Education Politics

Showtime, D.C.!

Published August 06, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT

As it is with every August in the greater Washington, D.C. area, the forecast is a consistent high-80s/low-90s with humidity and a chance of some sort of thunderstorm just about every day, Congress has skipped town for the better part of a month, and anyone still in the city is staring a hole through the tiny little "September" portion of the August page of his calendar. There are things to do, but there's nobody around to help get them done. It's, quite frankly, a hint at what hell might be like on certain days (except Hell doesn't have a Starbucks or a Cosi on every other corner).

In fact, the only people doing much of anything at this point in time are educators. And in the District of Columbia's school system, the prep for the upcoming school year seems to have higher stakes than usual. Chancellor Michelle Rhee has received an enormous amount of attention since arriving a couple of years ago, and her third year might be a "do or die" year in terms of her public image and future success: it's what most teachers consider their "tenure year"; there's a Democrat in the White House with a new Secretary of Education who supposedly has it in him to get things done instead of drafting NCLB II: The NCLBening; and as the Washington Post reported on Sunday, she's hired some contractors to "fix" some of the District's high schools ("A D.C. Schools Awakening," by Bill Turque, 8/2/09).

Those brought in to fix Coolidge, Dunbar, and Anacostia High Schools, referred to as "takeover agents" in the article's subhead, have met with success before in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, taking over schools marred by failing scores under NCLB and turning them around, and the task ahead of them is substantial.:

This summer, Friends of Bedford, which operates a Brooklyn public high school that has become New York City's most successful, has taken control of Coolidge and Dunbar senior high schools. Friendship Public Charter Schools, which serves about 4,000 students on six D.C. campuses, is running Anacostia Senior High School.

Rhee has also started discussions with Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Schools, which operates Locke Senior High School in Los Angeles, one of the city's largest and most troubled schools, about working in the District. Barr recently toured Eastern High School on Capitol Hill, although District officials said discussions are in an extremely preliminary stage.

Anacostia, Coolidge and Dunbar are all stark examples of the challenge [Arne] Duncan describes, places where scholarship and discipline flicker weakly at best. Fewer than a third of students read and write proficiently, according to citywide tests. A 2008 review of Dunbar by District officials said, "Evidence of effective teaching and learning was limited to a few individual teachers." On a single day in November, 19 girls were arrested for fighting.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal? (Final Thoughts)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Education Politics

Published August 04, 2009 @ 01:42PM PT

This is the final part in a five part series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here, Part 3 can be found here and Part 4 can be found here.]

Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared that providing “separate but equal” educational opportunities to students based on race denied students of color the equal protection of the law. Largely, the holding in the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education has been examined with respect to equity of access to the institution of schooling generally. And, while much of the progress that was achieved by eliminating legally enforced (de jure) school segregation has been erased by de facto housing segregation patterns that beget de facto school segregation, it is also clear that students of color continue to be denied equal educational opportunities within the institution of schooling. That is, while the post-Brown focus was and continues to be between-school and between-district segregation by race, more subtle forms of racial discrimination have persisted and proliferated within schools and districts, even in the most “integrated” schools and districts.

In summary, fifty-five years after the promises of the Brown decision, here is where we stand:

Today, nearly three out of every four African-American students in the U.S. attends a school that is majority-minority.

1 out of every 6 African-American children in the United States now attends a school where less than one percent of the population is white.

In 1998, African-American students were 59% more likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed than Caucasian students.

As of 2007, in the state of Virginia, African-American students were 54% more likely to be identified as disabled than other students.

African-American and Latina/o students are less than half as likely to be enrolled in gifted and talented educational classes and programs as Caucasian students.

While Internet access in schools and classrooms is consistently good and equitable, access to computers generally is slightly inversely related to the percentage of students of color in schools.

The frequency with which African-American students use computers in schools is at least as high, if not higher, than other students. However, African-American students are much more likely to use computers to practice or drill on math facts than White students.

These are just a few of the indicators that begin to paint the "still separate, still unequal" picture. There are additional indicators including differences in access to "high-quality" teachers; differences in access to modern, acceptable physical school facilities; etc. These differences by race in educational practices and conditions coincide with (likely correlate with) the differences by race in educational outcomes that are so well-documented.

