Thora Institute: December 2007

12/24/2007

A Sick System

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Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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[A Draft of an op-ed submitted to the New Haven Register.]

Prenatal health care is declining in Connecticut. According to data from the Department of Public Health, the percent of white mothers who failed to receive adequate prenatal care increased from 10 percent to 16 percent between 2000 and 2004 (the date of the most recent data available). The situation was worse for blacks. More than a quarter of black mothers failed to receive adequate prenatal care in 2004, up 8 percentage points from 2000. Hispanic mothers were in a somewhat similar condition to black mothers. More than a quarter of Latina mothers did not receive adequate prenatal care in 2004, up 5 percentage points from 2000.

I take the decline in prenatal care in Connecticut as yet another sign that our health care system is not well. A number of recent reports illustrate this fact. I was alerted to the decline in adequate prenatal care by the Connecticut NAACP’s “A Health Status Report on African Americans in Connecticut” issued this year.

The NAACP report also examined the growing cost of preventable hospitalizations. People without routine medical care tend to end up being rushed by ambulance to emergency rooms when their health care needs are critical. In many cases, these hospitalizations could have been prevented had the patient received routine health care.

In 2000, the cost of preventable hospitalizations was $611 million. By 2004, it had increased 46 percent to $893 million. It is estimated that it will exceed $1.1 billion in 2008. Again, our health care system is not well.

The national picture is quite similar. Large numbers of Americans are unable to obtain needed health care because of the cost. A survey conducted this year by the Rockefeller Foundation found that 17 percent of whites, 20 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics were unable to see a doctor because of the cost. Eight percent of whites and blacks and 13 percent of Hispanics were unable to take a child to the doctor because of the cost. Twenty percent of all Americans have had to dip into their savings or retirement accounts to pay for medical expenses. Unless our health care system receives a complete overhaul, it seems likely that these numbers will increase.

Many people with health insurance are filled with health care worries. About 40 percent of Americans with health care are worried that they will lose coverage in the near future. The number jumps to almost 60 percent for Hispanics. About half of all people with health care are worried that they might not be able to afford a major hospital stay. Again, for Latinos with health care, it is nearly 60 percent.

What are our options for dealing with an ailing health care system? It seems that if we were to adopt the health care system of just about any other Western developed nation, we would be better off. A recent report by the Commonwealth Fund compares the health care system of the United States with that of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The U.S. had the lowest overall ranking.

Although the U.S. ranked last, it actually has the highest health care spending per capita. The United Kingdom achieved its top spot by spending less than half of what we do per capita.

Of course, the U.S. will not adopt the health care policy of any other country whole cloth; and we should not. But I have problems with any politician who acts as if there are not important lessons that the U.S. can learn from countries like the United Kingdom that have provided quality health care to all of its citizens at a relatively low cost. Any politician who cavalierly dismisses the practices of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom as “socialized medicine” simply cannot be thinking about the millions of Americans without health care or even those with health care who are worried that they will not be able to afford it next year.

Not many issues in politics are life and death issues. This one is. Do we have politicians capable enough to take on the challenge of substantive health care reform? Let’s hope so.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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12/17/2007

A Small Step Forward in Criminal Justice Reform

Just One Small Step, Many Bigger Ones are Needed

Excerpts from Adam Liptak, "Whittling Away, but Leaving a Gap," New York Times, December 17, 2007

The United States justice system remains, by international standards at least, exceptionally punitive. And nothing that happened last week will change that.

Unless Congress acts, many thousands of defendants will continue to face vastly different sentences for possessing and selling different types of the same thing.

Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing who was until recently a federal trial judge, said the focus on the sentencing guidelines was in some ways a distraction.

"The mandatory minimums are so draconian," he said. "I'm a believer in a good guidelines system. And I would much rather trade a much tougher guidelines system and get rid of mandatory minimums."

The mandatory minimum sentence for crimes involving five grams of crack--a little more than a sugar packet--remains five years. For powder, the five-year mandatory sentence does not kick in until 500 grams, or more than a pound.

Fifty grams of crack equals a guaranteed 10 years. It takes five kilograms of powder to mandate the same sentence. Five kilos is a lot of cocaine.

Mere possession of a relatively small quantity of crack means a five-year sentence. Possessing five grams of powder cocaine usually results in probation, said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.

Indeed, the maximum sentence for simple possession of any drug but crack, including powder cocaine and heroin, is one year.

Eighty-five percent of people convicted of crack offenses are black.

In summary, the drug most associated with blacks receives the harshest punishment. Somebody ask Juan Williams why is that.

From Black Directions vol. 2, no. 5

Comparing Constructive and Destructive Crime Prevention
High-Quality Pre-Kindergarten vs. Incarceration

On all measures, high-quality pre-kindergarten is a better crime prevention policy than incarceration. Civil rights activists must force elected officials to support constructive crime prevention.

[click on image below for a better view]

See “What’s Wrong with Incarceration” in this issue of Black Directions for a discussion of these points.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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12/10/2007

Tough Questions for the Black-Cultural-Crisis Pundits

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[Find out The Truth about Black Students.]
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[Below is a statement submitted to Blacknews.com.]

Pundits have been claiming that black America is in a cultural crisis for decades. As the evidence for these claims weakens, the volume has risen. Instead of correcting the pundits’ factual errors and challenging their flawed reasoning, the media have handed the pundits the microphone and stepped out of the way. Below are just five of the questions journalists have failed to ask.

