Friday Reading List: A Long, Strange Trip on Federal Rules

Yesterday, Congress voted to ditch the rigorous accountability rules that the Obama administration had written for "ESSA," the big federal education law that passed in 2015. Dana Goldstein of The New York Times has the story:

When Mr. Obama signed the act in December 2015, many Democrats and Republicans alike celebrated the supposed end of what they saw as an era of federal overreach into local schools. The measure, known as ESSA, took a more collaborative approach than its predecessor, No Child Left Behind ... It took less than a year for that bipartisan consensus to fall apart. It is customary for federal agencies to issue detailed regulations on how new laws should be put into effect, and Mr. Obama’s Department of Education did so in November. But some lawmakers from both parties saw the regulations as unusually aggressive and far-reaching, and said they could subvert ESSA’s intent of re-establishing local control over education and decreasing the emphasis on testing.

Cutting through the noise is difficult on this issue; the substance of the accountability rules is obscured by the turf tension over whether the states or the federal government ought to have the power to set those rules. States that want to set rigorous accountability standards for underserved children still can, and likely will. As Mike Magee, who runs a network of state commissioners of education, wrote in The Hechinger Report:

... by holding themselves to a high standard, our members will set the bar for strong ESSA plans that align not only with the basic statutory requirements, but also with these principles of excellence and equity – pushing collectively to enact policies and systems that foster innovation and lasting change and lead to dramatic improvements in educational outcomes for all students.

In other words, if the feds set the bar too low, some states will still do their jobs. That's great, but they're not the problem. Other states may not be so forward thinking. That's why The National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest advocacy organization for Latinos, is concerned about these changes:

Including strong accountability regulations in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was critical to NCLR’s support for the law. We worked closely with stakeholders and the Obama administration to help draft and provide meaningful feedback on those rules, which are designed to better track and improve children’s educational performance. However, the recent House vote to strip ESSA of those accountability protections is cause for concern. If the repeal succeeds, it could have dramatic consequences for children around the country.

Before the early 2000s, states could basically do whatever they wanted with regard to monitoring schools. I know this will shock you, but in that milieu, some states ignored the performance of their most vulnerable kids, including Black and Latino students.

That's why more than fifty different civil rights organizations urged the administration to keep more stringent rules for accountability when Congress considered ESSA in 2015. As Chad Aldeman, a policy expert at Bellwether Education, pointed out on twitter yesterday, the law itself is vague, making the rules critical for how states implement the law:

Today's "Reading List" has been a bit wonkier than usual, but there's a reason. Remember I warned you that in appointing Betsy DeVos as education secretary, Trump and his Republican party had embraced some of the worst ideas in educational innovation (i.e. vouchers), while jettisoning some of the best ones (i.e. high standards for our most vulnerable kids)? It was impossible to deny DeVos's infatuation with vouchers, but I kept hearing from apologists that the Trump-DeVos regime could be counted on to remain strong on accountability ...

Have a nice weekend!

Thursday Reading List: Inequitable Admissions, False Comparisons, and College Chaos

New York City has a handful of selective high schools that admit students based on test scores. Monica Disare of Chalkbeat looked at the demographics of this year's admitted class:

Only 3.8 percent of offers to attend eight specialized high schools went to black students and 6.5 percent went to Hispanic students this year, according to data released Wednesday, though those populations comprise about 70 percent of city students. The vast majority of eighth graders who received offers were white or Asian. Students are admitted to eight of the specialized high schools based only on their scores on the high-stakes Specialized High School Admissions Test. And while those schools represent just one subset of New York City’s top high schools, their long history of serving top students — and the rapid decline of diversity at those schools over the last two decades — has put them at the center of a contentious debate about whether the city is doing enough to help black and Hispanic students succeed.

That's eye-poppingly bad. New York City - like most places in America - has significant wealth, employment, and opportunity gaps between residents of color and White residents. By systematically under-representing Black and Hispanic students in selective high schools, the city is exacerbating those gaps. It is impossible to assert that a test is "fair" when its outcomes reinforce inequality to such an extent. This story is a good reminder that traditional public schools deserve just as much scrutiny as charter schools - if not more - for the extent to which their policies run against equity.

Jamil Smith of MTV News draws a connection between this sort of systematic inequality, and Ben Carson's recent comments comparing slavery to immigration:

Carson’s remarks were not just wrong in every way "wrong" can be defined. They were slavery denialism dressed up as patriotism ... when that rubbish is affirmed by another black person, it is a different thing altogether ... The last thing racial revisionists want is for the American public to understand the true horror of slavery, for they may then decide that there is a debt that remains unpaid. They could also understand how slavery's roots have sprouted into today's economy, prisons, and schools, and continue to thrive ... That's why men like Carson are important to a contemporary conservative movement driven, increasingly, by white nationalism. Carson provides not simply symbolic cover for his fellow Republicans to push racist policy such as Trump's discriminatory travel bans. By claiming that slaves were immigrants, he also positions that policy in a narrative of individualistic heroism.

