Please read latest from Adam Bessie
A Tale of Two Vergaras: Of Stardom and the End of Teacher Tenure.
Twitter Truth (and The Onion Gets It Again)
As I have catalogued on this blog and elsewhere, when it comes to education policy, my home state of South Carolina is A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude.
And while we have garnered a sort of unwanted but fully warranted 15 minutes of fame by being the repeated source of ridicule for The Daily Show, SC has now achieved what I am calling Twitter Truth through the actions of Governor Nikki Haley, as reported at The Huffington Post:
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) wanted to tout her state’s education reform plan Monday — but it all went horribly wrong.
Here’s what Haley tweeted about the plan:
Haley, or whichever member of her staff posted the tweet, was the victim of Twitter’s 140 character limit. An Instagram photo caption longer than 140 characters in length is cut off mid-sentence, followed by a link to the original post. The full caption makes much more sense than the above tweet:
The tweet was deleted a few hours after it was posted.
If we put Tweet 1 (clipped by Twitter Truth) together with Tweet 2, we find that Tweet 1 actually makes an accurate commentary on how SC continues to plow the wrong road in our claimed quest for educating the children of SC, a large percentage of whom are living in poverty and suffering the burdens of their racial and language minority statuses.
For the record, “reading coaches” masks that SC has adopted 3rd-grade retention policy based on high-stakes testing, “technology investments” ignores SC’s high poverty rate and that the state needs to invest in hundreds of areas other than making technology vendors wealthy, and “charter schools” fails to note that SC charter schools, as is the case across the U.S., perform about the same and worse than public schools while contributing to the rise in re-segregation.
And with charter schools in mind, let’s be sure to give The Onion its due, once again; this time for New Charter School Lottery System Gives Each Applicant White Pill, Enrolls Whoever Left Standing:
NEW YORK—Introducing key changes to the lottery system that governs the admissions process, the New York City Charter School Center notified potential students this week that openings will now be filled by randomly distributing white pills to applicants and enrolling those left standing.
In place of the existing electronic lottery system conducted in the spring, education officials explained that applicants would receive identical white pills, among them a small number of innocuous placebos corresponding to the amount of open spots, and then wait approximately 30 minutes to determine the survivors and new charter school enrollees.
“With so many deserving students competing for so few spots in the city’s network of high-performing, tuition-free charter schools, our new lottery system ensures that each student is provided with an equal opportunity,” said Eva Moskowitz, the head of the Success Academy chain of 22 charter schools, while mixing up a tub of 118 sugar pills and 2,376 pentobarbital capsules to be blindly administered in an upcoming lottery. “Between small class sizes, longer school days, individualized instruction, and superior college admission rates, charters provide amazing opportunities for students who don’t enter a convulsive state, fall into a coma, stop breathing, and cease all bodily functions during the admissions process.” (emphasis added)
“Of course it’s heartbreaking for the families of children who aren’t accepted,” Moskowitz continued, “But seeing the look on parents’ faces when their child is still standing in a room littered with rejected applicants is priceless. They know their child is going to get the best possible education.” [1]
Administrators told reporters that the new quick and relatively painless lottery system is a welcome alternative to the notoriously long and emotional computerized drawings of past years, where all applicants received a random number and were subjected to waiting for many hours before learning whether they would attend a charter school or return to an inferior public school.
Officials confirmed that the innovative selection process has already proved a success, though not without its minor setbacks, in areas of the country where it has already been implemented.
“This year we’re making the pills a little stronger because not all the candidates were weeded out right away,” said Tim Bernard of Thrive Academy in Washington, D.C., a public charter that had 200 elementary school students apply for eight open spots last year. “Some kids would seem fine, we’d extend them an official offer of admission, and then a few days later they’d start hallucinating or slurring their speech. Meanwhile parents are scared sick we’re going to rescind their kids’ offers because too many applicants survived.”
