Just the ones who think being “white” and being a “boy” means the world owes them something.
Cause I’m white, too, and I know it doesn’t make me any better than anyone else.
But not you.
You think your lack of pigmentation is a special sign of your supremacy. As if being pale was synonymous for God’s chosen.
Well let me tell you something, white boy. God didn’t choose you. You did.
What you take for superiority is just a misguided attempt at self-esteem.
I’m a snowflake?YOU’RE the snowflake. Same color. Same consistency. In the first warm breeze, you’ll melt.
I’m talking to YOU, white boy. All of you.
All those melanin-starved faces wearing matching eggshell t-shirts and fat-ass khakis.
All those brave, young men holding Tiki torches and an inflated sense of self worth.
All the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, so fearless they can spray mace on those they disagree with, so bold they can throw punches so long as they know the police won’t hold them accountable, so courageous they can drive a car into unarmed counter-protestors, so brave that they can’t even call themselves what they are: Nazis, the Klan, white supremacists.
You hide behind “Alt Right” as if the rest of us can’t figure out who you really are.
Surprise! We see you!
We see your twisted lips, scrunched eyes and flaring nostrils. Your hood-starved heads and sweat-gelled haircuts. Your hate warped faces spouting reheated leftovers from WWII.
My grandparents fought people like you.
They dressed in army green and hopped the ocean to pound people like you into the ground.
They took your goose-stepping forebears and blasted them into bits. They buried your intellectual precursors under the ashes of their eternal Reich.
And for my grandfathers’ sacrifice, I rarely had to deal with people like you, myself. Not outright.
It’s not that people like you didn’t exist. Your attitudes and beliefs still percolated just beneath the surface of so many frustrated white boys.
The difference was that they were too smart to actually give voice to the darkness in their hearts.
It didn’t stop them from acting on it. They just wouldn’t admit why.
Segregation, red lining, broken windows policing, and a plethora of others. It was all polite, all deniable, all just the colorblind way we do things around here.
But that doesn’t really work anymore, does it?
Times are changing.
The face of America is changing. And it’s increasingly brown.
It’s got curly hair and unexpected features. It’s fed by different foods and nourished by different beliefs and customs. And it’s often called by a name that doesn’t derive from Europe.
People are starting to speak up. They’re starting to call you out.
And you don’t like it.
More than that you’re scared. Terrified.
It’s all going to end. The lie you told yourself about being special.
So you huddle together with others just like you, shivering and crying and blowing snot onto each others shoulders pretending that it’s a rally for white pride. It’s really just the world’s biggest pity party for boys too scared to be men and own up.
You’re brave when you’re in numbers, aren’t you? With numbers or with a gun.
Then you can say whatever you want. You can pretend whatever racial fantasy will protect your fragile little egos.
You’ll whine and boast and imagine you’re winning some kind of war for survival. But we know what you’re really doing.
You’re on your knees. You’re begging for a confrontation.
You’ll do anything to provoke it.
It’s your only hope.
Push them. Prod them. Insult them until they fight.
Bring them down to your level.
Prove your moral superiority by stoking a race war.
Because you can battle human bodies, but you can’t stop ideas.
You can’t triumph over equality, empathy and love.
You can’t stop the tick of time. You can just hope to reset the clock.
Well, I’ve got bad news for you.
There will be no race war.
Not now. Not ever.
Oh, there may be fighting.
You’ll try to make it happen. But it won’t be white vs. black.
It won’t be race vs. race.
It will be your minority of cowards and fools vs. the majority of the rest of us.
Do you really think people like me will fight on your side?
Do you think I’ll stand by you just because the shade of my epidermis matches yours?
Hell No!
I’ll fight with my black brothers and sisters if it comes to it.
I’ll fight on the side of equality, fairness and love.
I’ll do like my grandfathers and smash you into the ground. We all will.
But I’d rather not fight at all.
There need be no violence.
And there won’t be.
Unless you force it.
You see, you can’t make a race war happen.
All you can do is unite the rest of us against you.
Republicans have been arguing for years that the federal government can’t tell the states what they should be teaching. That’s the crux of opposition, and the newly reauthorized federal law governing K-12 schools, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), underlines it.
The power is unequivocally in the hands of governors and state legislatures.
The states control which academic standards their public schools are supposed to subscribe to or not. And since the beginning of 2017, the states are overwhelmingly in Republican control.
There are 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the United States. Republicans dominate 67 of them. In fact, the GOP controls both legislative chambers in 32 states – the most it has in the party’s history! And in 24 of those states, Republicans also run the show in the Governor’s mansion – the trifecta!
In short, despite any limits on Presidential power, the GOP has never been in a better position to get rid of Common Core.
If Republicans truly wanted to repeal it, they could do so tomorrow, and there’s zero Democrats could do about it in almost half of the country.
Yet, Republicans don’t.
They haven’t.
And they don’t seem in any rush to put it on their agenda in the future.
Which brings me to a serious question any critic of Common Core has to answer: WHY!?
Republicans say they hate Common Core.
They have the power to get rid of it.
Why don’t they do it?
