Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire
Easter came and went some days ago. What difference in our lives did that remembrance make? Did our politics get better? Did our leaders come to new insights about service and self-sacrifice for others modeling themselves on the ultimate sacrifice for others that Christians believe was made by Jesus?
Lincoln once spoke to his people about the “last full measure of devotion” paid by the country’s officers and soldiers in order that “government of the people, by the people and for the people” should not perish.
For some reason, my thoughts on Easter turned to the achievement gap bedeviling many students in our inner-city public schools. I have been thinking about this mismatch between justice in life outcomes and reality in life outcomes for some time now.
The statistics on educational accomplishment, graduation rates, and college entrance for a defined minority of our children are grim, chronic, and no longer news to anyone. But what are we doing to eliminate the gap?
Yes, educational achievement is ultimately a personal responsibility of the student, but it is also a public responsibility to educate well those who will grow up to contribute one way or another to the successes and failures of our community. Education is a public good from which we all benefit. Bad educational outcomes hold us all back while good education propels our society forward. Few will argue with this.
Evidently we have some new data on what kind of schools increase the public good of education available to our country.
I refer to new statistics on charter schools. Not until 2006, said Karl Zinmeister in a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, did total enrollment in charter schools reach 1 million students out of a total of 55 million nationwide. Poorly performing charter schools have been weeded out and closed down, a culling of bad performers that does not happen nearly as much in public school systems.
Other charter schools are following the example of the most successful ones. So eliminating failures and piling on success has led to good outcomes in this sector of our educational industry. In the KIPP chain of charter schools, 86 percent of all students live in low-income families and 95 percent are Latino or African-American, yet 83 percent of KIPP graduates are admitted to college.
Harlem’s highest performing middle school — with 97 percent of its fifth graders ethnically classified as minority — ranks first in New York State for math achievement.
Zinmeister concludes that “the oft-heard claim that charters perform no better than conventional schools on the whole is out of date and inaccurate.”
And urban charter schools achieve their results spending only 72 percent of what public schools receive for each child enrolled. More value for less money.
Just three weeks ago, charter schools in New York City struck a deal with Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo: The city will be obligated to find free space for charters in Department of Education buildings. If no free space can be made available, the city will have to kick in funds to help charters rent private space.
Opposition to charter schools comes largely from teachers unions. To me such opposition reveals a serious ethical myopia, one with links to the meaning of Easter. If we are to care about justice outcomes, then traditional public schools should make way for charters. Whoever delivers the bacon should get the money. It is a matter of ethics, not power, turf, ego, or personal economic advantage.
While Easter for Christians brings a celebration of Christ’s triumph over death and his sacrifice for all humanity, that they too might reach the kingdom of heaven in the hereafter, Jesus during his ministry on earth also spoke of getting us closer to the kingdom of heaven while we still live and breathe.
He taught that we can be “not far from the kingdom of heaven” if we live by the two commandments: to love God with all our heart and soul and to care for our neighbors as we care for ourselves. See the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 12.
The Gospel of Matthew Chapter 22 reports that once Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Papal encyclicals call living out this second commandment to care intensely and even intimately for others “Caritas.” It is the core theological vision of the new pope, Pope Francis.
So what might it mean with respect to the education of children who are not well-positioned by accident of birth and family environment for us collectively to use “caritas” on their behalf?
I suggest in this case that we link the ethical obligation to care for our neighbors well to the burdens of good stewardship. Caritas obligates us to be good shepherds. Vulnerable students depend on their parents, teachers, and society to do right by them, to be good stewards of their infant socialization, maturation into admired adulthood, and their educational experiences.
Jesus even said, according to the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 23, that those who would lead should first become servants of those to be led. And he affirmed that to feed the hungry, take in strangers, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit those in prison — all acts of caritas and faithful stewardship — was to serve the Lord himself. By caring for his needy and hurting “brothers and sisters,” this well-known Christian scripture tells us, we also serve God directly.
The responsibilities of a good shepherd in biblical terms were set forth starkly in Ezekiel 34, where the Lord God angrily said: “Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock?… You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. “
This is a pretty good metaphor as to what happens to young people when they are turned over to uncaring educators. They become prey for many of the vicissitudes of life.
The remedy for failure chosen by the Lord God as reported by Ezekiel was to remove the uncaring shepherds from their position of trust: “I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them.”
Such remedy applied in our times to reduce the achievement gap experience by many vulnerable students would replace public schools with charter schools.
Schools must be good shepherds, not bureaucracies dedicated above all else to feeding their employees. To overcome the achievement gap, it is not so much paying higher salaries to the officials we employ to run our inner city schools but more having such officials assume personal responsibility, inspired by caritas, to require achievement from all students.
Being a good shepherd is not a 9 to 5, take the customer’s money and run, kind of business engagement; it is a vocation of ethical motivations to place oneself in the service of others. To go the extra mile; to think about what is best for them; to walk in their shoes and feel personally what is needed to empower them to overcome adversities.
Kind of like Jesus at the end of his life, which personal sacrifice Christians brought to mind on Good Friday.