“Luckily, we worked out all the kinks for this year,” Bernard added. “The body removal crews are already assembled outside the auditoriums and ready to go.”
Though charter school officials maintained that the new admissions process is designed fairly, critics claimed many affluent parents have already found ways to exploit the system. For example, after a lottery in Los Angeles ended with a high number of living students, officials discovered that parents had been building up their children’s immunity to the pills by giving them small doses of poison each day, or had hired tutors to help them train their bodies to overcome the effects of the pills. (emphasis added) [2]
Despite these flaws, many parents said they have no doubts about trying to get their child into a charter.
“I went through charter school admissions with my oldest son last year, but after he died I wondered whether it was even worth it to try again with my other kids,” Hoboken, NJ mother Jane Schaal told reporters. “But then my younger daughter got into Achievement First and I knew we made the right decision. There was no way she was going to succeed in public school.”
“Next year we’ll try to get my youngest son into a good elementary school,” Schaal added. “He’s not in kindergarten yet, but even if he’s not accepted to a top-notch charter, it’s a relief knowing that his future will be set.”
This should be really funny, but as with many of their other satires, this piece comes disturbingly close to everything that is wrong with charter schools driven by market forces—a commitment done to children and their families, a process that sacrifices children in very real ways.
[1] Why Sending Your Child to a Charter School Hurts Other Children
[2] Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam:
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.”
Living in Dialogue: The Problem Isn’t Just Common Core, but the Entire Reform Agenda
Listening to a Teacher from a “No Excuses” Charter School
Valerie Strauss has raised a key problem with the education reform movement in the U.S.: The central experts in the education system, teachers, are essentially ignored.
I have a long history now of rejecting the charter school movement and the “no excuses” ideology that is driving many charter schools. Because of my position, I have been criticized for not visiting KIPP schools and I have detailed why that falls short against my central point about the racism and classism inherent in “no excuses” ideology.
So I want to offer a connection between my position on charters and “no excuses” with listening to a teacher.
I received an unsolicited email from a teacher who has recently taught in a “no excuses” charter school; this is the teacher’s central point:
Their system does not work. Their philosophy is to teach the kids over extended hours at school. We taught from 8:00-4:00 every day. The teachers have added responsibilities on top of those hours. Then most children went to after school care where they continued teaching and received dinner [1]. Guess what our report card score is? It’s an F.
The children were worn out all the time. The parents expected us to take care of the children no matter what. One day I had a parent not pick up their child and I was expected to stay at school until their parents came for their child. After calling every number I had, no one arrived to pick him up until 7:15 at night.
I have never seen such chaos in all my years of teaching.
Disillusioned, this teacher has moved to a different school, but I find the story and impressions hit on exactly what is wrong with “no excuses” ideologies: the unnecessarily harsh school environments for students and teachers, the remaining disconnect among all the stakeholders, and the inevitable negative consequences of relying on accountability metrics to determine if a school is successful or not.
If you still feel compelled not to listen to me, then at least listen to this teacher.
—
[1] Please consider this in the context of the teacher’s experience: A Few More Points About Charter Schools And Extended Time
Maxine Greene and the “Frozen Sea Inside of Us”
The image of Franz Kafka that captures most clearly Kafkan for me is the one of Kafka himself coming to consciousness in the morning, numbed from the waist down after sitting in one spot writing all night. He, of course, was lost in his text in a way that is something like dreaming—a hybrid of consciousness and unconsciousness.
The text of Kafka that speaks most directly about Kafka for me is his January 1904 letter to Oskar Pollack:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.
And although Kafka is writing here specifically about fiction, I think the core sentiment (“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us”) is the perfect entry point into why Maxine Greene’s works remain more important than ever, her voice the axe against the frozen sea of relentless but misguided education reform.
Greene’s Releasing the Imagination, a collection of essays, is one such book.
