JOHN McWHORTER: Today we are going to discuss the issue
of reconnecting a certain segment of disadvantaged men into
the workforce. The Manhattan Institute has been instrumental
in forging the reform of welfare legislation, beginning
with the actual legislation in 1996, and by all measures,
this policy has been a success. It certainly has not been
a magic bullet, but we are seeing that most of the women
who have participated in these programs are working and
childhood poverty, especially among African-Americans, is
on the decline, and has reduced most quickly since 1996,
when these programs were instituted.
It can be said, however, that we have only done half the
job in initiating these policies because welfare reform
has focused in particular on women. Meanwhile, since about
1966, some men have experienced similar problems. We face
a problem in that a very large number of disadvantaged men,
particularly Black and Brown men, are disconnected from
the workforce, regardless of the state of the economy and
with only a fitful relationship to the availability of low
skill work. The question we are here to discuss today is
what policies we should pursue to remedy this trend.
The first panel will present an overview of the issues.
Ronald Mincy, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
at Columbia University, is the first panelist. Next, we
will hear from Hillard Pouncy, Visiting Professor at the
Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton and
a specialist on anti-poverty legislation, whose work also
focuses on bringing ex-offenders back into the workforce.
Next, Lawrence Mead is a professor in the Political Science
Department at New York University and a specialist on anti-poverty
legislation and welfare reform. Our program today also includes
the Manhattan Institute's own Abigail Thernstrom, author
of Whose Votes Count? and America in Black and
White, which she coauthored with her husband Stephan
Thernstrom. More recently, she has written No Excuses.
There is an important book that engages on the printed
page with the issues this conference will address today:
Black Males Left Behind. Professor Mincy is the editor
of that book, which is an anthology of papers on this particular
issue and what can be done about it.
PROFESSOR RONALD MINCY: I have been studying African-American
men and boys for about thirty years. In this country we
have been circling around the challenges of less educated
African-American men and mainstreaming them for at least
three decades. There was a book published in 1987 called
Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species,
and this was the last time I remember a study provoking
a major conversation. There were state and local commissions
in cities around the country trying to address the issue.
I want to suggest several things that I learned from that
experience in order to plant some seeds for thinking about
what we should be doing in the current environment.
In the first place, we have seen a number of demonstration
projects that are targeted at disadvantaged youth, out-of-school
youth, high school dropouts and the like over the last 15
years. Often these programs receive boosts in funding and
public interest following a spate of information about what
is occurring adversely with respect to African-American
men.
Most recently this occurred with the genesis of the Youth
Opportunity Grant Program, which was a spatially targeted
youth-to-adult transition program for all young people residing
in 20-percent poverty areas. Though the research that motivated
the Youth Opportunity Grant Program focused on inner cities,
the program wound up targeting young people who lived in
poor neighborhoods in highly concentrated urban areas as
well as in rural areas.
What this program and others like it suggest that news
about the adverse outcomes of young, less educated African-American
men is a catalyst behind a series of legislative programs
and non-profit initiatives targeted at young people more
generally. Sometimes they are called "disconnected
youth" with the idea that they are young people who
are not firmly attached to families; they are high school
dropouts and the like. Sometimes the programs target youth
who are dropouts, but we rarely have the capacity to target
initiatives at African-American males or disadvantaged males
specifically. On the other hand, evaluations of existing
programs often show that initiatives targeting disadvantaged
youth produce decent results for girls, while their impact
on boys and young men is disappointing. This has been the
case with a major evaluation of the Job Training Partnership
Act, which was the major employment program targeting disadvantaged
workers. In the late 1980s, evaluations of the youth programs
concluded that the results for young women were cost effective,
in terms of increasing their employment rates and their
earnings, but the impacts of JTPA programs for young males
were not statistically significant, and some participants
actually did worse than males who were not enrolled in these
programs.
