Tag Archives: voucher programs

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

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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

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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

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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!

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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

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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.

The Politics of Abandonment

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The most appropriate way to describe the policies of educational reformers, educational policy-makers, and government officials with respect to their support of charter schools and vouchers to pay for them is the word “abandonment.” Think for a moment about what these powerful men and women do and examine the underlying logic of their actions.

In response to our most challenged public schools that almost always exist in areas populated by Americans of low income, these reformers, policy-makers, and their government supporters rarely, if ever, talk about what we can do to fix these low-performing schools. Instead they are indignant and decry the performance of such schools, implying that things would be different if only they were in charge.

These powerful men and women, often with the support of billion-dollar foundations and wealthy business people, make a great show of demanding accountability from such schools and their teachers. They threaten dire consequences for both the teachers and their schools corporations and demand that they demonstrate what they call “documented” or “verifiable” improvement on the basis of annual competency exams. When, as almost always happens, the test scores for the students of these schools show no improvement or even fall to a lower level these reformers and policy makers throw up their hands in figurative despair; their voices loud and echoing.

They respond by encouraging the creation of charter schools in those communities to provide what they anticipate will be attractive and high-performing alternatives. They then institute voucher programs that allow families to take the stream of revenue that follows their sons and daughters and transfer them to their school of choice. Parents who are sufficiently motivated to take advantage of such incentives are able to choose from the newly created charter schools and also parochial and other private schools within or close to their communities. Some even opt to go to nearby suburban public schools that are able to boast of the impressive performance of their students on annual competency exams.

That many of the charter schools are unable show improved performance of their new student populations seems not to matter. Rarely noted is that many of the parochial schools, all of which are thrilled to enjoy the increased revenue from vouchers, are poorly resourced and have faculties that receive insufficient training to help them deal with this influx of new and more challenging students. We often forget that many of the parochial schools are unable to compete with their public counterparts on the basis of teacher salaries. These schools typically attract teachers who share religious convictions or who are seeking what they believe will be a more stable and rewarding teaching environment.

Even the high-performing suburban public schools may struggle to welcome the “voucher students” and incorporate them into their mainstream academic and social cultures.

While many of the new students in charter, parochial, private, or suburban public schools make a successful transition and demonstrate a higher level of academic performance, many others do not. What seems to matter is attitude and level of commitment of the parents of these transferring students. Just because such parents are motivated to take advantage of the opportunities that vouchers present does not mean that they are sufficiently motivated to become actively involved and accept responsibility as partners in the educational process. Many of these parents are more likely to conclude that their job is done and now it is up to the new school and its teachers to turn their children around.

In the interim, the abandoned public schools from which voucher students have fled are left with fewer students with a strong motivation to learn, fewer parents that care, and less revenue with which to work. We should not be surprised that the progress these schools claim to be making is often obscured by their more challenging student population.

When these schools clamor for more revenue with which to rise to their escalating challenges and to pay their teachers, their requests are denied. More often than not they are met with even more emphasis on annual competency exams accompanied by sanctions and other consequences as a result of their presumed failure to rise to expectations.

When the teachers in these abandoned schools, and the unions and associations that represent them, lobby for more resources and better contracts those requests, too, are rejected. In many cases, the legislators in these states respond with bills and proposals to restrict the collective bargaining power of teachers’ unions and, in some cases, threaten to eliminate the unions, altogether.

Consider the social and economic consequences when our government offers lifelines to only the most motivated families in our most troubled schools and then confines the remaining families to what we publicly label as our worst schools. Consider the consequences when the actions of our government seem directed at increasing the level of segregation, not just in our schools from the perspective of race, but more importantly segregating both our schools and entire communities on the basis of the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

With righteous indignation our leadership is charting a course toward unmitigated disaster for our cities and, ultimately, for our society as a whole. We are fast becoming a house divided at a time when we can least afford it.

Our only hope of competing effectively in the ever-more dynamic and demanding world marketplace requires the very best that a people united by a common purpose can give.

Somehow we must reverse our course. Doing so requires that each and every one of us make a commitment to change the way we think; to solicit the support of our friends and colleagues; and, to act on the basis of our shared values and principles. And, we need to do so damn quickly!

Read my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America to see exactly what we can do and how!

Ongoing review of Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch, Chapter 6

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Chapter 6 of Reign of Error is focused on the performance gap that exists between white students and their minority classmates. There seems to be little doubt that the achievement gap is real and that it is particularly egregious with respect to African-American students.

The corporate reformers and other advocates of charter schools, vouchers, more testing and accountability, and privatization of education cite the data as irrefutable evidence that we need to rescue as many kids as possible from our underperforming schools. Rarely do they acknowledge any responsibility to help the schools that are being abandoned or to reach out help the people who seem unable to escape. The reality from the perspective of the poor is that they are being written off once again. How can they think otherwise?

Ravitch acknowledges that the gap is unacceptable but insists that much progress has been made in closing the gap over the past two decades. I suggest the progress has been too little, too slow.

While the reformers say that education is failing, Ravitch and other defenders of traditional education say that test scores and other measures of student performance, including graduation rates, are higher they have ever been. This may be true but neither the progress nor the data is good enough! The results are simply unacceptable. It is comparable to a president boasting that unemployment has dropped from 25 to 22 percent on his or her watch.

As we have noted in prior sections, we concur that the educational system is failing but believe that it is the educational process that is failing, not schools and their teachers.

While reformers call for what amounts to wholesale abandonment of traditional public education in America, Ravitch and her defenders suggest that we cannot fix education until we address the societal problems that cause the failure; specifically poverty and racial segregation. Once again, both sides of the argument totally misinterpret the forces that influence all that is taking place in our public schools.

One of the issues with which we agree totally with Ravitch is the importance of preserving the links between our schools and the communities they exist to serve. We agree that privatization of public education, the crippling of unions and the establishment of for-profit schools “inevitably means deregulation, greater segregation, and less equity with minimal oversight by public authorities.” Then Ravitch adds “Privatization has typically not been a friend to powerless groups.”

I find it remarkable that Ravitch has sufficient insight to recognize that many of the citizens and their communities who depend on public education are powerless yet she fails to grasp the role that this “powerlessness” plays in our educational crisis and she is not alone. Few people seem to recognize that unlike poverty, which is a condition over which we have been able to exert almost no control, “powerlessness” is a state of mind that is within our power to do something about. As we have said so often, we need to attack powerlessness and hopelessness relentlessly.

Rather than developing strategies that will help people learn how to begin exerting control over the outcomes in their lives we promise to take care of them; a promise we have yet to keep. Such promises do not help alleviate this sense of powerlessness rather they create dependencies to which the powerless can cling.

What the reformers do not seem to realize is that the farther you remove the community from the decision-making process the more powerless the citizens of those communities become. If we take away a community’s schools we effectively deprive the community of its ability to bridge the performance gap, themselves. In other words we increase their level of powerlessness and, therefore, their sense of hopelessness.

Ravitch states emphatically that African-Americans are making great progress and cites NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results that show a reduction of the number of students scoring “below basic” in math and reading.

My interpretation would suggest that Improvements between 2007 and 2011 have been marginal, at best. The numbers speak for themselves. NAEP results show that, in 2011, 49 percent of black students scored below basic in 8th grade math and 41 percent in 8th grade reading. In other words, virtually half of African-American eighth graders scored below basic in Math and 4 out every 10 scored below basic in reading. Hardly cause for celebration. Most importantly, “basic” is not an acceptable for which to strive.

The NAEP defines basic, which is one of its three achievement levels, as “denoting partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work. Think about what that means. It is partial mastery, not mastery. And, it is not even partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work but rather partial mastery of the “prerequisite” knowledge and skills.

NAEP’s definition of “proficient”, on the other hand, is “demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.” [The emphasis is mine.]

So, when one is proficient by this definition, it means they possess the ability to actually apply what they have learned to real life situations. “Basic,” on the other hand, implies that the knowledge and skills are not sufficient for utilization in solving “real life” situations. In other words, the gap between “proficiency” and “below basic,” as defined by NAEP, is as cavernous as the gap between the performance of white and black students.

In the business world, one would never send an employee out in the shop, plant, field, or office to do a job if they could only demonstrate partial mastery of prerequisite skills. They have to be able to apply their knowledge to “real-life situations” or they are of no use to their employer and pose a risk to customer satisfaction. Clearly, the performance bar needs to be raised to “proficient” and what we are doing now is blatantly inadequate.

Here, the data is every bit as disturbing. From 2003 to 2011 the percentage of black students who have achieved the level of “proficient or above” in math has risen from 8 percent to only 14 percent. In reading, during same time span, the percentage of African-American students who have achieved “proficient or above” has risen only from 13 to 15 percent. During this period, the percentage of white students who have achieved “proficient or above” in math and reading has risen to 43 and 44 percent, respectively.

The gap is alarming but why would we ever be satisfied that less than 45 percent of our children are achieving “proficiency or above.” We must raise our targets and change the way we do things.

We need to reinvent the educational process to one that is focused on success and that is structured in a way that it supports teachers and students in what they do. And, we need to create a nation-wide campaign to resell the American dream and engage parents from all demographic groups as full partners in the education of their children. The good news is that such a reinvention is well within our power to do if only we will open our minds to new ideas and to the possibility of a desirable outcome.

Ravitch’s assertion that blacks and other minorities are making real progress is difficult to accept given the facts. Possibly Ravitch and others are referring to the many middle class and professional blacks who have risen to the corporate boardroom, the operating room, and even to White House; but this population is an exception. The gap between uneducated blacks in our poor rural and urban communities and more accomplished middle class African-Americans is, itself, cavernous. The accomplishments of so many is clear evidence that African-American students can excel.

So we are left with the question “why do so many fail?” And let us not forget that many of the most accomplished African-Americans and other minorities rose from the same neighborhoods as their underperforming classmates.

Diane Ravitch is correct that “Achievement gaps begin long before children start kindergarten.” She is also correct that the variance with respect to preparation and motivation of students as they arrive for their first day of school is as disparate as the population is diverse. It is also true that where families fall on the affluence continuum, the degree to which education is valued in a given culture, and the availability of quality healthcare all play a role in determining how motivated and well-prepared a child is upon arrival for their first day of school.

The most important influence on the relative preparation and motivation of children is the level of hopelessness and powerlessness that surrounds the child from the day of their birth and up until they head off for their first day of school. Where I disagree with Ravitch is not the relative scope and scale of the challenges these children face but with our perceptions about what we have the power to do in response. Most Americans have the attitude that only our government bears responsibility for bringing about such changes and has the power needed. Because of that attitude, we go about our business as usual and we sit back and wait for the world to change around us.

The reality is that we are not powerless and we need not be hopeless. We need a plan of action; we need to work together as a community; and, we need to do that which is in our power to do, even if it is one step at a time or one family, school, or community at a time.

The reference to the work of Thomas B. Timar’s (University of California), I thought, was particularly helpful. Timar wrote, as quoted by Ravitch,

“One reason [why there was so little progress in closing the achievement gap] is that although schools can be held accountable for some of the disadvantages these students experience, they have been given the entire responsibility for closing the achievement gap. Yet the gap is the symptom of larger social, economic and political problems that go far beyond the reach of the school. . . . While schools are part of the solution, they alone cannot solve the problems of educational disparities.” (Timar, Thomas B. and Julie Maxwell-Jolly, eds., Narrowing the Achievement Gap: Perspectives and Strategies for Challenging Times, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Education Press, 2012, page 230).

According to Ravitch, Professor Timar also suggests that “policy makers have invested for thirty years in strategies that are “misdirected and ineffectual,” managing to keep urban schools in a state of “policy spin,” bouncing from one idea to another. . . .”

The most salient points by Timar are:
• Schools can’t solve the problem alone. . . .
• The value of local initiatives without which, Timar suggests, reforms cannot succeed.
• Creating social capital that exists between schools and their community. He describes them as built on a “sense of community, organizational stability, and trust. Leadership has a shared vision and a “sense of purpose, a plan, and individuals with responsibility for coordination and implementation.
• Teachers working collaboratively to improve teaching and learning
• The need to think in terms of long-term, comprehensive strategies.
• That American policymakers haves grown too politically conservative and are unwilling to address structural issues.
• “bureaucratizing the process of school improvement and turning it into a chase for higher test scores” have not worked.
• Federal programs like NCLB and Race to the Top have made schools less stable, encouraged staff turnover, promoted policy churn, and undermined professionalism.

The best chance, Timar implies and we which I suggest in my book Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, lies with grass roots models of change.

Where Timar strays off course is the traditional view that until we can address the issues of poverty there will always be achievement gaps but he redeems himself by saying that we need to “work vigorously to improve conditions” of families and communities. I would exchange the word “conditions” to “states of mind,” suggesting that we need to address hopelessness and powerlessness.

Ravitch writes, in reference to Timar’s point of view, “Rather than regulation and mandates we need professional collaboration, community building, and cooperation that require that schools have authority to design their own improvement plans and act without waiting for instructions or permission from Washington or the state capital [sic].”

My response to that is “RIGHT ON, DR. RAVITCH!”

Ravitch concludes this chapter by saying, “What we know from these scholars makes sense. The achievement gaps are rooted in social, political, and economic structures. If we are unwilling to change the root causes, we are unlikely ever to close the gaps. What we call achievement gaps are in fact opportunity gaps.”

She continues, “The schools did not cause the achievement gaps, and the schools alone are not powerful enough to close them.”

I think the point Ravitch is really striving to make, here, is that schools did not cause the gaps and should not be blamed for our lack of success in closing them. In Reinventing Education, I suggest that schools provide the perfect vehicle with which to attack the “root causes,” which I define as “powerlessness and hopelessness” rather than “poverty, segregation et al,” and that if parents and schools can be brought together in partnership, we have more than enough power to transform public education.

Finally, Ravitch says:

“So long as society is indifferent to poverty, so long as we are willing to look the other way rather than act vigorously to improve the conditions of families and communities, there will always be achievement gaps.”

The unfortunate but sublimely subtle truth—and the reason why poverty and deteriorating communities remain a reality—is our fixation on the idea that changing these realities is society’s or government’s responsibility. At no time do Ravitch and the legions of well-meaning professional educators, policy makers, and social scientists recognize the subtle but profound truth that these conditions exist because we have robbed the poor and the disenfranchised of a sense of responsibility for their own circumstances and we have enabled their sense of hopelessness and powerlessness.

We cannot change the economic conditions in which people live without addressing their dependency and helping them recognize the power that they have to begin changing their own lives. We can be of great assistance in helping people shed their sense of powerlessness and hopelessness but we cannot do it for them. What we must do is teach them that success is a process that even they can master and then help them deal with the obstacles that stand in the way of their children.

Exerpt #5 from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, from The Introduction

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Most Americans are unaware of the poor showing of the American educational system when compared to other nations in the world marketplace, but there does appear to be clear evidence that our children are performing poorly when compared to the children of other nations. This is particularly true of American children in our urban communities. As a result, our public schools are facing scathing criticism as are the educators who struggle to make the system work for our children. The cry goes out that our public schools are failing us and that teachers are to blame. Such claims are, at a minimum, misguided, at their worst a travesty.

In response to mounting pressure from federal and state officials, some school districts have resorted to major housecleaning; terminating teachers and administrators in groups both large and small. In other communities, state departments of public education are placing failing schools on probation and, in some cases, are threatening to take the schools over in an attempt to improve lagging test scores. In Fort Wayne Community Schools, the system to which we will often refer throughout this book, the district gave notices to more than 300 teachers and administrators at the end of the 2010/2011 school year and required them to reapply for their jobs as part of the district’s strategy for an academic shake up.

Such actions are tantamount to blaming soldiers for a war they were asked to fight. These efforts make an insignificant impact on the problem, especially when these schools rehire the same teachers and administrators and then move them to a different building. It does not work because teachers and administrators are only a small part of the problem and, in many cases, are themselves victims of an educational system that is both misdirected and poorly designed to do what we desperately need it to do in this ever-more complicated world.

So, what is the problem with public education in the United States of America? In response to what was meant as a rhetorical question, “What is the matter with these kids?” a middle school teacher with whom I shared a table in a faculty lounge summed up the problem with public education in the United States elegantly and concisely, if not kindly, in six words: “They just don’t give a shit!” And, he spat the words out.

My first response was to laugh. After ten years of substitute teaching, it has become glaringly obvious to me that there was more than a nugget of truth in the observations of this teacher, whose name and school I cannot recall. It is anything but a laughing matter, however.

There are, indeed, students who do care and parents who do support the educational process. The reality, however, is that an alarming percentage of those parents are pulling their children out of our urban public schools and placing them in a variety of private alternatives from parochial, charter schools, or other private schools to home schooling. In many places, state governments are encouraging such transfers through the use of voucher programs that allow the use of tax dollars to subsidize such transfers. Other parents are moving their families out of cities and into suburban and rural public school districts where they believe their children will receive a better education. The sad but compelling fact is that these suburban and rural public schools, and parochial and private alternatives, are out-performing their urban public counterparts on test scores to such a degree that it is difficult to be critical of parents who make such choices. The subsequent consequences with which our urban public school students and teachers must deal as a result of such departures are scary. We will return to this subject later in this chapter. Scarier, still, is that even our better schools are under performing relative to the school systems of other developed nations.

The only places where American students are consistently performing at an exceptional level are in special schools that exist, in small numbers, along the fringes of the mainstream educational system. Readers who have viewed the documentary, Waiting for Superman , were given a glimpse of a few examples of these remarkable little schools. As exciting as their performance might appear, these special little schools are not the answer to the American educational dilemma although they do offer a glimpse of the secret to solving the problem. They are not the solution because they are too few in number and simply cannot be replicated in sufficient numbers to solve the problem for the other ninety-nine percent of our nation’s student population. More importantly, they are not the solution because we have not made the effort to fully understand the reasons for their success. Instead, we stumble along in search of answers, blinded by our assumptions.

The leaders and advocates of such special schools suggest that their success can be attributed to two key factors. The first, these advocates suggest, is that these programs enjoy the luxury of being able to recruit exemplary teachers; the proverbial cream of the crop. The second is that, because these schools exist outside of the formal educational system, they are constrained by neither the bureaucracy of the public school system nor the power of teacher unions. Absent these constraints, according to their administrators, these schools are able to develop innovative curricula and place their exemplary teachers in exceptionally conducive environments, allowing them to do extraordinary things.

The freedom to do things differently and to break away from conventional wisdom creates a tremendous advantage for these schools and their students and mainstream educational policy makers and administrators must learn from their example. What we often ignore is that the most important advantage enjoyed by these special schools, we believe, is that the student populations of these schools are made up almost entirely of children whose parents are fiercely determined to see that their sons and daughters will get the best possible education.

Whether they are black, white, rich, poor, come from intact or fractured families is inconsequential. These parents took extraordinary action to get their children into these special schools, sometimes agonizing through a lottery process before their children are even accepted, and they are fully on board as partners in the educational process. It is from this fierce passion on the part of parents that students derive a powerful motivation to learn. When motivated students are supported by a sustained and active partnership between parents and educators, truly remarkable things happen. When combined with exemplary teachers utilizing innovative curricula and instructional methodology what takes place could be described as magical.

One would think it should be glaringly obvious that committed parents and their motivated sons and daughters are an essential ingredient in successful schools, wherever we find them, but the overwhelming majority of American educators and policy makers are so caught up in their daily challenges and so blinded by their preconceptions that they fail to see it.

Excerpt #3 from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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[Opposite the corporate reformers are] Advocates who support traditional, community-based public education and who oppose the forces of privatization, Common Core, reliance on standardized testing to hold schools and their teachers accountable, expansion of voucher programs and charter schools claim that while our schools are far from perfect, they are not failing. These advocates suggest that the quality of education being provided to American children is higher than it has ever been. They insist that poverty is the biggest problem in public education and that we should attack poverty and the disadvantages it creates for our children while protecting our educational traditions.

The purpose of this book is to show that both sides of this debate are terribly wrong and that both sides grossly misjudge the efficacy of education in America, both public and private. We suggest that both sides misinterpret the role of poverty and the other forces that contribute to the educational failure of an unacceptable number of Twenty-first Century American school children. It is the cultural equivalent of spending all of our resources on new and improved thermometers and fever reducers at the expense of attacking the cause of the elevated temperature. In the interim, the infection festers, unabated, while we poison the educational process with our intransigence.

How our nation responds to these challenges of the Twenty-first Century will determine the future of the American way of life, not to mention the American dream. Parents of children that we now refer to as baby boomers were fortunate to live in the world where there was great clarity with respect to core values, and at a time when the external forces that compete with the influence of parents and families were relatively insignificant. In each succeeding generation, parents have seen diminished clarity with respect to core values while the power and sophistication of external forces have grown, exponentially. Today, in this second decade of the Twenty-first Century, the external forces that compete for the attention of our children are unprecedented and of a power and magnitude that was unimaginable even a decade ago.

That these internal challenges come at a time when emerging economic powers, with laser-like focus, are working to challenge American economic and political supremacy places our future in grave jeopardy. It is vital that Americans understand that competition is a bad thing only for the player who has lost his or her ability to compete. Healthy competition brings out the best of all competitors. If we continue to slog down the same path, the health of our society and our ability to compete effectively will deteriorate at an accelerating pace.

The beauty of our situation as members of an ailing society, however, is that our educational system, both public and private, in addition to being the barometer with which we are able to identify and measure the severity of the crisis, also provides the most viable point of attack in quest of a solution. It is viable, however, only if we come together as one people, in all of our diversity, and work to restore our competitive advantage with the same sense of urgency that our competitors demonstrate. This crisis demands action and meaningful action requires that we challenge our fundamental assumptions and expand the boundaries of conventional wisdom.

Excerpt # 2 from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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America’s schools, both public and private, are the grounds upon which a battle is being waged for the very future of the United States and we are losing the battle. Many communities throughout the nation are perceived to have exemplary schools yet in cities across the United States the percentage of students unable to pass state competency exams ranges from twenty to over eighty percent. More often than not, the lowest passage rates are found in urban public schools. While outperforming their urban counterparts; even our best schools, whether public, private, parochial, or charter are not performing well enough to propel the U.S. into the top-twenty list of developed nations with respect to the performance in math and science. That we rank as high as 15th in language literacy is hardly cause for celebration. That China, arguably our biggest competitor in the international marketplace and also our nation’s largest creditor, ranks first in all three categories should be cause for alarm if not outright panic.

The consequence of this systemic indifference is that the number of children exiting our public schools with little in the way of marketable skills and who are functionally illiterate is growing at an untenable rate. Under the misguided belief that greatest problems with public education in America are poverty, bad schools, and bad teachers and in the wake of such federal initiatives as President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation and President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” our educational leaders and policy makers are under great pressure to reverse the declining performance of American school children.

Under the leadership of what are thought to be the best and brightest minds from the world of business and public policy think tanks, and with the backing of billionaires and private foundations we are in the midst of a rush toward privatization of our schools, Common Core, charter schools, holding schools and their teachers accountable on the basis of standardized competency examinations, minimizing if not eliminating the role of teachers unions, and the expansion of voucher programs. With full support of federal and many state governments, the sentiment is that private enterprise can do a better job of educating our children than community-based school corporations.

It is even suggested that, with the application of business principles such privatization can even bring an end to poverty, which is widely believed to be the root cause of the problems of education and almost every other social problem in America.

That poverty is an outcome of the evolution of our free-market economy, along with the federal government’s ineffectual tampering, begs the question of why we would ever think privatized schools will somehow create different outcomes. The one thing we can say with certainty is that free market forces will follow the money. This will remain true whether the marketplace is producing goods and services or educating our children. We can also say with some certainty that there “ain’t no money” in the poorest neighborhoods of urban or rural America.