Columnist Jesse Jackson
Dr. James A. Williams is on a mission. “We have a crisis in this country,” he says, “and no one is talking sense about it.” Williams is superintendent of the Buffalo Public School System. “We’re all part of the problem,” he says. There’s too much business as usual, too much bureaucracy, and not enough action.”
The crisis? Young African-American men born into poor and working-class households. According to figures developed by the Schott Foundation, only 42 percent who enter ninth grade graduate from high school. The old blue-collar jobs that used to provide a family income, secure employment, health care and pensions are disappearing.
These are children increasingly raised by a single parent, struggling simply to keep a roof over their heads. Too often, they are starved from the start of adequate nutrition, health care and learning stimulants. They go to overcrowded schools stocked with inexperienced teachers. They are under-represented in advanced-placement courses that are key for college.
“Their number one problem,” William says, “is that they cannot read. If you can’t read, you cannot succeed.”
In Washington, Congress is gearing up for the debate about the No Child Left Behind Act. But the debate is virtually irrelevant. The act mandates testing that inadequately measures school performance.
For Williams, any plan like that requires reforms that simply aren’t on the table.
We need longer school years, and far better teachers and teacher education. We need less discrimination in spending, in discipline, in advanced placement.
These kids face long odds from day one. In the crucial early years – from the time of inception to age 3 – when the mind is largely forged, they are shackled. One in five children is raised in poverty in this rich country, with no systematic program to insure prenatal care, health care, day care, parental education. We should be mobilizing intervention on the front side of these lives. Instead, we turn our heads, and then spend more on police, crime and prisons on the back end.
This is a tragedy of terrible and costly consequence, in lost hope, lost lives. And yet virtually no one is talking about it. To his credit, John Edwards has used his presidential campaign to call attention to the working poor in America. But generally, candidates are told to focus on the middle class that votes, not poor young boys who don’t. We hear a lot more about rescuing middle class homeowners in bad mortgages than we will about giving poor inner-city children a fair start. Congress is more concerned about retaining the tax breaks for the middle class than about extending the child tax credit to the children of working poor people.