It's Black History Month. As my African-American students used to note reflecting on its overall importance to America: it is the shortest month of the year. Let's not tarry in celebrating.
And, for all the fulminating about education and politics at Big Orange, we don't often broach issues of race. It isn't safe, nor pretty. Just when you think you've hit on something substantial, deep and true, another poster from a micro-niche of the represented group steps up to let you know how full of shit you are. Really full of shit.
With that in mind, I want to risk holding the "achievement gap" up to the light of day. It is the very reason for the entire bureaucratic and pedagogical nightmare of "No Child Left Behind." And, presumably, when it's gone, we will no longer have to endure the torturous exercise of putting young children through batteries of "national security exams", repeating every time the exact text written in instruction booklets about how really important, really-really-really important this test is.
Fix the gap, we can remove the vomit pails and get back to learning.
I am not keen on more discussion of NCLB or schools or tests or motivations. I just want to focus on the "achievement gap" because, in point of fact, it is real, disturbing and a damning indictment of our society.
Here we are, nearing 150 years since the start of a Civil War over slavery, fully 50 years past Brown vs The Board, and we have not been able to fundamentally undo the divide between black and white.
Why?
I've got some responses, but first, a look at the reality of the "gap", at least as it existed in the 1990s, according to one education author (Yeah, me.):
When I first started teaching at Park Center in the then mostly white suburb of Brooklyn Park—it, like most of America has changed quickly in the last decade in terms of race— there was a sizeable portion of black kids, especially young men, hanging out between class near the cafeteria. They seemed completely out of place, talking loud and slapping hands, smiling big, getting their raps on. I knew from a counselor in the office that there was not one of these dozens of kids in the top 50% of our school’s graduating class. Not one. Black on Black crime seemed to be getting worse. Gangs were a genuine threat. Images of black men as perpetrators of violence, drugs and crime filled the media. This disturbed me, as it did portions of the community and some on the teaching staff. I didn’t know many of these youngsters well, but in another way, I felt like I knew them. I imagined that I saw Maurice there, and Greg, my black backcourt partner from high school; Marcel, a Camerounian friend I met in France, and Ernest, a young man I knew from playing ball at a Minneapolis park. I believed these were good kids with a variety of talents and that something valuable was being wasted.
I don't measure the achievement gap in terms of test scores. I measure it in lives. I see it every day down at the corner where guys in parkas are eyeing vehicles that motor slowly by. I measure it by the faces and voices of people clinging to their roofs in New Orleans after Katrina. I measure it by knowing the numbers of those imprisoned by America's law and order psychosis--and the unemployment rate, the income gap, the average age of death, diversity in major American corporations, affirmative action in admissions, and on. The gap is real, it's pervasive, and, particularly for black men, it ain't going anywhere.
Why, people?
Here we are the richest, and by some accounts, the greatest nation on earth, and we have a profound disparity laying at the very heart of who we are as a people. One that ties in directly to the longest lasting, most extensive policy of racism ever created in the history of man: slavery.
There is not country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.
-- Howard Zinn
Um, because I am a teacher, I have the habit of asking questions and listening to answers, more than delivering truth in bite-size packets. I like learning myself, and I do that by listening. Also, in a way, a really big way, I believe that our questions are more important than our answers.
One must always trust and validate the questions posed by socialists because they are genuine and emerge from real issues. But, as well, one must be very skeptical of their answers, as reality has no repsonsibility to live up to ideals.
Paraphrase of a William Sloane Coffin paraphrase of someone else (Sorry)
And, in truth, in terms of the black-white gap in this country, whether it is called achievement, income, prison, or death "gap", there is not a single answer. Rather, there is a nexus of deep and festering truths that are writhing in the pit of America's stomach--so many snakes and sub-conscious feelings of fear and guilt and priviledge and hatred that the very idea of going down into it and teasing them apart makes most of us sick.
And, let's face it. The job is impossible. I mean, why would a black kid of 14 years old give up on education and learning for fear of being called a "whitey?" Why do kids gain more "cred" sitting in the back of a room and invest all their energy in flustering the teacher to the point of giving up? And it's not just me: from Bill Cosby to John McWhorters to Oprah Winfrey, there is frustration, dispute, discussion, but not a lot of anwers as to what can be done on these questions.
But, let me say one thing very clearly: For this country's political and business elites to hang this most vexing, thorny, central issue around the necks of teachers and schools, to scapegoat just one element in our society over something that the whole has created over centuries, to march public education itself to the edge of the cliff and say:
You fix this problem, you make every single kid in America whole, regardless of race, income or family circumstance, and you do it in the next 10 years, or we are going to push you and the entire enterprise of public schools down into the abyss.
For them to do that, and actually stand there with test results in their hand screaming: "Well? Well? Well?"
That is true insanity.
And paired with the notion that we can march troops blithely into foreign countries, take them over, bomb, shoot, kill our way to the heart of the capital, tell them we mean no harm but bring only good intentions, take over their government, pick replacements, call it democracy, and actually convince the American public that this is all necessary for our own security and the creation of a "new world order" -- well, I'm at a loss here, folks, I've already used the word insanity.
Can I say America is "a-historic"? That we are delusional in the most clinically severe extent of that term? That we are, in fact, gone nutso ipso facto? (Can't we just go shopping now?)
It's Black History Month, everyone. How far and how fast can we run away from the reality of the various "Gaps"--blaming teachers, blaming kids, blaming parents, blaming government--looking at everyone else except our own damn history and responsibility for the way things are?