Posted by DR. PROTUS TANIFORM, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION on 3/04/05

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Inner-city Education at the Crossroads in the United States
Chapter One
The Thwarted Goal
Bitter truths are hard to tell, because, most of
the time, when they are told, they send trickles of tears
down the eyes of those who care, from the bottom of their
hearts. Inner-city education is a miniature of the problems
encountered by modern education, at least from the
standpoint of unsuccessfulness and the abyss of failure. To
slash the already bleeding wounds even larger and wider,
and, therefore, render the whole process perilous and
hopeless, it has come to a point where scholarly failure is
a glorified phenomenon in the inner-city.
It came to my understanding, although under
difficult, subtle comprehension, that a child who was
prematurely lured into street gangs, particularly inner
city gangs, nursed the anxiety of deliberate failure in
learning at school- a practice generally accepted in the
gangs. To recount what brainwashing had caused to humanity
can, in some cases, reveal staggering cruelty. A tremendous
number of our inner-city children now believe education is
the White man’s business, since many have construed
educational success as the white culture. According to
census statistics in the United States (2001), the white
population in the inner-cities has dwindled tremendously,
leaving the inner-city with a predominantly colored
population- Asians, Blacks, Africans, Hispanics, Chicanos,
and what have you.
Paradoxically, the settlement pattern of the United
States is parallel to that of most developed nations of the
world. It has come to the point where most of the rich have
fled the metropolitan areas to the outskirts or suburbs.
The pattern is perhaps arguably conspicuous in major cities
like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and so on.
However, in big cities of the western developed countries,
for example, Paris, London, Tokyo, Rome, and more, the
scenario is different. In Britain, Buckingham Palace, the
British queen’s palace, is situated right in the heart of
London. Paris is also very exemplary with the heavy
presence of the old bourgeiosie in the heart of the city.
Some analysts have blamed the quaint settlement
pattern of the United States on the antagonism between the
first Europeans and the slaves, and eventually between the
colored people and the White race. Following the
assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, many
Caucasians were forced to flee the urban areas for fear of
being plundered. Analogous to this circumstance are the
Watts riots of Los Angeles in the 1960s, which saw the
migration of many Caucasians out of the heart of the city.
Another wave of civil unrest and lootings occurred
following the airing of Rodney King’s abuse, by several
officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, on
television screens across the world. A benevolent White
American citizen had video-recorded several L.A.P.D.
officers, who were diabolically beating a Black man, who,
supposedly, had just violated traffic and failed to stop
when pulled over by the police.
There has also been a paradigm shift in the
mainstream culture, whereby residence in the suburbs or out
of the inner-city is construed as a indicator of success.
The stigmatization of inner-city life has groomed this
stereotype, which is sporadically imbued with violence,
shootings, drugs, prostitution, and, more generally,
skyrocketing crime rates. The media has worsened this
school of thought by dramatizing negative events in the
cities.
Inner-city populations are partly constituted of a
conglomeration of new-arrival immigrants, most of whom come
in as economic, religious, political, and cultural
refugees. Many fled from famine (Ethiopians, Sudanese,
Somalis, etc), from wars and political unrest (Haitians,
Somalis, Rwandans, Burundians, Cameroonians, etc), from
economic crisis in their home countries (Chinese, Mexicans,
Cubans, Nigerians, Cameroonians, etc.), and from many other
unbearable situations. Unfortunately, most of these new
immigrants are poor and wind up in the poor inner-city
pockets, some call them ghettos, where housing is cheap,
and low-paying jobs are easily available. However, I am not
refuting the fact that a good number of them stream to the
small cities, suburbs, city outskirts, villages, and farms.
An example, worthy of notice, is the influx of refugees
from war-torn Sudan to Omaha, Nebraska, where they have
established veritable Sudanese communities.
Inner-city immigrant groups have seen a lot of
European immigrants over the last several centuries, but
they represent a very small number now, when compared to
the number of colored inner-city inhabitants and immigrants
in general. This assertion dispels the paradigm that
immigration in the United States is purely a non-White
issue; America immigrants have been known to come form all
over the world, and they are always welcome, even though
many immigrants still come in under unacceptable and
illegal methods.
The incoming poor immigrants blend with the low-
income inner-city populations and the resultant is a
community of low socio-economic status, bearing all the
characteristics that come with the tag, “low socio-economic
status”. Immigrant families that integrate directly into
the affluent communities are rare, and even when these
cases are seen, they show up rarely, and would just be
categorized as exceptions.
Socio-economic status and success in education are
directly linked. More affluent communities and
neighborhoods produce better test scores than less-affluent
communities and neighborhoods. This conclusion was very
evident when I compared test scores for students of Compton
Unified School District, California, and those for the
students of Palos Verdes Unified School District,
California, from 1999 to 2004. The students in the former
performed poorly when compared with students in the latter
district.
On one hand, Compton city, the bearer of Compton
Unified School District, is predominantly made up of low
income families, although there are pockets of affluent
blocks in the city. The community contributes less toward
the schools of the district and parental participation
toward the educational process is poor and almost
inexistent. On the other hand, Palos Verdes, is an upscale
neighborhood on the coast hills of Los Angeles County;
perhaps the dream neighborhood of many Californian
inhabitants. The high level of success of students in Palos
Verdes School District tell a lot about the contribution of
the highly educated and rich parents of the city, whose
wealth has brought to bear on the educational process. Due
to the nature of their highly lucrative professions, they
always find time to contribute toward the education of
their children, as opposed to most parents of low income
communities, who work around the clock and at minimum wage
and barely have enough time to raise their children, let
alone participate in their educational process. The bigger
question we will examine later is whether inner city kids
are privileged with parents.