THE STATE OF COMMON CORE
Despite any comments to the contrary, any blathering talking head nonsense from media pundits, the facts remain the same.
Sure, some legislatures have changed the name and made nominal revisions (Hello, Pennsylvania!) but they’re still essentially the same standards applied in the same way. The Common Core’s own Website doesn’t distinguish between states that have the standards outright and those where they have been slightly revised or renamed.
Specifically, nine states have announced plans to rewrite or replace the standards, but in the majority of these cases, they have resulted merely in slight revisions. Only Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee appear to have created significantly different standards, according to Education Week.
So what’s the hold up?
MAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE CORE
Full disclosure: I am not a Republican. I am the farthest thing you could find to a Republican. But on this one issue we agree.
No, I don’t think Common Core will make your child gay or indoctrinate kids into a far left worldview or any of a number of bizarre, crackpot criticisms you might hear from mentally ill pundits being exploited by far right media conglomerates. Nor am I opposed simply to undo any signature legislative achievements of our first black President.
Even if people like Glenn Beck and I disagree on the reasons why, we both agree on the course of action – repeal Common Core.
Yet the incumbent batch of GOP lawmakers across the country are letting us both down.
If one has to be beaten by Republicans, at least let them accomplish the things that have bipartisan support. That includes repealing Common Core.
Though the media likes to characterize this as a conservative issue, it’s not just Republicans who want to get rid of the Core. Regardless of politics, most people dislike the standards. They aren’t popular with adults. They aren’t popular with children. And most tellingly, they aren’t popular with classroom teachers.
According to the most recent Education Next poll, less than half of all Americans, 49%, favor the policy. In partisan terms, that’s 37% of Republicans and 57% of Democrats. And that support has been steadily dropping every year – by 20 points for Republicans and seven for Democrats since 2013.
And among teachers, the drop is even more dramatic. Only 40% now favor the Core. That’s a drop of 36 points among those who know the standards best!
POLITICAL PARALLELS
So let’s get rid of them.
For once I’m with Trump.
But the legislatures just won’t do it.
In some ways, this shares parallels with the healthcare debate.
Before going forward, let me just say that I am NOT in favor of repealing Obamacare and going back to the previous system. Nor am I in favor of repealing without a replacement or any of the so-called “skinny” plans put forth by the GOP.
All the legislatures would have to do is reinstate them.
Pennsylvania’s standards were particularly reasonable, flexible yet grade appropriate and comprehensive.
We could go back to them tomorrow.
But we don’t.
Why?
It’s that same question again.
What is holding us back?
STANDARDIZED TESTING
Here’s my theory: it’s the testing.
One of the most frustrating things for Common Core critics is when apologists say they hate standardized testing but love Common Core.
The two are inextricably interlinked. You can’t have Common Core without the testing. That is the whole point of the standards – to tell districts what to focus on because those things will be on the federally mandated high stakes standardized tests.
If states repeal Common Core, what happens to these tests?
Before adopting the Core, each state had a test aligned to its own specific standards. Even where some states had the same tests, their standards were significantly similar to allow this. In any case, most states that have adopted the Core have had to buy new, more difficult tests.
Sure, we could all go back to the tests we used to give, but this would present certain problems.
First, many states were taking tests that were already being aligned with Common Core before they officially adopted it. If they got rid of the standards, they couldn’t go back to the old tests because they’re already Common Core specific.
In theory, they could ask to reinstate older versions of the test that aren’t Common Core aligned. However, in practice for some states, this might necessitate the creation of yet another batch of new tests.
However, in many states like Pennsylvania, this wouldn’t be an issue. Before the Core, they had their own tests based on state specific standards. There’s really no reason why they couldn’t dust off these old tests and put them back into circulation.
The problem is that this would require politicians to justify the millions of dollars (at least $7 billion nationally) they wasted on the new tests, new workbooks, new textbooks, etc.
Lawmakers would have to own their mistakes.
They’d have to say, “My bad!”
And most of them aren’t about to do that.
Of course, there is a third option: they could undo the high stakes testing altogether. They could characterize this not as a misstep but a reform.
According to the ESSA, all states have to give federally mandated standardized tests from grades 3-8 and once in high school.
But what exactly those tests look like is debatable.
The federal government is supposed to give them leeway in this matter. What better way for the Trump administration and Betsy DeVos to demonstrate their commitment to local control than by approving accountability plans that don’t include standardized testing?
I’m sure if lawmakers were really serious about getting rid of Common Core, they could figure out a way to make this work. It would just require a commitment to patching up the massive hole in our school funding system where the standardized testing industry has been sucking away tax dollars that could be better used elsewhere – like in the actual act of teaching students!
THE CYNICAL INTERPRETATION
Which brings me to perhaps the most cynical interpretation of the data.
Republicans may be avoiding the Common Core issue because their opposition up to now was simply disingenuous partisan infighting. They could be craven servants to the testing industry. Or – and this is the worst case scenario – they could have another endgame in mind entirely.
