Bryant: Can school district replace fathers?

It’s painful sometimes to watch the Rochester School District try to fill the void left by absent fathers.

This week the district put out a call asking black and Latino men to come and cheer students at the district’s all-boys high school as they start their new school year. The volunteers will offer high fives and encouragement as the Leadership Academy boys walk from the bus to the front door.

The purpose of a school district is to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. It is not to remedy the economic, political and cultural maladies that have blasted a hole in the lower-class American family. But the district has to play the hand it has been dealt.

So do its kids, who by many measures are facing worse odds than you might expect. Earlier this summer, Superintendent Bolgen Vargas loaned me a copy of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. He and I will host a discussion of Harvard public policy professor Robert Putnam’s fascinating book on Sept. 30. I invite you to pick up a copy and join us.

Our Kids shows — in heartbreaking statistical detail — how much harder it has become for a child born at the bottom of the American ladder to climb upward. In much of 20th century, such children might have been weighted down by a metaphorical heavy backpack. Putnam uses a variety of measures to show that they now approach the ladder with a bowling ball shackled to each foot and a broken wrist.

For example, 50 years ago, most American families — rich and poor — consisted of a mother, father and their children. Sometime during the last century a two-tiered structure appeared. In it, children of college-educated upper- and middle-class parents are much more likely to grow up in a home with their mother and father. In homes with the least resources, fathers are more likely to be absent.

Economic stress has always strained families, writes Putnam, noting that 1.5 million men abandoned their wives during the Great Depression. However, he notes, “Unlike today, desperately poor, jobless men in the 1930s did not have kids outside of marriage whom they then largely ignored.”

People can debate the cause of this shift. There is no debating its effect. A large group of American children are being raised mainly by one parent who has minimal economic resources. A parent who must be both breadwinner and caregiver has much less of what Putnam calls “bandwidth” for the hard work of parenting. She (most of the time it is a she) has less time and energy for reading bedtime stories or enforcing rules. She has less money for enrichment activities. Her children enter school with fewer vocabulary words and basic skills.

Meanwhile, Putnam illustrates, social classes have been more isolated. In decades past, children of lesser means would have been more likely to share a neighborhood, school or church with more affluent people. They would have had more natural opportunities to meet and form relationships with adults who could have helped them in ways their own parents could not. Members of different social classes were more likely to marry, giving additional opportunities for family members of different classes to interact. Today children are more likely to find themselves confined to relationships with members of their own economic class. As a result, children whose parents lack advanced education have less opportunity for natural mentoring.

And so the school district has invited men to come to the Leadership Academy on the first day of school, in the hopes that some will decide to come back on a regular basis to help mentor some of the students. It’s a small step, but it may help some students who deserve more guidance from a caring adult.

Many other solutions to the growing opportunity gap are proposed in Our Kids. Superintendent Vargas and I will host a discussion of this book at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 30 in the newly renovated library of School 58, 200 University Ave. Please email me at ebryant@gannett.com if you might attend so I know how many cookies to bring.

If you are a man and you’d like to participate in the first day of school effort at Leadership Academy, contact RCSD volunteer coordinator Ricky Frazier at (585) 262-8489 or ricky.frazier@rcsdk12.org.

ebryant@gannett.com