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Paul Horton: Violence Against Blacks During Reconstruction

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2020 //
16

In response to the murder of George Floyd, as well as the murders of other African Americans in recent months, the media, historians, teachers, and others are reviewing the long history of vicious racism in this country and calling for structural changes. The challenge of our time is to look deeply into our institutions and not let this moment of reckoning with our racist attitudes and institutions fade away without meaningful change. No American should have to fear for their life and safety because of the color of their skin.

Paul Horton, acted her and historian at the University of Chicago Lab School (a unionized private school), shared this essay about her history:


Just a teacher-historian sharing history who spent hundreds of hours as a graduate student researching the KKK Reports, the set of published congressional investigations into the KKK and affiliated organizations during Reconstruction.

Yesterday, Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative published a report that estimates that over 2,000 blacks were murdered during Reconstruction for political activities associated with organizing for the party of Lincoln in the American South from 1865-1877. The Democratic Party in the South at this time and later referred to itself as “the party of the white man,” and the KKK was its paramilitary arm during and after Reconstruction, extending into the Civil Rights era.

NAACP founder and chief researcher, W.E.B. Dubois, published a similar estimate of murders of black people in the South during the Jim Crow era. Historians Elizabeth Hale and Phillip Dray and many others have documented Southern ritualized violence within the context of “constructing whiteness” as a unifying identity that was intended create what historian George Frederickson called a”herrenfolk democracy” that united poor, middle class, and wealthy Southern whites behind common white identity. It is important to draw the connection between the construction of Confederate monuments within the context of this racial violence. These monuments were constructed in the early twentieth century as black bodies were being lynched and mutilated in spectacles that often were witnessed by hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of whites of all social classes.

What we are witnessing today has to be seen within this context. During Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, tens of thousands of black Americans were sent to convict labor camps, most often on trumped up minor offences like loitering or not possessing a work contract. The intent of state officials in building these labor camps was to remove freedman from Southern cities. Those successful blacks who would not leave were subjected to “white riots” that destroyed black middle-class areas of New Orleans and Memphis in 1866; Colfax, Louisiana in response to the legitimate election of a Radical Republican county slate (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina, a white supremacist coup (1898); and Elaine, Arkansas where dozens who farmers were murdered for attempting to form a union (1919). Black areas were torched in East St. Louis (1917) Chicago (1919), Omaha (1919), Washington D.C. (1919). and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) in the wake of WWI when black soldiers returning home from a “war to make the world safe for democracy” began to assert their labor and civil rights. The entire town of Rosewood, Florida was torched during the first week of 1923 for similar reasons. The context surrounding the Rosewood massacre was the subject of a feature film directed by John Singleton in 1997. Most of the eyewitnesses to the massacre were murdered, but historians estimate the number killed to range from 27-200.

Massacres of hundreds of blacks also took place during the Civil War when black union soldiers and their officers were routinely murdered after surrendering because the Confederate government had a policy of “no quarter” for the USCT. This is why the phrase “no quarter” used by senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas in a recent NYT OpEd is so offensive to many. One hundred and eighty-two USCT (black) soldiers of the 1st Kansas Union regiment were killed, most after they had surrendered at Poison Spring, Arkansas in 1864. To this day, many in Arkansas refer to the ‘battle of Poison Spring” without mentioning the massacre that took place after black troops laid down their arms. The massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee was the bloodiest massacre of surrendered African American soldiers and their officers during the war. The total number of black soldiers killed after they surrendered most historians now believe ranges from two hundred to four hundred. (To learn more about Fort Pillow, see Paul Horton, “A Model for Teaching Secondary History: The Case of Fort Pillow,” The History Teacher, 2000)

Most of us know about the violence of slavery, but few of us outside of the Black community fully understand the level of violence that black people have experienced after “freedom.” Police and vigilante murders of unarmed black men have a long, sordid history in the United States after the Civil War. The Civil Rights Movement did not make this go away. Police departments all over the country must be trained in this long history, use of deadly force must be severely restricted, our public and private prisons, which resemble Reconstruction work camps that are used to profit investors, must be tightly regulated and house only violent offenders.

