Send School Children (Back) to Africa
Here’s an idea. Take your poor, urban, at-risk schoolchildren and send them to boarding school in Ghana. Because, you know, the whole Liberia experiment worked out so well, why not try it again!
The proposal comes from Indiana University Law professor, Kevin Brown. Brown is a smart guy, he has a law degree from Yale. That makes his thought bubble particularly dangerous because he knows how to make this plan sound reasonable:
A group of Indiana University professors is preparing to ask inner-city parents across Indiana to do just that: Ship their kids to a boarding school that they plan to launch with promises of a good education — in Ghana.
Moving to Western Africa, the professors say, could be just what’s needed for some children at risk of getting caught up in gangs or violence. They would see the world, get away from bad influences and be in a controlled setting focused on academics.
I’ll wait while everybody finishes singing Kum Bay Ya before I explain the flaws.
Here’s how the plan will work. Private donations will pay for the construction of a $4 million school/compound in Ghana. The school will cover grades 6 – 12 at no additional cost to the taxpayers. Instead, Indiana will simply divert the roughly $10,000 it spends per student a year to pay for the students locked up abroad. The school would be staffed by Indiana teachers, teaching to Indiana standards:
“The core idea is to pull kids out of an environment where they cannot thrive,” said Brown, an IU law professor, “and put them in one where they can.”
Well that is laudable. Unless of course, you happen to be Ghanaian. Then it’s horribly insulting. Think about it from the perspective of a Ghanaian teenager. You’re doing well, getting an education, staying away from crime and drugs. You don’t have the American or European economic advantages you’ve heard about, but your country isn’t in the crapper either. Thomas Friedman has a hard on for your internet access. You’re making it. And now here come the Americans, and they are going to drop $4 million on a shiny new school — only you can’t go. Nope, that brand new institution of learning is exclusively for American students; students who can’t get their act together in their own country and are coming to yours to feel better about themselves.
Seriously, how do Ghanaians feel about quotes like this:
Wendell E. Stewart, a Tech High School graduate who later traveled to Ghana as part of an IU summer program, said the effort to sort through the challenges will be worth it for the students from the neighborhoods he grew up in near 38th Street and Keystone Avenue.
“It would completely change their socioeconomic status,” he said. “Just break the cycle. Some people, their parents were born in this neighborhood, their grandparents were born in this neighborhood, and now they’re living in the same house their parents lived in.”
In Ghana, Stewart said, Ghanaians envied the education he and his IU classmates had received in American public schools.
Let me translate that quote: “Some Ghanaians envy the American schools. Let’s make sure we put one right in their freaking country and then don’t allow them to learn there. That’ll be a real hoot. No, I couldn’t possibly eat anymore, please throw the rest away.”
I understand the impulse to raise inner city youths up on the socioeconomic ladder, but the way to do that is not to scour the globe looking for a lower rung these kids can point and laugh at.
Alright, I can already hear the chorus of American educators that spend their lives trying to help poor American kids saying “what do I care if this idea offends some people from Ghana?” That’s not a very “global” approach, but it’s a point.
Unfortunately for American students that might benefit from this program, throwing up a boarding compound in Ghana sounds like an excellent end-run around legal protections American students enjoy.
I’d be worried about whether the school will be staffed by “Indiana teachers” or “Hoosier Missionaries.” I’d be worried that in a foreign country it would be a lot easier shove a Bible in front of a public student’s face — a Bible purchased with taxpayer money — than it is at Pike high school.
And we haven’t even gotten into the issue of corporal punishment. You realize that in a lot of countries, there is an awful lot of beatings at all-boys boarding schools? Now, it could be that some of these kids need a good beating. But we’ve decided that American children can only be physically punished by American parents — absentee though they may be.
Plus, there are other interesting educational ideas that can implemented right here. Check out Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer’s plan to pay the little people.
Sending an at-risk child to another country to get his ass kicked by Jesus might work. But I don’t think we can spend American tax dollars on the endeavor.
