CommentsEDUCATION POLITICS-I spent the Memorial Day weekend with an old teacher friend who lives and works in an upscale bedroom community out on Long Island, NY and was unexpectedly enlightened by yet another lesson on the state of public education in this nation. Our failing, predominantly poor minority-filled inner city public education system bears no resemblance to the still excellent public education system that remains the rule in the affluent suburbs, where the middle class live and can still exert their substantial financial influence.
When my friend, who only started teaching in his late 40s, told me that he was making well over $100,000 a year as a special needs teacher, I realized immediately Dorothy Gale and I were not in Kansas anymore or, for that matter, in inner city LA, Chicago or NYC, where the first rule of public education "reform" still remains: how little can we pay teachers, and how can we get rid of those at the top of the salary scale – all to increase corporate profits.
As constituted, the institution of public education is designed to maintain an inherently racist status quo in this country by assuring that the education received by the vast majority of minority children in inner city public schools does not resemble the excellent public, parochial or private education that predominantly white children get in toney suburban communities in places like Long Island, Marin County or Simi Valley.
In fairness to the folks living in suburbia and given their complete lack of association with minorities, it would be difficult for them to understand the destructive public education system that poor minorities at subjected to. By mistakenly projecting their exclusive education experience with their own children's education onto minorities, these predominantly affluent white parents are left with the conclusion that poor minorities must in fact be inferior.
In the not too distant past when the Irish, Italians, Jews and other immigrants were called inferior, they still managed to get an excellent public education. This was key to being able to transition from being uneducated immigrants to being fully integrated Americans in one generation. It was not that exceptional for a first generation son of immigrants – someone like Louis Brandeis -- to become a United States Supreme Court justice in just one generation. But Black folks who have been in this country for over 400 hundred years just can't seem to make the same transition. Accepting without question or outrage the notion that there should not be a reasonable expectation of Black student excellence shows that a pernicious form of racism is still alive in America.
The not so subtle racist message implied in the academic failure of minorities is that they are indeed inferior. The real reason is that the rote-learning based education that includes few expectations of its students does not approximate the education predominantly white -- and even some minority children – receive in low enrollment, well-funded, high quality public schools in the suburbs.
In the end, these contrasting and extremely disparate school realities boil down to a very mundane and fundamental idea: you get what you pay for.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
Tags: Leonard Isenberg, Education Politics, LAUSD, inner city public education, superior suburban education system, minorities, racism
