In New York and elsewhere, we will not return our schools to the standards America should expect until parents and communities demand it, and until we return to the old-fashioned notions that schools are there to educate, that education is important, that civilized behavior is essential to education, and that both behavioral and educational standards must be set and enforced.
To find the best ways to reform education, the first place to look is at the schools themselves. Not all have failed. Many have succeeded, some spectacularly. We should stop doing what demonstrably fails and do instead what demonstrably succeeds. We should not blame the teachers. It has to be a labor of love for anyone to teach in one of our crime-ridden, drug-infested urban schools.
Until college, I attended public schools. Mrs. Nixon was a teacher in an excellent public high school. But today the difference between the quality of public and private schools is striking. George Will illustrates the problem graphically: “About 50 percent of urban area public school teachers with school-age children send their children to private schools. What do they know that we ought to know?” If public schools are not good enough for the children of those who teach in them, why should other children have no choice but to attend them?
The generally better results produced by private schools are to some extent due to the more selective nature of their student bodies. By definition, parents who send their children to private schools care about education, and this is communicated to the child. But time and again, where comparable conditions are created and comparable requirements set in public schools, those public schools have shown that they too can excel.
One of the most promising ways to improve public schools is to introduce competition among them, which is exactly what the school choice movement is all about. A voucher system forces schools to compete for funds by competing for students. Those schools cease to be sinecures for the educational establishment and instead become participants in a vigorous educational marketplace. Parents gain the right to shop for the best education for their children, and with that right they gain a new incentive to become active partners in the educational process. Teachers and administrators are put on notice that they too have to make passing grades.
Teachers’ unions have waged all-out war against school choice, especially those plans that allow parents, as they should, to choose private as well as public schools. In 1993, California teachers’ unions, spending $18 million confiscated from teachers’ paychecks and thus from taxpayers, defeated a ballot initiative on school choice with television ads that were so distorted and cynical that they made the dirtiest congressional campaign seem like High Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by comparison. But the unions’ self-interest was blatant. School choice proposals will become policy when enough parents insist on it.
Mandatory busing, a relic of 1960s utopian thinking, is another sad example of the law of unintended consequences. It not only failed to achieve its intended result of improving American education but actually coincided with a precipitous decline in the performance of American students, especially in poor urban areas, where most of its ostensible beneficiaries reside.
Government must always be vigilant against de jure segregation—segregation by law, for which the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was a long-overdue and effective remedy. But it is both unconstitutional and bad social policy to use busing to compel integration when no de jure segregation exists. The problem in American education is not that minority students go to school together rather than to schools where they are integrated with the majority. Nor is it that they lack minority teachers. As Thomas Sowell has noted, the American educational system performed well for Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Poles, and other first- and second-generation ethnic Americans, most of whom lived in ethnic enclaves and managed to succeed regardless of the ethnic background of their teachers. American education is in crisis because of the erosion of standards of objective merit and the collapse of the social cohesion of neighborhoods; busing is at best an irrelevant remedy and at worst a factor that pulls neighborhoods farther apart.
Ultimately, the base of educational reform in America will have to be far broader than just schools themselves. Parents who leave their children’s education entirely to the schools abdicate their own responsibility. The home is the key ingredient in a child’s education. Habits learned there persist for a lifetime. Children from homes where knowledge is prized and reading is encouraged come to school eager to learn. Those from homes where learning is not part of life enter the schoolhouse door with two strikes against them. Couch-potato parents are likely to produce couch-potato children. As Lee Kwan Yew observed, “We should not substitute the state for the parents or the family.”
A host of private nonprofit organizations are proving that the right kind of intervention in the lives of children who might otherwise be lost can make a dramatic difference. They do it without bureaucracy, without a maze of rules and prescriptions and reporting requirements. They do it by focusing on the individual child, with common sense, caring, and nurturing, and, crucially, by setting high standards and making clear that they expect the children to meet them.
Setting standards and expecting them to be met are what too much of our public education system has abandoned in its prolonged fit of patronizing and egalitarianism. Not all children can meet all standards. But those who can meet high standards should not be held back by those who cannot or will not. And those who can must be stimulated to do so.
