Please Stop Helping Us_How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

  On average, black fourth and eighth graders perform two full grade levels behind their white peers.4 Large urban school districts where a majority of children are black or Hispanic produce even worse results. A U.S. Department of Education report released in 2012 showed that 79 percent of eighth graders in Chicago public schools, which are 41 percent black and 44 percent Hispanic, could not read at grade level, and 80 percent could not perform grade-level math. Incredibly, those students were still better off than their peers in Detroit, where 7 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading and only 4 percent were proficient in math.5 Detroit public schools, which are 95 percent black, “had the lowest scores ever recorded in the 21-year history of the national math proficiency test” in 2009, reported the New York Times.6

  The crisis is most pronounced among young black males, and even transcends socioeconomic status, asserted David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “On every measure of educational attainment, they [black boys] fare the worst; despite waves of reform, their situation has not changed appreciably in 30 years,” he wrote.

  The gap between their performance and that of their peers is perceptible from the first day of kindergarten, and only widens thereafter. In the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress—the massive, federally mandated report card on student performance, measured in grades 4, 8, and 12—the reading scores of African-American boys in eighth grade were barely higher than the scores of white girls in fourth grade. In math, 46% of African-American boys demonstrated “basic” or higher grade-level skills, compared with 82% of white boys. On the National Education Longitudinal Survey, 54% of 16-year-old African-American males scored below the 20th percentile, compared with 24% of white males and 42% of Hispanic males. Having well-educated parents did not close the gap: In 2006, 43% of black high-school seniors with at least one college-educated parent failed to demonstrate even basic reading comprehension, nearly twice the percentage of whites.7

  A 2012 Schott Foundation for Public Education report noted that the black-white disparity in high-school graduation rates among males had narrowed by just three percentage points in the previous decade. “At this rate of progress,” said the report, “. . . it would take another 50 years to close the graduation gap between Black males and their White male counterparts.”8

  These results are occurring despite the fact that the growth of the education workforce has far outpaced student enrollment. “Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides,” wrote Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute in 2012. “Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment.”9 Harvard professor Paul Peterson noted that since the 1960s, per-pupil spending in the United States has more than tripled after adjusting for inflation, while the number of pupils per teacher has fallen by a third.10

  Racial disparities in educational achievement can have serious consequences. Not surprisingly, it impacts life outcomes when the typical black student is graduating from high school (if he graduates at all) with an eighth-grade education. In general, high-school dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs, become teenage parents, and live in poverty. Most of the nearly half-million black students who drop out of school each year will be unemployed by their midthirties, and six in ten of the males will spend time behind bars.11 As David Kirp noted, “among 16- to 24-year-old black men not enrolled in school, fewer than half have jobs; about a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole.”12 According to sociologists Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, much of the black-white earning disparity can be tied to the learning gap. Young adult black men who scored above the 50th percentile on standardized tests earned 96 percent as much as their white peers in 1993, they found. And “when we compare blacks and whites with the same twelfth grade test scores, blacks are more likely than whites to complete college” and thus dramatically increase their potential lifetime earnings, among other positive outcomes.13 As far back as the early 1980s, black couples who both were college educated earned more than their white peers.

  The public continues to associate more spending with better education results, and politicians continue to tell voters what they want to hear. But for a very long time the evidence demonstrated that spending more money on schools is not key to shrinking the achievement gap. The 1966 Coleman Report, named for sociologist James Coleman, who conducted the study, surveyed 645,000 students nationwide. At the time the Lyndon Johnson administration, most education experts, and Coleman himself all expected to find a strong relationship between money spent per student and academic achievement. Instead, Coleman found that spending per pupil was about the same in both black and white schools, and that learning didn’t increase based on such expenditures. “These results were acutely embarrassing to the Office of Education, the federal agency that sponsored the research,” wrote Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom in No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.

  . . . his findings suggested that spending more money per pupil, reducing class size, obtaining more teachers with master’s degrees and the like were not likely to improve student test scores significantly in public schools as they were constituted in 1965, when the data were collected. But that was a point too subtle to convey to the press and to Congress, and the Office of Education dealt with the problem by producing a summary of the Coleman report that ignored its most important and most unsettling results.14

  Despite the fact that we now have nearly half a century of additional data that support these findings, politicians and the media continue to focus on spending more money, reducing class size, and hiring teachers with master’s degrees—all in the name of raising achievement and closing the learning gap. Why is that? Because even though such efforts don’t appear to be helping students very much, they do work to the benefit of the teachers’ unions that control public education in the United States. With apologies to Baudelaire, the greatest trick the teachers’ unions ever played was convincing enough people that their interests are perfectly aligned with those of schoolchildren. On the website of the United Auto Workers you will not find labor leaders posing for photos with people who have just bought Ford Fusions, because everyone knows that the UAW does not exist for the benefit of car customers. But on the website of the American Federation of Teachers cute kids are unavoidable, and even the union’s mission statement claims it prioritizes the needs of the children, rather than its members. “The American Federation of Teachers,” it reads, “is a union of professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities.”

