Urban Schools: Failure by Design

GUEST POST: John Harris Loflin, Education-Community Action Team

Urban schools are not broken: Moving to a 21^st century vision of urban education

The crisis is not about education at all. It’s about power.

                                                                          ~ James Baldwin

The idea that the Indianapolis Public School System (IPS) is broken and needs fixing is the basis for the current local school reform debate. (See Indy Star 03.16.12, “A broken system” by Kelly Bentley.) This assertion leaves unchallenged facts showing wealthier communities have better educational opportunities than low-income. It doesn’t make sense then to compare schools across these communities and then pronounce IPS as failing.

Urban schools produce academic failure at alarming rates. Yet, this happens inside a system designed to essentially predetermine winners and losers: one set of schools has the resources that ensure success and another set of schools does not. Thus, the “failure” of urban schools is a success. Urban schools like IPS are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

Here’s the question: has our public school system ever attempted to realize the purported mission to educate all children equally and effectively? The obvious answer is no. Reality reveals decades of fiscal, political, and structural policies which deliberately undercut and demean urban public schools. 

This doesn’t excuse poor academic outcomes in many urban schools, but suggests the need to move past 20^th century ideas based on “fixing failure.”

According to The Art of Critical Pedagogy, on which most of this letter is based, there are two reasons why school failure in urban districts continues.

1. The Politics of Failure: Perpetual urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone must fail in school.  Here, failure results from the inferiority of the student, the family, or her/his culture and community. Indeed, this deficit-model of students is built into most schools through the existence of a largely unchallenged system of grading and testing which by its very design requires failure for some.

2. The Economics of Failure: Public schools are America’s socio-economic sorting machine--where economic futures are cast and people are sorted into their future roles. In short, some people must fill the least desirable places in society. It’s important they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, basically, that there is a formal mechanism (urban schools) to justify their place there.

In effect, the high-stakes nature of this sorting process plays itself out behind the talk of opportunity and the myth of school-based meritocracy suggesting all students compete under similar rules with equal opportunity. Still, in the game of education, some families/students have high levels of social, political, economic capital. This guarantees an unfair competition and producing the same unequal outcomes.

To change public education, citizens must challenge the myth of meritocracy and the hype about “opportunity.” The few exceptional urban students who combine fortitude and fortune to succeed in under-resourced schools play an important role in this myth making, confirming for the public that opportunity exists for anyone who wants it bad enough. This opens the door for others to say the reason some fail is simply because they and their families do not care about education or they haven’t worked hard enough. This is, of course, untrue.

The stratified nature of our current society creates a “social pyramid” with no room at the top for everyone. This requires people to be sorted, and schools are the “mechanism” used to resolve this messy social “conundrum.”

The fact that "opportunity" exists (currently defined as all children having access to public schools) helps maintain the story of a democratic and meritocratic society where competition churns the cream to the top, ultimately benefiting society as a whole by rewarding the most deserving.  Still, those benefiting most from this sorting process look, talk, think, and act most like those who already have power.

This is inequality by design and well documented. Our IPS plays a role in the perpetuation of this rigged social lottery: the nation's poorest are the most likely to be denied access to a quality education and blamed (directly or indirectly) for their academic "failure." Thus, with consistency, IPS disproportionately produces the citizens who will hold the least desirable and least mobile socio-economic positions and these positions will be mainly occupied by residents emerging from the district’s poorest communities.

If IPS is criticized as broken, then these failures mean IPS is in fact successful at enabling the results it’s designed to produce. We can’t call schools designed to fail "broken.”

John Harris Loflin

Education-Community Action Team

johnharrisloflin@yahoo.com

The New Eugenics in Harlem

The following comments were offered in response to this post on the boasting of a veteran Teach for America regional manager:

As a teacher educator in NYC, from an elementary education program that just graduated 80 certified teachers, most of whom could not get a job in a public school due to the hiring freeze, I am handling distress call after distress email from recent grads in charter schools. I have been meeting with the first year teachers, visiting them in the classrooms, and listening to their descriptions over drinks on Fridays. This is what it boils down to: we have charter schools proliferating in Harlem, run by white CEOs and founders, who are making large salaries (Eva Moskowitz of the Harlem Success series of schools--chain?--makes in excess of $300,000 per year). The children in these schools are mostly all children of color -- and mostly Black: African American, African, and Caribbean American.