I've long imagined a class-action lawsuit alleging systemic discrimation based on race. Such a lawsuit would surely be a failure since under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI, proof of disriminatory effect is not sufficient; there must be intentional discrimination. Furthermore, as Kevin Welner describes, the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively denied private lawsuits pursuant to the Title VI regulations. "By a 5-4 majority in Alexander v. Sandoval...the Court concluded that Congress only intended these regulations to be directly enforceable by the Office of Civil Rights—a political body with very limited resources—not by a private right of action."

If we add in Justice Roberts' recent proclamation that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." we are left at a place where policy efforts to remedy discrimination on the basis of race are most certainly doomed. That is, in the wake of Sandoval and the Seattle/Louisville school desegregation case, one would be hard-pressed to imagine an educational policy decision that explicitly considers race as a factor passing constitutional muster.

But, here's the tricky thing. No Child Left Behind asks education agencies to disaggregate student test scores by race. Do you think Justice Roberts would rule those efforts unconstitutional? After all, by disaggregating test scores on the basis of race, we are discriminating on the basis of race, right?

I suppose the argument in support of disaggregation of test data by race is that closing the achievement gap is a compelling state interest, and the means prescribed by NCLB and state-level implementation of those ideas are narrowly tailored. Well, I would suggest that equality of educational opportunities is a compelling state interest. As Justice Kennedy wrote in his (sort of) concurring opinion in the Seattle/Louisville case:

Our Nation from the inception has sought to preserve and expand the promise of liberty and equality on which it was founded. Today we enjoy a society that is remarkable in its openness and opportunity. Yet our tradition is to go beyond present achievements, however significant, and to recognize and confront the flaws and injustices that remain. This is especially true when we seek assurance that opportunity is not denied on account of race. The enduring hope is that race should not matter; the reality is that too often it does.

I contend on the basis of the data I report throughout this series that equality of educational opportunity has been denied on the basis of race. Therefore, we must find appropriate (narrowly tailored?) ways to remedy these disparities. We must continue to have these courageous conversations.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal? (The Case of Digital Equity in Education)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Education Politics

Published July 31, 2009 @ 07:31PM PT

[This is Part 4 in a series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here, and Part 3 can be found here.]

Less an issue of “within-school” racial segregation than one of segregation across schools and districts, consider the issue of digital equity in education. I've written a bit about digital equity in education (see e.g. http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v15n3/), but mostly in academic journals. So, I thought I'd use this space today to mashup some text from blog posts I've written before.

In homes, there are significant disparities in computer access and use by race. Fairlie (2005) found that African-Americans and Latina/os are much less likely to have access to home computers than are white, non-Latina/os (50.6 and 48.7 percent compared to 74.6 percent), and those differences are more pronounced for children than for adults. Using advanced statistical analyses, he concludes that, “[e]ven among individuals with family incomes of at least $60,000, blacks [sic.] and Latinos [sic.] are substantially less likely to own a computer or have Internet access at home than are whites.” In the following table, we see some of those differences.

One problem these data present for educators is that the significant inequities that exist within homes present a huge barrier to using technology to extend the learning day and to bridge a home-school connection. That said, there are opportunities for schools to level the playing field with respect to access to technology. However, within schools, while disparities are less pronounced, digital inequities persist. Here are some selected statistics from an NCES report:

In 2005, the ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access in public schools was 3.8 to 1, a decrease from the 12.1 to 1 ratio in 1998, when it was first measured. However, schools with the lowest level of minority enrollment had fewer students per computer than did schools with higher minority enrollments. Specifically, according to my own analyses, schools in rural areas and schools with higher percentages of African-American students are more likely to have lower levels of computer access.

In 2005, 94 percent of public school instructional rooms had Internet access, compared with 3 percent in 1994. There are no differences across school characteristics.

Thus, while Internet access in schools and classrooms is consistently good and equitable, access to computers generally is slightly inversely related to the percentage of students of color in schools.

