Reforming Schools, Expanding Educational Options

Editor’s Note: "Finally!" Here is the conclusion to part six of the Solutions to the Culture of Poverty and Death as it relates to education reform.

The troubles with young people on the streets of Milwaukee has roots that can be traced to the Culture of Poverty if one knows where to look.

The City Fathers created this problem for themselves decades ago through the use of restrictive zoning and housing patterns, actively blocking Black business formation that would allow members of the African American community to employ their own. The fear was that an empowered Black Middle Class would challenge the status quo, and they were right.

Attorney and former Wisconsin State Legislator Lloyd Barbee’s successful federal desegregation suit against the city found it was actively using the Milwaukee Public Schools system as an instrument to keep the new Black postwar population out of the local economy and political power.

The educational system shenanigans, (and the concurrent Interstate Highway construction through a swath of a once thriving Middle Class sector of the city) resulted in a large class of the Black community estimated at around 70-80,000 or about a third of the present 250,000 or so Black population was pushed out and locked out of the process of Upward Mobility leading to the Middle Class for themselves or their children.

Had they not been blocked from acting on their normal human aspirations for themselves and their children a half-century ago, the city would now have an empowered, educated Middle Class into a second or third generation that would share the Middle Class values of the Larger Society, and could work together on common goals.

Instead, the city in essence helped in the formation of a large bloc of people that are a continuing drain on city resources and a source of criminality and neighborhood destabilization that will help to stymie its plans for a bright shiny Post Industrial economy.

Some of the lucky ones who escaped the scythe of welfare reform have gotten involved in the federal SSI scam, having their kids classified as Handicapped or disabled in some way, for a cool monthly payment of over $500 per child by the Supplemental Social Security program.

Several social services agencies, in a futile bid to put a crimp in the welfare reform initiative whose aims they hate, held publicized clinics paid for with taxpayer monies to instruct people how to qualify for SSI payments to protect their entitlement incomes from being cut from the welfare reformers.

Uneducated lower class women have turned their children over to be probed, injected and drugged with mind-altering, stupefying potions after energetic, primarily African American boys of low income single mothers are too quickly labeled either "Slow Learners" or "Hyperactive." There is the lure of money as well.

If a child is so diagnosed it could mean a monthly payment of over $500.00 per child for the household on top of any other payment they may be receiving, itself a powerful inducement for these mothers to push her child into the arms of the experimenters.

The children, the Seed Corn of the future, have been ritually sacrificed as society dallied and experimented with various elixirs, miracle potions and schemes, from urban Methadone Clinics in the 1970s that were supposed to eradicate heroin addiction, and the now-banned practices of surgical prison human experimentation, and Lobotomies performed on habitual criminals as a dubious cure. Pharmaceutical testing of prisoners remains, however.

Methadone is now an underground drug peddled on college campuses. Ritalin is the popular solution for Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder, which like Dyslexia and Autism may be another widely over-diagnosed childhood condition affecting naturally young boys being taught by young White Middle Class teachers. It is a drug of choice now too, as roommates started using it to help them concentrate on their college studies when they saw in the dormitories how well it worked.

The preceding generation is supposed to watch out for the younger generation. Things are supposed to get better that’s the way it always has been.

We have been charged with making a way for the young, creating opportunities for them as we handed off the future. This is the implied Social Contract.

Instead, there has been a regression. We, their guardians and protectors, allowed this to happen while on our watch, and the children know it. Perhaps this is why they behave as if nothing matters, as though they have no stake in society.

Perhaps this is why they "act out" and disrupt some festivities, which are perceived to be aloof and apart from them, unlike an open street festival held in their community such as Juneteenth Day, which is very much a part of their lives, and put together by people they know, love, respect, and see around their neighborhoods.

The school failure rates and the falling rates of men in college could have been predicted if only American society realized that the plight of Black men and their experiences as so-called "Endangered Species" were merely canaries in the mineshaft, and that our White brothers would be next.

Books such as "The Redundant Male" and such sparked the necessary soul searching that combined with Futurist outlooks, population predictions, and noting of societal trends such as young White women adopting the dysfunction of out of wedlock birth that spurred President Clinton and Congress to pass term limited welfare reform in 1995 to remove the incentives and support for dysfunctional family structures, built upon the Wisconsin Works W-2 model that is now being applied in Israel as they dismantle their welfare state.

The long-term effects of having millions of males already being raised by women with an anti-civilizations, anti-family, and anti-father attitude are yet to be tabulated but it is likely to be enormous.

The damage will be compounded by the dismay that this devastating trend occurs just as we as a society have decided that cyclic trans-generational poverty will not be tolerated, nor aided and abetted by our government programs any more and are starting to make some headway, which already resulted in a seventy percent drop in welfare rolls.