Tag Archives: public education

The Achievement Gap is an Outcome the American Educational Process Is Structured to Produce! – Part 1

Posted on by

This is the first of a four-part series of posts addressing the challenge of eliminating, once and for all, the performance gap that exists between African-American students, other minority students and their white classmates.

There was a great article written by Jamie Utt entitled “5 Things Well-Meaning White Educators Should Consider If They Really Want to Close the Achievement Gap” published at his website at www.changefromwithin.org.

Although all of the points in the article are on target, two sentences stand out to me.

The first:

“Let’s be honest: Public education was created to serve as an entry point for lower-to-middle-wealth White people into the American middle class (by preparing White students for success in industry and farming).”

And, the second:

“And simply put, when our schools have been set up to serve Whites while excluding all but a few people of Color, it makes sense that White people are far more likely to have an advanced education.”

The article goes on to present five things that we need to do. While all of them make perfect sense, and from a policy perspective should be at the forefront of our strategizing, none of them are things public school teachers can do for their students, irrespective of color, who arrived in their classrooms this morning, and every morning thereafter.

The article closed with the quote from legal scholar, Randall Robinson:

“No nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines begun parallel and left alone, can never touch.”

I want to draw attention to eleven words from this quote, minus one. These words portray exactly what has been taking place in American classrooms, for as long as any of us can remember and these are the very things that keep blacks, other minorities, and poor whites from getting the kind of education that they need if they are to have any hope of competing equally and effectively in 21st Century American society. Those words are:

“. . . pit them without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged . . . .”

You will note that I purposely left off the word “victimizers” for reasons that I hope will become clear, shortly, to those of you who are reading these words. These remaining ten words describe the educational process at work in schools all over the U.S., public or private.

We spend an inordinate amount of our time and energy agonizing about things that we are powerless to change and then behave as if we are powerless to do anything until our government or some other greater power, usually undefined, has solved the big picture.

The truth, if only we will allow ourselves to believe, is that we are not powerless and we need not feel hopeless.

The hostile environment so eloquently described by Randall Robinson is an educational process in which African-American students and other disadvantaged children are pitted, not against Robinson’s “victimizers” but rather against children, reared by educated if not affluent parents, who arrive for their first day of school primed, prepared and motivated to be successful. The academic performance of disadvantaged children is then measured against the performance of classmates with whom successful competition is highly improbable.

The result is a glaring performance gap that is the inevitable outcome that the American educational process is structured to produce. It is an educational process the structure of which is very much subject to our will if only we will accept responsibility for its reinvention. This reinvention does not require an act of Congress or a state legislature. Every school corporation in America has the authority to restructure the process to produce the outcomes we so desperately need.

In the next segment of this series, before we focus in on things we have the power to do on our own, we will spend some time reviewing the long list of things we fret about, historically.

How Do We Subtract Failure from the Public Education Equation?

Posted on by

Failure is a debilitating thing for anyone but it is particularly hard on children. Nevertheless, failure is key component of the traditional American educational process and the very fact that kids can fail leads to a reality in which far too many of them do. We need to ask ourselves, why is this necessary? Why should any child have to deal with failure?

Let us examine the definition of the word “fail.” Merriam Webster defines “fail” to mean “to end without success.”

For the purpose of public education, we can define “fail” as “unable to demonstrate mastery over given subject matter.” In our present educational process we have given the lesson; we have given students a fair opportunity to practice; and, finally, we assess their level of mastery by asking the student to demonstrate that mastery on a test. The grade the student earns and that goes into the gradebook is a reflection of their performance on that instrument of measurement. So far, so good.

The problem with the American educational process in an overwhelming number of public school classrooms is not that some kids did well on the test and other kids did poorly. Rather it is that, however the child performs, we declare our job done with respect to that particular lesson, lesson module, chapter, grading period, semester, or school year.

The question that needs to be posed is, “Why would we ever be satisfied with an unacceptable outcome for any of our students?”

These are children, after all. They are unique individuals—children of creation—and they each have equal value in the eyes of both the Creation and the law. Is there any reason in the world to compare them against their classmates and to declare that some are better or worse than others?

Is there any reason to believe that because students did not grasp a given lesson as quickly and easily as some of their classmates that they are incapable of learning? Yet, this is what happens in our classrooms. We finish one lesson and we move onto the next and each child is given a grade to reflect their level of mastery over the material at that point in time.

