It's our responsibility to help children achieve

WASHINGTON — Rod Paige and I, black Mississippians of a certain age, were pondering over lunch the differences between the education we received as children and the education poor children are receiving today.

"One difference," the secretary of education said at last, "is expectation. Too many teachers accept as a fact that certain students can't learn, and therefore they set low levels of expectation.

"If a teacher does not believe every child can learn, and the evidence is that some children aren't learning, the world seems all right.

"But if the teacher believes all children can learn, and some children aren't learning, then there is a problem that demands answers."

That may come as close as anything I've heard recently to explaining what is happening to poor children in America's inner cities. Too many of us — and not, by any means, just teachers — have accepted that many of our children really cannot learn very much. We bemoan that fact. We are deeply sorry that it's true, and we are handy with a grocery list of culprits. But fundamentally, we believe that the children of what is called the underclass can't learn.

Paige sees the evidence for this belief (which we seldom acknowledge out loud) in our resistance to national testing and national (and international) standards.

I see it more pervasively. America's black leaders, back in the day, took it as their key responsibility to get us ready to compete in an unfair world. Today's leadership, or so it seems to me, sees its primary responsibility as protesting the unfairness.

The difference is between remedying underperformance and merely explaining it.

When Paige and I were boys, explanations of black disadvantage were so obvious as to be pointless. The thing our people needed, our leaders kept reminding us, was to do well in spite of the disadvantage, to become productive, to make ourselves necessary. Today's leaders put less emphasis on what we must do and more on what is done to us.

They aren't wrong. But the unintended consequence of their emphasis is to make us feel more like powerless victims of circumstances we can't control and less like individuals capable of significant achievement.