Guest Lineup: Author and essayist PL Thomas, teacher and journalist Adam Bessie and teacher/journalist Mickey Huff (Project Censored).
[See podcast of interview/discussion at end of text.]
Category Archives: Education
NFL’s Shielded Barbarism Exposes Racism in U.S.
A few days after the 2015 Super Bowl XLIX, during the ESPN Radio Mike & Mike sports talk show, Mike Greenberg returned to the debate over Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, while also mentioning New England Patriots Rob Gronkowski‘s appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Lynch has received considerable criticism for his behavior during required media sessions as well as crotch-grabbing after scoring touch downs.
Greenberg has more or less argued that much of that criticism (except for the crotch grabbing) is misguided, including calling for everyone to leave Lynch alone. Since Arizona Cardinals linebacker Larry Foote (and others) has recently claimed Lynch is a dangerous role model, especially for inner-city youth, Greenberg pointed to Gronkowski’s comments to Kimmel, offered jokingly:
“I got pushed or something, and it was the last game of the year, and I was like, ‘Screw it, I’m throwing some haymakers,'” Gronkowski said Monday night.
Further, Greenberg highlighted that Gronkowski had also said the last book he read was in ninth grade, To Kill a Mockingbird, pointing out that Gronkowski had attended the University of Arizona.
The intersection of judgmental reactions to Lynch with, as Greenberg emphasized, most people viewing Gronkowski (playfully referred to as “Gronk”) as a lovable goof who likes to have a good time, partying and dancing (even after post-season loses), prompted Greenberg to wonder why Lynch and Gronkowski receive such different public responses.
Two important messages are presented in that intersection and Greenberg’s inability to understand it.
First, the closing seconds of Super Bowl XLIX included a “scrum that marred the end” of the game, ESPN reported, noting Gronkowski was not ejected. While viewing the fight with Kimmel, Gronkowski laughed about the incident:
“I don’t think I did. Roger, no, I did not,” the tight end said with a smile when asked by Kimmel whether he threw punches, referring to commissioner Roger Goodell.
Gronkowski said he did not want the league to fine him, jokingly saying he needed money for an upgraded party bus.
“Roger, that wasn’t me,” Gronkowski said as video replay of the fight was aired during the interview.
In a season highlighted by the NFL receiving several black eyes and bloody noses for players involved in off-the-field violence and the league appearing to fumble how to handle those public failures, and against the on-going pressure and fines bombarding Lynch mainly for not talking to the media, both the fight and Gronkowski’s role in and attitude about it expose the cavalier and hypocritical barbarism of the NFL itself.
Every play in the NFL depends on violence—but only the sort of violence endorsed by the shield. Fights after a violent play are forbidden (apparently because the sport has some sort of ethical code?). And violence off the field is now also forbidden since those incidences have been made public.
Especially New England fans, but virtually everyone who weighed in on the fight, directly and indirectly drifted into why Lynch receives more criticism and hatred than Gronkowski—those Seahawks revealed who they really are (hint: thugs).
Setting aside that moralizing by Patriots or Patriots fans may be one of the most hypocritical events in all of sports, how the media and public responded leads to an explanation for Greenberg’s question.
The NFL maintains a tight grip on its shield, hoping to hide behind it, but the inherent hypocrisy of the sport and business is gradually being exposed. As well, the NFL provides ample evidence of the power of racism remaining in the U.S.
The media and public cry, Why doesn’t Lynch know his place?
And then the media and public guffaw with Gronkowski: “The people of Boston could not love him more.”
Those different responses are literally black and white.
Of the two, the far worse role model is Gronkowski—whose nudge-nudge-wink-wink to “Roger” was clearly disrespecting authority (but remains safely in the Joe-Namath playboy template of good ol’ U.S.A. middle-class hypocrisy), whose response to the fight never rose above what we should expect from a nine-year-old, and whose reading comment may be the most troubling of all.
Of the two, Lynch deserves a much different response—as Jay Smooth explains far more eloquently than I could.
Delusion is a powerful thing, and in the U.S., our entertainment is certainly some of the ugliest examples of our delusions.
Those delusions of entertainment, however, reveal some hard truths.
The selective barbarism of the NFL is our barbarism.
