The Essential Selfishness of School Choice

November 28, 2016November 30, 2016 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Student Mobility, Teachers Betsy DeVos, children, education, Politics, public schools, pumpkin pie, selfishness, Students, teaching

Say your friend Sheila invites you over to her house.

Sheila has just made a fresh pumpkin pie.

She offers you a slice.

You politely refuse, but she insists. She hands you the knife so you can take as big a piece as you like.

You start to cut and then ask, “Does it matter where I cut from?”

Sheila says, “No. Take whatever you want.”

You don’t like crust, so you cut a perfect triangle piece from the middle of the pie.

Sheila’s face reddens.

This wasn’t exactly what she meant, but what is she going to do? You took your slice, and now the rest of the pie is ruined. No one else can take a whole piece. Your choice has limited everyone else’s.

That’s what school choice does to public education.

It privileges the choice of some and limits the choices of others.

Advocates say parents should be able to choose the school their children attend.

And parents today do have many choices. About 90% send their kids to traditional public schools. Others home school, pay for private schools or opt for charter or voucher schools.

The problem comes with these last two options. In both cases, tax money meant to help all children is siphoned off for just one child. In the case of vouchers, tax money goes to pay part of the tuition at a private or parochial school. In the case of charters, we’re diverting tax money to a school that’s public in name but privately run.

That means less money for traditional public schools and more money for privately run institutions. That’s really what school choice is – a way to further privatize public schools.

Why is that bad?

First, it increases the cost and reduces the services for everyone.

Public schools pool all the funding for a given community in one place. By doing so, they can reduce the cost and maximize the services provided. One building costs less than two. The same goes for one staff, one electric bill, one infrastructure, etc.

When you start adding additional layers of parallel schools, you increase the costs even if you somehow divided the children evenly between the two systems (which hardly ever happens). You buy less with the same money. That translates to fewer services for the same kids, larger class sizes, narrowed curriculum, etc. Why? So that parents could choose School A or School B. So that privatizers get a bigger slice of the pie – right from the middle.

Second, each type of school has different goals.

Public schools are designed to educate. Corporate schools are designed to profit. Those are their very reasons for existing. It’s built into their DNA and is reflected in the way they’re administrated.

By law, public schools are not for-profit. They pay for goods and services, but at the end of the day, they aren’t beholden to shareholders or investors. They don’t need to bring in more money than they spend. All they have to do is educate children, and if they somehow end up with extra money at the end of that process, that money is bound by law to be reinvested as savings for next year.

Charter and voucher schools are not so constrained. Their reason for being is not education – it is profit. Where they can, they will cut services for children and reduce quality so that they can increase the bottom line. Even a casual glance at the news will show you a plethora of charter and voucher school scandals where privateers have stolen millions of dollars of taxpayer money instead of educating. To return to the dessert metaphor, they don’t care what their slice does to everyone else – they only care about the size of the slice.

Third, charter and voucher schools aren’t as accountable as traditional public schools.

Each type of school is supported by tax money. Therefore, each school should be held accountable for spending that money wisely. But the rules are radically different for public schools vs. choice schools.

Public schools have elected school boards made up of taxpayers from the community. Choice schools often do not. They are run by appointed boards who are only accountable to investors. Public schools are required to be transparent. Their documentation, budgets and meetings must be available to the media and community for review. This is not true of privatized choice schools.

If taxpayers are unhappy with the way a traditional public school is being run, they have multiple options for changing it. With choice schools, their only option is to withdraw their child. And in the case of taxpayers who do not have children in the system at all, they have no recourse at all. This is fiscally irresponsible and amounts to taxation without representation. This alone should be enough to make any true conservative withdraw support – however ideology has trumped logic and reason. Not only do they ruin the pie, they get to do so in secret.

Fourth, school vouchers rarely cover the entire cost of attending private schools.

They end up subsidizing costs for rich and upper middle class students while keeping away the poor. As such they create a system of cultural and racial education segregation. They create tiers of schools – the public schools being only for the poor, cheaper private schools for the middle class and expensive private schools for the rich.

This is not the best way to educate children. It is not the best way to organize a society. It entrenches social and class differences and builds in entitlements and racism for the wealthy. Surely our public schools have become more segregated even without vouchers, but that is no reason to make the situation exponentially worse. The size and placement of one’s slice shouldn’t depend on the color of your skin or the size of your bank account.

Fifth, all schools are not equally successful.

Though the media would have you believe otherwise, traditional public schools do a much better job of educating children than charter or voucher schools. Some choice schools have better outcomes, but the majority do no better and often much worse than traditional public schools. Moreover, children who continually move from school-to-school regardless of its type almost always suffer academically.

So when parents engage in these choice schemes, they often end up hurting their own children. The chances of children benefiting from charter or voucher schools is minimal. You can cut a slice from the center of the pie, but it’s likely to fall apart before you get it on a plate.

So in summary, school choice is essentially selfish. Even in cases where kids do benefit from choice, they have weakened the chances of everyone else in the public school system. They have increased the expense and lowered the services of children at both types of school. They have allowed unscrupulous profiteers to make away with taxpayer money while taxpayers and fiscal watchdogs are blindfolded. And when students return to their traditional public school after having lost years of academic progress at a substandard privatized institution, it is up to the taxpayers to pay for remediation to get these kids back up to speed.

Choice advocates talk about children being trapped in failing schools, but they never examine what it is about them that is failing.

Almost all public schools that are struggling serve impoverished students. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the cause. Schools have difficulty educating the poorest children. Impoverished children have greater needs. We should be adding tutoring, counseling and mentor programs. We should be helping their parents find jobs, providing daycare, healthcare and giving these struggling people a helping hand to get them back on their feet.

But instead we’re abandoning them. Most impoverished schools serving poor children receive less funding than those serving middle class or wealthy populations. In other western countries, it’s just the opposite. They provide more funding and resources for poor students to meet their greater needs.

School choice ignores all of this. If I may momentarily switch metaphors, instead of fixing the leak in our public school system, advocates prescribe running for the lifeboats. We could all be sailing on a strong central cruise-liner able to meet the demands of a sometimes harsh and uncaring ocean together. Instead we’re told to get into often leaky escape craft that even under the best of circumstances aren’t as strong as the system we’re abandoning.

And the reason is profits.

Have you ever noticed that the overwhelming majority of school choice proponents are rich white people?

Many of them own charter school companies or otherwise invest in the field. They aren’t advocating a policy to help children learn. They’re enriching themselves at public expense. Sure they point their fingers at union teachers making a middle class wage. Meanwhile these choice advocates rake in public money to buy yachts, condos and jewelry.

Make no mistake – school choice is essentially about selfishness. At every level it’s about securing something for yourself at the expense of others. Advocates call that competition, but it’s really just grift.

Public education is essentially the opposite. It’s about ensuring that every child gets the best education possible. Yes, it’s not perfect, and there are things we could be doing to improve it. But it is inherently an altruistic endeavor coming from the best of what it means to be an American.

We’ve all got choices in life. The question is what kind of person do you want to be? A person who takes only for his or herself? Or someone who tries to find an option that helps everyone?

MythBuster: Do We Have a “Government-Run Education Monopoly”?

November 23, 2016 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Politics, President, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice education, Politics, Students, teaching, transparency

“There’s no failed policy more in need of change than our government-run education monopoly, and you know that’s exactly what it is.”

With these words, candidate Donald Trump unleashed his K-12 education policy at a campaign stop in September, two months before winning the general election.

In the speech, the former reality TV star and current President-elect vowed to spend $20 billion in federal tax dollars to encourage more charter and voucher schools nationwide.

It remains his most concrete executive policy offering to date. Yet it’s based on this characterization of public schools as a “government-run education monopoly.”

One wonders – is it true? Do we really have such a thing here in the U.S. or is it just propaganda to boost an unpopular education scheme?

The devil, it seems, is in the details.

The answer is both yes and no: Yes, public schools are government-run. No, they’re not a monopoly.

First, let’s consider “government-run.” Everything the government does from paving the roads, to delivering mail, to protecting us from invaders is “government-run.” The military is government-run. Would you rather a foreign power tell our soldiers what to do? Congress is government run. Would you rather big business come in and decide all our laws?

In that same spirit, yes, our public schools are indeed government run. But who else should run them? Russia!? The Mafia!? A media cabal?

In emphasizing the role of government in education, Trump appears to be trying to stoke the fires of anti-government sentiment. There is certainly a lot of that going around, deservedly so given the way the federal government has encroached on the states, the states have encroached on local government, etc.

However, public schools are not essentially federally-run schools, nor are they state-run schools. They are subject to federal and state mandates, but the major decisions about what happens in your neighborhood schools are made by your duly elected school board. They are not controlled by some nameless, faceless government bureaucracy. They’re controlled by you, your friends and neighbors – people you voted for and who are held accountable every few weeks at open meetings.

That, too, is government.

It’s not Big Brother. It’s Howdy Neighbor.

Let’s turn now to the “Monopoly” part.

A monopoly is the complete control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service. To put it in terms of the titular Parker Brothers board game, you have a monopoly when you own both Boardwalk and Park Place – you’re in control of what happens to all the dark blue properties. However, if you don’t have titles to BOTH, you don’t have a monopoly, and therefore can’t buy houses, hotels or charge double the normal rent.

Therefore, there is no education monopoly – no one has complete control of all the various kinds of schools. There are private schools, home schools, magnet schools, charter schools, even voucher schools. No one owns them all, no one tells them all what to do.

Yes, you could say that the overwhelming majority of them are public schools, but so what? That’s not a monopoly. There are far more personal computers out there than Macs. That doesn’t mean PCs have a monopoly on the field.

Once again, the term “monopoly” is meant to stir anti-government sentiment. We are meant to balk at the degree to which government – local government – is in control of our education system.
I’m sorry, but there is nothing objectionable about schools being controlled at the local level.

Are you upset by federal intrusions in school policy? Me, too.

Are you reeling about unfunded federal mandates? Me, too.

Are you angry about states sweeping in and stealing local control from impoverished inner city parents? Me, too.

But I’m just not one bit upset about being allowed a say in how my tax dollars are spent at my community school district. If you ask me, that how things SHOULD BE.

But Trump is proposing we change it. He’s proposing exactly the same kind of federal intrusion that drove many of us up the wall when it was done by President Barack Obama.

Obama used the Department of Education to bribe cash-strapped states into adopting Common Core. And now Trump wants to do the same thing with charters and voucher schools.

Excuse me, but it’s not the federal government’s job to dangle money in front of state legislatures with strings attached. The Department of Education is supposed to ensure all schools have adequate funding. It’s not supposed to tell us how we should be running our schools unless we’re breaking the law or violating students civil rights.

But what about parental rights? Shouldn’t parents be allowed to choose a school for their own children?

Heck no.

Hear me out. When you fall down the steps in your home alone, do you get to choose which governmental service comes to help you, or do you just call 9-1-1? When you need the police, do you get to choose officers from halfway across the state or make do with your local boys in blue? When your house catches on fire, do you shop around or call the nearest fire station?

