he knows the root cause of the problems of black people in this country better than most. He said something like "You all should be asking what Jesus would say about our failure, not what Martin Luther King would say." Until black people quit invoking the ghost of MLKing and feeding off the mythology about what the man would have thought about this, that, or the other issue, they will never be free to make a decision or pursue an action to attempt to correct their intractable problems. Besides, MLKing is not the model to follow; Jesus is!

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