NCLB Waivers: Closing Achievement Gap Requires Policy Overhaul, Not Tweaks

NCLB Waivers: 

Closing Achievement Gap Requires Policy Overhaul, Not Tweaks

by Kate Casas | HuffPost Black Voices

To date, 33 states and the District of Columbia have been granted a waiver from the requirements of No Child Left Behind. According to Education Weekly, once given the flexibility to revise their accountability system all but eight states have taken the opportunity to alter their achievement goals. States are now telling the Department of Education (DOE) that it will take longer for low-income, minority, and/or disabled children to reach proficiency than it will for everyone else. For example, the District of Columbia has said that by 2017, 70 percent of African American students and 90 percent of white students will be reading on grade level. In Delaware, it's 75 percent reading proficiency for black students, 71 percent for English Language Learners and 87 percent for white students.

As you can imagine, this has rankled the feathers of education advocates on all sides of the education reform debate. Opponents say that the 26 states that have altered subgroup achievement goals are lowering expectations for at-risk children. Proponents of the changes say states are being realistic about how long it will take to close the achievement gap.

My concern isn't about how the goals and timelines are being perceived, but rather, what policies and systemic changes are being implemented so states can realize their goals. What we should have learned from No Child Left Behind is that you can set a goal of 100 percent proficiency for all students, but if you don't have the policies to support that goal, you are going to fall far short.

Take, for example, my home state of Missouri. Missouri, to its credit, is one of the eight states that has not used the waiver to set different goals for each subgroup. However, the five-year trend in Missouri shows that without some serious policy overhaul it will take 174 years to close the achievement gap between Hispanic students and white students in reading and 87 years to close the black/white achievement gap in math. Additionally, the gap between low-income and non-low-income students in both math and reading is continuing to widen.

The achievement gaps in Missouri are not unlike the achievement gaps we see all over America. While it is admirable that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education believes the gap can be closed by 2017, I fear that the policy changes the department has outlined are not transformational enough to get the job done.

In order to close gaps of this magnitude, Missouri and other states have to focus on the following strategies:

• Turn traditional public schools into a model of autonomy for principals and teachers that ensures each school is able to meet the needs of the unique learners in its school;

• Provide a transparent system for giving A-F letter grades to all schools and hold them accountable for student outcomes and school spending decisions;

• Increase educational choices so children who are stuck in schools not making significant progress have a fantastic and immediate choice for something different and better;

• Recruit, retain, compensate and evaluate teachers based on performance, not seniority.

These kinds of systemic changes are happening in some places, but not in Missouri. Worse yet, there is currently no plan for them to. The outline for closing the achievement gap calls for the rehashing of a lot of worthwhile tweaks, but history has shown us that slight adjustments aren't enough.

My fear is that we are getting hung up on how states are communicating their goals for closing the achievement gap and forgetting that the actual plan for closing the achievement gap is what is important. Having spent a decade working in and with students in the mostly low-income and minority Saint Louis Public Schools, I understand as well as anyone the damage that the soft bigotry of low expectations can cause, but the loud bigotry of inaction is even worse.

***

Kate Casas is the State Policy Director of the Children's Education Alliance of Missouri, a statewide policy organization that focuses on parent engagement and public awareness.

Diane Ravitch: The Real Enemy of Failing Schools is Poverty

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

by David J. Leonard, Mark Anthony Neal and James Braxton Peterson | NewBlackMan

Few university courses generate much attention from mainstream media, but Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson’s course “The Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z” has drawn national attention from NBC’s Today Show, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, USA Today, and Forbes.com among many others.  To be sure such attention is not unusual for Dyson, who is one of the most visible academics in the United States and has offered courses dealing with hip-hop culture, sociology, and Black religious and vernacular expression for more than twenty-years.  Yet, such attention seems odd; hundreds of university courses containing a significant amount of content related to Hip-hop culture and Black youth are taught every year—and have been so, for more than a decade.  In addition, there are dozens of scholarly studies of Hip-hop published each year—Julius Bailey’s edited volume Jay-Z: Essays of Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King, among those published just this year—and two Ivy League universities, Harvardand Cornell, boast scholarly archives devoted to the subject of Hip-Hop.

Any course focused on a figure like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter), given his contemporary Horatio Algernarrative, and his reputation as an urban tastemaker, was bound to generate considerable attention, but the nature of the attention that Dyson’s class has received and some of the attendant criticism, suggest that much more is at play.

In early November, The Washington Post offered some of the first national coverage of the class, largely to coincide with the arrival of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne tour to Washington DC’s Verizon Center.  Jay-Z dutifully complied with the attention by giving Professor Dyson a shout-out from the stage. The largely favorable article about the class, did make note, as have many subsequent stories, about the cost of tuition at Georgetown; as if somehow the cost of that tuition is devalued by kids taking classes about hip-hop culture.

Other profiles of the course and Dyson have gone out of their way to make the point that the course had mid-term and final exams, as if that wouldn’t be standard procedure for any nationally recognized senior scholar at a top-tier research university in this country.  Such narrative slippages speak volumes about the widespread belief that courses that focus on some racial and cultural groups, are created in slipshod fashion and lack rigor; it is a critique that is well worn, and that various academic disciplines, such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies and even Sociology have long had to confront.

