Success Academy in the Bronx has a 90% poverty rate yet has reached a 96% proficiency rate in reading.
The veteran grassroots activist Bob Woodson has long argued that policymakers would do better to spend less time focused on the social pathology in low-income communities and more on people in those same communities who have beaten the odds.
“If we see that 70% of households are raising children out of wedlock, that means 30% are not,” Mr. Woodson once told me. “We want to know what the 30% are doing right. How are they raising kids who aren’t dropping out of school or on drugs or in jail?” His advice? “Seek them out—we call them the antibodies of the community—and put a microphone on them, and say, ‘Tell us how you did this.’ ”
Our public school system can likewise seem indifferent toward identifying, studying and replicating successful education models. Everyone knows that there are too many substandard K-12 schools in America. A federal assessment released last year found that only about a third of high-school seniors are prepared to handle college-level reading and math. American youngsters are also far from the top performers on international tests. Students from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Canada and elsewhere have consistently outscored their U.S. counterparts in math, reading and science.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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