What about use of technology in schools? Let's look at some recent statistics on computer uses in schools disaggregated by race. [NOTE: these data are generated with the NAEP Data Explorer. Thus, these are nationally representative data].

Looking first at computer use for math, by race, in 2007, at 4th grade:

[NOTE: click on the following images to see larger graphics]

and then at 8th grade:

What do we see? Well, two things: First, computer use for math is more frequent in 4th grade than 8th grade (BTW, that's a consistent finding across lots of ed. tech. research; what's up with the secondary school teachers?). Second, at both grade levels, white students are more likely than African-American students to "never or hardly ever" use computers for math (and, yes, statheads, those differences are "statistically significant"). So, I can't say that African-American students use computers for math more than white students, but I can say they are less likely to "never or hardly ever" use computers for math in school.

In fact, that's pretty much the gist of what I report in the article in the Educational Policy Analysis Archive to which I linked above. African-American students have slightly lower levels of access to computers in schools, but the frequency with which they use computers in schools is at least as high, if not higher, than other students.

The logical next question, then, is "What are the students doing on the computers?" Answering that question is difficult, mostly for a lack of appropriate data. For math. though, there are some interesting data. By further sniffing through the NAEP Data Explorer, I "explored" differences in digitally-infused pedagogy by race. One of the items on the background questionnaire of the 8th grade NAEP in 2007 was as follows: "When you are doing math for school or homework, how often do you use these different types of computer programs?" One of the listed programs was "A program to practice or drill on math facts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division)." Looking at the results for that item disaggregated by race, we get the following (again, click on image to enlarge):

Overall, African-American students are much more likely to use computers to practice or drill on math facts than White students. The learning affordances of the modern Internet seem to grow exponentially these days, but even in 2007 terms, using computers for drill on math facts is hardly taking advantage of the power of computer-mediated learning.

The educational research I have done over the last decade has taken me to schools all across the United States. I've been to schools in urban centers (e.g. NYC, Dallas, Houston, Miami-Dade, etc.), tiny rural towns (e.g. Beckley (WV), Gnadenhutten (OH), etc.) and everything in between. I can report with great confidence that the schools wherein I have seen advanced, progressive applications of technology have been schools that serve overwhelmingly Caucasian populations. Relatedly, if you consider all of the reasonably large-scale 1:1 computing initiatives in the United States, you would be hard-pressed to find such a program in a majority-minority community.

As the learning affordances of ubiquitous computing continue to expand, I worry deeply about creating a new sort of digital divide; one where students of color are not afforded the opportunities and advantages of learning in technologically innovative and important ways. The educational technology community is by no means bounded, but there is unquestionably a large, but tightly connected group of individuals who are arguably the "leading" practitioners with respect to technology in education. They are the folks who are connected through Twitter and through their blogs. They are overwhelmingly Caucasian, and I strongly suspect that if we polled them about the populations of students they serve, that population would be overwhelmingly Caucasian. A little over one year ago, Paul Bogush, a technologically-innovative teacher in Connecticut wrote:

Seventeen years ago a few months into my first teaching job, I was standing in an assembly when I realized something. I was the only white dude in the room.

I was looking around Twitter today at who other people follow and I had the same feeling come back. There are only white dudes in the “Twitter room.” I could not find anyone who was not. Out of every class that I have collaborated with this year only one person was an African American. Then I thought about the blogs I read, the wikis I check out, and the podcasts I listen to. Same deal as the Twitter room. What’s up with that?

Good question. What is up with that?

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Still Separate, Still Unequal? (The Case of Gifted and Talented Education)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Education Politics

Published July 30, 2009 @ 07:23PM PT

[NOTE: I apologize for not getting this posted yesterday. I didn't expect to spend 9 hours in LaGuardia airport yesterday with shaky Internet access...I'll just push everything back a day. My bad.]

[This is Part 3 in a series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here.]

As a second example of this “within-school” racial segregation, consider the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted education programs. The case of special education about which I wrote yesterday is a little more complicated given a couple of factors. First, for certain disability categories, the diagnostic processes are reasonably objective. Second, as Ira Socol suggests in the comments, there are aspects of the special education system that are consistent with what I would want for any child.