But the most barbaric reality about the NFL is the racism shielded as moralizing condemning Lynch but exempt for Gronkowski.
Consuming Education and Unintended (Ignored) Consequences
As I have noted often, the roots of the accountability era—President Reagan’s directive for the Nation at Risk report—are clearly connected to commitments to free market forces as central to education reform.
Over the past thirty years or so, parental choice has been promoted through a variety of market formats (vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools), and then accountability driven by standards and high-stakes tests have increasingly been morphed from academic incentives to financial incentives—starting with school report cards and exit exams for students before expanding to linking teacher retention and pay to student test scores and even now calling for adding teacher education to the value-added mania.
Many have begun to confront the negative impact of focusing high-stakes accountability on test scores, but those concerns tend to be about narrowing the curriculum and expectations by teaching to the test or about the lack of credible research supporting value-added methods of evaluating teachers or teacher education programs.
While those concerns are powerful and accurate, something more insidious is rarely examined: the unintended and ignored consequences of creating in education a culture of competitiveness among teachers about student test scores.
Whether value-added methods are used to determine teacher retention or merit pay, those policies are creating a system of labeling and ranking teachers, and thus, pitting teachers against each other for a finite number of jobs or pool of compensation.
The result of those policies is that each teacher must now not only prioritize her/his students’ test scores, but also seek ways in which her/his students can score higher than students in other teachers’ classes.
If Teacher A, then, finds ways in which to raise her/his students’ scores, she/he is incentivized to implement those practices while not sharing them with the wider community of teachers.
Yes, value-added methods (VAM) further reduce education to teaching to the test, but even more troubling is that VAM codifies a culture of competition that consumes the very community needed so that all students and all teachers excel.
Competition is often barbaric—as we witnessed at the end of the 2015 Superbowl when the Seahawks and Patriots were reduced in the closing seconds to the sort of fighting not accepted in the sport of football.
Schools, teaching, and learning are increasingly like those closing seconds—the circumstances are reduced, the stakes are high, and everyone becomes desperate to grab “his/hers,” without regard to others.
In education, then, the market forces us into the barbarism that formal education has been trying to overcome for decades.
Teacher Education to USDOE: “Let Us Ruin Our Own Discipline!”
Maybe this is appropriate with Groundhog Day approaching—since many of us now associate that with the Bill Murray comedy classic. But I am also prone to seeing all this through the lens of science fiction (SF), possibly a zombie narrative like World War Z.
“This,” for the record, is the accountability plague that began in the early 1980s and continues to spread through every aspect of public education—starting with students and schools, followed by infecting teachers, and now poised to infect teacher education.
As I noted above, on one hand, the accountability game is predictable: some government bureaucracy (state or federal) launches into yet another round of accountability driven by standards and high-stakes testing and then educators respond by showing that they too can play the accountability game.
On the other hand, accountability seems to be a SF plague, spawned in the bowels of government like the root of the zombie apocalypse.
Pick your analogy, but the newest round isn’t really any different than all the rounds before.
The USDOE announces accountability for teacher education, in part using value-added methods drawn from student scores on high-stakes tests.
NEPC offers an evidence-based review, refuting accountability based on student test scores as a way to reform teacher education.
But in the wake of misguided bureaucracy and policy, possibly the most disturbing part of this pattern of doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is that educators themselves invariably line up demanding that we be allowed to do that same thing ourselves (including our own continuous complaints about all the bureaucracy with which we gleefully fall in line).
In this case, Stephen Sawchuck reports for Education Week:
More than a dozen education school deans are banding together, aiming to design a coherent set of teacher-preparation experiences, validate them, and shore up support for them within their own colleges and the field at large.
Deans for Impact, based in Austin, Texas, launches this month with a $1 million grant from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.
The new group’s embrace of data-informed changes to teacher-preparation curricula—even, potentially, based on “value added” information—is likely to generate waves in the insular world of teacher preparation. It’s also a testament to teacher-educators’ search for an alternative to traditional associations and accreditation bodies.
And, the deans say, it’s a chance to move away from talking about which information on teacher preparation to collect to beginning the use of such data.