Rather than simply dismissing calls for “abolition” and “defunding the police,” in light of our renewed attention to the systematic violence committed against black people in this country, we need to enter into a serious dialogue that creates lasting reforms that go beyond getting rid of symbols and statues. These reforms must result in substantial legal changes at all levels of government and a citizen sponsored reconstitution of policing at every level.

If you would like to learn more about the KKK and Reconstruction violence against educators and those, black and white, who stood for racial and civil justice, you can study the documented evidence for yourselves. The following linked article will describe how you can get to the KKK Reports digitally: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/06/teacher-heres-the-history-lesson-betsy-devos-needed-on-black-colleges-and-the-ku-klux-klan/

Categories History, Racism

Victor Ray and Alan Aja: Education Won’t Save Us from Racism

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2020 //
86

Victor Ray and Alan Aja argue in this article that appeared in the Washington Post that racism can’t be “fixed” by more education. Plenty of highly educated people are racist.
The root of racism, they argue, is systematic inequality of resources and access to power.

Prescribing education as the cure for racism often confuses individual bigotry with a system of domination. As a system of domination, racism can be manipulated, because it is bigger than any individual. Highly educated people, who sometimes know better, contribute to systems of racial harm on a regular basis.

The architecture of American racism is not an unfortunate accident: It was created intentionally to acquire and keep power. The highly educated designed America’s system of segregation and America’s prison system. Highly educated lawyers devise arguments to protect police who kill black and brown folks, highly educated prosecutors decline to bring charges, and highly educated judges assign light sentences. There is no good evidence that educating police about implicit bias works to lessen harm. And whites with high cognitive ability are no more likely to support practical policies that lessen racial inequality. But their education does allow them to offer more sophisticated justifications for privilege…

The problem of racial inequality is not just a lack of knowledge; it is the lack of a willingness among many white people to commit to an equitable distribution of resources.
What movements like those currently in the streets recognize is that systemic problems are not solved by education in the absence of collective action. Solutions to racial inequality require a reorganization of what creates inequality in the first place: unequal access to social and material resources. Seeing education as a necessary but insufficient condition for challenging racial inequality is not pessimistic. It recognizes that knowledge used to confront, rather than accommodate or legitimate authority, can lead to a more equitable distribution of power.

My opinion: When billionaires intervene to disrupt and privatize education, they are diverting our attention. When Trump and DeVos bray that “school choice is the civil rights issue of our time and of all time,” they are changing the subject so as to protect their privilege. The root problem of our divided society is inequality. The billionaires should be lobbying to raise their taxes and to redistribute resources to society’s have-nots, so that we are a nation of haves.

Please read the book The Spirit Level. Its basic argument is that societies with high levels of inequality are unhappy societies. The more equality, the greater the level of social happiness.

Categories Poverty, Racism

Harold Meyerson: Trump as the Nosferatu of Our Time

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2020 //
33

In this brilliant column, Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect compares Trump to Nosferatu, the terrifying central figure in a silent German film of that name.

Death—meaning Trump—stalks Tulsa, bringing with him terror, disease, racism, and chaos. Hallmarks of this man.

Meyerson writes:

Tonight, the presidency of Donald Trump reaches its apotheosis with the president’s first 2020 campaign rally, a toxic mix of deadly germs and racist rage that he is inflicting on Tulsa. Even members of the coronavirus task force advised against this gathering. They were outvoted.

You might think Tulsa has suffered enough. It will soon commemorate the centenary of the white riot of 1921, when marauding bigots massacred hundreds of African Americans and all but destroyed their hitherto thriving community. It is currently enduring a spike in Covid-19 cases, which have risen by 140 percent in the past couple of weeks. Oklahoma now ranks second among the 50 states in the per capita rate of growth of coronavirus cases. Packing Tulsa’s BOK Center with 19,000 shouting Trump supporters, under no requirement to wear masks, will surely spread the virus to attendees, to the arena’s hapless employees, and to the surrounding community.