When we push kids along to a new lesson while they are still struggling to understand the old, they begin to view themselves as less capable than their classmates. This experience influences the way the child thinks of himself or herself and diminishes his or her self-esteem. When this happens over and over again, the effect is devastating. Is it any wonder that some of these kids reach a point at which they stop trying because they no longer believe that success is attainable? Is there ever a time when this could be considered an acceptable outcome?

If our job is to determine which children can learn the most in the fastest measure of time then the educational process in place today is perfectly structured.

If, however, our objective is to help every child learn as much he or she can as quickly as he or she is able then the educational process is working at cross purposes with our objective.

Each child deserves the time they need to experience that special moment when the material clicks in their mind and they understand. Only then should they be asked to move on to new material. Once a pattern of success begins to manifest itself in the child’s mind, everything changes. With each success it becomes easier to succeed on the next lesson.

Think about the difference this would make in the child’s self-perception.

When a child finds themselves at a point where they no longer see the sense in trying it is, indeed, a failure but it is a failure on the part of the educational process and not on the part of the child.

Our current educational process is structured to produce disparate outcomes and we will not be able to alter this reality until we change the way we teach and the context within which we teach. We need to re-invent the educational process until it is structured to produce the outcomes we seek: that all children learn as much as the can as fast as they are able.

My book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America offers a blue print for a structure that will produce such outcomes.

Racial Violence and Police Brutality Have a Similar Genesis!

Posted on by

The rioting taking place in Baltimore over the past couple of days is not the first nor will it be the last incidence of young blacks, mostly men, acting out in anger in central cities throughout the U.S. Unlike those who engage in thoughtful protest, violence is all many of these young people know.

They are part of a growing population of young people, a large percentage of which are black, who are disconnected from mainstream society. They have been chewed up a spit out by a flawed educational process, have access to minimal health care, feel targeted by the criminal justice system, and feel imprisoned in their own communities. Do these factors justify such behavior? Certainly not, but we are not seeking justification.

What we are seeking, what we must seek, is understanding. Until we understand the forces that drive such behavior we can only react to it and reaction only prompts a chain reaction. We need understanding if we are to have any hope of a meaningful resolution.

That being said, is the rioting in the streets in Baltimore any different than a group of cops losing control and beating a black suspect in the streets? History is full of examples in which seemingly peaceful groups of people can, when conditions are ripe, morph into a violent mob to which they seem compelled to relinquish their self-control.

That human beings have a propensity to surrender to the mob is a given and it is a powerful force of human nature. What concerns us are the factors that trigger such behavior.

In the case of white cops and young black men in urban America, the dynamics that trigger such violence are remarkably and ironically similar. In both instances, the triggering emotion is a heightened sense of frustration born of powerlessness in the face of forces that affect their daily lives. Let us remind ourselves that the overwhelming majority of African-Americans do not engage in senseless rioting in the streets of any neighborhood, let alone their own, and the overwhelming majority of police officers do not engage in the senseless beating of suspects of any demographic.

Young people living in poverty, hopelessness, and powerlessness are reacting to a world that does not seem to care about them and from which they see no escape. While this group includes people of all races, creeds, and ethnic heritage, African-Americans are disproportionately represented and possess a unique sensitivity to discrimination. This burgeoning population of Americans live in a world that is separate and apart from what is perceived to be mainstream society and the chasm that separates them is widening, relentlessly.

When these young people take to the streets, it is almost always begins as a reaction to what they believe to be police brutality or other forms of institutional racism.

The police officers who respond with violence are reacting to their own sense of frustration over their inability—their sense of powerlessness—to bring perpetrators of a virtual avalanche of criminal activity to justice in an environment in which they believe the courts to be ineffectual. Imagine how any of us would feel about a job in which the problems that keep us from doing our job are overwhelming and where our employer seems incapable of doing anything about it. None of this excuses this type of behavior but it does help us understand.

The reality that we face as members of a democratic form of government is that the world is changing faster than ever and the tools we have at our disposal are becoming obsolete. No matter how much some people might wish it, we cannot turn back the clock to a time when the white man ruled the roost and values were simpler and clearer. This is true whether you are viewing the scenario as a conservative or liberal, republican or democrat, tea-party member or socialist.

The combination of conservative and liberal policies employed by our leadership over the last 65 years are what brought us to this point in history. These policies did not work then and they have even less chance of working in a world in which the gaps that separate us as a people seem impassable; where the population is growing steadily more diverse; and, in which our elected legislators seem incapable of working together.

There are tens of millions of young people who feel disconnected from mainstream society and the number grows, daily. Somehow we must find a way to pull them into the mainstream, not shut them off from it. We need new ideas, new solutions; we need to think exponentially.

These new approaches must begin in our public schools where public school teachers are presently under attack by educational reformers who do not understand the challenges of public education; who think that simplistic, jingoistic solutions can solve complex problems; and, who are oblivious to the damage they do!

We must call upon professional educators to acknowledge that the way we have been teaching kids for decades no longer works. We need them to come together as a profession and seek new educational processes that are focused on the meeting the real needs each and every child and to create the necessary structure to support that effort.

To paraphrase Zig Ziglar, “if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.”

The reader is invited to explore my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, where I offer a blueprint for action.

Indiana’s Republican Governor and Republican-controlled General Assembly have Lost Their Way!

Posted on by

How ironic is it that both conservative and moderate republicans who have spent their lifetimes marching to the tune of small government and individual liberty, have so quickly put special interests ahead of the interests of Hoosier voters.

Recently, I suggested that republicans, under the influence of the tea party movement, have abandoned the interests of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” in favor of a strategy designed to pursue their own agendas. Clearly, the well-being of Romney’s “47 percent” no longer matters to those in office; men and women who were elected to represent the interests of all Americans, or in this case, all Hoosiers, not just a select few.

Governor Pence’s overt efforts to undermine the role of Indiana’s elected Superintendent of Public Instruction just because she would not kowtow to his policy initiatives is but one example. Whether through administrative polices, the formation of the Center for Education and Career Innovation (CECI), Indiana House Bill 1638, or other miscellaneous shenanigans the Governor and his supporters have waged war against public education, public schools, public school teachers, not to mention public school families, children and their communities.

When he finally dissolved the CECI, ostensibly to eliminate “the friction at the highest levels of government” and “fix what is broken in education in Indiana” the Governor expressed pride in the accomplishment of the CECI. That the most notable accomplishments of the CECI were the creation of “friction at the highest levels of government” and aggravation of “what is broken in education in Indiana” is the apex of irony.

Make no mistake, there are many problems with public education here in Indiana and in states throughout the nation but these are the very things the Superintendent of Public Education, the DOE, and Hoosier educators were working hard to address. Those efforts were sabotaged by the Governor in order to pave way for solutions that were conceived while being shielded from public scrutiny.

The whole principle of accountability of elected officials such as the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and also the Governor, is that the voters have the power to boot them out of office if their performance is unacceptable. The actions of the Governor have been dedicated to the process of removing the responsibility for accountability of selected elected officials from the hands of the voters and place it in the hands of policy-makers whom he has appointed and who are not held accountable by the voters.

A generation ago it would have been considered inconceivable that such actions would be the strategy of choice of conservative republicans.

Unfortunately, the power of Indiana’s current and recent Governors has also been directed at Indiana unions and their memberships through the ironically entitled ”right to work legislation”; and, more recently against the Common Construction Wage Law that guarantees that Hoosier workers in the various construction trades will be paid wages that enable them to provide for their families and pay their fair share of taxes.

Now, the republican leadership in Indiana has turned its attention to passing “religious freedom legislation” that has brought ridicule to our state and that places certain members of our diverse citizenry at risk of discrimination. Should not every citizen be entitled to protection both when they “have been substantially” subjected to discriminatory acts or consider themselves “likely to be substantially” subjected?

In response to public outcry, our governor and state legislators scrambled, this past week, to pass a fix that would placate the opposition. Let the reader understand that this fix does not alter the underlying motivation of Governor Pence and others and it was only passed because republicans were “caught with their hands in the cookie jar.”

Where will it end? Unless the voters of the State of Indiana rise up and hold their elected officials accountable for their self-serving legislation and policy making the ominous chasm that exists between the rich and poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, and between white citizens and their minority counterparts can only expand.

The saddest truth about this widening trend toward the disenfranchisement of so many of our citizens is that the people who are adversely affected by these actions could boot our elected officials out of office if only they would band together and exercise their right to vote.

Hoosiers are like all other Americans and must be challenged to recognize that the solutions to the problems of 21st Century America cannot be realized through the application of 20th Century thinking, whether conservative or liberal. These new and more complicated social challenges will demand new patterns of thought, fresh insights into the dynamics of 21st Century American society, and a new commitment to American imagination and ingenuity. What we require is exponential thinking of the highest order.

