Rodney Pierce is a seventh-grade teacher in North Carolina. He writes here on the Public Voices, Public Schools site sponsored by the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

“These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.”

Though made over 30 years ago by African American writer and social critic James Baldwin, this statement still emphasizes the choice that sits before us as a nation.

The choice of whether or not we make the investment in our public schools to the benefit of our students.

While that investment can be presented as one of physical capital, i.e., real estate, equipment, inventory, etc., the more significant expenditure is that of human capital, which is namely teachers.

From student performance and achievement, their social and emotional well-being, or the development of non-cognitive skills, a wealth of research shows the impact of teachers on student outcomes.

And if, like Baldwin, we believe these are “all our children,” we should be deeply concerned about the status of Black boys.

Looking at my state of North Carolina, Black male students in 2019 ranked last or near the bottom in Reading and Mathematics scores among 4^th, 8^th and 12^th graders (NAEP). They made up the lowest percentage of students identified as Academically and Intellectually Gifted (AIG) despite making up a higher percentage of male students overall (13 percent) than American Indian, Hispanic and Asian males combined. Black males had the highest rate of short-term and long-term suspensions, the fourth highest dropout rate and were placed more frequently in ALP (Alternative Learning Programs) than any other student groups. Black students as a whole are much more likely than their White counterparts to be arrested as they made up 49 percent of juvenile complaints at school.

These dismal educational scenarios lead to even more somber results in their lives, as Black males in North Carolina have one of the highest unemployment rates, one of the lowest life expectancies and the highest incarceration rate (49 percent of all state inmates as of December 2021).

Despite these grim statistics, the plight of Black male P-12 students can be alleviated by making the aforementioned investment in the recruitment AND retention of Black male teachers.

Research indicates Black male students having Black male teachers leads to lower dropout rates, fewer disciplinary issues, more positive views of schooling, better test scores and increased college aspirations. Our very presence undermines Black male stereotypes and we are more likely to be familiar with the cultural needs of our Black male students, as we were once these students ourselves. These students identify with us, and are able to see themselves working later in life as educated professionals. Black students taught by Black teachers are three times more likely to be assigned to AIG services than those taught by non-Black teachers and are more likely to take AP (Advanced Placement) courses taught by Black teachers.

Students of all races benefit in that they not only have lower likelihoods of discipline when taught by a Black male teacher, but the social and emotional impact of our presence lessens the possibility of those students developing implicit bias as adults. Simply put, seeing Black men in positions of authority helps all students develop dispositions for not only civic life but the  workforce. In several models controlling for student, teacher and school conditions, researchers have continuously found students expressed more favorable perceptions of Black male teachers than non-Black ones.

But there’s an impediment to these benefits of having Black men in P-12 classrooms.

In North Carolina, Black male teachers made up only 3% of teachers in 2017-18. We make up only 2% nationwide.

How do we solve this?

By making that investment.

The model is already available from groups and organizations like Call Me MISTER (South Carolina), the He Is Me Institute, Profound Gentlemen (Charlotte, NC), the BOND Project, the Center for Black Educator Development, the Boston Public Schools Male Educators of Color Program, etc.

If you want to recruit, develop, retain and ultimately, empower Black male teachers, you need to listen to the Black men who run these entities. Unfortunately, our country doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to that.

But if we don’t make the investment now, we will be making the investment later when it comes to Black male outlooks in unemployment, incarceration and health (life expectancies).

“These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.” Let’s ensure that we profit.

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Rodney D. Pierce is a seventh-year middle school Social Studies teacher in eastern North Carolina. He was the 2019 North Carolina Council for the Social Studies Teacher of the Year and the inaugural Teacher Fellow for the NC Equity Fellowship through the Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED). He is a Fellow of Carolina Public Humanities, the UNC-Chapel Hill Southern Oral History Program, and the NC Public School Forum’s Education Policy Fellowship.

Pierce has appeared on MSNBC’s The Reidout and the Tamron Hall Show on ABC to speak about the teaching of American history in public schools. An avid historian, his research on re-segregation in his native Halifax County was featured in the Washington Post. 

