"Half a Chance" - Black Males and Public Education

Check out Given Half A Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males. Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

The 2008 edition, Given Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, details the drastic range of outcomes for Black males, especially the tragic results in many of the nation’s biggest cities. Given Half a Chance also deliberately highlights the resource disparities that exist in schools attended by Black males and their White, non-Hispanic counterparts. The 2008 Schott report documents that states and most districts with large Black enrollments educate their White, non-Hispanic children, but do not similarly educate the majority of their Black male students. Key examples:

• More than half of Black males did not receive diplomas with their cohort in 2005/2006.
  
• The state of New York has 3 of the 10 districts with the lowest graduation rates for Black males.
  
• The one million Black male students enrolled in the New York, Florida, and Georgia public schools are twice as likely not to graduate with their class as to do so.
  
• Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, and Wisconsin graduated fewer Black males with their peer group than the national average.
  
• Illinois and Wisconsin have nearly 40-point gaps between how effectively they educate their Black and White non-Hispanic male students.
  

These trends, and others cited in Given Half a Chance, are evidence of a school-age population that is substantively denied an opportunity to learn, and of a nation at risk.

Rethinking Dialogue: Critical Pedagogy and Special Needs Populations

I was perusing through the blogs and forums on The Paulo and Nita Freire Project and came across an interesting discussion forum: Critical Pedagogy and Special Needs Students:

I have been thinking about Critical Pedagogy in relation to various oppressed groups. If Critical Pedagogy advocates dialogue in its practice, how can we apply critical pedagogy with students with special needs?

Vanessa Paradis offers this response:

What is dialogue? Is it limited to words that we speak or write down on paper? Dialogue can occur in many formats (art, movement, touch, music, presence, assistive technology, etc..) as can be noted from all of the different blogs on the site. What all dialogue must have in common is love (Freire's radical love) compassion, and humility with an overriding motivation for social justice. McLaren and Jaramillo (2007) state, "The longing for dignity and justice for others, as well as for ourselves, has been a primary motivation for critical educators worldwide to engage in the politics and practice of critical pedagogy" (p. 196).

Our concept of dialogue expands with critical pedagogy. What are all of the ways we might engage in dialogue with people? I ask this because I do not have the answers myself and it is an issue that I seek more knowledge for, especially given that I have a daughter with autism and I have seen her struggle with trying to communicate something she so desperately wants to say, but it stays locked up in her brain anyway, until she cries out in frustration.

We also need to expand how labels and diagnostics define people's capabilities; the ideal would be no labels at all. Setting limits based on a Cartiesian ontology is a tragic error and serves to keep people locked into confined spaces from which they might otherwise escape (Kincheloe, 2006). A perfect example is the IQ test and allowing it to tell us what a person cannot do. Kincheloe (2006) states, "Since the self is always in context and in process, no final delineation of a notion such as ability can be determined. Thus, we are released from the rugged cross of I.Q. and such hurtful and primitive colonial conceptions of 'intelligence'" (Contructing a Critical Ontology, para. 2). This requires us to step outside the boxes we have constructed and to look through different frameworks or lenses.

When we define the prerequisites for dialogue as the ability to speak and write in the ways of the dominant culture, who are we seeking to shut out from dialogue? Who is afraid to enter the dialogue? 

Another pitfall occurs when we make assumptions that certain populations are "unfit" for particular dialogues. In his Introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Donald Macedo writes about an occasion when he and Henry Giroux were asked to speak at Massasoit Community College (MA) to a group of unwed mothers in a GED program. The program mentioned that many of the women were considered "functionally illiterate." Macedo mentions one woman's response after the speech:

Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just didn't have a language to express what I have felt. Today, I have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you.

The particular language in which dialogue takes place is not necessarily what is important. What is fundamental is that individuals, in relationship to others, find languages in which to communicate, dialogue, and create and recreate the world. The dialogue that, as Freire would say, "unveils reality," is a relationship. Must we limit this "unveiling of reality" to certain vocabularies, languages, degree-holding groups, or those deemed to have higher abilities or higher IQ's? Those that are experts? 

