The "bread and butter" aspects of education—having good books for students, ensuring an inviting and safe school, providing good transportation, rewarding talented educational leaders, maintaining fiscal integrity, welcoming parents—all depend on how good the principal and the central administration is, said Roger Wilkins at his Distinguished Lecture. "Nothing else can work unless that works," he stressed.
Roger Wilkins
Having just finished a two-year term on the District of Columbia School Board, Wilkins shared his views on factors that help and hinder the education of low-income black students. When Wilkins was appointed to the board, he said, he was surprised at the array of solutions proposed for fixing the ailing school system. He found that most of them aimed for quick fixes and yet missed the mark completely. Because the entire school system "was dysfunctional," Wilkins said, the first step was to make the central administration "as functional as possible."
Historical Lessons
As a professor of history and American culture at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Wilkins shared some historical perspective on the roots of the achievement gap. He described the problem as "a grotesque and continuing gap between poor, inner-city youngsters and other children who have either intact or relatively intact families with parents who understand the importance of education and have the skills to imbue their children with a passion to learn." Wilkins said his own parents, who were college graduates, read with him and emphasized the importance of education.
In poor urban areas, parents as well as children need support in order to overcome a historical disabling of minorities in the United States, Wilkins said. "My view would be to make each school not only a school but a community hub," he said, where parents and children could get "wrap-around services." The principal resources would be directed toward giving the parents "a sense of how important they are to their children's education, how important their work is, and how important their self-discipline is."
Intentional Separation
The origins of the achievement gap can be traced back to the purposeful physical and mental disabling of African-born slaves by slave owners in what would become the United States, Wilkins said. The slave codes barred blacks from being citizens, participating in politics, reading, and owning guns. "So, in essence, an upside-down Bill of Rights was imposed on black people to disable them and keep them believing that they were inferior and outsiders," Wilkins added. He explored early America's history and leaders in his 2001 book Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism.
Segregation also contributed to this disabling by making black people feel powerless and blocking them from knowing their own capabilities, Wilkins said. These feelings eventually "got so deeply ingrained in the culture that it was just self-propelling," he said, and today the results are seen in urban communities and schools.
Funding Priorities
Urban communities will suffer even more as the federal government continues to cut funding for programs that could help support poor parents who need work training and other services, Wilkins said. These services could help improve the communities of some schools that will be identified as failing under the No Child Left Behind Act, he said.
The education community in general and black people in particular need to make a "clear-eyed study" of what No Child Left Behind can do and what it cannot, Wilkins advised. "It is cruel and hypocritical to sell to the nation a program that you say is going to improve the education of the poorest children in the country and call it the No Child Left Behind Act," he said, "when you are systematically leaving their parents behind by cutting the taxes that you would give to these programs and giving tax cuts to rich people."