Courant cartoonist Bob Englehart wrote this blog bombshell the other day:
Sure, we hear of an occasional winner come out of the ghetto. Movie stars, athletes, business people, we know their stories, but they are the very rare exception. For the most part, losers raise losers. Somehow we’ve got to get to these families and teach them how to respect education. Till then, nothing will change.
Most folks, including me, would strongly disagree with the veteran cartoonist’s offensive, ignorant characterization about “most” residents of “the ghetto.” New Haven Mayor John DeStefano correctly notes as much in a letter to the editor today. But is it possible also that there’s too much we are not talking about when we talk about fixing schools? Tenure is easy. Ugly stereotypes aren’t.
There’s a larger discussion here about personal responsibility, inequality, schools and government programs worth having if we really want to talk about school reform. It’s not just about school programs. It’s about how we pay for public education, school district boundary lines and yes, whether enough parents are doing their jobs.
The New Haven Independent points this out:
The resulting exchange reflects a deeper debate about school reform: Can schools do the job even if parents aren’t? Does a racial double standard apply to how officials look at urban schools? Do schools use parenting or racial preconceptions as an excuse not to do their job? Do parents use schools as an excuse not to do their job? Do the kids get sold out of a good education when policymakers and pundits believe they can’t learn? Do they get sold out of needed support when the challenges of poverty are downplayed?
Englehart has apologized.
Update: Take a look at McEnroe’s post, which raises all the important points, particularly about the decision to remove Englehart’s words. Meanwhile, @ct1rick asks me whether all opinion is immune from accountability. Good question — no, but once you start editing a cartoonist or a columnist, where does that stop?
It’s time for a more enlightened, honest discussion. Declaring that losers are the problem isn’t the way to begin this important conversation.
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21 Responses to The Wrong Words For An Important Discussion
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The business of education is complicated. We are still running our school systems on an agrarian calendar. We teach to the middle. We provide extensive services for children with special needs,whom we often fail to diagnosis early,hence more services are required at greater expense.We do nothing for another group of children who have special needs,the gifted. Often the gifted do not begin to rise to their potential because the educational system fails them. We pay no attention, that I can discern, to what the brain development folks say about learn–for example the best time to learn a second language is before the age of 8 to 10.We are paying more for education than we ever have and we are getting mediocre results. And yes there are parents that don’t do a good job parenting. We have a system that deals with them–the child welfare system and they on a good day are not always better. We laud the basketball star or the football quarterback, but not always the quiet kid who writes a stunning essay. So the conversation needs to begin in every home, in ever town and city. The work needs to be done grass roots, locally and not in the legislature or the Congress with grand schemes and unfunded mandates.
There’s a certain decadence to American Education. We spend more on nurturing the middle and far more on nurturing the the bottom 20% than we do the top 20%. The overlap of the financial pyramid and academic progress pyramid is very similar in the inner cities.
Does society better benefit from nurturing the bottom 20% of achievers or the top 20% of achievers? Which one creates jobs and becomes the leaders of a new generation where America has increasing international competition in engineers and researchers and product designers?
It’s a tricky question in the US given the history of poverty and race and education. There’s still an argument to be made that the US is about opportunity. Trying to guarantee equal outcomes is a fallacy if the student and parents don’t avail themselves of opportunity and desire to succeed and invest themselves in the process.
No one’s solved a simple problem: where are the jobs for the unskilled and academically uninclined? We’ve tried tech schools with some success but there’s a whole generation of high school students who would do better combining paid work with training at age 14. Instead we tend to encourage this group to become academic scholars and the results of this theoretical stretching are well known.
Some countries have a compulsory public service requirement for 1 or 2 years at age 18 and instill civic responsibility into kids from day 1. The US should do the same.
Let’s face it: we have an uneasy truce in the inner cities. The agreement is this: As long as the suburban taxpayers spend more per capita in the inner cities and don’t criticize the parents in the inner cities or hold them accountable or call them to the carpet then we have our uneasy truce. Here’s the money: we expect nothing in return and we get nothing in return and its a payoff for civil peace.
