This was definitely true in the small city in the Ozarks where I lived before I moved here - a town that was 98% white. We can blame meth for that; this town had a large homeless teenage population (it wasn’t visible because the kids couch-surfed) and a backpack program which provided food for kids on the weekends had to be discontinued because most of the food, and the backpacks too, were being traded by the parents for drugs. 
Everyone is racist on some level BigT and it doesn’t always play out like people assume. I grew up in the Deep South and have more black friends than 99+% of the population. The reason for that is because that is who was there. Almost 50% of my small home town is black so you would go out your mind the first day if you were a committed racist. That doesn’t happen and no sermons will improve the situation.
What we did have was trans-generational poverty and lots of black-on-black crime including true gang violence. I am not sure how to fix that in this context. It wasn’t white people abusing blacks. We even had a black police chief. It was blacks killing and raping each other. That is a persistent problem especially in places like Chicago. You can do all the hand-wringing that you want but it won’t fix anything. There are lots of black communities all over the country from Los Angeles to New York City that are basically FUBAR. A few will make it out but most won’t.
This is a very common modern refrain. It’s entirely ingenuous. The fact that it’s written as it is, declaring “truths” to be “unsayable,” isn’t an effort to address any problems in the schools, it’s a smarmy attack on anyone who opposes the “solution” of DISCARDING ENTIRE SEGMENTS OF THE POPULATION.
For one thing, the “truths” are not truths. They are statistical generalities. A statistical generality has nothing to do with “truth,” it’s something else entirely.
For another thing, the generality-based assumptions being made in the article are not “unsayable,” rather obviously: the article writer IS SAYING THEM. What an honest (racist) writer would have said is, “I can’t get people who oppose racism to admit that racism is good.” That’s all that the common dynamic of such discussions ever consists of these days.
As for the problems themselves, I am a repair person at my core. Dispassionate and goal oriented. The reason why both the left-wing and right wing “solutions” always fail, is that they all try to fix a MULTIPART problem, by addressing exactly one tiny aspect of it.
Or worse, they try to declare (as was done here) that the problem is inherent to the overall society, situation, culture, race, gender, whatever…and therefore that they should be absolved of making any effort at all to deal with it. The favored political rhetorical trick to play, is to express the intention to do nothing, in a manner that sounds on the surface, to be an aggressive, firm effort.
Hence the use of phrases such as “no progress can be made until what I’ve pointed out (without suggesting any action or responsibility on my part) is addressed (by someone else, on their dime).”
This is ad hominem + poisoning the well.
My SIL and her husband live in the Twin Cities and live in a partly Somali neighborhood (and he is an ESL teacher with a ton of Somali students), and they have tons of nice things to say about Somalis.
That’s just the *“It’s OK to be racist, but bad to call people racists” *argument that has become popular with the Right recently. Someone promoting racism is by definition racist. And insisting that people not point that out is well poisoning of its own.
Then go back to the questions I asked.
Which is it? Are the problems black people have just the inevitable result of them being black? Or are the problems black people have the result of things that have been done to black people?
A decade ago I was an assistant middle school teacher in Southern California. My superiors observed that children of single parents had noticeably worse outcomes on average. They weren’t as disciplined as their peers and were more improperly socialized…they had poor coping mechanisms and placed too much value on saving face…I could go on. It was rationalized to me thus: If children demanded a lot of time and money then reducing those resources by half is going to be consequential. That sounded right to me.
Fact: Human beings, but especially children and teens, are stupid assholes by nature and need the assistance of others to overcome both conditions. Students who don’t learn how to operate in a demanding, cooperative environment are unlikely to succeed at that. They risk becoming bigger, dumber assholes than most and being entirely unsympathetic. These students need the kind of care and attention usually given for free by family members.
Teachers can make a huge difference. Many years ago, I made the acquaintance of the head teacher of a state school for troubled children. The school was their last stop before Borstal. At the school, the children were polite and well-behaved and they loved the school. The teachers were firm but fair and the emphasis for the pupils was on discipline and for the teachers on providing positive role models.
That makes WAY too much logical sense. It’s far easier to embrace school vouchers and run from the problem.
The main factor in the performance of any school is the students and by extension their lives outside school. This is a fundamental truth, ‘unsayable’ or not.
But there is IMO room for an approach which doesn’t use this truth as a pretext for some preconceived agenda, but doesn’t deny it either, one which simply takes it into account realistically in setting school policies overall.
Trying to equalize academic outcomes across a diverse society, or moreover to make them appear equal, can have real negative effects in the world of school policy. It really isn’t a question of school policy helping somewhat or helping somewhat more depending on the level of effort, it can also hurt if equal outcome becomes the dominant goal. And it’s not a settled question (to say the least) if govt action beyond schools can really homogenize the out of school background and experiences of students at a cost to overall social well being anyone is or should be willing to accept. Any effort to change deep societal patterns with govt action will always be at the margin IMO.
Teachers CAN make a huge difference, and I will certainly be happy to note that not all teachers are great, and there’s a lot we could do to make teaching more attractive and get better teachers overall.
But teachers are only a part of the puzzle. The best teachers in the world aren’t going to be successful if the students and parents they have to work with are missing either the desire or the ability to succeed in school. That’s why fixing the education system has to fix more than just what happens within the school walls.
I think it’s granted that the root of the specific dysfunction we are talking about with respect to the attitudes and behaviors of children coming out poor, single mother households is deeply embedded in the history of how racism has impacted black people in America over the generations and marginalized black men as fathers. I think it’s also a fact that there is no real fix for this situation short of magically making all the poor, single mother households middle class, academically involved and having engaged middle class dads or other engaged middle class SO’s sharing the parenting load and modelling proper behavior for boys.
