No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind

Recent figures released by independent observers have revealed The No Child Left Behind Act to be another colossal failure. The gaps in reading and math scores between white and minority, and middleclass and poor students have been widening, and the projection that 100% of students will be proficient at grade level in these skills by 2014 is now being viewed as more laughable “pie-in-the-sky” hype from the same administration that brought us “weapons of mass destruction” and “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.

Why hasn’t the gap closed? The bad science pundits that I mentioned in earlier blogs have been busy providing explanations. First, there is the obvious: the initiative came with no funding, no guidelines, no oversight, no improvement of services in the schools, no early childhood education programs, the same untrained teachers, the same lack of incentives to attract better ones etc. Beyond those, however, researchers have been at work generating a list of the countless ways in which white and (mostly) middleclass students differ from their minority and (mostly) poor classmates, the differences being believed to translate into better or worse scores. Thus, there are more books and educational toys and aids in the white and middleclass house from an earlier age; parents seek out extracurricular educational opportunities, like visits to the museum, piano lessons, a foreign language, a trip abroad; life is a continuous, cooperative venture in which both children and adults equally participate, and the peer group influence is balanced out by parental input; at the same time, occasions are set aside for independent exploration and development; adults speak a greater absolute number of words to the children, and they are words of encouragement, praise and empowerment; they encourage children, as apprentice-adults, to participate in decision-making and even to be critical of elders; the parents are actively involved with the schools, which are generally better-funded, better-staffed etc; and the whole middleclass community is supportive of these efforts. There are the old saws of delaying gratification, teaching self-control and so on -as if poor and minority kids are the ones with the credit cards, regularly eat out at the more expensive restaurants, and are compensated for any hurt feelings, or rewarded for the least achievement, with lavish gifts and so on.

Now, bad science can often be like Mission Accomplished-speak, a matter of omission as much as commission. Are there other aspects of white and middleclass family life, and life in general, that are omitted from the picture above? Well, let’s see.

How about that sense of entitlement and American exceptionalism? The indignant feeling that our grandparents filed past the delousing at Ellis Island with nothing in their pockets and just made it through sheer hard work and guts (and shhh! SUPERIOR GENES), while these @#&^ want to get a free ride, affirmative action, special treatment and all that junk? Reparation for slavery, can you imagine? These feelings feed a staggering self-righteousness and self-absorption and have created a population that makes up its morals and its manners to its own advantage as goes along. It’s a population that firmly believes in its intellectual superiority and superior values, and –as we are currently witnessing- not at all shy about dispatching the Marines to cram it down unappreciative throats. Indeed, regime change has been a white and middleclass American pastime since the founding of the Republic.

How about hands-down, take-no-prisoners rivalry and competition in the family itself? The kind that gets mothers looking at their teenage daughters as the enemy that stole their good looks, or has Dad thinking incestuously? The grind-you-to-dust spitefulness that commits the grown daughter or son to a lifetime of therapy and anti-depressant drugs, not to mention everyone’s addiction to alcohol and illegal drugs? The kind that makes Thanksgiving and other holiday get-togethers everyone’s worst nightmare, requiring The New York Times to yearly publish an article on coping with them? The sibling rivalry that results in permanent physical wounds and scars, never mind the fancy psychological stuff, and occasionally a homicide or suicide or two? The violence needs a little sidebar on its own. Road rage, general truculence, general bad manners. Pistol-whipping of immigrants, legal as well as illegal. The New York Times gave up front page space to stampedes at Black and Blue Friday sales across the country, mostly at malls in all white, all middleclass and all Christian communities.

All this harmony and loving kindness are transplanted into the workplace. The mostly white and middleclass American workplace is the most vicious and litigious of any industrialized nation’s. America boasts the highest litigation rates in the world. Nothing like the “family model” that was traditionally the norm in Japanese companies: nothing like the socialist-democratic egalitarianism of the Scandinavian countries, where excessive wealth or yawning income disparities are discouraged. Once, the American white and middleclass workplace was rigidly racist and sexist, and vestiges of those good old days remain enshrined in the pay scales, advancement opportunities and more informally, in sexual exploitation, concubinage and vassalage. The newspapers are filled with tales of corporate knives in the back, ratting out one another, whistle blowing, envy and greed. Tenure on the job requires the skills of a Machiavelli! Of course, the incentive for all the backstabbing and backbiting is greed for the reward of super riches that would make King Midas’ eyes pop out.

