Civil rights hero James Meredith is worried about the future of American public schools. He fought so hard to integrate them, but now he sees new forces seeking to take control of them, and not for good reasons.
He wrote recently, as reported in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet”:
““We are losing millions of our children to inferior schools and catastrophically misguided and ineffective so-called education reforms. Our schools are being destroyed by politics, profit, greed and lies,” he adds. “Instead of evidence-based practices, money has become the engine of education policy, and our schools are being hijacked by politicians, non-educators and for-profit operators. Parents, teachers, citizens and community elders must arm ourselves with the best evidence and take back control of our children’s public education before it is too late. We all must work together to improve our public schools, not on the basis of profit or politics, but on the basis of evidence, and on the basis of love for America’s children.”
Here is Meredith’s Bill of Rights for American children:
“Every American public school child has the right to:
1. Experienced Teachers: A school run and staffed by fully qualified professional educators and teachers; a lead classroom teacher with a minimum of a masters degree in education and three years classroom experience; a school where computer products are never used to replace teachers; and a school the leaders of society would send their own children to.
2. Equity of Resources: A nation that sends many of its most experienced and effective teachers to help its highest-poverty and highest-needs students; strives to deliver educational equity of resources to all students; and strives to reduce the harm done to children by poverty and segregation.
3. Involved Parents: A school that strongly encourages and helps parents to: be directly involved in their children’s education; support their children with healthy eating and daily physical activity; disconnect their children from TV and video games and read with them on a daily basis; and a school that regularly invites parents to take part in school activities.
4. Quality Learning: A nation where educators and officials collaborate to identify the best evidence-based practices; a nation that rigorously tests classroom products and reforms before spending billions of dollars of taxpayer funds on them, including testing them versus smaller class sizes and more experienced teachers; a nation that that does not spend billions of taxpayer dollars on excessive, unreliable and low-quality standardized tests that displace and damage authentic learning; and an education with an absolute minimum of standardized tests and a maximum of high-quality, teacher-designed evaluations of student learning and progress.
5. Effective Teachers: A school where teachers are evaluated through fair and aggressive professional peer review, not unreliable standardized test data; and a school where under-performing teachers are coached, mentored and supported, and when necessary fired, through a process of professional review and transparent, timely due process.
6. Personalized Instruction: A school with small class sizes, similar to those enjoyed by the children of political and business leaders, so all students can receive a truly differentiated and personalized instruction, with regular, close feedback from their teachers.
7. Full Curriculum and Services: A school system that provides universal pre-K; a strong early education based on research fundamentals, correct developmental milestones and educational play; a rich curriculum including the arts, civics, literature, history, science, field trips, and music; fully funded, effective and inclusive special education that strives to intervene early and prevent problems; and if necessary, wraparound social services and a free, healthy breakfast and lunch.
8. Transparency: A school where records of every dollar of taxpayer money spent are available for public inspection; where personally identifiable student information is not shared with outside parties without express parental consent; where parents and teachers are involved in school management and policy; and where core public school functions are not sold off to for-profit operators.
9. Respect for Children and Teachers: A nation that respects teachers as well as it respects other elite professions; and considers every child’s physical, mental and emotional health, happiness and well-being as critical factors for school behavior, academic achievement and national progress.
10. Safety, Freedom and Challenge: A school and a classroom that are safe, comfortable, exciting, happy and well-disciplined; with regular quiet time and play time in the early grades; regular breaks through the school day; daily physical education and recess periods; a healthy, developmentally-appropriate and evidence-based after-school workload; and an atmosphere of low chronic stress and high productive challenge, where children are free to be children as they learn, and children are free to fail in the pursuit of success.
11. Reform Through Rigor and Accountability: A nation that uses rigor, accountability and transparency when it comes to education reform; where any proposed major education reforms must be tested first, and based on hard evidence, independently verified, before being widely adopted and funded by taxpayers.
12. A 21st Century Education: A school and a nation where children and teachers are supported, cherished and challenged, and where teachers are left alone to the maximum extent possible by politicians and bureaucrats to do their jobs – – which is to prepare children for life, citizenship, and careers with true 21st century skills: not by drilling them for standardized tests or forcing a culture of stress, overwork and fear upon them, but by helping them fall in love with authentic learning for the rest of their lives, inspiring them with joy, fun, passion, diligence, critical thinking and collaboration, new discoveries and excitement, and having the highest academic expectations of them.”
+ The Right To Be Free From Commercial Exploitation.
Add:
“The right to free from poverty well before a child enters any type of formal schooling.”
This is the most powerful statement about the education “reform” movement yet. It needs to be liked, tweeted, shared, commented on. We need to get the word out to the right people and we need a grassroots movement behind it. I’m gonna do everything in my power to help.
