Response to the researcher of” Raising Kids in the United States Today- American Dream Research.” Flier Left attached to the Community Bulletin Board of the Flint Public Library.
Several days have passed and the researcher has not contacted me (by responding to my email) nor seems to be interested in my very successful homeschooled son. I could assume that the researcher is interested in the other stories about Flint, and I could assume the researcher is interested in collecting data of the despair and poverty in Flint to compare with the other set of data from Farmington Hills.
So why do I not let this pass? Why am I sensitive to the issue that the University of Michigan researcher does not want to know the life of a home-schooled teenager that is truly living the American dream? Because it matters, because Flint is more than the simplistic caricatures that has been written all along. Because Flint also has happy endings. Because Flint is tired of been the feeder of researchers and not the beneficiaries of solutions.
I have decided to write this open letter with my opinions which are on one side asking people to change the narrative of misery and on the other to bring light to the challenges we have and work tirelessly and honestly to find solutions.
Based on the information I have found in the world wide webb about the researcher, it appears that she has worked and written on policy and poverty and yet, everything seems very much paper pushing presentations on seminars and beurocratic work in non-profit organizations. Does the researcher understand poverty? At the intellectual level, probably she understands.
That tired me, because I am on the trenches trying to improve the lives of the working poor by renting to people in Flint which is an entire research on human behavior in itself while the bureaucratic machine of public universities like the University of Michigan Ann Arbor use us like animal labs.
As a personal background, I understand the pressure of universities deeply. I know the belly of the beast, for my family in Argentina is full of professors. I am a product of the University Lab School in Tucuman, Argentina while my father was one of the founders of the public television in my home town (which was part of the university system). I married a professor whose first was working in Georgia Tech and now in Flint. I know how universities functions and how the money is used to feed the monster.
But what is painful for me to see is that universities attract the most talent individuals in our society and dilute their talents in a race to write more papers and have more grants to do research that only goes to support the huge university infrastructure. In Flint, we need serious, honest, committed and relentless researchers to do meaningful work, because if no, poor and violent people in Flint get victimized one more time.
I can not stop this researcher from writing about Flint and yet, since my children have been born here I have become that voice that is asking for serious solutions about poverty and youth violence in our city Flint.
I am asking to stop the insanity of the creation of mediocre programs and work in the tedious implementation and egoless evaluation to see what works and what does not. To move from the collecting data and writing soft conclusion to rigorous experimentation that could bring some results.
When you live in a city where the majority of middle class has moved to the suburbs and when you had worked hard as the president of the Mott Park neighborhood Association (did it for three years), and now as a landlord for the working poor, and when you attend the countless meetings that are supposed to help your community but do not, you get the real picture. The incentives are on the wrong place. The incentives are not in solving the complexities of poverty or crime but in keeping feeding the beurocratic machine of an economy of crime and poverty.
In Flint, poverty is an industry that provides jobs to lawyers, jails officers, huge beurocratic institutions, and employees of foundations, university researchers and medical residents that come to Hurley Hospital ER to practice on the the bodies of poor African American Youth, and the list goes on and on ( I know how that residency business work because I was a volunteer Spanish interpreter for the Spanish speaking population at the maternal and child care department at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, GA).
In Flint, MI there is a disconnection between the problems and the solutions, making the solutions sometimes more problematic than the problems. And the disconnection is the solution of research’s purpose is to learn about poverty but not to change, eradicate of move people to the next social class. And so, for people like me that do not escape to the suburbs after a long day of work at the hospital, health department, jail, law offices is painful to see the double tragedy of poor people in a city as a small as Flint.
Few people care to ask the deep questions, the ones that will risk researchers their long career and tenure. The questions are why there is poverty in Flint? Why there is violence in Flint? What do we do that create this soup that produces such results? Why a city that has so many churches produce so much violence? Why a city that has one of the richest foundations in the world cannot help improve the situation of children in Flint in a consistent and meaningful way that can be measured? Why a city that has so many universities cannot help the illiterate in Flint that one that does not have a chance to go to such universities? Why community colleges have such low graduation levels, especially in the numbers of African American and Latinos?
Why is liberating and dangerous word because asking why will uncover ugly corners. And it will require a humble heart that observes without preconceptions- yes everybody has an understanding and judgment of what poverty is and should be.