At the same time, Tulsa’s black community will be both celebrating Juneteenth and memorializing the massacre victims by protesting Trump and all his works, which could invite violence from the lumpen loonies of militias and white supremacy groups who Trump has summoned from the politically dead.

Has any notable visitor from afar ever dropped in on a city so manifestly spreading death in his wake?

Well, yes, at least in legend, and the tales spun from legend. One year after Tulsa’s white riot, in 1922, the brilliant German filmmaker F. W. Murnau made Nosferatu, the first great horror picture—for my money, still the greatest. It was the movies’ first treatment of the Dracula story, though in it, the Dracula character, embodied with terrifying aspect by Max Schreck, is named Nosferatu (derived loosely from the Romanian word Nesuferit, meaning “offensive” or “troublesome”). And, as in not the case in the subsequent Dracula films, Nosferatu neither stays in Transylvania nor confines his deadly compulsions to fatal neck-bites.

In Nosferatu, he travels on a ghostly ship to a placid 19th-century German town, bringing with him caskets full of diseased rats who spread the plague among the town’s panicked citizens. The film contains scenes that look almost predictive of what we’ve all gone through in recent weeks, as the burghers scatter to their homes when news of the plague is revealed, and as the streets grow quiet as the townspeople cower behind their doors.

Trump has reached the stage where comparisons to actual human beings no longer seem adequate. As the demagogue campaigner summons his unmasked hordes, he evokes no one so much as Murnau’s carrier of plague-bearing rats.

I’d be surprised if anyone has ever written that about a president of the United States.

Categories Accountability, Health, Racism, Trump, Tulsa

Virginia Heffernan: Trump’s Rally is a Really Bad Idea

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2020 //
9

Virginia Heffernan is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where this article appeared.

President Trump’s zeal for rally mode is rising almost as steeply as coronavirus cases in Tulsa, Okla., where his campaign plans to hold a little get-together on Saturday. The weather in Tulsa is expected to be muggy and nearly 90 degrees, with a high chance of thunder and lightning.

You don’t say.

“Bad idea” doesn’t begin to capture how reckless and vicious it is to pack an arena on a steamy night with thousands of rambunctious hotheads in the midst of a coronavirus outbreak.

The disease, which has killed some 120,000 Americans so far, rips through populations fastest when people are crowded indoors and shouting for extended periods.

Check, check, check, check. The Tulsa rally has it all…

This rally is really shaping up to be a teeming petri dish inside a wrecking ball inside a juggernaut.

And then there’s the sickening fact that Trump’s MAGA extravaganza is detonating in the midst of a two-day local celebration of Juneteenth, which this year marks the emancipation of enslaved Black people and coast-to-coast George Floyd protests.

These demonstrations and demands for police reform or abolition have garnered widespread support, even as Trump has repeatedly lied about who is protesting and what their aims are and earlier this month tried to put protests down with military force.

So on top of the strong possibility that the Tulsa rally could spread the coronavirus far and wide, confrontation and even violence might be in the offing. Black community leaders in Tulsa have warned that an appearance by Trump, whose racism is part of his allure, is a taunt.

For his part, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a popular Republican in a state that Trump won by 65.3% in 2016, has equivocated about the event almost since it was announced.

First, he invited Trump to visit Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the site of a 1921 race massacre in which white terrorists slaughtered hundreds of black residents with the help of local police and the National Guard, laying waste to what was then the nation’s wealthiest Black neighborhood.

Maybe Stitt thought the president would enjoy a history lesson, or that Tulsa’s Black leadership would want to meet the father of birtherism, the Muslim ban and internment camps for Latino children….

As for Trump’s decision to bring his racist campaign into a city with a history of deadly white terrorism during Juneteenth celebrations at the height of American racial tensions, Stitt was dismissive and lighthearted.

“We have great relationships in Oklahoma with all the different races.”

Sincere question: What are Trumpites even talking about when they say things like this? The Tulsa massacre was one of the worst racial atrocities in American history. The Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, was the nation’s deadliest domestic terrorist attack; its mastermind, Timothy McVeigh, was a white supremacist.

