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Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Paul Street at Mar 13, 2005

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Imagine if you will that you are a parent of a public school student in one of the United States' affluent Caucasian school districts – say the Roundout School District in the 94-percent white North Shore Chicago suburb Lake Forest, which spends $20,172 per year on every one of its school children. Your child and most of her fellow public students are the proud possessors of exceptionally high scores on the state's annual Illinois Scholastic Achievement Test (ISAT). Their per-student funding allotment is nearly three times as high as the public school investment ($7,261) made in each child in the 80 percent black and 13 percent Latino south-suburban Chicago suburb of Harvey, Illinois, where ISAT scores are quite low. This wide funding disparity marks a curiously inverted, privilege-preserving relationship between provision and need. According to the 2000 Census, the median household income in Lake Forest in 1999 was $136,142. Just 2 percent of Lake Forest's children lived at or below the poverty level that year. Sixty one percent of Lake Forest's employed population worked in the Census Bureau's most elevated employment classification – “management, the professions, or related occupations.” In Harvey, median household income in 1999 was $31,958 and 28 percent of the children lived in poverty. Only a fifth of the south suburb's employed population worked in “management, the professions, or related occupations.” Similarly, students in the 83 percent black and 11 percent Latino western Chicago suburb of Maywood – home to a 16 percent child poverty rate in 1999 – were priced at $6,292 per year, just 31 percent of the annual amount publicly invested in the education of each child in the Lake Forest. Maywood's ISAT scores are quite low. Imagine also that you learned about these and other thoroughly non-imaginary and heavily racialized school funding, socioeconomic and test-score disparities in your local metropolitan newspaper. Imagine further that your next-door sociologist neighbor puts you in contact with research showing that racial differences in school resources hold no statistically relevant relationship to racial differences in test-measured academic performance. The biggest test-score achievement-separating and suppressing factors, this literature shows, are broadly socioeconomic and sociologically environmental, including parents' income and educational levels, home experience, and peer culture. These "extra-school factors," you learn, are a much bigger determinant of black children's educational experience and test-score "performance" than anything schools were doing or not doing. Deeper inequalities of socioeconomic status, you find, account for as much as two-thirds of educational achievement as gauged by the standard test-score measures. Armed with all this knowledge, you go the local school council meeting and argue that Lake Forest students actually don't really need to receive so much school funding in order to “achieve" abovce the norm. School funding, you argue, doesn't really matter all that much in creating advantage for the children of the North Shore. The thing that really matters, you argue, is their elevated class position and related white skin privilege. “Maybe,” you argue, "we should take some of our extra school dollars and send them help fund anti-poverty and economic development programs in places like Harvey, Maywood, and the West Side of Chicago." Or maybe, a different regressive “you” contends, Lake Foresters should keep some of its school funding money and plow it back into their privileged private environments, which are the true source of most of their children's educational advantages. Lake Forest could cut its per-student allotment in half and its children will still do very well thank you very much would be your line. My guess is that Lake Forest school council members and parents would be appalled. Cut back on the middle school's state-of-the-art library and science laboratories? Close the swimming pool? Reduce the number of computers and musical instruments? Make children purchase their own team uniforms? Increase the ratio of students to teachers? Hire some of the newer and less qualified teachers? Suspend some of the bus lines? Save on school heating and cooling bills? Stop mowing the high school's golf course? “Surely you can't be serious,” would be the predominant response you'd get. The dominant white judgment is different, however, when we are talking about children on the bottom of the nation's related socioeconomic and racial pyramids. In January 2003, I spoke (in my role as the research director of a Chcago civil rights organization) at a press release supporting a significant, equity-enhancing reform of the state's public-educational finance system. I was approached afterword by a leading metropolitan education reporter who reminded me that officially “adequate” or even equalized school funding in and of itself cannot deliver equal educational opportunity for the nation's millions of poor and truly disadvantaged children of color. Test scores, this reporter told me, are most closely correlated in the existing academic literature, to socioeconomic status – low scores being linked to high poverty and high scores being linked to low poverty. Those scores are not that strongly linked to school funding differences. Since the racial-ethnic "achievement gap" (bigtime policy buzz phrase here in the US) is not irrefutably correlated with the school funding gap in the official (but rather sparse) research on the issue to date, this journalist told me, my organization's “civil-rights case” for school funding reform was tenuous at best. As Jonathan Kozol noted in 2000, “it's become conventional in social policy debates in recent years to pose what often sound like neutral questions about whether money ‘really makes much difference' in the education of poor children: questions that are seldom posed when wealthy people contemplate the benefits of sending their own children to expensive private schools or when they move into exclusive suburbs in which public schools are spending more than twice what public schools in the South Bronx are spending on the children in this book. Despite the many ways in which this issue has been clouded, nonetheless,” Kozol added, “there are few areas in which the value we attribute to a child's life may be so clearly measured as the decisions that we make about the money we believe it's worth investing in the education of one person's child as opposed to that of someone else's child.” It is one thing, of course, to point out that there's no solid proof showing that more school funding quickly and clearly translates into heightened "minority student" test-score “outcomes.” It's relevant, of course, to note the role of socioeconomic and other broadly environmental factors and to point the impact of numerous school practices – pedagogical and otherwise – that can boost or repress learning independently of school resources. It's another thing, however, to pretend to know that school money is irrelevant in determining the quality of education children receive. Money doesn't matter? Then surely the more affluent, well-equipped, and predominantly white suburban school districts and elite private schools in places like Lake Forest, Manhassat (on Long Island) and Grosse Pointe (above Detroit) will be happy to sacrifice their steep fiscal advantages, handing over their surplus school dollars to struggling children and teachers in highly impoverished places like the South Bronx, South Gate (California), East St. Louis (Illinois), Jasper County (South Carolina), the South and West sides of Chicago. Certainly, then, the preserves of race and class privilege are prepared to test the thesis that educational and school success is really just