Who do we limit with our constructions of dialogue? How do we limit the power of art, music, drama, dance, laughter as languages and dialogue?

Elite Colleges: Making Minds or Careers?

What are the disadvantages of an elite, top-notch, Ivy university? William Deresiewicz frames them pretty darn well in "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" from the current issue of The American Scholar.

Read the whole piece. Here are several tidbits that Dresiewicz pinpoints as serious disadvantages of the so-called "elite" educational institutions:

The first disadvantage of an elite education... is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.

Elite colleges and universities pride themselves in opening up doors to their students. But what doors are they closing?

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

I realize that I am just about to quote the whole article, so read it for yourself.

The bottom line?

The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

schoolracetalk.org

Mica Pollock, author of Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in Public Schools, Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools, and Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School, has launched schoolracetalk.org.

The blog will carry on conversation about issues of race in school. 

Brooklyn Students Say They Aren't Interested in Fighting Other People's Battles

Brooklyn high school students say they aren't interested in joining the military, despite recruitment efforts.

"In the military, I would fight for someone else's perception of what is right and wrong, and I don't want that," said Jarel March, of East New York, a student at Williamsburg Preparatory High School.

Book to Read: Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters by Stanley Aronowitz

"In Against Schooling, Stanley Aronowitz passionately raises an alarm about the current state of education in our country. Discipline and control over students, Aronowitz argues, are now the primary criteria of success, and genuine learning is sacrificed to a new educational militarism. In an age where school districts have imposed testing, teachers must teach to test, and both teacher and student are robbed of their autonomy and creativity. The crisis extends to higher education, where all but a few elite institutions are becoming increasingly narrowly focused and vocational in their teaching. With education lacking opportunity for self-reflection on broad social and historical dynamics, Against Schooling asks “How will society be able to solve its most pressing problems?” Aronowitz proposes innovative approaches to get schools back on track."

The book is expensive, but here's a link to an Aronowitz article: "Against Schooling: Education and Social Class."

SAT Spin

A recent study shows that the revamped SAT isn't any better at predicting college success than the old test was. The College Board began to revise the test in 2002, adding a writing section and taking away the analogies portion, when the University of California recommended that the school use a more curriculum- based approach to testing, saying that the SAT favored students from middle to high income families. (Think of the money lost if students applying to University of California schools weren't required to take the SAT!) The new test format was released three years ago. 

“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.

College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.

Huh? Sounds similar to Bush's spin on the Reading First results.

“The new SAT was supposed to be significantly better and fairer than the old one, but it is neither,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a group that is critical of much standardized testing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and over all, it does not predict college success as well as high school grades, so why do we need the SAT, old or new?”

“Given the data released today, what was the point of all the hoopla about the SAT’s revisions beyond preserving their California market?” Mr. Schaeffer said. “This is all spin. It’s been a marketing operation from the get-go.”

Why do we need the SAT???

Book to Read: Eugenics and Education in America by Ann Winfeild

Bill Ayers has an interesting post about Ann Winfeild's Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History, Ideology, and Memory (Complicated Conversation: a Book Series of Curriculum Studies).

 

Ayers' review:

Written out of the official story as quackery and the handiwork of a few nut-cases, Winfield demonstrates beyond doubt that eugenics was not only respectable, mainstream science but also that its major tenets were well-springs in the formation of American public schools with echoes in the every day practices of today. Formed in the crucible of white supremacy and rigid hierarchies of human value, American schools have never adequately faced that living heritage.

We no longer talk of “miscegenation” or “imbeciles,” of course, and we are likely to look upon forced sterilization and race-based marriage laws as archaic. But Winfield undermines any sense of smug superiority we might grant ourselves by drawing a direct line from those repulsive labels and practices to our own obsessions with “standards” and “accountability,” test scores and grades. White supremacy surely changes its spots but it remains durable and dominant.

I Love Bridging Differences

A great blog to read: Bridging Differences. It's a conversation between Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier both at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education who have "found themselves at odds on policy over the years."

