Urban fatalism, begone!

January 08, 2004

We've been teaching in the inner city for the better part of a decade, and we can tell you firsthand the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is alive and well.

As we've mentioned before in "Changing what we can change," part of the problem is the overwhelmingly common viewpoint that much of a child's success in public school depends on the efforts of the parents. We're not talking about choice, instead we mean motivation.

The attitude is: "If, for whatever reason, minority students in poor neighborhoods don't seem to have a lot of motivation to do well in school, well there's not much we can do about that, is there?" Along with "lack of motivation," a phrase that too many urban educations feel comfortable using is "they can't."

Just a few days ago in the hallways of an inner-city high school we had two separate conversations with educators. The first said, "There's only so much you can do, being that most parents just don't care." The second said (about students' paper-and-pencil computation skills), "They just can't compute without a calculator. They just can't."

We're not sure exactly from whence these low expectations come, but they are here in force.

The Cranky Professor had an interesting response to an article entitled "Student Performance Not Tied to Urban Setting, Study Suggests." If one regards "Urban Setting" as just a euphamism for "Being Black and Poor," the implicit racism of the mere title of that article speaks volumes.

While it is possible to put one's finger on some very real cultural differences between groups, might we suggest that schools can and do make huge strides in educating poor, minority students?

We could point to inner-city Catholic schools ... where the student population is not only 100% black, but 100% Baptist! And somehow these schools have no trouble teaching youngsters to read, with literacy rates in the high 90s.

And there's the story of Marva Collins, who formed her own school, initially with students who were considered by others to be "uneducable." Years later, after stellar success with ever increasing numbers of students, critics accused her of being selective of the students she admitted into her school, implying "creaming." They were correct about one thing. She was selective--she picked the biggest challenges, the most "hard-luck" cases to come her way!

And she had amazing success.

"Amazing" only in that others would be amazed to see the before-and-after results. But she wasn't amazed, for she believed that with enough hard work and dedication, any child can succeed in school.

Lorraine Monroe, founder of the Fredrick Douglass Academy in Harlem, is another such believer, with similar success.

Naysayers might point out that folks like Collins and Monroe are flukes, and that you can't just clone them. Don't tell that to the folks running the KIPP Schools. They have sites all over the country, with a proven recipe for success, known as the Five Pillars.

Joanne Jacobs has an inspiring story of the results freely available to any school that wants to push their students--regardless or race or socioeconomic status--toward the path of high achievement. She recounts a call-and-response from a Newark, N.J. school:

Why are you here?

TO GET AN EDUCATION.

And what will you have to do?

WORK! HARD! WORK, WORK, WORK HARD! WORK! HARD! WORK, WORK, WORK HARD!

And what will you need?

SELF-DISCIPLINE.

Why?

TO BE THE MASTER OF MY OWN DESTINY!

As the Cranky Professor concludes, it's not the urban setting. "No. It's the people who make some schools better and some schools worse."

Amen. Here's to more folks like Marva Collins and Lorraine Monroe, and to more schools like KIPP.