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William Raspberry Praises
South’s Early Childhood Educators
MARCH 12, 2005 –
Rural Early Childhood sponsored an appearance by William
Raspberry at the conference of the Southern Early Childhood
Association in Dallas March 4, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning
columnist praised early childhood teachers and caregivers for
giving young children the early learning experiences they need
to thrive and succeed in school.
Raspberry is a columnist for the Washington Post and the Knight
Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy
Studies at Duke University.
The full text of his speech follows:
Before I get down to the serious business at hand, I have to
pass along a story a friend just sent me. A Texas kindergarten
teacher was helping one of her kids into his cute little cowboy
boots. If you wear cowboy boots, you know it isn’t the easiest
thing in the world to do. Well, it was a lot tougher for this
young teacher. Even with her pulling and his pushing, the
darned things just didn’t want to go on.
Finally, though, she managed to get one on, then the other—and
that is precisely when the young tyke looked up with his
innocent eyes and said, “Teacher, they’re on the wrong feet.”
She looked, and sure enough, the kid was right. The teacher had
no bootjack, so it was about as much trouble to remove the boots
as it had been to put them on in the first place. But you know
kindergarten teachers: She kept her cool and finally got the
boots on the right feet.
She had hardly finished her huge sigh of relief when the
youngster hit her with another announcement: “These,” he
confided, “aren’t my boots.”
She wanted to scream “You little so-and-so, why didn’t you say
so in the first place.” But she was cool. She pulled and
tugged and got the ill-fitting boots off his little feet once
again. Then:
“They’re my brother’s boots. My Mom made me wear ‘em.”
Poor teacher didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but she
reached deep into her dwindling reservoir and extracted the last
measure of her remaining grace and patience. She put the boots
on his feet again.
She then helped him into his coat, it being a chilly day, then
asked: “Now where are your mittens?”
He said: “I stuffed ‘em in the toe of my boots.”
Her trial starts next month.
But I don’t want to talk about cowboy boots—or even about the
wagons and stars of your conference theme. I want to talk about
cliffs and children and waterfalls. My Duke University
colleague Kenneth Dodge uses this allegory: A man has stationed
himself at the bottom of a waterfall, where he is working
feverishly to rescue children as they plummet over the cascade.
He hauls them out, nurses their wounds, sends them off to the
hospital—and begs for more money to continue and expand his
rescue work. He’s a hero.
But he’s a smart hero, and it dawns on him that if he could get
up to the top of fall, he might be able to keep a lot of kids
out of the dangerous waters in the first place. But it’s a long
and rocky path to the top, and it is certain that more
youngsters will fall while he’s climbing the cliff. And so he
stays where he is.
And that, I fear, describes the way we deal with our troubled
children these days. We would like to prevent some of their
preventable difficulties, but we don’t dare abandon our
“treatment” — remediation, suspensions, expulsions, detentions,
incarcerations and — until the Supreme Court ruling this week –
executions. It is a real dilemma, particularly for public
agencies.
Let me make a couple of things clear. First, we’re not talking
about bad people or stupid people. Those are not idiots at the
bottom of that waterfall. They are, as I say, heroes. They are
doing God’s work. Who would want them to stop?
Second: Prevention and cure are not substitutive. The question
is not intervention vs. punishment. A just system will try to
divert young people from crime, even while understanding that
sometimes we have to punish. To insist on establishing well-baby
clinics is not to argue for closing emergency rooms. We’re not
talking either/or.
And yet, it is extremely difficult to get our legislators to
consider both/and. Tell them you’ve come up with a program that
will prevent a lot of social dysfunction, and their eyes light
up. Do you mean that they will be able to stop funding juvenile
centers and other “treatment” facilities? Well, no, you admit—at
least not in the near-term. For the time being, you’re asking
them to fund both prevention and treatment. And you can
see the curtains come down over their interest as they look at
their watches, mumble something about their next appointment and
tell you how glad they are that you had this little talk.
The legislators — whether in Congress, the State House or the
City and County Council — aren’t mean-spirited. But money is
money, and if you want to spend more here, you are expected to
spend less there. Besides they are deathly afraid that some of
the prevention money will be “wasted” on kids who would have
stayed out of trouble on their own. At least money spent after
the fact does target the right children.
Besides, rescue work and treatment are important. Many of us in
this room this afternoon sometimes find ourselves involved from
time to time in rescue work. I guess you could say that my own
small project in my hometown of Okolona, Mississippi — Baby
Steps — is a sort of rescue operation. But I prefer to think of
it as an attempt to snatch some of our children back from the
brink before they plummet into the academic shoals that have
become the fate of too many youngsters in our part of the
country.