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America has some of the best universities in the world, but they must face up to their weaknesses if they are to retain that position. Under the banners of pluralism and diversity, student and faculty activists alike have demanded an admissions policy based not on academic merit but on ethnic representation; a curriculum driven not by objective intellectual standards but by the politics of race and gender; speech codes striving not to promote free intellectual debate but to impose a new sensitivity fundamentally hostile to the Western tradition. As the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Martin Anderson has observed, “The percentage of professors with left liberal views has become so great that it has created a monolithic mindset.” Aging 1960s radicals who now dominate the faculties of many universities have helped power the movement for political correctness, which punishes truth, penalizes merit, promotes faculty on the basis of quotas, and suffuses the campus with an atmosphere of abysmal, inflammatory ignorance. Stanford’s celebrated change in its required curriculum to substitute the ravings of Frantz Fanon and other inconsequential polemicists for the likes of Plato, Aquinas, and Aristotle is all too typical. Elite universities have been abandoning objective excellence and exposure to the riches of the Western tradition in favor of hagiographic accounts of any civilization but our own.
The political consequences of this indoctrination are far less serious than the educational consequences. Young people have a way of outgrowing the fads of childhood, including political fads. But this blatant substitution of indoctrination for education cheats them of the intellectual foundation they need to prepare them for life in the twenty-first century.
Unless those responsible for our great universities—trustees, administrators, and faculty—take forceful and determined measures to restore their institutions’ standards of educational integrity, they will have grossly violated their basic trust. And we as a nation will have failed our first responsibility to the next generation: to transmit to them the values, the history, and the traditions of a humane civilization, together with the knowledge and understanding to bring those values to life.
WELFARE: SICKFARE FOR AMERICA’S CITIES
The forces undermining our universities as places of learning are integral parts of the pervasive complex of cultural influences, attitudes, and behavioral patterns that is also destroying our cities.
In a remarkable speech last year to the Association for a Better New York, Pat Moynihan asked his audience “to look back and ask yourselves what, in the last
fifty years in New York City, is now better than it was.”
He noted that fifty years ago “we were a city that already had a social structure, an infrastructure, the best subway system in the world, the finest housing stock, the best urban school system and, in many ways, the best-behaved citizens.” Now parts of the city are “overwhelmed by the social chaos that comes in the aftermath of the inability to socialize young males.” It grows worse by the year. He went on to quote from his own correspondence with a State Supreme Court Justice, Edwin Torres, who himself was raised in New York’s barrio. “The slaughter of the innocent,” Judge Torres wrote to him, “continues unabated: subway riders, bodega owners, cabdrivers, babies; in Laundromats, at cash machines, on elevators, in hallways.” Noting that in his own courtroom he finds victims so resigned to the mayhem that they blame themselves for getting in the way of bullets, the judge wrote: “This numbness, this near-narcoleptic state, can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen, friend and foe alike. A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.”
To the reflexive liberal mind, urban problems are poverty problems, and the way to meet them is to throw money at them. For thirty years the United States has been doing just that. The Great Society was given a blank check. The liberals claimed it bounced because of insufficient funds. The real answer is that the check should not have been written at all. Since the War on Poverty began in 1964, government in the United States has spent $3.5 trillion on assistance programs for the poor. Adjusting for inflation, this is more than the entire cost of World War II. Since the mid-1960s, annual welfare spending has increased by more than five times. Yet the conditions it was meant to cure, as Moynihan so eloquently noted, have only gotten worse. The closely interwoven problems of crime, illegitimacy, and welfare dependency have increased astronomically.
Poverty is a symptom, not a cause, of our urban decay. The rot in our cities is a spiritual, ethical, cultural, and behavioral rot, which causes the poverty, the crime, and the degradation and abuse of public facilities.
Nothing is more directly responsible for the decay of today’s cities than our corrupting, destabilizing, demoralizing, and dehumanizing welfare system. The liberal approach to welfare—spend more and demand less—means well but is tragically misguided. Its self-defeating incentives perpetuate poverty by rewarding illegitimacy, entrenching dependency, encouraging fathers to abandon their children, and thus undermining the stable family.
The worst of the violent criminal class are largely products of that system—in particular, of its positive encouragement of ignorant, unwed teenagers to produce babies that they have neither the means nor the competence to bring up. A sensible welfare system would discourage, not encourage, illegitimate births. We would not pay children to have children.
To a restless young teenager living in a crowded home, having a baby is her ticket to an apartment of her own, a cash allowance, food stamps, medical care, and an array of other social services, all with no questions asked and nothing required in return—as long as she neither works nor marries. For the single mother, welfare can provide benefits roughly equivalent to a $20,000-a-year job.
The effect of this institutionalized subsidy for illegitimacy has been disastrous, and nowhere more so than among the most fragile. Nearly thirty years ago Moynihan warned presciently about the coming social consequences of the breakdown of the black family. He was excoriated for doing so, but he was right. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Charles Murray, whose 1986 book Losing Ground was a landmark in exposing the human damage done by the welfare system, has now issued a similarly dramatic warning about the white family.
