Who knew that Republicans hate local control of public schools? Who knew that the root cause of low test scores was the input of parents and teachers?
Peter Greene tells a story in this post that should be required reading for every course in education and for every state legislator. It is an unbearably sad story, and if it doesn’t make you angry, you aren’t paying attention.
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/02/oh-lorain-hb-70-and-reformy-attack.html
Greene began his teaching career in Lorain, Ohio. At the end of his year, he and many other teachers were laid off and he moved on to teach in Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed a career that spanned nearly four decades. He remembers Lorain as a factory town, a functioning, multi-ethnic district with three high schools, seven middle schools, and many elementary schools. It was a strong union town, where most people worked in steel mills or auto plants.
Lorain was hit hard by deindustrialization. It was a small city that lost jobs and population.
He writes:
In 2016, my wife and I made a cross country trip. I’d not been back to Lorain (no reason to– I’d made no lasting relationships in my year, mostly because I ate, slept and drank my job), even though its a mere three hours away. The rows of factories are now rubble. My half-a-house apartment is now in a row of boarded-up empty buildings. The strip mall where I bought albums, my first luxury purchase with my own teacher-pay money is empty. My old high school is a vacant lot. Lorain’s population is now around 63,000, a loss of about a quarter of their population from the mid-70s.
The drop started quickly and continued relentlessly for years. The school district adjusted. The three high schools became two, then one. But the local economy was shrinking so severely that by 2013, the school district was the second-largest employer in town, behind the hospital. By the 2010s, reportedly 90% of the student population was free and reduced lunch (the standard proxy for measuring poverty).
Lawmakers in Ohio responded to the collapse of Lorain’s economy by declaring that its faltering schools were in “academic distress.” Its test scores were not good enough.
In 2007, Ohio created a new piece of turnaround legislation. The law created an academic distress commission, appointed by the state superintendent, the president of the school board, and the mayor of the city. ADC’s were responsible for coming up with a plan. They could fire and hire administrators and create a budget for the district. Lorain fell under the control of an ADC in 2013, but despite the employment of snazzy consultants, things didn’t seem to be improving. Some scores had started to creep up, but then changes in the state test– and how harshly it would be assessed– destroyed any forward momentum the district had developed.
It was several decades of tough challenges in the community and in the schools– and then, in 2015, that state of Ohio stepped in again to make things even worse.
The state passed a harsh and punitive bill called HB 70, which allowed the state to take over the district and install a tsar. Somehow the legislators imagined that the reason for low test scores was that local citizens had some say over what happened to their schools. Democracy was the problem.
Ohio’s old law called for an academic distress commission, appointed by the state superintendent, the president of the school board, and the mayor of the city. ADC’s were responsible for coming up with a plan. They could fire and hire administrators and create a budget for the district. Under HB 70, that changed dramatically. HB 70 is a corporate reformster’s dream law.
Under the new law, the ADC was required to appoint a CEO to run the district. The list of “include but not limited to” duties of the CEO runs to seventeen items, and they include:
Replacing administration and central office staff
Assigning employees to schools
Allocating teacher class loads and class sizes
Job descriptions for employees
Setting the school calendar
Setting the district budget
Setting grade “configuration”
Determining the school curriculum
Selecting instructional materials and assessments
Making reductions in staff
Establishing employee compensation
The law is nuts; it establishes the CEO as an unchecked tsar of the district with all the powers of both the superintendent and the school board. The only job requirement under the law is “high-level management experience in the public or private sector.” So he could be an education amateur.
The state took over Lorain and Youngstown, then East Cleveland.
What happened next in Lorain was eye-popping. It was the Corporate Reformers’ dream come true: All authority vested in one person who was thoroughly immersed in Reformy organizations and philosophy and jargon:
Immediately, there were questions. The duly-elected, but now essentially powerless (except for one thing, and we’ll come back to that later) school board demanded information about the search process, conducted by Chicago-based Atlantic Research Partners with little-to-no transparency. ARP was co-founded by Joseph Wise, after he was fired from the superintendent post in Duval County, Florida for “serious conduct” deemed “injurious” which included “not communicating or acting in good faith with board members during budget discussions.” Wise also owns Acceleration Academies.
