News Flash: Failed Education Policies Will ALWAYS Fail Our Children
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam
The horror of 9/11 in 2001 and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 captured both the 24/7 media attention and cultural consciousness in the U.S.
In the wake of both, however, the impact of disaster capitalism has remained mostly ignored and unchallenged.
This is the U.S. response to 9/11.
How to monetize and what will the market bear are the guiding ethics of disaster capitalism, which exists seamlessly within the larger ethic of the U.S., capitalism.
Disaster capitalism came to New Orleans in full force in the wake of Katrina, possibly more powerful than a hurricane, in the person of Paul Vallas and his education policy, the Recovery School District.
Career teachers (a significant percentage of the African American middle-class in the city) were fired and public schools were systematically replaced by charter schools and the new pseudo-teacher workforce (mostly young and privileged Teach For America recruits who were transplanted to New Orleans).
Now, less than a decade after Katrina, Lyndsey Layton reports:
With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.
Layton mostly paints this transformation in a positive light, focusing on an idealized view of market forces:
Advocates say the all-charter model empowers parents.
“We’ve reinvented how schools run,” said Neerav Kingsland of New Schools for New Orleans, which promotes and supports charter schools. He is leaving the organization to try to export the model to other cities. “If I am unhappy with service I’m getting in a school, I can pull my kid out and go to another school tomorrow. I don’t have to wait four years for an election cycle so I can vote for one member of a seven-member board that historically has been corrupt.”
By most indicators, school quality and academic progress have improved in Katrina’s aftermath, although it’s difficult to make direct comparisons because the student population changed drastically after the hurricane, with thousands of students not returning.
But this typically rosy but misleading picture of charter schools presents a different kind of evidence than intended, as Mercedes Schneider exposes:
Layton offers no substantial basis for her opinion of “improvement” other than that the schools were “seized” by the state following Katrina.
Certainly school performance scores do not support Layton’s idea of “improvement.” Even with the inflation of the 2013 school performance scores, RSD has no A schools and very few B schools. In fact, almost the entire RSD– which was already approximately 90 percent charters– qualifies as a district of “failing” schools according to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s definition of “failing schools” as C, D, F schools and whose students are eligible for vouchers.
And even in Layton’s own article, we discover the dark truth beneath the polished sheen of charter school advocacy:
White students disproportionately attend the best charter schools, while the worst are almost exclusively populated by African American students. Activists in New Orleans joined with others in Detroit and Newark last month to file a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that the city’s best-performing schools have admissions policies that exclude African American children. Those schools are overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t participate in OneApp, the city’s centralized school enrollment lottery.
Yes, you see, a rising tide does lift all boats, but we forget to point out that a rising tide has no impact on who sits in what boats after that tide rises (just as we never note that a rising tide drowns those without boats, even those without boats through no fault of their own, because market forces are amoral).
Once again, behind the curtain of charter school propaganda we find that there is nothing about “charterness” that will reform the most corrosive aspects of inequity in U.S. schools, corrosive aspects that are a reflection of inequity in society.
The relabeling of schools as “charter,” in fact, is yet another euphemistic tactic to avoid the racism and classism that dare not be mentioned, much less addressed.
As Andre Perry uncovers about “community engagement” in New Orleans:
What does community engagement mean? In particular, how does community engagement work for a “takeover district?” It doesn’t really.
Community engagement is a euphemism for “how to deal with black folk.”
I never use certain metaphors. Immediately after Katrina and the breeches in the levees, I added “hurricane” to a list that includes “slavery,” “rape” and sometimes “war.” I’ve also become very alert to people who use euphemisms to conveniently rob words of their history and meaning.
Standards of decency should rise above poetic license.
Nevertheless, education reformers look to post-Katrina New Orleans as a model to increase the percentage of charter schools, remove attendance zones, take over failing schools, close schools, dissolve teachers unions and decentralize bureaucratically thick school districts.
I’m constantly asked, “In lieu of a hurricane, what can be done to radically reform school districts?” Hurricane has become the unspoken metaphor or referent that reform strategists muse upon to build apparatuses that can initiate the aforementioned strategies. The turnaround/takeover/portfolio district has evolved to become the hurricane of reformers’ desire. As a result, community engagement has become euphemism for “how to deal with black folk in the aftermath.”
As well, Deborah Meier challenges the same euphemistic use of “urban”:
Even the “urban” has switched its meaning. When the 1955 film appeared, it was a word for low-income city kids. It’s now a euphemism for the “African American,” “Latino” poor. The book The Power of Their Ideas starts with me asking kids what it meant to refer to as “inner city” in preparation for a visit to a largely white college. They got it when I added that Dalton (a rich white school 20 blocks further “into” the city) was not considered inner city. It was a euphemism for another euphemism—ghetto.