about hard and honest work, moral discipline – a “culture of achievement” and “accountability” and not inherited and structural advantage, station, and resources – by letting their excess youth-instructional cash and all that goes with it (the best schools, the latest instructional technologies, the highest-paid and most qualified teachers, the latest materials, the ample auditoriums, playing fields and libraries, and more) flow back to the disadvantaged schools and communities that struggle in the forgotten shadows of the great central-city corporate downtowns that provide the economic basis for the safe, sheltered, and pleasing lives and campuses enjoyed by richer white suburbanites. Since educational “money” isn't really relevant really relevant, then surely the Lake Forests, Great Necks, Grosse Points, Manhassats and Andover and Marin Academies of America are willing to see the provision of educational resources properly aligned with the need for such resources. As the education writer Peter Schrag notes at the end of a chapter in which he reviews academics' and policy-wonk's complex debate over what affluent Ivy League and Rand Corporation researchers call “the [all-too unclear] relationship between student [test-score] performance and school [funding] resources”: "No parent or student should have to offer scientific proof that attractive schools with working toilets and decent classroom environments are more productive than those without. None should be asked how they knew that having rats in their classrooms impaired their ability to learn. Nor should any school have to justify good libraries and after-school programs in art or music with test scores and college attendance rates. What's perfectly clear is that when people can afford it, they opt for the schools with rich resources, and often struggle (and sometimes lie and cheat) to get their children into the right schools." Schrag's conclusion is consistent with the judgment of the New Jersey Supreme Court in ordering funding reform in 1990. After noting the remarkable school advantages that richer districts purchased at often “staggering” expense, that Court asked an interesting question: “If these factors were not related to quality of education, why are the richer districts willing to spend so much on them?” As for the education reporter's test-score-based challenge to the cause of school funding reform, here is the answer I gave to her (and to the notion that inefficient spending practices by urban schools mean that city schools should not receive adequate funding) during an urban “education summit” held at a public high school on the near West Side of Chicago in February of 2004: "It's not entirely clear that there's no significant correlation between resources and scores. I doubt that it is a purely accidental coincidence that Illinois has both the biggest school funding gap and the biggest achievement gap between rich and impoverished students. " "But there doesn't have to be a perfect or even a strong correlation to make the cause for funding equity in Illinois. In most of the relevant state-level school funding case law to date, it's about equal educational opportunity not equal test-score outcomes. It's acknowledged that a whole slew of factors go into the achievement gap and that the research is unclear and contested about the precise relationship between school funding and achievement." "Take it out of the court room and the seminar room and think about it like a parent whose got two kids, one of whom is thriving and the other one of whom is struggling with growing up, including their ABCs. You certainly wouldn't decide, at least I hope you wouldn't, to not give the struggling kid equal attention and food and clothes and resources. You wouldn't predicate their share of family wealth on performance-based outcomes, as a matter of family policy. You don't take slow Jennifer and put her in the basement and ban her from the library and the internet and give fast Johnny the best bedroom and full access to the learning resources in the house." "It's certainly true that overall community and family poverty – low 'socioeconomic status,' to use the social science language – provides the leading correlation with test-score 'failure.' But let's think for a minute about a useful analogy. Do you give fewer funds for street lights to a certain town because that community tends to have a large number of bad sunspot intersections where it's hard to make out the lights? The better response would be to increase the stoplight expenditures there to include special anti-glare mechanisms and techniques – to pay for the special stoplight and traffic extras required in a bad glare community." "If the school funding money isn't going as far we would like in, say Chicago, it may well be that – as many critics say – the money is not being spent wisely or fairly by the Chicago Public Schools. It isn't, say, being targeted in a way that properly matches the special barriers prevalent in inner city schools. Ok, fine, so you examine that and invest accordingly. You don't say, 'forget it, its all over for you….we're going to kill you with un-funded mandates and sadistic testing regimens until we pick you off with vouchers and turn it all over to Edison and the religious schools.'” "You don't say that, that is, if you are serious about reforming and sustaining the common public school. If you are genuine on that score, then there's no good reason to set up harsh either/or black and white dichotomies between more efficient spending and more equitable spending. " "And it's interesting that the whole 'do more with less' line is directed mainly at minority urban schools and not at the richer districts where there's certainly equivalent waste that gets covered up by overall socioeconomic and related cultural advantages that tend to ensure decent test scores. Of course, the real experiment to prove that school funding inequality is not a big factor in the achievement gap would be to practice full funding equity for a generation or two – or more. After all, we've been practicing savage school funding inequality for more than a hundred years." "Increased funding is, I think, a necessary but in-itself insufficient prerequisite for meaningful improvement in the educational experience of modern-day educational apartheid's child victims. There is rich moral obscenity that lay at the heart of the notion that we should even be discussing “whether money matters” for poor children and under-funded schools while we dole out hundreds of billions of dollars for the noble causes of militarism, empire, corporate welfare, and tax cuts for the already super-opulent few in the industrialized world's most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation. " "Finally, to say something really heretical here in Chicago, a crucial vanguard city in test-based 'school reform,' maybe we need some alternative measures of school and student 'success.' For what it's worth, I've always hated and never done particularly well on standardized tests and I've got a doctorate and I publish books and I've done hundreds of articles and I give speeches like this all over the place. I've done this by learning to ask the right critical questions of power and authority, and not by sitting around trying to spit back the right answers to the Dickensian school and seminar-room agents of power and authority." "Anecdotally, I hear from teachers and principals all the time that we are beating minority kids and minority schools to intellectual death with standardized tests. I hear the city's standardized test obsession called 'pedagogical murder' and 'a way to teacher-proof instruction,' a method for 'crushing critical thinking,' and even 'rote learning right out of Jim Crow.' The testing craze is a big part of the teacher turnover and quality issue we hear about in the city." "In any event you don't need and you may not want an absolute test- score correlation to argue for equity."

