Have you noticed that the vast majority of public schools that are being closed enroll disproportionate numbers of black students? Even in districts that are majority black, the closing schools are even more segregated than the district. What will happen to these children?
Jersey Jazzman noticed. He calls it the Néw Apartheid
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A teacher in California heard Tavis Smiley and Cornel West interview Wendy Kopp, Jonathan Kozol, and me–in separate interviews–and this was her reaction. She wrote a post called “TFA can’t connect the dots.”
Here is a link to the interview with Kopp.
A link to the interview with me.
A link to the interview with Jonathan Kozol. I am not sure if this is the right link, as it is a panel discussion on poverty, not the 2:1 conversation found in the other links.
Natalie Hopkinson is one of our nation’s most interesting and provocative writers. In this article, she asks the question that is the title of this post. She could have gone further to look at the strict disciplinary rules of the “no excuses” schools. Or the nearly all-white young teaching staffs in all-black schools. What is the subtext? I am sure we will more about these issues from her.
Here is a great article about Georgia’s “tax credit scholarship” program by Myra Blackmon of the Athens Banner-Herald.
Blackmon writes:
“I’m just sick about all this. My beloved Georgia has gone from being a shining beacon of educational innovation in the 1990s to a “me and my kid first” basis for decision-making and funding. We are resegregating our schools by race and class, making the quality of a child’s education dependent on his ZIP code or his parent’s income.
“Don’t talk to me about choice. That’s a euphemism for “just us.” Don’t talk to me about failing schools; talk to me about a failing legislature and corporate “reformers” who understand everything about education except teaching and learning. Don’t talk to me about “bloated budgets.” Since 2008, Georgia’s public schools have gained 37,000 students and lost 5,000 teachers.”
Richard Rothstein spoke to the AASA and told them that “reformers” like Joel Klein were wrong in claiming that high expectations and better teachers would close the achievement gap.
Here is a summary of his presentation:
Rothstein: Segregation Practices Block Achievement Gains
by Sasha Pudelski
Richard Rothstein gave a powerful lecture Thursday at the Federal Relations Luncheon where he urged AASA members to recognize the historical underpinnings of the academic achievement gap.
Rothstein, a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law, discussed how local, state and federal policies since the Great Depression have contributed to the intentional racial and socio-economic segregation of schools and communities. He urged superintendents to be proud of the academic gains that have been made over the past decade with regards to NAEP scores, graduation rates and other academic measures and to recognize the limitations of schools districts in doing more to improve low-income student achievement levels.
Rothstein’s latest social policy project, which he spoke of extensively during the lunch, is to educate policymakers, school leaders and others about how calculated policy changes aimed at maintaining segregated communities and schools since segregation in the 1930s continue to prohibit disadvantaged populations of students from reaching the same levels of achievement as their middle-class white counterparts.
“We have state-sponsored segregation and we will never narrow the achievement gap unless this goes away,” said Rothstein. But as a society, he argued, we have become convinced inaccurately that segregation is an accident of demographics rather than a long-standing deliberate attempt by our leaders to maintain separate communities and school districts.
Rothstein told the audience that school leaders need to stop apologizing for the achievement gap when they’re doing so much to improve it. He touched on a recent longitudinal analysis he authored that found while the most disadvantaged students in the country are improving on TIMSS, PISA and other benchmarking measures, disadvantaged students in places like Finland and Canada are actually doing worse on these measures over time.
He criticized those in the reform movement who believe that evidence of one school that succeeds in educating concentrated groups of disadvantaged students is evidence that it is possible everywhere. He slammed school reformers like Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City schools, who argue that if school leaders had higher expectations and higher-quality teachers, they could ensure every poor, hungry, mobile student was achieving in an equivalent manner to his stable, rich, healthy peer.
Rothstein concluded by insisting that if the United States ever hopes to make radical gains in eradicating the achievement gap, the answer is not in the school reform agenda, but in concrete changes to federal, state and local policy that force disadvantaged students to be integrated into middle-class or high-wealth school districts.
“When disadvantaged students are grouped together in schools, their challenges are compounded and build upon each other. … Unless we integrate disadvantaged students into middle class schools, we will never narrow the achievement gap beyond what we’ve done today,” Rothstein said.
