A post that actually is about WPS Transportation

 I did promise you an actual WPS Transportation post; here it is! Note that a transportation update is part of this week's Finance and Operations Subcommittee meeting on Thursday at 5 pm. You can join us in person in room 410 of 20 Irving Street, or the Zoom link is at the top of the agenda, plus the meeting will be streamed online as usual.

If I can just reflect for a moment...

What a thing to go from this in the FY17 budget:

Text reads: Student Transportation: The Administration will explore the feasibility of directly providing all in-district student transportation services beginning in 2020. The analysis and recommendation will be forwarded to the School Committee in advance of the next student transportation contract period. Further, the current capital equipment budget funding level is insufficient to provide a reliable replacement cycle for special education buses. With 35 buses and 1-3 vehicle replacement funding per year, the Administration will need to explore the lease of vehicles through the operating budget in the near future.

...to this for the first day of the 2022-23 school year:

I can't think of anything I've been part of that's gone from vision to execution in quite this fashion. So when I tell you that I choked up a bit when I saw this on my phone Monday morning, I'm not exaggerating:

As I said at our meeting on Thursday, one thing that has mattered enormously in this undertaking has been the degree to which it has been embraced by the community. From the vote just over a year ago (how was it only that long??) by the Worcester School Committee over the objections of then-superintendent Binienda, the degree to which the community has been solidly on the side of making this work has been abundantly clear. This past week, the overwhelming number of messages I got from parents (and there were a lot!) had some mention of how much they appreciated the district was doing transportation in-house, even if they were contacting me with a concern or a need for information. This was Worcester's project, which Worcester embraced, and Worcester is making it work.

It's far far too early for "Mission Accomplished" banners, but I don't think it's too early to note the vision that got us here was Brian Allen's--those are his words above in the FY17 budget--who has continued to ask how we can run our systems more effectively and more efficiently.
"Cycle of continuous improvement," anyone?

And, speaking as a school committee member, I'd sure as heck rather be paying our local bus drivers $30 an hour than sending any of our limited public dollars off to the international shareholders of National Express.

ON TO ACTUAL INFORMATION (much of this drawn from this week's update from Superintendent Monárrez):

• We started the week with 74 full-sized buses for the 74 routes those run, but we had several buses in and out of service for the first few days. That's clearly going to be less of an issue as more of the new buses--of which another 10 will be ready for this coming Wednesday--come into service and fewer of the buses we're renting are what we're using. That also will increase the number of buses we have overall, which will take some of the pressure off each bus.
  
  
• We have more drivers being trained, tested, and starting all of the time. (I think we even had someone pass a test Thursday?) Remember, we're training in-house, too, so new drivers are learning all of the time. It's going to be a bit before we get up to full (budgeted) strength on the number of drivers, but we're getting there. 
  
  
• For those who are asking when things, particularly in the afternoon, will be more dependably on time, the answer is twofold: the first few weeks are always creaky (they always have been), PLUS as we cycle more drivers in and can both decouple routes and have spares, there will be much smoother afternoons. So you'll see improvement over the next few weeks, with further improvements over the next few months with more drivers and buses on.
  
  
• Enter this number in your cell: 508-799-3241. That's WPS Transportation. They start answering the phones about when the buses leave the lot, and they're there until buses get back. 
  Crucial point about the phones: the wait time quoted is inaccurate. I know a number of people calling early in the week (include School Committee vice-chair Jermaine Johnson!) who had a quoted wait time of an hour; that was never actually the case! They're working to disable this message when you're on hold, but in the meantime, please don't believe it.
  Also, please note that liaisons speak Spanish and Portuguese in addition to English, so share that!
  
  
• On the app: The app available for students and families is called VersaTrans MyStop, made by Tyler Technologies. You can find district directions here. As a student or family member, you need only student ID and birthday to sign in; it syncs with our student information system to pull up and give access to the bus to which your student is assigned (and no others). 
  A few things to remember: you'll only see the outline of the route once the bus has started out, and you'll only see the bus on your student's route. However, we do have a few buses that are running double routes in the afternoons (they pick up at the high school, drop a busful at the stops closest to school that clear the bus, and go back to school for a longer, second route), and that it IS a double route isn't clear on the app. The schools do know this, and it should be clear to your student. The GPS also can't tell if what the bus is running is a consolidated route (in other words, the bus is picking up students from more than one route); this has happened when families might not see their bus running, and then a bus appears. Both of these will be resolved as more buses and drivers come online, and we can stop having to do this.
  If you are still having issues with your app, please call Transportation during the day and have them walk you through a reset. At this point, with the exceptions of the above, the app is operational, so if you're having issues, it's your connection with the app that needs to be fixed.
  