The underrepresentation of children of color in gifted education classes and or programs is less complicated. Here are some statistics on the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted and talented education programs. [NOTE: much like the data on special education, the data on student assignment to gifted programs tend to be old as well.]

In 1997, African-Americans made up 17.2% of the total student population, but only 8.40% of those assigned to gifted and talented classes or programs.

Latina/o students comprised 15.6% of the student population, but 8.6% of the students designated for gifted and talented classes or programs.

King, Kozleski and Landsdowne (2009) report that in California in 2007, 7.2% of the students enrolled in public education were African-American, yet only 4.13% of those enrolled in gifted and talented educational program were African-American.

In odds ratios terms, we see the same story: According to the National Research Council Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, Asian/ Pacific Islanders are 1/3 more likely than white students to be in gifted programs, while African-American and Latina/o students are less than half as likely to be enrolled in gifted and talented educational classes and programs as Caucasian students.

Those odds did not change considerably between 1976 and 1998.

Why is this less complicated? As vexing as it is to define what it means to be "disabled," many of the problems with the assignment of students to gifted education programs have to do with a lack of agreement and an overall subjectivity around defining giftedness. Thus, the discrimination here is more evident and explicit.

I am a little out of my league here as gifted education is not at all an area of expertise. But, I know enough to recognize that this is clearly an issue of definition and identification (which is driven by the definition). In other words, unlike special education, there is no legal mandate to offer services to children identified as gifted and/or talented. Decisions to offer gifted education are made locally and, therefore, implementation varies widely across and within states. Local education agencies can decide if they are to offer "extra" or "different" services for students identified as gifted and talented. The first step in that process, then, is defining that population of students. Therefore, what's most troubling about the statistics above is that school systems are clearly defining "giftedness" in a way that privileges Caucasian children.

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SELECTED REFERENCES

Castellano, J., & Diaz, E. (2002). Reaching new horizons. Gifted and talented education for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Donovan, M.S., & Cross, C.T. (2002). Minority students in special and gifted education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Ford, D., Harris, J., III, Tyson, C., & Trotman, M. (2002). Beyond deficit thinking: Providing access for gifted African American students. Roeper Review, 24, 52-58.

Ford, D. (2004). Recruiting and retaining culturally diverse gifted students from diverse ethnic, cultural, and language groups. In J. Banks and C. A. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (5th ed., pp. 379-397). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Scott, M., Deuel, L. S., Jean-Francois, B., & Urbano, R. C. (1996). Identifying Cognitively Gifted Ethnic Minority Children. Gifted Child Quarterly, 40, 147-153.

Sisk, D. (2003). Maximizing the high potential of minority economically disadvantaged students. In J.F. Smutny. Underserved gifted populations. Responding to their needs and abilities. (pp.239-260). New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc.

Sternberg, R. (2007). Cultural concepts of giftedness. Roeper Review, 29, 160-165.

Tomlinson, C., Callahan, C., & Lelli, K. (1997). Challenging expectations: Case studies of high potential, culturally diverse young children. Gifted Child Quarterly, 41(2), 5-18.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal? (The Case of Special Education)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Education Politics

Published July 28, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT

[This is Part 2 in a series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here]

As one example of this “within-school” racial segregation, consider the disproportionate number of students of color classified as special needs students. The Twenty-Second Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2000) documents the extent and seriousness of the problem:

African-American youth, ages 6 through 21, account for 14.8 percent of the general population. Yet, they account for 20.2 percent of the special education population.

In 10 of the 13 disability categories, the percentage of African-American students equals or exceeds the resident population percentage.

The representation of African-American students in the mental retardation and developmental delay categories is more than twice their national population estimates.

Those are the simplest ways to understand the problem. There are, however, other more refined ways of "measuring" disproportionality. The National Research Council's Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, in a widely cited report, offers three such measures:

The risk index (RI) is calculated by dividing the number of students of a particular race served in a particular disability category by the total enrollment of students of the given race in the school population. In other words, the “risk index” is the percentage of all students of a particular racial group identified in a particular disability category.

