Here are two things worth reading together: On his blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about growing up surrounded by the specter of violence, and in The New York Times Joe Nocera writes about the limits of education reform. Here's Nocera:
Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home. [...]
Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.
And here is Coates:
[I]n my experience, in distressed neighborhoods throughout our cities, these sorts of scenes are so common as to be unremarkable. Having caught one in my own time, having lived as a child who structured his day around violence, I can tell you that it's scary how quickly violence becomes normal to you. So much so that when I talk about my own victimhood I tend to couch it in euphemisms like, "Yeah, I caught one on Liberty" as opposed to what actually happened "I got my head stomped by six dudes, while a bunch of adults walked past and did nothing." (Liberty is a major street, by the way.)
At a gathering this Easter, I spoke with someone with experience in the juvenile justice system, and he made this excellent point: The net effect of living in an economically depressed area (unemployment among blacks and Latinos has yet to dip below 10 percent) -- devoid of meaningful opportunities and consumed with casual violence -- is to create kids completely disconnected from the world as we (middle-class Americans) understand it.
To play Captain Obvious for a moment, this is a huge problem for educators. It's not just that the most at-risk kids are unprepared for educational success; it's that the most at-risk kids live in environments which leave them completely unable to grok the social contract. How are children supposed to do well in school when they're preoccupied with avoiding physical harm? Likewise, how do you persuade children to value education, when they have yet to grok the connection between school and success. Hell, how are kids supposed to trust adults for their education when -- at home at least -- they can't trust them with their safety?
Again, none of this is particularly original, but -- in this current age of the school reformer -- it's something to think about.
