Archives for category: Racism
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An Iconic Photo: What Do You Think It Means?

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2019 //
18

This is a story about a photograph taken at a small Ku Klux Klan rally in Georgia in 1992.

The photo shows a child in KKK regalia looking at his reflection in a shield held by a police officer, who is African-American. The officer is there to prevent violence. He is protecting the peace and protecting even the members of the KKK.

The photo has been adopted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a pre-eminent CIvil Rights Organization.

Over the years, as you will read, people have debated what the photo says to them.

It reminded me of the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific.” The title “You’ve Got to Be Taught to Hate.” The little boy dressed up as a Klansman didn’t hate the man holding the shield. But he will be taught to hate by those who dressed him.

Categories Civil Rights, Georgia, Racism

Sherrilyn Ifill: Racism is a National Security Concern

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2018 //
7

Racism and segregation are our nation’s greatest sin, written into our founding and our history. We live with their consequences every day in the misery and blighted lives that stand in sharp contrast to the ideals of our founding documents. We think of ourselves as a just people, but we tolerate injustice. We think of our nation as one that is dedicated to equality, yet we live with inequality and ignore it. Now, as Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, writes in the Washington Post.


Two newly released reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian interference in the 2016 election have been nothing short of revelatory. Both studies — one produced by researchers at Oxford University, the other by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge — describe in granular detail how the Russian government tried to sow discord and confusion among American voters. And both conclude that Russia’s campaign included a massive effort to deceive and co-opt African Americans. We now have unassailable confirmation that a foreign power sought to exploit racial tensions in the United States for its own gain.

Ever since U.S. intelligence agencies reported that the Russian government worked to sway the 2016 election, foreign election meddling has been one of our nation’s top national security concerns. But our discussions about Russian interference rarely touch on the other major threat to our elections: the resurgence of state-sponsored voter suppression in the United States. In light of these disturbing new reports, it is clear we can no longer think of foreign election meddling as a phenomenon separate from attempts to disenfranchise Americans of color. Racial injustice remains a real vulnerability in our democracy, one that foreign powers are only too willing to attack.

How should we respond? First, we have to make it easier, not harder, for Americans to vote. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, which severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, we’ve seen a resurgence of voter-suppression efforts across the nation. Congress has the power to fix the Voting Rights Act, but so far it has declined to do so. The revelations of Russia’s racial targeting should serve as a wake-up call that domestic voter suppression, in addition to being unconstitutional, effectively aids foreign attacks on our democracy. Indeed, we should take seriously the danger that domestic and foreign groups may coordinate to suppress turnout in future elections, a possibility we can begin to forestall, first and foremost, by protecting the franchise here at home. Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.) has already introduced a comprehensive new voting rights bill, and Congress should swiftly act upon it in the new year.

Second, these revelations only deepen the urgency of demanding more accountability from technology companies. The New Knowledge report criticizes social media companies such as Facebook for misleading Congress about the nature of Russian interference, noting that one even denied that specific groups were targeted. This is just more evidence that Silicon Valley has yet to come to grips with the enormous influence it wields in our democracy, and the ways that foreign powers can use that influence to manipulate Americans. Congress should require greater transparency and responsibility from these corporations before the 2020 elections.

Finally, we have to accept that foreign powers seize upon these divisions because they are real — because racism remains the United States’ Achilles’ heel. Indeed, it is, and always has been, a national security vulnerability — a fundamental and easily exploitable reality of American life that belies the image and narrative of equality and justice we project and export around the world. It may be especially difficult in our era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” but we must recognize that our failure to acknowledge hard truths, especially when it comes to race, makes it easier for foreign powers to turn us against one another. Russia did not conjure out of thin air the black community’s legitimate grievances about racist policing. Nor did it invent racist and hateful conspiracy theories. Rather, Russian trolls seized upon these real problems as ready-made sources of discord. Moving forward, we need to recognize that our failure to honestly address issues of civil rights and racial justice makes all of us more susceptible to foreign interference.