If We Save Public Education in America, We Save America!!

Posted on by

If Ever There Was a Time to Stand and Fight for Public Education, this is it!

If you have not seen today’s editorial in this morning’s Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (Monday, February 9, 2015) then pick up the paper now or click on this link. Invest in Schools

Indiana has several issues being debated at the state legislature and you can be sure the same debates are taking place in many other state legislatures.

Here in Indiana it is public school funding legislation in which the Governor and many of his supporters are pushing for more funding for charter schools and voucher programs without adequately addressing the needs of public school corporations throughout the state.

The Indiana governor and his supporters in the state legislature are also pushing a bill to make the position of Superintendent of Public Instruction an appointed rather than an elected position. Had the Superintendent of Public Instruction in the State of Indiana been someone appointed by either this or past governors rather than one elected by 1.3 million Hoosier voters, the department would have been nothing but a rubber stamp on an agenda that is not friendly to our states public schools, their students and communities.

The forces that are harming public education in Indiana and elsewhere are powerful beyond description and the only way to slow them down is for the parents of public school children to stand up and be counted. Write an email or letter to both the state representative and state senator in your area. Better yet, write and old fashion letter that takes up space and must be handled.

Sign a petition to support public schools, public school students, and public school teachers. Here is a link to a petition started by a 9th grade high school student taking a stand against the current emphasis on standardized competency testing. Reduce Standardized Testing in Public Schools Across America.

Seek out other petitions and opportunities to be heard by contacting such organizations as the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education or the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, and many others.

Start your own petition and invite other parents to sign.

Contact your local school corporation or the principal of your child’s school and ask how you can help.

Just do something to make your voice heard and your vote count.

Hoosier voters, just like so many American voters, have fallen in to the habit of thinking that just because we have voted for people to represent our interests in the state legislature they can be left to do their job, unattended. Keep in mind that, once elected, your representatives and senators are immediately besieged by special interest groups who may be pushing agendas that are counter to your interests and the interests of your local schools and communities.

Do whatever you can to make certain that your interests are not subverted by these special interest groups.

If every public school parent and their friends and families would stand up to be counted we could put a stop to some of these policies very quickly.

Finally, link up with your public school teachers through your PTA and through local teachers associations and find out how, working together, you can make a difference. Right now, many of your school’s teachers are feeling overwhelmed by the changes taking place and powerless to do something about it other than leave the profession. We cannot afford to lose any more teachers.

The most important message I urge you to accept is the idea that we are not powerless and we need not feel hopeless. All we have to do is engage people, in any way we can, even one person at a time, to join the crusade. If we save public education in America we save America.

Tea Party Strategies Have Frightening Implications for the Poor and Minorities

Posted on by

During the 2012 presidential election campaign, Governor Mitt Romney’s remark about the “47 percent of Americans” not counting was intended to convey a shift in thinking that is at the center of the political strategies of the “Tea Party movement” and other conservative republicans.

What Romney meant was that many of the American’s who make up that 47 percent will not vote and those who do vote will not be voting for republicans. The resulting ideology that seems to guide much of today’s conservative political strategy is based on the idea that they cannot do anything to change the thinking of the 47 percent so they will stop trying.

Instead, their focus has become the pursuit of policies that they feel are in the best interests of the country without respect to the interests of the 47 percent. It is comparable to the isolationist point of view of American leaders of an earlier era that they will take care of Americans and let the rest of the world take care of itself. In this case, “the rest of the world” is the “47 percent.”

If we closely examine the policy initiatives of conservatives in both business and government, the theme is woven throughout with bright red, white, and blue threads.

The rabid opposition to “Obamacare” is but one example. In fact the term “Obamacare” and its root “Obama” have become a pejorative terms comparable to “Communist” and “socialist.” How often, when they can think of nothing intelligent to say about the opposition, do you see conservative political ads portray opposing candidate as an “Obamacare” supporters? With Pavlovian consistency, the typical response on the part of conservative Americans is that their minds shut down and they no longer listen to what the other side has to say.

I would be first to tell you that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a bad law but at least it was motivated by a sincere desire, on the part of its advocates, to address the national travesty that was and still is the American health care system. The proponents of healthcare reform might have been able to come with a workable solution to the problems of healthcare in America had the people on the other side of the political DMZ been willing to roll up their sleeves and help. The Affordable Care Act is as much a result of the intransigence of conservatives as it is the convoluted logic of its proponents.

The nation-wide attack on public education, public schools, and public school teachers—with our Hoosier state in the forefront—is another of the frightening examples of the strategic mindset on the part of Tea Party and other conservative leaders. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to cling to the hope that traditional republicans want what is best for all Americans, not just an elite minority.

Government and corporate reforms of public education focus on blaming teachers and our most challenged urban schools for the problems in education. As I have noted on many occasions, this is like blaming our men and women in uniform for the wars our government asks them to fight.

This conservative strategy, as terrifying as it is unspoken, is to attack our most challenged public schools and their teachers with a focus on standardized testing to hold them accountable. Then, rather than use the information gleaned from test results to address the real reasons why so many children are failing, they use the results to seek closure of urban schools and seize control of those schools from the communities.

Incidentally, using standardized test results to show that some schools are struggling is no more sophisticated and scientific than using a thermometer to determine that January is colder than July. To continue the metaphor, rather than use the findings to figure out ways to make the best of the cold, Governor Pence and his reformers use the findings to justify escaping to Florida for the winter months, leaving the rest of the population to shiver.

In the battle over public education the strategy of choice for reformers is two-pronged. With the right hand, they encourage the creation of more charter schools and then incent families to abandon their community public schools through the use of voucher programs. With their left hand they are stripping our urban public schools of the resources they need to teach their students and they are weakening the ability of local citizens to stand up for their schools. The underlying theme is, “let’s take care of our own and let the figurative 47 percent of the population fend for themselves.” These strategies are having a devastating effect not just on urban public school corporations and their teachers but also on our children and our communities.

Here in Indiana, we have a strong conservative governor who is intent on undermining the will of the people by stripping the Indiana Department of Public Education and its duly elected superintendent of their power to attend to the needs of every school, every teacher, and every student in Indiana. It seems almost incomprehensible to imagine that a conservative republican governor would so willfully usurp the will of 1.3 million Hoosier voters. It is also incomprehensible that most Hoosiers appear unable to recognize what is happening.

The most recent iteration of this “strategy of abandonment” was the creation of “Just IN.” This innovative creation was intended to empower our governor to use public funds to control the flow of information to Hoosier citizens. So much for the conservative mantra of protecting the citizenry from big government.

If all of this was not so tragic it would almost be exciting to see what these “self-proclaimed saviors of America” will come up with, next.

Fortunately, in the face of the public uproar, Governor Pence was quick to back down on his “Just IN” proposal. Supporters of public education and members of ethnically diverse urban communities throughout America need to take a lesson from this latest outcome. If supporters of public education stand united, there is hope that we can encourage the Governor Pence to cease and desist. Leaders of minority communities and other economically challenged communities must also take heed of Pence’s back down on “Just IN.”

If supporters of public education and the leaders of minority and other economically challenged communities would link arms and stand together they would be a force to be reckoned with. If we can combat the Governor’s attack on freedom of the press, who knows what, standing united, we might accomplish in our fight to restore our state’s commitment to our public schools and their students and teachers.

Attacking the Performance Gap between Black and White Students

Posted on by

As we have said so often, the performance gap that exists between white students and their black classmates is the single-most glaring fact in all of public education. Our ability to close the gap will be driven not by more standardized testing, not by blaming teachers for their inability to help their students raise test scores, not by the creation of more charter schools with voucher programs to pay for them, not by closing the so-called “failing public schools,” and certainly not by severing the vital relationships between our public schools and the communities they exist to serve.

We must understand why so many black kids fail. What we will discover is that the high rate of failure among poor urban black students is not the result of some genetic deficiency that makes it difficult for them to learn as well as their white classmates. There are far too many examples of accomplished African-Americans, many of whom grew up in poverty in our most challenging neighborhoods, who rose to prominence in virtually every profession in American Society. A black President of the United States is just one of many examples.

The reason why so many African-American students fail is not because they are poor, although being poor creates enormous challenges. The problem is that our focus on poverty, which we feel powerless to control, distracts from actions that are within our power to do.

We all know of examples where poor children have succeeded academically, irrespective of race or family structure. What we need to do is make the effort to understand what distinguishes poor kids who enjoy academic success from poor kids that fail.

While there can be any number of things that come into play in contributing to a child’s success in school, with a special teacher one of the most obvious, the overwhelming majority of such successes flow from a commitment of a parent or guardian who somehow clings to the hope that an quality education offers a way out for their child. It is when parents have lost hope that an education can make a difference that their sons and daughters arrive for their first day of school poorly prepared for academic success and with precious little motivation to learn.

Many of these families have lost faith in American public education and have lost both faith and hope in the American dream. I suggest to you that these are realities over which we have a great deal of control if only we would accept responsibility and try.

The following story taken from my book, Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, is true:

“While subbing in an alternative high school classroom (alternative school within the Fort Wayne Community Schools district is where middle and high school students are sent when they are suspended from their regular school), I had a conversation with a young African-American student. He would not work on the worksheet I had given to the class.

“You need to get busy on the assignment,” I said to him.

“I don’t do worksheets,” was his response.

“If you don’t understand the lesson, I’ll be happy to help you with it,” was my answer.

He looked at me and very calmly responded, “I didn’t say I don’t know how to do it, cuz. I said I don’t do worksheets.”

With full-fledged naiveté I asked, “You don’t think you need to learn this material?”

“It’s a complete waste of my time, cuz!” was his answer.

“You don’t think it’s necessary for you to read and write well? How will you get a job to support yourself?”

At no time did he show any emotion during this conversation.

“Cuz, you don’t know nothin’ about what I need to support myself in the hood. You need to back off, Cuz! I don’t need none of what you got!”

As I pointed out in my book, this was not a dumb kid and, in fact, if evaluated within the context of the world in which he exists he would be judged to be highly intelligent. It is also true that this young man was not an exception to the rule but rather one of many in his community. The difference is that these intelligent young kids, irrespective of race, learn what they consider to be important in their lives. The things we teach in our schools are just not on the list of the things that are important to a huge number of our youngsters.

What teachers and members of the community can do, working together in partnership, is begin to change the value placed on education by these youngsters and their parents or guardians.

If you are reading these words, is there any doubt in your mind that teacher and parent working together can be successful in helping a child see the value in an education and develop a motivation to learn? There are no guarantees, of course, and the earlier those partnerships can be formed along the timeline that represents the developmental years of a child, the higher the probability that a child can succeed. Not only will they succeed but they will rise to ever-higher expectations as identified by their teacher and parent. And, what is true for black children is true for all of our nation’s at-risk children.

The next, question, of course, is “but what can we do?”

A CALL TO ACTION: A New Civil Rights Movement Focused on Public Education!

Posted on by

Education is a civil rights issue today just as it was in the 1950s during the initial years of the historic civil rights movement. Back then, the challenge was breaking down the barriers that prevented black children from attending public schools. Today, the issue is virtually the same but with a new twist.

Southern public schools in particular discriminated against African-American children by denying them entrance into public schools and universities. Today, African-American, Hispanic, and other minority children, along with white children living in urban America already attend public schools. Today’s problem is that our government, both federal and state, are discriminating against public school corporations by siphoning off revenue through voucher programs that allow families to transfer their children to charter schools and other private and parochial schools.

Our government and the corporate reformers who support and encourage them are claiming that charter schools the other alternatives are doing a better job than our public schools and they cloak their advocacy under the blanket of “freedom of choice.” While they promote the development of charter schools and encourage families to take advantage of vouchers they attack our urban public schools with the charge that they are failing and that the blame for such failure rests on the shoulders of public school teachers. Therein lies the fallacy of current corporate and government education reforms.

The simple but compelling fact is that the teachers who populate our charter schools and other private and parochial alternatives are educated in the same colleges and universities and are license pursuant to the same state standards and qualifications as their public-school counterparts. How can we think that whether or not a qualified and licensed teacher will magically perform at a higher level is a function of the fact that they teach in a charter, private or parochial school rather than in a public school in the same community?

The problem is not “choice” and no right thinking American would deny the importance of giving families choices. The problem is that while luring students and their associated revenue away from our public schools our government is making no effort to address the real challenges that such schools face. As they heap more and more blame on teachers and schools for low scores on state competency exams and reduce the revenue upon which these schools depend, more and more teachers are leaving the profession. In many cases it is the most experienced and most capable teachers that are fleeing the field of education making it that much more difficult for the abandoned schools to meet the needs of their students.

Right now African-American citizens and other parents concerned with the quality of their public schools are in possession of a wonderful opportunity to change the reality for their children. Community leaders from each of these groups, working separately and in concert, need to rally their communities in support of their public schools and teachers.