It’s called a community for a reason. You’re a part of it, for better or for worse.

Our grandparents never thought they were so entitled they could pick and choose what governmental service should meet their needs. They joined the army, not Blackwater. They called the fire department where they volunteered. And they sent their kids to the local public school.

Yes, some public schools are better than others – which is just another way of saying that some are better funded. THAT is a problem we need to fix at the local, state and federal level. That’s something the President and Congress and our Governors and our state legislatures should actually be working on. But instead of meeting the real needs of their constituents, they’re too busy with all this choice nonsense.

Why? It’s a scam.

We’re talking Donald Trump here – founder of Trump University. He just settled out of court for $25 million for a fake business school that defrauded students out of hundreds of millions of dollars. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s a good scam.

Think about it.

Expanding charter and voucher schools, reduces accountability to taxpayers. These “choice” schools rarely are governed by elected school boards. They don’t have to abide by the same kinds of transparency standards as traditional public schools. They can spend our tax dollars in almost anyway they want behind closed doors, and there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, there have been a rash of high profile scandals where charter and voucher operators have defrauded the public out of millions of dollars.

Who wants to expand that? Criminals!

Not me. I’m a taxpayer. I want a full account of how my money is spent, and most voters are with me.

We didn’t just vote for President a few weeks ago. Many states held referendums on whether to expand charter schools or not. In every case, voters decided against it.

But does Trump care? No way. This proposed school choice policy is yet another example of the federal government ignoring the will of the people in favor of wealthy donors hoping to further enrich themselves at public expense. It opens the door for profiteers to keep stealing our money.

And they justify it by offering a false choice:

Hey parents, they say. Want to enroll your children in a school with little to no accountability, a school you may not be able to afford unless you spend some of your own money in addition to the tuition you get from the state, a school that can turn you down for whatever reason including race, religion or nationality, a school that may very well be no better and often much worse than a traditional public school?

But they spin it, offering slick commercials and preying on the ignorant and hopeless. That weakens the traditional public schools because it means a loss in revenues. Therefore, the public schools get worse, which is a reason for more parents to try the ‘choice’ schools, etc. It’s an endless cycle where students lose but investors in for-profit schools win.

Invariably, it leads to a further social stratification of schools. The rich go to the best schools, the middle class to the middling schools and the poor to the substandard ones. You think we’ve got segregated schools now, wait until Trump’s school choice policies! It’ll benefit the Nazis of the alt-right who want more white flight, but most kids will lose.

Such a policy does not represent the best of America. This country was founded on the principles of working together. We haven’t always lived up to it, but our ideals are ones of shared sacrifice, community and brotherhood. Trump’s education policy is about selfishness and greed.

That’s your real choice. Which will it be?

Standardizing Whiteness: the Essential Racism of Standardized Testing

October 26, 2016October 27, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, ESEA, Eugenics, Every Student Succeeds Act, Junk science, No Child Left Behind, Opt Out, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, standards, Teach for America, Teachers, Toxic Testing, Value Added Measures, VAM, White Privilege, Whiteness charter schools, common core, culture, education, normalization, Race, racism, standardization, standardized testing, Students, Teach for America, teacher shortage, teachers, teaching

“As a method of social production, as well as social reproduction, standardized testing has had serious cultural implications, not the least of which has been the eternal question of American identity. Consistent with notions of American identity, standardized testing, as an opposition to a cultural other, represents the normalization of whiteness, richness, and maleness.”
-Andrew Hartman

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
-Toni Morrison

We talk about standardized testing as if we don’t really understand what it is.

We say we want No child left behind!

And then we pass a law named after that very sentiment that ensures some students MUST be left behind.

We say we want Every student to succeed!

And then we pass a law named after that very sentiment that ensures every student will NOT succeed.

It would be absurd if not for the millions of children being forced to endure the harsh reality behind our pretty words.

It’s not these ideals that are the problem. It’s standardized testing.

Researchers, statisticians, and academics of every stripe have called for an end to high stakes testing in education policy. Parents, students and teachers have written letters, testified before congressional committees, protested in the streets, even refused to take or give the tests. All to deaf ears.

The federal government still requires all students in 3-8th grade and once in high school to take standardized tests.

But these assessments are graded on a curve. A certain amount of students are at the bottom, a certain amount are at the top, and most are clustered in the middle. This would be true if you were testing all geniuses or all people with traumatic brain injuries.

It doesn’t matter how smart your test takers are. There will always be this bell curve distribution. That’s how the tests are designed. So to talk about raising test scores is nonsensical. You can raise scores at school A or School B, but the total set of all test takers will always be the same. And some students will always fail.

But that isn’t even the worst part.

Standardization, itself, has certain consequences. We seem to have forgotten what the term even means. It’s defined as the act of evaluating someone or something by reference to a standard.

This socket wrench is a good socket wrench because it most closely resembles some ideal socket wrench. This McDonald’s Big Mac is good because it resembles the ideal McDonald’s Big Mac.

That’s what we’re doing to people – children in fact. We’re evaluating them based on their resemblance to some ideal definition of what a child should know and what a child should be.

But children are not socket wrenches nor are they Big Macs. It is not so easy to reduce them to their component parts and say this is good and that is bad.

When you try to abstract them to that point, it is impossible to remove various essential factors of their identity – race, gender, socio-economic status, etc. Nor would it be admirable if you could, because you would have abstracted to the point where the individual is no longer visible or valued. A child raised in poverty is simply not the same as a child from a privileged upbringing. A child from a culture that values cooperation is not the same as a child from a culture that values individual achievement. And that’s often a good thing.

But when you define a standard, an ideal, you make certain choices – you privilege some attributes and denigrate others. Since the people creating the tests are almost exclusively upper middle class white people, it should come as no surprise that that is the measure by which they assess success.

Is it any wonder then that poor kids and children of color don’t score as well on these tests? Is it any wonder that upper middle class white kids score so well?

We’ve known this for almost a century. Standardized tests do a poor job of assessing intelligence or knowledge. Those things are too complex and the tests are too simple. If you’re evaluating something equally simple like basic addition and subtraction, these tests can work alright. But if you’re trying to get at something complex like critical thinking or creativity, they end up doing little more than prizing the way some people think and not others. In short, they elevate the thought processes most associated with rich white kids.

It doesn’t mean poor and/or black children are any less intelligent. It just means rich white kids have the things for which the test designers are looking. Some of this is due to economic factors like greater access to private tutoring, books in the home, parents with more time to read to their kids, coming to school healthy and more focused. However, a large portion is due to the very act of taking tests that are created to reflect white upper class values and norms.

Think about it. Almost all the questions are field tested before they become a permanent part of the exam. Students are given a question that doesn’t count to their final score, but test makers tabulate how many kids get it right or wrong. So when most white kids answer a field tested question correctly and most black kids get it wrong, it still becomes a permanent test question because there are so few blacks relative to whites. Maybe it’s a question that references sun tan lotion, something with which darker skinned people don’t have as much experience. Imagine if a question referencing the hair care practices of black people became a test item. White people would have difficulty with it because they can’t easily relate. But the field testing process doesn’t allow that because it normalizes whiteness.

So black kids stumble while white kids have an easier time. We even have a name for it: the racial proficiency gap.

Many well-intentioned progressive voices have bemoaned this problem and wondered how to solve it. But it’s not the scores that are the problem. It’s the assessments. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do.

That’s right. You cannot have such obvious, historical problems perpetuated year-after-year, decade-after-decade, and still think they are mere unintended consequences.

This is how the system was designed to work. This is how it’s always been designed to work.

If you were going to create a racist and classist school system from scratch, what would you do? How would you go about it?

You’d need the lower classes to have SOME mediocre education so they are able to do the menial work that keeps society running. But only so much. Education as a social ladder is all well and good as propaganda. But you don’t want that ladder to lead out of the basement for more than a few.

You need something that will create a hierarchy with people of color at the bottom and poor whites only slightly better off so they can feel ennobled compared to their darker subordinates.

You need a biased sorting mechanism – something that allows you to put students into privileged and unprivileged categories but that will look to all the world like it was doing so fairly. It would have to appear like you were choosing students based on merit.

You’d need something like standardized test scores.

This is how these assessments have functioned from their very beginnings.

When Carl Brigham and Robert Yerkes, U.S. Army psychologists during WWI, designed the alpha and beta intelligence tests to determine which soldiers deserved to be officers, they were creating a pseudoscientific justification for white privilege. They used biased and unfair assessments to “prove” that rich white folks were best suited to give orders, and the rest of us belonged in the trenches.

Brigham and Yerkes were drawing upon eugenics, also called “racial hygiene” or “scientific racism.” This was a radical misreading of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. Eugenicists thought positive traits such as intelligence were widespread in Northwestern European races and almost nonexistent in others. Moreover, negative traits such as laziness and criminality were common in nonwhites and almost absent in those same Northwestern Europeans.

“We should not work primarily for the exclusion of intellectual defectives but rather for the classification of men in order that they may be properly placed,” wrote Yerkes.

THIS is the basis of standardized testing.

After the war, Brigham took the same principles to create the Scholastic Aptitude Test or S.A.T. – in principle the same exam still taken by 2.1 million teenagers every year to ensure they get into their chosen college.

The test was further refined by fellow eugenicist Lewis Terman, Professor of Education at Stanford University and originator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Together these three men created the foundations for the modern field of standardized testing. And make no mistake – its axiomatic principle is still that some races are genetically superior and others are inferior.

Or as Terman put it:

“A low level of intelligence is very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come… They constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”

After WWII, the eugenicist brand suffered from comparison to the Nazis who had been inspired by the findings of Brigham, Yerkes and Terman among others. In the post war years, we’ve discarded the overtly racist language but kept the assessments. Yet they still function the same way – sorting out blacks and the poor while prizing the rich and white.

This information is not secret. It is not kept under lock and key in some hidden military base somewhere. It’s accessible to anyone with Internet access or a library card.
We ignore it, because otherwise it would destabilize the current power structure – the corporate education policies that drive school practices in our country. We close our eyes and pretend it isn’t happening.

But it is.

“Standardized tests are the last form of legalized discrimination in the US,” said Education and Psychology Prof. Phil Harris.

With them you can give rich and middle class whites every advantage while withholding the same from students of color. And we don’t call it racism or classism because we pretend the whites earned their privileges by their test scores.

“We are using the testocracy as a proxy for privilege,” said civil rights theorist Lanni Guinier. Test scores are the excuse for prejudicial and unjust practices that would be impossible without them.

For instance, if you really wanted to help someone who’s struggling, you might offer extra help. But low test scores are used as the reason for withholding that help. We actually use these invalid scores as a means of demeaning and firing poor black kids’ teachers – as if anything they could do could completely overcome biased assessments and poverty. In this way, we not only remove those already in place to help these kids, we ensure few people will volunteer to take their place.