A second case in which this trend occurred is the Child
Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP). This was also a youth
development program targeted initially at the children of
welfare recipients, and the objective of the program was
to focus on a vulnerable population of young people, providing
them with a set of concentrated supports including mentoring,
and tutoring. The hope was that by focusing on a vulnerable
population before they showed signs of trouble, we could
increase graduation rates, college enrollment rates, and
more. Again, results showed that these programs work well
for girls, but they work poorly for boys.
The most recent information along these lines is the Moving
to Opportunity Program. This was a major demonstration that
targeted resources to single mothers who lived in high poverty
areas in the city of Chicago. The idea was to move these
women and children to lower poverty areas where there were
more substantial labor markets, better schools and safer
environments. Again, the results showed that moms transitioned
to employment, the girls found new friends and connected
with new people in the community and the school, and saw
improvements in terms of teenage pregnancy rates and high
school graduation rates. The boys, on the other hand, tended
to return to their old neighborhoods and environments, and
their results in terms of high school graduation, college
enrollment and crime are disappointing. The single exception,
in my reading, was the Career Academy's program—a school-to-work
initiative focused on young people who were likely to be
high school dropouts. It created a high school environment
that focused on a particular career track, and then taught
reading, writing and other basics in the context of that
career orientation. This was the unique program that I am
aware of that showed better results for males than for females.
In summary, over the last 15 years we have seen a few programs
targeted at disadvantaged young people who are making the
transition from youth to adulthood, often provoked by negative
news about the state of African-American males. The results
show that the programs work for women or young girls and
they do not work for boys.
As we go into the next round of programming to resolve
the challenges that young people-especially African-American
males-experience, we have to focus on the role of gender
in these disadvantages. We have to ask several questions:
in what ways do males learn differently in schools than
females? What is it about the ability of young males to
sit still, to focus on the academic process, and at what
time intervals do they need a break from the academic enterprise?
Do they need recreation periods that are longer or more
frequent than girls do? Finally, can we create academic
environments that focus on the learning styles of males
so that we can achieve more success, with males in particular,
in terms of making the school to work the youth to adult
transition?
African-Americans tend to live in highly segregated environments.
In the first place, they go to schools that are predominantly
Black and Puerto Rican. However, when in the late 1980s
we tried to create single gender schools, we ran into huge
civil liberty challenges: Why do you need to create special
educational environments for Black boys, and when you do
so, do you advantage them with respect to girls? My own
view is that we short-circuited efforts at creating single-gender
schools. In the process, we yielded the kind of challenges
that we have today, such as high school graduation rates
for African-American males in New York City hovering about
a third, declining employment rates, and the other things
that we are aware of from recent studies.
We have to think about the role of race and gender especially,
and have the courage to carry that thinking through into
the kind of programming that we do. That will represent
a huge challenge. When we create a set of tools-when we
pass legislation that creates youth development, high school
drop-out, or ex-offender programs-for working with this
population, we cannot forget about the craftsmen. That is,
who is it that is able to access the available tools or
the funding in order to serve these young men? Programs
that tend to focus on African-American males, who often
live in a highly segregated environment, tend not to have
the capacity to garner the resources available for this
population.
In twenty years of working in this area, I have consistently
observed the infrastructure of programs that work with young
African-American males to be in fundamental disarray. For
one reason, we have been very episodic in our interest in
this population; when we create a set of programs and legislation
focusing on African-American males, resources are available.
But within a few years those resources are used up and the
organizations that have acquired some expertise and learned
how to serve these populations disappear with the decline
in funding. I think this has to do with the disappointing
results with respect to African-American males, and a different
set of outcomes with respect to women because, as John McWhorter
suggested earlier, we have been pursuing teenage pregnancy
prevention and welfare reform for 40 years. The efforts
around welfare reform that were so successful in 1996 were
the culmination of a forty-year effort that began in 1962,
and although we have pursued different strategies, we have
worked toward welfare reform consistently for a forty-year
period. That means that we have tried things, learned certain
things, failed sometimes, jettisoned approaches, but the
organizations that have been serving young women and girls
have had the capacity, over a period of 40 years, to perfect
their art. Ultimately we have had the convergence of learning
from programming on the one hand and an extraordinary economy
on the other, benefiting a policy designed to put women
to work. In the absence of such consistent funding, we will
never build the capacity that we need among programs that
serve young African-American males to deliver the same kinds
of results.