Of the five finalists, ARP had connections to four. One of the four was connected by virtue of attending the National Superintendents Academy, another property that Wise bought up. The National Superintendents Academy was previously known as SUPES Academy– a name you may remember from the massive scandal involving Barbara Byrd-Bennett and her federal indictment for bribery in Chicago. The twisty background is laid out here, but it underlines another aspect of the reformster world– multiple connections and always failing upward.
The National Superintendents Academy graduate was David Hardy, Jr., and his resume is loaded with reform credentials.
Hardy grew up in West Chester PA, the son of a teacher. He studied business at Colgate, but says an internship changed his mind about that. After graduating from Colgate with a BS in Economics and a secondary concentration in education and English, Hardy headed out for– what else– a Teach for America gig in Miami-Dade schools teaching reading and writing to 6th and 7th graders. After two years of that, he became the Miami-Dade Madison Middle School Language Arts Chair, where he took credit for raising the school’s grade from F to C. He ran a TFA summer institute, worked as a curriculum support specialist, and then went to work for Achievement First as a Dean of Students, consulted for the Children First Network, and then became the founding principal of Achievement First East New York Middle School. Then Chris Cerf tagged him to become the executive director of one of the seven Regional Achievement Centers in Camden responsible for the turnaround of thirty schools. Then chief of academic supports in Philly, then Deputy Superintendent of Academics in St. Louis Public Schools (where they have problems of their own)– his longest time in a single job, at a whopping four years. Hardy graduated from Colgate in 2003.
Along the way he picked up a Masters degrees in education administration, plus a masters and doctorate from Columbia in urban education leadership. And he was selected as a Future Chief by Chiefs for Change. And he’s connected to the Pahara Institute, which is connected to Aspen.
You can read Peter’s description of the big plans of Hardy and the TFA team he brought to Lorain. It will sound familiar to you from the experiences of so many other cities.
Peter concludes:
I didn’t set out to do a hatchet job on David Hardy and his administration, and it would be wrong to ignore the fact that he does have some support in the city. Some residents see the opposition to Hardy as racist, and at least one school board member has said that upon reflection, she supports the embattled CEO. It’s a contentious mess. When the state took over, some folks were pushed out of positions of power, and it’s reasonable to assume that they would not have been impressed if Jesus Christ Himself had taken over the district.
Certain phrases keep coming up in connection with Hardy, like “in over his head.” He can talk a good game (watch this interview from his St. Louis days), but if leading in a city system like Lorain requires relationship-building, Hardy is coming up short. The latest bombshell is not only a slap in the face to staff, but was handled about as poorly as it possibly could have been.
But it’s important to ask if HB 70 set David Hardy up for failure.
It’s a bad law. It was slipped past the legislature as an amendment in a late-night smoke-filled room arrangement that guaranteed that it would not be publicly discussed. And it is most certainly a full-on assault on public education in the state.
Youngstown, Lorain and now East Cleveland have one thing in common– they are among the poorest school districts in the state. As such, it’s unsurprising that they would have low scores on the Big Standardized Test and therefor low grades for their schools. HB 70 targeted poor communities, and it didn’t target them for help. It targeted them to be taken over, dismantled, and handed off to charter operators. The Lorain I knew has taken such a beating over the years, and HB 70 is the legislative equivalent of taking a beaten puppy and saying, “Look, dammit– fetch now or I am going to give your food to a prettier dog.”
Lorain needs help and healing. It does not need to have its teachers beaten down, its parents kept in the dark, its community held at arms length, its elected officials stripped of power. There is no special mystery to why Lorain’s schools are struggling, but HB 70 doesn’t address any of the root issues of a struggling local economy and a loss of resources. It is a law that punishes poverty rather than trying to ameliorate it.
I am trying to imagine what kind of high-quality leadership would make it possible to sell, “Hi! I’m from the state and I’ve been appointed to strip you of local power and chop your community schools up for someone else’s investment opportunity. Also, all the bad things that are happening are your fault, because your town sucks.” No, David Hardy isn’t very good at his job– but who could be good at the job that HB 70 has created? How do you lead well when HB 70 is fundamentally a punishing act of disrespect toward a local district?