  
• If you are interested in how this is going and where this is going, please do read the backup for this week's meeting (that links straight to the page) for more information of where we are now, where we're going this year, and what happens next. And again, that meeting is at 5 on Thursday, and the public is welcome (online or in person).
  
  
• And if you have questions, please continue to send them along. The changes and improvements on this have been more than daily, and I know the feedback, questions, issues, and so forth getting back to those running the system have made a difference. Keep 'em coming. 

This post from Robert Reich this Labor Day reminded me of the spirit that's clear every time I walk into the Transportation Department. We'd gotten a few questions over if there'd be a division, for example, between those who have driven directly for the district right along, and those who were working for contractors. Through goodwill on all sides, a self-identification among staff as "Worcester Public School" bus drivers and monitors (that's what the buses all said, after all!), and management that genuinely values people, there has been an ongoing sense of (as with the larger community) this being a group effort to make this the best dang public school bus system around. 

Finally (and with the caveat that lists are dangerous things and always leave people out!), what a difference leadership makes: having Dr. Monárrez walk through the things that were not working (not denying they were there), while discussing what concrete steps were being taken to improve a system that people were working very hard to improve is what makes a system actually get better over time. I appreciate her thoughtful consideration of what is working and what isn't, her honesty about it, and then her leading concrete planning to improve systems.

I do want to note that having a transportation system directed by John Hennessey, who can 'make sense' of transportation in a way that's a combination of innate skill and experience that can't be matched, has been part of my level of confidence that this all can fly.
I also want to note the enormous amount of work done by assistant director of transportation Mike Freeman this week (and before and probably after!); I know I personally talked to him one morning before 6 am, and I got an email from him one night at 9 pm, and I know I wasn't alone. Mike is ongoingly devoted to making this all work better, and we couldn't be in a better position there.
The supervisors who are overseeing all that's going in and out--Wayne Cardwell, Angel Carrasquillo and Benjamin River--remind me of those movie sailors at the wheel, steadily steering a ship through a hurricane (sorry, gentlemen; I may just have condemned you to having that metaphor follow you!).
Yelitza Garcia is HR over at Transportation; one of my favorite tidbits from the FY23 budget is that Transportation staffing has increased 174.4%. That's Yelitza!
If you connected with someone at Transportation this week specifically about MyStop, that was Cassie Shea in IT, and thank goodness for her! 
We have had routers working for us for years at this point--did you know we have ongoing changes over the course of the year?--and Kerri Collins and Joy Winnie have been stalwarts through all the changes these past years.
If you are among those who have ever said "I could never do that" about driving a school bus: imagine teaching others to drive a school bus? We could not be making this work without the trainers and safety people--Marianne Bryan, Kathy Everett, Jason Crue, Dawn Cavanaugh, and Peggy Holloway (some of whom were driving buses themselves this week!), and I know they've also been key to that cohesiveness among the drivers and monitors, too. 

Anyone who answers phones to respond to questions and does it well consistently (said this elected official) is performing an underappreciated service, and the transportation liaisons responding in particular to parents these first weeks of school are so crucial to making this all work. That's Owen Tessier, Annaliese Estabrook, Becca Carlberg, and Adriana Campbell. 

Those actually keeping the buses running--the mechanics who are Jani Nakollari, James Hicks, and John Holmes--are literally keeping it all going.

And of course, to all the drivers and to all the monitors who are actually making the transportation happen: thank you! 
Onward to week two!
If I missed anyone above, that's my error and please tell me!

Email to a Worcester parent

 While I was on the Worcester School Committee for six years, it's this pandemic that has really brought home (no pun intended) the reality that we have over 25,000 students in over 16,000 families and 4500 employees in Worcester. That can be a lot of email.
I read them all; I respond to those that aren't petition generated (aka: you wrote something yourself), though that sometimes takes awhile. Because we do have the next steps of the move towards buildings up now for a meeting this week, I found myself writing the same thing a number of times today in response to parents, so I thought I would post it here, as well.

brook crossing, Moreland Hill

Thank you very much for your email, and I appreciate your concerns for your children. For our youngest and our highest need students, I am particularly concerned.