More recently, in 2016, Black Lives Matter protests erupted when a white Tulsa police officer, Betty Jo Shelby, shot and killed an unarmed black motorist, Terence Crutcher, only to be found not guilty of manslaughter.

And on June 4, Tulsa police harassed, handcuffed and forcibly restrained two black teenagers for walking down the center of a quiet, traffic-free road. One officer sat on one of the boys, holding the back of his neck while pressing his face into the ground.

We have great relationships in Oklahoma with all the different races.

These guys can wish away the pandemic and police brutality, but both are systemic — and Saturday’s rally in Tulsa is a powder keg.

Stitt’s not going to wear a mask when he takes the stage to introduce Trump, he said on Thursday. He seemed excited to greet an arena full of Trump supporters.

Tulsa is certainly going to be the center of something this weekend. Presumably, the governor wants to breathe it all in.

If Trump keeps these rallies going, he puts his most avid supporters at risk.

Categories Health, Racism, Trump, Tulsa

John Thompson: Trump in Tulsa: Come for the Racism, Stay for the Plague

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2020 //
16

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, is keeping a close watch on the Trump rally and its risks to public health. He reports from the front lines of a city that’s about to dare COVID-19 to show its stuff at tonight’s indoor rally for 19,000 people. You can be sure that Trump will not wear a mask. Not wearing a mask in the midst of a global pandemic is the mark of….a brave macho guy? A COVidiot? Time will tell. In about two weeks.

He writes:

The single best insight into President Donald Trump’s June 20 rally in Tulsa was posted by Mark Alan on Facebook:

“Come for the Racism, Stay for the Plague.”

If there was any thought that Alan was exaggerating, it would be overridden by Trump’s own words. After his campaign bragged about the 800,000 supporters who’ve shown interest in the Tulsa rally, he warned in a tweet:

Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!

As the first of the estimated 100,000 people drawn to the rally arrive, more questions arise about the racism as a curfew is imposed and then rescinded, as the National Guard is put on standby, and as more threats are posted on social media and the Tulsa Police Department reports “that individuals from organized groups who have been involved in destructive or violent behavior in other states are planning to travel to the City of Tulsa for purposes of causing unrest in and around the rally.”

Similarly, as the number of Tulsa County virus infections “skyrocket,” Oklahoma has become the state with the “second-fastest-growing per capita rate of new coronavirus infections in the country, based on a seven-day average.” So, with the plague side of the event, another question arises: Will we see “Profiles in Courage?”

I guess a possible nominee could be a Trump supporter, who’s been camping out in advance of the rally, and told the Oklahoman, “We feel like President Trump and his family have dedicated their lives to helping our country. Sacrificing a week of our lives is nothing for what Trump has done for us.”

I wonder how many of the “more than 50 campaign surrogates plan to attend the Oklahoma rally, including at least a dozen Republican House members and Sens. Jim Inhofe, James Lankford and Tom Cotton” are just as sincere in their commitment? Or, as Axios reports, are they parts of “scenes to be quickly converted into TV ads.”

Who knows what’s in the mind of Gov. Kevin Stitt, who still tells Trump that Oklahoma is “one of the first states that has safely and measurably reopened”?

Stitt did not consult community leaders before inviting Trump to visit Greenwood where, this month, 99 years ago, white mobs burned down the area known as “Black Wall Street,” killing as many as 300 people. (He later changed his mind about a visit.) We know, however, that like other African-Americans, Rep. Regina Goodwin doesn’t welcome the Confederate flags that early arrivals display. And we know she’s right in saying, “This isn’t a campaign stop. He’s already won Oklahoma. This is a dividing tactic to gin up his base and throw red meat out to his folks.”

Stitt’s newly appointed State Department of Health Commissioner, Lance Frye, doesn’t seem to be a likely Profile in Courage candidate. Frye had said it was “not my place to say whether I think a rally is a good idea or not.” Now he feels the rally is “a train rolling down the hill that we’re not going to be able to stop.”