Comment On This Blog Post  See All Comments (42)

Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 16, 2005 16:37 PM
I agree ebogan its the white power structure to no extent that keeps the mis-leaders in power. 7Natures at the end of the day your view goes nowhere ..you denounce the inequity of the system in truly outraged terms but you think its all about human nature: people are bad. So then what's the point? Seems like you're pie in the sky: justice and rewards will come only in the next life. Doesn't fly for here and now leftists.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Shannon, James at Mar 16, 2005 05:19 AM
Money talks and bull shit walks. Greed is self perpetuating. Knowledge is power - power is money -That is the reason why our society does not educate the poor. Ignorance is bliss. Keep'em stupid! It it easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a need than it is for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. Keep'em poor! Believe what you want - I'll believe what I see.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 16, 2005 02:31 AM
But I think it is interesting to ask why we only hear about the "poverty pimps" and "limosine liberals" in the media. It is not that there are no committed people doing worthy work. It's almost like a concerted negative advertising compaign against the anti racist movement.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 15, 2005 20:16 PM
Two phrases that seem to have been in wide currency on the right since at least the late 1970s capture something very real in what now passes for a civil rights movement and in what passes for a "progressive" white middle-class: "poverty pimps" and "limousine liberals." The civil rights and liberal sell-outs give more than a little substantive grist for the mills of running-dog [-loving] lackeys of capitalism/fascism like ngtw

