Food for Thought

Excerpted from The Street Stops Here: A year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, by Patrick J. McCloskey (pages 54-55):

"But the first hurdle is the basics, without which dire consequences are sadly predictable, as T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, illustrates at speaking engagements around the country. Fair recounts a chance meeting with two men in an airport bar on his way to an engagement. He learned that the two men worked for the Florida state prison system and were responsible for planning future prison needs. Fair asked them how they determine the number of prison cells a community will need in fifteen or twenty years. At first, the men evaded answering, but several drinks later, they confided that they looked at the fourth-grade reading and math scores on statewide tests. The number of students performing below standard, even this early in a child's life, follows a strict correlation with the number of future inmates. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates, Fair notes, are functionally illiterate high school dropouts. As a growing number of black leaders contend, Fair proclaims that education is the civil rights issue of the twenty-first century."

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