"Narratives of individualistic heroism" are a great cover story for ignoring systematic inequality. Individualistic heroism celebrates the one Black student who was admitted to Staten Island Technical High School (seriously ... there was only 1), while ignoring the fact that the system was set up to exclude all of her peers. The conflation of slavery and immigration is particularly pernicious, as it facilitates false comparisons between dissimilar groups of people, with radically different histories in America.

Speaking of overcoming complicated histories, Jon Marcus of The Hechinger Report examines the fight to lower the cost of college in South Africa:

The parallels between the problems in South Africa and those in the United States and elsewhere are inescapable. Both have seen their governments investing less in higher education and students and families struggling to pay more, with many of the poorest ending up at campuses with low success rates while those who are wealthier and white have access to the best universities ... In South Africa, this has bubbled over into turmoil, something local experts chalk up to the relatively recent triumph of the fight against apartheid, which is still fresh in collective memory, and frustration that not all the promises that were made by politicians then have yet been kept. But [university president Adam] Habib and others say it’s only a matter of time before the same thing flares up everywhere.

Exploding costs. Inequitable admissions policies. Racial strife. Any of that sound familiar? The other major factor that Marcus mulls is the extent to which the battle over college costs in South Africa is generational. In America too we are spending less and less money on supporting our young people, and more and more money providing for the longer-than-expected retirement of the older generations. It's hard to see how the current division-of-spending can hold.

Meanwhile, on American campuses, overt White supremacy is having a renaissance, as Blavity reports:

Given the current social and political climate, white supremacist groups have stepped up their efforts to target college students in their recruitment efforts. A report by the Anti-Defamation League indicates that these groups are making “an unprecedented outreach effort to attract and recruit students on American college campuses" ... While the Trump administration has been very vocal about thwarting the radicalization and recruitment efforts of what they refer to as “radical Islamic terrorism,” they have yet to address the documented increase in domestic terrorism of white supremacist groups ... “White supremacists have consciously made the decision to focus their recruitment efforts on students and have in some cases openly boasted of efforts to establish a physical presence on campus,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement. “While there have been recruitment efforts in the past, never have we seen anti-Semites and white supremacists so focused on outreach to students on campus.”

The media has an unfortunate habit of attributing racist behavior to the underclasses, while dismissing evidence that their wealthier and middle-class peers indulge similar attitudes. The proliferation of racist terror tactics on college campuses should help obviate that distinction. Moreover, when commentators suggest that racism is a byproduct of economic stagnation, they give tacit permission for people who feel marginalized to engage in racist behaviors as a means of acting out. Ignoring this trend is dangerous.

Wednesday Reading List: Healthcare in Schools, A Day Without a Woman, and Accomplices

As Congress searches for a way to upend the Affordable Care Act, Alyson Klein of Education Week examines the education ramifications of healthcare reform:

Here's why school districts should care: They get a lot of money from Medicaid, which helps cover the cost of services to eligible kids in special education. (Think speech therapy, occupational therapy, even devices like wheelchairs.) In fact, AASA, the School Superintendents' Association, estimates that school districts get about $4 billion a year through Medicaid. (That's not chump change. In fact it's about a third of federal special education state grants, and roughly the size of the Obama administration's Race to the Top program.) AASA surveyed 1,000 educators in 42 states and found that two-thirds of districts use their Medicaid funds to cover salaries of professionals who work with students in special education. And about 40 percent use the money to hook kids up with other health services. In some states districts use the money to help cover things like vision and hearing screenings for Medicaid eligible kids.

While $4 billion is a lot of money in the aggregate, the funds are spread thinly across thousands of districts and schools. Many of the professionals whose salaries are covered by Medicaid are contract providers, and not career educators; given that context, it will be interesting to see whether or not the unions play a bigger role in the politics of healthcare reform this round.

Speaking of educators showing up for things, Alene Tchekmedyian of the Los Angeles Times looks at today's worldwide protest - "A Day Without a Woman" - and sees education implications:

Thousands of women are expected to participate in “A Day Without a Woman,” a spinoff of the women’s march that drew millions of people across the country and around the world into the streets a day after President Trump’s inauguration. Planners of the march are urging women around the world to stay home from work, avoid shopping or wear red on Wednesday — which is also International Women’s Day — to “highlight the economic power and significance” of women. Schools may feel some of the biggest effects. Roughly three-quarters of U.S. teachers are women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Two school districts in North Carolina and Virginia have canceled classes, telling about 27,000 students to stay home because not enough teachers and staff plan to show up for work.

On the one hand, this political action is intended to call attention to the fact that women are essential to the functioning of the country, its civic life, and the economy. The absence of women from our schools is perhaps the most salient way to execute that tactic. On the other hand, an unexpected day without school is a hardship to manage for some families. Women whose leadership I respect come down on both sides of this issue, so if you're trying to be an ally to women, I encourage you to listen to their perspectives before jumping to conclusions.