In other words, “charter school,” “Recovery School District,” “community engagement,” and “parental empowerment” are euphemisms designed to mask the consequences of disaster capitalism.
Charter schools as a rebranding of public schools into a free market model driven by competition and choice teach us some ignored but urgent lessons:
- When parents choose segregation, that choice should not be on the public dime.
- No impoverished children should have to depend on their parents’ choices in order to have equitable opportunities to learn
However, it seems unlikely these lessons will be heeded because in the U.S., the entire public is a distracted Nero as our Rome burns in the form of souvenirs for sell at the 9/11 museum and the eradication of public schools.
It is no longer enough to call the charter school movement a “scam” because the consequences are much higher than that, as Layton also reports:
John White, the state’s superintendent of education, agreed that access to the best schools is not equal in New Orleans, but he said the state is prevented by law from interfering with the Orleans Parish School Board’s operations.
“The claim that there’s an imbalance is right on the money,” White said. “The idea that it’s associated with privilege and high outcomes is right on the money.”
And here, we have idiom that speaks to the truth euphemisms avoid, possibly with the simple change of a preposition, about the money.
In the U.S., Where the Female Nipple Is More Dangerous Than a Gun
Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez are back with the long-awaited Sin City sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. The films are both based on Miller’s graphic novels—with the graphic novels and films sharing distinct visual impacts on readers and viewers.
So it is fitting that the first released poster for the second film is visually provocative:
As an unapologetic comic book and film nerd, I must admit that the first things I noticed about this poster were the gun, immediately, as well as the visual similarities (and differences) with the first film (the red nail polish and lipstick, her green eyes, the glistening diamond). In fact, the poster made me wonder if this film will maintain the striking mostly black-and-white look of the first.
But not the Motion Picture Association of America, as reported at The Guardian:
A poster for the upcoming Sin City sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has been banned by the Motion Picture Association of America for depicting its star, Eva Green, in a state of relative undress.
Green appears in the poster wearing a revealing thin gown – to use the powerfully erotic words of the censor board, the poster was banned “for nudity — curve of under breast and dark nipple/areola circle visible through sheer gown.”
It’s a fittingly controversial image for a film whose first installment became notorious for its ultraviolence.
Other than giving Scout Willis more fodder for her “free the nipple” campaign, this censoring of a film poster captures once again the baffling Puritanical streak in the U.S. that exists beside something between a dull ambivalence toward and a brutal bloodlust for violence—represented in our near fetish for guns.
There is brilliant and nuanced routine by George Carlin I first heard on his albums Class Clown and Occupation: Foole. As part of his classic seven words you can’t say on television (including the censoring of the word “tit,” which Carlin finds outrageous), Carlin muses about replacing the word “kill” with the word “f***” in memorable lines like “OK, Sheriff, we’re going to kill you now, but we’re going to kill you slow,” “Kill the ump,” or “You better watch out, Bob, you’re going to kill that engine”:
And here we are forty-odd years later in the U.S.—where no one ever has been killed by a nipple/areola, but where school and mass shootings are more common than in any other so-called civilized country—censoring film posters while states have moved since the Sandy Hook school shooting to relax, not restrict, gun ownership.
Perhaps there was a time when all other nations looked up to the U.S., wanted to be the U.S., maybe. But increasingly we are a people to be laughed at, not with because we are wont to have both our guns and the female nipple concealed.
If the U.S. were a Carlin comedy album, it’d have to be Nation: Fooles.
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UPDATE 1: Appears Rihanna has failed to understand the right to a concealed weapon (and she has already been banned by Instagram!).
UPDATE 2: As I note here, “Apparently Eva Green’s thinly-veiled nipples are not only more dangerous than the gun she is holding in the new Sin City sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, poster, but also more offensive than Jackman’s nipples (despite the violence and extended sequences of a topless Jackman, the film is rated PG-13 “for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence, some sexuality and language”).”
UPDATE 3: Appears GQ offers a series of shots that sort of prove the point. Can you figure out what is taboo?
UPDATE 4: Bosom Baddies
SC, Choose OK, Not FL: Failing Students with Failed Policy
What do third-grade retention policies based on reading tests, charter schools, tracking, and parental choice have in common?
First, across the U.S., they all have a great deal of public and political support.
Second, the research base on all of these policies (among many other popular policies) has shown repeatedly that they do more to fail students than to achieve any of the lofty goals advocates claim.
My home state of South Carolina is a typical example of how education policy not grounded in the evidence continues to fail students again and again. For example, charter schools advocacy remains robust and deeply misleading:
We know that choice in education changes lives. We must work together to develop a culture in South Carolina that values education — from our families to funding at the State House. All students deserve access to a high-quality education regardless of their ZIP code, and excellent public charter schools are part of the solution in transforming South Carolina’s future.