In closing, we must pay attention to two things: First
we must identify the role of race and gender and decide
if we will have the courage to identify how race and gender
have created adverse outcomes for young people and incorporate
that understanding into the kinds of programming that we
do. Secondly, we must be able to support building the infrastructure
among programs that work with these young people, so that
those who know how to do the job have the capacity to compete
in the public arena for funding and deliver the services
that are needed.
PROFESSOR HILLARD POUNCY: I think there are two
separate conversations or dynamics controlling conversations
about mainstreaming. I think one conversation is within
the broader public, and if you are attentive, you see it.
The other one is within the Black community and it is a
more difficult conversation to hear. My view is that both
conversations have the capacity to reinforce barriers to
mainstreaming, or they can help us overcome barriers to
mainstreaming. I believe we need both these conversations
because they feed off each other, and they go in two very
different directions. I want to focus on how to get out
of the phase in which conversations increase or reinforce
barriers, and create incentives and structures for conversations
that help us overcome these barriers.
In the broader public, an example of conversations and
dynamics that create barriers to mainstreaming came up about
a quarter of a century ago. It essentially said if less
educated men in general, and young Black males specifically,
are causing trouble, let's lock them up. We are very good
at these things, so for the last quarter century we have
created structures and incentives for politicians and policymakers
alike to operate with the goal of addressing the issues
of crime and its connection to less well-educated men. In
the book Black Males Left Behind, we discuss the
recent work of Bruce Western at Princeton University, which
shows that we got so good at increasing incarceration and
addressing the problems of crime that when we reduced levels
of crime in the 1990s, we also increased incarceration.
You might think the main goal of locking people up would
be to stop crime, but we achieved that goal-we reduced crime-but
rather than reducing levels of incarceration, just the opposite
happened. According to Bruce Western, during the eighties
we took youngsters who had committed a crime and either
gave them jail time or a certain number of them would be
put into a diversion program. As we rolled into the nineties,
we doubled an offender's chances of going to jail, and if
he did go to jail his chances of staying there longer increased.
Structures and incentives have led to an ability of our
society to incarcerate these young men so effectively that
even when the crime rates went down we kept doing it. So
the question is, is there another way to think about this?
The answer is obvious: to think about mainstreaming. But
what does mainstreaming mean?
Using the parallel of the welfare conversation, the goal
of welfare reform was self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency,
in practical terms, really meant that young mothers who
required public assistance were not pushed off the welfare
roles into lives of self-sufficiency, rather they were pushed
into a process in which they became eligible for a number
of supports; they earned income tax credit, child care benefits,
food stamps, and so forth. The reality of self-sufficiency
for welfare moms was something less than real self-sufficiency,
but politically we could gain help for welfare moms in the
name of self-sufficiency with the practicality of important
supports.
How are we to make that kind of anecdote relevant to the
case of less-educated men? The key is to put meaning behind
the idea of mainstreaming. If we remember the lessons of
welfare reform we might want to think about some sort of
minimal standard, which Michael Katz calls the "minimal
standards of citizenship." He argues that when we talk
about public policy we do one thing for citizens and other
things for non-citizens, our immigrants, et cetera. When
we talk about the undeserving poor, young Black men, for
example, we are in the hidden language of public policy
talking about whether these are young citizens or not. We
could argue that mainstreaming simply means that we expect
young men, from this point on, to do the following: accept
and enter the world of work; to honor their obligations
to their children; and to obey the law. If we could strike
such a public contract so that young men increasingly find
these terms of living in America acceptable, then the lessons
of welfare reform would suggest that we create a new set
of incentives for our political leaders and policymakers.