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Ludicrous! This seems insulting to everyone involved. There is a huge difference between cultural exchange among established and distinguished institutions of learning and setting up a well-funded reformatory that places at-risk kids 5,000 miles from their families. Are we arguing that their parents are so incompetent/neglectful/such a bad influence that responsibility for their care should be surrendered completely to the public schools?
I would have no problem with an exchange program that allowed the best and brightest student from one nation to switch places with other thriving children half way across the world. Taking a child with a strong foundation of achievement out of his or her comfort zone and exposing them to a new culture will probably broaden his or her horizons– absent this foundation, I imagine you run the risk of just traumatizing them. Exiling failing kids on the theory that their self esteem will be boosted by looking down on kids living in a less economically developed nation? That’s just sick.
Are these kids failing solely because they’re currently being exposed to guns and drugs that don’t exist in Ghana? Or are they failing at least partially because of the very educational system (even one geared toward “Indiana educational standards”) that they are proposing be replicated in Ghana?
My guess is that there are some great schools in Ghana, and some terrible ones, each very differently run than the average American public school. It doesn’t sound like the intent here is to adopt the best parts of the Ghanaian educational system to “enrich the experience” of these American children. If the objective is to expose kids to a “different culture” how is that going to be achieved if schools are set up using the American model and enrollment is limited to American children?
For that matter, what’s in it for Ghana, and its children? The potential to look on as American kids (who may actually be further behind them academically) access the superior resources that their comparatively superior buying power affords them, before the American kids go on to compete in the American economy (from which these Ghanaian students are also excluded)? This plan at once “dumps” problem kids way, way out of earshot and insults and exploits their potential hosts. Don’t even get me started on the legal liability here, the cultural message these essentially segregated schools would send or the selection of an African nation to send these (predominantly black) kids to—over say India, or Portugal or rural Indiana for that matter.
Outrageous.
Wow. That is a comment! I’ve actually lived in Indianapolis (for 13 months and nine days, but whose counting?) You are absolutely right that the same “taking these kids out of a bad situation” effect could be had if they were sent to French Lick (home of Larry Bird, of course) as Ghana. So clearly there is some kind of “send the black kids to Africa” upside they are looking for. Obviously I agree that such an upside, if it exists, is pretty insulting to people from Ghana.
But, you also ask “Are we arguing that their parents are so incompetent/neglectful/such a bad influence that responsibility for their care should be surrendered completely to the public schools?” I don’t think they are “arguing” that so much as they are acknowledging the obvious. Sadly, behind most at-risk kids, you’ll find parents (sorry: “a parent) that is unable or unwilling to fulfill their responsibilities. Brown essentially wants to get these kids as far away from their families as possible. Hence all the “breaking the cycle” stuff.
Again, I don’t see why this couldn’t be accomplished in southern Indiana. But then again, *I* don’t want to be the one to go to the town hall meeting to inform those people that the state is sending a bunch of poor black youths to their community.
In response to another comment. See in context »Yes, apologies, I got a little riled up about this
There’s so much to get riled up about though.
It’s not just insulting to the kids themselves and to the entire nation of Ghana, it is also essentially the government offering (or insisting, I’m not sure which) to functionally revoke and assume parental rights. It may well be rotten parenting that is leading some kids astray, but why in this case does it seem acceptable for parents to relinquish–and the government to assume–what are basically parental rights and responsibilities?
“But we’ve decided that American children can only be physically punished by American parents — absentee though they may be.”
This is incorrect. The people of Indiana and 21 other states allow corporal punishment in public schools. I realize it was not the main point of your post, but there is no federal law against school administrators physically punishing American children. Laws governing corporal punishment, be it by schools, parents, or anyone else, remain largely the province of the states.
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Indiana teachers are now protected from frivolous lawsuits filed over student-discipline disputes under the state’s new teacher-protection law. Now, if a teacher is sued for disciplining a student, they will have stronger legal protections, and can be represented in court by the Indiana Attorney General’s Office. With this new law, Indiana now has the toughest legislation in the Nation to protect their teachers from frivolous lawsuits. Indiana is one of the remaining 20 states where Physical/Corporal Punishment of Children in SCHOOLS is legal and practiced.