This sort of incomplete and distorted advocacy is commonplace in SC, regretfully, but charter schools in SC have reinforced several patterns found across the U.S. but contradictory to the advocacy:
- Charter schools contribute significantly to the re-segregation of schools, and thus to the exact inequity that plagues schools in high-poverty states such as SC.
- Students in charter schools have measurable outcomes that are about the same or worse than comparable public schools. I have documented this in SC, but national studies of charter schools have shown that nothing about “charterness” offers advantage to students.
- Charter schools are the newest version of the school choice movement that depends on emotional appeals to sloganism, “Parents deserve more choices,” and anecdote. Ultimately, however, parental choice has been idealized (many parents can and do make poor choices for children), and school choice remains mostly a neutral to negative influence on educational quality. Charter schools as a mechanism for competition are a distraction from the public good and harm all students, even those who claim they are thriving in selected charter schools. [1]
Charter schools and parental choice—like grade retention and tracking—are politically compelling, but neither effective nor appropriate for the essential problems facing public education.
As well, SC is also seeking to follow Florida’s third-grade retention and reading policies—which have been discredited when reviewed. However, a possible pinpoint of light may be at the end of this accountability-based education reform movement tunnel, as John Thompson details:
Oklahoma’s Republican Legislature overrode the veto of Republican Governor Mary Fallin, and overwhelmingly rejected another cornerstone of Jeb Bush’s corporate reform agenda. The overall vote was 124 to 21….
Oklahoma’s victory over the test and punish approach to 3rd grade reading is a win-win team effort of national importance. The override was due to an unexpected, grassroots uprising started by parents, joined by superintendents and teachers, organized on social media, and assisted by anti- corporate reform educators and our opposite, Stand for Children, as well as Tea Party supporters, and social service providers who are increasingly coming to the rescue of the state’s grossly underfunded schools.
The rise of grade-retention policy shares with the rise of charter schools the powerful and flawed combination of popularity and a solid research base discrediting those policies. Deborah Stipek and Michael Lombardo pose some key points about the need to reject grade-retention policy, points that should guide similar movements against charter schools, tracking, and parental choice:
- Before policy is implemented, the problem needs to be clearly defined and then the research base on the appropriate policies for that problem must be identified by experts in the field (and not political leaders or policy advocates). If, for example, reading achievement is an identified problem in a state, what do we know about grade retention as a policy solution?
A majority of peer-reviewed studies over the past 30 years have demonstrated that holding students back yields little or no long-term academic benefits and can actually be harmful to students. When improvements in achievement are linked to retention, they are not usually sustained beyond a few years, and there is some evidence for negative effects on self-esteem and emotional well-being.
Moreover, there is compelling evidence that retention can reduce the probability of high school graduation. According to a 2005 review of decades of studies by Nailing Xia and Elizabeth Glennie: “Research has consistently found that retained students are at a higher risk of leaving school earlier, even after controlling for academic performance and other factors such as race and ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, family background, etc.”
- Once we establish the problem and the evidence base on the reform, what concept should guide adopting new policy? Again, about retention, Stipek and Lombardo explain: “Instead of giving children the same treatment that failed them the first time, alternative strategies provide different kinds of learning opportunities.” In other words, policies that reinforce or replicate the identified problems must be ended, and then something different needs to be implemented.
If reading achievement is a problem, grade retention guarantees to cause more harm than good.
If public school segregation and student achievement are problems, charter schools actually fuel segregation and offer about the same student achievement (and even worse) as public schools.
If equity of opportunity is a public school problem, tracking creates inequity in schools.
In the current public and political environment that rails against failing schools and failing students, the ugly truth is that public and political support for misguided policy is failing students. Again and again.
Education policy must no longer be a popularity contest driven by sloganism and anecdotes.
If we insist on continuing a commitment to choice, we need to choose the sorts of public school policies that will insure that no child and no parent needs to choose the school best for any child.
In SC and across the U.S., we need to choose Oklahoma, not Florida.
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[1] Now that New Orleans has completely replaced the public school system with charter schools, the full picture of the futility of charter schools is being revealed, as Layton explains about the results of the turnover:
White students disproportionately attend the best charter schools, while the worst are almost exclusively populated by African American students. Activists in New Orleans joined with others in Detroit and Newark last month to file a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that the city’s best-performing schools have admissions policies that exclude African American children. Those schools are overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t participate in OneApp, the city’s centralized school enrollment lottery.
John White, the state’s superintendent of education, agreed that access to the best schools is not equal in New Orleans, but he said the state is prevented by law from interfering with the Orleans Parish School Board’s operations.
