ParisTampaBlog

In February of 2006 David Berliner told the American Association of School Administrators Federal Relations luncheon that the 600 pound gorilla sitting in the nation’s classrooms and making it difficult (if not impossible) for schools to do their job was poverty.

Many, especially those on the political Left, believe this. These reformers would address the failure of many inner city public schools to educate by making available to the impoverished communities where these children live many more of the resources and advantages that suburban children generally enjoy naturally. In other words, these people say that if you would have poor children learn look first to eliminating the presence of poverty, that 600 pound gorilla in the classroom.

And there are others, those on the political Right, who see poverty, not as a reason, but as an excuse for not learning. These “no excuses” people (from the book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom) affirm that proper classroom procedures and discipline, high expectations of students and teachers, accountability etc. can assure that learning will take place no matter the gorilla’s presence.

And of course there are those who would do both, eliminate the impoverished and disadvantaged living conditions that the children bring with them to school, and also make high demands of the students and teachers in the classroom.

Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has called for this approach, what he describes as a “Broader, Bolder Approach,” insisting that schools alone are not enough, that they need lots of help, such as better and expanded health care including family counseling services, schools for parents etc. as well as longer school days with afterschool programs, summer sessions for the students, and more and better early childhood initiatives.

But there is another elephant or 800 pound gorilla in the classroom, and no one is talking about this one. This is segregation which is back and in force. Too often our inner city classrooms are segregated in regard to both race and class. Even the best “no excuses” schools, the KIPP schools and others, those schools that are raising test scores and almost eliminating thereby the test score gap between inner city and suburban schools, mostly have students of a single skin color, black, and a single class, poor.

Once again, as in 1954, when in Brown vs. the Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled that Plessy vs. Ferguson was unconstitutional, that separate was not equal, we’re confronted with separate and “equal” schools. And this time there seems to be no solution, either in the courts or in the legislatures.

At that earlier time the solution was busing across the city. OK, that was doable, but busing across city lines into the suburbs? No way is that going to happen. The whites have fled to the suburbs and there are mostly only impoverished minority populations remaining in the cities. And it’s just not possible to integrate city schools when nearly all city school kids are of the same color or class.

Richard Kahlenberg has proposed enlarging the city school districts to include the suburbs, as in Wake County, NC, or in the single city, Cambridge, MA, that which would again enable integration to take place by busing. But the logistics of this, busing to the suburbs for example, are probably insurmountable, let alone the entrenched opposition of the suburban parents to allowing poor inner city children into their own children’s schools and classrooms.

KIPP Schools, and schools like KIPP seem the best we can do for the actual situation in our inner cities. But let no one mistake it, this situation is again, at best, separate and unequal. And the KIPP solution is in any case only for a relatively small number of students.

While KIPP schools are proposing that by 2012 there could be as many as 24,000 poor, mostly black students in their schools how many others are there out there, not reached by the “no excuses” schools? Depending on what poverty definition you use there are anywhere from 10 to 20 million children living in poverty.

As long as the school populations in our cities are poor and minority there is little chance that these children will ever profit from the great benefit of attending school with others who are significantly different from them in regard to both race and class, and from whom they might discover that the race and class into which they were born need not be their destiny, as too often it is for too many of them at the present time.