But Tulsa Health Department Director Bruce Dart has earned his Profile in Courage by telling the truth about the recent surge in infections. From the beginning of the controversy, Dart said, “Our job” is “to stand up and try to do the right thing based on what the data and the science is telling us.” He used the term “super-spreader” to describe a possible “outbreak linked to indoor gatherings, with large groups of people congregated in close contact for prolonged periods of time.”

By contrast, Mayor G.T. Bynum takes the prize for the one who knew what the responsible path was, but ducked. He took a first stand, of sorts, on Facebook posting:

Earlier this year, Tulsans collectively undertook great sacrifice to “flatten the curve”. We did this to slow the spread of COVID-19 and allow our local health care system the time it needed to become properly equipped for handling a longer term pandemic.

We acted early and we were successful. …

But, since May 1, he followed Stitt’s reopening plan. That is why he writes: “Do I share anxiety about having a full house at the BOK Center? Of course.” The mayor then said he was unaware of Trump’s plan until the venue management contacted the city about police support.

David Blatt, the founder of the highly respected Oklahoma Policy Institute replied:

This is inexcusable. As a previously strong and vocal supporter of yours throughout your time in office, I am tremendously disappointed in your catastrophic failure of leadership on this. You are neglecting your responsibility as Mayor for the health and safety of Tulsans, and sad to say, the blood of those who get sick and die because of this rally will be on your hands.

Bynum’s credibility was further undermined by the executive vice president of ASM Global, the company that manages the BOK Center. He said that he would have said no to the campaign rally had Bynum told them to say no.

The previous day Bynum said that he had told ASM Global, “you need to operate this safely and whatever decision you make, we’ll have your back, but that it’s their decision under their contract with the city. They have sole authority for making the decisions on bookings in that facility.” He acknowledged “anxiety” about “having a full house at the BOK Center.” But at the same time, he said he was “not a public health professional.” So, “I’m not here to testify to the safety of anything.”

During these discussions, it was learned that half of the BOK’s staff would not work at Saturday’s rally, and will be replaced by part-time workers. Doesn’t that mean the arena staff will barely know who is supposed to do what, when implementing social distancing and other CDC-approved procedures?

Neither do I believe the Courts will be eligible for a Profile in Courage recognition. After 700 medical professionals and other experts were unable to persuade city leaders to protect the public, a suit was filed, arguing the issue wasn’t about politics, but about requiring safety procedures. It argued that state and city executive orders require the arena to follow Center for Disease Control guidance, and make plans for following recommended protocols. It was supposed to follow the state’s “Open Up and Recover Safely (OURS)” plans.

The plaintiff’s attorney, Clark Brewster, argued that the business operators had a duty to follow OURS procedures, and that included discussions with health authorities, which did not happen. (Curiously, the operator, ASM Global, said that it needed to have such discussions with the Trump campaign, but it didn’t respond to their outreach.)

The plaintiffs also “noted that the courts aren’t allowing full trials because of coronavirus safety restrictions. ‘If it’s not safe to have 12 citizens in a jury box, how is it safe to have 19,000 people together?’” one of the lawyers argued.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court was the “only institution that stands between Tulsa and a biological bomb.” But the Washington Post reports that the Court rejected the argument because “the state’s June 1 reopening plan allowed business owners to use discretion over social distancing measures, and they were not mandatory as the plaintiffs had asserted.”

I’ll need to hear the legal debate before making a judgment, but it seems the Court ducked the issue. Yes, businesses can use discretion when making plans for social distancing. But it seems clear that no meaningful discretion has been devoted to the safety plan. And clearly, the lack of discussion and planning is dangerous. I’ll be curious whether the Court discussed the level of safety that is possible when unprepared staff members are tasked with protecting public health within the arena.

Surely the Court also discussed the spread of the disease and the possible deaths of non-attendees who didn’t choose to put themselves at risk…

But, maybe I am taking an approach that is too liberal and/or science-based. As the Los Angeles Times explains, “Saturday’s rally in Tulsa is a powder keg.” It comes with both systemic dangers born of the pandemic and police brutality. But, maybe the public’s health and safety isn’t enough to slow the political process where the President and his people slap together a mega-event which invites their people to “Come for the Racism, Stay for the Plague.”

