On Tuesday, I went to D.C. for a meeting to discuss the state of civil rights in the half-century since the release of the Kerner Commission Report. The nation was rocked by civil disorders and riots in the early 1960: cities like Detroit and Newark experienced devastating clashes between angry black people and police, and many of our cities were in flames. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to analyze the causes of the riots and report back. The commission acted expeditiously and released a devastating indictment of American society, memorably warning that unless we acted to reverse and remedy the root causes, America would be two societies, separate and unequal.
The root causes of the violence, the commission concluded, were racism, poverty, segregation, and police brutality. President Johnson was not pleased with the report and did not endorse its conclusions, but the report was on target.
The sole survivor of the Commission, Senator Fred Harris, and his ally, Alan Curtis, now president of the Milton Eisenhower Foundation (founded by the public-spirited brother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower), organized a fifty-year retrospective devoted to the Kerner Commission Report. I was invited to write a chapter about what has changed in education over the past 50 years. Others wrote about jobs, the economy, mass incarceration and policing, housing, and the other issues raised by the report. You can read the essays in a book just out called “Healing Our Divided Society.” It is an agenda for a better future.
Senator Harris, by the way, ran for president in 1972 and 1976. His campaign slogan was “The issue is privilege.” He didn’t win, obviously, but the issue is still privilege.
The theme of the meeting Tuesday was, we are all in this together. Whatever our race or religion, we must work together for a better society where everyone—everyone—has a decent standard of living, good housing, good medical care, good education, and just treatment.
Harris and Curtis wrote an article in the New York Times summarizing the findings of the 50-year retrospective. It may be behind a pay wall. I hope not. The graphics tell the story. Progress, then backsliding.
The story in education is well documented: a sharp decline in segregation, then the courts release school districts from court orders to desegregate, followed by a reversion to segregated schools. The problem is national, not limited to the south. When court orders end, segregation resumes. States never under court order have intense segregation. Right now, the most segregated schools in the nation are in California, followed by Texas, New York, Maryland, Nevada, and Connecticut. When you consider that only 13% of the population is black, the concentration of black students in majority black schools is shocking.
Over the past fifty years, inequality has deepened:
“The disheartening percentage of Americans living in extreme poverty — that is, living on less than half the poverty threshold — has increased since the 1970s. The overall poverty rate remains about the same today as it was 50 years ago; the total number of poor people has increased from over 25 million to well over 40 million, more than the population of California.
“Meanwhile, the rich have profited at the expense of most working Americans. Today, the top 1 percent receive 52 percent of all new income. Rich people are healthier and live longer. They get a better education, which produces greater gains in income. And their greater economic power translates into greater political power.”
Mass incarceration of poor black and brown people has become a new normal:
”At the time of the Kerner Commission, there were about 200,000 people behind bars. Today, there are about 1.4 million. “Zero tolerance” policing aimed at African-Americans and Latinos has failed, while our sentencing policies (for example, on crack versus powder cocaine) continue to racially discriminate. Mass incarceration has become a kind of housing policy for the poor.”
What have we learned in fifty years? We know what works, and our government doesn’t do it.
“Policies based on ideology instead of evidence. Privatization and funding cuts instead of expanding effective programs.
“We’re living with the human costs of these failed approaches. The Kerner ethos — “Everyone does better when everyone does better” — has been, for many decades, supplanted by its opposite: “You’re on your own.”
“Today more people oppose the immorality of poverty and rising inequality, including middle-class Americans who realize their interests are much closer to Kerner priorities than to those of the very rich.
“We have the experience and knowledge to scale up what works. Now we need the “new will” that the Kerner Commission concluded was equally important.”
The article then contrasts what doesn’t work with what does work.
In education, what doesn’t work: Racial segregation, vouchers, charters, and school choice.
What does work: Racial integration, investments in public school equity, quality teachers, early childhood education, community schools and other proven models
This report updates an epochal one. The Trump administration won’t read it or act on it. If we want a better future, a better society, a real commitment to equality of opportunity and the realization of the American dream for all, this new report is a great starting point.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If I may, I am providing a link to this, a blog post of my own this morning on the Kerner Commission: https://1968nothingwasrevealed.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/february-29-1968-the-kerner-commision/
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Aaron, Thanks you for the link to your post. The great ray of hope at this moment comes from the savvy students who are putting pressure on Congress to do something about school safety and loudly aligning themselves with the civic opportunity to vote in the midterms.
