Confederate public school names do harm

This past May, some colleagues and I published an article in the Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership (JCEL) about a high school in Virginia (it's a composite) named for the leader of the secessionist Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee. I blogged about that article here. I have watched and studied the issue of Confederate-named public schools and mascots with great interest over the course of the past few years, bookmarking dozens of articles (maybe someday I will do a study about it).  However, I have more than a scholarly interest in this.

Ever since Charlottesville, across the state of Virginia, and country, counties and cities have been reconsidering their Confederate-named schools and mascots. In Virginia alone, so far I know of efforts in Arlington, Fairfax, and Prince William Counties. There's one Virginia county, however, where the School Board is studiously not reconsidering their Confederate-named schools and mascots, and that's the county where I live, Hanover.

About five or six years ago, I realized the importance of local and state education policy and decided to get much more active at those levels. I wrote about that here. I have been very open and public with my advocacy efforts, but I have mostly privately expressed consternation about and advocated for holding public discussions about the two Confederate-named schools and mascots in Hanover County Public Schools (note: these schools are not in my district, or part of the county): Lee-Davis High School (mascot: Confederates) and Stonewall-Jackson Middle School (mascot: the Rebels). The names promote white supremacy and are shameful and harmful to students and community members. Needless to say, my efforts have not resulted in any movement.

Certainly, other Hanover County Public Schools stakeholders have also advocated about the name and mascots over the years, but after Charlottesville happened, advocacy around this issue got new urgency.  More Hanover residents and Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall-Jackson Middle School community members and alumni started speaking up. For example, an alumnus named Ryan Leach, started this effort on facebook which includes an eloquent and compelling statement as to why the names should be changed, and which led to this larger petition addressed to the School Board. I came across this letter written to the Hanover School Board by another alumna, Mary Murrell, about why the names and mascots should be changed. I don't normally post about local matters here but I was so impressed with how well-written and -researched Mary's letter was and thought it so relevant to the greater issue, that I asked her if I could share it.

Here it is:

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August 24, 2017

Dear Hanover County School Board,

I am a graduate of Lee-Davis High School (class of 1981) and have recently joined hundreds of people in signing a petition asking you to change the name of Lee-Davis High School. As I have additional thoughts about the name, I wanted to write you directly and lay out why I believe this action is urgently needed. I also want to include Stonewall Jackson Middle School, which I attended in 1977-78, to the discussion.

The Context in which Lee-Davis Was Named

As you likely know, when the name of Lee-Davis was chosen in May 1958, Virginia was defiantly refusing to integrate its public schools. At that time, Virginia remained one of only seven states that still maintained segregated schools, even though the Supreme Court had handed down its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education four years earlier.[i] Successive Virginia governors had called for statewide “massive resistance” to that ruling, and Virginia’s legislature passed a series of laws that defied federal orders to desegregate its schools.[ii]

In 1958, despite Brown vs. Board of Education, the county was busy planning two new all-white high schools: one for the eastern end and one for the western end. Black students would continue to attend the county’s only “negro” high school, located in Ashland.[iii] The School Board chose to name the eastern end high school Lee-Davis. According to the minutes of the May 6, 1958, School Board meeting, the Board did so “in the memory and honor of two prominent members of the Confederacy,” Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.[iv]

How and Why the Name Lee-Davis Was Chosen

Various rumors have circulated about how and why the School Board arrived at the name Lee-Davis. I have looked into what evidence exists in the public record. At the time of the May 1958 naming, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported only that the School Board approved the name “on recommendation by a special committee.”[v] The Herald-Progress provides more precise details.[vi] The new eastern end high school was to consolidate two existing overcrowded high schools (Battlefield Park and Washington-Henry). Earlier in the year, juniors from the two schools independently considered names for what would become their new school.[vii] Each group of students submitted just one name: the Battlefield High students recommended the name Jefferson Davis; the Washington-Henry High students recommended the name William White, in honor of a teacher at both high schools who had been killed in World War II.[viii]

Later, the County School Board would choose a different name: Lee-Davis. The new name came from B. W. Sadler, the School Board member representing the Henry district.[ix] The school was in a hurry to name itself, as it was already May and officials were hoping the school could open in September. Because students at Battlefield Park were nicknamed “the rebels,” and the students at Washington-Henry were nicknamed “the statesmen,” Sadler thought that his name captured a bit of both. Jefferson Davis, he reasoned, had been a rebel, so his name fit with the Battlefield Park side, and Robert E. Lee, a general and a statesman, suited the Washington-Henry side. Sadler also added that the combination of the two names Lee and Davis into one hyphenated name had “individuality.”

The Context of the Naming of Stonewall Jackson

Even after the last of the massive resistance laws were ruled unconstitutional in 1959, Virginia continued to fight school integration. Some school systems were closed entirely rather than admit black students. Full integration would require the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. And yet, even with that landmark legislation, Hanover County was among the last counties in Virginia to fully integrate its schools.[x] Spurred on by a lawsuit brought by the parents of black students, Hanover County finally fully integrated its public schools with the 1969-70 school year—a full fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education and ten years after Lee-Davis opened.

That first year of full integration, 1969, presented an opportunity to replace the name Lee-Davis with a more inclusive or at least neutral name such as Mechanicsville High. Unfortunately, that renaming did not happen. Rather, the Hanover County School Board chose for its new junior high school, adjacent to Lee-Davis, yet another confederate name: Stonewall Jackson Junior High.

Why the School Names Need to be Changed

Public schools have the legal obligation to provide an education to all children and to treat their students equally. Public schools are powerful institutions that shape and influence their students for years to come. School names such as Lee-Davis and Stonewall Jackson – along with their attendant mascots and nicknames – are as much public symbols of the Confederacy as monuments, statues, and the Confederate flag.[xi] When the Hanover County School Board chose in 1958 to honor prominent men precisely for their association with the Confederacy, it sent a message to the public and to its students. This message said, and continues to say, that public authorities in Hanover County esteem and celebrate the Confederacy. It is wrong for the Hanover County Public Schools to do this for the following reasons:

Paying homage to the Confederacy through naming, mimicry, and memorialization disdains, insults, and alienates black students. No matter how common or “normal” symbols of the Confederacy are throughout Virginia, they are never neutral. Confederate symbols convey a message of domination and exclusion. When a public school honors the Confederacy, it conveys a preference for the concerns and interests of the historically dominant social group (whites) in the South at the same time that it conveys a lack of sympathy and even contempt for the historically dominated group (blacks). When a public school honors the Confederacy, it tells non-white students that Hanover is a white person’s county and that they don’t belong in the same way that whites do. By sending these messages – not limited to those I’ve listed – a public school betrays the spirit of equality that is fundamental to public education. When our public authorities continue to pay homage to the Confederacy, black (and also immigrant) students can never be sure they will be treated fairly. A community cannot prosper if any group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination.