Concurrently, public school teachers, both individually and collectively, need to reach out to the leaders of the local communities and offer to work together to rise to the challenges facing public education. Make no mistake. A partnership between public school teachers and the parents of their communities working together to serve the best interests of children will transform public education as surely as rain will make the flowers grow.

At the national level, we need high profile leaders of all of our minority communities to link together and take a stand on the issue of public education with the same commitment that we witness anew in the movie Selma. We beseech these leaders from business, government, entertainment, and professional athletics to come together on this most important issue and to reach out to the American Federation of Teachers, to the National Education Association, and to such groups as the Bad Ass Teachers Association. At the same time, we need the leaders of the AFT, NEA and BATs to reach out to community leaders.

Not since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues and supporters marched to Selma has there been an issue as important to the future of our nation and its children as exists today with the crisis in public education. Never has there been an opportunity to bring about such transformational change as exists right now, in cities across the United States of America.

If you are reading this message, today, please pass on this call to action to everyone you know. It may be the most important thing you can do for your country.

Government and Corporate Education Reforms Devastating to Minorities and the Poor

Posted on by

One can only wonder why the public, particularly the African-American community, has not responded to the threat posed by current educational reforms with the same zeal and anger displayed in response to the tragedies in Ferguson, Missouri and in other communities throughout the U.S.

While symptoms of deep racial enmity will continue to plague our society, at least the senseless targeting of young blacks will no longer go unnoticed. Such incidents are sparks from the static electricity generated by the friction between the races; they are symptoms of an underlying pathology.

Until recently, like many white Americans observing the incidents in Ferguson and elsewhere, I understood the fear and anger of black America at an intellectual level, only. It was not until I became the grandfather of a young black male that I began to feel it at a gut level. That my sweet young grandson may someday be judged by the color of his skin rather than by “the content of his character” is agonizing on a deeper level than I could have ever imagined.

As great as it may be, however, the tragedy of young blacks being profiled by police officers and by our justice system pales in comparison to a tragedy being perpetrated against Americans of all races living in the poorest urban and rural communities of our nation. This tragedy, which is being systematically executed by of our state and federal governments, is the remarkable disassembly of our systems of public education.

It is difficult enough to understand why so many of the leaders of American government and business are committed a “policy of abandonment” of our nation’s most challenged public schools. What is even more difficult to understand, in the midst of this systemic attack against our public schools and teachers, is the apparent apathy on the part of Americans from all segments of our population. It is astonishing that our public school teachers and other public school educators seem to be the only people who see what is happening.

Where are the protests by African-, Hispanic-, and other minority Americans who must surely recognize that an attack against our public school teachers and their schools is also an attack against their children? Where is the outcry from white Americans whose children depend on our rural and urban public schools? Where are protests of local employers in communities throughout our nation who depend on our public schools as a source for their collective workforces? How can we let our public school teachers face this crisis alone?

In communities throughout the United States, with Indiana but one example, state governments are promoting legislative and executive action to siphon scarce dollars away from urban public school corporations in order to fund voucher programs that will benefit only a select group of families. Advocates of such programs are fond of declaring a commitment to such concepts as “choice” and “competition.”

These declarations are nothing more than a pre-meditated deception. Governor Pence claims to want all students to have a choice. Looking at just FWCS, where can 31,000 students go? Are there sufficient classrooms in our community’s parochial, private, and charter schools to absorb 31,000 students? What about the approximate 5,000 special education students. Do the parochial, private, and charter alternatives have the resources to serve this special population? Extrapolate these numbers to the entire State of Indiana.

The problem is not the existence of charter schools and voucher programs rather that such schools and programs are not balanced by a commitment to fix our public schools.

The truth is that while Indiana offers vouchers to insure “choice” for a few of our state’s one million public school students, the state is stripping our public school corporations of vital resources necessary to serve hundreds of thousands of their students. They are attacking our public school teachers with such ferocity that many are opting to leave the teaching profession at a time when fewer and fewer college students are aspiring to become teachers.

Indiana is challenging public schools to compete effectively against charter schools and other private and parochial alternatives while evidence mounts that charter schools, in particular, are not being held to the same standards. Add the fact that our public schools are expected to serve a disproportionately higher population of special needs students and we are creating a recipe for social disaster.

It harkens back to Governor Romney’s “47 percent” remark during his campaign for the presidency. It seems as if our government has decided that there is nothing they can do to fix the problems in our public schools. So, instead of trying to fix the problems of public education, they have chosen to subsidize those families that are motivated to move their kids to a charter, private or public school and let the public schools and their communities fend for themselves.

