I just came across this old piece by Janet Elliott and Salatheia Bryant titled, With scoring standards lowered, more passing TAAS. It's deja vu all over again. Doesn't this show that this system really isn't one that results in providing or seeking to provide the best possible instruction that we can to children? Shouldn't we be able to see through all of this to see that this is really harmful to children and anti-democratic? The problems as shown across the two pieces reveal themselves to be deeply systemic rather than idiosyncratic, reducible to a peculiar problem particular to a specific district. Remedy? Fundamental overhaul beginning with an honest discussion in our country over fundamental aims behind public schooling and just as importantly, who controls (or should control) our public schools. -Angela
October 5, 2005
One Secret to Better Test Scores: Make State Reading Tests Easier
By MICHAEL WINERIP
PARENTS are delighted when state test scores go up. Obviously, their children are getting smarter and the teachers are doing better. Politicians are ecstatic; their school reforms must be working. Indeed, during his re-election campaign, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has repeatedly cited the rise in the city's 2005 fourth-grade test results (up 10 percentage points in English to 59 percent at grade level, and up 9 points in math to 77 percent) as proof that his school programs are a success. "Amazing results," he said, that "should put a smile on the face of everybody in the city."
However, those in the trenches, the teachers and principals, tend to view the scores differently. While they would rather be cheered than booed, they know how much is out of their control.
Take Frances Rosenstein, a respected veteran principal of Public School 159 in the Bronx. Ms. Rosenstein has every right to brag about her school's 2005 test scores. The percentage of her fourth graders who were at grade level in English was 40 points higher than in 2004.
How did she do it? New teachers? No, same teachers. New curriculum? No, same dual-language curriculum for a student body that is 96 percent Hispanic and poor (100 percent free lunches). New resources? Same.
So? "The state test was easier," she said. Ms. Rosenstein, who has been principal 13 years and began teaching in 1974, says the 2005 state English test was unusually easy and the 2004 test unusually hard. "I knew it the minute I opened the test booklets," she said.
The first reading excerpt in the 2004 test was 451 words. It was about a family traveling west on the Oregon Trail. There were six characters to keep track of (Levi, Austin, Pa, Mr. Morrison, Miss Amelia, Mr. Ezra Zikes). The story was written in 1850's western vernacular with phrases like "I reckon," "cut out the oxen from the herd," "check over the running gear" for the oxen, "set the stock to graze," "Pa's claim."
Ms. Rosenstein said such language was devastating for her urban Hispanic children. "They're talking about a 'train' and they mean wagon train," she said. "Our kids know the subway. I walked into a class and there was a girl crying. I took the test booklet and read it. I thought, 'Oh, my God, we're in trouble.' "
In contrast, the first reading in the 2005 test was 188 words about a day in the life of an otter. A typical sentence: "The river otter is a great swimmer." Ms. Rosenstein said: "The otter story was so easy, it gave our kids confidence. It was a great way for them to start the test."
She said the pattern continued throughout the two tests. In 2004, on the "hard test," the second passage was about the Netherlands thanking Canada for its support during World War II by sending 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa. The third story was about a photographer, Joel Sartore, who embedded himself in Madidi National Park in Bolivia to get rare nature shots.
"These were very sophisticated pieces," Ms. Rosenstein said. "We teach our kids when reading to make a connection to themselves. These stories were foreign to their experience. You didn't have anything like this on the 2005 test."
In 2005, on the "easy test," the second passage was about hummingbirds. The third was about a boy who thought he won a real horse, but it was a china horse. The story was told mainly in dialogue that read like the old Dick and Jane primers:
" 'What's going on?' asked Beth.
'I just won a horse,' said Jamie."
"What a difference from the 2004 test," Ms. Rosenstein said. "I was so happy for the kids - they felt good after they took the 2005 test."
In an e-mail message, Jonathan Burman, a state education spokesman, said there was no cultural bias on the 2004 test. He said the 2004 and 2005 tests were extensively field-tested. "We found that the passages could be understood by all students, including urban students," he wrote.
He acknowledged that the 2004 test was harder but said the state compensated by using a tougher scale to score the 2005 test. "Students had to answer a few more questions correctly in 2005 and get more raw points in order to get the same scaled score as in 2004," he said. But even if the 2005 test was scaled, scores still soared statewide, with 70.4 percent at grade level, up 8.2 percentage points from 2004 and with several cities - Yonkers, Syracuse, Rochester - posting increases even higher than New York City's.
Ms. Rosenstein does not believe the scaling made the two tests equivalent. "If a child can't follow the passages, a few points won't make a difference," she said. "They give up."
P.S. 159 has just 242 students from kindergarten to fifth, with 28 fourth graders taking the state test in a typical year. As a result, the performance of a handful of students can cause a big scoring swing. P.S. 159's test results followed the ups and downs statewide; they're just amplified. For example, on the 2004 "hard test," 62.2 percent of students statewide scored at grade level, down 2 points from 2003. At P.S. 159, 17.9 percent were at grade level, down 46 points from 2003.
BUT at a small school it's easier to examine the variables at play. For example, all three years, as scores fluctuated, Yehonela Ortiz taught fourth grade. Her principal called her an outstanding teacher, a nine-year veteran who is bilingual.
Ms. Ortiz said she could not take credit for the big jump this year nor the blame for last year's big drop. "So many things go into it," she said. "They've had a lot of teachers since pre-K. I feel it's a collaboration of all the many teachers since."
A few years ago, 64 percent of her fourth graders scored at grade level in English, her best results. "It wasn't me," she said. It was a class that happened to have a large number of Hispanic parents speaking English at home. "They came to me more academic. I don't think it was anything we did."
She said that there were yearly fluctuations, but that test scores would generally rise over time because the state has been using the same format for seven years.
"We know the test now," Ms. Ortiz said. "We start preparing them in September. When I go through a lesson, I always connect it to what's in the exam. We know there's always letter-writing, so we give more of that. We know there's nonfiction, so we make sure we do it before the test." When she gives a writing assignment, she now sets a timer for 10 minutes, to simulate testing conditions.
Does it mean students are getting smarter and teachers better?
"I don't know," said Ms. Ortiz.
E-mail: edmike@nytimes.com
Monday, October 10, 2005
Sunday, October 09, 2005
That Ancient Cornfield
This is a thoughtful piece that comments on the present moment and where Mexicans and Latin Americans, generally—all descendents of a corn-based culture—find themselves. Unfortunately, it is a time period of harsh, anti-immigrant sentiments where they're being scapegoated for all manner of reasons. There's a deeper story of the corn, by the way, and how agribusinesses (corporate botanists and engineers) in Mexico are genetically re-engineering corn, resulting in an altering and ultimately loss of the original seeds and thusly, tastes and associated health that native people have enjoyed for centuries.
Another thought, I don't think I'm wrong about this, but I saw so little coverage on the English-speaking channels this past week on the massive flooding in Chiapas, Quintana Roo (2 states in Mexico), and the area of Mexico that borders Guatemala this past week as a result of Hurricane Stan. These aren't remote islands on the South Pacific. This is our neighboring country with whom we have amazingly strong and historic ties. I can't help but feel that this reaction by the press is related to what Rodriguez and Gonzales offer below. -Angela
COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS
By Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales
RELEASE DATE: October 10, 2005
Not long ago, a reader commented that as a result of our research regarding origins & migrations, that we had gone in search of Aztlan and instead found a cornfield.
We did find a cornfield… and the ants of Quetzalcoatl - from where our sacred maize comes from.
The truth is, we never actually went looking for Aztlan -- the purported homeland of the Aztec/Mexica. What we did was research a map that indicated that the Aztecs had once lived north of the Hopi and that the Hopi had never surrendered their sovereignty. We've previously detailed this collaborative and groundbreaking research that involves historic maps, chronicles, codices and oral traditions - all speaking to the entire continent, not just one corner of the United States.
The context was California's post-Proposition 187 era in which the nation's anti-immigrant fervor coalesced into not simply xenophobic legislation, but a rabid fear and hatred of immigrants… particularly against Mexicans and Central Americans (South Americans and peoples from the Caribbean also).
Ten years later, that fear and hatred has not simply been exported nationwide, but post-911, it has now been conflated with terrorism.