HB 70 sets a district up for every bad corporate reform idea in the book. Test Scores! Visionary CEO! Transformation! Disruption! Spank teachers! Test scores! Strip local control! Expectations! Test Scores! Kids first (but not really)! A smart person with marketworld skills from outside will be so much better than career educators! The state knows more about fixing schools than anyone! Also, test scores!
When gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich visited Lorain last year, he suggested suing the state over HB 70, but that process is already under way. Youngstown has been leading the charge, and Lorain parents have gotten involved— at least on the petition level. The law was challenged in court almost immediately, initially decided in favor of the state, and worked up to the state supreme court which agreed to hear it last October. It also creates some unique issues– Youngstown’s school CEO would not allow the Youngstown board to spend money on the appeal. Lorain teachers filed a “friend of the court” brief as a party directly affected by the outcome, and several districts ands the Ohio School Boards Association have joined the suit.
Meanwhile, new Ohio governor Mike DeWine is sympathetic to some of the issues involved:
“One of the concerns, one of the things that we have seen in Youngstown, Lorain, is the obvious loss of local control, and we’re seeing some of the dynamics that result from the loss of local control. We are a very local government state,” DeWine said. “We like it that way, most of us do. Most of us think that problems get solved locally, so I’ve got some people working on this and we are working with some legislators on this, actually, but I really can’t go into any more details at this point.”
So there is at least some small bit of hope for Lorain and Youngstown and East Cleveland and every other poor Ohio community that was going to fall under HB 70 sooner or later. But if HB 70 ever goes away, those communities will still be facing all the problems they were facing before the state stepped in to help plus all the wreckage left by HB 70. The future is not going to be all rainbows and unicorns any time soon.
And the bitter irony in all of this is that, by many accounts, Lorain was climbing when the state stepped in. We’ll never know how they would have done if the state had just left them alone.
I came to really like Lorain in my brief time there. If things had worked out differently, I would have been glad to stay in that big little town. It deserved better than to be used and discarded by industry; its solid blue collar citizens deserved better as well. And they deserve better treatment by the state than to be thrown under a reform-driven bus that gives them exactly all the wrong things, everything but the support, assistance and resources that they need. This is corporate ed reform at its worst, disenfranchising citizens, trashing communities, and not even coming close to delivering what it promised as an excuse for the power grab.
I’ve kept up with Lorain, watching them in the news over the years ever since I left town right ahead of the industrial collapse. I’ll keep watching the news, hoping for good news from that beautiful little big city on the lake.
Yes, very sad. I visited the area several times for conferences nearby at Youngstown. Perhaps a forgotten part of the story: In late 70s, as de-industrialization of the unionized Northeast moved rapidly in favor of anti-union ‘Sunbelt” and dictatorships abroad, a local groups called the Mahoning Valley Coalition moved to buy the local steel mills and operate them as union-community cooperatives. They asked the Democratic Carter Administration to guarantee a loan of $250mil to convert the private mills to a community venture, to save the jobs and the culture of the area. Carter turned them down, too radical an idea, community control and cooperatives, might lead to democratic socialism, just imagine, how could they allow that?
Our Constitutional Republic and democracy are being buried under a growing pile of manure that will one day be mountains and the working class will be under that mountain.
The more I read about the runaway, fascist, corporate, libertarian, neoliberal, and neoconservative tribal gangs subverting the U.S. Constitution out of greed and hate, the more I think of Thomas Jefferson’s advice on how often we have to nourish the Tree of Liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
The revolution is near if not here. Streets already flow with red — #Red4Ed, that is. Which makes me wonder how near a statewide strike in Ohio to overturn HB 70 might be if the lawsuit doesn’t work. Strikes work.
But while some states get their butts in gear to organize like WVA, CA, Etc…. there are many others INs, OHs, and TNs out there that never seem to get organized and therefore public ed gets taken to the cleaners again and again
Lorain’s story is the story of East Cleveland. We are both trapped in the grips of the aristocracy whose idea of school improvement is basically corporal punishment of school districts. When you have no real idea you go back to what has worked in the past you beat the poor and disenfranchised, what are we being beat with is the ADC, people who look like us, but have the will and the desires of the aristocracy at heart. Modern day slave catchers.