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 15, 2005 20:15 PM
I forgot to add that there was one comment by the recently departed wtgn (who will no doubt return some day as "WTGN2") that I actually largely agreed with: "The black community has no leaders, just a bunch of leaches (ala Jesse Jackson, Louis Farakahn) who enrich themselves off of whiteys handouts." Let me be careful: "No leaders" is too strong for me and the big corporate "whiteys" are a big part of why real and militant leaders are marginalized and well-fed collaborators (who wave symbolic flags but undertake no substantive steps against racial injustice) are in charge of the what's left of the CRM. But description of much of the official "leadership" as "leeches [spelling correction there] who enrich themselves off of whitey's [apostrophe added]handouts" is sadly all too accurate --- that is really going on and has been for quite some time, you better believe it. This is well understood within progressive black communities.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 15, 2005 18:01 PM
I can't grasp the angry white canine-fascist mindset enough to credibly do the wtgn (who is actually somewhat sick and less than amusing even as we laugh)ones but I thinking I could now pretty much do some of realpc's in advance for him. I could save him the time of writing by attaching advance versions of his predictable objections and just saying "check here." In my experience around too many "bourgeois" (sorry)intellectuals (real and wannabe), you are expected to understand and master their perspective but they have no obligation to actually understand where radicals are coming from. I was always amazed when I met an anti-"Marxist" who had actually read and understood the actual Marx -- that's extremely rare. Can't count how many times I've heard academics dismiss "Chomsky" outright and then proceed to show that they know nothing about what the guy actually said or wrote about the matter under discussion. It's just a cartoon image they prefer. For a literal example see the latest (March 2005) issue of American Prospect, titled "Between Chomsky and Cheney," sub-titled "Toward a New Liberal Foreign Policy" or something like that...with, well, a cartoon picture. Chomsky's actual ideas and research (which raise some rather uncomfortable questions about the noble foreign policy record of such liberal-imperial Prospect idols as George Kennan, Harry Truman, and JFK), are nowhere to be found after the cartoon.

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By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 15, 2005 04:10 AM
"If we didn't have these sorts of fellows we get, we might think about inventing them just to prove how wrong the other side is and where its moral and intellectual failures lead." Did you write all the wtgn posts yourself, Paul?!! Oh! NOOOO!!!! We have all been had! :)

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 15, 2005 02:35 AM
You wouldn't know it from my comments but I sort of do too. You know you're doing something right when people like him are moved to threaten physical violence (as in "I know where you live"). This threat is by now routine over the net for that that's worth. If we didn't have these sorts of fellows we get (I think of realpc, who is just snottily capitalist but thankfully not aggressively fascist like this clown), we might think about inventing them just to prove how wrong the other side is and where its moral and intellectual failures lead.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Hesed00, Hesed at Mar 14, 2005 20:01 PM
I for one like having WTGN1 around. His ideas are like comic relief to the normally serious tone of this blog. He is also a reminder that education can't make up for a mommy and daddy not loving their child.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Mar 14, 2005 03:19 AM
The thing is, this WTGN character is here because he'd be lost in the crowd on Rush Limbaughs website. Here he feels important. I'm sure at some level people like this actually see truth/sympathize, but it's a cool, harsh world out there. Gotta get yours before the other guy does, dog-eat-dog and all that jazz. "I wanted to love the world mommy, it just didn't give me a chance so I had to hate it back."

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 03:06 AM
You talk tough Paul, but are you sure you can cash all these checks your mouth is writing? Or, as the shit eating Marxist scumbag you are, do you reject checks and all forms of currency as another link in the capitalist chains of slavery?

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 14, 2005 02:59 AM
Actually wtgn the predominant feeling is just relief that you appear to have backed off your so-terrifying physical threats. I was told to "watch [my] lip" because you know "where [I] live." I subsequently exhibited my extreme intimidation by referring to you as a "racist pig" and "a proto-fascist rat." Gee wtg nothing intellectual or even pseudo-intellectual about that now is there? Just a straight out nail-on-the-head description of your basic sick nature. And now your new threat is to "troll" my boards. Big anonymous web-flamer who knows where I live but doesn't know his sorry dog-loving ass from a hole in the ground. Oh you are one helluva badass "wtgn." Troll away asshole and give "Great Dane's" a rest.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 02:43 AM
How does that make your doomed ass (watch your back, sir) feel mister pinko? Must make you awful pissed that one of the only places you have to engage your comrades free from the likes of neo-con reactionary rabble, is now home to …. Well ……. neo-con reactionary rabble like myself. That's gotta hurt baby!

