Savage Inequalities

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1. testbot123Jun 2020
   > Right, that's another word for police.

   I guess we agree then: more police so we can stop targeting minorities in street-level busts and instead target the big offenders: white collar crime that destroys minority communities and keeps them in perpetual bondage. If you want to haul the rich and powerful out of their homes with tear gas and tanks, who am I to disagree?

   > No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know it.

   Now we're getting somewhere. By itself, no, it didn't. Institutionalized racism in the forms of employment, education, and housing discrimination carried from the 1960s caused largely-minority communities to remain segregated and poor while at the same time, white flight took money from the inner cities and moved it to the suburbs, leaving behind an underfunded and broken education system [0]. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act are relatively recent developments: 1964 and 1968, respectively -- just a little over 10 years before your father got to LA. By the 80s, increased class stratification and tough-on-crime initiatives from the federal government meant minorities and the poor faced even more disproportionately aggressive policing and incarceration. With little hope of achieving the same success as their more affluent counterparts in the suburbs, many individuals turned to crime as a mode of survival. Then came Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and gangs.

   Of course, if you're talking about true gangs in the US during this time, we can also discuss the American mafia, white supremacists like the Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK, or even the gangs depicted in the film, "Gangs of New York" in the "Five Points" area of NY (but this is an example of some of the first gangs in the US, around the late 1700s -- thought some historical context would be interesting). These gangs, however, have faced less scrutiny because of their close connections with law enforcement and government.

   [0] For a heartbreaking account of the devastating long term effects of this, I highly recommend Jonathan Kozol's 1991 book, "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools"

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2. homosaurNov 2012
   Having lived in the North for most of my life (or at least above the Mason-Dixon) and having lived an extensive stint in the South, nowadays the Northern cities seem far more segregated. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that there was not forced integration there in the 60's. Look at a city like Chicago or New York where some of the largest population areas are almost entirely black. Check out Kozol's book Savage Inequalities, it's pretty shocking if you didn't grow up in a large northern city. If you did, then well, you know all about what I'm talking about.

   There's a lot of elitism from the Northern states still about how they are so progressive but I saw way less racial hostility and more interracial interaction on a daily basis in New Orleans or Atlanta than I do in cities like Chicago or even Saint Louis, a lower midwest town where you can cut the racial tension with a knife.

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3. jlgbecomSep 2010
   There is a ton of scholarly work on the effects of unequal funding on public education. Google Scholar is a good place to start:

   http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unequal+funding+educatio...

   A good "primer" book, although a bit old, but not outdated, is called "Savage Inequalities"

   http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Inequalities-Children-Americas-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities

   Another book is "The Shame Of A Nation" by the same author. These are just starting points, though, there's no shortage of studies, essays, books, and scholarly works on the subject. What I'm presenting here, in terms of social critiques of education, is by no means unique.

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4. hyperpapeOct 2018
   This is admittedly 27 years old, but at the time Savage Inequalities was written, the range was anywhere from $3k-15k/student: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities. I don't remember much of the book, but I remember the description of East St. Louis: raw sewage repeatedly backing up into the schools.
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5. henrymercerJul 2014
   "That word `legitimate' is very sneaky. I'd say it's close to racist to assert that black on white crime is a "legitimate problem" rather than just a "social problem" or a plain old "problem"."

   I have no idea what you are talking about. By legitimate, I simply mean "real" or "not imagined". I mean that the problem actually exists in reality, as a opposed to a problem that exists only in the heads of the stormfronters.

   "...because only wilful ignorance could be blind to the socio-economic conditions that give rise to this crime."

   I used to believe as you believe. I've read all the books - William Julius Wilson, The New Jim Crow, Tally's Corner, etc. etc. I used to be willfully ignorant of the more "race realist" positions, because, well, I thought they were racist. But then a friend I respected convinced me to study further. I did and the facts and evidence was compelling. It would be better for me personally if I actually took your advice and re-adopted my original views on the issue, which were more like yours. But the evidence has convinced me that socio-economic conditions are not at the root of the urban crime problem, and so I now believe otherwise.

   In the 1890's Philadelphia was a far poorer (in terms of any measure of median income), and far more unequal city than it is today. It was the gilded age and extremely wealthy people lived right in the city, rather than the distant suburbs. The city teemed with immigrants of all sorts. Yet the murder rate was 1/10th of what it is today. Why?

   Or look at London, England in the 1910's. Massive inequality, massive problems of poverty. Yet the homicide rate was a tiny fraction of what it is in modern Philadelphia.

   You can do the exercise at home. Find the homicide rates for a couple dozen U.S. cities, from both present day and from the early 1900's. Correlate the crime rate with income, then try correlating with race.

   Look at South Korea in the 1950's. Take the problems that John Kozol writes about in Savage Inequalities, compare to the South Korean schools of that period, and you'll see the South Koreans had it much worse. Yet the crime rate was low, and the dire school situation did not prevent their economic growth.