Pahara (mentioned in the post), Bellwether, TFA and New Schools Venture Fund had the same founder, Kim Smith. In an interview at
Philanthropy Roundtable she said the goal of charters was “….brands on a large scale.” All 4 organizations received Gates’ support.
I do believe that we have an INNUMERACY problem. People don’t look beneath those numbers and they don’t even understand those numbers.
Many just ADD and subtract and even with these operations, I have noticed that many have problems.
When scores are reported, where’s the reliability and standard error of measurement? Plus, those tests are not even validated. Good GAWD.
Several years ago, probably more than I care to think about, I read a book by that title. The point was that we tolerate innumerate statements so ridiculous that comparable mistakes in language would make you a laughingstock. Although the modern definition of laughingstocks seems to have become much more forgiving, it strikes me that I am seeing math errors, especially where percents are involved, that are so logically egregious that it defies imagination.
It was by Paulos and was an ok book. Sort of a simplified math version of the book ‘amusing ourselves to death’ (which was better).
I always liked ‘how to lie with statistics’. A good book that I bet you might have seen. Rather old but still 100% usable today
yes
People have a political literacy problem; they are politically illiterate.
Greene gives a birds eye view of a poor, declining community swept up by the churn of “reform.” He shows how “reform” operates in a vacuum with top down imposition and data collection, bias against teachers and a disconnect from the people they are hired to serve. This is one of Greene’s best posts. He writes with just the right amount of irony and avoids sounding sarcastic, which is easy to become, considering the topic. I enjoyed his comment that people in “reform” continuously fail “upward.”
As far as the budget projections for the future in the article, it is clear that the authentic teachers will be few and far between. Deformers intend to become more “efficient” by hiring more TFA, but the greatest change will be a shift to technology. It shows an unwillingness to invest in students that live in poor areas. The message seems to be that these students face a bleak future so they are not entitled to a greater investment. As someone that taught mostly poor students, I find this assumption offensive and anti-democratic. I taught some very bright ELLs, even if they were behind in academics. Deformers are never going to close the “opportunity gap” with technology. They are going to create a separate and unequal access to resources that will result in a tiered disparity in opportunity based on race and class.
BTW, Greene talks about the “teaching geniuses in TFA.” I often look through job websites as my son has been looking for a job for some time. I recently saw an ad for TFA on Indeed. They were looking for college graduates with a 2.5 average. That does not sound like teaching geniuses. It sounds like TFA is settling for warm bodies to fill slots.
They still recruit mainly at public ivies when they can. But their numbers aren’t what they used to be
It’s not “Republicans” who hate local control, it’s oligarchs of all political stripes. Look at Gates and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Jobs and all the other “liberal” oligarchs – no love for local control there either.
Why kist demonize the GOP when you can truthfully lump both parties together in destroying public education? The only difference is that the GOP is more honest and open about how disgusting they really are while the Democrats are not.
Huffpo reports that Dems have abandoned the tech monopolists and cite as evidence, their willingness to criticize Z-berg.
I’ll believe it when Dem politicians tell CAP and its funder, Bill Gates to take a hike.
Elements in both Parties are guilty but not every member of both parties. After all AOC is a Democrat.
Both the Democratic and Republican Parties are worse at the national level. At the state level, one example of Republicans who are not on board is rural Texas state reps and in Arizona, the autocratic kleptocrats have lost some ground. Imagine how much they will spend in future state elections to turn that around.
Charles Koch was recently quoted saying that they should focus on public school district elections because it was the low hanging fruit. The Koch brothers may already be history since David has dropped out of sight as he fights pancreatic cancer.
However, some states have been lost due to massive campaign contributions from the autocratic billionaires who are doing all they can to subvert the US Constitutional Republic and turn it into a companion of an oligarchy, a theocracy and a kleptocracy depending on the state. Florida looks lost. The Washington DC schools look lost. Ohio seems lost.
