The Atlanta cheating scandal: it’s raaaacism!
The idea of putting the cheating Atlanta educators in prison is racist, say a group of black clergy in Atlanta. Just what’s racist about it they don’t bother to explain.
Do they mean that, if the offenders had been white, there would have been no chance of them going to jail? Are they saying that prison itself is racist, since a disproportionate number of inmates are black? Or is the charge of racism so reflexive by now that they’re not even thinking of a justification for it?
The irony here is that it seems the vast majority of the characters in the story are black: the perpetrators, the DA who wants prison terms for them, and the victims, the schoolchildren and parents of Atlanta. Most Atlanta public schools are virtually all black—and quite a few of them, such as Booker T. Washington High, Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater, have never been integrated, passing seamlessly from the days of de jure segregation to de facto segregation despite official integration.
The Atlanta cheating scandal has shed a light on the current state of public education, particularly for black students in poor urban areas. If education has any chance of countering trends in that community towards family disintegration and the glorification of an anti-academic, outlaw mentality, it isn’t being helped along by certain attitudes of the leadership of the black community, as exemplified in these clergymen—or by some of the moves of the NAACP and the teachers’ unions:
The American public education system is failing many groups, but none more miserably than black males. The numbers are shocking. The Schott Foundation recently reported that only 47 percent of black males graduate from high school on time, compared to 78 percent of white male students…
The way urban city school districts fail black males is more disconcerting considering that black professionals are in charge. Urban districts are among the worst at graduating black males: Atlanta, 34 percent; Baltimore, 35 percent; Philadelphia, 28 percent; New York, 28 percent; Detroit, 27 percent; and St. Louis, 38 percent.
There are surely many reasons for such failure, and family breakdown must rank high among them. Schools may be powerless to transform black family life, but they should not be left off the hook for turning in a dismal performance. In a recent interview, Dr. Steve Perry, principal and founder of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Conn., repeatedly places the blame for the black achievement gap at the feet of the partnerships between the teachers unions and the NAACP, “a civil-rights relic.” The places where black students excel, says Perry, are those where students have access to choice. Sadly the NAACP and the NEA have long undermined the push for low-income black parents to exercise freedom to choose the best schools as a national norm.
For example, even with mounting evidence demonstrating that single-sex education for blacks males from low-income households represents one of the best opportunities for graduation, the NEA petitioned the Department of Education in 2004 to prevent single-sex options from becoming nationally normative, balking because “the creation of an artificial single-sex environment [will] ill prepare students for life in the real world.”
Why aren’t these black preachers talking about values within their own congregations? Is it because it is easier to externalize th problems they have?
The video is surreal in that it’s not a satire on Saturday Night Live of hilarious moments to cry racismmmmm. Maybe we should just make it a breaking news story only when a so called black leader doesn’t play the race card.
I will agree that the clergymen quoted are more fitted to clown suits than clerical collars. However, there is an argument for not putting the cheating educators in jail. If they were put in jail, they would still be on the taxpayers’ dime. Revoke their teaching licenses and forbid them from any further employment with any government entity.
They should be forced to work for private enterprise- if any will hire them.
While there may be a few saints and missionaries teaching in inner city schools, very few people want to teach in that setting. It’s dangerous and unpleasant. The bulk of the teachers are there because they could not get hired elsewhere.
Poverty is not the problem. Subculture is. Maine is a poor state but does fine on national tests.
“Maine is a poor state but does fine on national tests.”
Actually, it does badly on the SATs, because it makes all high school students take them. Other than that, yeah.
What the preachers are doing is a form of racial disassociation. If urban black students worked just as hard, received as much encouragement and discipline from their own community, and accepted that white people are not the source of all their problems, and still fell behind, that would be a far harder problem to explain.
So they don’t. They keep the barriers up because honestly trying with all your might is the scariest thing you can do. The risk of failure becomes real.
Liz,
You are correct. The opposite is true for Mississippi and the SAT because it is an ACT state where the SAT takers are few and self selected.
I was thinking of the NAEP tests where Maine is in the top ten on some tests.
1. I agree with SteveH that the video is surreal. Even the MSM interviewer seems pained.
2. Ne writes, …it seems the vast majority of the characters in the story are black: the perpetrators, the DA who wants prison terms for them, and the victims, the schoolchildren and parents of Atlanta.
a. An educated, prosperous elite is victimizing the people whose interests they should be working for.
There’s a lot of that going on these days.
b. Imagine the garbage the DA will take if he does his job. Here’s hoping he’s up to the challenge.
3. Hopefully Curtis will be along to help with my hazy recollection of Scripture, but didn’t Jesus say that really nasty things will happen to those who lead children astray?
If racism disappeared, the race hustlers would have to seek other employment.
At the risk of sounding like another astonishingly loquacious commenter, it all goes back to the protective tariff.