But let’s assume that magic does not exist and this dysfunction has persisted across generations and there is no way to “fix” this short of taking the kids away from these parents at a birth. Let’s also assume there is no amount of political will or voter inclination to gather enough funds to give these single mother families the equivalent of a middle class level of resources. Plus people would reasonably ask that even if this economic scaffolding was available would things really change if attitudes about discipline, academic engagement and general behavior did not change.
So, if you have a group of kids whose attitudes make leaning and academic progress very difficult for them and others in their proximity, and there is no magic wand or enough real world resources to make their household economic behaviors and attitudes middle ass what is the fix? Containment, triage, make believe? Muddling through? What do we owe the kids who do want to learn in these chaotic environments?
And well into the twenty-teens, and not just in the South. A lot of the Cleveland public schools are 100% black even today. They’re not enforced 100% black; if a white student wanted to enroll at one of them, they could. But they don’t.
There are a handful of good schools in the Cleveland district, and competition is fierce to get into them. Anyone who doesn’t get into one of those schools, if they can afford it, either moves into the suburbs or enrolls in private schools. So the only students left in the majority of the Cleveland schools are those who are too poor to do either. Who are mostly black.
Confusing cause and effect?
Anyway …
This reminds me of some scenes in the PBS documentary The Lost Children of Rockdale County about a STD outbreak among young teens in a mostly white suburb of Atlanta.
Several times it’s mentioned how the parents of these kids kept wanting the schools, the police, or the churches to fix the problem of their kids being loose all night and having unprotected sex. As opposed to, you know, the parents doing something about their kids.
There are a lot of social problems out there. Bad parenting doesn’t restrict itself to color or economic status.
OTOH, poverty makes these problems more blatant. If you fix the poverty then the black inner city schools will have the same poorly parented kids as the rich white suburbs.
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Unfortunately, cause and effect are very difficult to distinguish in any social phenomenon. That goes all the more for your implicit assumption under point 3.
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Obviously. But there’s a clear correlation between social pattern outside the home and school performance. And while we can trumpet the social shortcomings of the middle or upper middle class ‘mainstream’ as much as we want in order to appear ‘fair’, it’s still apparent those are more conducive social environments for objective academic performance than the single mother underclass environment. They aren’t the only good ones or the best necessarily (compared to certain immigrant social environments in the US, or in other countries), nor do many individual families conform to the exact mean for their group, again obviously. But still, pointing out that everybody has problems doesn’t get us very far with the practical issue at hand.
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But this just seems to say to solve a much bigger and more intractable tangle of cause and effect to solve a relatively much smaller, albeit very important, one. It turns on its head the general concept of public* education as a path to the middle class. Here we seem to say we have to make everyone middle class first to fix the schools. Not realistic IMO on any level, social or political.
*as in publicly funded, not to sidetrack into debate about alternatives to public schools per se which are or would be also publicly funded.
Black, not Somali cite - video. I live in Minneapolis and it was in the news quite a bit that year. The other attacks/violence that brought that school notoriety (St Paul Central High School) predominantly involved black students as well.
The consensus at the time, or argument that got the most attention from those in the know, was criticism towards the policy of the district to not suspend or expel trouble-making, violent, students. The policy seemed to move from the previous 'kick ‘em out, better off without them disrupting/affecting other students’ to ‘it’s better to deal with them in-house, internally, instead of suspending/expelling them and putting them out on the streets with nowhere to go and no supervision at all.’
Admirable policy in my opinion, but one that backfired in that violence and disrespect by a few begets violence and disrespect to the broader school as a whole (again, IMO). I don’t what they’ve done specifically since then to address the problem, but it doesn’t seem to be the problem today it was back then.
Sounds like you’re getting bad information. While they do have a large presence in Minneapolis and tend to live in their own enclaves or areas (like blacks, Asians, etc do as well) they don’t seem proportionally worse or better than any other minority in the city (again IMO and if the news, anecdotes, and what I’ve seen going about my business in the city are any guide).
Black, not Somali cite - video. I live in Minneapolis and it was in the news quite a bit that year. The other attacks/violence that brought that school notoriety (St Paul Central High School) predominantly involved black students as well.
The consensus at the time, or argument that got the most attention from those in the know, was indeed criticism towards the policy of the district to not suspend or expel trouble-making, violent, students. The policy seemed to move from the previous 'kick ‘em out, better off without them disrupting/affecting other students’ to ‘it’s better to deal with them in-house, internally, instead of suspending/expelling them and putting them out on the streets with nowhere to go and no supervision at all.’
Admirable policy in my opinion, but one that backfired in that violence and disrespect by a few begets violence and disrespect to the broader school as a whole (again, IMO). I don’t what they’ve done specifically since then to address the problem, but it doesn’t seem to be the problem today it was back then.
Sounds like you’re getting bad information. While they do have a large presence in Minneapolis and tend to live in their own enclaves or areas (like blacks, Asians, etc do as well) they don’t seem proportionally worse or better than any other minority in the city (again IMO and if the news, anecdotes, and what I’ve seen going about my business in the city are any guide).
Are these the only two options?
This is not a fair characterization of the article. The article does say problem is violent disrespectful teenagers who are products of single mothers. However, it does say there is a solution, alternative schools, which would isolate the troublemakers and allow those in the real schools to have a chance at an education. Because more of the troublemakers are black that is deemed unacceptable to the education establishment and so is not being tried. That is the unsayable truth, not that students are the reason for failing schools which is widely said by everyone who understands the issue.