Sharif El-Mekki expounds on the idea of allyship on Philly's 7th Ward, explaining why he prefers accomplices:

The activism of my parents and their friends was undergirded with their contributions to education reform from the 1960s onwards. Dismantling White supremacy and all the intersecting -isms has always been a multi-layered effort. But, if you look closely, all of these efforts have been undergirded with the demand for a better educational system and educational justice ... just as the freedom fighters before us stood against police brutality, racism, housing discrimination, and all other forms of injustice they saw, so should we. However, core to this resistance is the belief that educational justice must anchor our work as we address the myriad issues that plague our country. To do this, we need more than allies. We need John Browns. Allies, move over. Make room for our accomplices.

You can start to read more about the distinction between allies and accomplices here; it's worth understanding the nuances, especially if you're white (hi!) and aspiring to be helpful.

(NB: That gif is WAY funnier if you've seen one particular episode of the show Atlanta.)

Finally, Emily DeRuy of The Atlantic examines a program at Central Michigan University that cultivates conversations across political lines:

On Tuesdays, the group arranges a few desks in an unlocked classroom in a circle, sits down, and talks. It can get tense, but no one yells, no one storms out, and everyone has a chance to explain why they feel the way they do. Afterward, they sometimes go for drinks and late-night snacks at the Applebee’s nearby. The society is one example of how, at a time when Washington and much of the rest of the country is gripped by political polarization that can make substantive conversations about policy differences difficult, college students on politically divided campuses, who are part of a generation many older Americans expect to be apathetic, have found a way to have those conversations in a productive way.

Read the whole article, because it's critical to understand how the dialogues are facilitated. It's easy to disconnect from people whose opinions differ from yours, and this effort is a way to curtail that impulse. That said, it's ALSO easy to put too much faith in the idea of persuasion and dialogue as a mechanism for political change. Some people, unfortunately, have a vested interest in continuing to not hear the perspectives of other. Or as Assata Shakur once said, "Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."

Have a great day!

Monday Reading List: Revisiting Desegregation in Kentucky, Higher Education, and Civil Rights

Emma Brown of The Washington Post has a must read piece about an attempt to dismantle the vestiges of desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky:

Even as integration efforts faded across much of the South and schools nationwide have grown more segregated by race and class in recent years, Jefferson County persisted in using busing and magnet programs to strengthen diversity in the classroom. White and black and poor and rich children share schools to a greater extent here than in most other large districts across the country, leading to friendships across the usual social divides and giving rise to what school officials say are stronger academic outcomes for disadvantaged students. Now the program is in danger of being dismantled. The threat is no longer from protesters in hoods throwing bricks at buses carrying black children into white parts of town, but from state legislators pushing a bill to require a return to neighborhood schools.

This effort is a good reminder that there is nothing inherently romantic, good, diverse, or just about the concept of the neighborhood school. Moreover, the Louisville situation highlights the extent to which traditional school systems were established to reinforce segregation and class divisions. Whenever I hear someone pine for a return to traditional public schools, I'm like ... 

Meanwhile, Andrew Ujifusa of Education Week looks at action on the federal level and thinks lawmakers are likely to tackle the higher education act:

A broad set of issues will be under the microscope, from Pell Grants for low-income prospective students, to the information about higher education programs made available to families as K-12 students consider their postsecondary careers. Republican lawmakers appear ready to put their own stamp on the HEA, which technically expired in 2013 and was last reauthorized in 2008. Both Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the leaders of their respective chambers' education committees, have made it clear they're taking a close look at the law ... Alexander has previously expressed worries about student overborrowing and has indicated support for colleges and universities having some "skin in the game," or financial responsibility if students can't pay back their loans. And he's likely to push for a dramatically simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

It's notable that the leadership for this endeavor is coming from Congress, and not the Trump administration. Is this a signal that Congress is not prioritizing Trump's K-12 desires? Or can Congress do both?

Caroline Bauman of Chalkbeat looks at how one Memphis school is rethinking discipline, in light of child trauma:

Leaders at Aspire Coleman, whose 525 students are mostly black and poor, have been revamping their disciplinary practices based on gender, with a special focus on girls of color who have experienced trauma. They now offer separate advisory classes to support girls and boys, and have trained staff on how to work with students who have been abused or neglected. After three years, suspensions are down by two-thirds school-wide, and are well below the national rate for girls of color ... Researchers increasingly point to emotional trauma as the root of disciplinary problems that lead black girls, as a group, to be suspended or expelled six times more frequently than girls of any other race — more often than white boys, too. Trauma can range from abuse and neglect to homelessness and family dysfunction. The data has school leaders across the nation rethinking their disciplinary policies.

Grappling with the underlying causes of misbehavior seems critical. It's important to understand how gender and race affect interactions among teachers and students. Those interactions end up manifesting not just in schools, but in the criminal justice system as well.

