“Educators’ Ousiderness”

In the August 30, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, Nancy Franklin reviewed the latest chapter of Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary.  A sequel to the 2006 When the Levees Broke, If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise debuted on HBO on August 26th in honor of, and benefiting from the perspective of, the five-year anniversary of the big storm.  Levees is still pending on my Netflix queue and I don’t get HBO, but I did read the review and a Teach for America reference buried in the second page tweaked my antenna.

Vallas [the young principal of a new charter school in New Orleans]  is white, as are many of the young teachers in the Teach for America program who have come to New Orleans in recent years.  It’s not clear that that’s an issue for local parents, but the educators’ outsiderness seems to be.  ‘A lot of people here trying to teach our kids…do not know them,’ one man says.  To him, the criteria for being a teacher in his district should be ‘Do you love these children like you love your own, and would you take a bullet for them?’  This is the definition of a no-win situation: local people who can’t fix the schools themselves but are suspicious of outsiders.

Both the sentiment and the syntax of the quoted community member echo an experience had during my first months as a Teach for America teacher in inner city Miami.  Amid the exhausting buzz of setting up a classroom and managing my students, I was also required, as a new resident, to register for a Florida driver’s license.  The first appointment I had scheduled had been at a DMV so far away that the gridlock of both I-95 and local roads made it impossible for me to get there in time.  The maze of canals and industrial parks that sabotage the organized beauty of the Miami grid system delayed me further.  My second attempt was foiled by Hurricane Katrina herself, which taunted Miami before going on to barrage The Big Easy, posing enough of a threat to close schools and summon conscientious homeowners to cover their windows with corrugated aluminum shutters.  A week or so later, I made my third attempt.  I left the school parking lot with my L.L. Bean teacher bag loaded so full of teachers manuals and worksheets that the Corolla sensor mistook it for a person and incessantly beeped its demand that the seat belt be utilized.  I drove from Overtown to Liberty City and found the DMV tucked in a dilapidated shopping center with five minutes to spare before my scheduled appointment.

I parked and walked towards the office.  At some point the shopping complex may have been a bustling business center, a reason for optimism for African Americans moving north to escape the crippling population density and toxic poverty of Overtown, but by September 2005 most of the stores were vacant, windows had been shattered and soggy piles of trash nestled in the doorways.  A group of young black men stood across from the entrance to the DMV and I ignored their greetings as best I could as I went inside.

I opened the door and the atmosphere fronze.  Every person packed into the cramped and crumbling office was black and every one of them turned around to see what could have been the only white 22 year old blond girl to ever set foot inside that establishment.  I asked a security guard what I should do if I had an appointment and he pointed to a machine on the wall dispensing numbers and implied to me with his eye roll that I was not exempt from any rules.  I sat down.  I waited for about an hour.

When they called my name I went to the counter and was told that I would have to pay a 30 dollar fee.  Panicking, I admitted that I didn’t have any cash or checks with me and the clerk told me I could go to an ATM at the Walgreens across the street, but that I would have to hurry because they were closing in three minutes.  In New York walking across the street or down the block is no big deal, but the situation here was different.  I walked as fast as I could through the eerie maze of empty storefronts to the shopping center entrance.  I made my way across ten lanes of frantic traffic, the intersection studded with little old Central American ladies hawking bouquets of discount roses and boys offering one-dollar bottles of water, their labels soggy with condensation, to hot and frustrated drivers.  I went into the pharmacy and got the money.  Coming and going I had to contend with the congregation of men who stood around the shopping center as they amused themselves with the vision of me rushing through their slow-paced stomping ground and responded with hoots and menacing catcalls.  I was almost an anachronism: hastily ripped from the elite Northeastern all-women college campus where I belonged and dropped into this poverty-paralyzed tropical neighborhood.  In his play Julius Ceasar, Shakespeare exhibits his brilliant sense of the dramatic by signaling the chiming of a clock in ancient Rome, but my purpose in the Liberty City DMV seemed, both to myself and my observers, both more strange and less justified.

I arrived back at the counter with the door locked behind me to any latecomers and the waiting room emptying as the last appointments were called.  The woman charged with assisting me asked the requisite questions and entered the data into a form.  Suddenly she seemed to be struck with the possibility of the entertainment such an unusual patron might provide.  Looking skeptically at my Virginia driver’s license, she said,

“Why you coming down here?”

“I’m teaching at a school in Overtown.”  I admitted, trying to be polite but businesslike.

“You one of those Teach America people?”

Sheepishly, “Yes.”

“Oh so you white people think you come down here and save our children?  What school you say you teach at?”