It's difficult to fathom that the atmosphere nationwide could have gotten worse - yet with the rise of the anti-immigrant Minuteman movement -- it has. Also, as a result of deteriorating economic and political conditions caused by the ill-conceived Iraqi war, the administration's tilt to the rich, and its disastrous response to Katrina - all point to an even more and forthcoming virulent anti-immigrant movement.
The attitude seems to be: If we could only wall the border and drive out the Mexicans, all the nation's problems would be solved and we'd win the war against terrorism also. And if they would just assimilate and learn English…
And a new twist: The Blacks had to fight for their rights. Why should illegal immigrants be handed everything on a silver platter?
The rantings of extremists? Not uniquely so. It's actually part of mainstream discourse in which immigrants now equal a threat to the U.S. middle class. Fear and scapegoating are fast becoming the national pastime, though the notion that anti-immigrants are not really anti-immigrant does indeed have some merit. Hispanics - like Cameron Diaz and Daisy Fuentes -- don't bother them. Of course not. It's the dark, ominous Mexicans and Central Americans that do -- the ones that have at least a 7,000 year-old corn-based culture and perhaps a 40,000 year-presence on this continent. Why? No doubt they are seen as inassimilable mongrels or as Indians attempting to reclaim the continent.
No, they say. They simply want the nation's laws enforced, even if it means erecting impregnable walls, Gestapo raids, internal checkpoints, national ID cards and racial profiling.
The problem of immigration can easily be fixed (through an agreement), though keeping migrants in states of criminality or modern slavery is not a solution. Despite this, and despite the death of several thousand migrants in the desert, there will always be politicians who cater to peoples' basest instincts.
And thanks to Katrina, racism against African Americans is also back [in the spotlight]. As such, conservative William Bennett feels he can openly claim that aborting all Black babies would reduce crime, this while Republicans can claim that New Orleans will cease being as Black as it was. Couple that with the never-ending attempts to de-indigenize the continent and this is our new poisoned atmosphere in which we're all also pitted against each other.
The reason we conducted our research is not because of a fascination with historic maps, but because our humanity and our existence continue to be questioned.
… And about that ancient cornfield - the corn, beans, squash and the chile found throughout the continent -- indeed proves both the indigeneity of Mexicans/Central Americans and the continued centrality of that indigenous diet to their daily lives. Despite this, we've also encountered the attitude that because many of us are mixed (what peoples aren't?) or because our indigenous cultures were forcibly taken from us, that we're no longer truly indigenous. Translated, this means that colonization is purportedly irreversible, that we are “bastards,” and that the continent has ceased being indigenous. Not quite.
The collective findings of our recently completed Amoxtli San Ce Tojuan documentary show that indigenous peoples on the continent continue to be connected by language (particularly Uto-Nahuatl peoples), stories, trade, food, medicines and spiritual traditions. And they - we - are connected because we choose to be connected, not just to the continent and its peoples, but to all humanity. Most importantly, the accompanying values -- and way of life -- that teach us that all life is sacred is what makes us most human.
© 2005 Column of the Americas
http://hometown.aol.com/xcolumn/myhomepage/
Another thought, I don't think I'm wrong about this, but I saw so little coverage on the English-speaking channels this past week on the massive flooding in Chiapas, Quintana Roo (2 states in Mexico), and the area of Mexico that borders Guatemala this past week as a result of Hurricane Stan. These aren't remote islands on the South Pacific. This is our neighboring country with whom we have amazingly strong and historic ties. I can't help but feel that this reaction by the press is related to what Rodriguez and Gonzales offer below. -Angela
COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS
By Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales
RELEASE DATE: October 10, 2005
Not long ago, a reader commented that as a result of our research regarding origins & migrations, that we had gone in search of Aztlan and instead found a cornfield.
We did find a cornfield… and the ants of Quetzalcoatl - from where our sacred maize comes from.
The truth is, we never actually went looking for Aztlan -- the purported homeland of the Aztec/Mexica. What we did was research a map that indicated that the Aztecs had once lived north of the Hopi and that the Hopi had never surrendered their sovereignty. We've previously detailed this collaborative and groundbreaking research that involves historic maps, chronicles, codices and oral traditions - all speaking to the entire continent, not just one corner of the United States.
The context was California's post-Proposition 187 era in which the nation's anti-immigrant fervor coalesced into not simply xenophobic legislation, but a rabid fear and hatred of immigrants… particularly against Mexicans and Central Americans (South Americans and peoples from the Caribbean also).
Ten years later, that fear and hatred has not simply been exported nationwide, but post-911, it has now been conflated with terrorism.
It's difficult to fathom that the atmosphere nationwide could have gotten worse - yet with the rise of the anti-immigrant Minuteman movement -- it has. Also, as a result of deteriorating economic and political conditions caused by the ill-conceived Iraqi war, the administration's tilt to the rich, and its disastrous response to Katrina - all point to an even more and forthcoming virulent anti-immigrant movement.
The attitude seems to be: If we could only wall the border and drive out the Mexicans, all the nation's problems would be solved and we'd win the war against terrorism also. And if they would just assimilate and learn English…
And a new twist: The Blacks had to fight for their rights. Why should illegal immigrants be handed everything on a silver platter?
The rantings of extremists? Not uniquely so. It's actually part of mainstream discourse in which immigrants now equal a threat to the U.S. middle class. Fear and scapegoating are fast becoming the national pastime, though the notion that anti-immigrants are not really anti-immigrant does indeed have some merit. Hispanics - like Cameron Diaz and Daisy Fuentes -- don't bother them. Of course not. It's the dark, ominous Mexicans and Central Americans that do -- the ones that have at least a 7,000 year-old corn-based culture and perhaps a 40,000 year-presence on this continent. Why? No doubt they are seen as inassimilable mongrels or as Indians attempting to reclaim the continent.
No, they say. They simply want the nation's laws enforced, even if it means erecting impregnable walls, Gestapo raids, internal checkpoints, national ID cards and racial profiling.
The problem of immigration can easily be fixed (through an agreement), though keeping migrants in states of criminality or modern slavery is not a solution. Despite this, and despite the death of several thousand migrants in the desert, there will always be politicians who cater to peoples' basest instincts.
And thanks to Katrina, racism against African Americans is also back [in the spotlight]. As such, conservative William Bennett feels he can openly claim that aborting all Black babies would reduce crime, this while Republicans can claim that New Orleans will cease being as Black as it was. Couple that with the never-ending attempts to de-indigenize the continent and this is our new poisoned atmosphere in which we're all also pitted against each other.
The reason we conducted our research is not because of a fascination with historic maps, but because our humanity and our existence continue to be questioned.
… And about that ancient cornfield - the corn, beans, squash and the chile found throughout the continent -- indeed proves both the indigeneity of Mexicans/Central Americans and the continued centrality of that indigenous diet to their daily lives. Despite this, we've also encountered the attitude that because many of us are mixed (what peoples aren't?) or because our indigenous cultures were forcibly taken from us, that we're no longer truly indigenous. Translated, this means that colonization is purportedly irreversible, that we are “bastards,” and that the continent has ceased being indigenous. Not quite.
The collective findings of our recently completed Amoxtli San Ce Tojuan documentary show that indigenous peoples on the continent continue to be connected by language (particularly Uto-Nahuatl peoples), stories, trade, food, medicines and spiritual traditions. And they - we - are connected because we choose to be connected, not just to the continent and its peoples, but to all humanity. Most importantly, the accompanying values -- and way of life -- that teach us that all life is sacred is what makes us most human.
© 2005 Column of the Americas
http://hometown.aol.com/xcolumn/myhomepage/
Why indict Sharpstown underling?
This is an excellent analysis of the Houston dropout scandal. I can't see either why a data-tech person would change the numbers on his own. What would have been HIS investment in the system in doing so??? It strikes me as quite untenable that he would have done this when HE'S not the one who's accountability in this system. In any case, he appears to be in deep trouble, particularly in the absence of a paper trail. No, he shouldn't have cheated, by neither should he be the fall guy, paying for the sins not only of his superiors, but also of a system that creates perverse incentives to cheat, genreally.
-Angela
Oct. 8, 2005, 7:29PM
by RICK CASEY / Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
I guess we should be glad the district attorney's office persuaded a grand jury to indict Ken Cuadra on Friday.
