Grassroots community groups in Néw Orleans, Newark, and Chicago filed complaints of violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the Justice Department and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. They seek an investigation of racially discriminatory school closings in their communities.
They wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary Arne Duncan:
“Journey for Justice is a coalition of grassroots organizations in twenty-two cities across the country. The coalition has come together because, across our communities, education “reformers” and privatizers are targeting neighborhood schools filled with children of color, and leaving behind devastation. By stealth, seizure, and sabotage, these corporate profiteers are closing and privatizing our schools, keeping public education for children of color, not only separate, not only unequal, but increasingly not public at all.
“Adding insult to injury, the perpetrators of this injustice have cloaked themselves in the language of the Civil Rights Movement. But too many of the charter and privately-managed schools that have multiplied as replacements for our beloved neighborhood schools are test prep mills that promote prison-like environments, and seem to be geared at keeping young people of color controlled, undereducated, and dehumanized. Children of color are not collateral damage. Our communities are not collateral damage.
“Thus, we stand in solidarity, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in Chicago, Coalition for Community Schools and Conscious Concerned Citizens Controlling Community Changes in New Orleans, New Jersey’s Parents Unified for Local School Education in Newark, and Journey for Justice member organizations across the country, to shed light on the racial injustice of school closings.
“Neighborhood schools are the hearts of our communities, and the harm caused by just one school closure is deep and devastating. This is death by a thousand cuts.”
There is deep irony and sadness in the fact that these community groups are appealing for justice even as the nation commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision striking down legal segregation.
There is deep irony and sadness in the fact that these complaints are filed to the administration of the nation’s first black president.
There is deep irony and sadness in the fact that these complaints are directed at the policies not of racist governors but of the Obama administration itself.
Secretary Duncan has encouraged and funded the school closings that are at the heart of the complaints. He has applauded and funded the privatization of schools in black communities. He openly admires the “no excuses” charter schools that emphasize control over education and that teach strict conformity to arbitrary rules, not the habits of mind and dispositions of a free people.
In effect, the Obama administration is being asked to overrule its own education policies. How sad. How ironic.
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How ironic indeed! I’m so disappointed in Obama and his administration. 😦
You want irony? Try this on for size (NYT 5/16/14)
TOPEKA, Kan. — Sixty years after the Supreme Court outlawed “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, civil rights advocates say American schools are becoming increasingly segregated, while the first lady, Michelle Obama, lamented that “many young people are going to schools with kids who look just like them.”
“Today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. King gave his final speech,” Mrs. Obama told 1,200 graduating high school seniors Friday here in the city that gave rise to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
In a speech that was part commencement address, part policy pronouncement and part journey into her own past, Mrs. Obama said that Brown’s advances were being reversed. “Many districts in this country have actually pulled back on efforts to integrate their schools, and many communities have become less diverse,” she said, leading to schools that are less diverse.
“And too often,” Mrs. Obama said, “those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color which too often lag behind.”
Today about four in 10 black and Latino students attend intensely segregated schools, the federal Department of Education reported on its official blog on Friday, adding that only 14 percent of white students attend schools that could be considered multicultural.
“We have slowly and very steadily slipped backward,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights. “All over the country we are seeing more and more racially segregated schools.”
Here in Kansas, there is intense debate over whether the state is living up to Brown’s promise. An alliance of school districts has sued the state, contending that current financing for schools is inadequate and is disproportionately hurting schools in low-income, minority districts.
The State Supreme Court recently ordered the Legislature to restore special aid for poor districts. Gov. Sam Brownback said in a brief interview on Friday that he agreed with the court’s decision. “It needs to be fixed,” he said.
But Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in Washington, said Friday that funding systems like that in Kansas “are relegating millions of primarily black and brown children into schools that are separate, unequal and inadequate.”
Saturday marks 60 years to the day that the Supreme Court decided Brown, a case whose lead plaintiff was Oliver L. Brown, a part-time pastor and shop welder for the Santa Fe Railroad who wanted his eldest daughter, Linda, to attend integrated schools.
In Washington on Friday evening, President Obama observed the anniversary of the Brown decision by meeting with families of the plaintiffs. Linda Brown and her younger sister, Cheryl Brown Henderson, as well as two of the lawyers in the case, planned to attend.
“It’s our first African-American president, something that many people involved in Brown didn’t think they would live to see,” Mrs. Brown Henderson said in an interview this week, calling the visit “a manifestation of what they worked for.”
Mrs. Obama spent the afternoon touring the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka. The two-story brick schoolhouse, once a school for blacks only, is now a civil rights museum and education center, and the first lady held a round-table discussion there with high school students from poor neighborhoods who dream of going to college.
“What are your hopes, how do you think about college, what do you think about life there?” she asked them. “What are some of the challenges that you face?”
Earlier in the day, Governor Brownback visited the site, cutting a ribbon on a newly renovated kindergarten classroom that has been restored to look as it did during the 1950s.
“Separate but equal ends here,” Mr. Brownback said.