Virginia and Hanover County’s defiance with regard to school integration during the Civil rights era is a regrettable legacy that needs to be redressed not perpetuated. It has been shown that Confederate symbols spiked in two distinct historical periods.[xii] The first period was the early 20^th century, after Reconstruction, when white supremacy again took hold in the South, the Ku Klux Klan gained power, and southern states passed Jim Crow laws that terrorized black citizens. The second spike occurred during the civil rights period from 1950-1970, when Southerners forcefully resisted federal efforts aimed at integration. Both Lee-Davis and Stonewall Jackson were named during this period. Lee-Davis was named amid Virginia’s “massive resistance,” and Stonewall Jackson was named in very year that Hanover County belatedly integrated its public schools for real. Notably, no schools in Hanover have been named after Confederate figures since this time. The School Board has chosen non-controversial place names like Atlee, Pole Green, and Hanover for the newest schools. This is all for the good but it does not alleviate the prior problem of Lee-Davis and Stonewall Jackson.

The Confederacy was founded upon and committed to abhorrent beliefs, and public institutions should not in any way associate themselves with such beliefs. Southern states, including Virginia, seceded from the United States in order to preserve slavery in the South and to extend it into the territories. Since the 1950s, there is no longer any dispute among academic historians about the reasons for the Civil War.[xiii] Slavery was a system of oppression under-girded by the belief that white people were superior to black people. Its leaders, such as Alexander Stephens, did not believe, as the Declaration of Independence declares, that all men were created equal but, rather, that slavery was “the natural and normal condition” of black people.[xiv] There is no “racially friendly” case for the Confederacy, no matter how passionately some people, including many in the Lee-Davis community, insist there is.

Celebrations of the Confederacy depend upon discredited history that was promulgated after the South lost the Civil War, and, as such, these celebrations mis-educate young people about the past. After the defeat of the Confederacy, its former leaders (and others) cultivated a revised version of events that sanitized the Civil War as one fought over states rights, “Southern honor,” the South’s superior agrarian way of life, and so forth. This new version of history gave rise to the romantic myth of the Lost Cause. This myth remains stubbornly popular -- especially, but not only, in the South – but, regardless, it is still a myth. A public school teaches history not myth. I am certain that Lee-Davis teachers teach proper history. But outside the classroom, students confront other ideas about the past. Lee-Davis calls itself the “home of the Confederates,” titles its yearbook The Confederate, incorporates two Confederate figures into its logo, and takes as its motto “Tradition and Pride.” In what traditions should its students be proud, exactly?

Honoring the Confederacy imposes a false heritage onto white students. Many students that attend or have attended Lee-Davis, including myself, do not consider the Confederacy to be part of their heritage, or, if they do, they do not take “pride” in it. I love many things about Virginia, and can find many things about its history and culture to be proud of, but its leadership in the Civil War and its continued tendency to defend and whitewash the Confederacy is not among them. The schools’ names should be changed because they encourage white students to believe that the Confederacy and its “traditions” are something that they should value and embrace, and that the Confederacy is a positive part of who they are and a positive source of their identity. A public school violates the public trust when it imposes such associations and values upon its students. Children in Hanover County schools – of any color or background – are not confederates. They should not be taught to carry the Confederacy in their hearts or to derive values from it.

What’s even more concerning is that Neo-Nazi groups are currently engaged in something similar. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, equates Confederate symbols such as statues, flags and schools with “white culture,” and Neo-Nazi groups, like the Klan before them, have embraced Confederate symbols, as seen at the recent Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march. These extremists have no hesitation in admitting that the Confederacy was about white supremacy—that’s why they want to associate with it.[xv] The Hanover School Board needs to seriously consider whether it is any longer possible to disentangle the Neo-Nazis’ Confederacy with the “romantic” Lost Cause Confederacy.[xvi]   

A Duty to Overcome the Discrimination of the Past

In discussions of changing Lee-Davis’s name, I have witnessed a lot of strong feelings. I believe such strong feelings arise precisely because current and former students have come to see being a “Confederate” as somehow an important part of their history, culture, and identity. I have argued throughout this letter that a public school should not play a role in promoting such an identity. But many people in the Lee-Davis community nevertheless do feel that “pride” that they have been encouraged to feel. You therefore cannot look to the current and former student body to resolve this issue through voting or petitions. They are likely only to deliver the status quo.

You will be criticized for whatever you do, I recognize that, but doing nothing is not an option. The Confederate names were chosen a long time ago. That was not your doing. But today you have the privilege and the power to undo them. The problem is not going to go away as long as the names remain. Small tweaks like saying “C-fed” instead of “Confederate” at football games do not solve anything; they only point to the problem that won’t go away. The divisiveness that surrounds the discussion of name change is already embedded in the names themselves. That divisiveness cannot be avoided, but it can be overcome. Changing the names is the way forward.

In 1966 a federal judge wrote, “The duty rests with the [Hanover County] School Board to overcome the discrimination of the past.”[xvii] It is 2017 and Hanover County has still not overcome the “discrimination of the past.” Lee-Davis’s mission statement says that the school aspires to “assure a quality education for success in a changing world.” Hanover County is part of that changing world. Please find new names for Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall Jackson Middle School.

Sincerely,

Mary Murrell, 

Class of 1981

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[i] Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, A Virginia Town, A Civil Rights Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 165.

[ii] There is a large literature on this subject. Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951-1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); James Latimer, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Massive Resistance,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sept 22, 1996, A1, A9-A12; Ira M. Lechner, “Massive Resistance: Virginia’s Great Leap Backward,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 74:4 (1998); Matthew Lassiter and Andrew Lewis, eds. The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Hodder Arnold, 2006), pp. 52ff.

[iii] Given the size of the county, some black students, especially those in the eastern side of the county, had to endure two-hour bus rides to school, in dilapidated and segregated buses—or not go at all. “Gandy High Alumni Reflect on School Days,” Herald-Progress, September 10, 2009, p. 1.

[iv] Hanover County School Board minute book, May 6, 1958.

[v] “Hanover School Named Lee-Davis,” Richmond-Times Dispatch, May 7, 1958.

[vi] Dan Sherrier, “The History of Lee-Davis and Patrick Henry High Schools,” Part II, Herald-Progress, October 2, 2008, pp. 2, 6.

[vii] In 2009, a student from the first graduating class told a reporter covering the 50^th anniversary celebrations: "I remember sitting in Washington Henry and going through all these names…. We were trying to be really creative." Richmond Times-Dispatch April, 17, 2009.

[viii] Whether intended or not, the latter suggestion would have resulted in an all-white high school with the name “White High School.”

[ix] Sadler later became the School Board Chairman and, in 1966, earned lasting notoriety after the School Board banned To Kill a Mockingbird. Claudia Durst Johnson, “The Issue of Censorship,” pp. 3-22, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2006). Sadler died in 1976.

[x] Herald-Progress, July 11, 1968. Cited in Dan Sherrier, “The History of Lee-Davis and Patrick Henry,” Part X, Herald-Progress December 11, 2008. See also Rebecca Bray and Dr. Lloyd Jones, The History of Education in Hanover County, Virginia, 1708-2008 (Ashland, VA: Hanover County Public Schools, 2010).