The teachers union is of little value in the discussion. It’s a shame. Should teachers be blamed for accepting their salaries and producing the results they do? If the inner cities require a different kind of school with wrap around social services and increased face time then lets get that up and running and working and then talk about union salaries. The insistence that the Avon model can be transplanted into Hartford and teachers should get paid the same, work the same hours, and reap inferior results isn’t sustainable.
The biggest shame: the Spartan education model, taking the kids from their parents at age 3 and putting them in military schools, is in fact the model required. We are getting there the most expensive way possible: increased school hours and year round schooling. All day pre-schools. School programs for breakfast, lunch and soon dinner with the longer days. Uniforms. School health services. This is another uneasy truth: we don’t want the kids home with their parents any more than they have to be. Maybe to watch TV for 2 hours a day and then off to sleep.
It would be cheaper to house the kids 5 days a week with overnight accommodations instead of busing them home everyday to the ‘environments’ that aren’t conducive to development or learning. Yes, let’s do it right and put them in military camps at a young age. Give them their 3 square meals, health services, year round education and uniforms. Then we can address the parents addiction problems or job retraining problems or language problems unencumbered.
Re Richard’s last paragraph–visit
http://www.seedfoundation.com/
THanks Barbara. Urban boarding shcools!
And yes it gets deeper in publci schools when we factor in the true cost of DSS services if the child ahs to go through state intervention. The cost of direct services for foster care and indirect administration costs including staff pensions and health care when coupled with the education related expenses are simply phenomenal on a per student basis.
Someon calculated the cost was cheper to send the kids to a European boarding school with Mick Jaggers kids. School like Jagger…gotta school like Jagger…..er…sorry.
SEED is $35,000 a year and there are those thinking it can be done year round for that price. Urban boarding schools!
Miss Porter’s Boarding School:
Financial Information
Tuition Boarding: $46,650
Tuition Day: $36,850
Students on financial aid: 34 percent
—————————————
CBS coverage of Urban Boarding Schools:
http://tinyurl.com/7scjmzz
There are other variations including entire housing complexes dedicated to education. The parents and kids go to classes at night together at the complex. The kids go to Charter schools during the day. It’s designed to be as immersive as possible.
You can’t get there as long as people are willing to lie to themselves. “Losers breeding losers” is a bit much. Calling what we do today successful is an even more offensive and expensive lie. Letting the unions and superintendents come first in the decision making and at the public trough? RICO charges should be filed.
Englehart of course will be able to keep his job, after all, he’s a liberal’s liberal. It’s always funny to me when a liberal in an unguarded moment shows his or her true colors.
If Englehart were a conservative attacking…oh, I don’t know how about Obama…he would have been fired. There are two sets of rules, Bob Englehart it seems, gets to enjoy the other kind.
The Courant is swimming in red ink…here’s a perfect example of why.
I was shocked when I read Mr. Englehart’s words — not at the stark reality he describes but at the fact a public person had the courage to speak them.
Mr. Green is correct. The word loser is probably the wrong word in this situation. Mr. Englehart is a cartoonist, not a writer. But he has already sparked a much needed discussion about the steady erosion of personal responsibility in the inner cities and to a larger extent elsewhere.
Two statistics are important to keep in mind in this discussion. One is the percentage of births to unwed (teenage) mothers. The other is the percentage of students who graduate 8th grade but do not go on to graduate high school. Both of these numbers are shockingly high in the inner cities.
Parents (and the children themselves) are responsible for the education and welfare of their children. No teacher, school or government can do it for them.
Teachers (and their unions and tenure) are easy targets. But they are not the right targets. Any child who wants to learn, and makes the effort to learn, can succeed in any inner city high school in Connecticut. Why don’t more succeed? Why don’t more parents and their children value the effort required to succeed in the classroom and in life.
If you swopped every teacher in Hartford with every teacher in Avon, would the test scores in Avon decline and those in Hartford rise?