The odds ratio (OR) is computed by dividing the risk index of a given racial group by the risk index of another racial group. Typically, odds ratios are reported relative to white students. In that case, if the risk index for a given racial group is identical to white students, the odds ratio will equal 1.0. Odds ratios greater than 1.0 means that students in the given racial group are at greater risk for identification, while odds ratios of less than 1.0 indicate that they are less at risk.

The composition index (CI) is calculated by dividing the number of students of a particular racial group enrolled in a particular disability category by the total number of students enrolled in that same disability category. In other words, the CI indicates the proportion of all children served under a given disability category who are members of a given racial/ethnic group.

The following table comes from the National Research Council report. The data indicate significant overrepresentation of African-American students in the emotional disturbance category. In 1998, African-American students were 59% more likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed than Caucasian students.

As evidenced above, much of the data used in reports or studies on the issue of racial disproportionality in special education are fairly old. It is not uncommon to see relatively recent articles reporting on data from 5-10 years prior. However, some of the most recent data are maintained by the Equity Alliance at Arizona State University. Through their partnerships with the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI) and the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), they offer a powerful data visualization application where, across cities and states, special education data can be examined with respect to the distributions of students with disabilities across various disability categories by ethnic/racial category. Using that service, examining my the state in which I currently reside (Virginia), I produced a graph that shows the risk index/ratio for African-American students across all disabilities over time. The graph shows that, relative to Caucasian students and relative to all other races, African-American students are significantly more likely to be identified with a disability; the risk-ratio increased every year from 2001-2007. As of 2007, in the state of Virginia, African-American students were 54% more likely to be identified as disabled than other students.

Poverty is often cited as an explanation for these disparities. However, while poverty and related factors correlate highly with the incidence of disability, the effects of gender and race remain significant even after controlling for socioeconomics. Furthermore, and most striking, according to the NAACP (2001), “and contrary to the expectations, is the finding that the risk for being labeled ‘mentally retarded’ increases for blacks attending schools in districts serving mostly middle-class or wealthy white students” (p. 18). In fact, Losen and Orfield (2002) tell us that African-American children, and especially males, are at increased risk for mental retardation and emotional disturbance identification as the white population of a district increases. In other words, even and especially where African-American youth have achieved integration, they are disproportionately labeled and excluded from the general education setting.

The data on the overrepresentation of students of color in special education present a prima facie problem. Efforts to address the problem have been codified. According to this document produced last month by the U.S. Department of Education:

IDEA requires States and LEAs to take steps to address disproportionate representation of racial/ethnic groups in special education. 20 U.S.C. 1416(a)(3)(C); 34 CFR §300.600(d)(3)...States have a separate obligation, under 20 U.S.C. 1418(d) and 34 CFR §300.646, to collect and examine data to determine whether significant disproportionality based on race and ethnicity is occurring in the State and LEAs of the State with respect to the identification of children as children with disabilities, including identification as children with particular impairments; the placement of children in particular educational settings; and the incidence, duration, and type of disciplinary actions, including suspensions and expulsions.

In other words, this problem has been identified and is finally being addressed in the educational policy arena. The extant research identifies the "disproportionate representation problem as a complex social process of intricate interactions among multiple determinant factors" (Mooney, 2007). Thus, whether the policy approaches to remedying the problem prove effective is still an empirical question at this point.

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SELECTED REFERENCES

Artiles, A. J., & Trent, S.C. (2000). Representations of culturally/linguistically diverse students. In C. R. Reynolds, & E. Fletcher-Janzen (Eds), Encyclopedia of Special Education, (2nd ed. , Vol. 1, pp. 513-517). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Coutinho, M. J., Oswald, D.P., & Best A. M. (2002). The influence of sociodemographics and gender on the disproportionate identification of minority students as having learning disabilities. Remedial and Special Education, 23 (1), 49-59.

Hosp, J., & Reschly, D. (2002). Predictors of restrictiveness of placement for African-American and Caucasian students. Exceptional Children, 68 (2), 225-238.