And Valerie Strauss adds at her The Answer Sheet blog an open letter to the USDOE from teacher educators, including:
We recommend that you develop a process for revising these regulations that substantively includes the educational community in advancing your goal of making teacher preparation programs more accountable for successful preparation of teachers. We suggest you convene classroom teachers and school administrators; academics with expertise in teacher education, teaching, learning and student achievement and assessment; and policymakers to develop accountability measures that more accurately assess program quality and the successful preparation of teachers.
Sigh.
“[Y]our goal of making teacher preparation programs more accountable,” and thus, teacher education once again falls all over itself to prove we can out-accountable the accountability mania that has not worked for thirty-plus years.
Let’s be clear, instead, that accountability (a lack of or the type of) has never been the problem; thus, accountability is not the solution.
Let’s be clear that while teacher quality and teacher preparation obviously matter, they mostly cannot and do not matter when the teaching and learning conditions in schools prevent effective teaching, when children’s live render them incapable of learning.
And finally, let’s be clear that in that context, we have a great deal to do before we can or should worry too much about teacher quality and teacher preparation.
Even when we can truly tease out teacher quality and better teacher education, accountability will not be the appropriate way to do either.
Teacher education is a field, a discipline just as any other field or discipline. The essential problem with teacher education is that it has never been allowed to be a field or discipline; teacher education is mired in bureaucracy.
The open letter noted above is only half right. Yes, teacher education needs autonomy, but that autonomy must not remain tethered to the same hole digging we have been doing for decades.
Teacher education autonomy must be about reimagining teacher education as the complex and dynamic field it is—not a puppet for political and bureaucratic manipulation—whether done to us or done to ourselves.
The Real Education Crisis?
For Education Week‘s Quality Counts 2015, Christina A. Samuels opens a piece on early reading with the following:
Children who are not reading proficiently by 3rd grade are widely seen as being in academic crisis. Educators are increasingly looking for actions they can take in the younger grades—even as early as preschool—to head off failure later in a child’s school career.
Framing 3rd-grade reading proficiency as a crisis is about as enduring (and suspect) as the uncritical belief in the literacy deficit among children raised in poverty.
Later in the article, Samuels notes that many states have implemented grade retention policies based on high-stakes tests in 3rd grade, adding:
Student retention as a part of a strategy to support early literacy has vocal critics as well as supporters. But no one is arguing against the importance of ensuring that children are reaching reading milestones throughout the early grades.
Modeling once again the central flaw of education journalism, Samuels represents grade retention as nothing more than a tug-of-war between “vocal critics” and “supporters”—with word choices that clearly skew the reader toward the more reasonable “supporters.”
Despite the intentions of this piece about the importance of early literacy in children, we must acknowledge that the real crisis in education is both how the media covers education and how politicians design and implement policy.
First, “crisis” is the worst possible description of any educational condition since a state of crisis forces urgency when deliberation and patience are warranted. Think about the differences between emergency rooms and doctors’ offices. (See a discussion of crisis here also.)
Impoverished children have overwhelming life conditions that inhibit their ability to learn at the same rates and in the same ways as their more affluent peers. Children in poverty do not need harsh and intense educational experiences (harsh and intense often characterize their lives, and are thus the conditions muting their learning); they do not need high-stakes tests and punitive consequences.
And that leads to the ultimate education crisis: Confusing grade retention with reading policy.
That is not only a crisis, but inexcusable since there is no debate about grade retention, despite the breezy framing above.
Decades of research show that grade retention is often harmful and other strategies are always more effective (Note: the evidence-based alternative to grade retention is not “social promotion,” the great ugliness tossed out by all who embrace grade retention).
I suppose the great irony here is that it appears many in the media and most political leaders are not capable of reading the research and have a really limited vocabulary themselves.
So let me make this simple: There is no crisis in reading, and grade retention hurts children.
Now let’s address and fully fund rich and evidence-based reading for all children throughout their formal education in our public schools and make genuine commitments to the lives of all children so those policies can work.
For Further Reading
NCTE: Resolution on Mandatory Grade Retention and High-Stakes Testing
Florida Retention Policy a Blight on Literacy, Children across US
Retain to Impede: When Reading Legislation Fails (Again)
First, Do No Harm: That Includes the Media
American Sniper: A Reader
The popularity of the film American Sniper is often punctuated with something like “You know, it’s a true story.”
