It's Racism - Not the Public Schools! (an answer to a Columbus Dispatch column)
Dear Professor Oldenquist,
In your column today your heart was in the right place, but I believe you have overlooked a few considerations in determining your conclusions.
Certainly racism (and class-ism) are at the bottom of our internal problems – just as you point out, but linking racism AND “outmoded educational philosophy” causes problems. The pairing removes the “control” – i.e. it becomes impossible to determine what is caused by either racism or educational philosophy. What are the respective impacts of the two factors? 50-50? 60-40? 90-10? What?
It’s a fact that many “good” teachers in the suburbs once taught in urban schools. It’s also a fact that many teachers in urban schools are equal or superior to many teachers in suburban schools. Racism and class-ism are overwhelmingly the causative factor.
You are exactly right in your criticism of the various areas of dysfunction and in warning of the consequences of continuing in this way, but I can’t agree with a number of things you suggest.
Pedagogy will not overturn the effects of racism. Suggesting that it can (if only this or that were done BY THE SCHOOL SYSTEM) helps maintain racism, the actual, underlying cause. What urban families need is not vouchers, charter schools, and parenting classes. What they need is a future – good jobs paying a living wage – a stake in this country. Without that, all educational philosophy is “outmoded.”
“Not having enough math and science teachers” is itself an outmoded philosophical cliché. We have enough for urban schools, and as corporations lay off more and more well-educated engineers and scientists to be replaced by equally well-educated Indians who will work for peanuts, we should have science/math teachers coming out of our ears (since we can’t outsource the school kids to India).
Those businessmen who complain about the use of standard English don’t seem averse to outsourcing their telephone “support” to India where many of the speakers’ accent, syntax, and grammar are far from what American speakers would call standard.
Similarly, I heard from a vice-president at Nationwide how difficult it was to get workers who could write. I asked how much they paid and was given a low figure. I told him to double it and his door would be beaten down – I would go to work for him.
Again, as you said, “It’s about money.” The complaint isn’t that they can’t get the workers they need, but that they can’t get the workers they need at the low price they’d like. Hence, outsourcing to India where they CAN pay repressive wages. It is NOT lack of ability, training, or education that traps people in poverty or low-paying jobs. As you say, “It’s about money.”
And that’s why the situation will NOT be improved. It would cost the wrong people too much money – much more than even your Marshal Plan – to treat all people fairly. Our system is run by people who believe in the amassing of personal wealth, not sharing the wealth - hence profitable businesses outsourcing jobs to India to obtain MORE profit.
Racist beliefs are, in many ways, supportive of this system, “justifying” much of the economic prejudice. The problems you so clearly see and describe will never be ended by pedagogy, but only by changing the system to eliminate racism.
That will take more than a "Marshal Plan." A revolution, perhaps?
- Uke Man
Public education’s failures are a threat to the nation
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
ANDREW OLDENQUIST
If, in the next 25 years, America becomes a Third World country supplying raw materials to China, India and Europe, the main cause will be the failure of public education. We now rank near the bottom in education achievement among advanced countries; we don’t have enough science and math teachers; some central-city dropout rates exceed 50 percent; teachers despair and Columbus school officials put their own kids in private schools.
If Americans can’t write effectively and read complex material, do math and science, if they don’t learn history and geography, then the rest of the world, which does teach these things, will simply take our jobs and wealth away from us. Already, employers and colleges go crazy because urban high-school graduates so often don’t know anything and cannot speak and write standard English.
The main reasons for the failure of American public schools are their outmoded educational philosophy and the legacy of racism, and these two things reinforce each other. America’s worst internal problem always has been race. Suburban students do well because of the education, stability and prosperity of their families. Inner-city black students do much worse because their families so often are poor, fatherless, powerless and poorly educated.
School decline fuels the economic decline of central cities. It’s all tied together: The legacy of racism, dysfunctional black families, dysfunctional urban schools, teachers and school officials afraid to make demands on their students, white flight to the suburbs, white middle-class fear of black people and consequent hesitancy to patronize downtown businesses and cultural events.
Putting one’s children in a charter school is one kind of flight the poor can afford because, like mainstream public schools, charter schools are free. Regular Columbus public schools are 63 percent black. But Columbus charter schools are 72 percent black, which puts the lie to the idea that only whites want out of the inner-city schools.