Hoping that the first question was rhetorical, I opt to answer the second.  “Dunbar Elementary on 20th Street.”

Though she had been incredulous about my motives only moments before, she now warmed to the hilarity of such an enterprise and turned to tell the clerk next to her, “She at Dunbar.  You know, where Tyneka’s baby go.  Oooooooh, that’s a bad place, Dunbar!  She gonna get shot!”  Having attracted the attention of other staff members, the clerk glanced at the form she had been filling out for my name and said, in high spirits and at top volume, “Get down on the flo’ Miss Davenport!  You gonna get shot!”  By this time it seemed like everyone in the office was laughing and repeating the joke.  A clerk three stations down towards the door, an older man who had been waiting to be called, each echoed the pronouncement.

My memory ends there, but, as much as I would have wished it at the time, I know I was not immediately and magically transported back to my apartment.  I had my picture taken and was given my license. I smiled tightly and tried to pretend I was comfortable in one of the most confrontational and racially uncomfortable situations of my life up to that point.

Because I don’t drive in New York, it is still the identification I carry in my wallet five years later.  My birth month is wrong, likely lost in the confusion of the ebullient dialogue during the completion of the paperwork.  The picture is a souvenir of my passage through that experience.  There are dark circles under my eyes from getting as little as three hours of sleep a night and attempting to teach all day.  I am not smiling.  I look pale and bewildered, but grimly resolute.

Part of the reason that I had joined Teach For America instead of the Peace Corps was that I believed that “we Americans” should fix our own problems before traipsing off to other countries and confidently meddling in the affairs of foreigners.  But if Liberty City is located within “my country,” no one in the DMV that day would have believed it.  I was every bit as out of place as I was during my junior year studying Spanish in the Dominican Republic.  Somehow this alienation was both more disorienting and more terrifying.

The clerk’s rhetorical question rings in my ears: “Oh so you white people think you come down here and save our children?”  I had wrestled with the challenge with the gentle guidance of professors in college and I would continue to ask it of myself and my peers throughout my three years in Miami.  But the conundrum of who should teach poor black children in the United States was never put to me with such brutal elegance as it was that day.

The man Spike Lee interviewed for If God is Willing, says that prospective New Orleans teachers should be asked, “‘Do you love these children like you love your own, and would you take a bullet for them?” For me, the answer, even after a few horrific months in the classroom, was a quite literal yes.  At 27 I have yet to become a mother, but I responded to each school-wide lock down, called because of a drive-by shooting, hostage situation, or run-away criminal in the vicinity, by going outside to lock our classroom door with my key and tersely herding my students into the supply closet until the threat was over.  Unfortunately, as Teach for America rhetoric resolutely asserts, love is not enough to close the achievement gap.  My love couldn’t make Malek’s mother stop drinking or chase away the demons that haunted Tiara.  My love couldn’t even teach all 18 of them to read on grade level or pass the state tests.  So why do we white people think we can save their children?  And if we can’t, should we try?

I’m still not sure of my answer to that question.  I believe that my love for my students made an impact on some of them, helped them master a few concepts, comforted a few of them through a rough time.  And my love for them definitely changed me, as did experiences like the one in the Liberty City DMV.  Are those lessons, changes, small conforts enough to improve American education?  Perhaps, if God is willing…

Click on the book cover or the title to hear an NPR story about the book.

The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial by Susan Eaton is assigned reading for my public policy and education class this semester.  It’s very readable – more pop than academic – so it’s a refreshing break from the scholarly articles that are most of my homework.

One passage in particular reminded me of teaching at Dunbar.  I usually feel like I am now every bit as confused as I was two years ago, but reading this I actually felt like the time I’ve had away gave me some valuable perspective.

The Children in Room E4 traces the history of the Sheff v. O’Neill Connecicut Supreme Court case in which students sued the Hartford public school system to racially integrate schools.  Eaton intersperses this history with her experiences observing in the Harford public school elementary classroom of Ms. Luddy, and focuses particularly on the experiences of a student named Jeremy.  This passage occurs on page 268, when Ms. Luddy has taken her class to spend the day with another fourth grade at a mostly White, suburban school in Marlborough, Connecticut.

‘Did you see here how kids can just walk around this school?  There’s a kind of trust,” Ms. Luddy commented to me in Marlborough.  ‘If you see a child walking down the hall at Simpson-Waverly? [the school Ms. Luddy teaches at in Hartford]  I’m automatically asking, “Ahh, excuse me, exactly where are you supposed to be?”  It’s different.’

Order, predictability, and obedience were important at Simpson-Waverly.