For instance, here’s Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway during an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos “will get on with the business of executing on the president’s vision for education,” Conway said. “He’s made very clear all throughout the campaign and as president he wants to repeal Common Core, he doesn’t think that federal standards are better than local and parental control…And that children should not be restricted in terms of education opportunities just by their ZIP code, just by where they live. We’ve got to look at homeschooling, and charter schools, and school choice and other alternatives for certain students.”
It’s possible that today’s Republicans at both the state and federal level aren’t concerned with repealing Common Core because it’s irrelevant to their ultimate goal – repealing the very notion of public education.
If every school or almost every school was a charter, voucher or homeschool, Common Core would be a moot point.
After all, choice schools don’t have to follow most regulations. That could include using the Core.
On the other hand, charter schools often allegedly do use Common Core, but regulations are so lax with so few measures to hold them accountable for anything in most states that whether they’re actually using the standards and to what extent is anyone’s guess. Unscrupulous charter operators could conceivably forgo the standards regardless of state mandates with little fear of being found out or contradicted.
This may be the ultimate selling point for school choice. Almost anything goes. It could certainly allow schools to circumvent Common Core, just as it allows them to circumvent civil rights protections, fiscal responsibility, democratic local control – really any kind of protections to ensure taxpayer money is being spent responsibly and kids are actually being educated.
In short, it hammers a nail with a bazooka. Yet conservative lawmakers may only be concerned with who’s selling the bazooka and not who gets hit by the shrapnel.
It will become just another revenue stream in a multitudinous school system where education only has meaning in how much it can profitize students and enrich investors.
That may be the true endgame for policymakers.
Common Core is just one of a number of schemes they’re pushing to take advantage of the country’s fastest growing revenue stream: our children.
CONCLUSIONS
THIS is why lawmakers – both Republican and Democrat – won’t get rid of Common Core.
They are bought and sold employees of Wall Street and Corporate America.
Too many people are making a fortune off the backs of our children – charter and voucher school investors, book publishers, software companies, test manufacturers, private prison corporations! They aren’t about to let their profits take a nosedive by allowing their paid agents in the legislature to turn off the gravy train.
These organizations are worried that such measures, if approved, would allow Florida to ignore the needs of minority students.
In fact, lumping minority students’ test scores in with the majority white population would obscure whether they were struggling at all. So would explicitly ignoring any achievement gaps between the majority and minority populations.
The first question is at the heart of a disagreement between many on the political left and right. Democrats generally favor more federal intervention, while Republicans favor more state control.
Which side will end up victorious is hard to say. In situations like this, it’s even hard to say who SHOULD be victorious.
Like the No Child Left Behind legislation before it, the ESSA specifically uses standardized test scores for this purpose.
However, test scores are terrible at determining accountability. They’re economically and culturally biased. Rich kids tend to pass and poor kids tend to fail. At best, they show which students have been the most economically privileged and which have not.
But we don’t need test scores to see that. We can simply look at students’ socio-economic status. We can look at whether they’re living below the poverty line or not. We can look at their nutrition and health. We can look at whether they belong to a group that has historically been selected against in this country or not.
And once we find that out, we shouldn’t punish the school for having the audacity to teach poor and minority children. We should give them extra funding and resources to meet those students’ needs. But the current test-based accountability system doesn’t do that. Instead it cuts off funding to schools that need it most while pushing public schools to be closed and replaced with charter and voucher institutions that have a worse record of success.
In short, accountability is vital in our public schools, but the way we determine who needs help and what we consider help are drastically out of step with student needs.
Likewise, some on the right might try to characterize Florida’s attempted waiver as an act of defiance against test-based accountability.
It’s not. Officials in the Sunshine State aren’t concerned with undoing the testocracy. They’re perfectly fine with high stakes testing – so long as they don’t have to do anything special to help black and brown kids.
It’s a situation where blatant self-interest can easily be hidden under a fake concern for children.
If you’re going to use standardized tests to hold schools accountable for providing a quality education – and that’s a Big IF – it’s unfair to obscure data about minority students and possible achievement gaps. Moreover, it’s reprehensible that you wouldn’t even bother to test them fairly by letting them take these assessments in their native languages.
However, it would be even better to dispense with test-based accountability in the first place. It would be better to see student needs directly and not as a reflection of test scores. That would more easily allow help to reach the students and not the vulture industries circling above our public schools waiting to pick them apart in the name of accountability.
Even when he lies – which is often – he’s no good at it. His real motives are plain as the weave on his head.
Under Obama, they could do almost the same things, but at least Barack would apologize for it. He’d clothe it in the language of civil rights and make it sound all noble. He’d excuse systemic inequality as the deserved results of competition.
Imagine sincerely believing that poor black kids deserve to go to schools that aren’t controlled by school boards but instead by unelected bureaucrats. Imagine thinking the color of your skin should determine whether you have a say in your child’s education. White folks get to elect the people running their schools, but not black folks. And you know what, it’s for their own good, say the reformers!
Imagine thinking that the amount of melanin in your skin should determine whether your schools are transparent or not – whether they’re required to have open records, open meetings, even whether they have to follow the same safety protocols and regulations as traditional public schools!
WHITE SCHOOLS – not for profit, spend the budget all on the students. BLACK SCHOOLS – CA-CHING! CA-CHING!
