I guess where I’m getting hung up is what I see as two conflicting truths: these kids don’t have any good models for appropriate “middle class” behavior, and also they’re being raised by people who are working three jobs. I mean, if you’re holding down three jobs, you must be able to present good behavior because otherwise you’d be getting fired, right? There seems to be a disconnect here. On the one hand, people living in poverty have the best work ethic of anyone on earth, and on the other hand they aren’t passing that work ethic onto their kids, because Cycle of Poverty. What am I missing? I’m honestly not trying to be an asshole. I find this issue both interesting and really sad, and I’d love to understand it better.
White liberals aren’t avoiding those schools because they’re full of black people. They avoid those schools because they’re bad schools. Yes, we try to fix them, but until we manage that, they’re still bad schools, and people still don’t want to shortchange their own families.
The kids are not getting good role modeling in the benefits of an education, the benefits of waiting to have a family, and the benefits of getting out of the cycle of poverty, or even that these are things that are possible for them.
They just see their parents working, all the time, and see that as their future as well. School and an education does not seem a way out to them. About the only ways they see out is sports or music, and that’s bad, as those are about the most unlikely ways to make it anywhere.
I would also point out that having worked with many of these single mothers, I said they worked many hours, I did not say they had great work ethic. I don’t want to generalize, but I will say that on average, their work ethic was certainly no better than the typical employee. They showed up, and most of the time, they did enough work to not get fired.
My anecdote, take of it what you will:
I went to a magnet school. 1/2 black, 1/2 other. Everyone had to apply to get in. It was in a black and poor neighborhood. If you lived in the neighborhood and didn’t have the grades to get in, you went to the thug school further north. There was a no tolerance fighting policy. Fight, and you get expelled. Even if you were defending yourself. It’s that simple. Ergo, there were almost no fights,
Any racism there was, was light black on white racism. White people in marching band being told they had no rhythm. Shit like that…whites being mostly excluded from the basketball and football teams. The whites just took it. It was no big deal. We did theatre shows like “Purlie Victorious” which contains scenes of a white guy saying N****R…it’s a comedy by the way. Nobody lost their shit. The world didn’t come to an end. Did Equus which had the lead actors smoking on stage.
Also had a ‘smoke hole’ where the 14 year old freshmen could go smoke.
A different time to be sure.
The alternative school got shut down by the PA DoE because it had a dozen or so kids from across 4 grade levels in it. A different subject teacher rotated in each period. DoE figured the little darlings were not getting sufficiently individualized grade-level appropriate instruction and forced us to place them back in the GP. I ran ISS very successfully for two years. Our last Republican governor slashed education funding and it hit my district hard. Teachers were furloughed and ISS was eliminated. Our present Democratic governor hasn’t completely made good on restoring funding, so we remain a skeleton faculty. We’ve seen all our best students leave as their parents didn’t want them in this madhouse…so things just keep getting worse. Fuck it…I spent 25 years working at helping this community unfuck itself. It didn’t happen, but I tried.
It takes more than a work ethnic to succeed? On a high school level, theses are things like:
- Navigating the school bureaucracy to make sure you are enrolled in the appropriate classes and are signed up for any special programs available.
- Completing the many, many steps of the college application process, from registering for the SATs to knowing the importance of leadership in extracurricular activities.
- Starting to build a career through volunteering, internships or an entry-level job that will eventually lead to a middle class job.
- Just knowing what middle class career paths and career progressions look like. What does it take to be a lawyer? A teacher? What majors do they study in college? What first jobs do they take?
Getting through high school and in to a career requires a pretty specific set of steps, sometimes with very precise deadlines, and nobody hands you a guidebook on how to do this. Most middle class people are walked through the process by their parents and coached by guidance counselor. Poor kids, on the other hand, often have no way to even know this stuff exists.
I have friends who never knew the SAT was a thing. Another took an extra semester of ESL not knowing that that didn’t count toward the four years of “English” class required by state universities. I myself was repeatedly auto-enrolled in useless electives
Got cut off…
I was repeatedly enrolled in useless elections (things like typing), and had to navigate the bureaucracy to get into useful classes.
And this isn’t getting into structural barriers like kids who have to spend their afternoons and weekends taking care of siblings or working to help pay rent.
No, it’s not typically true that single mothers are working three jobs. Almost 23% of single mothers work part-time, and 24% do not work outside the home (cite).
I can’t find any figures on number of hours worked per week for single mothers who are employed full-time, but somewhere around 47% of single mothers are not working even one full-time job.
Regards,
Shodan
I agree with this. Earlier it was mentioned that there were things white people can do, and things black people can do. Actually using birth control is something black people have to do for themselves - white people can’t force them to do it.
