JOHN MCWHORTER COMMENTARY: Fighting Words In Education Crowds

The moderate-liberal commentator and former linguistics professor argues that Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, nor Sen. John McCain has had a whole lot to say about education during their campaigns: "Vouchers and No Child Left Behind have not yielded really big news. There's a war and a teetering economy to discuss. But it's also because in some quarters, the longer school day is fighting words. Nobody wants to touch this third rail when the issue is not as screamingly urgent as warfare, an impending recession, or an attack ad. But once we've settled on two nominees, I'm going to be waiting to see which one of them really wants to take on the forces united against a policy that could help public school students come out actually knowing some things. It can be quaint reading of Congressional debates over instituting what we now know as Social Security, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and other aspects of our safety net. Quite a few were afraid such 'handouts' threatened socialism. Seventy years from now, ambivalence over the extension of the public school day will look similar. Despite Knowledge is Power Program and charter schools working wonders with the longer school day, Concerned Folk grouse over whether it's 'fair' to give more attention to disadvantaged urban students. Meanwhile, many teachers balk at the idea of putting in the extra work."

Mr. McWhorter continues his commentary: "One wonders whether people of this stripe truly understand what barriers poor kids face to learning how to read in a truly functional way. In countless American communities, flyers are routinely full of major misspellings, more than a few are only fitfully comfortable with e-mail, and few read newspapers above the tabloid level. Life is fundamentally oral. Students from places like this — which include Appalachia and the rural white South as much as black and brown inner cities — get next to no reinforcement from home life in acquiring comfort with the written word. Eternally dismal reading scores make it clear that a school day ending at 3 p.m. is not alleviating the problem. We have become sadly familiar with every second black 8th grader reading below basic level."

And more: "Direct questions as regular interaction are largely an epiphenomenon of the printed page. Most humans on earth lead fundamentally oral lives in the linguistic sense, and need to adjust to direct questions. Middle class American kids inhale them at the kitchen table. Poor kids learn how to deal with them in school, and it takes practice. One objection is that supposedly, in the old days even poor kids just sat down in school and learned what they needed to know. But the grandparents who recount this were among the sliver of poor kids who even made it through school. A century ago, only 14% of native-born American kids even made it to high school, and more to the point, only 2% of Italian and Polish immigrant kids did....Today, however, even low-skill service jobs require a basic comfort with the written word. A school day that ends at 3 p.m., in the America that we live in, isn't enough to give that to people from bookless homes whose parents are unsure how to make the system work for their kids. So far, on the longer school day, Mr. McCain is a question mark, Mrs. Clinton approves but has no actual plan, and Mr Obama supports it only for problem kids. This isn't good enough – let's see which of them will offer more."