Occasionally, I hear “based on a true story,” but I have learned that the general public has only a loose understanding of genre (such as memoir or film based on a true story); for example, consider the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces once it was endorsed and then refuted by Oprah Winfrey.
One of the ways in which I teach writing to first year college students is that we focus on adaptation in order to examine issues related to genre awareness as well as factual truth (often the domain of nonfiction) versus Universal Truth (typically associated with fiction and poetry).
Both the popularity and Oscar attention focused on American Sniper are worth highlighting as a whitewashing of the already skewed ultra-patriotism in the U.S. But the film as adaptation of memoir also highlights the tension created when we consider a work as a piece of art in the context of the larger socio-political issues that work addresses or exists within (a U.S. film for a mostly U.S. audience building sympathy for the soldier-as-sniper versus the carnage of war, the collateral damage and loss of life among a foreign people to the targeted audience).
It is possible to admire a film as a fine work of art while also recognizing that the work of art has failed in some real and important ways related to messages, both intended and implied. I have felt that tension when examining the poetry of e.e. cummings against his life, for example.
Here, then, I offer a place to start a critical viewing and consideration of the film American Sniper (to be updated as warranted):
American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, Chris Kyle
Pat Tillman (11/6/76 – 4/22/04): A Decade of Forgetting
The Controversial True Story Behind ‘American Sniper’, Michael Hoinski
American Sniper feeds America’s hero complex, and it isn’t the truth about war, Alex Horton
The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?, Lindy West
The Legend of Chris Kyle, Michael J. Mooney
Is American Sniper historically accurate?, Alex von Tunzelmann
‘American Sniper’ Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize, Matt Taibbi
7 Big Lies ‘American Sniper’ Is Telling America, Zaid Jilani
‘American Sniper’: American Hero or American Psycho?, Sonali Kolhatkar
Death of an American sniper, Laura Miller
“American Sniper” and the culture wars: Why the movie’s not what you think it is, Andrew O’Hehir
“American Propagander”: Six Ways Paul Rieckhoff’s “American Sniper” Column Deeply Bothers This US Veteran, Emily Yates
American Sniper illustrates the west’s morality blind spots, Gary Younge
Killing Ragheads for Jesus, Chris Hedges
I was an American sniper, and Chris Kyle’s war was not my war, Garett Repenhagen
American Sniper perpetuates Hollywood’s typical Arab stereotypes, Michael Green
Liberal Hollywood?: A Reader
With the current Oscar nominations being scrutinized as a mostly white/male celebration, I want to highlight that the recurring bashing of “liberal Hollywood” in the U.S. is being exposed as a false culture war similar to the bashing of “liberal/progressive public schools.”
Since the U.S. is governed and ruled by an essentially conservative elite (if you have power, you are almost always conservative in that you seek ways to keep the status quo that affords you that power), as I have discussed before, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is a brilliant fictional account of how those in power manufacture social battles to maintain control of the public.
Hollywood is not liberal or progressive; it is commercial.
Public schools are not liberal or progressive; they are traditional institutions of enculturation, governed by a white, middle-class ideal that is the type of fiction we often find in Hollywood.
The Oscar nominations reveal, then, that Hollywood is not a liberal demon, but a mirror of the essential inequity that remains in the U.S.—inequity of race, class, and gender.
Please consider:
Oscar Voters: 94% White, 76% Men, and an Average of 63 Years Old
The Oscars celebrates white men. What about the rest of us?
The Whitest Oscars Since 1998: Why the ‘Selma’ Snubs Matter
“Gravity”: The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Woman
True Detective: It’s Still a Man’s (Hostile) World, pt. 2
Both the popularity and Oscar attention focused on American Sniper are worth highlighting as a whitewashing of the already skewed ultra-patriotism in the U.S.; thus, also consider:
Pat Tillman (11/6/76 – 4/22/04): A Decade of Forgetting
The Controversial True Story Behind ‘American Sniper’
American Sniper feeds America’s hero complex, and it isn’t the truth about war, Alex Horton
The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?, Lindy West
Education Journalism Deserves an F: A Reader
On the local evening news, a story ran recently about closing down a popular segment of a relatively new rail trail to work on the crumbling infrastructure of pipes crossing beneath the trail and nearby roads.