  The head of the AFT, this supposed champion for students and their families, is Randi Weingarten. “We want to improve public schools,” she once told me in an interview. “Ninety percent of the kids in the United States of America go to public schools, and it’s our responsibility to help them. I think every single child deserves a great education.” Weingarten told the New York Times that “there’s a much more important purpose here, which is the love of children.”15 Yet many of the policies that teachers’ unions promote show utter disregard for the needs of students in general and low-income minority students in particular—not because unions don’t care about kids, but because they care more about their members, notwithstanding the treacly rhetoric.

  “The teachers unions have more influence over the public schools than any other group in American society,” according to Terry Moe, an education scholar at Stanford. “They influence schools from the bottom up, through collective bargaining activities that shape virtually every aspect of school organization. And they influence schools from the top down, through political activities that shape government policy.” Moe said the problem is not “that the unions are somehow bad or ill-intentioned. They aren’t. The
problem is that when they simply do what all organizations do—pursue their own interests—they are inevitably led to do things that are not in the best interests of children.”16

  The AFT and its larger sister organization, the National Education Association, have some 4.5 million dues-paying members and thousands of state and local affiliates. And it is on behalf of these members that unions fight to keep open the most violent and poorest-performing schools; block efforts to send the best teachers to the neediest students; insist that teachers be laid off based on seniority instead of performance; oppose teacher evaluation systems and merit pay structures that could ferret out bad teachers; back tenure rules that offer instructors lifetime sinecures after only a few years on the job; and make it nearly impossible to fire the system’s worst actors, from teachers who are chronically absent or incompetent to those who have criminal records. None of these positions make sense if your goal is to improve public education and help children learn. But they make perfect sense if the job security of adults is your main objective.

  Teachers’ unions have done a masterful job of perpetuating an education establishment that prioritizes the needs of its members, even while these efforts leave black children—especially those from low-income families—demonstrably worse off. And unions have accomplished this feat primarily by making their organizations a major force in Democratic politics. Teachers’ unions are not just another special interest group, like the Sierra Club or Americans for Tax Reform. They are better understood as a liberal philanthropy. They use their billions in dues money to support everything from single-payer health care to D.C. statehood to gun control. They’ve given money to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative, Amnesty International, and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

  “Often, the recipients of these outlays have at best a tangential education mission,” wrote the Wall Street Journal in a 2006 editorial on the National Education Association’s financial filings.

  The Floridians For All Committee, a political action committee created by pro-labor Acorn to push for a minimum-wage hike, received $250,000 from the NEA last year. And the Fund to Protect Social Security received $400,000. In total, the NEA reports spending $25 million on “political activities and lobbying.”

  In addition, reported the Journal, the NEA spent

  another $65.5 million on “contributions, gifts and grants,” and many of the recipients listed under this category are also overtly politicized organizations: the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation ($40,000), the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute ($35,000), the Democratic Leadership Council ($25,000).17

  But it’s not just the largesse—95 percent of which goes to Democrats—that makes the AFT and NEA so essential to liberal politics. Teachers’ unions are also party foot soldiers. They hand out flyers, knock on doors, work the phone banks, and ferry voters to the polls on Election Day. They typically send the most delegates to the Democratic National Convention every four years. A teachers’ union endorsement, or even its decision to remain neutral in a race, can often make or break an election. It would be difficult to find another group that can match this combination of money, power, and national reach.

  However the real strength of the AFT, the NEA, and their affiliates lies in their ability to obstruct policies that threaten their control of public education. When the Obama administration decided to offer grants under its Race to the Top program to states that instituted certain education reforms, it requested that the states receive buy-ins from teachers’ unions before applying for the grant. Think about that. Nobody elects teachers’ unions to reform education; that’s why we elect politicians. Yet the “administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders,” explained the Washington Post.

  The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state’s teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.

