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Why Many Kids Are Still Left Behind

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JOSEPH H. BROWN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 13, 2008

Premium cable channel HBO has a reputation for its bold programming that features a lot of profanity, nudity and violence. It's the main reason a lot of families with children don't subscribe to it.

HBO also airs many award-winning documentaries. One that debuted a few weeks ago, "Hard Times at Douglass High," should be mandatory viewing by educators and parents across the nation.

"Hard Times" documents the 2004-05 school year at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore. The school is named after the 19th-century abolitionist and freedom-fighter who Abraham Lincoln, after meeting him in 1862, called the most meritorious American considering his start in life as a slave. The school's most famous alumnus is Thurgood Marshall, the first black person on the U.S. Supreme Court who as a civil rights lawyer helped win the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

After watching the documentary, I began to wonder why Marshall even bothered with Brown.

It's Been A Crime For Years

The head of Douglass' English department sums up what the school is up against:

"We did our ninth-grade reading-level tests at the beginning of the year, and I think out of maybe 300, 400 students that were tested, our incoming ninth-graders, maybe three were on grade level. Most were in 5, 4.5 level. It's unrealistic to think that if you have a fifth-grade reading level that you're going to pass a 10th-grade reading test. It's baffled me for years that we've allowed this to go on. It's almost as if no one wanted to admit that the students were passed to high schools with third- and fourth-grade reading levels. And I'm not talking about special-education students, either. I'm talking about regular students in regular classes. It's a crime - been one for years."

It is, indeed, a crime, and it's being committed in inner-city schools across the nation.

What, however, is one to do with idiots like the braided-hair, grilled-teeth young man we meet 25 minutes into the documentary, who says as he and some of his friends are roaming the halls aimlessly:

"This what we do. Just walking the halls all day, baby. Expletive class. That expletive's for clowns, man. Don't nobody go to class around here, man. Man, expletive academics. Academics? We gon' leave that to them nerd-expletive expletives. We gon' keep expletive straight 'hood. All my expletives out here, we gon' keep it gutter."

More Than Money Is Needed

You also see only a handful of parents showing up on the school's annual Parents' Night held before the start of school, girls behind in school because they took maternity leave, students who are truant more than in class, and parents who are either clueless or don't care, or both.

So it's no surprise when the students take the standardized tests required by the No Child Left Behind mandate, most get left.

This is what people intent on improving education need to focus on when policy is discussed. We usually hear about the need for more funding, but it's obvious more money won't fix this mess.

Joseph H. Brown is a Tribune editorial writer.

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