Blaming Teachers Gets Us All Off the Hook
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It is important to read stories like Joe Mozingo’s piece, San Bernardino: Broken City, or listen to the NPR broadcast based on Mozingo’s reporting. The subject is desperation and family homelessness among the destitute in a faded California city where many children reside in cheap motels. I watched children, ready for school, come out of a strip of such places one morning in Phoenix, and I once watched a school bus drop off children at such a motel in Florida. It’s a jarring sight, partly because of what it says about America these days and partly because most of us, far more privileged, imagine going to school in the context of our own school days or the educational setting we intentionally provided for our children.
I suppose this place in our own more privileged imaginations is why, for many of us, blaming teachers makes sense. If students in our poorest communities can’t realize our expectations for rising test scores, we are willing to accept it when someone says we have to hold teachers accountable. As Mozingo paints the picture—meth addiction, homelessness, grueling employment for parents in the huge distribution warehouses out in the desert—San Bernardino is a place where median household income has fallen from $56,278 in 1970 to $37,440 today in inflation-adjusted dollars. While Mozingo reports on neither the schools nor the test scores, I am certain the schools are caught in the same kind of vicious cycle. I live in the Northeast Rust Belt, and I don’t get to California very often, but when I drive through downtown Gary, Indiana or the devastated neighborhoods of Youngstown, Ohio, I have created a discipline for myself. To parrot society’s message, I say to myself, “The children’s test scores here are because of the school teachers,” and then I consider the implications of that statement.
There is a whole shelf of sociology books—Karl Alexander’s The Long Shadow, about Baltimore—Robert Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect—Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality—about the concept of neighborhood ecology—all the factors that come together to shape people’s experience of where they live. Sharkey defines the ecology of neighborhoods very clearly: “To truly understand inequality in America… it is necessary to move beyond a focus on income, occupation, and education, the traditional markers of socioeconomic status, and to consider the ways in which inequality is organized in space. In doing so, we find that the neighborhood is an independent dimension of stratification, meaning the residential patterning of American neighborhoods is not explained by these other dimensions of stratification—income, occupation, or education… By studying neighborhoods and communities we see a different dimension of inequality, and a more severe brand of racial inequality.” “(T)he spatial clustering of social phenomena, economic opportunities, environmental resources and hazards, and public institutions has important implications for the life chances of individuals.”(Stuck in Place, p. 15)
Instead of considering something as complicated and nuanced as the ecology of neighborhoods, the rhetoric of No Child Left Behind, which set out to blame somebody and punish the school-perpetrators of low test scores, and the No Child Left Behind Waivers granted to states by the Obama Department of Education, which demanded that states Blaming Teachers Gets Us All Off the Hook | janresseger: