Let Our Schools Excel

Forty years after the voters’ rights act, it is arguable that the black American is in a worse place than he was back then. Why is that? Because he/she is constantly being told about the numerous black people who have advanced to higher stations in life, like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and various black executives. I must, however remind the reader of a time-tested adage: The exception proves the rule. The fact that certain people have escaped the poverty inherent to the ghettoes such as Harlem and Compton in the united states means absolutely nothing, under funded schools and cultural differences still work to ensure that the black American will not reach his/her potential in a white man’s world.

A statistic that I was not aware of is that the number of black children born to unwed mothers has actually increased since the voting rights act, which was supposed to liberate blacks from the terrors of the Jim Crow laws all but completely. At the time of the act, the figure was one quarter. Now? The figure is two-thirds.

Children born into this kind of oppression can hardly hope to stop the cycle of poverty and crime that seems all so inherent to the ghetto. For example, at New York City’s Stuyvesant high school, where students gain entrance based on standardized tests, the student body is less than two percent black, in New York City – a city that has far more than a two percent black population.

What’s the solution? We’re far from being able to provide it. It will arise not from affirmative action or handouts; it must be in the public school system. The solution is not throwing money at the public school system, which is the solution favored far and away by the powerful teacher’s union. The solution is accountability.

Bad teachers should be paid less. Good teachers should be paid more. Simple? It should be. It’s the basic principle of capitalism, the good succeed and the bad fail. It seems simple to me that by basing the salaries of teachers directly on the performance of their students, they will have initiative to help them succeed. That’s a good principle in theory though, but past efforts to put such a program into place have been stopped short because of a powerful teachers union that is more concerned for their own well being than that of the children they teach. As well, ways to calculate how their kids are doing are tough. Here’s my idea: bring in independent consultants twice annualy, and have them rate the students based on a rubric. The average of the two independent consultants’ reports will indicate the teachers’ pay. Simple enough? Yes. Quite frankly, it’s something we’ve gotta do.

Unions prevent the application of capitalism to the labor force in every industry where the unions exist.

In airlines, poor performers that meet the bar minimum are rewarded as frequently or almost as frequently as those that work hard. I have an uncle who worked for ages for an airline and he worked hard. The union took their dues, and ensured that the slackers got to keep their jobs at the expense of promotions for the truly motivated.

In schools - teachers just aren't provided with an incentive to achieve results. It is considered crass to apply reality to the acquisition of knowledge. Such a noble profession should be governed by the spiritual reward of teaching young minds, not by the ability of the teacher to actually teach. Crass or not, our education system is in dire need of a reality check. At some point, lowering standards every year just isn't going to work.

"Bad teachers should be paid less. Good teachers should be paid more."

Fine, but that will not solve the problem. If you check on the expenditures per student, you will find that as much money is spent educating the average black student as is spent education the average white student.

"Despite glaring economic inequalities between a few rich suburbs and nearby central cities, the average black child and the average white child now live in school districts that spend almost exactly the same amount per pupil. Black and white schools also have the same average number of teachers per pupil, the same pay scales, and teachers with almost the same amount of formal education and teaching experience. The most important resource difference between black and white schools seems to be that teachers in black schools have lower test scores than teachers in white schools. This is partly because black schools have more black teachers and partly because white teachers in black schools have unusually low scores."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jencks-gap.html

Students of ethnicities other than black also have both bad and good teachers, but they do better academically even when attending the same schools.

Asian students do well enough in so called bad high schools in urban San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles that they are able to go to the University of California at Berkeley.

"the Thernstroms reinforce a well-known, yet vital point: Asian students do better than any others including whites because of resolute family expectations. The Thernstroms say "hard work is a culturally transferable trait."
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/noexcuses/html/r-tst.html

Black students attending school in school systems in which they are a significant part of the student population and where the students come from comfortable middle class families and where expenditures per student are relatively high, still do poorly academically compared to other ethnic groups.

""No matter how you reform schools, it's not going to solve the problem," he said in an interview. "There are two parts of the problem, society and schools on one hand and the black community on the other hand."

Professor Ogbu's latest conclusions are highlighted in a study of blacks in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb whose school district is equally divided between blacks and whites. As in many racially integrated school districts, the black students have lagged behind whites in grade-point averages, test scores and placement in high-level classes. Professor Ogbu was invited by black parents in 1997 to examine the district's 5,000 students to figure out why.

"What amazed me is that these kids who come from homes of doctors and lawyers are not thinking like their parents; they don't know how their parents made it," Professor Ogbu said in an interview. "They are looking at rappers in ghettos as their role models, they are looking at entertainers. The parents work two jobs, three jobs, to give their children everything, but they are not guiding their children."
http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm

"Berkeley High tried to lift urban black and Latino pupils to the level of high-performing Asians and whites. But a sizable divide persists."
http://www.smallschoolsworkshop.org/lat090402jmglionna.html

"As a group, African American students are the worst performing in the nation. They earn the lowest grades and test scores at every level from elementary school through law school. This pattern is not merely confined to those isolated in rural areas or poor inner-city communities. Even in prosperous suburbs such as Fairfax County, Va., Evanston, Ill., and Shaker Heights, Ohio, educators are struggling against a tide of underachievement among black students.

"You see it again, again and again," McWhorter says. "It is not a fluke."

"The stubborn achievement gap separating black and white students is a problem that has baffled educators for years. From the beginning, African American preschoolers score much lower than whites in vocabulary tests, setting a pattern that is evident through graduate and professional school."

http://www.racematters.org/mcwhorter.htm

Discipline. Even the best teacher in the world can't teach if his or her hands are tied when it comes to discipline. Even good kids underachieve when there are no consequences. You may as well take all the unions-bad-teacher talk and put it on the shelf until we stop handling kids as if they're going to break.

When I was in school, if I didn't get the grades, it was my fault. If I got in trouble at school, I was in even more trouble at home. My brother teaches (7th grade) and his only recourse when a student does bad is to send him or her to the office. He recently had a kid stand up in the middle of the class and start screaming obscenities and throwing stuff at another kid. Do you know what the (obviously liberal) counselor does? Lets him play a video game until he's calmed down and then sends him back to class (the all-powerful "timeout"). When my brother complained about this, he was told that the school didn't want the parents coming in and causing a bunch of trouble, and it was up to him to work something out (Doesn't it say something that this kid was allowed back into class after a violent act, but if he had drawn a picture of a gun, he probably would have been suspended for the rest of the year).

He's constantly attacked by parents who think their precious little child can do no wrong. Somehow it's always his fault.

He's a damn good teacher, but he's about to give up. So much for income incentives.

It's not surprising, though. This is the evil the liberals have released on us. It's never your fault; someone is trying to keep you down or simply hates you for no reason. How easy that excuse is. It's no wonder kids have picked up on it so quickly.

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