It’s about money. Many black parents also support school vouchers and are drawn to the relatively inexpensive Catholic schools.
If inner-city blacks continue to learn almost nothing in school, more poor and unemployed black men will be on Downtown streets at night, which will further scare away middle-aged whites and our Downtown cultural institutions will die, which will free up a little more money for the bigger prisons we will need. A Harvard University study says the black community has the largest recorded shortage of men of any ethnic subgroup in the world.
The flight from the urban public schools exacerbates the class divide between the largely black population stuck in schools that can’t handle them, and the largely white middle class who fled them. So the schools worsen because kids from poor and dysfunctional families set the tone, while the children of more educated and education-conscious families are no longer there as a counter-influence.
Our public schools don’t emphasize learning facts, spelling and grammar, which is why middle-class kids now do poorly on standardized tests. The mainly black poor get low scores because of dysfunctional families. But the inner city gets a double whammy: The educators’ bias against memorizing and against teaching "white middle-class" speech, grammar and spelling is applied there too, but with a vengeance because the kids are already less motivated to do homework and less trained at home in standard English.
Columbus Public Schools deserve praise for recognizing the appeal of charter schools and promising seven specialized district schools. The charter-school movement is letting 100 flowers bloom; it is a market experiment in which schools survive only if they satisfy parents expectations about safety, orderliness, character education, test scores, special themes and/or whatever parents are looking for. Regular public schools are losing students to the suburbs, private schools and charter schools.
The real threat to the city school system isn’t charter schools and vouchers; it is an unwillingness to experiment and respond to obvious failings, together with the family situations of urban underclass kids.
We very much need to know what works in public education. But the schools alone cannot make healthy families and neighborhoods.
If Columbus wants to take a stab at being a national leader in urban resuscitation, it might try a mini-Marshall Plan for one inner-city high school and its neighborhood feeder schools: Provide help with the home environment and studying, provide safe after-school activities, classes for parents, discipline and structure in school, neighborhood cleanup and policing, carrots and sticks to get fathers home again, extended schooling, tutoring and more.
This would cost almost as much money as a new prison. It would be nice if private philanthropists were inclined to fund parts of this.
Andrew Oldenquist is professor emeritus of philosophy at Ohio State University.
oldenquist.1 @osu.edu
In your column today your heart was in the right place, but I believe you have overlooked a few considerations in determining your conclusions.
Certainly racism (and class-ism) are at the bottom of our internal problems – just as you point out, but linking racism AND “outmoded educational philosophy” causes problems. The pairing removes the “control” – i.e. it becomes impossible to determine what is caused by either racism or educational philosophy. What are the respective impacts of the two factors? 50-50? 60-40? 90-10? What?
It’s a fact that many “good” teachers in the suburbs once taught in urban schools. It’s also a fact that many teachers in urban schools are equal or superior to many teachers in suburban schools. Racism and class-ism are overwhelmingly the causative factor.
You are exactly right in your criticism of the various areas of dysfunction and in warning of the consequences of continuing in this way, but I can’t agree with a number of things you suggest.
Pedagogy will not overturn the effects of racism. Suggesting that it can (if only this or that were done BY THE SCHOOL SYSTEM) helps maintain racism, the actual, underlying cause. What urban families need is not vouchers, charter schools, and parenting classes. What they need is a future – good jobs paying a living wage – a stake in this country. Without that, all educational philosophy is “outmoded.”
“Not having enough math and science teachers” is itself an outmoded philosophical cliché. We have enough for urban schools, and as corporations lay off more and more well-educated engineers and scientists to be replaced by equally well-educated Indians who will work for peanuts, we should have science/math teachers coming out of our ears (since we can’t outsource the school kids to India).
Those businessmen who complain about the use of standard English don’t seem averse to outsourcing their telephone “support” to India where many of the speakers’ accent, syntax, and grammar are far from what American speakers would call standard.
Similarly, I heard from a vice-president at Nationwide how difficult it was to get workers who could write. I asked how much they paid and was given a low figure. I told him to double it and his door would be beaten down – I would go to work for him.
Again, as you said, “It’s about money.” The complaint isn’t that they can’t get the workers they need, but that they can’t get the workers they need at the low price they’d like. Hence, outsourcing to India where they CAN pay repressive wages. It is NOT lack of ability, training, or education that traps people in poverty or low-paying jobs. As you say, “It’s about money.”
