It is hard to remember that we once had stable schools in this country. That was before No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top went into full implementation. Now, schools in African American and Latino communities are routinely targeted for state takeovers, turnarounds, transformations, and transfer to chartering entities, without the consent of the people who live in the communities and the people whose children attend the schools. The billionaires pushing the “parent triggers” want parents to have the power to turn their school over to a charter corporation, but they are unwilling to grant them the power to say “no” to a takeover or a closure ordered by the Mayor, the Governor, or some bureaucrat.
Takeover goes in only one direction: privatization.
If this subject interests you, you will find this brief report of great value. It summarizes the “systematic disenfranchisement of African-American and Latino communities through school takeovers.” It describes the failure of all of these measures, from the takeover of New Orleans to the takeover of Detroit to the takeover of Newark to the takeover of public schools in Tennessee. One thing that all these schools have in common is that they enroll children of color. The powerful assume that African American and Latino parents lack the political power to stop them, and so far they have been correct.
The hunger strike at Dyett High School in Chicago demonstrates that there are ways for the “powerless” to take power. With the strength of their will, they can force those who hold the levers of power to back down.
That same fortitude is needed in all the threatened communities. The same local leadership can change the outcome.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The one thing that all these schools have in common is that they enroll children of color.”
I think you meant to write that this is “one thing they have in common,” not “the one thing they have in common.” Because these schools surely have other things in common, no?
FLERP, agreed. They are probably under=resourced as well.
Cross posted it with Commentary that refers back to posts at this blog.
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Out-of-Control-The-System-in-Best_Web_OpEds-African-americans_Children_Diane-Ravitch_Education-For-All-150918-336.html
Yes indeed: “Takeover goes in only one direction: privatization.” SIC indeed.
Yes, that’s what you do when you’re a bully, attack the most vulnerable. Local activism has to be the engine that powers this fight back. Parents must fight for their local schools, opt out of this stigmatizing test labeling. Teachers have to have the courage to fight for the best educational program for their students, politicians have to do their job for the community they represent. It won’t be easy and everyone won’t help. Money is a powerful lure but our students future and that of our communities is on the line. We must get these deformers and profit making leeches out of public education.
This study maintained that the loss of neighborhood schools leads to destabilization and fragmentation of the neighborhood. I believe this is the plan of some complicit mayors. They want to upend the minority communities to move them out of pricey areas near the downtown core to make way for high priced development. This is definitely part of the plan in New Orleans and Chicago. They want to use the charter schools as vehicle for gentrification.
This study did not address the laws such as the New Market Tax Credits that are driving
the corporate privatization. The taxpayers are underwriting lots of the cheap charters than invade urban areas. Citizens should pressure representatives to repeal or amend the laws so they do not apply to public schools. Using public schools as experiments in market based economics is unethical, may be illegal as well, and it is failing. These laws are contributing to the destabilization and under funding of public schools in poor neighborhoods. As they mention in the study, local governance is not a cause of the problems of urban schools, yet the market based solution is usually to dissolve local governance while increasing segregation.
Voters in poor areas targeted for ed-deform have little say over their schools in our present money-talks democracy. However some states (like NJ) re-distribute a significant chunk of local taxes from higher-income to low-income school districts. This presents another avenue of political pressure besides Opt-Out. Folks in wealthy towns like mine– which get little state aid and pay virtually their entire school budgets from local property taxes– have ‘skin in the game’. They need to know the costs, the waste, and the unentitled corporate beneficiaries of the taxes they pay into the maw of ed-deform.
“It is hard to remember that we once had stable schools in this country. That was before No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top went into full implementation. Now, schools in African American and Latino communities are routinely targeted for state takeovers, turnarounds, transformations, and transfer to chartering entities, without the consent of the people who live in the communities and the people whose children attend the schools.”
What you are attempting to do is rewrite history. The reason for NCLB is BECAUSE schools were failing – and had been on a downward slope for some time. When I moved to this country in ’96, lots of people were already complaining about the backwards movement in schools. When I saw one of my sons with an A in English, I knew something was wrong. Even though he grew up bi-lingual, and had started on 2 other languages two years before this move, I knew an A was not the right grade. (Probably the first time you hear a parent complaining the grade is too high)
So to say the NCLB is responsible for for destabilizing schools is incorrect. It was an intended fix – which was doomed to fail, but that was for different reasons.
This A had more to do with parental and administrative pressure than with your son’s work. I have had fights over B plus even when I had been very clear about my expectations.
Recently, in a class where nearly everyone had “failed” to bother to learn the multiplication tables or even learn a method for figuring out what one number times another could be, a father from Central America asked me why his son fought him when he tried to drill him on the times table at home. I assured him he could continue to do so, that yes I expected his son to have this knowledge, and that, yes, probably none of his son’s friends knew the table.
If I lowered grades for 75% of the class for not achieving this attainable goal in middle school, I might find myself in confrontations with the principal or parents. Holding kids to attainable goals is often difficult because of the power of parents who spend time complaining about their child’s mistreatment.
One colleague was called in by the principal when he failed a large number of students on a progress report. The base requirement was to go to the second floor school library and check out a book for a Sustained Silent Reading period of 15 minutes daily. Hardly an unattainable requirement–participating in a daily reading period–but they just did not do it, impeding their reading growth as well as missing a third of the class.
