A public school teacher argues that the achievement gap between white and black is a about parents not race; it’s a cultural matter, Mike D’Virgilio notes.
In “Making the Grade Isn’t About Race. It’s About Parents,” Patrick Welsh was stunned when some of his students in his all black class blamed their poor academic performance on the lack of a father in their home. Excuses are always convenient, but there is empirical sociological evidence to back up their claim. He states:
My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn’t because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn’t wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren’t there for them — at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.
It’s not a skin color issue, because practically every child from a broken or non-married family does worse in every way. But the black family has been particularly devastated, and this did not happen in a vacuum.
This isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue, but it is a philosophical issue. Ever since I can remember growing up in the 60s and 70s the left in our country, i.e. modern liberals, have denigrated the family. The seeds of this animosity toward traditional religious values of course go back hundreds of years, but those decades saw such elite opinion make its way into and throughout American culture. The family to many feminists and their allies was a bastion of patriarchal oppression, which destroyed the soul of the individual, especially women.
Popular culture affirmed this view over and over and does so to this day. (Consider, for example, one movie I saw recently, Revolutionary Road.)
This mentality has become part and parcel with the left’s view that government is the solution for pretty much everything. When Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, he and everyone on the left naively thought that government transfers of wealth could actually change human nature!
It’s astonishing how foolish modern liberals are when it comes to understanding human nature. Give your children something for nothing long enough and you destroy their character. Everyone, including liberals knows this. But for some reason welfare intended well is supposed to help people. It may in some small immediate way, but something for nothing destroys adult character too.
Thus you have generations of black men who do not believe they need to marry the woman who bears their child. Out of wedlock birth is 70% for the black community.
And liberals wonder why there is an achievement gap or argue it’s caused by racism. The worldview of the modern liberal is permeated with victimization. We’re all victims; we’re all powerless and need the benign hand of government to redress the grievances unjustly inflicted upon us.
Until the underlying philosophy is exposed for the poison that it is, nothing will change for the better.
–Mike D’Virgilio
There are certainly instances where children overcome a dysfunctional family environment. But it’s really hard. My wife works in a public elementary school, and if the river of a child’s character flows a certain way, a teacher and school may be able to slow it down, but chances are they will not be able to reverse the flow. The home and family environment generally trump everything else.
I was born and raised in southern California where after the Vietnam war there was a huge influx of Asians. These kids went to the same schools as their white, black and Hispanic counterparts and almost always achieved more. Asian family and culture values achievement and excellence. They were expected to work their butt off and focus and the results showed that. Who we are and who we become are an outgrowth of the cultural air we breathe.
I guess there is such as thing as “tough love”. We have to teach kids that nothing will change unless you change them. I’ve seen teachers taking the role of parents because their biological parents just don’t care.
Mike, I think your point about this being a cultural problem is spot-on. Unless people adhere to bourgeois values, they cannot expect to have bourgeois lives.
What’s fascinating is that both the students and the teacher know and acknowledge that society spends a huge amount on K-12 education, which largely goes entirely to waste. These kids want to succeed, but they don’t have the family background to help them do so, and there is really no substitute for that.
As one of the people quoted in the story noted, if some of these children don’t learn these values in school, they won’t learn them anywhere. The schools are utterly failing to teach children middle-class values, and that is why these children cannot hope to have middle-class or better futures.