Releasing the Imagination: “Breaking with Old Quantitative Models”
Published in 1995, Releasing the Imagination speaks from the middle of the current 30-year cycle of accountability-based education reform driven by standards and high-stakes testing. But the volume also speaks to the resilient nature of the fundamental source for why education reform remains mired in the same failed policy paradigm that is repackaged over and over:
In many ways, school restructure does, indeed, mean breaking with old quantitative models; but countering this break is an anxiety that is driving people into what John Dewey called “the quest for certainty” (1929). Present-day economic uncertainty has much to do with this anxiety as does the current challenge to traditional authorities. In response to school changes, many parents yearn not merely for the predictable but also for the assurances that used to accompany children’s mastery of the basics. (p. 18)
Threads running though Greene’s work are powerfully weaved into this important recognition of the Siren’s song of “certainty” that appears to be captured in quantitative data (think test scores as evidence of student learning and teacher quality): Greene’s existential philosophical lens, her rich progressive commitment, and ability to frame education within larger societal and cultural realities.
Greene continues her examination of breakthroughs by referring to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, and Denise Leverton (again, the style that distinguishes Greene), which she incorporates seamlessly with the framing of Dewey and then Paulo Freire. By example and then explicitly, Greene is making a case for setting aside the veneer of certainty presented by measurement and numbers for the ambiguity and unexpected of art:
In contradicting the established, or the given, art reaches beyond what is established and leads those who are willing to risk transformations to the shaping of social vision.
Of course, this does not happen automatically or even naturally. Dewey, in Art as Experience, talks about how important it is for people to plunge into subject matter in order to steep themselves in it, and this is probably more true of works of art than other subject matters….In our engagements with historical texts, too, with mathematical problems, scientific inquiries, and (not incidentally) the political and social realities we have constructed along with those around us, it is never enough simply to label, categorize, or recognize certain phenomena or events. There has to be a live, aware, reflective transaction if what presents itself to consciousness is to be realized.
Dewey asked for an abandonment of “conformity to norms of conventional admiration” in approaching art; he asked that we try to avoid “confused, even if genuine emotional excitation” (1934, p. 54). The beholder, the percipient, the learner must approach from the vantage point of her or his lived situation, that is, in accord with a distinctive point of view and interest….Imagination may be a new way of decentering ourselves, of breaking out of the confinements of privatism and self-regard into a space where we can come face to face with others and call out, “Here we are.” (pp. 30-31)
From A Nation at Risk and then No Child Left Behind as that morphed into the Common Core movement, education reform has remained focused on the exact measurement (“label, categorize, or recognize”) Greene warns against while that reform has also concurrently erased the arts from the lives and education of children (more often than not, from the lives and education of the most marginalized children).
Along with the allure of quantifying as the pursuit of certainty, of control, bureaucracy is also exposed as a recurring flaw of education reform: “Community cannot be produced simply through rational formulation nor through edict,” Greene recognizes (p. 39), adding:
Community is not a question of which social contracts are the most reasonable for individuals to enter. It is a question of what might contribute to the pursuit of shared goods: what ways of being together, of attaining mutuality, of reaching toward some common world. (p. 39)
The bureaucracy of education reform built on recycling the accountability paradigm also fails because we remain committed as well, not to community and democracy, but competition and market forces (charter schools and dismantling teachers unions and tenure, for examples). Education reform is, in fact, not reform at all; education reform insures that public institutions, such as schools, maintain the status quo of society. As a result, students are being indoctrinated, not educated—as Greene confronts about the trap teachers face:
This brings me back to my argument that we teachers must make an intensified effort to break through the frames of custom and to touch the consciousness of those we teach. It is an argument stemming from a concern about noxious invisible clouds and cover-ups and false consciousness and helplessness. It has to do as well with our need to empower the young to deal with the threat and fear of holocaust, to know and understand enough to make significant choices as they grow. Surely, education today must be conceived as a model of opening the world to critical judgments by the young and their imaginative projections and, in time, to their transformative actions. (p. 56)
Education today, in this time of high-stakes accountability, may at best be preparing students to make choices between buying a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry (which is no real choice at all), but education today, in this time of high-stakes accountability, is not empowering students to choose not to own or drive a car at all, not empowering them to imagine another world, a better world.