The focus on learning is reduced to getting higher test scores. The focus on behavior is reduced to compliance and punishment and is according to one school leader who resigned, "The most punitive atmosphere I have ever seen in a school in my entire decades-long career." The children are subjected to draconian behavioral expectations for long hours with few breaks for play or recess. The parents are subjected to various humiliation tactics for violations of the dress code. (One of these white-run charter schools reguires girls to only wear dresses.)

I have heard too many of these stories in the past month to sleep well at night. This landscape reminds me of white northerners who went to the South after the U.S. Civil War to set up 'schools' to educate the children of newly emancipated enslaved Blacks. The curriculum of most of these "schools" was designed around the habits and skills needed to serve in positions as housekeepers, child care workers, servants, maids, railroad porters, carpenters and other menial jobs that Blacks were expected to fill.

These white philanthropists wrapped their racism and social control in a mantle of charity and liberalism. Today's so called reformers are clear in their treatment of young Black children: in the name of educational equity, they are repressing and subjugating young children and their families.

What shall we do?

NBC KIPP Piece Based on Jonathan Alter's Fake Numbers

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter is one of the go-to guys on MSNBC who can be counted on to offer the current centrist cynicism with a touch of irony for most all political issues worth the gossip. Alter is smart and somewhat personable, though I suspect his hair shortage has left him a bit bitter. Alter is well-connected, nonetheless, in Washington and knows all the corporate talking points on education, but unfortunately for his readers, that's all he knows on the subject.

Two days ago Caroline Grannam took to task NBC for some inflated numbers they used regarding how many former KIPPsters are in college. Rather than going to the other end of the horse where NBC got their numbers, Grannan went to the horse's mouth, KIPP's home office. Instead of 12,800 students in college, there were last summer 447:

Actually, KIPP runs almost all middle schools and has only been running a few long enough to have their graduates finish high school and go to college. I pinned them down on the number after Newsweek wrote in July 2008 that 12,800 KIPP graduates had gone on to college.

The actual number of KIPP alumni who had started college, KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini said at that time, was 447. Again, that's the number of KIPP graduates who had started college by 2008. (KIPP claims to track them carefully even though of course they're long gone from KIPP by that time.)

I went to the July 21, 2008 Newsweek, and sure enough, there was Alter's shiny pate beside his cheerleading article full of misinformation about KIPP. Here's the clip:

The irony is, we know what works to close the achievement gap. At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids. While KIPP isn't fully replicable (not enough effective teachers to go around), every low-income school should be measured by how close it gets to that model, where kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and part of the summer, and teachers are held strictly accountable for showing student improvement.

The reason that KIPP "isn't fully replicable," Jonathan, is not because there are not enough good teachers but, rather, there are not enough good teachers who can give up their lives to the total compliance of KIPP's missionary sect. KIPP could not, in fact, operate without the constant infusion of two-year Ivy League temps from Teach for America, untrained neophytes who know less about teaching than they do about the psychological manipulations of Dr. Martin Seligman. This is from a 2008 SRI International study on the five KIPP schools in the Bay Area:

Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom before leaving (32).

SRI researchers found teachers committed but clearly doubtful of their capacity to continue under the stress of 65 hours of school-related work per week (includes 2 hours per night for telephone homework assistance). One veteran teacher told researchers: “The consequence is I can’t do this job very much longer. It is too much. I don’t see any solution with our structure and our nonnegotiables. No one has really presented any way to solve that problem” (35).

And so TFA continues to spend more each year on recruiting new replacement neophytes than it does on training them to teach in KIPP's psychological sterilization camps.

NBC's recent coverage of KIPP had another lie from the same Jon Alter paragraph cited above. Alter puts the percentage of poor kids entering college at 20 percent, whereas the percentage of KIPP kids going to college he puts at 80 percent. This 20 percent figure was parroted in the NBC report. Here is some context for these numbers, which has everything to do with washouts, pushouts, dropouts, and lies outright .
In the SRI study of five KIPP schools in the Bay Area, researchers found that 60 percent of 5^th grade students in five Oakland KIPP schools who began KIPP in 5th grade did not finish 8th grade:

Together, the four schools began with a combined total of 312 fifth graders in 2003-04, and ended with 173 eighth graders in 2006-07 (see Exhibit 2-3). The number of eighth graders includes new students who entered KIPP after fifth grade (12).