This is hardly the first time our adversaries have identified race and racism as America’s great vulnerability. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union frequently pointed to segregation and civil unrest as proof of American hypocrisy. This propaganda was sufficiently widespread, and contained enough truth, that leaders of both parties began arguing that segregation undermined the United States’ position in the Cold War, helping to ease the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Today, we need a similar understanding that our failure to ensure equal justice for all has grave implications for U.S. national security. The upcoming House oversight committee hearings on Russian interference and voter suppression will be critical opportunities to educate the public on the threats to our democracy, and they deserve our close attention.

But we must be careful not to reduce the struggle for racial equality into a bloodless question of national interest. Civil rights are essential to our national security, but national security cannot be the chief rationale for pursuing civil rights. After all, racial injustice is not just another chink in our armor. It is the great flaw in our character. Our adversaries know that race makes us our own worst enemy. It is past time we learn this hard truth ourselves.

Categories Inequality, Injustice, Racism

Eve L. Ewing Explains the Racist Purpose of School Closings

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
8

Eve Ewing has a fabulous bio, as author, academic, playwright, poet, and comic book hero.

She is also the author of the recent book about Rahm Emanuel’s historic closing of 50 schools in a single day, called “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.” I reviewed it here. It was the first book to my knowledge that tells the story of school closings from the perspective of the students, families, teachers, and communities.

Here she appears on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Speaking of ghosts, she will haunt Rahm Emanuel forever. Her book will be remembered long after he is forgotten.

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Racism

Mercedes Schneider: The Racist Origins of School Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2018 //
30

Mercedes Schneider wrote a history of vouchers and school choice called School Choice: The End of Public Education? She is aware that libertarians like to credit the origins of vouchers to Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. But, their ideas never took root in American soil.

School vouchers, and the larger concept of private schools paid for with public money, is rooted in racism.

Schneider writes:

The history of school vouchers in American K12 education is rooted in racism.

This fact is indisputable.

Libertarian economist Milton Friedman wrote his famous proposal for vouchers in 1955. Southern governors loved the idea of using public money to escape federal court orders.

She writes:

When it comes to racial integration, school vouchers have yet to “show promise.” Moreover, even though over 60 years has passed since vouchers were first used in K12 education to stymie the federal desegregation mandate, school voucher usage has yet to redeem its reputation as a catalyst for racial resegregation.

In the face of this reality, crediting Paine, or Mill, or Friedman with “the” idea for school vouchers matters little, for it is an idea that only fares well on paper.

Vouchers have also fared poorly in studies of academic achievement.

They seem to be best at reinforcing Inequity.

Categories Accountability, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Oakland Teachers: Enough Is Enough!

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2018 //
5

Teachers in Oakland, California, are preparing to strike. The following press release explains why.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACTS:

The Wildcat Underground, Oakland High School Educators United

Twitter:​​ @WildcatUndrgrnd
IG:​​ wildcat_underground
FB:​​ Wildcat Underground

Miles Murray,​​ English Teacher, Oakland High OEA Rep: (510) 684-2956
Suzi LeBaron​​, Science Teacher and Department Head/Pathway Director: (707) 695-6873 Cole Margen​​,
History Teacher and Oakland High OEA Rep: (925) 300-8634
Alex Webster Guiney​​, Special Education Teacher: (415) 722-7668

Oakland Unified does not remember the past and is condemning its teachers and students to repeat it.

The teachers of Oakland Unified School District have been working without a contract since 2017.

Oakland Education Association (OEA, AFL-CIO) bargaining with the district reached an impasse last spring. Like a glacier calving in global warming, the rumbling and cracking is escalating in Oakland public schools.

Teachers at Oakland High School are some of the most vocal in the district and are organizing for the inevitable fight.

In the coming weeks, there will be a series of actions, including an Educators Day Out, which will include a march and rally at Oakland City Hall by 70 Oakland High educators, plus students, families, and supporters, on a scheduled school day before winter break.

“You can call it a walk-out or a work stoppage if you want. It is not an official OEA action. Our union has been following the rules in negotiations for almost two years and the district continues to stall, except when moving in the wrong direction. Teachers at Oakland High have had enough. We need to take action to be heard, and the actions will only escalate from here, and hopefully spread to other sites before the School Board does more damage. We must make our city government realize that that the health of our city depends on strong, equitable, public​ schools,” said Miles Murray, English teacher and Oakland High OEA representative, who said that a strike is not off the table. “In fact, it’s looming and hopefully this and, other ‘Wildcat Underground’ actions will show the district, city officials, and our fellow teachers the high level of solidarity, organization, and fortitude we have. If the district finally offers a raise to match inflation, sane class sizes, and all the rest of our demands that will truly benefit our students, we won’t have to strike.”

