Bloomberg/Soros Millions for Futile Social Engineering

[Geee]

American Thinker:




Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently announced that New York City would spend nearly $130 million dollars over three years to help the city' 315,000 young blacks and Hispanics who are undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed. Bloomberg himself would pay $30 million, George Soros another $30 million with the city financing the balance.

The ambitious endeavor begins with job recruitment centers where many black and Hispanics live while receiving retraining from probation officers to cut recidivism rates. Also included are fatherhood classes and closer tracking of academic performance. The outreach involves multiple city bureaucracies, will start in middle schools and include remedial math and literacy classes, plus $7.25 an hour internships. The performance of these young men will also determine decisions about school closings, a powerful incentive for teachers and administrators.
Meanwhile, the city's Probation Department would open five satellite probation offices in high-crime neighborhoods to provide vocational training plus yoga for anger management. Nine hundred paid mentors (of similar troubled backgrounds) will serve as role models for those on probation, in addition to city-paid jobs to clean parks or paint community centers. To top it all off, the city will try to reduce employment barriers by requesting managers not to ask about possible criminal records during the initial interview.

Nobody can deny that these 315,000 young African Americans and Hispanics deserve all the help they can get to find jobs and stay out of jail. Nevertheless, this enterprise is an expensive exercise in desperation. The $130 million could be better spent elsewhere. Two obstacles stand out. First, the paucity of past successful interventions; and, second, an unwillingness to confront the culture that surrounds these young men.

Efforts to uplift young black and Hispanic men began with the Great Society in the mid-1960s and the track record is dismal. Every measure in today's repertoire has been tried before and, as today's grim statistics indicate, has failed. If role models, make-work municipal jobs, fatherhood training, convenient vocational training and all the rest performed as promised, today's version would be unnecessary. Just read Charles Murray's Losing Ground (published in 1984), and note that Murray's pessimistic conclusions have been repeatedly confirmed. If Bloomberg, Soros and all their advisers possess some newly invented magic bullet cure, it is a well-kept secret.

Nor can the tribulations of these 315,000 youngsters be attributed to outside forces such as horrific economic conditions or racist discrimination. Millions of recent immigrants -- including countless non-whites -- often began moving up the ladder with imperfect English skills, limited educations and unfamiliarity with our culture. This $130 million program does not target recent arrivals from the Caribbean (and Africa) for good reason -- many will on their own take advantage of the opportunities available to everyone, including these "under-served" youngsters (for example, see here).