Learning from Memphis: Lessons on Race, Poverty, and Saving City Schools
A Conversation with Marcus Pohlmann
Over the past few decades, when major industries moved out of many U.S. cities they left behind not only workers, but also millions of school-age children. For this article, Education Update spoke with Rhodes College political science professor Marcus Pohlmann about his new book, Opportunities Lost: Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools, which gives a socioeconomic history of Memphis, Tenn., and sheds light on the factors that have caused students in the district to struggle academically. Pohlmann also explains that the problems Memphis City Schools educators face resonate with teachers in other urban districts across the nation.
Q: Why are Memphis City Schools a good case study for the challenges facing urban America?
A: If you look toward the end of the book at the comparison of Memphis to many of the other city school systems in the larger cities in the country, you see a lot of comparable data. Inner city schools are facing pretty much the same problems throughout the country. They're serving high concentrations of low income, often primarily African American and Hispanic populations that, because of their income situation, bring to the classroom many additional teaching challenges. In inner cities, too, there's usually, as there was in Memphis, an out-migration of middle-income African Americans to [nearby counties], further isolating the most poor students in the city schools. Considering these common trends, I think Memphis is a pretty good bellwether of urban education challenges across the country.
Q: You note that the most significant difference between Memphis City Schools and the neighboring Shelby County Schools is the degree of poverty of students in these districts. What impact can poverty have on student achievement? What influence does the home environment have on academic achievement?
A: When children bring significant educational deficits to the classroom, they're going to be much more difficult to educate. That's one of the messages of the book, that this country has a choice: it can either provide education or it can be serious about educating—they're two very different things. If we're serious about educating, we're going to have to figure out a way to compensate for the educational enrichment these children are not receiving in the home. That doesn't just mean providing education to a mother or a father, because these kids bounce from residence to residence and there could be any number of people involved in raising these children. We have to be very creative and consider some of the, for lack of a better term, "more expensive" alternatives once they begin school if we're going to really compensate for the educational background children are not getting in the home.
Q: Why did you use Horatio Alger's popular rags-to-riches narratives as a frame for the ideas and realities discussed in your book?
A: For people who aren't living with poverty in the inner city, Alger's formula is something that's been fed to mainstream America as a possibility. We think this sort of thing is part of the American dream, and at the time that Alger was writing, there were more opportunities to pull yourself out of poverty through education. But in my first chapter, especially, I talk about how the current economic landscape in U.S. cities makes doing that more difficult and makes it more challenging to provide education opportunities for all children. No Child Left Behind is a terrific goal; we haven't begun to scratch the surface of what it would require to really accomplish this goal.
Q: Do you think people are still holding on to a rags-to-riches formula for inner-city schools?
A: I think there are some. It's a very cheap way out to say that people who drop out or people who don't achieve are just not working hard enough. Maybe I picked Horatio Alger as a way to sort of shock people out of that oversimplified notion that all it really requires is hard work. Some of the kids work very hard, but they are just bringing so little to school at the outset.
I'll give you an example of that. My friend's wife was a middle school counselor in the Memphis City Schools for years, and she would counsel kids who in middle school had never seen an adult get up and go to work. Never in their life had they ever seen anyone get up in the morning and go to work. To expect that child to somehow innately understand sacrifice, long-term planning, and so on is really asking a lot.
Q: In your book, you offer five "Rs" for improving the chances of inner-city students. (The five "Rs" are reasonable income, reforms, resolve, responsibility, and respect.) Why did you decide to focus the idea of reform so heavily on early childhood education?
A: Some children just literally don't have a chance from the minute they walk in the door at 5 years old. That's probably what struck me most with my research. When I first started doing this research about five years ago, all this empirical brain analysis wasn't as commonplace. As you read the studies that keep rolling in, so much of the brain formation has completed by age 3; add in language capacity and home environment instability, and by age 5 these kids are just fighting a huge uphill battle before we ever get them into public schools. One of the most important messages of the book is that we've got to reach back earlier. I was just at Douglas Head Start in Memphis, an early Head Start program that begins at 6 weeks of age—that's what we ought to be doing in the inner city. The five "Rs" are an attempt to suggest these are all things that need to be done and probably pursued simultaneously.
Q: Do you think the desegregation of the '70s represented an opportunity lost for Memphis City Schools?
A: Desegregation had to happen. It was separate but unequal—I don't question that. But two-way busing, as it was conducted in Memphis and other highly resistant cities like Boston, was a disaster. I think there was a chance for busing to work, if you did one-way busing, bused a reasonable number of low-income children to the wealthier schools and tried to integrate them in that way. Although there would have been some resistance, as you saw in Little Rock and other places, I think it was doable without setting back the Memphis City Schools as badly as the approach they ended up with.
Two-way busing was never realistic. Parents of middle-class kids were never going to let their children get on a bus and ride to a perceived more dangerous, lower-quality school. What was going to happen was they were going to run to the suburbs and private schools. There was an out for middle-income kids, and it was going to be taken. Once that was set in motion, the combination of racial animosity and class animosity and so on just exacerbated things, and Memphis City Schools, instead of being somewhat [racially] and socioeconomically diverse, turned almost entirely minority and much, much poorer, relatively overnight. Busing hit the Memphis City Schools like an atomic bomb.
Q: With No Child Left Behind up for reauthorization and a president who made signing the State Children's Health Insurance Program legislation one of his earliest acts of office, are you hopeful that some of your five "Rs" will be adopted in Memphis?
A: I really am. I'm encouraged by the appointment of Arne Duncan as secretary of education. He seems to understand the importance of early childhood education and seems also to put a lot of investment in charter schools. It's important to provide options for inner city families, but ideally, we would upgrade all schools so that we wouldn't have to run away from any of them, plucking the best students from their schools and moving them to better schools. I'm optimistic. A year ago, if you would have asked if I could envision the federal government investing 10 [dollars], let alone tens of billions of dollars in American education, I would have said, "No." We're at a juncture where, if the money is spent wisely, we could make a serious dent in this problem.
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