On the one hand, we’re one of the first modern Democracies, a product of Enlightenment thinking and unabashed pluralism and cultural diversity.
On the other, we’ve built our entire society on a cast system that is the basis of our economics, politics and cultural mores.
We’re the land of Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, and Sandra Day O’Connor.
But we’re also the land of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis, Charles Lindberg, Bull Connor, and David Duke.
Tolerance and love are as American as apple pie. But so are racism, sexism, prejudice and anti-Semitism.
“It is not as though the United States is the land of opportunity, or a hypocritical racist state,” says sociologist John Skrentny. “It is one or both, depending on context.”
To which I reply, “Hell, yes, it is! Where have you been the last 241 years!?”
We base our salary scales on genitalia! You think we’re really so freaking advanced!?
The shade of your epidermis determines the likelihood of police arresting you, charging you, even killing you regardless of your having a weapon, whether you resist arrest or simply lay on the ground with your hands in the air.
Regardless of the evidence, if you’re convicted, the length and severity of the sentence are all partially determined by the amount of melanin in your skin. The cultural derivation of the name on your resume determines the likelihood of employers calling you back for an interview. In many places, your rights are legislated based on whom you love.
Our schools are segregated. Our taxes are levied most heavily on those with the least means to pay. Our prisons house more black people today than did slave plantations in the 1860s.
Yet a bunch of white dudes carrying Tiki torches shouting hate filled puns (“Jew will not replace us”? Seriously?) somehow doesn’t compute?
Come on.
This is America.
Racism and prejudice are not threats smuggled in past border security. They’ve always been here. At least since Europeans came offering trade and peace with one hand and guns and smallpox with the other.
The land of the free was stolen from the Native Americans. Our national wealth was built on the backs of slaves. Our laws and electoral system were built to empower one group at the expense of others.
Yet reformations in this process are rarely met with celebration. Instead of memorializing the end of slavery, we embrace the institution with fond remembrance.
Nor did prejudice and bigotry end when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, after Brown vs. Board, the Voting Rights Act, Freedom Rides, sit-ins or civil rights protests.
America has always been a place hostile to the under privileged, the second sex, religious dissenters, the brown skinned.
At most, we had become less confrontational in recent years, but we never really changed our core values, our social structures, who has power and who does not.
During my lifetime, people started to equate having a black President with the end of racism. Somehow they ignored the everyday reality for most black people.
They ignored the constant prejudice against the poor, the continued bigotry against LGBTs, the Islamophobia, the increase in hate crimes.
If there has been any change during the past eight months, it hasn’t been with the degree to which Americans are prejudiced. It’s the degree with which we’re willing to hide it.
Whereas before racists would claim to be colorblind, that their actions were completely devoid of racial bias, today they sigh and repeat the dusty slogans of Jim Crow Alabama or 1930s Berlin.
And somehow people are actually surprised about this.
It’s because too many of us have swallowed the lies about living in a post-racial society.
You thought we were beyond all that. It was a brave new world, morning in America, and we were finally treating everyone equally – unless you looked at what we were actually doing.
Mainly this is the reaction you get from white people. They rub their eyes and just can’t believe it.
You don’t see this too often from people of color, Muslims, LGBTs and some Jews. Why? Because they never had the luxury to ignore it.
That’s what we white folks have been doing since the beginning.
Whenever these issues come up, we have a knee jerk reaction to minimize it.
Things aren’t that bad. You’re just blowing it out of proportion.
But, no. I’m not.
That’s why you’re so damn shocked, son.
You haven’t been looking reality square in the face.
So when we’ve got undeniable video footage of angry white males (mostly) marching through Southern streets brandishing swastikas and assault rifles, it catches many white folks off guard.
They’re not prepared for it – because they haven’t been doing their homework.
We’ve been living in a bubble. Especially those living in major metropolitan areas.
That kind of thing never happens around here, right?
Of course it does!
Just because you live above the Mason Dixon Line doesn’t mean you’re safe.
