By Dr. Vernard T. Gant, Director of ACSI Urban School Services
Historical Perspective
Unless firm and immediate steps are taken to reverse the present trend, the public school system … will become a school system of low academic standards, providing a second-class education for under-classed children and thereby a chief contributor to the perpetuation of the “social dynamite” which is the cumulative pathology of the ghetto. (Clark 1967, 112)
This statement was made over 40 years ago, just a school generation of students after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court. Ironically, the statement was made by Kenneth B. Clark, whose research played a major role in influencing the justices to strike down the “separate but equal” clause that defined the American public education system for over half a century. Under Dr. Clark’s impressive and persuasive testimony, the Court determined that separate was “inherently unequal.” They further concluded that “today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” (347 U.S. 483 [1954]). Their decision had the intent of correcting the educational system so that it would work for all children, including black ones. One school generation of students after the decision, Dr. Clark, to his dismay, came to a startling yet sober conclusion that the schools were continuing to fail the children who were the subject of the Brown ruling:
Children in ghetto schools tend to lose ground in I.Q. as they proceed through the schools and to fall further and further behind the standard for their grade level in academic performance. The schools are presently damaging the children they exist to help. (1967, 124)
He explained what he observed as a main contributor to the setbacks:
The fact that these children, by and large, do not learn because they are not being taught effectively and they are not being taught because those who are charged with the responsibility of teaching them do not believe that they can learn, do not expect that they can learn, and do not act toward them in ways which help them to learn. (131)
Sometime later, disillusioned by the glaring deficiencies of the educational system, this champion of public education called for the formation of “Alternative Public School Systems”:
It follows that alternative forms of public education must be developed if the children of our cities are to be educated and made constructive members of our society. (Clark 1968, 112)
Alternatives—realistic, aggressive, and viable competitors— to the present public school systems must be found. The development of such competitive public school systems will be attacked by the defenders of the present system as attempts to weaken the present system and thereby weaken, if not destroy, public education. This type of expected self-serving argument can be briefly and accurately disposed of by asserting and demonstrating that truly effective competition strengthens rather than weakens that which deserves to survive. I would argue further that public education need not be identified with the present system of organization of public schools. Public education can be more broadly and pragmatically defined in terms of that form of organization and functioning of an educational system which is in the public interest. (111)
This nation knows and values the education of its citizenry so much so that education is compulsory in this nation. To not educate a child is to break the law. It is indeed in the national interest to have an educated populace; by the same token, for every child who is not educated, the entire nation pays. It behooves us, then, to pursue the education of all the children and to develop effective educational systems for doing so.
This was the conclusion in the 1930s by Carter G. Woodson, the father of black history. The educational system of his day was failing to effectively educate black children. And in his words, receiving an effective education was the most important thing for their “uplift.” He therefore proposed the following:
It seems only a reasonable proposition, then that, if under the present system which produced our leadership in religion, politics, and business we have gone backward … or have at least been kept from advancing …, it is high time to develop another sort of leadership with a different educational system. (1992, 144)
A Different Educational System
It is important to bear in mind that educational systems were created to serve children, and not children to fit into educational systems. While this is apparent in theory and concept, it is not always so in practice. For example, Kenneth Clark called for alternative school systems that would address the educational plight of undereducated and miseducated children. They were basically children of color and mostly poor. That call basically amounted to school choice, or educational freedom, so that the parents of those children would be empowered to choose from among schools that would work educationally for their children. The call was never heeded.
Today, this hotly debated issue is at the heart of the school reform movement. In discussing the plight of the children, both proponents and opponents of school choice begin the debate with reference to the children. All sides assert that this issue is about the well-being of children, while they assure their advocacy for them. Observe, however, as the dialogue about the educational and social well-being of the children ensues. At some point in the discussion, the center focus shifts from the welfare of children to that of the educational institutions established to serve them. With a little closer scrutiny, one would observe the subtle tendency to equate the two. The children are discussed synonymously with the school systems established to educate them. The well-being of the children is intricately tied to the well-being of the system. However, a reminder is in order just as Jesus reminded the keepers of the Sabbath system of His day. They too had reversed the order by putting the system before the individuals it was designed to serve. His reminder: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27, NASB). By the same token, school systems were made for children, and not children for school systems.