As ethnomusicologist Joe Schoss, author of Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, recently suggested on Facebook, courses constructed around the mythology of “great men” are often the vehicle in which outlier disciplines are made legible within traditional academic settings. Indeed Dyson’s career has been marked by such studies, where he’s examined figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, hip-hop artists Tupac Shakur and Nas (Nasir Jones).  He is also teaching a class on the legacy of Jesse Jackson this semester, to commemorate the Civil Rights leader’s 70^thbirthday. 

Figures like Dyson, and Brown University Professor Tricia Rose, who authored the landmark Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America in 1994, were at the forefront of establishing Hip-Hop studies as a viable—and yes popular—academic discipline for nearly two decades. 

The reality of the presence of Hip-Hop Studies at virtually every major college and University, unveils the “oh my, golly gee” discovery mode of so much of the reporting and controversy surrounding the Jay Z class, as more manufactured, than anything else.  More to the point, the attack on the validity of a class focused on a prominent and highly influential cultural figure, who happens to be a young Black man who has trafficked in outlier sub-cultures, seems more emblematic of an assault on the value of a liberal education. This assault comes at a historical moment when the products of a liberal education, are literally raising critical questions about the nature of inequality in American society.

There are other critics, some of whom throw darts from within the realm of Hip Hop Studies.  They disparage Jay-Z as merely a misogynist, a hustler who promotes consumerism and other poisonous messages to young minds that mindlessly follow him.  Some of these same critics have also questioned Dyson’s knowledge of Hip Hop culture, his cultural bona fides on the discourses of the subject matter and his ability to choose the appropriate subjects.  So at the same time that conservative critics question the validity of Hip Hop studies vis a vis Shakespeare or *yawn* classical music, other critics (the one’s we’d assume might appreciate the value of such a course in the broader context of Africana, Popular culture, and Hip Hop studies) are quick to cast Dyson as an outsider; to proffer Dead Prez or Mos Def as more appropriate subject matter for this kind of course. 

Well, “we don’t believe you/You need more people.” “Do you dudes listen to music?/Or do you just skim through it?”   Yes Jay-Z’s music has many limitations, faults, and critical flaws – some of which he is poignantly aware.  But that is exactly why his life and lyrics make substantive subject matter for sociological inquiry.  His influence and impact – or what some may deem popularity or sell-out-status – are more grist for the sociological mill.  In the end, the critique of the course that suggests that Hip Hop Studies has no place in the academy is eerily connected to those critiques that question Dyson’s authenticity as either an elite scholar or a ‘real’ Hip Hop Head.   And we LOVE Dead Prez, but the “mainstream” media ain’t checking for a Dead Prez class and in order to stave off the onslaught against area studies, interdisciplinary studies, Hip Hop studies, and more broadly but directly, the Humanities, we are going to need some of that mainstream attention.  Folks hate to hear this, but part of the reason why we have access to so much of the ‘underground’ Hip Hop that we know and love is because there exists a healthy amount of popular attention (and dollars) directed at the drivel we (love to) hate.

In a recent article that was less than optimistic about the future of the humanities within American higher education, Dr. Frank Donoghue wrote, "When we claim to wonder whether the humanities will survive the twenty first century, we're really asking, 'Will the humanities have a place in the standard higher-education curriculum in the United States?' (2010).  The answer appears to be no from a myriad of places.   “But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up,” writes Nancy Cook in “The Death of Liberal Arts.”  “For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend.” Peddling the often-cited binaries between “cerebral” and “the practical,” the intellectual and the useful, Cook highlights the ubiquitous attack on academic enterprises that seemingly don’t produce tangible results or profits.

While commentators tend to focus on the declining interest and place of a liberal arts education that has resulted from the increased costs of higher education, the focus on securing a good job upon graduation, and the professionalization of higher education, the waning place of liberal arts and humanities is not simply an organic process.  It reflects a direct assault from conservative factions within the American political landscape.  In Texas, Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation called for substantial changes in the delivery of higher education, proposing greater emphasis on teaching and research that benefits the state and its economic needs.  Defending the call for reform, Ronald L. Trowbridge, “The Case for Higher Ed Accountability” described his views on educational reform in the following way:

What is the value of any research endeavor to students or to wider societal needs? Some process of evaluation must be established. If researchers wish to pursue matters that do not serve students or wider societal needs, they are certainly free to do so, but such should be so without release time from the classroom.

Texas is not alone.  In Florida, Governor Rick Scott recently announced his desire to remake public universities with greater emphasis on programs that stimulate the economy and produce future workers in key industries.  “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs,” Scott noted “So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.”  The divestment of public investment in the arts, human inquiry, and humanistic endeavors has been central to the conservative movement.  Opposition to intellectual pursuits and the neoliberal emphasis on professionalism has had profound influence on contemporary culture.

Describing a friend who wanted to study comparative literature, Andrew Bast notes his initial reaction as one of “bewilderment” and “fascination,” asking himself, “What in the world would be the value in that?” Capturing the hegemonic of the assault and systemic devaluing of the humanities within contemporary culture, he makes “The Case for a Useless Degree:”

I later learned that there's actually a huge value in it. Computer science, accounting, marketing—the purpose of many majors is self-evident. They lead to well-paid jobs and clear-cut career paths. (One hopes, at least.) But comparative literature, classics, and philosophy—according to the new conventional wisdom—offer no clear trajectory.

