Friday Reading List: Have a Great Weekend!

It's a busy Friday, so here are some articles to get you through the day. I'll be back on Monday with a full reading list!

According to Elizabeth Harris of The New York Times, NYC Mayor Bill DiBlasio released a lukewarm plan to integrate schools, but refuses to say that the city's schools are segregated ...

An Indiana elementary school suspended a child for not saying the pledge of allegiance. Yesha Callahan of The Root has the story.

Megan Garber of The Atlantic reviews a new book, which argues that adolescence lasts ... 

And finally, Marva Hinton of Education Week looks at disparities in pre-K access and funding around the country.

Have a great weekend!

Thursday Reading List: Stop Suspending Little Kids, Don't Handcuff Older Ones, and Some Other Stuff

Sarah Gonser of The Hechinger Report tries to determine why schools suspend so many younger children:

Last school year, the School District of Philadelphia suspended 5,667 children under the age of 10, including kindergarteners through third graders. Of the district’s 134,041 students, 50 percent are black and 20 percent Hispanic. Acknowledging the long-term harmful impact of kicking young children out of school, the district revised its Student Code of Conduct last summer to ban suspending kindergarteners unless their actions resulted in serious bodily injury. Since then, however, some say the needle hasn’t moved much. “It’s fair to say that young kids are still suspended in Philadelphia in violation of the policy,” said Harold Jordan, senior policy advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “The district administrators have not come through with implementing the new policy, even when it comes to kindergarten.”

Gonser looks for districts where the changes are more promising and finds a glimmer of hope in Connecticut, where schools in the state's "Commissioner's Network" are seeing significant reductions in suspensions and expulsions (Full Disclosure: in my last job, I advised the state of Connecticut on the design of that network). Teaching kids with behavior challenges is more difficult than just throwing them out of school, which is why we have this problem in the first place. Schools need to set hard, non-negotiable targets for reducing suspensions and expulsions.

Otherwise, you end up with this, from Raquel Reichard of Latinx:

Black and Latinx students are severely more likely to be handcuffed by police officers in New York Public Schools. In fact, according to a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union, 99 perecent of the students placed in handcuffs in 2016 were Black or Latinx. To break that down further, 262 young people were shackled while on campus last year, and only three of those incidents involved white students. With Black and brown students making up two-thirds of the city’s more than 1 million public school students, the percentage of them who have been restrained is clearly disproportionate.

 

Not. Okay. At. All.

The disproportionality is stunning. Police and school-based security personnel should be treating children of color as the people they serve, but instead they treat them as a threat. There's a short, direct line from suspending kids in kindergarten to cuffing them in middle school.

In other news, Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat looks at how public schools in suburban Ohio segregate themselves by not accepting students from neighboring cities:

Suburbs might close their doors to city students simply because their schools are at capacity and accepting more students would place a strain on the system. But the study authors say that’s not the case: enrollment in the districts that don’t participate in the program actually declined on average. On average, districts that refused open enrollment had higher achievement levels and lower poverty rates. While the largest eight cities in the state were composed of more than 70 percent students of color, the surrounding districts that declined transfers had fewer than 30 percent non-white students. This suggests that the suburbs’ decision not to take students from other districts may perpetuate school segregation.

Let's be clear: the primary reason that the suburbs exist in their current form is that during the latter half of the 20th century, White families abandoned cities and their public systems. We can debate all day long whether those decisions were rooted racial animus, class prejudice, neither, or all of the above. The downstream effect of those decisions, though, has been the perpetuation of socioeconomic and racial segregation in schools, not through school policy, but through real estate purchasing behavior and wealth accumulation. That's why I'm 0% surprised that the denizens of the Ohio suburbs are continuing to hoard their wealth and privilege.

Finally today, Christina Samuels of Education Week looks at how states are measuring progress among special education students:

The Education Department has long been responsible for evaluating how well states were meeting the mandates spelled out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
The law and its accompanying regulations can be exacting: For example, states have 60 calendar days to evaluate a child once a disability is suspected. Over time, states have been meeting such procedural compliance provisions of the law. But when it comes to standards connected to how well students are doing academically—test scores and graduation rates, to name two—the performance of students with disabilities has been stagnant. That was the impetus for results-driven accountability: States would still be responsible for meeting the procedural aspects of the federal special education law, but they were also prompted to create a "state systemic improvement plan" that would focus on improving academic results.