Ladner, M., & Hammons, C. (2001). Special but unequal: Race and special education. In C.E. Finn, A. J. Rotherham, & C. R. Hokanson Jr. (Eds.), Rethinking special education for a new century (pp. 85-110). Thomas B. Fordham Foundation & The Progressive Policy Institute.

Losen, D.J. & Orfield, G. (2002). Racial Inequity in Special Education. Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Harvard Education Press.

Mooney, K. (2007) An Historical Case Study of the Intersection between Policy and Practice in One School District: Untangling the Disproportionate Representation of Students of Color in Special Education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Hofstra University. Hempstead, NY.

NAACP Education Department (2001). NAACP call for action in education. Baltimore, MD: NAACP Education Department. Retrieved on February 24, 2002 from http://naacp.org/about/resources/publications/education_call_to_actn_2.pdf.

National Research Council (2002). Minority students in special education and gifted education. Washington D.C.: National Academic Press.

U.S. Department of Education (2000). Twenty second annual report to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Zhang, D. & Katsiyannis, A. (2002). Minority representation in special education: A persistent challenge. Remedial and Special Education, 22, 180-87.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal? (An Introduction)

by Jonathan D. Becker

category: Education Politics

Published July 27, 2009 @ 11:09AM PT

To separate [elementary- and secondary-school children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954).

Subsequent to that decision, though certainly not "with all deliberate speed," progress was made towards the goal of desegregating the public schools in the United States. However, as documented by the Civil Rights Project, we are now a good decade or so into a period of rapid resegregation. A 2003 report by the Civil Rights Project stated that 1 out of every 6 African-American children in the United States now attends a school where less than one percent of the population is white. The table below is from the most recent report from the Civil Rights project. The percentage of African-American students in predominantly (>50%) minority schools dropped from 77% in 1968 to 63% in 1988, but by 2005 the percentage had rebounded to 73%. Today, nearly three out of every four African-American students in the U.S. attends a school that is majority-minority. The rapid resegregation is most pronounced in the South.

Five years ago, at an event recognizing the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, I had the honor of serving on a panel with Theodore M. Shaw, then the director-general counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF). Offering his take on the desegregation struggles, Shaw said something to the effect of "I'm tired of chasing white people." Around the same time, the New York Times a interviewed Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (yes, THAT, Dr. Gates!). Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, Dr. Gates said:

What we're talking about really is how to deal with the conflict between quality and community. Many of our friends on the left would have us believe that all black people want their kids bused out of the inner cities. [But] what they want from busing is quality. If we could make predominantly black schools excellent, would that be a satisfactory goal? I say yes, because I don't think there's anything magic about being around white people. I think it's good for a multicultural society to have integration. But unless we have economic integration, we're not going to have residential integration. And unless the schools have quality, we're not going to have economic integration.

I distinctly remember struggling to wrap my head around what I was hearing and reading from prominent African-American scholars. I believed in the intangible benefits of integrated schooling and I was hopeful. Just one year earlier, the Supreme Court held that achieving student body racial diversity was a compelling governmental interest, at least in the law school context.

Then, two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended policy efforts to remedy or curb the resegregation of schools. In a 5-4 decision in the case of Parents Inolved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al., the Court held that student assignment plans aimed at racial balancing were unconstitutional. Some commentators have suggested that efforts to desegregate on the basis of race are not entirely impossible, pointing to Justice Kennedy's concurring opinion which suggested that race may be considered to ensure equal educational opportunity. Yet, even the most adamant advocates for racial desegregation have a hard time getting past Chief Justice Roberts' proclamation that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

To that, CJ Roberts, I say, "right on!" In fact, while much of the progress that was achieved by eliminating legally enforced (de jure) school segregation has been erased by de facto housing segregation patterns that beget de facto school segregation, it is also clear that students of color continue to be denied equal educational opportunities within the institution of schooling. That is, while the post-Brown focus was and continues to be between-school and between-district segregation by race, more subtle forms of racial discrimination have persisted and proliferated within schools and districts, even in the most “integrated” schools and districts.

