Posted on 01/29/2003 10:55:27 PM PST by pad 34
Price: Schools must be a priority Urban League leader urges focus on public schools By David B. Wilkerson, CBS.MarketWatch.com Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Jan. 20, 2003
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Though some complain that money is being wasted in inner city public schools, Hugh Price remains convinced that the schools remain "grossly underfunded."
The outgoing president of the National Urban League spoke to CBS.MarketWatch.com about education issues facing the African-American community in the 21st century as part of a wide-ranging interview. See the complete three-part interview.
Q. One of your main focuses has been education, and I wondered what your take was on Edison Schools (EDSN: news, chart, profile). Here's a company that was going to come into troubled school districts and run them better than county or state governments could, and now they've experienced a number of problems.
A. I think they had an education theory [about] which the jury is still out. I've yet to see any conclusive evidence that the schools they've run are any better than other kinds of well-run schools. ...
A. They've obviously also discovered that it's very hard to run a school on a business-based model and generate a profit. They've struggled with the selection of faculty. They've struggled with the basic financing of the schools. So I'm not terribly surprised that in an enterprise that is basically people-oriented, and public service oriented, that a for-profit entity has encountered a lot of difficulty.
A. The other thing is that the business model, the conception of Edison, has changed considerably since its early days. Originally, they were going to create new, freestanding schools that would be financed by tuition from parents, if I recall correctly. Then they decided to stop doing that, and go into the charter school business. There was a revenue stream already available, the public schools that they could tap in order to run some schools. ...
Q. It seems like part of the assumption that informed the decision to go with someone like Edison was that there's so much waste going on in inner-city schools, that people are tired of throwing money at them. How much waste do you actually see at public schools around the country?
A. I don't think there's a lot of waste in the public schools. I think they're grossly underfunded.
A. Obviously, there are situations where the schools aren't run as well as they should be, the teachers aren't as good as they should be.
A. But I think there's little question that our society is not investing nearly enough in public education. And we should, when you look at what we know works, ask ourselves if we're spending enough money on it.
A. What we know works is smaller schools, smaller classes, highly qualified teachers, substantial investment in teachers' professional development ... longer school days, part-time school on Saturday, more weeks of instruction during the year. Maybe schools running 11 months out of the year. You know, all of those things cost money.
A. [We need] school buildings that are properly equipped with technology, and lots of books that are up-to-date, not petrified books that are 20 or more years old.
A. So I don't think, as a society, we spend nearly enough on public education, or urban education, or rural education, as we should. What's interesting to me is that school financing debates get framed around how much the cities have to spend, and how much the suburbs have to spend. ... By and large, cities are not spending as much as well-to-do suburbs.
A. But when we decided to wage war against crime, we didn't ask how much the cities spend, vs. the suburbs. We just asked how many more policemen, jail cells, prisons and prison guards do we need, to reduce the crime rate.
A. If we asked that question in urban education, I think we'd come out in a very different place than where we are now.
Q. How much of the attitude about urban education is reflected in John Ogbu's new book, "Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement," in which he argues that even in affluent surroundings, black students are less likely than their white counterparts to apply themselves to schoolwork. Do you agree with his conclusions?
A. I haven't read his new book; I've read an article about it. My take on what they said in the article is that [black] parents aren't pushing and guiding their kids enough. ... And I think there's probably some truth to that.
A. And I think there's probably some truth to his point that there's what he called an "oppositional peer culture," or young people who aren't into academic achievement, who are spreading that message to our kids.
A. What we also have to take into account is that a lot of our children are in schools where the teachers don't believe that they can achieve, where the teachers don't have the skills necessary to ensure that they're academically successful, that schools don't have enough resources, etc., etc.
A. I think that Ogbu's diagnosis has some basis in fact, but there are many, many other factors in play as well. And what's interesting to me is to see how schools function, and how communities function, where they are taking academic achievement quite seriously.
A. For example, look at the great surge in achievement in Mt. Vernon, outside of New York, where they went from 33 percent of the kids passing the New York state exam in the fourth grade in 1999 to 79 percent in the year 2002. There's a community that's congealing around academic achievement.
A. We see children in our National Achievers Society who are deeply committed to academic achievement. I was down in Ft. Lauderdale [Fla.] for the annual induction ceremony there, and they took in close to 200 kids who are earning "B" averages or better in school, and hundreds of parents were there.
A. So I think there are some issues there, and we've still got to get our parents even more focused on supporting their children. That's why I wrote the book, "Achievement Matters." So I don't want to deny the things that Ogbu points out, but we have to look at who's figured this out, and who's getting it done.
Q. What are some of the ways of helping parents who themselves might not be well educated, might not know how to take advantage of certain resources that could help their children?
A. We're doing a number of things in that vein. We teamed up with Scholastic magazine to create a magazine called Read and Rise, which is filled with practical tips on how to help parents enable their children to become good readers. Covering all sorts of things like how to get them to read when very young, how to get them to read for fun, and so on. We've produced this with Scholastic, and are making it available thanks to grants from UPS and State Farm Life Insurance.
A. I wrote the book ["Achievement Matters"], and the book is filled with very practical stories for parents. ... So there are lots of specific things that churches can do, that parents can do. The question is summoning the will, and using the motherwit that enables us to say, I'm going to get this done.
Read the other portions of the three-part interview with Price. David B. Wilkerson is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com in San Francisco.
OK, let's just pour more of MY money down the toilet.
I've heard this one before also, normally it means pay for graduate degrees from a socialist EDU establishment (while on salary, scholarship and stipend), then come back to the classroom on higher salary and spout more stalinist ideas to hapless students.
Great plan for the "teachers" union.
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