Teaching Civil Rights With No Excuses
By Richard Davis (12/04/03)
On the first page of their critically acclaimed book "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning," Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom inform readers, as they would inform audiences repeatedly during their book tour, that the widening racial gap in education is the “central civil rights issue of our time.” Thus they begin "No Excuses" with one of the biggest excuses of them all.
If poor student performance is taken as a civil rights issue, and not as the social issue it actually is, then of course that demands more government involvement, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more money -- in short, more of the same thing that got us here today. Even worse, it perpetuates the Victim’s Excuse, which has more legs than the proverbial homework-hungry dog.
It also appears to contradict the Thernstroms’ own book, which reaches the principal conclusion that parental attitudes, not civil rights deprivation, are the ultimate cause of the gap. African-American parents expect less of their kids than do Asian or white parents, and the kids respond as expected by achieving less. That’s a brave, if obvious, hypothesis in that it defies the liberal, neoMarxist orthodoxy and assigns at least some responsibility for a problem onto individuals themselves, or at least their parents. But where is the civil rights violation?
The Thernstroms have long been active in race and civil rights matters -- Abigail is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights -- therefore it’s not surprising that they find civil rights issues behind every situation involving African-Americans. To the Thernstroms, as to most minority activists, civil rights are color coded. No one finds any civil rights issues underlying the performance gap between whites and Asians, though that gap is even larger than the white-black gap and also growing. And given racial demographics in America -- blacks comprise just 17% of all school students -- the total number of white students, including dropouts, underperforming at these most dismal levels has always exceeded the number of such black students. No civil rights problem there.
According to the Thernstroms, this central civil rights issue is “our failure to provide first-class education to black and Hispanic students, in both cities and suburbs.” Actually, the central issue, as their book makes clear, is the failure of a large number of black and Hispanic students to take advantage of the education that is offered to them, good or bad, for reasons that have nothing to do with civil rights (except as civil rights provide an excuse for underachievement) .
If I am a substandard student, undisciplined, unprepared, often tardy or absent, perhaps even hostile and disruptive, and my academic performance is correspondingly poor, my civil rights have not been violated. In fact, in so far as I interfere with the education of fellow students, I am violating their civil rights to an education. The failure of my teachers and school to prevent me from doing that may be a further violation of their civil rights. It is that failure we should accord centrality to. “The level of disorder and disruptive student behavior in many of our urban public schools is shocking,” write the Thernstroms.
This argument, that poor-performing schools evidence a civil rights failure, poses an embarrassing dilemma for civil rights advocates and liberal educators alike. They have had virtually absolute control over these schools, their curricula and environments, for more than a quarter of a century. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been handed over to them almost without restrictions. Now these same people say to us, “We have made a royal mess of things, and they’re only getting tragically worse. Your failure to prevent us from doing this -- and we will fight you tooth and nail if you try to stop us -- has now created the central civil rights issue of our time.” For once they may be right.
(One can expand this theme further by noting that many of the cultural factors identified as perpetuating failure and underperformance by minority children, most significantly the breakdown of the traditional family structure that has led to high illegitimacy and single-mother homes, have been exacerbated by well-intentioned liberal social programs which have only promoted poverty, dependence, crime, pessimism and irresponsibility.)
The Thernstroms’ go on to write that this academic achievement gap is the “main source of ongoing racial inequality” in America today. Actually, that’s good news with a bad-news sidebar, though here, too, they (over)state the obvious. Educational gaps, caused by a combination of personal and cultural factors, are inherently the main sources of inequality, racial or otherwise, in most Western societies. Every large family, graduating class or local community knows that. Two kids start school together, even at a poor-performance urban school, and one becomes a highly paid doctor while the other struggles to get by as a day laborer. Which has had his civil rights violated?
Furthermore, the black-white inequality gap has been shrinking at a remarkable rate over the past 30 years, and there’s no indication that is about to be reversed. The one inequality gap that has been expanding is the one between haves and have-nots in general, and most have-nots are white. There are nine times as many whites living in poverty as blacks, according to the US census. Of course, no one couches their predicament in civil rights terms. But, then, there is no civil right to economic equality.
That the source of inequality is education and not civil rights signals a triumphant success for American society in a relatively short time. It wasn’t always so. We should be proud of ourselves, though that doesn’t mean it’s time to look the other way.
To be fair to the Thernstroms, once one gets beyond this civil-rights sermonizing No Excuses drops the PC excuses and faces unblinkingly America’s education woes, causes and solutions. They debunk most of the left’s conventional wisdom that more money, smaller classes, more integration, higher-degreed teachers, etc., will solve the problems, and for that reason alone the book is a valuable and necessary addition to the discussion. It’s difficult to imagine any long-term remedies that don’t borrow generously from the Thernstroms’ no-excuses prescription.
But they should have been more thorough in jettisoning excuses. Not every social dilemma involving nonwhites is a civil rights matter. Making it seem so when it isn’t constitutes a racist slur on whites and only deepens blacks’ emotional dependency on a debilitating pychological crutch.
The Thernstroms know the insidious and pervasive reach of this excuse. They note in their book that underlying the pessimism and failure of most underperforming blacks, the excuse they resort to almost religiously is this very one, that their civil rights to opportunity in America are denied them anyway, so there’s no point in trying. That excuse was dead years before they were even born, and it’s time we finally lay it to rest for their sakes and ours.This isn’t Selma 1965. There’s no excuse for moving on.
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