To understand poverty this researcher has to do more than “in depth interviews of 70- low-income African –American residents of Camden, New Jersey.” It would be beneficial for this researcher to live next to poor families for a month or six months and have them as neighbors; may then, the researcher will see the things she cannot observe, and maybe, maybe the researcher will understand poverty a tiny bit more.
Why we as a society produce high numbers of drop out students and why as a society we produce high levels of crime in a particular population are complex inquires. It makes us participants of a more interconnected web. We are part of that mess too. not the ones looking for the top down.
Asking why is hard. And the answers would require changes to a lot of the present programs that are a complete failure. Those programs most tend to have a paternalistic approach of “we know better.” Head start is one of them (and my advisor at the University of Michigan who passed away several years ago was a researcher in the field), not because on paper the program is bad but the reality and the implementation is something completely different As the writer of Freakonomics, “Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner put it so well that children in poverty “Instead of spending the day with their own undereducated, overworked mother, the typical Head Start child spends the day with someone else’s undereducated, overworked mother.” (I had the opportunity to observe that- because I wanted my children to relate with children from other social groups and race so I signed them to SKIP program in our neighborhood. There, I observed countless times the under prepared, undereducated teachers not being able to answer even the simpler questions that curious four year old children ask- like the name of the estates on a map that was on the floor of the play ground of that school which the teachers never learned. Well intended instructors had “high knowledge deficits” (E.D. Hirsch Jr.- the Knowledge Deficit).
Have we asked the poor what they need? Have we? Have schools in Flint have asked the teenagers what they need to learn to find jobs when they graduate? No, we continue selling them the middle class high school degree that from some of the public schools in Flint have zero value despite that the teachers continue making a good salary while blaming the children for not learning.
Poor children in Flint have only two things “brains and time” and we are the ones that waist their hopes of using both over and over. And do not let me start with all the researchers of the University of Michigan School of Public Health that comes here to collect data after data, and the students of the University of Michigan School of Architecture and Urban Planning that come to do graduate research on “changing neighborhoods like Mott Park,” with results that were pathetically disappointing
And if I feel frustrated by the superficiality of the comments and conclusions from researchers how do you think the people that the researcher interviewed feel?
I know how is to use and abuse governmental money. I worked for an architectural company in Atlanta that would go to public housing and do surveys…the tenants in the public housing projects were so hopeful that we would do something. And yet, we were there and paid handsomely to count how many roaches were per bedroom, how many windows were broken, how many burners on the stove were not functioning…
Why are we trying to change poverty giving things to children instead of changing behavior of parents? Because addressing the choices that certain mothers do is taboo. My short experience with rentals could attest that if the single mother has higher expectations for their children, the children do better, and yet who will do a research on that? It is not politically correct, so, we will continue spending money under the light of useless research because it is easy than the kind of research is needed.
Poverty is a serious matter and should be treated like that, because life is unfair and if in the lottery of life a child are born in a family that is poor his challenges at his door steps will be forever.
The researcher seems to be interested in inequality and stratification, and I believe that if we have as a goal to move children out of poverty and treat them like intelligent human being with full potential the implementations at school will be completely different.
Very little things could improve inequality, very little modifications could have tremendous impact, in the life of children in Flint, but that again requires that we care.
For example, children/ in general teenagers of single parents families who come from chaotic backgrounds tend to have problems dealing with anger and conflict management (they have seen most of the time their role models/adults in their lives get angry and shout or hit when under stress or frustrated), so often they get into trouble in the schools. And what public schools do in Flint? They send the students with suspension to home; a home that does not have adult supervision. After several suspensions, these kids are fresh meet to drug dealers, and gang recruiters looking for kids that are bored and with no money. Soon these teenagers are feeders to a life of petty crime, bigger crime, jails and lawyers and judges and the cycle repeats again.
If we ask why, we could create solutions. These are the kids that need school the most. They need to know that adults really care. They need to know that we are here to helped them navigate difficult childhood experiences, but nobody wants to talk in a problem solving mode. We do not talk about teenagers killing teenagers and in the process destroying the fiber of society, one family at the time. But that is what is happing in Flint in the poorest sectors or our society.
Why nobody acknowledge that crime is a taboo subject in families in poverty, and that parents do not want talk about it with their children? Why is that police does not want to educate people in the community about graffiti and the number of gang groups that are in Flint? May be because control of information is job security? Why is that schools in Flint do not have a central data base and when children move from school to school parents and teachers have to start from Zero? Is it because there is no collaboration between charter schools and public schools?