[xi] For a comprehensive list of Confederate symbols, including schools, see Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy. Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016. Available at: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf.

[xii] See Whose Heritage?

[xiii] James M. McPherson, “Southern Comfort,” New York Review of Books, April 21, 2001.

[xiv] McPherson, “Southern Comfort.”

[xv] For examples of white supremacists embracing the Confederacy for its racist ideology, see: Campbell Robertson, Alan Blinder, and Richard Fausset, “In Monument Debate, Calls for an Overdue Reckoning on Race and Southern Identity,” New York Times, August 18, 2017.

[xvi] Some political operatives in the state appear to have trouble telling the difference. See Washington Post, August 12, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/va-gop-northam-turned-back-on-heritage-by-calling-for-confederate-monuments-to-come-down/2017/08/23/a5b3edf6-882d-11e7-a50f-e0d4e6ec070a_story.html

[xvii] Herald-Progress, February 3, 1966, Cited in Ben Sherrier, “History of Lee-Davis,” November 13, 2008, p. A-9.

What’s in a Name? The Confluence of Confederate Symbolism and the Disparate Experiences of African American Students in a Central Virginia High School

Over the past several years, and especially recently, the presence of Confederate names, symbols, and statues in Virginia public institutions and spaces, including public schools, has been discussed, debated, and protested.

Based on several of these events, some colleagues and I published a composite case study on the topic this past spring in the Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership. It was also the occasion of my first first-author publication. I hope that others in our field might find it useful.

For the full piece, go here (warning, a) it is behind a paywall and b) it is an academic piece). Here is the abstract:

In 2015-2016, news stories from Charleston, South Carolina, and the University of Missouri, among others, motivated and inspired many people to organize against assaults on the Black community generally and Black students in particular. Similarly, Black students at Robert E. Lee High School in Virginia have come together around what they perceive as racist symbolism and inequitable educational policies and practices. The Black student leaders at Robert E. Lee High School have presented their school principal with a list of demands. Meanwhile, the school’s football and basketball teams, The Rebels, are threatening to go on strike until students’ demands are addressed.

This case study could be used in educational leadership graduate programs as well as curriculum and instruction coursework, especially in courses that emphasize social justice and ethical decision making. Particularly relevant courses might include School-Community Relations, Organizational Culture, Politics of Education, Contemporary Issues in Education, Visionary Planning and Strategies, and Schools as Learning Communities. In addition, this case study aligns with Standards 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards and can be integrated in leadership preparation programs accordingly. This case might also be used in school district–sponsored professional development workshops for current and/or aspiring administrators.

When social media meets the academy

After I started my PhD program, I gave up much of my social media and blogging activity (though not all). This was for reasons of time, energy, but also voice and skills. I read and write so much for school that it's not exactly what I feel like doing when I have free time. In addition, the skills and voice I use for blogging and education writing are different from those needed for scholarly education writing. And, I needed to take some time to learn the later. I have started writing more again recently--more on this here.

This dichotomy came up during a seminar (David L. Clark seminar) for doctoral students I was a participant in at the Annual AERA Meeting this past spring in San Antonio, during a panel discussion entitled "The Role of Education Research Outside of the Academy." On the panel was Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education policy at University of Southern California, who happens to be one of my pre-PhD program #edutwitter pals.

Morgan addressed the confluence of social media and academia. In a nutshell, he said that while it's important to still hold your work to high standards and to make certain stipulations before agreeing to work on non-academic enterprises, activity on social media and doing non-academic writing strengthens, and doesn't supplant, academic writing. It can also help academics to share, articulate, and get feedback/push back on their work and ideas, especially from those in education but outside of academia.

I was glad to see Morgan advocate for academics having a place and presence on social media. I agree: Activity on social media and informal writing can be part of being a public intellectual and is a way for scholars to communicate with other academics and with non-academics in the same field.

But for me, I had a reverse path in that I was active and had a presence on social media before going into academia. While, as afore-mentioned, I took a break, there was no way I was going to walk that back or dismantle the web of connections and relationships I had made via social media and blogging, nor did I want to just discount all of the work and non-academic education writing I had done.

What's been especially tricky is the clashing of diminished power hierarchies on social media (not eliminated, mind you, because I think those hierarchies do reassert themselves) with the rigid hierarchies that exist in academia. Before my PhD program, I was on equal footing on twitter with academics and any other #edutwitter folks. What mattered is what I had to say, not what my status was. When  I started grad school, all of a sudden I wasn't on equal footing.  Previously, I could just speak my mind and now it was kind of like, what do I know, I'm just a grad student.

Now, there is some reason for this that I respect and understand. Expertise in educational research is expertise in educational research and I didn't really have much, which is why I went to grad school, so that I could fully feel like I knew of what I spoke and so that I would gain knowledge about educational research. But it's also been frustrating: Even as the academy is more open socially and in terms of critique and debate of ideas, if you are in it, you are supposed to, you know, Know. Your. Place. Which means you are expected to refrain from critiquing or challenging the ideas of those above you. I luckily have found an adviser who balances addressing my novice expertise with encouraging me that not always knowing my place is one my strengths. (She might change her mind when no one will hire me or when I get fired from my first job out of grad school.) In addition, I have heard from far too many established academics that non-academic writing and social media activity are frowned upon, until you get tenure in which case it will simply be ignored.

Getting back to the seminar and Morgan, this was interesting because, as I said, I was in touch with Morgan before I was a PhD student. Though we like one another, we do not always agree on educational policy and practice, so I probably tweeted at him that I thought he was wrong about something. But all of a sudden at the conference, I was nervous. Am I supposed to call him Dr. Polikoff now? After all, he was on a higher plane that I was. What if he thinks my work stinks? After all, he does have expertise that I don't.

Ultimately, while we should respect our elders and all, many of the students coming to the academy will already have a social media presence that they shouldn't be asked to renounce or give up. The academy is going to have open itself up to social media as a valid place for academics to exchange and debate ideas, and to engage in professional activity. And while that happens, the academy is also going to have to let some of those rigid hierarchies loosen up a bit. Because for people like me, that cat is already out of the bag and we're not putting it back in.

Podcast: Racial Disproportionality in Disciplinary Practices

A big topic in educational policy and practice right now is disparate disciplinary practices. Essentially, black students, especially males, and students with disabilities are subject to disproportionally high rates of exclusionary discipline practices (suspensions and expulsions) and what they are being disciplined for is often subjective behaviors, such as disrespect, versus objective behaviors, such as smoking cigarettes on school grounds. This is an especially big topic in the state of Virginia and in the region of Virginia--central Virginia--where I live and study. See this recent article about it in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

A congressman has called for a federal investigation of disparities in student treatment within the Richmond region’s schools.

U.S. Rep. A. Donald McEachin, D-4th, requested an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights on Monday, the same day that a Richmond Times-Dispatch article detailed higher suspension rates and over-identification of African-American students with disabilities.