(Sasha Pudelski is a government affairs manager with AASA.)
In a stunning surprise, the federal Commission on Equity and Excellence dismissed the reforms of the Bush-Obama era and called for a fresh approach. What is remarkable about the commission report is that the members were appointed by Secretary Duncan. Its members include a solid bloc of corporate reformers, but clearly they did not prevail.
Quite frankly, I was expecting a reprise of the corporate reformer mantra: more charter schools, more vouchers, more competition, more inexperienced teachers, more testing, and more online learning will end the deeply rooted poverty in our society and lift all boats. Test more often, fire more teachers, lower standards for entry into teaching, close more schools.
But this commission did not echo the popular and failed nostrums of the past generation.. It demanded more resources for the neediest students, better prepared teachers, early childhood education, health and social services, and a deliberate effort to reduce segregation.
Since 1983, when “A Nation at Risk” was published by another federal commission, the policymakers at the state and national levels have followed the formula of testing, accountability (read: punishment), and choice. With what results? After three decades, we now have a raging, destructive movement to privatize public education, bash teachers, remove their academic freedom, replace them with temps, and use standardized tests to judge and punish teachers, principals, and schools.
The heroes of this “movement” are entrepreneurs, foundation executives, and think tank thinkers, who express contempt for public schools and those who work in them. We are on our way to creating (re-creating) dual school systems in cities across the nation and giving public dollars to schools that are free to exclude the neediest students. A “movement” that talks incessantly about results and data-based decision-making has become impervious to the meager results of its own policies and has now turned into an ideological war against public education.
Secretary Duncan should read the report of his commission. For the first time in 30 years, a federal commission tells the nation what it needs to hear. We can expect the corporate reform leaders to ignore the report.
This, quite frankly, is the agenda President Obama’s supporters had expected in 2008. Will he listen?
A reader offers his observations:
Charter Schools, a failure that cannot be measured.
January 12, 2013 by Joe Hernandez
As I drive happily and optimistically through our South Florida roads, I can’t fail to notice the familiar signs we are all accustomed to viewing, the burger chains, gas stations and the strip malls. As an educator and more specifically, a school psychologist, something catches my eye in a decrepit, run down strip mall, a charter school. I pull in, curious, as to what this school has to offer, as it looks like any other store I could walk in, including an adult book store a few hundred feet away and a gun shop to go with it! I ask the friendly young lady behind a window, what type of school is this? She happily explains that this is a Kindergarten through Eigth grade charter school. Curiously, I ask where are the classrooms? She answers, they are behind that door, but I’m sorry, visitors are not allowed back there. So I ask, may I see the school counselor? I have some questions about enrolling my children here. The young lady quickly snaps back and says, “I am the school counselor”. Being of a mental health background I naturally ask, what experience do you need to be a counselor here? She quickly responds, none, that is just my title. I enroll students here. I only work part-time here. At this point, this so-called counselor is beginning to become suspicious of my intentions. So she asks, would you like to see our administrator? I answer no, not now at least, I am going to read the application completely first.
I settle down into what appears to be an old sofa of a doctor’s office, in fact, the whole charter school appears to be an old office renovated for educational purposes, complete with the obnoxious sliding glass window you need to knock on to get the attention of the office aide/school counselor to turn in your application. In the far distance, I can here the familiar laugh of children and a teacher screaming at the top of her lungs “shut up”. I look around the small waiting room, and I cannot help to notice a young lady wringing her hands, with an impatient look. Next to her, is a stack of papers and a textbook. Curious, I ask her, how do you like this school? She quickly responds that she is very disappointed. Very disappointed I ask? Yes, she says, as she begins to recount how she arrived to this school. I was offered something called a McKay Scholarship where I could choose any school I wanted private or public. Acting naive, I asked, isn’t this a good thing? She answers back, well, on the surface, everything looks great. The school is small, the staff is friendly, and the students all have to wear uniforms. So what is the problem?, I ask. She quickly explains that in order for her “application” to be accepted she had to sign a waiver. A waiver I ask? Yes a waiver. You see, when my child was in public school last year, she was receiving special education services for her Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. This school, like most other charter schools do not have the resources that public schools have. So you are required to sign a waiver stating that even though your child has “special needs” you agree that the school does not have to provide any accommodations. Surprised at this revelation, I asked the parent, and you agreed to this? Well, the school seemed so eager to please, I felt at ease that my child could learn here. So what are your plans, I ask the mother. I am going to ask the administrator if the staff could at least look at her previous year’s work and have some compassion. I looked back at her and asked, and when will the administrator see you? She snapped quickly, they told me in half an hour, but as you can see, you and I have been close to an hour here and there is no administrator in sight. I again ask naively, is this common? Oh, you don’t know? I said no, I am applying here. She looks at me straight in the eyes, think twice about the decision you are about to make. There is one administrator for the ten charter schools this company runs.