Greene recognized that we are tragically paralyzed by the pursuit of certainty and the need to complete our tasks; as a result, we remain trapped like bugs in the amber of capitalism, never freeing ourselves to pursue democracy:
Dewey found that democracy is an ideal in the sense that it is always reaching toward some end that can finally never be achieved. Like community itself, it has to always be in the making. (p. 66)
And so we stand in 2014, in the wake of Greene’s death, and before us is the frozen sea of education reform. Greene’s Releasing the Imagination is one of the axes waiting for us to take it in hand, to break us free.
These essays now about two decades old serve as foundational explorations of all that is wrong with how we fail to re-imagine our schools in our commitments under the misnomer “reform.” In “Teaching for Openings” (Chapter Nine), Greene presents a tour de force for those of us who embrace the label “teacher,” and it is here that I argue for the enduring importance of finally listening to Greene:
Still, caught in the turmoils of interrogation, in what Buber called the pain, I am likely to feel the pull of my old search for certainty. I find myself now and then yearning after the laws and norms and formulations, even though I know how many of them were constructed in the interests of those in power [emphasis added]. Their appeal to me was not only due to the ways in which they provide barriers against relativism. It was also due to my marginality: I wanted so much to be accepted in the great world of wood-panelled libraries, authoritative intellectuals, sophisticated urban cafes….
That means that what Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has called the elite culture must be transformed. This is the culture white male scholars tend to create, one that has “functioned in relation to women, the lower classes, and some white races analogously to the way in which imperialism functioned for colonized people. At worst, it denied the values of all others and imposed itself as an absolute standard….As a set of techniques, literacy has often silenced persons and disempowered them. Our obligation today is to find ways of enabling the young to find their voices, to open their spaces, to reclaim their histories in all their variety and discontinuity. Attention has to be paid to those on the margins [emphasis added]…. (pp. 114, 120)
•
As I wrote to implore us all to beware the roadbuilders, as I drafted that piece while skimming through Alice Walker’s The Color Purple to find the truth I felt compelled to offer, I stood on Greene’s shoulders, as I often do, trying in my very small way to pay attention to those on the margins because with the axe Greene provided me, I was able to begin breaking the frozen sea of my privilege.
In her death, then, we must return not only to Greene’s words, but to the alternative she points to with those words:
Art offers life; it offers hope; it offers the prospect of discovery; it offers light. Resisting, we may make the teaching of the aesthetic experience our pedagogic creed. (p. 133)
Death to Common Core! Long Live Failed Education Policy!
From the beginning of the call for and debate about Common Core, I have taken a clear stand against the promise of standards-based reform; for example, Why Common Standards Won’t Work:
A call for national standards ensures that we continue doing what is most wrong with our bureaucratic schools (establish-prescribe-measure) and that we persist in looking away from the largest cause of low student achievement: childhood poverty.
A call for national standards is a political veneer, a tragic waste of time and energy that would be better spent addressing real needs in the lives of children—safe homes, adequate and plentiful food, essential health care, and neighborhood schools that are not reflections of the neighborhoods where children live through no choice of their own.
Education is in no way short of a knowledge base. And even if it were, tinkering (yet again) at a standard core of knowledge while ignoring the dehumanizing practices in our schools, and the oppressive impact of poverty on the lives of children, is simply more fiddling while the futures of our children smolder over our shoulders and we look the other way.
So with the news of Oklahoma and my home state of South Carolina dropping Common Core, you’d think I would feel vindicated, but the truth is that if you dig beneath the (mostly partisan) policy moves to separate states from the Common Core movement, you find that those states maintain a robust and misguided commitment to all the reasons we should be dropping the Common Core.