‘Why,’ Ms. Luddy asked me one day, ‘do the lines have to be straight?  I don’t know.  I do it, but I don’t know.’

Quiet, straight lines reflected schoolwide culture.  Ms. Luddy kept straight lines, not in response to an explicit rule, but to honor a crucial convention.  She could justify the quiet.  ‘The quiet teaches them consideration for others,’ she’d said.  ‘But the straight thing confuses me.’

Marlborough’s hallways were less quiet.  Teachers permitted chidren to cluster into social groups.  The kids could whisper.  Simpson-Waverly’s silent, arrow-straight lines didn’t inspire imitation in Marlborough.  Mike Larkin, the third-grade teacher I’d spent time with there, had said, ‘They have to be quiet, respectful, and I have to keep track of them.  But I never think about the lines, in fact.  Never.’

The rigidity outside Ms. Luddy’s room aside, her class was more than a decorous, functional room.  It was a reliable sanctuary within a chaotic, unreliable neighborhood.  But what happened in Simpson-Waverly out beyond Ms. Luddy’s safe haven?  What kind of things happened at Simpson-Waverly that didn’t happen at Marlborough?

In the corridor at Simpson-Waverly, the dour (white) chaperone lightly but repeatedly slapped the hands of first graders who sucked their thumbs.  A ((black) former vice-principle hollered at a second grader, ‘You should be ashamed to say my name.  Don’t you speak my name.  Don’t you dare.  And get that foolish hat off your foolish head.’  A (black) substitute teacher hurled insults at a fifth grader: ‘lazy, rude, foolish.’ Another substitute (black) screamed, ‘Shut up.’  A third substitute teacher (Asian) declined conversation with children.  A visibly exasperated, young (white) teacher pushed a whiny, jumpy child against the wall (hard) and back into a line.  I overheard a teacher (black) say scoldingly to a child in the hallway, ‘What is wrong with you?  There is something very wrong with you.’

A school’s culture, I’d long found, reveals itself most discernibly far from the classroom.

Several aspects of this text struck me. The culture at the school I taught at was exactly like this, if not more brutal.  Not only did I get used to it but I considered my adaptation to it a matter of survival and in some contexts a kind of warped pride at being tough.

On a first date with a Miami Teaching Fellows middle school teacher in Liberty City, he regaled me with the vivid recollection of him twisting a fat, aggressive eighth grade girl’s arm behind her back as he escorted her to the office after a particularly brutal, extension-ripping, nail-breaking fight.  As he wrangled with the still-seething teenager he whispered under his breath, “Move again and I’ll fucking break your arm.”  I’d imagine that many women he’d date (and in fairness, I’m sure he wouldn’t have told it to those who were not in similar situations), would not find this either amusing or attractive.  I laughed and shot back with a story of my own.

Typing it for this post, I focused on how strange it is that Eaton inexplicably notes the race of each offender.  (I have to say that I don’t think I’ve ever heard a white person use the word “foolishness” before).  Why does she do this?  Why does it matter?  Does it seem worse for white adults to verbally or physically abuse Black and Latino children because of our country’s history?  Can we excuse, but not condone, what a reader of Eaton’s book might to consider to be “that aspect of black culture?”

I do think it’s important that she provides racial labels here.  Being white (and young and little) had an enormous impact on my teaching experience.  No one expected me to be able to control students, especially my students.  I got real mean, real fast and my first year I won the dubious honor of  “Rookie Teacher of the Year” based on classroom management alone.  My kids might have also made the most academic gains, but no one noticed.  What mattered was that I pushed the security button less, never got locked out of my classroom, and when an administrator came in my room the kids were sitting down.

Within the first month in the classroom, I said and did things to children that I never could have imagined before.  Reading Eaton’s passage makes me cringe, not because of the simple truth that no child should be treated with such belittling hostility, but because I said and did things like that, things that I am not proud of.  I cringe because someone who did not experience what I did would think that the adults portrayed are bad people, but I know that, while they may or may not be bad people, they are definitely functioning as a part of a bad system.

New York Times Article: Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them

In an article for the New York Times this week, Benedict Carey explores interesting questions about how little kids learn.  I thought the point about numeracy getting neglected in the federal push for literacy was especially thought provoking.

Click here to read the article.

