However, it is also a movie that has come under fire for perpetuating the white savior trope.
The film is based on the true story of Erin Gruwell, a white middle class woman, who taught inner city children to find their own voices by writing about their lives in Freedom Writer journals.
The biggest problem seems to be that in the film the teacher takes on more jobs to afford supplies, spends time putting together field trips, and even ends up losing her marriage so her students’ needs will be met in the classroom.
Is she a white savior transforming, saving and redeeming the lives of her students through her own personal sacrifices?
Is this essentially a feel good story about a white person saving otherwise irredeemable brown skinned children?
Is there something wrong with these kids? Absolutely not. Stereotypes aside, their problems arise from the circumstances in which they live more than anything else.
But if I’m being truthful, I have to admit these are tough questions, even more so when we’re asking them about real teachers and students. After all, I show the movie to my students because we’re in a somewhat similar relationship. They have many analogous experiences and I try to teach them using some corresponding texts and methods.
And am I not also a white teacher with a class of mostly black and brown children?
How often are people in my own position labelled white saviors? And what part of that label is denigration and what part valid criticism?
On the one hand, there are legitimate challenges born out of this situation.
About eight-in-ten U.S. public school teachers (79%) identified as White (non-Hispanic) during the 2017-18 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Fewer than one-in-ten teachers were Black (7%), Hispanic (9%) or Asian American (2%). So this situation is pretty much the norm – most students of color have white teachers.
This is challenging because study after study shows white teachers bring their biases with them to the classroom. They often have lower expectations for students of color, which greatly affects their students’ motivation and achievement. This may even impact expulsion and discipline rates as well as other facets of students’ academic experiences.
However, I do not think it is correct to characterize this as being a white savior. I think it is being a colonizer, and I have seen the same kinds of attitudes and actions from people of various races and ethnicities.
In my own admittedly limited experience, the most test obsessed teachers and administrators I have ever know have been people of color – almost as if they were trying to make a point about their own racial identity by raising test scores of the children in their charge.
The problem with being a colonizer is that it enforces a prejudicial status quo. So raising test scores (even if you’re successful) does little to help people of color. It simply justifies making them jump through biased and unfair hoops in the first place with the excuse, “See? They did it. Why can’t you?”
In this way, I agree with, Dr. Christopher Emdin, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who advised educators in his book “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too”:
“You are there not as a savior, but as a revolutionary.”
Teachers should be openly antiracist – especially white teachers. As difficult as it can be sometimes, we must not allow racism to become a taboo topic – something to be whispered about but never spoken of by name. We need to have the uncomfortable conversations. We need to read texts by people of color and honor every student’s race and culture. We need to prize difference and examine our own reactions to it.
However, as I said I do not think the issue here is saviorism.
That is something completely different though just as harmful.
You can criticize Gruwell’s story because of all she gives up for her students, but that is kind of what teachers are obliged to do if they want to accomplish even a smidgen of their responsibilities.
And you want to complain that teachers are acting like saviors!?
Fine! Stop giving us two pieces of wood and some nails!
While there is a legitimate caution behind the white savior teacher trope, it is mischaracterized and misused in order to gaslight educators to simply take the abuse and be quiet.
Yes, educators need to stop defending the status quo. We need to examine our biases and embrace racial and cultural differences. We need to actively work to tear down systems of oppression even in our educational system.
These are two sides of the same coin. The same system that oppresses children of color by withholding enough compels teachers to become saviors. The one is built upon the other.
Civil rights activists need to do a better job recognizing this and speaking out against it.
As activist Lilla Watson famously said:
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
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Douglass was born into bondage until he fled to the North at age 20. He was considered a fugitive for nine more years until 1845 when English friends raised $711.66 to buy his freedom. He was already a famous orator, author and abolitionist.
But he knew the power of a picture and how a still image of him grinning ear-to-ear might be used by slaveholders to indicate that people of color enjoyed their own servitude.
Now 158 years after the Civil War, the Florida Department of Education is trying to perpetuate that same myth with its new guidelines for Black history curriculum in public schools.
The guidelines say that teachers’ lessons should “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”
But we’re losing sight of the fact that it was forced labor! That seems an essential feature – a defining characteristic!
So enslaved people might acquire skills in bondage that they did not previously possess. They could sometimes become expert artisans who might earn money to buy things.
But they did not own their own bodies! They were property! That limits your buying power in kind of a major way – not to mention your humanity!
No skills, nothing you could purchase could possibly make you cherish your lack of freedom.
“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom.”
“Every tone was testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. . . . To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. . . . The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”
The new education guidelines in the Sunshine state are the latest since the Stop Woke Act was enacted in July 2022. The law says discussions about race must be taught in an “objective manner” and should not be “used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” It also states that students should not feel guilty for actions taken in the past by people of their same race or origin.
Not only are these guidelines insensitive at best, state policymakers do not understand the actual record. They seem to believe in Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” to colonize, civilize, and Christianize non-Europeans – that slavery was a means of protecting and bringing Africans into the civilized era.
But this is pure nonsense – what’s worse it’s antiquated nonsense.
People who were kidnapped from Africa and forced into slavery across the Atlantic were not savages who were civilized by white slavers.
These were people with their own cultures, heritages and, yes, skills.
Each regional clan or group had professions or crafts such as weaving, basket making, potting, or iron working. They grew agricultural products, made textiles, manufactured goods, music and art. They made traditional foods and had unique customs.
These skills were used by enslaved people in the American South and beyond creating many industries in the US, but their contributions were most often erased.
Daniel was an orphan working as a day laborer on the farm of Dan Call, a Lynchburg preacher, grocer and distiller. Daniel took an interest in the distillery and pleaded to learn the trade. Call eventually introduced him to Green, who he called “the best whiskey maker that I know of,” according to a 1967 biography, Jack Daniel’s Legacy. He instructed the enslaved man to teach the young boy his distilling process.
Green taught Daniel “sugar maple charcoal filtering” (now called the Lincoln County Process), a universally accepted critical step in the making of Tennessee whiskey. This involves filtering the whiskey through wooden charcoal chips before being placed in casks for aging. Food historians believe this was inspired by similar charcoal filtering techniques used to purify water and foods in West Africa. The process imparts a unique flavor that set Jack Daniel’s whiskey apart from its competitors.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, Daniel bought Call’s distillery, renaming it after himself. More than seven generations of the Green family worked either for or with the Jack Daniel’s brand.
It’s important to note that these were skills Green already possessed. They were not learned in bondage. They were brought with him to this country.
Men of color handled cattle, tamed horses, worked ranches, encountered outlaws and starred in rodeos. It’s estimated that anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 Black cowboys were part of the legendary cattle drives of the 1800s.
Eli Whitney, a white man, is given credit for inventing the machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber.
However, there is much debate about where he got the idea.
Some historians believe Catherine Greene, a woman he was living with, devised the cotton gin and Whitney merely built it and applied for the patent, since at that time women were not allowed to do this. Others believe the idea was Whitney’s but Greene played an important role as both designer and financier.