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 02:39 AM
Hey Paul, you can have your little masturbatory fantasies about me rotting in jail all you like, it just goes to show how weak you argument is since you feel the need to personally attack me. And, just for the record, I, like most people I know (black and white), moved out of the once neighborly and picturesque south burbs quite some time ago. Perhaps Paul will undergo a transformation like Hitchens some day and realize that despite praying to his false god for all these years it has done nothing but alienate and fail him. This place is far too much fun to leave. I hope you enjoy me trolling your boards for foreseeable future.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 14, 2005 02:28 AM
Perhaps WTGN will get his wake-up call behind bars. Get himself an assault conviction and do some participant observation research on the racially disparate mass incarceration experience from the other side of the bars. Then perhaps he'll have the "American History X" (good movie about racism) experience: after getting raped by some badder white supremacists he'll find common cause with some of his black fellow inmates and learn to drop his very thinly veiled racist ideology. Maybe his prison library will contain a copy of William Julius Wilson's book When Work Disappears, which details the way that large-scale job loss/deindustrialization tends to impact social organization and family structure in inner-city neighborhoods and communities in ways that create vital context for the actually relevant educational issue of low parental involvement in ghetto schools.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 14, 2005 02:27 AM
So now we have an actual physical threat from an anonymous proto-fascist lab rat captured right here in the maze of this blog, a Chicago area web-troller who "knows where [I] live." Truth is, such threats are now routine from angry reactionary white guys these days. They've gone way up since Bush's re-election. It's amazing how deeply pychologically (and psychotically) invested some of my more marginal fellow Caucasians are in their racism....it's all they've got to keep them feeling superior. WTGN's reactionary and immoral world view (click on his alias to read that brilliant "Capitalism" web site)won't permit him to acknowledge the real commanding heights of power in this society (predominantly white capital) so of course he fusses and fumes over the supposed inferiority of those damn terrible lazy black folks who drive declining south suburban whites so damn crazy. This displaced anger is critical to his protypical racist and fascist pig world view.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 02:20 AM
I always thought that most LAS studies were for losers that could not make it in the real world. I mean seriously, Marxist literary critiques have little if any real value to society. But I now may have to re-evaluate this belief. If Bolshevik reactionaries like y'all dominate school boards, you could conceivable have more influence over society than its productive members like myself.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 02:16 AM
Interesting that I should randomly choose such an appropriate term, the educational-industrial complex to describe what is really going on here. The United States spends far more on education than it does on the Pentagon and all its affiliates. Just as Eisenhower warned that the military industrial complex could become so powerful and influential that it could bend almost anyone it wanted to, the educational-industrial complex has taken a stealth route through the tired banter of “think about the children” to become one of the most powerful institutional forces in America today. Perhaps that is why people like Paul want to control it and demand that its monopoly not be broken. Imagine the propagandizing and indoctrination that marginalized and ignored people like Street could achieve if they had access to levers of power within the educational-industrial complex. They could disseminate their half-baked bullshit neo-marxist dribble to all the children throughout all the land.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 02:04 AM
And by the way, I make no idle threats. When I say I'm coming to get you I mean it and I have been doing this long enough to differentiate between implied and inferred intent.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 02:03 AM
Ahh, I see, even when what is essentially, my criticism comes from an individual like Bill Cosby, its still just more vile racist bullshit? Let me see if I get this strait, you know more about the issues in black America than Cosby does? McNabb, despite your label of him being a token (how racist of you!), is just one of the more prominent examples, one of millions. The Milwaukee experiment in vouchers, as handicapped as it was by the unions, showed much more than a "negligible" influence on the quality and of education as well as the satisfaction of the parents. If you want to listen to the hacks at the NEA and the Teachers unions instead of what the raw numbers say, go right ahead.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 01:09 AM
And Paul, you'd best watch that lip cause I know where you live.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 01:08 AM
I also find it interesting that my comments on Chicago's catholic schools being a real alternative against the educational-industrial complex were not even mentioned. I suspect that is because you have no real argument against this and know deep down inside that vouchers would mean a real increase in quality of educational services. But then again, how could such dedicated collectivists ever support the decentralization of an institution larger than even the military. Once again, there is a reason Donovan McNabb went to private K-12 schools, and the evil whitey had nothing to do with it!