This is one powerful point of view. I’m tweeting, sharing, commenting, etc. Thank you, Diane for bringing it to our attention.
Love it – any chance we can replace the word “rigor” with a term that’s means appropriately challenging. Rigor in CCSS seems to mean trying to get kids to do a bunch of really hard stuff way too soon – like putting a novice skier on a rigorous black diamond slope as soon as she straps on her new skis because, hey, that’s the slope the other good skiers can handle at her age so screw the green slope BS being suggested by the lazy ski instructors that are claiming that in their experience novice skiers tend to break their necks on the black slopes.
Agree.
The term rigor turns my stomach, probably due to inappropriate and over use by the edubullies and edufrauds, and the inescapable association (in the mind of this biology teacher) with rigor mortis.
But..not wishing to only throw cold water…
LOVE IT!
I thought the same thing about the use of rigor. It would be wise to chose a word that means something genuine and doesn’t have the eduformer slant. Same thing with accountability. Sounds like more tests instead of what is intended.
An American Child’s Bill of Rights is a brilliant idea.
Smart, easy to share & understand.
“Rigor” turned my stomach, too. “Accountability” had a similar effect on me. It creates the specter of someone with a clipboard trolling classrooms looking for behavior that suggests a lack of pedagogical genius. Come to think of it, “best practice” creates a similar regurgitative reflex. I know there is some uninspired teaching out there, but “best practice” reeks of checklist of cute tricks to keep the kids entertained. I had my off days, but a happy check lister would have been irritating.
Beyond the critique, his heart is in the right place and he is right to call out the ed reformers who have anything but genuine reform on their minds.
I agree to adding “best practices” to the list.
A good list. I might add access to the same specialized kinds of education available to those able to afford private schools to point 6, and that each school have a curriculum that is capabible of taking a student as far as the student can go to point 7.
It is an expensive list though, and I am concerned that the rural districts in my state would have a very hard time providing everything on it.
Spot on James Meredith!!!
“Our schools are being destroyed by politics, profit, greed and lies,” he adds. “Instead of evidence-based practices, money has become the engine of education policy, and our schools are being hijacked by politicians, non-educators and for-profit operators.”
You have hit the Bulls Eye!!!!
Oh, how ironic in the extreme that the first U.S. President who self-identifies to be “African American” goes in the absolute opposite direction of James Meredith’s “American Child’s Education Bill of Rights.”
But of course that does not matter to the people who follow along with the President mainly because of color of skin, because he looks like them, never mind content of character. And maybe that sheds some light on understanding why the President awarded charter schools advocate C. T. Vivian the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Black History Month? Certainly. Still, one should expect human history to be none too kind to President Obama’s legacy on public education for sustaining and advancing democratic ideals in service to the common good. And it will be a human history some will conveniently dismiss as being “racism.”
I don’t understand why you brought race into this discussion at all, Ed Johnson. What does President Obama being black have to do with his education policies?
Right on!
I was just thinking about how this country never ceases to exploit the weak, poor, women and children. Is this 3rd world philosophy disguised with a materialistic facade or what? It will never change as long as we have the good ole boys running the country (politicians and their lobbyists).
Yup – don’t forget the Supreme Court guys…
In my experience, teacher quality does not necessarily come with a master’s degree or three years experience. I’d reword #1, and I agree with the comments about “rigor.” It means: “harshness or severity.” Is that really want we want? Not me, thank you.
I agree with you about a master’s degree not necessarily being the mark of a quality teacher. However, I have never heard any of my teacher colleagues say they were better teachers in their first couple years than they were after a few years of experience. Experience counts for a lot in education – more so than in many other professions. The learning curve is very steep in the first few years. New teachers come in with much enthusiasm but must learn classroom management, try out discipline techniques, hone their teaching style, and learn the depth of the curriculum. I would rather have a teacher with some experience teaching my own child than a brand new teacher.
Mr. Meredith, Thank You! You have given voice to what many of us here have long thought. I will gladly support, march, or be arrested with you anywhere in support of this agenda… a decent education and life should be available for all.
An excellent list. But how to enforce it in today’s privatized mania?
You enforce it by hounding your elected officials, joining groups, such as NPE, attending PTA meetings, demonstrating, protesting, and boycotting . . . .
There is always permanent hope . . . . .
Agree with all of Meredith’s points. Only criticism is that I’d place much greater emphasis on improving the pre-school experience, particularly for the low-SES children. If school systems magically implemented all of Meredith’s Bill of Rights, many/most of the low-SES students would still struggle to achieve academically and the low-SES schools would accordingly have large numbers of students reading far below grade level, engaging in minor but endemic misconduct, and dropping out short of graduation.
