Arne Duncan's Race-to-the-Top scam won't help the kids at the bottom

The acquisition of knowledge is a natural human need not unlike the pursuit of junk food, the opposite sex, and fast cars.  Did you ever encounter a three-year old child that was not naturally inquisitive and completely receptive to any and everything you were willing to teach him?  Of course not.  By age four these tykes look out of the window, see the parade of munchkins walking to school and long to go with them.  Then why is it five years later, by the time the lad is in the third grade, school bums him out?  Has the thirst for learning dried up before the curriculum even gets to long division?  It doesn’t make sense. 

Yet, if you put that same kid who can no longer tolerate the constraints and restraints of a effeminate classroom, on a football field, in a music studio, or later in advanced infantry training, that kid can execute, remember and decipher complicated plays, complex music structures, and multi-faceted military tactics that would confound others, and he can do it with flash and dash.  Why is that?  How it is that same individual learns in one environment and fails in another?  Is Arne the Duncan asking these questions?

People, school reform is no more of a complicated task to a real educator than mending a broken leg is to a real doctor.  But then, if the doctor sets the left leg when it is the right leg that is fractured, a simple problem is compounded at the victim’s expense.   So if Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, tricks you into charter-school surgery on the wrong leg, five years from now your limp will be permanent, and National Nice Guy Arne will be Governor of Illinois. 

Ya gotta know which leg to fix.  How?  Look at it. It is the one with the jagged bone protruding from the flesh.  It is obvious!  In public schools, the busted limb is the minority male student, African-American black and Latino Brown.  How did he get busted up?  At age five he skipped into kindergarten with a big sloppy smile on his face, and at age sixteen, he limps out of high school with a weapon in the waistband of his stupid looking pants.  What happened?

Teachers happened!   He didn’t get smacked down by the curriculum.  Nor did the lad give up because the instructor used a teaching method less than the best practice, whatever that is.  Though parents sometimes come in ugly packages, none of them orders their child not to learn.  There is a problem in urban schools.  What is it? It’s simple.  The kid didn’t like school because he hated his teacher.  Think it through.  Why would a forty-pound boy dislike any adult?  Easy answer:  because the child perceives the adult does not like him.  Or worse.  And as goofy as kids are, the one thing their survival instinct tells each one is when you don’t give a rabbit about them.  Furthermore, in these awful student warehouses, principals do not principal; they look the other way to avoid both union wrath and cowardly district superintendents.  That is why school reform is run by non-educators.    

Black children have dealt with disdain from white adults for a few hundred years now; they pretty much expect to see it.  Black parents warn their children before they let them out of the door.  So it takes a whole lot of disdain to get these kids to give up on school before they are old enough to be a boy scout.  This is happening every day before our very eyes and we do nothing.

True story.  I had two boys, identical twins in the fourth grade in a Joliet elementary school.  Let’s call them Cuff and Link.  Cuff’s teacher was a black woman and he scored well into the top quintile on the Iowa standardized test.  Link, and you can’t make this stuff up, scored barely in the lowest quintile after eight months of instruction from a white male.  I was already on top of this clod all year because every time I visited his classroom, the kids were coloring or working on some vacuous worksheet.  Even the official teacher observation went poorly, and I told him I expected more substance from a veteran teacher.  Later, when I looked at the Iowa test results, I confronted him with the contrasting scores for the twins and demanded an explanation.  At the end of the school year he opted for early retirement rather than subject himself to another year of my supervision.  Score one for the kids, one incompetent boob eliminated.  I was a first-year principal and had to wonder, how many hundreds of fourth grade babies in this all-black school did he ruin before I got there?  And why didn’t the previous principal bust him out?   

People, we have teachers who simply do not care about their students.  Others do care but feel the little colored kids are incapable of white folks learning, so why stress them out and diminish their ‘self-esteem.’  Black teachers push black kids and when those kids don’t respond, black teachers call in the parents.  Yeah parents.  That’s another story.

In another elementary school in Bellwood, two of my white female staff literally ran into my closet-sized office visibly upset because there was a ‘man’ in the hallway.  I literally ran out into the hall myself, encountered the ‘man’ and said, ‘good morning Mr. Jones.’  He was a parent.  Tell the truth out there.  White teachers are not only afraid of large black boys, they are afraid of large black parents as well.  So they don’t call them and encourage them to come up to school to see about their kids.  And when black parents do come in looking for help, they don’t get the truth because white teachers fear them.  Frankly, I can’t blame the teachers entirely.  Have you ever seen an angry and self-righteous black mother who is scared to death her ‘baby’ might be as dumb as the absent father?  Not a pretty sight; I have had two or three of these ‘Madea’ women arrested for creating a disturbance in a public school. 

If you know a white teacher, God bless them for trying, you’ve heard their horror stories and you know bloody well they demean the minority kids.  As a beginning teacher I refused to go into the teachers lounge because I could not relax with all the student bashing that goes on.  As a principal I was not permitted in that snake pit.  Frankly, if you’ve tried and failed, and your boss is too yellow to fire you, you need to quit.  Kids’ lives are at stake.  Yes, I have seen excellent white teachers and terrible black ones, but for every effective white teacher I have seen, I have seen five-to-six teachers that were a menace to the sub-society they worked in.  That is where your astronomical suspension and expulsion rate comes from; did you think the principal walked up and down the halls wiping kids out at random?  No, they are discipline referrals driven by the human inability of the teacher to communicate with the child.  Sorry, but at that point I hold the adult responsible, not the kid! 

There is nothing in Arne Duncan’s Race-to-the-Top school reform plan to address the very simple problem of a mismatch of teacher personnel to the community student.  Most boys go through their formative years in school without a male teacher of any hue or religion, much less one of his own.  Why is it so difficult to accept that it is more difficult for a goose to teach a duck than it is for the goose to teach another goose?   Madness.