The tariff made the labor of farmers and farm workers less remunerative than the labor of town and of factory workers. Thus, there was less cash in the South, West and Mid-West than in the Northeastern quadrant of the US. So, a school teacher in the family was a very essential asset. In a year of poor harvest or even worse than usual prices, the family with the cash income from the teacher, kept their land. OTOH, in a good year, a man who farmed or ranched would make a very nice profit, even it it all went to pay off last year’s debt. So, girls went to college, boys went to work on the farm. Scholarship, for rural people, was effeminate. I attended a high school in a small, mostly agrarian town, but my folks were townies for three generations before me, so my grandfather taught school, too. (My high school math teacher was one of his pupils.) I still remember the rural boys who sat in a row at the back of the class room, mumbling, resenting those of us who knew the answers, but not wanting to be seen studying.
Many, many African Americans are still very rural in their outlook. My children’s godmother, a lady of African descent, and a very good teacher, used to come to Sunday dinner nearly every week and piss and moan about the kids in her classes who could not even be bothered to bring a pencil to class. It would not be cool, you see. My wife attempted to teach, a few years later, in that same school, to little good effect. I have supervised the products of such a culture, when I worked in a nursing home, a two-year-long nightmare.
There are, of course, kids of African descent who succeed, a few more every year. However, there are millions still stuck in that mindset, the unmanliness of literacy. That rural attitude, not skin color, not even, at least not completely, singe parenthood, tracks academic failure more closely. We all have Black co-workers, bosses, junior employees who will one day succeed us. Many of them are women, who don’t have to prove their masculinity, of course, and men, who come from a different place, really, in effect, a different time.
Single sex schools have proven to work very well, as the theory would predict, although the reasons that people think that they work, like bad influence from girls, or raging hormones, which, and it pains me to say this, because I do not like to imagine racism in every compost pit, carries a hint of that uncontrollable-lust myth. Catholic schools, even those with both sexes, traditionally exercised very strict discipline, and that may have been the key to their success, or just a better applicant pool might be enough to make the difference.
Whatever else we do, though, we still replicate the badness in every generation, as long as young Black boys are told that success by diligence in school is shameful.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Michael. Not prolix at all, afaic. In fact, I wish you’d given more detail about what the protective tariff was and why it created the situation you describe.
The protective tariff was Hamilton’s idea, was a major cause of the division into Democratic-Republican and Federalist parties. It taxed imported goods, at a rate high enough to give our “infant industries” a competitive edge over European manufactures. Since we already produced agricultural wealth in great abundance, import tariffs would not help farmers. The tariff worked. America industrialized. It also meant that, outside the Northeast, cash was always in short supply. People bartered. People made non-cash arrangements. Slavery is one of those arrangements. When slavery was abolished, it was replaced by share-cropping, which is understood, outside the South, as a Black thing. However, my great-grandfather, and, also, my wife’s grandfather, who were Caucasian, both sometimes raised a crop on shares. It was a way that a farmer could increase his operation, without incurring more debt. Booker T Washington and George Washington Carver, and many Caucasian agrarian reformers, as well, encouraged farmers to use share-cropping as leverage, to increase their holdings. This leverage was why, from 1868 until 1940, Black land-ownership increased every year but two, an increase that began, as my dates have it, even before such a strategy was advocated by Washington, Carver, Cash et al .
The school teacher, paid in cash, could pay the taxes on the farm, and, also, the interest on the mortgage, in a bad year. This chronic lack of liquidity is a part, a big part, of rural people’s preference for low-tax/low-service government. It also explains the South’s former allegiance to the Democrat party, because the Democrats were anti-tariff, and because, in the twentieth century, they favored dispensing large amounts of largess, in cash, of course, in rural areas. As the South industrialized, they became more Republican, because they started paying for that largess, in income taxes, which had not mattered so much, when the income tax was first introduced, because people had no income, and so paid little tax.
We import a great many manufactured goods from China, now, because we no longer have protective tariffs. That is bad for American manufacturing, and good for American consumers. OTOH, the protective tariff allowed our automobile and steel industries to become rather fat and inefficient*, and, therefore, less competitive, when the time came to compete.
I hope I have been helpful.
*However, that comparative inefficiency is not as huge as it is often said to be. Our industries are often top heavy and a bit bureaucratic in management style, but our workers’ productivity is greater than the output of, for example, of Chinese workers.
1. Michael Says:
I hope I have been helpful.
You certainly have. As you diplomatically did not point out, the rudimentary facts are available online. A cogent presentation of the overall situation is a different matter.
2. More like this, please, if you have time and inclination.
3. Perhaps the entrepreneur/venture capitalist relationship is a modern variant of sharecropping.
4. A shout-out to Neo for running a blog that attracts comments like Michael’s.