Over 600 educators of color and education scholars of color have signed a statement opposing failed billionaire-backed “reforms” intended to privatize public schools and deprofessionalize teaching.
The statement was drafted by Kevin Kumashiro and can be found on his website, along with the list of those who signed it. People continue to sign on to demonstrate to the public that their rightwing campaign is not fooling educators and scholars of color.
All Educators of Color and Educational Scholars of Color in the U.S. are invited to sign on (please scroll down to sign)
THIS MUST END NOW:
Educators & Scholars of Color Against Failed Educational “Reforms”
The public is being misled. Billionaire philanthropists are increasingly foisting so-called “reform” initiatives upon the schools that serve predominantly students of color and low-income students, and are using black and brown voices to echo claims of improving schools or advancing civil rights in order to rally community support. However, the evidence to the contrary is clear: these initiatives have not systematically improved student success, are faulty by design, and have already proven to widen racial and economic disparities. Therefore, we must heed the growing body of research and support communities and civil-rights organizations in their calls for a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the problems facing our schools, for a retreat from failed “reforms,” and for better solutions:
• Our school systems need more public investment, not philanthropic experimentation; more democratic governance, not disenfranchisement; more guidance from the profession, the community, and researchers, not from those looking to privatize and profiteer; and more attention to legacies of systemic injustice, racism, and poverty, not neoliberal, market-based initiatives that function merely to incentivize, blame, and punish.
• Our teachers and leaders need more, better, and ongoing preparation and support, more professional experience and community connections, and more involvement in shared governance and collective bargaining for the common good, not less.
• Our vision should be that every student receives the very best that our country has to offer as a fundamental right and a public good; not be forced to compete in a marketplace where some have and some have not, and where some win and many others lose.
The offer for “help” is alluring, and is reinforced by Hollywood’s long history of deficit-oriented films about white teachers saving poorer black and brown students from suffering, as if the solution consisted merely of uplifting and inspiring individuals, rather than of tackling the broader system of stratification that functions to fail them in the first place. Today, more than ever before, the “help” comes in the form of contingent financing for education, and the pressure to accept is intense: shrinking public resources, resounding claims of scarcity, and urgent calls for austerity make it seem negligent to turn down sizable financial incentives, even when such aid is tied to problematic reforms.
The growing number of funders includes high-profile foundations and obscure new funders (including but not limited to the Arnold Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bradley Foundation, Broad Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, City Fund, DeVos family foundations, Gates Foundation, Koch family foundations, and Walton Family Foundation), and for the most part, have converged on what counts as worthwhile and fundable, whether leaning conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat (see, for example, the platform of Democrats for Education Reform). Such funders may be supporting some grassroots initiatives, but overall, mega-philanthropy in public education exemplifies the 21st-century shift from traditional donating that supported others’ initiatives with relatively smaller grants, to venture financing that offers funding pools of unprecedented size and scale but only to those who agree to implement the funders’ experiments. Belying the rhetoric of improving schools is the reality that such experiments are making struggling schools look less and less like the top performing schools for the elite, and do so by design, as with the following:
• The Portfolio Model.
Exemplified in the early 2000s by the turnaround-school reforms in Chicago Public Schools and Race to the Top, and increasingly shaping urban districts across the country today, the “portfolio model” decentralizes decision making, expands school choice, holds schools accountable through performance measures like student testing, and sanctions failing schools with restructuring or closure, incentivizing their replacements in the form of charter schools. This model purports that marketizing school systems will lead to system improvement, and that student testing carries both validity and reliability for high-stakes decisions, neither of which is true.
Instead of improving struggling schools, what results are growing racial disparities that fuel gentrification for the richer alongside disinvestment from the poorer. The racially disparate outcomes should not be surprising, given the historical ties between mass standardized testing and eugenics, and even today, given the ways that “norm referencing” in test construction guarantees the perpetuation of a racialized achievement curve. Yet, the hallmarks of the portfolio model are taught in the Broad Superintendents Academy that prepares an increasingly steady flow of new leaders for urban districts, and not surprisingly, that has produced the leaders that have been ousted in some of the highest profile protests by parents and teachers in recent years. This is the model that propels the funding and incubation of school-choice expansion, particularly via charter schools, through such organizations as the NewSchools Venture Fund and various charter networks whose leaders are among the trainers in the Broad Academy. Imposing this model on poorer communities of color is nefarious, disingenuous, and must end.
• Choice, Vouchers, Charters.