As part of the story, the on-air reporter chatted with two women who frequently walk along the trail each morning, but will now be diverted. The reporter ended the segment by asking those two women their opinions of replacing the pipes—both nodding in agreement while endorsing the work.
Watching this, I recognized everything wrong with journalism in the U.S. The story was breezy and relevant, but I had to wonder what authority two random women walking down a rail trail had to be credible voices about the need for infrastructure work in the area.
My disappointment in journalism, notably education journalism, has been documented regularly in my blogging over the past two-plus years. And the recent national debate about police behavior and accountability has now intersected with my own work refuting the national teacher-bashing more and more common during the Obama administration as well as my persistent challenges to education journalism.
The tension is between supporting the institutions of public education, criminal justice, journalism, and unions as well as the individual people who work in those fields or situations, but being deeply concerned that we are mostly failing each of those in systemic ways.
It is possible, then, I think, to strongly criticize education journalism as failing its duty while not necessarily indicting each and every education journalist.
That said, education journalism is quite flawed, mired in a lack of knowledge about the history, practice, and research in education, trapped like a bug in amber in the compulsion to air “both sides” equally of every issue.
Here, then, I offer a reader to that concern:
No Excuses for Advocacy Masquerading as Research
Education Writers Association: Independent Bloggers Need Not Apply, Anthony Cody
O, Free Press, Where Art Thou?
Invoking “Oliver Rule (Expanded)” for Education Reform Debate
U.S. and Education Reform Need a Critical Free Press
My Open Letter to Journalists: A Critical Free Press, pt. 2
See Also
Ed Writers – Try looking beyond propaganda & press releases for success stories
CALL: Chapters for revised volume, De-Testing and De-Grading Schools (Peter Lang USA)
Classroom teachers, researchers, and de-testing/de-grading advocates are encouraged to contact me about a revised volume for Peter Lang USA: De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization.
Synopsis of original volume from 2013:
A century of education and education reform along with the last three decades of high-stakes testing and accountability reveals a disturbing paradox: Education has a steadfast commitment to testing and grading despite decades of research, theory, and philosophy that reveal the corrosive consequences of both testing and grading within an education system designed to support human agency and democratic principles.
This edited volume brings together a collection of essays that confronts the failure of testing and grading and then offers practical and detailed examinations of implementing at the macro and micro levels of education teaching and learning free of the weight of testing and grading. The book explores the historical failure of testing and grading; the theoretical and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; the negative influence of testing and grading on social justice, race, class, and gender; and the role of testing and grading in perpetuating a deficit perspective of children, learning, race, and class.
The chapters fall under two broad sections: Part I: «Degrading Learning, Detesting Education: The Failure of High-Stake Accountability in Education» includes essays on the historical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; Part II: «De-Grading and De-Testing in a Time of High-Stakes Education Reform» presents practical experiments in de-testing and de-grading classrooms for authentic learning experiences.
Original Table of Contents:
Contents: Alfie Kohn: Introduction: The Roots of Grades-and-Tests – Lisa Guisbond/Monty Neill/Bob Schaeffer: NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from This Policy Failure? – Fernando F. Padró: High-Stakes Testing Assessment: The Deus ex Machina of Quality in Education – Anthony Cody: Technocratic Groupthink Inflates the Testing Bubble – Lawrence Baines/Rhonda Goolsby: Mean Scores in a Mean World – Julie A. Gorlewski/David A. Gorlewski: De-grading Literacy: How New York State Tests Knowledge, Culture, and Critical Thinking – Morna McDermott: The Corporate Model of Schooling: How High Stakes Testing Dehumanizes Education – Richard Mora: Standardized Testing and Boredom at an Urban Middle School – Brian R. Beabout and Andre M. Perry: Reconciling Student Outcomes and Community Self-Reliance in Modern School Reform Contexts – David L. Bolton/John M. Elmore: The Role of Assessment in Empowering/Disempowering Students in the Critical Pedagogy Classroom – Alfie Kohn: The Case Against Grades – Joe Bower: Reduced to Numbers: From Concealing to Revealing Learning – John Hoben: Outside the Wounding Machine: Grading and the Motive for Metaphor – Peter DeWitt: No Testing Week: Focusing on Creativity in the Classroom – Hadley J. Ferguson: Journey into Ungrading – Jim Webber/Maja Wilson: Moving Beyond «Parents Just Want to Know the Grade!» – P. L. Thomas: De-grading Writing Instruction in a Time of High-Stakes Testing: The Power of Feedback in Workshop – Brian Rhode: One Week, Many Thoughts – Lisa William-White: Conclusion: Striving toward Authentic Teaching for Social Justice.