For example, we must recognize that SC, specifically but as a typical example, is directly rejecting Common Core as a federal and thus flawed set of standards while continuing to develop and implement policy to design (yet again) new SC standards, new SC high-stakes testing, and new SC accountability—all of which are the essential structures that are ineffective.
The problem for education reform, then, is not specifically Common Core, but that the evidence base shows standards-based reform has not and will not address issues of equity or achievement.
As a parallel example of how most of the current education reform commitments simply do not and cannot address the fundamental problems facing education, consider that New Orleans has now replaced the entire public school system with charter schools; the result?:
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.
The partisan political backlash against Common Core, then, is not reason to celebrate because the essential political commitments to misguided education reform policy (such as accountability built on standards and testing, charter schools, Teach For America, and value-added methods of teacher evaluation) remain robust below the partisan posturing against Common Core as a uniquely flawed set of standards.
Adopting and implementing Common Core and the related high-stakes testing and accountability mechanisms are tremendous wastes of time and money that we cannot afford. Yes, let’s stop Common Core, but as a key step to stopping the entire flawed education reform movement built on ever-new standards and tests.
Insurance and the Common Good
A few weeks ago, a hail storm battered my neighborhood:
Within the hour after the storm, signs appeared around my neighborhood for miles advertising hail damage repair for cars and homes.
And while I have two badly damaged cars, my home suffered only a few dings to the siding and some ripped window screens (none of which will result in my filing insurance claims). But the insurance vultures continue to circle my house, leaving cards and flyers along with coming to my door and soliciting their services.
On more than one occasion, as well, friends have stated directly to me that they regret the storm missed their homes because they need new shingles.
This micro-disaster capitalism occurring in my neighborhood is a stark example of the feeding frenzy around the promise of a large and robust pool of insurance money there for the taking. Yes, many of us actually did sustain property loss in the hail storm, but the swarm of insurance adjusters, paintless dent repair businesses, and roofing contractors is also basking in the glow of work and profit that will come from wink-wink, nudge-nudge property loss.
Something important about this phenomenon is the outright glee of everyone involved after a natural disaster, one that spawns commerce of course. The glee is over the veneer of new stuff, work opportunities, and making money.
I think we should contrast this glee over micro-disaster capitalism with the popular and persistent antagonism in the U.S. about publicly funded institutions and programs. And in that comparison, let’s also consider just what insurance is: The pooling of funds by a collective of people for the occasional benefit of a few (and those few can and do benefit even when the loss is their fault).
Public institutions and public policy are pooling resources for the good of a few that in fact benefits everyone. I have made this case about taking steps to treat each children as our child and the converse of making narrow decisions for “my” child actually hurts that child.
That the public appears eager to participate in the micro-disaster capitalism of the insurance game (and even to break through certain ethical boundaries) but unwilling to embrace the actual individual and social advantages of public funding is a disturbing message about allegiances: As long as the process appears bound to material gain, increased “work,” and “making money,” that veneer of capitalism makes the essential nature of insurance (pooled resources for the benefit of the few) somehow tolerable.
The real grounding of the American character may well be, not democracy, not capitalism even, but disaster capitalism—the generating of market dynamics, by any means necessary and as the ends themselves.
In 2014, the greatest of fortunes, it seems, is to hit the insurance jackpot that appears to bring you the new roof you have been hoping you could attain. (Who cares that 22+% of children in the U.S. live in poverty—especially if they have a new roof?)