Categories Health, Racism, Trump, Tulsa

A Response to Diana Senechal Regarding Robert Pondiscio

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2020 //
33

Alex Zimmerman wrote an article about Black teachers at Success Academy charter schools questioning what some regarded as racist treatment of children and parents at the charters. After reviewing their complaints, Zimmerman asked Robert Pondiscio his view of the controversy. Pondiscio wrote a book about the chain after spending a year observing it.You can read the article here. I summarized the article here.

Robert Pondiscio took to Twitter to denounce me as “shameful” for not making clear that he found the practices described in the article to be “repellent.” But he didn’t say that to Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat. I responded on Twitter, inviting Robert to write a post on my blog. He did not answer.

I heard today from Diana Senechal, who brilliantly edited my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School system: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Robert Pondiscio was an early reader of the book, and I think I introduced them. She wrote a comment today that defended Robert at length.

It was nice to hear from Diana, but still no word from Robert himself.

You can find Diana’s long commentary in the responses to the article.

I wonder why Robert doesn’t write me directly, offline or offline. If I got anything wrong, I would quickly correct it. I once again extend an invitation to Robert Pondiscio to write a post here about the disciplinary policies at Success Academy charter schools and the reactions to them by Black teachers. Are they “repellent” or are they a necessary element in producing high test scores? Or neither?

Here is my response to Diana Senechal.

Diana,

I was not writing a review of Robert Pondiscio’s book. I was writing about an article in Chalkbeat whose main point was that Black teachers and other staff were complaining about racism at Success Academy charters. Their complaints began because Eva Moskowitz was silent for four days after the murder of George Floyd. Her prolonged silence prompted them to complain about other practices at Success Academy that they consider racist, such as calling 911 when children behave badly or monitoring black hair styles or suspending disproportionate numbers of black boys or young white teachers hectoring Black parents.

Chalkbeat contacted Pondiscio to ask him about the complaints of racism. His response was:

“There is no doubt in my mind that there is a significant appetite among low-income parents for exactly the flavor of education that Eva Moskowitz offers,” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the conservative-learning Fordham Institute who spent a year observing a Success elementary school in the South Bronx and wrote a book about it. “It just does violence to reality to pretend that this is some kind of pedagogy that’s being imposed on families of color.”

“At the same time, he isn’t surprised that some employees may be increasingly uncomfortable with the responsibility of enforcing strict behavior expectations on students of color, even if they are designed to foster student achievement.

“A lot of those techniques — rightly or wrongly — may feel oppressive to a new generation of young people, and I think that’s a vulnerability for high-performing charter schools,” Pondiscio said.”

I wish he had said that it is wrong to call 911 (the cops) when a child acts out. I wish he had said that it is wrong to punish children for their hair style. I wish he had said it is wrong to suspend disproportionate numbers of Black boys as a disciplinary tool. But he didn’t. His response was an “eye of the beholder” defense of these racist tactics.

Furthermore, instead of writing to me directly—he has my personal email, as do you—he went to Twitter to denounce me as shameful. I twice invited him on Twitter to write for this blog to clarify any misunderstanding, and he did not answer or accept my invitation.

Did he ask you to defend him?

Why doesn’t he come out himself and say he deplores the disparate and harsh treatment of Black boys in Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools? If it’s repellent to him, as he claimed on Twitter, why doesn’t he say so to Chalkbeat or here?

The Black teachers at the SA chain risked their jobs by speaking out against racist treatment of Black children and their parents. Why doesn’t he speak out too? He has nothing to lose.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Harlem Success Academy, Racism

Educators of Color and Education Scholars of Color Speak Out Against Failed Billionaire-Backed “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2020 //
27

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.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Racism, Testing, Vouchers

Stop Honoring Confederate Heroes

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2020 //
93

Today is Juneteenth, a day that marks the end of slavery. Juneteenth is the day in 1865 when black people in Texas finally got the news that slavery had been abolished. There is currently a movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Many large corporations already recognize its importance.