He's the clerk at Sharpstown High School who is alleged to have doctored records to indicate that the school had no dropouts.
If he did the crime, he should do the time, right?
And it's good, I suppose, to make an example of a public employee who cheats in order to keep others from doing it.
Maybe he deserves a felony on his record and up to 10 years in prison, as the law provides.
Still, if voters were ever foolish enough to elect me district attorney, I don't think I would have sought this indictment.
Even if the evidence were overwhelming that he did it.
I was unable Friday to reach either Terese Buess, the special crimes prosecutor who presented the case to the grand jury, or her boss, DA Chuck Rosenthal.
Maybe they have their reasons for seeking the indictment shortly before the three-year statute of limitations runs out.
Here's why, absent any more information, I wouldn't.
I can't figure out why Cuadra would doctor the records unless one of his bosses wanted him to.
Bosses got credit
A lowly bank clerk might make funny numbers to embezzle money.
But Cuadra was a computer-network technician at a school. If he went into the computer and made dropouts disappear — and there's considerable evidence he did — it's not like it put money in his pocket.
He didn't even get credit for improving the school's performance any more than the janitors or cafeteria workers.
It was teachers and administrators who got the credit. Administrators had bonuses tied to such matters, although the dropout rate was just one of a large number of factors, 14 for the principal, for example.
Cuadra's bosses received no bonuses that year. The school, filled with low-income students, did not meet enough criteria.
According to a report by the prominent law firm Rusty Hardin & Associates, which was hired by the school district to investigate the matter, Cuadra had told a varying succession of stories to different people.
'You are great!'
On the advice of his lawyer, Cuadra did not talk to Hardin's staff. Anything he said to them could be turned over to prosecutors (as their report eventually was), and they could not offer him immunity or any other deal as a prosecutor could.
Cuadra has said he was asked to cook the books on dropouts by his superiors, but Hardin's staff could find no evidence of it.
If they told him to do it only in verbal instructions with no witnesses present, which is quite possible, then Texas law makes it impossible to convict the superiors of the crime.
Unlike laws of the federal government and many states, Texas law says if two people are involved in a crime, you can't convict one solely on the testimony of the other.
So unless Cuadra had e-mail or other documents showing he was told to alter the records, he had nothing to offer the district attorney.
There are, however, plenty of e-mail messages and documents showing the pleasure of his superiors at the patently unrealistic numbers Cuadra was producing.
One example: On Oct. 25, 2000, Cuadra sent a dropout roster to two bosses showing only three dropouts. One of them returned the memo with a note: "You are great!"
By 2002, Cuadra made dropouts disappear altogether, going from 30 on Oct. 22 to zero on Oct. 23. The number is so ridiculous that it raised flags both among faculty and in the HISD central office. Yet his bosses made no serious inquiry.
They might as well have been told that all their students had made perfect scores on TAKS and figured that the Genius Fairy had visited all the kids.
The sober Hardin report concluded that "it was completely unrealistic to believe the high school had no dropouts to report for the 2001-02 year."
The report went on: "Despite their doubts regarding the accuracy of the dropout information, none of the administrators did anything to confirm for themselves that the data transmission to the Texas Education Agency was supported by research and proper documentation. None of the administrators did anything to stop it."
So at the very least, Cuadra worked in a leadership culture that more than tacitly celebrated the unreality he is alleged to have created.
Some of his superiors were punished, as was Cuadra. He was docked two weeks' pay and reprimanded. He was publicly humiliated, and he resigned.
Now, three years after the action and two years after the controversy erupted, he and only he is indicted.
The district attorney's office certainly has the power to do that. But should they?
Based on what we know, I say if they can't indict the higher-ups, leave the disgraced underling be.
You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/3387551
-Angela
Oct. 8, 2005, 7:29PM
by RICK CASEY / Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
I guess we should be glad the district attorney's office persuaded a grand jury to indict Ken Cuadra on Friday.
He's the clerk at Sharpstown High School who is alleged to have doctored records to indicate that the school had no dropouts.
If he did the crime, he should do the time, right?
And it's good, I suppose, to make an example of a public employee who cheats in order to keep others from doing it.
Maybe he deserves a felony on his record and up to 10 years in prison, as the law provides.
Still, if voters were ever foolish enough to elect me district attorney, I don't think I would have sought this indictment.
Even if the evidence were overwhelming that he did it.
I was unable Friday to reach either Terese Buess, the special crimes prosecutor who presented the case to the grand jury, or her boss, DA Chuck Rosenthal.
Maybe they have their reasons for seeking the indictment shortly before the three-year statute of limitations runs out.
Here's why, absent any more information, I wouldn't.
I can't figure out why Cuadra would doctor the records unless one of his bosses wanted him to.
Bosses got credit
A lowly bank clerk might make funny numbers to embezzle money.
But Cuadra was a computer-network technician at a school. If he went into the computer and made dropouts disappear — and there's considerable evidence he did — it's not like it put money in his pocket.
He didn't even get credit for improving the school's performance any more than the janitors or cafeteria workers.
It was teachers and administrators who got the credit. Administrators had bonuses tied to such matters, although the dropout rate was just one of a large number of factors, 14 for the principal, for example.
Cuadra's bosses received no bonuses that year. The school, filled with low-income students, did not meet enough criteria.
According to a report by the prominent law firm Rusty Hardin & Associates, which was hired by the school district to investigate the matter, Cuadra had told a varying succession of stories to different people.
'You are great!'
On the advice of his lawyer, Cuadra did not talk to Hardin's staff. Anything he said to them could be turned over to prosecutors (as their report eventually was), and they could not offer him immunity or any other deal as a prosecutor could.
Cuadra has said he was asked to cook the books on dropouts by his superiors, but Hardin's staff could find no evidence of it.
If they told him to do it only in verbal instructions with no witnesses present, which is quite possible, then Texas law makes it impossible to convict the superiors of the crime.
Unlike laws of the federal government and many states, Texas law says if two people are involved in a crime, you can't convict one solely on the testimony of the other.
So unless Cuadra had e-mail or other documents showing he was told to alter the records, he had nothing to offer the district attorney.
There are, however, plenty of e-mail messages and documents showing the pleasure of his superiors at the patently unrealistic numbers Cuadra was producing.
One example: On Oct. 25, 2000, Cuadra sent a dropout roster to two bosses showing only three dropouts. One of them returned the memo with a note: "You are great!"
By 2002, Cuadra made dropouts disappear altogether, going from 30 on Oct. 22 to zero on Oct. 23. The number is so ridiculous that it raised flags both among faculty and in the HISD central office. Yet his bosses made no serious inquiry.
They might as well have been told that all their students had made perfect scores on TAKS and figured that the Genius Fairy had visited all the kids.
The sober Hardin report concluded that "it was completely unrealistic to believe the high school had no dropouts to report for the 2001-02 year."
The report went on: "Despite their doubts regarding the accuracy of the dropout information, none of the administrators did anything to confirm for themselves that the data transmission to the Texas Education Agency was supported by research and proper documentation. None of the administrators did anything to stop it."
So at the very least, Cuadra worked in a leadership culture that more than tacitly celebrated the unreality he is alleged to have created.
Some of his superiors were punished, as was Cuadra. He was docked two weeks' pay and reprimanded. He was publicly humiliated, and he resigned.
Now, three years after the action and two years after the controversy erupted, he and only he is indicted.
The district attorney's office certainly has the power to do that. But should they?
Based on what we know, I say if they can't indict the higher-ups, leave the disgraced underling be.
You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/3387551
Former HISD employee indicted over dropout flap
Read the Rick Casey analysis (next post) for his view on how unjust this indictment is. I happen to agree with him as well. -Angela
Oct. 8, 2005
Former HISD employee indicted over dropout flap
Prosecutors say computer records link him to the falsified data
By SALATHEIA BRYANT
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
A Harris County grand jury indicted a former Sharpstown High School computer
network specialist Friday on a charge of tampering with a governmental
record so that it would appear the school had no dropouts during the 2001-02
year.
Kenneth Cuadra, who resigned from the Houston Independent School District in
August 2004, faces a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in
prison and a $10,000 fine.
It is likely the first-ever indictment of a public school staff member
accused of criminal misconduct relating to dropout reporting, a spokeswoman
for the Texas Education Agency said.
