Archives for category: Race
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EduShyster: TFA’s Perplexing Diversity Dilemma

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2016 //
25

In this post, EduShyster interviews Teach for America alumna-turned-academic Terrenda White. She joined TFA in the early 2000s. CNN followed her around during her first year of teaching, presumably to show how successful this new thing called TFA was. Now she studies TFA’s diversity problem. While TFA claims to have increased the diversity of those within its ranks, it also causes a decrease in the number of teachers of color by displacing them.

 

White says:

 

While TFA may be improving their diversity numbers, that improvement has coincided with a drastic decline in the number of teachers of color, and Black teachers in particular, in the very cities where TFA has expanded. I don’t see them making a connection between their own diversity goals and the hits that teachers of color have taken as a result of policies to which TFA is connected: school closures where teachers of color disproportionately work, charter school expansion, teacher layoffs as schools are turned around. We have to talk about whether and how those policies have benefited TFA to expand in a way that they’re not ready to publicly acknowledge….

 

What happened in New Orleans, for example, is a microcosm of this larger issue where you have a blunt policy that we know resulted in the displacement of teachers of color, followed by TFA’s expansion in that region. I’ve never heard TFA talk about or address that issue. Or take Chicago, where the number of Black teachers has been cut in half as schools have been closed or turned around. In the lawsuits that teachers filed against the Chicago Board of Education, they used a lot of social science research and tracked that if a school was low performing and was located on the north or the west side and had a higher percentage of white teachers, that school was less likely to be closed. As the teachers pointed out, this wasn’t just about closing low-performing schools, but closing low-performing schools in communities of color, and particularly those schools that had a higher percentage of teachers of color. What bothers me is that we have a national rhetoric about wanting diversity when at the same time we’re actually manufacturing the lack of diversity in the way in which we craft our policies. And we mete them out in a racially discriminatory way. So in many ways we’re creating the problem we say we want to fix….

 

For TFA, the managerialism and the technocratic approach excludes a serious discussion about these larger, systemic problems: poverty, segregation and unequal funding. When I was a TFA corps member, I really believed that if I just had perfect lesson plans, then these larger problems wouldn’t matter. The technocratic approach is just about test scores and making them go up, and it’s disconnected from these larger questions. How do we involve parents, and do they have any say in what a good school is? Are they a part of these turnaround models? Do they get any kind of voice? I think the whole community-based model of schooling is very much being lost to a top-down managerial approach.

 

This is another fascinating interview from EduShyster that introduces us to a young scholar who will have a large impact on the future of teaching and on how TFA is perceived by the public.

Categories Education Reform, Poverty, Race, Teach for America

Why Did Cleveland Sue Tamir Rice’s Family After His Death?

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2016 //
1

This is a fascinating interview with a legal scholar at Georgetown University that addresses the question of why the city of Cleveland sued the estate of 12-year-old Tamir Rice for $500 after he was mistakenly shot dead by police. And why a Chicago police officer who mistakenly killed two people sued their estates for emotional stress.

 

 

The answer may surprise you. But it shouldn’t.

Categories Injustice, Race

Study Finds Many Charter Schools Give Disparate Discipline to Black Students and Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2016 //
16

The UCLA Civil Rights Project faulted many charter schools for harsh disciplinary policies towards black students and students with disabilities. These practices, the study concluded, contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. The new study is called Charter Schools, Civil Rights, and School Discipline: A Comprehensive Review.

 

The comprehensive analysis by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the UCLA Civil Rights Project identified 374 charter schools across the country that had suspended 25% or more of their entire student body during the course of the 2011-12 academic year. The comprehensive review also revealed:

 

Nearly half of all black secondary charter school students attended one of the 270 charter schools that was hyper-segregated (80% black) and where the aggregate black suspension rate was 25%.
More than 500 charter schools suspended black charter students at a rate that was at least 10 percentage points higher than that of white charter students.

 
Even more disconcerting, 1,093 charter schools suspended students with disabilities at a rate that was 10 or more percentage points higher than that of students without disabilities.

 
Perhaps most alarming, 235 charter schools suspended more than 50% of their enrolled students with disabilities.* (*This count includes schools with at least 50 students enrolled and excludes alternative schools, schools identified as part of the juvenile justice system, virtual schools and schools that enrolled fewer than 10 students with disabilities. Any school where rounding of the data or another error produced a suspension rate of more than 100% for a subgroup also was excluded.)

 
“It’s disturbing to see so many of these schools still reporting such high suspension rates because that indicates charter leaders continue to pursue ‘broken windows,’ ‘no excuses’ and other forms of ‘zero tolerance’ discipline,” said Daniel Losen, the Center’s director and the study’s lead author. “And we know from decades of research that frequently suspending children from school is counter-productive.”