The embedded chart, reproduced here, describes the various ways in which states are measuring progress. The vast majority of students who receive special education have mild disabilities that, when accounted for and understood, should have little impact on academic achievement. Even students with the most severe kind of disabilities can achieve at high levels. Unfortunately, most special education policy since the 1970s has focused on compliance and not results, so the stagnation of progress shouldn't surprise us. Here's hoping that the next generation of special education policy doubles-down on helping students to reach their full potential. Have a great day ...

Wednesday Reading List: Tech Titans Wield Influence, Rules for Effective Teaching, and Disambiguating Racism

Natasha Singer has a long reported piece in The New York Times about the influence of the tech sector on American public schools:

Captains of American industry have long used their private wealth to remake public education, with lasting and not always beneficial results. What is different today is that some technology giants have begun pitching their ideas directly to students, teachers and parents — using social media to rally people behind their ideas. Some companies also cultivate teachers to spread the word about their products. Such strategies help companies and philanthropists alike influence public schools far more quickly than in the past, by creating legions of supporters who can sway legislators and education officials.

I'm glad Singer differentiates this era of "American Tycoon Drives Reform" from its earlier iterations, otherwise you could have changed the proper nouns in this piece and published it in each of the last 35 years. The direct cultivation of parents and students as both customers themselves, and as sources of demand pressure upon school systems, is unique to this period in time. I've had dozens of conversations with technology entrepreneurs, and this strategy of reaching out to children with free products to build demand for both reform and technology is 100% intentional. Some people will interpret this strategy as morally questionable, while other folks view the approach as an indispensable mechanism for accelerating improvement in intransigent systems. Either way, the topic deserves public debate. I could talk about this piece forever, so do me a favor and just ... 

In other news, Daarel Burnette II of Education Week examines how the concept of effective teaching has shifted with new federal rules:

ESSA requires states to provide a single definition of "ineffective teachers" in the plans they submit to the federal government and then describe how they will ensure that poor and minority students aren't being taught by a disproportionate number of them. This shift in policy has reignited battles over who should stand in front of America's classrooms, whether state or local leaders should make those decisions, and what information about teachers' performance should be reported. Civil rights advocates and teacher accountability hawks have expressed deep frustration with how some states ignored this portion of the law in the 17 plans submitted so far. They are pushing the Education Department to get tough as those plans undergo peer review before the education secretary rules on them.

And you thought we were done discussing teacher accountability as a state- and federal-level policy issue?

Fact: low-income children are disproportionately harmed by having an ineffective teacher.

Fact: a disproportionate number of our least effective teachers end up in schools serving high concentrations of poor children.

I hope that today's policymakers can leverage the laws at their disposal to protect the educational interests of vulnerable children ... without designing overly-byzantine systems that both piss everyone off, and are impossible to execute. Good luck!

Finally today, I want to juxtapose two stories from this week that illustrate the interconnectedness of "personal racism" and "institutional racism." First, here's Hannah Natanson of The Harvard Crimson:

Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat. A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook in late December, according to two incoming freshmen. In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups.

Whatever you think about the actions of Harvard in this instance, it's pretty clear that the students involved were sharing noxious ideas and images. Does that make the individuals involved "racists" and "sexists" themselves? Frankly, I don't care. It's irrelevant what's "in the hearts" of these students, because their actions encourage prejudicial beliefs, and they're willfully spreading stereotypes that undergird discrimination.

Now, consider this story, from Flint, Michigan, reported by Breanna Edwards of The Root [Note: the excerpt contains both profanity and a racial slur]:

A Flint, Mich., official has tendered his resignation after water activists recorded him using a racial slur and racially charged stereotypes as he pointed blame for the city’s water crisis. Phil Stair, the sales manager of the Genessee County Land Bank, handed in his resignation after being recorded blaming the city’s water crisis on “fucking niggers [who] don’t pay their bills” ... Stair made his comments while attempting to explain to the activists his version of how the water crisis went down, claiming that the city was forced to use the contaminated water from the Flint River after Detroit jacked up prices to account for its own unpaid water bills ... [Genessee County Land Bank] takes over tax-foreclosed properties and carries out demolitions, rehabilitations and sales.

This situation is different, and not because Phil Stair seems any more "personally racist" than the students in the prior example. In this case, the person in question wields considerable power; the Genessee County Land Bank is a government entity that happens to be the largest property owner in Flint. Readers will remember that Flint is still struggling with a manmade water crisis, and as The New York Times has reported, Stair's bank forecloses on properties with unpaid water bills. These foreclosures disproportionately affect Flint's Black residents, who are still being forced to pay the state for poisoned water.