Orwellian Educational Change under Obama: Crisis Discourse, Utopian Expectations, and Accountability Failures by Paul Thomas
Education in Black and White: Beware the Roadbuilders
Nettie sees the world in a stark black and white once she faces and confronts the missionary zeal being done to the people who are native to Africa. The letters exchanged between Nettie and Celie, which constitute The Color Purple, are literally the lived stories of oppression and the oppressed right there in black and white for readers:
The first thing I should tell you about is the road. The road finally reached the cassava fields about nine months ago and the Olinka, who love nothing better than a celebration, outdid themselves preparing a feast for the roadbuilders who talked and laughed and cut their eyes at the Olinka women the whole day. In the evening many were invited into the village itself and there was merrymaking far into the night. I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them. The Olinka definitely hold this view. And so they naturally thought the road being built was for them [emphasis added]. And, in fact, the roadbuilders talked much of how quickly the Olinka will now be able to get to the coast. With a tarmac road it is only a three-day journey. By bicycle it will be even less. Of course no one in Olinka owns a bicycle, but one of the roadbuilders has one, and all the Olinka men covet it and talk of someday soon purchasing their own.
Well, the morning after the road was “finished” as far as the Olinka were concerned (after all, it had reached their village), what should we discover but that the roadbuilders were back at work. They have instructions to continue the road for another thirty miles! And to continue it on its present course right through the village of Olinka. By the time we were out of bed, the road was already being dug through Catherine’s newly planted yam field. Of course the Olinka were up in arms. But the roadbuilders were literally up in arms. They had guns, Celie, with orders to shoot!
It was pitiful, Celie. The people felt so betrayed! They stood by helplessly—they really don’t know how to fight, and rarely think of it since the old days of tribal wars—as their crops and then their very homes were destroyed. Yes. The roadbuilders didn’t deviate an inch from the plan the headman was following. Every hut that lay in the proposed roadpath was leveled. And, Celie, our church, our school, my hut, all went down in a matter of hours. Fortunately, we were able to save all of our things, but with a tarmac road running straight through the middle of it, the village itself seems gutted.
Immediately after understanding the roadbuilders’ intentions, the chief set off toward the coast, seeking explanations and reparations. Two weeks later he returned with even more disturbing news. The whole territory, including the Olinkas’ village, now belongs to a rubber manufacturer in England. As he neared the coast, he was stunned to see hundreds and hundreds of villagers much like the Olinka clearing the forests on each side of the road, and planting rubber trees. The ancient, giant mahogany trees, all the trees, the game, everything of the forest was being destroyed, and the land was forced to lie flat, he said, and bare as the palm of his hand.
And there is a scene in the problematic film Gandhi (itself both an unmasking of imperialism and the embodiment of paternalism and privilege) when Gandhi expresses his idealism about the potential for non-violent resistance to overcome oppression:
Brigadier: You don’t think we’re just going to walk out of India!
Gandhi: Yes. In the end, you will walk out. Because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate.
As a work of art (The Color People) and a film recreation (and appropriation) of history (Gandhi), these scenes speak to the current state of education and education reform, especially as those contexts are being viewed through the lens of the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board.
Unlike Gandhi, I am not optimistic that oppressive privilege will simply walk away. Like Nettie, I watch as the roadbuilders court the people they plan to bulldoze.
In New Orleans, the roadbuilders are charter school advocates and Teach For America are the missionaries filled with zeal.
And 60 years after Brown v. Board, New Orleans has replaced its public schools in the wake of firing all of the public school teachers with charter schools—a 21st century separate but equal, as Lyndsey Layton reports:
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.
Privilege remains white and inequity remains black.
I invite you, then, to read.
Andre Perry in The education-reform movement is too white to do any good:
But let’s also stipulate that overwhelmingly white movements pursuing change for black and brown communities are inherently paternalistic. The great educator Benjamin E. Mays famously said, “I would rather go to hell by choice than to stumble into heaven.” Reform is being done to communities of color. That’s why saying you’re a black education reformer effectually elicits charges of “acting white” from black communities….
Diversity removes doubt of racial bias, explicit or implicit. So when black and brown people are largely absent from positions of power, the entire reform movement loses credibility and accrues suspicion. Black education reformers struggle to connect with the very communities we’re members of. The overarching sentiment among attendees at the aforementioned meeting was that black leadership is missing from education reform. Consequently, “reform” has become a dirty word in some communities….