The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s A Nation at Risk has arguably had more influence on public education in the U.S. than any other document and has “become part of the folklore of American education” (Cross, 2004).  Capitalizing on American fears of losing the dominant position in the world economy, its strong language commanded attention at all levels of the educational system, and was the primary cause for the standards and accountability movement that was codified with the passage of No Child Left Behind and continues today. While the powerful influence it exerted is indisputable, its validity is not: A Nation at Risk has been criticized as a “manufactured crisis.”  Berliner and Biddle’s 1995 book attacks the report for inaccuracy and proceeds to debate many of its claims about the decline of public education.  A review of both the major themes of the report and its critiques provides for an assessment of the lasting effects A Nation at Risk has had on education policy.

A central theme of A Nation at Risk was that the U.S. was failing to educate children to the high standards necessary to compete in the increasingly global marketplace.  This threat emerges in one of the oft-quoted passages of the report: “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”  High rates of inflation and unemployment of the late 1970s and early1980s left the public especially vulnerable to this type of rhetoric.  The power of the report lay in its ability to play on this fear and in its fiery language.  When early drafts were criticized as too academic, a decision was made to “drop all footnotes and eliminate the educational jargon” (Cross, 2004).  The final version was a terse 36 pages full of resolute affirmations about the poor quality of American Education designed to create maximum impact with the press and the public.

1983 was not the first time that a perceived crisis had led to demands for a stronger system of education; there are many parallels between the reaction to the release of A Nation at Risk and the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957.  The report itself refers to Sputnik to criticize the fading out of science programs it spawned:

We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

However, the deeper connection lies in the fact that both the findings of the National Commission on Excellence in Education and the launching of the satellite were seen by the American public and the legislators who represented them as crises that demanded action on the part of the federal government.  The reluctance of conservative politicians, who were usually bent on keeping the federal government out of state and local school policy, was overcome by the urgent call for action.  It is interesting to note, while Sputnik was a threat that came from outside the U.S., Secretary Bell was fully aware of creating this second crisis.

“More than two decades ago the Soviet Sputnik had spurred us into action to improve educational standards and performance.  We needed an equally powerful spur today.  I wanted to stage an event that would jar people into action on behalf of their educational system” (Bell, 1988).

Regardless of whether Sputnik or A Nation at Risk was worthy of the American reaction to them, the reaction to the 1983 report quickly surpassed Bell’s highest expectations.

In their 1995 book The Manufactured Crisis, Berliner and Biddle vehemently attack the validity of A Nation at Risk, calling it “myths, half-truths, and sometimes outright lies” and a “disinformation campaign.”  The authors’ own review of standardized test scores showed that they had either remained steady or improved over time, even as a more diverse student population took them.  They conclude that, “on average, today’s students are at least as well informed as students were in previous generations and that education in America compares favorably with education elsewhere” (1995).  Berliner and Biddle’s biggest complaint about A Nation at Risk is not its alleged inaccuracy, but that “drew attention away from the real problems in education” (1995).  They asserted that many affluent students in the U.S. receive truly excellent educations, while many poor and minority students lack the resources necessary for them to learn.  The real risk for America, they argued, is not that it educated its students poorly in comparison to with other industrialized nations, but that it educated its poor and minority children poorly in comparison to their wealthy compatriots.

Ultimately Berliner and Biddle’s protests did little to slow the standards and accountability reforms that swept the nation as a result of A Nation at Risk.  The report made explicit recommendations that would be reflected in the standards adopted by many states: “We recommend that schools, colleges, and universities adopt more rigorous and measurable standards, and higher expectations, for academic performance and student conduct.”  Secretary Bell (1988) addressed the direct connection between A Nation at Risk and the standards and accountability movement, pressing legislatures, school boards, educators, and the public to adopt tough new standards of academic excellence.  Bell also reflects that many governors were especially enthusiastic about the “education wall chart” he devised after the release of the report, eager to see how their own states measured up in comparison to their neighbors and competitors.

Concrete ramifications of the standards recommended by the report appear in the 1987 authorization of the ESEA, also called the Hawkins Stafford Bill.  While conservatives had previously resisted the reporting of student achievement data to the federal government, the crisis evoked by A Nation at Risk persuaded them to agree to requirements that schools and districts monitor student performance, outlining specific levels that students benefiting from federal funds should reach.  Under the Hawkins Stafford Bill states were to identify low-performing schools, a requirement which was the precursor to the identification of failing schools under NCLB.