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 14, 2005 01:06 AM
This bullshit idea that somehow all the problems black folk experience is all the cause of whitey is pure bullshit and if it continues to dominate the discussions of poor performances in the black community nothing will ever be solved. The black community has no leaders, just a bunch of leaches (ala Jesse Jackson, Louis Farakahn) who enrich themselves off of whiteys handouts. Until blacks start taking some degree of responsibility for the sad state that they find themselves in, they will continue to be second class citizens. Unfortunately people like Street and his friends at the NUL just play into the problem. The old joke of mass confusion being defined as fathers day in Cabrini Green is not far from reality and Street and ilk only add to the problem by laying this and the general destruction of the black family all at the door of whitey.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 14, 2005 00:05 AM
In addition to allocation of material resoures, racism also has a cultural dimension which is in some way even more insidious. Negative stereotypes and expectations have a way to reproduce and perpetrate themselves. The same teacher may behave differently in a "good school" and a "bad school"(can't blame the teacher entirely)At the same time, the students may internalize the stereotypes and low expectations in the embient society and act in ways they otherwise would not. These factors tend to feed into and reinforce each other. Adequate funding is a start. But we should also keep in mind that school experience is a part of a bigger problem. It cannot be understood and dealt with in isolation.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 14, 2005 00:04 AM
The very fact that you have certain predominately "black" schools in black districts (which according to wtgn the parents don't give a rat's ass about their kids) and predominately "white schools" in districts where there are few blacks(where parants do care according to wtgn)in itself speaks volume about the reality of racism in the U.S. It is bizzare to use this as the basis to insinuate that blacks only have themselves to blame. It is like comparing a a White district and a black township in apartheid South Africa and conclude that since the blacks are a lot more messed up and they should clean up their acts instead of blaming the whites. The fact that are even white and black areas are completely ignored.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 23:32 PM
Wow, it's WTGN again. Well, actually it's "WTGN1", new and improved...some new hybrid of man and "Great Dane" perhaps. Shoots and misses again and again. What an unmitigated asshole.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 13, 2005 22:09 PM
Parents in school districts like Lake Forest and Naperville are much more involved. Go to a PTA meeting or a parent teacher conference night in one of these areas and it will be a very crowded house, go to one in Harvey and Maywood and you might be pretty lonely. Blacks don't care about their own children. Just a product of the racial biased environment you say, the same level of involvement seen in wealthy suburban schools is also seen in poor urban private schools. But what would pail know about it anyway? I know exactly where he lives and it's nowehere near these communities, and has no idea anyways.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 13, 2005 22:08 PM
Here is where Paul ignores the elephant in the room: the communities do not support the schools. I noticed Paul mentioned Harvey, a town I grew next door to, and how the poor colored folk in Harvey are being kept down by the man. It might interest Paul to know that last year alone, residents of Harvey were delinquent in property taxes by over $10mil, roughly 70% the budget shortfall of Thornwood. Thornwood also has an almost impossible time finding local community volunteers at the school (but just to clue you in they are almost all retired white people). When are black people going to quit blaming whitey and get it together like we did? It might also interest Paul to know that the South Holland Police department breaks up gang fight on a daily basis there. In short, one of the major reasons schools like Thornwood are in such dire shape, is because the local sorry black community does nothing to support them. Most parents who actually give a rats ass about their children's education send them to a private school, like Donovan McNabb.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Mar 13, 2005 22:06 PM
Now Paul, although for all the wrong reasons, does have a point when it comes to a more equitable funding scheme. I think its ridiculous that while Bloom Trial is canceling all of its sports programs Nequa valley spent over $100m just to construct its temple of gross educational indulgence. But I also see that Paul has failed to even mention Chicago's well established and well run private school system, namely the one run by the Chicago archdioceses. How is it that the Catholic school system of Chicago (and the suburbs) can produce a far better product with the less or comparable per pupil spending than its public counterpart in the city and produce a product on par with and many times exceeding that of its suburban counterpart for far less money?