The low-SES child starts kindergarten far behind the middle/high-SES child regarding vocabulary and other related learning preconditioning. “Quality” pre-school might alleviate this problem, but only if “quality” goes far beyond the traditional HeadStart emphasis on socialization, nutrition, and childcare to include heavy emphasis on exposing the low-SES child to a lot of the kind of adult-child interaction that usually occurs constantly in the high-SES home — i.e., lots of adult/child talking, adults using lots of words when talking to the child, adults using many more encouraging words than prohibitory words.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that school systems or local govts will create this kind of “quality” pre-school, on even a pilot program basis. First, it would be expensive — requiring a relatively low child/adult ration, starting at age 2 or even earlier, and employing relatively well-educated/functional adults. Second, it would be vulnerable to challenge as being racist — that is, that the school system/local govt was being racist in favoring a “white” adult-child interaction over a “black” or “Hispanic” adult-child interaction. Hope I’m being too pessimistic.
It’s obvious that we need to put Head Start on steriods, but it needs to continue until they are in high school. Some will have the resilency to make it passed HS, but building vocabulary isn’t enough. We used to think as long as they could read by the 3rd grade that they would have a better chance of graduating. However, the dyfunction in the family (trauma, abuse, neglect, working teenagers, absentism, drug abuse, gangs, etc) contributes heavily to their outcome in the teen years.
A child’s rights should also include the care they receive in their homes. The family court system needs much improvement as far as protecting kids. We need to put money into their welfare, so that they come to school ready to learn. No curriculum is going to work unless kids have a purpose to learn and support from their family. Teachers can only reach so many of these kids–not all. With CCSS being the driving force in education, the gap will continue to grow. The at-risk kids that could be reached will decrease.
Many of us see quantiative data when we talked about the achievement gap. The only ones who truly know the dilemma are those teachers & administrators working every school day in title schools where it is like triage. To have this kind of school environment where kids disrespect their peers and teachers is unimaginable. If kindergarteners can throw the f bomb around, bite/kick, & scream, can you imagine what 6th graders are capable of? To only service pre-k in low SES areas would be a waste of time and money, if you put them into these grade schools.
The low-SES-area teachers whom I’ve talked with say that the low-SES students behave reasonably well in kindergarten and the early elementary grades with the minor but endemic misbehavior becoming a serious problem in the upper elementary grades and later. This suggests that the misbehavior is the result of being frustrated/struggling academically rather than as the result of negative at-home attitudes regarding behavior/respect/authority. If most of the low-SES students could be brought close to middle-SES level pre-K, it’s likely that there would be fewer students getting frustrated and resorting to misbehavior in the upper-elementary grades.
American Children Already Have a Bill of Rights.
Agree! A very powerful statement! With reference to: 2.Equity of Resources. Perhaps including students with special needs should be considered. These students are of “highest need” as well.
The kindergarterners I know do not behave reasonable well. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said kindergartners throw the f bomb, kick, bite, physically aggressive. One calls her teaching an f…ing b..ch. Now imagine those who had great support in pre-k and entering a kindergarten class with students who come from dysfunctional families. Environment has everything to do with behavior and academic success.
Those you stated whom later become frustrated later in upper elementary grades is exactly my point. The support must come from home and school. Frustration is an emotion which results in overt/covert behavior. Do we know if it is only due to struggling academically? Kids who come from dysfunctional homes which involves poverty and ilterate parents are frustrated because many lack self-efficacy which must be modeled by home and school. Teachers can do their part, however if parents do not make education a priority then what are the chances their kids will make it a priority?
You said, “it’s likely that there would be fewer students getting frustrated and resorting to misbehavior in the upper-elementary grades. “What does likely mean?” As far as I know, the only likelyhood of kids being less frustrated, putting aside CCSS, is when parents, teachers and student are a team.
My post above to Labor Lawyer.
Somewhere along the line parents should be given and acknowledged as an important voice in school success. The above statement makes demands of parents – but does not solicit their support as much as it should. “Regularly take part” is not enough. Parents can and should come along side the school to help with program support and direction. Parents can provide “pre-K” education, in many cases, better than a program. Alienating parents from your Bill of Rights is not the way to maximize support.
jon — Obviously, parental attitudes impact a student’s academic achievement, motivation, and in-school behavior. But, it’s virtually impossible for school systems or local govts to significantly modify the low-SES student’s parents’ attitudes (that is, short of politically infeasible laws requiring involuntary birth control for young/poor women or prohibiting young/poor women from keeping babies and requiring that babies born to young/poor women be taken by the govt and placed for adoption). On the other hand, it would be feasible for school systems/local govts to provide pre-school starting from a very early age (perhaps 1 or 2) for low-SES children that exposed the low-SES children to the kind of adult-child interactions that routinely occur in high-SES families — it would be expensive, but it would be feasible.
