Think About It!Don't get mad; get smart
By HARRISON J. ULLMANN
Why don't black kids do as well as white kids in the schools we give them?
That's a tough, ugly question, but it's time we got tough enough to go looking for the ugly answers. After all, it's the awful truth of the community we all share that black kids do not do as well as white kids in the schools we give them.
If you are already angry about the insensitivity of the question I've asked, then go ahead and send the e-mails and snail mails and voice mails that tell me about the black National Merit Scholars you know and tell me about the brain-dead white slackers you've found tending the cash registers where you shop.
You are right, of course. There are black kids who do very well and white kids who don't do well at all after they've been through the schools we give them. But you are also wrong. Black kids, as a group, don't do as well as the white kids, as a group. There is persistent evidence in the tests we give them - the ISTEPs and the SATs. Don't you wonder why?
The advocates of the Righteous Right would tell you that black kids are failing because the public schools have failed, the public schools being terminally afflicted by teachers' unions, professors of education, the government and its bureaucrats. They would tell you that we should finance education through vouchers that let black children escape from the public schools, using public money to buy their educations in the private schools. That looks right, as well as Right, but it is wrong.
For the last several years, we've been using Unigov's public and private schools in a large though unintended experiment that tests the diagnosis and remedy that's prescribed by the Hudson Institute, the Friedman Foundation and the rest of the Righteous Right.
We have divided Unigov's children into four groups: There are city children in IPS and city children in Catholic schools; there are suburban kids in the township schools and suburban kids in Catholic schools. We give the same ISTEPs to these four different groups, so we can do a lot of comparing and contrasting with the test scores.
In many important ways, the public schools in the townships and the city are very similar. They get their money from the same federal, state and local taxpayers; they work under the same laws and regulations set by the state and federal governments.
The public schools in the city and the townships get their teachers from the same schools of education and set their salaries and working conditions under contracts with the same teachers' unions. They also get their textbooks from the same publishers and their methodologies from the same consultants and academicians.
If public schools have failed because they are government schools, then they should be failing in the townships as well as the city, and the scores from the ISTEPs and the SATs should tell us so. But that's not what the ISTEPs and the SATs tell us. Instead, the scores tell us the kids in the township schools do a lot better than the kids in the city schools, or at least they do better at the stuff that gets tested by ISTEPs and SATs.
That means the test scores are telling us that what's wrong in the city schools cannot be explained by unions and governments, since those conditions are the same in the townships as they are in the city. The scores also warn us that when we look for what's wrong with the schools, we may not find the answers in the schools. But that's only one part of the great experiment we've been running with Unigov's schools and Unigov's children.
In most ways that seem important to us, the public schools and the Catholic schools are very different.
The Catholic schools are strong on faith and moral values; the public schools are not. The Catholic schools may hire anyone they want for teachers; the public schools are stuck with the licensed alumni of teachers colleges. The Catholic schools have small bureaucracies and they are not bothered much by the government ...
In short, Catholic schools seem to be doing a lot of important things better than the public schools do them. So, test scores from Catholic schools ought to be a lot better than test scores from public schools. But they are not.
The ISTEP scores for elementary schools shows that the test scores are similar when public schools in the city are compared with Catholic schools in the city and they are similar when public schools in the townships are compared with Catholic schools in the townships.
But when Catholic schools in the townships are compared with Catholic schools in the city, then the ISTEP scores diverge just as they do when public schools in the townships are compared with public schools in the city.
This is an important point: The differences in test scores are largest when public and parochial township schools are compared with public and parochial city schools; the differences are smallest when public and parochial schools in the city are compared with each other and when public and parochial schools in the townships are compared with each other.
Here's the same point in different words: When public schools and Catholic schools get similar kids from similar neighborhoods, they get similar test scores.
So, the evidence from this massive social experiment that's been run with generations of Unigov's children is that where they live matters a lot more than where they go to school.
But there is another massive social experiment that we've been running with Unigov's children, a massive social experiment that would tell us the rest of what we need to know about educating the black kids in Unigov's schools. We've been spending a lot of money for this experiment - $40 million a year - but no one wants to know the results, even though we will keep running the experiment well into the next century.
Ever since 1981, school buses have been collecting thousands of black kids from inner city neighborhoods and taking them out to public schools in the townships. Some of the first black children who were involuntarily enrolled in this experiment are grown-ups now, some of them have children and maybe even grandchildren who are now riding the buses.
The townships schools have 18 years of academic records that would tell us if this has done any good that's been worth the trouble and worth the money. If black children do better when they are bused to white schools in white neighborhoods, there are report cards and test scores in the files that would tell us so. And if black children don't do better after they come home from the township schools, then it's even more important for us to know what's in the files.
But nobody important wants to know ...
Judge S. Hugh Dillin, the federal judge who ordered the busing as a remedy for the segregation of the Indianapolis Public Schools, has not asked the schools to tell him whether the black children have been helped by his orders. The judge hasn't asked and the township superintendents aren't telling.
Indiana's superintendents of public instruction, who have been ordered by Judge Dillin to pay whatever the township schools demand for the black children they accept from the city, have never asked for any evidence that the public money does anything good for the public interest. The state's superintendents haven't asked and the township superintendents aren't telling.
The members of America's Worst State Legislature haven't asked whether the money they appropriate for the judge's orders has helped the black kids in the township schools do better than the black kids in the city schools. The legislators haven't asked and the township superintendents aren't telling.
Every once in a while, a professor on a research mission will ask to look at the records that the township schools have been keeping on the black kids they import from the city. The township schools have denied access, claiming needs to protect privacy. Even when they are asked, the township superintendents aren't telling.
So, we've spent all those years and all that money hauling children from the black neighborhoods where they live to the white townships where they go to school. But neither the men in suits nor the man in the robe have ever asked if it did anyone any good. If these misfeasant and nonfeasing worthies would just ask the questions, just once, then we would know whether or not the busing has done us any good.
I suspect that if they ever asked the questions, the answers would be that the black kids that the judge sent to the townships haven't been doing much better than the black kids he left in the city. And then we would know that there is something wrong in the schools that cannot be fixed with buses, vouchers, busted unions or any of the other easy answers we get from the reformers.
But that's not enough to answer the tough, ugly question that's back at the top of this column: Why don't black kids do as well as white kids in the schools we give them?
If we can't find the answer to that question in the schools, then we need to look somewhere else. I think I know where to look, but I've got no space left to tell you what I think we'd find. Meet me here next week ...
E-mail: hullmann@nuvo.net