You have a black friend, you like authentic Mexican food and you laugh while watching “Modern Family.”
But you haven’t opened your eyes to the reality outside your door.
You send your kids to private school or live in a mostly upper class white district. You have an exclusive gym membership that keeps out the riff-raff. You work in an office where that one token person of color makes you feel sophisticated and open-minded.
You’ve got to wake up.
You’ve got to educate yourself about race and class in America.
Because those people you saw in Charlottesville aren’t an anomaly.
They are an authentic part of this country, and if you don’t like it, you have to do something about it.
You can’t hide behind denial.
You have to take a stand, pick a side, and be counted.
Because one day soon, the torches will be outside your door.
You have to decide now – do you want to brandish or extinguish them?
The proposal released today applies only to the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests – those taken by students in grades 3-8. Keystone Exams taken by high school students are unaffected.
It would cut one of three reading sections and one of three math sections – two total. Wolf also wants to cut some questions from one of the science sections.
Such a move is estimated to eliminate 48 minutes from the math test, 45 minutes from the reading test and 22 minutes from the science test. However, judging from my own students, these times vary considerably depending on the individual taking the tests. I’ve had 8th grade students finish a PSSA section in as little as 5 minutes or as much as two hours.
Most schools give either a section a day or two in one day. Therefore, this proposal probably translates to 1 to 2 fewer days testing in most districts.
Um. Thanks?
Look I don’t want to seem ungrateful here, but these suggested modifications are little more than fiddling around the edges of a massive problem.
At best, this proposal will allow students to spend two more days a year learning. Assuming most districts don’t use that extra time for test prep, that IS a good thing.
The problem with standardized testing isn’t just the number of raw days it takes students to complete the tests. It is how the tests deform the entire year-long curriculum. Students don’t just learn anymore. They learn what’s on the test – and anything else is purely optional.
Regardless of the size of the assessments, they are still being used to sort and judge students, teachers and schools. Shortening their length does nothing to address the fundamental unfairness of the evaluations. Rich white kids still tend to have high scores and poor minority kids still tend to have low ones.
At best, they reveal structural funding disparities between poor and wealthy districts. At worst, the cultural bias inherent in the questions favor those from dominant, privileged ethnicities while punishing those who don’t fit the standard.
That’s what “standardized test” means after all – defining normal and punishing those who don’t fit the definition. Most questions don’t assess universals like the value of 2 and 2. They evaluate cultural and social norms required to understand the questions and easily find an answer that another “normal” student would choose. (Don’t believe me? Watch “Black Jeopardy” on Saturday Night Live.)
This is true whether the test takes one day or 100 days.
The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) contains provisions to circumvent them. States are supposed to be given leeway about testing. They may even be able to replace them with projects or other non-standardized assessments. THAT’S what Wolf and the Pennsylvania Department of Education should be exploring – not half measures.
To be fair, the state Department of Education is attempting reform based on the ESSA. This year, the department introduced Future Ready PA, a new way of using test scores and other measures to assess school success. To its credit, The Index does place additional emphasis on academic growth, evaluation of school climate, attendance, graduation rates, etc. However, for my money it still gives far too much importance to standardized testing and test prep.
Like reducing the size of the PSSAs, it’s a positive step but won’t do much to get us to our destination.
Neither measure will have much impact on the day-to-day operations of our public schools. Districts will still be pressured to emphasize test prep, test taking strategies, approaches to answering multiple choice questions, etc. Meanwhile, critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity will still be pushed to the side.
Moreover, since schools and teachers will be assessed as successful or not based largely on these test scores, districts will be under tremendous pressure to give countless practice tests throughout the year to gauge how well students are prepared for the PSSAs. The state will still be providing and encouraging the optional Classroom Diagnostics Tools (CDT) tests be taken several times in reading and math throughout the year. Trimming off two days from the PSSA will affect that not at all.