And when you have a teacher shortage in these poor urban neighborhoods, you can use that to justify further deprivations. Instead of teachers with 4-year education degrees, you can hire lightly trained Teach for America temps – college grads who’ve taken no coursework in education beyond a six weeks cram session.

And if the parents of these children complain, you can open charter schools to pull a quick bait and switch. Make them feel like they have a choice when really you’re pulling the rug out from under them. You provide them with a school with none of the safeguards of a traditional public institution – no elected school board, no transparency on how tax dollars are spent, little oversight, a right to refuse any student they wish, etc. And when the school goes belly up, these kids will be pushed back to their former traditional public school that has had to make due with less funding and now can provide even fewer services than it could before students jumped ship.

Using standardized test scores to judge not just students but whole schools, you can destabilize the entire system of public education. Charter schools and traditional public schools fight over ever-dwindling funding, one required to prove everything it does, the other able to do whatever it wants until it closes with little to no consequences for charter operators who take the money and run.

The US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs Board that we can’t have “separate but equal” schools because when they’re separate, they’re rarely equal. But somehow that doesn’t apply to charter schools.

Somehow we’ve stopped caring about integration – one of the central victories of the Civil Rights movement! This plays right into the hands of the corporate education reformers. They have done everything they can to increase segregation because it makes it so much easier to privilege rich white kids and crush poor black ones.

They don’t want an equal mix of black and white, rich and poor in our schools. That would make it much harder to select against one class of student while boosting another.

They need to keep the races and classes as separate as possible. Charter schools help in this regard, but they would be insufficient without the help from many white families who flee from these “other” darker complected kids. It’s just another way to send more funding to white kids and less to poor black kids. They say it’s based on local property taxes. That way they can pretend it’s all fair and above board. Rich folks have a right to be able to give their kids the best, and if poor folks can’t afford to do the same, who do you expect to pick up the tab?

Oh! And let’s not forget setting “high academic standards” while all this is going on. They throw out everything that’s been working and come up with a Common Core of knowledge that all kids need to learn. Don’t include black and brown history, culture or the arts – just the stuff the business community thinks is valuable because they know so much about what’s really important in life. And have the whole thing written up by non-educators and non-psychologists and don’t bother testing it out to make sure it works.

Your rich white kids will have no problem jumping through these hoops. But your poor black and brown kids will stumble and fall – just as planned.

This is what has become of our public schools.

This is corporate education reform.

This is our racist, classist school system.

And it’s all based on standardized testing – a perfectly legal system of normalizing rich whiteness.

What If Clinton and Trump Debated Education Policy?

October 10, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, AFT, Bernie Sanders, bloggers, Civil Rights, Common Core, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Dr. Jill Stein, Education, Election, Every Student Succeeds Act, Hillary Clinton, John King, Media, NAACP, Parents, President, privatization, School Choice, school segregation, School to Prison Pipeline, school vouchers, segregation, Sexism, Standardized Testing, Teachers, Unions, voting blogs, children, Debate, education, Politics, presidential debate, Students, teaching

The second Presidential debate was a bust for the millions of Americans who care about public schools.

Instead, we got Donald Trump mansplaining away his vagina-grabbing days. We got Hillary Clinton blaming Machiavellian duplicity on a movie about Abraham Lincoln. But not a word about K-12 education.

After all these debates in the primary and only one more debate left in the general, it seems a pattern is emerging. The media just doesn’t ask the kind of questions parents, teachers and students really care about. After all, there is no defined position staked out by each political party on schools and schooling. Both sides are kind of the same. Asking about it wouldn’t support the usual narratives about so-called “conservatives” and “liberals.”

So once again I appeal to the power of education bloggery to give you what I imagine a debate on this subject might sound like from Clinton and Trump.

Hold on to your pussies. Here goes…

Me: Thank you, Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump, for being here today to talk about education issues.

Clinton: You’re very welcome.

Trump: (sniff) Yes. I am very glad to be here. No one cares more about education than me. Okay?

Clinton: Well, hold on there, Donald. I’ve spent my entire career fighting for kids and families…

Trump: (sniff. sniff.) What about the kids and families of Benghazi?

Me: O-kay! Let’s begin. Shall we? This question is for both of you. How would you describe your education vision? Mr. Trump, you won the coin toss, so you go first.

Trump: Thank you, Steven. And let me just say I have lots of education vision. My education vision is just tremendous. I think public schools are the most important thing in our country. The taxes we pay for them are just incredibly high. No one pays more taxes for schools than we do. Not the French. Not the Chinese. Not the Russians. And as President I would make America great again by cutting taxes on schools. The business community doesn’t need this. It hurts competition and that hurts education. And there are too many taxes for you regular people out there, too. Unlike my opponent, she’s just terrible. Isn’t she, folks? I’d cut taxes while she would raise them.

Me: Your time is up, Mr. Trump.

Trump: …and I just want to say this one last thing, Steven. Hillary Clinton is a liar. And I would never lie like her. Ask Bernie Sanders about that.

Me: Thank you, Mr. Trump. Secretary Clinton? Same question.

Clinton: Thank you, Steven. I want to take this opportunity to thank you, personally, for being here. As a country, we don’t appreciate teachers enough. You are our number one resource. And a renewable resource. Right? You can clap here, People. Ha! Ha! But seriously my vision for education is a strong one. I’ve fought for children and families all my life as First lady of Arkansas, as First Lady of the United States, as a U.S. Senator and as Secretary of State. You might say that I am the most qualified candidate for President in U.S. history.

Me: Thank you. Madame Secretary. Though I wish you had answered the question.

Clinton: Oh I will answer the question. That’s why I have been endorsed by the largest teachers unions in the country…

Me: Next question. Secretary Clinton, you mention your experience. Some have criticized you for putting the needs of Wall Street ahead of working families. How would you prioritize the needs of students and parents over the corporations and edu-tech industry?

Clinton: As you said, Steven, I’ve been around a long time. I’ve seen a thing or two. Like you, I’ve raised a daughter and know how to navigate the pitfalls of our education system. And, honestly, I don’t think we have to have a conflict of interests between business and education.

Trump: Crazy Bernie says differently.

Clinton: …I see our public schools and public charter schools working together hand-in-hand to provide our children with a world class education. You know my husband and I have long supported…

Trump: You should be in jail.

Clinton: Donald, I think this is my time. Is this my time, Steven?

Me: Yes, Mr. Trump. Please stop interrupting. You’ll have a chance to respond.

Trump: Sorry, Steven. I’m just not used to a woman talking for so long. It’s exhausting.

Clinton: Anyway, I’ve always been a booster for higher academic standards. And as President I would do everything I can to make sure our students get the best education possible.

Me: Mr. Trump. Same question.

Trump: What was that question again, Steven? I kind of forgot while I was listening to that long speech she just gave. Talk. Talk. Talk. This isn’t the Bengazhi commission, Hillary, but I wish it was. Trey Gowdy…

Me: Mr. Trump. The question was “How would you prioritize the needs of students and parents over the corporations and edu-tech industry?”

Trump: Students and parents? They’re just wonderful. We need more students, but I guess that’s where parents come in. That’s why I had so many kids, and they’re all so successful. We didn’t stop with just one. We raised one, two, three… a whole bunch of them. And they’re just tremendous. So I would definitely make sure their needs were being met. Their needs are my needs and so, of course, I would make sure they were being met. You know, perhaps she should have spent more time meeting her husbands needs. Do you know what I mean?

Me: Mr. Trump, the question was about corporations servicing public schools.

Trump: (sniff.) In that case, I’d service corporations. I believe in business. I’ve been a businessman all my life. Very successful. No one knows success like Trump. And I’ve just got to say we all might have been better off in the ‘90s if she had serviced her husband more. I have to tell you.

Me: You are disgusting.

Trump: (shrugs) This debate is rigged.

Me: The next question is for you, Mr. Trump. Whenever you’ve spoken out on education issues, you’ve consistently criticized Common Core. As President, what would you do about Common Core and what role do you think is appropriate for a President in setting national education policy?

Trump: Common Core? I’m against it. It’s no secret. I think it’s been just terrible. It’s been a disaster. A national disaster. And one of the first things I’d do – well the first thing I’d do is throw you in jail…

Clinton: Donald, I…

Trump: But after that I’d get rid of Common Core. There would be no more Common Core. Our kids don’t need Fed Ed. Period. They need more choice. Parents should get to pick the schools they send their kids to. We should stand back and let the parents choose. That’s what I did for Ivanka and my other children and they turned out just fine. Don’t you think they turned out fine, folks? You all saw them on my hit TV shows ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ Those were great shows. Award-winning TV. Must See Television. Those were good days.

Me: Secretary Clinton. Same question.

Clinton: Thank you, Steven. I appreciate the quality of your questions. It’s clear that this debate has been put together by educators and not representatives of the media. Though I thoroughly support the field of journalism as a profession and a calling.

Trump: You never had a TV show.

Clinton: As to Common Core, I just want to ask Donald something.

Trump: (pops a Tic Tac) It’s surprising you’re going to give up your time to let me talk. I have to say. This is the first time you’ve let somebody else talk…

Clinton: How do you propose to get rid of Common Core when the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives that power back to the states?

Trump: (sniff.) E-S-S-A? Never heard of it. I’ll have to ask Mike Pence about it. But the President can do what he wants. You know the old saying, folks: it’s good to be the king.

Clinton: You talk a good game about states rights, Donald, but when you propose getting rid of Common Core, you’re proposing a federal policy that takes away states rights. Every state legislature has the power to change academic standards or retain…

Me: Secretary Clinton, that may be true, but the question was meant for you. What would YOU do about Common Core as President?

Clinton: Nothing. I would respect the law.

Trump: THAT’S a first!

Clinton: I would encourage states to adopt high academic standards and if those standards were the same as Common Core then so be it.

Me: How would you encourage them? By withholding federal grant money like the Obama administration did?

Clinton: I… I think the federal government has a strong role to play in the education of our children. But I would not violate the spirit of the ESSA, unlike Donald. He says he’s for states rights but he calls for a bigger federal power grab than anything my party has ever participated in.

Trump: (sniff.) Wrong.

Me: Okay. Next question. Since we’re talking about the federal role in education, let me ask you both what role you see for the U.S. Department of Education under your administration and whom would you nominate as Education Secretary? Secretary Clinton. You go first.

Clinton: Thank you, Steven. As I said, I believe in the Department of Education. I believe in the Secretary of Education. I believe in teachers. And if we’re going to give our students a leg up – all of our students – then we need to strengthen our public schools and public charter schools. That’s where the Department of Education comes in. Not to enforce education policy but to set the agenda. It helps the states get things done through competitive grants, research and data collection.

Me: So whom would you nominate to head the department?

Clinton: I would have to talk about that with my advisors…

Me: Give us the shortlist.

Clinton: Perhaps someone like John King.

Me: John King!?

Clinton: He’s already there and as my daddy said, if it ain’t broke do not fix it.