Deborah comments on "Blaming Teachers" and Bloomberg's recent speeches on NYC's test score "victory:"

Bloomberg is one of many that view anything that isn't built around a harsh competitive spirit, with easy to count winners and losers, and money at stake can't work. Maybe even shouldn't work. Further, if you believe that nothing worthwhile happened prior to the arrival of one's own new bold plans little attention need be paid to those "on the ground." Crisis thinking has that inevitable downside—one has no for serious thought, for persuading or being persuaded by the reluctant in face of imminent danger. * All independent power blocs that stand in the way (like parents and teachers) must be immobilized so that swift and inflexible action can be taken from the top. (Bloomberg should reread War and Peace.) For noble ends, short cuts in truth-telling are allowed. We remember (and disremember) best what proves our point. (Mea culpa too.)

Artsbridge: The Art of Imagination, Dialogue and Conflict Resolution for Israeli and Palestinian Youth

Boston Globe article features Artsbridge camp founder Debbie Nathan. Artsbridge provides dialogue training and art therapy to students caught up in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. You can view a video about the program at its website.

Students in the Artsbridge program will collaborate on sculptural artwork. 

Each student will be given the opportunity to place his or her contribution into a circle. If they want to touch another participant's work, they must ask permission. Where the kids choose to place their objects, say the organizers of Artsbridge, will reveal a lot about their perceived relationship to the group and their expectations for the program.

Art can be a powerful tool for dialogue and imagining new possibities. Maxine Greene says, "For me, the child is a veritable image of becoming, of possibility, poised to reach towards what is not yet, towards a growing that cannot be predetermined or prescribed. I see her and I fill the space with others like her, risking, straining, wanting to find out, to ask their own questions, to experience a world that is shared." Community created art work mimics this becoming and possibility, and opens up a shared space for questions, risks, and possibilities.

Though Nathan lived in Israel from 1976 to 1979, on a recent trip to interview candidates for the program she was struck by the depth of despair on both sides of the conflict.

"If you woke up tomorrow and the world was perfect," she asked every youth who applied for the program, "what would it look like?"

None of the children could begin to answer, she said this month at a daylong retreat for the Artsbridge board members at Nathan's house in Swampscott. She is haunted by the shocked looks that came over the students' faces when she asked whether they could imagine peace in their lifetime.

"They hadn't even thought about it," she said.

When she asked the prospective campers what they would ask for if they were granted three wishes, she recalled, almost all of them wished for health for their families and peace for their communities. She couldn't help but wonder how American students would respond.

"These kids' stories are so powerful to me," she said.

Coalition Advocates on Capitol Hill for Culturally Based Teaching

From Diverse Issues in Higher Education:

Teachers must be sensitive and inclusive to all students’ cultural backgrounds, educators and advocacy organizations said during a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

The briefing, “Culturally Based Teaching: A Model for Student Success, ” provided educators and student advocates with the opportunity to share their views and provide federal policymakers with first-hand accounts on how using a culturally based education model will empower students and help close the achievement gap.

Dr. Willard Sakiestewa Gilbert, president of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA), comments:

“These approaches include recognizing and utilizing native languages as a first or second language that can incorporate traditional cultural characteristics and involve teaching strategies that are harmonious with the native culture knowledge and contemporary ways of knowing and learning.”

(This comes at a time when Oregon's Secretary of State Office has released that an initiative limiting non-English language teaching in schools will appear on the ballot in November.)

The Coalition also suggests preparing more culturally teachers and recruiting and hiring more minority teachers that come from students' own communities.

Bottom line:

Dr. Luis A. Vázquez, associate graduate school dean at New Mexico State University, said that students will be more likely to excel academically if they can relate to what is being taught.

Vázquez used his parents as an example. One only made it to the fourth grade and the other to the seventh grade. He added that the lack of cultural identity in his family members’ school curriculum was generational.

“Nothing in the textbooks looked like them, nothing related to them,” Vázquez said, adding that students today do not need to feel like “they are guests in somebody else’s house” while in school.

Raising the "Achievement Gap:" In Perspective

Real World Educators for Active Learning has an important post about what it means to really improve public education: "Dialogues for the Rich (& Poor). In the quest to close the achievement gap, it's important to take a step back and look at what we've defined "achievement" as. What are students learning? What are we really aiming for when we seek to close the gap in test scores? Will education really be "equal" then?

Dr. Rios says:

Are people really concerned with fixing the public system? Who does this system currently serve? And finally, if historically the only consistent determining variable for student outcomes has been socio-economic status of the child – then we need to ask: How are wealthy kids being educated in this country and in whose best interest? Perhaps the problem is not about how much different students are learning and that Black students are learning less than White students; the problem is possibly what all students are learning and that all students are learning in ways that perpetuate oppressive ideologies (Kumashiro, 2008). Raising the “achievement gap” in the current education system is counterproductive if what is being taught is biased to begin with and the current system does not invite us to investigate into the nature of ideologies being taught to students who are considered “successful.”

She continues:

What are we teaching about life, sustainability and living together? What are our priorities and what do we value as a society? Can you promise our youth that if they “do all the right things” that they will be guaranteed a piece of the pie? Does working harder and for more hours increase your wage? Does your salary equate intelligence or your position in a company? Who is calling the shots in this country and what did they score on their SAT’s? When will the poor be able to stop dancing for money and when will the rich open their door – not for charity, but for humanity?

Mississippi High School Holds a New Kind of Prom

Charleston High School held its first interracial prom in April. Previously, the school's proms were privately and separately organized for blacks and whites. One black student was even kicked out after trying to attend the white prom.

The event was filmed for an upcoming documentary called Prom Night in Mississippi. A photographer commented:

She [the photographer] describes one encounter in an African-American beauty parlor, in which an elderly woman who'd been part of the civil rights movement stopped in to see what the hubbub was about. The woman ended up giving an impromptu testimony about the history these young people were about to make. "It was almost like it didn't occur to a lot of the kids, until the day of the prom, how important what was going on really was," Farquharson reports.

Says one student:

"It was just magnificent," Buckley says. "That night, when we stepped in that door, everybody just had a good time. We proved ourselves wrong. We proved the community wrong, because they didn't think that it was going to happen."

NPR on Teacher Peer Review Systems

NPR reports on Toledo's peer review system for teachers. It's spread to 70 school districts in Ohio, Connecticut, and California.

Every year for the past 27 years, a panel of Toledo administrators and teachers has met behind closed doors to discuss teachers who've been deemed "incompetent."

Under peer review, a team of master teachers called "consultants" meticulously monitors and evaluates teachers in several areas: how they prepare, plan and present lessons, how well they know the material they teach, how they engage and discipline students — even a teacher's punctuality and dress are scrutinized.

Support Culturally Empowered Education

Updates on Karen Salazar, the LA Teacher fired for her Afro-Centric Teaching.

What We Can't Measure With Tests

Diane Ravitch at Bridging Differences has a meaningful post about humane education:

The clock will not be turned back. No matter how frequently or how beautifully you describe the joys of childhood, those who are making education policy will not be deterred or persuaded. Their agenda is competitiveness. They are in the throes of data-driven decision-making, which has become a sort of mantra that takes the place of actual thinking. How can you measure the joys of childhood? How can you measure wonder and awe? Go where the numbers tell you to go, they say; but what if the numbers are measuring trivial things? Do what the numbers tell you to do, they say; but people—not numbers—devise policy alternatives.

What I am suggesting is that your longing for a more humane approach to educating children has a huge constituency among teachers, but none among policymakers. What I am suggesting is that we should talk not about a past that has been lost, perhaps irretrievably, but how to change and mitigate the policies that are now destroying joy, wonder, and any hope of a better education.

Bush's DOE: A Pressure Cooker

Former Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, Susan Neuman, describes Bush's DOE as a "pressure cooker" in this NYT article.

Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."