In 1996, Oakland teachers went on strike in January and didn’t return until spring. Unfortunately, many of the issues teachers face in Oakland have not changed substantially since 1996. In fact, they look eerily similar. Oakland continues to lead state school districts in the percentage of its budget paid to consultants and top-salaried district-level administrators.

“Systemically, nothing has changed in 22 years, since our last strike. It’s scary that OUSD has not figured out how to evolve and improve in more than two decades,” said Alex Webster Guiney, a Special Education teacher and school site OEA rep. “OUSD administration still does not recognize the inherent value of teacher satisfaction and longevity,” she added.

1996 STRIKE HISTORY HERE:

https://libcom.org/library/oakland-teachers-strike-1996-iww?fbclid=IwAR1BscKe60H-EQSnkJ63Ag3VCJrhjMid PiWhdFuqk4RGkqyxd9RlcNtoIIY)

Oakland teachers make considerably less than teachers in surrounding districts in the Bay Area where the cost of living is similar, or even less than in Oakland. The cost of living in Oakland has risen astronomically as San Francisco has tapped it for commuter tech housing, and as the city has experienced a renaissance in restaurants, bars, and shopping. With all of this, rents have skyrocketed as Oakland educators continue to fall behind.

“It is ridiculous that the majority of educators in Oakland can barely afford to live in the community in which we teach,” said Oakland High OEA rep Cole Margen, a history teacher in Oakland High’s RISE Academy, which serves a population of recent immigrants and students learning English as a second language. “Our salary caps out at 80 thousand after 20 years in the district and that is nowhere near enough to live on, or retire on, if we want to support ourselves and our families -– especially with the housing bubble that has so lovingly accommodated the tech exodus from San Francisco.”

By comparison teachers in surrounding districts rise to higher salaries earlier in their careers, and finish much higher with more secure retirements for their time spent teaching.

“The primary difference between Oakland and many of these districts is the percentage of black and brown students we educate,” said Suzi LeBaron, a science teacher, department head, and pathway director at Oakland High. “You can look at the demographics and the comparative salaries and see a clear trend. This is institutional racism at work and no one is talking about it. Vultures in the form of consultants and top-salaried administrators continue to circle and pick our district apart, because that is OUSD’s history.”

A newly credentialed teacher with a BA starts in Oakland at $46,570. Our median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is $2,330/month. (Oakland demographics, 25.3% Hispanic/Latinx, and 28% African American).
In Fremont, where the median rent is $2,086, a teacher starts at $66,398, nearly $20,000 more. (Fremont demographics, 14.8% Hispanic/Latinx, and 3.3% African American).

In Mountain View-Los Altos district, where the median rent is about $450 higher than Oakland, the starting salary is $82,819. (Mountain View demographics, 21.7% Hispanic/Latinx, and 2.2% African American).

In fact, even though Mountain View teachers don’t get a raise in the first five years, at the end of those five years they have earned ​$170,611 MORE ​​than a 5-year teacher in Oakland. That’s the difference between home stability and no home stability. Oakland teachers cannot continue to work to better the lives of our students while their own livelihood is at risk. They can no longer tolerate a system of attrition.

Another point of contention is the education of children with special needs: “These children are disproportionately assigned to our public schools because their applications can be rejected by charter schools,” Guiney said. Charter schools are NOT obligated to provide services to children with special needs, but public schools are. As a result, OUSD wants to raise the cap on Special Ed class sizes in order to balance out overcrowding in general ed classrooms. “Adding more high-need children to a Special Ed classroom in order to reduce the number of children in general ed classrooms is an inefficient way of handling overcrowding, and will only end up reducing the quality of education for all students,” Guiney added.

Unfortunately, OUSD’s continued financial woes are the result of continuing sloppy mismanagement due to the historic attitude that students in Oakland didn’t, and still don’t, matter as much as students in surrounding communities.

