Flushing Trillions
City Journal has a great piece about educating and raising inner city children. The article starts with Bill Cosby's rants against black parents for failing their children. It then explores the trillions of dollars that have been wasted in efforts to provide better education for inner city children (we say "wasted" because there's nothing to show for the efforts). The problem is a difference between middle class homes and poor homes. This isn't particularly surprising, but then the article goes on to identify the differences between the homes: primarily, middle class homes are on a "mission" to raise educated and happy children. That mission is missing from poor houses. Link. Excerpts:
After endless attempts at school reform and a gazillion dollars' worth of what policymakers call “interventions,” just about everyone realizes–without minimizing the awfulness of ghetto schools–that the problem begins at home and begins early. Yet the assumption among black leaders and poverty experts has long been that you can't expect uneducated, highly stressed parents, often themselves poorly reared, to do all that much about it. Cosby is saying that they can.
Let's start with a difficult truth behind Cosby's rant: 40 years and trillions of government dollars have not given black and white children equal chances. Put aside the question of the public schools for now; the problem begins way before children first go through their shabby doors. Black kids enter school significantly below their white peers in everything from vocabulary to number awareness to self-control.
Edward Zigler, a Head Start founder, has urged experts in the field to “become realistic and temper our hopes.” For the bitter truth is that even in the best programs that money can buy, what we're looking at is not equality but damage control, not a middle-class future but “risk prevention.”
So why have we been able to make so little headway in improving the life chances of poor black children? One reason towers over all others, and it's the one Cosby was alluding to, however crudely, in his town-hall meetings: poor black parents rear their children very differently from the way middle-class parents do, and even by the time the kids are four years old, the results are extremely hard to change.
[Why? Various explanations are offered, but they] shy away from the one reason that renders others moot: poor parents raise their kids differently, because they see being parents differently. They are not simply middle-class parents manqué; they have their own culture of child rearing, and–not to mince words–that culture is a recipe for more poverty. Without addressing that fact head-on, not much will ever change.
But poor parents differ in ways that are less predictably the consequences of poverty or the lack of high school diplomas. Researchers find that low-income parents are more likely to spank or hit their children. They talk less to their kids and are more likely to give commands or prohibitions when they do talk: “Put that fork down!” rather than the more soccer-mommish, “Why don't you give me that fork so that you don't get hurt?” In general, middle-class parents speak in ways designed to elicit responses from their children, pointing out objects they should notice and asking lots of questions: “That's a horse. What does a horsie say?” (or that middle-class mantra, “What's the magic word?”). Middle-class mothers also give more positive feedback: “That's right! Neigh! What a smart girl!” Poor parents do little of this.
In middle-class families, the child's development–emotional, social, and (these days, above all) cognitive–takes center stage. It is the family's raison d'être, its state religion. It's the reason for that Mozart or Rafi tape in the morning and that bedtime story at night, for finding out all you can about a teacher in the fall and for Little League in the spring, for all the books, crib mobiles, trips to the museum, and limits on TV. It's the reason, even, for careful family planning; fewer children, properly spaced, allow parents to focus ample attention on each one. Just about everything that defines middle-class parenting–talking to a child, asking questions, reasoning rather than spanking–consciously aims at education or child development.
The article cogently argues that nothing will change for inner-city children until their parents accept the mission. Concluding excerpt:
No one could reasonably expect Cosby's crusade to change much on its own. But as part of a broader cultural argument from the bully pulpits of government, churches, foundations, and academia, it is essential. It is at that point that interventions–and schooling–can have “positive effects” worth crowing about.