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Reform, Race, Special Education

Paul Thomas: “Turnaround Districts” are a Hoax

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2016 //
15

Paul Thomas of Furman University in South Carolina knows that elected officials are intrigued with the idea of “turnaround districts,” although they know surprisingly little about the research or experience associated with such districts. The idea is simple: if a school has low test scores for x number of years in a row, or if it ranks in the bottom x% of all schools in the state, fire the principal and the teachers and give the community’s public school to a private charter operator. Kind of like declaring bankruptcy, but forgetting that a school is not a business like a chain store.

 

Thomas points out that there are good reasons to be wary of turnaround districts. He cites research about what has happened to them.

 

First, advocacy for takeovers is mostly political cheerleading, and second, a growing body of research has revealed that takeovers have not achieved what advocates claim and often have replicated or even increased the exact problems they were designed to solve, such as race and class segregation and inequitable educational opportunities.

 

New Orleans is a low-performing district that has become even more segregated and stratified than it was before the takeover.

 

He writes:

 

Takeovers in several states—similar to embracing charter schools and Teach For America—have simply shuffled funding, wasted time, and failed to address the root causes of struggling schools: concentrated poverty and social inequity.

 

Yes, SC must reform our public schools, and we should shift gears to address our vulnerable populations of students first. But charter takeover approaches are yet more political faddism that our state and children cannot afford.

 

Continuing to double-down on accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing as well as rushing to join the political reform-of-the-moment with clever names is inexcusable since we have decades of evidence about what works, and what hasn’t.

 

SC must embrace a new way—one committed to social policies addressing food security for the poor, stable work throughout the state, and healthcare for all, and then a new vision for education reform built on equity.

 

All SC students deserve experienced and certified teachers, access to challenging courses, low class sizes, fully funded schools, safe school buildings and cultures, and equitable disciplinary policies and practices. These are reforms that must be guarantees for every public school student regardless of zip code, and they need not be part of complex but cleverly named programs.

 

You will want to read the post in full to gain access to its many excellent links to news and research.

 

Those who continue to advocate for already failed fixes are stalling, delaying the day that we must address the root causes of educational failure. They should be held accountable for their neglect of the real needs of children, families, and communities. And some day, they will.

 

Categories Michigan, New Orleans, Poverty, Race, Segregation, Tennessee

Professor Mike Marder: Why Diversity is Important in My Physics Classes

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2016 //
23

Professor Mike Marder teaches physics at the University of Texas. He followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent hearings on affirmative action.

 

When Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleague Justice Scalia asked why diversity mattered in a physics class, the question struck home to Professor Marder, and he wrote this commentary.

 

He pointed out that Texas is now a majority-minority state. Whites are the minority.

 

Many of the jobs of today and the future, particularly in engineering, require strong grounding in physics. Already, companies complain that they have trouble finding suitable employees, to which one of the main responses of physics is to bring highly skilled future workers in from abroad through our PhD programs.

 

This is cost effective while it lasts, but it will not last. The rest of the world is building graduate programs to compete with ours, and as this happens we will lose the ability to recruit and retain other countries’ brightest minds. Then the complaint of companies that they cannot find employees for top-level jobs will move from a murmur to a roar, and we will sit staring at institutional practices that leave much more than half the population of the state feeling unprepared for and unwelcome in our classrooms.

 

We will be unable to prepare either the workers of tomorrow or the teachers to inspire them.

 

As the Supreme Court decides whether to issue a ruling that could derail even the gentlest attempts to increase participation of underrepresented majorities in our classrooms, they should know that these are the issues we confront, and the challenge diversity poses to the future of our state and country.

Categories Justice, Race

A Black Parent: Is Dr. King’s Dream Turning into a Nightmare

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2016 //
16

This post was written by a black parent in Massachusetts. Her son attends a charter school. She is worried about the “preschool-to-prison pipeline.”

She wrote:

“Because we may listen to the speeches of MLK and others like him yet never act on their wisdom or heed their warning, we are faced with a Charter School Expansion. One that is extremely questionable and controversial for good reason. The “CHAINS” schema should not be allowed to ooze into “urban” schools because CHAINS cannot be broken. And let’s face it; a charter is a ship. The last time we got on a Chartered ship we were forced into bondage!

“Look at Walmart’s impact on Mom and Pop stores. Same family, same rules, same game — they are big supporters of charter schools.

“I do not support CHARTER SCHOOL CHAINS whatsoever and neither does the NAACP or the Black Educators Alliance of Massachusetts.

