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Urban Education:
Who Cares?
The marketplace, that's who, if only we left
false compassion out
of the debate
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Business New Haven
12/14/1998
By: Laurence D. Cohen
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Imagine the burden that would be lifted from the body politic if we simply admitted that we really don't give a hoot whether children in cities like New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford are educated well, educated badly or, in truth, whether they drop out of school and aren't really educated at all.
These kids are too black, too brown, too under-educated, too scary, too troublesome. These parents, they are too unsophisticated, too poor, too politically weak to cause any real trouble.
Why don't we just say it out loud? Problematic kids. Parents with no clout. We don't care about them - and we don't have to care.
Instead of telling the truth, and dealing with it, we're killing these families with kindness. School boards get dumped, superintendents get fired, school buildings get repainted, bond issues get passed - all to the beat of a Greek chorus of politicians and “civic leaders” who cluck about how much we all care. But all we really care about is dumping enough money into the system to ensure that the union employees' paychecks don't bounce.
The ongoing Hartford school-desegregation lawsuit creates more fertile ground for fake compassion. The legal “remedy” appears somewhat elusive, in large part because we prefer the situation as it is: poor kids, trapped in city schools.
If you probe the subtext of the plaintiffs' arguments in the desegregation case, if you listen to their speeches or read their essays, it becomes clear what the litigation is really all about. They know we don't care. We know we don't care. They know that we know that we don't really care.
The “desegregation” in the desegregation lawsuit is almost irrelevant to the issue of whether or not we care to educate poor and minority children. A new public-opinion poll from Public Agenda, a good government-type outfit that is much the media darling, reported that 80 percent of black parents want their school systems to focus on academic achievement, rather than diversity and desegregation.
Black parents know we don't care. Public Agenda delicately blames the “lack of ardor for integration” on the “heavy investment of whites in finding good schools,” which makes whites “cautious and tentative about upsetting the applecart.”
What shall we do, when the hypocrisy grows so severe that our fake compassion breeds contempt and ridicule? As economist Herbert Stein puts it: When something can't go on any longer, it won't go on any longer.
When we finally generate the courage to admit that we don't care, then the marketplace should, and must, be allowed to respond. Markets reek of self-interest; some folks always cares if its serves their purposes. In the case of education for minority children, markets abound with self-interested players who will do more than pretend that urban children are worthy of a high-quality education.
Entrepreneurs will begin (and in fact, already have begun) to open schools that promise to better educate the poor, at a discount. But there are other markets. Some of serve our self-interest through our pursuit of justice, through our sense of fairness. Some of us respond to the challenge of fixing a system that has failed. Whatever the motivation, markets create an energy, an urgency, when demand exists.
In Wisconsin, Polly Williams, the liberal black legislator who brought vouchers and school choice and an array of private schools to minorities in the lousy Milwaukee public schools, had to fight off dozens of special interest group opponents who pretended they cared. In Ohio, in Arizona, in Vermont, in dozens of cities and states across the country, the pressure is on to allow parents to take their own tax money and run from false compassion, to embrace a marketplace of educational opportunities. BNH
Laurence D. Cohen is a senior fellow of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy.
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