And when it comes to voucher schools, imagine selling a tax cut to a wealthy family as if it somehow benefited poor folks. Letting the Walton’s pocket a few thousand from their kids exclusive private school tuition doesn’t help Ma and Pa Six Pack. Nor does offering a discount to the kind of parochial schools that brainwash kids into thinking that evolution is evil, climate change is a Chinese conspiracy, and slavery was just God’s will.
Imagine pushing standardized tests as if they were a technological breakthrough. They’ve been around since at least China’s Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). If that’s cutting edge, I think you’ll like my new APP. It’s called The Wheel!
I couldn’t do it with a straight face. But they did!
And it worked! For a little while.
Now their whole pyramid scheme is just too damn clear. Make the kids take unfair, biased tests that will show how few resources poor black kids get and then use that as a justification for giving them fewer resources, closing their schools and privatizing them. No one’s even tried a scam that blatant since Bernie Madoff went to prison!
Racism pays, folks! Prejudice pays! Because the majority doesn’t mind so much when you take advantage of the underprivileged. That’s why they’re underprivileged in the first place!
And when people like me speak out against them, the best they can do are Ad hominem attacks – you’re too white to question policy affecting black people, or your friends are black but (somehow) not black enough. Today I actually read a response to an article I wrote that came down to these insightful criticisms – Nu-uh! And How dare you! Which we can add to their response to criticisms that charter schools increase segregation – I know you are but what am I?
The folks at the Education Post, a propaganda network passing off most of this nonsense as if it were legitimate news and funded by $12 million from the Broads, the Waltons and other usual suspects, they must really be desperate.
They’ve sold their souls to the Devil and may not even get a good return on the investment.
You see, they’re betting that by the time the Trump zeppelin explodes, their policies will be irreversible.
The problem is that he’s been extremely ineffective. He’s pushing their agenda, but isn’t getting much done.
I cannot stand in front of a class of thirty and give them each my undivided attention. Not all at once.
When students ask a question, I need time to answer it.
When students hand in a paper, I need time to grade it.
During the workday, I need time to plan my lessons. I need time to call parents. I need time to read all the individual education plans, fill out all the weekly monitoring forms, finish all the administrative paperwork.
At the end of a long day, I get tired and need rest.
At the end of a long week, I need time to spend with my family.
At the end of a long year, I need time to myself – to get a summer job, to take continuing education courses, to plan for next year, to heal.
I need a middle class income – not because I’m trying to get rich, but because I’m human. I need food and shelter. I have a family for whom I need to provide. If you can’t give me that, I’ll need to move on.
Sorry, but it’s true.
I’ll tell you one thing I don’t need. I don’t need the state, federal or local government telling me how to do my job. When I plan my lessons, I need the freedom to teach children in the way that seems most effective to me – the professional in the room.
I also don’t need some bureaucrat telling me how to assess my students. I don’t need some standardized test to tell me what kids have learned, if they can read or write. I’ve spent an average of 80 minutes a day with these children for five days a week. If I can’t tell, I don’t deserve to be in the classroom.
And I don’t need my principal or superintendent setting my colleagues and me against each other. We’re not competing to see who can do a better job. We should be collaborating to make sure everyone succeeds.
I need my right to collective bargaining. I need the power to gather with my colleagues and co-workers so we can create the best possible work environment for myself and my students. I need due process, tenure, so I can’t be fired at the whim of the school board or administrators without having them prove my inequities.
I need my work to be evaluated fairly. Judge me on what I do – not on what my students do with what I’ve given them.
And when it comes to the racial proficiency gap, don’t look to me to exert some kind of supernatural teacher magic. I am not a white savior who can make school segregation, racism and prejudice disappear. I try to treat every student fairly, but my actions can’t undo a system that’s set up to privilege some and disadvantage others.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re expecting a superhero, I’m bound to disappoint.
And that DOES seem to be what many of you expect us to be.
Seven years ago, Davis Guggenheim characterized the public schools as if we were Waiting for Superman.
Things are so screwed up, he alleged back then, that we need someone with superpowers to swoop in and fix it all.
But there is no superman. There’s just Clark Kent.
That’s me – a bespectacled shlub who shows up everyday in the naive hope that he can make a difference.
According to landmark research by Dan Goldhaber and James Coleman, only about 9 percent of student achievement is attributable to teachers.
That’s right – 9 percent.
If you add in everything in the entire school environment – class size, curriculum, instructional time, availability of specialists and tutors, and resources for learning (books, computers, science labs, etc.), all that only accounts for 20 percent.
There’s another 20 percent they can’t explain. But the largest variable by far is out of school factors. This means parents, home life, health, poverty, nutrition, geographic location, stress, etc. Researchers estimate those count for 60 percent of student success.
I try to teach children how to read though many are hungry and traumatized by their home lives.
I try to teach children how to write though many haven’t slept the night before, haven’t taken their ADD medication and – to be honest – many haven’t even shown up to school yet.
I most certainly try to get them to pass culturally biased, developmentally inappropriate standardized tests without sucking away every bit of creativity from the classroom.
But much of this is beyond my control.
