Oldsocialworker - Not With All the Money In the World

The media coverage of  Mark Zuckerberg’s generous $100, 000,000.00 dollar donation for the improvement of Newark, NJ public schools could lead one to believe that impressive amounts of money is a new and unusual opportunity for the “underprivileged” district.  

Nothing could be further from the verifiable truth.  As it stands, Newark spends on average $24,000.00 per student, this figure likely does not include the cost of educating students who are sent out of district to alternative programs, rehab centers, or are incarcerated-  the costs for which New Jersey districts are responsible to meet.   One alternative school placement can cost in excess of $80,000.00 per year for ONE student- and that is just the beginning of legally mandated accommodations.  

There is not much to say about the donation itself- Zuckerberg has done a decent thing and should be properly commended.  But in the same way that malignant, metastasized, and aggressive cancers most often cannot be cured for even the wealthiest among us because of the nature of the beast, so it is that Newark’s problems will not be solved with yet more cash and programs.

 Based on a more than a couple of decades of working with at-risk teens in the public school system, I have come to firmly believe that schools reflect the values of the communities in which they reside.  In the case of Newark and other districts that are in impoverished communities (I say “impoverished communities” as opposed to “impoverished districts” because the districts are and have been well funded for the past thirty years), the greatest pressing issues are firmly rooted in systemic political corruption and the prevailing priorities of the citizenry, which have a symbiotic relationship.   

During my lifetime and career tenure, most social problems- more glaringly in inner cities like Newark- have increased in both scope and severity, which has had direct impact on our education system.  When standards- be they social or educational- are bent and lowered (but renamed with cute euphemisms like “compassion” and “inclusion”)- the end product can yield nothing but mediocrity and outright failure.  

Demanding and ultimately insatiable human nature- when unchecked and unchallenged in such a society-will have it no other way.

It is widely agreed that children behave in ways that “work for them” at home and that those adaptive behaviors manifest in the school.   Over the past 40 years, there has been a steady transfer of responsibility from the individual to the state for not only material well-being, but for behaviors as well; with this came the unfortunate “infantilization” of what is now generations of people.   Countless social programs exist to “meet the needs” of various populations, most of which got their start in earnest with the implementation of the Great Society policies and approaches to “ending” poverty.  As less in terms of what I call adult behavior is required of those receiving “help”, the more people unwilling or unable to participate in any process with standards- such as education- we cultivate.  

Here are some examples from situations I have worked with:

The eighties were a time of lavish funding for and expansion of community children and family service programs.  Social services were integrated into schools in effort to promote “seamless” or “wrap around” services to get the kids who were “falling through the cracks”.   

I was part of a team in an urban New Jersey area who worked to combat teen pregnancy, substance abuse, and truancy- all of which had been increasing steadily over the previous decade.  Despite the existence of a prominent and accessible community health center for the poor, many kids did not attend school because the record reflected that they did not have physicals and required immunizations.  It was decided that if parents wouldn’t bring the kids for medical treatment, we’d bring the medical treatment to them.  A van was secured (as the bachelor’s level social worker, I got to be the driver!), a kind young doctor from a residency-training program volunteered, as did a master’s level social worker. We went off as if in a Good Humor Ice Cream truck on a mission of medical and social mercy! 

One of the families included a single mother and her three daughters, two of which were school aged and truant.  Ms. R lived in a state subsidized apartment with her daughters, “Cathy”, “Beth”, and “Patty”- along with a succession of boyfriends.  Cathy and Beth participated in an after school recreation program, and were unable to attend while out of school.  The social worker, “Carrie”, was determined to get them back.  Carrie went up the stairs that lead to Ms.R’s apartment and heard the television, the kids, and Ms.R’s voices.  Carrie knocked loudly to no avail, so she pushed the already cracked door open, stepped into the kitchen, and called into the apartment.  What ensued from that effort was an empurpled and screaming Ms. R, who tried to press charges against Carrie for breaking and entering and swiftly filed a formal complaint to the agency Carrie worked for.  Carrie was scolded and written up for disrespecting a client and inappropriate conduct.   Project “vaccination van” came to an ignominious end.

Despite many services and active interventions over the years, Cathy, Beth, and Patty all dropped out of school and went on to live in the same conditions as their mother, who remained willfully committed to her pursuit of parties, men, and becoming pregnant with babies she could neither afford nor intended to raise.  