Me: Mr. Trump. Same question. What in your opinion is the federal role in national education policy?

Trump: Well, Steven, I don’t think there is one. You know the government that governs best governs least. I learned that from my good friend, Gary Busey. You know? Come to think of it, he’d make a pretty good Secretary of Education, but no. One of the first things I would do is completely disband the Department of Education. On day one. Gone.

Me: So what would happen to Pell Grants, for example, and all the federal money that helps buoy our public schools?

Trump: Do we need it? I was able to raise my family without any help from the federal government.

Clinton: Unless you count your nine bankruptcies, and using loopholes to avoid paying any federal income taxes for over a decade at least.

Trump: I did it all on my own. My father gave me a loan but I made it pay out for me so I could build the Trump empire.

Me: Didn’t you inherit most of your money?

Trump: I’m surprised at you, Steven. I expect something like that from her. She’s bleeding from her… whatever. But you should know better. You think Americans are stupid. And I just think they are strong enough to do it on their own. They don’t need the government to help. We don’t need the regulation, the taxation. Parents can use state money to choose and that will be good enough. Let the free market decide.

Me: Okay. Next question. Standardized testing has come under fire for assessing children’s economic situation more than what they’ve learned. Would you continue to mandate annual testing for all public schools? Mr. Trump?

Trump: I dunno. I’ll have to ask Pence on this one.

Me: You have to ask your vice president what to think on standardized testing!?

Trump: Yes. I mean no. I’m not really sure. Could you make this one multiple choice?

Me: Secretary Clinton? Same question.

Clinton: Standardized testing has been an important part of how we hold school districts accountable. While I understand the concern about over-testing, I think it is important we keep testing our children in grades 3-8 and once in high school. It helps us make sure our schools are meeting all our students’ needs and not violating their civil rights. Many of my former colleagues in the Senate expressed the same concern you mention, Steven, but changed their minds when they were approached by various civil rights organizations…

Me: Many prominent civil rights organizations such as Journey for Justice and various chapters of the NAACP still oppose testing. Why do you chose to side with the organizations who are beholden to the testing industry for their funding?

Clinton: I think… maybe we can give the situation more study and find solutions that would satisfy both the civil rights organizations and testing critics. But it is imperative that schools are held accountable…

Me: What about politicians? Shouldn’t they be held accountable for adequately funding our public schools? That’s why schools struggle. They serve poor populations and don’t have the resources to help their kids excel.

Clinton: This is something you’re obviously passionate about. I have always listened to teachers and with the NEA and AFT would strive to work together to find a solution that’s mutually beneficial to everyone.

Me: Okay. Last question. Since you brought up civil rights, Secretary Clinton, one of the biggest issues facing our schools today is segregation. Many modern schools are as segregated or more segregated by race and socio-economic status than they were before Brown vs. Board. What would you do about that?

Clinton: That is a problem. We must make sure that all our students needs are being met. We cannot let our schools revert to old bad habits. We cannot have schools for blacks and schools for whites. Black lives matter – even when they’re in school. As President, I would make sure everyone had the opportunity to go to the best schools possible. Students who don’t get what they need at school end up on the streets. They feed the school-to-prison pipeline. They end up lost, and many of them become super-predators.

Trump: (laughs)

Me: Isn’t that the term you used as First Lady to describe black youth when your husband’s mandatory sentencing policies expanded our prison population exponentially?

Clinton: Yes and I stand by that statement. We need to help minorities rise above their circumstances. We need to give them a helping hand. They deserve all the same amenities my daughter had, because all lives matter…. Oh shit.

Me: Mr. Trump? Your response?

Trump: Do I have to?

Me: Yes.

Trump: Okay then. Let me just say that segregation is a bad thing. It’s terrible. I’m not exactly sure why but that’s what I’m hearing. We need to make sure only the best students get to go to the best schools and the worst students get their own schools, schools that are right for them. That’s why we need school choice to weed out the worst kids and let them go to the schools that are right for them.

Me: Isn’t that just segregation?

Trump: N…No. That was a really stupid thing to say. Too many people are just stupid today. That’s why I’m going to make America great again. We’re going to have the best schools. You won’t even believe it. They’ll be just the best anyone has ever seen. Okay?

Me: But they’ll be separate schools for blacks and whites? Rich and poor?

Trump: I’d like to pass, Steven.

Me: Okay. That’s all the time we have for today. I’d like to thank both candidates for coming…

Trump: Steven, I just want to say one last thing.

Me: O-kay.

Trump: I… uh… I never grabbed anyone’s pussy. That was just locker room talk.

Clinton: Oh please! It’s just that kind of talk that empowers rapists…

Me: Thank you both for coming…

Trump: Your husband certainly understands this, Hillary. Men like us with such big hands, we’ve never had any complaints. You know? Here let me show you. (reaches into pants.)

Me: Cut their microphones please. Call security on, Mr. Trump. Thank you, everyone, for coming. We’ll see you at the polls in November. Just remember, you picked these two assholes. We could have had Bernie Sanders but we’re left with these two tools. This is your democracy at work. We should have let Jill Stein in here to class up the joint. Oh well. Goodnight and good luck.

If I Were Secretary of Education – A Classroom Teacher’s Fantasy

October 5, 2016 stevenmsinger Accountability, bloggers, Charter Schools, Chicago, Civil Rights, Common Core, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Data Mining, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Every Student Succeeds Act, Hillary Clinton, John King, Local Control, New York, Obama, Opt Out, Politics, President, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Teachers, Unions children, Data Mining, Department of Education, education, ESSA, Politics, Students, teachers, teaching, transparency

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I will never be Secretary of Education.

Frankly, I’m just not qualified.

I’m only a classroom teacher. The powers that be don’t trust someone like me with that kind of responsibility. It’s okay to give me a roomful of impressionable children everyday, but there’s no confidence I can make sound policy decisions. For that we need someone with experience in management – not schools, pedagogy, children or psychology.

The presiding incumbent in this prestigious position, John King, somehow overcame that handicap. He had taught for three whole years at a charter school, but the bulk of his experience is in administration – administrating a Boston charter school with high suspension and attrition rates. He also was New York State Education Commissioner, where he single-handedly dismantled the state system of education and sparked one of the largest parental revolts in the nation in the state’s opt out movement.

The previous Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, was much more qualified, having never taught a day in his life. Before getting Congressional approval, he was appointed to run a charter school and later was entrusted as CEO of Chicago City Schools where he likewise blundered his way to the top with policy decisions that devastated a great system of public education.

What do I have to offer compared to all that? I only have more than a decade’s worth of experience helping kids learn. I’m only one of 3% of teachers nationwide who are Nationally Board Certified. I’ve only earned a Masters degree in Education. I only help run a more than 56,000 member national education advocacy group, the Badass Teachers Association, and write a popular blog dedicated to education and civil rights.

I’ve never sunk a major metropolitan school. I’ve never been run out of a populous state chased by citizens armed with torches and pitchforks.

But let’s close our eyes and imagine that somehow through the magic of education bloggery I was whisked into office at the U.S. Department of Education.

What would a person like me do as Secretary?

1) Respect the Limits of the Job

Though George W. Bush and Barack Obama come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, these two Presidents did more to increase the powers of the Department of Education than any chief executives before them. They turned it into – as former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander puts it – a national school board with the Secretary was the national superintendent.

The department forced test and punishment policies on the states, cudgeled and bribed state officials to enact lousy Common Core Standards, and held federal grants hostage unless states accepted every corporate education reform scheme big business could think up.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a New Deal Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrat, but even I think these two administrations blatantly abused their power and overstepped their Constitutional authority.

So the first thing I would do is take a step back and follow the law. The recently enacted Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) sets explicit limits on federal power over education policy returning much of it to the states. As Education Secretary, I would respect the power of the states to control public education. It is the state’s job to set policy. It is the federal government’s job to provide support, encouragement and oversight.

Therefore, the role of the Department of Education is to ensure public schools are being properly funded, civil rights are not being violated and to be a repository for national data and research. I’d dedicate myself to that – not some corporate fueled power trip that both parties condemn except when they’re practicing it.

2) Push for More Federal Funding for Public Schools

Therefore, the first thing I would do is use the full power of the office to ensure the federal government is giving its utmost to help state public schools. I would use whatever grants were available to increase federal funding to the most impoverished schools. I would fully fund Title I. I would increase the federal share of Special Education – (Under Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) the federal government is supposed to fund 40% of the per pupil cost of all special education students but has never met this obligation. I would seek to rectify that if possible.) I would enact a national after school tutoring initiative. I would provide funding to hire additional teachers to reduce class size. And as far as is possible, I would forgive college students loan debt so they can begin their lives with a clean slate.

This is something that those who seek to disband the U.S. Department of Education never seem to understand. The federal government has an important role to play in our school systems. It’s not the unfounded power grab of the last few decades, but we need another robust player on the field to help the states achieve their goals and also to keep the states honest.

If we disbanded the Department of Education, as some conservatives from Reagan to Paul to Cruz to Trump suggest, what would happen to Pell Grants, for instance? What would happen to the bundles of federal money that boost our public schools? Who would make sure states are doing their jobs? Where could we go to find accurate data about how our schools are doing nationally and not just state-by-state?

If we got rid of the department, at best these jobs would fall back on other government agencies that haven’t the funding, staff or ability to accomplish them. More likely, it would result in the elimination of billions of education dollars that the states simply couldn’t (or wouldn’t) replace. Abuses against students on the grounds of civil rights, gender, special education, etc. would skyrocket with little to no recourse. And we would be in the dark about how well we were educating our nation’s children.

3) Encourage States to Enact Accountability Measures that Don’t Include Standardized Testing

Accountability has become a dirty word in many education circles because of the way the Bush and Obama administrations have perverted it to mean test and punish. It has become a boondoggle for the standardized testing industry, an excuse to close poorly funded and often urban public schools to be replaced by unaccountable charter schools. While this is a terrible misuse of federal power, states must be responsible for the education they provide their children. And contrary to popular belief, this can be accomplished without resorting to the usual corporate reform measures.

As Secretary, I would put an immediate stop to the era of test and punish at the federal level. As it stands, the ESSA allows states to determine what they will use to demonstrate their educational progress for students. This is a state decision, but I would encourage states not to use standardized testing. I would offer to help any state interested to find new ways to show accountability. For instance, districts could submit to a simple audit showing student-teacher ratios, per pupil funding, discipline data broken out by race, degree of segregation, richness of the curriculum, etc.

Let me be clear: it is up to states to make these decisions. As Secretary, I would have no power to force legislatures or departments of education to do any of this. However, I’m willing to bet that many states would be excited by these possibilities and jump at the opportunity. Helping them achieve this would be my job.

4) Stop Federal Funding to Charter Schools, Teach for America and Common Core

Speaking of encouragement, I would stop all federal help for corporate education reform policies. That means turning off the money faucet for programs that enrich corporations and big business at the expense of school children.