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 21:52 PM
...(largely a reflection of circumstances significantly beyond their control according to much educational research) will lead to school closure. Our privilege-apologist commenter "realpc" says that rich parents of Lake Forest and Manhassatt "naturally" want to give Jody and Buffy "the very best." But the poorer (and not just coincidentally blacker and browner) parents and elders of Harvey and Maywood do not also "naturally" wish the best for their younger ones? If it's socioeconomic status and not school funding that does the most to boost "achievement" (by the admittedly hideous dominant default test-score measure), then maybe egalitarians should demand the diversion of surplus school dollars from the Roundout districts to support "achievement"-enabling anti-poverty and development programs in the inner city. I suppose there is some utility in repeatedly refuting such relentlessly wrong commenters as "realpc" but maybe the cost of the effort outweighs the benefit; it's hard to say as life is short.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 21:50 PM
There is no doubt that expectations are higher in the rich homes and districts; that is uncontroversial though it should be noted that differences in expectation relate to the way that class and race privilege interact to ensure that some folks' educational high performance will be more richly rewarded than others. It is true as I said that test-scores reflect socioeconomic status more than school funding differences so yes rich kids do not owe their high test scores just to better computers and swimming pools etc., but the question remains: if public school funding "money doesn't matter," then why don't rich districts show us the way and prove the great American Protestant-bootsraps point by cutting their allotments in half or thereabouts? I suspect that pedagogical differences deserve more attention: middle- and upper-class white communities and parents would never put up with the sort of Dickensian curriculum and classroom practice as is imposed in the inner city, where teachers and principals constantly worry that test-score "failure"...

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 20:48 PM
c78 says "Brains and creativity aren't lacking in the poor schools, but the standardized tests and teaching methods are built for an homogenized society that doesn't exist in these kids' reality." That's a great point. A good friend of mine has taught American and world history in a leading state correctional facility for years. His students behind bars are three-fourths black. Most of them are from the ghettoes of Chicago. A few come from places like Peoria, Rockford, and East St. Louis. Gang tattoos are the norm though some of the white prisoners have their own curious markings including swastikas. He has also taught history to suburban white kids at a major state university. He reports that the prisoners are much better and more interesting and engaged students. They exhibit a much greater ability to understand and build upon key course materials. Their knowledge and intelligence is simply invisible under the dominant culture's prevalent systems of evaluation and curriculum.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 20:32 PM
"The lack of correlation between test scores and money spent on education refers to the finding that SAT scores are lower for blacks accross the income range. More research probably needs to be done to find out why." It does not just refer to that, nor would we expect it to when blacks are just 12 percent of the total US population. It refers to what it says it refer to: the fact that test scores correlate above all with socioeconomic status. This is true among and between whites as well between blacks and whites. While they "research" the standardized test-score gap until they are blue in the face (they are already purple), the testing craze will continue to wreak intended havoc on the moral intellectual character of American public education and especially on inner city schools where the teacher-proof cookie-cutter mind-closing test-based curricululm is imposed with special savage severity. At the same time the testing corporations will continue to rake in windfall profits and enjoy the support of their moronic apologists.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 20:23 PM
Actally its fairly true that the rich white kids get higher per-student funding pretty much, well, because they are rich and white. Yes, we fund schools quite locally, largely (extremely in Illinois) on the basis of local property taxes and that interacts with residential race segregation and the strongly related phenomenon of racial wealth inequality to create not-so public-educational systems for preserving race and class privilege. Local funding and control is precisely a filter of such privilege. And there's a small library that might be cited to show that racial prejudice in the real estate and home-lending industries (not to mention the labor market, criminal justice, educational, land-use/zoning, and transportation systems)and in the minds of white homeowners continues to play a very strong role in the persistence of harsh residential segregation, which translates into school segregation when school district boundaries are drawn to mirror jurisdictional and neighborhood boundaries.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 19:48 PM
As for NCLBA, it is transparently moronic and morally suspect to expect students, teachers, and principals in poor racially isolated schools to start posting high test-scores in short order – as if people who run an occasional 12-minute mile could be expected to match up competitively in a long-distance running race with seasoned marathoners (and this is without even mentioning cultural bias in the standardized tests, which has not been magically eliminated as some claim). This supposed expectation (NCBLA actually calls for the end of racial, ethnic and socioeconomnic achievement gaps by 2014) is so ridiculous, especially when it is not accompanied by significantly expanded school resources, as to make serious analysts question its sincerity. I am neither the first nor the last observer to suspect that the real agenda behind the false “reforms” of high-stakes testing and the NCBLA is in fact precisely to advance the hard-right school privatization project by setting goals that the public educational system cannot possibly meet in the absence of revolutionary social change that is anathema to U.S. policymakers