I regularly see the girls of mothers like Ms. R wind up living with the “men” ( I use this term to indicate gender only, not maturity level) who were formerly with their mothers.   There are entire communities comprised of such rudderless and ill fated contrivances; where people incessantly feed or sacrifice one another-primarily parents sacrificing children-to the beck and call of their appetites     No amount of money provided to education or other systems can extract academic or any other kind of success from this brand of moral bankruptcy and its wretched priorities, which- at this time- cannot be dealt with for what it is by any of our systems.

Here is another example from situations I have worked with:

There was a 14 year old girl I’ll call “Terry” who was in my group that consisted of “emotionally disturbed” kids who attended an alternative school for ED and adjudicated kids during the early 1990’s.  Terry was referred by child “protective” services and because she was often “dissociative”-which means she’d regularly lose track of time and dramatically “space out”-and she could not function in school even with ample accommodations.    I was dispatched to do a home visit when Terry stopped attending our program and her parents made themselves unavailable. 

Terry lived in a nice looking three-bedroom home in a working class urban neighborhood.  The home was rent subsidized, and was occupied by her 74 year old father, her 32 year old mother, and two younger siblings.  Upon entering, the smell of human and animal waste was overwhelming, and the interior was comprised of a jumble of filth, automobile parts, and heaps of assorted refuse. Terry’s mother, “Marge” expected someone would be coming, and was ready with and explanation as to why Terry’s absence was, though regrettable, necessary.  Marge relayed to me that she had been raised that “family comes first”, and Terry’s help was needed for “maintaining the house” while her husband (Terry’s father) was incapacitated from a broken wrist.  

It turns out that Terry’s primary duties were to feed and walk the family’s two Rottweilers, clean their pen, and “empty the buckets”.  Marge did not care to “walk all the way” to the fully functional bathroom located off of the kitchen, so she put spackle buckets in each room so they’d be handy when nature called.  The entire family became accustomed to this jaunty approach to elimination, so the buckets needed to be emptied- in Marge’s estimation- three times per day.   This was the report I handed to my supervisor, “Jane”, a calm woman with a diplomatic head on her shoulders. 

Jane explained that no matter how appalling the situation was, we could not pass a “value judgment” because “people have a right to live the way they choose, even if it is horrendous to us”.  

Because many of our laws are heavily influenced by moral relativism, Jane was and is right.  Jane wasn’t any happier about it than I was, so we did what we could.  The health department was involved to deal with the issue of the buckets, which ended up having to be emptied into a toilet rather than the backyard from then on.  There was also a fine for improper disposal of motor oil, and the family was required to provide their dogs with shade in their pens.   Terry had to return to school and tend to the dogs and the buckets before and after school.   

Needless to say, Terry and her siblings did not fare well.  None finished high school, and all three went on to have lives that involved having babies as teens and living on government assistance.  None of this came from the lack of anything other than the ability to call this treachery out for what it was: wicked, abusive, and exploitive and get the kids out of that hell hole.

SUMMARY:

There are countless ghastly home environments from which kids comprise the student bodies of schools come, and the highest concentrations are obviously urban places like Newark.  We have been offering service upon service in a vain effort to offset the results of ruinous social policies- including in-school full service health centers, three school meals per day in some districts, “family” lunches in some districts, in school counseling, after school programs (some of which are staffed by gang members- that’s another topic altogether), and summer programs.  

We have redesigned curriculum to be more entertaining, lowered- in some cases eviscerated-academic standards so that “everyone can feel successful” (that hideous little maneuver came from the greasy self-esteem movement that has infiltrated education replacing legitimate success as a goal), we have expanded the definition of disabilities so that environmentally based issues are lumped in with the physiologically disabled so that increased amounts of services can be funded, acquired, and continued. 

We have heaped ruinous policies and mandates one upon the other in subservience to venality, and the results are clear: higher drop out rates (50% in Newark), increased school and community violence, and overall lower American academic achievement; much lower than 30 years ago before the age of big government’s plans to improve society and education got its claws decisively into matters.  

The only recourse that can lead to change is allowing people to absorb the consequences for the situations they create and restore high academic standards and enforceable behavioral expectations.  Since this doesn’t involve money and the creation of another task force or bureaucracy, it’ll never happen-not even with the well intended addition of $100,000,000.00.