The problem lies with a self-perpetuating system, in the inner cities and increasingly elsewhere, that generates parents who are unable or unwilling to accept their responsibility to be parents.
Mr. Englehart’s words have certainly ignited a firestorm. I may be wrong, that I believe that that is the point of an A more critical issue, however, is the fact that The Hartford Courant removed the comments. “Gutless” is not too strong a word to use for such an action. Peter Zenger must be rolling over in his grave. That, Mr. Green, is the big issue here, that a newspaper rolls over because it doesn’t have the courage to stand up to a couple of politicians. I don’t always agree with Mr. Englehart’s point of view, but damn it, at least have the courage to allow him to have an opinion.
Here’s another example of political correctness gone wild. PC is complete BS. If Obama looked more like his mother than his father it would be Hillary looking for a second term not the leftist amateur will are stuck with until 2013. How come a mayor can make a stupid taco comment and the left wants him fired..yet when one of their own drops the ball and offers an empty apology all’s forgotten?
Bob is famous for his cartoons portraying a flying up to heaven after they had died. Perhaps the Courant would allow Bob space for a cartoon of his career floating to the heavens.
The mayor said taco. Bob said losers…Bob’s comment is far more egregious.
Englehart simply spoke the truth, without the usual filters. We all know that, and Green’s attempt to get around them with calls to honesty, enlightenment and related blather is just that, blather. There’s not a honest teacher or citizen out there that doesn’t realize that ghettos and the losers who inhabit them ARE the expression of the problem, but not the cause of the problem. The cause is the Democrat-created, massive, failed, soft-bigotry policies that have led the the existence of wrecked cities and the ghettos at their core. But, the Democrats have created a needy, addicted, and pliable constituency, which is exactly what they intended to do in the first place.
Bob’s comment certainly touches on our belief that much can be done if willed: so much American meritocracy. Fits so much the Republican tenet that the poor deserve their poverty. Yet more is at work in inner-city dweller failure than a willful moral decline in values that the morally superior and financially secure observe.
Paul Krugman’s recent NYT article suggests an economic determinism for the decline in expectations and achievement. Two stats for high school graduates: entry level wages have fallen 23% since ’73; health benefit coverage for new employees has fallen from 65% to 29%.
since ’80. The overall point being that the economy has been a disincentive. (Think marriage and family.)
While everyone can agree that schools “should” raise standards and that parents “should” be more involved, the answer is more complex than simply to demand it as some suggest. (About as helpful as the Republicans telling people to “just get a job” when only one job existed for every six people seeking ‘gainful’work.)
The Romneyesque claim that the poor are living in an adequate safety net is pure hogwash, simply a justification for ignoring them.
The “Americanization” of the inner city (and rural) poor has the best chance of happening when the economy recovers/opens to more people.
Full employment!
Insensitive? Yes…
Offensive? Yes…
Wrong? No.
Which school system is going to produce more productive members of society as a percentage of grads, or even freshman enrollees: West Hartford or Hartford? Which one has more teen and single mother births? Which one has more violence? Which one has more wanting to be rappers than doctors?
If we want to get serious about all this school reform nonsense we need to identify and fully recognize the social factors that are present outside of the school system and quit pretending a dismal social structure doesn’t play a huge part and can’t be solved by dropping money from a helicopter over every low income neighborhood in the state.
Furthermore- Where are the “urban leaders” on fatherless children? On the drug culture? On gangs? On the “stop snitching” t-shirts from a few years ago? Oh, wait…
Yet everyone manages to get their panties in a bunch when a cartoonist points out the obvious.
What’s shocking the crap out of me is that the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton are not out in front of the Courant’s or Englehart’s front door.
Sharpton & Jackson must be losing their fastballs…in the old days those two would have have been yelling into their bullhorns seconds after they saw the word losers.
