Poverty, culture, education

Had a good lunch with a friend today -- a guy who reads this blog, so perhaps he'll chime in on this post. He mentioned at one point that he's been volunteering for a while as a mentor to minority students in a poor part of Dallas. He's a white man with a family living in comfortable circumstances, and wanted to give something back to kids who don't have the same opportunities as his kids have.

The story he told was pretty depressing. He said working as a mentor to these poor black kids has been frustrating. I'm going to paraphrase our long conversation, but the gist of it was this: these kids share our planet, but they live in completely different worlds. The key is that material poverty isn't the cause of their suffering. It's culture. N. told me that the children he's been working with live in a situation of more or less anarchy. One year they're living with their grandmother. The next they're living with their mother and her boyfriend du jour. There's no stability in their lives. Their father has children by three different women.

The kids come from a culture that apparently has little concept of time, structure and personal accountability. He said that if the kids agree to go do something he's arranged with them, maybe only one time out of three will they actually turn up. Last year he paid for them to go to camp. The day before they were set to leave, he called their grandmother to see if they were ready. "Oh no," she said, "they went with their daddy this week." The thing is, said my friend, in the world they live in, this is normal. He said that it's very difficult keeping in touch with the kids he mentors, because so many people in their world fail to pay their phone bills on time that they're constantly having their phones turned on and off.

I could tell this whole conversation grieved my friend, who has a big heart for these kids. He went on to say that the academic situation for kids like them is horrible. Their school district is one of the worst in Dallas. Leaving aside problems with the teachers, there's really only so much any school, no matter how excellent the teaching staff and how expensively outfitted the building, can do when the children have no support from their parents (or actually, parent singular -- if that).

N. said he once went to a high school football game in the district, and took his two sons. Big mistake. He said that you'd have thought it was a big college game, given the turnout -- this is Texas, and people like their high school football -- but at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, scores of these parents were sitting in the parking lot getting drunk and smoking pot. When the game started, they were in the stands cursing the referees. Like I said, no order, internally or externally.

"Where do these kids get their moral sense?" I asked. N. said, "What moral sense? I'm telling you, the kinds of things you and I take as given, these kids know nothing about."

I hope I'm conveying to you how troubled N. was by what he was telling me. There was not the least sense of superiority in his tone or his words. There was nothing but concern, and a sense of helplessness. I told him that in our editorial board discussions of public education, many of my colleagues seem to think that if we only pour more money into the system, fiddle with the testing and carry out other procedural fixes, somehow we'll turn the situation around for the kids in these impoverished, low-performing districts. My view is, from talking to teachers about the role parenting and culture plays in the mental lives of their students, that this is naive.

N. shook his head. "Money is not going to do much for these kids," he sighed, adding that the culture these kids come from is unbelievably self-sabotaging.

I think the reason N. feels so down about it, and so powerless, is that there really is only so much outsiders can do. We -- meaning middle-class and upper-class people of all ethnicities, who live in stable environments -- don't want to leave children who didn't ask to grow up this way to the mercies of the selfish adults who refuse their duty to care for their own kids. But what realistically can be done? I really want to know.

You might remember my story some time ago about a black pastor who moved in from out of town and took over a church in a struggling part of town. The pastor and his wife started an afterschool program so the kids from the church could have a safe place to go study and hang out after classes, to stay out of trouble. They were startled to see that the children would show up at their house ... and all fall asleep. Come to find out that the kids were living in home environments of such chaos -- absent fathers, their mothers staying up till all hours partying with their boyfriends, etc. -- that they literally weren't getting enough rest. That's how profound are the problems these poor children face. That's how massive are the barriers that irresponsible adults put in front of their children's path out of poverty.

One's heart breaks. But what can be done to rescue those children? Anybody have any ideas. Any honest discussion of this issue has to go into the land-mine territory of race and class. So let's not avoid that. But be careful to be civil.