Hi, Phil--

Noticed the great support for Faith Based initiatives in the black community. How come this is never reported?

Perhaps for the same reason that the dissent inside the black community is underreported: the community itself is loathe to insist upon it. Maybe, if America at large (in America, that means mostly white) thinks that blacks would rather rely on their churches, which are the traditional agency of change in this traditionally disenfranchised part of the population, then there will be an excuse not to provide public services on a par with the public services that America at large has come to expect, demand and rely upon. Public schools, for instance. Think about it: no matter how wealthy in spirit an inner city church is, it can't provide what a well-funded public school system can in sheer resources, such as computers, new books, a decent library, and paying for top talent. At best, faith-based initiatives can only offer help to a small portion of the children who need it. Each child is important, even those for whom there are no chairs available. The effort needs to be greater. The citizens of impoverished communities will never be able to support a greater effort without a sound economy. They will never have a sound economy without a middle-class average income in their community. They will never have that average income without training and modelling of appropriate behavior (known as "good examples"). They will never have training and example without exposure of the majority of the children to decent educational institutions run by people providing good role models. They will never be able to afford that kind of investment without a sound economy. Watch the cycle chase its tail.

To pull one's self up by one's bootstraps is a good philosophy. So let's make sure they all have boots, already. Then, if they refuse to wear them or lose them, their situation will be of their own making, not because opportunity was denied them.

I wish that the issue of vouchers was in the survey. Interesting that it was not.

Yes. The issues of "white flight", tax inequity, poverty vs. race as a handicap, and governmental "equal access" regs as a condition of receipt of tax monies in private schools are also mentioned very seldom. The last one is glossed, I suspect, because numerous private schools were founded in the '80s and '90s with the specific objective of preserving the privilege of their students, and that the equilibrium's disturbance through the use of vouchers to introduce "unsavory elements" may not be welcomed by schools with this underlying founding principle. But that's just my opinion.

Please note this excerpt from "Educational Demographics: What Teachers Should Know" by Harold Hodgkinson [Educational Leadership 58: 4 (Dec 2000/Jan 2001)]:

Diversity is increasingly unevenly distributed. In fact, the 65 percent increase in diverse populations will be absorbed by only about 230 of our 3,068 counties; California, Texas, and Florida will get about three-fifths of the increase. Remember that more than half of our entire population lives in only nine states—those three, plus New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey—yet only California, Texas, and Florida are growing so quickly; the other six seem to be "wealthy but tired." Forty-one states compete for the other half of the population. Although we talk of "minority majorities," this phenomenon is only possible in a handful of counties. Whites will become a minority of the U.S. population around 2050, and you will have retired before then.



But the blurring of racial lines suggests the declining importance of race, and many people are lobbying for race data to be excluded from the next census because it tells many things that are not accurate. Most poor children in the United States are white, but a higher percentage of black and Hispanic kids are poor. Being black is no longer a universal handicap; over one-quarter of black households have a higher income than the white average, and rates of blacks who go to college and own homes continue to grow. But poverty is a universal handicap. If you have poor kids of diverse ethnicities as well as middle-class minorities in your classes, you know exactly what I mean.

Racial desegregation has not led to economic equality. Twenty percent of U.S. kids are below the poverty line today—exactly the same percentage as 15 years ago—even though most of the nation is less segregated and wealthier. This poverty rate is inexcusable in the wealthiest nation on earth. It is time to do what Kentucky has done—build an economic "floor" under every child in the state to equalize the investment in each child's education. That is economic desegregation, and many states are doing it. Our new understanding of the importance of children's preschool years has led many states to mandate a preschool program for all poverty-level children in the state, another attempt to equalize investment in every child and economically desegregate.



With a resource like this at stake, how far are we willing to trust to God and faith-based organizations? Does infrastructure important to the national security include minds and attitudes as well as roads and sewers? Does reliance on churches to fill the gap left by underfunded public services mean that, if your family has money, you can be raised in the religious background your parents choose, but if your family is poor, you had better worship at the church with the best school?

Regards--
Mary Anne