All of which is to say, the personal prejudices of Phil Stair have a direct effect on wealth distribution in Flint, through the power his bank wields over foreclosures, demolitions, and repossessions. That's TEXTBOOK institutional racism:

Power + Prejudice = Racism

I know people who think that we will never eradicate personal racism, and that shaming individuals for expressing prejudiced views is a waste of time. I agree that we may never drive out racially-motivated prejudices from this world, but I'm okay with imposing social penalties on people who perpetuate prejudice. The students at Harvard are quite literally on a fast track to acquiring power and privilege. Some day, many of them will hold institutional roles with exponentially more authority than a middle manager at the Genessee County Land Bank can even imagine.

I don't know if revoking the admissions of these students will have any effect on lessening their prejudices, but it might curtail their short-term access to power. "Personal racism" and "institutional racism" are two different things. But we're kidding ourselves if we think they're not related. Have a good day ... 

Monday Reading List: Paraprofessional Diversity, Career Education, and Town-Gown Disparities

Amaya Garcia and Shayna Cook are in Slate, examining the diversity of paraprofessionals in American schools:

Currently, many states and local school districts need to fill shortages of bilingual, dual immersion, and English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers to meet the needs of their growing English learner student population. Paraprofessionals more closely match the racial and linguistic diversity of the U.S. student population, with about one-fifth of paraprofessionals speaking a non-English language at home and around 20 percent self-identifying as non-White. It is clear that paraprofessionals can help to diversify the mostly white, monolingual K-12 teacher workforce by filling teacher shortages. Yet they often face bureaucratic, linguistic, and financial barriers to entering the teaching profession.

The authors draw upon research they conducted at New America to make their case. Perhaps their most compelling argument is that we should look at paraprofessionals as a potential source for identifying new teachers. Given that the talent pool in the paraprofessional space is more reflective of the diversity of public school children, this seems like a great place to focus some attention.

In other news, Erik Gleibermann is in The Atlantic, examining the wealth disparities and opportunity gaps in college towns:

Politically progressive university towns with racially integrated schools like Berkeley, California; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Ann Arbor, Michigan, might seem natural environments for black students to thrive. Each is home to a prestigious university with an activist, social justice-oriented school of education. Each school district has been a part of a network to promote equity for students of color. Each has a large community of well-educated African Americans. Yet in a comprehensive analysis of the standardized-test scores in hundreds of districts nationwide, Berkeley and Chapel Hill have the widest and third-widest achievement gaps between black and white students. Even when controlling for socioeconomic disparities, the gaps remain: The 2016 study, conducted by researchers at Stanford, still placed Chapel Hill and Berkeley toward the top for test-score inequality.

The author goes on to describe the qualitative research he conducted in those cities, which contains some fascinating anecdotes about how inequality and discrimination manifest in those places. Racial stereotyping, the supplemental spending behaviors of wealthier families, and a lack of cultural diversity among the educator workforce all seem to contribute to the disparities. The primary takeaway, however, is that in the country's absolute hotbeds of academic and cultural liberalism, our most vexing educational problem is not just present, but seemingly exacerbated by the milieu of academia.

In other news, Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat throws a tiny bit of cold water on the career-and-technical-education-parade:

... new international research points to a significant downside of such programs: students may benefit early in their careers, but are harmed later in life as the economy changes and they lack the general skills necessary to adapt. The study raises concerns about the trade-offs that could come with significantly expanding career and technical training in the United States — at least any version that substitutes for broad knowledge and skills transferable across jobs. “Individuals with general education initially face worse employment outcomes but experience improved employment probability as they become older relative to individuals with vocational education,” write four researchers in the study, which appeared in the winter 2017 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Resources.

This is roughly what I've always suspected about career and technical programs, and I'm disappointed, but not shocked, to see it confirmed. Barnum summarizes how some European countries have adapted to the challenge, while sharing data on domestic job certification programs that intend to fill the academic void for adults who need transferable skills. Whenever we train people for a specific vocation, we should remember that many industries have an expiration date within a human's lifetime. For example, Christopher Ingraham of The Washington Post describes the employment prospects in the coal industry:

There are various estimates of coal-sector employment, but according to the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns program, which allows for detailed comparisons with many other industries, the coal industry employed 76,572 people in 2014, the latest year for which data is available ... Looking at the level of individual businesses, the coal industry in 2014 (76,572) employed about as many as Whole Foods (72,650), and fewer workers than Arby's (close to 80,000), Dollar General (105,000) or J.C. Penney (114,000). The country's largest private employer, Walmart (2.2 million employees) provides roughly 28 times as many jobs as coal.

