Successful Schools and Failing Politics

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 239 - 241

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Successful Schools and Failing Politics

IN THE JUNE 2, 1997 ISSUE of Forbes magazine, historian Diane Ravitch offers a heart-warming contemporary story about a ghetto school in Brooklyn where the children are doing far better academically than in most ghetto schools—or a lot of nonghetto schools, for that matter.

The school is P.S. 161 in the poor Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Professor Ravitch found that four-fifths of the third-graders there met the state reading standards for their grade. In fact, more than one-third of these third-graders met the state reading standards for the sixth grade.

With so many people across the country wringing their hands over the poor quality of education for black children, you might think that there would be great cheering over such results and that the principal would be regarded as a national hero. But I doubt that this will happen.

Twenty years ago, I wrote about similar black schools in various parts of the country and found that the best I could hope for was indifference. Where there was any reaction, it was usually hostility, since successful black schools seemed to undermine the crusade for racial mixing and matching of students, as well as the crusades for more federal money.

Professor Ravitch points out that the politicians in Washington already know that the billions of dollars they are pouring down a bottomless pit in the name of educating ghetto children are accomplishing nothing—at least nothing beneficial to those children. But this money is enormously beneficial to the politicians.

First of all, it makes a big public show of their "commitment" and makes their political opponents vulnerable to the charge that they lack "compassion" when these opponents are unwilling to spend as freely on the many failed programs. More than that, free spending gains the political support of local "community leaders" who are able to build their own little empires with the taxpayers' money, hiring their friends, relatives and political allies to work on the programs created.

In many poor communities, as in many Third World countries, the readiest source of wealth is the public treasury. Desperate struggles to gain access to political office and the money this represents, as well as high levels of corruption, are the predictable results in both cases.

Teachers' unions also have their agendas that require more money from taxpayers. These unions need victories, in order to maintain membership support. These victories have to be things that can be measured in higher pay, smaller class sizes and other tangible benefits to their members—whether or not these things make the slightest difference to the school children.

At P.S. 161 in Brooklyn, for example, class sizes range up to 35 children per class. In some of the high-quality black schools I studied 20 years ago, class sizes were even larger.

But smaller class size is a political symbol, as well as a means of creating more jobs for teachers, so it is promoted to the public as a sacred goal and to the union's membership as a trophy of victory.

If all this cynical politicking over education did nothing worse than waste some more money, it would hardly be worth getting upset about. But, for many of the poorest children, education is their one ticket out of poverty. If they miss that train, they miss everything: They are history before they are teenagers.

Who is to fight the battles for these children's interests? The Congressional Black Caucus is virtually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the largest teachers' union, the National Education Association, which shells out millions of dollars a year to the Democrats.

The only people who can be relied on to put these children's interests first are their own parents. Yet these parents are often too poor to be able to pull their children out of rotten public schools and put them elsewhere. Various kinds of parental choice policies, whether based on vouchers or some other method, would allow the well-being of these children to become important.

Needless to say, the Congressional Black Caucus is bitterly opposed to vouchers and anything else that would offend their sponsors, the National Education Association.

In the meantime, we have P.S. 161 in Brooklyn as an example of what can be accomplished with children who are just as poor and just as black as other kids who are failing miserably in other schools all across the country.

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15 June 2024