The Virginia Department of Education cited Henrico and Chesterfield counties for suspending black students with disabilities at a disproportionately high rate over several years. The department cited Richmond because the city’s African-American students with disabilities have been more likely to be identified as having an “other health impairment” than other students with disabilities.

Chesterfield, Henrico and Richmond are among seven Virginia school districts mandated to set aside federal money received under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act this year to combat the pattern.

This problem is not new at all, for example, see this article from 2012. And, there's lots more where that came from.

How do I know so much about this? How is it that I have read almost every single report, news and journal article about this? Well, I am part of a MERC research team studying the issue in the Richmond, Virginia, area. The Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC) comprises "a partnership between seven Richmond-area school divisions and the VCU School of Education" that "plans, conducts, and disseminates community-engaged action and applied research."

A few months ago, I took part with other team members in a MERC podcast about the study. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to take a listen.

Why DeVos Might Lose

So far, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education, seems to be one of the most, if not the most, unpopular of all of the cabinet nominees. That's not to say that she won't be confirmed. But as of my writing this, she has not been confirmed and only one more vote from the Republicans is needed to deny her the appointment.

Why is this? Well, just as there was bi-partisan unpopularity (aside from GOP establishment types) of Eric Cantor in Virginia's 7th district (my old district) during the 2014 elections, there is bi-partisan unpopularity of Betsy DeVos.

1. She is a blatant pay-to-play actor. She bought the Michigan legislature. She has given tens of thousands of dollars to several Senate Education Committee members. The way Cantor thought he was above members of the public, she operates in a way that shows she believes she is above members of public. On this point, this ad by End Citizens United is particularly devastating:


2. Besides purchasing pet education policies, Betsy Devos has no experience in education at all. Proposing someone to be U.S. Secretary of Education who has no experience in education at all is a slap in the face to all educators. Public school teachers and educators are tiring of getting crapped on and they are tired of people with little to no experience in education telling them what to do. Teachers got crapped on by the Bush administration and then the Obama administration and they are tired of it. Kind of like no one outside of the GOP establishment liked Cantor, hardly anyone who actually worked in public schools or had children in them liked Obama's education policies. Mostly insulated centrist Democratic and moderate Republican DC wonks and education reform-types liked Obama's education policies. Many of the policies that DeVos advocates for, including the Common Core, are part of the bi-partisan education reform regime that we have all been suffering through.


3. I live in a very conservative area of Virginia where public schools are very popular. In fact, public schools are very popular in many conservative areas in Virginia. 53% of white women voted for Trump. Public school teachers are 82% white and 76% female. Of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) members who voted, roughly one in five of them voted for Trump.  Among National Education Association (NEA) member voters, more than one in three likely voted for Trump.

Basically, there is bi-partisan support of public schools. A small majority of white women voted for Trump. A large majority of teachers are white women.  They might have voted for Trump (and I don't have time right now to get into how messed up that is) but that doesn't mean they take kindly to being insulted by the nomination of someone who has no experience in education and who doesn't support the work they do anyway.


4.  Parents of students with disabilities are Republicans and they are Democrats and they are Independents. Disabilities do not manifest themselves in children according to the political party of their parents. These parents are very organized and they are very big advocates for their children and their groups are very powerful. I see this where I live, too. I also have a child with a (medical) disability. Except in extreme cases, because of IDEA, a child with disabilities has a better chance of being accommodated, served, and better educated in public schools than in private schools, let alone religious schools. The idea that a child with disabilities is to be protected and equitably educated is largely a mainstream, assumed one that is part of the fabric of public schooling. I have rights as a parent of a student with a disability, my child has rights as a student with a disability, it's on paper, and everybody knows it. Everybody, that is, except for Betsy DeVos. She has shown an ignorance of IDEA and a callousness towards students with disabilities. That is a big bi-partisan, political no-no.


5. In her confirmation hearing, Betsy DeVos came across as robotic, fumbling, clueless, lacking in leadership skills, and bland. I have yet to meet a bland educational leader who serves in a public position. Her answer to every question was a smile and  "choice." She knew nothing beyond her own ideology.

Q: What would you do to serve students with disabilities?
A: Choice.

Q: What is your plan to stem bullying?
A: Choice.

Q: How are you going to enforce civil rights laws in our public schools?
A: Choice.

Q: What are you going to do about sexual assault on college campuses?
A: Choice.

Q: What are going to do when we give you follow-up questions to answer?
A: Plagiarize.

Plagiarizing may be part of the Trump administration modus operandi and education reform ideologues might be able to overlook it, but it does not go over well with parents and educators.


6. Betsy DeVos is a woman. She is completely unqualified but she is a woman. I don't doubt that Democrats (except for Eva Moskowitz) would oppose her nomination even if she were a man. But I wonder if a completely unqualified man would get put through the same thing.

When I grit on grit

A recent post up at Education Week chronicles a presentation that Albemarle County Public Schools Superintendent Pam Moran (I'm a big fan) and Albemarle Assistant Director for Educational Technology and Innovation Ira Socol gave at the recent EduCon 2.7 conference in Philadelphia. It's is getting a lot of attention and some pushback.

"Grit" has in recent years captivated the imagination of educators and policymakers, leading many to embrace the idea that schools should seek to cultivate in their students a set of personality traits demonstrated by researchers to be closely tied to academic and personal success. 

Increasingly, though, critics are offering a different take, arguing that grit is a racist construct and has harmed low-income students by crowding out a focus on providing children with the supports they deserve and the more-flexible educational approach enjoyed by many of their more affluent counterparts. 

I don't believe that the concept "grit" is inherently racist or that Duckworth's work is racist per se. I won't get into too much of a discussion of this as cognitive psychologist Cedar Riener has a much better informed opinion than I do on this:

Research psychologists such as Duckworth would do well to understand the context (and yes, the narratives) that can drive public acceptance and promotion of their science. But equally, policymakers and interpreters of psychological science should seek to situate the scientific evidence within both its scientific context as well as its social and institutional context. The existence and power of traits does not deny the power of situational and motivational context.

But I do think the way the concept is often applied is racist, meaning that the assumptions that educators seem to make when deciding they must teach "grit" to certain kids (usually children of color who live in poverty) are racist. They imply that there is something lacking in the character of those students and that it is that lack which has determined those students' lack of power in our society. I would argue instead that social, economic, and institutional forces have largely determined these students' lack of power and that we should all work on fixing those.

I also have to admit that some of my disconnect with the concept of "grit" comes from the way the word was used when I was growing up in DC. The word "grit" meant to give someone a dirty look, as in, "Why are you gritting on me?" meaning, "Why are you giving me a dirty look?" So I always think of that.

In any case, these were the bits from the post that resonated with me and that are worth thinking about: 

Moran also argued that children from difficult circumstances often demonstrate considerable grit in their day-to-day lives, but those students' strengths are often not recognized by educators. 

And many at EduCon also contended that inside schools, grit is frequently, and wrongfully, conflated with compliance (e.g., completing homework assignments, paying attention in class, or taking standardized tests seriously.)  