That's right: Whole Foods employs the same amount of people as the ENTIRE coal industry. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that we'll solve all of our problems by getting more kids ready for the careers of the future. Spoiler alert: nobody knows what those jobs are, and the institutional bias will be towards preparing people for the expiring jobs of the present. When I was in high school, most kids still didn't have email addresses, so they sure as heck weren't preparing us to be Instagram engineers.

Finally today, Shaka King directed a satirical video about colorblindness, starring Lakeith Stanfield:

This piece splits the difference between comedy and tragedy, so be sure to watch with an open mind. Have a great week!

Friday Reading List: GREAT School Funding Charts and a Counter-Productive Fight Over Vouchers

Hayley Glatter of The Atlantic looked at the relative progressiveness/regressiveness of school funding formulas across the states:

In states where districts are more economically segregated, policymakers have an easier time targeting funding to the neediest students. Because poor children benefit more than their wealthier counterparts from increased per pupil funding, a correctly tuned targeting formula could be an important step toward closing the achievement gap. According to a new report released by the Urban Institute, a social- and economic-policy nonprofit in Washington, D.C., the degree to which funding is targeted is inconsistent among states. In three states—Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois—non-poor students attend better funded school districts despite state and federal government efforts to level the playing field.

Glatter shares some remarkable charts illustrating the disparities, which came from a recent study by the Urban Institute:

The chart on the left includes federal funding, while the one on the right shows how states would distribute resources absent federal involvement. Perhaps the most striking thing about these charts are the states where the local system is super-regressive, while the state system compensates by being hyper-progressive. At the risk of oversimplifying the analysis here, those seem to be places where socioeconomic segregation and opportunity gaps are high; where districts are small and plentiful; and tax policy at a statewide level reflects some level of equity. Those states are concentrated in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, and the level of intra-state division in these places is remarkable. I'd love to hear how other folks interpret these results, and whether there are any big themes I'm missing.

Earlier this week, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten and Stand for Children chief executive Jonah Edelman co-authored an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times:

Although our organizations have sparred and disagreed over the years, such is the danger to public schooling posed by Trump’s embrace of vouchers that we are speaking out together on this issue. The Trump-DeVos effort to push vouchers, or something equivalent through tax credits, threatens the promise and purpose of America’s great equalizer, public education. At a time when low-income children make up the majority of public school students, we as a country must do more to support families, teachers, administrators and public schools. Trump’s plan would do the opposite.

Weingarten and Edelman go on to explain their reasoning for opposing vouchers, which closely tracks my own. Erika Sanzi of Good School Hunting was frustrated with the show of unity:

While many of my own friends and colleagues seem comfortable working within this dynamic and are ready and willing to embrace union leaders when it suits them, I simply refuse to go there. Unions exist to put the interests of adults first. As a former member of the teachers’ union, I have seen it first hand. Randi Weingarten’s primary responsibility is to her members and those members all happen to be grown ups. So when the interests of children and the interests of the grown ups are at odds, which happens very often in education, Randi will adhere to her job description and protect the adults. At the expense of kids. Every single time.

Sanzi is correct that Weingarten's legal obligation is to protect the interests of her members, and at times those interests do not intersect with those of children and families in public schools. I'm worried that Sanzi's final point overstates the issue, though, and I also worry that Weingarten and Edelman are elevating the voucher fight beyond where it needs to be in the public consciousness, which is counterproductive.  The antagonistic formulation above is a recipe for another decade of educational gridlock, which would be a giant waste of time and energy. Vouchers constitute a tiny part of the overall education policy landscape, and there exists little evidence that the Trump-DeVos administration has either the inclination, or the skill, to expand vouchers in a way that would truly undermine the foundations of public schooling. Choice advocates  and the unions alike should spend 1000% less time sniping over the voucher issue, and 1000% more time improving the overall quality of charter and traditional public schools.

Have a great weekend!

