POOR SCORES AND FIFTY YEARS AGO

"Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment -- even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal."
- Brown v. Board of Education, Argued 1952, Ruled upon 1954.

by JUDITH HANEY

USNewsLink/August 4, 2002

No matter where you come down on the subject of public education and tax payer assisted private education (school vouchers), you have to admit that the nation is as divided on the issue as it was in 1954. when public schools were ordered integrated by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.

The plain and simple truth is, within the past fifty years, Brown v. Board of Education has failed to achieve the parity and equity it sought for poor and minority children living in urban areas of the United States.

The reason the landmark desegregation ruling failed to meet its noble objective is because the underlying problem of poverty was not simultaneously addressed and overcome.

Our democracy cannot achieve integration, and positive cultural assimilation of its underclass's, without affording those classes a hand up into the mainstream. In that regard the United States of America, as a great democratic experiment, has failed and failed miserably.

Presently, throughout the nation, what white and black parents have in common is that they both have fled from the schools where an overwhelming number of poor children brought from their homes all of the baggage that most poor kids bring to school: low verbal skills, discipline problems and bad attitudes about learning. Many middle class black parents have chosen to send their children to virtually all white private schools, where they will be isolated from poor kids and their self described "ghetto" culture.

The biggest problem in urban schools is not the teachers but the culture that comes with poverty.

The research of Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation backs up what most teachers know: "On the whole, high-poverty schools just don't work," Kahlenberg says.

It is much easier for politicians and education bureaucrats to blame teachers for the differences in performance between poor kids and middle class kids than to look at the devastating effect poverty has on success in school.

It is much easier for them to look at test scores from suburban schools, where property values freeze out the poor, or private schools, where tuition does the same thing, and declare those schools successful when, in fact, they may be full of complacent, lazy teachers and administrators making their reputations off the educational backgrounds of their students' parents.

Bush's stated goal is "to leave no child behind," but, ironically, that is just what his education plan will do: leave hordes of the poorest kids isolated in schools that will become hopelessly dysfunctional, while taking credit for rescuing a few kids here and there by getting them to better public or, with vouchers, private schools.

Fundamentally the public issue yet to be resolved in a bi-partisan manner by congress is not test scores, or school vouchers, but why so many poor children are left behind and how to change public education so as to avoid it in the future.