"If you just push the idea of grit, you avoid a conversation about, 'To what end?'" said Larissa Pahomov, an English teacher at Science Leadership Academy, the magnet high school in Philadelphia that hosts the annual conference.In order to avoid the "terribly racist" consequences of "the grit narrative," said Socol, the Albemarle County administrator, schools and districts should focus on creating an environment of "abundance," especially for students of color and children from circumstances of poverty. 

"There's [grit], and then there's the ability to get back up with the help of people around you, which is what the wealthy always do," said Socol in an interview prior to the conference. "The trick is in how you build a community around [students] and help them find the tools that will help them solve their problems."

UPDATE 1/29/2015, 2:45: I want to give Benjamin Herold credit for covering the session and for writing such a great post in the first place. Great work!

Schooled by Schooled (& Silicon Valley)

I finally read The New Yorker article ("Schooled") about education reform in Newark, New Jersey. I think it was a fair piece but before I continue, a disclaimer: I assume that anything I say here could be legitimately challenged or discounted given what people who are on the ground know (there is a, hint, hint, comments section at the bottom).

So, first, it's important (for me, at least) to understand the mindset of someone like Cory Booker (former mayor of Newark and current NJ senator) and in doing that, I will be linking to one other New Yorker article that has expanded my understanding of Booker et al's approach.

"Schooled" paints a fairly (in both senses of the word) damning picture of Cory Booker, one of someone of great ambition and desire for fame but who has forgotten to match that with engagement with public.

Now, Booker never switched "sides" on education reform, nor is he a Johnny-come-lately on the topic. His view has always been that public education as an institution has poorly served disadvantaged and marginalized people. He has also always been in favor of market-based solutions: vouchers, charters, privatization, etc, to remedy this. From "Schooled":

The school-reform movement, then dominated by conservative white Republicans, saw Booker as a valuable asset. In 2000, he was invited to speak at the Manhattan Institute, in New York. He was an electrifying speaker, depicting impoverished Newark residents as captives of nepotistic politicians, their children trapped in a “repugnant” school system. "I define public education not as a publicly guaranteed space and a publicly run, publicly funded building where our children are sent based on their Zip Code,” he said. “Public education is the use of public dollars to educate our children at the schools that are best equipped to do so—public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, Baptist schools, Jewish schools.”

Furthermore, Booker was in a big hurry. Big mistake.  It's not realistic to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish in just  three years and such haste makes, well, waste. (See my post about the ill-conceived pace of modern ed reform).

Booker, now a U.S. senator, said in a recent interview that he understood families’ fear and anger: “My mom—she would’ve been fit to be tied with some of what happened.” But he characterized the rancor as “a sort of nadir,” and predicted that in two or three years Newark could be a national model of urban education. “That’s pretty monumental in terms of the accomplishment that will be.”

And,

Booker acknowledged the missteps, but said that he had to move quickly. He and Christie could be out of office within three years. If a Democrat defeated Christie in 2013, he or she would have the backing of the teachers’ unions and might return the district to local control. “We want to do as much as possible right away,” Booker said. “Entrenched forces are very invested in resisting choices we’re making around a one-billion-dollar budget.” Participants in the meeting, who had worked for decades in Newark, were doubtful that reforms imposed over three years would be sustainable. 

Second mistake: Booker's plan was designed not of the people, by the people, for the people but of the philanthrocapitalists, by the consultants, and kind of, maybe for the people.

Early in the summer of 2010, Booker presented Christie with a proposal, stamped “Confidential Draft,” titled “Newark Public Schools—A Reform Plan.” It called for imposing reform from the top down; a more open political process could be taken captive by unions and machine politicians. Real change has casualties and those who prospered under the pre-existing order will fight loudly and viciously,” the proposal said. Seeking consensus would undercut real reform. One of the goals was to “make Newark the charter school capital of the nation.” The plan called for an “infusion of philanthropic support” to recruit teachers and principals through national school-reform organizations; build sophisticated data and accountability systems; expand charters; and weaken tenure and seniority protections. Philanthropy, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending. Christie approved the plan, and Booker began pitching it to major donors. 

In the previous decade, the foundations of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the California real-estate and insurance magnate Eli Broad, the Walton family (of the Walmart fortune), and other billionaires from Wall Street to Silicon Valley had come to dominate charitable funding to education. Dubbed “venture philanthropists,” they called themselves investors rather than donors and sought returns in the form of sweeping changes to public schooling. In addition to financing the expansion of charter schools, they helped finance Teach for America and the development of the Common Core State Standards to increase the rigor of instruction.

So, now we see that Booker was rather modeling the reforms using a Silicon Valley model. He was highly influenced by Silicon Valley ideology and ethics and not just by Zukerberg (who if you read the article I am about to cite actually ventured outside of the Silicon valley bubble). To get a real sense of the Silicon Valley approach, read this other New Yorker article by George Packer "Change the World"--it really explains that ideology and ethics and how they are fueled by a sense of righteousness via technology, as in creating apps = act of social justice. Here Packer compares Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to financiers. When I read this article, I remember thinking, Oh, this is where so many Booker-type reformers get their language of education reform and social justice via entrepreneurialism, of "innovation," and of "revolution." This is why they sound like Apple ads.

When financiers say that they’re doing God’s work by providing cheap credit, and oilmen claim to be patriots who are making the country energy-independent, no one takes them too seriously—it’s a given that their motivation is profit. But when technology entrepreneurs describe their lofty goals there’s no smirk or wink. “Many see their social responsibility fulfilled by their businesses, not by social or political action,” one young entrepreneur said of his colleagues. “It’s remarkably convenient that they can achieve all their goals just by doing their start-up.” He added, “They actually think that Facebook is going to be the panacea for many of the world’s problems. It isn’t cynicism—it’s arrogance and ignorance.”

Also, within that there is a disdain for politics, government, and inherently in that for democratic processes:

The technology industry, by sequestering itself from the community it inhabits, has transformed the Bay Area without being changed by it—in a sense, without getting its hands dirty. Throughout most of Silicon Valley’s history, its executives have displayed a libertarian instinct to stay as far from politics and government as possible. Reid Hoffman described the attitude this way: “Look what I can do as an individual myself—everyone else should be able to do that, too. I can make a multibillion-dollar company with a little bit of investment. Why can’t the whole world do that?” But the imperative to change the world has recently led some Silicon Valley leaders to imagine that the values and concepts behind their success can be uploaded to the public sphere.

From Zuckerberg's former roommate Joe Green:

“People in tech, when they talk about why they started their company, they tend to talk about changing the world,” Green said. “I think it’s actually genuine. On the other hand, people are just completely disconnected from politics. Partly because the operating principles of politics and the operating principles of tech are completely different.” Whereas politics is transactional and opaque, based on hierarchies and handshakes, Green argued, technology is empirical and often transparent, driven by data.