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Street, Paul at Mar 13, 2005 19:45 PM
ebogan4 yes there is some very real opinion poll data showing much of the black community seeming to support vouchers but it's all more than a little deceptive. People naturally aren'tgiven the full story on vouchers by the survey takers and of course they have experienced a "public" school system than tends to replicate private economic and race privilege in all kinds of ways - not just funding. If the polls were properly constructed to gauge true popular sentiment on the issue, respondents would be queried in a way that meaningfully defined school choice. They would be asked if they would support school vouchers over equitably funded (which to me would mean much higher-per-student expenditures to compensate for "extra-school factors" in high-poverty neighborhoods) and truly integrated (including across city-suburban lines where practicable) schools with small class sizes and well-trained, highly motivated teachers. The majority of black respondents would probably say “no” to such a question. In fact, polling data suggests much more support for increasing and equalizing school spending and desegregating schools than for vouchers.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Mar 13, 2005 17:44 PM
"I've done this by learning to ask the right critical questions of power and authority, and not by sitting around trying to spit back the right answers to the Dickensian school and seminar-room agents of power and authority." This is a great point. I personally attended public schools that were very diverse, whose students ranged from very wealthy to very poor. Classes were seperated between 'normal', and 'gifted' students which near perfectly correlated with race and economic status. Poor and black kids in the lower classes, privledged and mostly white kids in the gifted ones. Same school, same teachers, same funding. Although I 100% agree that this is no excuse not to equally fund poor schools. The point lies, I think in that poor kids in rough neighborhoods can't concentrate and learn by rote some obscure facts out of an institutional textbook when they're worried about having food to eat, or getting their asses jumped in the hallways. Brains and creativity aren't lacking in the poor schools, but the standardized tests and teaching methods are built for an homogenized society that doesn't exist in these kids' reality.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 13, 2005 16:21 PM
Of course all children deserve a decent school building and qualified teachers. But added luxuries probably don't make a difference in how much is learned. The rich neighborhoods can afford it and naturally want their kids to have the best of everything. I'm not saying that's fair, but it cannot explain the higher scores of the rich kids. I think more is expected of them.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 13, 2005 16:16 PM
And, of course, SAT scores are not the central goal of education. But without some kind of standardized testing it's hard to make scientific comparisons. We know that Asians do better in school and on SATs than whites, and this certainly can't be blamed on racism. Cultural factors could be part of the reason blacks have lower average scores. It can't be only financial, according to the research (but research can be defective or incorrectly interpreted, so maybe the findings are wrong).

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 13, 2005 16:11 PM
You make it sound as if the rich school districts are given better funding just because they are rich and white. Actually it's because public education is mostly funded by the local community. Blacks happen to be over-represented in the poor neighborhoods, and this cannot be blamed entirely on racism. The lack of correlation between test scores and money spent on education refers to the finding that SAT scores are lower for blacks accross the income range. More research probably needs to be done to find out why.

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Ryan, Resident-dissident at Mar 13, 2005 13:32 PM
So, people are angry, and the complacent corporate media here (i.e., the chronicle) doesn't even seem to bother discussing the economic hardships of the this community, nor the systemic racism that's abound, let alone acknowledge a possible error in the actual rating of the school... I can't seem to find the particular chron article I read the other day about this issue online anywhere, but you can learn more about the Yates fight or take action from here: http://www.savejackyates.com/wst_page2.html

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Re: Money Doesn't Matter? Let Rich School Districts Show the Way

By Ryan, Resident-dissident at Mar 13, 2005 13:30 PM
1. Well, I've been taking on a similar battle here in Houston concerning Jack Yates High School: a predominantly black, low-income school in the city's third ward. Seems that HISD policy is now this: "leave all the poor minority children behind" as it strangles the already disadvantaged school by giving it a questionably low "academic performance" rating. However, the school and the community dispute the low rating, and say instead that the district gave wrong ATTENDANCE codes to the state education agency (which are of course NON-ACADEMIC codes). That alone would therefore invalidate the low "academic" rating... Anyway, because of these low ratings, there's now talk from HISD of outscourcing control of the school, or even closing it down entirely. But even if that's just speculation, then the rating itself would crush the school's eligibility for future funding at current levels, etc...

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