The office of civil rights at the United States Department of Education exists to monitor these sorts of racial and gender  disparities. Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform, is in The Hechinger Report defending that department:

OCR is responsible for enforcing several civil rights statues that entitle students to non-discriminatory treatment ... This mandate is inseparable from the capacity of public schools to effectively educate students, as students’ learning is invariably compromised to the degree they are subject to decision-making rooted in stereotypes about their identity, as opposed to their educational needs. The denial of mainstream educational services to students with disabilities; the tracking of African-American and Latino kids to remedial classes; the provision of extracurricular activities only to boys; the allocation of educational resources to schools in ethnically disparate ways – these practices, among many others, fall within the purview of OCR, and OCR’s effectiveness, or lack thereof, in policing such discriminatory practices is inextricably connected to our students’ ability to be educated well.

The context here is that Republican lawmakers have a preternatural desire to cut civil rights funding for education. Education secretary Betsy DeVos seems unlikely to be a huge advocate for civil rights, and attorney general Jeff Sessions is not likely protect the civil rights of children, given his track record as a Senator and US Attorney. Given that milieu, vigilance is important. Have a nice week!

Friday Reading List: Special Education and Keeping Guns Out of Schools

Jackie Mader at The Hechinger Report looks at whether teacher preparation programs adequately arm teachers to reach students with special needs:

Many teacher education programs offer just one class about students with disabilities to their general education teachers, “Special Ed 101,” as it’s called at one New Jersey college. It’s not enough to equip teachers for a roomful of children who can range from the gifted to students who read far below grade level due to a learning disability. A study in 2007 found that general education teachers in a teacher preparation program reported taking an average of 1.5 courses focusing on inclusion or special education, compared to about 11 courses for special education teachers. Educators say little has changed since then. A 2009 study concluded that no one explicitly shows teachers how to teach to “different needs.” Because of time constraints, the many academic standards that must be taught, and a lack of support, “teachers are not only hesitant to implement individualized instruction, but they do not even know how to do so,” the report stated.

To some extent, "special education" is just great teaching. Teachers need to adjust instruction to meet the needs of students, and preparing teachers to better address the needs of children with disabilities will have nothing but upside for those children, not to mention the vast majority of kids who would benefit from some sort of differentiation.

Meanwhile, Evie Blad at Education Week watches a terrifying trend:

Abbey Clements could hear the sounds of the nation's deadliest K-12 school shooting as she huddled with her 2nd graders singing Christmas carols to drown out the terrifying noises coming from down the hall. Gunman Adam Lanza had turned left after he entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that day. If he had turned right, he may have ended up in Clements' classroom ... Clements is among a growing number of educators—some of them survivors of school shootings—speaking out about gun laws on the state and national level. The interest has grown strong enough that Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a group that advocates for tougher gun laws, plans to launch Educators Demand Action, a campaign to help coordinate their efforts. Educators, including Clements, have long been involved with the organization's work. They feel a special sense of urgency this year as they watch to see if President Donald Trump, who was endorsed by the National Rifle Association, will follow through on a campaign promise to push for ending federal gun-free school zones that he once referred to as "bait" for a "sicko" who may attack a school. The federal law prohibits carrying or discharging guns within 1,000 feet of public or private school grounds unless a person is specifically authorized to do so by a state.

There are so few bright lines in policy and politics. Mostly there are ambiguous hues of gray. This issues is simple, though. There. Should. Not. Be. Guns. In. Schools.

Finally, Monique Judge of The Root looks at a different series of laws that is gaining traction nationally:

Since the beginning of the year, there have been 32 bills introduced in 14 states proposing that members of law enforcement be included in hate crime protections, the same type of protections granted to people of color, religious minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community, according to an analysis of state legislatures. Huffington Post, which conducted the analysis, says that “the wave of legislation, which classifies violent attacks on police as hate crimes, exposes an appetite to provide political sanctuary to an already protected class.” Louisiana was the first state to pass a “Blue Lives Matter” bill last year, and they were followed by Mississippi, whose state senate advanced a similar bill on Jan. 26, and the Kentucky House of Representatives pushed forward its own version on Feb. 13.

Your daily reminder: "blue" is not a racial identity! Policing obviously is dangerous work, but being a law enforcement officer is a career choice, and one that carries signifiant legal protections ... for example, seemingly, the right to kill people with impunity. If there's anything we DON'T need right now is to make it even more difficult to hold police officers accountable for violent behavior. Have a nice weekend ...

Thursday Reading List: Vouchers, HBCUS, and Boosting College Graduation Rates

Yamiche Alcindor of The New York Times goes deeper on the Trump administration's voucher plans:

President Trump, returning to a promise that won him cheers on the campaign trail, signaled in his first address to Congress on Tuesday that he will move aggressively to allow more public school students to use tax money to pay for tuition at public charter schools, private schools and even religious schools ... A Department of Education official said on Wednesday afternoon that Mr. Trump and Ms. DeVos were considering a number of ways to create a federal school choice program that would offer tax credit scholarships. That would allow individuals and corporations to make tax deductible donations to nonprofit networks of private schools, which then provide tuition scholarships to students. The administration is also considering allowing schools to directly access Title I funds from the Education Department that are used to help support low income students.