"This should close the books on the whole episode," DeEtta Culbertson said.
"Houston ISD took steps to tighten up their data reporting. That was a good
thing."
Chris Tritico, Cuadra's attorney, said the criminal charge was the result of
shoddy investigative work forwarded to the district attorney's office by
HISD, not misconduct on the part of his client.
The charge against Cuadra comes three years after widespread problems were
uncovered with how the state's largest school district accounted for
students who left school.
The underreporting of dropout data brought national scrutiny to Texas'
system of grading schools and to HISD's highly acclaimed educational gains
under former Superintendent Rod Paige.
The state had routinely used dropout statistics to rank high schools. Those
results, in turn, were used by many district officials to dole out
performance bonuses to administrators. The state now looks at graduation
rates — rather than dropout rates — to determine how a high school should
rank.
No motive established
In making her case to the grand jury, Assistant District Attorney Terese
Buess, of the Public Integrity Division, said evidence showed that Cuadra's
computer identification number was used on or about Oct. 22, 2002, to change
the school's dropout numbers from 30 to zero.
She declined to speculate on why Cuadra made the changes, since no motive
was established. She added that she didn't have to prove a motive to support
an indictment.
Buess said there wasn't enough evidence to support charges against any other
school administrators, even though several others were implicated in the
scandal at the time. Principal Carol Wichmann lost two weeks' pay from her
retirement benefits, and the school's three assistant principals, Robert
Kimball, Marmion Dambrino and Andrew Monzon, were reassigned and received
letters of reprimand.
Kimball, however, later filed a lawsuit accusing HISD of retaliating against
him for questioning the district's handling of the scandal. In a settlement
last year, HISD paid Kimball $90,000 and withdrew the reprimand. Kimball
also sent letters to Harris County prosecutors in 2003 asking for a criminal
investigation.
On Friday, Buess did not rule out future indictments should evidence warrant
them, but said: "There was evidence only on Mr. Cuadra."
"That information goes to Austin, and decisions are made based on that
information," Buess said. "My office is going to continue to investigate
every shred of information."
An independent investigation funded by HISD in 2003 found that Sharpstown
administrators fostered a climate that tolerated unrealistic dropout numbers
and encouraged Cuadra to alter records. HISD later turned that report over
to Harris County prosecutors.
The state's investigation reached a similar conclusion, and prompted the TEA
to strip HISD of its "acceptable" accountability rating amid doubts about
the accuracy of dropout figures at high schools districtwide.
The TEA restored HISD's rating a year ago, after determining HISD had
cleaned up its data-reporting practices. Twelve high schools, including
Sharpstown, and two middle schools with flawed dropout numbers were forced
to keep their "low performing" ratings.
Tritico said he and his client were disappointed by the indictment.
"He's dismayed about the indictment," he said. "This is such a sad turn of
events after all this time — now he has to put his life on hold and battle
HISD."
Cuadra did not want to comment, Tritico said, and he added that: "We look
forward to 12 citizens of Harris County looking at the facts."
Reactions mixed
HISD officials declined to comment on the indictment beyond a one-page
written statement that included: "HISD dealt effectively with the Sharpstown
issue and also used the experience to improve the way it tracks and prevents
dropouts."
Karla Cisneros, one of nine school board trustees, said she thinks the
district acted "appropriately" in its handling of the dropout investigation.
Three other trustees did not return calls seeking comment by early Friday
evening.
Kimball, however, an outspoken critic of the district's handling of
Sharpstown, questioned why the criminal investigation hasn't gone farther.
"It makes me angry. There's a lot more people who should be indicted," said
Kimball, who teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. "They're going
after the one that's the easiest to prove. I'm very disappointed people in
higher leadership weren't indicted."
salatheia.bryant@chron.com
RESOURCES
A LOOK BACK AT SHARPSTOWN
Key events in the dropout reporting scandal uncovered in 2003:
• February 2003: Reports surface that Sharpstown High School administrators
knew dropout information provided to the Texas Education Agency was false.
• March 2003: The Houston Independent School District disciplines Robert
Kimball and Kenneth Cuadra while it investigates the dropout reports.
• August 2003: An investigation by Rusty Hardin and Associates determines,
as did an earlier HISD investigation, that Cuadra changed the dropout
records in a school computer. Documents are turned over to the Harris County
District Attorney's office.
• June 2004: HISD agrees to pay $90,000 to settle the whistle-blower lawsuit
of former Sharpstown Assistant Principal Robert Kimball. He accused school
officials of retaliating against him for pointing out the falsely reported
numbers.
• October 2004: HISD agrees to spend $435,000 to hire 10 dropout-prevention
specialists as part of a push to keep students in school.
• Oct. 7, 2005: A Harris County grand jury indicts Kenneth Cuadra, a former
computer technician at Sharpstown, on a charge of falsifying government
computer records so that it appeared the school had no dropouts in 2001-02.
The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison and up
to a $10,000 fine.
Oct. 8, 2005
Former HISD employee indicted over dropout flap
Prosecutors say computer records link him to the falsified data
By SALATHEIA BRYANT
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
A Harris County grand jury indicted a former Sharpstown High School computer
network specialist Friday on a charge of tampering with a governmental
record so that it would appear the school had no dropouts during the 2001-02
year.
Kenneth Cuadra, who resigned from the Houston Independent School District in
August 2004, faces a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in
prison and a $10,000 fine.
It is likely the first-ever indictment of a public school staff member
accused of criminal misconduct relating to dropout reporting, a spokeswoman
for the Texas Education Agency said.
"This should close the books on the whole episode," DeEtta Culbertson said.
"Houston ISD took steps to tighten up their data reporting. That was a good
thing."
Chris Tritico, Cuadra's attorney, said the criminal charge was the result of
shoddy investigative work forwarded to the district attorney's office by
HISD, not misconduct on the part of his client.
The charge against Cuadra comes three years after widespread problems were
uncovered with how the state's largest school district accounted for
students who left school.
The underreporting of dropout data brought national scrutiny to Texas'
system of grading schools and to HISD's highly acclaimed educational gains
under former Superintendent Rod Paige.
The state had routinely used dropout statistics to rank high schools. Those
results, in turn, were used by many district officials to dole out
performance bonuses to administrators. The state now looks at graduation
rates — rather than dropout rates — to determine how a high school should
rank.
No motive established
In making her case to the grand jury, Assistant District Attorney Terese
Buess, of the Public Integrity Division, said evidence showed that Cuadra's
computer identification number was used on or about Oct. 22, 2002, to change
the school's dropout numbers from 30 to zero.
She declined to speculate on why Cuadra made the changes, since no motive
was established. She added that she didn't have to prove a motive to support
an indictment.
Buess said there wasn't enough evidence to support charges against any other
school administrators, even though several others were implicated in the
scandal at the time. Principal Carol Wichmann lost two weeks' pay from her
retirement benefits, and the school's three assistant principals, Robert
Kimball, Marmion Dambrino and Andrew Monzon, were reassigned and received
letters of reprimand.
Kimball, however, later filed a lawsuit accusing HISD of retaliating against
him for questioning the district's handling of the scandal. In a settlement
last year, HISD paid Kimball $90,000 and withdrew the reprimand. Kimball
also sent letters to Harris County prosecutors in 2003 asking for a criminal
investigation.
On Friday, Buess did not rule out future indictments should evidence warrant
them, but said: "There was evidence only on Mr. Cuadra."
"That information goes to Austin, and decisions are made based on that
information," Buess said. "My office is going to continue to investigate
every shred of information."
An independent investigation funded by HISD in 2003 found that Sharpstown
administrators fostered a climate that tolerated unrealistic dropout numbers
and encouraged Cuadra to alter records. HISD later turned that report over
to Harris County prosecutors.
The state's investigation reached a similar conclusion, and prompted the TEA
to strip HISD of its "acceptable" accountability rating amid doubts about
the accuracy of dropout figures at high schools districtwide.
The TEA restored HISD's rating a year ago, after determining HISD had
cleaned up its data-reporting practices. Twelve high schools, including
Sharpstown, and two middle schools with flawed dropout numbers were forced
to keep their "low performing" ratings.
Tritico said he and his client were disappointed by the indictment.
"He's dismayed about the indictment," he said. "This is such a sad turn of
events after all this time — now he has to put his life on hold and battle
HISD."
