Pull Those Damn Bootstraps!

“Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps!”  

This exclamation captures the prevailing attitude of many Americans, mostly conservatives, toward the least advantaged among us.   The sentiment is accompanied by a belief that we live in a meritocracy, where one deserves what they get and get what they deserve.

It is a silly admonition because, of course, the act of pulling up on bootstraps can have only the physical result of keeping you stuck where you are.  It is humorous and strangely instructive to note that the original meaning of “pulling up on your bootstraps” meant to try something utterly absurd.  It was a journalist’s snarky response to an 1834 claim of “discovering perpetual motion” by a man named Nimrod Murphree.   

It is equally absurd to insist that poor people, particularly people of color, will rise by dint of their own efforts, when the force of gravity and the inadequacy of public policy conspire to keep them stuck in the same dismal spot. 

Which brings me to the point of this post:  Decades of education reform, billions in “think tank” research and ceaseless examination of test scores, curricula and educational practice have failed to make a discernible dent in so-called “achievement gaps” or debilitating poverty.  

Why might this be so?  It is because the relationship between education and poverty is broadly misunderstood, whether willfully or maliciously.

I could cite endless examples of the enthusiastic claims that the road to the cure for poverty runs through education.  If only we could equalize education outcomes, then economic justice would follow close behind!   Thus we have declared boldly that we will Leave No Child Behind!  We will legislate that Every Student Succeeds!  We will have a Common Core and identify Uncommon Schools!

It is all nonsense, because the conventional -  nearly universally accepted - wisdom is 180 degrees wrong.  Education has not, will not, cannot, ameliorate poverty.  Ameliorating poverty is the only way to equalize educational attainment.   As I have quipped for many years, testing, accountability, standards and metrics are all equivalent to expecting Hansel and Gretel to fatten up by incessantly weighing them. 

I don’t suggest that educational practice is irrelevant.  I could make - have made (see book link below) - the case that progressive pedagogy produces more profound and durable learning, but even that distinction is relatively unimportant in light of the pernicious effects of poverty.   At every level of education, variable outcomes track precisely with wealth.   SAT scores can be most accurately predicted by family wealth.  Town by town analyses of test scores follow wealth.   Graduation rates from kindergarten to graduate school are largely determined by wealth.  

I have often cited, with undiminished anger, the glib response of hedge fund multi-millionaire Whitney Tilson when he was challenged about the abusive, “tough love” discipline in charter schools he championed.  “Because they need it!” he answered;  “they” meaning poor brown and Black children, in stark contrast to his own very white daughters who attended a very white, very expensive Manhattan private girls school where any similarly “tough love” treatment of students would bring an immediate swarm of entitled parents to the Headmistress’s office to remind her who was paying her salary.

Since LBJ’s War on Poverty, which did dramatically reduce poverty, our political attitude has been more like Nimrod Murphree’s claim to have discovered perpetual motion.  We just tell folks to pull on those bootstraps and then blame their perpetual poverty on a lack of effort or, in many the fetid rightwing mind, a lack of innate ability.  Nimrod did not discover perpetual motion, but we have discovered perpetual immobility.

In my years in NYC, I visited underfunded public schools and saw first hand, the effects of poverty.  A middle school where I served as “Principal for a Day,” each morning welcomed 20% of their students from homeless shelters or the mean streets of the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx.  I watched teachers who exhibited great compassion and skill, trying every day to mitigate endemic urban despair while leaning against a tidal wave of irrelevant or inhibiting policy expectations.

Children like these, in neighborhoods all over the nation, come from homes with low literacy rates, racial isolation, less, if any, time in good early education, homes with no stable employment, more exposure to environmental and social toxins, and the crippling ramifications of decades of mass incarceration of their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, cousins and brothers.  

The poverty rate for Black children in America is 26%, nearly triple the rate for white children.  We expect them to tug on those tiny bootstraps when they don’t have any damn boots!

In my small way I have tried to fight for equitable public education . . . and I’ll keep on keeping’ on.  But unless and until we face poverty and racism head on, schools can only try to bail water out of a ship foundering on the shoals of societal indifference.