In the coming days, I will be exploring issues of within-school segregation. Specifically, I will be writing about:

The overrepresentation of students of color in special education (Tuesday)

The underrepresentation of students of color in gifted and talented programs (Wednesday)

The underrepresentation of students of color in STEM initiatives (Thursday)

On Friday, I plan to wrap it all up and offer critical commentary and policy recommendations. I hope you'll join me for some courageous conversations about race and schooling.

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Today’s “School Reformers” vs Real Change for Education - II

by Ira David Socol

category: Education Politics

Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:54AM PT

Yesterday I described my ideas for investigating fundamental change in how American schools function, but a big part of this change must come in how we find, recruit, train, and support our teachers.

Teachers are the least respected professionals in America. Oh, lawyers get all the jokes. And doctors - whose professional organization keeps trying to block universal health insurance for the U.S. - are seen as greedy. But George W. Bush's first Secretary of Education called teachers "terrorists," Obama's Secretary of Education lectures teachers on blocking change, and a whole bunch of rich and powerful people think that the teaching profession is so easy that any reasonably smart graduate of college can do it after listening to five weeks of lectures. And then, it sure seems like most of the U.S. population thinks teachers are overpaid and underworked.

I just want to remind everyone that these are the people we have placed in charge of our future. These are the people who change the lives and save the lives of our most vulnerable children.

There's history here. In the years after the American Civil War, as public education spread through the unique U.S. "local pay" system, school boards did not want to pay male salaries to teachers. So teaching switched from a male profession to a female profession at a time when pay for females was deplorably low. Of course, so were rates of female higher education. So teachers, at the beginning of the American system, were disrespected women, paid incredibly poorly, and virtually untrained.

This contrasts, for example, with Europe, where schoolmasters were clergy, and deeply respected members of the community.

As the 19th Century ended, "Normal Schools" (teacher training colleges) were appearing everywhere, and the march toward professionalism had begun. But in the early 20th Century, when doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers - all almost exclusively male - organized themselves as "professional organizations" with real public policy and public relations clout, female teachers were left out.

So today, no matter how much money the friends of Wendy Kopp have, no one like her could get away with suggesting that she could train people to perform surgery with five weeks of summer camp training, or build bridges, or design the new World Trade Center, or even take on a death penalty case in court (she has as much experience with those four skill sets as she has with teaching). But she can put completely untrained young people into life or death control of poor people's children, and can be treated as a national expert on teacher certification and education policy.

A profession, not a temp job

I think many teachers are doing a lousy job. I think much of our teacher training is hopelessly disconnected from the needs of our students. I think students lack a diversity of role models among their educators - African-American males, people with learning and attention "issues" especially.

But I can not imagine that "less training" is the solution - because I understand all which anyone must learn to become good at teaching.

On Twitter one day, a "charter school advocate" wondered why Michigan would not certify Civil War filmmaker Ken Burns to teach history. I asked, "What does Ken Burns know about LD, ADHD, EBD, ELL, AAC, UDL?" Because teaching, as anyone who has attended university and slept through the horrid lectures of an expert knows, is about a great deal more than content knowledge. All "human professions" are - which is why, though I might know much less about the law than many Law School professors, I was probably a better New York City cop than most of them could be.

Like all professions, teaching requires a vast amount of both factual and operational knowledge. It requires a constant update of both of those knowledge bases. And it requires an effective peer mentoring and peer review structure. A teacher needs subject knowledge, needs to know the DSM-IV, needs to know brain research, education research, communications technology research. A teacher needs to be a critical thinker, a creative developer of tools of engagement for a wildly diverse audience, and needs a rather stunning level of observational skills and people skills.

How do we find those people? recruit them? train them? support them? reward them? retain them?

Diversities

I want to find more new teachers from a few under-represented populations. I want more who have done poorly in K-12 schools, more survivors of special education, more from chronically failing groups. I want more who grew up in, who live in and are committed to, impoverished communities. And I want more teachers who arrive later in life, having collected big world experiences.

So step one is creating alternate certification routes which make sense in the building of diversity. This means we stop diverting resources to programs like Teach for America, and invest instead in the following:

Community-based Teacher Certification - A decade ago I ran a project in an inner city school, the kind of place which really struggles to hire teachers - especially at the secondary level. The community was impoverished and the tax base shattered. There were great teachers, but many others had checked out.