Self-congratulation is another medal this population loves to pin on its breast. How giving and charitable we are! Truth is, white and middleclass Americans hate handing over their money –as taxes- for other white and middleclass Americans –elected representatives and bureaucrats- to spend, and charitable spending allows them to hold on to it a while longer. This vaunted giving still leaves hundreds of thousands of homeless persons on the streets: it still won’t give affordable AIDS drugs to those needing them, it still allows three out of every five African babies to die before reaching two months of age. It is the attitude that leaves us with an unworkable health care system, the scandal of the civilized world. We still have the death penalty, over four million in lock-up (see my blogs on drug abuse) and our foreign aid, when it hasn’t enriched the American bureaucracy or returned dollars to American businesses, has turned whole countries into brothels –we are big on sexual tourism- and others into baby mills for adoptive American parents.

Of course, white and middleclass duplicity now has its justifications in postmodernist theories. What is truth any way? Please don’t talk uppercase “T” anything! What doesn’t involve self-interest? Aren’t they all narratives, which are malleable, depending on the circumstances and the audience? Hence “weapons of mass destruction!” And by the way, Mississippi has more than satisfied the No Child Left Behind mandate, with 99% of kids already showing grade level proficiency by the state’s accounting, although independent enumerators think it is the second worst state in the nation by their reckoning. See, all you have to do is change the standard, lower the bar, especially since the Act didn’t bother to define one! Seems like all the states are getting in on the scam and reporting dramatic, overnight improvements, which will translate into a whole lotta pork for white and middleclass supervisors, chairpersons of the board and so on. Recall the “aggressive accounting” of the late Kenny Boy Lay and Jeffrey Skilling? Insider trading anyone? Any doctors in the house up to defrauding Medicaid today? How about Halliburton and Bechtel? Over 13,000 Iraqis died this October, but they’re still selling a 25-cents bottle of water to the military for $2.00. Who’s kidding whom, this is a good war!

How about false representation of credentials and personal beliefs? Is this a memoir, or did you make it all up to make a buck, Mr. Frey? What’s that again about same-sex marriage, Rev. Haggard? Representative Foley, tell us again where you stand on the victimization of teenage pages. Wasn’t Michael Brown specially trained specifically in hurricane damage control? Wasn’t Donald Rumsfeld a whiz sans pareil at transforming the military, planning wars and a real clairvoyant when it came to forecasting their aftermath? And to get right down to the schools and students, who bothers to write a term paper anymore? Who doesn’t cheat on tests and exams? Who doesn’t inflate the piano lessons and the cross-country running exploits in applications to universities? How many Ph.D’s are really earned?

It was the architect Rem Koolhass of Cornell who observed, in his recent book on Lagos, that Nigerians, under the machine-gun muzzles of a repressive government, were fabulous bricoleurs, doing amazing design things with the barest of scrap materials, while Americans, supposedly free and individualistic, were utterly conformist, unable to venture the least bit out of the way of established custom, whether the design of their homes, the menu at Thanksgiving dinner, the prevailing fashion in clothes and so on. Stray, and you face ridicule, ostracism or worse. As elsewhere in the American workplace (see above), lavishly funded and rewarded American scientists have been regularly scooping up Nobel prizes –but only for nonconformist, innovative research that will ultimately make super-rich Americans even richer or give them longer lives.

The scientists –sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists- who set themselves the task of finding out why the gap remains might have done a better job if they’d made some international comparisons. Cuba is a great example of how spiteful and vindictive white and middleclass policymakers can be. Long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they still maintain that the struggling island is a great threat to American security and they penalize it with embargos etc. Despite the latter, however, Cuba moved from single-digit to 100% literacy and numeracy in less than a decade: today, its universities and training institutions supply doctors and engineers to the rest of the underdeveloped world and will train foreign students from there without charge. While our oil-rich, Arab allies can’t trust their local hospitals and must fly to Sloan-Kettering etc for treatment, Fidel remained at home and is doing very well thanks since his last serious illness some two years ago, when white and super-rich Bush (this man is a head of state???!!!) had started sending him “Are you dead yet?” cards and planning for a post-Fidel Cuba. Cuba also boasts the most vibrant arts and sports scenes in the Americas, with world-class ballet, orchestras, theatre, writers, pop music and rap. Compare with the U.S., where sports survive only because of the mega- millions a few get in salaries and prize money: arts institutions and libraries are dropping like flies all over the country. Barbados is another example of a poor, tiny country that has achieved 100% literacy and numeracy: and is even more interesting when the educational fates of Barbadian immigrants in the U.S. are considered. Within a generation of living stateside, the latter dropped that 100% literacy and numeracy they’d had at home and sank to the equal of the low-performing minority groups here!