Cuadra did not want to comment, Tritico said, and he added that: "We look
forward to 12 citizens of Harris County looking at the facts."
Reactions mixed
HISD officials declined to comment on the indictment beyond a one-page
written statement that included: "HISD dealt effectively with the Sharpstown
issue and also used the experience to improve the way it tracks and prevents
dropouts."
Karla Cisneros, one of nine school board trustees, said she thinks the
district acted "appropriately" in its handling of the dropout investigation.
Three other trustees did not return calls seeking comment by early Friday
evening.
Kimball, however, an outspoken critic of the district's handling of
Sharpstown, questioned why the criminal investigation hasn't gone farther.
"It makes me angry. There's a lot more people who should be indicted," said
Kimball, who teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. "They're going
after the one that's the easiest to prove. I'm very disappointed people in
higher leadership weren't indicted."
salatheia.bryant@chron.com
RESOURCES
A LOOK BACK AT SHARPSTOWN
Key events in the dropout reporting scandal uncovered in 2003:
• February 2003: Reports surface that Sharpstown High School administrators
knew dropout information provided to the Texas Education Agency was false.
• March 2003: The Houston Independent School District disciplines Robert
Kimball and Kenneth Cuadra while it investigates the dropout reports.
• August 2003: An investigation by Rusty Hardin and Associates determines,
as did an earlier HISD investigation, that Cuadra changed the dropout
records in a school computer. Documents are turned over to the Harris County
District Attorney's office.
• June 2004: HISD agrees to pay $90,000 to settle the whistle-blower lawsuit
of former Sharpstown Assistant Principal Robert Kimball. He accused school
officials of retaliating against him for pointing out the falsely reported
numbers.
• October 2004: HISD agrees to spend $435,000 to hire 10 dropout-prevention
specialists as part of a push to keep students in school.
• Oct. 7, 2005: A Harris County grand jury indicts Kenneth Cuadra, a former
computer technician at Sharpstown, on a charge of falsifying government
computer records so that it appeared the school had no dropouts in 2001-02.
The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison and up
to a $10,000 fine.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Why Segregation Matters: Poverty & Educational Inequality
Wanted to let you know about this report. It’s a good companion to the Kozol and Berliner pieces that I've posted on this blog. Also, I've been getting a lot of spam but I think that all of this has been fixed.
Personally, I've been thinking a lot lately about poverty and race with the Katrina disaster and the re-integration and continuing segregation of New Orleans' schools. Segregation as an issue probably has more currency now than pre-Katrina and the authoritative source(s) on this is the work put out by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. You can download this full report and many other excellent ones at the HCRP website.
I'll be looking to post pieces of that sort.
-Angela
January 16, 2005
By Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee
RESEARCH
Dropouts in America
On December 7, 2004, CRP published a new book entitled Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis. This book provides information essential to stemming the dangerously large numbers of students--
disproportionately poor and minority--who flee our nation's schools before obtaining high school diplomas.
Introduction
Much of the discussion about school reform in the U.S. in the past two decades has been about racial inequality. President Bush has promised that the No Child Left Behind Act and the forthcoming expansion of high stakes testing to high schools can end the “soft racism of low expectations.” Yet a disproportionate number of the schools being officially labeled as persistent failures and facing sanctions under this program are segregated minority schools. Large city school systems are engaged in massive efforts to break large segregated high poverty high schools into small schools, hoping that it will create a setting better able to reduce inequality, while others claim that market forces operating through charter schools and private schools could end racial inequalities even though both of these are even more segregated than public schools and there is no convincing evidence for either of these claims. More and more of the still standing court orders and plans for desegregated schools are being terminated or challenged in court, and the leaders of the small number of high achieving segregated schools in each big city or state are celebrated. The existence of these schools is being used to claim that we can have general educational success within the existing context of deepening segregation. Clearly the basic assumption is that separate schools can be made equal and that we need not worry about the abandonment of the movement for integration whose history was celebrated so extensively last year on the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision even as the schools continued to resegregate. There has been a continuous pattern of deepening segregation for black and Latino students now since the 1980s.
What if this basic assumption is wrong? What if the Supreme Court was correct a half century ago in its conclusion that segregated schools were “inherently unequal”? What if Martin Luther King’s many statements about how segregation harms both the segregator and the segregated, drastically limits opportunity, and does not provide the basis for building a successful interracial society are correct? What if the Supreme Court’s sweeping conclusion in the 2003 University of Michigan case that there is compelling evidence that diversity improves the education of all students is true and applies with even greater force to public schools?
If, however, it is wrong to assume that segregation is irrelevant and policies that ignore that fact simply punish the victims of segregation because they fail to take into account many of the causes of the inequality, then current policy is being built on the foundation that it cannot produce the desired results and may even compound the existing inequalities. We believe this to be true. Segregated schools are unequal and there is very little evidence of any success in creating “separate but equal” outcomes on a large scale.
One of the common misconceptions over the issue of resegregation of schools is that many people treat it as simply a change in the skin color of the students in a school. If skin color were not systematically linked to other forms of inequality, it would, of course, be of little significance for educational policy. Unfortunately that is not and never has been the nature of our society. Socioeconomic segregation is a stubborn, multidimensional and deeply important cause of educational inequality. U.S. schools are now 41 percent nonwhite and the great majority of the nonwhite students attend schools which now show substantial segregation. Levels of segregation for black and Latino students have been steadily increasing since the l980s, as we have shown in a series of reports. Achievement scores are strongly linked to school racial composition and so is the presence of highly qualified and experienced teachers. The nation’s shockingly high dropout problem is squarely concentrated in heavily minority high schools in big cities. The high level of poverty among children, together with many housing policies and practices which excludes poor people from most communities, mean that students in inner city schools face isolation not only from the white community but also from middle class schools. Minority children are far more likely than whites to grow up in persistent poverty. Since few whites have direct experience with concentrated poverty schools, it is very important to examine research about its effects.
Evidence of the Multidimensional Nature of Segregation in Education
Race is deeply and systematically linked to many forms of inequality in background, treatment, expectations and opportunities. From an educational perspective, perhaps the most important of those linkages is with the level of concentrated poverty in a school. These differences start at an early age. A comprehensive federal study of children across the country entering kindergarten shows very large differences in the acquisition of skills invaluable for school success long before the children ever enter a schoolhouse. Schools where almost all of the students come with these problems obviously face very different challenges than schools where some of the kindergarteners come better prepared.
Our study of metro Boston shows a strong relationship between segregation by race and poverty and teacher quality, test scores and dropout rates. In the entire metro region, 97 percent of the schools with less than a tenth white students face concentrated poverty compared to 1 percent of the schools with less than a tenth minority students. These differences were strongly related to the results on the high stakes MCAS state examinations.
The nation’s dropout problem is concentrated in segregated high poverty schools. In our new book, Dropouts in America, we report that half of the nation’s African American and Latino students are dropping out of high school. The most severe problems are in segregated high poverty schools. For the high school class of 2002 almost a third of the high schools that were more than 50 percent minority graduated less than half of their class. Among schools that were 90 percent or more white, only one school in fifty had this kind of record. Half of the majority-minority schools had dropout rates over 40 percent as did two-thirds of the schools with less than a tenth white students. Nationally the gap in graduation rates between districts with high and low proportions of low income students was 18.4 percent in 2001, even higher than the gap between majority white and majority-minority districts.
Richard Rothstein’s important 2004 book, Class and Schools, reviews a wide array of studies that have shown for decades strong links between individual poverty, school poverty, race and educational inequality. Studies show that poverty is strongly related to everything from the child’s physical development to the family’s ability to stay in a neighborhood long enough so that a school might have an effect on the student. His analysis suggests that we tend to provide weaker education in highly impoverished schools and that the major claims about successful reforms in these schools are wrong. He argues that it is unrealistic to expect to change schools in any deep way without dealing with some of the issues that arise with poverty.