“Why don’t we see the Charter School expansion in the burbs? Why don’t the “haves” want them? Have they not seen the value or heard of the “scholar’s pledge” and the no excuses drill em and kill em while you make sure they sit still em’s ? Or have they not observed the following snapshot: instead of teaching “Fox in Sox” by Dr. Seuss, the acceptable utterance is —“you better be wearing matching socks, Or you’ll go straight to the principal’s office, you little 5 year-old you!

“My son attends a Charter School, not a chain. It’s my best forced “choice”. The other option was homeschooling him – real talk…However, I have to work full-time to keep our little house out of the hands of the big bank so I could not pull it off.

“I want my son in a community in the midst of his peer group. I want him to be held accountable to high academic and social standards yet I will not allow his person-hood to be ignored. Therefore, I work with the school. Oft times, I feel resolution. Sometimes I wish someone would turn off the White( Noise, that is) and keep the light shining on the action steps that have to happen in order for his potential to be fully realized. Would I recommend his school to others? Yes, it’s a decent option But like any school, parents have to know how to advocate.

“I cannot find the “enrichment” that he deserves within this school “choice” context bc it’s inclusion. You get (1) size fits all instruction. There are no AP tracks or gifted education programs for the students in his school. However, there is a subsidized travel opportunity for “well-behaved” scholars. Well behaved as defined\filtered through the white female gaze and backed up by the white male authoritarian gaze… so he’s left out.”

Categories Equity, Race

Steven Singer: High-Stakes Testing is not a Civil Right

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2016 //
6

Steven Singer, a teacher and blogger in Pennsylvania, takes on the myth that high-stakes testing is a civil rights issue. It is curious that this myth gained any traction, because civil rights groups used to sue to block high-stakes tests because they violated the rights of black children. They argued that the tests were biased and unfair. They argued that it was wrong to label children with such tests.

He writes:

“Standardized testing has never been shown to adequately gauge what students know, especially if the skills being assessed are complex. The only correlation that has been demonstrated consistently is between high test scores and parental wealth. In general, rich kids score well on standardized tests. Poor kids do not.

“Therefore, it is absurd to demand high stakes standardized testing as a means of ensuring students’ civil rights.

“Judging kids based on these sorts of assessments is not the utopia of which Dr. King dreamed. We are not judging them by the content of their character. We’re judging them by the contents of their parents bank accounts.

“There are real things we could be doing to realize racial and economic equality. We could do something about crippling generational poverty that grips more than half of public school students throughout the country. We could be taking steps to stop the worsening segregation of our schools that allows the effects of test-based accountability to disproportionately strike schools serving mostly students of color. We could invest in our neediest children (many of whom are minorities) to provide nutrition, tutoring, counseling, wrap around services, smaller class sizes, and a diverse curriculum including arts and humanities.”

Categories Civil Rights, Race, Testing

Yohuru Williams: Dr. King Believed in Unions

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2016 //
25

On the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., many politicians will praise his legacy even as they act in ways that betray his ideals.

Yohuru Williams, a professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut, reminds us that Dr. King was a strong advocate of labor unions because he understood that they protect the rights of working people by demanding fair pay and safe working conditions.

I was a small speck in the crowd when Dr. King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963. Most of the chartered buses that brought hundreds of thousands of supporters to hear Dr. King that day were sponsored by labor unions. The theme of the day was “Jobs and Justice.”

Williams writes:

“Teachers, then and now, invoked the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the words of Martin Luther King to support a deeper investment in America’s public schools including more robust budgets for instruction, greater interventions for English language learners, and fair compensation. Their appeals for politicians to live up to the spirit of the movement fail to move political leaders like Rahm Emmanuel and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder whose positions on high stakes testing, teachers unions, and insistence on school closures represent the most egregious form of historical amnesia concerning the continuing relevance of Dr. King’s message.”

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide a case intended to cripple labor unions, we know that Dr. King’s prophetic warnings will be weighed too. Will working people have a chance to get middle-class jobs, or will they be stripped of any job protections, left to work at the whim of faceless corporations and heartless politicians?

Let it not be forgotten why Dr. King was in Memphis when he was murdered. He was there to advocate for the right of sanitation workers to form a union.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Equity, Race, Unions

Jamaal Bowman to Black Parents: Time for Civil Disobedience!

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2015 //
5

Jamaal Bowman, principal of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action Middle School in the Bronx, gives a dynamite interview aimed at black families about how to change the quality of education for their children.

 

He says we are investing billions in standardized testing and ignoring what we should be doing in our communities.

 

Black and brown children are being miseducated by current policies.

 

The “right to be tested” is not a right that helps children. It hurts them.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Race, Testing

Steven Singer: Sacrificing the Children of Philadelphia to Balance the Budget

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2015 //
7

Steven Singer is a teacher in Pennsylvania. This is a moving post, and he gave me permission to post it in full. It has many links. If you want to read them, open the article.

