The Ghosts Are Not So Ethereal
The essay “Chasing Ghosts” posted on The Urban Education blog on July 10, 2007 received an important comment stating that the essay was idealistic, unrealistic, and based on overbroad generalizations. The following is a response to that comment.
Thank you very much for your comment. Your critique is a very important one. It is indeed an ever-present danger when considering approaches to such difficult problems as the disparities of urban education that one may make overbroad generalizations. This danger is perhaps even more acute when writing an essay such as “Chasing Ghosts,” which is based upon experiential and antidotal insights, and does not claim the support of quantitative analysis.
It certainly may seem as though I was making an assumption in the essay that all urban teens come from “broken homes.” In fact, I know that this is not the case. Perhaps we should even shy away from the term “broken homes,” as it seems inevitably to imply at least an implicit judgment. However, it is also undeniable from my own personal experience of working very closely with urban youth every day that there is an undeniable amount of pain they hold in their psyche from multifaceted sources in their personal lives. I have had too many long conversations and sharing sessions with the youth we work with about such pain to deny its existence.
Moreover, there is a tremendous amount of quantitative research which has been performed which has shown that: 1) More challenging family situations such as children living in single-parent households are far more prevalent in urban areas than they are in non-urban areas and 2) These more challenging family situations can be traced directly as being one of the factors contributing to the lower skills attainment in urban areas.
For example, the book “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning,” by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom draws upon a wealth of scholarly accepted social-scientific research that shows both that there are concrete reasons, such as more difficult family structures, for the extreme skills attainment disparities between races and between urban and non-urban areas, and that these reasons need not, and should not, be an impediment to achieving racial equality in educational attainment.
Interestingly enough, the Thernstroms are often termed “conservative” academic theorists. However, their “No Excuses” book and approach are haled by urban educators producing impressive results who could be placed, if such labeling be necessary, across the political and racial spectrum. Such empowering educational models embracing the work of the Thernstroms include Achievement First, the parent organization of the successful Amistad Academy in New Haven, the family of KIPP charter schools, successful supplemental educational models such as Legal Outreach in New York City, NJ LEEP in New Jersey, and many more.
Finally, it must be emphasized that we certainly hope to imply no patronizing critique of urban families. The families with which we work are as heroic as the students from those families. Our mission is to work with both students and families so that we all can be more empowered to make positive change. However, the reality is that many, but of course not all, urban families face tremendous obstacles. But by facing the true reality of the situation, and the depth of the pain involved, we believe we all can raise our collective expectations, and the collective results, for what we can achieve in the urban educational context.