However, according to the University of Houston’s College of Engineering, Whitney got the idea from an enslaved person known to history only as Sam. Sam’s father came up with a kind of comb to get the seeds out of a cotton boll. Whitney heard about the idea and simply mechanized it.
Whether Sam or his father were able to invent the cotton gin because of skills learned in America or Africa is hard to say, but they certainly didn’t profit off of them. If they were given any remuneration, it was nothing in comparison to Whitney.
Ironically, this device made the mass cultivation of cotton profitable. The result was that the enslaved population in the United States jumped from about 250,000 around the time of the Revolutionary War to around 4 million at the time of the Civil War.
Sadly, this is far from the only example of white people getting the credit for the intellectual work of enslaved people.
Jo Anderson came up with the idea or at least co-invented a reaping machine that revolutionized agriculture. But the credit went to Cyrus McCormick, the white man who owned him.
Cutting wheat in the early 1800s was slow, difficult and labor-intensive. Workers had to walk and cut the stalks with scythes, and laborers (also called “binders”) walking behind them gathered and tied the stalks into sheaves. The reaper was a device that sheared a wide path of grain. A worker would just need to rake the cut stalks off the machine’s bed onto the ground in ready-to-bind stacks.
In the 1850s, Benjamin Montgomery invented a steamboat propeller designed for shallow water. But since he was enslaved, his invention could not be patented in his name. His owners – future Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph – then tried to patent the propeller in their names but the request was denied since they were not the inventors. It went unpatented.
In 1831, a freed slave named Henry Boyd invented a “Tester Bed” that used wooden side rails. However, he had to let a white man, George Porter, patent his design for him since he could not do it, himself.
Free Black men were technically allowed to patent inventions but it could be incredibly difficult to do so. Often they ended up putting patents in the names of their white lawyers to give them a better shot at acceptance.
While some of these skills may have been learned in servitude, Black people rarely got to experience the rewards they deserved for using them.
It should be achingly obvious that being kidnapped and enslaved did not in the final analysis profit Black people even if they may have occasionally learned skills or earned a little money. Any suggestion otherwise is pure fantasy.
It is a political fiction that is being revived to stop any attempts at actual justice in this country.
Though they are no longer enslaved, African Americans still suffer from the after affects of our peculiar institution. Jim Crow laws continued until the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement. Even then policies like red lining, discriminatory hiring practices, and over-policing of Black neighborhoods continued. Though progress has been made at each step along the way, Black people still suffer from institutional racism of which Florida’s new educational guidelines are a prime example.
Florida’s new guidelines are another attempt to erase the problem without fixing it – to make even stating the racial realities impossible for teachers in the classroom and thus unlikely to be learned by anyone who doesn’t experience this type of inequity first hand.
“The people of America deprive us [Black people] of every privilege—they turn round and taunt us with our inferiority!—they stand upon our necks, they impudently taunt us, and ask the question, why we don’t stand up erect? They tie our feet, and ask us why we don’t run? That is the position of America in the present time. The laws forbid education, the mother must not teach her child the letters of the Lord’s prayer; and then while this unfortunate state of things exist they turn round and ask, why we are not moral and intelligent; and tell us, because we are not, that they have the right to enslave [us].”
It’s no wonder he did not smile in his photographs.
I doubt his expression would change much, If he were alive today and presented with Florida’s idea of Black history.
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So it should come as no surprise that supply side policymakers are using the current teacher exodus as an excuse to remake the profession in their own image.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the number closer to 567,000 fewer educators in America’s public schools today than there were before the pandemic. That’s 0.57 new hires for every open position – completely unsustainable.
This was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, but the slow march of teachers out of the classroom has been going on for at least a decade. The federal government and most states have been either unwilling or unable to act – until now.
But it’s instructive to see exactly what it is they’re doing.
If approved by the legislature, newly certified members of those three professions would be eligible to receive up to $2,500 off their state income taxes.
However, the credit would be nonrefundable — recipients would save only the amount of tax they would have paid rather than also receiving the unused portion of the credit as a refund.
According to an Associated Press analysis in March, to receive the full $2,500 annual benefit with the state’s 3.07 flat income tax rate, a teacher (nurse or police officer) would have to make almost $82,000 — far above the normal starting wage for those professions.
The proposal, which seems unpopular on both sides of the aisle, doesn’t even do much to increase recruitment. It should have been used to raise the base salary of teachers instead of focusing on just newbies.
But its intent was clear – get more teachers in the door.
PDE is putting forward a new program starting in July called Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) which includes 49 cultural competence standards to encourage teachers to be more aware of racial issues in our schools.
The impetus behind enacting these standards is to help recruit more new teachers of color. It’s a worthy goal considering how few teachers are non-white in the Commonwealth. However, increased salary, prestige and autonomy would go a lot farther than this kind of whitewashing.
After all, if the state, the New America Foundation or the billionaire philanthropists backing them actually wanted to decrease racism, they’d be much more successful attacking racist structures than random interactions – reversing the neoliberal policies (charter schools, high stakes testing, etc.) that they, themselves, promote.
The excuse constantly given for such an emphasis on recruiting new teachers is that so few graduates are entering the profession. A decade ago, roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).
According to the NEA, educators quitting is driving a significant part of the current educator shortage. More teachers quit the job than those who retire, are laid off, are transferred to other locations, go on disability or die. And this has remained true almost every year for the last decade with few exceptions.
If our government really wanted to solve the problem, it would spend at least as much time keeping the experienced teachers we have as trying to get new ones to join their ranks.
“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?
“We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”
1) Experienced teachers on average are more effective in raising student achievement (both test scores and classroom grades) than less experienced ones.
2) Teachers do better as they gain experience. Researchers have long documented that teachers improve dramatically during their first few years on the job. However, teachers make even further gains in subsequent years.
3) Experienced teachers also reduce student absences, encourage students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom, serve as mentors for young teachers and help to create and maintain a strong school community.
First, there must be an increase in salary. Teacher pay must at least be adequate including the expectation that as educators gain experience, their salaries will rise in line with what college graduates earn in comparable professions. This is not happening now.
In addition, something must be done to improve teachers working conditions. Lack of proper support and supportive administrators is one of the main reasons experienced teachers leave a building or the profession.
And perhaps most obviously, politicians have to stop scapegoating educators for all of society’s problems and even for all of the problems of the school system. Teachers don’t get to make policy. They are rarely even allowed a voice, but they are blamed for everything that happens in and around education.
If we want teachers to work with socially disadvantaged students, they must be provided with the institutional supports needed to be effective and steadily advance their skills.
But this requires making education a priority and not a political football.
As it is now, the same disaster capitalist shenanigans echo over-and-over again in the halls of our country’s education history with disastrous consequences for students.
Perhaps the most obvious example is in New Orleans.