Wells describes the shift of federal influence from “equity” to “excellence” as such: “the education policy agenda in this country shifted sharply from one designed to guarantee the rights of students who had not been well served in public schools to one that mandates better educational outcomes for all students.”  The effects of Berliner and Biddle’s criticism that A Nation at Risk’s claim that American schools at large were failing was distracting to the more important reality that great disparity existed between wealthy and poor students can also be found in the Hawkins-Stafford Bill.  While previous incarnations of Title I had been specifically directed at low income children, Chapter 1 of the 1987 Act relaxed those requirements: at schools where 75 percent of the students were eligible for services, programs could include the entire student body (Cross, 2004).  By claiming that the nation’s schools were failing all children, not just poor ones, the report set the precedent for federal programs and funding that would impact students of all economic classes. Even in the name of the 2001 reauthorization of ESEA, No Child Left Behind, it is evident, that federal funding is no longer just for poor children.

A Nation at Risk still reverberates in educational legislation 27 years after its release.  Fear of “a rising tide of mediocrity” spurred federal and state legislators and politicians into embracing academic standards and increased standardized testing that otherwise would have never come to fruition.  The report challenged policymakers at all levels to create and meet demanding new standards and the failure to meet the challenge provided “the rationale for much more proscriptive intervention by both the states and the federal government” (Cross, 2004).  The unfortunate side effect of the report’s rhetoric, which Secretary Bell praised as a powerful motivator, was that federal funding previously focused on low income children came to be seen as necessary for all students, thereby diluting the dollars spent on those who most needed the services they could provide.

Bell, T. H. (1988). The Thirteenth Man: A Reagan Cabinet Memoir.  New York: The Free Press.

Berliner, D. C. and Biddle, B. J. (1995).  The Manufactured Crisis.  Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Cross, C. T. (2004). Political education: National policy comes of age. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wells, A.S. (2009) “Our Children’s Burden: A History of Federal Education Policies that Ask (now Require) Our Public Schools to Solve Societal Inequality.” In Michael A. Rebell and Jessica Wolff (Eds.) NCLB at the Crossroads: Re-examining America’s Commitment to Closing our Nation’s Achievement Gaps. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

To separate them … 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.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954) that separate is inherently unequal when regarding racial segregation in public education.  However, less than twenty years later the federal judiciary ruled on Rodriquez v. San Antonio Independent School District (1973), effectively relegating cases pertaining to equal educational opportunity to state courts.  The legal fight for racially integrated schools was, in many ways, over, given up in favor of the seemingly less idealistic and more practical plan of working towards separate but equal.  If black children were to be isolated, the logic ran, at least attorneys could win more resources and funding for their schools; if desegregation had failed, separate but equal was second best.

With little hope of making further headway in federal courts, educational equity lawyers turned to the state courts.  “The equal protection clauses in most state constitutions provided the basis for the initial cases brought on behalf of poor students or poor districts during the 1970s” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2004).  The equal protection clauses in most state constitutions provided the basis for the initial cases brought on behalf of poor students or poor districts during the 1970s (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2004).
For more than a decade “equity cases had varying levels of success, before giving way to the new “adequacy” approach.  This shift in legal strategy from “equity” to “adequacy” was the direct result of the standards and accountability movement that began in the late 1980s.  An analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the equity and adequacy arguments, combined with an examination of the shift from the former to the latter, will provide insight into the trajectory of educational opportunity court cases.

The Rodriguez ruling was a major turning point in educational equity litigation.  In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a five to four majority that the Texas system of school finance was not unconstitutional, overturning the lower court’s decision that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.  Two aspects of the ruling shaped the future of educational equity.  First, the court ruled that wealth is not a suspect classification and therefore cases brought by poor people do not require the court to use the strict scrutiny standard.  Second, the federal judiciary decided that education is not a fundamental right, because to be classified as fundamental a right must be listed[1] in the U.S. constitution: education is not.

With educational equity litigation thwarted at the federal level, lawyers turned to state courts to continue their fight.  By 2009, 45 state high courts had ruled on school finance litigation.  One of the first successful cases was Serrano v. Priest (1971, 1976, 1977) in which the California Supreme Court found that the system of funding public schools in the state failed to meet the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  In Abbott v. Burke (1981) the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the state must provide poor districts with enough funds to equalize their budget with rich districts.

While some equity cases did improve educational opportunities for poor and minority children, educational inequity was still far from being realized.  The Serrano victory was minimized by the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, which capped property taxes in California and undermined the intentions of the California Court.  Even in states where rulings were not sabotaged by such legislation other complications arose.  McUsic (1999) notes that, “while the equity cases enjoy a number of victories in the courtroom, it has been harder to carry that victory through the legislature to the classroom.  Even cases that succeed in court (less than half of all cases filed) often fail to equalize funding or educational opportunity.”  Another stumbling block was that many judges felt uncomfortable ruling on educational issues that they were not familiar with, especially when faced with experts asserting diametrically opposing views in their courtrooms.  By the mid 1980s plaintiffs filing under the equal protection clause were receiving even fewer of such favorable and quasi-favorable rulings.  Attorneys began to look for other strategies to take the place of the equity approach.