Dropout Rates in Inner-city Schools as Opposed to Suburban
and Outskirts Schools
It is a fact that the dropout rates in American
inner-city schools are higher than in the suburbs and
outskirts. A comparative study among the inner city schools
of Los Angeles and the suburban schools on the peripheries
of Los Angeles County, California illustrates the
discrepancy in dropout rates.

Chapter Two
The Road Bumps on the Trajectory of American, Urban
Education
The Collapse in the Family Structure
Centuries of cruelty and social disruption have led
to a veritable collapse in family structure, family
customs, and family values. According to U.S. census
reports (2000), the number of single parents in the United
States has increased dramatically over the last several
decades. On August 26, 2004, in Suitland, Maryland, U.S.
Census Bureau Director Louis Kincannon spoke at a news
conference where 2003 income, poverty and health insurance
coverage were announced. Other participants were Preston
J. Waite, associate director for decennial census and Dr.
Daniel Weinberg, chief of the Housing and Household
Economic Statistics Division. The statistics sounded like
an abomination for inner-city dwellers.
Indeed, the proliferation of drugs in the black
market has sent a wave of drug abuse in the American
citizenry, to the point where the economically
disadvantaged people, who cannot support the cost of drug
rehabilitation, have sat and watched drug addiction
gradually destroy their families. The phenomenon itself has
added to the number of foster children we are now obliged
to put up with, and, worse of all, the large number of
children and adults with special needs in the field of
education.

The Resurgence of Prostitution
Prostitution, the oldest, known profession, has
taken an abominable turn in American inner-cities, despite
the fact that the profession has already been outlawed in
most federated states of the United States of America.
Tough economic circumstances have snared many run-away
girls into urban prostitution in the major cities of the
United States. Many of these runaway girls are below 18
years of age and have dropped out of school for one reason
or the other, with a considerable number of them coming in
from the countryside and poor outer-city dwellings. The
swelling number of inner-city, teenage prostitutes lures
even more students out of high schools to increase the
number of prostitutes. Immoral and risky though the
practice might be, it turns out to be a lucrative endeavor
for many adventurous, young ladies, and the side effect is
the increase in the number of students who drop out from
schools. Exotic dancing in strip clubs has added another
twist to the prostitution ring. Other young prostitutes who
cherish a safer haven sought refuge in the city of Las
Vegas, Nevada, where prostitution is legal.
With rising crime rates in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s
and 2000s and also the understaffing and under-financing of
the Los Angeles Police Department, many inner-city streets
of Los Angeles County have basically been abandoned to
prostitutes and pimps, amongst which are segments of the
famous Figueroa Street and Sunset Boulevard. Poor police
supervision of the streets has even helped many young
students to join the illegal prostitution rings, strip
clubs, and prostitution-imbued escort services. A thin line
has been established between prostitution and escort
services.