We should also credit Milton Eisenhower Foundation for having the good sense to invite Diane to contribute to this report. Given the media environment today, I suppose that every key point that can be reduced to 140 characters and tweeted may attract attention, even if not sustaining thought and action on the long standing issues.
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Well said, Aaron!
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My school, James Madison High School, in Brooklyn received class sets of the Kerner Report (have no idea from whom) and it became part of our curriculum for a couple of years …. ah, for the good old days when principals and staffs actually ran their own schools.
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Thanks for this post. Why do we rarely learn from our own history? This finding strikes me as especially relevant,” Policies based on ideology instead of evidence. Privatization and funding cuts instead of expanding effective programs.” James Moffett in his revealing book “Storm in the Mountains” about the West Virginia textbook controversy years ago wrote about how some of those who censored the books suffered from what he called “agnosis,” a habit of holding on to beliefs that are not supported by evidence, a kind of treasured and nurtured ignorance.
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One popular belief that is not supported by evidence: reading is a teachable skill (it’s really a function of background knowledge –that’s why the most knowledgable kids are always the best readers, regardless of whether they’ve had skill instruction).
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That idea worked so well for my bright dyslexic students. If they just learned more content they would magically be able to read. Give it a rest, ponderosa. No one disputes that something to learn/content is necessary for learning to take place, but many students benefit from training in how to maximize the amount of content they learn. It sounds to me like you are essentially saying what a lot of reformers contend. We don’t need people trained to teach. All they have to be able to do is deliver content. TFA and technology ought to be able to cover that just fine. I’m not sure what that would mean for the special ed students I taught.
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Special Educator: You need to read Nell Duke, reading guru at the University of Michigan, or Dan Willingham at UVA, or Marylin Jaeger Adams, at Brown. The old orthodoxy on reading is wrong. These eminent experts say it. Reading skills instruction and practice has some benefit, but not that much. Reading comprehension is largely a function of background knowledge. The more one knows, the more likely it is one will understand the words on the page. If you don’t know the words, you won’t get it, regardless of how much skills instruction you’ve had. This is why my best readers are always the ones who have rich general knowledge –regardless of how much skills instruction they’ve had. The worst readers are frequently the ones who’ve had the MOST skills practice –via reading intervention classes. If your theory is correct, the reading intervention kids should rocket past the other readers, yet they always lag way behind. Clinging to these old orthodoxies is hurting kids. I urge you to open your mind.
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It is obvious you have never studied dyslexia. We can trade pet reading experts, but I can tell you believe you have found the ultimate authorities on all things reading. While they have many valuable things to say, ignoring the very real problems of dyslexia will not make them go away. “Try harder” is not terribly useful information to a student who already has to spend 2-3 times as much time reading an assignment as most students. Not all reading problems require intensive intervention; many children will read without extra support but, as with all learning, they will do it at their own pace. Instilling a love of reading is always important because students will read (and learn) more if they enjoy doing it, but it is not always enough. While you continue to trash my training as a special educator, you are trashing the entire teaching profession by insisting that nothing is required other than cramming content into their little heads. I am assuming that you must have some skills in making this process engaging, but am I also to understand that your teaching skills were automatic and did not require any training? Why are you so insistent that the skill component of mastering content is automatic?
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“nothing is required other than cramming content into their little heads.”
Yeah, I just read a few books from Willingham, and I have a nagging question to him: How come the greatest discoveries in physics and math come from people who are in their early twenties—and sometimes in their teens? Shouldn’t more knowledge make scientists wiser, enabling them to make greater discoveries?
How come it is teens who are leading the way in the gun control movement now? Shouldn’t they be better equipped if they studied the system first?
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There is so much we do not understand about the learning process in general. If we really understood what we were doing, there would be no need for all the upheavals we have had in education. Ideas to commercialize education would be immediately recognized for what they are. All of that aside, not a day went by when I was teaching that i wasn’t intrigued by trying to understand how the minds of my students worked. I understand Ponderosa’s concern that content is taking a subordinate role to process. Common Core has driven an overemphasis on processes we only understand on a superficial level and certainly have no business trying to teach and assess in a manner that says we do. In any case those processes depend on content to drive them.