Republicans, Democrats – it doesn’t matter. They both champion nearly the same education policies of standardized testing and school privatization.
Thus it should come as no surprise that our contemporary policy makers are using the current crisis – an ongoing teacher exodus – as an excuse to remodel the education workforce into a more ignorant and malleable one.
When will they ever learn?
When will we ever learn not to trust them?
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The Mars Area, Penn Crest and Laurel school districts filed a lawsuit Monday trying to stop Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration from implementing a program called Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) in every school district in the Commonwealth starting next school year.
CRSE is a set of 49 cultural competency standards kind of like the Common Core – guidelines for teacher training programs to be used for both new educators and continuing education credits for current educators.
Plaintiffs complain that the program is vague, requires teachers to think a certain way, encroaches on districts’ autonomy to pick their own curriculum and threatens to take away owed subsidies if districts don’t comply.
Let’s examine each in turn.
Is the policy vague? No way. It has nine core competencies, each with between 4 and 7 standards. These are guidelines and certainly don’t outline every possible use, but you could argue they’re detailed to a fault. One regulation requires educators to disrupt harmful institutional practices. Another asks educators to acknowledge microaggressions – when someone unintentionally expresses prejudice towards a person or group.
Do they encroach on district’s autonomy? That’s debatable – but should districts really resist taking steps to make themselves less racist?
Do they threaten districts with loss of funding if schools don’t comply? I don’t see anything explicit in the program that says this, but that could be implicit in the program or have been expressed by PDE employees. In any case, I don’t see why it’s a problem to offer tools to do something you really should want to do anyway.
In short, there’s nothing wrong with the guidelines, per se, if you agree that racism is something schools and teachers should strive against. Now I can’t read people’s minds, and I don’t know explicitly what their motivations are, but the real issue seems to be that certain people don’t believe in the cause.
They don’t believe racism is much of a problem today or that schools should be engaged in antiracist work.
However, for some of us, the matter isn’t so simple.
Frankly, I’m of two minds when it comes to these new guidelines for antiracist teacher training.
On the one hand, I am in favor of teaching people to be less racist – especially when those people are teachers, themselves, who can spread the message even further and use it to be more fair and equitable to students.
But no. They do none of these things. Instead they throw it all on teachers.
Once again the powerful do nothing to actually fix our problems but put the burden of our crumbling societies on our crumbling public schools and traumatized teachers.
THAT’S my problem with this program.
It’s not that they want to teach teachers to be antiracist and to take steps to create more fair and equitable classrooms. It’s that this is all a smokescreen to allow the people who are really behind many of the racist systems in our society to keep getting away with it and perpetuating more and more inequality.
I can just imagine how well the state would greet educators “disrupt[ing] harmful institutional practices” by refusing to give standardized tests!
Public schools are a PART of the solution to our broken society. But they are not the WHOLE.
We need real public policy to address these issues. We need to get rid of reductive and prejudicial laws.
And the fact that we don’t have any of that is certain to poison the fervor of many teachers next year who will be required to sit through antiracist programs paid for and conducted by the same folks behind the public school apartheid that is our everyday reality.
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It’s kind of like a judge watching a driver plow his car into a brick wall repeatedly and then instead of taking away his license, awarding him a safe driver certificate.
It doesn’t take a political scientist to figure out why.
The organization’s own report describes the Foundation as “tireless advocates for high-quality academic standards, assessments, and accountability as tools for educational equity.”
The report was written by Dan Goldhaber and Michael DeArmond of the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes for Research with a qualitative analysis by Brightbeam CEO Chris Stewart and his staff.
CALDER is a federally-funded nonprofit organization with several testing industry-funded and conservative think-tank members in management, on the advisory board, and working as independent researchers – in case, you thought anything they produced might be fair and balanced.
Brightbeam is a corporate education reform think tank financed by the usual billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg, Alice Walton, Jim Walton, Laurene Jobs Powell and Mark Zuckerberg. And Stewart is a long-time standardized testing and school privatization cheerleader – not exactly the kind of people who can afford to find much fault in NCLB because doing so would put them out of work.
The report highlights eight key findings – four positive and four negative.
First, the authors of the report pat each other on the back because NCLB collected so much yummy data that had been unavailable previously. In particular, the law extracted data from the nation’s schools based on race, socioeconomics and special needs. “No longer were school districts able to hide the performance of some students behind an average,” the report states.
Moreover, it’s strange to celebrate NCLB for disallowing hiding student performance behind an average when that’s exactly what it does. Everything is an average now! Average test scores, aggregate passing scores, whether your school made adequate yearly progress… it’s all averages! Oh to go back to the times when you could look at a single student’s academic record without having to compare it to anyone else!
Second, the authors claim student test scores increased because of NCLB especially among Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. However, this depends on how you massage the data.
Test scores have stayed relatively the same throughout the last 20 years with dips here and rises there. No matter the test, the overall trajectory has been pretty flat. You can focus here or focus there to create a picture that supports whatever narrative you want, but taken as a whole, there has not been any significant progress as shown by test scores.
Third, the report celebrates the production of “more reliable, comparable education data.” This is a suspect claim.
Are test scores more reliable than classroom grades? That has never been proven. In fact, when it comes to predicting future success in college or careers, there is plenty of evidence that classroom grades do a better job than test scores. After all, tests are based on work done over a relatively few number of days. Grades are based on an entire year’s worth of work.
However, it is true that test scores are more easily comparable because they come from the same assessments. Why this is so important is unclear. Learning is not the same as sports statistics. It is not a competition. Students learn when they’re ready to learn – not based on anyone’s schedule. What matters is if they learn at all.
Fourth, the authors admit “Reforms in teacher evaluation and school turnaround initiatives did not consistently improve student outcomes at scale, in part due to significant variation in quality of implementation.”
It is interesting that even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce can’t spin NCLB into an unquestionable success. But it is almost a cliche among the standardized testing industry that any failures of the big tests are always excused as failures solely of “implementation.” If teachers and districts just tried harder to put the testing industry’s plans into effect, everything would be working perfectly. It’s these darn teachers and schools! Whine! Cry! Sob!
For the negative findings, the report concluded there were unknowns about the impact of NCLB that should be further studied.
First, they were unsure if schools serving minorities and the poor ended up getting more money to improve than they otherwise would have done. SPOILER ALERT: they did not.
The original Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed under Lyndon B. Johnson was focused on equity – the exact concern the authors of the report pretend to be all about. However, when the law was reauthorized as NCLB in 2002 (and reauthorized again in 2015 as the Every Student Succeeds Act) it focused instead on test scores as a gatekeeper to equity. Instead of looking at needs, you had to pass the tests to get the money to meet your needs. And if you had needs, that meant your district and teachers were failing so they had to lose funding to punish them, first. Somehow you were supposed to end up with more funding after all that nonsense.
Second, if schools did get more funding because of test scores, the authors of the report were unsure what schools did with it. SPOILER ALERT: It went to test prep and charter school expansion.