Now, as the nation is rocked by demonstrations and protests against racism, is a good time to stop honoring Confederate heroes.

Education Week conducted a survey and identified some 174 schools, all in the south, that honor southern heroes, mainly Robert E. Lee. Let’s face it. The leaders of the insurrection were traitors to the United States. Their “sacred cause” was white supremacy. The war they fought to secede cost more than 600,000 lives.

Alan Singer says it’s past time to remove all the statues and memorials honoring Robert E. Lee, who violated his oath to serve his country and waged war against it.

Growing up in Houston, I attended Albert Sidney Johnston Junior High School, named for a Confederate General, the first of his rank to die in the Civil War. I didn’t know anything about him as a student, although everyone memorized the school marching song that honored his name (he died in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862).The school’s name was changed only four years ago, along with those of other schools in Houston named for heroes of the Confederacy.

Recently, the leaders of the military proposed renaming military bases that bear the names of Confederate generals. Trump flatly rejected the proposal, claiming that it would dishonor the military. Strange words from a man who ridiculed Senator John McCain because he was captured in Vietnam. Why praise generals who lost a disastrous rebellion while demeaning a war hero who refused the opportunity to be freed until the other American captives imprisoned with him were released?

Democrats are demanding the renaming of the military bases named for Confederate generals. House Democrats have vowed to attach their demand to the defense funding bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren is attaching an amendment to the Defense Authorization act requiring the renaming of the bases.

Justice Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, was outraged by Warren’s amendment. He sent out a blast email to the other judges and their clerks calling her amendment “madness.” A day later, a black clerk responded to Justice Silberman, risking his job, defending Warren’s proposal.

The Intercept reported:

“Hi Judge Silberman,” began the career-risking reply-all email, “I am one of only five black law clerks in this entire circuit. However, the views I express below are solely my own,” they went on. “Since no one in the court’s leadership has responded to your message, I thought I would give it a try.”

[M]y maternal ancestors were enslaved in Mississippi. While the laws of this nation viewed my ancestors as property, I view them as hostages. In a hostage situation, when someone does something that leads to the freeing of the hostages, I am not sure if the hostages would be concerned as to whether the person that saved them, actually intended to save them. In this instance, as people considered to be property, my ancestors would not have been involved in the philosophical and political debates about Lincoln’s true intentions, or his view on racial equality. For them, and myself, race is not an abstract topic to be debated, so in my view anything that was built to represent white racial superiority, or named after someone who fought to maintain white supremacy (or the Southern economy of slavery), see Photo of Liberty Monument attached, should be removed from high trafficked areas of prominence and placed in museums where they can be part of lessons that put them in context.

In your message, you talked about your ancestors, one that fought for the confederacy and one that fought for the Union. This seems to be a true example of a house divided. However, it is very clear what the Confederacy stood for. In 1861, at the Virginia secession convention, Henry L. Benning (for whom Fort Benning is named) in explaining the reasoning for Georgia’s decision to secede from the United States stated, “[it] was a conviction … that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery…[I]t is probable that the white race, being superior in every respect, may push the other back.” Unfortunately, in this scenario, no matter how bravely your uncle fought for the Confederacy, the foundation of his fight was a decision that he agreed more with the ideals of the Confederacy, than he did with those of the Union. And in the end, he chose the losing side of history.

Finally, I will note that the current movement to rename Government owned facilities is in line with your previous opinions on the importance of names and what they represent. In 2005, you publicly advocated for the removal of J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI Building due to the problematic material you came across in your review of his FBI files after his death. You equated it to the Defense Department being named for Aaron Burr. In view of your opinion of J. Edgar Hoover’s history and your advocacy for renaming the FBI building because of the prominence it provides Hoover’s legacy, it is very strange that you would be against renaming our military facilities, since the legacy of the Confederacy represents the same thing. This moment of confronting our nation’s racial history is too big to be disregarded based on familial ties.

The correspondence was provided to The Intercept by a member of the Court staff on the condition the identity of the clerk (who was not the source) and judges who replied be kept confidential.