The recent spectacle and media frenzy surrounding Michael Eric Dyson’s “Sociology of Hip-Hop” course points to the powerful ways that “useless degrees” and “useless” knowledge are under attack.  It also exposes the critical discourses that exist within Hip Hop studies – who can teach it/who is authentic enough to teach it.  The media frenzy and the debate about this class reflect a well-organized attack on the humanities, liberal arts education and individual academic FREEDOM.

Strangely enough, the internecine squabbles about whether or not Jay-Z is fit to be taught or if Dyson is fit to teach similarly swirl in the discursive diatribes against certain “less practical” disciplines.  What reflects back at us is an ideology that demonizes critical thought, demonizes intellectual inquiry, and silences conversations about race, gender, inequality and other issues of social injustice.  A focus here on Jay-Z or Michael Eric Dyson misses the point because the class is becoming a stand-in for a larger assault on education, intellectualism, and critical thinking.  The media coverage and the ensuing debates about it—on social media—reflect  an overall effort to demonize those who teach, those who educate, and those who articulate "freedom dreams."  The culture wars are back and it’s us against them and us against us. 

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris. Follow him on Twitter @DR_DJL.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University.  He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.  Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University  and the author of the forthcoming Major Figures: Critical Essays on Hip Hop Music(Mississippi University Press). Follow him at @DrJamesPeterson.

Natalie Hopkinson on "Why School Choice Fails"

Why School Choice Fails

by Natalie Hopkinson | New York Times Op-Ed

IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he’s been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it’s time for middle school, and there’s been no neighborhood option available.

Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.

Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.

My neighborhood’s last free-standing middle school was closed in 2008, part of a round of closures by then Mayor Adrian Fenty and his schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. The pride and gusto with which they dismantled those institutions was shameful, but I don’t blame them. The closures were the inevitable outcome of policies hatched years before.

In 1995 the Republican-led Congress, ignoring the objections of local leadership, put in motion one of the country’s strongest reform policies for Washington: if a school was deemed failing, students could transfer schools, opt to attend a charter school or receive a voucher to attend a private school.

The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed.

Meanwhile, failing neighborhood schools, depleted of students, were shut down. Invariably, schools that served the poorest families got the ax — partly because those were the schools where students struggled the most, and partly because the parents of those students had the least power.

Competition produces winners and losers; I get that. Indeed, the rhetoric of school choice can be seductive to angst-filled middle-class parents like myself. We crunch the data and believe that, with enough elbow grease, we can make the system work for us. Naturally, I’ve only considered high-performing schools for my children, some of them public, some charter, some parochial, all outside our neighborhood.

But I’ve come to realize that this brand of school reform is a great deal only if you live in a wealthy neighborhood. You buy a house, and access to a good school comes with it. Whether you choose to enroll there or not, the public investment in neighborhood schools only helps your property values.

For the rest of us, it’s a cynical game. There aren’t enough slots in the best neighborhood and charter schools. So even for those of us lucky ones with cars and school-data spreadsheets, our options are mediocre at best.

In the meantime, the neighborhood schools are dying. After Ms. Rhee closed our first neighborhood school, the students were assigned to an elementary school connected to a homeless shelter. Then that closed, and I watched the children get shuffled again.

Earlier this year, when we were searching for a middle school for my son — 11 is a vulnerable age for anyone — our public options were even grimmer. I could have sent him to one of the newly consolidated kindergarten-to-eighth-grade campuses in my neighborhood, with low test scores and no algebra or foreign languages. We could enter a lottery for a spot in another charter or out-of-boundary middle school, competing against families all over the city.

The system recently floated a plan for yet another round of closings, with a proposal for new magnet middle school programs in my neighborhood, none of which would open in time for my son. These proposals, like much of reform in Washington, are aimed at some speculative future demographic, while doing nothing for the children already here. In the meantime, enrollment, and the best teachers, continue to go to the whitest, wealthiest communities.

The situation for Washington’s working- and middle-class families may be bleak, but we are hardly alone. Despite the lack of proof that school-choice policies work, they are gaining popularity in communities nationwide. Like us, those places will face a stark decision: Do they want equitable investment in community education, or do they want to hand it over to private schools and charters? Let’s stop pretending we can fairly do both. As long as we do, some will keep winning, but many of us will lose.

***

Natalie Hopkinson is the author of the forthcoming book Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City (Duke University Press).

Diane Ravitch Unplugged @ Duke University

Duke's Program in Education and Durham Public Schools join to bring Diane Ravitch to campus and Durham schools. http://today.duke.edu/2011/10/ravitich

The Return of Solidarity: Young Americans Band Together To Organize for Justice

The Return of Solidarity: 

Young Americans Band Together To Organize for Justice

by Mark Naison | special NewBlackMan

During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, many Americans, though brought up on “rags to riches” stories of individual mobility, began to cautiously embrace the concept of “Solidarity”—the idea that working people could only survive, and ultimately prosper, if they helped one another when they were in need and organized together to demand that government and business provide them with economic security. Such an ideal fueled the growth of the industrial labor movement, which called on workers to sacrifice for once another, rather than compete for the favors of employers. But it was also visible in the emergence of an ethic of mutual aid that honored those who helped people in trouble, whether it was feeding a hungry person who came to the door asking for food, or taking in a family who just lost their farm or got evicted from their apartment.

The music of Woodie Guthrie and the novels of John Steinbeck, especially the Grapes of Wrath captured the moral grandeur of solidarity both as a personal credo and a political ideal, but it was also institutionalized, through an alliance of the New Deal and the emerging labor movement, in unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and the legal protection of collective bargaining rights in basic industry.