The Proliferation of Street Gangs, the Augmentation of
Crimes
The Italian Mafia’s rules of operation have touched
down on inner-city gangs, where young gangsters have
indulged in padded deals, shady deals, racketeering, armed
robberies, burglaries, prostitution, pimping, strip-
clubbing, murders, life threats, and many other imaginable
crimes. The indoctrination of vulnerable, unsupervised
children, mostly young boys, who have been taught to admit
gangs and criminality as an institutionalized cult, has
helped to stretched the rosters of inner-city gangs; gang-
related shootings on school grounds are a common scene in
inner-city schools, a phenomenon which has also tainted the
safety of school campuses with wanton insecurity. A
tremendous number of students have been known to stay away
from school for fear of being murdered by students from
rival gangs. While caught in the dilemma of informing
students about shootings outside school campuses and on
school campuses, and, therefore, frightening students to
stay at home because of fear, or not informing students at
all about any hazards on campus, many school officials have
chosen not to dramatize school violence reports, because
they do not want to traumatize their young students. The
school officials always choose to handle these incidents
with law enforcement officials, but student attendance
still dwindles. Poor attendance is one of the major
contributory factors of poor academic performance in inner
city schools.

The Cruelty of Revived Capitalism
With the arrival of European colonialists in North
America in the late 1400s came a group of aristocrats, who
carried with them the entrenched values of private
ownership. The importation of european capitalism had set
the stage for the continuous exploitation of the rich by
the poor, thereby widening the gap between the rich and the
poor as the colonies evolved into confederated states, and,
later, the eventual creation of the United States of
America. The practice of slavery in North A merica
created a unique settlement pattern for African American
slaves, who found themselves with basically nothing after
the abolition of slavery in 1865. Many of the freed slaves
fled to the big cities in the northern states of the United
States, to look for low paying jobs in the industries. They
worked under very poor conditions- poor housing, lack of
adequate medical care, poor nutrition, and more.
Even in the early years of the 21th century, it is
still very evident that this migration pattern has survived
over more than a century, from 1865 to 2004. Many blacks
are still moving from the southern states of the United
States into the major cities of the north, east, and west
of the United States. While in their new environments they
have met poor immigrants from Central America, South
America, and other parts of the world, and together they
have constituted the inner-city population. Due to the low
level of education in the inner city communities, this
population provides most of the unskilled labor that is
needed in factories and other businesses. This population
is also the recruitment ground for prisons and plantations.
American capitalism has taken another twist, which
has added kinks to the quest toward the salvation of inner-
city education, by instituting welfare incentives. The
government, through its Social Security Administration,
hands out checks and food stamps, and offers free housing
to many single mothers and their families who meet the
requirements provided by legislation. The same practice
also provides some minimal health care to needy inner-city
children, but social security support has proven to be much
more of a hindrance to the salvation of urban education in
the United States than help. No sooner had these benefits
to the economically disadvantaged been instituted by the
federal, state, and local governments than many students
embraced it as a career in its own right. Many students
systematically welcome teenage pregnancy, get on welfare,
and drop put of school, thereby creating a chain reaction.
Their siblings and children end up being indoctrinated to
follow the same pattern as the parent end up being of
little or no support to their children’s education. These
repetitive sequence that ensues results in the persistence
of inner city ghettos, where the youth are focused on not
succeeding. Even the best teachers, best educational
infrastructure, and best education equipment in the inner
city areas will never yield the level of academic success a
modern nation would cherish. For such material and human
resources to be productive, we need a total rehaul of the
socio-economic status of inner-city communities; the
process will not take several years, but would rather take
several decades, if not years.
The public housing pattern for the economically
disadvantaged has doomed urban education to failure in many
communities. Most schools surrounded by housing projects
perform poorly and many of them in this category have no
Academic Performance Index (A.P.I.) scores, because they
have never succeeded to test enough students in order to be
given just the chance to have an A.P.I. score, though too
low the score might be. The problem stems from poor
attendance and the preponderance of students on probation
and at risk. Teenage pregnancy and early gang affiliation
are serious problems in communities spotted with poor
housing projects; these communities see a lot of crimes,
violence, drug abuse, drug trafficking, prostitution, and
much more.
In the 2003/2004 school year, Locke High School,
Los Angeles was going through another perilous year of
state audit. One of the major expectations of the state for
the institution was the establishment of an A.P.I. score,
which meant Locke High School had to assure perfect student
attendance that would lay the groundwork for testing. In
order to improve students’ attendance, Los Angeles Unified
School District officials launched many strategies, which
were then passed down to the school principal for
execution. However, the old school culture still took the
front seat on campus. The usual violence and general
discipline problems on campus prevailed and the inevitable
stretched register of student suspensions frustrated the
efforts the local school authorities deployed to put
attendance back on track. Then came the long awaited
testing month of May 2004, which met with still unprepared
students, most of whom found themselves in high school
because of social promotion. At this point it became
evident that many students did not show up for testing, and
many of the students that were even on campus did not want
to be tested; this behavior brought to light the question
whether these students even knew where they were heading
to, being in high school. It came to a point where
throughout a period of three weeks students were escorted
to confined areas and actually forced to take multiple
choice tests against their will, and they ended up bubbling
artistic patterns on the bubble sheets. Despite all these
efforts the school did not succeed to get an A.P.I. score,
and at the end of the school year the school administrators
took their frustration on many innocent veteran teachers by
issuing false, bogus, negative evaluations. To satirize the
whole situation, the school principal and some of her
associates were demoted and transferred to other ailing
schools several blocks away in the poverty-stricken
community.
Violence and crime have chased businesses off inner
cities, and fleeing businesses carry with them job
opportunities, and wealth. The government has put in
insufficient efforts to revamp the socio-economic status of
these inner city communities, and the negligence has taken
a toll on the education of young innocent citizens. Many
students whom I have interviewed are willing to learn, but
students who glorify failure and perceive academic success
as a threat to their vicious cycle negatively influence
those students who want to learn and succeed.
Capitalism has confined the economically
disadvantaged child in the inner-cities where there is
little hope for success, and the children are also
systematically barred from the mainstream culture, speaking
quite very different brands of English which are not
accepted in the mainstream culture. Students who speak
English as a second language are predominantly located in
the inner-city populations, and language barrier has proven
itself to be one of the major hindrances to education in
the United States, especially in states like California,
where the legislation entitled Proposition 207 went as far
as outlawing bilingual education in public schools in
California.

