In Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed, he recounts a conversation with Elizabeth Dozier, the principal of Christian Fenger High School in Chicago.

When we spoke . . . Dozier said her thinking about schools had been changed by her time at Fenger. “I used to always think that if a school wasn’t performing, that it was strictly because there was a bad principal, or there were bad teachers,” she explained. “But the reality is that at Fenger, we’re a neighborhood school, so we’re just a reflection of the community. And you can’t expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what’s happening in the community.” (p5)

That is a wise insight. If you listen to the public dialogue about the education crisis and the achievement gap, the tacit assumption underneath much of it is that the school is the exclusive locus of education (and therefore the problem to be solved).

It is not. The school is vitally important, but it is primarily a reflection of the community. And therefore any attempt to address the needs of the school must address the needs of the community.

Tough and Dozier continued their discussion of the adversities that children in the community face.

A quarter of the female students were either pregnant or already teenage mothers, [Dozier] said. And when I asked her to estimate how many of her students lived with both biological parents, a quizzical look came over her face. “I can’t think of one,” she replied. (ibid)

Zero percent. Statistically that might be inaccurate. Despite the fact that Dozier couldn’t think of a single student, surely there was at least one in her school. How many children live not only with both biological parents, but with both biological parents who are married and were married at the time he or she was born? That might just be a statistical zero at Fenger.

What’s Going On in the Community
This is the elephant in the room that no one seems to have the courage to address publicly (unless it is finger wagging). What is going on in this community, and in virtually every community of endemic poverty in the United States is the devastation of the family. Since the family is the primary locus of cultural transmission and character formation, the devastation of the family is the demolition of the community, and the culture.

Any serious, courageous attempt to combat cyclical poverty must not only acknowledge this, but ardently seek to undo it. That means having the courage to say emphatically, “This is not the way things ought to be,” and “Because this is not the way things ought to be, we are willing to walk with those dying in it and call their children to lifelong, chaste marital faithfulness.”

The Other Zero Percent
I know almost no one who has the courage and integrity to boldly make both of those statements and live them out. It is that hard. It is like committing to live with the maimed in a mine field while slowly and painstakingly marking, disarming, and removing the land mines. That is the measure of the virtue required to serve and renew a shattered community.