For the last three years, I have been looking for signs that young college educated Americans, along with their working class counterparts, are beginning to rediscover the concept of Solidarity. Young people have been hammered especially hard in the current economic crisis. As of the Spring of 2011, youth unemployment in the US had topped 20 percent, with sections of that labor force (minority youth, high school graduates) having rates double that total. Even graduates of elite universities were having trouble finding work they were trained for, as many returned home to live with parents rather than striking out on their own.

For a while, I saw little evidence that young Americans were reading the handwriting on the wall and concluding that acquisitive individualism and consumerism just weren’t going to work all that well for their generation. I watched in astonishment as young Americans failed to mobilize for the 2010 Congressional elections as they had in 2008, paving the way for Republican—and Tea Party-dominance of the House of Representatives.

But in the last six months, I have seen numerous signs that Solidarity is making a comeback among young people who are starting to realize that this economic crisis is not going away and that they had better reach out to one another and fight for economic justice, lest their dignity, as well as their power to make a living, be permanently compromised.

The first sign of this was in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of high school students and college students mobilized in support of union workers whose collective bargaining rights were being taken away through the actions of a Republican Governor and State Legislature. At the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington, I had the privilege of introducing Kas Schwerdtfeger, a Students for a Democratic Society organizer from Milwaukee who led walkouts of thousands of high school and college students in support of the occupation of the state legislature by union workers, as well ass semester long occupation of the student center at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Such actions equaled, and in many ways, exceeded those launched by the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, the last major student movement in the US to mobilize around the concept of ”Solidarity.” But Wisconsin was not an isolated incident.

In New York City, the concept of ”Solidarity” has been embraced by many young teachers enraged by the testing and assessment protocols imposed by the Bloomberg Dictatorship in the NYC Department of Education as well as the huge propaganda campaign launched by wealthy philanthropists in behalf of charter schools and privatization of public education. In the last six months, a multifaceted resistance movement, jointly led by young teachers and veteran education activists, has resulted in the organization of “Fight Back Fridays,” citywide protests by protests by teachers, students and parents and parents against excessive testing; the production of “The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting For Superman,” a devastating critique of dominant Education Reform ideology, and the organization of an amazing group called “The New Teacher Underground” which brings together teachers in alternative certification programs like Teach for America with long time graduates of teacher education programs to fight for democracy and a fair distribution of resources in the city’s schools and the communities they are located in.

As someone who has been directly or indirectly involved with these initiatives—I have marched on a picket line with young teacher activists at Lehman High School, written an article on charters schools with the help of the creators of “The Inconvenient Truth about Waiting For Superman,” and spoken at a meeting of the “New Teacher Underground”—I have seen, first hand, a level of energy and commitment on the part of young teacher activists in New York that reminds me of my own experience in justice movements in the Sixties and early Seventies

And this is only the beginning.

As the government of the United States has set upon a course of action, affirmed by both major parties, that will intensify the hardship of America’s poor and drive millions of middle class people into the edge of poverty, the young people of this nation, I now am confident, will organize, will resist, and ultimately, over time, will change the course of American history so that sacrifice and hardship is no longer concentrated on our society’s most vulnerable people.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the  Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Exposing Education Reform’s Big Lie: The Atlanta Test Scores Scandal

Exposing Education Reform’s Big Lie: 

The Atlanta Test Scores Scandal

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Once again, a major cheating scandal has been uncovered in an urban school district. What happened in Houston ten years ago (but not before it’s allegedly miraculous test score gains helped spawn No Child Left Behind) has happened in Atlanta. A state investigation has uncovered systematic falsification of test scores by teachers, principals, and district administrators in a district where careers could be made or broken by those results, leading to the resignation of the district superintendant and potential suspensions, and possibly criminal indictments, or scores of teachers and principals.

To regard what took place in Atlanta as an exception to an otherwise unblemished record of probity in administering standardized tests would be like regarding Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme as an aberration in an otherwise healthy financial system. In each instance, unscrupulous individuals took the basic tenets of a flawed system to an extreme. In the case of Madoff, he provided clients with high returns based on non-existent investments, rather than flawed ones ( subprime mortgages packed into Triple A bonds); in the case of Atlanta, officials decided to invent impossible results rather than browbeat and terminate teachers and principals when they didn’t achieve them.

Let us be clear--the Atlanta scandal is the logical outcome of a national movement, supported by government and private capital, to radically improve school performance and hopefully lift people out of poverty, through a centrally imposed and rigidly administered combination of privatization, competition, material incentives and high stakes testing. You would think that a movement which commands such widespread support, and extraordinary resources, has a history of proven examples, either in the US, or other nations, to guide its implementation.

But the truth is that there is not a single time in American history--with the exception of the ten years following the end of slavery--where you can point to educational reform as a factor which lifted a group out of poverty, or allowed an important minority group to improve its status relative to the majority population. The kind of “heavy” lifting required to do that, with that one exception of the Reconstruction Era, during which activists founded schools for a people once denied literacy, has come, not from top down educational reform, but from bottom up political mobilization, coupled with changes in labor markets which radically improve earning opportunities for the group in question.

Let us look at the one moment in the 20th Century where the African American population not only experienced a rapid improvement in its economic status, but improved its status relative to whites, the time between 1940 and 1950. During those ten years, Black per capital income rose from 44% of the white total to 57%. This income growth was not only a result of wartime prosperity, and Black migration from the rural to urban areas, but a result of the protest movement launched by A Phillip Randolph in 1941 to demand equal treatment for Blacks in the emerging war economy, as well as the enrollment of Black workers in industrial unions. 