And, Marc Andreessen, a partner in the venture-capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz:

 Andreessen described to me the stages of the industry’s attitude toward political engagement. The first, prevailing in the seventies and eighties, was “Just leave us alone. Let us do our thing.” T. J. Rodgers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, said that anyone who got involved in politics was making a big mistake, warning, “If you talk to these people, they’ll just get in your ass.” The Valley’s libertarianism—which ignores the federal government’s crucial role in providing research money—is less doctrinal than instinctive. Andreessen said, “It’s very possible for somebody to show up here—a twenty-four-year-old engineer who’s completely state of the art in building companies and products—and have had absolutely no exposure at all to politics, social issues, history. When the government shows up, it’s bad news. They go, ‘Oh, my God, government is evil, I didn’t understand how bad it was. We must fight it.’ ”

You should read the whole thing, I can't do justice to it here (or quote the whole thing despite my efforts) except to say that it will you teach you a lot about where some strains of education reform are coming from, about the way many of these reformers think. They are applying Silicon Valley thinking and solutionism to problems of public democratic institutions. In some cases they are deeply influenced by it but in others they are just paying lip service, just parroting; they don't actually understand what they're saying, nor if you consider the implications of standardization, do they really practice what they preach. I agree with Packer here:

Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency. But it has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value. Evgeny Morozov, in his new book “To Save Everything, Click Here,” calls this belief “solutionism.” Morozov, who is twenty-nine and grew up in a mining town in Belarus, is the fiercest critic of technological optimism in America, tirelessly dismantling the language of its followers. “They want to be ‘open,’ they want to be ‘disruptive,’ they want to ‘innovate,’ ” Morozov told me. “The open agenda is, in many ways, the opposite of equality and justice. They think anything that helps you to bypass institutions is, by default, empowering or liberating. You might not be able to pay for health care or your insurance, but if you have an app on your phone that alerts you to the fact that you need to exercise more, or you aren’t eating healthily enough, they think they are solving the problem.”

Back to "Schooled," while Booker looks self-serving and out of touch, Cami Anderson is portrayed as being far from the devil incarnate she is painted by some of her critics. Certainly, most of her career she has surrounded herself with the top-down, market-based reformers. Plus, her take-no-constructive-criticism management style is a deal breaker, serving as a legitimate impediment to progress, especially if you look at actions of her recent tenure such as the One Newark plan and the dismissal of employees who publicly criticized her policies. But otherwise there are a number of passages that belie the existence of some balance, for example,

Christie appointed Anderson in May, 2011. It quickly emerged that she differed with her bosses about the role of charter schools in urban districts. She pointed out that, with rare exceptions, charters served a smaller proportion than the district schools of children who lived in extreme poverty, had learning disabilities, or struggled to speak English. Moreover, charter lotteries disproportionately attracted the “choosers”—parents with the time to navigate the process. Charters in Newark were expected to enroll forty per cent of the city’s children by 2016. That would leave the neediest sixty per cent in district schools. Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg expected Anderson to revive the district, yet as children and revenue were siphoned off she would have to close schools and dismiss teachers. Because of the state’s seniority rules, the most junior teachers would go first. Anderson called this “the lifeboat theory of education reform,” arguing that it could leave a majority of children to sink as if on the Titanic. “Your theories of change are on a collision course,” she told Cerf and Booker. As Anderson put it to me, “I told the Governor . . . I did not come here to phase the district out.”

Anderson acknowledged the successes of the top charter schools, but Newark faced the conundrum common to almost every urban school system: how to expand charters without destabilizing traditional public schools.

And it sounds as if Anderson started out okay:

One of her prime initiatives in her first two years was to close and consolidate the twelve lowest-performing kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools into eight “renew schools.” Each was assigned a principal who, borrowing from the charter model, would choose his or her own teaching staff. The schools also got math and literacy coaches and smart boards, along with the new curricula. Teachers worked an extended day and two extra weeks in the summer. Anderson intended to create “proof points” that would show how to turn around failing district schools. 

The eight consolidated schools opened in the fall of 2012, and most won strong support from parents. At the hundred-year-old Peshine Avenue School, in the South Ward, Chaleeta Barnes, the new principal, and Tameshone Lewis, the vice-principal, both had deep Newark roots, and parents, teachers, and children responded well to their insistence on higher standards. They replaced more than half the previous year’s teachers, and the new staff coördinated efforts to improve instruction and address individual students’ academic and discipline issues. 

Teachers worked closely with children who couldn’t keep up, and many of them saw improvement, but the effects of children’s traumas outside school posed bigger problems. The father of a student in Shakel Nelson’s fifth-grade math class had been murdered early in the school year. When Nelson sat beside his desk and encouraged him, he sometimes solved problems, but as she moved on he put his head down and dropped his pencil. A girl who was excelling early in the year stopped trying when her estranged, emotionally disturbed parents resumed contact and began fighting. 

The quality of teaching and the morale in most of the renew schools improved, but only Peshine made modest gains in both math and literacy on state tests. Six others declined in one subject or both, and the seventh remained unchanged in one and increased in one. This wasn’t surprising. It takes more than a year for reforms to take hold and show up in test scores. Across the district, in Anderson’s first two years, the percentage of students passing the state’s standardized tests declined in all but two of the tested grades. She questioned the validity of the tests, saying that they had become harder and the students needier, although she used them to determine which schools were failing and required overhaul. After her first year, she announced a ten-per-cent gain in the high-school graduation rate, but A.C.T. scores indicated that only two per cent of juniors were prepared for college. 

Anderson recognized that the schools needed more social and emotional support, but pointed out that Newark already spent more money per student than almost every other district in the country. She urged principals to shift their existing budgets accordingly. “There’s no pot of gold,” she said.

Also, she knew the trade-offs. One of my (and others) biggest critiques of the reformers is that they say they only are "for the kids" but they don't seem to connect in any meaningful way the kids' success to the success via decent working conditions and living wages of their parents. I've written about this before. It's hard to believe they are "for the kids" when their education reform industry feeds off of profits squeezed out of the kids' parents. Wal-Mart under-pays Mr. Smith (not to mention factory workers who work on the supply side). Walmart makes huge profits. Huge profits go into foundation and pay Jane TFA Edu-crat's salary. Anderson, however, seemed to understand the value to the public of a vigorous public sector:

Improbably, a district with a billion dollars in revenue and two hundred million dollars in philanthropy was going broke. Anderson announced a fifty-seven-million-dollar budget gap in March, 2013, attributing it mostly to the charter exodus. She cut more than eighteen million dollars from school budgets and laid off more than two hundred attendance counsellors, clerical workers, and janitors, most of them Newark residents with few comparable job prospects. “We’re raising the poverty level in Newark in the name of school reform,” she lamented to a group of funders. “It’s a hard thing to wrestle with.”

It's incredible how much both Booker and Anderson have spent on consultants. This is also the case in other reformy systems such as DCPS. In fact, NCLB is sometimes referred to as No Consultant Left Behind.

During the next two years, more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, teacher evaluation. Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement, and a number of them had contracts with several school systems financed by Race to the Top grants and venture philanthropy. The going rate for individual consultants in Newark was a thousand dollars a day. Vivian Cox Fraser, the president of the Urban League of Essex County, observed, “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.”