This means not one more federal dollar to help private companies open new charter schools. Teach for America would have to rely on its corporate donors, not the taxpayers. And the Common Core gravy train would come to a screeching halt. No more money to help states enact the standards, no more bags of cash for book publishers and test manufacturers.

If states that had enacted the Core wanted to keep it, fine. If not, fine. But they would be on their own.

(In a sad aside, opposition to Common Core is most virulent from conservatives, yet there are an awful lot of state legislatures completely in GOP control that could get rid of Common Core tomorrow but which have done – and continue to do – nothing about it. No matter who the next Education Secretary is, the fate of Common Core is in the hands of state legislatures across the country – not the President, not Congress and not the Education Secretary. There’s far too much rhetoric and not nearly enough action.)

5) Do Everything I Can to Increase Teacher Autonomy, Respect, Pay and Training

Finally, I would use my position as Education Secretary to boost the greatest resource we have to help students learn – teachers. I would speak out on the need for educators to have autonomy in the classroom so they are empowered to meet student needs. I would work to increase public perception and respect for the profession. We simply can’t afford teacher bashing, because when you disrespect educators, you reduce their power to help kids. I would boost teachers pay through matching state grants. If you want the best possible teachers, you have to pay for them. If you want to attract the best people to the field, you need to ensure they will have a reliable middle class income and not have to work a second job or use their own money to buy school supplies. I would invest federal funds in training programs so the newest crop of teachers are up to date with the latest pedagogy and techniques. I would encourage more people of color to enter the field. And I would partner with teachers unions to strengthen protections for teachers while educating the public on the meaning of due process and the reality that strong unions mean fewer bad teachers in the classroom.

Are there more things we need to do to help improve our national system of public education? Certainly.

We need to start integrating schools again and stop the constant push to segregate through charter schools and white flight. We need to ensure every student receives adequate, equitable, sustainable funding. We need to change charter school laws so that they can’t cherry pick students and are as transparent and accountable as traditional public schools. We need to stop closing struggling schools and address root causes. We need to stop state takeovers except under the most dire of circumstances and set limits on how long states can stay in control. And we need to pass strong student privacy laws – even updating the Family Education Privacy Act (FERPA) to protect our children from predatory ed-tech companies that constantly data mine students and sell millions of data points on our children to the highest bidder.

There are a whole host of things needing done. However, most of these things go beyond the powers of the Department of Education and its cabinet level Secretary. They can only be addressed by the President, Congress, state legislatures and/or the court system. The Education Department can help steer that agenda, it can be an ally to real positive change, but it can’t go it alone.

Unfortunately, no matter who wins the Presidency in November – Clinton or Trump – neither seems likely to nominate an Education Secretary who would do any of the things I’ve outlined.

For all his talk of reducing the size of the government, Trump proposes increasing the federal footprint with school choice initiatives turning the Department of Education into a wheelbarrow marked “free money” for big business and parochial schools while forcing states to accept his school policies. Meanwhile, Clinton is likely to continue the course set by Bush and Obama of embracing every corporate school reform package from which Wall Street benefits.

It’s a crazy time full of crazy candidates and crazy solutions, but of this we can be sure – no one is crazy enough to let a teacher make decisions about public education policy.

Racism Never Ended – It Just Keeps Evolving

September 17, 2016September 17, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Hate Crimes, Police, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Voter ID, voter suppression, White Allies, White Privilege #blacklivesmatter, #icantbreathe, charter schools, Civil Rights, civil war, Corporate Education Reform, education, lynching, Mass Incarceration, Politics, prejudice, Prisons, public schools, racism, school funding, segregation, slavery, standardized testing, Voter ID, voter supression, white privilege

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“One of our founding principles as a nation [is] that Black lives and Black bodies don’t matter; you see that in all our headlines today. This original sin lingers on, that’s why we got to call it sin… Slavery never ended, it just evolved. Mass incarceration is the current evolution of slavery.”
–Jim Wallis

“Even the most casual student of our country’s legal system should know that racism hasn’t existed since 1964 when we passed the Civil Rights Act. So obviously there’s no possible way for my statement to be considered racist if racism hasn’t existed for fifty years! I mean come on, racism? It’s 2015 people, racism is over.”

–Antonin Scalia

When does brutality end – when it stops being practiced or when its effects stop being felt?

Neither condition has been met in the United States today. Black people still suffer under state-sanctioned barbarism just as the echoes of cruelty from years past continue to ring in our ears.

People of color – whether they be black, Latino, Hispanic, etc. – experience a much different reality than whites. They live under the constant threat of violence without justice. Their rights are continually being re-evaluated. They are subject to systems that wait for them to step out of line in even the most innocuous ways and then pounce.

And the white majority goes around blind to these perceptions while repeating the fairy tale that all wrongdoings were only in the past.

But it’s not in the past. Our history, written in blood, has never been allowed to dry on our forgotten chronicles of yesterday. When white eyes examine the facts, they often see a series of unrelated dots which they cannot – or will not – logically connect.

The Civil War is over, they say.

No. It’s not.

Slavery is over, they say.

No. It’s not.

Racism is over, they say.

No. It’s not.

We still are engaged in the struggle for basic human dignity. And the only way to even begin on that path is to recognize the truth staring us in the face.

Nothing has ended. It has only evolved.

THE CIVIL WAR

When did the American Civil War end?

This may seem a strange question to ask.

But when a country goes to war with itself, it may be difficult to discern when that conflict actually comes to completion.

History gives us many important dates to consider.

On April 9, 1865, commander of the Confederate armies General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia. But there were still sizable Confederate troops left standing.

In fact, the bloodshed was far from over. President Abraham Lincoln was murdered a mere 5 days later by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer. Andrew Johnson was sworn in as President on April 15, the next morning.

It wasn’t until April 26, that General Joseph E. Johnson surrendered nearly 90,000 Tennessee soldiers – the largest of a series of subsequent capitulations.

President Johnson declared the insurrection to be over on May 9. However, the last Confederate general didn’t surrender until June 23.

Which date shall we choose? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The point is that the conflict clearly came to an end.

Clearly the Confederacy was defeated by the Union.

Wasn’t it?

The problem is how to tell.

The Southern states were brought back into the union. But the overwhelming reason behind their secession has not been settled.

Today partisans and talking heads will argue that slavery was but one of many reasons behind the split. But during the 1860s, there was no such confusion.

Four of the Southern states explicitly gave slavery as the impetus for the break.

But Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, removed all doubt when he said:

“The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions–African slavery as it exists among us–the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.

[…] The general opinion of the men of that day
[Revolutionary Period] was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution [slavery] would be evanescent and pass away.

[…] Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

So if the war was fought over the issue of slavery and the subjugation of black people, its end can be traced to the date at which slavery ended and black people were treated as equals with whites.

That day has not yet come.

Outright slavery came to an eventual end, but – as we shall see – it was replaced with another institution. Moreover, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, we were left with Jim Crow laws cementing white supremacy. Most newly “freed” blacks lived in squalid conditions with few rights, little pay and education. Their situation was only slightly different in fact from their state under slavery. These laws had to be struck down by the collective actions of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Only then were black people truly permitted to vote en mass. Only then were they permitted in the same public spaces and offered some actionable protections under the law. But social and economic change still lags behind.

Today, more than 150 years since the end of the war’s military conflicts, we’re left to ponder: have things really changed so much?

Certainly there are cosmetic differences. There are no open air slave markets, no rolling cotton plantations staffed by bare backed, lash marked, kidnapped Africans. But have black people really been put on an equal footing with whites? Do they enjoy the same freedoms and privileges? Are they truly free from bondage and oppression?

If we look with open eyes, the answer is no.

SLAVERY

Today no one is legally allowed to own another person. You can’t purchase human beings. You can’t deprive them of their liberty and rights. You can’t use them as a source of revenue for your own benefit.

At least, that’s what the law says. But it happens every day.

What is the modern prison industry if not a new form of slavery? No matter how you look at it, we lock up a higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world. The US represents 5% of the world’s population but has 25% of the world’s prisoners. And the majority of those inmates have brown skin.

Whether federal, state, or privately run, the result is a massive increase in incarceration for people of color. In fact, more black people are in prison today than were in bondage in 1865. That’s a higher percentage of the black population than South Africa locked up at the height of apartheid. Today one in three black males is likely to spend some time incarcerated. That’s not insignificant.

Technically no one owns these people, but they are deprived of their freedom. They are kept in prison and unable to leave. In lockup, they are forced to work and the profit from that cheap labor goes to the prison industry. Moreover, state and federal governments often farm out these prison services to private industry which then profits off that incarceration. In many cases, the government has a contract with these corporations to fill X number of beds or else be penalized with Y dollars. So the incentive is to provide a continual stream of persons bound to labor.

This looks a lot like slavery. It is a kind of plantation where big business is paid to keep people in chains.

However, one can anticipate the following objection: Slaves were born into their servitude. Prisoners are not. They are thrown behind bars because they freely broke the law.

This does represent a difference. But is it more than cosmetic?

People of color – especially black males – commit crimes at about the same rate as white people but are imprisoned nearly six times the rate of whites. They also get much harsher sentences than whites for the same crimes. They are often imprisoned for nonviolent drug violations. And once in the system, it’s hard to get out. To survive in prison, it is often necessary to become a criminal even if you weren’t much of one when you entered.

Even if you manage to get out, you now are a second-class citizen deprived of many of the rights and privileges of your neighbors. Spend any time in the system and you’ll increasingly be deprived of your right to vote and may find it difficult to achieve gainful employment. The chances of going back inside for someone who has already been there are huge.

That is not slavery. But it’s not far from it.

As Michelle Alexander writes in her landmark book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”

THE EVOLUTION OF RACISM

Even for those people of color who have never been incarcerated, there is the constant burden of living in a racist society.

It’s not so much that white individuals consciously practice bigotry and hate in their daily lives. It’s the systematic abuse that’s built into the very fabric of our governments and communities. No one has to decide to be racist. They just go along with the status quo without seeing how that status quo puts black people at risk.

And it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize how the realities of today grew from the prejudices of the past.

LYNCHING

Before the 1960s, it was common for black people – especially men – to be brutalized and murdered with little to no provocation. A look, a word, even the suspicion of violating unspoken social codes could earn a death sentence. Nor was the accused even given a chance to defend himself or explain. That generally doesn’t happen today. Southern trees no longer bare such ‘strange fruit.’

But the same cannot be said for our inner city streets, playgrounds and churches.

It doesn’t take much beyond suspicion of wrongdoing, a suspicion that only requires the sight of black skin to justify deadly force. People of color still are publicly executed with little to no provocation. Black people have been slaughtered in the last few years for the following offenses: buying Skittles and iced tea, driving with a broken tail light, being suspected of selling loose cigarettes, selling CDs in a parking lot, being scared and running the other way or even just attending a house of worship.

