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Segregation is the solution to one of public education’s two biggest problems
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What follows isn’t pretty and it will make you uncomfortable, but someone’s got to say it and take the heat. Public schools have two big problems that generate a thousand intractable small ones; just two, and I’m going to tell you how to fix one of them. Problem one: black boys. Problem two: Latino boys. I am not going to exclude my Latin brothers out of malice or ignorance; I am just not an expert on that culture. Let’s not play games with one another; we both know that schools with small numbers of black and Hispanic students seem to do just fine, regardless of the income level of the community. 41 white school kids were not killed in Chicago last year. Are white kids bullet proof? Can we truth talk? Or are you too afraid?
Problem One: I don’t have time or space to catalog what you already know. Black males get the lowest grades, have the highest drop-out rates, and are disciplined way out of proportion to their percentage of the school population and take up most of the seats in special education classes. Black males run in gangs, deal drugs, shoot each other when they’re bored, and wear really funny looking clothes. Many teachers and a sizable number of policemen fear them. They are the last hired, first fired, and unless they sing, dance, or have some athletic skill, they’re pretty much unwelcome in polite society. Black men are 12% of the population but over half of its prisoners. Face it, if Michael Jordan was a dentist, you’d live with the cavities, and Barack Obama’s national charm is the half of him that is not one of us. Heck, even our erudite vice president was surprised at how ‘clean’ his boss was. I have always enjoyed Joe’s goofy honesty. If I am lethally candid I have to tell you that some black men and women also avoid black men. Relatively few black women were lynched or mutilated, and when they were it was usually because they were trying to help defend their man. The national headache is black males, and has been since the Civil War.
If you’re living on the planet Unicorn and have not already come to privately realize this long-running reality, then I can’t be of service to you. But if you can drop the politically correct, bed-wetting double-speak, we might be able to address the 165-pound problem in our inner cities. The black male adolescent. Now how do we fix it?
When black boys had black teachers in segregated schools, they weren’t gangbanging and singing stupid songs that demeaned black women and girls. School integration seemed like a good idea in 1954, but it never really happened because of ‘white flight.’ Chicago schools are 80% minority. What the eggheads and do-gooders did give us was integrated teaching staffs. The other way to look at faculty integration is from the perspective of the student. Black boys lost the one group of people who would not categorically reject them, black teachers, and they lost them at the same time that their collective mothers decided that they did not need fathers in the home. The results we are living with are so predictable I have to pop an aspirin to keep my cool. We have to stop living this euphemistic lie and face the awful truth.
The Solution: Black male teachers! Brothers teaching brothers in segregated schools. Yeah I know, less than 5% of all K-12 teachers are brothers. How are we gonna get them? MONEY! Triple the salaries for black male teachers just like we did when the Russians put Sputnik in space and we went nuts looking for engineers and scientists. Kennedy (JFK) said in 1961, we’d reach the moon in 9 years, and we did. It shut the Kremlin up and put the first nail in the soviet coffin. If a resource is scarce, you pay what you must to acquire it. Gold is only expensive because there ain’t much of it. Spend that windfall Obama money on what we need, not William Ayres experiments looking for the ‘best practice,’ and testing the kids so much that there’s no time to teach. Cut the crap! That is, if you really want to solve the problem and not fiddle around with mission statements while children die in the streets. If Mayor Daley can give $98 million dollars to UNO, DOS, or whomever, some kind of way we can afford to train and hire black males to teach their own kind.
So where are we gonna get these teacher-brothers? Answer: From the U.S. Armed Forces that most school systems demean, ignore, and reject! Poll after poll is taken and every time we learn that the most respected institution in this nation is our military. But the aging hippie mentality of school administrators taught by William Ayres and his ilk quietly closes their doors to our vets.
Black families did not self-destruct overnight. It took 4 decades of War-on-Poverty, rabbit-hole madness to blind us to reality and make excuses for the inexcusable. Sadly, it will take another 40 years to fix it, 40 years from whenever we decide to start. Delay at your own risk.
Edward Hayes, U.S. Army Reserve Retired
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