For those of you who are younger than 40, we’ll now tell a startling tale. Believe it or not, liberals once spent a lot of time worrying about low-income/minority children! The young will find this hard to believe, but we swear that our statement is accurate. Starting in the mid-1960s, a range of well-known, best-selling books were written about low-income schools—among them Jonathan Kozol’s brilliant Death at an Early Age and Herbert Kohl’s semi-puzzling but heartfelt 36 Children. It was a standard liberal concern—what should we do about the needs of black children? For ourselves, books like those were part of what brought us here to Baltimore in the first place. When we started teaching fifth grade in 1969, it was books like those, by Kozol and Kohl, which framed our (very meager) understanding.
But uh-oh! It soon became clear that it wouldn’t be easy to solve the problems of low-income schools. In the sixties, pleasing thoughts had prevailed; many liberals assumed that racist teachers were holding black kids back in school, and that basic good faith would solve the problems which obtained in their classrooms. (To his credit, Kozol never really said or implied this. Nor did he claim, in his award-winning book, that he had produced great academic outcomes in the Boston school where he taught.) But as time went by, it became fairly clear that the problems found in low-income schools wouldn’t be easy to solve at all. And everyone knows what happened then; liberals dropped low-income kids like a rock! As we all know if we think about it, we modern liberals don’t discuss the problems and pathologies of our low-income schools. Decades ago, we libs took a hike. We too sang, “Farewell, Gabriela.”
Do you have any doubt about this? If so, consider what happened in liberal and mainstream circles when Helfand published his lengthy piece about Gabriela Ocampo—and about the thousands of low-income kids being pushed from Los Angeles high schools.
What happened when Helfand’s report appeared? In liberal circles, nothing happened! Liberal journals didn’t discuss it, nor did liberal bloggers. Whatever one thinks of the L.A. school board’s new policies, Helfand’s report was quite remarkable—and it opened with a well-known former Democratic politician, L.A. superintendent Roy Romer, wringing his hands about the “cumulative failure” involved in the massive algebra drop-outs. But liberal bloggers and liberal journals didn’t say a word about this. In the modern world, conservatives talk about low-income kids—but we liberals no longer bother. We simply don’t care about low-income kids. We don’t waste our time on their problems.
How little do liberals and mainstream writers seem to care about low-income kids? Consider what happened when the Post’s Richard Cohen discussed Gabriela’s large problem.
“I am haunted by Gabriela Ocampo,” Cohen wrote, at the start of a February 16 column—a column which appeared on-line but not in the Post itself. But as Cohen wrote, it became fairly clear that he wasn’t all that “haunted” by Ocampo’s plight. He wrote a largely fatuous piece about his own alleged struggles with algebra—a piece in which he addressed Gabriela, apparently trying to buck up her spirits. “Gabriela, this is Richard,” he wrote. “There’s life after algebra,” he sagely advised. And then he offered this foolish attempt to empathize with this low-income child—with a child who’d been left far behind:
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Let’s be fair: If Gabriela were planning to become a Post columnist, this would constitute useful advice. But Gabriela looks ahead to a lifetime of “nickel and diming”—a lifetime of low-wage employment. The problem isn’t her lack of algebra; almost surely, the problem is her lack of a wide range of skills—and now, her lack of a high school diploma. But Cohen seemed almost totally clueless about the real problem which Helfand described. After all, Gabriela “won’t need algebra” at that Subway shop, either. But readers, that misses the point.