Once Anderson was appointed, this reckless spending on consultants continued:

Anderson turned her immediate attention to the district’s schools. She gave principals more flexibility and introduced new curricula aligned to the Common Core standards. Using $1.8 million from the Foundation for Newark’s Future, she hired the nonprofit consulting group TNTP, in part to develop more rigorous evaluation systems. In her first year, the foundation gave her a four-million-dollar grant to hire consultants at her own discretion.

And:

Anderson spent much of the fall working with data analysts from the Parthenon Group, an international consulting firm that received roughly three million dollars over two years from Newark philanthropy.

Also, what occurred in Newark seems to confirm that the reform plan involves orchestrating "failure" of the public schools. Particularly disturbing is the account of two Newark principals (charter and division) working together to decrease criminal activity on school grounds wherein the district principal had to ask the charter principal to place the call to police because he knew they would respond to her versus him. This is unconscionable:

Jackson had never got the police to respond adequately to his pleas for improved security. Gangs periodically held nighttime rites on school grounds, and Jackson reported them without result. One night, a month after spark settled into Carver, a security camera captured images of nine young men apparently mauling another.When Jackson and Belcher arrived the next morning, they found bloody handprints on the wall and blood on the walkway. His and Belcher’s calls to police and e-mails to the superintendent’s staff went unanswered. At Jackson’s request, Belcher e-mailed the Mayor, attaching three pictures of the bloody trail on “the steps our K-2 scholars use to enter the building.” Twenty minutes later, Booker responded: “Joanna, your email greatly concerned me. I have copied this email to the police director who will contact you as soon as possible. Cory.” The police director, Sam DeMaio, called, and the precinct captain and the anti-gang unit visited the school. Police presence was stepped up, and the gang moved on.

Shavar Jeffries, one of the recent Newark mayoral candidates, the one who lost, sums up the situation well:

Shavar Jeffries believes that the Newark backlash could have been avoided. Too often, he said, “education reform . . . comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades. It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in coöperation with people.” Some reformers have told him that unions and machine politicians will always dominate turnout in school-board elections and thus control the public schools. He disagrees: “This is a democracy. A majority of people support these ideas. You have to build coalitions and educate and advocate.” As he put it to me at the outset of the reform initiative, “This remains the United States. At some time, you have to persuade people.”

People like Cami Anderson, even if full of hubris, may start out with a balanced perspective and with a plan to improve public institutions from within and in partnership with the public. But while, indeed, leadership style was a problem in Newark, I mostly see it as a problem of plutocracy and of the continued disenfranchisement of disadvantages and marginalized communities in the name of education reform.

There is no incentive or obligation to be accountable to the people on the receiving end of current education policies. People like Cami Anderson don't seem to feel that they are answerable to the public. Rather, they are accountable to politicians and to "investors." On top of that, there's the influence of government-is-the-problem libertarians and enablers from Silicon Valley, replete with intolerance of democratic processes.

This is much like the problems I see with the Common Core in that even if the standards are good, they will falter if filtered through our rigid, skill-based testing accountability structure. People like Cami Anderson, dictatorial style aside, who might be knowledgeable and passionate about education and about educating children who have been ill-served by public institutions, will also falter when their leadership is filtered through the plutocratic blob that seems to have railroaded our democracy.

Public education for me but not for thee

Although he has since quasi-apologized, Arne Duncan put his foot in his mouth, saying that,

It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan said. “You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.” 

Overcoming that will require communicating to parents that competition is now global, not local, he said.

This was a wrong (as in incorrect) and stupid (as in politically dense) thing to say. As Sabrina Joy Stevens explains here, the low-poverty, suburban demographic does fairly well on international comparisons. Suburban moms were a key constituency for Obama in 2012 and telling them that some Common Core aligned test being promoted by the feds knows their child better than they do is a huge political mistake (this is why people hate Democrats). Finally, it's unfair to boil down public school parents' objections to the Common Core to, "you think your kids are brilliant, but they're not." Duncan reinforced the hubris so endemic in so many modern school reformers: if you are critical of our policies, you're deluded or lying to your kids and yourselves, you're a status quo defender or you don't like children or you think poor children can't learn.

Certainly, more affluent school districts coast on their reputations and are probably not doing as good a job as they should be, but I would hardly chalk this up to delusional suburban moms. I would chalk it up to the same things everyone else is suffering from: a broken accountability structure, too much emphasis on (too many and poorly designed) standardized tests and not enough rich and meaningful curriculum, plus the same budget cuts everyone else is experiencing. In short, more affluent school districts are suffering from what less affluent ones are: modern education reform.

Unlike Secretary Duncan, I don't agree that the Common Core and its accompanying tests will cure public education's ills. To the contrary, it will be more of the same. I've said over and over again that the substance of the Common Core standards are not worth debating when the way they were made and and the rigid accountability structure they will be filtered through are so problematic and will result in more of the same.

Another important piece in this is what Sherman Dorn brings up here: That maybe more people in whose favor the current system works, including suburban white families, would support more shifts, say in curriculum or assessment, if they didn't have to sacrifice their children's success to them. This goes back to the idea that slow and steady (with plenty of time for reflection and tweaking and input from all stakeholders) wins the race. 

Current hullabaloo aside, it's taken an awfully long while for ed reform fatigue to trickle up to the more affluent. It's upsetting to consider that only now that they have been offended, that suburban white moms might pay attention to what's going on with school reform. I won't repeat what Jose Vilson has written already about this or what Paul Thomas said but I can vouch for it given my current access to white suburbanites. I've heard plenty of parents of students in low-poverty schools say things like, Isn't Michelle Rhee wonderful? I like what she's doing. Um, would you want someone steamrolling through your school district talking about "collaboration and consensus-building are overrated? Oh, that doesn't work for you? I didn't think so. I've also heard, TFA. What a fabulous organization. Um, do you want TFAers teaching in your district? Because I've noticed that when one of your child's teachers goes on maternity leave you demand an actual licensed and vetted teacher just to sub in their long-term absence. Another example: when I tried to alert other Virginians to the dangers of the Opportunity Education Institution in Virginia, I heard so things like, Well, in Petersburg, they need that help or Well, that's because Richmond is a mess. Richmond and Petersburg are majority black cities with high levels of poverty, so yes, such comments are code for those poor black people just can't get it together.

My response is usually some or all of: a) There are historical conditions and policies that have contributed to the poverty of those communities; it's not endemic; b) No, democracy and local control is not just for the affluent; and c) It's a slippery slope, or as Jose Vilson said, "First, they came for the Urban Black and Latina moms." With the SOL tests getting more tricky rigorous, some schools in more affluent districts may find themselves under OEI's control (should OEI be found constitutional) and whatcha gonna do then? Are you going to want to be disenfranchised? I didn't think so.