The expansion of school choice, including vouchers (and neo-voucher initiatives, like tax credits) and charter schools, purports to give children and parents the freedom to leave a “failing” school. However, the research on decades of such programs does not give any compelling evidence that such reforms lead to system improvement, instead showing increased racial segregation, diversion of public funding from the neediest of communities, neglect of students with disabilities and English-language learners, and more racial disparities in educational opportunity. This should not be surprising: choice emerged during the Civil Rights Movement as a way to resist desegregation; vouchers also emerged during this time, when the federal government was growing its investment into public education, as a way to privatize public school systems and divert funding to private schools for the elite; and charter schools emerged in the 1990s as laboratories for communities to shape their own schools, but have become the primary tool to privatize school systems.
Yes, choice and vouchers give some students a better education, but in many areas, students of color and low-income students are in the minority of those using vouchers. Yes, some charters are high performing, but overall, the under-regulation of and disproportionate funding for charter schools has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in waste (and even more in corporate profits) that could otherwise have gone to traditional public schools. The NAACP was right when it resolved that privatization is a threat to public education, and in particular, called for a moratorium on charter-school expansion; and the NAACP, MALDEF, ACLU, and other national civil-rights organizations have opposed voucher expansion. Diverting funds towards vouchers, neo-vouchers, and charters must end.
• Teacher Deprofessionalization.
The deprofessionalization of teaching—including the undermining of collective bargaining and shared governance, and the preferential hiring of underprepared teachers—is foregrounded in charter schools (which often prohibit unionization and hire a disproportionate number of Teach for America teachers), but affects the teaching force in public schools, writ large. The mega-philanthropies are not only anti-union, having supported (sometimes rhetorically, sometimes resourcefully) the recent wave of anti-union bills across the states; but more broadly, are anti-shared governance, supporting the shift toward top-down management forms (including by for-profit management at the school level, and unelected, mayor-appointed boards at the district level).
The weakening of the profession is also apparent in the philanthropies’ funding of fast-track routes to certification, not only for leaders (like with New Leaders for New Schools), but also for classroom teachers, like with the American Board for Certification of Teaching Excellence, and more notably, Teach for America (TFA). TFA accelerates the revolving door of teachers by turning teaching into a brief service obligation, justified by a redefining of quality teacher away from preparedness, experience, and community connectedness to merely being knowledgeable of subject matter (and notably, after the courts found that TFA teachers did not meet the definition of “highly qualified,” Congress would remove the requirement that every student have a “highly qualified” teacher in its 2015 reauthorization of ESEA, thus authorizing the placement of underprepared teachers in the neediest of schools).
Parents are being lied to when told that these “reforms” of weakening unions and lessening professional preparation will raise the quality of teachers for their children. Yes, some teachers and leaders from alternative routes are effective and well-intended, but outliers should not drive policy. Students are being lied to when told that choosing such pathways is akin to joining the legacy of civil-rights struggles for poorer communities of color. Not surprisingly, the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives have called out how initiatives like TFA appeal to our desire to serve and help, but shortchange the students who need and deserve more.
We, as a nationwide collective of educators of color and educational scholars of color, oppose the failed reforms that are being forced by wealthy philanthropists onto our communities with problematic and often devastating results. These must end now. We support reforms that better serve our students, particularly in poorer communities of color, and we will continue to work with lawmakers, leaders, school systems, and the public to make such goals a reality.
From ILA.
Featured guests are as follows:
Cornelius Minor, author of We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be
Tiffany M. Jewell, author of This Book Is Anti-Racist
Pam Allyn, global literacy expert and coauthor (with Ernest Morrell) of Every Child a Super Reader
Dr. Noni Thomas López, head of school at The Gordon School in Providence, RI
Karyn Parsons, author and founder of Sweet Blackberry
Kimberly Jones, young adult novelist and activist
Dr. Stephen G. Peters, vice president of the ILA Board of Directors, will deliver opening remarks.
Wow! Outstanding!
Diane This is an excellent non-extremist treatment of privatization and the various arguments for public education . . . and it’s “grassroots.” If anyone listening is “connected” to the Biden campaign, nail this statement to someone’s forehead there?
Thank you for posting it. CBK
well said in this moment of chaos: NAIL THE STATEMENT to those who have a chance at getting the message across
It sounds like Mr. Kumashiro read and digested “Slaying Goliath,” which includes an exhaustive list of the various groups seeking to undermine public education. This post is an excellent summary of assault on the common good during the past twenty years or so. Multiple people should send this excellent summary to the Biden campaign. Perhaps if many people flood the campaign with this message, Biden may actually get to read and digest it. It may also give his campaign some idea of how tired parents, students and teachers are of disruption and fake reform.
Establishing separate and unequal schools for mostly minority students should not be a priority, and we should be wasting valuable public dollars on this anti-democratic, political agenda of the 1% and the right wing. We need investment in public schools that aspire to help all students and bring diverse students together, and we need to stop monetizing mostly black and brown students.