OUSD supports a larger percentage of consultants, upper-level managers, and administrators than other state school districts, and a smaller percentage is spent on direct services to students (include the salaries and retention of their teachers). This is a classic example of educational redlining.
Instead, the district is increasingly relying on additional sources of revenue (parcel taxes and state support for career and technical education, as two examples) to keep programs robust for students. The actual work of teachers, however, continues to be minimized.

Additionally, the growth of private and public charter schools in Oakland (staffed with non-unionized teachers) has resulted in a well-documented “white flight” from Oakland’s public schools, further emphasizing inequities.

While OUSD talks about the possibility of closing 24 public schools, the district has approved a large number of largely-unregulated charter schools that continue to drain resources and students from public schools, with no proven outcomes. In fact, OUSD has recently hired another top-level (highly paid) administrator to oversee the Office of Charter Schools, all the while refusing to bargain with its nearly 3.000 public school educators represented by OEA.

Categories Accountability, California, Oakland, Racism, Teacher Pay, Unions

Mississippi Senator Who Made “Public Hanging” Remark Attended Segregation Academy

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2018 //
25

The Jackson Free-Press (Mississippi) reported that Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith attended an all-white segregation academy in her high school years.

The story was picked up by Huffington Post.

It’s important to remember that segregation academies were created as the first statewide examples of school choice. Their purpose was to allow white students to avoid being forced by federal courts to go to school with black students after the Brown vs, Board of Education decision in 1954.

Senator Hyde-Smith’s alma mater, Lawrence County Academy, “was established in 1970, one year after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Mississippi to desegregate its schools. For 15 years after desegregation became law of the land, Mississippi dragged its feet on integrating black and white students.”

It was part of the school choice movement across the South whose purpose was to avoid and defeat desegregation.

Categories Accountability, Mississippi, Racism, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

My Review of Eve L. Ewing’s “Ghosts in the Schoolyard”

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2018 //
14

The best book about education this year was written by a woman who is a poet, a playwright, a novelist, and soon to be the writer of a Marvel comic about “a black girl genius from Chicago.” Ewing has a doctorate in sociology from Harvard and is now on the faculty of the University of Chicago. In case you don’t know all this, I am referring to Eve L. Ewing and her new book about school closings in Chicago. The title is Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.

Eve Ewing was a teacher in one of the 50 public schools that Rahm Emanuel closed in a single day. Her book will help to memorialize Rahm Emanuel’s stigma as the only person in American history to close 50 public schools in one day.

Because she is a poet, the book is written beautifully. She has managed to overcome the burden of academic language, which can so often sound technical, bureaucratic, and dehumanizing. Her language goes to the heart of the experience of suffering at the hands of bureaucrats and technocrats.

She examines the school closings from the perspective of those who were its victims: students, families, communities.

The question at the heart of the book is this: Why do students and families fight to keep their schools open after the authorities declare they are “failing schools.”

She answers the question by listening to and recording the moving testimony of those who fought for the survival of their schools.

Ewing sketches the history of the Bronzeville community in Chicago, racially segregated by government action. What resulted was a community that was hemmed in but nonetheless developed strong traditions, ties, and communal bonds. One of those bonds was the one between families and schools.

She describes some of the schools that were closed, schools with long histories in the black community. Parents and students came out to testify in opposition to the closings. They spoke about why they loved their school, how their family members had proudly attended the school, only to be confronted by school officials who waved “data” and “facts” in their faces to justify closing their beloved school.

Ewing deftly contrasts the official pronouncements of Barbara Byrd-Bennett (now in prison for accepting kickbacks from vendors), who insisted that it was not “racist” to close the schools of Bronzeville with the emotional responses of the students and families, who saw racism in the decision.

Ewing writes powerfully about a concept she calls “institutional mourning.” Families experienced this mourning process as the city leaders killed the institutions that were part of their lives and their history. The school closings were “part of a broader pattern of disrespect for people of color in Chicago,” they were part of “a formula of destruction” intended to obliterate memory, history, and tradition. The act of closing schools was integral to gentrification. And indeed, Chicago has seen a mass exodus of a significant part of its black population, which may have been (likely was) the purpose of the school closings and the removal of black neighborhoods.

