This is a sad story. It is the story of the failure of the promise to equalize the outcomes between black and white students in the years after segregation ended. The irony was that the desegregation of schools was supposedly to be for that end, and was the clarion call for the Civil Rights Movement in the Fifties and Sixties, that emblemized by the Norman Rockwell painting of the little Ruby Bridges being escorted into a New Orleans elementary school by burly protectors. So many other changes in race relations did change. A Black middle class and a Black professional class has entered the ranks of doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs. There are numerous Black politicians in that the percentage of Black congresspeople is about the same as that of the population at large even though there are, at the moment, only three Black Senators, but then there has been a Black President and, currently, a Black Vice President. The Secretary of Defense is a Black man. Perhaps most important as a measure of normalizing Black people in the United States, is that Black women are featured in fashion magazines and that there are a large number of Black people as reporters and news talk hosts and commentators. But not so with education.
There were many innovations that were provided to clear the way for the advancement of the education of black people in the decades that followed on the desegregation decisions, now that the American people came to believe, as they had not seen previously, that poor educational results for black children was just inevitable and so schools were judged only by white accomplishment, as was indicated by the attempt to make middle class and so largely white schools as more educationally intensive because of the threat of Sputnik, in 1956, where there might be a science gap between the scientific success of American and Russian high school students. But the Sixties and the Seventies did turn to finding ways in which Black students would become successful. There was a change whereby state taxes were raised to give money to counties whose property taxes had previously been the basis for school budgets and had resulted in poor communities getting fewer money than did wealthy communities. There were also educational innovations. Local districts changed curricula to suit minority students; there were attempts to change more flexible rules in hiring teachers; there were attempts to make more lenient the punishments for disruptive students because black students were more prevalent in those students who engaged in infractions. The New York State Chief Justice of the Appellate Court has repeatedly opined on the bench that every student is guaranteed the right to “a basic education”, though the judges did not clarify what was included in “basic” and how to portion out the school’s responsibility from the responsibility of the students.
But even with these economic and institutional developments, there were many problems in advancing the education of Black children. The qualitative studies of the times show that educational progress was very slow with individuals, that there was not a massive application of youths to their education even if there were new innovations in education, often because students did not seem equipped to deal with the discipline that people of higher levels of social class are prepared to accept and so are acclimated to the educational enterprise from the earliest ages. The qualitative studies show the processes going on in schools, though it is necessary to turn to quantitative measures of educational achievement to show the outcomes that result from those processes.
A union activist recounts what happened at Franklin K. Lane H.S. in Brooklyn, New York (Salzman, 1972) during these early years in integrating education. Black militancy and underclass violence against teachers and students abound while principals and politicians cover up these disruptions lest they be considered racist or, even worse, not fit to run their schools. Black students are to be allowed to do their own thing, no matter how disruptive that is, and even if there are among them many who continue to want to learn, even when redistricting has given the school more students than it can handle. Public education is destroyed because no one will listen to the legitimate concerns of faculty, just those who have been pilloried by Jonathan Kozel and others as being unconcerned about the well being of their students.
The same thing happened in Boston. A teacher at South Boston High School keeps a diary of the impact of Judge Garrity’s forced busing plan (Ione Malloy, 1986). The faculty is villainized by Garrity, who does not have a clue about what it is like to run a school, and by blacks who think the teachers are racist and taking the side of whites when they are taking the side of order. The blacks feel aggrieved because they have to run a gauntlet of abusive whites every day they are bussed to school The school is in constant turmoil. Every incident blows up into a racial confrontation, followed by fights and suspensions. The principal, at one point, to quell a riot in the cafeteria, orders black students to one part of the school and white students to another. The racial issue is not a cover for class conflict; it is the issue. Parents are well aware that their students are being bussed from one working class neighborhood to another. They see this not as a fight for better education but for the principle of integration, a part of the civil rights struggle for racial equality.
These reports can be faulted as coming from biased sources, though that is to assume that people with a point of view cannot accurately report what is happening around them. A more sociological examination of a high school during the same period is provided in Gerald Grant’s “The World We Created at Hamilton High” (Grant, 1988). The author believes that every school is a Durkheimian compact. The high school can only survive as a learning community if norms of student conduct are obeyed. It only takes a few troublemakers to disrupt a school and call those norms into question if they are not severely dealt with. The opportunity for troublemaking occurred when the school was integrated. The school broke down as a community high school. More accurately, however, Hamilton High is better understood as a Hobbesian contract, where the first priority is physical security, and everything else can be built on that. If social norms will not do, then call in the police to make sure there is physical security.