In their isolated inside-the-Beltway arrogance, it appears the Obama administration did not anticipate the huge blowback resulting from Obama’s decree that Catholic institutions provide birth control, abortion drugs, and other contraceptive services to their employees.
This latest attack on the unborn is simply more of the same from Obama. As an Illinois senator, Obama voted against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which authorized hospital staff to give medical assistance to babies who survived failed abortions. Before the Born-Alive Act, hospitals were legally forced to leave an unsuccessfully aborted baby to die. Some died quickly; some clung to life for several hours. Obama voted against Born-Alive Act three times.
But folks, Obama is not alone in his callousness towards the most innocent of human life.
Think of the secular-progressive movement as a pro-abortion patchwork quilt of various anti-America groups. These people hate everything about America, from the light bulbs we use to our consumption of beef to our love affair with the automobile. They believe that America is the greatest source of evil in the world; everyone else in the world has too little because America has too much.
Now get this, folks — a large number of these environmental zealots are mega-wealthy Hollywood people and Democratic politicians who live in mansions and travel everywhere in limos and private jets. They consume more fuel and resources per month than most of us will consume in our entire lifetimes. I was shocked when I picked up a government-funded brochure at my local library which laid a huge guilt-trip on young couples, instructing them to “save the planet” by not having a baby.
Abortion is the thread which joins each wacko anti-America patch of the secular-progressive quilt. Why? Why is the left so fanatical about killing human babies? If it is about “choice,” as they claim, why are they infuriated when a woman “chooses” to have her baby? Case in point: the left’s hysterical outrage over the Super Bowl ad in which Tim Tebow thanked his mom for not aborting him.
“Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.” So said Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. Seventy-eight percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are in black neighborhoods. Blacks make up only 12% of the population, but 35% of America’s aborted babies are black. Half of black pregnancies end in abortion. Is this an intentional genocide?
“The most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb,” according to Pastor Clenard Childress, Jr. Blacks are the only minority in America experiencing a declining population.
So why would Obama, the NAACP, Rev. Sharpton, and other black leftists be passionate supporters of Planned Parenthood? Why did Al Sharpton threaten to protest a pro-life billboard which exposed the devastatingly high number of black abortions?
Why? Why are these leftist blacks more loyal to their Holy Grail of abortion than they are to their fellow blacks — all the while claiming that rich white Republicans and the Tea Party are the enemies of black America?
Why are so-called African-American activists, all Democrats, at odds with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece, Alveda King who is a committed Christian pro-life advocate?
What is up with these people on the left? Why do the same folks who passionately defend the life of a whale, a spotted owl, a baby seal, a toad, and a death-row serial killer get extremely angry at the mere suggestion that a woman consider not killing her baby? Why?
I can only conclude that it is a spiritual thing. I know what some of you are thinking: there you go again, Lloyd, bringing God, good, and evil into the mix. Well, there is something extremely evil and godless about the left’s obsession with killing babies.
Obama’s obsession is so strong that he is willing to risk re-election. How else can you interpret Obama basically giving Catholics, of which a majority supported him last election, the finger?
I once thought Obama voted against the Born-Alive Act and passionately supported Planned Parenthood to secure the hardcore radical feminist vote. I was wrong. Obama’s commitment to abortion goes far deeper. Limbaugh nailed it: “Abortion is the sacrament to the religion of liberalism” — a religion of which I, Lloyd Marcus, believe that Obama is a zealot.
Arrogant egomaniacs have a tendency to overreach. Who was the guy in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun despite being cautioned not to do so? Oh, yeah — Icarus was his name. The wax which held his wings together melted, and Icarus fell to his death.
Mr. President, you may have flown a bit too close to the sun with your latest in-your-face attack against people of faith. Even the superglue of your race will not be able to hold your wings together this time. I pray that come November, your fall will be great.
Where’s the news here? The Courant employs a racist cartoonist. Do any of you remember a few years back at the way Condoleezza Rice was portrayed by political cartoonists?
How come Engelhart still even has a job at the Courant? Oh yeah, liberal professional courtesy.