Well stated. Thanks for posting.
I have so much work to do and you keep posting insightful, meaningful things like to keep distracting me…in a good way. Curses!
As a retired black educator, I totally agree that the philanthropic models don’t work because they are essentially tax write-offs for the uber wealthy, who parley the ‘give-aways’ into great PR but not results. The tax codes in the US generally ought to be re-written so that the very rich are taxed—-as Senator Warren pointed out—-at a rate that would then allow the government to target funds and programs where results can be quantified. And this model should be used to revitalize housing, education, healthcare, and family support initiatives. Otherwise, America is a shithole country!
And this model should be used to revitalize housing, education, healthcare, and family support initiatives.
Amen
I agree wholeheartedly. We need to recalibrate the reparations argument to, at the state and local levels, defund the police (which does not mean getting rid of police, despite disingenuous, lying attempts to confuse people) and, at the federal level, defund the military (see parenthetical comment above) to reinvest massive resources in the areas you cite. One of the misunderstood aspects of significantly higher social spending–at least here in the U.S.–in western industrialized countries and places like Japan and South Korea is that these policies have a quelling effect on violence due to extreme poverty and lack of economic opportunity.
GregB A D Congressman referred to “de-funding the police” as “a sloppily-written slogan.” I think he was right.
That said, as usual, what we get from the other side is willfully deliberate, and so pretended, ignorance and misunderstanding . . . . of what the slogan means . . . a pox on them and their disingenuous attitudes . . . .
BTW, from Gavin Newsom (Governor of CA): all must now wear masks in public in California, because (1) too many people are going mask-less as we are re-opening; and (2) virus case numbers are going up.
Those adolescent R-idiots are issuing death threats to government officials and doctors who are recommending wearing face masks. I have a right to jump off a cliff, but it MIGHT be bad for my health.
Democracy: Where we have to smile and suffer fools. CBK
“Defunding the police” is a bad slogan, tailor-made for Trump’s campaign.
Last night as I was walking my dog very late, with no one in sight, I felt fearful and I thought about Truman Capote’s classic “In Cold Blood,” where a couple of miscreants (white) entered a farm house in Kansas and slaughtered everyone. And the murders in Connecticut where a couple of criminals (white) tied up a family, took the wife to the bank to draw out money, raped the daughters, set fire to the house and burned everyone alive. The father, a doctor, managed to escape, and the murderers were caught. Too late to save the mother and daughters. No, I don’t want to defund the police. I want them to have a culture of respect and honor and a duty to protect everyone. I hope for more black and Hispanic police officers.
Diane The term “defund” is WAAAAAY over-generalized and INVITES misunderstanding. I’ve heard it explained in several different ways, most of which have to do with re-channeling monies but also functions, away from police; for instance, psychological, health, or social services that all seem to come in on 911 calls and that require other sorts of expertise and outcomes (besides legal) . . . and demilitarizing them. NO ONE that I heard said they wanted to get rid of the police–who would be immediately relevant in your scenarios (I remember those well also–still gives me chills to think about them.)
I personally would also like the police to all have a crash course in the Amendments to the Constitution. (Apparently, many need it.) CBK
I agree, and I agree with what Senator Sanders said in an interview with The New Yorker a week ago. We need to not defund police, but instead better fund police to be well-educated, well-trained, well-paid professionals. Instead of fully funding them, we send in often underprepared officers armed with M-16s and grenade launchers while we attack their pension plans. Police officers, like teachers, like nurses, like firefighters, need to be treated like professionals to do very difficult jobs filled with complicated issues of violence, race, abuse, mental illness, and addiction. When we as a country look past using every excuse to attack public unions and defund public services, we will see the wisdom of having a just and functioning society ahead of letting billionaires avoid taxation.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bernie-sanders-is-not-done-fighting
beautifully said
But what I originally intended to write when visiting this post is the most hearty agreement with the educators of color who wrote this eloquent statement against deprofessionalizing and privatizing education. So right!
Thanks Bob!
“Defunding the police” is a bad slogan, tailor-made for Trump’s campaign.
Exactly right. Your walk with the dog imagery is chilling to read. There are remedies in budgets and in narrowed job descriptions for police officers versus calls for medical emergencies, social services for homeless people and so on.
The expression “Defund the Police” was a great propaganda gift to Fox and Trump. Now every discussion of what needs to be done regarding policing in the U.S. has to start with a disclaimer about this mind-blowingly stupid expression. No sane person wants anarchy, just as no sane person wants a nation to be, like ours, seeped in gun culture, just as no sane person wants there to be more guns than citizens, just as no sane person wants untrained and poorly vetted police, sometimes ones in precincts with extraordinarily racist organizational cultures, to be carrying weapons and following procedures designed for use by combat soldiers.