If, then, the 40 percent of children who survive KIPP from grade 5 through 8 all finish high school, then 30-35 percent of children who began KIPP in fifth grade will eventually go on to college. That would still be an impressive percentage if we were to accept Alter’s claim that, nationally, only 20 percent of poor kids go to college. According to a 2008 report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, however, the percentage of “poor kids” attending college after high school is, in fact, 52 percent, rather than 20 percent as Alter claims:

In terms of family income, 91% of high school students from families in the highest income group (above $100,000) enroll in college. The enrollment rate for student from middle-income families (from $50,001 to $100,000) is 78% and for those in the lowest income group ($20,000 and below) the rate is 52% (p. 7).

A correction or a retraction will be accepted from NBC and from Newsweek.

In the "No Excuses" Bubble, Is Death a Valid Excuse?

This morning as I write this post Attorney General Eric Holder and the Dunc are meeting with Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago to offer more money, no doubt, to put more police in and around the apartheid Renaissance schools of Chicago. No doubt Mr. Holder, reflecting the views of the President whose political sense regarding racism and privilege has displaced his moral sense regarding race and the lack of privilege, sees the death of honor student, Derrion Albert, as a tragic result of gangs out of control, thuggery on the rise, and a lack of community involvement. The political calculus, in fact, does not allow Mr. Obama or his surrogates to even discuss the systemic institutional racism and privilege that provide the ever-present grounding for any of the overt, figural actions of bigotry or prejudice that President Carter alluded to some weeks back, and that Mr. Obama denied.

Derrion's death is so upsetting to so many because it respresents an affront to the cheap solution of racial containment and the gospel of individual initiative that we apply to the social symptoms of a problem that no billionaire philanthro-capitalist is vaguely interested in tackling. If AIG was too big to fail, poverty in America is too big to fix--at least in the view of those who want to continue to shrink democratic governance to the point that it can be dragged into the bathtub and drowned to benefit the virtues of selfishness and unrestrained capitalism.

Derrion had done everything right, after all, hadn't he? He had worked hard and been nice, keeping his nose to the grindstone and was making grades that put him on the honor roll and on the path to college, it would seem. He had passed the Cosby Quiz and the Thermstrom Test of "No Excuses." He even had a family that loved and supported him.

So what solutions are available to a society unwilling to talk about a system of racial privilege that we all take advantage of and participate in, while denying that white privilege even exists? A system that labels this murder "black-on-black violence?" How about more police, or even the Army, as Jesse Jackson has suggested in Nadra Kareem's blog post:

. . . .During Albert's funeral, the Rev. Jackson focused on students rather than black-on-black violence in general, according to newspaper reports. He told funeral attendees that the National Guard escorted black students to an all-white Arkansas school in 1957 to ensure that they could walk to and from school safely. He declared that similar intervention is needed in present day Chicago.

The irony here is that in 1957, the Little Rock Nine needed protection from violent white segregationists. Today, black youth need protection from one another. Whites historically devalued black life with race-related terror, but somewhere down the line blacks have also learned to devalue black life. Given this, I'm not sure that a stronger police presence will end the violence. What's needed is a psychological intervention of sorts. Black youth not only need to know that their lives are salvageable but that their lives and their peers' lives are worth living. In short, killing other black youth really does amount to self-destruction. The question now is how do you address the psychic wounds created by the legacy of racism and the resulting social ills that have taught blacks their lives are worthless?

So then we need a psychological intervention, as the author suggests? Notice that this would require only to fix the insides of children's heads, rather than fixing the crumbling communities and schools and families and despair and lack of health and dental care that our system of privilege has created for those who must be denied so that others will thrive. And we have that psychological intervention on the boards ready to scale up, as evidenced by recent corporate media coverage on NBC and MS-NBC for the apartheid KIPP Schools, Inc., which contain children in total compliance school sects and brainwash them through an applied program of intermittent learned helplessness and learned optimism.

We are going to heal those psychic wounds, alright, even if it is with a corporate charter school shortcut that, in fact, preaches there are no shortcuts.

And when the next impoverished honor student in the President's hometown is beaten or gunned down (no one notices when it happens in Arkansas), our rage will be reignited, and more police will be added, again. Perhaps if the President is re-elected, he will be able to really hold a national town hall to discuss our capitalist system of privilege and zero-sum games. And maybe the President will realize that when he was growing up and being called Buster by his white mom who drug him out of bed early in the morning to do homework, he did not have to worry about being murdered on his way to school in white Kansas. He didn't even have to worry about getting into Harvard--his father went there.