Even conservative pundits think that it will be hard to convince Congress to go along with these plans. "Title I funds" are distributed on a formulaic basis to states and districts, and in some places constitute a large portion of school funding. At the hyper-local level, preserving scarce resources for local institutions tends to supersede partisan ideology.

Speaking of politically transcendent issues, Alyson Klein of Education Week heard familiar overtones in President Trump's speech to Congress:

President Donald Trump used his first speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday to frame education as "the civil rights issue of our time"—a line used by other leaders in both parties, including former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. 

The phrase "civil rights issue of our time" has officially ceased to have any meaning. Don't get me wrong, a quality, equitable education is  central to the fulfillment of civil rights in this country. But when an administration deports children with one hand, and makes overtures about civil rights with the other, it's extremely difficult to take the rhetoric seriously.

Betsy DeVos WAS having the worst week ever for a cabinet secretary this week, after she issued comments suggesting that Historically Black Colleges and Universities were born out of "choice," and not - you know - statutorily enforced racist terror and segregation. (Jeff Sessions, though.) Still, Chris Stewart at Citizen Education wants to put Trump's meetings with HBCU leaders in context:

University of Pennsylvania’s Marybeth Gassman, quoted in the Business Insider, says “HBCUs often struggle because they have fewer resources than other colleges — typically due to lower endowments and less money coming in from alumni giving.” The same article points to inequitable funding from government, citing a piece by Donald Mitchell, Jr comparing ”the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill’s $15,700 in state funding per student” versus “North Carolina A&T University’s $7,800 in state funding per student" ... Now HBCU leaders must pivot and make the best of yet another intricate relationship, this time with an incomparably problematic president who offers thirsty people water for political reasons (see Nixon’s overture to black capitalism for a parallel).

It's important to get more resources into the hands of institutions that have experience and expertise serving vulnerable groups of children. As Meredith Kolodner points out in The Hechinger Report, there are some institutions that perform at much higher levels than others, relative to preparing traditionally underserved students:

Colleges that say they can’t improve graduation rates for their black students because they enroll too many poor students or too many who are academically unprepared are sometimes just making excuses, a new report says ... More than a quarter of colleges and universities have black-white graduation gaps higher than 20 percentage points, but the data also show that improvement is possible, [researcher Andrew] Nichols said. Among the 676 institutions analyzed, 22 percent had a black-white graduation gap of less than 5 percentage points, and at 8 percent of the colleges, black students graduated at the same rate (or higher) as white students. The study lists the top and bottom performing institutions in terms of graduation rates for black students, and offers comparisons between colleges serving similar student populations.

It's worth examining the whole report, which you can find at The Education Trust. Studies like this one reveal that equity is possible, if the right strategies are deployed. Closing gaps in graduation rates requires providing targeted resources and attention to vulnerable students. That sounds obvious, right? 

Obvious? Yes. Easy? No, because institutions receive pressure to spend money on students who are already on track for relative success. It's in situations like these that trite phrases like "a rising tide floats all boats" fall apart. Sometimes, you have to be a little more specific about which boats you hope hope to float a little higher. Have a great day!

Swapping Out the White Lens

In the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, filmmaker Raoul Peck excerpts large sections of an interview that James Baldwin, the film’s subject, gave in 1968:

I don’t know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only conclude what they feel by the state of their institutions … I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn’t matter, but I know I’m not in their unions. I don’t know if the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know that the real estate lobby keeps me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read, and the schools that we have to go to. This is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself … my children … on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.

Even in a downtown Manhattan theater, deep within the womblike comfort of the coastal-elite-NPR-tote-bag-carrying bubble, white people shifted in their seats during this scene, myself included. The discomfort was heightened, because the filmmaker juxtaposes Baldwin’s incisive words with glittery dancehall scenes from Hollywood’s golden age. In his New Yorker review of the film, Hilton Als  describes the La La Land-imagery as an indication of “how whiteness views itself.”

While white America revels in the triumphant version of itself feted in splashy musicals, Baldwin and Peck offer a counter-narrative.  So do Jordan Peele, the director of the film Get Out, and Justin Simien, whose 2014 movie Dear White People is in the process of being revived as a series on Netflix. These auteurs are interested in engaging whiteness, but not on whiteness’s terms. Peele, Peck, and Simien cast whiteness through a different lens, which has been honed over four centuries of being on the receiving end of white culture’s most oppressive tendencies.

This is not a lens through which white America enjoys peering for very long. When Netflix released a trailer for new episodes of Dear White People, a former BuzzFeed reporter called for a boycott, arguing that Simien’s satire advocated “white genocide,” a favorite bête noir of the alt-right. Armond White (seriously) of the National Review called Get Out an entry in the “Get-Whitey” genre, arguing that the movie plays on the “Trayvon Martin myth” to arouse sympathy for a black character.

It is a damning feature of white culture that makes myth creation the necessary antecedent to feeling empathy for a dead black child. That same feature – which we sometimes shorthand as “privilege” – led Camilla Long, in her review of Moonlight, to suggest that the Oscar-winning best picture is not “relevant,” because it does not revolve around whiteness. White privilege cannot tolerate the relevance of other cultures, as its sustenance depends on the perpetuation of a fiction about its own primacy.