While the shape of the pandemic continues to shift, that has not changed in any way the realities of our student enrollment and our buildings and our buses. Districts that are going back full time--even those that are going back on two day a week swings--have significantly lesser concentration of students in buildings. We have noted for some years now that we have more students attending WPS than we did fifteen years ago when we closed eight school buildings. That has the results we are seeing.
Likewise, having both the programs we run citywide, from WAMS to Tech, and serving the student population we do, in a city in which a significant number of our families lack private transportation, makes any transportation shifts both an equity and an access issue.
The COVID relief has gone for the technology to have our students accessing education now and does not run to rental space, and even if it did, those additional spaces, as the administration noted back in August, would need staffing (and furniture and equipment). Far from having funding for that, we instead only avoided laying off teachers this fall because we could cut the transportation budget. And I should add, that August cut was based on the projection of the state at least carrying through the inflationary increase of our budget, something less secure with no additional aid coming from Washington. 
None of this is to argue, as I said, with your concerns. I know that from a parental perspective this can sound like naysaying. As someone deeply engaged with the finances of schools, though, the disparities you and your family note are the consequences of the decades-old funding disparities that brought Worcester to the verge of a lawsuit last year.
The timing of the pandemic, in this year in which the state was to finally begin to implement better funding, would be ironic were it not also so deeply painful.

For those who don't teach (but do)

This afternoon, some of the members of the Worcester School Committee went for a bus ride. We're in negotiations with the drivers who drive directly for the district, and they invited us to come experience riding a bus now, and several of us took them up on it.

We started at the WPS bus yard on Fremont Street (seeing some great innovations going on there; more no doubt to come on that!) and went down past City Hall, down Grove and then back up the highway. And there were discussions of masks and spacing and cleaning, which is why we were there, after all. But the talk from the drivers and monitors kept coming back to one thing:

Kids.

The ones who can't sit still.

The ones who haven't had breakfast.

The ones who bounce around in their seats.

The ones who look for their driver every day.

The ones who listen to their music. 

The ones who are quiet.

The ones who aren't.

I was thinking of this as I was reading this Atlantic piece on the load that has been shouldered by school nutrition workers during the pandemic; that even as school buildings closed, they kept coming to work. And now that numbers of children being fed has fallen--which is an emergency of itself--federal reimbursements for school nutrition have fallen, as has the work, and districts are laying off nutrition staff.

There are a lot of people who work in school districts who aren't teachers. And even while our teachers are scrambling to get connected with students online, some of those people are still not going to see kids.

That matters. 

Sometimes it isn't the elementary teacher or your math teacher that makes the connection with you. Sometimes, the adult that matters to a child is the custodian (do you remember your elementary school custodian? I do!), or the librarian, or the lunch lady, or the bus driver.

Today I saw how some of them miss their kids.
I know that some of the kids miss them, too. 

"What’s the point of having a bus system if it can’t be trusted?"

A part of the ongoing "is this happening/is it just us or is this actually a larger management issue?" check in on Durham Bus Services across the country.

When we last checked in on Charleston, SC, they had accepted a HIGHER bid from First Student  as a result of their current issues with Durham; Durham protested. The district has denied the protest, saying it did not come in on time. Durham has now filed an appeal. As noted by WCSC:

Durham has provided bus services for the school district for more than a decade and has faced criticism from some parents for poor service. This school year alone, Durham has faced a number of problems with late buses and a bus driver shortage.

Heading closer to home, Framingham isn't the only district that has had it with Durham--their meeting this Wednesday will focus on transportation--as Wallingford, Connecticut reports similar problems. Asked about drivers shortages, the superintendent responded:

Menzo said he understands some drivers will be out sick, but wants to see a return to “normal.” 

“Families can’t tolerate this any further, I can't tolerate this any further as a superintendent,” he said.

Wallingford's contract is up this year--the decision is expected in May or June--but the local editorial board opined:

What’s the point of having a bus system if it can’t be trusted? 

The situation needs to be corrected as soon as possible, and shouldn’t wait while the school system goes about the process of awarding the next five-year transportation contract.

 ...a sentiment with which one can only agree.

The Doherty draft Preferred Schematic Design

All 864 pages of it are online here, and this is what will be voted on tomorrow evening. I should also note that I was not at the last building committee meeting (postponed meetings due to snow), so I can't vouch for what was and wasn't said then, let alone what has come up in other places.
I'll say that the thing that really concerns me about this is it continues to be framed--including by the district itself, in repeated phone calls to families--that this is a vote on the preferred site.
It is much much more than that. It is a vote on the preferred design of the school, including what's included in what is being requested.