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Here’s a Nell Duke slideshow:
Click to access Duke-slides.pdf
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Mate: math is different than other disciplines, it seems to me, in that there are a pretty manageable number of essential ideas to memorize. The rest is just reasoning based on those rules and principles. So it seems possible for a bright young person to learn the key ideas fairly quickly and then deploy his innate neural processing capacities –still at their peak and undamaged by the blows and buffets of life –to race to new conclusions. But I’m not a mathematician; perhaps you can correct me.
In terms of physics –had Einstein mastered Newton first? Could he have innovated without that prior learning?
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There is a lot to learn in math, if you look at it from knowledge point of view: math never gets old, never gets outdated, so in theory you need to learn everything mathematicians piled up in the last 4+ thousand years before you “know” math. And much of math was invented for physicists’ sake, so in theory, physicists need to learn math then physics, and only then they are ready to do the craft. In reality, Einstein needed no specifics from Newton, and he really was not very good at math (it’s not just an anecdote), and by the time he turned into a wise old man, being able to give advice to everybody, he became completely unproductive.
But take poets, Mozart, Schubert, etc.
Facts obviously needed for learning, but as far as I can see, there is much more of them in textbooks than necessary. Ask any kids: textbooks are intimidating for most of them.
When scientists object Willingham’s assertions about the knowledge necessary to do their work, he dismisses them saying, they don’t know what they are talking about.
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Mate,
As far as I can tell, these prodigies’ brains were flooded with knowledge from an early age. Mozart’s dad was a composer himself, so Mozart steeped in music. Same with J.S. Mill –he was fed (some would say, force fed) knowledge from an early age by his erudite father.
It seems to me all of Euclid emerges from a few principles applied in different ways. Becoming an expert on French history or British literature takes a long, long time. The reading is endless.
I agree that textbooks are dense with facts. Too dense. Only 10% of my seventh graders can read them profitably. Facts, facts everywhere, and not a drop to drink. This is why I favor lecture. I take what the textbook has, supplement it with knowledge gleaned from my outside reading, and then convert it into a slow drip of lucidly presented facts, aided by bold hand-drawn slides that I project huge with the document camera, that their brains can easily grasp to get it IN the brain. To me, this is the most important thing I do to promote learning.
Once knowledge is present lucidly in the mind, then kids can do all the higher-order stuff on it –easily. They can analyze, infer, compare and contrast, etc. Creativity runs wild. The heavy lifting is getting the facts in the head. Most teachers have it exactly backwards: they think the fact absorption is the quick and easy part, and the “teaching” (to be accurate, what they’re really doing is just eliciting) of skills is the hard part. Have you ever noticed this with your students –once they “get” a concept, they spontaneously start analyzing, comparing, etc.? We don’t need to teach these skills. We DO need to teach knowledge.
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Pondersoa: I like your approach. I had a ‘history teacher’ who was a football coach. My high school was known for its great football team. He’d tell us which pages to read at the beginning of class and to write answers to the questions at the end of the chapter. He’d leave and come back around 15 minutes before class was out. He’d return and ask us to tell what we’d ‘learned’.
I can’t imagine why such an incompetent was allowed to ‘teach’ that way. Football mattered a lot more than us learning anything about history. [This was in Idaho.] I also can’t imagine leaving students alone. That was back in the dark ages. For some reason none of us did anything horrendous while he was out of the room.
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I am not presenting a “knowledge theory” here. I simply claim that there are problems with Willingham’s description of learning and knowledge.
The point is that many of these young people do not know that much—a seasoned scientist, literature prof know much more than these guys.
Not all these young creative people were prodigies. But even those who were: think about the fact that as Mozart was learning from his father, he already created better music than his father—who clearly “knew” much more about music than his son.
Science history is full events when a young scientist is not admitted to a university though he or she already has the “great theory”. This is because profs do not have a good way of identifying “knowledge”. I think, it’s not even clear what knowledge is.
The problem with Willingham is that he almost equates knowledge and understanding with knowing facts.
In knowledge, the relationship between quantity and quality is not clear at all.
