So, this is what the Civil Rights movement has come to 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education: There’s nothing wrong with Virginia’s failing public school systems that showering them with more money won’t solve. In a nutshell that’s the message conveyed by Oliver Hill, Jr., and Andrew Block in an op-ed piece in today’s Times-Dispatch.
Hill and Block construct a rickety argument that leans upon nearly every prop of liberal thinking about schools in common currency today. They start their column by hijacking the moral authority of the 1960s civil rights movement. “Our political leaders,” they write, “should continue to honor Virginia’s civil rights legacy by funding an educational system that meets the needs of all of our students, including those same children of color for whom so many fought so hard.”
The Standards of Quality, which redistributes billions of dollars in state aid from affluent school districts to poor ones, is not enough to “ensure equality of educational opportunity,” they continue. Neither is the $354 million in “at risk” funding that supports special programs for poor children. Low-income students, they assert, need “additional resources to be successful.”
Nowhere in their column do Hill and Block allude to the fact that many minority-dominated school districts spend significantly more per pupil than neighboring suburban school districts. Nowhere do they mention the scandalous bureaucracy and waste in many of those school districts — a bureaucracy that Mayor L. Douglas Wilder, incidentally, has targeted in his ongoing battle with the Richmond School Board.
The thrust of the Hill-Block column is to absolve minorities from making any financial sacrifice themselves, restructuring educational bureaucracies or altering their own cultural values or attitudes towards education. More money is the solution, and the onus falls squarely upon the taxpayers of Virginia to dig deeper into their pockets — or dishonor the civil rights movement.
This is the same old, minorities-as-victims ideology that has fostered passivity among poor African-Americans and kept them them dependent upon the largesse of whites. While Hill and Block purport to honor the heroes of the Civil Rights movement of 50 years ago, their antiquated thinking keeps poor African-Americans mired in the role of supplicants. Virginia would do far better to emulate the example of those hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who have escaped poverty and joined the economic mainstream of society. What was their secret? How can their success be replicated?