In Black Males Left Behind, we discuss how to create
incentives for politicians to mainstream young men. In this
sense, mainstreaming would include things such as working
with the child support system on behalf of those who choose
to be responsible fathers, and finding better employment
options for those who choose to avoid a life of crime.
If the first half of the conversation is about how to
structure politics and the incentives for policymakers,
the other half of the conversation is about what is going
on in the Black community. I am going to appeal to a cartoon
of this: Bill Cosby and Eric Dyson have been having a public
discussion of late about these issues, but it has been a
toxic discussion. Bill Cosby says the African-American community
should behave more responsibly and its youngsters should
become mainstream and not engage in crime. Dyson took offense
to Cosby's comments, and they began a policy conservation,
which unfortunately degenerated into each saying he didn't
like what the other said. The result is not much movement,
effectiveness, or fruitful discussion on what should be
done.
In the book Black Males Left Behind, we try to think
of a more productive way of discussing these problems within
the Black community, and what came to mind was the Million
Man March. In effect, this was a policy idea: why not get
a bunch of people together in Washington, D.C. and say we
ought to mainstream our young people? In fact, Martin Luther
King tried it and it seemed to have worked in the 1960s.
So why did it not work in the 1990s? The answer seems to
be that one shot is a willful answer to a large social problem.
Once the marchers leave town what else happens? Where is
the infrastructure? How do you build on that? It seems to
be a situation that leaves the Black community bereft of
an opportunity to contribute to this conversation.
In a recent study we looked at some dialog within the political
science community of late, and the short version goes something
like this: the hidden elephant in the room is a theory that
John McWhorter has talked about many times called the special
mismatch hypothesis. It says if you put poor people and
rich people, or jobs and people who need jobs, in different
places bad things are going to happen. This a good theory,
and most people find some parts of it right, but most of
us find many parts of it wrong. In the African-American
community something really interesting has begun to happen
as better-off Blacks have separated from less educated,
less well-off Blacks by moving to the suburbs: when the
Black community pulls apart along socioeconomic fissures
the chances of the community thinking holistically about
its problems begin to decrease. In other words, the Dyson-Cosby
debate is symptomatic of a larger dynamic going on within
the Black community, based on survey evidence.
When we looked at some data on communities in Philadelphia
we found that in cases where that has not happened-where
well off African-Americans still live within the community-dynamics
begin to take place so that you create a capacity for a
community to host its own conversation about mainstreaming.
To conclude, in my view we need these two kinds of conversations-within
the policy community and within the Black community-and
there is some evidence that both are in progress, but there
is also evidence of the toxic alternative to those conversations
very much underway. Once we have confirmed that mainstreaming
means some minimal set of standards and behaviors that we
expect of our young people, and the Black community reinforces
that and generates a capacity to echo and reinforce those
conversations, I think there is reason to hope for improvement.
PROFESSOR LAWRENCE MEAD: This is an important meeting.
I have a sense that there is indeed a new wave of interest
in the problem of low-income men, and I hope this time it
leads to some fundamental policy changes.
I am going to talk mainly about poor adult men and how
we might reconnect with them. Among poor men in 2004, less
than 20 percent worked full time and full year, and nearly
60 percent did not work at all. These men often have many
problems, and this may not be the most serious, but it is
the one that stands out, and the one that I think we can
do something about.
Non-work seems to me the immediate reason why these men
are poor, and it is also the cause of their problems as
husbands and fathers. A man who does not work regularly
cannot satisfy his employer and he cannot satisfy his spouse
or his children. This problem is of strategic importance,
and by addressing it, I think we can make some real progress
in reconnecting these men.
In the past, we have approached this problem too much in
terms of economics. I am a political scientist, and I believe
that politics is the master science and the way we need
to solve this. The economists approach the work problem
in terms of human capital; they say that the poor men lack
skills, so we should invest more in them. In this way economists
see them as empty vessels, passive figures into which we
have to pour resources. As Ronald Mincy has pointed out,
programs that try to do this-training programs-do not evaluate
very well, and in fact, they often fail to get the job done,
as do most education programs serving this population.