He serves on the Governor’s Teacher Advisory Committee. 

Kathryn Joyce, an investigative reporter for Salon, has written a three-part series for Salon about Hillsdale College, the ultra-conservative Christian college that has entered the charter industry. This is first in the series. Hillsdale was originally founded to preserve the classical tradition in education, but it evolved into a far-right incubator of ideas and officials for the Trump administration.

Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee has already made a deal with Hillsdale to launch 50 Christian-themed charter schools in his state. The fact that this usurps local control of schools in Tennessee doesn’t bother the governor because the state will supply a politically sanitized, Christian school at public expense.

Hillsdale leaders, Joyce explains, were deeply involved in Trump’s so-called “1776 Commission,” which was supposed to be a call for “patriotic education” as a counter to “The 1619 Project.” The college “has quietly become one of the most influential entities in conservative politics.”

Joyce describes in detail a Hillsdale charter school in Orange County led by a powerful ultra-conservative couple: the wife is president of the Orange County Board of Education and the husband is a physician who opposes COVID vaccines and any effort to combat climate change.

Joyce writes:

In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a “hero to populist conservatives around the world.” [Diane’s note: They got that right!]

If you thought that Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission — a jingoistic alternative to the New York Times’ “1619 Project” that was roundly panned by historians — died with his presidency, that effort is now being amplified and exported, on a massive scale, around the country. If you wonder what conservatives hope to install in place of the books they’re trying to ban, the answer often lies in Hillsdale’s freely-licensed curricula.

And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale’s proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the “patriotic education” premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools. 

Please finish reading this excellent and alarming article by opening the link.

Gary Rubinstein was part of the earliest cohorts of Teach for America. He became friends with many of the pioneers of TFA and the charter movement. Many years later, he became disillusioned and became a friendly critic. Over time, his criticism became sharper as he realized that TFA and the charter leaders were making unsupportable claims. He is now an experienced math teacher at one of New York City’s selective high schools. When he learned that the applications for TFA were steadily declining, he thought hard about how TFA lost its luster.

What happened? Certainly it was not financial woes. It has an operating budget of $300 million. Its CEO is paid $450,000 a year.

Rubinstein attributes the declining attraction of TFA to three factors:

1. Failure to properly train corps members.
2. Ineffective leadership.
3. Alliance with teacher-bashing reformers.

The root cause of these factors is, he says, ”arrogance.” TFA never saw a need to improve their training. They made audacious claims about their success. They believed their own press releases. They kept raking in millions every year from foundations, corporations, and the federal government. It didn’t matter that there was no there there.

Jennifer Berkshire writes powerfully in The Forum about the outraged parents of students at elite private schools who want to squash critical race theory and anything that smacks of liberalism.

Bret Stephens had come to Boston’s historic Copley Plaza Hotel bearing an ominous warning: Illiberalism is on the march, and free speech is under siege. As it happens, his claim was borne out by the growing number of states that have now enacted education gag orders, restricting how teachers can talk about race, but this was not the scourge that the New York Times opinion columnist had in mind. No, Stephens’ ire was trained on the schools—or as he described them, “feeders for woke culture in every part of society.”
 

It was familiar Stephens fare, dished up in column after column. But attendees at the Parents Unite conference, who’d shelled out $350 a pop to spend a recent fall weekend commiserating over the rising tide of wokeness in the nation’s elite schools, ate it up. After all, Stephens’ ties to the world of top-tier prep schools run deep. Not only did he board down the road in Concord at the Middlesex School as a lad, but he also serves on its board of trustees. These parents want their schools back, and Stephens was happy to help lead the charge.
 