We should implement a few pilot programs testing this approach. Granted, it might not work. But, it would be research-based (that is, based on the research showing large differences between low-SES and high-SES parent-child interactions and showing large differences in vocab size at the start of kindergarten between low-SES and high-SES students.
Re the extent of misbehavior in the early elementary grades in low-SES schools — I concede that my opinion is based on anecdotal evidence; as, apparently, is yours. The entire subject of student misbehavior in the low-SES schools has, to my knowledge, been largely ignored — by both researchers and the school reform movement. It would be useful to do research focusing on the amount/type of misbehavior in the low-SES schools as well as the extent to which this misbehavior fluctuates as the students progress through the grades.
Labor lawyer: I think it would be just as feasible to not only to expose the children but their parents to adult (parent)-child interactions that routinely occur in high-SES families. Making home visits a priority is essential not only by schools but by social workers. In some places, nurses come to the house to give pre-post natal care for months. We also need the community to check and help each other thereafter.
Furthermore, toddlers need exposure to other toddlers from high and low SES (diversity) in preschool. We don’t have to modify the law to change the environment. But it takes the community, village mentalilty if you will, to want to help others. Kids in high SES communities need to experience what the opposite is like and so do their parents. One teacher who works in a high SES school has 14 parent volunteers in her class. Why don’t they volunteer in low SES schools?
There is plenty that can be done w/o going through the bureaucratic system. Unfortunately we live in a society where we neglect our own people, those who only look out for their own, and then the ones who call themselves philanthropists but steal people’s tax dollars appropriated for public schools.
I agree with you that “it would be expensive, but it would be feasible,” if funds are used appropriately. Enlarging vocabulary being one of many things needed after the basics (clothing, food and shelter). Ironic how wealthy gated-communities are like government subsized housing (they both protect their environment alarms/gangs, you have to meet the income criteria to live in either, they both have a culture/norms). However, the differences between both are what we need to solve.
Completely agree that it would be very useful to educate low-SES parents re how high-SES parents interact with their children. I’d be concerned that any such program would be a political non-starter for an inner-city elected official, but it would be great if they could do it.
(When I say “low-SES parent” or “high-SES parent” I’m using those terms as a short-hand for effective parent-child interactions in which the parent speaks frequently to the child, the parent uses different words in speaking to the child, the parent routinely responds positively to what the child says/does, the parent encourages the child to speak him/herself, and the parent maximizes the number of encouraging statements relative to the number of prohibitory statements. Obviously, there are some low-SES parents who routinely do all this and some high-SES parents who routinely fail to do any of this.)
I love this, but I do believe a “lead teacher” should have at least eight years experience.
I posted this on another blog as well. These very recent news from Russia were shocking to know. The ever increasing amount of homework and pressure has gone up over the years. In the 1950-1960s the homework was minimal and the results were great.
In 1970s-1980s the pressure was more and the results were medium.
With the increase of homework and testing pressure from 1990s all the results are declining. In 2000s declining more. In 2010s it is a disaster looming.
I hope the countries could agree on kids bill of rights to avoid this.
If the kids are pushed too hard and are deprived of normal life than this is what happens::
A 15-years old student shoots his teacher and a police officer
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/world/europe/fatal-shooting-by-student-at-moscow-school.html?_r=0
What this articles does not tell but you can get it from Russian sources that the student Sergey Gordeyev, was a “perfect A-student” who suddenly got a “B” from his geography teacher, and so he felt the teacher must be ‘punished’. And the shooting took place at a school with STEM emphasis, where the daily load of homework was enormous starting from K. His daily schedule was packed with homework alone, he had no life outside of homework, tests and grades. His parents believed that he must be a PERFECT boy and did not want him to have any grades other than A-s. His parents also made him memorize the whole Bible by heart, as that was a part of their idea of a PERFECT boy.
And “perfect” boy he was until his unsuspecting geography teacher dared to give him a “B” for one of his minor assignments. This created a disconnect in a perfect paradise of a perfect-robot boys brain. The disturber had to be eliminated. Since the boy’s modern and perfect parents had the weapons readily available at home, this was not a hard task for a perfect boy, rather a science exploration experiment – you know those things in Bible he had to memorize…
NY times did not publish the whole truth. Why not?
I hope someone gives this story a fair review. Because this whole testing thing and the crazy homework, and how the kids suffered emotionally in NY this year due to Common Core tests…. The outcome will be sad. Better learn from other people’s experience.