 

 

Pennsylvania lawmakers are ready to help all students across the Commonwealth – if only they can abuse, mistreat and trample some of them.

 

Which ones? The poor black and brown kids. Of course!

 

That seems to be the lesson of a school code bill passed with bipartisan support by the state Senate Thursday.

 

The legislation would require the Commonwealth to pick as many as 5 “underperforming” Philadelphia schools a year to close, charterize or just fire the principal and half the staff. It would also allow non-medically trained personnel to take an on-line course before working in the district to treat diabetic school children. And it would – of course – open the floodgates to more charter schools!

 

It’s a dumb provision, full of unsubstantiated facts, faulty logic and corporate education reform kickbacks. But that’s only the half of it!

 

The bill is part of a budget framework agreed to by Governor Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled legislature necessary to finally pass a state-wide spending plan. The financial proposal has been held hostage for almost half a year!

 

The major sticking point has been school funding. Democrats like Wolf demand an increase. Republicans refuse. And the worst part is that the increase would only begin to heal the cuts the GOP made over the last four years.

 

Republicans just won’t clean up their own mess.

 

They slashed public school budgets by almost $1 billion per year for the last four years with disastrous consequences. Voters who could make little headway against a GOP legislature entrenched in office through gerrymandering rebelled by kicking the Republican Governor out of Harrisburg and voting in Wolf, a new chief executive who promised to support school children.

 

But for the last 5 months, the Republican-controlled legislature simply refused to spend money on – yuck – school children! Especially poor brown and black kids who rely more on state funding! Barf!

 

Finally a bargain was struck to put the money back, but only if it screws over more poor black and brown kids.

 

As usual, Philadelphia Schools are the state’s whipping boy.

 

For decades saddled with a host of social ills yet starved of resources, Philadelphia Schools simply couldn’t function on funding from an impoverished local tax base. The 8th largest school district in the country needed a financial investment from the state to make up the difference. However, in 2001 the Commonwealth decided it would only do this if it could assume control with a mostly unelected School Recovery Commission (SRC). Now after 14 years of failure, the state has decided annually to take a quintet of Philly schools away from the state and give them to – THE STATE! The State Department of Education, that is, which will have to enact one of the above terrible reforms to turn the schools around.

 

Yet each of these reforms is a bunch of baloney!

 

Hiring non-medical personnel with on-line training to treat diabetic kids!? Yes, two children died in Philly schools recently because budget cuts took away full-time school nurses. But this solution is an outrage! Try proposing it at a school for middle class or rich kids! Try proposing it for a school serving a mostly white population!

 

More charter schools!? Most new charter companies aren’t even interested in taking over Philly learning institutions. There’s no money in it! The carcass has been picked clean!

 

Privatizing public schools has never increased academic outcomes. Charter schools – at best – do no better than traditional public schools and – most often – do much worse.

 

Closing schools is a ridiculous idea, too. No school has ever been improved by being shut down. Students uprooted from their communities rarely see academic gains.

 

And firing staff because the legislature won’t provide resources is like kicking your car because you forgot to buy gas. You can’t get blood from a stone.

 

But this is what Republicans are demanding. And most of the Democrats are giving in. Every state Senator from Philadelphia voted for this plan – though reluctantly.

 

Is this really the only way to reach some kind of normalcy for the rest of the state? Do we really need to bleed Philadelphia some more before we can heal the self-inflicted wounds caused by our conservative legislators?

 

The bill includes a $100 million increase for Philadelphia Schools. But this is just healing budget cuts made to the district four years ago. Until Republicans took over the legislature, Philadelphia received this same sum from the state to help offset the vampire bite of charter schools on their shrinking budgets. Now – like all impoverished Pennsylvania schools – that charter school reimbursement is only a memory.

 

So this money only puts Philly back to where it was financially a handful of years ago when it was still struggling.

 

It’s a bad bargain for these students. Though some might argue it’s all we’ve got.

 

A sane government would increase funding to meet the needs of the students AND return the district to local control.

 

Republicans demand accountability for any increase in funding but how does this new bill do that exactly? Charter schools are not accountable to anyone but their shareholders. The School Recovery Commission has been failing for over a decade. Since most are political appointees, who are they accountable to really?

 

A duly elected school board would be accountable to residents. If voters didn’t like how they were leading the district, they could vote them out. THAT would be accountability. Not this sham blood sacrifice.

 

The state House is set to vote on this bill soon and will probably pass it, too. Maybe that’s just as well. Maybe there really is no other choice in the twisted halls of Pennsylvania politics.

 

However, let’s be honest about it. This is some classist, racist bullshit.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Philadelphia, Race
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