The black students I went to law school with did not have rudimentary skills at all. I went to Tulane, so lower standards there were still much higher than state schools.
The brightest black student in my first year class transferred to Harvard at the end of first year, full scholarship. The more selective law schools compete really hard for the brightest black students.
I understand that getting a good elementary school education is hard in some school districts, e.g., the District of Columbia.
It may be hard now to tease out which came first, poverty or lack of education but there is no doubt that each causes the other - lack of education causes poverty, and poverty causes lack of education.
But when I was in elementary school, junior high and of high school, our schools were still segregated. I graduated in 1970 from Broadmoor High School and it was still segregated even then! The principle flew the Confederate flag on the school flagpole HIGHER than the American flag. He was very resistant to integration -- the other high schools in Baton Rouge were integrated several years earlier, but he fought it.
But I did go to school for one year with black students, at Baton Rouge High, and they were a mixed bag, pretty much like the white students, some good students, some not so good. This was a middle class school district, before bussing.
Lower class neighborhoods had worse schools and worse students. Which came first? I think the worse schools did. It takes a really good school to make up for a bad home life.
I just got off the phone with a client, who is trying to get out of back due child support for a child that isn't his. They recently (few years ago) came out with paternity tests that don't require testing the mother's blood.
He was able to have future child support payments cancelled on his own but finally decided he needed a lawyer to get the past due support cancelled -- it's not easy and sometimes not possible.
In his case, the difficulty is tracking down the mother, who officially has vanished, although she is able to get her welfare checks and food stamps somehow, and the grandmother, who also officially doesn't live at the address that she gets her welfare checks at. The grandmother gets welfare checks for the child, who hasn't lived with her for years.
The child dropped out in the seventh grade and just lives wherever. She even stayed with my client for a while, which is how he was finally able to get her to the testing lab for the paternity test. (No, he didn't have visitation with her or take any interest in her at all.)
It would surprise me very much if that child had good writing and math skills, growing up that way. |