The future of educational equity cases lay in the growing standards and accountability movement.  Beginning in the late 1980s some states began to develop standards of learning that were codified by their legislatures.  Such standards were usually accompanied by standardized testing, explicitly defining acceptable educational achievement. Coupled with clauses in state constitutions that gave students the right to an “adequate” education, the new standards and test scores provided those seeking a new legal strategy for educational equity with exactly the material they needed.  The new adequacy argument also had the benefit of relieving a decision maker judges who had been loath to make decisions they felt better left to expert educators.  McUsic (2009) writes,

“Adequacy claims owe their growing strength to the trend – begun by state governments in the 1980s – of defining explicit educational standards for public schools…This approach clarifies the legal complaint by relying not on the plaintiff, defendant or the judge for a definition of ‘adequate education,’ but on the policy established by education experts and endorsed by the legislature or the state department of education.  As a result, the judge is expected to decide not the state’s educational policy, but only whether the state is adhering to that policy.”

By explicitly defining what is meant by an adequate education, state legislators had opened the door to lawyers looking to prove educational inequity.

Adequacy cases replaced equity cases as more and more states, spurred on by the passage of the No Child Left Behind authorization of ESEA in 2001, adopted academic standards and standardized testing.  However, it is important to recognize that both equity and adequacy cases require forgoing the ideals of racial integration as outlined in Brown in favor of moving slowly towards the separate but equal public schools described in Plessey v. Ferguson (1986).  Whether seeking more money and resources for the schools attended by poor minority children or insisting upon the academic success of all children, Justice Warren’s declaration that separate cannot be equal, seems to have been forgotten.

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[1] Some fundamental rights are not listed, but implied in the U.S. Constitution.  Some argue that, contrary to the Rodriguez ruling, education is an implied fundamental right.

References

Hochshild, J. L. & Scovronick, N. (2003).  The American Dream and the Public Schools. New York: Oxford University Press.

McUsic, M. S., 1999.  The law’s role in the distribution of education: The promises and pitfalls of school finance litigation. In J. P. Heubert (Ed.) Law & School reform: Six strategies for promoting educational equity (pp. 88-159).  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Political Forces in the 1950s and 60s Set the Stage for Growth of National Education Policy

“The question we ask today is not whether our government

is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

President Obama, Inauguration Speech, January 2009

Federal involvement in local education, while certainly controversial, is not new.  Political forces at work in the 1950s and 1960s set the stage for the growth of national education policy, currently embodied in No Child Left Behind.  Events such as the baby boom, the Sputnik crisis, and the Civil Rights Movement may seem irrelevant to this topic, but the U.S. government’s and public’s reaction to them have had long-lasting repercussions in public education.  At every step of the process of increasing federal involvement, opposition arose against measures that would increase the federal government’s power.  Proponents of states’ rights, the Catholic Church, and those representing its interests, and those concerned about accountability for and efficacy of large government programs all shaped the political environment education policymakers encounter today.

World War II drove a revival of the U.S. economy and its conclusion was coupled with a giant surge in the national birth rate.[1] When baby boomers were ready for school, America’s public schools were not ready for them.  The sudden, added stress caused a “crushing burden on facilities” and a severe teacher shortage (Cross, 2004), while local governments scrambled for funds to build more schools quickly.  Although the public was demanding federal construction aid, the Cooper Bill (1956) and its successors over the following decade were all defeated in Congress due to heated controversy about race.  Despite the fact that the federal government did not provide funds for building schools, Cross notes, “although most characterized construction support as a temporary or emergency measure, others felt that this would provide the opening for general aid.”  Both general aid and construction aid went unfunded, but public demand for them illustrates the willingness to allow, if not the new expectation of, federal involvement in education.

In 1957 Americans were dismayed to learn that the Soviet Union had successfully launched the satellite Sputnik.  As with the release of A Nation At Risk 34 years later, fear that the U.S. was falling behind other countries precipitated swift policy action. Within a year, Congress was voting on “a series of crash programs, mostly at the college level, supporting math, science, and foreign language instruction” (Cross, 2004).  Two of these were the Education Development Act of 1958 and the National Defense Education Act.  The public obsession with winning the “Space Race,” in which traditional patriotism was amplified by Cold War fears, led even conservative national legislators to approve these measures.  The immediate purpose of Sputnik-motivated legislation was to prepare America’s young people to compete in math and science on an international level, but the very real domestic derivative was the expansion of the federal role in education.