After the clerk’s response came out, others spoke up, including two black judges.

Slam dunk.

This flurry of activism is a response to the outrage kindled by the murder of George Floyd. It is a response to a newly awakened public opinion. It is a testament to the work of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Rename the schools. Rename the bases. Honor heroes of freedom and democracy. Put the statues of Confederate military leaders in a museum where their words and deeds and legacy can be studied as part of American history. To be discussed but not to be honored as heroes.

Categories Accountability, History, Racism

Staff at Success Academy Complain about Eva Moskowitz’s Insensitivity to Racism

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2020 //
76

A teacher at the acclaimed Success Academy charter chain in New York City publicly complained about Eva Moskowitz’s silence after the murder of George Floyd.

Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat reported:

Four days after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, a Brooklyn Success Academy teacher emailed her network’s CEO, one of the nation’s most prominent charter school leaders, asking why she hadn’t said anything publicly.

“I am deeply hurt and shocked by your lack of words on the topic that affects so many of your employees, children and families in communities that you serve,” first-year Success Academy Flatbush teacher Fabiola St Hilaire wrote to Eva Moskowitz. “All of your black employees are paying attention to your silence.”

Moskowitz responded about an hour later, thanking St Hilaire for reaching out but also brushing her aside. “I actually opined on this subject early this am. Please take a look,” Moskowitz wrote, referring to a tweet sent the same morning. “I hope you can understand that running remote learning in the middle of a world economic shutdown has kept me focused on [Success Academy’s] immediate needs.”

Upset by the response, St Hilaire posted the email exchange on social media, thrusting New York City’s largest charter network into a wider debate about institutional racism. Some current and former employees were angry that Moskowitz seemed to dismiss the concerns of an educator of color as well as the broader movement to reckon with structural racism in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing.

Eva Moskowitz quickly backtracked when she saw the reaction among her staff to her silence and her brusque dismissal of St Hilaire’s criticism. Moskowitz was interviewed by Donald Trump as a contender for his Secretary of Education. She supported his selection of Betsy DeVos.

The exchange between Moskowitz and a first-year teacher set off a debate about institutional racism in Success Academy and its harsh no-excuses methods. Those draconian disciplinary methods were defended by Robert Pondiscio of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who is white, and by Moskowitz, who is also white. Black children need harsh discipline, they argued.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline, Harlem Success Academy, Racism

Robert Shepherd Transcribed Trump’s Remarks on School Choice, with Commentary

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2020 //
37

Donald Trump spoke today, presumably in response to massive demonstrations across the country against racism and police brutality. Someone decided this would be a good time to make a pitch for school choice. Robert Shepherd, author and editor, transcribed Trump’s remarks and added his own commentary.

Here, in his typical toddler English, our part-time president in the orange clown makeup, IQ45, struggles, today, to remember an Ed Deform slogan:

“We’re fighting for school choice, which is really the civil rights [long pause, weird face; he can’t recall the word and finally just leaves it out] of all time in this country. Frankly, school choice is the civil rights [pause; he still can’t find the word] statement [sic] of the year, [he realizes he made a ridiculous gaffe in saying that this was the most important issue of all time; there was, for example, the matter of slavery] of the decade, and probably beyond because all children have to have access to a quality education. A child’s ZIP code in America [as opposed to her ZIP Code in Sri Lanka?] should never determine their [sic] future, and that’s what was happening, so we’re very, very strong on school choice, and I hope everybody remembers that, and it’s happening. [What’s happening? Who kn​ows.] It’s already happening. We have tremendous opposition from people that [sic] know they shouldn’t be opposing it. [These people who oppose it are just perverse. LOL.] School. [pause] Choice. [He says it as though he’s just recently learned the term and expects that other people have never heard it before either. LOL.] All children deserve equal opportunity because we are all made equal by God. So true. [said as if a comment on something a speech he was advised to make, which it probably was.] A great jobs market and thriving economy is [sic] probably the best thing [sic] we can do to help the black, Hispanic, Asian communities.”

Categories Education Reform, Racism, School Choice, Trump
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