Maybe it's NOT the schools

The recent talk given by Dr. Edward Gordon at the Independent Writers of Chicago (IWOC) meeting made my brain hurt. The talk was supposed to be about how independent writers can thrive in the global marketplace. I had hoped Dr. Gordon was going to talk about how to get out of cold, grey, drizzly Chicago and catch the transporter beam to Paris or Amsterdam (which are equally cold and grey this time of year but who cares?)

Unfortunately for me, Dr. Gordon’s talk was not exactly nuts and bolts. He focused on what workers need to compete in the coming world order as he sees it. His central point was that there is more demand for certain kinds of skills than people to fill them. No duh there. But then he started sawing away on the same old, “Schools need to educate our kids better. We need more math and science. We need to teach writing skills.” Doesn’t anyone ever question this? Even my beloved Barack Obama has been known to blather about these tired chestnuts.

I never got to argue with Dr. Gordon as he was beset by other writers handing him their business cards and giving their elevator speeches (which I usually do and I’m only mad that so many beat me to it this time. ) As with so many examples of entrenched wisdom, maybe the reason we can’t solve this issue is that we’re starting from the wrong premise. What if, in fact, the schools ARE doing a (fairly) good job and the problem is entirely elsewhere?

I live in Evanston, where the schools are supposed to be good to excellent, the median income is nearly $70,000, and the poorest segments of the community are not living anywhere near the level that they are in, say, Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, where the median income is more like $19,000. No matter which school your kids attend, they’re sitting side by side with kids of other races and income levels. Let’s put it another way, though—no matter the race or income level, from first grade on, kids are sitting in the same classes, with the same (multi-racial) teachers, using the same materials, for the same amount of time a day. However, from the early grades through high school, testing shows a gigantic gap between the achievement of African-American and Hispanic students, and Caucasian students. The most recent data, for example, on Evanston Township High School seniors’ ACT scores shows Black students (their term) attaining an average score of 19.2, Hispanic students averaging 19, and white kids getting 27.2. Folks, this is a GIGANTIC difference. These kids had the SAME schooling.

Even more interesting is to look at the pre-high school statistics. From third grade on (the first time the kids are tested) on through 8th grade, African-American students lag the performance of white students by 20 points or so, and for the most part the gap gets worse the longer they’re in school. (I’m omitting Hispanic kids here, because I have no way of gauging the impact being a non-native speaker might have. Cop out, I know.) Now, in third grade you can hardly blame the schools—they haven’t had the kids long enough to “fail” that dramatically. Is it biological inferiority of one race over another? Oh come on, only Southern Republicans and Fox News fans are dumb enough to believe that garbage anymore.

So what is it? If you give kids functionally identical education and they score wildly differently, maybe it isn’t the schools. I think Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, has a clue. In it, he talks about the difference between music students who go on to study and become performers (his elite) versus those who either do not go on, or go on to music education programs. The difference is, he says, the amount of time each practices. The magic number, according to Gladwell, is 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours spent doing anything is a gigantic amount of time, but some kids achieve it early on (practicing 6 or 7 hours a day from early childhood) and some never make it. Figure it out—a kid practicing an hour a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year is only going to put in 250 hours a year, and is going to need 40 years to reach that 10,000 hours mark. A kid practicing 4 hours a day will need only 10 years. Butt-in-seat time makes a huge difference.

My proposition is that it’s the exposure that kids gain outside of class that makes all the difference. Put another way, it’s the haul-your-kid-around factor. Evanston is filled with anxious white parents with eyes on the prize—an Ivy League education for the little darlings, or as close as they can get. From kindermusik on, (white) Evanston parents begin hauling the kids to library story hour, crafts day at museums, soccer, Northwestern kiddie concerts, music lessons, ballet lessons, theater performances and workshops, you name it. Schools eliminated music and art? The parents find it, whether at the lower cost park district or the private music and art programs. Let’s not even get started on all the play groups, support groups, and better parenting seminars. And show me the parent who hasn’t got the kid’s summer all laid out—camp, enrichment, language or creative writing intensive. You can go all summer before you see white kids riding their bike in the street (unless they have an instrument slung over their back on the way to music lessons.)

As a battle scarred veteran of the hauling routine (those moms have sharp elbows) I can attest to the overwhelming color of the participants: white. I don’t know why black kids don’t show up at free storybook programs, or library science night, or why music scholarships go begging. But they don’t show up, at least here. Every once in a while there’s an exception (I bet the Obamas are fine “haulers”), but for the most part, the crowd of kids at any cultural activity is 98% white, even though Evanston itself is nearly 30% African-American. It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out that white kids in my neck of the woods are getting exposed to, and have the opportunity to learn far more than kids who don’t constantly participate in these enrichment activities.

Wealthy parents know it. Pick out any high priced private school and you’ll see floods of art, music and literature classes, and enough afterschool and before school activities to fill just about all the waking hours of the kids, and the parents or au pairs that drive them. Pick any Saturday at the Evanston Arts Center or Piven Theater workshop and you’ll get run over by all the parents driving Hummers and Mercedes SUVs.

Maybe what we need (with apologies to Dr. Gordon) is to stop wringing our hands over providing “the basics” in schools. Maybe all the enrichment that some kids get really makes the difference—gives them a broader context and a head start on absorbing what schools actually can accomplish. Maybe all the stuff we’ve eliminated from schools (art, music, Great Books clubs) is what really makes the difference. I don’t know how to get all kids participating in enrichment. At least here in Evanston, it’s been “built” but they haven’t come. And there might be a topic for some worthwhile research.