Of Failing Schools and Spin
Doctors
By
Johnie H. Scott
(WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, November 29, 2000)
Spin Doctor(s): Their job responsibility is to put the best face possible on a bad situation. Most commonly found in political circles although their tentacles have spread through society to include the education and financial communities.
In June (2000), I devoted this column to the problems stemming from the Los Angeles Unified School District’s implementing its end to “social promotion” for students failing to master the basic requirements of their grade level. The LAUSD “with more than 784,000 students” is the second largest district in the nation with New York City occupying the top spot. Educators aware of the problems inherent in such a decision were raising issues that demanded attention.
The information for that article was drawn from the LAUSD’s May Report. At the time, the district realized massive problems would come from attempting to implement the effort at all grade levels. Recognizing those difficulties, district officials instead targeted the second and eighth grades as starting points. At first glance, the effort appeared a good one: to put an end to passing students onto the next grade simply because of their age; instead, hold them back for however long it might take to achieve grade level proficiency.
In a world with a playing field that was truly “level,” there would be nothing with this thinking. In a world where real parity had been achieved so that it didn’t matter where a person lived, or where one’s children or grandchildren attended school, putting an end to passing kids simply because of their age just made good sense particularly if they couldn’t read, write, count or perform any of the related skills and tasks expected from individuals at that grade level.
This argument, however, would have been quickly put to rest if one were looking at the public schools of the 1960s, and before, anywhere in the nation. The cumulative effects of racism and de facto segregation had seen to it that education in the public schools was not only separate, but distinctly unequal. When you think about the Little Rock Nine, or Alabama Governor Orville Faubus standing in the doorway at Little Rock’s Central High School saying “Segregation now, Segregation forever!” to the cheers of white citizens, it went without saying that the schools African American children attended were inferior. No one questioned this apparent fact of life.
We’d like to think the landscape has changed a great deal since those turbulent times (See Walter Mosley’s “Introduction” to Black Genius, pp. 7-12). Part of that change can be seen in how few of today’s youth who are seniors in high school would recognize the names of Orville Faubus, George Wallace, Eugene “Bull” Connor and the Jim Crow system they represented. One would like to think the lack of name recognition is because these individuals and others like them have faded into the past, receding away in the American memory like mists into the swamps of time.
We’d all like to see that day come, after all, when a positive answer could be given to Rodney King’s question moaned out over national television in the upheaval that was the 1992 Los Angeles Riots: Can’t we all just get along?
We’d love to believe that Proposition 209 – the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative bringing an end to Affirmative Action – represented right-headed rather than reactionary thinking. No one in their right mind, after all, wants a system where “set asides” exist simply to help a certain group of people catch up while never, ever, seeming to get ahead on heir own initiative.
“Yes Virginia,
There is a Santa Claus.”
Nonetheless, Affirmative Action was the battlefield of the 1950s and 1960s with Black folks leading the way for a host of others in seeking expanded opportunities from education to the job market. That’s the sort of thought process leading to situations much like answering the question, “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” But where Prop 209 is now the law of the Golden State, where the same Golden State’s Proposition 21 sets into place the legal wherewithal to sentence 14-year-olds to adult prisons (See Joseph Hallinan’s Going Up the River), and where “social promotion” has been placed in its gravesite, something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.
I pointed my finger and called out the problem for what it was – the results of the LAUSD’s first efforts at ending social promotion in May of 2000 resulted in a reported 3,800 eighth graders and 10,000 second-graders faced with having to repeat those grades the next year. To put it another way, think of classrooms holding 30 students and apply that to the second graders in the LAUSD. You are talking of 330 classrooms filled with children “flunking” the second grade!
“I’m Invisible”
I took it a step further in pointing out the majority of kids in those same 330 classrooms had black and brown faces. They came from Southcentral and East Los Angeles. I end by looking at the spate of carnage rocking Los Angeles with the brutal murders of Lori Gonzalez, LAPD Chief’s Bernard Parks’ granddaughter along with the deaths of Al Patton and his wheelchair-bound wife Edna, that elderly couple viciously beaten and stabbed to death in their own home.
I concluded by asking who was there to mourn for those 10,000 second graders, those nameless faces kicked out of the system, so very reminiscent of the little boy in the motion picture Claudine starring James Earl Jones as the love-struck garbage man and Gladys Knight as the single parent mother of seven. It was that little boy who replied when asked by Jones why he was so quiet, “It’s because I’m invisible.” For me, as a product of the same communities in which so many of these youngsters growing up “invisible” as they try to survive with hopes and dreams, that question stands as a very real issue.
The State of Our
Nation’s Children
Adding urgency to the failure comes from reflecting on the recently-released State of America’s Children Yearbook 2000 published by the Children’s Defense Fund and some key facts about our kids:
· 1 in 2 preschoolers has a mother in the labor force;
· 1 in 2 will live in a single parent family at some point in childhood;
·
1 in 3 is behind a year or more in school;
· 1 in 4 lives with only one parent;
· 1 in 4 was born poor;
· 1 in 5 is poor now;
· 1 in 5 lives in a family receiving food stamps;
·
1 in 5 is born to a mother who did not finish high
school;
· 1 in 7 has a worker in their family but is still poor;
·
1 in 8 never graduates from high school;
· 1 in 8 is born to a teenage mother;
· 1 in 12 lives at less than half the poverty level;
· 1 in 24 lives with neither parent;
· 1 in 138 will die before their first birthday; and
· 1 in 910 will be killed by guns before age 20.
“Only 6,000 Will
Be Forced to Repeat the Second Grade”
The facts you have just read are true for all of the nation’s youth. They go much higher, however, when the subjects are African American and Hispanic/Latino – the children of our ghettoes and barrios. A few weeks ago, that same LAUSD stepped forward with its own “spin doctors” in an attempt to put a shiny face on those second and eighth graders faced with having to repeat those grades.
Good news, or so the spin went, the numbers of those having to repeat have gone down. The long and short of it being that, with special summer programs, it seems that “only” 6,000 kids will be forced to repeat the second grade. What went unsaid, of course, was that the overwhelming majority of these kids live in black and brown neighborhoods distinguished primarily by poverty, crime, and poor schools.
There’s a New
Question Waiting to be Answered
What also went unmentioned is the expansion to this year’s kindergartners of the end to social promotion. Which leads me to ask the question now: what does a kid have to do in order to flunk kindergarten?
Think about that question. It’s not funny. Not funny at all. Here in the state of California, we voted “No” to School Vouchers (and I was one among those voters) which means that we somehow have faith in what our schools can, or should be doing. I hope we don’t sit back on our duffs, leaving the corrective measures up to a system that, nationwide, has consistently failed to deliver results for black and other minority schoolchildren.
(This
article has been edited by the author from its original version published in
the WAVE and updated to include websites for students and any others interested
in the issues – JS)