Some reactions to Duncan's comments haven't been much different. Now that kids who don't usually fail standardized tests are failing, then it matters--it's okay for kids that are supposed to fail but not my kids. While he definitely misspoke, I wince at the Now, I'm mad. Now you've pissed off the wrong people comments. Why were you not mad before? "The wrong people"? What's that supposed to mean? That just reinforces the idea that non-suburban white moms don't care as much about their kids' education and reinforces Duncan's implication that non-suburban-white moms support his policies.

The reformers have decided that they speak for poor people of color, that they should be happy that they're there to fix their dysfunctional systems, that the answer to dysfunction is disempowerment. White suburban folks have seemed largely to accept that. Remember that Michelle Rhee's supporters (and Arne Duncan is certainly among them--he all but endorsed her and Fenty in DC's mayoral election) have claimed that one reason Adrian Fenty lost in DC is because Rhee is Korean-American and that black people in DC were too full of race pride and too busy shielding their incompetence to admit that she was right. And who's been buying copies of the Bee Eater and Radical? My guess is: yes, suburban white people.

As I've learned in the activism work I have been doing locally, the truth of the matter is that, indeed, many parents only start to get worked up when something affects their kids. And while I wish that were different, maybe we should go with the better-late-than-never attitude and hope that suburban white moms' political muscle trickles down. Maybe this will open the eyes of parents of children in more affluent schools to the reformy fiasco their peers in many U.S. cities have already been subjected to. Maybe they'll realize that there's no "I' in public education, that the attitude of democracy and public education for me but not for thee may cost all of us both.

Book Review: First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School

The following guest post is written by Jeff Tignor. Jeff has undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard and Duke University, respectively. He lives in Washington, DC, where he is a telecommunications lawyer and fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, researching how local communities can use the internet and wireless technologies to foster civic engagement. 



In the excellent new book First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School, Alison Stewart tells the story of one of the best and most important American high schools of the 20th century. The stories that Ms. Stewart shares of the tight-knit African-American community in Washington, DC with high school teachers with master’s degrees and PhDs sending students from a segregated high school to the best colleges and universities in the country amplify stories I’ve heard throughout my life. My father, paternal grandparents, two uncles, a great aunt and a cousin all attended Dunbar. After receiving his master’s degree from Columbia, my grandfather returned to Dunbar to teach English. My father and one of my uncles both left Dunbar for Yale and went on, respectively, to become a professor at Yale’s School of Epidemiology and Public Health and a surgeon in Kokomo, Indiana and part-time professor at Indiana University. My Dunbar family tree is filled with educators. The legacy of Dunbar has deeply influenced and affected me, even though I did not grow up in Washington, DC. For example, a few years after I moved to DC as an adult, I decided to run for Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for my neighborhood. On election day, as I stood in the rain handing out flyers, a woman said, as my opponent attempted to reach out to her, “Sorry, but I’m voting for Mr. Tignor’s Grandson.” I won.

Dunbar was a groundbreaking educational institution born in Washington, DC, as a result of a unique set of circumstances and later hobbled by home rule politics, social class conflicts, and racial desegregation without integration. In the first half of the 20th century  this public school produced numerous leaders in medicine, science, education, law, politics, and the military. With the end of segregation, the conditions that resulted in Dunbar’s creation ceased to exist. Ms. Stewart, an award-winning journalist who has worked as an anchor and reporter for several major commercial TV networks, as well as NPR and PBS, and whose parents graduated from Dunbar in the 1940s, uses Dunbar as a lens for examining the history of education in Washington, DC. The book covers three distinct eras:  First, from 1807-1954, a detailed history of African-American education in Washington, DC, and of how Dunbar became America’s first African-American public high school; second, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe decisions, a transitional period in the years surrounding school integration; and third, Dunbar’s post-1960 full transformation to the neighborhood school it is today, struggling with the challenges of urban education. As someone whose family history in Washington, DC, dates to the post-civil war 1800s, I learned new facts about DC’s history and was struck by the irony of Dunbar alums arguing for desegregation at the Supreme Court and then seeing their prestigious and beloved alma mater fray as the unconstitutional system of segregation was dismantled. I was moved by the heartbreaking stories of students and educators trying to honor Dunbar’s past and simultaneously create a present and future that will allow the school to once again become a launching pad for great careers.

Dunbar came to be because unlike in much of the South, there were no laws restricting the education of free blacks in Washington, DC.  Small schools such as the Bell School and the Normal School for Colored Girls begat the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, M Street High School, and ultimately in 1916, Dunbar High School. As the only academic high school for African-Americans in Washington, DC, Dunbar effectively became a magnet school. Students from DC had to pass an 8 to enroll and students transferring into Dunbar as part of the Great Migration had to take an entrance exam. Dunbar’s curriculum focused on English, math, the sciences, ancient history, music, Latin, French and German. Many of Dunbar’s teachers and administrators, like my grandfather, had advanced degrees and included doctors, lawyers, and two of the first three African-American women to receive PhDs. Dunbar sent students to prestigious colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and the University of Michigan. Notable alums include Edward Brooke, the first black US Senator elected by popular vote; Charles Drew, the creator of the blood bank; William Hastie, the first African-American Federal judge; and, Wesley Brown, the first African-American graduate of the Naval Academy.

In 1954, Charles Hamilton Houston and two of his fellow alums from the M Street School, Dunbar’s forerunner, were key members of the team that successfully argued for outlawing legally segregated schools in the states in Brown v. Board of Education and in the District of Columbia in Bolling v. Sharpe. From 1955 onward, Dunbar became a neighborhood school, with attendance solely based on the boundaries within which a child resided. One educator commented at the time that First & O, NW, was infamous as a gathering place for young men who were unemployed, out of school and “indecent in their public conduct.” Ms. Stewart writes: “It is bitterly ironic that three of the key players in dismantling legal segregation…learned their lessons at a school that became an unintended casualty of necessary civil rights action.” In a July NPR interview, Ms. Stewart described Dunbar's benefitting from the glass ceiling segregation placed on Dunbar’s highly educated teachers as a “perversity.”

By the mid-1960s, Dunbar and several of its alumni and former teachers, who had moved on to other leadership positions in education in the city, found students not nearly as interested in the tradition-bound lessons that began in 1807. My grandfather, Madison Tignor, found himself having to answer tough questions from students such as: Why doesn’t Eastern High School have an Afrocentric curriculum? Architect of school desegregation, now Howard University President James Nabrit was asked: Why is Howard Law School no longer serving the needs of African-Americans seeking equality? Marion Barry came to prominence. Dunbar never did integrate. From the 1970s forward, “the economic and social woes of DC were Dunbar’s woes.”

Over the years, there have been periodic signs of hope; a pre-engineering magnet program focused heavily on the sciences and partially financed by corporate sponsors, a Dunbar graduate becoming a Stanford graduate, and most recently, the track coach who will pick up girls at home as early as 3:30 am to get them to practice and who can point to every girl in a team photo and name where she is in college. Ms. Stewart ends on a positive note suggesting that given the demographic changes in the neighborhood maybe Dunbar will make history again, as its founders would have wished, “as the first truly, organically integrated school in Washington, DC.” Here's to hoping she's right.