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“Once knowledge is present lucidly in the mind, then kids can do all the higher-order stuff on it –easily.”
On the other hand, it is well known that too much stuff in your head inhibits “higher order” thinking.
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Doesn’t it depend on where in the head the knowledge resides? Working memory can easily get overloaded (on average it can handle seven things at once, if I recall correctly) but the long-term memory is almost infinitely capacious. It’s this latter that allows us to transcend the limits of short-term memory, providing just-in-time delivery of relevant facts as we think. The job of teachers, then, is to stock this on-board library.
Going back to young stars: I’ve read that early adolescence is a time of major brain cell growth, and that what gets learned at that time gets learned extraordinarily well. Perhaps Mozart was several steps ahead of his dad at that age, and so the music learning he achieved then was learned better than his dad’s. Maybe the neural connections made then were wider ranging and more robust, so that his musical thinking could go beyond what his dad could do. I’ve seen this with contra dance bands. The first generation were hippies who learned the tunes in their 20’s. Their kids learn the tunes before the age of ten, and they frequently surpass their parents in virtuosity and inventiveness by the time they reach their late teens.
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Maybe, Ponderosa. But no, I am not talking about what’s in short or long term memory and actual, absolute “knowledge” of facts. What’s even more annoying is that many of the “facts” kids learn are disputable.
There is no easy relationship between a scientist’s knowledge of her field of research and the quality (significance) of her research. Can I put statistics on this observation? No, and I am not sure that my assertion is measurable—but true, nevertheless.
Since the Oscars were yesterday: is there a simple relationship between how good an actor is and her studies and her knowledge about acting? Again, some statistics can be provided to show that there is some relationship, but there is no doubt, the exceptions are too numerous to support Willingham’s claim.
What I think we need to keep in mind is that knowledge is not well defined—even in history. Yeah, there was a Civil War and there were pharaohs and their pyramids but much (most) of the associated facts are disputable and the details are open for interpretation, aren’t they?
I think what needs to be done is reexamine every single school subject, determine what are true facts, then find the essential facts, and let kids know about the questionable issues, and then, finally, spend much more time on debating possible answers to questions.
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A good way to introduce high school students is to teach the debates and controversies, not just a parade of facts.
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Diane –I think that approach has merit. After reading about that approach somewhere (was it in one of your books?), I paid a visit to Edward R. Murrow HS in Brooklyn to watch the teachers there do it. Kids seemed engaged and seemed to be learning. However I do think there’s a lot of value in a survey course, well done. I’m supposed to cover world history from 0 to 1700. I cannot do depth, but I can give the big picture/ the table of contents to the story of humans. I think a well-educated mind needs this, and I tend to think it’s good to install this early and let the deep dives happen later.
Mate –I think you overstate the ambiguity of facts. Christianity began in the first century CE. It spread across Europe. Europeans had been pagans. Vikings raided. The Church split into Catholics and Orthodox. Is any of this controversial? Teachers need to sketch out the world on kids’ brains. It doesn’t need to be perfect. They need to get the big picture, the context from which we all emerge and in which we all find ourselves. Leave the quibbling and doubting to the graduate students. So many of the errors of education today come from importing graduate school notions into elementary schools. Order of operations.
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Ponderosa, as you probably know, I am a content person and was on ED Hirsch’s board. That said, I think that it is deadening to try to stuff kids with facts. When I did research on the efficacy of Hitsch’s Ideas about CK, I learned that the most successful CK schools were utilizing progressive projects and activities to teach content. Not drill and kill. Ironic.
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“Europeans had been pagans. Vikings raided. The Church split into Catholics and Orthodox. Is any of this controversial? … So many of the errors of education today come from importing graduate school notions into elementary schools. ”
So when a kid asks the teacher “How do we know this stuff? How can we be sure these things happened? How do we know when they happened? How do you know the Vikings were merciless when they are so nice in How to train a dragon?” should the teacher say “You should go to grad school if you want to find out the answers to these questions. For now, lemme continue with the facts, because I have a lot of them.”
Isn’t it interesting (and important) for a 6th grader to find out how we know what we seem to know about ancient Egypt—more interesting than the list of the “most significant” pharaohs and their policies?