Institutional mourning, she writes, “is the social and emotional experience undergone by individuals and communities facing the loss of a shared institution they are affiliated with—-such as a school, church, residence, neighborhood, or business district–especially when those individuals or communities occupy a socially marginalized status that amplifies their reliance on the institution or its significance in their lives.

Ewing asks:

“What do school closures, and their disproportionate clustering in communities like Bronzeville, tell us about a fundamental devaluation of African American children, their families, and black life in general? Is there room for democracy and real grassroots participation in a school system that has been run like an oligarchy?”

Byrd-Bennett spoke about a “utilization crisis” that required the closure of schools in Bronzeville and the dispersion of their students. Ewing offers a counterpoint, seeing the schools in the black community “as a bastion of community pride” and a long-running war over “the future of a city and who gets to claim it. There is the need to consider that losing the school represents another assault in a long line of racist attacks against a people, part of a history of levying harmful policies against them, blaming them for the aftermath, then having the audacity to pretend none of it really happened. There is the way some of these policy decisions are camouflaged by pseudoscientific analysis that is both ethically and statistically questionable. There is our intensely segregated society to account for, in which those who attend the school experience a fundamentally different reality than those who have the power to steer its future. And finally, there is the intense emotional aftermath that follows school closure, which can have a profound, lasting effect on those who experience the closure even as it is rarely acknowledged with any seriousness by those who made the decision.”

One bright spot in her book is the story of the successful resistance to the closing of the Walter H. Dyett high school in Bronzeville. She explains who Walter H. Dyett was, why the school was important, and why the community fought to keep the school named for him open. Dyett was a musician and a beloved high school music teacher; he taught in Bronzeville for 38 years. The school bearing his name may be the only one ever named for a teacher. A dozen community members, led by Jitu Brown of the Journey for Justice Alliance, conducted a hunger strike that lasted for 32 days. Only by risking their lives were they able to persuade the Chicago Mayor and his hand-picked Board to invest in the school instead of closing it.

Why do parents fight to save their schools, a fight they usually lose? She writes, “They fight because losing them [their schools] can mean losing their very world.”

I have underlined and starred entire paragraphs. Certainly, the testimony of students at public hearings, which was very moving. Also Ewing’s commentary, which is insightful.

At the hearing concerning the proposed (and certain) closing of the Mayo elementary school, students talked about the shame they felt.

One student, a third grader, testified:

My whole class started breaking out crying, so did my teacher. We walked through the halls in shame because we didn’t want Mayo to close. When I’m in fourth grade, I was really thinking about going to the fiftieth year anniversary, but how can I when Mayo is closing?

The shame was on Rahm Emanuel and Barbara Byrd-Bennett, but the students somehow felt culpable for what was done to them.

Another student from Mayo said:

Every day I go to school, we sing the Mayo song, and we are proud to hear the song. We are proud to sing the song every…every day. All I want to know is, why close Mayo? This is one of the best schools we ever had.

The book reads like a novel.

Let me add that I have waited for this book for a long time, not knowing if it would ever be written. History told from the point of view of those who were acted on, rather than the point of view of those at the top of the pyramid. Whose story will be told and who will tell it? Eve Ewing has told it.

I found it difficult to put down.

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Emanuel, Rahm, Racism

Wendy Lecker: A Terrific Book about Chicago School Closings: Eve Ewing’s “Ghosts in the Schoolyard”

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2018 //
16

Wendy Lecker is a civil rights lawyer who writes frequently for the Stamford Advocate in Connecticut.

In this article, she reviews Eve L. Ewing’s marvelous book Ghosts in the Schoolyard.

I finished it a few days ago and can testify that it is a very important book. It is a powerful account of the 2013 mass school closings in Chicago.

Lecker writes:

The increase in racist attacks and voter suppression across the country prompts many whites to claim that this ugliness is “not who we are” as Americans. Sadly, these events merely reinforce how pervasive racism is in American society and policy.

A new book, “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side,” describes how African-American communities experience education reform policies, particularly school closures, in the context of the history of racial segregation and discrimination in Chicago. The author, Eve Ewing, is a professor at the University of Chicago, and a graduate of and former teacher in the Chicago public schools.

In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s administration closed 49 schools, on the pretext that the schools had low test scores and were “under-utilized.” The closures disproportionately affected African-American students in the intensely segregated district.

