The Education Solution

More bad news on Illinois school test scores (Prairie State Exams), and we lag the country (NAEP Exams). Tribune:

Four years ago, when all states began taking the exam, Illinois posted pass rates higher than the nation in every category.

This year, Illinois pupils are either equal to or behind their national counterparts on every exam, the data shows.

In 2003, about 32 percent of Illinois 4th graders scored at or above the "proficient" level on the math exam, showing they have mastery of the subject matter. This year, 36 percent did so.

But that improvement rate was far outpaced by the nation.

And the flat percentage of those who score as proficient is nothing to brag about--36%. That essentially means a failure rate of over 60%.

To compound the problem, Illinois continues to pursue useless solutions. The entire supposed rationale (besides lining the pockets of Friends of Rod and Barack, Jeff Schoenberg, and Julie Hamos) for the wrong-headed, wasteful Illinois affordable housing scheme, which would have us spend millions on high-priced real estate rather than direct dollars to the children that most need it, was this one---that the mere proximity to kids who are doing better in school would solve everything. Here's the latest on that boneheaded idea--sending poor kids to middle-class schools doesn't fix the system. In a recent column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Reason Foundation's Joanne Jacobs writes:

"In June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred school assignments based on race to increase racial diversity. So school leaders immediately began considering economic integration plans instead. Sit poor kids next to middle-class kids. That should work! Presidential candidate John Edwards -- Mr. Two Americas -- has made this the core of his education proposals." Jacobs, author of the book, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds, examines the data and finds "contrary to expectations, moving families out of high-poverty neighborhoods has no overall positive impact on children's learning. The new neighborhoods were significantly less poor, and their residents were better educated. But researchers found no difference in children's reading or math scores or in behavior or attitudes toward school when comparing families that won the housing lottery with those who didn't. There also was no effect on retentions in grade or suspensions."

This is the smug, patronizing, shallow, empty-headed solution of the liberal Dem elites, and it is a proven failure. (And Tribune stories like this one don't help. Well maybe a little. It points to a conclusion that our feminized schools are ill-equipped to deal with boys, especially blacks.) What we need is wholesale cultural change. Myron Magnet, City Journal:

How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?

The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued. That legacy didn’t stop blacks from raising themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowell’s data show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didn’t cause. Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.

And this effect of growing up in such an atmosphere:

But calling women “bitches” and “hos” (dialect for “whores”)—and rap has almost no other word for woman—is an even more destructive development. Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson explains black Americans’ low marriage rate and high illegitimacy rate by saying that too many unskilled black men are “unmarriageable,” since the disappearance of well-paid manual labor has deprived them of the means to support wives. He’s right that they are unmarriageable, but the reason is not economic but cultural: they are unmarriageable because they have odious attitudes, and therefore odious behavior, toward women, which rap expresses ad nauseam.

Political and media leaders need to reject rap. Step up Hillary, Barack. Some have tried, as Magnet suggests, Bill Cosby, Wynton Marsalis.

Rap culture rejects education as useless. I still remember a NY Times story about a young black woman who had won a prestigious scholarship to college, and still wondered whether she could succeed. It's tragic. And we are stuck with "leaders" like Jesse Jackson in Chicago who are stuck on stupid.

We need better schools, early on, to counteract this destructive culture. Going back to the failed idea of just moving kids blocks away--even many middle class schools don't teach the Golden Rule anymore, most kids get that at home, if at all, but they have enough positive modeling to succeed. The multiculti liberal orthodoxy that permeates our public schools, urban and suburban, the soft bigotry of lowered expectations which treats vulnerable kids as victims won't cut it for these kids.

The only way you achieve success is by introducing some measure of competition, so that schools and the teachers' unions are forced to view parents as consumers, and students as their first priority. In Illinois, we have a long way to go. Please let's start by lifting the cap on charter schools, at least for Chicago, and in needy surrounding areas.

Related UPDATE: Heather McDonald, City Journal, via RCP, The Jena Dodge:

The reason that the black incarceration rate is the highest in the country is that blacks have the highest crime rate—by a long shot. Don’t trust the police, prosecutors, or judges to give a fair picture of black crime? Then go where the bodies are. Los Angeles is representative. In the first seven months of 2007, blacks in Los Angeles were murdered at a rate ten times that of whites and Asians. Who’s killing them? It’s not whites and Asians. While a minor proportion of the assailants of blacks are Hispanic, the vast majority are black themselves. [snip]

In short, the opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not. California’s state superintendent of public instruction broke a longstanding taboo this August by pointing out that middle-class black students in the state score worse on math and English than poor white and Asian students—a disparity that applies across the country. The usual poverty excuse for black underachievement does not hold up.

The Jena protesters will go home in denial of these truths. In fact, the purpose of such mass celebrations—and that is indeed what they are—is to make sure that attention stays far away from the actual problems holding blacks back. Astronomical rates of black criminality are not the only topic that the Jena rallies have obscured. No one wallowing in Jena promotion has had the courage to speak about an even more important crisis, the breakdown of marriage. The nearly 70 percent national illegitimacy rate for blacks—a number that can approach 90 percent in inner cities—is a cataclysm. Its consequences go far beyond the harm to individual black children—especially boys—who grow up without fathers. The real poison of the marriage crisis is the message it sends to young men about personal responsibility. The first duty in civil society is toward one’s own children; everything else is built around it.

MacDonald further points out "The orgy of Jena coverage will not just fail to improve the lagging performance of blacks; it will impede such improvement by strengthening the victim mentality." Gateway Pundit on "The Ugly Side of Another Failed Black Democrat".

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