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One of the biggest barriers to reforming American public education is the soft bigotry of low expectations for our children — especially those from poor and minority households — among many education traditionalists working in classrooms, districts, ed schools, and other outfits. These so-called teachers, school leaders, and others essentially think little of our children (and even less of their families and communities), even as their own capacity for improving student achievement and nurturing young minds is lacking. So they use theories, including the Poverty Myth of Education (either in the “poverty is an inescapable force” rhetoric of Diane Ravitch and her ilk, or the collection of reprehensible stereotypes about incapable poor parents offered up by Ruby Payne and the infamously faulty and skewed Hart-Risley study) as excuses for their failures.

But when data and evidence makes mincemeat of Poverty Mythmaking won’t sustain their views, then education traditionalists will embrace another school of thought: The Personal Responsibility Myth that ascribes academic failure to single motherhood, the lack of two-family homes, a lack of values, and the stereotypes of certain minorities — particularly young black men — as wastrels, drug dealers and worse. After all, it’s easier to declare that the kids and the homes from which they come are somehow defective instead of admitting the impact of educational neglect and malpractice.

So it wasn’t exactly surprising when Phi Delta Kappan, one of the foremost magazines on the education traditionalist front, allowed Milwaukee Center for Independence Vice President Tracey Sparrow and her sister, Abby (a teacher in D.C.) to indulge in such fantastic thinking — this time, about the young black men who, along with other young men from different racial and economic backgrounds, suffer the most from the nation’s education crisis — in six full-color pages. Focusing on a group of young black men they seemingly pulled out of  central casting, the Sparrows culled such quotes as “[young black men] don’t take stuff seriously because we want to smoke, do alcohol, and steal”, and are too influenced by rap music.  The Sparrows also found time to play blame-the-families, pulling quotes such as “Black parents give up on their kids and let them do whatever.”

From where the Sparrows sit, their interviews “reveal that the young men interviewed are clear that the challenge of educating black males is much bigger than the schoolhouse.” And ultimately, schools can do nothing to provide these young men the tools they need for success. What the Sparrows (and Phi Delta Kappan, by association) have actually have shown is that traditionalists would rather believe stereotypes and fantasies that make them feel good about their failed vision of education.

For one, the profiles themselves would not stand the legendary Leon Dash’s sniff test; after all, his famed Washington Post profiles were gleaned after months and years of interviews, asking the same questions (and gathering string from other interviews) to finally pierce through the stories people tell the facts instead of the yarns they think (and know) their interviewers want to hear. The fact that the Sparrows didn’t even cite anything in the way of statistics — and declared that they “did not approach this as a rigorous academic study” —  makes clear that they weren’t exactly looking to do more than aid the comfortable in classrooms at the expense of the children whose futures they are supposed to nurture.

The Sparrows also fail to acknowledge that American public education is academically neglecting kids — especially young men of all backgrounds. This is clear from the fact that one out of every two young American Indian men in ninth grade — kids who mostly live outside of big cities — will drop out by senior year in high school, as will one out of every two young Latino men. The fact that young men from middle-class households who, in theory, have strong moral values and be exposed to good parenting, are also struggling in reading and other aspects of academics should also give pause. One out of every five young white male high school seniors from college-educated households were functionally illiterate according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. So were 42 percent of young black male eighth-graders whose parents were college-educated as well as three out of every ten of their American Indian peers according to NAEP’s 2011 exams.

When one looks at the low level of academic performance of American students against the rest of the world — including the fact that white students were outperformed by peers in 16 other nations on the most-recent PISA exam, and that our country has a lower level of proficient students than 22 other nations — then it is clear that the problem isn’t the perceived engagement of families in student learning.