Most of the states that seem totally lost are still controlled by the GOP, and most of thsoe elected reps that have gone over so far to the dark side of the force, they are not going to change. If they are not voted out of office, then the only way to get rid of them is when they die of old age or disease.
Lloyd, thank you for pointing that out.
I did not mean to paint with so broad a brush, but at the federal level, the vast majority of both parties are atrocious. AOC and Bernie certainly don’t fit into that category.
State and county and even local levels are quite different from D.C., but if I had to characterize America as a whole, I’d confidently say that it’s not nearly as leftist and progressive as other modern industrialized democracies and as it needs to be. This is generally true at all levels.
Agreed, the corruption runs deep but nothing stays the same forever. After all, the Founding Fathers challenged the most powerful empire on the planet and with some help from France and Spain, won.
And at the same time, I see a resurgence of progressivism in the US. It makes sense.
Why JUST demonize . . . . .
Sorry for the typo!
It’s one of the best things Peter has written. In community after community the same thing plays out.
I am chilled by the idea that this CEO thinks he can fire his way to success at the HS. The community deserves so much better and there’s no way they can get it until the state changes the law and bucks up to provide support, long term.
My bigger woe with this story is: how can we recommend anyone enter this profession when this is the kind of thing happening in community after community? Sooo sad.
Diane,
PLEASE inform Heidi Hayes Jacobs and Harvey Silver know about Peter’s blog article. They worked diligently and tiredlessly with us prior to this obscene enforcement from the second ADC. There are more reports since Peter’s report:
http://www.chroniclet.com/Local-News/2019/02/22/Lorain-Schools-redefine-buildings-by-performance.html
http://www.chroniclet.com/Local-News/2019/02/23/Lorain-School-Board-President-calls-for-CEO-to-reapply-to-keep-his-job-DOCUMENT.html
https://www.morningjournal.com/news/lorain-county/lorain-teachers-school-board-blast-hardy-s-teacher-selection-process/article_f7744c4a-36f9-11e9-a857-bfb5f8d3da08.html
WE NEED HELP!!!!
I cannot thank Peter enough for his story. However, we need more help. TFA is destroying our schools, our students, our faculty and staff, our community, our culture, our climate, and our city.
Thank you.
Thanks for the links. “They’re targeting teachers, but they’re doing nothing to help teachers.” That says a lot about so-called reform. They come in with a lot of bias. Instead of community based solutions from the bottom, they come in with a top down wrecking ball that generally leads to privatization which is more wrecking balls and even fewer answers. Before the community blinks, the public asset winds up in some rich person’s portfolio. That’s when the community loses the most.
Retired Teacher, et. al., thank you for reading this and supporting us. WE NEED ALL YOUR SUPPORT! Please pass Diane’s reblog and Peter’s blog on. Let your BATs know. Let your locals know. Let EVERYONE know. Please pay attention to the http://www.chronicle.northcoastnow.com for updates. They come out daily as this disaster evolves.
We appreciate ALL your support!
Thank you!
Will do with pleasure! Keep fighting.
http://www.chroniclet.com/Local-News/2019/02/24/Lorain-Schools-CEO-had-told-union-president-that-teachers-wouldn-39-t-be-moved.html
Presumably, Lorain is the outcome Frederick Hess and AEI wanted. Hess called for rich, ed deformers to control schools of ed. in, “Don’t Surrender the Academy”, posted by Philanthropy Roundtable.
Hess is quite cordial to talk with but he’s bought and paid for like the rest of the edudeformer cheerleaders.
Perfect storm for red corporate saviors on white horses in post-industrial deteriorating cities
Urban centers
Once bustling industrial communities
Communities dependent on one or major industrial anchors, manufacturing, steel, first wave technology (Kodak)
Leading decline in population (St. Louis, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Gary…)
White flight
Corporate flight
Diminished tax base
State legislatures tired of redistributing statewide taxes to underwrite “the big cities”
Red-state State legislatures racism, anti-welfare, anti-common good victim pretense
results in lost local tax revenue + un(der) funded state formulas
= reduced and gross under-funding to urban schools,
Urban and once-industrial cities ripe for silver bullets, smoke and mirrors ripe for wealthy conservative, poor us high taxes self-proclaimed saviors in “takeover” mode.