There’s plenty of rescue work to be done. Marian Wright Edelman
of the Children’s Defense Fund can describe the rocks and rapids
with statistical precision: A Deep South child is born into
poverty every 40 minutes., is abused or neglected every hour,
dies before his first birthday every 20 hours, is killed by
gunfire every week . . . .
And she could point out that as many as eight out of every ten
fourth-graders in parts of the American South read below grade
level.
You of all people understand that these facts are not
unconnected. Our failure to see to the health and safety of our
children has an important impact on their social and academic
development.
Still, the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that
the best way to deal with these problems is to prevent them in
the first place. You see, even while we are wrestling with the
problem of sick babies, and spending millions of dollars on
neonatal intensive care, we are producing new candidates for
expensive medical care by neglecting the far less costly
approach of making sure that pregnant women – and girls – get
the prenatal care they need. Even while we are trying to figure
out where to get the money for new prison cells to house drug
dealers, drug abusers and other disaffected elements of our
society, we are turning out new thousands of disaffected young
people. Even while we are trying to dream up remediation
programs to help slow learners and dropouts and discouraged
students, we are churning out new thousands of them. I mean
children who have virtually no hope of reaching or even
DISCOVERING their potential.
And why are so many of our children in this fix? Poor hearing,
poor eyesight, dyslexia and other specific learning disorders,
yes--and also the stress of poverty and discrimination and
alienation. They need rescue.
But the main reason so many of your young people are in academic
and developmental and even physical danger — the reason so many
of them fall so far short of their God-given potential — is that
too many of them start off behind.
I'm talking about kids who need remediation before they are able
to cope with kindergarten, or even Head Start.
Most of these youngsters who start off behind never catch up,
and that, my friends, is why we have so much school failure.
And that is why I have chosen to spend some of my time and
personal resources at the top of the cascade, doing what I can
to grab some of our children before they plummet over the
rocky precipice. I mention my little program—Baby Steps—not
because it is hugely successful or because it contains in its
fledgling origins the blueprint for curing what ails us, but
because it represents a truth it took me too long to discover.
You’ve heard it said that all politics is local. Well it is
beyond doubting that all education is local. You can have a
great secretary of education, a top-flight state commissioner of
education, first-rate superintendents and school boards and a
generous budget oversight committee. But if you don’t fix what
happens to individual youngsters, the rest of it won’t matter
very much.
And how do you do that? Well, I think where you start — at any
rate where I’ve started—is by facing up to what we all
know: Homes where education and
learning are central values, and where the parents are
reasonably competent at the business of child-rearing, are homes
where good students live.
There are exceptions, but they only prove the rule: Good homes
produce good students. And the clearest identifying
characteristic of what we call a good school is a critical mass
of children from good homes.
As I say, anybody who has ever worked in or near a school knows
this, yet to listen to our school leaders, you'd think the
difference between school success and school failure lies in the
quality of the superintendent, the size of the school budgets,
or the academic backgrounds and skill levels of the teachers.
I don't mean to suggest that the things that schools and school
districts do don't matter. Of course it matters to have
qualified teachers, principals who can provide safety and
support, budgets that furnish the tools of learning, and
competent staffs to bring all these things together.
But it matters more what parents do – and believe.
My point is not to let the schools off the hook but to offer an
explanation of why a torrent of school reforms over the past few
decades has brought the merest trickle of improvement. We
haven't paid enough attention to what happens at the top of the
waterfall—to improving the homes our children come from.
Maybe one reason is that we have confused good homes with
affluent homes. It's true that the educational values I'm
talking about are more likely to reside in the homes of
economically successful adults.
But the values that place a premium on education don't exist
only in rich homes. Good homes in the sense I'm talking about
are homes where parents understand and stress the importance of
knowledge, quite apart from its economic utility.
The problem is that we have thousands and thousands of parents,
mostly poor, with only a limited understanding of the
transforming power of education. Many of them are poor because
they left school, which, in any case, wasn't working for them.
How can they tell their children of the wonders education will
open up for them?
Well, they can't – unless they believe it. And they won't
believe it unless those of us who know the truth take the
trouble to teach them.
That simple notion is at the heart of many successful
parent-education programs across the nation – Head Start,
Parents as Teachers, and a host of others. And it is at the
heart of what I am trying to do with the modest program in my
Mississippi hometown. The major aim is to help parents
understand the critical value of what they do at home. We try to
do it by teaching parents of young children – birth to age 5 –
some of the tricks for getting them ready for learning and for
life. And we try to make it fun.
We are talking, mind you, about parents who love their children
but who may think they don't have much to give them by way of
academic help. We tell them that the best help they can give is
to make their children know how much they value learning.
So far only a few dozen parents are regularly involved – not bad
for a town of 3,500, and perhaps enough to create a critical
mass of "good" parents. And as David Lawrence said … “Nothing
worthwhile emerges full-blown.” We have to start where we are
and do what we can.
