Education

In the New York Times this morning there is a news article about the struggles of the Bridgeport CT school system comparing it to an adjacent upper middle class school system.  Both schools have roughly the same state budget, but as the article pointed out the inferior system is marked by rampant student absenteeism which of course makes for impossible discontinuities in the programs.  It made me think of the program set in place by Eva Moskowitz whose Success charter schools in upper Manhattan offer to my mind a paradigm of dealing with serious academic deficiencies.  A key feature of her system is a certain relentless determination on the part of the institution.  For instance, the parents or guardian of any student recorded as absent is immediately contacted and the circumstances of the absence are analyzed.  Moskowitz is determined that the students in her schools will succeed.  Of course, her system although akin to a public school is not public in every sense of the word so this kind of severe program is possible.  I thought to myself "but the children of Bridgeport should somehow be forced to go to school also."  One thinks of the enormous financial cost and misery resulting from student absenteeism which is inflicted upon the general public in the forms of failing incomes, ill health, crime and all the other ills attendant upon a demographic who from the start have developed a mind set for failure.  "Forced" in my mind became the operative word.  What is another word that begins with "F"?  Fascist.  How could we have so regimented a system?  The low income student becomes a victim of the society in yet another way.  I am currently reading Richard Hoggart's brilliant "Uses of Literacy," an account of growing up in a lower class family near Leeds England, whose father died in the war, and his mother when he was eight.  Through the encouragement of his grandmother and his aunt he succeeded in going to school and on to college and university, becoming in the end a university professor.  This book is an account of the economically marginal life his family and neighbors lived and he calls it good because it was an authentic culture.  What  he decries is the collapse of culture among these people when television, mass marketing, cheap capitalism made their lives completely ersatz.  My instinct was to see the same thing at work among the students of Bridgeport who unlike the boys and girls Hoggart describes have almost no chance for work without advanced education, and whose points of reference are only reactions to the common ersatz culture they see on television.  Fifty years ago working class people could rely on muscle and enterprise.  And they knew who they were and were comfortable with that. Not anymore