We need less “reform” and more social justice.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (and Ta-Nehisi Coates) in No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are:
For some, reparations to African Americans for enslavement and state-sanctioned apartheid (more benignly known as “Jim Crow”) is a shocking case to make. I am a sociologist whose training has been, in part, with economists like Sandy Darity at Duke University and Darrick Hamilton at The New School. For Darity, Hamilton, and many other serious scholars of race, history, and inequality, the matter of reparations is anything but novel or shocking. Neither is it hyperbolic. There are real programs, with feasibility studies and implementation suggestions, and they move far beyond Coates’ call for a spiritual reckoning of the body politic. If you have never heard of them, that is likely by design [emphasis added]. Few powerful persons or institutions have ever been willing to seriously put a reparations program before the American people.
But I wager that you have heard a lot about how education and opportunity can be, through hard work and moral fortitude, the path to greater equality for African Americans. In many ways, when the formerly enslaved asked first for a national program to redress the forced, free labor that made the United States the nation we know it to be, they were given schooling instead of redress; opportunity instead of compensation. It is an attitude that persists in our policy and our cultural lexicon. When the demand is for justice, we are most likely to respond with an appeal, instead, to fairness. And in no institution is that more clearly evident than education. There’s just one problem: It’s not good enough.
Mia McKenzie in The White Teachers I Wish I Never Had:
Black children need teachers who can reflect the history of our people to them in an honest and empowering way. They also need teachers who see them, who don’t think of them as deficient, as problems to solve, or as thugs-in-training, when they are really just children, innocent and eager and as capable of learning as anyone else. They need teachers who can love them. In a world that tells them they are less, having authority figures, from an early age, who believe in their humanity, in their goodness, in their extraordinariness, is everything.
Ms. Reisman was the first terrible white teacher I had, but after her there were others. Mr. Fleischman, my seventh-grade homeroom and math teacher, was one. He disliked me and he showed it. He punished me for things more popular kids got away with daily. He seemed to like only the Black kids who were hip and cool but not smart, and then only if they were also boys. My awkward girl presence bugged him, particularly because I wasn’t silent or invisible. I was still confident, in spite of not being cool, or a boy, and he seemed to loathe it, his misogynoir showing quite clearly. I battled him, too.
Margaret Kimberley in Police Target Black Children:
Americans should take a long look in the mirror before criticizing other nations for human rights abuses. The law enforcement system in the United States ranks among the worst in the world in the cruel treatment meted out to its citizens. Even children in this country are not safe if they are black and unlucky enough to interact with the police. Of all the various ethnic and national groups in the United States, only black people have to worry that their child may be pushed through a glass window by officers of the law.
A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology demonstrated what black people have always known. Black children are dehumanized to such an extent that they aren’t perceived as children at all. They are assumed to be older, less innocent and inherently guilty of some wrong doing. Study co-author Matthew Jackson said, “With the average age overestimation for black boys exceeding four-and-a-half years, in some cases, black children may be viewed as adults when they are just 13 years old.” Two recent cases involving the New York City police department show the truth of these words and the perils black people face even in childhood.
Beware the roadbuilders. They are not here to serve you, they are on their way to bulldoze right over you.
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See Also
Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era
Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam
Kindness as Antidote to Fatalism of “Grit”
For all the advocates of “grit”—along with the disturbing racism and classism—the world is a horrible place, a fixed horrible place—one requiring children to be treated horribly as practice for that horrible world. (I imagine “grit” advocates see the world in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road when they are planning how to “toughen our children up.”)
And thus, it is that fatalism I find nearly as disturbing as the racism and classism (apparently “grit” advocates fail to notice or acknowledge that the world is not horrible for a select few, mostly white and wealthy).
The antidote to the horrible world, of course, is kindness:
