By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Two recent events -- one on the east coast and one on the
west coast -- raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when
we say that we want better education for minority children.
One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High
School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin "an
entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160
million state-of-the-art school building."
The painful irony in all this is that the original Dunbar
High School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record of
high academic achievements for generations of black students, despite the
inadequacies of the building and the inadequacies of the financial support that
the school received.
By contrast, today's Dunbar High School is just another
ghetto school with abysmal standards, despite Washington's record of having
some of the country's highest levels of money spent per pupil -- and some of
the lowest test score results.
Housing an educational disaster in an expensive new
building is all too typical of what political incentives produce.
We pay a lot of lip service to educational excellence.
But too many institutions and individuals that have produced good educational
results for minority students have not only failed to get support, but have
even been undermined.
A recent example on the west coast is a charter school
operation in Oakland called the American Indian Model Schools. The high school
part of this operation has been ranked among the best high schools in the nation.
Its students' test scores rank first in its district and fourth in the state of
California.
But the California State Board of Education announced
plans to shut down this charter school -- immediately. Its students would have
had to attend inferior public schools this September, except that a challenge
in court stopped this sudden shutdown.
Why such a hurry to take drastic action? Because of a
claim of financial improprieties against the charter schools' founder and
former head, Ben Chavis.
Ben Chavis has not been found guilty of anything in a
court of law. Nor has he even been brought to trial, though that would seem to
be the normal thing to do if the charges were serious.
More important, the children have not been accused of
anything. Nor is there any reason for urgency in immediately depriving them of
an excellent education they are not likely to get in their local public
schools.
What Ben Chavis and the American Indian Model Schools are
really guilty of is creating academic excellence that shows up the public
school system, both by this school's achievements and by the methods used to
create those achievements, which go against the educational dogmas prevailing
in the failing public schools.
If it seems strange that there would be a vendetta
against an educator who has defied the education establishment and thereby
improved the education of minority students, the fact is that Ben Chavis is
only the latest in a long line of educators who have done just that -- and
aroused animosity, and even vindictiveness, as a result.
Washington's former public school head, Michelle Rhee,
raised test scores in that city's school system and was demonized by the
education establishment and politicians. She has left.
Years ago, high school math teacher Jaime Escalante,
whose success in teaching Mexican American students was celebrated in the movie
Stand and Deliver, was eventually hounded out of Garfield High School in Los
Angeles. Yet, while he was there, about one-fourth of all Mexican American
students -- in the entire country -- who passed Advanced Placement Calculus
came from that one school.
Marva Collins, who established a very successful private
school for black children in Chicago, doing so on a shoestring, was likewise
the target of hostility when she was a dedicated teacher in the public schools.
Other examples could be cited of educators who produced
outstanding results for minority students -- in New York, Houston and other
places -- and faced the wrath of the education establishment, which sees
schools as places to provide jobs for teachers, rather than education for
students, and which will not tolerate challenges to its politically correct
dogmas.
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