I can’t help that the federal, state and local government are cutting school funding. I can’t help that my impoverished district has few school supplies, the students enter the building without them because their parents are too poor to buy them. But I can – and do – spend out of my own pocket to make sure all of my students have pencil, paper, whatever they need.
I can’t help that officials at every step of the way want me to narrow my teaching to only things that will appear on the yearly standardized test, that they want me to present it as a multiple choice look-a-like item, that they want me to teach by pointing at a Common Core standard as if that held any meaning in a child’s life. But I can make the lesson as creative as possible and offer kids a chance to engage with the material in a way that connects to their real lives, desires and interests.
I can’t help that kids don’t read like they used to and instead experience the bulk of text on the Internet, Facebook or Twitter. I can’t help that most of their real world writing experience is limited to thumbing social media updates, comments on YouTube videos or communicating through a string of colorful emojis. But I can try to offer them meaningful journal topics that make them think and offer them the chance to share their thoughts in a public forum with their peers.
There’s nothing super about any of it.
But it’s the kind of things teachers do everyday without anyone noticing. It’s the kind of thing that rarely gets noted on an evaluation, rarely earns you a Thank You card or even an apple to put on your desk.
However, when the day is done, students often are reluctant to leave. They cluster about in the hall or linger in the classroom asking questions, voicing concerns, just relieved that there’s someone there they can talk to.
And that’s reason enough for me to stay.
The odds are stacked against me. Help isn’t coming from any corner of our society. But sometimes despite all of that, I’m actually able to get things done.
Everyday it seems I help students understand something they never knew before. I’ve become accustomed to that look of wonder, the aha moment. And I helped it happen!
I get to see students grow. I get to nurture that growth. I get to be there for young ones who have nobody else.
It’s a wonderful feeling.
I know I’m making a difference.
So, yes, I’m no superman.
I have no special powers, no superhuman abilities. I can’t fix all of our social problems all by myself.
White America has a history of freaking out at perfectly reasonable suggestions by the black community.
Hey, maybe black people shouldn’t be slaves.
SOUTHERN STATES SECEDE! THE CIVIL WAR BEGINS!
Hey, maybe black lives should matter as much as white ones.
BLUE LIVES MATTER! MAGA! TRUMP!
Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be making money off of children’s educations?
PANIC!
That’s what seems to be happening at think tanks and school privatization lobbying firms across the country after a new report by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) this week.
Some news sources are characterizing the report as “radical” or “controversial.”
“Public schools must be public,” the report states. “They must serve all children equitably and well. To the extent that they are part of our public education system, charter schools must be designed to serve these ends.”
And why shouldn’t they?
More than 3 million students attend charter schools across the country. Approximately 837,000 of them are black. Don’t they deserve the same kinds of democratically controlled schools and fiscal responsibility as their counterparts in traditional public schools?
“No federal, state, or local taxpayer dollars should be used to fund for-profit charter schools, nor should public funding be sent from nonprofit charters to for-profit charter management companies.”
But that’s not all.
The author’s also call out charters infamous enrollment and hiring practices. Specifically, these kinds of privatized schools are known to cherry pick the best and brightest students during admissions, and to kick out those who are difficult to teach or with learning disabilities before standardized testing season. The report called for charters to admit all students who apply and to work harder to keep difficult students – both hallmarks of traditional public schools.
In addition, the report suggests charters no longer try to save money by hiring uncertified teachers. If charters are going to accept public money, they should provide the same kind of qualified educators as their traditional public school counterparts.
However, even if such reforms are made, the report is doubtful that privatized education could ever be as effective and equitable as traditional public schools. In perhaps the most damning statement in the report, the authors wrote:
“While high-quality, accountable, and accessible charters can contribute to educational opportunity, by themselves, even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education.”
The report was written by the 12-member NAACP Task Force on Quality Education after a set of intensive hearings or “listening sessions” across the country in cities such as New Haven, Memphis, Orlando, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans and New York. The final product is the result of the input they received during these meetings.
This is only the latest in a growing movement of skepticism toward privatized education of all sorts – especially in relation to its impact on students of color.
Despite a truly controversial record, over the past decade, the number of students in charter schools has nearly tripled. In terms of pure numbers, black students only make up more than a quarter of charter school enrollment. However, that’s a disproportionately high number since they make up only 15 percent of total public school enrollment. To put it another way, one in eight black students in the United States today attends a charter school.
The NAACP isn’t the only civil rights organization critical of charter schools. Groups such as the Journey for Justice Alliance, a coalition of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations, and the Movement for Black Lives, a conglomeration of the nation’s youngest national civil rights organizations, have also expressed concern over the uses and abuses of students of color in charter schools.
The report identifies severe inequalities between rich vs. poor communities as the cause of so-called failing schools. The report argues that “to solve the quality education problems that are at the root of many of the issues, school finance reform is essential to ensure that resources are allocated according to student needs.”
Corporate reformers are running scared with their hair on fire as someone finally has the guts to point out that the emperor is walking around stark naked!
In what must count as another new low in American discourse, the school voucher industry is striking back against claims that their products lead to greater segregation of students.
Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), had the audacity to voice the truth:
“Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation,” she said a week ago during a speech at the AFT’s yearly convention.
To which school privatization mouthpieces quickly countered with the truth:
“If vouchers are the polite cousins of segregation, then most urban school districts are segregation’s direct descendants. The vast majority of our urban public school districts are segregated because of white flight and neighborhood neglect.”
This was from a statement by Kevin Chavous, founding board member of the American Federation for Children, the school privatization advocacy group that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos used to lead.
So there you have it.
A nation of more than 325 million people, with a more than 241-year history reduced to – I Know You Are But What Am I?
Does that mean that both systems – privatized and public – are equally at fault? Does it mean that both somehow get a pass for reprehensible behavior?
No and no.
First, we must explain why segregation is bad.
Peter Cunningham, former assistant secretary for communications and outreach at the Education Department under Obama, wagged his finger at Weingarten on the privatization propaganda Website, the 74.
He called out Weingarten’s hypocrisy, which takes some cojones for a man who only last year pondered aloud and in public whether segregation was really such a bad thing.
“Maybe the fight’s not worth it. It’s a good thing; we all think integration is good. But it’s been a long fight, we’ve had middling success. At the same time, we have lots and lots of schools filled with kids of one race, one background, that are doing great. It’s a good question.”
Funny, isn’t it?
He calls out Weingarten because of public school segregation but defends charter schools because their segregation is somehow just swell.
Keep in mind. Cunningham is the executive director of the Education Post, a well-funded charter school public relations firm that packages its advertisements, propaganda and apologias as journalism. And he’s not about to poop where he eats.
So, yes, Mr. Cunningham, segregation is worth fighting.
That’s why in Brown v. Board the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “Separate but Equal” – because when races are kept separate, their schools are rarely equal.
This game of excusing one system based on the deficiencies of the other is pure sophistry.
To be fair, Weingarten seems to tacitly admit this about public schools.
She acknowledges the disinvestment in public education, how public schools have been systemically undermined by politicians and lobbyists, many of them advocating for privatized schools, so that they could use this disinvestment as an excuse for their own for-profit education schemes.
“…no amount of facts or evidence will sway voucher proponents from their agenda to starve public schools to the breaking point, then criticize their deficiencies and let the market handle the rest, all in the name of choice,” she said in a statement.
Schools serving poor and minority students aren’t getting the proper resources. So they propose further segregating them.
That’s a terrible idea. It’s like escaping from a leaky cruise ship by jumping into a leaky lifeboat. You’ll sink in both, but the lifeboat will sink quicker.
Yes, our public schools are segregated by race and class and therefore poor and minority students receive inequitable funding and resources. Charters and vouchers cannot possibly remedy that. They will always make it worse. Only a robust and integrated public school system can be truly equitable. A system that deifies choice cannot combat racism if it is freely chosen.
We have let the wolf write our education policy. It should be no shock that his solution isn’t to build more houses of bricks but to process our little piggies into bacon.
Full disclosure: I am no fan of Weingarten.
I recently called for both her and National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen Garcia to voluntarily step down because of undemocratic practices and mismanagement in both teachers unions.
However, I’ll stand up for her when she’s right, and in this instance, she is.
Frankly, it makes her ineffective in speaking out on this matter. I have nothing against charter school teachers. I know, personally, several very good educators who work at charter schools. In this job market, sometimes you have to take what you can get. However, the sad fact of the matter is that by their very structure, charter schools are inferior to public schools. They are less democratic, less transparent, less accountable and more easily subject to fraud and abuse of children. That’s not to say all charters are guilty of this, but just by being a charter school and being subject to the deregulated rules governing them, they are more susceptible to these errors than their traditional public school brethren.
Perhaps the biggest mistake Weingarten made was in glossing over the worst abuses of public schools. If she was going to call out the segregation at voucher schools, she also should have explicitly called it out at public schools.
Here’s a high stakes testing statistic you won’t hear bandied about on the news.
The suicide rate among 10- to 14-year-olds doubled between 2007 and 2014 – the same period in which states have increasingly adopted Common Core standards and new, more rigorous high stakes tests.
To be fair, researchers, educators and psychologists say several factors are responsible for the spike, however, pressure from standardized testing is high on the list.
In fact, it is a hallmark of other nations where children perform better on these tests than our own.
According to the National Youth Policy Institute in Korea, one in four students considers committing suicide. In fact, Korea has the second highest youth suicide rate among contemporary nations.
For several years, the Korean school system has topped the roughly 70 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) educational league, which measures 15-year-old students’ knowledge through the PISA test, an international student assessment exam within OECD member states.
However, the system is roundly criticized for its emphasis on memorization and test prep with little real-life application. In fact, 75 percent of South Korean children attend “cram schools” where they do little else than prepare for standardized assessments.
Likewise, Chinese students suffer similar curriculum and rates of child suicide. Though Shanghai students have some of the highest scores in OECD, abuse runs rampant.
According to the China Daily, teachers at Hubei Xiaogan No 1 High School in central Hubei province actually rigged their students up to IV drips in the classroom so they could continue studying after being physically exhausted.