The questionable standard used to determine “under-utilization” was large class size — 30 children per class. When predominately white Chicago neighborhoods suffered large population declines, CPS never considered school closures there. CPS claimed it would send students to “better” schools, but the receiving schools had test scores just a few points above those slated for closure. From 2000 to 2015, CPS closed 125 neighborhood schools in communities of color, while opening 149 charter schools and selective admission public schools.

“I feel like I’m at a slave auction … Because I’m like, begging you to keep my family together. Don’t take them and separate them.”

This plea was uttered by a Chicago public school principal at one of the public hearings in 2013. Professor Ewing reviewed the testimony of the throngs of community members who came out to oppose gutting their schools. The schools, which had educated generations of the same families, were community institutions. Parents, teachers and students described them as families that provided continuity and stability for the entire neighborhood.

The analogy to a slave auction was not far-fetched. As Ewing notes, “the intentional disruption of the African-American family has been a primary tool of white supremacy.” In Chicago, this is not the first time African-American communities were torn apart by government policy. Wooed to the north by labor recruiters during the great migration, African-Americans were confined to one neighborhood, eventually dubbed Bronzeville, by violence, restrictive covenants and, later, housing policy. The community turned this forcibly segregated neighborhood into a vibrant place — a hub for music and the arts. Public housing policies favored families. Consequently, Bronzeville had a dense concentration of children. Local officials refused to integrate schools, so these children attended predominately African-American neighborhood public schools. Moreover, CPS consistently failed to invest in these segregated schools. Despite local activism and federal intervention over the years, Chicago has done little to address school or residential segregation.

In the late 1990s, Chicago demolished much of Bronzeville’s public housing, ousting many of its residents. Parents who were able sent children to live with relatives who remained in Bronzeville in order to preserve vital school relationships. As Ewing observes, the loss of student population in Bronzeville was the result of overt government policy.

To Bronzeville residents, the 2013 round of school closures was the continuation of a pattern of segregation, displacement and underfunding by Chicago officials. One resident described CPS’s attitude as “I poured gasoline on your house and then it’s your fault it’s on fire.”

There is extensive evidence showing that the 2013 Chicago school closings diminished educational opportunities for the children whose schools closed. Ewing demonstrates that the accompanying loss of relationships, identity and sense of history was just as devastating. The community mourned lost connections with teachers, staff, students, and something larger. Ewing details some of the personalities behind the names of the closed schools — notable African-American professionals from the same community. As one student noted, “That’s how you get black history to go away. Closing schools (especially those named for prominent African-Americans).” In the rare instance where a school slated for closure, Dyett High School, was saved after a community-wide hunger strike, a student declared that “(w)e value our education more because of what people sacrificed.”

“Ghosts in the Schoolyard” illustrates how supposedly objective metrics officials use to judge a school’s quality and fate are far from neutral and fail to account for a host of considerations critical to the community affected. As Ewing concludes, if we fail to consider history, community, race, power and identity when framing and investigating the problems facing our public schools, we will fail to find solutions that serve the best interests of children and communities.

Wendy Lecker is a columnist for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and is senior attorney at the Education Law Center.

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Emanuel, Rahm, Race, Racism

Jim Sleeper on Republican Derangement Syndrome

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2018 //
51

Journalist Jim Sleeper recalls the moderate brand of Republicanism that he grew up with in Massachusetts.

He is shocked to see how the national party has been captured by fringe extremists who are no longer on the fringe, nor are they “extreme” in the context of a Trump-captured party.

It’s not enough to observe, however rightly, that Republicans have been deranged by the much-ballyhooed sins of what a concerted conservative campaign derides as “Social Justice Warriors,” what Rush Limbaugh calls “feminazis,” what Trump and his minions call invading Mexican rapists and terrorists, and other such bogeymen. Only a few of those are carriers or casualties of what’s generating Trumpism itself: the disease of turbo-marketing that’s reducing American education, entertainment, social media, politics and the dignity of work itself to levels determined by a mania to maximize profits and shareholder dividends, no matter the social costs.

The few conservatives who still hope to advance the ordered, principled republican liberty that my Massachusetts exemplars upheld can no longer convincingly reconcile that hope with their movement’s and the Republican Party’s obeisance to every whim and riptide of corporate, global capitalism that’s destroying the liberty they claim to cherish and that’s generating a lot of what’s wrong in the bogeymen they vow to defeat.