Enter the billionaire white boys club on their billionaire white horses co-opting unsuspecting well-intended efforts in charters (Shanker) and original concept of teacher/peace corps (additional (not supplanting) staff).
Hmmm – ever wonder why don’t we read these stories about the Napervilles, Scarsdales, and the suburbs.
I wonder what party is more responsible for the robot revolution that has cost millions of jobs and millions more in the coming years.
Are the Republicans or Democrats more guilty?
Why split hairs, at this point? Both have severely damaged PUBLIC education. With all due respect, the debate is moot.
The debate is NOT moot … in fact, nothing is ever moot, because the future hasn’t happened yet and if enough voters wake up and send more people like AOC to Washington and state capitals, in time the pendulum will start to swing back.
That pendulum is always swinging one way or the other.
Instead of reacting like the sky is falling, it’s better to work toward a better future by finding more AOCs and then letting them know they must not fall prey to the billionaires that will dangle millions in front of them every time there is an election.
Yes, Lloyd, I’m with you here. Where the f*** have the two newbies who are all of a sudden so worked up about Lorain been before today? Where were you when we discussed the same issues in EVERY part of the country? What have you been doing to educate your neighbors, friends, and colleagues around the country who have been facing the same issues for years? I’m not expecting everyone to be successful. But when they only come out of the woodwork when the s*** hits the fan in their back yard, excuse me if my sympathy is limited.
If you think any part of this “debate is moot”, then you really don’t know what the hell you are squawking about.
For decades, workers losing their jobs were mislead repeatedly to think that it was always China’s fault for stealing their jobs. It wasn’t until a recent study that we discovered that more than 80-percent of the lost jobs were caused by automation and most of U.S. manufacturing never left the country. in fact, up until a few years ago, The U.S. had the largest manufacturing sector in the world and is still in second place.
While millions of workers were losing their jobs in manufacturing, output increased steadily and has ever declined. In some sectors yes, but overall manufacturing has always produced more products than the previous year.
The U.S. might not export most of what it produces but that is because more than two-thirds of what is produced in the U.S. is bought by US consumers. In China, only about a third of what is produced there is bought by Chinese consumers.
But there will be people that will always blame China for lost jobs no matter what the truth is just like there will always be people that worship President Teflon Ray-Gun and Trump.
Then there are the predictions that another 40 million jobs will be lost to automation in the next decade or two and those jobs are not in manufacturing.
The billionaire white boys ride on their Trojan horses ready to unleash privatization on poor, depleted communities. This is what we get with “small government” with few resources.
Hate to tell you, but some suburbs (the older one), at least, are being treated in similar fashion. Generally these suburbs are poorer and more minority than the suburbs I’m sure you were thinking of when you wrote this.
You are right.
I should have been more specific:
No charters in the Wealthy and property rich suburbs and the white flight exurbs.
Yes, yes, yes to both of you.
Peter Greene has told the tragic story of Lorain. This post is certainly one of his best. Anyone who thinks DeWine is a source of hope is mistaken.
Policies in this state have to pass muster with The Fordham Institute, Philanthropy Ohio and the Gates representative in that organization, along with the major employers who want job-ready graduates willing to follow rules.
Ohio’s Five Year Strategic Plan, published last year was an exercise in slinging slogans around with no understanding of the consequences. Politically important groups were represented as “partners” in creating the plan, 150 in all, with a notably thin cadre of experienced educators.
This plan has no direct bearing on Ohio’s ESSA plan, or the current sham requirements foisted on districts by the Ohio Department of Public Instruction.
The expert on deep structural problems in Ohio public education is William L. Phillis… and in the case of Lorain, certainly Peter Greene among other teachers.
As an immigrant to Ohio, the home I adopted as my permanent home, I don’t disagree with anything in this post or comments. But until we address and make substantive reparations in Detroit and Flint, my sympathy is limited.
As someone who was born/raised in Ohio, and lived in East Cleveland, I am with you on this. I also keep telling my teacher colleagues, here in Ohio, by continuing to vote against public ed interests, and blindly welcoming/complying with any and all reform based programs, we’re all soon going to be sleeping in a soiled bed.
One thing Greene does not talk about, and to be fair, he could not, is the trajectory of the families that originally populated this part of Ohio. The great midwestern economic machine was powered by a population from the rural south. a hundred thousand from West Virginia to Akron. There was a saying in Eastern Kentucky: ” we teach readin’, ritin’, and rt 23″. All over the south, people took busses to northern cities. A bus left West Jeffereson, NC on a monthly basis, bound for Harford County, MD. Out in the country near Tullahoma, TN, Jr. Tucker took a one way bus trip to the Chrysler town of Muncie.
My father-in-law was one of these kids, going with his father to Akron for a time. Returning to Tennessee, he reflected a bias he no doubt absorbed in Akron. He was a half a year ahead of his Tennessee cousins in school. He was to stay in Tennessee, but so many of the people Greene taught in Ohio were from the south.
While they were in the south, they were nationally discussed as poor whites and Negroes, equally uneducable and problematic. When they went north, economic activity suddenly transformed them into good workers. They returned to their families boasting of bulging wallets and great opportunities. Union contracts gave them money on an unprecedented scale. But it never got them respect. No respect for Emmet Till, part of the next generation. None either for the thousands of Appalachian children who never got to come back except to visit the beautiful homeland out of which they had been driven like so many sons of Cain, bearing only the mark of wistfulness. But for economic privation, they would all have returned to the hollows in the mountains they once had to leave.
Greene’s story is not only the story of the refusal to fund a school system, it is also the story of our own inability to keep the economic reality of the world from harming its most vulnerable people. It was the grandsons of that great migration that were leaving the town where he taught, shrinking the population even as the rural population of the Great Plains was making its way out of the great agricultural belt, leaving behind boarded up houses there as well.
The greatest generation, dubbed this knighthood by Brokaw, will be remembered for what they built. Their sons and daughters will be remembered for what they tore down. The small town communities that were America have now given way to the rising metropolitan areas across the country, their decaying inner cities surrounded by suburbs. Their gentrifying downtowns cannot hide the great mass of population that is being left out of the mix. Their rising property values cannot but create a vast population outside the pale of the economic world.
This may interest you, Roy:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/06/what-youre-getting-wrong-about-appalachia
And then there’s this, too:
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/a-dreamers-life
But the irony of Hardy’s narrative to TFA:
https://www.teachforamerica.org/stories/rebuilding-schools-in-a-rust-belt-town
I’m from Lorain, Graduated from Lorain, Live in Lorain, Teach for LORAIN!
#1 PROBLEM = Standardized ONE DAY (Subject) Tests
As an educator, If I cannot instill in my students, something that was [maybe] not instilled at home (enough to stick), or has been engrained in some way shape or form that “education/ school matters”….these standardized test, that have deemed Lorain City Schools “a failure”…is always going to be our downfall…..Because “No Child Left Behind” and “The Department of Education” has created a system where [now], to TOO MANY students, it simply has…
NO VALUE.
NO VALUE to kids who:
– have high absenteeism
– know they will get passed on to the next grade level ANYWAY
– don’t have the “intrinsic” value for education, enough to try their BEST
– don’t care AT ALL about the “results”, that they receive MONTHS later
– do not have the DESIRE to want to do well on it, because to them, “it don’t matter, I get passed on (again) anyways.”
– have “decided” they ARE NOT going to graduate
– have “decided” they ARE NOT going to college, so who cares
– cannot understand the verbage, jargon, vocabulary, language and “give up”
– have so many problems at home, BEFORE they even sit down for “this” test, that this “TEST” is the “LEAST” of their problems.
– talk and make disruptions during this very “important” test
– finish in 8 minutes
– notice that “nothing happens” when they don’t do well on it
Until the “1-Day” (for English, 1 for Math) Standardized Test is eliminated as a means to “grade” an entire school-years worth of “learning”, Lorain and many other cities will never see the full potential of what so many great kids have to offer to this world.
Update on Peter’s blog.
Also, wear Titan’s gear all this week in support of HS and/or order the unity shirt. Pass this message along please.
If I may ask: What do you teach? If you teach a tested subject, have you refused to give the test?