The only group of people in the U.S. still legally subjected to Physical/Corporal Punishment in the 21st Century are children in schools in 20 states. It is ILLEGAL for school employees to hit children with WOODEN PADDLES to punish in schools in 30 states.
At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.”
The TRUTH is that school children are treated differently in our great nation based on where they live. A middle school student in Texas DIED by having his chest crushed when his teacher sat on him to restrain him, a Texas high school student suffered deep bruising and welts to his lower back, buttocks and back of his legs when he received 21 “licks” with a wooden canoe paddle, which broke during the beating and had to be taped to continue the beating, a 9-year old Georgia 3rd grader suffered deep bruising injuries when he was paddled with a WOODEN PADDLE 3 TIMES IN ONE DAY (Decatur Co., GA affirmed Corporal Punishment Policy 9/17/09 for school children) and a Publicly Funded Charter School in Memphis, Tennessee physically punishes middle/high school boys and GIRLS weekly during a ceremony called “Chapel” by hitting them with wooden paddles and/or whipping their hands with leather straps IN FRONT OF ALL THE OTHER STUDENTS AS A DETERRENT to publicly induce shame, humiliation and fear! The school employees in the above actions have LEGAL IMMUNITY and are STILL paid by our tax-dollars to be ENTRUSTED with the care and education of our children!
A recent news headline reads, “Nearly 60,000 spankings in Miss. schools last year.” “Ouch! For the second time in a month, a school district in Leflore County has been hit with a $500,000 (each) lawsuit from a student alleging injuries from a paddling. It was reported that a state legal adviser, who told Bristol, Tennessee Director of Schools Gary Lilly that while school principals who paddled students were legally protected from allegations of assault, they were not immune from accusations of inappropriate or improper touching.
School boards are asking for trouble to sanction a practice that is intended to inflict pain.
Make no mistake: beating schoolchildren on their pelvic area with a wooden board causes more problems than it corrects — if it corrects any at all. Teacher-training programs do not include instruction in the “correct method” for hitting students. Zero tolerance for weapons and violence is the standard that should apply to everyone in educational settings. Teachers included
What corporal punishment does accomplish is to degrade the teaching profession, drive good people away, and make the teaching field a safe haven for the dangerously unfit. Its net effect on schools is a negative one. The more that schools indulge in paddling, the higher the dropout rate, along with all the social ills that follow, e.g., gang activity, addiction, mental health problems, unemployment, etc.
The time is long over due for our lawmakers and education policy makers to apply the zero-tolerance rule universally. When paddlers complain, as some inevitably will, they should be advised to look beyond their classroom walls and see how schoolchildren are managed violence free throughout the civilized world. They should look and learn from the 30 states where corporal punishment in schools is forbidden by law. If they can’t learn, they can’t teach.
U.S. Congress is currently holding hearings on Abusive and DEADLY practices in SCHOOLS and MUST ABOLISH Physical/Corporal Punishment Nationwide of ALL Children in ALL Schools, The Cost is $0.
I am one of the Co-Chairs of the proposal. I should note that one of the members of the Founding Committee is a former justice of Ghana’s Supreme Court. Another one is the former governmental official in charge of approving all private schools in Ghana. A third member is a former professor at the University of Ghana and personal friends of current President of Ghana. The group also includes 3 professors from the Indiana University’s School of Education, 2 from the IU business school and one who is a former professor of philosophy at Howard.
The proposal is to create the school. We would construct the facilities. The main classroom teachers would be licensed in the state of Indiana and the curriculum would be the same as what is taught in Indiana schools. However, there would also be courses on Ghanaian history, language and culture.
America has a 200 year tradition of operating elite boarding schools. The problem, however, with public boarding schools is the cost. The facilities cost 25 million to build and the annual operating costs are $35,000 per student. This school would provide the students to attend the chance to have that elite boarding school experience at a cost that is no more than what public schools are paying right now. In addition, the students would have a great international educational experience.