Further, a major 2005 report from the University of North Carolina explored the increasing concentration of poverty in metropolitan Charlotte following the end of desegregation. By the 2004-2005 school year, more than a fifth of the metropolitan district’s schools had poverty levels over 75 percent. Many studies over four decades have found a strong relationship between concentrated school poverty and low achievement. The study found that between 2003 and 2004 the largest achievement test score gains were reported by low income students attending middle income schools. These students gained 10 points on the test compared to just 4 points for similarly low income students in high poverty schools; 82 percent of poor children in middle class schools were at grade level compared to 64 percent of poor children in concentrated poverty schools. The high poverty schools were performing much worse than schools in nearby Wake County (metro Raleigh) which had socio-economic desegregation to end poverty concentrations.
High poverty schools also tend to have a less stable and less qualified teaching staff. A 2004 U.S. Department of Education report showed that in schools where “at least 75 percent of the students were low-income, there were three times as many uncertified or out-of-field teachers in both English and science…” Teachers tend to become more effective with experience, and building an effective team in a school takes years of collaboration. In Charlotte’s highest poverty schools, almost a third of the teachers left each year. The North Carolina study recommended that the school district limit the number of high poverty schools and use districting and choice policies to create economically diverse schools.
A 2004 study by researchers at the University of Miami and the University of South Florida explored the relationship between segregation, integration and success of students in passing the state’s demanding high stakes tests. Florida is one of the states that achieved the greatest increase in desegregation in the l970s and has been losing those gains ever since. After controlling for other possible factors such as expenditures, poverty levels, teaching quality, class size, and mobility of students, the study showed that segregation was clearly related to lower pass rates on the state test for black students in racially isolated schools and that black students in integrated schools did about as well as the rare black students in overwhelmingly white schools. The authors concluded that segregated schools can be viewed as institutions of concentrated disadvantage and that policies “that attempt to resolve the achievement gap by funding equity or classroom size changes” would probably fail if the segregation issue were not addressed.
These and many other inequalities do not mean that racial or socioeconomic integration is a magic bullet that can cure all the inequalities rooted in the broader society, but they clearly suggest that it is foolish to ignore the damage of segregation and to accept policy changes that may make it worse. Those who argue that because there are segregated schools that succeed we need not worry about segregation are engaged in a fallacy of using exceptions to the rule to prove a relationship.
Martin Luther King understood the nature of racial inequality and campaigned against segregation, discrimination and poverty. Dr. King died more than a third of a century ago and with his death the civil rights movement lost its central voice and focus and faced a strengthening movement toward preservation of the status quo. With the passage of time and changing political leadership we have seen sweeping policy reversals, rising segregation, especially in the South and West, and a loss of understanding of the reasons for Dr. King’s crusades against racial separation. Certainly there was nothing about Dr. King that held that black institutions were bad—he was the proud pastor of an overwhelmingly black church of great influence and power and a proud graduate of the preeminent black college for men, Morehouse in Atlanta. Segregation was evil in his mind not because of skin color but because it almost always led to unequal opportunities, given the realities of American society, and because it produced both ignorance and damaging racial stereotypes in the minds of both the segregated and the segregators. Segregation was a basic structure that subordinated and limited opportunities for nonwhite children. Dr. King advocated not only plans that brought minority children into previously segregated white schools but much deeper transformations in which segregated schools became truly integrated with equal treatment and respect for all groups of students.
Segregation was never just a black-white problem, never just a Southern problem, or never just a racial problem, but in the initial struggle in the South of the mid-twentieth century that was clearly the focus. By the time Dr. King organized his last movement, the Poor Peoples Campaign, his approach was clearly multiracial, with a deepening emphasis on poverty as well as racial discrimination. Speaking ten days before he died, King spoke of his conviction that it was “absolutely necessary now to deal massively and militantly with the economic problem…. So the grave problem facing us is the problem of economic deprivation, with the syndrome of bad housing and poor education and improper health facilities all surrounding this basic problem.” Had he not been assassinated shortly before that movement came to Washington, perhaps the link between racial and economic isolation would be better understood as would the profound impact of double segregation (often triple segregation for immigrant children who are also isolated by language in their schools.)
The civil rights movement was never about sitting next to whites, it was about equalizing opportunity. If high poverty schools are systematically unequal and segregated minority schools are almost always high poverty schools, it is much easier to understand both the consequences of segregation and the conditions that create the possibility of substantial gains in desegregated classes. At a time when the racial achievement gaps remain substantial and desegregation orders are being challenged, it is particularly important to understand the pattern that is developing and to think seriously about how to address it.
This report examines the changing nature of segregation and integration in a society that has now become far more profoundly multiracial than it was in the past and explores some of the connections between segregation by race, segregation by poverty, and unequal opportunity. It has several basic goals—to help people understand some of the mechanisms of educational inequality by looking at segregation of schools and students by poverty, discussing the massive research literature showing the ways in which high poverty schools are systematically unequal, and then exploring the racial consequences of the fact that concentrated poverty schools have a vastly larger impact on black and Latino students than on their white and Asian counterparts. Another basic goal of the paper is to show how different relationships between race and poverty in differing parts of a nation in rapid demographic transition challenges the traditional black-white description of segregation. Unlike our earlier studies, this one gives central attention to the issue of segregation by poverty and shows how it relates to racial inequality.
To view the COMPLETE REPORT and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality (in PDF Format)
Personally, I've been thinking a lot lately about poverty and race with the Katrina disaster and the re-integration and continuing segregation of New Orleans' schools. Segregation as an issue probably has more currency now than pre-Katrina and the authoritative source(s) on this is the work put out by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. You can download this full report and many other excellent ones at the HCRP website.
I'll be looking to post pieces of that sort.
-Angela
January 16, 2005
By Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee
RESEARCH
Dropouts in America
On December 7, 2004, CRP published a new book entitled Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis. This book provides information essential to stemming the dangerously large numbers of students--
disproportionately poor and minority--who flee our nation's schools before obtaining high school diplomas.
Introduction
Much of the discussion about school reform in the U.S. in the past two decades has been about racial inequality. President Bush has promised that the No Child Left Behind Act and the forthcoming expansion of high stakes testing to high schools can end the “soft racism of low expectations.” Yet a disproportionate number of the schools being officially labeled as persistent failures and facing sanctions under this program are segregated minority schools. Large city school systems are engaged in massive efforts to break large segregated high poverty high schools into small schools, hoping that it will create a setting better able to reduce inequality, while others claim that market forces operating through charter schools and private schools could end racial inequalities even though both of these are even more segregated than public schools and there is no convincing evidence for either of these claims. More and more of the still standing court orders and plans for desegregated schools are being terminated or challenged in court, and the leaders of the small number of high achieving segregated schools in each big city or state are celebrated. The existence of these schools is being used to claim that we can have general educational success within the existing context of deepening segregation. Clearly the basic assumption is that separate schools can be made equal and that we need not worry about the abandonment of the movement for integration whose history was celebrated so extensively last year on the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision even as the schools continued to resegregate. There has been a continuous pattern of deepening segregation for black and Latino students now since the 1980s.
What if this basic assumption is wrong? What if the Supreme Court was correct a half century ago in its conclusion that segregated schools were “inherently unequal”? What if Martin Luther King’s many statements about how segregation harms both the segregator and the segregated, drastically limits opportunity, and does not provide the basis for building a successful interracial society are correct? What if the Supreme Court’s sweeping conclusion in the 2003 University of Michigan case that there is compelling evidence that diversity improves the education of all students is true and applies with even greater force to public schools?
If, however, it is wrong to assume that segregation is irrelevant and policies that ignore that fact simply punish the victims of segregation because they fail to take into account many of the causes of the inequality, then current policy is being built on the foundation that it cannot produce the desired results and may even compound the existing inequalities. We believe this to be true. Segregated schools are unequal and there is very little evidence of any success in creating “separate but equal” outcomes on a large scale.
One of the common misconceptions over the issue of resegregation of schools is that many people treat it as simply a change in the skin color of the students in a school. If skin color were not systematically linked to other forms of inequality, it would, of course, be of little significance for educational policy. Unfortunately that is not and never has been the nature of our society. Socioeconomic segregation is a stubborn, multidimensional and deeply important cause of educational inequality. U.S. schools are now 41 percent nonwhite and the great majority of the nonwhite students attend schools which now show substantial segregation. Levels of segregation for black and Latino students have been steadily increasing since the l980s, as we have shown in a series of reports. Achievement scores are strongly linked to school racial composition and so is the presence of highly qualified and experienced teachers. The nation’s shockingly high dropout problem is squarely concentrated in heavily minority high schools in big cities. The high level of poverty among children, together with many housing policies and practices which excludes poor people from most communities, mean that students in inner city schools face isolation not only from the white community but also from middle class schools. Minority children are far more likely than whites to grow up in persistent poverty. Since few whites have direct experience with concentrated poverty schools, it is very important to examine research about its effects.