As you'd expect in 864 pages, there's a lot there (this is a report that could do with both page numbers and internal hyperlinks).

Meanwhile in Roanoke City...

In the ongoing saga of a district that also has Durham busing and associated issues, but the school board cares...
The headline on today's article really says most of it:

"Roanoke City School Board threatens termination for embroiled bus provider: Durham School Services took over school bus operations over the summer"

The article continues:

For the first time, after nearly three months of issues with Durham School Services, the school board mentioned possibly firing the company. Durham apologized once again for the issues, but the board made it clear it was not satisfied with the apology and demanded an action plan be delivered by Wednesday afternoon. Board members said firing the company would not be good for anyone, but they are running out of patience.

Remember: Roanoke City Schools have had Durham only since August...
After quoting Board member Laura Rottenborn, who, we know from previous articles, is herself a parent, the article continues:

...at Tuesday’s meeting, the school board, which at first was tolerant of Durham’s performance, sounded more like the parents that have been speaking at the podium during the school board’s meetings each month.

Echoing parental concerns...
And their bottom line?

The board said the bottom line is that it can’t take chances with kids.

For the record, I don't--and it isn't clear to me that Roanoke City knows--if "firing" a contractor is possible, and if so, how. 
But. 
Accountability starts at the top. 

Citing my sources on Durham

When I testified at last Monday's Worcester subcommittee meeting on the proposed renewal of the Durham bus contract, I referenced a number of articles from across the country about the service districts aren't receiving from the company. I also noted in my Thursday testimony that an article from that day had spoke of another district planning to move to self-operation from Durham; on Friday, another joined them. I thought it might be useful for others to have those, and other, links.

Roanoke City, Virginia has just started a contract with Durham; they have had a chaotic beginning of the year, which involved the company firing the local manager. Southern schools largely start earlier than we in the Northeast do, so they're a month in and still having issues. The quote that I read was from their school board member Laura Rottenborn, who at a meeting two weeks ago said:

“Wearing my parent only hat, not my board hat, I personally called Durham to find out where my child’s bus was and it took me 30 minutes to get an answer. And I as a parent find that unacceptable. And as a board member on behalf of all of our children in our school division, that is unacceptable,” Rottenborn said in the meeting.

They are now five weeks into school and the issues with Durham have just hit The Washington Post.

 Charleston County, South Carolina had 3000 bus complaints logged with the school district last year. As for what impact that had on students:

“This is the third week without a bus with no explanation of what has happened to the driver,” one bus complaint from a Thomas C. Cario parent said. “Why is the bus just “not coming?”
McCarthy said her daughter has had to miss school because a bus never showed up.
“She’s missed two days of school the whole day this year due to buses not being here on time,” McCarthy said. “I’ve tried to get them to tell me what time the bus is going to be there to pick her up so she can go home or go back out to wait for the bus and they can’t tell you what time. They just want them to wait outside.”

And it hasn't improved this year.

Central Dauphin schools (that's Harrrisburg), Pennsylvania counts this year as a new low.

Cumberland, Rhode Island officials are disgusted enough with Durham's services that they are planning now, two years before their contract is up, to work with other districts towards self-operation.

On Durham’s chronic issues returning this year, Mitchell said school officials are extremely frustrated.
“At some point, things seem to iron out,” he said. “To be honest, the performance up to this point has been disappointing and I think unacceptable.”

And while Worcester was renewing the contract with Durham, the Framingham School Committee was planning to move on self-operation:

School Committee Chairman Adam Freudberg, of District 4, said the district will start to look for bids from bus companies in January 2021. He urged the district to look into “what can be done here to strategically prepare and do all that work to look into bringing it in-house” soon.
“If bringing it in-house is the right thing for Framingham, let’s do that work right now to get ready for January of 2021,” said Freudberg.

Among the districts that has brought transportation into district operation is Pflugerville ISD in Texas:

PfISD officials said the transition will help the district retain quality control and save funds in the long term.
“One of the things we wanted to do as a district was really get a better control of this specific area,” PfISD Chief Operating Officer Ed Ramos said.

This was after videos of overcrowded buses with students sitting on the floor last spring during a contract that had been renewed in 2015 over the protests of parents.

And PS: no, it isn't some sort of magic insider information. I just know how to use Google. 

