Calling A Spade A Spade
In the L.A. Beez -- Hive For Hyper Local Ethnic News -- article entitled Feds Eye African-American Performance Gape in L.A. Schools, the predominantly African Americans readership are feed the foolish arguments that the habitual failure of Black children in LAUSD has something to do with "the ongoing budget crunch," seniority of teachers, or the preference of good teachers to go to "affluent neighborhoods." Nothing could be further from the truth. The painful reality is that our society -- whether Black, White, and/or Brown -- we have allowed a coat of endemic ignorance, not stupidity, to be used in defining education without rigor for children of color in this system. While a patina of colored folks have been co-opted into this racist system to give it visual credibility, it is still the American beehive that continues to give children of color the royal shaft instead of the royal jelly.
Good teachers don't go to less affluent neighborhoods because poverty scares them, they don't go because no attempt is made to maintain enough discipline to create an environment where rigorous education can take place. While you wouldn't know it at inner city schools like Audubon Middle School from the burned out and cynical attitude of teachers and administrators, they did not get into teaching in the first place to teach the affluent, but rather as an expression of the idealism and social justice that brightened their own eyes while going to school.
There was little or no affluence in the Bronx when the Muslims created first-rate education for their children when they got tired of waiting and there doesn't need to be in the hood of today. There just needs to be consequences -- good and bad -- for all constituencies: teachers, students, parents, and administrators based on whether they follow or subvert a clear, pragmatic, and specifically defined high quality education program. What there needs to be is a confrontation of the deeply held belief by most African American children that being "school boy" is a negative. When I taught at Dorsey and tried to teach at the same level that I later taught at Palisades Charter High School, I had to suffer the ignorance of my principal who called me into her office to remind me, "This is a Black school." Dumbing down Black and Brown education while talking about how all of our kids are going to college is not just dishonest, it is criminal and should be prosecuted as such.
Whether or not Russlyn Ali remembers where she and her people came from remains to be seen, but there is