The Daddy Gap
The Daddy Gap
Where does low achievement come from? High school teacher Patrick Welsh writes in The Washington Post:
"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."
Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.
I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn't be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father's absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don't: parents.
My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren't there for them -- at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.
A 2005 Kay Hymowitz piece from City Journal that I've linked to before takes a historical look at the problem, from the Moynihan Report on:
1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.
Black leaders like Jesse Jackson need to take a little time off from blaming white people for everything and start stigmatizing single motherhood in the black community, and start teaching that every time a child is born to some poor single mother, it's a tragedy.
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Stumble It!
Good luck especially since leaders in the black community like Jesse Jackson just don't care…
Dabir,
It is worse than that – N!ggers like Jesse Jackson WANT this to keep going, because they gain power from it.
And if there's someone more desrving of that moniker, white, black, orange, purple – I haven't even heard of them, let alone met them. I'd be mroe willing to forgive Robert Byrd, the Klan Grandmaster or whatever, than to forgive the Reverend Jesse Jackson his evil. Evil borne of ignorance can be corrected. Intentional, knowingly propagated systemic evil is unforgivable.
(BTW, I work in technology, so racist comments and thoughts are highly damaging. Worked with pleny of white, black, Indian, Chinese, Japanese men and women. Biggest racists I met were an Indian manager, and a black woman who had no redeeming social graces or skills. I've known a few thousand people – to have only 2 cases of prejudice incdicates that it contibutes negatively to teams and projects, and is therefore not tolerated, condoned, or permitted.)