Brook Larmer of the New York Times reports visiting student dormitories in Maotanchang, a secluded town in Anhui province, where the windows were covered in wire mesh to prevent students from jumping to their deaths.
In the United States, education “reform” hasn’t reached these depths, but we’re getting closer every year.
Efforts to increase test scores have changed U.S. schools to closer resemble those of Asia. Curriculum is being narrowed to only the tested subjects and instruction is being limited to testing scenarios, workbooks, computer simulations, practice and diagnostic tests.
A classroom where students aren’t allowed to pursue their natural curiosities and are instead directed to boring and abstract drills is not a place of joy and discovery. A school that does not allow children to express themselves but forces constant test prep is a lifeless environment devoid of hope.
But that’s not the worst of it.
American students are increasingly being sorted and evaluated by reference to their test score rather than their classroom grade or other academic indicators. Students are no longer 6th, 7th or 8th graders. They’re Below Basics, Basics, Proficents and Advanced. The classes they’re placed in, the style of teaching, even personal rewards and punishments are determined by a single score.
In some states, like Florida, performance on federally mandated tests actually determine if students can advance to the next grade. Some children pass their classes but don’t move on purely because of test scores well within the margin or error.
His mother explains that he had to take a summer remediation course and a retest, but still failed by one point. She couldn’t bear to tell him, but he insisted that he had failed and was utterly crushed.
After a brief period where he was silent, alone in his room, she became apprehensive:
“I … ran down the hall to [his] room, banged on the door and called his name. No response. I threw the door open. There was my perfect, nine- year-old freckled son with a belt around his neck hanging from a post on his bunk bed. His eyes were blank, his lips blue, his face emotionless. I don’t know how I had the strength to hoist him up and get the belt off but I did, then collapsed on the floor and held [him] as close to my heart as possible. There were no words. He didn’t speak and for the life of me I couldn’t either. I was physically unable to form words. I shook as I held him and felt his heart racing.
“I’d saved [him]! No, not really…I saved him physically, but mentally he was gone…The next 18 months were terrible. It took him six months to make eye contact with me. He secluded himself from friends and family. He didn’t laugh for almost a year…”
The boy had to repeat the third grade but is haunted by what had happened as is his mother.
And this is by no means an isolated incident.
According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, the suicide rate for 5- to 14- year-olds jumped by 39.5 percent from 2000 to 2013. The rate for 15- to 24-year-olds, which was already 818% higher than for younger children, also increased during the same time period by 18.9 percent.
That’s more than 5,000 children and rising each year taking their own lives.
Again, high stakes testing isn’t responsible for all of it. But the dramatic increase along with a subsequent increase in high stakes testing is not unrelated.
The Alliance for Childhood, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advises on early education, compiled a report from parents, teachers, school nurses, psychologists, and child psychiatrists noting that the stress of high-stakes testing was literally making children sick.
On testing days, school nurses report that their offices are filled with students complaining of headaches and stomachaches. There have even been reports of uncontrollable sobbing.
In 2013, eight prominent New York principals were so alarmed by this increasing student behavior that they wrote a letter to parents expressing their concerns:
“We know that many children cried during or after testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders. Others simply gave up. One teacher reported that a student kept banging his head on the desk, and wrote, ‘This is too hard,’ and ‘I can’t do this,’ throughout his test booklet.”
School counselors note increasing student anxiety levels, sleep problems, drug use, avoidance behaviors, attendance problems, acting out, etc. that increase around testing time and during test prep lessons. This is a major contributor, they say, to the unprecedented increase in the number of young children being labeled and treated for psychiatric illnesses ranging from learning disabilities and attention disorders to anxiety and depression.
And the psychological trauma isn’t limited to the students, alone. The adults also suffer from it.
In 2015, Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, a West Harlem elementary school principal, took her own life by jumping in front of a subway train to escape a standardized testing scandal. Under intense pressure from the federal and state government to improve academic achievement, she had allegedly instructed her staff to change students’ answers on a new Common Core aligned high stakes test.
But the trauma isn’t always so dramatic. Teachers and principals often suffer in silence. And when it affects the adults in the room, imagine what it does to the children.
This is why there is a growing grass roots movement against these sorts of assessments and other corporate school reforms.
It’s time the media connect the dots and report these sorts of stories in context.
Don’t just shrug when reporting on child suicide rates, if you report it at all. Give the microphone to experts who can point the finger where it belongs.
And the rest of us need to make sure our representatives at the state, local and federal level know where we stand.
High stakes testing is child abuse. We should not emulate other nations’ scores especially when they come at such a cost.
There is no single education policy more harmful than test-based accountability.
The idea goes like this: We need to make sure public schools actually teach children, and the best way to do that is with high stakes standardized testing.
It starts from the assumption that the problems with our school system are all service-based. Individual schools or districts are not providing quality services. Teachers and administrators are either screwing up or don’t care enough to do the job.
However, any lack of intention or ability on the part of schools to actually teach is, in fact, pure conjecture. It is a presumption, an excuse by those responsible for allocating resources (i.e. lawmakers) from doing their jobs.