Another economic perspective is that there is something
wrong with the labor market or the opportunity structure
so that jobs are not available, which was one of the contentions
of the mismatch theory that Hillard Pouncy mentioned. Evidence
for that claim is not very good. Another claim is that the
jobs these men take do not pay enough, which is why they
remain poor even if they work. It turns out, however, that
the main problem is that these men do not work at all, not
that they are working at low wages. The problem has more
to do with the fact that these men are not fully engaged
in the labor market.
What do we do about that? Liberals tend to propose spending
more money on these people and generating more resources
for them. Conservatives identify that as the problem—government
trying to do too much. Instead, government ought to stop
interfering with the labor market and let men find their
own best employment. The debate tends to be all about economics
and doing more versus doing less.
Welfare reform has shown us that this is fundamentally
mistaken. In the welfare arena the way that we solved the
problem was we got away from economic thinking. We used
to say that welfare mothers lacked human capital too, or
that the labor market was inadequate, and for much of the
40 years of welfare reform many of the reforms that we tried
were ways to re-jigger the labor market, or change incentives,
or have training or investment programs. That approach did
not get results.
Then about 20 years ago we hit on the idea of actually
requiring the mothers to work, which turned out to be the
answer. If we had programs that required welfare mothers
to work as a condition of aid, then they would in fact go
to work. We had to spend some money too, but the crucial
thing was having a clear-cut work requirement. About 20
years ago we began to get positive evaluations for work
programs like this-mandatory work programs-and from that
point a snowball started to roll, and it swept right through
the welfare system, and today we have a totally different
system. The key was not spending more money; the key was
accepting that there had to be a work obligation, and the
positive effects of that generated the public commitment
to spend more as necessary. So we did in fact spend more
on childcare, wage subsidies and all these supports, but
that was acceptable because it was now going to enforce
a value that the public deeply believed in, which was that
there should be a work obligation connected to public aid.
The cost of welfare did not upset the public; studies show
clearly that it was the work problem that upset the public.
They wanted the recipients to work alongside the taxpayers,
and once they got it, the coffers opened and money was no
object. That, I believe, is the model we need to apply to
these men; we have to get away from an economic logic in
dealing with them. It is true that they do need some new
benefits, such as a higher minimum wage or higher income
tax credits, perhaps.
In particular, we have to do something about immigration.
Unless we can prevent employers from immediately resorting
to hiring illegal immigrants in place of low-skilled Americans,
we are not going to get very far. However, all of this is
only a small part of the problem. The main problem is that
the men we are talking about do not face a serious requirement
to work on a regular basis. We have to somehow say to them,
"you have to work, and you have to work consistently,
and if you do that we will help you in these numerous ways."
If we do that, I am quite convinced that the education and
training programs will have much greater effect because
the men will face a serious requirement to work steadily.
This message also addresses the politics. There is an assumption
in some of the previous comments that we need to persuade
the public to spend money on low-income Black men. I think
the public would be willing to spend money when we show
results from serious work programs that require employment;
I think the public response to the idea of enforcing a value
in which we believe will be generous.
My advice, then, is to ask for the authority to obligate
these men with work requirements, and then the money will
follow. In a sense, we have to do what Daniel Patrick Moynihan
talked about in the Moynihan Report 40 years ago: we have
to find a way to put these guys in the army. Because the
army is now a volunteer force, we have to find a way to
substitute for the army. How might we do that? How do we
find an authority structure that will require these guys
to work? Unfortunately, we do not have a benefits system
like the welfare system with the same breadth and strength
that that system offered for the welfare mothers, so it
seems to me that we have to resort primarily to two other
institutions that already deal with low-income men. One
of them is the Child Support System, which is now dedicated
to collecting as much money from the unmarried fathers as
possible to support the families. We somehow have to shift
that system to include focusing on the fathers' employment
as well; we have to make that system responsible for getting
the fathers working, which is just as important, if not
more so, than getting them to pay child support.
Some past experiments have tried to do this; such programs
have presented fathers who were in arrears with the choice
to pay up, participate in the program or go to prison. They
found that to increase the child support payments we have
to increase the father's employment. We have not found a
way to do that yet. I think we can probably improve on those
programs.
The other issue is arrearages: a lot of these men build
up substantial debts to the Child Support System, such that
they cannot work on the books without the state attacking
their wages. We have to make some tradeoffs to reach some
balance between a work obligation and paying every penny
that they owe, because employment is probably more important
than paying off every penny.
The second major institution that has frequent interaction
with low income men is the criminal justice system. This
system is currently dedicated to locking up offenders and
protecting society, but again, we have to shift its goals
to include the employment of people once they leave prison,
which is crucial to avoiding recidivism.
We have to make the system become accountable for the employment
outcomes of people leaving prison. There are already a number
of prison reentry programs, some of which involve job placement
and some involve mandatory work in community service positions;
both worth discussing. Programs like this, which require
people to work in return for support, are exactly the sort
of thing that might generate positive results for these
men, and then get wide public support.
The ultimate problem is not really money; the real challenge
will be changing the institution so that employment becomes
part of its core mission - not merely a special program.
With welfare reform, we did not have a separate program,
rather we built employment into the welfare structure so
that it became a central goal of the entire system. That
is what we have to do with employment for men through the
Child Support and criminal justice systems. When we do so,
I think we will finally see these men channeled toward employment
and required to work, but also supported to work. The goal
is integration. The goal is not to blame, exclude or find
fault; rather the goal is to satisfy what I call the common
obligation—in this case employment, which will allow
these men to fully enter into society.
ABIGAIL THERNSTROM: I think, before going any further,
it is important to remind ourselves that not all Black men
live in poverty or in inner-city neighborhoods. A third
of Black families now live in suburbia-half by self-identification
are middle class-and so we are talking here about a sector
of the Black male community. Nevertheless, the problem obviously
has an impact on American society in general; it ripples
through the fabric of the society, and we ignore it at our
peril.
I am going to focus on one aspect of the question: education.
I found Ronald Mincy's suggestion that we try to shape the
school day in different ways to give Black boys more recreational
time very interesting. It is a suggestion I am sympathetic
to, but I want to make a slightly different point. I will
start by telling you a story.
I love the North Star Academy Charter School in Newark,
New Jersey. It is hard to find schools that you walk into
and just adore, and that is one of them. It started out
as a middle school, and then it added a high school, and
one of the conditions of going to the high school is that
you have attended the middle school, which is fairly gender-balanced.
The last time I was there they had just started the high
school and they were doing it one grade at a time. I walked
into the new ninth grade and I looked around the room and
I said, "where are the boys?" They had disappeared.
I called the school yesterday, because this took place a
couple of years ago now, and I asked what has happened since
then. I asked how large the high school is now, and the
woman I spoke to told me they had 123 students. I asked,
how many of them are male, and she said she did not know
exactly, but guessed that about 50 are male. What I saw
several years ago remains the case: The boys have gone.
Nobody at North Star thinks these young men have dropped
out of school, but they will not go along with the personal
discipline that North Star demands.
One of Larry Mead's central points is that investing more
in giving young Black men education and training would achieve
relatively little because their problem is not a lack of
specific job skills. It is more often precisely that lack
of personal discipline that North Star and other excellent
schools insist upon and that Steve, my husband, and I discuss
at some length in our book, No Excuses, in a chapter
called "Not by Mass Alone." In writing No Excuses,
we did think about looking at the gender split, but when
one writes a book one always gives up certain topics in
the interest of getting the book done, and that was one
of the topics we did not look at.