If fact, the reality is that there are plenty of families, regardless of their race or economic background, be they single mothers or blended households, who are pushing hard not only to just be engaged in education, but to actually take power in schools. There’s the work of parents unions in Connecticut and Texas to enact Parent Trigger laws and take control of failing schools, as well as the grassroots efforts of Buffalo ReformEd in the biggest city in western New York State, and the evangelistic efforts of Parent Revolution in California. Then there are the efforts of parents in Adelanto, Calif., who are working to take control of Desert Trails Elementary School from a district that has been promoting academic failure for far too long. And then there are the families who are exercising school choice, either by using school voucher plans or sending their kids to public charter schools in their communities. These and other parents are finally coming to the realization that the myth that any school can serve their child is no longer true (and chances are that it was never so) — and are no longer willing to tolerate teachers and school leaders who consider them to be afterthoughts, nuisances, and troublemakers be cause they demand power.

Meanwhile the Sparrows (and by association, Phi Delta Kappen) fails to address the abysmal teaching, subpar curricula, and cultures of mediocrity and deficiency within American public education that is at the heart of why so many children from all households have been condemned to economic and social despair.

We know that 40 percent of all children enter school with reading problems regardless of what families do at home. This is especially true for young men, because the areas of their brains in which language and literacy is developed lags behind that of their female schoolmates. Yet most traditional districts fail to offer any form of intensive reading remediation that can help these kids catch up and stay on track. At the same time, the nation’s university schools of education continue to poorly train teachers in reading instruction; just one in five ed schools in Illinois surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality in one study adequately trained their students in reading instruction. The consequence are dire. As Reid Lyon determined in 1997, most black boys landed in special education because they struggled in reading. And as Stanford University Researchers Deborah Stipek and Sarah Miles determined in a 2006 study, low literacy levels in first grade are strong predictors of aggression and other school discipline problems two grades down the line.

Then there is the fact that traditional districts deny rigorous college-preparatory curricula to poor and minority students. As former National Math and Science Initiative president Tom Luce noted last year, even with the growth in students taking A.P. courses, far too many black and Latino students are shied away from them. This happens despite the fact that A.P. participation increases their likelihood of kids graduating from high school and completing college. In Atlanta, for example, just 7 percent of black students were taking AP courses during the 2005-2006 school year, while 31 percent of their white high school peers took those courses. Meanwhile district bureaucracies do little to inform parents of these opportunities for rigorous learning and fight those who are aware of them.

Meanwhile there is no way to dance around the  general consensus that schools account for at least 40 percent of student achievement and that teacher quality accounts for as much as half (if not more) of student success. If one argues that schools account for half of variation in student achievement, then likely teacher quality looms even larger. That’s even before one considers that researchers admit that their own research may understate importance of schools (and teachers).

What Personal Responsibility mythmakers such as the Sparrows (and  their counterparts among the Poverty Myth crowd) are unwilling to do is acknowledge that American public education often does little more than chew up the futures of young black men and toss their lives out into the garbage like cleaned-off chicken bones. They are unwilling to admit the systemic problems why this happens: Low-quality instruction; mediocre curricula; abysmal recruiting and training of teachers and school leaders; Zip Code Education policies that deny high-quality educational choice to children and the families that love them; overdiagnosis of illiterate children (especially young men) as being learning disabled; school cultures that treat families as afterthoughts and nuisances; and a system of low expectations (including social promotion and a belief that only some kids deserve high-quality education). And they would rather conjure up fantasies of young men led astray by hip-hop music and wayward parents than address the cancerous beliefs they hold.

In the process, they essentially declare that these young men and women are mere throwaways whose lives are not worth saving, and that pursuing systemic reform is not worth doing. All in all, their beliefs are absolutely amoral and inhumane. And absolutely unacceptable.

Certainly good parenting and strong family structures can’t be helpful in improving educational outcomes. In fact, taking responsibility for shaping how schools serve children is at the heart of Parent Power and school choice. But at the same time, Personal Responsibility mythmakers and other education traditionalists are simply advocating stereotypes of young men and women that absolve them of their responsibility for perpetuating a system that fails far too many of our children. The kind of mythmaking that the Sparrows and Phi Delta Kappan has engaged in should not be tolerated. Simply put, they deserve our collective scorn.