History books are not just about facts, but also about interpretation. I am sure I learned about Vikings and the Catholic church differently from you, since it was taught to me from a Marxist point of view. We had a lot of questions, some doubts, but we were told not to ask them.
In other words, the selection of facts and their interpretations are already controversial. Howard Zinn: “there is no such thing as impartial history. The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lie. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of important of course depends on one’s values.”
Of course, facts are also controversial, debatable, like “Columbus discovered America” or “the pyramids are gigantic tombs and were built by slaves” or “Jesus is a fictional figure”.
I do not pretend that I know how to teach history, and I have no idea about what portion of a history or literature class should be devoted to fact dissemination. What I can say with conviction is that the amount of facts taught in math can and should be reduced by close to 50%, and the freed up time should be devoted to activities of this sort
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnSQD5ca7M
Factful math is useless, harmful, unneeded. Here is how Success Academy teaches factful math (while pretending, they are teaching critical thinking)
http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/sa_math.mp4
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[video src="http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/sa_math.mp4" /]
Arghh! My head hurt after watching it.
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Diane, do you count lecture to be “stuffing kids heads with facts”? Do you have a better way of getting content in kids’ heads? If you wanted to learn more about, say, unions in West Virginia, would you rather listen to a good lecture, or would you rather do a role play? I have students make skits and other creative projects at the end of a unit –after I have given them the facts to work with. I do this mostly to cement learning, and also because kids like it. I find that having kids try to learn through reading (which is what research projects and many progressive-type lessons boil down to) often results in hazy understanding and little content acquisition. My kids loathe having to learn from the textbook. They like having me lecture. It’s like a read-aloud. Some kids are happy to get kicked out of other classrooms so they’ll be sent to my room, where they sit quietly and listen to the lecture, often for the second time that day.
I’d be interested to read the research you did on CK schools. I’d appreciate knowing where I could find it. How were the less effective schools trying to “stuff kids heads with facts”? Did the effective ones use direct instruction in addition to projects and activities? Perhaps I could learn something from this.
Mate: I’m not sure what to think of the Friends video you showed. Friends kids are elite kids. They can make any lesson plan fly. I’d like to see that tried on a typical public school class. And, personally, I don’t think I’d enjoy that lesson. I like to listen and think and write and draw. I don’t like getting up and moving around and trying to participate in a group think. Yes, the optics are wonderful and I think sadly that’s how many people judge lessons these days. Everything must be visible to the eye for it to count. There’s a pervasive bias against a classroom of silent kids listening, even though the invisible neural activity may be much richer than what’s happening in the visible “active” hands-on learning type scenario. This is one of the things I hate most about modern education –we discount the invisible. Principals’ obsession with bulletin boards and think-pair-share is part of this tendency. People think sitting quietly and listening is the epitome of oppression and stultification, when it’s often quite the opposite. Crude stereotypes pervade our discourse.
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Some lecturers are engaging, many are not. Textbooks are deadly. As I mentioned earlier, I had to read every history and literature textbook in use for “The Language Police,” and I found all of them to be awful. The history texts have no life. The literature texts consisted of about 40% graphics, and not very good literature. There are many ways to be a good teacher, and I wouldn’t dare prescribe one best way.
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“There are many ways to be a good teacher, and I wouldn’t dare prescribe one best way.”
Of course. I am sure, I’d be fascinated with Ponderosa’s storytelling. Though I may act up if I had to sit quietly or just still for longer than 10 minutes.
About books: I am quite sure high school math books are worse than other subjects’—maybe we should attempt an “objective” comparison. How about weight comparison?
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As I recall, publishers have adopted a common size and weight for textbooks. All the same size, 7 pounds. Try putting three or four of those in your backpack.
What I hated most was the large percentage of dead space—blank space, pointless graphics unrelated to text. About 40% overall. Behind the glitz is a vain effort to compete with TV. Loading up the boook with distractors.
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This morning, I weighed my 12th grader daughter’s school backpack: 34 lbs, and the zippers were bursting.
I now understand why: because of the 7 pound standard.
Your description that “they try to compete with TV” is perfect—maybe we could modify it to “they try to compete with smart phones”, since nowadays kids mostly look at their phones even while watching TV.