But there was a group of adults who held the school together. They were para-pros and bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians. They lived in the community. They were committed to the school. They knew the kids, in school and on the street. In many ways they were teachers in every way except content knowledge.

Of course they lacked much of that content knowledge, and they all lacked any kind of post-secondary degree. But I thought then what I think now - I'd rather try to teach community-committed, kid-committed adults the content knowledge they need to teach than try to turn uninterested content experts into teachers.

So let's fund in-community evening teacher-training in all those places which now hire those bright Teach for America corps members. Let's pay community members to get fast-tracked degrees and relevant educational training. And let's create life-long teachers who'll be legitimate role models in their communities.

Second Careers - I'm not interested in finding suddenly unemployed investment bankers who want to hide out in education until Wall Street recovers. But there are a ton of people out there who could make fabulous teachers if they could pause, and train. But America is hard: you quit your job, you lose your health insurance; you go to school, you get charged.

There are alternative certification programs for people like these in certain places, but too many are "district quickies" where the teaching is rote, the curriculum scripted, and the time to grow extremely limited. We need a national program to pay (and insure) these career changers for as long as two years, as they learn about education and spend time every week in schools working directly with students. Only then can they see if this is really the job for them, and only then can "we" see if they've got the people skills to do this complicated job.

The best undergrads - How do we bring our best and brightest to education? And how do we know if those "best and brightest" will be good teachers?

We encourage commitment from freshman year and we insist on time in schools/time with students from the very start.

Now at Michigan State we require time working with "urban" students from the very first education course - at the freshman level. And before our pre-service teachers enter their internship year, they will have probably interacted with more diverse students than a TFA member will during his or her "career" - and so we know who's got the stuff to be a teacher. But we don't have the incentives.

I want to nationalize that kind of time-in-school teacher education while offering tuition and room and board pay-backs for those who become teachers - with those pay-backs starting from the year an undergraduate student began education courses. In other words, try out teaching from the start, and if it works for you, and you work for it - college is free. If we build great teacher education programs, and we get great students to sample them, we'll find our share of great teachers. And if we find and train great teachers, paying for four years of college is a very small price for a nation committed to its children.

Supporting and Keeping Teachers

Finding great teachers, training great teachers, isn't the end. We need to support great teachers. I won't even discuss "merit pay" now, because it remains a ridiculous idea until we decide what "merits" bonuses. America lacks a reasonable track record on that issue.

But we know that teachers cannot continue to be paid the most for working with the easiest students. Teachers in the Bronx cannot earn less than teachers in Scarsdale. Teachers in Los Angeles cannot earn less than teachers in Beverly Hills. Teachers in Gary, Indiana cannot earn less than teachers in River Forest, Illinois. If they do, America's economic system will bring a different set of teachers to those poor communities. We know that.

And we know that we cannot let teachers continue to try to solve their on-the-job problems in isolation. We need to pay them to attend summer institutes and conferences. We need to increase pay to cover more days of in-service training, and we need to make that training excellent, make it differentiated by teacher need, and make it engaging and relevant.

We need to connect our teachers to the information and communication technologies of our times, so they can be comfortable with them and work with them in the classroom. Basic teacher perks must include anywhere broadband access, new computers, and smartphones - and support to learn what they can do.

But we need to do something more. We need to make the teacher workplace a safe place in every way possible. Physically safe and safe for professional experimentation. Because we cannot have teachers who come to work afraid - of students, of administrators, of parents, of tests scores. Just as with students, we can demand more from teachers only if we create high expectations and the kind of space which allows any human to reach their potential.

The role of teachers

If our schools are to be anything better than they are today, the role of teaching must radically change. Teachers will be "guides" rather than an information delivery system. They will function more like librarians than lecturers, helping students find both information and tools. They will need to operate on a critical thinking/creative plane all the time, if we are to get our students to do the same.

That change is going to be difficult. And we need great people, backed by great training and great resources, if we're going to do it.

- Ira Socol

You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com

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