At this point, I had heard or you can say learned enough. I quietly exit the waiting room and venture to the back alley of the strip mall to see for myself what type of Physical Education field or playground this charter school had to offer. As I passed numerous, obnoxiously smelling dumpsters, I observed a fence, a 20 by 20 feet area approximately, that had a group of students doing some jumping jacks. There were no swings, slides, fields to run through, nada! Just concrete and space to do some kinesthetics!
By this time, my charter school curiosity had been fulfilled, I had seen enough what this “free, unregulated, market model” had to offer our children. I believe my experience with this randomly selected charter school, in a local strip mall may not be representative of all charter schools. I suspect that charter schools, located in our more affluent/wealthier neighborhoods run at a higher standard. Naturally, this defeats the notion of an “equal education for all”. Some may disagree with me and say, there is no more segregation in our education system. I beg to differ, charter schools are creating and contributing to what I call the new “socio-economic segregation” of our times. It is the cancer that is draining the resources of an education system, already stretched to its limits, and that has long been regulated to serve all of our children, hungry, poor, rich, disabled, gifted etc.
Joseph Hernandez, ED.S.
School Psychologist
Minneapolis is one of America’s prettiest cities in one of its most beautiful states. But it has an ugly secret.
It has a charter sector that has resurrected segregation. Myron Orfield of the University of Minnesota Law School regularly tracks segregation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul schools. He says that seeing the charters–one white, one black–in the same neighborhood, feels like the Jim Crow era in the Deep South. Orfield estimates that three-quarters of the charters are segregated schools. Orfield’s 2012 study found that charter schools in the Twin Cities are more segregated and get worse results than public schools.
As NPR put it, summarizing Orfield’s study, said: “Nearly 20 years after Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law, charters in the Twin Cities continue to perform worse, are more segregated than traditional public schools and are forcing those traditional public schools to become more segregated.”
John Hechinger, a crack reporter for Bloomberg News, visited the Twin Cities and came away with the same reaction. He too saw the revival of the era preceding the Supreme Court’s Brown decision against “separate but equal” practices.
Sad that an idea that began with liberal impulses turned into a force for resegregation.
New Jersey Save Our Schools reminds us that “school choice” was closely associated with resistance to court-ordered school desegregation in the South. Not only vouchers but segregation academies (“schools of choice”) were havens for whites fleeing contact with blacks.
Save Our Schools NJ Statement on School Choice Week
This week, there will be a concerted national effort to use the idea of parental school choice to advance an entirely different agenda.
We want to remind our legislators and those marketing school choice that legitimate school choices:
• Ensure every child has access to a high-quality public school education;
• Do not segregate or discriminate against our children on the basis of income, English proficiency, special needs, race, gender, religion or sexual preference;
• Are transparent in the sources and uses of their funding and in their educational outcomes;
• Are democratically controlled by local communities.
Unfortunately, what is being promoted by “choice” advocates does not come even close to meeting these standards.
Vouchers arose in Southern states during the 1960s, as a method of perpetuating segregation. To prevent children of color from attending their all-white schools, some districts actually closed those public schools and issued vouchers to parents that were only good at privately segregated schools, known as segregation academies.
The more recent history of voucher use in other states confirms that they continue to increase segregation.
Unfortunately, many charter schools have the same segregating effect.
For example, the recent Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) study of New Jersey charter schools found that New Jersey’s traditional public schools served four and a half times as many students with Limited English Proficiency and one and a half times as many special-needs students as did the charter schools. Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker has documented that this segregation also includes income, with charter schools serving a wealthier population of students than comparable traditional public schools.