That is the foundation of the concept. It’s hard to imagine more unstable ground from which to base national education policy.
But it gets worse.
With our eyes closed and this assumption swallowed like a poison pill, we are asked to accept further toxic premises.
Next comes the concept of trustworthiness.
We are being asked to question the trustworthiness of teachers. Instead, we are pushed to trust corporations – corporations that manufacture standardized tests.
I have no idea why anyone would think that big business is inherently moral or ethical. The history of the world demonstrates this lie. Nor do I understand why anyone would start from the proposition that teachers are inherently untrustworthy. Like any other group of human beings, educators include individuals that are more or less honest, but the profession is not motivated by a creed that specifically prescribes lying if it maximizes profit.
Business is.
Test manufacturers are motivated by profit. They will do that which maximizes the corporate bottom line. And student failure does just that.
Most of these companies don’t just manufacturer tests. They also provide the books, workbooks, software and other materials schools use to get students ready to take the tests. They produce the remediation materials for students who fail the tests. And they provide and grade the tests in the first place.
When students fail their tests, it means more money for the corporation. More money to give and grade the retests. More money to provide additional remediation materials. And it justifies the need for tests to begin with.
Is it any wonder then that so many kids fail? That’s what’s profitable.
There was a time when classroom teachers were not so motivated.
They were not paid based on how many of their students passed the test. Their evaluations were not based on student test scores. Their effectiveness used to be judged based on what they actually did in the classroom. If they could demonstrate to their administrators that they were actually making good faith efforts to teach kids, they were considered effective. If not, they were ineffective. It was a system that was both empirical and fair – and one to which we should return.
Yet this is a major premise behind test-based accountability – the untrustworthiness of teachers compared to the dependable, credibility of corporations.
I’m not saying that there aren’t individual teachers out there who may be doing a bad job educating poor and minority children. There certainly are some. But there is no evidence of a systemic conspiracy by teachers to educate the rich white kids and ignore all others. However, there IS an unquestionable, proven system of disinvestment in these exact same kids by lawmakers.
It is therefore not surprising that test scores show privileged white kids as superior to underprivileged students of color. That is how the system was designed.
Why any educated person would unquestionably accept these scores as valid assessments of student learning is beyond me.
Yet these are the assumptions and premises upon which the house of test-based accountability is built.
We must no longer allow policymakers to hide behind this blatant and immoral lie.
Not only should voters refrain from re-electing any lawmakers whose constituents children are receiving inequitable school resources, they should not be eligible for re-election.
Imagine you’re settling in to enjoy an article on-line or in your favorite print newspaper and you come across this headline:
U.S. Schools Ranked Low Internationally!
Or
Out of X Countries, U.S. Places Far From the Top in Math!
You feel embarrassed.
Soon that embarrassment turns to anger.
Sweat starts to break out on your brow.
And then you start to grasp for a solution to the problem – something major, something to disrupt the current system and bring us back to our proper place in the lead.
TWEEEEEEEET!
That was me blowing a gym teacher’s whistle. I’ll do it again:
TWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!
Hold it right there, consumer of corporate media. You’ve just been had by one of the oldest tricks in the book.
It’s the old manipulate-the-data-to-make-it-look-like-there’s-a-crisis-that-can-only-be-solved-by-drastic-measures-that-you-would-never-approve-of-normally.
It’s been used to get people to agree to terrible solutions like preemptive wars of choice, warrantless wiretapping of civilians, torturing prisoners, defunding public health programs and scientific research – just about everything the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, the Broads, Gateses and other billionaire hegemonists have on their fire sale wish list.
In the case of the American educational system, it’s the impetus behind high stakes standardized testing, Common Core, Teach for America, and charter and voucher schools.
Students are considered passing or failing based on an arbitrary cut score that changes every year. That’s not exactly unbiased.
Moreover, standardized tests are always graded on a curve. That means no matter how well students do, some will always be considered failing. We cannot have No Child Left Behind when our assessments are designed to do just the opposite – it’s logically impossible.
But whenever the media turns to these international rankings, they ignore these facts.
At best, these test scores are a second hand indication of structural inequalities in our public education system. It’s no accident that student from wealthy families generally score higher than those from poor ones. Nor is it pure misadventure that minority children also tend to score lower than their white counterparts.
Thankfully, they’re unnecessary. It doesn’t take a standardized test to determine which students are receiving the least funding. Nor does it take a corporate intermediary to show us which schools have the largest class sizes and lowest resources.
Yet our policymakers continue to push for these measures because they have no intention of helping poor and minority public school students. They just want to enrich their friends in the school privatization industry. They just want to divert public money to testing corporations and book publishers.
THAT is the problem with America’s education system.
We must be honest about why our public schools struggle. That’s the only way to find real solutions.
We must acknowledge the increasing segregation – both racially and economically. We must acknowledge the blatant funding disparities. And we must acknowledge how the majority of education policy at the federal, state and local level has done little to help alleviate these problems – in fact it has exacerbated them.
We need to stop testing and start investing in our schools. We need to stop privatizing and start participating in our neighborhood schools.
And most of all, we need to stop the lies and disinformation.
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