But I have just looked at the National Assessment for Educational
Progress—the nation's report card on education. I looked
at the twelfth grade scores, and they are quite fascinating.
They suggest that the huge gender imbalance in college enrollments-the
college enrollment ratio of females to males 2:1-is not
an indication that Black adolescent males lag far behind
Black women in cognitive skills, because they do not. Blacks
in general lag behind Whites and Asians, but the gender
gap for Blacks is not sufficiently striking to account for
that total imbalance in college enrollment. For example,
there is not a statistically significant gender difference
among Black male and female students in math. In reading,
while Black twelfth-grade males are almost a grade level
behind their Black sisters in high school, we should note
that the gender gap among African-Americans is only half
as large as it is among Whites. White males, on the average,
are close to two years behind their White female classmates
in reading, in contrast to the one year gap between Black
students. Perhaps there is an obvious explanation: Results
are deceptive because Black males are more likely to drop
out of high school and therefore are not available for the
twelfth grade test, which makes them a more selective population.
However, there is no consensus at present on how to count
the drop-out rate. But without wading into that battle I
would suggest that neither method yields such large gender
differences in drop-out rates for Blacks.
Schools like North Star, the KIPP Academies, and other
successful charter schools are all out from under the regular
public system. They understand something fundamental: their
inner-city children need an education beyond reading, writing
and arithmetic. These children need an education in a much
broader set of skills. Charter schools focus relentlessly
on core academic subjects and provide a safe and orderly
environment in which kids can learn, but they also aim to
shape the culture of their students. That culture affects
academic learning and the acquisition of skills and knowledge
that will lead to good jobs in life, as Larry Mead discussed
earlier.
Orlando Patterson has written, "The greatest problem
now facing African-Americans is their isolation from the
tacit norms of the dominant culture." Superb schools
uniformly attack that isolation of Black kids from mainstream
norms by making certain demands, and the isolation of course
seems to be worse among Black males than Black females.
These schools insist that their students learn how to speak
standard English, show up on time properly dressed, sit
up straight in their desks, chairs pulled in, workbooks
organized. They are never allowed to waste a minute when
they could be learning. They walk down halls quickly and
quietly, they always finish their homework, they look at
people when they are talking to them, they listen to teachers
politely and follow their directions precisely. They treat
their classmates with equal respect. They shake hands with
visitors into the school introducing themselves. Even minor
infractions of the rules-a shirt not tucked in, some foul
language-have immediate consequences. In other words, as
journalist David Shipler has put to point, the "soft
skills of punctuality, diligence, and a can-do attitude,"
that is internalized self-discipline and believing that
your work will matter and pay off, are as important as basic
math skills.
Other equally important messages permeate the culture of
these schools. They deliver an optimistic message about
America and about the rules that govern climbing the ladder
of economic opportunity in this country. The message is
that the doors are open for those who make the right decisions,
opportunities outweigh barriers, and determination pays
off. The effort to put disadvantaged youth on the traditional
ladder of social mobility has another related component,
which is never explicitly articulated. The best inner-city
schools and students define themselves as individuals. Ralph
Ellison, in the 1970s, wrote, "If White society has
tried to do anything to us it has tried to keep us from
being individuals, to deprive Blacks of the understanding
that individuality is still operative beyond the racial
structuring of America." These schools want their students
to think of themselves as individuals beyond the racial
structuring of America, free to emphasize their racial and
ethnic group ties as much or as little as they wish. That
is a tall order in contemporary America, which generally
delivers such a different message—a message that race
is who you are. Race-related public policies reinforce that
view. These policies include racial preferences in higher
education and contracting employment, racially gerrymandered
voting districts, and elementary and secondary school systems
that assign people to school based on the color of their
skin. Omaha, Nebraska is in the middle of trying to do just
that by splitting the district into three racially identifiable
sub-districts. All such policies say the same thing: race
or ethnicity is the single most important fact about an
individual. From there, it is a straight line to the belief,
on the part of Blacks themselves, that Whites are powerful
and Blacks are helpless. Such a belief leads to their profound
alienation from mainstream American society, and is so pernicious
that we must address it.