In addition, today’s proposal only applies to the PSSA. While that assessment is important, the Keystone Exams given to high school students are even more so. According to existing state law, passing the Keystones in Algebra I, Literature and Biology are required in order to qualify for a diploma. However, that condition has yet to go live. So far the legislature has continuously pushed back the date when passing scores become graduation requirements. The Governor and Department of Education should be proposing the elimination of this prerequisite before anything else. Other than education funding and perhaps charter school accountability, it is the most important education issue before Commonwealth lawmakers today.
If you want to talk about accountability, that’s where the majority of the issue belongs.
And primarily it’s out of Wolf’s hands. One can understand why he is proposing changes where he can and trying to do whatever good is possible given the political climate.
Shortening the PSSA tests would benefit our students. It is a step in a positive direction.
However, it is far from solving our many education problems.
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.
Isn’t it shocking that no one is willing to invest more money into the actual act of educating children?
Consider this: full-time employees making minimum wage earn between $15,000-$20,000 a year. (Some states have voluntarily raised the minimum wage above the federally mandated $7.25 to as much as $10 an hour.)
There are places in this country where going into debt earning a four year degree in education, serving an (often unpaid) internship in the classroom and agreeing to teach the next generation gets you a few notches above fry chefs and WalMart greeters.
This isn’t to disparage burger cooks or grocery clerks. I, too, love a crispy French fried potato and a sincere greeting. But which profession is more important to our future as a nation? The quality of our service industries or the education of every single child in the country – all our future doctors, lawyers, politicians and… well… EVERYTHING!
Average starting salary for teachers nationwide is only $37,000, according to NACE.
Compare that to other professions.
Computer programmers start at $65,000. Engineers start at $61,000. Accountants (mathematics and statistics majors) start at $54,000. Even philosophers and priests (philosophy and religious studies majors) start at $45,000.
Are they more important than teachers? Do they provide more value for society?
I humbly suggest that they do not.
Who taught the programmers how to program? Who taught the engineers and accountants how to add and subtract? Who taught the philosophers how to think logically? Who taught the priests how to write their sermons?
TEACHERS. That’s who.
Yet if we judge purely by starting salary, we certainly don’t value their services much.
They can’t buy a home or even rent an apartment in most metropolitan areas. They can’t afford to marry, raise children, or eke out a middle class existence.
What effect does this have on students?
Well, for one, it often leaves them with inexperienced or exhausted teachers.
Nationwide, 46 percent of educators quit before reaching the five year mark. And it’s worse in urban districts, where 20 percent quit every single year!
That translates to more students learning from educators who are, themselves, just learning how to teach. If we took pains to keep them in the profession, think of what a positive impact that would have on the quality of education the nation’s students receive – Teachers learning from experience and improving their practice every year instead of a continual flux of novices just trying to figure out the basics and survive!
But it’s not all intangibles. It costs bookoo bucks to constantly find and train new teachers – roughly $7.34 billion a year, to be exact. Imagine if we could invest that money into salaries instead.
This is exactly what they do in many other countries.
Many of these countries recruit the top graduates to become teachers. How? By offering sweeteners and incentives to become a life-long educator.
In Singapore and Finland, for example, they actually cover the cost of the college coursework needed to become a teacher. And when it comes to salary, they leave us in the dust. In South Korea, they pay educators an average of 250 percent more than we do!
For many people, education is a calling. You feel drawn toward the job because it holds meaning to you. But how many people ignore that calling because of simple economics? There are plenty of things you can do with your life; If you can’t earn a living doing one thing, you may opt for something else.
How many more excellent teachers would we have in this country if we prized and rewarded those practitioners we already have?
Imagine if we saw teachers as part of the solution! What effect would that have on teacher turnover?
Look no further than our foreign counterparts. In South Korea, turnover is only 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, it’s 3 percent.
It’s certainly worth a try.
As reforms go, this is one with more evidence behind it than 90 percent of the garbage that comes floating out of partisan think tanks.
Pay teachers more.
Starting salary should be at least $65,000. End pay after 30 years should be at least $150,000.
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