The Republican party of Eisenhower and Rockefeller is dead. It has been replaced by the ideology of Donald Trump, an ideology that does not hesitate to play with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and every other intolerant idea in the lexicon. Just in the past few days, Trump has made a point of belittling black female members of the press, as part of his war on the press. The Republican leadership doesn’t care.

Categories Education Reform, Racism, Republicans

Peter Greene: Society Is Failing Our Children and Their Schools

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2018 //
12

Recently, a commenter on this blog wrote that he finally understood why some schools are succeeding and others are failing. He said he realized that children in affluent communities have well-resourced and successful schools, while children in impoverished communities have terrible schools. I tried for the umpteenth time to explain to him that he was reaching the wrong conclusion. The only measure he was using was test scores, which reflect family income. I suggested he consider that the schools in poor communities did not get the same resources as those in affluent communities. The schools he called “failing” very likely have dedicated teachers who are working hard despite large classes and inadequate support. The problem is not the schools, but society’s refusal to pay the cost of making every school a good school.

Peter Greene explains the point in more detail in this post about the Journey for Justice Alliance.

He begins:

“If you’re not regularly exposed to the problem, you might think that finding the ways in which non-white non-wealthy students are shortchanged would require deep and nuanced research. As it turns out, finding the ways in which education fails to serve those students requires no more careful research than finding the nose on the front of your face.

“The Journey For Justice Alliance is based in Chicago, but it’s an alliance of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in 24 cities across the country. They are working and organizing for community-driven alternatives to the privatization of and dismantling of public school systems. They’re the folks behind the #WeChoose movement (as in “we choose education equity, not the illusion of school choice.” Look at their member groups and you’ll find honest-to-goodness community grass roots organizations, not just one more astroturf group funded by Gates, Walton, et al. Their director, Jitu Brown, is one of the most powerful speakers for education and equity it has ever been my pleasure to hear.

“Last spring they issued a report– “Failing Brown v. Board”– that looks at the gap between the schools that serve primarily wealthy white families and those that serve non-wealthy families of color. Their findings are not encouraging.

“The report says: The fact is, public schools in Black and Latino communities are not “failing.” They have been failed. More accurately, these schools have been sabotaged for years by policy-makers who fail to fully fund them, by ideologues who choose to experiment with them, by “entrepreneurs” who choose to extract public taxpayer dollars from education systems for their own pockets.

“The report also rejects the notion that money doesn’t matter, or that somehow the children and their families are responsible. And they know what successful, fully-resourced schools look like

They offer a culturally relevant, engaging and challenging curriculum, smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, wrap-around emotional and academic supports, a student-centered school climate and meaningful parent and community engagement. These are the hallmarks of what Journey for Justice calls sustainable community schools.

“J4J performed a fairly simple piece of research– looking at course offerings in various schools across twelve cities. They acknowledge that such a comparison isn’t perfect, that schools may offer courses that are never actually taught, that the course offering list doesn’t tell you about the quality of those courses. But the findings are still pretty stark.”

In every pairing of black and white schools, “majority white schools offered both more academic subjects and more “enrichment” subjects in the arts than majority Black and/or Brown schools. Majority white schools offered more foreign languages, more high-level math options, more AP courses. The range of offerings in arts, music, dance and theater was far greater in majority white schools…

“Charter fans are going to say, “See? That’s why we need to build more charters, so we can get some of those children of color out of there,” but why should those children have to sacrifice the other big benefit that majority white schools enjoy– a school in their own community that they can attend with their neighbors? And why do we need a complicated web of privatized schools to fix the problem. We know how to fix the problem, as witnessed by the fact that politicians and leaders have fixed the problem for each of the affluent majority white schools.

“It’s like you have twenty kids in a cafeteria, and ten sit down with a steak dinner and the other ten get bowls of cold oatmeal, and when someone complains about it, a bunch of folks pop up to propose some complex system by which one of the oatmeal kids will be sent out to a restaurant across town. No! Just get back out in the kitchen and use the same tools and supplies that you demonstrably already have to make steak dinners for the rest of the kids.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Inequality, Injustice, Racism
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