“The claim that there’s an imbalance is right on the money,” White said. “The idea that it’s associated with privilege and high outcomes is right on the money.”
Maya Angelou, RIP
With the death of Maya Angelou, I offer a few intersections between Angelou and James Baldwin.
At 80, Maya Angelou Reflects on a ‘Glorious’ Life:
Angelou says author James Baldwin, whom she considers a brother, had a covert hand in getting her to write “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Acting on Baldwin’s advice, Angelou’s editor tried a little reverse psychology and told her that writing an autobiography as literature was “almost impossible” and she shouldn’t even attempt it.
“I said, ‘Well, hmmm, maybe I’ll try it.'” Angelou recalls. “The truth is that he had talked to James Baldwin, my brother friend, and Jimmy told him that ‘if you want Maya Angelou to do something, tell her she can’t do it.'”
Angelou and Baldwin in The Price of the Ticket.
Dr. Maya Angelou: “I hear Baldwin as a part of the continuity, begun if you will for me anyway, with Frederick Douglass in 1849 in the slave narrative. I hear his voice. I hear Baldwin when I think of Jupiter Hammon, a slave in the 18th century. I hear Baldwin in the music, the lyric really, of George Moses Horton, writing about 1840, ’50. He wrote ‘Alas, and was I born for this, to wear this slavish chain–‘ I hear Baldwin.”
Recommended: Talking Back to Maya Angelou, Hilton Als
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Overview of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from Salem Press.
If The Onion Gets It … : “when the mist distorts the outline of the cypress trees”
The power of ideology makes me think of those dewy mornings when the mist distorts the outline of the cypress trees and they become shadows of something we know is there but cannot really define. The shortsightedness that afflicts us makes our perception difficult. More serious still is the way we can so easily accept that what we are seeing and hearing is, in fact, what really is and not a distorted version of what is. This tendency to cloud the truth, to become myopic, to deafen our ears, has made many of us accept without critical questioning the cynical fatalism of neoliberal thought, which proclaims that mass unemployment is an inevitable end-of-the-century calamity. Or that the dream is dead and that it is now the era of the pedagogical pragmatism of the technio-scientific training of the individual and not of his or her total education (which, obviously, includes the former). The capacity to tame, inherent in ideology, makes us at times docilely accept that the globalization of the economy is its own invention, a kind of inevitable destiny, an almost metaphysical entity rather than a moment of economic development, subject to a given political orientation dictated by the interests of those who hold power, as is the whole of capitalist economic production. What we hear is that the globalization of the economy is a necessity from which we cannot escape. (p. 113)
Pedagogy of Freedom, Paulo Freire (2000)
Paulo Freire died in the spring of 1997 while preparing to teach in the fall of that year, resulting in the publication of Pedagogy of Freedom. Freire’s passage above, then, grew out of the billowing storm called “accountability”—anticipating, ironically, the inevitable expansion of test-based assaults on students, schools, and teachers (at least students, schools, and teachers in the public/state systems throughout the world).
As philosophical text, Freire’s final testament has likely (and probably now) falls on deaf ears, increasing the irony: We (especially in the U.S., and especially teachers) are too practical for all those big words and all that deep thinking.
However, Freire’s essential confrontation of fatalism seems to be obvious enough for The Onion [1] to recognize.
Consider New STEM Education Initiative Inspires Girls To Earn Less Than Men In Scientific Career:
“If America intends to maintain its status as an international research leader, we must do more to encourage young women to enter careers in engineering and technology where they’ll be paid, on average, $4,000 less than their male peers for doing the same work,” said program director Elizabeth Grant, stressing that the strategy would include inspirational K-12 classroom visits by female scientists, televised ad campaigns, and mentorship opportunities targeted at showing young girls that they too could attain a position in which they have fewer opportunities for professional advancement relative to men and are regarded as less competent by their superiors.
And ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens:
“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.
The same sort of uncomfortable dark satire could be written about school discipline impacting African American and Latino boys and the mass incarceration of African American young men [2]—or the relentless bloodlust for war already catalogued in satire by Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and many others.
It seems to me, then, if The Onion can recognize and confront the fatalism existing in and fostered by capitalism and consumerism in the U.S., then the rest of us should be able to do the same—and then to take action against the paralysis of that fatalism.
Or we could just follow The Onion and Funny or Die on Twitter.
[1] My points here are couched within an important caveat: Please do not ignore that satire in the U.S. is corporate satire. While popular outlets such as The Onion and Funny or Die as well as popular satirists such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are apt to confront well ideas ignored among the so-called serious media, these outlets and entertainers are, nonetheless, part of the corporate (neoliberal, Freire would say) problem also. See my Legend of the Fall series as one example of that concern.
[2] The Onion has already shown they get Teach For America: Teach For America Chews Up, Spits Out Another Ethnic-Studies Major and My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids (with the brilliant by-line “By Megan Richmond, Volunteer Teacher”).
What’s Really Wrong with Advanced Placement Courses and College Board?
“Fraudulent schemes come in all shapes and sizes,” asserts John Tierney, adding, ” To work, they typically wear a patina of respectability. That’s the case with Advanced Placement [A.P.] courses, one of the great frauds currently perpetrated on American high-school students.”
Tierney calling the A.P. program from the College Board a scam may seem at first to be at best hyperbole and at worst, baseless screed.
But I find Tierney’s arguments are important as one more door opening into what is wrong with the College Board broadly, as well as what is wrong with A.P. more specifically.
Let me offer some context for my assertions to follow.
First, I am no fan of the College Board’s SAT, having addressed the class-, race-, and gender-based flaws with the SAT for at least two decades now—along with confronting the more recent flaws with the 2005 addition of writing on the SAT, the David Coleman planned reboot, and the proposed relationship with the Khan Academy.
However, from 1984 until 2002, while teaching high school English in a rural South Carolina public school, I always taught either advanced feeder courses, A.P. Literature courses, or both.
My experience with A.P. in a small impoverished high school that often ranked first in the state for highest percentage of students enrolled in A.P. courses was not typical because our district policy was to push as many students up into the advanced track as possible (occasionally with those students and their parents kicking and screaming). As well, my A.P. students hovered around scoring 3 or above at about only a 50% rate—whereas at nearby high schools, A.P. was a strictly gated program and those teachers were expected to have 3 or above rates at 100% [1].
The commitment of my district also included that my classes were very small and I had nearly complete autonomy for the content of the courses and how I taught the courses.
As a result of the unusual context of my A.P. experience as a public school teacher, my background is mostly positive in terms of how well we prepared students for college within our unique implementation of the A.P. program (notably disregarding—or at least greatly expanding—the College Board’s guidelines for gatekeeping that existed in those years).
Like the SAT, the College Board’s A.P. program experienced changes in who took the exams throughout the 1980s and 1990s, during my public teaching career. Since the early 2000s, A.P. programs have increasingly lost value at the university level (as Tierney points out and Schneider details, and as I have witnessed, colleges are often likely to give less or different credit than parents and students expect, and for much higher scores).
The A.P. program has also received criticism (again like the SAT) for inherent inequity problems, mostly about the lack of diversity in who has access to the courses or the score gaps among race and class groups.
But, this still leaves us with an important question regarding Tierney’s provocative claim: Are A.P. courses a scam?
My short answer is that we must come to terms with this: The A.P. program (as well as the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams, Common Core, and all test-based practices and policies in education) is a deeply flawed distraction, as Jack Schneider concludes:
Without a doubt, programs like AP have their place. And in many schools AP remains a valuable addition to the curriculum. But when we pretend that all our schools need is the right reform, we erode our collective will to do the harder work required of us. We distract ourselves from our greater purposes. (see HERE and HERE for additional criticism of A.P. by Schneider)
While not unique to the program, A.P. ultimately fails the broader promise of universal public education in the following ways:
- The A.P. program is grounded in gatekeeping (historically hard gatekeeping metrics as well as lingering soft gatekeeping dynamics) and tracking [2], both of which are counter to goals of equity in public schooling. As a result, A.P. scores share with SAT (and ACT) scores the power to perpetuate privilege and establish inequitable schools-within-schools.
- The A.P. program is one example of the popular and political fetish for “top students”—a fabricated crisis that speaks to and perpetuates privilege [3].
- A.P. tests further reinforce the reduction of learning and merit to single test scores generated from one testing session. As well, the importance of the A.P. score as a potential ticket to earning college credit (and the claim that this process can save students and their parents money) can and often reduces A.P. courses to teaching-to-the-tests.
- Through the aura of being an “elite” program and by their selective nature, A.P. courses erode efforts to create educational settings that are equitable for all students. [The A.P. program was built on the allure of being elite, and regardless of the College Board’s claims for seeking equity and diversity, the A.P. program benefits from elitism and selectivity.]
- The concept of “earning college credit while in high school” distorts and marginalizes the value of both student intellectual development and instructional time spent in courses. While I disagree in some respects with Tierney’s claim that A.P. course are rarely comparable to college-level courses (some A.P. Literature and A.P. Language courses are far more demanding than freshman composition courses), I would pose that it is essentially impossible to capture a college experience in a high school classroom—and there is no reason to seek that goal as well.
- Thus, A.P. courses draw too much focus on attaining certain content and away form valuing the entire learning experience that is greater than content acquisition.
- A.P. courses and programs are a secondary and additional financial drain on families (often indirectly) and public funding, yet another source of expenses (time and funding) for materials, tests, and training that would be better spent elsewhere.
- Another part of the allure of the A.P. program is similar to the promise embedded in the Common Core—establishing a standard curriculum across the U.S. However, if the A.P. program shows us anything, it is that the goal of standardization is both misguided and impossible to attain. In this respect, the A.P. program may not be quite a scam, but it is a mirage.
- And as Schneider emphasizes, A.P. courses suggest that all we need to do it get what is taught, how it is taught, and how it is tested right and then all will be well. Among almost all the current calls for in-school-only education reform, A.P. courses are distractions from needed social reform and in-school reform seeking equity.
My final point about the College Board’s A.P. program is the same as my argument about school choice: We need to create the sort of equitable public school curriculum for all students that would make A.P. courses unnecessary.
The best parts of my and my students’ experiences when I taught A.P.—small class sizes, teacher autonomy, rich content (mostly immune from censorship), administrative support—can and should be what all teachers and students experience as the norm of schooling—not the rare air of selective programs that cost parents and schools additional funds and time to create.
[1] At surrounding high schools (and common across the U.S.) in the 1980s and 1990s, students were often blocked from taking A.P. courses unless they had scored well on the PSAT or met other quantitative requirements set by schools. At one nearby high school, for example, that had a student body 3 to 4 times larger than where I taught, the A.P. Literature class was about the same number of students as the one I taught.
[2] See Moving Beyond Tracking, Mathis (2013)
[3] Satire Warning: See a post from 2011 below about the “top student” crisis:
Top Student Crisis!: A Call for Trickle-Down Education Reform
The elite minds at The Thomas B. Fordham Institute have unmasked a serious but neglected crisis in education:
[M]any high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and ‘leaving no child behind’ coming at the expense of our ‘talented tenth’—and America’s future international competitiveness?
This study has prompted Room for Debate at The New York Times to ask: “Are Top Students Getting Short Shrift?”
The answer? According to Rick Hess, “We are shortchanging America’s brightest students, and we’re doing it reflexively and furtively.”
The top students in U.S. schools are in crisis, and the economic competitiveness of our country hangs in the balance. With this now exposed, I am calling for a move to trickle-down education reform, modeled on the trickle-down economic theories driving our commitment to avoid overtaxing the wealthy in the U.S. since they are our job creators and the backbone of our thriving economy.
Trickle-Down Education Reform
Trickle-down education reform requires our current education reform movement—spearheaded by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, philanthropist Bill Gates, and student-first advocate Michelle Rhee—to shift its focus on the bottom 10% of student performance and apply their same reform to the top 10%. This transformation must include the following:
- Initiate funding of Teach for America (TfA) to send their core of teachers to teach in high-needs schools serving the top 10% achieving students. This core must replace the current experienced and certified teachers now teaching the top students.
- Initiate funding to support Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools to serve schools consisting only of the the top 10% of students. These top students must be held to “no excuses” and taught to form lines, make eye contact, shake hands, say “yes, sir” and “no, sir,” and chant daily words of inspiration that will serve them well in corporate America.
- Place the top students in classes with 40-to-1 student/teacher ratios.
- Eliminate all band, music, art, and PE courses at the schools serving the top students and insure that these students focus exclusively on math, ELA, and science in order to perform well on state and national tests.
- Increase dramatically the number of tests top students take and provide these top students the intense test-prep they deserve.
Once these reforms have been implemented, of course, we must hold the TfA teachers and KIPP schools accountable for not only the test scores of these top students but also the trickle-down effect of these policies on the remaining 90% of students who are currently being served to the detriment of our top students.
As Michael J. Petrilli implores us:
But if we want to do right by our highest-achieving students — and maintain America’s international competitiveness — we should rethink the move to eradicate tracking. Future generations will thank us.
UPDATED: Memorial Day 2015: A Reader
If we could find a space to honor peace, to honor peace by taking action so that peace was the norm of humanity…
Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, Howard Zinn
Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren….
Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.
We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.
Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.
The First Decoration Day, David W. Blight
Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
21st century “Children’s Crusade”: A curriculum of peace driven by critical literacy, P. L. Thomas
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
“All the King’s Horses,” Kurt Vonnegut
Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, Howard Zinn
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border, William Stafford
“next to of course god america i, e. e. cummings
Misreading the Never-Ending Drop-Out “Crisis”
Prompted by Peter Greene’s Why Students Drop Out, further evidence that evidence doesn’t matter for the Obama administration of Secretary Duncan, I post below an entry for the Daily Kos from 4 February 2012.
The political and public concern about high school graduation rates must be placed in two contexts: the historical reality of drop-out rates in the U.S. and the misleading use of “crisis” discourse surrounding drop-out rates.
I also strongly recommend Ralph Ellison’s speech from 1963, What These Children Are Like, which confronts the high drop-out rate among African American students:
I assume you all know that I really have no business attending this sort of conference. I have no technical terminology and no knowledge of an academic discipline. This isn’t boasting, nor is it an apology; it is just a means of reminding myself of what my reality has been and of what I am. At this point it might be useful for us to ask ourselves a few questions: what is this act, what is this scene in which the action is taking place, what is this agency and what is its purpose? The act is to discuss “these children,” the difficult thirty percent. We know this very well; it has been hammered out again and again. But the matter of scene seems to get us into trouble.
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Daring to Look Behind the Curtain: The Drop-Out Crisis Redux
“‘Only four out of ten U.S. children finish high school, only one out of five who finish high school goes to college’”—does this sound familiar? Possibly at least echoed in the 2012 State of the Union Address by President Obama, who made this charge regarding U.S. public education?:
We also know that when students don’t walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. When students are not allowed to drop out, they do better. So tonight, I am proposing that every state — every state — requires that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.
The opening quote is from a 1947 Time magazine article focusing on John Ward Studebaker, a former school superintendent who served as U.S. Commissioner of Education in the mid-1940s. The drop-out crisis has been one of many refrains in U.S. politics and education for nearly a century.
Fifty years later, in 1997, The America’s Promise Alliance formed, chaired by General Colin Powell, with the express purpose of confronting the drop-out crisis.
Yet, despite decades of some essential facts—many students persisting in dropping out of school, drop-out rates disproportionately occurring in at-risk sub-groups (high poverty, racial minorities, English language learners), federal and state policies and codes mandating school attendance—we find ourselves in 2012 with President Obama declaring yet another mandate, which was met with applause.
Daring to Look Behind the Curtain
Power, authority, privilege, and winning are certain narcotics—numbing the mind and soul, limiting vision, and removing the possibility of pulling aside the curtain of assumptions to see the reality behind the pageantry.
I have always had an affinity for The Wizard of Oz, similar to my life-long affection for children’s books like Hop on Pop and Go, Dog, Go! of my childhood. The Wizard of Oz, now, offers an important reading about the nature of critical pedagogy as it confronts the enormity of authority.
A critical reading of the classic film of Dorothy and Toto focuses on the dangers of norms—that those caught up in the given are trapped like bugs in amber, never even considering there is a curtain, much less the possibility of looking behind it—and the need for the brave outsider, that person or those people who both consider the possibility of the curtain and act on pulling it aside.
Americans are tragically bound to our ideals—such as our faith in free markets, rugged individualism, and our contemporary tandem of royalty, wealth and fame—and we fear pulling aside those curtains because we don’t want to confront that those ideals may be wrong.
Thus, our leaders are allowed and even encouraged to do the same thing over and over, while lamenting that things never change (or worse, while never even acknowledging that our so-called “crises” are not unique to our time but persistent realities we in fact maintain by the very cures we prescribe). And such is the case with the drop-out crisis redux (Obama’s 2012 incarnation).
Mandating that students remain in school until 18 or upon graduating is maintaining the status quo while decrying the status quo. Like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the endless accountability spawns of that legislation, creating a national mandate for attending school fails for the same reasons a national curriculum and national testing will fail, for the same reasons that student accountability morphing into school and teacher accountability have and will fail: These are all acts of those who cannot imagine the curtain, and are, in effect, desperately keeping anyone from looking behind the curtain.
So here are just some of the things we should pull aside the curtain to consider:
The prekindergarten expulsion rate was 6.7 per 1,000 prekindergarteners enrolled. Based on current enrollment rates, an estimated 5,117 prekindergarten students across the nation are expelled each year. This rate is 3.2 times higher than the national rate of expulsion for K-12 students, which is 2.1 per 1,000 enrolled.
Four-year-olds were expelled at a rate about 50 percent greater than three-year-olds. Boys were expelled at a rate over 4.5 times that of girls. African-Americans attending state-funded prekindergarten were about twice as likely to be expelled as Latino and Caucasian children, and over five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children.
And Gilliam (2005) details further that gender and race are distinct elements in how pre-kindergarteners experience school:
African-American preschoolers were about twice as likely to be expelled as European-American (both Latino and non-Latino) preschoolers and over five times as likely as Asian-American preschoolers. Boys were expelled at a rate over 4½ times that of girls. The increased likelihood of boys to be expelled over girls was similar across all ethnicities, except for African-Americans (?2 = 25.93, p < .01), where boys accounted for 91.4% of the expulsions.