That policy, carried out in so many urban schools at the time, has a downside. The introduction of police and metal detectors, even if they work to reduce the number of weapons or dangerous assaults within a school, will change the nature of the learning environment. The school becomes more like a day prison than a day care center, much less an educational center. The overt threat of force and the lack of respect for people as being able to mind themselves redefine what happens in school. People are not given more responsibility to build their confidence in taking on responsibility, but reminded at every turn that they are not considered responsible. That may be the case for some of them, but they all suffer from it, whether or not they think so. The metal detector can become an annoyance that is not seen as an insult, which just reinforces the message that people can’t trust one another, cannot deal with one another in a civil manner. The only way to get rid of the metal detectors, however, would be to rid the school of the troublemakers, and that presents problems if attendance at school is regarded as a right defensible in court rather than a privilege dispensed by the principal and other administrators who operate an opportunity structure for those they regard as qualified by behavior and ability to take advantage of it.
Let us suppose that the disruptive schools of the Sixties through the Eighties was a transitional struggle whereby a new generation of Black students had to learn the ropes of being schooled, other ethnic groups, for their reasons, having to do with relative wealth or better formed family structure, not having to find it so difficult to adjust to the discipline required of students to pay attention to the tasks involved with trying to learn something. Schooling may have calmed down. So what are those inner city schools like in the last two decades of the Twentieth Century? They are much like the rural high schools or the community high schools, overwhelmingly white, from the Twenties on, that educational critics said were longer on school spirit then on intellectual achievement and had led an attempt to tighten up educational standards both before and after Sputnik in 1957.
Samuel J. Friedman portrays in his “Small Victories” (Friedman, 1990), a close up of Jessica Siegel, a real high school teacher, who is to be regarded as heroic because she goes into a classroom when there are overwhelming odds that the students she is dealing with will not succeed. She is a superb teacher. Her lesson on Emily Dickinson is a model of how to get students engaged in discussing a literary theme without pandering or oversimplifying, but finding a level at which the students can appreciate a poem as a poem and not just come to think that song lyrics are a fair measure of poetry. She gives sensible assignments that are related to thinking about the poem. She serves as faculty advisor on the student newspaper and treats that as an opportunity to extend student comfort with writing in some other setting than the classroom.
Siegel takes on even more responsibilities. She shepherds students to college interviews; she inquires about and is responsive to their personal problems. Whether she calls herself that or not, she sees herself as a case worker who intervenes with words towards the organization of the life of her clients. She must remain at the top of her game, ever attentive, because you never know when a learning opportunity-- something akin to grace-- will arise, and you can, by giving a clear answer, or seeming concerned, or making an appropriate adult variety observation, make a difference in the life of a child, turn them around, and further their personal development. It is an exhausting job, when it is done right, that offers, as the title of the book suggests, only small victories, counted out in the number of students that have been nudged into lives that are a bit more expansive, a bit more enlightened. And if it is done wrong, it is a chronicle of lost opportunities, of classes gone sour, of students who sustain rather than mitigate their animus towards teachers. That quality of life for teachers, that they are always supposed to be not only more knowledgeable than their students, but their moral exemplars even when tested to be otherwise, is what may lead teachers to think what they are doing is a pretense at education, something that can only be accomplished by the particularly gifted teacher. What are ordinary people supposed to do to make their jobs work?
The picture is even more stark in “On the Outside Looking In” (Rathbone, 1998). This book is about an alternative high school in New York City that enrolls older students who have failed in other schools to pass their Regents competency exams, a requirement for a New York State high school diploma. Successful students in this alternative school will be those who work to read the first whole book ever and even as a result of extreme diligence will pass a writing test. These students have avoided the lure of youth gangs to accomplish these goals. The students have been urged and sometimes convinced to work hard at what they are not good at under the pretext that they will get a diploma, whatever good that might do them. The hope is that some residue will remain from this experience that they can take with them into later life, along with a degree of poise and maturity that they gain from being shepherded through their stormy adolescence by concerned teachers. Every student is “to acknowledge and activate their potential.” The whole project seems to me to be a pipedream in that the students would better spend their time at supervised work projects-- or is it that these young people are so damaged that all they can try to do is to play at doing some very rudimentary educational tasks?