Thank you, Bob. I agree completely.
Laura,
So do you advocate supporting ever increasing funds to the police as other services get cut, then eliminated? Wouldn’t you rather see police funding cut so that there could be squads of mental health experts responding to many ‘incidents’?
‘Our’ police were invented to protect the property of the powerful. That’s their job. They do ‘protect and serve’, but not who you think.
For some background, you can read ‘Policing a Class Society’ by S. Harring, however this enforcement role was invented well before the American Civil War [Was the ‘Sheriff of Nottingham’ a nice guy? What was his role?]
In theory, our country was founded on the idea that the ‘ruling class’ (the British aristocracy) was incompetent and incapable of ruling in the interest of the people of North America. In practice, however, many of the ‘founding fathers’ didn’t want an egalitarian system, but simply wanted to become a new ruling class (based on the British model). This was counter to the ideas of Thomas Paine, of course, but the speed with which Paine was forgotten after the Brits were kicked out shows how, from the very start, the ‘democratic ideal’ was used to dupe the masses into supporting a particular group of elites.
It took years and years of popular struggle to get to the limited vision of Lincoln (of, by and for the People). After the Civil War, the publicly funded police began to become important strikebreakers, enforcing oppression of the working class and keeping them malleable and submissive in a far more efficient way than overt military use.
Of course, the police seldom made the Law, which was designed of, by and for the ruling class, but they did ‘interpret’ where to enforce it and where to turn a blind eye. They knew that busting a bunch of underage rich kids at a fraternity party drinking scotch was a no-no, and that going after the ‘dealer’ that sold the scotch was out of the question. They also knew that going after a bunch of poor kids doing crack cocaine on the street was vital! And, dismantling the distribution network was essential.
Daedalus:
“So do you advocate supporting ever increasing funds to the police as other services get cut, then eliminated? ”
Of course not. If I believed that I would have said so.
“Wouldn’t you rather see police funding cut so that there could be squads of mental health experts responding to many ‘incidents’?
No, and you speak of mental health squads as if I favor some sort of mental health militia. Wrong.
Thank you for the suggested reading on police, I suppose.
Your blanket contempt for the police is obvious.
Well, we certainly disagree on the ‘mental health’ issue. I would far rather to see a mental health professional deal with (or at least be on the scene and in control) a large portion of the incidents that attract police. There aren’t as many bank robberies and murders as you might think, and the odd psychopath is almost as rare as hen’s teeth (despite Diane’s strange concern…. she needs to change her viewing habits).
My ‘blanket contempt’ is aimed at the history of the institution. The reason is there for anyone to see, if they have the will to look without blinders. Even as recently as the OWS breakup, we can see the use of police violence against peaceful, lawful protest. Even today, I saw (on TV) a woman in a ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-shirt being removed from the grounds of the Tulsa Trump thing. She had a ticket (if it was private property) or, if it was public property, she was entitled to sit in her t-shirt. Shouldn’t you be offering up ‘contempt’ for this action?
And, of course, there’s the ‘few bad apples’ excuse. When the elderly guy was pushed down and blood began flowing from his ear, one cop (the single good apple?) attempted to bend down to attend him. That cop was pulled away and encouraged to join the army of his ‘brothers’ that walked right past the stricken man. How do you interpret that event? The entire police unit resigned in protest of the reprimand to those two ‘officers’ that did the disgusting deed. Isn’t that worthy of contempt?
Yes, I have contempt for a militarized domestic paramilitary. I do not see it as an institution the serves the vast majority of our citizenry. They ‘do their job’ almost mechanically, however their ‘job’ is often harmful to the citizenry. It’s similar to the ‘Brownshirts’, only more ‘legal’.
That being said, i do think most traffic laws are for the general benefit, and I would like the cops to start issuing ‘reminders’ to people to use their turn signals (or at least use hand signals). Instead, they concentrate on ‘pot’ busts, at least in my neighborhood. Do I smoke pot? No. Do I care if my neighbor smokes pot? No.
Re: “‘Defunding the police’ is a bad slogan, tailor-made for Trump’s campaign.”
That is why progressives really need to do Frank Luntz-style research to help wordsmith their message to the public on things like police reform, immigration reform, and Medicare expansion. It seems to me that either conservatives are really good at shaping the public narrative or progressives are really bad at marketing their ideas.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
This Must End Now!
This article should motivate public school advocates to rekindle their efforts. Charter schools and voucher schools discriminate in a multitude of ways.
I wish the otherwise fine article emphasized more the virtues of community schools rooted in the communities they serve. Paul