Randolph’s march on Washington Movement didn’t lead to the desegregation of the armed forces, but it did lead President Roosevelt to issue a proclamation requiring non-discriminatory employment in defense industries and to create a Commission to enforce this decree. While huge pockets of discrimination remained, African Americans, women as well as men, found work in factories throughout the nation producing ships, aircraft, and motorized vehicles and were enrolled in the unions that represented the bulk of workers involved in war production.

In Detroit, in Los Angeles, in Youngstown, in Pittsburgh, in Richmond California, Black workers, many of them newly arrived in the South were earning incomes four to five times what they would have made as sharecroppers or tenant farmers and had union protection in their places of employment. This economic revolution spawned a political revolution, with nearly 500,000 African Americans joining the NAACP, and a cultural one as well, with rhythm and blues becoming the music of choice for the emerging black working class, inspiring clubs and radio stations and small record labels to cater to this rapidly growing black consumer market.

Though educational opportunities for blacks did improve in this period, it was changes in the job market, fought for, and consolidated by grass roots political movements, reinforced by strong labor unions, that were the primary engine of change.

There is a lesson here that activists and educators should consider. If you want to improve economic conditions in Black and working class neighborhoods, than it would make more sense to raise incomes, either by unionizing low wage industries, or demanding that tax revenues be directed into job creation, rather than trying to legislate magical improvements in schools based on results on standardized tests.

Children living in impoverished communities cannot be magically vaulted into the middle class by pounding information into their heads and testing them on it relentlessly . However, their parents, and older brothers and sisters, can be lifted into the middle class through jobs that offer decent incomes and security coupled with opportunity for personal advancement through education.

School Reform is the American Elite’s preferred response to poverty and inequality, a strategy that requires no sacrifice, no redistribution nor any self-organization by America’s disfranchised groups. Every day, it is proving itself a dismal failure

It’s time that a new strategy be launched that focuses on jobs, economic opportunity and the redistribution of wealth, one linking civil rights groups, unions, and people living in working class and poor communities who have watched wealth and opportunity be siphoned out of their communities by the very wealthy- the same people, ironically, who are the biggest supporters of School Reform.

***

→Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Test Driven School Reform and Disengaging Working Class Youth

Filling In Bubbles:

Test Driven School Reform and Disengaging Working Class Youth

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

If I was going to figure out a plan to get working class youth to disengage from school, here would be my major components. First, I would make students sit at their desks all day and force them to constantly memorize materials to prepare for tests. Second, I would take away recess and eliminate gym. Third, I would cut out arts projects and hands on science experiments. Fourth, I would limit the number of school trips. Fifth, I would take away extracurricular activities like bands, and dance teams and talent shows and reduce the number of athletic teams, so that student’s energies could be exclusively concentrated on strictly academic tasks.

But wait a minute, isn’t that exactly what the dominant Education Reform movement in the United States is doing, from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on down. Aren’t policy makers forcing schools to add more and more standardized tests and threatening teachers and principals with mass firings if their scores on those tests don’t go up, with the results that anything that isn’t test driven is eliminated from the school culture?

Yes that’s what’s going on in education, all across the country. Starting with No Child Left Behind and continuing through Race to the Top, we are hell bent on making students from working class and poor families economically competitive with their wealthier peers by increasing their test scores and improving their graduation rates. And the way to do that, we believe, is to make them devote more and more of their time to acquiring basic literacy and then translating those skills into passing standardized tests in every subject.

But in formulating this strategy, which from the outside appears to be sensible and rational, we erase the world view of the very students in whose interests claim to be acting. We treat working class students as passive recipients of a service, who will do whatever we tell them to, rather than critical thinkers, and impassioned, sometimes impulsive historical actors, who respond to school policies based on their culture, values and their sense of how those policies effect their short term and long term interests.

As someone who grew up in a tough working class neighborhood, and has worked in similar neighborhoods as a coach, community organizer and teacher, I can assure you that young people in these communities are anything but passive when it comes to how they respond to externally imposed authority. Although some children in those communities accept authority unquestioningly, many more make it a matter of pride to challenge and test adults outside their families who claim power of them and get respect from their peers for doing so. No teacher, or coach, or social worker assigned to teach “in the hood” gets a free pass from that testing, which sometimes reaches the proportions of hazing; Whatever respect you get has to be earned.

And what goes for teachers or community workers goes for schools. Most people in poor and working class neighborhoods do not see schools as working in their or their children’s interests. Their own experiences with schools have often not been that positive and their attitudes of skepticism and even hostility readily transfer to their children. Overcoming that ingrained skepticism not only requires efforts by individual teachers, it requires efforts by the entire school to make students feel that it is a place where they are respected, where their voice can be heard and their culture validated, and where they can actually have some fun. The best inner city schools I know not only make sure they maintain a welcoming atmosphere, but try to create a festive one, with music and the arts being part of every public meeting, with sports events being highlighted, and where student, parent and community input is incorporated into every dimension of the school culture.

Now enter the “Era of Test Mania,” with administrators and teachers panicked they will lose their jobs if they do not produce continuous results on one high stakes test after another. Forget the school being a place where student and community creativity can be validated. Every bit of time, and energy and emotion must be devoted to test prep. Students have to sit still and listen, and memorize and regurgitate large bodies of information. Time for self expression disappears. Time for physical activity is erased. The school becomes a place filled with stress and fear.