No discussion of education policy during the 1950s and 60s would be complete without an analysis of racial politics. The judicial branch was the first to insert itself into local school politics.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) won court battles in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents in 1950, and took the ultimate prize in the 1954 Brown decision.  After 58 years of failure to enforce the “separate but equal” policy established in Plessey, the U.S. Supreme Court asserted its own strength by imposing desegregation on local school districts.  A group of civil rights supporters in the House and the Senate, in consultation with the NAACP, followed the courts lead by drafting an amendment (first to the Cooper bill, then to many others) mandating that “each state receiving funds certify that their schools were desegregated” (Cross, 2004).  Facing vehement opposition, these so-called “Powell amendments[2]” were one reason that construction and general aid bills were not passed.  The deadlock over race, which kept so much federal funding for schools from being distributed between 1955 and 1964, was finally put to rest with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, allowing for vastly increased federal influence in education.

 

Several groups fought against the expansion of the federal role in education.  Perhaps the most fervent opposition came from Southern congressmen advocating states’ rights.[3] McGuinn (2006) observes that, although states welcomed additional funding, they were less inclined to towards the strings attached.  Some argued, since the U.S. Constitution never refers explicitly to education, the entire endeavor should fall to the states under the 10^th Amendment.  Many Southern Democrats voiced the concern that, “the needy are being used as a wedge to open the floodgates,” (Cross, 2004).  Mistrust of big government interference led to votes against federal education acts, even when that meant forgoing large financial incentives for constituents.

Race and religion proved themselves to be the greatest stumbling blocks for general aid.  Catholic organizations and politicians, while strongly supporting general aid, believed that parochial and private schools should be eligible for federal funds.  They balked at the when the Hovde Task Force suggested made recommendations that included supporting only public schools, although America’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, was politically bound to extol the wisdom of separation of church and state.  The private school debate was equal to the issue of race in the way that it impeded the passage of general aid bills, and was only remedied in 1965 when John Brademas brokered a compromise between the Catholic Welfare Association and the National Education Association (NEA) at an intimate dinner meeting.  The concept that emerged, the “child benefit theory,” tied specific funds to specific children, so that, at least theoretically, government funds were not being distributed to religious institutions.  A policy of general aid, so long debated, would never be inacted, but the new “picket fence federalism” would provide categorical aid to particular groups of students.

Some federal legislators supported the expansion of the federal role in education in theory, but were concerned about how federal money was being spent.  During the drafting of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Senator Robert Kennedy voiced concerns that school districts would not be held accountable for Title I money.  Other congressmen and policymakers turned to social scientists for answers about how to best spend federal money, but were met with a slew of clashing answers and little consensus. Cross (2004) describes the ensuing confusion: “The mix of programs established under ESEA reflected the substantial disagreement over the precise cause of educational inequalities among poor children and over the best strategies for eradicating them.”  There was also debate over the ideal size and power of the federal education bureaucracy, at that time part of the larger Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).  Though these individuals and groups agreed that the federal government should play a large part in American education, there was no consensus on how the funds should be spent, how to effect the most positive change, or how to administer new programs.

The struggle over the size and scope of the federal role in education was clearly won by those arguing for increased federal funding and control.  However, many of the dissenting parties made an impact upon the path eventually taken.  The victory of large government proponents culminated in the passage of ESEA in 1965, from which point the federal role in education has grown exponentially.

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[1] Public school enrollment jumped from 25.1 million to 36.4 million during the 1950s (Cross, 2004).

 

[2] Named for Education and Labor Committee member Adam Clayton Powell, an influential African American who represented the Harlem district of New York City in the House between 1945 and 1971.

[3] It is likely that much of the “States Rights” argument was a façade for racist motivations, just like in the Civil War.

“…it looked like the American dream might become more than a cruel taunt to African Americans.” The American Dream and The Public Schools, Hochschild & Scovronick

School desegregation was the most powerful and most effective tool ever implemented by the federal government to close the achievement gap.  Where correctly carried out, it benefitted students of all races, lowered residential segregation, and pushed our society closer to the ideology of the American dream.  Unfortunately, mandatory desegregation continues to be politically untenable today, if not so much as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.  Hochschild and Scovronick (2003) casually suggest that many Whites oppose desegregation because they do not want their children to face increased competition for wealth and prestige.  The authors quickly dismiss this argument, writing, “but if they believe in the American dream, they cannot legitimately complain about that.”  Though it seems probable that White reluctance is at least partially based on such fear, there are many other powerful circumstances that led to the cessation of desegregation programs, such as the rise of Black Power and White backlash against it, Supreme Court rulings, public frustration with the process of integration, and the geo-historical contexts in which they were carried out.  A review of the historical record will show that desegregation policies were effective and could be again.