Instead of a white robe, a disturbing number of their executioners wear a badge and police blues. Many of these hits were conducted by the very law enforcement officers that are charged with the duty to protect and serve. And when these incidents come before a grand jury, they rarely go on to criminal court. In the eyes of the law, an unarmed black person killed by police rarely inspires any suspicion of wrongdoing on the officer’s part. To the courts, it’s not even conceivable that a crime may have been committed.

As Slate’s Chief Political Correspondent Jamelle Bouie put it:

“Our courts and juries aren’t impartial arbiters — they exist inside society, not outside of it — and they can only provide as much justice as society is willing to give.”

This phenomenon isn’t the same as the lynchings of old – but it’s awfully similar. In both cases, there is little provocation, no quarter given and no justice afterwards. In fact, the modern variety may be worse. US Police killed more black citizens in 2015 than were lynched at the height of segregation.

SEGREGATION

At first glance, one might assume segregation to be a thing of the past. There are no more separate lunch counters, separate bathrooms, separate schools, etc.

Brown vs. Board of Education made it illegal for public schools to be “separate but equal” because if they were separate, they were rarely equal.

Certainly progress was made in this regard during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. But as time has gone on, integrated schools just haven’t been a priority – even for the Obama Administration.

When you look at public schools today what you see is increasing segregation. Many districts are as segregated or worse than they were before the 1950s. So-called school choice initiatives have only made it worse with charter and voucher schools springing up that cater to one race at the expense of another. Cadillac charters open in otherwise economically diverse neighborhoods swooping in to provide white flight. Big corporations start cut-rate charters with empty promises for black kids while bleaching the student body at the neighborhood’s traditional public school.

But school choice isn’t the only problem. Economics plays a factor, too. Public schools often are funded based on local property taxes, so poor kids get much fewer resources for their schools than rich kids. And since most black students are poor, this provides a stealthy way to funnel more money and resources to the white kids than the black ones.

We don’t call it segregation because it doesn’t just affect minority children. It affects poor whites, too. Everyone agrees there’s a problem, but policymakers only propose measures that make it worse. Instead of fixing underlying inequalities, we punish under-resourced schools for the very academic problems they don’t have the resources to successfully eliminate. Instead of providing more and better equipped teachers, we hire lightly trained temps through Teach for America thereby reducing both the quality of education and the cost. Meanwhile private corporations line-up to start testing corporations, test prep publishers and for-profit charter schools at the expense of black and brown kids.

None of it would be possible without segregation. Our schools today are at least as separate and unequal as they’ve ever been. And no one in power cares.

VOTING RIGHTS

Perhaps the only progress we’ve made is in black people’s suffrage. At the time of the Civil War even in the North, blacks couldn’t cast a ballot or their vote was worth significantly less than that of white people. At least today people of color get the same say in the political arena as anyone else.

Or do they?

Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, a plethora of states in both the North and the South have passed laws to make it harder for people of color to vote.

Voter ID laws have sprung up across the country requiring citizens to present photo identification at the polls. However, just any picture ID won’t do. These laws require exactly the types of identification black people are least likely to have. In addition, states pass restrictions on early voting making it difficult for black churches to help the majority of their congregations who don’t own cars to physically get to a ballot box. Likewise, polling places in black areas of town are closed forcing minorities to endure long lines to vote while people from white areas of town just waltz right in.

It’s not an outright ban on black voting. But it represents continued hurdles just as the Jim Crow laws of old required literacy tests, poll taxes and other forms of intimidation.

CONCLUSIONS

When we look closely at our society and how it treats blacks vs. whites, it becomes clear that something is terribly wrong.

There is deep inequality, deep inequity, deep assumptions about the relative worth of various peoples. In fact, our society creates and perpetuated these injustices. It’s baked into the system, taught to us in our unspoken assumptions, our prescriptions of right and wrong, propriety and norms.

If we step back and look at it from the long view, we can see exactly where this came from. It’s not new. It didn’t fall from the sky like a mysterious alien artifact.

The racism of today is merely the continuation of the racism of yesterday. We pride ourselves that we’re better than our forbears, but it’s only a slight matter of degree.

Black people still are subject to a form of slavery in our system of mass incarceration. They are lynched – often by law enforcement – with little to no consequences for their killers. They go to increasingly segregated schools. And they often endure severe obstacles in order to vote.

Therefore, the battles of the 1860s and 1960s have never fully been decided. The Civil War is not yet over. Slavery continues in a new form. And racism is entrenched in our nation, communities and people.

But if we recognize that, we’ve taken the first step to building a new and better world.

What’s More Important – Fighting School Segregation or Protecting Charter School Profits?

September 1, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Budget, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Education, Journalism, Media, NAACP, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Teachers #blacklivesmatter, #StandUpForPublicSchools, Barack Obama, charter schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education Reform, Democrats, DFER, education, Education Post, education reform, neoliberal, Peter Cunningham, Politics, public schools, racism, Republicans, School Choice, school funding, segregation, teachers

No one wants school segregation.

At least, no one champions it publicly.

As a matter of policy, it would be political suicide to say we need to divide up our school children by race and socio-economics.

But when you look at our public school system, this is exactly what you see. After the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement, we’ve let our schools fall back into old habits that shouldn’t be acceptable in the post-Jim Crow era.

When we elected Barack Obama, our first President of color, many observers thought he’d address the issue. Instead we got continued silence from the Oval Office coupled with an education policy that frankly made matters worse.

So one wonders if people still care.

Is educational apartheid really acceptable in this day and age? Is it still important to fight against school segregation?

Peter Cunningham isn’t so sure.

The former assistant Secretary of Education under Obama and prominent Democrat worries that fighting segregation may hurt an initiative he holds even more dear – charter schools.

Cunningham is executive director of the Education Post, a well-funded charter school public relations firm that packages its advertisements, propaganda and apologias as journalism.

Everywhere you look Democrats and Republicans are engaged in promoting various school choice schemes at the expense of the traditional public school system. Taxpayer money is funneled to private or religious schools, on the one hand, or privatized (and often for-profit) charter schools on the other.

One of the most heated debates about these schemes is whether dividing students up in this way – especially between privately run charter schools – makes them more segregated by race and socio-economic status.

Put simply – does it make segregation worse?

Civil Rights organizations like the NAACP and Black Lives Matter say it does. And there’s plenty of research to back them up.

But until recently, charter school apologists have contested these findings.

Cunningham breaks this mold by tacitly admitting that charter schools DO, in fact, increase segregation, but he questions whether that matters.

He says:

“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.”

The schools he’s referring to are charter schools like the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) where mostly minority students are selected, but only those with the best grades and hardest work ethic. The children who are more difficult to teach are booted back to traditional public schools.

It’s a highly controversial model.

KIPP is famous for two things: draconian discipline and high attrition rates. Even those kids who do well there often don’t go on to graduate from college. Two thirds of KIPP students who passed the 8^th grade still haven’t achieved a bachelor’s degree 10 years later.

Moreover, its methods aren’t reproducible elsewhere. The one time KIPP tried to take over an existing public school district and apply its approach without skimming the best and brightest off the top, it failed miserably – so much so that KIPP isn’t in the school turnaround business anymore.

These are the “lots and lots of schools” Cunningham is worried about disturbing if we tackle school segregation.

He first voiced this concern at a meeting with Democrats for Education Reform – a well-funded neoliberal organization bent on spreading school privatization. Even at such a gathering of like minds, some people might be embarrassed for saying such a thing. Is integration worth it? It sounds like something you’d expect to come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, not a supposedly prominent Democrat.

But Cunningham isn’t backing away from his remarks. He’s doubling down on them.

He even wrote an article published in US News and World Report called “Is Integration Necessary?”

Here’s the issue.

Segregation is bad.

But charter schools increase segregation.

So the obvious conclusion is that charter schools are bad.

BUT WE CAN’T DO THAT!

It would forever crash the gravy train that transforms public school budgets into private profits. It would forever kill the goose that turns Johnny’s school money into fancy trips, expense accounts and yachts for people like Cunningham.

This industry pays his salary. Of course he chooses it over the damage done by school segregation.

But the rest of us aren’t burdened by his bias.

His claims go counter to the entire history of the Civil Rights movement, the more than hundred year struggle for people of color to be treated equitably. That’s hard to ignore.

People didn’t march in the streets and submit to violent recriminations to gain something that just isn’t necessary. They weren’t sprayed by hoses and attacked by police dogs so they could gain an advantage for their children that isn’t essential to their rights. They weren’t beaten and murdered for an amenity at which their posterity should gaze with indifference and shrug.

We used to understand this. We used to know that allowing all the black kids to go to one school and all the white kids to go to another would also allow all the money to go to the white kids and the crumbs to fall to the black kids.

We knew it because that’s what happened. Before the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education, it’s a matter of historical fact. And today it’s an empirical one. As our schools have been allowed to fall back into segregation, resources have been allocated in increasingly unfair ways.

We have rich schools and poor schools. We have predominantly black schools and predominantly white schools. Where do you think the money goes?

But somehow Cunningham thinks charter schools will magically fix this problem.

Charters are so powerful they will somehow equalize school funding. Or maybe they’re so amazing they’ll make funding disparities irrelevant.

For believers, charter pedagogy wields just that kind of sorcery. Hocus Pocus and it won’t matter that black kids don’t have the books or extra-curriculars or arts and humanities or lower class sizes.

Unfortunately for Cunningham, the effects of school segregation have been studied for decades.

“Today, we know integration has a positive effect on almost every aspect of schooling that matters, and segregation the inverse,” says Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law.

“We also know integration matters for all students. Both minorities and whites are disadvantaged by attending racially isolated schools, although in somewhat different ways.”

Minorities are harmed academically by being in segregated schools. Whites are harmed socially.

At predominantly minority schools, less money means less educational opportunities and less ability to maximize the opportunities that do exist. Likewise, at predominantly white schools, less exposure to minorities tends to make students more insular, xenophobic and, well, racist. If you don’t want little Billy and Sally to maybe one day become closeted Klan members, you may need to give them the opportunity to make some black friends. At very least they need to see black and brown people as people – not media stereotypes.

Even Richard D. Kahlenberg, a proponent of some types of charter schools and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, thinks integration is vital to a successful school system.

“To my mind, it’s hugely significant,” says Kahlenberg, who has studied the impact of school segregation.

“If you think about the two fundamental purposes of public education, it’s to promote social mobility so that a child, no matter her circumstances, can, through a good education, go where her God-given talents would take her. The second purpose is to strengthen our democracy by creating intelligent and open-minded citizens, and related to that, to build social cohesion.

Because we’re a nation where people come from all corners of the world, it’s important that the public schools be a place where children learn what it means to be an American, and learn the values of a democracy, one of which is that we’re all social equals. Segregation by race and by socioeconomic status significantly undercuts both of those goals.”

We used to know that public education wasn’t just about providing what’s best for one student. It was about providing the best for all students.

Public schools build the society of tomorrow. What kind of future are we trying to create? One where everyone looks out just for themselves or one where we succeed together as a single country, a unified people?