In a critique of Long’s review, Josh Manasa posits that, “Whiteness maintains its dominance, in part, by presuming that we are incapable of doing or being anything outside of what it thinks of us.”

Another way that whiteness clings to power is by avoiding hearing or seeing what anyone else thinks of it.

 

All of these films challenge that avoidance strategy. Peck and Simien even construct their titles in the second person, addressing white audiences directly, leaving little confusion as to whose culture is being examined.

White faces have been behind the literal and metaphorical cameras of American culture since the country’s inception. What’s so important about the films of Peele, Peck, and Simien is that they all eschew a critique of cartoonish bigotry, in favor of shifting the frame to shed light on the passive acquiescence of white liberals to their own privilege. If the contrapuntal weight-shifting of my peers in the Manhattan theater was any indication, liberal white folks are aware that something is rotten in their state, but they have no idea how to stanch the decay.

Plenty of white audiences enjoy these films, because fortunately artistic appreciation does not require us to “like” the versions of ourselves we see in these metaphorical mirrors. Whether we like the reflections, however, has no bearing on their accuracy. White culture was built on a racial caste system that never went away, and it will never go away without outside pressure. Or to paraphrase someone who is being recognized more and more these days, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

The amplification of these nonwhite cultural voices has coincided with quixotic changes in the national political culture. Those mutations have unleashed a flurry of activity among the white liberals of America. We are protesting, marching, writing letters, promising to dismantle racism, and acknowledging the existence of white supremacy. What we continue to not do, however, is take adequate responsibility for the problems of whiteness.

In the rush to explain and understand the chimerical “white working class,” the white liberals of America have once again cast ourselves as innocent bystanders in a cultural war, looking for other people at whose feet we might lay the blame for America’s persistent injustices.

 

Peele, Peck, Simien, and Baldwin have a different, and more important, demand for liberal white America: be quiet, listen, and try not to freak out at what you see in the mirror.

Tuesday Reading List: Hidden Figures ... EVERYWHERE!

E. Angel, an engineer writing at Black Girl Nerds, wants to talk about some real life "hidden figures":

Over the last couple of years and especially since the release of Hidden Figures folks have been throwing around the term STEM.  Every children’s program you see now indicates they have some kind of STEM component. Even my tween nephews get some coding classes as part of their regular curriculum in middle school. That is all well and good, but let me drop some real hidden figures, by means of the U.S. Census Bureau, on you. In 2015, the median (middle) income in the United States was ~$56,500. For the majority, median income was ~$60,100, while minorities make ~ $39,500. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that in 2015 the annual mean (average) wage for STEM occupations is $87,600 which is almost twice that of non-STEM occupations. Minorities, appear to make around 85 percent of what our peers make ... There is a census study that indicates that minority women are about 10 percent of STEM population. A study in 2011 indicates that our representation in STEM fields is increasing, but that increase tends to not to be in engineering.

One way to ameliorate the disparities is to democratize access to elite educational programs. Christina Samuels, writing in Education Week, looks at how gifted education has changed in Seminole, Florida:

... the district’s efforts to bring more underrepresented students into gifted education have focused around five highly diverse Title I elementary schools ... While the district’s population of black students averages about 15 percent in its elementary schools, black student enrollment at the five schools ranges from about 31 to 56 percent. The district’s population of English-language learners in elementary schools is around 8 percent, compared to 10 to 21 percent in the Project ELEVATE schools. And the schools also have a high population of economically disadvantaged students: 76 to 95 percent, compared to the district’s overall average of 52 percent in its elementaries. At those five schools, gifted enrollment has risen from 62 students in September 2013 to 168 as of last June ... Across the district, the share of low-income and black and Hispanic students who are identified as gifted has been trending upward.

That's a pretty big increase, so the district should be proud. The subtext here is the magnitude of the in-district demographic disparities. Florida - like a few other states - has large, county-based school systems that tend to contain communities of varying demographics. In general, this seems like a more equitable way to organize schools.

Sharif El-Mekki reaches back into history to identify a hidden educational figure:

Dr. Anna Julia Cooper is one of those people. She was a Black pioneer, the daughter of an enslaved woman, who demonstrated high expectations and produced results for our youth generations ago ... Despite the segregation policies in the District of Columbia at that time, her students achieved at the highest levels in Washington’s first public high school for Black children. Her all-Black school, now named the Paul Lawrence Dunbar school, produced scholars and pioneers. Her students consistently outperformed their White peers. She insisted on the expectation that her students were going to be college bound and immensely successful.

El-Mekki reminds us that some of the most prominent Black learning institutions in America were born out of statutory segregation, and by virtue of that genesis, were themselves segregated institutions. United States education secretary Betsy DeVos seems not to have received that memo.