Some students will conform, and may even pass all the tests that they are given, but just as many- a good portion of them boys- will rebel, either by disrupting classes, challenging the teacher, vandalizing the school or not going to school altogether. There is no way that working class kids like I was or a lot of the kids that I coached and taught over the years, are going to sit in school and obediently memorize material if you don’t give them some physical outlets, some chance to move and express themselves, and some opportunity to speak out on issues important to them.

When you are brought up to “take no …. From anyone” and stand up for yourself, you are not about to allow teachers and school administrators to humiliate you, intimidate you, and silence your rebellious spirit. In neighborhoods where respect of peers is the key to survival, where the underground economy beckons, and where many people, in the words of Big Pun “would rather sell reefer than do Pizza delivery,” schools which try to discipline students, rather than engage them, will find they are in for trouble.

The vision of School Reform currently dominant in our country, where teachers and principals browbeat and harass students to pass tests in order to keep themselves from being fired, is going to blow up in our face.

And though teacher protest will be an important component of the resistance, it will be student disengagement and violence which will ultimately put this phase of Reform to rest.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Teach for America: A Failed Vision

Teach for America: A Failed Vision

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: “Sorry. Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way”

It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for American recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in high poverty schools and allowed the TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, which are filled with Urban Studies and African American Studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and several of whom came from the kind of high poverty neighborhoods TFA proposed to send its recruits to teach in.

Not one of them was accepted! Enraged, I did a little research and found that TFA had accepted only four of the nearly 100 Fordham students who applied. I become even more enraged when I found out from the New York Times that TFA had accepted 44 out of a hundred applicants from Yale that year. Something was really wrong here if an organization who wanted to serve low income communities rejected every applicant from Fordham who came from those communities and accepted half of the applicants from an Ivy League school where very few of the students, even students of color, come from working class or poor families.

Since that time, the percentage of Fordham students accepted has marginally increased, but the organization has done little to win my confidence that it is seriously committed to recruiting people willing to make a lifetime commitment to teaching and administering schools in high poverty areas.

Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach for America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make, and encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career. Indeed, the organization does everything in its power to make joining Teach for America seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher paying professions.

Three years ago, the TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” To me, the message of that flyer was “use teaching in high poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only profoundly disrespectful of every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume padding” for ambitious young people.

In saying these things, let me make it clear that my quarrel is not with the many talented young people who join Teach for America, some of whom decide to remain in the communities they work in and some of whom become lifetime educators. It is with the leaders of the organization who enjoy the favor with which TFA is regarded with captains of industry, members of Congress, the media, and the foundation world, and have used this access to move rapidly to positions as heads of local school systems, executives in Charter school companies, and educational analysts in management consulting firms.

The organization’s facile circumvention of the grinding, difficult but profoundly empowering work of teaching and administering schools has created the illusion that there are quick fixes, not only for failing schools, but for deeply entrenched patterns of poverty and inequality. No organization has been more complicit than TFA in the demonization of teachers and teachers unions, and no organization has provided more “shock troops” for Education Reform strategies which emphasize privatization and high stakes testing. Michelle Rhee, a TFA recruit, is the poster child for such policies, but she is hardly alone. Her counterparts can be found in New Orleans ( where they led the movement toward a system dominated by charter school) in New York ( where they play an important role in the Bloomberg Education bureaucracy) and in many other cities.

And that elusive goal of educational equity. How well has it advanced in the years TFA has been operating? Not only has there been little progress, in the last fifteen years, in narrowing the test score gap by race and class, but income inequality has become greater, in those years, than any time in modern American history. TFA has done nothing to promote income redistribution, reduce the size of the prison population, encourage social investment in high poverty neighborhoods, or revitalize arts and science and history in the nation’s schools. Its main accomplishment has been to marginally increase the number of talented people entering the teaching profession, but only a small fraction of those remain in the schools to which they were originally sent.

But the most objectionable aspect of Teach for America–other than its contempt for lifetime educators—is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged, in the rapidly expanding Educational Industrial Complex, which offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well connected. An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham's Urban Studies Program. He is the author of three books and over 100 articles on African-American History, urban history, and the history of sports. His most recent book White Boy: A Memoir, published in the Spring of 2002.

Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Most in Need

Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Most in Need

by Mark Naison | Fordham University

special to NewBlackMan

"The Public Education-Industrial Complex is the latest sector of the Misery Industries. The Public Education-Industrial Complex works hand in hand with the Prison-Industrial Complex to turn the misery of inner city residents into profit-making businesses that owe both their existence and profits to the misery found in these communities."--Henry Louis Taylor

In the last ten years, tens of billions of dollars have been spent to reform America’s schools—some of it coming from the Federal Department of Education, some of it from state legislatures, some of it from private foundations. This money has gone to fund research on Common Core Standards, to close failing schools and open up new ones, to create new protocols for assessing schools and teachers, to create new batteries of tests to evaluate students learning, to bring management consultants into school systems and in some cases into individual school and to fund charter schools and educational maintenance organizations.