Bob is the prime example of a prejudiced liberal. To their core liberals treat minorities as inferior charity cases. The sick relationship is one of guardian and child. Remember people of color liberals always know what’s for you …just don’t forget to pull that Democrat lever on election day.
Liberals were a sorry spectacle this month, when they were forced to bare their teeth on the Planned Parenthood/Komen caper. A real hegemonic ruling class at the peak of its power doesn’t need to make threats. Its natives don’t even think about getting restless.
That, after all, is why liberals invented political correctness. Every American pretends to sneer at political correctness, but every American knows better than to say anything politically incorrect, else he’ll find the local liberal enforcer paying a visit, and everyone in America knows what the PC enforcer can do to you. She can brand you with the liberal mark of Cain — racist, sexist, homophobe — and that could pitch you out of college or out of a job. Political correctness, or Chicago politics, or any other protection racket works best when Mr. Big never has to send the thugs around to make explicit the crude intimidation of “nice little column you got there…”
But once the Raj’s local District Officer gets afraid and tells Superintendent Ronald Merrick order a police lathi (or Indian police baton) charge, well, then the end of the empire is just a matter of time.
And that’s where liberals are today after the lathi charge on Komen and the fake retreat on the Catholic health insurance blunder. American women who don’t want liberals legislating a culture of death over their families should know what’s what. Faithful Catholics who continue to vote for Democrats have to ask themselves: what was the point of “Dagger John” Hughes, first Catholic Archbishop of New York, teaching the WASPs the time of day a century and a half ago? What was the point of building the Catholic school system to which the nuns devoted their lives, if today’s Catholics just knuckle under to a new era of anti-Catholic bigotry?
And for what are people supporting the Democrats? It’s not as if they will have much loot to hand out — not after the government’s finances go Greek on us.
Even here in India (where I’m vacationing for three weeks) liberals are worrying about the future of government programs. Sunil Khilnani writes in the Times of India about the problem of delivering policies over government’s “last mile.” India’s capital throbs with great ideas and policies, he writes, but nothing seems to change.
The core problem, in domain after domain of social policy, lies in the inability to bridge that last mile — to translate intention, law and resources into outcomes that improve individual opportunities. Take for instance the case of primary education. We have fine legislation in place that establishes a right to basic education.
And yet, as we know from a series of recent reports, the gains across India’s school-bound young in literacy and numeracy are shockingly poor and depressing. It’s that last mile — delivering the actual classroom lessons that improve learning and the capacity to learn — which is the weakest link.
Now, Khilnani is a good, faithful liberal teaching at King’s College in London, and there’s a charming naiveté in his faith in “intention, law and resources.”
But if you want to deliver any service over the “last mile,” you need a system that succeeds or fails on how it actually delivers to real citizens at the other end of that last mile. In politics, the last mile is not the delivery of literacy and numeracy to schoolchildren, or even “reproductive health” to at-risk women; it is getting that last one percent to win the next election or buying the last vote to pass a bill.
When he was running for president, Barack Obama used to talk a lot about his “faith tradition.” Well, I have a faith tradition, too. It is called American exceptionalism, and I’ll put it up against the president’s faith tradition any day. My faith tradition says that when America needed someone to clean up the Revolutionary War debts and put the national economy on a sound footing, it got Alexander Hamilton. When it needed a president to end the suppurating wound of slavery, it got Abraham Lincoln. When it needed a president to show liberals that their politics and their economics stank, it got Ronald Reagan.
Back in 1860, the South gagged on Lincoln the way that the rest of the nation gagged on the stench of gangrene from America’s Original Sin. In the 1980s liberals were the real amiable dunces who wouldn’t read the verdict on Keynesianism and government dependency. So now liberals are going to have to learn the hard way. Just like the South did between 1860 and 1960.
Baring their teeth to the breast cancer folks and faking out the liberal Catholics ain’t gonna save them. When America needed a president to show that liberalism was past its sell-by date, it got Barack Obama.