As Chicago's Urban Children Are Shot and Killed, Duncan Gives Himself and F and Calls for More School Hours

In a video clip from the Chicago Sun-Times, Arne Duncan shows why the "F" he gives himself for not protecting schoolchildren must stand for "Fool." As reporters probe for what ED might do stem the child murder epidemic in impoversished inner cities, Duncan cannot, does not, even mention the conditions of life with which these urban poverty victims must contend as they dodge bullets (or take them) on their way to school, where they are expected by Mr. Duncan and Obama (No Excuses!) to function like children in the leafy suburbs who have routes to school that don't include special markers where children have been shot down coming and going to their crumbling classrooms.

As you watch the video clip, please note the sad idiot calling for schools to remain open more days and hours, as if more trips to school would somehow reduce, instead of increase, the likelihood of being shot down in the rotting neighborhoods that these children must traverse in order to attend school. Here is the link to the Sun-Times story.

Open Letter to Arne Duncan from Herb Kohl

Posted at ARN, thanks to Monty Neill:
Herb Kohl: An Open Letter to Arne Duncan

Summer 2009

From Herbert Kohl

Dear Arne Duncan,

In a recent interview with NEA Today you said of my book *36 Children,* "I read [it] in high school … [and] … wrote about his book in one of my college essays, and I talked about the tremendous hope that I feel [and] the challenges that teachers in tough communities face. The book had a big impact on me."

When I wrote *36 Children* in 1965 it was commonly believed that African American students, with a few exceptions, simply could not function on a high academic level. The book was motivated by my desire to provide a counter-example, one I had created in my classroom, to this cynical and racist view, and to let the students' creativity and intelligence speak for itself. It was also intended to show how important it was to provide interesting and complex curriculum that integrated the arts and sciences, and utilized the students' own culture and experiences to inspire learning. I discovered then, in my early teaching career, that learning is best driven by ideas, challenges, experiences, and activities that engage students. My experience over the past 45 years has confirmed this.

We have come far from that time in the '60s. Now the mantra is high expectations and high standards. Yet, with all that zeal to produce measurable learning outcomes we have lost sight of the essential motivations to learn that moved my students. Recently I asked a number of elementary school students what they were learning about and the reactions were consistently, "We are learning how to do good on the tests." They did not say they were learning to read.

It is hard for me to understand how educators can claim that they are creating high standards when the substance and content o f learning is reduced to the mechanical task of getting a correct answer on a manufactured test. In the panic over teaching students to perform well on reading tests, educators seem to have lost sight of the fact that reading is a tool, an instrument that is used for pleasure and for the acquisition of knowledge and information about the way the world works. The mastery of complex reading skills develops as students grapple with ideas, learn to understand plot and character, and develop and articulate opinions on literature. They also develop through learning history, science, and technology.

Reading is not a series of isolated skills acquired in a sanitized rote-learning environment utilizing "teacher-proof" materials. It develops through interaction with a knowledgeable, active teacher—through dialogue, and critical analysis. It also develops through imaginative writing and research.

It is no wonder that the struggle to coerce all students into mastering high-stakes testing is hardest at the upper grades. The impoverishment of learning taking place in the early grades naturally leads to boredom and alienation from school-based learning. This disengagement is often stigmatized as "attention deficit disorder." The very capacities that No Child Left Behind is trying to achieve are undermined by th e way in which the law is implemented.

This impoverishment of learning is reinforced by cutting programs in the arts. The free play of the imagination, which is so crucial for problem-solving and even for entrepreneurship, is discouraged in a basics curriculum lacking in substantial artistic and human content.

Add to this the elimination of physical education in order to clear more time to torture students with mechanical drilling and shallow questioning and it is no wonder that many American students are lethargic when it comes to ideas and actions. I'm sure that NCLB has, in many cases, a direct hand in the development of childhood obesity.

It is possible to maintain high standards for all children, to help students learn how to speak thoughtfully, think through problems, and create imaginative representations of the world as it is and as it could be, without forcing them through a regime of high-stakes testing. Attention has to be paid to the richness of the curriculum itself and time has to be allocated to thoughtful exploration and experimentation. It is easy to ignore content when the sole focus is on test scores.

Your administration has the opportunity, when NCLB comes up for reauthorization, to set the tone, aspirations, and philosophical and moral grounds for reform that develops the intelligence, creativity, and social and personal sensitivity of students. I still hold to the hope you mentioned you took away from *36 Children* but I sometimes despair about how we are wasting the current opportunity to create truly effective schools where students welcome the wonderful learning that we as adults should feel privileged to provide them.