NCLB refocused education on test scores, so if students did badly on the assessments, they needed test prep material. And if the teachers and districts weren’t miraculously overcoming social, economic and special needs of students in impoverished areas, money was given to open competing charter schools.
Did this help? Just the opposite. Now you have two schools vying for an even smaller pot of funding but one of these schools (the charter) doesn’t have to follow the regulations the others school must. So anyone with no background in education can open a school, hire uncertified teachers, make decisions on how to spend tax dollars without an elected school board, etc. Not helpful.
Third, the authors of the report were unsure how many struggling schools became successful under NCLB. SPOILER ALERT: Not many.
You don’t help a malnourished person by starving him even further or making him compete for food. The same with school districts. In almost every case where a school miracle is proposed in which kids simply pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, the reality turns out to be a byproduct of creative accounting or selective data.
Take New Orleans, a district often held up by the testing and privatization industry as a success. This is the only all-charter school district in the country. After 2005 and Hurricane Katrina, a predominantly white Republican legislature forced the district’s public schools to become charters – outright experimenting on a majority African American city. The result? School enrollment declined from 65,000 before the hurricane to 48,000 a dozen years later. The most recent state scores rated 49% of the city’s charter schools as D or F, based on their academic performance. The New Orleans district scores are below the state average, and that’s saying something since Louisiana is one of the lowest performing states in the nation.
Not exactly an overwhelming success.
Fourth, the authors wondered if NCLB might have resulted in non-academic improvements – things like a reduction in chronic absences, school climate, etc. SPOILER ALERT: Nope.
So there you have it. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is proud of their little report about the impact of NCLB. They give themselves a gold star.
The reality though is much different than what you’ll find on this bit of propaganda.
Let’s get real. Poverty and wealth are the most important factors determining test scores. This shows up on every standardized test. In fact, that’s what the name means – STANDARDIZED test – these assessments are normed on a bell curve reflecting family income and education. Kids from families from higher socioeconomic brackets are at the top of the curve and poor kids are on the bottom.
And consider this: nearly half the students in the U.S. now qualify for free or reduced lunches – the federal measure of poverty. So if we really want to help kids achieve academically, we need to first reduce the impact of poverty on children and families by making sure that they have access to nutrition, medical care, and good housing. Ensure pregnant women get medical care so their children are born healthy.
In short, don’t give students corporate canned tests. Give them well-maintained schools with nurses, counselors, and libraries with flesh-and-blood librarians. These are just some of the ways we could actually make things better.
It’s been two decades already. People know high stakes testing has failed despite whatever public relations reports are issued by lobbyist organizations. It’s time we had the courage to admit NCLB was a mistake and acted to finally put things right.
It may hurt some businesses that rely on testing to make a buck. It may require big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. But that is the only way to improve education.
We must put our money where our mouths are – or else be quiet.
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Year after year, decade after decade, the poor and people of color get fewer school resources, larger class sizes, narrowed curriculum and lower acceptance to colleges.
Yet, as defenders of standardized testing (and racist practices in general) love to point out, not all minorities consistently fail these tests.
In particular, Asian-Americans – taken as a whole – score better than white Americans.
So the tests are totally fair, right? Case closed?
Wrong.
Asian-Americans, who make up roughly 5 percent of public school enrollment nationally, are just as much victimized by standardized testing as any other minority. The only difference is their success is held up as an excuse for upholding this deeply inequitable practice.
It’s kind of like if two people were pitted against each other in a race, and one had to run a mile, and the other had to run 1.5 miles – and the second person actually won. Would that make the race fair?
No. Not at all. But the organizers point to the result as proof that running that extra distance in the same amount of time was nondiscriminatory. So stop complaining!
Take the SAT. Asian-American students typically score higher than other students on America’s most popular college gatekeeper as they do on other standardized tests. For instance, among high school students who graduated in 2020, Asian students scored an average of 632 on the SAT math section, compared with 547 for white students. The average math score overall was 523 (out of 800).
What does this really mean?
ASIAN AMERICANS ARE NOT A MONOLITH
First of all, when we talk about Asian-American students doing well on standardized tests, we’re generalizing. We don’t mean all Asians – only a certain percentage of certain kinds of these people. After all, Asia is a pretty big continent.
According to the US Census Bureau, there are roughly 23 million Americans of Asian descent, and the largest subgroups are people of Chinese and Indian ancestry with populations of approximately 5 million each. Next comes people of Filipino (4.2 million), Vietnamese (2.2 million), Korean (1.9 million) and Japanese descent (1.5 million).
But those are just the biggest subgroups. When you add in all Asian-Americans including Pacific Islanders, you get more than 50 different ethnic groups with varying languages, immigration histories and educational experiences.
Any generalization about such a diverse group will leave out important details, including test scores.
ALL ASIANS DON’T GET HIGH TEST SCORES
For example, high test achievement is not something attained universally by all people who can trace their parentage through that part of the world. It’s actually much more common for East Asians than others. In particular, we’re talking about people of Chinese, Korean and similar heritages.
In these countries, college admission often is decided on a single high-stakes test – the gaokao in China or the suneung in South Korea. People whose cultures trace back to these parts of the world are used to engaging in intense test prep as a regular feature of teenage life. So many Asian immigrant parents with ties to these countries often see the SAT or ACT as the equivalent of Asia’s admissions tests and thus engage in test prep as a matter of course, regardless of cost or effort.
This goes far in explaining why Chinese- and Korean-Americans have the highest rate of participation in SAT/ACT test prep – even more than people from other Asian ethnicities.
In one study, more than half of Korean-Americans and 42 percent of Chinese-Americans took an SAT prep course before college compared to 35.6 percent of white students, 32.4 percent of Hispanic students and 40.4 percent of black students. This is true regardless of household income. Affluent Asian Americans were more likely to take test prep, but 46.7 percent of low-income Korean-Americans still took a prep course.
East Asian-Americans show statistically significant gains from test prep much more often than others. This is partially due to having better access to adequately funded K-12 schools than other minority groups. They are less likely to attend racially segregated, poorly resourced schools, unlike their Black and Hispanic peers. Even Asians from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to get more out of test prep than others because they are more likely to attend well-resourced schools than their counterparts in the same socio-economic bracket.
And let’s not forget that test prep companies target Asian-American communities. You’ll find them in urban centers like Koreatown in Los Angeles or heavily Asian suburbs such as the San Gabriel Valley. Advertising material for these services are often in multiple languages or displayed in Asian-language newspapers and ethnic media.
Most of New York City’s 411 prep centers are based in Queens and Brooklyn, “with over a quarter of them… most notably in the boroughs’ Asian enclaves of Flushing and Sunset Park in Brooklyn,” The New York Times reported.
“On the opposite coast, 861 such tutoring centers exist in California’s Orange, Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties, all heavy with Asian-American families,” the article states.
So it’s no wonder why certain Asian-American communities – especially East Asian communities – tend to favor test prep and achieve high standardized test scores.