Thursday Reading List: Research on Educators of Color and Data on Virtual Schools

Marilyn Rhames is in Education Post with a discussion of the hurdles facing Black teachers in the American education workforce:

According to the [Harvard Educational Review] study, “Black applicants were significantly less likely than their White counterparts to receive a job offer. Further, they find evidence of workforce segregation: when hired, Black teachers were significantly more likely to be placed in schools with large populations of children of color and children in poverty or schools characterized as struggling" ... According to the study, Black teacher candidates in Fairfax County Public Schools were more likely to have advanced degrees, such as a master’s, and almost two more years of school teaching experience than White teacher candidates. Yet, in 2012, Black teachers made up 13 percent of the candidates and got only 6 percent of the jobs, while White candidates accounted for 70 percent of the candidates and got 77 percent of the jobs.

This mismatch manifests in school districts across the country, and the disparity can seem even more acute in schools that serve large numbers of children of color. Rhames shares some anecdotes to animate the data, which will sound familiar to folks who have worked in public schools. 

Elsewhere, in The Hechinger Report, Emmanuel Felton examines the effect of Hurricane Katrina on the community of Black educators in New Orleans:

Pre-Katrina New Orleans schools were a bit of an anomaly. In 2003, just 15 percent of teachers in large urban districts across the country were black but in New Orleans, teaching was largely a job done by black women: 71 percent of teachers were black and 78 percent were women. The demographics of the city’s teacher workforce have changed drastically since: in 2014, black teachers comprised a little less than half of the city’s teacher corps. In the years following Katrina, New Orleans became a mecca for new teachers. Before Katrina, the city’s teachers had an average of 15 years of classroom experience. Now the majority of teachers have less than five years of experience ... While the black community was hit harder by the firings because so many teachers were African American, the researchers did not find a racial disparity in who was rehired after the storm. In fact they found that black teachers were slightly more likely to return to New Orleans schools than their white peers. 

There's no easy way to talk about this data. Local activists have been raising this issue for years, during which time many reform leaders either dismissed or downplayed the importance of the shift. Given the emerging mountain of evidence that students of color are more likely to thrive in classrooms led by educators of color, leaders in New Orleans and beyond should think of this as an academic achievement issue, in addition to a political one.

Some educators in Philadelphia are taking a proactive approach to cultivating diversity and inclusion among teachers. Sharif El-Mekki describes that work in Philly's 7th Ward:

Seventeen Black men who were leading classrooms and schools in Philadelphia launched The Fellowship-Black Male Educators for Social Justice. Our initial goal was hardly to create a formal organization. We came together over a monthly dinner at a Black-owned restaurant in west Philly to problem-solve and celebrate wins, to collaborate, and to support each other. We met to ensure our students’ success. And, to facilitate our own learning ... Today, we are proud to be gearing up for our 7th BMEC (Black Male Educators Convening). Despite the name, these convenings are not solely for Black men—although our focus is. Our convenings (and membership to The Fellowship) are open to anyone who is committed to the idea of diversity in our classroom and school leaders. We welcome all who want to engage in problem-solving to rectify decades-long issues that negatively impact our children.

El-Mekki himself is the leader of a charter school, although the network includes leaders from traditional district schools as well. There's a lot to like about this project. Most importantly, The Fellowship addresses a legitimate issue that has vexed education leaders in other cities. In addition, this network is a model for how teachers can collaborate across district and charter models, which is rare in places where significant political tension exists across sectors.

Finally today, Matt Barnum is in Chalkbeat examining the kind of virtual schools that excite United States Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos:

In addition to advocating for school vouchers, DeVos has also long backed virtual schools, a small but swiftly growing sector of schools. For-profit virtual school companies are tightly connected to [DeVos family backed American Federation of Children, or AFC]. The two largest such groups, K12 and Connections Academy, were among the chief sponsors of the conference ... John Kirtley of AFC praised the company, saying, “They’re doing great things in digital learning.” And although the research evidence for blended or personalized learning models is mixed, the handful of studies of fully virtual schools point to a clearer verdict: students in such schools perform dramatically worse on standardized tests relative to similar students in traditional schools, according to a study of thousands of virtual charter school students in 18 states.

Barnum also has been dogged in documenting the dismal results attached to voucher programs. I love innovation, I support personalization, and I embrace change where change is necessary. The evidence, however, demonstrates that DeVos's top educational priorities are often worse for students than the status quo. There is no reason to support such initiatives, and perhaps more importantly, her continued advocacy of dubious ideas creates enormous credibility problems for anything she - or her administration - embraces. Sad.

Have a good day!

Wednesday Reading List: The Cleveland PD Thinks Lying on a Resume is a Worse Offense Than Child Murder

Timothy Loehmann, the police officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in 2014, got fired yesterday. Adam Ferrise of Cleveland.com has the story:

Timothy Loehmann's ouster from the department was not the result of November 2014 killing the child, but for his failure to disclose the fact that he was asked to resign from the Independence Police Department after a supervisor raised concerns about his ability to be an effective police officer ... The union that represents [Loehmann] filed an appeal of the discipline within hours of McGrath's announcement. Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association President Steve Loomis, whose public statements about Tamir's death often drew the ire of civil-rights leaders, said he is confident that an arbitrator will overturn the discipline. "This is nothing but a political witch hunt," Loomis said. "We're not going to stand for it. They didn't do anything wrong."

I don't know what makes me angrier: that Loehmann was fired for lying on his job application, and not for KILLING A CHILD; or that his union is calling this a "political witch hunt." For the Cleveland police department, it seems that resume accuracy is a more important value than the lives of Black children.

Monique Judge of The Root looks at another instance of specious concern for Black lives:

The Journal of Political Philosophy has come under fire for its June issue, which dedicates more than 60 pages to a three-author “symposium” on the Black Lives Matter movement that does not include any actual black voices. The journal has since apologized for not including the work of black philosophers, but as Inside Higher Ed reports, the incident has drawn attention to the fact that the journal has a poor record of including black scholars and, prior to the symposium issue, did little to include scholarship on issues of race.

Unfortunately, this kind of stuff happens all the time, and not a single person at the decision-making table says, "Hey, you know what might be a problem here?'

People have blindspots. White folks, in particular, often have a very particular leadership shortcoming, wherein they fail to understand the lasting impact of race on power structures within professional fields. The omission described above provides a uniquely poignant vignette about the downstream effects of that lack of awareness.

In other news, Caroline Preston of The Hechinger Report describes the academic consequences of a fragile foster care system:

As of September 2016, roughly 428,000 children were in foster care nationwide, a number that’s increased recently, in part because of the opioid epidemic. By the time youth in foster care reach their junior year, more than a third will have switched schools at least five times. The consequences for young people are significant. With each move, students lose an estimated four to six months of academic progress. The reasons for these low success rates are manifold — trauma from the abuse and neglect that foster children routinely suffer, the absence of dependable adults in their lives and a lack of financial support. Frequent, disruptive school moves compound the problem. Child welfare agencies have historically paid little attention to schooling when they move youths to and from foster homes.

While schools can work to accommodate students whose lives are interrupted by the foster care system, it's hard to see how schools alone can solve for challenges like these ... outside of having a radically top-down system of identical schools, wherein switching from one school to another would be inconsequential. But that's pretty much the opposite of American schooling. New federal rules require schools to provide transportation for students whose lives are driven by foster care placements, and despite the Trump administration's rollback of schooling regulations, these protections remain in place.

Finally today, Eric Gorski of Chalkbeat studied STRIVE Prep, a Denver charter school that is working to serve many more special needs students:

When STRIVE Prep Lake opened in 2010, Gibbons said STRIVE set out to build a school that was “truly of the neighborhood, serving all kids.” That meant not only serving students with disabilities or students who do not know English, but also taking a stand about “backfill,” an issue that divides charter advocates. Some charter schools across the country do not replace students who leave, avoiding a potential drop in test scores and the disruption of adding new students. But STRIVE Prep Lake decided to take students at mid-year and in all grades. That practice that has since spread to all STRIVE schools.

Read the whole article, as it confronts some of the academic and operational tradeoffs that are necessary when a school wants to serve all children. The best charter schools have done a nice job demonstrating their effectiveness in getting many more socioeconomically underrepresented students ready for college. If charter schools want to continue to thrive as a part of a robust public system of education, they must deliver on the promise of serving all children, particularly those with special needs.

Have a great day!

Tuesday Reading List: Quality Matters in Childcare, Equivocation on Discrimination, and People Who Shouldn't Be Teaching

Hayley Glatter of The Atlantic looked at whether program quality matters in childcare:

Attending a low-quality childcare program has deleterious effects on boys, so much so that the children would have been better off staying home. According to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research co-authored by the economists Jorge Luis Garcia, James Heckman, and Anna Ziff of the University of Chicago, it is the quality of the childcare, not simply the presence of it, that matters. Relying on data from childcare programs serving disadvantaged children in North Carolina, the researchers found a gender gap exists in the long-term outcomes of preschool and that boys are more vulnerable than girls if exposed to facilities that aren’t meeting high standards.

Policymakers often construe equity and quality as competing goals. As states expand access to early childhood education, we should be as vigilant about quality as we are about access.

In other news, Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat followed up on Betsy DeVos's questionable comments about discrimination from last week:

Betsy DeVos drew incredulous reactions this week when she said she would let states decide on the rules for voucher programs vying for federal money — including whether schools that discriminate against LGBT students could participate. But the education secretary’s position isn’t out of the mainstream among voucher supporters, or out of step with how private school choice programs work across the country. For instance, Robert Enlow of the Indianapolis-based EdChoice, a group that advocates for vouchers, emphasized that his group does not support discrimination but declined to take a position on whether private schools that receive public funds should be prohibited from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

It's possible to be agnostic about whether the private or public sector is best positioned to create quality schools. I happen to think that a robust public schooling system is essential to knitting together a sustainable democratic republic, but I know plenty of people who trust the private sector more, and not for evil or mischievous reasons. That said, I do NOT think it's possible to be agnostic on this question of discrimination. Anyone who is sentient right now can see that hate groups - particularly White supremacists - are feeling more confident in expressing their hate publicly. Given that, we must be as forceful as possible in protecting people from discrimination on the basis of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other facets of their identities.

Speaking of identity, here's a great example of how NOT to cultivate a positive sense of identity among children, from the team at Blavity:

Just a few days ago, we covered a student, Lizeth Villanueva, who received a "Most Likely To Be A Terrorist" award. As awful and insensitive as that was, it wasn't the only insensitive and flat out rude superlative given out by the same teacher. Sydney Caesar, a student at Anthony Aguirre Junior High School in Texas, received an award that stated she was “Most Likely to Blend in With White People,” from her college-prep teacher Stacey Lockett. 

If I have to explain to you why this is not okay, you shouldn't be a teacher ... ergo the person who gave these awards should not be teaching children.

Finally today, on a lighter note, Michael Harriott is in Adequate Man giving White people advice on how attending Black cookouts:  

At a black cookout (yes, if there’s more than seven black people there, the name automatically changes from “barbecue” to a “cookout”), only the meat and the grill is supplied by the host. Everything else is brought by attendees—and no, this is not “potluck.” Black people don’t do potlucks. Potluck dinners are for Caucasian bible-study meetings where one can bring store-bought dishes. Here, you either show up with a homemade dish, or they’re gonna look at you funny. And please don’t try no new shit like potato salad with raisins or vegetarian shish kabobs. If you can’t cook, or you don’t have all the required black seasonings, just bring some cups and napkins. 

May your summer be blessed with many opportunities to act on this advice. Have a great day!

Friday Reading List: Former Department of Education Officials React to the Current Administration

Former United States Secretary of Education John King, Jr. is in U.S. News & World Report slamming the Trump administration's budget:

Yes; we believe in personal responsibility. We understand America's self-concept as the place where all people can lift themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps and improve themselves ... we recognize that you can't pull off an upset if the game is rigged against you and that those of us who were not born into privilege sometimes need a boost from our teammates ... And that's precisely why the Trump administration's recently released 2018 budget is such a deeply problematic assault on the American Dream. It eliminates many of the critical supports that give people the opportunities and tools to better their lives, particularly through a net cut of more than $10 billion to education.

What's so offensive about the Trump budget is that it couples these deep gashes in the social safety net with both increases in military spending, and huge tax cuts for wealthier Americans. One cannot claim with a straight face that this budget about fiscal conservatism; it's about cruelty to those with less.

Matt Lehrich, writing at Education Post, wonders if current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos understands the federal role in civil rights enforcement:

In a budget hearing yesterday, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) pressed DeVos on whether her plan for school choice would allow federal dollars to flow to private schools even if they discriminate against LGBT students. DeVos offered her standard fare in response: those choices would be up to states ... DeVos couldn’t think of one. Here was the United States Secretary of Education saying that if a state wanted to give federal dollars to a private school that only admitted White students, that would be fine by her. Want to reject any student who’s gay or Jewish or has a disability? That’s ok too, she was implying. We’re just here to dole out the cash. Of course, such a scheme would never hold up in court. But it laid bare the moral vacuity of the commonly-professed view that the federal government should just get out of the way and let states figure it out.

Lehrich went there, didn't he? What's impossible to tell is whether DeVos truly doesn't care if schools discriminate, or whether she's oblivious to the fact that some TOTALLY WILL when given the chance. Either way, she's ...