And that’s why the situation will NOT be improved. It would cost the wrong people too much money – much more than even your Marshal Plan – to treat all people fairly. Our system is run by people who believe in the amassing of personal wealth, not sharing the wealth - hence profitable businesses outsourcing jobs to India to obtain MORE profit.
Racist beliefs are, in many ways, supportive of this system, “justifying” much of the economic prejudice. The problems you so clearly see and describe will never be ended by pedagogy, but only by changing the system to eliminate racism.
That will take more than a "Marshal Plan." A revolution, perhaps?
- Uke Man
Public education’s failures are a threat to the nation
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
ANDREW OLDENQUIST
If, in the next 25 years, America becomes a Third World country supplying raw materials to China, India and Europe, the main cause will be the failure of public education. We now rank near the bottom in education achievement among advanced countries; we don’t have enough science and math teachers; some central-city dropout rates exceed 50 percent; teachers despair and Columbus school officials put their own kids in private schools.
If Americans can’t write effectively and read complex material, do math and science, if they don’t learn history and geography, then the rest of the world, which does teach these things, will simply take our jobs and wealth away from us. Already, employers and colleges go crazy because urban high-school graduates so often don’t know anything and cannot speak and write standard English.
The main reasons for the failure of American public schools are their outmoded educational philosophy and the legacy of racism, and these two things reinforce each other. America’s worst internal problem always has been race. Suburban students do well because of the education, stability and prosperity of their families. Inner-city black students do much worse because their families so often are poor, fatherless, powerless and poorly educated.
School decline fuels the economic decline of central cities. It’s all tied together: The legacy of racism, dysfunctional black families, dysfunctional urban schools, teachers and school officials afraid to make demands on their students, white flight to the suburbs, white middle-class fear of black people and consequent hesitancy to patronize downtown businesses and cultural events.
Putting one’s children in a charter school is one kind of flight the poor can afford because, like mainstream public schools, charter schools are free. Regular Columbus public schools are 63 percent black. But Columbus charter schools are 72 percent black, which puts the lie to the idea that only whites want out of the inner-city schools.
It’s about money. Many black parents also support school vouchers and are drawn to the relatively inexpensive Catholic schools.
If inner-city blacks continue to learn almost nothing in school, more poor and unemployed black men will be on Downtown streets at night, which will further scare away middle-aged whites and our Downtown cultural institutions will die, which will free up a little more money for the bigger prisons we will need. A Harvard University study says the black community has the largest recorded shortage of men of any ethnic subgroup in the world.
The flight from the urban public schools exacerbates the class divide between the largely black population stuck in schools that can’t handle them, and the largely white middle class who fled them. So the schools worsen because kids from poor and dysfunctional families set the tone, while the children of more educated and education-conscious families are no longer there as a counter-influence.
Our public schools don’t emphasize learning facts, spelling and grammar, which is why middle-class kids now do poorly on standardized tests. The mainly black poor get low scores because of dysfunctional families. But the inner city gets a double whammy: The educators’ bias against memorizing and against teaching "white middle-class" speech, grammar and spelling is applied there too, but with a vengeance because the kids are already less motivated to do homework and less trained at home in standard English.
Columbus Public Schools deserve praise for recognizing the appeal of charter schools and promising seven specialized district schools. The charter-school movement is letting 100 flowers bloom; it is a market experiment in which schools survive only if they satisfy parents expectations about safety, orderliness, character education, test scores, special themes and/or whatever parents are looking for. Regular public schools are losing students to the suburbs, private schools and charter schools.
The real threat to the city school system isn’t charter schools and vouchers; it is an unwillingness to experiment and respond to obvious failings, together with the family situations of urban underclass kids.
We very much need to know what works in public education. But the schools alone cannot make healthy families and neighborhoods.
If Columbus wants to take a stab at being a national leader in urban resuscitation, it might try a mini-Marshall Plan for one inner-city high school and its neighborhood feeder schools: Provide help with the home environment and studying, provide safe after-school activities, classes for parents, discipline and structure in school, neighborhood cleanup and policing, carrots and sticks to get fathers home again, extended schooling, tutoring and more.
This would cost almost as much money as a new prison. It would be nice if private philanthropists were inclined to fund parts of this.
Andrew Oldenquist is professor emeritus of philosophy at Ohio State University.
oldenquist.1 @osu.edu
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