How inequities continue

On this 66th anniversary of the Brown v. the Board of Education decision, might I suggest reading this op-ed about school district lines and how they perpetuate inequality?

Almost two-thirds of our district borders nationwide create local revenue disparities of at least $1,000 per pupil across an invisible line between similar school systems in the same neighborhood.

See also this series of interviews with teachers about zip codes as destiny. 

A word about the federal government and bussing

Sorry, I know this is late; I'm at the national school boards' trainers conference in Omaha, and I haven't had much of a chance to post!
If you watched the Democratic debate last night (or if you saw much since then), you saw this exchange between Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joseph Biden:



I do want to observe here that this illustrates something which is crucial: policy is never hypothetical. It's always about the second grader on the bus; it's about people.

Senator Harris attended the Berkeley, CA public schools which did voluntarily desegregate in 1968 (you can read a lot about Berkeley in 1968 here). Berkeley used two-way bussing, meaning that children went in both directions (not only sending Black children into white schools). It was done due to local community decision through massive community organizing, 'though one can't, of course isolate Berkeley from what else happened in the rest of the country.

Vice President Biden's position has been well covered by the education press in the past few weeks; this piece in EdWeek captures much of the history, and his letter to Senator James Eastland, a noted segregationist, has been well-circulated. He went so far in 1975 as to float the idea of a Constitutional amendment forbidding it. Above, he speaks of opposing the (federal) Department of Education forcing schools to desegregate through bussing, something of which I can find no record, which may have been discussed by the Ford administration, though Ford cited busing orders as federal overreach (see also his statement here); desegregation, when it was ordered, came through the federal courts (the judiciary, thus, not the executive branch). Note the points in this interview, in particular:

It seemed like the crux of his response was, he was trying to draw this distinction between when busing or desegregation efforts were mandated by outsiders versus when communities came up with them or OK’d them themselves. I wonder what you made of that. 

It struck me as a distinction without much meaning to it. By which I mean, the local and the federal roles have always been intertwined with schooling in America, particularly on the school desegregation issue. This sense that communities should only desegregate when they locally decide to do so is farcical. It demonstrates a complete either lack of knowledge or willful misunderstanding of how race and school desegregation played out in the country.

The main power the federal legislative branch has, of course, is that of funding. Since at least 1974, sections 301 and 302 of appropriations has included a ban on the use of federal funding for bussing used for desegregation efforts. It has been noted, however, that this would seem to run afoul of one of the main points of the Every Student Succeeds Act:

Momentum to remove these provisions began last year, when it became evident that the decades-old riders conflicted with the Every Students Succeeds Act, the federal education overhaul passed in 2015. That law gives states and local districts greater flexibility to implement evidenced-based school improvement strategies. Decades of research have shown that racial and socioeconomic integration can lead to a wide-range of academic and social benefits — which many state and local policymakers hope to provide for students.

Since this has now come up--and it doesn't seem to me as if today's "clarification" clarified at all--one can hope that this discussion continues. I, too, would be interested:

all of the politics and optics and theater criticism of the Biden/Harris thing aside, I'd love to read a big long piece about where the Dem candidates stand on school segregation that has them talk through their own sense of how we got here and what we should do moving forward

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 28, 2019

A significant number of the current president's judicial nominees have declined to say if they think Brown v. Board was correctly decided, so the issue is necessary in more ways than one.

To read Election Night

Charlie Pierce is watching the midterms from the elementary school you know from Brown v. the Board of Education: 

Dick and Francine, two poll workers, were talking about all the people who'd been through during the morning hours, and about how great they felt working at this particular polling place on this particular day. "When you think of what began here," Dick said, "you feel like there's something special to coming here to vote."

June Board of Education: history and social studies

backup is here
Riley: a comprehensive two year endeavor
hundreds of comments that have been absorbed
Peske: "rich, robust" engagement process
Sagan: I'd focus on changes and updates
Peske: five slides, changes from May to now, I think the time is six minutes
Dave Buchanan: concern about one standard at the end of high school course around race relations since 1960's
have done some work to broaden that standards; provides opportunities for students to look at impact on legislation over time
ties students to using data in studying social science
includes students in civics work group acknowledgements
footnote in grade 8 civics now includes Mendez which laid groundwork for Brown
Susan Wheltle: how best to include information about native peoples
important movements of late 20th century; now also includes movements around native sovereignty
Michelle Ryan: implementation over next year
three day institute coming up in July on civics, specifically focused on 8th grade course
integrated approach to history around literacy
quick reference guides coming in the fall
instructional support networks
vertical progression documents

Stewart: availability to families?
Peske: have tried to include families in all work
being more clear with teachers about what has changed since last standards
"don't have a complete plan sketched out but certainly thinking of families"

Fernandez: feedback loops?
engage working group over implementation?
Peske: variety of data sources to get feedback from educators themselves
more qualitative methods
get feedback from those who use quick reference guides and the like
share best practices around frameworks

Stewart: supplemental processes...does that get to the heart of the concern expressed by earlier speaker (from Deer Island)
Sagan: process for further revision?
Peske: shifting into implementation; build out set of resources
very much informed by needs of field
"are not poised to bring frameworks back for further revision anytime soon"

Peyser: pick up on comment on anticlimax
"this is really a very big deal"
"not just further content, but further quality"
"has implications for the rest of the curriculum"
"underlying document is quite strong, certainly stronger than what we began with"
"as much as implementation is the next step, assessment is" another
other sorts of assessment "to provide greater focus to the field"
capstone project "as suggested by Roberta"

McKenna: "has been a long, arduous task"
"DESE can listen and adjust...and change and adjust"
"which is hard to do"
"you sort of had everyone coming at you from every direction"
"not perfect, but coming to a place where people have to applaud your work"
"teachers are enthusiastic" but need help, looking for professional development

Moriarty: professional development on implemenation
"has to be a non-negotiable"
is some legislation
Peyser: "I don't think there's anything in there that would be in conflict with what we have done"
"may require some additional effort on our part to bring the two together"

Standards are approved uanimously

Two reads on resegregation for this weekend

Be sure and read Nikole Hannah Jones on "The Resegregation of Jefferson County" and then read Emmanuel Felton on "How the Federal Government Abandoned Brown v. the Board of Education." 

Duncan's most destructive legacy

Salon's response to the Washington Post piece on Arne Duncan goes in several different directions, but it hits the most important point last:

Congress, in its efforts to rewrite NCLB, has “moved to substantially scale back the federal government’s role in education.” The impetus for this scaling back is bipartisan and shared in both the House and the Senate. And should a new version of NCLB pass, it will limit the federal government’s role in our nation’s schools.

What’s particularly unfortunate about that policy direction is that the federal government historically has had a mostly positive influence in public schools. As the article reminds us, what we now call NCLB was “initially passed in 1965 as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” a law that “was originally designed to protect the nation’s neediest students, and that the federal government must play a significant enforcement role to ensure that poor students, racial minorities and students with disabilities all receive an equal education.”

Because of that act, millions upon millions of impoverished children have had resources funneled to their schools through programs like Title I. Students who do not speak English as their first language have had funds sent to their schools to pay for specialists. Students who have physical disabilities, social-emotional problems and trouble with their learning and intellectual development have had more access to education opportunities and better supports in their schools. More girls and young women have been provided opportunities to play sports and experience a full curriculum.

Sure, this federal mission has not always been fully funded or adequately implemented. But that was the goal, and it was the goal NCLB took our attention away from and the goal this blundering oaf of a secretary refused to take up as his primary job, even though everyone outside his inner circle clamored he do so.

So the biggest tragedy of Arne Duncan is not only the millions of students and families ill-served under his tenure but the millions that will likely be ill-served in the future because it looks like his self-righteous, narrow-minded zeal will leave the federal government’s role in education marginalized for the immediate and foreseeable future.

Post-election day panel

Moderated by Jim Braude; panelists are Michael Jonas of CommonWealth magazine, Jennifer Braceras a  (conservative) commentator and political columnist, and Robert Haynes, president emeritus MA AFL-CIO
Notes going up at the end...everyone's talking too fast to post as we go! Sorry for any typos; I'll clean it up later.