My hope is that by the time the children of our Baby Steps
parents emerge from the preschool pipeline into regular classes,
the difference will be plain to see.
I don't exempt either the school system or the larger community
from its responsibility to help the town's children grow up
smart and successful – and, indeed, both the system and the
community have come together in support of Baby Steps in its
first year.
But I am convinced that all the other things we do will have
limited impact unless we also undertake to enhance the
competence of our children's first and most effective teachers:
their parents.
I will say again—because I want to be crystal clear about
it: This is not an advertisement for Baby Steps. To be frank, I
have settled on the bare outlines of Baby Steps because of two
earlier decisions: That I would do something to help children
and learning in my home town, and that I would pay for it—at
least to start--out of my own resources.
Other people and other places have more resources than I can
muster, and, as a result, they can do more things than we
are doing in Okolona. But the point remains: The best and most
effective of those approaches will begin early and, preferably,
at home.
We need to catch kids before they fall. I commend those with the
talent and patience for rescue work, but I have a special place
in my heart for those who get those little boots on the right
feet in the first place. After a few decades of observing what
happens in our schools, I simply cannot muster much enthusiasm
for our ability to fix kids after they are broken. If we can’t
teach the little ones to read, when they come to school eager
for learning, what makes us so optimistic that we can turn their
lives around with a few hours of remediation? You see why I
worry about that heroic young man at the bottom of the cascade?
Oh, I've read the stories of late-bloomers, children who muddled
through the first six or ten grades and then suddenly caught
fire. I have written some of those stories myself. But they are
depressingly rare.
I am thrilled that there are people working to rescue our
children—and thrilled that sometimes the rescue efforts work
splendidly, even almost miraculously.
But I believe our best work, our best results, come when we
undertake to save our children before disaster strikes.
Am I telling you that we should write-off our crushed and broken
students, give up any hope of saving them? You know better. I
would no more tell you to abandon your rescue work than I would
suggest that our valiant soldiers, our heroic teachers or the
selfless souls who work for the Red Cross – people who dedicate
their lives to rescuing the victims of life’s tragedies – should
stop what they are doing.
But we need to distinguish between emergencies and conditions.
We used to joke about the old lady who would drive around with
her emergency brake on all the time –just in case. Now
I have to explain to the younger people that emergency brake is
what we used to call the thing you now call a parking brake or a
hand brake, and . . . Oh, never mind.
All I’m saying is that when “emergency” conditions become
routine, we have to call them something else.
You have to understand that I am speaking to you as a layman on
a subject on which most in this audience are experienced
experts. Still, I have to tell you that I'm not very sanguine
about our chances of rescuing very many youngsters AFTER they
have fallen into poor health and turned off to school. You have
to keep trying, of course. We all do. The few we might save are
worth it, even if we lose the many.
Even the best schools, with the best superintendents and the
best principals can't do it alone. The business people, the
churches, the civic organizations, the philanthropists —
everybody has to play a part in fixing what has gone wrong in
public education. Schools didn't cause all the problems that
contribute to academic failure, and it is certain that schools
can't cure them all. The entire community must pitch in to halt
at their source the problems that make school learning so
difficult.
We have to undertake the vital work of teaching parents how to
be good parents— how to encourage their children, talk to them,
instill the proper values in them and get them ready for school
and for life. That, in my view, is more important than all the
remediation in the world.
It is the surest way of avoiding another generation of the
children we euphemistically describe as "at-risk." (And be
clear, by the way, that not all at-risk youngsters are urban or
minority—or even poor. Too many of America’s children from all
stations of life are in danger of sliding into the chasm.
We need to build a protective wall to keep them from going over
the edge. A few minutes ago, I called on the philanthropists
among us for special assistance in this regard. I know that when
I say “philanthropist,” you think of people with lots of money.
But I have to tell you something it has taken me all these years
to learn: Philanthropy is not a financial condition but an
attitude. We can all do philanthropy if we are only willing to
share our resources. In the wall-building business, you can
think of the rich philanthropists as the heavy-equipment
operators — the people with access to backhoes and bulldozers
and cranes and so forth. But I can lay a brick or two, and so
can each of you. That brick could be a little extra time spent
with families that need help, a little extra help for people who
are trying to make our community better … And if you and I lay
our few bricks today and a few more tomorrow and the next day,
pretty soon we’ve got something that starts to look like a
protective wall.
What I’m saying is not mysterious. If those of us with resources
will commit even a fraction of those resources to helping even
one or two endangered children, many children will be saved.
46 Blackjack Road / P.O. Box 6013 / Mississippi State, MS /
39762
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© 2004-2006 Mississippi State University
Updated
12/01/2006
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