Institutionalized Poverty
State and Federal abandonment of Education to Parents-
Disfavoring Poor Communities
Formal education in the United States, as in many
nations across the globe, has suffered drastic budget
deficiencies over centuries; yet formal education, at least
in the modern world, is one of the indispensable pillars of
the foundation of society. Many nations have diverted funds
from formal education to other departments or ministries of
the government. For example, during the Cold War that
emerged at the end of the Second World War and ended in the
early 1990s, the United States, Russia, China, and many
other countries invested a lot in armament and their
military arsenals. The adverse effect of this move was the
slashing of funds that had previously been allocated to
formal education and other governmental institutions,
public agencies, private agencies, charities, et cetera.
Parents and guardians of students were abandoned
with the task of shouldering the extra expenses and
responsibilities that government, state, regional, and
local governments have systematically turned over to them.
In this perspective, affluent communities contributed hefty
material, financial, moral, and human support to the
schools their children were attending, but, unfortunately,
inner-city schools, which had always been in a delapidating
state, became faced with an even more deplorable situation.
Inner-city school districts could not provide, on a
consistent basis, sufficient, basic materials in schools;
for example, books, pencils, desks, and so on. Parent
participation has historically been poor in inner-city
schools, partly due the low-socioeconomic status of most
residents of American inner-city inhabitants, and mainly
because of the battery of problems that come with being
economically disadvantaged. I have explored these
ramifications of poverty earlier, and the bottom line is
that inner-city parents and guardians contribute relative
poorly toward the education of their children because of
the financial short-handedness of most inner city
dwellers. The literacy rate is lower in American inner-
cities than in the suburbs and other peripheries, and this
fact accounts for the truth that many parents and guardians
cannot even help their children with their academic work at
home.
Even more dangerous and sensitive are the
ramifications of illegal immigration. The federal
government has guaranteed mandatory education for all
children living in the United States, but parents who are
in the United States on an illegal immigration status are
reluctant to actively involve themselves in the education
of their children, for fear of having their immigration
illegality revealed, and, therefore, relinquishing
themselves to deportation proceedings executed under the
auspices of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This
department came into being as a result of the attacks on
the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on
September 11, 2001- its goal is partly to counter terrorism
and illegal immigration; stringent measures from the
department have placed the many illegal immigrants of the
inner city in a situation of relentless vigilance and fear
of prosecution and eventual deportation. Therefore, the
reluctance of parents, who fall under the illegal
immigration status, and are reluctant to openly involve
themselves in the education of their children, has
contributed to the failure of inner-city schools. This is
an issue that the federal, state, and local governments, as
late as August 29, 2004, still have not addressed, as one
of the drawbacks of the harsh measures taken by the
department of homeland security.

