More from James Forman on Jobs for Kids

 

Speak of James Forman, I'm sharing with permission his email to me, commenting on the Op Ed I sent around a few days ago about the lack of jobs for inner-city youth:

The lousy education kids are getting throughout the year is quite intimately connected with the lack of jobs--and it is not just lack of summer jobs by the way, it is also jobs throughout the school year.  For teens from the most depressed communities, like those I worked with as a public defender in DC and now at Maya [Angelou charter school], one of the real challenges with getting them to take advantage of even the mediocre educational offerings is getting them to see the relevance of all of this to their future.  It is hard for you to imagine what it is like to grow up in a community where so many people are unemployed--and where even the employed people have jobs that are so uninteresting and poorly paid that it is hard to convince anyone to aspire to them.  Even worse, kids who have no money really want a chance to earn a little, legally, during the evenings and the weekends, and when that isn't possible it pushes them further to the margins and drains them of hope.  Kids are not dumb, and all the "you can make it" chanting in the world, while very important, runs against the hard reality of what they see in front of them.  So, my point is, it really isn't even worth thinking about things in terms of what is worse, no jobs or crappy schools.  It is a seamless web.