On the other hand, the systems do have a tendency to work for the children for whom they were created. It is not that the public school systems (and even the Christian and private ones) do not work for children. On the contrary, they work extremely well for a lot of children. It is just that they do not work well for all children. They seem to work well and best for the children for whom they were designed. The children who were being failed by the educational systems of their day, as cited by Dr. Woodson and Dr. Clark, were not the children for whom the systems were designed. Likewise, the black, the brown, and the poor children who are being failed by today’s educational systems (including the Christian systems) are not the children for whom the systems were designed. Perhaps this is the reason why efforts at reforming and repairing the systems continue to fall short.
Let me illustrate. When we moved into our new home, we had to purchase a new refrigerator. After shopping around, we settled on a brand-name model that came highly recommended. The model that we purchased had a water and ice dispenser in the door. We enjoyed having this feature, but there was a slight problem: Whenever we would get water from the water dispenser and remove the glass, the water would continue to dispense for a fraction of a second after the switch was disengaged. After a while, the water would build up in the dispenser tray and eventually run down the door of the refrigerator and onto the floor. We called the service department on several occasions about the problem, and they sent out the same technician each time to try to fix it. Finally, the service technician informed us that he had the same model at home and that he was going to see if his was performing the same way. Later that day I received a call from the technician, and sure enough, his refrigerator was doing exactly the same thing as ours. This led him to conclude: “Mr. Gant, the reason I can’t fix it is because it ain’t broken.”
I have drawn this same conclusion about the educational systems and the many failed efforts to reform them. The reason why they cannot be fixed is that they “ain’t broken.” They are working according to design. They were never designed to educate all children equally and effectively. If the architects of modern education were resurrected from the dead and the current status of education was described to them whereby millions of African American, Latino, and poor children are being left behind their white counterparts, they would probably want to know, “What is the concern?” During the universal education movement, one of its chief architects was Charles Dabney, then president of the University of Tennessee. During one of the movement’s conferences, Dr. Dabney made the following declaration:
The only solution of the southern problem is free public schools for all the people, blacks and whites alike, and compulsory-attendance laws.… The negro is in the South to stay—he is a necessity for southern industries—and the southern people must educate and so elevate him or he will drag them down.…We must use common sense in the education of the negro.…We must recognize in all its relations that momentous fact that the negro is a child race, at least two thousand years behind the Anglo-Saxon in its development.… Nothing is more ridiculous than the programme of the good religious people from the North who insist upon teaching Latin, Greek, and philosophy to the negro boys who come to their schools. (Anderson 1988, 85)
Anderson further points out the universal swath of this developing educational system:
Thus historians have revealed only a half-truth in arguing that it was the white South that insisted on a second-class education to prepare blacks for subordinate roles in the southern economy. The northern philanthropists insisted on the same. White supremacists themselves, northern reformers were not perturbed by the southern racism per se. They also viewed black Americans as an inferior and childlike people. Peabody maintained that black people were “children in mental capacity.” (1988, 92)
Technically, then, the systems are working according to design. Ultimately, it does not matter who is running the systems, but rather how the systems were designed. Efforts at reform are efforts at trying to get the systems to do something other than what the design teams had in mind. Looking at this another way, reforming the current educational systems compares to an attempt to upgrade a mainframe computer from 50 years ago. Imagine trying to take a computer that filled an entire room and put a multi-gigabyte hard drive in it along with a high-megahertz processor. It would basically amount to an exercise in futility because of design incompatibility. New structures are required to accommodate the new hardware.
New Systems
“Alternatives—realistic, aggressive, and viable competitors—to the present public school systems must be found” (Clark 1968, 111). This was Dr. Clark’s appeal nearly 40 years ago to address the educational plight of children who were not being served well by the school system at that time. In many ways, these same children (who are now the children’s grandchildren referenced by Dr. Clark) are not being served well today. It is high time that the nation heeded Dr. Clark’s call.
This new generation of students needs and requires a new generation of schools that works for them.
The clarion call is for a new generation of schools and school systems that will effectively and successfully educate urban, minority, and under-resourced children. These children must be the norm-reference group in the design and organization of the systems. In other words, the systems must be developed around these children. To be effective, this new generation of schools must be characterized by several components that make up what I call a “CP” education.
A CP education is one that is the following:
- College Prep. According to a report, released by ACT (2004), entitled Crisis at the Core: Preparing All Studentsfor College and Work:
70 percent of the 30 fastestgrowing jobs will require an education beyond high school.