And nice one on school buses

If you're one of those who like understanding how things work, you might enjoy this from Smithsonian Magazine on school buses and why they are yellow:

“The yellow is not pure spectral yellow,” says Ivan Schwab, clinical spokesperson at the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “The best way to describe [the color] would be in wavelength,” says Schwab. The wavelength of the popular school-bus color is “right smack in the middle” of the peak wavelengths that stimulate the photoreceptor cells our eyes use to perceive red and green. The red and green photoreceptor cells, or “cones” as they are commonly known, are the two most predominant cones in our eyes. Schwab says, “If you get a pure wavelength of one color…and you hit just one cone with it, you’re going to have x amount of transmission of signal to the brain. But if that [wavelength] were to stimulate two cones, you’ll get double the amount of transmission to the brain.” Remarkably, “That color that we are calling school bus yellow hits both peaks equally.” So although they may not have fully comprehended the science behind it, the color Cyr and his colleagues chose at the 1939 conference makes it hard for other drivers to miss a school bus, even in their peripheral vision. “And it’s darned big,” Schwab adds.

And also:

The school bus transportation system is the largest mass transit system in the United States, yet school buses account for less than one percent of traffic fatalities each year. Students on school buses, NHTSA says, are 70 times safer than those who travel to school by car "because [school buses] are the most regulated vehicles on the road; they are designed to be safer than passenger vehicles...; and in every state, stop-arm laws (referring to the mechanical stop-sign arm that swings from the side of the bus when stopped) protect children from other motorists." Kinney, says, “If you look at fatalities, it’s not the occupants of the school bus that have fatal injuries, it’s the people that run into the school bus.”

'Round and 'round: on district transportation

Back when I was an English teacher, I taught my students the five paragraph essay (yes, I can hear the gasps now; you can find my defending this practice if done appropriately in the January 2001 edition of English Journal, if you like). When my students were still getting the hang of how the essay worked, one of my most frequent comments on essays was:

evidence doesn't support your thesis

And so it is that we consider the report of the Worcester Public Schools transportation options for next year and going forward.

As this hasn't been discussed in Committee since March (on a subcommittee report which oddly did not make the minutes of the meeting), you might have lost track of where we're at. It's taken this long, incidentally, because they've postponed the subcommittee meeting twice.
The direction of the Worcester School Committee, on a 4-3 vote, was not not only send out for bids, but also to require administration to prepare a district-run option for comparison.
It thus is odd that Monday's agenda instead says:

To review bid specifications for student transportation services and award contract to lowest responsive and responsible bidder for a contract term to begin in June 2020.

...which was not the committee's directive back in March.

Nonetheless, the report they are receiving (which only posted Friday morning) does still do both. The conclusion the report reaches is:

Therefore, the Superintendent recommends the award of this contract with status quo arrangement for the next two years. Upon the end of the next contract in June 2022, the Superintendent recommends that the School Committee review all information provided by internal and external groups and made the appropriate recommendation.

 The bold is in the original. Never has status quo seemed more apt. Note, of course, the School Committee would not make a "recommendation,"  but an actual decision.

What then leads us to this conclusion?

It certainly isn't the service we've been receiving, as witnessed again in my own family Wednesday, but countless families across the district daily. Hundreds of families were again impacted on Friday afternoon when buses were late, something shared by school administrations but quickly deleted when it became clear that it was getting attention. Presumably it went down the memory hole.

In fact, the reconciliation of credits document accompanying the report itself makes the argument: the district has claimed nearly half a million dollars in lack of service credits from Durham over just last year! A review of the claims show not only traffic (it is a city) but basic Durham issues like not having the required GPS (or so they said) or forwarding things as needed. Note as well that some of those credits are in buses providing services required under special education plans. That the district now is going to give back over $100K in those credits in order to settle the contract is outrageous; a glance through the parent groups I'm on argues that this is probably well under documented.

Clearly then, it is not about service.

It isn't, despite what some have argued, about the bus drivers. The issues with the busing largely have been ones out of the drivers control. And drivers, whoever is running the system, need hardly fear they'll lack work, as there is a very well-documented national bus driver shortage. This is set up as one (of two) arguments against district-run transportation, but it is no less true of Durham; the district just doesn't have the capacity to do anything about it when it is the contractor.
The report also clearly lays out that Durham drivers, as allowed by contractual and other requirements, would not only be sought after as Worcester Public School drivers, but would have contract and benefits that are the same or better than what they have now (see page 11 of the report). Because they would be driving for Worcester, they also wouldn't be sent elsewhere to drive, as Durham drivers are and have been. It is also important to note the explicit commitment to diversifying the transportation office, not only drivers but also managment; that is the first such commitment I've seen in the Worcester Public Schools, and it certainly isn't something we're hearing from Durham.