   Or look at 1850's Japan or Germany in 1700's where it was the upper class committing a lot of the crime. Why? Because they could get away with it. If you were a young punk from a Samurai family you could terrorize and steal from a merchant and suffer no punishment. Now in Japan, the murder rate is ridiculously low and you can leave a purse on a public bench and not have it taken. Why? Read up on Japan policing tactics. And murder clearance and conviction rate is over 90%. People do not get away with murder. Compare to Baltimore where the solving rate is closer to 30%.

   Socio-economics has little to do with crime rates. Crime is committed by people who do not fear its consequences, for one reason or another.

   I went to college in a city with a large underclass black population. Multiple friends were mugged or assaulted. Then I visited China, a country that went through hell and back in the last sixty years, and is still way poorer than my college town. And yet I was safer anywhere I walked, than I was a few blocks away from my own dorm.

   Also, this not just a matter of correlations. Read the links. In many of the attacks, the attackers are not out for money, and they are saying stuff like, "get whitey." These are racially motivated, black-on-white crimes.

   For the record, I do not think that black people are incapable of low crime rates. Rather, they live in communities where a) the police only show up to bust some heads now and then, but do not provide an ongoing presence to deter crime b) there are no fathers to instill discipline c) teachers don't sufficiently discipline students for fear of being called racist d) there is an entire culture of victimhood and "blame whitey" Schools teach more about slavery and how whitey oppressed them, rather than teaching about science or engineering. Thus teenage thugs looking for some fun feel it morally acceptable to enact violence against whites.

   What is the solution? Restore the same policing practices that made 1900's London, 1890's Philadelphia, or modern Japan safe. Stop teaching racial grievance in the schools. Allow white people to sue the schools for teach racial grievances, or for getting bullied for racial reasons, just as black people can sue schools when they get the same from white people. Make sure teenagers from broken homes are under the supervision of male authority figures one way or another, many via after-school activities, longer school days, or by having convent style living arrangements. You would also need to figure out a way to create a constructive black leadership. A leadership that would focus on opening black-owned businesses and then getting black people to spend money at those businesses rather than on products made by giant outside corporations. In other words, the leadership needs to drop the grievance/hand-out culture and replace it with the same type of culture used by every other ethnic group, ever, to get ahead.

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6. LDaleJan 2013
   My primary concern with the privatization of education is not that charters, like KIPP, can't and won't educate students effectively and efficiently. As a teacher I understand that there are many ways in which our educational system can fundamentally improve.

   My worry is that the incentives of private enterprise could very well lead to an education system that doesn’t strive, as a core mission, to education all Americans to a high level.

   If we did transition to a privately held education system we would, naturally, need to consider whether or not funding would be guaranteed by the government (as is currently true, within bounds). If funding is guaranteed it seems like that cost of education would explode. Private programs would have few incentives to restrict overhead and procurement costs, as is true in contemporary military procurements and fee-for-service healthcare delivery models. Schools would be operating, after all, in a persistent, non-voluntary market.

   A second – and more damaging – possibility (if funding is not government backed, though it seems likely to take place regardless) is that that private educational institutions would be incentivized to either reduce the quality of education provided to low performing (and thereby low-value) students – perhaps through low-overhead online coursework (which has not yet proven itself an equal method of educational delivery – see failure of K12 Inc. online schools) - or to outright reduce the availability of education to low-performing/low-value students. While this clearly undermines the long-standing tradition that all children the United States must be provided with an equal education, we might find a corollary in the current national conversation regarding healthcare availability, or lack thereof, for the poor.

   In this case, it is unlikely that withholding education would carry the same moral difficulty for the public as restricting healthcare does when a poor individual comes to the emergency room with a grave injury. As such, these low-performing/low-value students would likely be allowed/encouraged to drop out of primary and secondary charter education (which we already see, for instance through zero tolerance conduct rules, in small charter school populations of ELL students and students with cognitive/behavioral problems) – or they would fall onto a governmental supported educational system specifically tailored to their educational/SES class. It is possible that this safety-net education system would allow for more specifically tailored education practices – however, judging by the historically tiered and inequitable education system we see today (Reese, 2007), (Kozol, 1992) it seems unlikely that these schools would constitute anything more than a dumping ground for struggling students.

   It is, instead, more likely that these safety-net schools would be highly stigmatized and exacerbate negative self-perceptions of students’ future economic opportunities (Ogbu, 1987) while also limiting students access to academic knowledge and skills necessary to enter a modern workforce (Oakes, 2008). The reframing of the term “public education” to carry the same connotations as “public house” or “public hospital” is already underway – as discussed by Lee Raudonis, former executive director of the Georgia Republican Party.

   http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/11/28/charter-sc...

   If we’re not concerned with education as a primary empowering force for personal advancement and an initial level playing field for all Americans, then we can just move along.

   For me, as a white/middle class/privately educated k12 teacher – it is something to protect against.

   Readings (in order of use): Reese, W.J. (2007). Public schools and the common good. In History, education, and the schools (pp. 141-158). New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.

   Kozol, J. (1992). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Chapter 3: The Savage Inequalities of Public Education in New York (pp. 83-132).

   Ogbu, J. (1987). Variability in minority school performance: A problem in search of an explanation. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 18(4), 312-334.

   Oakes, J. (2008) Keeping track: Structuring equality and inequality in an era of accountability. Teachers College Record, 110(3), 700-712.

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