MALE VOICE: It seems that as America becomes urbanized,
the schools of education have these urban education formats
and programs. There is a growing disconnect between the
theorists and the researchers, on the one hand, and the
participants, who are largely Black and Latino, from which
all of these conclusions are drawn. For example, in the
New York school system there are 250 research studies on
an increasing Brown and Black population from which we conclude
these things. My question is, how can we close the gap between
researchers and the research participants?
DR. THERNSTROM: My first answer is to close down
the education schools. There are so few scholars doing good
work on education, and interestingly enough, most of them
are economists and are not in education schools. They are
people like economist Caroline Hoxby at Harvard, and some
others are in think tanks. In a recent meeting to celebrate
departing Boston superintendent Tom Payzant, his second-in-command
said something very courageous, which made my jaw drop because
he has been in a bureaucracy for the last 10 years in Boston.
He said that these large urban systems cannot be turned
around within the current structure of public education.
An outgoing official could say that; if I said it, which
I often do, nobody listens to me. But people might listen
to him.
MALE VOICE: As researchers, and in general, we use
the terms "African-American" and "Black"
as though they are interchangeable. Who are we talking about?
Is it important that we disaggregate cultural experiences
of Black folks to understand that, as you point out, not
all Black folk have these problems? If we want to disaggregate
it today, who are we talking about? African-Americans, Haitians,
Jamaicans?
PROFESSOR MINCY: I think the point that you raise
dissipates across generations. If we were talking about
Jamaicans, with whom I went to school, they would possess
a culture about education and work that more closely resembled
the ideology of their immigrant parents, and you would see
radical differences between their outcomes and those of
native born African-Americans. On the other hand, two or
three generations later we begin to see, a local context.
As we work through cohorts, I think the differences in the
outcomes for Jamaican or even for African students who are
now in the United States are beginning to show that gender
and color are beginning to disadvantage ethnic groups of
color in ways that we would only recognize with respect
to African-Americans years ago.
DR. THERNSTROM: We do not have the data, however,
to track these students in the National Assessment for Education
Progress.
PROFESSOR MINCY: If you look at a study that Doug
Massey is conducting on enrollment rates of Black students
in historically Black and colleges clearly shows that African-American
male students are declining in their enrollment relative
to girls.
DR. THERNSTROM: I am talking about the rates for
Haitians versus the American-born.
PROFESSOR MINCY: But he does this across color and
ethnicity.
DR. THERNSTROM: The foreign-born are a relatively
small group. Unfortunately, we do not track them. One of
the things NAEP should do is ask for the country of origin
of your parents, but now it does not ask that simple question.
FEMALE VOICE: Do you think that America is playing
African-Americans and the West Indians against each other?
I remember, it used to be that the West Indians were getting
jobs and African-Americans were not, and then the next generation
became African-American. Now the Latinos are finding jobs
and the West Indians cannot get the work. Do you think that
anyone that comes to this country will get work before the
African-Americans, and that way it keeps everybody divided?
PROFESSOR MEAD: It comes to seem that way because
the individuals we are talking about primarily here-low-income
men who are often Black but could also include other groups-are
simply less employable. We have to recognize that there
are real issues of employability, and so the new groups-in
this case the aliens coming in from Mexico-get the jobs.
There is no policy to make this happen - that is not in
the interest of the employers. We have to recognize the
need to increase the employability of the native born and
to restrain immigration.
DR. THERNSTROM: Hillard Pouncy has data that fascinated
me: He found that 38 percent of young jobless Black men-men
who are out of the labor force entirely-admit to earnings
from crime. Then he says that employers do not want to hire
young Black men out of fear of crime, but his own chart
shows that 30 percent of those who do have jobs are, nevertheless,
involved in crime. So maybe employers are reacting to something
that is legitimate.
