Freedom of Choice for Inner-City Parents

Suppressing tears of frustration and embarrassment, a young black man slips unobtrusively out of the employment office, slam-dunking a crumpled form into a wastebasket on his way out the door. Although he has spent a dozen years in inner-city public schools, this aspiring worker cannot read and write well enough to fill out a standard job application. Sadder still is the fact that the wastebasket, by the time the janitor empties it, will be brimming with crumpled, partially completed applications—waste paper symbolizing the wasted lives of a lost generation, the current product of our inner-city public schools.

The U.S. Department of Education readily concedes that 42 per cent of black 17-year-olds are functionally illiterate. Notwithstanding the tragic import of such a statistic, it has been dismissed with a shrug of government shoulders; after all, it is a mere statistic. Ironically, though, black leaders, who could be expected to express profound concern with such a sorrowful statistic, have also chosen to shrug their shoulders. For when Congress considered the Packwood-Moynihan tuition tax credit bill—a bill that would have provided low-income, inner-city minority-group members with the financial help they desperately need to choose alternative education—black leaders almost uniformly opposed it. Both the NAACP and the National Urban League opposed tuition tax credits, as did celebrated black columnists Jesse Jackson, Carl Rowan, and Vernon Jar- ret. And black congressmen voted 10 to 1 against the bill that would have provided tax credits to hundreds of thousands of inner-city black parents.

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Suppressing tears of frustration and embarrassment, a young black man slips unobtrusively out of the employment office, slam-dunking a crumpled form into a wastebasket on his way out the door. Although he has spent a dozen years in inner-city public schools, this aspiring worker cannot read and write well enough to fill out a standard job application. Sadder still is the fact that the wastebasket, by the time the janitor empties it, will be brimming with crumpled, partially completed applications—waste paper symbolizing the wasted lives of a lost generation, the current product of our inner-city public schools.

The U.S. Department of Education readily concedes that 42 per cent of black 17-year-olds are functionally illiterate. Notwithstanding the tragic import of such a statistic, it has been dismissed with a shrug of government shoulders; after all, it is a mere statistic. Ironically, though, black leaders, who could be expected to express profound concern with such a sorrowful statistic, have also chosen to shrug their shoulders. For when Congress considered the Packwood-Moynihan tuition tax credit bill—a bill that would have provided low-income, inner-city minority-group members with the financial help they desperately need to choose alternative education—black leaders almost uniformly opposed it. Both the NAACP and the National Urban League opposed tuition tax credits, as did celebrated black columnists Jesse Jackson, Carl Rowan, and Vernon Jar- ret. And black congressmen voted 10 to 1 against the bill that would have provided tax credits to hundreds of thousands of inner-city black parents.