1. A Poverty Question for Mr. Pundit
Census Bureau data indicates that the strong economy of the 1990s led to a nearly 30 percent decline in the black poverty rate. This decline was the biggest since the 1960s. Some see this as evidence that when blacks have the opportunity to leave poverty, they take it. Why, immediately after this historic decline in black poverty, have you been claiming that bad values prevent black poverty from declining?

2. A Crime Question for Mr. Pundit
The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the violent crime rate for blacks declined by 67 percent between 1994 and 2004. During the 1960s, violent crime increased. Why do you claim that blacks today have bad values relative to the 1960s when in the 1960s there was a large increase in violent crime and recently there has been a large decline?

3. An Education Question for Mr. Pundit
Several surveys show that black students value education as least as much as white students do. One can look at the National Education Longitudinal Study, the education questions in the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation, and Public Agenda’s Reality Check 2006 survey to name a few. The long-term trends tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that black standardized test scores have increased significantly since the 1970s. The Digest of Education statistics shows that the number of blacks receiving bachelor’s degrees have increased by more than 50 percent since 1995.

In spite of (1) attitudinal surveys, (2) test-score trends, and (3) college completion trends showing that black students do value education, you and other pundits continue to condemn black students. What specifically do you see as the flaws in each of the three types of research showing that black students do, in fact, value education?

4. Another Education Question for Mr. Pundit
Current educational research points to a combination of socioeconomic disadvantage and inferior quality education as being responsible for the black-white test-score gap. Regardless of race, students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to do worse in school than students of higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Blacks on average are of lower socioeconomic status than whites.

Black students face the additional disadvantage of attending schools of lower quality than white students. Educational researchers have recently been documenting the lower teacher quality in black schools relative to white schools, for example.

What specifically do you see as the flaws in the research showing that socioeconomic disadvantage and inferior schooling are primarily responsible for the test-score gap?

5. A Rap Question for Mr. Pundit
The majority of rap consumers are not black. Rap scholars state that gangsta rap receives most of its support from young white men. Do you think that gangsta rap reveals the values of the current generation of young white men? Do you think gangsta rap reveals the values of the current generation of young black men?

These are just a small sample of the questions the black-cultural-crisis pundits are not being asked. Is there any journalist out there willing to do the research and fact checking to ask the tough questions?

Sociologist Algernon Austin Offers His Assistance

“In less than 15 minutes, I can show any journalist that the black-cultural-crisis claims are false,” states Dr. Algernon Austin author of “Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals Are Failing Black America.” “I am willing to spend a few minutes with any journalist interested in learning the truth about black America, to the extent that my schedule allows,” he adds. Dr. Austin states that a few minutes examining mainly U.S. government data websites will show that the cultural crisis claims are based on faulty assumptions, bad data analysis and racial stereotypes. Dr. Austin can be reached by e-mail via contact@thorainstitute.com.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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12/03/2007

Almost a Social Panacea: High-Quality Pre-K

Although high-achieving lower-income schoolchildren can be counted in the millions, there should be many more. Specifically, we find that only 28 percent of top-quartile achievers in first grade come from families in America’s lower economic half, while 72 percent come from the top economic half. This finding suggests that disparities at the high end of achievement begin before children enter elementary school, a conclusion consistent with an emerging body of research on the effects that inferior early-childhood education has on school readiness of lower-income children.

Evidence suggests that lower-income children have inadequate access to the high-quality preschool programs that can significantly increase academic ability, cognitive development, social adjustment, and professional achievement.

Joshus S. Wyner, John M. Bridgeland and John J. DiIulio, Jr., Achievement Trap: How America is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, 2007.

Barnett and Belfield point out that preschool programs raise academic skills on average, but do not appear to have notably different effects for different groups of children, and so do not strongly enhance social mobility. In such areas as crime, welfare, and teen parenting, however, preschool seems more able to break links between parental behaviors and child outcomes.

Increased investment in preschool, conclude Barnett and Belfield, could raise social mobility. Program expansions targeted to disadvantaged children would help them move up the ladder, as would a more universal set of policies from which disadvantaged children gained disproportionately. Increasing the educational effectiveness of early childhood programs would provide for greater gains in social mobility than increasing participation rates alone.

Summary, W. Steven Barnett and Clive R. Belfield, “Early Childhood Development and Social Mobility,” The Future of Children, vol. 16, no. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 73-98.

High-quality pre-kindergarten is the closest thing to a social panacea there is. Not only does it lead to high educational outcomes, it reduces the likelihood of criminal behavior, teen pregnancy and increases the likelihood of college graduation. It does not, however, end anti-black discrimination in the labor market and elsewhere. We need social activism for that problem.

Head Start should not be confused with high-quality pre-kindergarten. Head Start is not high-quality. It is low quality. The Department of Health and Human Services which administers Head Start has admitted as much. The good news is that our elected officials have done the right thing and are increasing the teacher qualifications for Head Start.

Past research has shown that while Head Start is not high quality pre-kindergarten, the Head Start that black students receive is of particularly low quality. In the article cited above, Barnett and Belfield, show that black students receive fewer educational gains from Head Start than do white students (p. 84).

This issue with Head Start is really just a special case of the larger issue of teacher quality. Black students at all levels attend schools with lower teacher quality than white students. People concerned about black America need to continue to push to see that the quality of black education improves from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

In the 1950s and 1960s, black leaders targeted the inferior education that black students receive as a major civil rights issue. Current research still identifies blacks as receiving inferior education and still points to this inferior education as a major factor in black students’ lower educational outcomes. The current generation of black leaders, however, rather than condemn the fact that blacks still receive an inferior education increasingly spend their time condemning black students based on false racial stereotypes.

It’s time for some new black leaders.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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