- The class, race, and gender gaps in our standardized testing regimes—SAT, NAEP, state accountability tests—for example, regarding the 2010 SAT results:
Students from some racial- and ethnic-minority groups, and those from disadvantaged families, continued to turn in lower SAT scores on average than those of their white, Asian, and more-affluent peers, patterns that have held their shape for the past decade.
In reading, for instance, white students’ average score was 528, and Asian students’ was 519, compared with 454 for Latino students and 429 for African-Americans. In math, white students outscored blacks by 108 points and Latinos by 69 or more points. Asians’ average math score was 55 points higher than that of white students….
Students’ scores continued to reflect their family income and parents’ education. Those in the lowest-income brackets, and whose parents had the least education, scored 125 points or more below their peers at the top of the family-income or parental education grid.”
South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society. What does it mean that the leader of the “free world” locks up its Black men at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world?
While white males outnumber African American males 5 to 1 in the U.S., the prison population (which exceeds a ratio of 10 to 1 of men to women) is 6 to 1 African American males to white males.
“You Matter. Your Culture Matters. You Belong Here.”
When Diane Ravitch pulled back the curtain and asked “Does President Obama Know What Race to the Top Is?” some responses to her blog clamored to support the ideals we allow to thrive behind “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”—looking always at the student or the teacher and abdicating supreme authority to tests.
But if we dare to pull aside the curtain we must ask: Why is prekindergarten so much like prison? How do males and specifically African American males find their lives so often trapped in exclusion and punishment?
Yes, if we pull back the curtain of the drop-out crisis, and set aside the notion that compulsion is the answer, we can stop to ask: Why are so many students dropping out?
This question is vital since there is no compelling evidence that dropping out of school has ever been a fruitful path for most people to take.
Linda Christensen offers a rare look behind the curtain, an alternative to Obama’s myopic policy:
The school-to-prison pipeline doesn’t just begin with cops in the hallways and zero tolerance discipline policies. It begins when we fail to create a curriculum and a pedagogy that connects with students, that takes them seriously as intellectuals, that lets students know we care about them, that gives them the chance to channel their pain and defiance in productive ways. Making sure that we opt out of the classroom-to-prison pipeline will look and feel different in every subject and with every group of students[emphasis added]. But the classroom will share certain features: It will take the time to build relationships, and it will say, “You matter. Your culture matters. You belong here.”
Standardizing students is dehumanizing, and likely driving children into our streets. Compulsion doesn’t address that fatal flaw.
Compelling children and young adults to remain in our scripted, test-based classrooms where we can predict how children will be labeled and ranked simply by the accident of their zip codes, the color of their skin, and the language of their homes is inexcusable; it is the act of those who are deaf and blind and numb to the humanity of us all.
Testing, labeling, sorting, and ranking are both the creation and tool of the historical realities of the U.S., a culture committed to the ideals of equity but mired in the realities of racism, classism, and sexism. Testing perpetuates these plagues on our possibilities; testing will never address them.
In hundreds of ways, the Obama administration’s education policies are being orchestrated from behind a curtain where no questions can be asked, not even the wrong ones.
Those with power, authority, and privilege (often built on the pillars of the circumstances of their birth and the fortunes afforded them by test scores) must face the mirror now and ask, “Why are children dropping out?” while making sure they keep their gaze steady into their own eyes where the answers lie.
References
Get adjusted. (1947, December 15). Time.
Gilliam, W. S. (2005, May 4). Prekindergarteners left behind: Expulsion rates in state prekindergarten systems. Yale University Child Study Center.
Margaret Fuller: “I find no intellect comparable to my own”
“Men disappoint me so,” Margaret Fuller shared in a letter (21 February 1841) to Reverend William Henry Channing. Born on May 23, 1810, Fuller was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, notable for what I believe is my favorite comment by Fuller: “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”
On July 19, 1850, Fuller along with Giovanni Ossoli and their child died in a shipwreck off the coast of New York.
The personal tragedy of Fuller is a haunting parallel to how her voice and works are often marginalized still in the traditional canon. See the following resources for examining and exploring Fuller:
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Megan Marshall [NYT review]
Margaret Fuller 2010 Bicentennial web site
Margaret Fuller at American Transcendentalism Web
Margaret Fuller at Literary Jukebox
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller
There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves….
We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty. We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue.
Yet, then and only then will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.
At Home And Abroad; Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe, Margaret Fuller
Life Without and Life Within: Or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems, Margaret Fuller
Fuller’s perceptive mind remains relevant today:
We doubt not the destiny of our country — that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points. (“American Facts” in Life Without and Life Within (1860) edited by Arthur Buckminster Fuller, p. 108)
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 