  By contrast, applications from Florida and Louisiana were considered innovative but fell short in part because they had less union support. The District’s bid, rated last among 16 finalists, was opposed by the local union.18

  Unions insist that the differences in outcomes between black and white students mainly reflect income disparities, which are outside the control of teachers and schools. In fact, if the education establishment is to be believed, all of the problems within public education are caused by factors outside of public education. As Weingarten put it, “Jason, don’t talk to me about an achievement gap until we solve poverty in this country.” Yet there is overwhelming evidence that the underprivileged black children that traditional public schools have failed so miserably are not unteachable. There have long been schools willing and able to educate the hardest cases. But many (though not all) of these schools operate outside of the traditional public-school system, so teachers’ unions and their political allies work to undermine them. Again, what drives Weingarten and the politicians who carry her water is not racial animus. The simple fact is that unions have a stake in keeping kids in schools that they control, and politicians want to get elected, which is more difficult when you cross the teachers’ unions.

  Between 1800 and 1835, most southern states passed legislation that made it a crime to teach enslaved children how to read and write. In 1860 only about 5 percent of slaves could read. Yet “before northern benevolent societies entered the South in 1862, before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and before Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedom and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) in 1865, slaves and free persons of color had already begun to make plans for the systematic instruction of their illiterates,” reported historian James Anderson. After the Civil War, wrote Harriett Beecher Stowe, “They rushed not to the grog-shop but to the schoolroom—they cried for the spelling-book as bread, and pleaded for teachers as a necessity of life.” Booker T. Washington, a former slave, wrote that “few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education. . . . It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.”

  The postwar South was “extremely hostile to the idea of universal public education. The ex-slaves broke sharply with this position,” wrote Anderson. “Ex-slaves did much more than establish a tradition of education self-help that supported most of their schools. They also were the first among native southerners to wage a campaign for universal public education.”19 It did not take long for elite black schools to appear. In 1950, fewer than 10 percent of white men in the country over the age of 25 had completed four years of college. Yet between 1870 and 1955, most graduates of the District of Columbia’s Dunbar High School, the first public black high school in the United States, attended college. In 1899 Dunbar’s students outperformed their white peers on citywide tests. The education establishment wants to dismiss Dunbar as a fluke, but there have been too many other examples over the decades to take that rejection seriously.

  Xavier University Prep, a Catholic school in New Orleans that has primarily educated blacks for nearly a century, was producing Dunbar-type results as far back as the 1950s and ’60s. Amyin Parker founded the Marcus Garvey School in South Central Los Angeles in 1975, the same year that Marva Collins opened the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago. Both schools sought out poor black children and proved skeptics like Weingarten wrong. University Park Campus School, which is located in the poorest section of Worcester, Massachusetts, and accepts only neighborhood kids, opened in 1997 with thirty-five seventh graders, four of whom couldn’t read. “Almost half of the entering students read at or below the third grade level and about a third were special needs students,” wrote Davi
d Whitman in Sweating the Small Stuff, a book about successful inner-city schools. “Yet three-and-a-half years later, in tenth grade, every one of those seventh graders not only passed the state’s demanding Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) English and math tests but managed to do so with high scores: more than 80 percent had proficient or advanced skills in both English and math.”20 By 2003 University Park was ranked thirty-fourth in the state (out of 332 high schools). Today some 95 percent of its students go to college, and almost all are the first in their families to do so. The people who are producing these results might take issue with Weingarten’s notion that poor minorities are destined to trail whites academically “until we solve poverty in this country.”

  These days it is mostly charter schools that are closing the achievement gap, which is one reason why they are so popular with black people. Charter schools are tuition-free public schools run by independent organizations outside the control of the local school board. Polls have shown that charter supporters outnumber detractors two to one, and blacks who favor charters outnumber opponents by four to one. But that is less important to the education establishment than the fact that most charters aren’t organized. These schools have thus earned the wrath of teachers’ unions, who do everything in their power to shut them down, or at least stunt their growth. As far as the AFT and NEA are concerned, what determines whether a school reform is good or bad is not its impact on students, but its impact on adults.

  Not long after my interview with Randi Weingarten I found myself listening to a speech by Geoffrey Canada, a charter-school operator in Harlem. “People are upset because I believe that these poor kids in Harlem, who have every social ill you can imagine,” can still learn, said Canada. “Name one, we’ve got it. Gangs? Yes, we’ve got it. Substance abuse? Got that too. Single [parent] families? Yes, we’ve got all of that. Parents who don’t care? Yes, we’ve got all of that. But my kids are going to go to college. And it doesn’t matter what the issues are.” Where Weingarten is making excuses, Canada is accepting responsibility. Is it any wonder that poor parents, given the opportunity, are fleeing Weingarten’s schools for Canada’s?