Is poverty or a moral deficit to blame, or could it be our public school system?
For the past couple of days, Jeff and Greg Doyle and I have been going round and round on PACOVILLA Corrections blog about what they refer to as a ‘culture of crime.’ Jeff blames the high school dropout problem and the criminal behavior of the dropouts on bad parenting, absence of fathers and teen mothers. He says, “If education spending was the cure for crime, you [correctional officers] would all have been out of a job years ago.”
I maintained that almost all of the school dropouts involve kids that come from a cycle of poverty. Their great grandparents lived in poverty and so did their grandparents and parents. And all their friends and neighbors are likewise poverty stricken. They do not see education as a way out of poverty and drop out of school, some to take menial low-paying jobs while others turn to dealing drugs or committing burglaries and robberies. The criminal types see their lives of crime as a means of escaping from the cycle of poverty.
Greg responded by saying: “I really wish what you said about the high school dropout rate was true. Poverty is not the source or root cause with high school dropouts or criminal behavior as the left contends. If that were true poor people would all end up in jail by virtue of their poverty, and we know that is not true.” He blames the problem on ‘parental apathy and absenteeism.’ In working with juvenile offenders, Greg said “Divorce was the most significant source problem of juvenile delinquency, followed closely by children born to unwed mothers. In the majority of the petitions I reviewed, fathers were absent in the lives of their troubled offspring.” And Jeff adds, “A moral deficit, not financial poverty, is the problem.”
Whether it's a moral deficit or financial poverty, the bottom line is that many African-American and Latino kids see no incentive in remaining in school. They do not see education for them as breaking the poverty cycle. They see dope dealers and pimps running around wearing gold chains and driving BMWs. On the other hand, they see their parents, some of whom did graduate from high school, struggling to make ends meet, either through menial jobs or through the War on Poverty government handouts. For many of the school dropouts, turning to a life of crime seems a better alternative. Call it a moral deficit if you will.
And our public school system does not help either. It is geared to preparing kids for a college education. But to accommodate the 'disadvantaged' students, the curriculum has been dumbed down to the point where many high school graduates cannot read, write intelligible or do simple math problems. President Obama's stated goal is for every kid in the U.S. to get a college education. A noble goal, but completely unrealistic. Because of the dumbed down public school curriculum, colleges are now spending valuable time and resources on remedial education courses. And after they've gotten their freshman students to read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide, those students are still not prepared to enter the fields of physics, chemistry and engineering, fields that are vital if the U.S. is to remain in the forefront of scientific, medical and technological innovation.
How do we change an education system that now leads to failure rather than success? How do we change an education system so that the disadvantaged will remain in school rather than drop out? That requires a complete and radical overhaul. First and contrary to Obama's stated goal of a college education for everyone, we have to recognize that many kids are not college material, whether they are disadvantaged or from affluent families. The first eight years of school should ensure that by the time students enter high school they are proficient in reading, writing and math. During the entry phase into high school, each student needs to be evaluated as to his or her ability to succeed in passing a college preparatory curriculum. For those who by then are still not college material, there should be a curriculum designed to prepare high school graduates for obtaining the jobs that are available to those who do not have a college education, and I do not mean jobs flipping burgers at McDonald's. I realize that such an apartheid system will be vehemently opposed by educators and liberals, but I firmly believe that it will reduce the problem of school dropouts. Alas, my skin will turn green before my apartheid high school proposal is ever taken seriously by the educators and liberals who are the very ones that have screwed up our public school system.
Greg, a man of profound faith, believes it will take a restoration of moral values - to be instilled in children by their parents – to turn kids away from crime. While that will definitely help, it will take more than moral values to eradicate the culture of crime among ghetto and barrio dwellers.
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