Evidence of the Multidimensional Nature of Segregation in Education
Race is deeply and systematically linked to many forms of inequality in background, treatment, expectations and opportunities. From an educational perspective, perhaps the most important of those linkages is with the level of concentrated poverty in a school. These differences start at an early age. A comprehensive federal study of children across the country entering kindergarten shows very large differences in the acquisition of skills invaluable for school success long before the children ever enter a schoolhouse. Schools where almost all of the students come with these problems obviously face very different challenges than schools where some of the kindergarteners come better prepared.
Our study of metro Boston shows a strong relationship between segregation by race and poverty and teacher quality, test scores and dropout rates. In the entire metro region, 97 percent of the schools with less than a tenth white students face concentrated poverty compared to 1 percent of the schools with less than a tenth minority students. These differences were strongly related to the results on the high stakes MCAS state examinations.
The nation’s dropout problem is concentrated in segregated high poverty schools. In our new book, Dropouts in America, we report that half of the nation’s African American and Latino students are dropping out of high school. The most severe problems are in segregated high poverty schools. For the high school class of 2002 almost a third of the high schools that were more than 50 percent minority graduated less than half of their class. Among schools that were 90 percent or more white, only one school in fifty had this kind of record. Half of the majority-minority schools had dropout rates over 40 percent as did two-thirds of the schools with less than a tenth white students. Nationally the gap in graduation rates between districts with high and low proportions of low income students was 18.4 percent in 2001, even higher than the gap between majority white and majority-minority districts.
Richard Rothstein’s important 2004 book, Class and Schools, reviews a wide array of studies that have shown for decades strong links between individual poverty, school poverty, race and educational inequality. Studies show that poverty is strongly related to everything from the child’s physical development to the family’s ability to stay in a neighborhood long enough so that a school might have an effect on the student. His analysis suggests that we tend to provide weaker education in highly impoverished schools and that the major claims about successful reforms in these schools are wrong. He argues that it is unrealistic to expect to change schools in any deep way without dealing with some of the issues that arise with poverty.
Further, a major 2005 report from the University of North Carolina explored the increasing concentration of poverty in metropolitan Charlotte following the end of desegregation. By the 2004-2005 school year, more than a fifth of the metropolitan district’s schools had poverty levels over 75 percent. Many studies over four decades have found a strong relationship between concentrated school poverty and low achievement. The study found that between 2003 and 2004 the largest achievement test score gains were reported by low income students attending middle income schools. These students gained 10 points on the test compared to just 4 points for similarly low income students in high poverty schools; 82 percent of poor children in middle class schools were at grade level compared to 64 percent of poor children in concentrated poverty schools. The high poverty schools were performing much worse than schools in nearby Wake County (metro Raleigh) which had socio-economic desegregation to end poverty concentrations.
High poverty schools also tend to have a less stable and less qualified teaching staff. A 2004 U.S. Department of Education report showed that in schools where “at least 75 percent of the students were low-income, there were three times as many uncertified or out-of-field teachers in both English and science…” Teachers tend to become more effective with experience, and building an effective team in a school takes years of collaboration. In Charlotte’s highest poverty schools, almost a third of the teachers left each year. The North Carolina study recommended that the school district limit the number of high poverty schools and use districting and choice policies to create economically diverse schools.
A 2004 study by researchers at the University of Miami and the University of South Florida explored the relationship between segregation, integration and success of students in passing the state’s demanding high stakes tests. Florida is one of the states that achieved the greatest increase in desegregation in the l970s and has been losing those gains ever since. After controlling for other possible factors such as expenditures, poverty levels, teaching quality, class size, and mobility of students, the study showed that segregation was clearly related to lower pass rates on the state test for black students in racially isolated schools and that black students in integrated schools did about as well as the rare black students in overwhelmingly white schools. The authors concluded that segregated schools can be viewed as institutions of concentrated disadvantage and that policies “that attempt to resolve the achievement gap by funding equity or classroom size changes” would probably fail if the segregation issue were not addressed.
These and many other inequalities do not mean that racial or socioeconomic integration is a magic bullet that can cure all the inequalities rooted in the broader society, but they clearly suggest that it is foolish to ignore the damage of segregation and to accept policy changes that may make it worse. Those who argue that because there are segregated schools that succeed we need not worry about segregation are engaged in a fallacy of using exceptions to the rule to prove a relationship.
Martin Luther King understood the nature of racial inequality and campaigned against segregation, discrimination and poverty. Dr. King died more than a third of a century ago and with his death the civil rights movement lost its central voice and focus and faced a strengthening movement toward preservation of the status quo. With the passage of time and changing political leadership we have seen sweeping policy reversals, rising segregation, especially in the South and West, and a loss of understanding of the reasons for Dr. King’s crusades against racial separation. Certainly there was nothing about Dr. King that held that black institutions were bad—he was the proud pastor of an overwhelmingly black church of great influence and power and a proud graduate of the preeminent black college for men, Morehouse in Atlanta. Segregation was evil in his mind not because of skin color but because it almost always led to unequal opportunities, given the realities of American society, and because it produced both ignorance and damaging racial stereotypes in the minds of both the segregated and the segregators. Segregation was a basic structure that subordinated and limited opportunities for nonwhite children. Dr. King advocated not only plans that brought minority children into previously segregated white schools but much deeper transformations in which segregated schools became truly integrated with equal treatment and respect for all groups of students.
Segregation was never just a black-white problem, never just a Southern problem, or never just a racial problem, but in the initial struggle in the South of the mid-twentieth century that was clearly the focus. By the time Dr. King organized his last movement, the Poor Peoples Campaign, his approach was clearly multiracial, with a deepening emphasis on poverty as well as racial discrimination. Speaking ten days before he died, King spoke of his conviction that it was “absolutely necessary now to deal massively and militantly with the economic problem…. So the grave problem facing us is the problem of economic deprivation, with the syndrome of bad housing and poor education and improper health facilities all surrounding this basic problem.” Had he not been assassinated shortly before that movement came to Washington, perhaps the link between racial and economic isolation would be better understood as would the profound impact of double segregation (often triple segregation for immigrant children who are also isolated by language in their schools.)
The civil rights movement was never about sitting next to whites, it was about equalizing opportunity. If high poverty schools are systematically unequal and segregated minority schools are almost always high poverty schools, it is much easier to understand both the consequences of segregation and the conditions that create the possibility of substantial gains in desegregated classes. At a time when the racial achievement gaps remain substantial and desegregation orders are being challenged, it is particularly important to understand the pattern that is developing and to think seriously about how to address it.
This report examines the changing nature of segregation and integration in a society that has now become far more profoundly multiracial than it was in the past and explores some of the connections between segregation by race, segregation by poverty, and unequal opportunity. It has several basic goals—to help people understand some of the mechanisms of educational inequality by looking at segregation of schools and students by poverty, discussing the massive research literature showing the ways in which high poverty schools are systematically unequal, and then exploring the racial consequences of the fact that concentrated poverty schools have a vastly larger impact on black and Latino students than on their white and Asian counterparts. Another basic goal of the paper is to show how different relationships between race and poverty in differing parts of a nation in rapid demographic transition challenges the traditional black-white description of segregation. Unlike our earlier studies, this one gives central attention to the issue of segregation by poverty and shows how it relates to racial inequality.
To view the COMPLETE REPORT and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality (in PDF Format)
Still Separate, Still Unequal:
I've mentioned this piece but haven't posted it. It's a powerful piece on poverty by Jonathan Kozol. -Angela
JONATHAN KOZOL / Harper's Magazine v.311, n.1864 1sep2005
Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.
In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.
Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S. Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were white.
A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. "I've been at this school for eighteen years," she said. "This is the first white student I have ever taught."
One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. It is even more disheartening when schools like these are not in deeply segregated inner-city neighborhoods but in racially mixed areas where the integration of a public school would seem to be most natural, and where, indeed, it takes a conscious effort on the part of parents or school officials in these districts to avoid the integration option that is often right at their front door.
