In today’s Los Angeles Times Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, laments that American education is “still separate, still unequal.” (Link thanks to Howard Bashman)
Levine wisely points out that affirmative action would be moot if K-12 education were better. “Affirmative action comes too late for the many low income and minority children who drop out of failing schools before completing high school.” Most inner city students, Levine writes,
come from low-income and minority families. They attend schools funded at lower rates, which means their teachers are paid lower salaries than suburban teachers. They are far more likely to have teachers who lack certification, and their curriculum materials are likely to be inadequate in number and in poorer condition than at suburban schools. Their facilities are in far poorer shape.
….
There is a huge gap in achievement between minority and majority students and between students attending urban and suburban schools. We have two school systems: one for affluent children, another for the poor. We have a set of schools largely for black and Latino students and another, far better, largely for whites. Once again, we have created, not by design but by happenstance, a system of separate and unequal education.
I’m afraid Levine is too optimistic. His analysis suggests that the problems of the schools can be cured with more money. Money would no doubt help many failing school systems, but there is some reason to believe that there are some improvements even money can’t buy.
I am no expert, or even a particularly well-informed observer, of these matters (Joanne, are you here?), but my impression from years of living in northern Virginia (before moving to Jefferson Country) and reading the Washington Post is that the Washington, D.C., school system compares very favorably with the much higher performing suburban schools systems that surround it in teachers’ salaries, rates of certification, educational materials, etc.
Even if true, that’s not to say that most urban school system don’t deserve more resources. But it does raise a question about whether those resources alone will close the gaps that Levine laments.
UPDATE – Now go read something from someone, Joanne Jacobs, who actually knows something about education.
I’m also intrigued by the way the quoted passage, and indeed most writing on education from a leftist perspective, identifies “low-income” with “minority,” and completely ignores the poor white kids who are in, from what I can tell, exactly the same boat. This is, of course, an obvious point for anyone willing to see it. However, the fact that Levine can call having better schools in high-income areas “separate and unequal” with regards to race indicates that the idea isn’t getting through that in this case, race doesn’t even appear in the equation.
The “inner city schools get less money” gambit is false. That’s not the problem.
New York City schools are a good example. I tried to send my children to NYC public schools. Funding per student in NYC schools is little different from public schools in the suburbs.
NYC public schools could not provide a sane disciplinary environment for my children and so I took them out. What I mean by “sane disciplinary environment” is that disruptive students turned classes into wars, and my daughters could not walk through the halls in safety.
It’s easy to place the blame on the schools and the teachers and they have to take their share. My observation was that nothing can be done with a student body that does not respect education. Girls and boys who are not disciplined at home cannot be disciplined at school.
If you want an easy answer, I can’t give you one.
Bad schools have expenses that good schools don’t. In California, schools are penalized monetarily for every student absence. So bad schools, with less family involvement, have to hire truant officers (they have some euphemistic title now). Bad schools have to spend more on security, theft, and vandalism. Often bad schools have aging, more expensive physical plants. And yes, bad schools sometimes have administrations that don’t spend money as wisely as possible. Nevertheless, I think that there is a powerful counterargument to the idea that increased spending won’t improve a school. If it were true, then decreased spending wouldn’t hurt a school, and why would fiscally-conservative suburbanites not cut their school budgets and their taxes? (But I do agree with Stephen that there are some schools so bad, with such dysfunctional students, that more money would be only a small part of a solution. We spend the money later, anyway, on prisons.)
Wrong about the money there, Andrew. At least in Los Angeles County, that is. Millions upon millions have been pored into the public schools of LA County since I’ve been here, 1975. Take a tour — they have slowly been destroyed. Until you change the character of the students and the neighborhood, proing more money into those schools will see the same result. It starts at home!
Dan, LA seems to have an exceptionally incompetent school district. I’ve seen money make a lot of positive changes in the Berkeley public schools (which, notwithstanding popular belief, include many majority-black high-poverty schools), and I’m going to see many of them go away in the Gray Davis budget sinkhole.