I think textbooks don’t have to be suitable for 100% self studying. They are to serve barely more than summaries of what was happening in class. Then you’ll have regular size, 200 page long, 1 pound books instead of 1000 page long ugly, overcolored monsters.
Btw, at the U of Memphis, we will experiment in the Fall with replacing our usual $200, heavyweight, 1K page Calculus book with a 400 page free online book.
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Publishers of educational materials think kids won’t pay attention without flashy graphics.
How surprised they were when the Harry Potter books were a wild success without illustrations.
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“How surprised they were when the Harry Potter books were a wild success without illustrations.”
Well, the reason for publishers’ preference for flashy books is not just stupidity: even the hard cover version of Harry Potter is $18 while a modern calculus book is $200.
Let’s not forget that successful textbook authors are millionaires
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/for-millionaire-mathematician-james-stewart-music-will-play-on-after-his-death/article20714879/
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“I’m not sure what to think of the Friends video you showed. Friends kids are elite kids.”
Elite kids? Are you saying, poor or “non-elite” kids don’t like to ask questions if they don’t understand something or are curious, they don’t like to express themselves? Instead, they like to sit in silence and listen, take notes, thinking, they will postpone their questions till 30 minutes later, when the formulas are already written up and sample problems are solved? What if they get lost in the very beginning? How are they going to understand the remaining 29 minutes? How does the teacher know if kids understand what’s going on?
No doubt, (mildly) affluent people seek out Montessori and Waldorf style schools where instruction is much more interactive than in traditional schools.
What you see in the Friends video is not the part where kids are learning the facts but when they do something with the facts. In the Success Academy video, you see the same thing when instead of the kids, the teacher dominates the “explorations” of what’s behind the facts.
So I think the big question is the ratio of time spent on fact dissemination to kids doing something with the facts. This ratio, of course, depends on the subject and the kids in the class. I certainly can imagine that in history the ratio needs to be greater than in math. (I remark that when I observed the active way kids learned history at a local Montessori school, I wanted to stay for the whole year.)
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“there’s a pervasive bias against a classroom of silent kids listening, even though the invisible neural activity may be much richer than what’s happening in the visible “active” hands-on learning type scenario. ”
You are correct about the bias, and I’d like to see some statistics about kids preferences in various subjects. In math, though, the stats would favor the hands on approach. Here is why.
Understanding in math happens in bits and pieces, and immediate enlightenment doesn’t come to even the smartest kids. In math, introduction of facts require their understanding without delay: you can memorize the Pythagorean theorem as “a squared plus b squared equal to c squared” quickly but without its meaning, you learned nothing even remotely tangible: you can go home, stare at the formula silently as much as you want, your understanding will not increase.
Pure memorization without understanding is useless in math—the silent neural activity during such pure memorization would no doubt show nothing but increased math anxiety. In my experience, as soon as kids don’t understand something, they’d like to ask for a repeated or better explanation. The only reason kids stay quiet is for fear of embarrassment—and this is why half of the kids in a typical math class develop math anxiety to some (and often high) degree.
So, in a math class, silence is not the sign of quiet, intense, introspective pondering but the sign of kids’ being lost. I don’t recall any exception to this during my 33 years of teaching.
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Diane: I still remember your amusing comment in The Language Police about the visual clutter in textbooks: it “pokes you in the eye”. I completely agree. I like beauty and elegance in presentations; the textbooks are the antithesis of these.
Mate: you sound like a perceptive observer of how students learn math. I have never taught math, and I have no doubt that it is a different ball of wax.
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When the Kerner commission report came out I ordered class sets to use them to teach that era of American History when it was contemporary up until it was 40 years old.
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Cool!
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What a sad state of affairs that this country, that has so much potential, still is not making progress or is even going backwards in so many areas. It is known what is needed and nothing gets done. The wealthy control and the wealthy don’t care. This is it in a nutshell.
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Here’s an indicator of how much the country has changed in recent decades: (real) progressive Senator Fred Harris was elected to office in Oklahoma, of all places, and proposed legislation to nationalize the oil companies.
Let that sink in for a moment: a senator from Oklahoma calling for nationalization of the oil industry!