ASIANS ARE HELD TO UNFAIR STANDARDS
But let us not forget that East Asians are not ALL ASIANS. If you’re unlucky enough to be from other parts of that massive continent or the island chains of the Pacific, the US will still paint you with the same broad brush.
All Asian-Americans – whether of East Asian descent or not – are held to a higher standard in things like college admissions where overachievement is considered the norm and little else is tolerated.
This is unfair to East Asians because it expects them to jump through more hoops than white people or other ethnic groups just to be accepted, but it is even worse for other Asian subgroups.
A 2022 study of the nine-campus University of California – the state with the country’s largest Asian-American population – concluded that Filipino, Thai, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Laotian students were admitted at below-average rates and that many ethnicities including Samoans and Chamorros, were underrepresented in the system.
Why? They had lower test scores than admissions officials expected.
Such an emphasis on standardized testing is not healthy for students of any nationality. The College Board makes millions of dollars every year with assessments like the SAT and ACT holding the scores up as proof that certain students have what it takes to excel in college or universities.
This is a rarely mentioned side effect of Asian-American’s standardized testing overachievement. And it may help to explain why – despite scoring well on standardized tests – Asians don’t complete college as often as students from other ethnicities.
According to an analysis of the 23-campus California State University System, all Asian subgroups were less likely than whites to complete their degrees in four years. There were roughly 78,000 Asians attending the university system in 2016, yet their four-year completion rate was 3% below that of all students. Only a few subgroups – Japanese and Asian Indians – had four-year completion rates that exceeded the average.
If test scores and admissions were all it took to achieve post secondary success, you’d expect college completion to be shared by Asian-Americans across the board.
In reality, college attainment varies significantly within the Asian community. While more than half of Japanese and Korean Americans (and nearly 3/4 of Asian Indian Americans) age 24 or older had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2019, the same was true for less than 1/5 of their Laotian, Hmong and Cambodian counterparts.
CONCLUSIONS
Therefore, it is highly suspect when standardized testing apologists point to Asian-American test scores as proof the system is fair and balanced.
First of all, it conflates the achievements of mostly East Asians with all Americans of eastern heritage. Second, it demands more of one minority group to be accepted as equal to a white majority.
In any case, the standardized testing industry can no longer hide behind the myth of the Asian-American model minority to justify their shady business practices.
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These questions are at the heart of a well-financed war against a simple term – woke-ness.
Since the summer of 2020, oligarchs and their tools in the United States have been waging a disinformation campaign against that term – especially as it pertains to our schools.
Chiding, nagging, insinuating – you hear it constantly, usually with a sneer and wagging finger, but what does it really mean?
To hear certain governors, state legislators and TV pundits talk, you’d think it was the worst thing in the world. But it’s not that at all.
That’s all – just knowing that these things exist and trying to recognize them when present.
I’m not sure what’s so controversial about that. If we all agree racism is bad, why is it undesirable to acknowledge it exists when it’s demonstrably there?
More specifically, being woke means focusing on intersectionality – how issues of race, class and gender overlap and interrelate with each other. It means practicing critical race theory – not the made up dog whistle conservatives use to describe anything they don’t like being taught in school, but the study of how racial bias is inherent in many Western social and legal systems. It means using the lens of Black feminism, queer theory and others to address structural inequality.
Again, why is that a bad thing? If we agree that prejudice is bad, we should want to avoid it in every way possible, and these are the primary tools that enable us to do so.
Shouldn’t we protect hard-fought advances in human rights? Shouldn’t we continue to strive for social justice and the ability of every citizen to freely participate in our democracy – especially in our public schools?
Of course we should!
But leaders of the backlash will disagree.
Like in so many other areas of our culture, they have stolen the term “woke-ness” and tried to co-opt it into another invented grievance. For people who deride their political opponents as being too fragile and unable to handle reality, they certainly find a million things to cry about on their 24-hour news networks to keep their base angry and engaged all the time.
They have targeted and demonized antiracist work. They have tried to discredit the concepts that Black women and LGBTQ people have created to explain and improve the inequitable conditions of their lives.
And the reason is crystal clear – they oppose that work.
They oppose anti-racism. They oppose the rights of Black women and LGBTQ people to better treatment.
They are against everyone but a perceived white, male, heteronormative majority that doesn’t even really exist.
For we are the keepers of history, science and culture.
Who will teach the true history that for more than 400 years in excess of 15 million men, women and children were the victims of the transatlantic slave trade? Who will teach the true history of the fight against human bondage and the struggle for equal rights? Who will teach about women’s fight for suffrage, equal pay, and reproductive freedom? Who will teach about the struggle of the individual to affirm their own gender identity and sexual expression?
It won’t be the College Board, a billion-dollar American business calling itself a non-profit, that after years of stalling finally released its Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum – a college-level course available for high school students nationwide. In the wake of political backlash, the new course material is as watered-down as weak tea in comparison to previous drafts of the course.
This just goes to show that the free market will never stand up to political power if it is perceived as adversely affecting the bottom line. True education comes not from corporate academic standards or standardized test gatekeepers. It comes from teachers.
Intersectional frames such as those under attack by billionaires posing as populists have been incredibly important in supporting overlooked social problems and addressing today’s human rights failures.
Those of us who know history understand that suppression of knowledge and intellectuals (especially those from marginalized peoples) are a tool used to increase racism and oppression – to overturn the progress of the last century.
Refusing students access to books, criminalizing “divisive concepts,” and discrediting those with whom they disagree have all been tools of domination. Just as denying the persistence of any inequality has been a tool to discredit its victims.
If we give in to these partisan “anti-woke” imperatives, we enable the return of racist and cultural inequalities that had been at least partially rectified years ago. We clear the way for these extremists to bring back a mythical past in which women are meant to be merely subservient to men and where race, gender and sexuality are rigidly defined and limited according to the ruling class.
Teachers, we cannot allow this to happen.
We stand at the gates, the first (and perhaps last) line of defense, because we stand at the schoolhouse doors.
If we are truly educators, we must teach the truth.
We must put the facts in their proper context.
We must encourage our students to think about what came before and what’s happening now.
We must stay woke.
Or the whole world sleeps.
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They don’t stop crime. Typically they arrive AFTER a crime has already been committed. If anything, they are an instrument of justice – of ensuring the guilty are punished, but let’s not keep up this fantasy that they routinely prevent crime from taking place.
At best, this is a deterrent to crime. But that only works if the justice system works – and, frankly, our courts are in shambles.
How many times have we seen criminals escape consequences – especially if they’re rich and powerful?
We have people like George Santos in Congress caught in multiple lies and frauds. And nothing seems to be happening to them.
We have people like Matt Gaetz in Congress accused of sex trafficking and assault, and they aren’t even being actively investigated.
You think police deter crime? Not in a country without justice.
If you’re poor and you’re accused of a crime, you often have to spend weeks or months in jail awaiting trial because you can’t make bail. And when you’re incarcerated, you could lose your job, your reputation and who knows what violence may befall you behind bars?