For our nation, the long term consequences of such a strategy are staggering. The consequences for our poor and minority students border on criminal.

Where are the protests? Where are the shouts of anger and frustration? Where is the support for our public school teachers and other professionals who labor under such adverse circumstances? Does anyone care?

In my next post, I will begin laying out a challenge to public school parents to take a stand in support of their children, their children’s teachers and schools. I will be laying out a specific challenge to our African-American citizens their leaders and also to the leaders and citizens of the Hispanic and other minority populations.

What can one teacher do to stop the dismantling of public education in America?

Posted on by

During a recent visit with my daughter and her family, I had an opportunity to talk with the husband of a public school teacher from the Cincinnati area. I was disappointed to learn that this young woman was working hard to prepare herself for a new career outside the field of education.

Like so many public school teachers, today, this husband explained his wife’s frustration with the changes that are taking place in public education in Ohio, changes that are making it difficult for her to teach children.

Her husband shared with me that his wife is one of seven or eight teachers at her school who are actively pursuing a career change once the current school year has ended. He also said that his wife’s principal is aware of the fact that she and several of her colleagues are planning to leave and this principal has been pleading with them to reconsider. “You are my best teachers,” he tells them. No doubt this principal is one of many who dread the prospect of leading their schools into an uncertain future without their best teachers.

Can we blame teachers for leaving their profession? Do they not have the right to pursue the best opportunities for which they are qualified? Public school corporations are no different than any other employer. An employer can expect the loyalty of its employees for only as long as that employer can sell them on the importance of the organization’s mission; meet their need for professional and financial fulfillment; and, give them reason to hope for successful outcomes.

Given the degree to which public education is under attack, the school corporations that serve our nation’s most vulnerable communities are being stripped of the power to make any assurances to their faculties, which begs the question of how such corporations, in the absence of a capable faculty, can offer any assurances to their students and their community.

The unpleasant truth with which the American people must come to terms is that our nation’s leaders have created a scenario in which the control over the education of our nation’s children has been placed in the hands of people who have no understanding of the realities of educating children; corporate executives and government officials who function within a logical realm that is corrupted by special interests and who have only their arrogance to guide them.

What kind of future can we have as a democratic society when we have lost our ability to prepare all of our children for the responsibilities of citizenship? What kind of future do the American people want for their children?

The dilemma for the American people is that they do not trust the bill of goods being pushed by corporate and government reformers and, also, that they have lost faith in traditional public education.

Teachers, principals, and superintendents and other educational professionals are the only ones who possess sufficient knowledge to save public education and to offer the American people what they want and need. The American people desperately need professional educators to stand and fight rather than stand by with our hands in our pockets and do nothing or, worse, leave the profession to the reformers.

If professional educators choose to stand and fight rather than flee, we can work together to offer the American people an alternative to the policies of the corporate and government reformers. We can offer them a new reality that is focused on learning and the special relationship that exists between teachers, students and parents. We can offer them a reality in which every child is important and in which no student will be permitted to fail.

It is understandable that individual teachers feel lost and alone and it is natural to feel like there is nothing one person can do. But teachers need not feel alone. They are part of a population of as many as three million professional educators who can come together to create this new reality.

In addition to existing unions and associations at both the state and national level, there is a new group of players in the game: the Bad Ass Teachers Association with a membership of 53,000 professionals and counting. Teachers can become BATS and still be active in their unions and associations, in fact they are encouraged to do so. Get active and demand action!

Teachers are not the only professionals at risk in these challenging times. The future of public school principals and administrators and also the superintendents and other administrative professionals of every public school corporation in the nation are also at risk, particularly those who serve populations in our nation’s most challenging communities.

The leaderships of each of these representative entities must recognize that they are at war for the very survival of public education and mounting a challenge to the corporate and government reformers must become their over-riding priority.

When faced with a common adversary the best strategy is always to unite all those who share a common interest. It is time for the leaders of each and every organization that is committed to public education to step up and find ways to work together to provide the American people with a reason to hope. If we can give them something in which they can believe the people will stand with their children’s teachers. Together, we can reject the forces that are striving to usurp the will of the American people to the great disadvantage of our children.

The future of teachers, public education, and the American people are at stake and the consequences for our failure to stem the tide will be tragic beyond description. In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America, I offer a blueprint of a plan to create a new reality in education.