A system where everyone pays their own way through school and gets the best education they can afford works great for the rich. But it leaves the masses of humanity behind. It entrenches class and racial divides. In short, it’s not the kind of world where the majority of people would want their children to grow up.

More than half of public school students today live in poverty. Imagine if we could tap into that ever-expanding pool of humanity. How many more scientific breakthroughs, how many works of art, how much prosperity could we engender for everyone!?

That is the goal of integration – a better world.

But people like Cunningham only can see how it cuts into their individual bank accounts.

So is it important to fight school segregation?

That we’re even seriously asking the question tells more about the kind of society we live in today than anything else.

We Are All Chicago Schools – More Layoffs, Less Help for Other People’s Kids

August 8, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Election, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Politics, Poverty, President, privatization, Racism, Rahm, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Teachers, union busting, Unions #blacklivesmatter, #StandUpForPublicSchools, ALEC, charter schools, Chicago Schools, Chicago Teachers, Civil Rights, Corporate Education Reform, Democrats, disaster capitalism, education, Election, election 2016, Hillary Clinton, illinois, Layoffs, neoliberal, Politics, public schools, racism, Rahm, rahm emanuel, Republicans, school closings, school funding, teachers, unions

“Fuck those kids.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel couldn’t have been clearer if he’d said the above.

Chicago Schools Chief Executive Forrest Claypool couldn’t have made his priorities clearer if he’d given Chicago’s parents the bird and told them to “Kiss my ass.”

The Chicago Board of Education – made up of members all of whom are appointed by the mayor – decided to layoff 1,000 teachers and staff at the city’s public schools just a month before opening day. Sure, some may keep their jobs through reassignment, but hundreds will be unemployed.

This after a recent history of closing more than 80 schools and slashing thousands of jobs. Just last February, the district laid off 62 employees, including 17 teachers. In January, it laid off 227 staff members.

This begs several questions: How many teachers and support staff can Chicago Public Schools afford to lose? What exactly is this doing to its students? How is it affecting their future prospects to be taught by a skeleton crew?

The city’s leaders don’t give a shit.

And why should they? These aren’t their kids!

Emanuel’s children attend University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools, a private institution. Claypool’s kids go to Francis W. Parker, a private school in Lincoln Park. Even Gov. Bruce Rauner’s six kids don’t go to public school. They’re all grown.

So this doesn’t affect them. Nor does it affect any charter school kids. Not a single one of these 1,000 cuts will occur at a city charter school.

It’s just the traditional public schools, those schools where approximately 85% of students are Latino or African-American. Just those schools where 87% of the children come from low-income homes. Just those schools where 12% of kids are reported to have limited English proficiency.

Yeah. Fuck those kids.

And the worst part is that it’s not necessary. Chicago doesn’t have to continue to abandon its neediest children.

When you’re in a family, you make sacrifices for your kids. If funds are tight, you make cuts elsewhere or maybe you even take another job. Anything to make sure you’re providing your children with the best.

But Chicago’s leaders aren’t interested in doing any of that for these kids because they just don’t care.

Otherwise they could find the money. The teachers union suggests declaring a TIF surplus and reinstating a corporate head tax. The city isn’t exactly a wasteland. Wealthy developers are looking to build yet Emanuel has no intention of inconveniencing them by making them pay a fair share of taxes. Instead, the full burden falls on the city’s working families. And he calls himself a Democrat!

There’s always enough money for projects leaders care about. For instance, there was no problem finding $250,000 to pay a law firm where Claypool and his handpicked general counsel, Ron Marmer, both formerly worked. Marmer still has financial ties to the firm! So cut a check to Jenner & Block LLP? YES! Ensure kids have all the teachers they need? HECK NO!

Strangely there’s $27 million hiding in the seat cushions to open a new charter school for the University of Chicago. The Woodlawn Campus of the University of Chicago Charter School will be part of the development around the newly-planned Obama Library. It’s a fitting symbol of the President’s legacy – a brand new privatized educational facility while a few blocks away traditional public schools molder in ruin.

Meanwhile, Gov. Rauner holds the state education budget hostage. Illinois lawmakers could only agree on a 6-month state budget in June. Republicans expressed concern about the state being responsible for bailing out Chicago Schools. It’s not our problem, they seem to think. Well of course not. These aren’t your kids.

It’s the same swindle we see throughout the country. Refuse to pay for public schools – especially the schools serving poor brown kids, and then shrug. “Look at the impasse,” they shout, hoping voters are too stupid to realize it’s an impasse created by these lawmakers, themselves! It’s a textbook disaster capitalism move, approved by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other conservative think tanks. But Rauner can at least be forgiven for being a proud Republican. This is, after all, the behavior progressives expect from GOP lawmakers.

What about Democrats like Emanuel? This isn’t the way progressives are supposed to act. They aren’t supposed to favor privatization over public schools. They aren’t supposed to fawn on big business and promise tax cuts, tax shelters, and every other kind of tax avoidance.

Some might say it’s just Emanuel. After all, for a Democrat he sure pals around with a lot of conservatives. He and Rauner are best buddies. When Emanuel earned his fortune, he was an investment banker, and one of his best clients was Rauner. They go out to dinner and even spend vacations together. Sure they occasionally criticize each other in public, but behind closed doors the ideological differences just melt away.

What about the rest of the Democrats? Surely they don’t agree with Emanuel’s tactics. They made sure to keep him away from the Democratic National Convention – out of sight, out of mind.

But if the party is really so opposed to these policies, where is the condemnation from party leaders?

I haven’t heard a peep from the Democratic nominee for President, Hillary Clinton, about these layoffs. Have you? She’s the de facto leader of the party and she’s got nothing to say about this. What does that tell you about her priorities?

Sure she’s cozied up to the two biggest national teachers unions who liked her so much they didn’t even need to consult the rank and file before endorsing her in the primary. Ronald Reagan had the support of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) right up until he declared their strike illegal and demanded they return to work. Will Clinton, too, turn against union teachers once she’s used them for their vote in November?

But you know what? Forget Hillary. Where’s Bill? Where’s Tim Kaine? Where’s Barack and Michelle Obama? Where’s Joe Biden? Where’s Al Franken? Where’s Cory Booker?

We have to get beyond labels like Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Almost all of them are neoliberals. They all believe essentially the same things.

And as proof I offer the deafening silence offered against Emanuel in Chicago.

He’s hurting school children.

But no one in power gives a fuck.

No New Charter Schools – NAACP Draws Line in the Sand

July 30, 2016 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Hillary Clinton, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Puerto Rico, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Supreme Court, Teachers, voting #StandUpForPublicSchools, charter schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education Reform, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Diane Ravich, education, education reform, Election, election 2016, Hillary Clinton, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Pennsylvania, Politics, President, public schools, Puerto Rico, Republicans, school funding, segregation, standardized testing, teachers

In the education market, charter schools are often sold as a way to help black and brown children.

But The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) isn’t buying it.

In fact, the organization is calling for a halt on any new charter schools across the nation.

Delegates from across the country passed a resolution at the NAACP’s national convention in Cincinnati last week calling for a moratorium on new charters schools. Approval of the new resolution will not be official until the national board meeting later this year.

This resolution isn’t a change in policy. But it strengthens the organization’s stance from 2010 and 2014 against charters.

Specifically, the resolution states:

“…the NAACP opposes the privatization of public schools and/or public subsidizing or funding of for-profit or charter schools…”

“…the NAACP calls for full funding and support of high quality free public education for all children…”

The resolution goes on to oppose tax breaks to support charter schools and calls for new legislation to increase charter school transparency. Moreover, charters should not be allowed to kick students out for disciplinary reasons.

This goes against the well-funded narrative of charter schools as vehicles to ensure civil rights.

The pro-charter story has been told by deep pocketed investors such as the Koch Brothers and the Walton Family Foundation. But the idea that a separate parallel school system would somehow benefit black and brown children goes against history and common sense.

The Supreme Court, after all, ruled separate but equal to be Unconstitutional in Brown vs. Board of Education. Yet somehow these wealthy “philanthropists” know better.

People of color know that when your children are separated from the white and rich kids, they often don’t get the same resources, funding and proper education. You want your children to be integrated not segregated. You want them to be where the rich white kids are. That way it’s harder for them to be excluded from the excellent education being provided to their lighter skinned and more economically advantaged peers.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, education chair of the California and Hawaiian NAACP chapter which proposed the new resolution, says its ironic charter schools are marketed as school choice.

The endgame, says Heilig, is to replace the current public schools with privatized charter schools. This is exactly what’s been proposed in the US territory of Puerto Rico.

It’s not about giving parents more choices. It’s about eliminating one option and replacing it with another. It’s about reducing the cost to educate poor and minority children while also reducing the quality of services provided. Meanwhile, public tax dollars earmarked to help students learn become profit for wealthy corporations running charter schools.

As the Presidential election heats up, it will be interesting to see how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump address the issue. Already school choice policies have been wholeheartedly embraced by the Republican nominee. Not only does he favor charter schools, he also supports school vouchers and other schemes to privatize public tax money. This shouldn’t be a surprise since he ran his own private education scam – Trump University.

Clinton, on the other hand, has been more measured in her support, even criticizing some aspects of charter schools. However, her campaign has issued statements saying she supports only “high quality charter schools” – whatever those are.

Moreover, just this week at the Democratic National Convention, Clinton staffers met with hedge fund mangers from Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).

According to Molly Knefel who covered the meeting for Truthout, the mood was not positive toward ending corporate education reform strategies.

She reported that moderator Jonathan Alter worried about the argument becoming based on social justice.

“If it becomes a social justice movement, doesn’t that in some ways let, for lack of a better word or expression, Diane Ravitch’s argument win?” asked Alter. “Which is, ‘don’t blame any of us, don’t focus on schools; if we don’t solve poverty, nothing is going to get better.’ Isn’t there a danger of falling away from the focus on at least some responsibility on schools?”

Apparently Alter is falling back on the old chestnut that under-funded schools should be blamed and shut down if they can’t help the neediest children to the same degree as well-resourced schools. And any attempt to focus on underlying inequalities would somehow give teachers a free pass? I suppose Alter believes a fire company that can’t afford a fire truck should be just as effective as one with three new ones.

Meanwhile, longtime corporate education reformer Peter Cunningham was asked specifically if school integration was important. He responded tellingly:

“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.”

The number of segregated schools where students “are doing great” is certainly in question. Perhaps he’s referring to well-resourced all-white private schools for the children of the rich and powerful. Or maybe he means the all-black charter schools where administrators handpick the best and brightest students and refuse to educate those most in need.

One hopes Clinton will continue to fight alongside the NAACP and other civil rights organizations like Journey for Justice and the Rev. William Barber’s Moral Mondays to defend public schools against the failed education policies of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

Two weeks ago DFER President Shavar Jeffries criticized the finalized Democratic education platform for turning against corporate education reform. This transformation away from school privatization and standardized testing was the result of education activists Chuck Pascal of Pittsburgh, Troy LaRaviere of Chicago and Christine Kramar of Nevada who worked hard to ensure the platform – though non-binding – would at least set forth a positive vision of what our public schools should look like.