Alabama constitution on the ballot

The section dealing with education in Alabama state constitution is on the ballot in that state next Tuesday, and the decision involves everything from segregation to school funding:

The dispute goes back to a section of the 1901 Constitution dealing with education, which says the state shall maintain “a liberal system of public schools,” before dictating that those schools remain separate for white and black children.That remained the law until 1956, when, after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, the state’s political leaders sought a way around integration. They passed an amendment that, among other things, explicitly denied “any right to education or training at public expense,” thus letting the state transfer public schools to private operators.The status of that 1956 amendment is a matter for debate. In 1991, a trial court judge ruled the amendment unconstitutional in a case involving the adequacy of school financing in Alabama. The State Supreme Court dismissed the underlying case in 2002, but its decision and the various concurrences left so little clarity that it remains uncertain what exactly the constitutional status of the amendment is today.The 2004 attempt to strip the vestigial racist language would have left standing the 1901 clause mandating a liberal system of public schools. Some of the state’s influential conservative leaders saw this as leading to expanded financing for public education. Arguing that the whole thing was a plot to raise taxes, they narrowly won the campaign for the amendment’s defeat.Last year, a Republican state senator, Arthur Orr, who says he was troubled by the Constitution’s continuing deterrent effect on economic development, introduced the proposal again. His version, after some revisions, did not include the language about public schools that prompted the antitax backlash, but retains the clause from the 1956 amendment denying the right to a public education.

Pinkie swear

Fun photo today in the T&G of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren "pinkie swearing" for better schools yesterday at her Worcester event. I'd love to know that this means that a) we're going to have an actual conversation about education in this election and b) that we could have someone pushing back on the current national nonsense that passes for ed policy.

Desegregation before Brown

I did not know of the Méndez vs.Westminster case out of California, but it's an important piece of American educational history.

When Sylvia was 8, her aunt, who was a lighter-skinned Mexican-American with a French-sounding name - Viadurri - took her to the “white” school to enroll her with the Viadurri children. When school officials refused to admit Sylvia and her brother while at the same time accepting the Viadurris, it set off the battle.
“I started crying and I go home and I tell my mother, ‘They don’t want us in that school,’ and my mother said, ‘We’re going to fight for you, because you’re just as good as they are and we’re all equal under God! Of course you’re going to go to that school.’”

And she did. And the California school system was desegregated in 1946, eight years before Brown v. the Board of Education.

Separate but equal?

Bruce Ditata has a different take on the MCAS exam in this editorial from Saturday.

In purely economic terms, MCAS, the high-stakes test that remains the only avenue to a high school diploma in the commonwealth, is funded on an unequal basis from town to town and discriminates against students of poorer communities. The funding formula favors wealthier cities and towns with higher property values which are taxed at a fixed rate, barring unpopular tax overrides.

Affluent communities are, therefore, immune from such realities as lack of textbooks. While the Newtons, Wellesleys and Brooklines have the luxury of multiple texts — one for the classroom, one to take home for homework/enrichment — the New Bedfords, Fall Rivers and Warehams are fortunate to have one class set of texts which are shared by three to four homerooms and cannot leave the building. Where is the "equality" in that scenario?

Another take on Brown

Here's someone else's take on Brown:

...if Brown’s election represents a widespread backlash to big government, and in particular big, costly federal government, then this expanded federal role in education could be washed away along with universal health care.

Brown on education

So, we're sending Scott Brown off to Washington. What are his positions on education?
I grabbed this off of his website:

Education
I am passionate about improving the quality of our public schools. Accountability and high standards are paramount. I support choice through charter schools, as well as the MCAS exam as a graduation requirement. I have worked to ensure that all children have access to a quality education. I am a strong advocate for the METCO program, which provides lower income students with broader educational opportunities.

So, what does that mean?

The first two sentences are basically political boilerplate: everyone wants to improve the quality of our schools, and everyone favors "accountability and high standards." Those two words have been used to support everything from standardized testing to school closures to increased funding (and I'll bet you can find them on nearly everyone's website, too). Charters are pretty broadly supported right now (recall that the Democratic president has the same position). Support for MCAS isn't a big surprise: it came in under a Republican governor ('though this had nothing to do with Brown, as he wasn't elected to office yet), and has bipartisan support in Massachusetts. Supporting METCO (especially in a year when communities are going to struggle to pay for it) is a big plus, particularly if he backs it up with money.

From here, I tracked down his voting record (slim; I take it he didn't vote on the Ed Reform bill? I guess it was during the campaign). We get that he opposed (with, it looks like, the Republicans in the Senate) the reorganization that happened when Governor Patrick came into office.

I also haven't found any public statements he's made on education.

He hasn't taken the Political Courage test.

He served on the Education committee.

I think this boils down to someone for whom this hasn't been a core issue (and I don't, by the way, think that this would be much difference with Martha Coakley). I wonder if that will change in Washington, or if his focus will be elsewhere?