Things might have been expected to change in urban education, as I say, after the children of the first generation of African-Americans who immigrated from the South had been absorbed into the urban working class. The immigrants were, however, subject to differential absorption. Those who were middle class or on the cusp of being middle class, however that is defined for the African-American population, were in a position to take advantage of schooling, and especially of the emphasis on diversity that allowed graduates of urban schools spots at prestigious colleges. Those who were not middle class or on the cusp of being middle class, however, were not able to take advantage of the opportunities that were presented by schooling even if schooling was often portrayed as the only way to get out of the urban ghetto. Many children were consigned to limited educations not because they were not ambitious or motivated, but because their skills were too poor and the school setting too anti-intellectual for them to get much out of their educations, even if they were the prize pupils in the school.
“There Are No Children Here” (Kotlowitz, 1992) portrays Pharoah, a young boy living in the Taylor Houses in urban Chicago. He has a stutter, but with a good deal of diligence, studied by the light of an unshaded bulb late at night, he is able to win second place in a spelling contest. So he seems to have a bright future. But his brother is shot, he becomes dispirited, and his earlier ambitions wane. That is the tragic story we would like to believe: a young person of talent is disillusioned by the violence of his surroundings. What is more to the point, however, is that even at his best, Pharoah was reading two years behind grade level. The standards of his school were just not very high, which may have reflected the fact that the student body as a whole performed badly. It may have also reflected the fact that the best of the students were merely ahead of the average for that school, and may or may not have been able to perform much better than they were doing even if they went to schools with better facilities, better trained teachers, and a more encouraging learning atmosphere.
The schools at the bottom of the barrel do not seem to have changed after the first generation of immigration. Perhaps the students in them were just those left over after the better minority students had been culled for programs for the gifted or scholarships to private schools or because their parents moved to better school districts. Nevertheless, there seems to be a set of schools which are culturally isolated from the larger world. They reveal what the American sociologist William Julius Wilson claims to be one of the main causes of African American poverty: a pattern of residential segregation more severe than it is for other minority groups that means that young people will not find in their neighborhoods either educated people or bookstores or social services other than those directed at their poverty rather than their education. They will not even see men going out to work every morning, and so get a sense of what a responsible adult male life is like.
That this is the case is shown by a 1991 study of inner city schools.(International Journal of Educational Research Vol. 27, Nov. 2 1997). The schools were well funded and had a lot of paras and other supportive staff. There were laboratories and other facilities. But the atmosphere of the school was terrible. It was in permanent lock down, with students going through detectors, the school noisy. Teachers said they thought a program to develop learning skills was not very useful in a school which had to combat the surrounding drug culture.
If this view is correct, then schools have morphed into social work agencies. They are the settlement houses of the present day, doing whatever it is they can do to improve the lives of ghetto youth by providing them with some discipline, some moral lessons, hot breakfasts and lunch, and a relatively safe place to spend the day. Some education gets thrown in, but that is not the primary object because it is overwhelmed by the other requirements for keeping order and making the children into responsible people. The goal of the school has been displaced from education to something that may be more basic, or prior to education as a way to prepare children for adulthood, but is not education per se. As a school, the place is a failure.
These are not the issues of the past. Recent statistics show that there is a continuing large difference between Black and white academic achievement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2009, for instance, showed that there was a 26 point difference between Blacks and whites in math in the fourth grade and a 31 point difference between Blacks and whites in the eighth grade. There is a 27 point difference between Blacks and whites on math in the fourth grade and a 26 point difference in the eighth grade. Yet more recent facts, at the National Educational Longitudinal Survey show that 93.8% of Black students get high school completion while white students have a 94.8% completion rate. Why would students doing so poorly get out of high school as well as the white students? The answer is in our cited qualitative studies. Schools cover up the failures of their Black students. There is an ongoing scandal that both Blacks and whites have continued to cover up. For shame.
The alternative? Hispamics do even worse than Blacks on the same tests that I have mentioned, and so part of the difference is class rather than race. Poorer parents are more poorly educated people and get poorly educated children. I have previously argued that there has to create large scale residential academies that intervene young people very early on so that they can develop the emotional and educational skills needed to do well in school. Short of that, it means supporting families so that the children can prosper, hiring social workers to visit homes so that, as the expression goes, both parents and children learn together. Or else we can wait for another generation when educational success is a lagging indicator, dependent upon Black people getting the jobs that will allow a firm family structure that allows children to thrive in their education. Given the political priorities, “jobs” rather than “education” is the more pressing mantra.