Most of the original chapters will be updated and revised, but a few are unable to work on the revised volume project. Thus, we should have room for 2-4 new chapters.
Please send proposals ASAP, and we are requiring full drafts by July 31, 2015, to submit the revised volume by September 15, 2015.
Chapters must be in APA citation/style format and about 6000 words maximum; both practical and research/theoretical cases highlighting de-testing and de-grading classrooms are needed.
Email me with proposals or questions: paul.thomas@furman.edu
Two Bad Options Justify Neither: MLK 2015
Whether on the day of his birth (January 15) or the national holiday date, taking special time to recall and honor Martin Luther King Jr. remains vital in the U.S. since we continue to be trapped in the swamp of racial inequity as well as the fog of denying racism.
However, along with remembering and praising, we must also protect against continuing to reduce King to the stereotype of the passive radical, a characterization that serves the ineffective status quo of the politics of privilege in this so-called land of the free and home of the brave.
“In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out,” King notes in Where Do We Go From Here?, “there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States,” continuing:
Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike….
At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.
In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.
In 2015, we are likely served well to be guided by the radical King who rejected the status quo, particularly the status quo of reform (poverty, education, etc.) bound to dualistic thinking and indirect approaches.
This is profoundly important in the context of how we are perversely dedicated to accountability-based education reform that is heralded as the primary mechanism for eradicating poverty—despite both accountability and education’s ability to erase poverty being demonstrably false promises.
For example, let’s consider the charter school formula:
Since public school X is failing to address the needs of high-poverty and minority students, we must embrace charter school Y.
Step one, which I suggest we rarely do, is to examine the initial premise: Is public school X failing to serve those students or is public school X unable to achieve utopian goals in overwhelming circumstances that are not being addressed?
Step two, if we determine that initial premise is true, is then to examine the validity of the effectiveness of charter school Y.
Since a great deal of the charter school movement is both targeting high-poverty/minority students and embracing “no excuses” ideologies and practices for those students, this second step must include considerations of not only credible claims of “serving better” but also at what costs to the dignity and humanity of the students.
Complicating this process is that high-poverty/minority parents often appear to choose charter schools over their apparently failing assigned public schools.
As I have examined before, here is what I believe we should confront when facing the fabricated choice between a failing public school and a “no excuses” charter schools:
[Michelle] Alexander [in The New Jim Crow] explains about the effectiveness of the war on drugs: “Conservatives could point to black support for highly punitive approaches to dealing with the problems of the urban poor as ‘proof’ that race had nothing to do with their ‘law and order’ agenda” (p. 42).
This last point – that African Americans seem to support both the war on crime and “no excuses” charter schools – presents the most problematic aspect of charges that mass incarceration and education reform are ultimately racist, significant contributions to the New Jim Crow.
For example, [Sarah] Carr [in Hope Against Hope] reports that African American parents not only choose “no excuses” charter schools in New Orleans, but also actively cheer and encourage the authoritarian policies voiced by the schools’ administrators. But Alexander states, “Given the dilemma facing poor black communities, it is inaccurate to say that black people ‘support’ mass incarceration or ‘get-tough’ policies” because “if the only choice that is offered blacks is rampant crime or more prisons, the predictable (and understandable) answer will be ‘more prisons'” (p. 210).
New Orleans serves as a stark example of how this dynamic works in education reform: Given the choice between segregated, underfunded and deteriorating public schools and “no excuses” charters – and not the choice of the school environments and offerings found in many elite private schools – the predictable answer is “no excuses” charters.
The radical King who rejected the status quo of racism as well as the status quo of political thought and practice, I believe, would also reject the false duality of “segregated, underfunded and deteriorating public schools and ‘no excuses’ charters,” would reject the hollow claim that continuing to dig the same school accountability hole is the best way to eradicate poverty.
Two bad options justify neither.
The U.S. has a moral obligation to do public education right—for the good of all—and to end poverty and racism, as King demanded, directly.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 