     In the increasingly crowded market catering to parent outrage, the Boston-based Parents Unite stands out for its pedigree. Yes, Moms for Liberty offers $500 bounties for teachers who violate education gag orders, and Parents Defending Education seeks to root out politics in the classroom via anonymous snitching. But Parents Unite, not to be confused with the pro-charter school, anti-union Massachusetts Parents United, aims for higher ground: “diversity of thought.” The group represents parents of children enrolled at top “independent” schools in New England, and according to its official origin story, the homeschooling measures of the Covid pandemic gave those parents a scarifying crash course in the sort of agitprop fare that their hefty tuition checks were underwriting. More specifically, it was what these parents saw as the over-the-top response by many private schools to the murder of George Floyd that launched them into full-scale revolt. For hundreds of years, parents have sent their children off to the elite precincts of Phillips and Hotchkiss, secure in the knowledge that the Ivy League awaits. And now all of a sudden these same schools wanted them to feel bad about their privilege?

But the outrage didn’t end there. As the proceedings at the weekend-long Parents Unite confab made clear, anti-wokeness is a slippery slope. What began as a howl of protest against “critical race theory” has quickly built to include a seemingly endless litany of conservative complaints about what gets taught in schools and by whom. As the conference wore on, grievance piled up upon fresh grievance. Classrooms were being “racialized, sexualized and politicized,” as one speaker put it. Kids were coming home defeated and deflated, charged another. Schools no longer teach real-world knowledge, complained one of the student attendees. The vast majority of his classmates don’t know the difference between a stock and a bond, he reported in astonishment. Wouldn’t they gain more from learning about that than about how to combat racism?
 
     A panel discussion with the rather too-on-the-nose title “DEI: Under the Hood,” quickly moved on from the alleged excesses of diversity, equity and inclusion to fresh outrages, like social and emotional learning (SEL). This brand of instruction, it turns out, was actually brought into schools at the behest of businesses looking to recruit future knowledge-economy workers outfitted with “soft skills,” like team building and collaboration. But in the hothouse culture-war reveries of Parents United, SEL has taken its place alongside DEI and CRT as another sinister form of woke-ist mind control masquerading as sensitivity and empathy.

What began as a howl of protest against “critical race theory” has quickly built to include a seemingly endless litany of conservative complaints about what gets taught in schools and by whom.     

      Then there’s “gender ideology.” Erika Sanzi, who has herself recently transitioned from Obama-era charter school advocate to parents’ rights crusader, explained from the stage, parents who might be too fearful to speak out about CRT are going to revolt when they realize that the schools are trying to turn their kids trans.
 
     What or whom specifically is carrying out all of this indoctrination? Teachers unions are to blame, naturally, along with graduate schools of education—a perennial source of political ire dating back to the early nineteenth century. (That private schools are overwhelmingly union free, and do not require the credentials dispensed by schools of education seemed to matter not at all here.) Most of all, though, it was young teachers—social justice warriors all—who bore the brunt of the ire. These self-styled revolutionaries eschew not just the classic texts but all texts, one panelist bemoaned. Older, tenured teachers—the same reliable villains who’ve been depicted as the enemy of progress throughout the modern era of education reform—are evidently now the last remaining bulwark against wokeism.
 
     For parents rebelling against leftist indoctrination in the public schools, politicians have seized on a favorite conservative cure: school choice. This, too, was a baffling refrain at the Parents United conference: private school parents have already exercised that option. Indeed, one striking plaint running through the sessions in Boston was that parents who send their children to elite private schools are uniquely powerless—victimized by the meritocracy itself. To voice their grievances is to risk not just their youngster’s spot at Groton or Deerfield Academy, but also to jeopardize the great brass ring at the end of the prep school carousel: entrée into the Ivy League.
 
     Desperate times, then, call for desperate measures. Kerry McDonald, the senior education fellow at the liberty-loving think tank, Foundation for Economic Education, proposed that instead of continuing to support “school,” parents return to the time-honored tradition of teaching their children themselves. But rather than going into despairing cultural retreat mode, in the manner of many latter-day evangelical homeschoolers, the refugees from the woke prep academies can count on the largess and thought-leading cachet of Silicon Valley. “Marc Andreessen has been talking a lot about homeschooling,” McDonald reported, citing the great market imprimatur of the Netscape founder-turned-venture-capitalist.

Please open the link and finish reading the article. And shed salty tears for the parents of children in elite private schools who think they have no voice.