The Glorification of Violence and Immorality by the
Mainstream Culture and the Pop Culture
Violence had been an indelible part of western
civilization for millennia and still is part and parcel of
the same civilization. With the advent of movies in the
20th Century, violence and immorality were glorified and
generally accepted in movies, despite protests from
conservative pressure and interest groups. Modern movie and
music production companies have glorified hardcore
pornography, profanities and obscenities are used in pop
music and in movies, and violent movies are the order of
the day. Hollywood movies have been criticized worldwide
for incorporating to much violence into their scripts, to
the point where Mel Gibson’s movie entitled “The Passion”
(Spring 2004) was excessively violent and caught the
attention of even the Vatican, where the sovereign pontiff,
Pope John Paul II, criticized the exorbitant portrayal of
violence in the movie, though digitally enhanced it might
have appeared to be to many trained eyes. The Spring of
2004, therefore, marked a milestone in the appreciation of
violence in movies, but, amazingly, The Passion was very
successful and turned out more than 350 million dollars in
its first five months at the box office.
Inner-city street gangs have propelled violence to
a different level, and teenage gangsters have carried their
rivalry into schools. Shootings, though not only a
happening of the inner-city as seen in the Columbine High
School shootings, are generally speaking, more rampant in
inner city schools. The violent movies from film industries
and immoral lyrics chanted by rappers and pop musicians
only help in deceiving young, misled students that they are
on the correct track. As they become lured into immoral
values, they stand a greater risk of neglecting and
eventually abandoning their school work.
Profanity, obscenities, violence, and hardcore
immorality and sex are so much entrenched into pop and rap
music, a brand cherished by the young population. Pop and
rap stars, under the sponsorship of powerful film and music
producers and production companies, make millions of U.S.
dollars in sales of their compact discs at the detriment of
young students most of whom are poorly supervised inner-
city children. It is true that most parents and guardians
might be crying foul, but parents and guardians from more
affluent residential neighborhoods are better equipped to
monitor and supervise their children than parents and
guardians of inner-city children are equipped to do the
same.
It is not uncommon for students to be carrying
posters of rap and pop stars characterized by indecent
exposure. I spoke with many young students who were
carrying Tupac Shakur’s portrait in their folders and many
of them told me he was their hero and the he will be
resurrecting from death. Shakur, an ex-convict and multiple
felon, admitted to committing six bank robberies, was,
however, a famous and notorious musician, who incorporated
mob lifestyle into his musical career. In the fall of 1996,
Shakur was killed in what was later investigated to be a
gang-related shooting in Las Vegas. Images of the
marijuana plant entertain the sight of students, many of
whom have conceived the plant as a symbol of drugs, and, of
course, many inner-city students deem the consumption of
drugs and its trafficking as an accomplishment.

Students Entrenched in the Wrongful Expectation of Imminent
Stardom

Chapter Three
The Collapse of Teaching and Learning Attributed to the
Politicization of Education
Education Imbued with Employees and Leaders Who Chose the
Wrong Profession
Education Infested With Laid-off Workers Who Switched to
Education for a Living

Chapter Four
Education Fast Becoming the Affair of the Economically
Advantaged

Chapter Five
The Patched Solution Which Seems not to be a Solution
Bilingual education, Carol Way Elementary

Re: SUPERVISION OF INSTRUCTION, 3/04/05, by Ozarks Lawyer.

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