Finally, Andrew Simmons of The Atlantic looks at a new documentary that challenges stereotypes about the teaching profession. He asks one of the teachers featured in the movie to describe what's wrong with the American system of schooling, to which she responded:

Other countries, like Finland and Singapore, have figured this out. Look at how much time during the day American teachers interface with students at the expense of planning and grading. We are exceptional in how we run teachers into the ground. Teachers have no bandwidth for anything else. We’d attract higher-caliber people [to the profession] if we addressed that. We all know it comes down to will and resources. Today we run schools efficiently at the expense of sustainability and the profession of teaching. A high percentage of teachers leave after four or five years, when I don’t think you don’t become great until 10 years. We’re eating our seed corn. That doesn’t work in farming, and it doesn’t work in education.

It's worth reading the whole interview. I don't agree with everything in the piece (NB: that disclaimer should apply to virtually everything I read and share), but there are important points with which to wrestle. Have a good day!

Monday Reading List: Vouchers Don't Work, Computer Science, and Diversity as Strategy

At the end of last week, Kevin Carey wrote in The New York Times about recent data on school voucher programs:

The first results came in late 2015. Researchers examined an Indiana voucher program that had quickly grown to serve tens of thousands of students under Mike Pence, then the state’s governor. “In mathematics,” they found, “voucher students who transfer to private schools experienced significant losses in achievement.” They also saw no improvement in reading. The next results came a few months later ... They found large negative results in both reading and math ... This is very unusual. When people try to improve education, sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. The successes usually register as modest improvements, while the failures generally have no effect at all. It’s rare to see efforts to improve test scores having the opposite result. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, calls the negative effects in Louisiana “as large as any I’ve seen in the literature” — not just compared with other voucher studies, but in the history of American education research.

Ouch. In light of this data, it's hard to see how support for a broad-based, federally-funded voucher program is anything but ideological. One pernicious idea in the realm of public policy is that, "We should try radical things, because it couldn't get worse." Well, it turns out that, if you send vulnerable kids and families to unaccountable, cut-rate private schools that take government handouts as their primary source of revenue, yes, it can get worse. I will reiterate my challenge: if the Trump administration crafts a voucher plan that uses a progressive taxation scheme to fund vouchers at the level of the median price of the most elite private schools in the country, I will gladly support it.

Cassi Feldman and Eric Gorski at Chalkbeat look at another Trump administration priority: slashing the AmeriCorps program:

President Donald Trump is set to propose slashing the AmeriCorps program from the federal budget, according to a document obtained by The New York Times. That would cost more than 11,000 schools support that they use to help students who’ve fallen behind, build playgrounds, and offer after-school programs ... AmeriCorps has been threatened before, but members and supporters have good reason to fear this time could be different. President Trump has promised significant cuts to government programs, and Republicans control Congress and can easily sign off on them. The prospect of the elimination of federal funding has brought uncertainty to the 80,000 working AmeriCorps members and the schools and communities that rely on them. It has also mobilized the organization’s leadership and supporters to make their case to Congress that the relatively modest investment — just .03 percent of the federal budget — is worth it.

This is the wrong way to apply the principles of fiscal conservatism. Cutting AmeriCorps would eliminate jobs in vulnerable communities and leave schools without critical supplemental services. In the meantime, its elimination will have a negligible effect on spending. To use an extended metaphor, let's say you spend the national average $150 per week on food for your family. Cutting .03 percent would mean spending 4 cents less every week. Extending this argument, even if you completely eliminated twenty other programs like AmeriCorps, you still would not have saved a single dollar from your weekly budget.

In other news, Emily DeRuy of The Atlantic looks at computer science teaching in Finland:

Coding and programming are now part of the curriculum in the Scandinavian country, and they’re subjects kids tackle from a young age. But unlike in some parts of the United States where learning to code is an isolated skill, Finnish children are taught to think of coding and programming more as tools to be explored and utilized across multiple subjects. That mindset aims to accomplish a couple of things: to make coding and programming accessible to kids with a variety of interests, and to show students why understanding how technology works is relevant to their lives by linking its use to a multitude of activities.

This approach makes sense to me, and I saw something similar in action at the Wild Rose school in Massachusetts, where children used wooden balls and tubes to learn binary. Computer science is about computational thinking; coding is the language in which that kind of thinking gets translated to a machine. Schools should think holistically about teaching the relevant theories and skills of this domain.

Finally, Emmanuel Felton of The Hechinger Report looks at the intentionally diverse Bricolage charter school in New Orleans:

[Principal Josh] Densen is convinced that there’s widespread demand for a school like Bricolage across the racial and socioeconomic fault lines of New Orleans. While designing his school, he held community meetings in predominately middle-class, black communities in New Orleans East, in poor black sections of town like Central City, in diverse communities like Mid-City and in more affluent white neighborhoods Uptown. But, he recognizes, he can’t just build a school and expect a cross section of New Orleans to come; that’s why he has spent a lot of his time recruiting since launching Bricolage ... In the school’s first year, white children made up roughly 45 percent of the student body. As Bricolage parents began to rave about their experiences, the school grew even whiter — white students now make up 55 percent of the student body. Hoping to maintain a diverse school, Densen now exclusively focuses on selling Bricolage in the city’s poor and black neighborhoods.

