The answer, to my mind, is nothing that a good school wouldn't fix.
Perhaps you could convince me that we are taking two steps forward and only one step backward in our focus on educating ?black boys.?? (I hate the term more than the N-word.)? But most of the time it feels as if we're doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
So Education Week is reporting that ?Experts Call for Early Focus on Black Boys' Nonacademic Skills.?? When will the academic silliness stop? ?When will our scholars and policymakers admit that African Americans need an education just as much as Caucasians, Asians, et al. And that the duty of a school is to provide it, regardless of race or ethnicity?
The interesting thing, in my experience, is that many of our schools are equal opportunity failure factories; they can be just as insensitive to white social and emotional needs as to black social and emotional needs.? (Did the recent NAEP history scores bring on a wave of calls for ?white boy? symposia?) We keep shoving the responsibility for school failure on to the kids ? poor kids, black kids, disabled kids, tall kids, fat kids ? instead of focusing our efforts on making schools (I mean, the adults in them) responsive.? Schools that work tend to be just as good about providing a good curriculum as fixing water fountains -- and just as bad at both. (And as Kathleen suggests, the age of the "individualized learning plan" may be making things worse.)
Just as you don't stop teaching math to fix a water fountain, so you don't stop teaching literature, history, and science because a child has an emotional problem. But that is what happens.? I heard a wonderful speech the other day by one of New York? State's newest Regents, James O. Jackson,? an African-American, who complained that our schools have been "turned into social service agencies." And he's right.? Every social problem gets a curriculum. ?Drugs ? we have anti-drug classes. Character?? Hours of character-building exercises.? Jobs?? We'll visit employers (forget whether the kid can't read or write).? Teen pregnancy?? Let's hand out dolls and condoms and spend hours talking about body plumbing.? Did someone say Dickens?? Names of the fifty states?? Abraham Lincoln?? Who's got time?
I'm sorry, dear scholars, but African American children, like most children, would do much better later in life if school taught them how to read and write ? and, hopefully, a little history and science, art and math along the way ? instead of being served up what has become a steady and distracting and unhealthy diet of paternalism and fries.
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