Make no mistake, the tide is turning. It is becoming increasingly difficult for charter supporters to claim their products boost minority children’s civil rights.

Too many people have seen how they actually violate them.

Why the Rich Need Racists: Prejudice as Social Control

July 17, 2016May 10, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Black Names, capitalism, Civil Rights, Donald Trump, Education, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Hate Crimes, Labor, LGBT, Michael Brown, Police, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Propaganda, Racism, Sandra Bland, School Funding, school segregation, segregation, Shooting, Social Justice, Tamir Rice, Unions, White Allies, White Fragility, White Privilege, Whiteness #blacklivesmatter, #icantbreathe, Black Names, Blackness, capitalism, Civil Rights, Politics, prejudice, racism, racist, scapegoats, school funding, unions, white ally, white fragility, white privilege, Whiteness

“HELP WANTED: RACISTS
Anywhere, USA

-Must have an irrational fear and hatred of all things African American.

-Must honestly believe black people get all the breaks, have it easier than whites.

-Must believe black people are naturally inferior to whites, lazy, prone to criminality, less intelligent, etc.

-Must believe racism ended with either (1) the civil rights movement or (2) slavery.

But must hide these beliefs under a thin veneer of civility. For instance:

-must never use the N-word (in public)

-must never beat or kill a black person (unless on the police force)

-must never light a burning cross on a black person’s lawn (and get caught)

-must never tweet or express these views publicly in a way that can be traced back to you.

Enjoyment of rap music, black culture or black sexual partners optional. Fox News viewership preferred.

Bonus pay if racism is unrecognized by the applicant.

No experience necessary. Apply within.”

If you saw an advertisement like the above posted in your local shop window, it really wouldn’t be so surprising. Would it?

Well maybe because of its bluntness. But it’s not really that different from campaign fliers for Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump vowing to “Make America Great Again!”

Throughout its history, when exactly was America great for black and brown people who have been denied equal rights? When was it great for women or LGBTs or a host of other non-cis/non-male/non-white people?

A pledge to make America great again is just a pledge to make America white again – or at least to propel male whiteness back to the center of normativity.

(In fact, much of what I’m going to say about racism here could also be said of all kinds of prejudice. But for the interest of clarity, I’ll try to contain myself to focusing on racism, though I acknowledge the high degree of intersectionality of the phenomena.)

Yep. A lot of folks are riled up because the flower of white male privilege is wilting, and they think too many are suggesting we let it die.

What can they do? White people’s only remaining claim on supremacy is based on a fleeting numerical majority that is fast coming to an end. Soon they’ll be outnumbered.

They’re so mad about even an incremental loss of white power, they’re willing to blind themselves to obvious injustices against people of color.

For instance, black people are killed by the police at twice the rate of white people. Unarmed black people are killed at five times the rate. Yet somehow it’s black folk’s own doggone fault.

What if he has a legal weapon, but it’s not anywhere in use? HIS FAULT.

What if he has no weapon? HIS FAULT.

What if he’s just a child? HIS FAULT.

What if it’s a woman mysteriously found hanged in her prison cell with no possible motive for suicide? HER FAULT.

What if he’s screaming in pain from an injury sustained in the police encounter? HIS FAULT.

What if he’s complaining on video that police are choking him and he dies as a result of those injuries? HIS FAULT.

I mean come on, people! How does a brotha’ got to die before white folks will admit to some culpability by police?

And that’s just one type of example. Consider: There are more black people in prison today than were slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. Black people get harsher prison sentences than whites for the exact same crimes. Black people are segregated into poor communities with underfunded schools. People with black-sounding names are less likely to get a job than white counterparts with the same experience.

And on-and-on-and-on.

Yet you’ll find white apologists everywhere who will see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of the racial caste system under which their black brothers and sisters are forced to live. They refuse to acknowledge it, get angry when you bring it up and will actively support it at the polls.

That’s racism, people.

It’s 2016. Legal slavery ended more than 150 years ago in this country. The civil rights movement ended more than 60 years ago. Why do we still have systematic racism baked into the fabric of America?

In 1963, the African American writer James Baldwin asked the same question. He said:

“The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people, and our representatives, it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they’re going to face and deal with and embrace the stranger who they’ve maligned for so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have the n****r in the first place. I am not a n****r. I am a man. But if you think I’m a n****r, it means you need it… You, the white people, invented him, and you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.”

Why do white people need racism?

Today we have an answer. The short version would be this: because it’s useful.

It serves a function in society.

When people conceptualize each other into these highly dubious and unjustifiable categories of black and white, it provides a valuable service to the status quo. In fact, we couldn’t have the status quo without it.

When historians look back at the ancient Spartan empire of 900 -192 BC, there is little confusion why their society was so highly militarized. Few historians wonder why such a small population organized themselves into a military state. They needed to control the vast network of slaves dispersed throughout their community. The conquerors were massively outnumbered by the conquered so they resorted to militarized fear to keep their social structure intact. They weren’t afraid of invaders from without. They were afraid of invaders from within.

Likewise, if humanity survives our current moment in time, historians of the future will undoubtedly be in agreement about the reasons for American racism. It’s the same reason found in ancient Sparta. We need it to keep our society together.

In America today, the top one percent own more than the bottom 90 percent. The richest 85 people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the country. And it’s only getting worse.

A country with such vast wealth inequality cannot survive without a scapegoat – black people. The majority of the population would not let the top one percent gorge themselves on our riches unless they had distracted us with something.

Don’t pay any attention to the Wall Street bailout. Look at those welfare queens, which is code for black people sucking away our wealth.

Don’t pay attention to the overt militarization of the police force. Look at those violent black criminals they have to deal with by pulling their service pistols and shooting them into submission.

Don’t pay attention to the inequitable distribution of education funding to your public schools. Look at how these black kids don’t pull up their pants, and if they manage to graduate, they’re given undeserved preference over more qualified white people through affirmative action.

Think about it. Why do we have a sizable black population in the first place?

Slavery. The very presence of a substantial black population is attributable to market forces. We needed a cheap workforce for our agricultural industry – especially tobacco and cotton. It was a labor intensive process and the only way to make a substantial profit at it was immoral thrift. And you can’t get much cheaper than forced, generational servitude.

Why weren’t black people treated equally after the Civil War?

We still needed that cheap workforce. The wealth of our nation depended on it. We needed legal ways to keep them subjugated. We needed to keep them on the farm or in prison so the economic engine of agriculture could continue unabated. If they all had the right to vote or could protest their conditions, that would hurt the bottom line. They’d gain freedom, but we’d lose money. Not gonna’ happen.

Why didn’t equality come after the civil rights movement?

Agricultural mechanization had decreased the need for cheap labor, but having an underclass is profitable for whoever can take advantage of them. The invisible hand of the market will preserve human subjugation for as long as it can and as long as it turns a profit.

Moreover, throughout the entire history of this country, the rich have needed something to keep white labor in check, too. Fair wages, overtime pay, child labor laws, vacation pay, workplace safety – all of these rights had to be fought for tooth and nail – usually by the most demonized of social institutions, the labor unions. We needed something to stop the rising tide of economic fairness. Giving white workers someone to kick around made them more satisfied with their own lot in life and less willing to fight for a larger share of the pie.

It went something like this: You may have to work in the factory all day, but at least you aren’t one of THEM. You might be bone tired while the bosses get rich off of your labor, but at least you can feel proud of your race.

What an amazing swindle! The rich have actually convinced many hard-working white people to feel proud of the pigmentation of their skin! No. Not their cultural heritage. Not the struggle of their moms and dads, their ties to a homeland across the sea, their religion or ethnicity. No. The color of their skins!

If intelligent aliens ever crossed light years of space and time to investigate the intellect of human beings, that one fact would have them rushing back home shaking their tentacles and multiple heads in disbelief!

Just look at how racism has been used to justify the actions of the wealthy throughout history!

Europeans discover a New World in 1492 full of riches to plunder and exploit. But how do you justify doing that when it’s already populated? How can you do that morally? After all, doesn’t our God command we love our neighbors as ourselves? Isn’t murder and theft a… gulp… sin?

Well obviously the indigenous peoples don’t count. They’re not like us. They’re not Christians. They’re heathens.

But wait a minute! The church is forcing them to adopt our religion. This justification has a sell-by date. It won’t last long enough for us to suck every drop of wealth out of the Americas.

So we came up with a new way to dehumanize people – racism. It’s not just that they’re heathens. They’re subhuman, too. FWEW! Problem solved.

Then comes 1776. The American colonies revolt and write up some high minded language about all men being equal. If we actually believed that, it would necessitate a new social order. Much easier to find new justifications for the old one.

Well we already agreed the Native Americans are naturally inferior. These African slaves we stole are likewise beneath our high ideals. The same with women. And the poor. And immigrants. And homosexuals. And whoever else we need to subjugate. They just don’t count.

When idealism and capitalism have come into conflict, the rich have invariably chosen capitalism. And when the rest of us choose racism, prejudice, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, we’re doing them a favor. We’re backing up their interests.

Stop being such chumps, white people!

A racist is invariably a traitor to his own class. A sexist is a sycophant to the smart set. A xenophobe is a diversion to the hands buried in your pocket robbing you blind.
Your interests have much more in common with all those people you’ve been taught to hate. You could be coming together in common cause with all those black and brown people. You could be rising up and demanding your due. We could join together and demand a fair shake, an equitable piece of our gross national product.

But instead we are content to protect an ever shrinking share of our national wealth if we can just keep that ridiculous and childish pride in our lack of melanin.

During the same interview, Baldwin was asked if he thought there was any hope America would change it’s ways. He said:

“I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”

I agree.

It’s all up to us, white people.

Racism doesn’t serve us. It subjugates us just like it does everyone else.

They throw us a bone and we jealously guard it like its a prime cut of steak.

When are we going to wake up? When are we going to put away hate and choose love?

When are we going to join our brothers and sisters in the struggle and demand what’s ours?

The rich may need racists, but we don’t.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

segregation

What If Clinton and Trump Debated Education Policy?

If I Were Secretary of Education – A Classroom Teacher’s Fantasy

1) Respect the Limits of the Job

2) Push for More Federal Funding for Public Schools

3) Encourage States to Enact Accountability Measures that Don’t Include Standardized Testing

4) Stop Federal Funding to Charter Schools, Teach for America and Common Core

5) Do Everything I Can to Increase Teacher Autonomy, Respect, Pay and Training

Racism Never Ended – It Just Keeps Evolving

THE CIVIL WAR

SLAVERY

THE EVOLUTION OF RACISM

LYNCHING

SEGREGATION

VOTING RIGHTS

CONCLUSIONS

We Are All Chicago Schools – More Layoffs, Less Help for Other People’s Kids