Felton does a nice job of laying out the technical, and political, complications of managing the diversity of a school's student body. Whereas real estate is one of the biggest barriers to diversity for a traditional public school with neighborhood boundaries, recruitment and retention are the nuts to crack in the charter domain. There's no shortcut to running an academically exceptional public school, nor is there an easy way to hasten racial and socioeconomic integration. Both, however, are worthy endeavors. Have a great day!

Friday Reading List: Nonprofit Leaders Against the #MuslimBan (With a Notable Exception)

Over four hundred nonprofit leaders, including the heads of some of the country's largest charter school networks, have signed an open letter denouncing the White House's #MuslimBan:

As leaders who have spent our careers pioneering innovative solutions for many of our nation’s and the world’s most entrenched challenges, we write to express our unequivocal disagreement with your Executive Order issued on January 27, 2017, which banned individuals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. We believe the order violates one of America’s most closely-held values to block entry to a targeted minority, whether comprised of temporary visitors, immigrants, or refugees. This is especially true for those who live on the edge of survival in war zones and refugee camps and have waited for years to call this great country their new home. Groups like ours exist to help lift up the poorest and most marginalized with innovative solutions. In our opinion, this ban will make our work to foster peace, sustainability, opportunity and inclusiveness much harder.

One name was notably absent from that letter, as Eliza Shapiro from Politco reports:

Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz, one of the nation’s most influential charter school leaders who has been a vocal supporter of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and defender of President Donald Trump, recently told a group of faculty members concerned about her alliances to the new administration that she is limited in how much she can advocate politically. A group of Success faculty members recently wrote Moskowitz a letter outlining their concerns about her ties to DeVos and Trump, and her silence on Trump policies that impact Success students, particularly the executive order on immigration and new deportation guidelines. Moskowitz responded in a lengthy letter this week, writing, “I … need to consider whether it is appropriate for me to use my position as the leader of a collection of public schools paid for with government funds to advocate politically.”

I'm about to eschew the mincing of words, so please forgive me in advance ... that last statement is the some of the most disingenuous bullshit I have ever read. Moskowitz has built her network of schools through the dint of relentless and controversial advocacy. She has infuriated her political opponents in the process, and the press has responded to her assertiveness with an equal and opposite fury that is sometimes disproportionate to her actual significance. If Moscowitz doesn't want to compromise her blossoming relationship with the Trump administration, she should just say that. Hundreds of other nonprofit leaders decided that speaking up for the the families and children they serve was more important than worrying about the consequences of their decisions to "advocate politically."

In completely unrelated news, a group of charter school teachers in Washington is trying to unionize. Rachel Cohen (no relation) of The American Prospect has the story:

This morning, teachers at Paul Public Charter School, one of the oldest charters in Washington, D.C., publicly announced their intent to unionize—a first for charter schoolteachers in the nation’s capital ... The Center for Education Reform estimates that 10 percent of charter schools are unionized nationally, up from seven percent in 2012. As more and more charter teachers have launched organizing efforts, the absence of charter unions in Washington, D.C., has been notable—particularly given the city’s high density of charter schools. There are 118 charters—run by 65 nonprofits—within D.C., educating 44 percent of the city’s public school students.

My hunch is that charter leaders nationally are underestimating the political and tactical consequences of their push to claim greater and greater "market share" in cities. This is one of them. Other charter schools, most notably the Green Dot network in Los Angeles, were designed to work with labor unions. It's harder to make that relationship work when the opening salvo is adversarial.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, writing in The Atlantic, looks at the fundamentals of the for-profit higher education industry:

From my experience on the ground working in for-profit colleges, and later when studying them, I realized there is a more satisfying—if damning—explanation for the rise of for-profit colleges in the Wall Street era of lower ed. Inequalities in how people work, exacerbated by social policies and legitimized by individualist notions of education as a consumer good, conspired to create the demand for a credential that would insure workers against bad jobs. And everyone from politicians to employers to researchers and those in traditional higher education benefitted when for-profit colleges became the solution to that demand. For-profit credentials became a political solution for “re-training” America’s workforce. It may not be explicit, but when politicians extol the virtues of short-term occupational training, they are promoting for-profit colleges’ speciality.

Cottom expounds on this analysis in her new book, Lower Ed ... Which is a great segue to the last article of the week, from Stephen J. Grant at Blavity:

The black experience is multifaceted and literature plays a vital role in documenting, navigating and understanding our history. Whether it's reading letters by Bayard Rustin in I Must Resist, or modern texts like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, the written word is a great source for strength and guidance. Noir Reads, a new subscription book service launched on Monday, by Derick Brewer and Zellie Imani, will guarantee your bookshelves are filled with prominent black writers ... The low-cost subscription service priced at $35 per month or $100 for three months, delivers two to three fiction and nonfiction books each month right to your doorstep. The first shipment includes Angela Davis’ Freedom Is A Constant Struggle and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

Please do not hesitate to buy Noir Reads as a gift, specifically for me. Have a great weekend!