And this is just if you’re accused. There’s no “innocent until proven guilty.” You’re treated like you’re guilty UNLESS you can pay to be treated innocent.
“But this is the justice system,” you say. “The police aren’t responsible for the justice system.”
Maybe not, but they support it. They prop it up. The system couldn’t exist without them.
The purpose of police is to prop up our system – and it is an unjust system.
If police refused to do that, maybe the system might get fixed.
Take the incident in question where Officer Sluganski was killed.
According to accounts in local papers, he and his partner were responding to what they thought was a domestic dispute. A McKeesport resident – a former member of the military – was suffering from PTSD and acting violently toward his family. He had guns in his home and had already made a death threat to people at a banking institution weeks earlier.
The police knew all about the incident, according to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, but the details don’t seem to have been accurately conveyed to the officers responding to the scene. And the result was gun play and death.
And speaking of supporting the police, what about this mentally ill veteran? If you really want to support our men and women in blue, don’t send so many of our children across the sea to unnecessary wars that enrich the wealthy and waste our resources here at home.
That’s what I’d call supporting the police. Not putting up a stupid sign.
You want to support the police? How about common sense gun regulations so that there aren’t so many firearms out there with which to shoot them? The US literally has more guns than people and you think a yard sign is doing anything for law enforcement!?
It won’t help the police. All it will do is make any criticism of the police or the system they serve seem outrageous.
How dare you criticize our officers or our system!? Don’t you appreciate how this man died!? Don’t you appreciate the bullets he and his partner took for you!?
And that’s the BEST case scenario.
Now let’s look at the other possibility.
You think there’s no harm that can come from signs like this all across our community? Ask a black person.
Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown…. Poor little Antwon Rose! He was a 17-year-old boy shot and killed five years ago as he was running away from police in East Pittsburgh – not far at all from McKeesport and where last week’s incident took place.
I know his mother. He has family and friends in the school where I’m a teacher.
Michael Rosfeld, the officer who killed Antwon, was fired and he was sued civilly in court. But that doesn’t make up for the murder of a child.
Where are Antwon’s signs? Where are his novelty lightbulbs?
Police across the country killed an average of more than three people a day, or nearly 100 people every month last year according to Mapping Police Violence.
In 2021, police killed 1,145 people; 1,152 in 2020; 1,097 in 2019; 1,140 in 2018; and 1,089 in 2017.
And you want me to put up a sign saying “We Support Our Police?”
I know all police officers are not bad. But the system is. It is broken, and putting up a sign like that helps draw attention away from that fact and ensures nothing will get done to fix it.
After all, why should we bother? Everyone here supports our police.
There are real solutions we could enact that might bring us some peace.
Clinicians and medics could responded to mental health calls like the one last week instead of the police. In fact, this has been tried successfully in Denver. If they need backup, THEN call police. But you shouldn’t start the interaction with armed law enforcement officers who do not have sufficient training or expertise for these types of situations.
You could restrict traffic stops for minor violations. Decriminalize things like jaywalking and other minor infractions. We don’t need broken windows policing when it leads to more citizens in body bags and more police getting killed.
And can we get some gun control? Please?
We need broad systematic change to reduce lethal force from police. We need to get rid of qualified immunity for officers so that if they make a mistake, they can be held accountable for it. We need incentives to make them think twice before taking a life.
These are the kinds of things that would START to bring about positive change. These are the kinds of things that I DO support.
But, no, I don’t support police without qualification.
I don’t support anyone that far.
It is ridiculous to oversimplify our world down to such a slogan.
That’s why I will mourn with my community over this senseless act of violence.
And I will appreciate all that law enforcement does right.
But I will also demand better for our boys and girls in blue, our community and my black and brown brothers and sisters who bear the brunt of our societal dysfunction.
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The non-profit chain of 13 schools based in Pittsburgh, Pa, boasts high academics, safe campuses and certified teachers.
At least, that’s what its advertising blitz proclaims from every grocery store cart, newspaper page, radio announcement and billboard. Which just goes to show that anyone will tout your virtues if you pay them enough money – taxpayer money, that is.
Take Propel McKeesport – the franchise located in my own neighborhood.
“…ranked as ONE OF THE BEST charter schools in the nation by U.S. News World Report” (Emphasis mine).
One of the best is not THE best. But it’s still good. Let’s call it embellishing the school’s resume.
According to Propel’s Website, in 2021, the McKeesport location was #11 in the state’s charter elementary schools and #7 in the state’s charter middle schools.
I suppose that is impressive, too, though being one of the best CHARTER SCHOOLS isn’t the same as being one of the best SCHOOLS.
The percentage of students achieving proficiency in math was 7% (which is lower than the Pennsylvania state average of 38%) for the 2020-21 school year. The percentage of students achieving proficiency in reading was 34% (which is lower than the Pennsylvania state average of 55%) for the 2020-21 school year.
Moreover, test scores in both subjects were higher at the McKeesport Area School District, the local authentic public school – 17% higher in math and 3.5% higher in reading at the elementary level and 6% higher in math and 2% higher in reading at the middle school level. Propel McKeesport does not teach beyond 8th grade.
So what exactly is Propel celebrating?
Maybe it’s the fact that its McKeesport location achieved these standardized test scores while teaching an intensely racially segregated student body – 86% minority (mostly Black). By comparison, the authentic public schools range from 52-71% minority students (mostly Black).
I’m not sure that’s much of a victory. Wasn’t one of the major tenants of the civil rights movement having racially integrated schools – that doing so would help students of color achieve academically because resources couldn’t be horded away from them?
In 2015, two teenagers at Propel Braddock Hills High School were arrested after one allegedly tried to sell guns to another in a bathroom during the school day. Two guns were recovered by police and the students were taken into custody on campus. The rest of the students were placed on lockdown until police cleared the area.
In 2019, police arrested four people in connection with a scheme to steal nearly $23,000 from Propel Schools by forging checks in the charter school operator’s name. The Propel Schools Foundation filed a report with police after discovering nearly two dozen fraudulent checks in Propel’s name had been cashed at various places, a Pittsburgh Public Safety spokeswoman said. At least 28 checks drawn against the school’s bank account were counterfeit, the complaint said. The fake checks were cashed using the forged signature of the school’s co-founder, Jeremy Resnick.
So does Propel provide a safe learning environment? Maybe. But not more so than any other district.
Individual Attention and Small Class Size
The problem here is verification.
Charter schools are not nearly as transparent as authentic public schools. They are not required by law to provide as much information about their operations as neighborhood public schools. For instance, nearly every authentic public school district is run by an elected school board which has open meetings and open records.
For Propel it is unclear exactly how members are chosen for its corporate board, but it is difficult for parents and community members to be appointed.
According to an article in Public Source, individuals can only become board members if they are already members of the “Friends of Propel,” but the charter chain did not provide information on this group or how its members are selected.
