The Tragedy Everyone is Ignoring
Nathan Glazer: “By the early 2000s, more than a third of all young black non-college men were incarcerated. More than 60 percent of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s go to prison.”
William Julius Wilson: “In 2003-2004, for every 100 bachelor’s degrees conferred on black men, 200 were conferred on black women.”
Educational Testing Service: Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents, which may partly explain why 59 percent of black eighth-graders watch four or more hours of television on an average day while only 24 percent of their white peers do… By age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family and about 35 million more than the average child in a welfare family — a child often alone with a mother who is a high school dropout…
Paul E. Barton, author of America’s Smallest School: The Family: Has estimated that about 90 percent of the difference in schools’ proficiencies can be explained by five factors: the number of days students are absent from school, the number of hours students spend watching television, the number of pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading material in the students’ homes – and, the most important, the presence of two parents in the home.
Public policies can have little purchase on these five, and least of all on the fifth.
Full op-ed by Washington Post’s George Will here.
It’s politically incorrect to talk about this.
I think all this is the result of the welfare state. In the 1950s there wasn’t that much difference between the experiences of blacks and whites. The welfare state destroyed the black family.
I agree with Vicki.
There is another factor that was inferred but not really stated in Paul Barton’s five factors that explain school performance. It’s not the number of school days missed, or homework read or TV watching or the second parent. Rather, it’s the expectations of the (two) parents and their willingness to make the kids turn off the TV, read their homework and helps (i.e. make) the kids do it. My parents would not tolerate mediocrity — much less failure. As a young child just starting out in school, my mother tutored me and made sure I performed at the top of my class.
How do you fix it? I guess the idea is that repealing the welfare state might force people to make better decisions?
Well Virginia, one other way to start is by preventing the police from targeting blacks for minor drug violations. Once you have a criminal record, your chance of getting a job goes down to zero. Drug usage is just as high for middle and upper class whites, but their drug arrest and incarceration rates are significantly lower.
Drug prohibition and crummy public education. Public policies that devastated Black males.
Actually, I hear that the hours of TV watching closely correlate with school success and is melanin independent.