In New York City, Education Reform funding has spawned a variety of new public sector careers, ranging from “accountability officers” in the Department of Education, to the heads of charter school companies making multiple six figure salaries, to management consultants on the payroll of the DOE, to scores of new principals whose jobs have created in small schools created when large, allegedly “failing” ones have been broken up. When you add this the tens of millions of dollars spent to create new computer systems for the DOE, and the hundreds of millions of dollars given to publishing companies like Mc Graw Hill to create new tests for almost every subject and every grade, you can see the opportunity for profit making and career building this movement has inspired among aspiring professionals.

But how much of this funding has gone directly to the people this reform movement was supposedly created to help, working class and minority students and their families? How many jobs for students, or their parents, have Education Reform funds created, either in school programs or after school centers. Has this money helped keep families in their apartments, allowed them to secure medical care or access better sports, arts and recreation programs?

The answer to this is a resounding no! In New York City and around the nation, the funds have created a whole new layer of middle class professionals in the schools, most of them white and helped create opportunities for profit to a number of private corporations, but have done nothing to ease the burden of poverty on the nation’s working class and minorities.

As of 2011, the child poverty rate in the United States had reached 25 percent, the highest level since the Depression, and Black Unemployment had reached 16 percent. Given this, how can the supporters of test driven education reform, whether they are in Washington, state houses, city halls, or the offices of major foundations, justify spending tens of billions of dollars to ( allegedly) improve schools without one cent of it going into the pockets of poor people.

While people are losing their homes, their jobs, their medical care, their recreational opportunities, and are experiencing daily fear and stress, new school professionals are flooding their communities with programs that to date have offered no return on their investment to the people they were allegedly designed to benefit.

What we have in America, put forward by those who claim to put “Children First,” is a cynical round of profit taking and career building reminiscent of the Gilded Age. It’s time that people serious about ending poverty in America take a serious look at the Education Reform movement and FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL!

From what I can see, it leads directly into more profits for the haves, and more hardship for the have nots.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Test Driven Educational Reform: A Desperate Response to A Society Rotting at the Core

Test Driven Educational Reform: 

A Desperate Response to A Society Rotting at the Core

by Mark Naison | Fordham University

special to NewBlackMan

The breadth of support for tying teacher evaluations to student test scores is something which cuts across all parts of the political spectrum. It is something which unites  Barack Obama with Newt Gingrich,  Bill Gates with the Koch Brothers, Andrew Cuomo with Scott Walker, and Al Sharpton with Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly.  While those of us who have spent our lives in the classroom regard this as ill-advised and counterproductive, it is important to examine why test driven educational reform is virtually the only policy initiative which commands this kind of bi-partisan support.

To do so, we have to take an honest look at what has happened to America’s working class and poor in the last thirty years, particularly in those portions of the country which were once part of America’s industrial heartland. Looked at from the vantage point of once proud industrial centers like Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo, Newark, Bridgeport, Gary, Youngstown, and Philadelphia,  the United States is a society literally rotting at the core.  Whole stretches of these cities lay abandoned ever since their factories closed, with only piles of bricks and metals left as reminders of industries that once employed millions of people. Often, the only new building in the most decayed sections of these cities are schools and prisons, with the former often serving as recruiting grounds for the latter. 

With more than 2 million people now in prison in the US--as compared to less than 400,000 in 1980-- and with over 10 million people having spent time in prison and  been rendered virtually unemployable, there are  huge stretches of urban America, and more than a few small towns, where the streets are filled with  men, and more than a few women, who have no secure connection to the legal labor market and whose pessimism and despair creates an atmosphere that literally sucks the energy out of everyone around them.  

As someone who has walked these streets, as well as driven through them in most of the above mentioned cities, it is hard not to feel like a whole section of the American population has been abandoned by their government. No one talks about these people, no one does anything for them, no one discusses the conditions they are living as problems central to the future of the society. Needless to say, these conditions have been immeasurably worsened by tax policies and industrial policies, adopted in the last 30 years, which have frozen working class incomes and concentrated wealth in the top layers of the society to an unprecedented degree.

So where does school reform come in?  Some  time during the last ten years, a  broad spectrum of groups in American society, some of them elected officials and community organizers, some of them business leaders, decided that the way to bring America’s most devastates communities into the economic mainstream was by radically transforming schools.  If we somehow turned schools into places of energy and optimism, where young people learned skills necessary to compete in a global economy, then maybe the children of the poor could escape the fate of their parents and we could achieve a more equal society without changing tax policy or redistributing wealth.

It was an extraordinarily seductive vision. It appealed to parents and community leaders living in poor neighborhoods because it  appeared to show, for the first time in decades, that the nation was willing to invest in the future of their children. It appealed to political conservatives because some of the reforms proposed--school vouchers and charter schools--involved the application of market principles to the public sector. And it appealed to the very rich, because it promised a path to greater equality that left the tax system that allowed them to acquire great wealth untouched.

In the beginning, school reform appeared to be a “win win:” for everybody. But after the first few years, when dramatic reforms, including vouchers and founding of charter schools, appeared to show few significant gains in test scores, or changes in the atmosphere of neighborhoods where the experiments took place, the discourse of reform started to center on the “problem of bad teachers.”  With cruel cynicism, reformers began arguing that their brilliant plans were being sabotaged by poorly motivated and recalcitrant teachers, and that elevating children out of poverty through schooling could only be effective if teachers were  forced to work much harder and be fired if they refused to produce.

