As someone who hopes to help change the education system in our country, I have a tremendous amount of respect for individuals like Bob Herbert who continuously draw attention to the issue despite its lack of "sexiness" in the news.
Herbert gets it: Education, and the lack thereof, poses the greatest threat to the American Empire in 2006 (and in 2016, and 2026, and so on and so forth).
Today, he published a gut-wrenching, mind-boggling column that has reinvigorated my passion for educational reform. I hope it can have the same impact on you.
The axis around which Herbert's article revolves is a new report from Harvard's Civil Rights project, which finds that, a generation from now, non-Hispanic whites will comprise less than 60% of the U.S. population, and will be half by 2050. Why? The Harvard Civil Rights Project finds that "It is because of a changing population structure created by differential birth rates and age structures and a largely nonwhite international flow of millions of immigrants. Since whites are older, marry at later ages, have smaller families and account for a small fraction of immigratns, these changes are almost certain to continue."
Herbert contends that the ramifications of this bode very poorly for Hispanics and African-Americans. Specifically, the fact that so many members of these groups will receive bachelor's degrees is, to put it euphemistically, ominous.
He cites Gary Orfield, the director of the Civil Rights Project:
Only the kids who get a postsecondary education are even keeping even in terms of income in their lives, and so forth. The rest are falling behind, year by year. Only about a twelfth of the Latino kids and maybe a sixth of the black kids are getting college degrees. The rest of them aren't getting ready for anything that's going to have much of a future in the American economy."
Terrifying, right?
It's much worse than it sounds. In increasing numbers, those same students aren't even getting high school degrees--and those that do aren't necessarily getting the education the degrees are supposed to represent.
The problem, as Herbert notes, is that myriad students are dropping out--particularly between their freshman and sophomore years of high school. The rising tide of students doing as such is just as lamentable as the rising tide of students failing to get their college degrees.
"Failing" isn't the right word, however. Our educational system is failing them.
All of our reforms are concentrated on high school and college--both in institutions and in educational reforms.
Our concentration must be on pre-school and elementary education. And Head Start isn't nearly enough.
We're pushing students through the meager system until they reach high school, when they are paralyzed with woefully inferior skills. And once there, we ask them to do things that we have not prepared them for. So they either drop out, or they get pushed through a little further until they receive a diploma. But what is that diploma worth? Not too much, for when they get to college, so many of the students from the underperforming school districts are taking remedial courses and grow frustrated there, and promptly drop out or remain well-behind their better-prepared peers.
Some characterize these students as "unmotivated" and "impossible to teach." That's hogwash. These students are taught by administrators and civic leaders that are unmotivated to teach them. And thus far, it has been impossible to get them to shift their focus. It has been impossible to get them to try to teach. And that is where the change must come.
Herbert cites Orfield again:
The high dropout rate has been built into the regular order of school facilities in our big cities. They expect that the classes will just shrivel as the kids go through the grades.
And I'll close with Herbert's brilliance:
Nationally, just two-thirds of all students--and only half of all blacks and Latinos--who enter ninth grade actually graduate with regular diplmoas four years later.
This state of affairs in so many of the nation's higih schools is potentially calamitous, not just for the students, but for society as a whole...
Youngsters who drop out of high school are much less likely to be regularly employed, or to escape poverty, even if they work full time. They are less likely to be married and less likely to have a decent home and a decent school for the kids. Their chances of ending up in prison--especially for the African-American and Latino boys--are much higher.
These kids will not be part of the cadre of new leadership for America in the 21st century. They will have a hard enough time just surviving.
And the prospect of that cycle continuing, thanks to our antiquated public school funding system, means this problem will get worse exponentially before it ever gets better.
What can we do to fix it? Our nation needs our help...