When it comes to class size, most Propel schools report having student-to-teacher ratios slightly smaller or the same as at neighborhood authentic public schools. But who knows? There’s no way to tell whether classes may actually be larger.
However, individual attention is even harder to verify.
Most schools focus on more individual attention these days.
Unfortunately, the network provides very little detailed information about its curriculum.
So this claim by Propel is a way of bragging that the network doesn’t have to have certified and qualified teachers, but it does so anyway.
Unfortunately, it is definitively false.
According to those US News and World Report spotlights that the charter school network likes to highlight, several Propel schools do not have all certified teachers. For instance, Propel McKeesport only has 92% full-time certified teachers, Propel Homestead only has 94%, Propel Pitcairn only has 96%, etc.
So does Propel have 100% Certified and Qualified Teachers? Absolutely not.
Award Winning Arts Programs
Kudos to Propel for recognizing that arts are an important part of the curriculum. Or at least using it as a selling point on its advertisements. However, without details of its curriculum submitted to the state and verifiable by audit, there is nothing to back this claim up factually.
In fact, on Propel’s own Website, the only reference I see to awards for art is a brief mention in its after-school program which they label as “award-winning.”
What award did it win? The ‘Propel Presents Itself with an Award’ Award? Is there anything more substantial to this claim?
Certainly every school should have a dress code, but can’t students express themselves freely anymore? I just don’t see why emulating the worst qualities of private schools is a great thing – especially when it adds an unnecessary cost for parents.
-Tuition Free
Charter schools are funded with public tax dollars. So, yes, you don’t have to pay a tuition to attend. However, you do have to pay for extras like school uniforms.
In fact, overcoming the unpopularity of charter schools because of the increased expense for taxpayers is cited by Droz Marketing – the company that made all those glossy Propel advertisements – on its Website portfolio as an obstacle the company had to overcome to sell Propel to the masses.
Which brings us back to the beginning.
Does Propel go beyond the facts in its claims for itself?
Certainly.
Many businesses do that these days. And make no mistake – Propel IS a business. If it can cut a corner or find a loophole to put more money in operators’ pockets, it will.
Technically, this is not illegal. But it certainly doesn’t help educate children. It just goes to enrich the charter school operators.
Non-profit? Yeah, in name only.
However, let me end with what may be the most telling indicator of what it is like at Propel’s charter schools.
indeed.com is a Website workers use to decide if they should apply at a given job site. Employees anonymously review their current place of employment to let prospective job applicants know what it is like there and if they should consider seeking a job there.
The site has many entries on schools in the Propel network. Some are positive. Some are glowing. But most are incredibly negative.
Here in their own words is what it’s like inside the Propel network from the people who work (or worked) there.
Para Educator (Former Employee) – Propel East, Turtle Creek – July 19, 2020
Pandering to the cultural climate and using all the right talking points still doesn’t provide a quality education because of the many behavior problems.
Educator (Current Employee) – Pittsburgh, PA – August 4, 2022
Management verbalizes a desire, but does not actively seek to improve diversity within the ranks of educators. The lack of diversity directly impacts how the student body is educated.
First Grade Teacher (Former Employee) – McKeesport, PA – April 15, 2022 I worked at Propel McKeesport for 9 days before I realized it would negatively affect my mental health greatly if I stayed. Everything about the school was chaotic and unorganized. There is so much asked of the teachers, and they are given little to no support in the process. The people that are put in place to act as supports are spread so thin, that you aren’t able to receive the support necessary. I would have to get to work early and stay late in order to get all of my tasks done. I had no time for my personal life, and I was constantly overwhelmed. Leaving was the best decision I could’ve made for myself and my well being. Pros Higher than average starting pay for new teachers, healthcare benefits Cons Unorganized, consuming, little support/structure
Elementary School Teacher (Former Employee) – Hazelwood, PA – February 3, 2022 My time at Propel Hazelwood was the worst experience I have ever had in a professional setting. The principal, at the time, had all sorts of big ideas, and no clue how to make them actionable. Behavior was managed through a failed token economy… so I’m sure you can imagine what behavior looked like. But good news, they’ll just fire you before you qualify for benefits, and trick the next poor sap. For reference, I was the 3rd of 5 teachers to go through that position in 2 years.
In summary, I hope you line up a therapist before you sign your soul away to Propel. I know I needed one. Pros There were no pros. I can’t even make one up. Cons Pitiful everything. People, leadership, attitudes, slogans, curriculum (or lack there of). Run away… fast.
Teacher (Former Employee) – McKeesport, PA – September 3, 2021 Propel McKeesport cannot keep their staff members. They have so many open positions because their lesson plan template is 6 pages long, and the work pile-up is more than loving your scholars. The wonderful scholars don’t get a chance to love who you are because you (if you are not a favorite) are swamped with work. The job is a nightmare. Pros There is not one pro I can think of. Cons Flooded with work. Lies and says it is “Propel-Wide”
Janitor (Current Employee) – Pittsburgh, PA – January 3, 2022
Hr treats you bad Teachers treat you bad You are less then nothing to everyone even your bosses Never work for Braddock propel worst school I’ve seen Pros Nothing Cons You will be treated like you are worthless
Teacher (Former Employee) – Braddock Hills, PA – September 27, 2021 Wow. It sounds good from the outside but is terrible in the inside. High school students were out of control. Administration offered little help. The parents were just as aggressive as their children. The teachers will throw anyone under the bus as soon as possible. Pros Great pay. Amazing benefits. Stellar retirement and health insurance. Cons Terribly behaved students, aggressive parents, woke and offended staff
Educator (Current Employee) – Pittsburgh, PA – May 21, 2021 Even though I went in knowing the hours would be long and the school year would be longer, I was not prepared for the lack of work life balance. I have worked with Propel for 3 years and I will say that it is all consuming. I have been expected to not only do my job during building hours, but outside of work as well. This would be fine if it was occasional, but especially during COVID, it has become constant. Not only is the work never ending, but in my buildng we are not given adequate time to eat (25 minutes) or plan (50 minutes, but this time is often taken up by meetings almost daily). On top of limited planning time and expectations that never seem to stop coming, many of us have been forced into taking on additional, unpaid roles that we did not ask or agree to, and “no thank you” is not accepted as an answer. The district struggles to employee substitutes, so teachers are often expected to split classes when other grade level members are out. This has resulted in 30+ students in classrooms during non-COVID times, with one educator. Pros Good benefits, reasonable pay for the area, great curriculum Cons Short breaks, underqualified building administration, limited support
Teacher (Current Employee) – Pittsburgh, PA – January 13, 2021 Propel staff does care a lot about the students, but it doesn’t feel like those who are higher up care as much about them. Having a CEO/Superintendent may be the reason for this. Pros Dedicated cohorts Cons Work-life balance off
teacher (Former Employee) – Montour, PA – July 24, 2020 There was always a feeling of being watched in a critical way throughout the day. Administration was constantly evaluating teacher performance in the classroom which created a negative work environment. When a student became disruptive in the classroom administrators were difficult to locate. If an administrator did come to the classroom he/she would coddle the student with candy or a fun activity before returning him/her to the classroom. Needless to say the disruptive behavior would continue within an hour. Positive effective leadership was nonexistent.