40 percent of all new jobs will require at least an associate’s degree.
Today, an estimated 85 percent of jobs are classified as “skilled,” requiring education beyond high school.
60 percent of future jobs will require training that only 20 percent of today’s workers possess.
Therefore, children must be prepared to do college-level work. Conventional wisdom and the historical approach hold that all children are not college material and should be educated accordingly; the new system must shift the burden of proof from the educator to the educated. For a knowledge-based, informationdriven economy, children must be educated in such a manner that if a child decides not to go to college, that is what it will be—a decision made by the child and not by those who predetermine the child’s academic plateau.
- Cycle Preventing. Many urban, minority, and under-resourced children have social, cultural, and economic backgrounds that put them at risk of ending up in the same place as their parents. These children must be given an education that helps break the cycles that put their futures and their lives at risk. The conventional, historical approach to educating emphasizes the role and importance of parental involvement for effective education. The new system must educate children despite their parents and parental backgrounds. Such an education must be largely interventionist and not conventional in nature.
- Christian Principled. Having Christian in the names of schools or using textbooks that identify themselves as Christian does not make schools or school systems Christian. Rather, it is the practice of Christianity, or Christlikeness, that does so. A Christian-principled school, school system, or classroom is one in which the heart of Christ is expressed with the intent of giving each student what is needed to function effectively and successfully in life. It facilitates the heart of Christ to
heal the brokenhearted
proclaim liberty to the captives
proclaim recovery of sight to the blind
set at liberty those who are oppressed
The conventional, historical approach to educating has held that the ones being educated determine whether a school or school system is Christian in that all students and/or their parents have been required to be Christians before being admitted into the school. The new system must maintain that it is not the educated but the educators who make that determination.
- Character Producing. Character is a product of a child’s attitude, values, goals, objectives, ideas, and habits. A child’s character determines what the child thinks, feels, and ultimately does. A Christian-principled education has as one of its prime objectives a character-rich child. The conventional, historical approach to educating children has been to make good citizens by conforming to and advancing the social order. The new system must teach to the character of children so that
instead of conforming their lives to the world, they will seek to transform the world by their lives
instead of escaping the society because of the bad, they will seek to engage it for the good
instead of replicating the culture, they will seek to recreate it
instead of making a living, they will seek to make a difference by their living
- Culturally Plural. When the current educational systems were established, white children were a vast numerical majority. That is changing and changing rapidly. Today, 43 percent of the U.S. child population is made up of children of color. In some states, including California, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, white children are already a numerical minority. The conventional, historical approach to education promoted the concept of the melting pot of American culture whereby all children and their cultures would blend into one. The new system of education must respect and promote cultural diversity. God values diversity to the point that He does not correct it upon conversion. Just as no color of the rainbow has to surrender its color to be a part of the rainbow, no people of color have to surrender their color of be a part of God’s family. On the contrary, the multiplicity of color is what gives the rainbow its beauty and splendor. The multiplicity of color and cultures is what gives the Body of Christ and His creation their beauty and splendor. In the Final Day, women and men and boys and girls “out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation” will make up the assembly of the redeemed (Revelation 5:9, NKJV).
It behooves us, as a people and as a society, to educate all the children and to educate them well. We need educational systems designed to that end. This new generation of students needs and requires a new generation of schools that works for the students. Efforts at upgrading and retrofitting existing systems invariably fall short of the task. Oftentimes such efforts equate to pouring new wine into old wineskins or sewing a new piece of cloth on an old garment (Matthew 9:16–17). The result is a wasted effort that results in the loss of both.
If we succeed in finding and developing these and better alternatives to the present educational inefficiency, we will not only save countless [black, brown, and poor] children from lives of despair and hopelessness; and thousands and thousands of white children from cynicism, moral emptiness, and social ineptness—but we will also demonstrate the validity of our democratic promises. We also will have saved our civilization through saving our cities. (Clark 1968, 113)
Amen!
References
ACT. 2004. Crisis at the core: Preparing all students for college and work.
Anderson, James D. 1988. The education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Clark, Kenneth B. 1967. Dark ghetto. New York: Harper & Row.
———. 1968. Alternative public school systems. Harvard Educational Review 38, no. 1 (Winter).
Woodson, Carter G. 1992. The miseducation of the Negro. Hampton, VA: U.B. & U.S. Communications Systems.
The Meantime Volume 6 Number 1