Finally, a bit of shameless self-promotion: for your weekend read, be sure to check out the longer piece I wrote in reaction to New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's speech about the removal of Confederate monuments from his city:

 Have a great weekend!

We Don’t Need More White Dudes in Charge of Things, But the Ones Who Are Should Be More Like Mitch Landrieu

Last week, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments commemorating the Confederacy from the city’s public spaces. The action was the result of sustained pressure from local activists at "Take 'Em Down NOLA," like Angela Kinlaw, Malcolm Suber, and Michael "Quess?" Moore.

To mark the event, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered a stunning speech that is getting a lot of attention, during which he dismantled a false, yet sticky, narrative about the Civil War:

… the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it … These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

I debated whether to write anything about this speech, because my normal rule of thumb is:

“White dudes shouldn’t congratulate other White dudes just for doing the right thing.”

But the remarkable thing about Landrieu’s speech is that, in 2017, his ability to tell the truth about the past renders him an exceptional member of the coterie of White-men-who-still-run-shit. Landrieu mentions slavery eight times in a twenty-minute speech, while naming the rape, torture, and violence that accompanied America’s foul practice of systematic dehumanization. He calls the Confederate monuments “symbols of White supremacy,” while wondering aloud why his city offers no visual reminders that New Orleans was America’s most active marketplace for trafficking enslaved people.

In recounting these facts of history, Landrieu, with a bit of exasperation, says, “Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.”  

He’s right to be anxious about what constitutes “The Obvious” in America. Telling a consistent, factual story regarding this country’s history of slavery and racial violence is undermined by the same false narrative that was perpetuated by these monuments. The narrative receives the balance of its oxygen from textbooks, history teachers, cable news, and unsubtle paeans to making America great again.

This is the ACTUAL original text from one of the monuments that Landrieu ordered removed. For real. 📷: : Jonas Chartock 

It is rare for a politician – let alone a White southern one – to challenge this sanitized mythology in such stark terms. Georgia Governor Zell Miller tried in 1993, when he implored his state legislature to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state's flag, arguing that to reject his plea meant identifying Georgia with the “dark side of the Confederacy.” President Lyndon Johnson also tried during his 1965 commencement address at Howard University, asserting that “white America must accept responsibility” for “centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man.”

What is striking about Landrieu, Johnson, and Miller is that they all told the truth, even though that truth is a direct challenge to White supremacy, from which they all benefit, whether they like it or not. The false narrative about the American South is hard to uproot not just because White people can choose to ignore their privilege to their own benefit, but also because the myth is more appealing than the truth. There is no joy in acknowledging that your ancestors were complicit in the systematic dehumanization of millions of enslaved people, and it’s hard to find pride in hearing that your grandparents’ heroes were bigoted losers. The lies start as a coping mechanism, but after centuries of metastasizing they have become a giant dam behind which we contain the crushing power of our collective past.

As James Baldwin said, though, "To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same thing as drowning in it.”

The only way to prevent ourselves from drowning in the real pain of our collective history is to stop aggrandizing the traumatizing events of our past. Landrieu spares no words in correcting the record, but he offers a life preserver of sorts to the folks set adrift by the accurate version of the war. Towards the end of his speech, he proffers a new narrative to replace the old one:

… we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people … It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes.

Landrieu casts pluralism as patriotic, offering a rebuttal to the ugliest corners of our contemporary discourse.

Roadside billboard in Harrison, Arkansas, 2017.

White supremacist rally in Virginia, 2017.

The reality of pluralism in this country, however, has never matched the aspiration of its idealized form, just as the removal of the symbols of White supremacy does not mean its inevitable demise. Pluralism in practice too often means that people of color continue to be on the receiving end of institutional racism, while White folks get to celebrate having a Black friend or two. Correcting the narrative is a necessary, yet insufficient, component of making this country a more just place for people who don’t look like Mayor Landrieu.

The future of American life will be much less White than its present, and as a result its political leadership should become much less White – not to mention much less male – than its current incarnation. Many White people struggle with this idea, because they view that outcome as an inevitable loss. The only thing we have to lose, though, is a false sense of unearned superiority. We must tell different stories if we’re going to have a different America, and the next generation of American political leaders should aspire to speak the truth about our past. They should speak that truth not just so that all of us can hear, but so that all of us can see our past and future selves in the narrative. Mitch Landrieu offered both words and deeds last weekend. Neither were perfect, but they’re a good start