Saving The School. Martin Brick. Educational Reform

Michael Brick, author of Saving the School: The True Story of  a Principal, a Teacher, a Coach, a Bunch of Kids and a Year in the Cross Hairs of Education Reform has an article in today's New York Times, in which he comes to the startling conclusion that various programs meant to address the perceived failings of public schools in economically deprived areas have themselves, as programs, failed to achieve the goal of transforming disadvantaged children into well educated citizens.

No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top were both well intentioned programs to raise the level of instruction in public schools which were said to be "failing" their children.

Apparently, judging from the title of his book, which I have not yet read, and judging from the text of his article, Mr. Brick spent at least a year in close observation of a school (in Austin, Texas), and was dismayed by what he learned.

The Phantom, followers of this blog will not be surprised to learn, asks, why would anyone need to do this when it has already been done by people who spent more than ten years making the same observations, but with more perspective, in Baltimore, and these observations were presented, movingly, convincingly and in great detail in the fourth season of The Wire?

What was apparent from the story presented from Ed Burns and David Simon was that the failure of the schools in Baltimore to transform lives was not the failure of the schools. The schools were only institution among many failing institutions in Baltimore, and the schools never had a chance to withstand the tidal surges every week unleashed at them by the Drug Trade, the disintegration of anything resembling a healthy family life, the dysfunctional police, government policies (like the awarding of money to schools for each student who showed up only one day a month in the school), the collapse of the inner city economy which meant parents worked two jobs and only rarely saw their children, and that was in the case of children who were lucky enough to be actually living in the same house with adults, the culture of resistance to adult authority among the children, the Black cultural mores which held that "talking all Condeleeza"  (speaking the Queens English as Condeleeza Rice does) meant you'd sold out to white society and knuckled under to "the Man." 

Under such circumstances holding the schools responsible for not succeeding in transforming lives is like placing the blame on the house builder the collapse of houses washed away when the dam breaks upriver.  It is blaming the Emergency Room doctor for the death of the child who arrives at the ER with a bullet through his heart.  

Nobody should be allowed to say a word about school reform in the inner city who has not been certified to have watched the fourth season of The Wire at least three times and who has not been examined as to his or her understanding of what is contained in that essential work.

Public policy is most often well meaning, the best of intentions, but it is often based on ignorance of reality, on a perception of reality which is shaped by the political implications of that reality.  It goes back to that Upton Sinclair comment, "It is difficult to bring a man to understanding, if his income depends on his not understanding."