By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I don’t hear it said much any longer, but there was a time when white parents were accused of racist motives if they “gave up” on their local racially mixed public schools in favor of private or church-related schools. I suspect the reason why we don’t hear this criticism much these days is that everyone knows that there are few white liberals who send their children to the dangerous and dysfunctional public schools in our major cities.
There are too many examples of people like the Clintons, the Bidens, and the Obamas sending their children to expensive private academies in the Washington, D.C., area, to scold middle class parents who do the same.
An article in the May 15 edition of City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, makes clear why parents in many urban areas of the country feel that they have no choice but to use private schools for their children. The author is Kay Hymowitz, a William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She also writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal.
What motivated Hymowitz to write was a video of a May 4 student brawl at her alma mater, Cheltenham High School in the suburbs of Philadelphia, that went viral on YouTube. Four security officers and eight teachers were injured in the melee. “Four students,” she writes, “were taken into custody; one of them, 18 and charged as an adult for four counts of aggravated assault, is still in jail as I write. All four of the students were black females.”
Hymowitz decided to return to her alma mater to take part in “a packed emergency community meeting” about the May 4 events.
“It became clear almost immediately,” she writes, “that the brawl was no one-off. One student at the meeting testified, ‘Really we have experienced [this kind of fight] our entire high school career. We complained. We never got any response. We were told all disputes were personal and the school was safe. Why now?’” she asked tearfully. “Because a video of it was leaked to the media?”
Several students at the meeting “described rape threats, stalking, kids sent back to classrooms after menacing teachers or classmates, teachers walking past fighting kids, security guards looking the other way. The problems, students insisted, weren’t limited to the high school; they remembered thuggery in middle and even elementary school, too.”
Hymowitz cites a “February survey of Cheltenham High School teachers that revealed a school that resembled Lord of the Flies. Cursing, yelling students roamed the halls, pushing, shoving, ramming each other into walls, sometimes ‘accidentally’ colliding with teachers.”
Teachers told of students replying, “What are you going to do about it? You can’t do anything,” “F***k off, crazy old mother-f****r,” when they tried to reprimand students.
Hymowitz narrows the focus: “What could not be said out loud was that the problem kids were all black. Like many inner suburbs, once predominantly white Cheltenham has become increasingly African-American over the past decades.
“Back in the day, only about 10 percent of the high school population was black. The large majority of my classmates were the sons and daughters of second-generation Jews who had followed the immigrant dream into Philly’s northern suburbs in the postwar years. (Jonathan Netanyahu, who would die in the 1976 Entebbe raid, is a graduate of the school. His brother Bibi picked up his diploma three years later.)”
Today, Hymowitz continues, “the district is 53 percent black. Most of those students are the children of a growing black middle class that had moved to Cheltenham for the same reason postwar Jewish families had: its relatively affordable, attractive homes and its highly regarded schools, the holy grail of American house-hunting parents of all races. A number of black parents at the meeting spoke poignantly of the hopes that had brought them to the district, which now seem dashed as the school’s problems multiply.”
Many of these black parents pointed to the arrival of students from North Philadelphia, which Hymowitz describes as the “city’s immense and long-suffering black ghetto.” These students were “moved into aging apartment complexes on the district’s border, bringing with them the old neighborhood’s broken culture.
“These students come from homes with radically different domestic lives than their middle-class black and white classmates — with few routines, disappearing fathers and stepfathers, and little adult interest in homework, teachers, and discipline. Researchers have repeatedly found that boys growing up in single-mother households are especially prone to ‘externalizing’ behavior like fighting, impulsiveness, rudeness — in other words, precisely the sort of behavior that the community meeting was demanding the administration do something about.”
But Hymowitz observes that this “class and family divide, intertwined as it is with race,” is “off-limits to polite discussion, leading to conversations like the one at the community meeting,” where “the audience retreated to the familiar litany of policy fixes with a long history of uneven or meager results: More black teachers! More counselors! More mentors!”
What does Hymowitz propose instead?
“One solution is alternative schools, which would place the small number of students making education impossible for the majority into schools explicitly designed for kids unable to function in ordinary education environments. A February teacher survey showed that the vast majority of instructors supported the approach; several black parents also endorsed it at the meeting. (A white father reviled the idea as stigmatizing.) For three hours, parents and students demanded that the administration impose clear ‘consequences’ for fighting and rudeness.”
Hymowitz notes that imposing “consequences” is easier to say than to accomplish. “The administrators’ hands are more or less tied. In 2013, the Obama administration’s Department of Education Civil Rights Division warned school districts that schools violate federal law when they ‘evenhandedly implement racially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race’.”
As a result, Hymowitz writes, “Cheltenham’s ruffians will be safe from discipline and stigma, though not, of course, from each other. The bitter irony of the widespread evasion about racial discrepancies in ‘externalizing’ behavior is that it harms Cheltenham’s blacks above all. The large majority of kids who are well prepared to walk the halls and talk to teachers with a modicum of civility are forced to cede their educations and safety to the uncivilized few.
“Cheltenham has a committed (for now) cadre of white parents dedicated to diversity, but the township’s population is considerably whiter than its schools; a sizable number of whites have clearly already fled the local schools or decided not to move there in the first place.
“They’re not alone. Several disgusted black parents said that they had pulled their children out of the local schools despite paying ‘astronomical’ taxes in order to live in the reputedly excellent district. Now this lovely suburb with once-envied schools is facing black as well as white flight. Let’s see how the Education Department’s Civil Rights Division deals with that.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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