Patrick Welsh, who has been teaching English at Alexandria, Virginia’s, T.C. Williams High School (the school featured in Remember the Titans) since right after the earth cooled, has another of his periodic Washington Post columns today reporting from the school front lines.
Making the Grade Isn’t About Race. It’s About Parents argues, as you will have guessed, that the poor performance of so many of his (and other) black students has “nothing to do with race.” He begins:
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class — and was constantly distracting other students when he did — shot back: “It’s because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study.”
Another student angrily challenged me: “You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us.” When I did, not one hand went up.
I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn’t be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father’s absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don’t: parents.
My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn’t because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn’t wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren’t there for them — at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.
The academic debris resulting from fatherless families is of course not news, and I suspect Welsh was “stunned” not by the fact of the rampant fatherlessness but by the frank recognition of its impact by his students.
Welsh goes on to paint a devastating and depressing picture of the “fixation on race” at T.C. Williams.
In an example of how bad the fixation on race here has become, last year Morton Sherman, the new superintendent, ordered principals throughout the city to post huge charts in their hallways so everyone — including 10-year-old kids — could see differences in test scores between white, black and Hispanic students. One mother told me that a black fifth-grader at Cora Kelly Magnet School said that “whoever sees that sign will think I am stupid.” A fourth-grade African American girl there looked at the sign and said to a friend: “That’s not me.” When black and white parents protested that impressionable young children don’t need such information, administrators accused them of not facing up to the problem. Only when the local NAACP complained did Sherman have the charts removed….
But focusing on a “racial achievement gap” is too simple; it’s a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.
Last year, two of the finest and most dedicated teachers at my school — one in science and one in math — tried to move students who were failing their classes into more appropriate prerequisite courses, because the kids had none of the background knowledge essential to mastering more advanced material. Both teachers were told by a T.C. Williams administrator that the problem was not with the students but with their own low expectations.
Welsh is obviously correct that fatherless families and unsupportive parents are not inherited racial characteristics, that emphasizing race and blaming the schools fosters victimology. The color of a father’s skin does not cause his absence from his family, nor does the color of a mother’s skin determine how strict she is about homework. Still, Welsh goes overboard in attempting to dissociate race altogether from the dysfunctional educational behavior he observes, if for no other reason than that there the percentage of black children in single-parent families is three times higher than whites. It is true that damaged families, not race, stack the deck against black kids raised in single families, but it is not true that their difficulty “has nothing to do with race.”
Just ask the liberals. They’ll tell you (as they’ve no doubt told Welsh) that attributing educational difficulty to single-parent families is just as racist as blaming their race, just another example of “blaming the victim.”
Liberals can’t afford to let go of their victims. (If they weren’t victims, who would need liberals?)
Having no father present in the home doesn’t help, but neither does being of genetically low intelligence. Even worse, the latter is not fixable. This is the dirty secret of American education. If you mention this, even as a possibility, you are a “racist” and beyond the pale. So everyone pretends that the emperor has clothes on.