Another colleague, when a parent complained of her son’s “D” in a class, took the report card and gave the kid an “A.” This is a smart ass response, but I could empathize.
One time, I had two brothers who were superior readers to the rest of the seventh graders in their English class. However, they scored as fourth grade on a reading test, mainly because of vocabulary deficits as second language learners. When they came to me in shock. I pointed out that most of their classmates were getting levels of second and third grade. I then told them to get the newspaper and read daily. A year later they came to me and told me their reading scores had gone up (as I suspected they would).
Do not depend on a teacher’s grade or on a test score. You need to insist on your son’s doing even more than he now does intellectually. He may be in a class of very low achievers. My father said he was not elated by an “A” unless he had seen me making extra effort. If I did not need to make an effort, the class was too easy for me!
And by the way, the schools were not and are not failing. When you compare U. S. scores with other nation’s scores, you are comparing apples to oranges. Many of those other nation’s are not involved in providing education to everyone as we do in the U. S. Check out your son’s peer group. My son was an underachiever because of mental problems, but I tried to keep him with students who would model achievement. He eventually earned “A’s” in college classes.
This is by the way we can lift students who are underachieving, by integrating them in small numbers into groups of higher achievers. It is the one method that has paid off.
This is the way…sorry.
Having diverse classes of learners benefit those at the bottom tremendously. That is why it is important to integrate students. Many people don’t understand that students learn a great deal of pro-social behavior, work habits and even content from one another. Diversity works, and it is often less expensive than other options. I was an ESL teacher, and my students gained from being in the company of middle class students, and middle class students didn’t lose anything. In fact, they became more tolerant and understanding.
Gosh. I love this post. So honest and true.
I was lucky. I taught from the sixties to the nineties, and even in schools where poverty prevailed, parents always backed me up. teachers were respected before the Duncan narrative of those ‘bad teachers’ came along.
To ride a bike,on must get on the bike.
To play piano or any instrument, one must practice.
ALL skills, bar none, are acquired by the brain by PRACTICE.
As part of the REAL National Standards research n LEARNING and the things that make learning happen, all of us cohorts were directed to talk about HARD WORK and to make our kids grasp that personal achievement is earned by WORK.
America has changed. Now, the mantra sold is “if you can dream it, then you can have it.”
To which I add, indeed it is POSSIBLE if you are willing to do the work.
Reading makes it possible to WRITE well, too.
Just read. I purchased over 1000 YA books at garage sales and other venues, when they gave me the entire 7th grade at East Side Middle School, and told me to teach them to write well. I set aside 15 minutes of every period for silent reading, and ensured that the shelves had high interest books, but well written ones, like those by Lowry, Lipsyte, and other writers for YA.
My kids had the highest scores in NYC in reading tests, and when the first writing exam came along… they were 3rd in the state…and I was in a rubber room gighitn charges of incompetence… but THAT is another story… in fact… it is THE story of how they ensured that schools failed!
A reminder to visitors to this blog—
This is how you manufacture, out of whole cloth, the lie that public education is such a failure that it must be replaced, displaced and eliminated by charters and privatization.
From Gerald Bracey, READING EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: HOW TO AVOID GETTING STATISTICALLY SNOOKERED (2006, pp. 24-26), on the seminal book in the rheephorm propaganda campaign, A NATION AT RISK (1983). He comments on the selective use of statistics, quoting the ANAR about a steady decline in science achievement test scores for 17-year olds. *NAEP refers to the National Assessment of Education Progress.*
[start]
… we should ask why the commissioners selected only science and why they selected only seventeen-year-olds to make their point. NAEP also tests nine- and thirteen-year-olds. NAEP also tests reading and mathematics at those three ages. So if the decline is widespread and awful, why weren’t the other ages and other subjects included?
{p. 25 has charts, labeled Figure 2, showing the NAEP averages}
If we look at all nine trend lines (three subjects tested at three different ages), as shown in Figure 2, we quickly see that the science trend of seventeen-year-olds is the only one that shows a “steady decline.” It is the only one that will support the report’s crisis rhetoric and it was the only one mentioned. (Terrel Bell, the secretary of education who commissioned A Nation At Risk, was quite candid in his memoirs The Thirteenth Man about how he had heard many stories about the terrible state of public schools and had convened the commission to document the stories.)
[end]
Andrew Lang described the rheephormsters long ago:
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts – for support rather than for illumination.”
😎
P.S. For the shills and trolls: all my life I have been just as ready to criticize public schools for their failings as I have been to sing their praises. A word to the unwise: don’t waste your sneers, jeers and smears.
Great comment! I cheer, not jeer!
Parents are opting out to oppose high-stakes testing and the use of test results to punish their children’s teachers and schools.
Why couldn’t parents organize to keep their kids at home en masse in protest of punitive measures taken against their children and their schools?
What’s a school without children?
What’s a DOE without students?
What are the mandates of a state without the participation of its citizenry?
When discussing black and brown children, Native American students always seem to be forgotten. In Utah, three of the four schools that are threatened with takeover are on reservations. The other is an online high school, which I expect won’t be taken over. The underfunding of education for Native American students is criminal.