Seems democrats have been talking about this issue for a while and their control of cities for two generations isn't doing much..... Unless you think it's all us white folk in the suburbs that are keeping your communities under thumb....
Fred just spells it out, it's about education man.
Walter Williams, Catholics, the Projects, and Schooling for Blacks: Something is Wrong Somewhere
http://fredoneverything.org/the-racism-racket-in-the-schools/
Some time ago I read a column on the schooling of blacks written by Walter Williams, the black economist at George Mason University, who grew up in the black housing projects of Philadelphia in the Thirties. He reports that all the kids could read, and that classrooms were orderly and teachers respected. Today, by all reports, in the urban black schools the kids can’t read and chaos reigns. Black kids have not gotten stupider since the Thirties. Something is wrong somewhere.
In 1981, I wrote a piece for Harper’s on the overwhelmingly black Catholic schools of Washington, DC, and found them to be exactly as Williams described the schools in his projects: well-behaved, and all the kids could read.
I expected that liberals would applaud a piece demonstrating that black kids could learn far better than they did in the public schools. Instead, fury erupted. The success of the Catholics pointed up the incompetence of the teacher’s unions and the vacuity of accepted social theory. Whatever nits can be picked with the piece, whatever one believes about the relative intelligence of blacks, whites, yellows, and ed majors, it is obvious that black kids could do far, far better than they are doing. Something is wrong somewhere.
An obvious observation, which hardly anyone seems to make, is that blacks suffer less from racism than from poor education. Harvard does not reject black applicants because it dislikes blacks but because they are badly prepared. Blacks do not fail the federal entrance examination because it is rigged to exclude them but because they don’t know the answers. Equality of opportunity without equality of education is a cruel joke: giving an illiterate the right to apply to Yale isn’t giving him much.
The intelligent policy is to educate black children, something that the public schools of Washington manage, at great expense, not to do. In fact the prevailing (if unspoken) view seems to be that black children cannot be educated, an idea whose only defect is that it is wrong: the Catholic schools of Washington have been educating black children for years. The Catholic system has 12,170 students in the District, of whom 7,884, or 65 percent, are black.
Why do the Catholics get better results? One reason is that the students have parents who care enough to put them in superior schools. Another reason is that Catholic schools have superior staffs, with teachers generally required to have at least a B.A. in their subjects. Also involved are academic rigor — students are often assigned two-and-a-half hours of homework — and discipline. One disruptive student can reduce a class to chaos. Catholic schools, not being subject to educational bureaucracies and political pressures, can prevent disruption, resorting, if need be, to expulsion.
One may argue that in general the chief hindrances to progress for poor blacks are misguided racial policies and the attitudes of those who make them. Today the obstacle to racial progress is not Bill Buckley; it is Ted Kennedy. It isn’t the KKK; it is the NEA.
Race has become an industry. CETA, EEOC, OMBE, and other forbidding acronyms with huge payrolls exist by presiding over the status quo. Various freelance acronyms, such as NAACP, SCLC, ACLU, and PUSH, derive their importance from appearing to galvanize the governmental acronyms. Politicians and influential subcommittees thrive by conspicuously giving their attention to racial matters. The Democratic party retains blacks as a largely docile voting bloc by maintaining the flow of money for racial programs. Billions of dollars, countless jobs, and the political balance ride on keeping things as they are.
They have all but silenced opposition with their insistence that He who is against me is against blacks. This argument, repeated often enough, results in something close to censorship, so that it is currently almost impossible to discuss racial programs on their merits — i.e., on whether they work. Whether, for example, the welfare system needs revision isn’t considered.
The racial establishment also discourages the imposition of discipline in the schools, without which teaching is impossible. The problem is horrendous in some of Washington’s schools. The students need protection against marauders from outside, and the staff need protection against physical assault by students. Teachers tell of being attacked by students with knives, of being afraid to go to certain parts of the school. Vincent Reed recently voiced his concern over security. “When I have kids being shot in schools by outside intruders and teachers being mauled by outside intruders — last year we had a young girl ten years old taken out of the building and raped — I don’t have time for rhetoric.”
Finally, the absolute unwillingness of the racial industry to police itself — to make sure that money accomplishes the intended results — has made racial programs a synonym for corruption, waste, mismanagement, nepotism, and undeserved preference. It is hard to find a racial program that is not grotesquely abused.
Corruption and mismanagement inevitably lead to resentment among whites whose money is being wasted. This resentment is currently called “white backlash,” which has a comfortingly vicious sound and implies that it is someone else’s fault. (In the race business, everything is someone else’s fault.) Antagonizing half the country by shoddy performance is abysmally stupid politics, especially given that the nation would probably have few objections to sensible programs that worked. I find it hard to believe that many people would object to giving a black child a good education at a reasonable price.