Thus it isn't about bus drivers.

One might think, given how much concern has been manifested by the superintendent and others, that it's about a working relationship with Durham management. That would seem to ignore--perhaps it isn't known?--about national concerns that have been raised about the company. Another lawsuit was filed in federal court just last week around the Chatanooga crash; Hamilton County of course sent their contract elsewhere when it was up. To look across the country is to see districts considering other options due to families raising concerns, which has been true for years. Roanoke is among the more recent examples. And I could give lots more links!
Contrast that of course--see page 9 of the report--with district employees who are local, many of whom have worked for the district for years.
One hopes, therefore, that it isn't about management relationships.

Thus, it's got to be money, right?

Nope. It isn't money, either. The remarkable thing about the district-run proposal--which, it is important to note, is something the district has been working on for nine years--is that it would cost less next year than we pay Durham this year. 

And it would cost $2.1M less than it would cost if we hired Durham to run next year.

And it would save us $30M over the next ten years.

For those who pay attention to such things, one might further note that transportation is among the only cost centers that do not count towards net school spending. As the city moves closer and closer back to zero--

tossing another $2M of local funds on top of what is already going to transportation would not appear to be in the city's best interest, let alone the district's. It also means that the argument, as made on page 12 that pursuing the foundation budget lawsuit is somehow a drawback, makes no sense: now is when we most need those resources saved to be used in the system!

Durham, by the way, is a U.S. subsidary of the U.K. company National Express, which has been doing just fine in terms of profits.

The choices before the Worcester School Committee next week thus are:

• continue to have the same bad service we have had for the past several years, covering up the lacks of that service and misleading the public and families about it, moving drivers around New England, for $1M more than this year and 3% increases after that
• expand district service to include all students, ensuring that when a family calls the Worcester Public Schools about a transportation concern, they get someone who can fix it, keeping our drivers and our funding local, and saving $2.1M next year and $30M long term

Choose this day who you will serve, Worcester School Committee.

Finance and Operations meets Monday at 5 pm at the Durkin Adminstration Building.
The full Committee meets Thursday at 7 pm at City Hall.
Both meetings are public meetings and testimony is generally taken during both.
And you can always email. 
Also, if you want to hear me talk about this for three minutes (campaign alert!), I've posted a video about this here. 

They're back!

Today's the day! The students in Worcester (grades 1 through 12; kindergarten starts Thursday) are back to school.
Best wishes for the year!

More resources on desegregation of schools

In addition to this post (late and somewhat in haste from Omaha), some more resources on this:

• Note the use of the word "bussing" itself is problematic, as children are and have been bussed in and around districts for decades, and it was only when black children were being bussed to white schools that it became an issue: 

Pro tip: being against "forced busing" was the preferred northern way to oppose desegregation (while distinguishing themselves from the south). Most students were bused before "busing" without objection from white parents. As Julian Bond observed, "It's not the bus, it's us."

— Jeanne Theoharis (@JeanneTheoharis) June 30, 2019



• What we might learn from Berkeley (which was a voluntary effort) is covered here. Both this and the page above are from Matt Delmont, professor of history at Dartmouth who also wrote Why Busing Failed.

• It is particularly important for those of us from Massachusetts to step away from Common Ground, the Pultizer Prize winning account of the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools in the 1970's. 

Black Bostonians disputed Lukas’s favorable presentation of white resistance to school desegregation, his emphasis on black family dysfunction, and his selection of a black family with no ties to the decades-long campaign to secure educational equality for black children (he found the black family he profiled through a social worker). Longtime Boston civil rights activist Ruth Batson described Common Ground as "one of the most devastating and distorted views" of Boston's school history.

(note: add this to my "still learning" list)


• There is some lousy dismissal of desegregation of fairy dust; please don't buy this.

• If you're interested in what the research in fact says about desegregation and its impact on students, Matt Barum has a good round-up of it. We shouldn't dismiss the loss of Black educators as part of desegregation efforts, for one. Do also read the work of Rucker Johnson, professor of economics and public policy at Berkeley, who wrote Children of the Dream: Why Integration Works. 

• Also, Nikole Hannah Jones has been tweeting up a storm, so go check her timeline.

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.