There were many benefits of school desegregation policies.  Perhaps most importantly, “[d]esegregation has harmed no group and has helped African Americans to pursue their dreams” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003).  While recognizing that how and where a program is implemented matters,[1] Hochschild and Scovronick provide numerous statistics that illuminate the success of desegregation.  The authors also point out that in some cases desegregation has led to greater residential integration and that children who have gone to integrated schools are much more likely to live integrated lives as adults.  The topic of Hochschild and Scovronick’s book is the American dream and they neatly tie that theme into their desegregation arguments, writing, “[e]nding legal segregation in schools and other public facilities, fostering real, not just legal, desegregation, did more to move the American dream from ideology to practice than has any other public policy or private effort” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003).

One reason that desegregation policy was ended concerns the rise of the Black Power movement and the White backlash that followed.  As early as 1965, organizations that had previously fought alongside Whites for civil rights began to “move towards black separatism” (Orfield, 1988).  In the late 1960s, a common public misapprehension was that Blacks had begun working towards building up their own communities and no longer valued interaction with Whites in society or schools.  Many White supporters felt rejected, while in reality, the movement “never had a substantial mass following in the black community” (Orfield, 1988).  The combination of such perceptions with widespread rioting during the summers of the Johnson Administration led to major White backlash against all policies meant to help Blacks or to bring Blacks and Whites closer together.

Federal and State courts have had an immense and direct impact on the decline of desegregation programs.[2] The federal judicial role can be traced to Milliken v. Bradley (1974), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that desegregation plans could not include busing across school district lines, effectively isolating the Black cities from the White suburbs.  Referring back to Hochschild’s point about the importance of quality implementation, the Milliken decision doomed many desegregation plans from their very inceptions.  In the 1990s the courts’ decisions have made the standards for achieving unity[3] much more lenient.  Examples include Freeman v. Pitts (1992), which held that school districts could stop desegregation programs even if the goals established in Green had not been reached, and Jenkins v. Kansas City (1995), which stated that improved test scores are not a requirement for establishing unitary status.  In 1954 Brown v. Board overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessey v. Ferguson (1896).  Unfortunately, the goal toward which many educators and politicians have been reaching has weakened since Milliken, leaving them effectively striving for Plessey instead of Brown.

Another reason for the end of desegregation is that the public expected the process of integrating American society to be easier, and was so dismayed by the difficulties that it abandoned the effort.  After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, many believed that, with legal discrimination squelched, there was no reason that Blacks and Whites could not live in harmony.  This was especially the case for Northerners who saw people in the South as the perpetrators of segregation and inequality while failing to recognize the symptoms of racism in their own states.  Orfield (1988) provides a non-education example that is nonetheless illuminating, writing that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) ended its racist housing policies around 1967, but no plan was ever proposed to remedy the tens of thousands of segregated neighborhoods those policies had previously produced.  It was generally assumed, or at least hoped, that once legal barriers were removed the problem would solve itself.  When this first round of remedies to inequality had been found lacking, combined with the previously mentioned suspicion of Black Power and fear from the riots, the White public was loath to keep working towards the worthy goal of school desegregation.

The final obstacle faced by desegregation programs was caused by the reality of geographic, historic, and cultural differences between the North and the South.  As was previously mentioned, Northerners were quick to place the responsibility for inequality on the South, as well as the onus for solving the problem.  Justices who made relevant rulings did nothing to dispel this notion, and often compounded it, drawing stark lines between de jure and de facto segregation that Hochschild and Scovronick point out are not so “concrete” as the federal judiciary would have us believe.  “Although segregation by individual decision and social practice were widespread in the North, the courts never assumed responsibility to remedy it” (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003).  Simple geography also made a difference.  In the South, where most school districts were large enough to contain both urban and suburban populations, busing could actually reduce transportation time and costs.  When similar programs were implemented in the fragmented school districts of Northern metropolitan areas, the realities were quite different.

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[1] Positive school climate has been shown to impact the results of desegregation programs.  Desegregation plans have tended to be more successful in places where the school district covered urban and suburban areas, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003).

 

[2] The fact that Nixon appointed four Supreme Court justices during his presidency led to a conservative court.

[3] Six areas in which desegregation was to be achieved were established in Green v. New Kent County (1968): student assignment, faculty, staff, transportation, extra curricular activities, and facilities.