Look at some of the states where leading liberals of the time were elected, and compare it to now, and you’ll see how far the Democratic Party has fallen, largely because it has turned its back on working people and everyone else in “Flyover Country:” George McGovern in South Dakota, Fred Harris in Oklahoma, Frank Church in Idaho, et. al.
All of those states, once part of the New Deal coalition, now reliably elect some of the most reactionary politicians in the country. That’s what happens when you abandon workers and entire parts of the country. That void will be filled, by right-wing Republicans and worse…
Seen in that light, no one should be surprised that Trump was elected President, and all the (still unproven) talk about “collusion” with Russia looks like the preposterous distraction it is.
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Amen.
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For those interested, Senator Harris and other guests were on the San Francisco NPR station KQED “Forum” program the other day discussing the Kerner Commission report:
https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2018/02/26/evaluating-the-influence-of-the-kerner-report-on-race-and-inequality-50-years-later/
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At the base of these problems is the corrupt, anti-democratic U.S. political-economic system of corporate capitalism. Unless that system is finally discarded in favor of a system which prioritizes the Common Good, nothing will improve.
The clock is ticking, as climate disaster accelerates daily, and nuclear warriors in D.C. and the military plan their suicidal “usable” nuclear weapons strategy (see the recent Nuclear Posture Review for an example of institutional psychopathology).
Due to these two increasing existential threats to most life on earth, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved up their Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, the closest it has been to doomsday since the 1953 hydrogen bomb test by the USSR.
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Ed,
Well said.
COMMON GOOD!
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So pleased you have a chapter in the book, HEALING OUR DIVIDED SOCIETY. Congratulations.
Former Senator Harris and Alan Curtis, editorrs of the book, were on PBS News last night. They were excellent.
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This may seem like a dumb question, but what is the exact mechanism that benefits black kids who are sent to a mostly white school? Is it that white kids model academic behaviors that black kids emulate? Is it that schools with whites have better academic programs that benefit blacks? Do we know?
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There are many factors that matter. Black kids are often in under-resourced schools. Integration guarantees that they will have the same resources as white kids. Racial segregation has a demoralizing and stigmatizing effect. Interaction with children of other races is mutually beneficial.
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I return time and time again to the wise words of Tractenberg, Orfield, and Flaxman from a joint report on traditional neighborhood school hypersegregation in NJ, which is also home to the nation’s most equitably funded public schools. Many white liberals support maintaining segregated schools while giving predominantly black and Latino schools more money than predominantly white schools. NJ is a living, breathing example of the extreme limitations of this approach:
“Money . . . does not typically buy the same kind of teachers, curriculum, level of instruction, level of peer group academic support and positive competition, and stability of enrollment of classmates and of faculties that are usually found in white and stably diverse schools.”
That being said, NJ is also home to a handful of high-end suburbs that are highly integrated and whose white residents need hardly any provocation at all to remind you of their moral superiority to yours. Unfortunately, these towns provide another object lesson—integration isn’t a hands-off affair. It needs to be done intentionally and mindfully, otherwise the segregation will occur, brutally and ruthlessly, within schools buildings rather than between them.
http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2018/02/south_orange_maplewood_school_district_discriminat.html
This TOS-compliant, fully on-topic comment was submitted at 11:10 AM, 3/2/18.
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The scum continues to come out from under the rocks. Now schools are being ‘protected’ by the Oath Keepers! Good grief. What groups comes next?
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SPLC News This Week
Oath Keepers
Radical antigovernment group wants to post its own guards at schools nationwide
The leader of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group that sees the U.S. government as its enemy, wants his members to stand guard at public schools across the country in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, shooting. Stewart Rhodes urged his members to arm themselves and stake out positions near schools. Rhodes said they need only “notify” school officials of their intent, not ask permission.
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“Senator Harris, by the way, ran for president in 1972 and 1976. His campaign slogan was “The issue is privilege.” ”
Isn’t this what Marx said 100+ years before?
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Can you imagine someone like Fred Harris being elected from a state like Oklahoma today? Or George McGovern from South Dakota? We have to figure out how people in these states started voting against their pocketbooks and their own futures.
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The switch must have happened in the last decade or so: what happened to Al Gore’s Tennessee?
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Diane, a good place to start answering the question you pose is, “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” by Thomas Frank.
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