I would welcome any opportunity to discuss these and other educational issues with you.

Sincerely, Herbert Kohl
— Herb Kohl
*Open Letter*
2009-06-16

Poverty Schooling, Chicago Style

From Kristof's blog at the NYTimes (ht to Monty Neill):

No Safety, No Homework

By VICTOR HARBISON

Victor Harbison teaches civics and history at Gage Park High School in Chicago, where he also sponsors the school newspaper. In 2000, he became the first National Board-certified high school history teacher in Chicago and he has worked on several educational reform projects during his career. Gage Park faces the all-too-common challenges of an urban school: test scores are so low that only 8% of students meet state standards; only 47% of its students graduate; and 97.4% of them live in poverty. Victor will help this blog keep education on its radar after the departure of long-time teacher and contributor Will Okun.

One of my students hasn’t done any homework for me for five weeks. He saw his older brother perish from gun violence two years ago in front of his house and today is in a constant state of worry about his mother who has cancer.

What should I do?

Today, I asked my students to raise their hands if they knew anyone who had been shot. Eighteen out of 23 raised their hands. I asked if they had ever been shot themselves and four kept their hands up. Three asked whether they should keep their hands up if they had been shot at but not hit.

Ouch.

These kids, my kids, wondered if being shot at but not hit qualified.

Those of us who teach in such urban settings have to acknowledge that it is the rare student who feels safe and secure. That is the reality urban teachers face, day after day after day.

At my school, two students died, tragically and violently, within a week of each other before we were halfway through October.

The local media started a “death watch” of Chicago public school students a few years ago, with the best of intentions I am sure, but still a bit on the morbid side, as anyone who has to deal with the aftermath will tell you.

Hundreds of children. And the end is nowhere in sight.

As I have pondered how to teach with all of this going on, I am reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (caveat: I only had one psych course in college). And I know I can’t meet the most basic need of my students: I can’t make them feel safe.

As unemployment figures go up, I imagine readers of the Times thinking about IRA’s and who will be on Obama’s economic team. … Me? When I hear unemployment is going up, I wonder how long before my students have to face violence in the home as well as on the streets. (There are tons of studies, like this one, that show a correlation between unemployment and a rise in domestic violence.)

People wonder why test scores are so low in urban schools. I’m not looking for an excuse, but it’s hard for me to stop thinking about the violence children experience every day in this city.

And then it hit too close to home. On October 25, a day after the murder of Chicago native Jennifer Hudson’s mother and brother in their home here, I got a call from a city police detective. He wanted to know if my 7-year-old daughter knew anything about the possible whereabouts of Ms. Hudson’s nephew. He asked me to talk to her and, if she knew anything, to call him back.

It turns out that I have a picture of Julian King hanging on the wall of my home, in my daughter’s play room. It is her first-grade class photo. And Julian has been in my daughter’s class for two years running.

I struggle with what to say to 16- and 17-year-old students on a daily basis. But having to talk to a 7-year-old about the possible murder of her classmate and friend…?

By Monday night, we had to find a way to talk to our daughter about Julian’s death. As horrible as I felt about it, I also realized that this was a conversation that thousands of Chicago families have had to have with their children, year after year after year.

And there was a measure of relief that the conversation was about someone outside the family. I can only imagine the feelings of those who have lost a loved one themselves.

School started the next day at 7:30 a.m. A little diminished, a little worse for wear, I gave out assignments and, once again, asked for homework.

Underfunded Urban Schools on the Brink of Financial Collapse

From the Connecticut Post:

. . . . Warning that education in Connecticut's cities faces impending disaster, the chief of the Bristol school system is calling on state lawmakers to suspend standardized testing, shorten the school year and authorize teacher furloughs.

Even with those emergency actions, Bristol --along with many other urban school systems across the state --will be short millions of dollars, and could be forced into layoffs and program cutbacks for the next two years, Superintendent Philip Streifer said Wednesday.

"The public needs to understand the scope of this problem. I'm not going to stand by while public education is decimated," he said. "I'm one voice, but I'm shouting."

Streifer's warning came a day after state budget analysts reaffirmed that Connecticut is on track to a staggering $6 billion budget deficit for the next two years. Gov. M. Jodi Rell has called for $284 million in state education spending next year, a measure that could knock out 6 to 12 percent of education cost-sharing aid to municipalities. That would slice into revenues for suburbs and rural towns, but would most severely hit cities, which rely on state money to pay for half or more of their school costs. . . .