RUTHFULLY YOURS

The new Obama initiative urges colleges and universities to increase diversity on campus by pretending that affirmative action is not about race, which courts have found to be unconstitutional,   but about something else that mysteriously will provide a better racial mix.  Colleges could decide to give admission preferences to graduates of certain schools (which would be largely black or Hispanic) or partner with certain high schools (which would be black or Hispanic).  Elementary schools have been told that they can manipulate two school districts with different demographics to form one school for grades K-2 and the other for grades 3-5. Forget the logistics of busing very young children and changing their buildings every few years, let’s instead turn to the underlying problem itself.

According to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, the national graduation rate for black students from high school is 47% – of these 20%  are deemed college-ready. Startlingly, New York State has the worst graduation rate in the country for black males – only 28% complete high school on time.  Of all black students who go on to college, ¾ of them go to large state universities throughout the U.S.   The University of Michigan has the largest black enrollment of any high-ranking college or university – but only 67% of entering students go on to graduate. Graduation rates from smaller, more elite colleges and universities are considerably better but they are catering to a tiny fraction of the black college-ready population. What is immediately clear is that the focus on dealing with black educational failure must be on pre-school and primary school – it’s too late to make the necessary changes by the time a student enters college and regardless of outreach programs, athletic scholarships and other incentives, blacks are graduating at a rate 20 percentage points lower than whites.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education points to financial pressures, cultural and family issues and inferior K-12 preparation, as the causes for black failure. It would seem that our pre-eminent national educational priority should be a drastic overhaul of our current public school system, with incentives given to groups or individuals who come up with creative ways to challenge the conventional wisdom that has brought us to this abyss. Charter schools alone are clearly not enough to tackle the stagnation and paralysis of young black students, particularly male, who drop out of high school into a life on the street with drugs and crime as their major source of income. The toll this takes on young lives – their joblessness, indigence, incarceration rate, health and addiction problems – and the concomitant cost to our society, is immeasurable, affecting every aspect of social welfare and the justice system. Rather than sending directives to colleges and universities that are the equivalent of band-aids for a full-blown contagious epidemic, we need the White House to call for a National Inter-Disciplinary Conference, utilizing the best and brightest minds to re-set a default system that has been bankrupt for too many years. We need to engage parents as well as students in a re-ordering of values and commitments when children are sent to school.

To America’s credit, we have conquered or controlled many diseases, been inventive in aeronautics and technology and we have extended our civil rights for women, homosexuals, minorities, the handicapped and the elderly. We have sent Peace Corps volunteers all over the world and initiated Teach For America domestically. Now we need to use our ingenuity to re-think the problems of our black and Hispanic underclass and to come up with a comprehensive approach to family responsibility, education and individual performance. As a man with both black and white lineage, Mr. Obama is in a unique position to spearhead this endeavor – Occupy Education Now!