Accounting Manager (Former Employee) – Pittsburgh, PA – March 4, 2020 Did not get the job I was hired to do. Turnover was high. Cannot speak to majority of the the issues that I had due to a clause in my severance package.
Educator (Former Employee) – Pitcairn, PA – February 3, 2020 Challenging work environment, burn out is high, little support from administration. Propel varies from building to building, but overall its sounds great in theory and in their “plans”, but they’re not able to carry out what they promise to students or staff.
Pros: Let me start by saying, the students are amazing! The parents can be challenging but they truly want what’s best for their children. Cons: If you aren’t LIKED by the superintendent and assistant superintendent your days with Propel are numbered. From the onset, I was deceived by this organization. I spent 4-months interviewing for a High School principal position. I was offered the position of high school principal only to find out I would be a K-8 principal. This was the first red flag of many. Unfortunately, I wasn’t well liked therefore I received very little of what I needed to effectively lead the school. Instead, I got the unhelpful support they thought I needed and none of which I requested. By Feb. I had lost both my APs – one by choice and the other by force. In March I was given a replacement AP that wasn’t a good fit. Work-life balance does NOT exist at Propel Charter Schools. On average, I worked 12 -14-hour days. Sadly, this is the norm for principals in this network. If you are considering Propel for a position as a school administrator, I would not recommend it.
Teacher (Former Employee) – Hazelwood, PA – September 18, 2019
The staff is wonderful and very supportive. However, the students there are very disrespectful, rude, and have major problems with authority. As a teacher walking into the classroom, they refuse to listen, talk over you, cuss you, and not a lot is done about it.
Propel is not ran like a school, it is ran like a business. They do not give the students a fighting chance for a bright future. They are more worried about the name ‘propel’ than anything. The work-life balance is awful. They expect way too much of your own time and when they don’t get it, you are looked down on for it. They create cliques and if you are not in the clique, consider yourself gone. They place you wherever they want, certified or not, and will watch you fail. There is lack of help and support from the administration. The only decent people around are your co-workers. I would never recommend this as a work environment nor for parents to send their kids there. No learning takes place. You constantly deal with behavior problems while the children who want to learn are put on the back burner. They change rules half way into the school year and fudge their data. At the rate they are going, they will never compare to peers across the state for PSSAs due to behavior issues and poor management. Not to mention, your lunch is 20 minutes so I hope you can eat fast and 9X out of 10, your planning time to taken away from you for meetings! Be prepared for meetings!!!
There was little time to be able to practice individualized teaching practices and spend time working with students. Leaders were only focused on enrollment and test scores, and did not focus on the important needs of the child. Work/Home life balance did not exist, as emails and texts were sent at 9:00 PM at night. Money is the number one focus, and for a school system, it was not what was expected.
Pros
Teaching children, benefits and compensation
Cons
Bad work/home life balance
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Right-wingers would much rather make it all a business where the more you pay, the better the education your kids get. There’d be poor quality charter schools for those who can’t afford the entry fee, but the best of everything would be reserved for the kids of the rich and powerful whose parents would use school vouchers to offset some of their tuition at private institutions.
Lawmakers might have to create real policies, a platform, solutions – to actually govern!
So GOP operatives spread hysterical lies about public schools. They call them “government schools” as if that meant some imposed bureaucracy of outsiders and not what it actually does – schools governed by elected members of the community.
Which brings us to the latest one – the new red scare that public school teachers are raising the next generation to hate Adam Smith and love Karl Marx.
Robert Bluey, vice president of publishing for the Heritage Foundation, asked her a question on The Daily Signal Podcast (a Heritage Foundation mouthpiece) about the growing popularity of socialism among young people.
And it’s true, according to a 2018 Gallup poll, Americans aged 18 to 29 are almost as positive about socialism (51%) as they are about capitalism (45%).
So on behalf of the right-wing think tank behind the critical race theory brouhaha, transphobic legislation, climate change denial and a host of other regressive causes, Bluey asked DeVos why young people aren’t as firmly championing capitalism as previous generations.
“I recall visiting a classroom not too long ago where one of the teachers was wearing a shirt that said “Find Your Truth,” suggesting that, of course, truth is a very fungible and mutable thing instead of focusing on the fact that there is objective truth and part of learning is actually pursuing that truth.”
This is a rather strange answer. It may be the case that there are absolute truths in the world, but economic theories certainly don’t qualify. In matters of opinion, isn’t it better to tell students the facts and let them think for themselves about their relative virtues?
Tell them capitalism is great. Tell them socialism is terrible. Screw critical thinking.
The Heritage Foundation, at least, liked her answer, using it as a template to fund a plethora of stories about public schools – not just leaving the matter up to students to decide – but actually bullying kids into championing communism.
In the text of article, Blair admits he was only “in education” for 4 years, but it seems he was not a full-time classroom teacher for most of that time. According to his Linked-In account, he was a French teacher for 9 months in a school in Portland, Oregon. Before that he was an Extracurricular Aide, an English Language Assistant and Language Immersion Counselor at various schools in the US and France.
His evidence of indoctrination reads like “Kids Say the Darndest Things – Republican Edition.”
For example, he says he asked an elementary school girl if she liked Winston Churchill, and she frowned calling Churchill racist.
That’s right. Whether teachers need to or not, they have to spend at least 45 minutes on it every November.
“We want to make sure that every year folks in Florida, but particularly our students, will learn about the evils of communism. The dictators that have led communist regimes and the hundreds of millions of individuals who suffered and continue to suffer under the weight of this discredited ideology,” DeSantis said, adding that “a lot of young people don’t really know that much” about the political ideology.
At first blush, this may sound like a good idea. More historical knowledge is a good thing, but it’s the context that makes this troubling.
Florida Republicans already have passed a battalion of laws telling educators what they CANNOT teach.
So you can’t teach about racial issues including the history of slavery if it makes any student “feel uncomfortable.” Math books are censored from depicting “prohibited topics.” You can’t talk about a wide range of human sexuality including LGBTQ people because of the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
But you’d better teach about how bad communism is! Or else!
Third, there’s the subtext. This sounds to me like an invitation to conflate communism with socialism (which are two different ideas with different histories) and to champion one ideology over another.
In each case, I encourage my students to think about the problems from the stories, the solutions offered in the narratives and to discuss the matter with classmates. We hold Socratic Seminars and write critical essays. For “The Giver,” students work in groups to create their own utopias – you’d be surprised how many are socialist, though there are also a number of capitalist republics, dictatorships and anarchies. Kids love anarchy.
And I admit it – I encourage my students to think for themselves. I try not to give them my answers – my truths.
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