This conclusion resulted in a determination to use test scores, not just to rate the progress of students, but to motivate teachers and administrators. Across the nation, with the encouragement of educational foundations funded by some of America’s wealthiest people, school systems began tying the salaries and careers of teachers and principals to the test scores of students they worked with, and began systematically attacking teachers unions for standing in the way of these motivational schemes.

When teachers resisted giving up seniority rights to allow such accountability plans to be put in place, they were demonized as the major obstacle, not only to educational reform, but to the achievement of economic and even racial equality.  Public school teachers, and leaders of teachers unions, were lambasted in the media, and by public officials in Washington and State Capitals, as selfish and pampered.  If school systems could replace teachers at will the way business did with employees when they didn’t perform, than school performance would improve over night and the US would become economically competitive and egalitarian with one wave of the magic wand.  The key was to constantly rate student learning by measurable criteria and determine the status of teachers, administrators and entire schools on the basis of such “data.”

By the time Barack Obama was elected, the momentum of this accountability frenzy was well nigh irreversible.

There was only one problem. There was no place in the entire United States where such strategies achieved any of the intended results. There was not one school system in a low income community where test scores were significantly raised by tying teacher salaries and tenure to student test scores, nor was evidence anywhere that such reforms had a measurable effect on income distribution or economic development in depressed communities.   To put the matter bluntly, if you applied the same accountability criteria to educational reformers that were are being used to rate teachers and principals, they would all be fired.

What  test driven school reform turns out to be, when all is said and done, is an initially well intentioned, but now cruelly deceptive effort to reduce poverty and inequality without addressing any of its root causes in taxation, industrial policy and the distribution of funding for housing, health care and community economic development. Because of that, it can never succeed in achieving its professed goals, but along the way, it can suck the life out of schools and demoralize a generation of students and teachers.

In school systems around the country, that is exactly what it is doing.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Prepping Parents for Education Reform

Lofty plans for overhauling the education system are all very well and good. But parents have to be ready to take advantage of change.

Prepping Parents for Education Reform
by Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele

As a member of the burgeoning movement to improve public education, I believe that for education reform to happen, advocates need to focus their efforts on equipping parents with the appropriate mind-set to succeed in the rapidly changing school landscape.

Many parents will need help transitioning to and operating under the new paradigms proposed by school-choice advocates, primarily because -- well, public education has never been viewed as a commodity. Not all parents are aware of their options, and if they are, not all parents have the time to commit themselves to take full advantage of a sudden abundance of choice.

A few months ago, I attended a media-training seminar for school-choice advocates. There, one of the attendees described his laissez-faire ideal for America's schools: The public education system would function as a shopping mall, with parents picking and choosing from an array of public schools. As he saw it, parents wouldn't be forced to send their children to a school based on geographic zoning restrictions. Instead, mothers and fathers would be the consumers; school leaders would be the vendors. The vendors would be motivated to increase their products' efficiency to attract customers, thereby increasing the quality of all goods (think schools) sold -- and so on and so forth as the Business 101 supply-and-demand principles go.

While that proposed model is not bad or ill-intentioned, it is drastically different from the way that parents, particularly mothers, have traditionally gone about securing -- if that is even the appropriate term -- public education for their children.

Read the More @ The Root.com

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Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a multimedia journalist specializing in political thought and introspective narratives. She works in education reform. Follow her on Twitter.

'Waiting for Superman' Won't Fly with Some Audiences

'Waiting for Superman' Won't Fly with Some Audiences
by R. L’Heureux Lewis

Waiting for Superman is a powerful film about educational reform and the potential of our schools from the same team that brought us by director Davis Guggenheim and producer Lesley Chilcott, the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Unfortunately the filmmakers leave the audience hoping for a change that is as likely as a caped crusader appearing in real life.

While the film taps into the concerns that many of us have towards a failing educational system, it fails to provide a full portrait of what is really happening in the nation's schools. If you're interested in heart wrenching stories, see this film. But if you are interested in changing education make sure you bring your x-ray vision so you can see beyond the veil of what the filmmakers are advocating.

The film opens with an interview of Anthony, a young black boy enrolled in a Washington, D.C. school. We learn that Anthony's father died years earlier from a possible drug overdose and his grandmother is now raising him in a poverty stricken neighborhood. With poise he answers math questions and in his eyes you see the glimmer of potential and high educational hopes. Unfortunately Anthony is slotted to attend a failing middle school that feeds into a high school nationally known as a "dropout factory" where 40 percent of students fail to graduate. This is an all too common reality many black, brown and poor students in the United States.

The happy ending to this story is to come by Anthony being rescued by an innovative new D.C. charter boarding school. The catch is that this salvation is only available to a few via a lottery. The lottery exists because when more people enroll in charter school than they can accommodate they must use a lottery system to determine admission. Guggenheim and filmmakers lament this point and stress "we know what works" but we leave success up to chance for our young people.

The story of Anthony and the other families that are followed are touching but do not tell the full reality of schooling, particularly in charter schools. Behind the heart tugging narrative lies an inconvenient truth, that charter schools on average actually perform no better than traditional public schools and often perform worse! In the nearly two-hour film this reality is tucked in a sound bite where the film confesses only 1 in 5 charter schools is excelling. Yes, you read that right, 80 percent of charter schools do no better or fare worse than traditional public schools. It is clear this research finding does not deter the filmmakers, but viewers should not be so quick to skip it. The Stanford's CREDO National Charter School Study has done the most comprehensive work on charter schools and found that they are far from a cure all for educational woes.

Read the Full Essay @ theGrio