I suppose that depends on how we reform it. The article in the OP describes something roughly analogous to one kind of reform, where punishments like suspensions were de-emphasized for students of color, along with a general shift away from traditional school discipline methods. That didn’t seem to work in the sense that the parents wanted - fewer students were suspended, but at a cost of more violence and disruption in the schools. Maybe if we as a society de-emphasized the role of criminal justice, we would have fewer black men with criminal records, but also more violence and disruptive behavior, mostly in the black community where most black criminal behavior occurs.
See my previous post. It does not appear that your experience was at all representative of the situation of single mothers in the US.
Regards,
Shodan
But that’s not lack of family planning education, that’s ineffective family planning education. But I see what you mean.
Of course, but fixing it should be a force of its own, with benefits to the education of the populace. I just meant that “fixing the justice system” shouldn’t be the first things tried in order to increase education results.
I support this wholeheartedly. Are there any places where this is offered or even talked about being offered?
Thanks for the info. Seems quite sad 
I am not sure I feel it is a white/black problem, but more of a not poor/ poor problem.
It’s not a matter of forcing people to use birth control, but to make sure that society encourages it. Many churches are against it, and it is not something we talk about in polite society, and there really haven’t even been any PSA campaigns about it (as much good as they do about the drug problem).
Everything to do with sex and reproduction is a taboo subject that is hard to broach, and the most of the few who are willing to talk about it are against birth control.
So, as a society, we need to address birth control and teen pregnancy, it’s something that effects everyone, not just blacks. My nieces go to a pretty white middle class school, and they talk about how many pregnancies and pregnancy scares there are among their classmates. Putting this on the black community is just one more obligation that we try to shove upon those who we have made less fortunate than ourselves.
That’s the problem with simple solutions to complex problems. It has been demonstrated that due to unconscious bias, black students are usually punished more harshly than their white counterparts for the same behaviors. That is something that needs to be addressed, and a simplistic “well, let’s just let them get away with anything” is not addressing the problem, just strawmanning it in order to prove a point that no one was ever contesting.
Let’s say we start by putting more emphasis on diversion programs rather than punishment, and see where that leads us.
from your cite
I did point out that my experience with single mothers is almost entirely in the workforce, so my experiences with them pretty much ensure that they have at least one job.
The way you decided to word it, you try to make it sound as if they aren’t working much, but the majority do in fact have at least one full time job, and the super majority are in fact working, even if not full time. Even people working part time may still have more than one job, as there are many jobs that will only schedule you for a few hours a week, especially if you have a problematic schedule due to kids.
I don’t know that I agree. Being a poor minority in this country also means many encounters with the police on a regular basis. And not pleasant encounters either.
If I came from those schools, and from that environment, the one thing that I would learn is to never trust any authority figure. That’s not the education we should be handing out.
Yeah, we almost had it in the 70’s. Congress actually passed a very bipartisan bill providing for comprehensive day care, but Nixon vetoed it, in large part, due to Pat Buchanan.
Anyone or anywhere more recent?
Not in the US, as far as I am aware.
Since the large majority of black children are born out of wedlock, and most of them grow up without the long-term presence of a father figure in their homes, and since the bad effects of single mothering are mitigated but not eliminated by income or education levels, I don’t think you are accurate. Of course, a disproportionate number of black people are poor, so there is a lot of overlap. But poverty is at least as much a cause of poverty and the poverty cycle as it is an effect.
Nothing that we as a society do to address the problem will work if black people don’t accept that it is ultimately their responsibility to behave responsibly.
You said that the majority of single mothers that you interacted with had three jobs. I was pointing out that for single mothers in general in the US, they don’t.
IOW as you correctly point out, your experience is different from the average single mother.
Regards,
Shodan
Quick question for everyone I guess: When people say “working 3 jobs” in threads like these, do you mean works for 3 different employers for less than 40 hours a week? Or 3 different employers for 80 hours a week? I mean, if you say “works 3 jobs” but it is really only 10 hours a week with each job, that doesn’t seem to be as onerous as 90 hours a week with 3 jobs.
My experience is that they are usually working north of 80 hours a week, total. Usually one primary job, as close to full time as they can get, one secondary, usually not all that much less, and one on the side that they may only work 10 or so hours at.
But, keep in mind that 10 hours a week at one job still means that you have to get ready for and travel to and from that job. There are many jobs that only work you 3-4 hours in a shift, so they may only be working 10 hours at a job, but are working 3 shifts.
It is hard for people whose kids are kicked out of school to yell racism if the kicker-outers are black themselves. It is hard for crooked black school administrators to yell racism if they’re replaced by honest black administrators. Solutions are self-suggesting here.
So, why don’t we stop treating everyone as part of a group, and start treating them as individuals? That would require a huge outlay of money, because more teachers and more facilities would be needed. But smaller class sizes and more individualized instruction would be better for everyone except the bean-counters.
This is why, as a teacher, I believe homeschooling could be the best environment for students.
There’s another reason schools stink. Society has been molded to make what was once the norm an impossibility for most.
How a family became single-mom makes a HUGE difference. A divorced woman, a never-married woman, and a widowed woman are NOT the same thing.