These Kids Have No Chance
Here’s the public failure of the week: Twenty-three schools in Baltimore have not one student who is "proficient" in math—i.e., performing at grade level. Another 20 schools have only one or two students who are proficient. In Chicago, Wirepoints discovered, 33 schools similarly have no student proficient in math, and another 22 schools have no student proficient in reading.
The failure of inner city education is not a new story. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released “A Nation at Risk,” which chronicled the decline in achievement in America's schools. The Commission called for major changes in approach, including a longer school year, more rigor, and accountability for ineffective teachers. Twenty-five years later, in 2008, a report sponsored by the Rockefeller, Gates, and Broad Foundations found that “stunningly few of the Commission’s recommendations actually have been enacted." The main impediment was union opposition: "State and local leaders have tried to enact reforms ... only to be stymied by organized special interests and political inertia."
Endemic failures have a numbing effect, and come to be accepted as a state of nature. Year after year, decade after decade, hundreds of thousands of inner city youth are pushed through dreary, unmanageable, and often dangerous schools, learning little or nothing and condemned to lead lives on the street such as those depicted in the television series The Wire.
But as the 2008 report concluded, there are plenty of "common-sense ideas, backed by decades of research, to significantly improve American schools." In 2019, a Success Academy charter school in Harlem, with students picked by lottery, ranked 37th in academic achievement among 2400 NYS elementary schools. The public school sharing the same building ranked 1,694th. That's how much difference there can be when school leaders are empowered to manage a school and its teachers.
Why do we accept this disparity? More to the point, why do liberals accept this disparity? Yes, teachers unions are mighty supporters of D candidates. Ten percent of delegates at the Democratic National Convention are members of the teachers unions. But this addiction, like all addictions, is self-destructive. It has destroyed the prospects of generations of inner city youths. These are real people whose lives are ruined. More broadly, the political addiction to public unions has rendered the ideal of good government into a kind of joke. Look at Illinois.
David Freddoso in the Washington Examiner magazine has a powerful essay this weekend, “Imagine There’s No Public Employee Unions." As he concludes, “Governments all over America might just suddenly ... start working.”
In this webcast, Robert Doar, president of the American Enterprise Institute, interviewed Philip Howard about Not Accountable, raising a number of important concerns about how to create a public employee framework that attracts good people into public service.
In his Newt’s World podcast, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich interviews Philip about his formative early job at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and his commitment to restoring a human responsibility governing framework.
Dan Janison covers Philip's book in his column for Newsday, writing: “Public-sector unions across New York have a famously large amount of say in how elected officials run government agencies—and at what cost.”