People in Topeka have strong feelings about the Brown case; some of those who attended Mr. Brownback’s ribbon cutting on Friday had attended segregated schools here. Among them was Dale Cushinberry, a retired school principal, who recalls being bused as a child to a school outside his own neighborhood.
“Our neighborhood was integrated,” Mr. Cushinberry said. “We played in the park together, and played ball on weekends, and then on Monday we would get on a yellow school bus and they” — his white playmates — “would walk down the street” to the neighborhood school.
“After Brown,” he said, “we just walked to school together.”
For Mrs. Obama, too, the visit was personal. She was born in Chicago at a time when public schools were still resisting integration. By the time she entered high school, the city — under pressure from the federal government — opened an integrated magnet school for high achievers, which Mrs. Obama credits with setting her on a path to Princeton and Harvard.
She told the students in Topeka that when she was feeling discouraged, she liked to “take a step back and remind myself” of all the progress she had seen.
“I think about my mother, who, as a little girl, went to segregated schools in Chicago and felt the sting of discrimination,” she said. “I think about my husband’s grandparents, white folks born and raised right here in Kansas — products themselves of segregation,” who helped raise a biracial grandson.
“And then,” Mrs. Obama said, “I think about how that child grew up to be the president of the United States, and how today, that little girl from Chicago is helping to raise her granddaughters in the White House.”
There should be neither irony nor sadness here. Anyone who was watching the show in December 2008 knew that when Barack Obama sat with Arne Duncan to announce that Arne would become U.S. Secretary of Education realized that this meant that the “Chicago Plan” for corporate “school reform” — with all its racism and nastiness — would become the policy of the Obama administration. But it took a bit longer for those who had been teary-eyed in Chicago’s Grant Park a month before Obama and Duncan sat together at “Dodge School of Excellence” to realize just how hypocritical — not ironic or sad — the entire Obama corporate project would soon become. Dodge school was the first school to be closed by the Duncan administration and slated for “turnaround” because it was supposedly a “failure.” Dodge was also the first school to be subjected to the privatization schemes of the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) — which is now the national corporate model for public school “turnaround”. We could go on, but let’s try to agree that before we even voted for Barack Obama (and I voted for him twice by the time he sat with Duncan) we should have realized that the man who wrote the “Audacity of Hope” was clearly going to be the enemy of democracy, public education, and indeed human rights. From Drone murders and the nonsense against the Snowden revelations about the NSA to “Race To The Top” we are getting the government we deserve. And those of us who covered it in Chicago long before all those tears and “rock star” sillinesses are today reminding everyone that this is NOT either ironic or “sad” — but the result of corporate propaganda hatched and embodied in one of the slickest shysters ever to walk on to the world stage after apprenticing in all those arts here in Chicago.
I would like to see an account of the early development of Obama’s political connections and allegiances, from the people covering Chicago at the time. I wonder if he’s really the evil genius behind himself, or a malleable lucky find for the Chicago School.
George: quoting your sentence: “There should be neither irony nor sadness here. Anyone who was watching the show in December 2008 knew that when Barack Obama sat with Arne Duncan to announce that Arne would become U.S. Secretary of Education realized that this meant that the “Chicago Plan” for corporate “school reform” — with all its racism and nastiness — would become the policy of the Obama administration. ”
I was one of those naive people caught unaware; it took me a long time to wake up and then to find the resources that Diane has put together here. I will honestly say i was committed to health care and what we needed to do at that point; I was committed to getting Scott Brown out of the Massachusetts politics and getting Elizabeth Warren in and I totally neglected to pay attention to what was happening to public schools because I trusted in the Governor and the Commissioner to do that while we focused on the banks and health care. I just didn’t want you to number me among the ignorant…when I was unaware and focussed on issues that were important — like convincing people that health care was an essential… and it took a lot of time and energy. The Governor and the Commissioner were the only people who signed off on the Race to the Top application for Massachusetts and it was after that fact that my eyes were opened . I regret that I didn’t know more about the situation in Chicago until the teacher’s union was negotiating and I caught up with what was happening in Philly, Detroit , Chicago etc. That is why Diane’s daily blogs are so important to me…
The legacy of the Obama administration will be the re-segregation of public education. It doesn’t matter whether the root is indifference, stupidity, or racism. The policy is what it does. Corporate “reformers” have been incredibly slick in selling their message in the language of civil rights. I, too, voted for Obama–the first time with enthusiasm, the second time because there wasn’t much choice. Arne Duncan has been a disaster heading the DOE, after doing a terrible job heading Chicago schools.
The Obama re-write:
I Have a Scheme
I have a scheme that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of my education policy: “We hold these standards to be self-evident, and that all tests are created to punish, humiliate, and quantitatively define developing children.”
I have a scheme that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the computer, where personalized adaptive instruction and assessment will make them all college and career ready.
I have a scheme that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of confusing and convoluted multiple choice test items designed to trick students into failing
I have a scheme that my two little girls will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the value of their standardized test scores.
I have a, can’t miss, gobs and gobs of money making, plutocracy defining, absolutely beautiful scheme today.
Hello. Great post. When it comes to Black Americans, irony hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles, ready to chop at any moment. 😦