Why is that we never publish in the Flint Journal all the great success of charter schools in Flint that have helped poor families to have the luxury of options, something that middle class does not seem to understand? Maybe because the Flint Journal favor union organized schools (one time when I was the president of the Mott Park neighborhood Association and the International Academy of Flint had been mentioned in the News Week Report as one of the best High Schools in the Country and was not mentioned in the Flint Journal, a group of African American teenagers boys complained to me…”they- the journal never writes anything positive about us in the newspaper.”
Why is that everybody can converse about poverty but nobody acknowledge that money and money earning capabilities is a taboo subject in USA? Why is that money and money literacy is not a subject in the curriculum of what to learn in elementary school, middle school and high school? Is because teachers are not good about managing money either? And why is never a discussion of the correlation between knowledge about money and money accumulation?
Why is that money or pay day offices are close to poor neighborhoods next to pond shops but not banks? And both are legitimate business that take tremendous advantage of poor people?(read please, Broke, USA. From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. How the Working Poor Became Big Business by Gary Rivlin).
And why is always more money in the form of grants to collect data (and feed researchers) than into implement solutions that have been successfully tried in other parts of the country like the Harlem Children Zone – http://hcz.org/.?
Why is that with all the billions spent in research there is very little empirical research about poverty? What will happen if children are allowed to discuss money issues in groups’ settings? Will that open the doors to feel free to express the shame they have to be treated like second class citizens because they do not have money? Could they come out with creative solutions better that the ones we design for them? What will happen if schools teach teenagers about entrepreneurial opportunities as part of school curriculum? Could that have an effect on their future? Could children instead of receiving free breakfast receive vouchers and have the opportunity themselves to buy the breakfast…will they have a different respect for money and not dump all the apples in the streets like they do now in front of the school on University Avenue?
If the researcher is interested in the children of Flint? She can go to the International Academy and take some samples there and compare them with another Charter school students like Grand Blanc Academy, Madison Academy or Way Academy located the Flint Cultural Center. The researcher can go to Hurley Hospital and find some families there. Go to Dollar Stores around town and try to find some families or Waltmart. Go to Landmark Food Centers – http://landmarkfoodcenter.com/ and try to talk to the owners and recruit families there. Read the Currier and learn about the black churches and try to recruit there too- http://www.cpsaflint.com/. Go to the Flint Farmer’s Market and try to recruit there. Go to the YMC in downtown and try to recruit there. And if the researcher is interested in the Latino population, she can go to the churches that cater to Latinos in town. Go to “Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church- http://ologflint.org/
The American Dream varies in Flint from area to area, for real state determine part of the destiny. The researcher can recruit families in the Dort Hwy Corridor, the Pierson Rd Corridor-http://www.imagineflint.com/Portals/tempflint/Subarea%20Plan%201%20-%20Pierson%20Road%20DRAFT%2005062014.pdf
The East Side Corridor-http://www.imagineflint.com/Portals/tempflint/Subarea%20Plan%206%20-%20Eastside%20DRAFT%2005192014.pdf
Or the researcher can go to the Miller Road area where people with influence in the daily activities of the city live. Their children go to the new Powers Catholic School -http://www.powerscatholic.org/
But to do a meaningful research, about poverty and the American Dream, the researcher needs to dare to be different.
If the researcher wants to know what people in Flint thinks about the researchers that come to “study Flint,” she could read the comments of these three articles about the University corridor on MLive-1) http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/02/crime_hot_spots_identified_alo.html; 2) http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/03/university_avenue_grant_worker.html, 3) http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/02/university_avenue_corridor_gra.html
But there are some pockets of hope and like the author David Kord Murray and his book Borrowing Brilliance, it would be valuable for the researcher to learn what Esther Duffo is doing about povertyhttp://economics.mit.edu/faculty/eduflo/publications.-
Finally, the American Dream means different things to different people and while upper mobility is one of the marks of the American Dream it is also freedom to choose and for homeschoolers, there is not better country than United States where a minority group like African American are homeschooling in bigger numbers. Why? Because in United States- you can- http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/the-rise-of-homeschooling-among-black-families/385543/
FlintMichiganchangingneighborhoodspovertyandcrime 