My employer, a local unit of government in the Twin Cities area, is a "partner" of the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization and, consequently, encourages employees to volunteer in what BBBS calls its "school-based mentoring program." So I volunteered and, every Tuesday during the school year, spend about an hour with my "little," who is this year a seventh grader at Cityview School in north Minneapolis.
I don't know what he has gotten out of our time together--possibly confirmation of the fact that in basketball height can make up for deficiencies in quickness and energy--but the experience has been eye-opening for me. According to the principal, virtually all the kids attending Cityview are poor, and I see now, at the Minneapolis school website, that over 90% qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. Since I am not blind, I can report that virtually all are racial minorities, too. The website reports that two-thirds of the students at Cityview are African-American, and the balance is mainly Asian. One kid in 25 is white.
My "little" does not talk very much about the academic part of school, and questions along this line are guaranteed conversation-stoppers. A couple of times, we have played Yahtzee, and I've marked his struggles to add up his score at the end of the game. I'm sure his troubles are representative. I've never been in a classroom when a teacher was conducting class, but other "bigs" have, and they report that keeping order is a full-time job. Instruction, therefore, is sketchy--or worse.
I live less than ten miles from Cityview but my neighborhood, in south Minneapolis, might seem to my "little" like a foreign country. The school that my stepdaughter will attend next fall for kindergarten (Burroughs) is, in the categories compared at the website, nearly a mirror-image of Cityview: two-thirds are white (as opposed to two-thirds black and 4% white), slightly less than a quarter qualify for free or reduced-price lunches (as opposed to slightly more than 90%), and three-quarters perform at or above grade level on standardized tests in math and reading (as opposed to one-third).
It is often argued that such measurements prove that Cityview is a bad school, its staff manifest failures, and that its students should receive vouchers enabling them to attend private schools, where students do better. But I think the problem at Cityview is that the percentage of kids from disadvantaged, even chaotic, households has attained a certain critical mass--Malcolm Gladwell would say a "tipping point"--with the result that the school is swamped by the social problems endemic in the neighborhood.
The problem is not Cityview School. It is the racial and socioeconomic isolation of the population it serves. A voucher program would, if it was partly successful, help the few kids who took advantage of it and further isolate the ones left behind. If it was more successful, the problem Cityview has would simply be exported to private schools.
The solution is to address and dissipate the social and racial isolation of the Cityview students. But now the Supreme Court has ruled, in one of many 5-4 decisions (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy on the one side and Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter on the other), that efforts to do precisely that in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, are unconstitutional, since they "take account of race" in an unacceptable way. Ronald Dworkin, writing in a recent New York Review, has aggressively criticized the reasoning of the narrow majority, as expressed in the school case by the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts, and I hope in my next post to summarize Dworkin's analysis and the dissenting opinion of Justice Breyer, which Justice Stevens called "unanswerable."
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