New Jersey Department of Education statistics confirm that a number of New Jersey charter schools are also segregated by race and ethnicity.
Until school choice advocates can ensure that greater options for some parents do not equal more segregation for all of our children, their claims of looking out for the needy do not ring true.
Joining an all-white country club is also a choice, but not one that we would ever support.
——-
Save Our Schools NJ is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization of parents and other concerned residents whose more than 10,000 members believe that all NJ children should have access to a high quality public education.
This opinion piece appeared in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
It was titled “Defend Public Schools, Our Children, Our Democracy”
This op-ed was submitted by 11 leaders of community and education organizations in Milwaukee.
We need communitywide discussion and action to protect the future of the Milwaukee Public Schools.
We welcome input from all who believe in and support quality public education for all children.
We represent thousands of parents, community members and educators who have been working – and will continue to work – to ensure that all children receive a first-class education comparable to anywhere else in the state.
A Jan. 20 Crossroads op-ed by the executive board of Milwaukee Succeeds highlights the need to secure a sound financial future for MPS and to develop guiding principles for educating all the children in this city.
The initiative, however, was noticeably and disturbingly top-down, developed behind closed doors.
Does Milwaukee need yet another policy mandate with vague and arbitrary “guiding principles” that ignore Milwaukee’s hypersegregation, poverty and joblessness? That ignore the fundamental and inherent differences between public, voucher and charter schools?
Any discussion of the future of public education in this city requires input from all key stakeholders, in particular people who live in Milwaukee and people who are part of the MPS community, from staff to parents to students.
We believe that any set of guiding principles also must include the following:
All schools in Milwaukee that receive public funds must adhere to Wisconsin’s open meetings/open records laws to ensure full transparency and accountability. The public must have access to information such as the percentage of students in poverty, English language learners, special education students, suspensions, expulsions, teacher certification, content of curricula and so forth.
All schools in Milwaukee that receive public funds must respect the constitutional rights of students and staff (for example, rights of due process and freedom of speech). They also must adhere to state anti-discrimination laws in areas such as sexual orientation or pregnancy.
All schools in Milwaukee that receive public funds must respect the language needs of students and must adhere to federal and state protections for English language learners. In particular, we must maintain and develop strong bilingual programs for the city’s growing Latino community.
All schools in Milwaukee that receive public funds should serve all children, including children with disabilities. This also means they should accommodate the needs of all children with disabilities and not exclude, expel or counsel such children out of the school.
All children in Milwaukee deserve a rich curriculum, including a comprehensive academic program and art, music, physical education and access to school libraries.
We should establish a moratorium on new charter schools that are part of national franchises. Our precious educational dollars should be kept in the community, not sent out of state.
We must develop a regional discussion on hypersegregation in Milwaukee and how such hypersegregation negatively affects not only education but jobs, transportation, housing and health care.
For the past two decades, education reform in Milwaukee has been dominated by consumer-based, privatization initiatives. They have not worked. The Milwaukee Succeeds op-ed repackages school privatization as a call for a “unified education agenda.” But, at its heart, school privatization is a disservice to our children and our democracy.
We must improve our public schools. But we also must defend the constitutional right to a free, public education for all children. A truly public education means more than funneling tax dollars to private voucher schools and semiprivate charter schools that operate outside of expected norms of public oversight and accountability – and that undermine the very survival of MPS.
MPS is the only educational institution in this city that has the capacity, commitment and legal obligation to serve all of Milwaukee’s children.
We look forward to conversations that include all the stakeholders in this community, that protect the rights of all and that recognize the inherent bond between strong public schools and a strong democracy.
This was submitted by Christopher Ahmuty, ACLU of Wisconsin executive director; Jasmine Alinder, board president of Parents for Public Schools of Milwaukee; Tony Baez, Centro Hispano Milwaukee executive director; the Rev. Willie Brisco, Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope president; James Hall, NAACP Milwaukee Branch president; Marva Herndon, chair of Women Committed to an Informed Community; Robert Kraig, Citizen Action of Wisconsin executive director; Larry Miller, Milwaukee School Board vice president; Christine Neumann-Ortiz, Voces de la Frontera executive director; Bob Peterson, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association president; and Milwaukee School Board member Annie Woodward.
Diane Ravitch's blog 