St. Louis CofCC Blog

USA Today:

Programs for urban blacks lauded

(snip)

The report, released today by the Eisenhower Foundation, a policy group formed by a former Kerner Commission member and former staff members, makes recommendations:

•Increase funding for national programs such as Head Start, which promotes early childhood education; Safe Haven and Quantum Opportunities, which offer after-school tutoring and mentoring; and the Gemeinschaft Home, a residential program in Harrisonburg that helps inmates make the transition from prison.

Head Start seems to be successful, but it’s only because black children receive it in a time in their lives when their average intellectual development is higher than that of whites, because black babies and children tend to mature more quickly than whites.  But once they do, they level off and fall behind whites as a measure of central tendency through the late single-digit years and the teenage years.

•Raise the federal minimum wage from the current $5.85 an hour.

So, blacks are only worth the minimum wage?  Even I don’t agree with that.

•Create a federal Employment Training and Job Creation Act.

Ever hear of CETA?  That Federal boondoggle of affirmative action make-work was dispatched in the Reagan era.

The report does not put a price tag on its proposals.

Of course.  Nothing is too dear for our diverse population.

“We know what works,” says Alan Curtis, the foundation’s president, who wrote the report. “It’s a matter of having the political will to do it.”

I agree.  I know what works, and that it’s simply a matter of having the political will to do it.  But what does that have to do with anything he is proposing?

The report finds that from 1980 through 2000, three times as many black men went to prison as went to college. In 2000, half of the 800,000 black men in prison did not have the literacy skills needed in the job market.

The solution is easy — just transfer those black men from prison to Harvard.