If you think these assessments of white and middleclass America are overly harsh, they’re borne out by social science research. Two centuries ago, Tocqueville had worried that it would all end in a free-for all among atomized individuals but hoped that voluntary associations would apply a brake. To learn how vain that hope was, read some Saul Bellow, John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Powers, Richard Yeats, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers etc. You’ll read about white and middleclass Americans who won’t leave one another’s wives and husbands alone as commonplace –it’s no longer the big news it used to be in Homer’s or even Flaubert’s day. Who envy one another’s good fortune, who plot and scheme for another’s downfall, who sexually exploit one another’s children, who wrestle with drugs and alcohol, who lie and steal. Jonathan Frantzen’s autobiographical new book describes a person you would fly to the moon to avoid. Or at least wish you could be repatriated to Africa!

No, it’s not simply a matter of your parents filling the home with books or talking you to death even in your sleep or cutting one another’s throats to get you into the three reputable grade schools in the country. If minorities and the poor are to improve their reading and math by emulating middleclass whites, it’s by getting acculturated and assimilated to all twelve paragraphs above, and a lot of them simply won’t. It’s not in their philosophy of life. Theodore Dreiser had made that forecast about poor whites, long before Civil Rights legislation had brought minorities into the picture as well. For one thing, you won’t get them to hone their reading skills by reading the authors above, except maybe Dreiser, Flaubert and Homer: those literary experiences are just too alien. You’d have to start up a parallel book publishing industry that will publish books for and by minorities other than the blaxploitation books now available. Which, by the way, are gaining an enviably large minority readership, for want of better fare.

For example, African Americans have been preserving their traditions for upward of five centuries in the teeth of white and middleclass efforts to extinguish them, and they no doubt have the force and strength to carry them far into the future. Elders have to be respected because they gave you life and nurtured you when you were dependent, they have the knowledge that comes only from experience, and Grandma will trump your Ph.D any day of the week, especially Sundays. Elders are anchors of the family, with its important ceremonies of death, birth and marriage, and are also anchors of “the race.” You also belong to an age-set, in which you learn to be loyal and trustworthy: its insignia are your favorite dance moves, music, fashions in dress and hairstyle etc. Having to endure slavery and persistent Jim Crow has only strengthened these memberships and has taught a very different understanding of what is valuable in life. African Americans were 100% against the American wars against Vietnam and Iraq. Whether they could or couldn’t read and write and do sums, they knew very well there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, while white and middleclass polymaths like Joe Lieberman are still looking for them. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were the two exceptions -but look at the price!

For the gap to be closed, there has to be a little wiggle room in the ironclad, Marine-protected, white and middle class communal practices that were described above. There has to be something a little more palatable to which one may be assimilated. Brooklyn Deities, Inc., an extensive residential, educational, devotional, training and recreational complex that would greatly empower minority and immigrant youth by offering an innovative, scholastic curriculum that prominently includes yoga, meditation, Sanskrit and other Brahmic studies, as well as African languages, Chinese, Arabic, history, anthropology, philosophy† etc., might be better in tune with minorities’ way of life and aspirations and would therefore stand an excellent chance of reaching those reading, writing and math objectives. It would be infinitely better than a madrassa, another possibly feasible option that’s sure to come up one day (including the milquetoast madrassas the KIPPs schools already exemplify )††.

Endnotes

†See Ansley Hamid 2006 Park Slope Upanishad (unpublished manuscript).

††See The New York Times Magazine, 11/25/06, “Can We Close The Gap?”

~ by andyhamid on November 28, 2006.