J.K. Rowling's Commencement Speech on the Power of the Imagination

Why it's so important to open up the imagination in schools, discuss, learn, and understand other cultures, eloquently put forth in J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard. You can view the full video at the site.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

When we fire teachers for being too Afro-centric in their teaching, when we attempt to pass laws that limit or ban multiculturalism in schools, when we attack schools like the Khalil Gibran International Academy, when we are scared to confront world realities in our classroom, we are choosing to live in these narrow spaces. 

But when we value the varied experiences of our students, when we study the horrors that can happen in our world, when we go beyond tolerance to challenge our heteronormative assumptions within our schools and classrooms, we choose to engage in the challenging, scary, risky, and wonderful spaces that fully employ our imaginative capabilities, ask us to change our assumptions, and push educators and students to grow together.

Book To Check Out: Slavery by Another Name

Matthew Yglesias at The Atlantic recommends Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon. At the book's website you can find more information about Blackmon, an exerpt from the book, and an interactive map and media.

...what's really striking about the subject is that despite how central the story of racial conflict is to the story of America, and despite how well-known certain key episodes in that history are, the shocking story that Blackmon has to tell here is virtually unknown.

I assume that this kind of thing forms part of the basis of black-white gaps in perception in the United States. The white version of American history certainly admits to the existence of racial oppression, but it's a very optimistic "up from slavery" story where the key figures are the heroes and the key episodes are the ones in which the good guys lost. But for fifty-five or sixty years following the collapse of the Confederacy, the cause of racial equality suffered nothing but setbacks. African-Americans are no doubt largely ignorant of these obscure episodes in a formal sense, but since it's literally part of their family background the history of backsliding and abandonment is going to color the black community's perception of progress made thus far.

It's one thing to recognize that America once tolerated great injustices and then put a stop to them. It's another thing entirely to recognize that the injustices came back and the whole period in which they did so has been expurgated from our official narrative.

The history that we don't seem to teach about in schools. From Slaverybyanothername.com:

In 2000, the National Association of Black Journalists recognized Blackmon’s stories revealing the secret role of J.P. Morgan & Co. during the 1960s in funneling funds between a wealthy northern white supremacist and segregationists fighting the Civil Rights Movement in the South. A year later, he revealed in the Journal how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century, an article which led to his first book, Slavery By Another Name, which broadly examines how a form of neoslavery thrived in the U.S. long after legal abolition.

Saying No To Deficit Theory, Culture of Poverty

Paul Gorsky, founder of EdChange, is highlighted in the Parsons Sun. 

"The achievement gap is not as much an achievement gap as an opportunity gap. ... By calling it an achievement gap it puts full responsibility on our most disenfranchised, and I think that is problematic."

Culture of poverty, first coined by Oscar Lewis and based on ethnographic studies of a few small Mexican communities, is the idea that poor people share all the same beliefs, values and behaviors -- such as frequent violence. He extrapolated his findings to suggest a universal culture of poverty.

While his theory was popular, his work inspired a massive amount of research, all of which came to one predominant conclusion -- there is no culture of poverty.
Within that concept, Gorski said educators approach students based on their deficits rather than their strengths.

The deficit theory argues that poor people are poor because of deficiencies based on stereotypes.

"There are two aspects to this I see playing out in education in implicit ways: It draws on stereotypes that are false ... and it ignores system conditions that give some people access and opportunities that others are denied."

To believe the poor are poor because of their own shortcomings ignores the impact of rising costs of health care, gasoline, housing, utilities and food.

"These costs affect everyone, but they most greatly affect the poor," Gorski said. "You have to ignore all the structural conditions and pretend they don't exist and you must ignore every influence that might be contributing to keeping the cycle of poverty in place."

The message:

To change, Gorski said teachers must understand how race, gender, disabilities and other factors interrelate and accept there is inequity and oppression and understand them as systemic and not individual acts.

More on Gorski:

• Interview on classism and poverty with National Journal of Education Reform Faculty
  
• White Paper - Good Intentions Are Not Enough: A Decolonizing Multicultural Education
  
• What We're Teaching Teachers: An Analysis of Multicultural Teacher Education Courses