Death by Schooling

It never ceases to amaze me how so many Americans support legislators who slash and burn public school budgets but scream for more prisons, harsher sentences, and the right to bear arms to protect themselves from a growing (they believe) criminal element and a gnawing underclass that saps entitlement programs. As if there were no correlation between a failed public school system, from K through college, the worst time in over 80 years to try and get a job without skills or education, and the heavy cost of social welfare and our over-large criminal justice system.

The 47% - including retirees who paid into the Social Security accounts – are drains on the system, say some of the most senior politicians in America. Why should the rich subsidize those families who act irresponsibly and do not avail themselves of the “clear” opportunities that society offers them? The adults and older kids who have opted for welfare and a criminal path should be punished, not coddled, they say. The notion of “victimization” wears thin on the minds of hardworking Americans who have to pay the taxes to support those who do not or cannot. These taxpayers feel that it is they who are indeed the victims of an underclass destined to prey on their wealth and their labors. School budgets they can cut, but prisons – at over $40K/prisoner per year in expected costs – are good investments?

The problem with this approach is the relying on any concept of victimization – giver or taker –  to understand the process. Do we punish a seven-year-old, whose single mother has no capacity to parent, by putting that child into an urban public school system where he or she has no real shot of learning how to read, write, calculate and reason, where the dropout rate is over 50% by time high school rolls around? It takes a lot of individual focus to turn that child around, but there is little appetite among legislators to address the problem with a solution that really could work. Between union seniority systems and budget-cutting legislators, children are increasing nothing more than an inconvenient truth.

Are the horrifically overcrowded inner city classrooms, dilapidated facilities, the older kids shaking down younger kids with “pocket checks,” the proclivity to join a gang if only for protection within an underfunded and corrupt system that truly doesn’t care, teachers who cannot cope with the restrictions, the new “teaching to the test” mentality, and peer pressures to give up and move into the streets all to be blamed on these miscreants-in-the-making elementary school children? And if we failed these children from the day they entered the public school system, exactly why are we enraged when they later enter the adult world as burdens to society? What exactly did we expect them to become?

A couple of articles point out exactly how stupid our educational policies are, even among kids who want to go beyond high school. The Los Angeles Unified School District, with a pretty typical urban dropout rate for major cities (over 50%), illustrates our folly. A study of the LAUSD from Harvard University, released on March 8^th, shows how ill-prepared most graduates are to pursue higher education. “[The] Harvard study … found that just 16 percent of LAUSD's Class of 2011 passed the classes needed to attend California's public universities, an indicator of the challenges facing the district as it makes rigorous college-prep courses a requirement for graduation…

“Using information provided by LAUSD, researchers found that 66 percent of students who entered ninth grade in 2008-09 were on track to graduate, but only 59 got their diploma four years later. And just 16 percent of those students completed the A-G [basic college prep] coursework by the time they graduated, although 36 percent had started down the college-prep track as ninth-graders.” Huffington Post, April 9^th. And most kids who do move from LAUSD’s public school system into the state’s junior colleges, colleges and universities need some level of remedial education!

Across the country, we seem to have decided to deny the vast majority of our children either a viable future or even a standard of living that approaches half of what the older generations enjoyed before the Wall Street-driven economic collapse. Even before the resulting massive budget cuts to education, we were performing badly: “In 2009, the Program for International Student Assessment, which compares student performance across advanced industrialized countries, ranked American 15-year-olds 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math — trailing their counterparts in Belgium, Estonia and Poland. One-third of entering college students need remedial education. Huge gaps by race and class persist: the average black high school senior’s reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress continue to be at the level of the average white eighth grader’s. Seventeen-year-olds score the same in reading as they did in 1971…  As the education scholar Charles M. Payne of the University of Chicago has put it: ‘So much reform, so little change.’”  New York Times, April 12^th.

And now with the terrifying distraction of school shootings, some American school districts are lovingly following the NRA’s recommendation of having well-armed guards in school, even police officers stationed there. Of course, the law of unintended consequences has once again created new and unforeseen costs, squarely placed into our overtaxed criminal justice system, from our “let’s solve our problems with guns” mentality. “As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office.

“Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed ‘school resource officers’ for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers…

“Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project, in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York.

“Such criminal charges may be most prevalent in Texas, where police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year, said Deborah Fowler, the deputy director of Texas Appleseed, a legal advocacy center in Austin. The students seldom get legal aid, she noted, and they may face hundreds of dollars in fines, community service and, in some cases, a lasting record that could affect applications for jobs or the military.” New York Times, April 11^th.  Let’s hear it for the permanent underclass that we seem destined to continue to expand!

Yup, we’d much rather spend money on our criminal justice system, even inserting it into our school systems, diverting educational budgets in order to satisfy the NRA. These are our choices, and the heavy pressure on our entitlement and criminal justice programs are the linear and direct consequences of these decisions. Want someone to blame? Look at those who have decimated our public educational system. It is their fault… and those who voted for them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really have only ourselves to blame.