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This Wallace No George
Critics of Cheshire schools
chief miss an important point
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Business New Haven
12/29/1997
By: Laurence D. Cohen
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You're a black student in the bedraggled New Haven public schools, and while walking home, you stumble upon a magic lamp - home to a genie who will grant you one wish.
You ask to be relocated to a better school system. The genie offers you the Cheshire public schools - a suburban system with a good reputation and good test scores.
Oh, no, you protest. I couldn't possibly attend school in Cheshire. The teachers are too white, insufficiently diverse.
It is this kind of absurdity that Cheshire Schools Superintendent Ralph Wallace was addressing when he opined that he believed in color-blind hiring of teachers - and that he would make no special efforts to recruit minority teachers.
Wallace is a school-is-for-schooling kind of guy, without much patience for the social engineering with which school systems have been burdened.
For hinting that diversity is less important than multiplication tables, Wallace has been abused by legislators, the state's education commissioner and politically correct editorial pages.
Much has been left unsaid about all this - as is usually the case in matters tinged with race and hypocrisy.
It should be said that Wallace is getting a bit of a free ride from his own school board members, who mostly have remained silent or publicly supported him. In fact, they must be furious at him.
He brought unwanted controversy to a school system that doesn't think it deserves all the fuss; and they're probably furious because, in theory at least, school boards set “policy,” not school superintendents with big mouths.
That Wallace spoke the truth, that Wallace is correct about the motion that what and how teachers teach is more important than the color of their skin, has been lost along the way.
It could also be noted that Wallace is married to a woman who is not “white,” not “Caucasian,” to arm him for the inevitable complaints about his “racism,” but the argument about the perceived value of “diversity” in education doesn't really revolve around one man.
The nuts-and-bolts reality of recruiting teachers is that it is a numbers game - and the numbers suggest that most suburban systems aren't going to get very many of them. From a limited pool of black college graduates, and from an even more limited pool of blacks who choose to become teachers, there is a further subtraction of those black teachers committed to teaching in urban systems. The relatively small number who are left are vigorously recruited by suburban systems - most of which will come up empty.
The national scramble to make school faculties more diverse also suffers a bit from geography. With the exception of large sections of the southeastern United States, most of live ion states, from Maine to California and most of what is in-between, that are less than ten percent black.
All that said, Wallace wasn't really complaining about the difficulty of recruiting black teachers. He questioned the emphasis placed on its importance.
The education establishment has fallen in with other conspirators intent on finding new and inventive ways to categorize blacks as victims, rather than achievers. As Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson points out in his new book, The Ordeal of Integration, the black middle class is now larger than the number of black poor - and that most blacks not a part of the ghetto underclass are achieving traditional economic and social success - whether or not they are invited to join the country club.
A commitment to education, a commitment to marriage, a commitment to work and achievement - the secret of American success is no mystery, except to those who insist that blacks should focus their attentions on frivolous distractions, on real and imagined slights.
Should Cheshire's teaching pool be four-percent black, or six percent or eight percent, instead of the two percent it is now? Wallace says something more subversive than “no.” He says, Who cares? He says, Judge us by our performance, not by our racial head count.
That is the challenge for which his critics have no answer. With poor children of every race mired in lousy schools from which they can't escape, and which face little or no accountability, we should be focused on quality and performance, not the color of the teachers' skins in a school system that seems to be working.
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