He notes that 30 percent of all children born in the United States in 1991 were born to unwed mothers. Among blacks the figure is 68 percent; in most inner-city areas, it exceeds 80 percent. But the illegitimacy rate among whites, he points out, has also risen, to an alarming 22 percent. Of these unwed mothers, fully 82 percent are women with a high school education or less. For white women below the poverty line, nearly half of all births are now illegitimate.
Murray asks: “How much illegitimacy can a community tolerate? Nobody knows, but the historical fact is that the trendlines on black crime, dropout from the labor force, and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward as the overall black illegitimacy rate passed 25 percent.” And he adds that “the white illegitimacy rate is approaching that same problematic 25 percent region at a time when a social policy is more comprehensively wrongheaded than it was in the mid-1960s, and the cultural and sexual norms are still more degraded.”
If we are serious about reclaiming our cities, the first step should be to stop rewarding illegitimate breeding by incompetent teenagers. Their offspring, growing up without the responsible adult nurturing any child needs, are the ones terrorizing the streets, dealing drugs, and turning schools into armed camps.
Part of the liberals’ sensitivity revolution of recent decades has been to redefine welfare so as to eliminate its stigma for welfare recipients. But welfare should carry a stigma. Any adult who is physically and mentally capable of providing for himself or herself but chooses not to make the necessary effort to become employable or to take employment, whether or not for “chump change,” should be made to feel shame. The community owes that person nothing but contempt.
The welfare system now is a giant chute down which taxpayer money is poured, with virtually nothing required of the recipients at the other end. Thanks to the poverty lobby, ever more taxpayer dollars are spent trying to attract ever more “clients” into the welfare system through programs of “outreach” and “education.” As a result, more Americans now collect welfare than ever before. New York City alone carries a staggering 1.1 million people on its rolls.
The central focus of any responsible welfare system should not be to “serve” welfare “clients,” but to get people off welfare and into productive jobs. The notion that welfare recipients are clients to be served is an invention of the welfare bureaucracy, which sees each new “client” as a new meal ticket for itself.
Murray proposes severe measures that would compel single young women to think twice about having babies. Their effect would be to induce those who opt for motherhood to turn for help to their families, their boyfriends, their churches, or their communities, which in turn would restore some social pressure on unwed teenagers not to have babies for fun and profit.
One way or another, this, or something close to it, is the basic direction in which we must go if we seriously intend to cure the cancer that is eating at America’s cities and destroying its families. Young males should be made to discover that they cannot go on impregnating young females willy-nilly without personal consequences. Young females should be made to discover that their own irresponsibility will no longer be subsidized. The family must be restored as the basic social unit for the rearing of children. We must create powerful social pressures toward restoring to children the right to have fathers as well as mothers.
Welfare will not truly be reformed until the taxpayers who pay for it rise up and demand reform, and until they make crystal clear that by reform they mean no longer having their own pockets picked ever more insistently in order to enable ever more deadbeats to decide whether they find it more agreeable to go on welfare than to work. Irving Kristol encapsulated the principle: “The general rule has to be: If it is your own behavior that could land you on welfare, then you don’t get it, or get very little of it . . . . It is crueler to entice people into the blind alley of welfare, where their humanity is dissipated and degraded, than to sternly warn them off.”
CRIME AND RACE IN AMERICA
With the end of the Cold War we know freedom from the fear of war. What most Americans want more than anything else from their government today is freedom from the fear of crime. And yet we live in a culture of violence and of fear. Random acts of viciousness plague our s
treets and our homes. Six people are shot dead on the Long Island Rail Road by a man armed with a gun and an all-consuming racial hatred. Polly Klass, a twelve-year-old girl, is kidnapped from her bedroom and killed by a man with a rap sheet longer than the Mississippi River. Metal detectors are scanning students for weapons. There is no longer a sense of sanctuary anywhere. Millions of Americans are afraid to walk the streets or to use their parks. Since the 1960s the rate of violent crime has increased by a staggering 560 percent. In 1992 alone, fourteen million serious crimes were reported to the police. Millions more went unreported. In New York City, the number-one cause of workplace deaths is murder; two thirds of those killed at work there in 1992 were victims of homicides. To our international shame, Washington, D.C., has the highest murder rate of any capital city in the world.
Our criminal justice system has abysmally failed to deliver what should be the first freedom: freedom from fear. Young thugs openly thumb their noses at a system that operates a revolving door, often sending those who get caught back out onto the streets at a rate that clearly carries the message that crime does pay. But the more fundamental problem is the social corrosion that creates the criminals in the first place: the breakdown of value structures, the lack of discipline, the absence of any sense of right and wrong among many young Americans, particularly in those inner-city slums that are the breeding grounds—in both senses of the term—of so much of the mindless violence.
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