In a Seattle neighborhood that I visited in 2002, for instance, where approximately half the families were Caucasian, 95 percent of students at the Thurgood Marshall Elementary School were black, Hispanic, Native American, or of Asian origin. An African-American teacher at the school told me—not with bitterness but wistfully—of seeing clusters of white parents and their children each morning on the corner of a street close to the school, waiting for a bus that took the children to a predominantly white school.
"At Thurgood Marshall," according to a big wall poster in the school's lobby, "the dream is alive." But school-assignment practices and federal court decisions that have countermanded long-established policies that previously fostered integration in Seattle's schools make the realization of the dream identified with Justice Marshall all but unattainable today. In San Diego there is a school that bears the name of Rosa Parks in which 86 percent of students are black and Hispanic and only some 2 percent are white. In Los Angeles there is a school that bears the name of Dr. King that is 99 percent black and Hispanic, and another in Milwaukee in which black and Hispanic children also make up 99 percent of the enrollment. There is a high school in Cleveland that is named for Dr. King in which black students make up 97 percent of the student body, and the graduation rate is only 35 percent. In Philadelphia, 98 percent of children at a high school named for Dr. King are black. At a middle school named for Dr. King in Boston, black and Hispanic children make up 98 percent of the enrollment.
In New York City there is a primary school named for Langston Hughes (99 percent black and Hispanic), a middle school named for Jackie Robinson (96 percent black and Hispanic), and a high school named for Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the great heroes of the integration movement in the South, in which 98 percent of students are black or Hispanic. In Harlem there is yet another segregated Thurgood Marshall School (also 98 percent black and Hispanic), and in the South Bronx dozens of children I have known went to a segregated middle school named in honor of Paul Robeson in which less than half of one percent of the enrollment was Caucasian.
There is a well-known high school named for Martin Luther King Jr. in New York City too. This school, which I've visited repeatedly in recent years, is located in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood, where it was built in the belief—or hope—that it would draw large numbers of white students by permitting them to walk to school, while only their black and Hispanic classmates would be asked to ride the bus or come by train. When the school was opened in 1975, less than a block from Lincoln Center in Manhattan, "it was seen," according to the New York Times, "as a promising effort to integrate white, black and Hispanic students in a thriving neighborhood that held one of the city's cultural gems." Even from the start, however, parents in the neighborhood showed great reluctance to permit their children to enroll at Martin Luther King, and, despite "its prime location and its name, which itself creates the highest of expectations," notes the Times, the school before long came to be a destination for black and Hispanic students who could not obtain admission into more successful schools. It stands today as one of the nation's most visible and problematic symbols of an expectation rapidly receding and a legacy substantially betrayed.
Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation fifty years before—and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly agreed-upon convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor like "racial segregation" in a narrative description of a segregated school. Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults, and surrogate vocabularies are repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as 3 or 4 percent of students may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for instance—and where every other child in the building is black or Hispanic—are referred to as "diverse." Visitors to schools like these discover quickly the eviscerated meaning of the word, which is no longer a proper adjective but a euphemism for a plainer word that has apparently become unspeakable.
School systems themselves repeatedly employ this euphemism in describing the composition of their student populations. In a school I visited in the fall of 2004 in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, a document distributed to visitors reports that the school's curriculum "addresses the needs of children from diverse backgrounds." But as I went from class to class, I did not encounter any children who were white or Asian—or Hispanic, for that matter—and when I was later provided with precise statistics for the demographics of the school, I learned that 99.6 percent of students there were African American. In a similar document, the school board of another district, this one in New York State, referred to "the diversity" of its student population and "the rich variations of ethnic backgrounds." But when I looked at the racial numbers that the district had reported to the state, I learned that there were 2,800 black and Hispanic children in the system, 1 Asian child, and 3 whites. Words, in these cases, cease to have real meaning; or, rather, they mean the opposite of what they say.
High school students whom I talk with in deeply segregated neighborhoods and public schools seem far less circumspect than their elders and far more open in their willingness to confront these issues. "It's more like being hidden," said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel* I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools. "It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."
* The names of children mentioned in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.
I asked her if she thought America truly did not "have room" for her or other children of her race. "Think of it this way," said a sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside her. "If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?"
"How do you think they'd feel?" I asked.
"I think they'd he relieved," this very solemn girl replied.
Many educators make the argument today that given the demographics of large cities like New York and their suburban areas, our only realistic goal should be the nurturing of strong, empowered, and well-funded schools in segregated neighborhoods. Black school officials in these situations have sometimes conveyed to me a bitter and clear-sighted recognition that they're being asked, essentially, to mediate and render functional an uncontested separation between children of their race and children of white people living sometimes in a distant section of their town and sometimes in almost their own immediate communities. Implicit in this mediation is a willingness to set aside the promises of Brown and—though never stating this or even thinking of it clearly in these terms—to settle for the promise made more than a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in which "separate but equal" was accepted as a tolerable rationale for the perpetuation of a dual system in American society.
Equality itself—equality alone—is now, it seems, the article of faith to which most of the principals of inner-city public schools subscribe. And some who are perhaps most realistic do not even dare to ask for, or expect, complete equality, which seems beyond the realm of probability for many years to come, but look instead for only a sufficiency of means—"adequacy" is the legal term most often used today—by which to win those practical and finite victories that appear to be within their reach. Higher standards, higher expectations, are repeatedly demanded of these urban principals, and of the teachers and students in their schools, but far lower standards—certainly in ethical respects—appear to be expected of the dominant society that isolates these children in unequal institutions.
Dear Mr. Kozol," wrote the eight-year-old, "we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks.
You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?"
The letter, from a child named Alliyah, came in a flit envelope of twenty-seven letters from a class of third-grade children in the Bronx. Other letters that the students in Alliyah's classroom sent me registered some of the same complaints. "We don't have no gardens," "no Music or Art," and "no fun places to play," one child said. "Is there a way to fix this Problem?" Another noted a concern one hears from many children in such overcrowded schools: "We have a gym but it is for lining up. I think it is not fair." Yet another of Alliyah's classmates asked me, with a sweet misspelling, if I knew the way to make her school into a "good" school—"like the other kings have"—and ended with the hope that I would do my best to make it possible for "all the kings" to have good schools.
The letter that affected me the most, however, had been written by a child named Elizabeth. "It is not fair that other kids have a garden and new things. But we don't have that," said Elizabeth. "I wish that this school was the most beautiful school in the whole why world."
"The whole why world" stayed in my thoughts for days. When I later met Elizabeth, I brought her letter with me, thinking I might see whether, in reading it aloud, she'd change the "why" to "wide" or leave it as it was. My visit to her class, however, proved to he so pleasant, and the children seemed so eager to bombard me with their questions about where I lived, and why I lived there rather than in New York, and who I lived with, and how many dogs I had, and other interesting questions of that sort, that I decided not to interrupt the nice reception they had given me with questions about usages and spelling. I left "the whole why world" to float around unedited and unrevised in my mind. The letter itself soon found a resting place on the wall above my desk.
In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many other schools in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx as well. I had made repeated visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In one makeshift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a funeral establishment in yet another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of the Bronx, class size rose to thirty-four and more; four kindergarten classes and a sixth-grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows. The air was stifling in many rooms, and the children had no place for recess because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym.
In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. "This," he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, "would not happen to white children." Libraries, once one of the glories of the New York City school system, were either nonexistent or, at best, vestigial in large numbers of the elementary schools. Art and music programs had also for the most part disappeared. "When I began to teach in 1969," the principal of an elementary school in the South Bronx reported to me, "every school had a full-time licensed art and music teacher and librarian." During the subsequent decades, he recalled, "I saw all of that destroyed."
School physicians also were removed from elementary schools during these years. In 1970, when substantial numbers of white children still attended New York City's public schools, 400 doctors had been present to address the health needs of the children. By 1993 the number of doctors had been cut to 23, most of them part-time—a cutback that affected most severely children in the city's poorest neighborhoods, where medical facilities were most deficient and health problems faced by children most extreme. Teachers told me of asthmatic children who came into class with chronic wheezing and who at any moment of the day might undergo more serious attacks, but in the schools I visited there were no doctors to attend to them.
In explaining these steep declines in services, political leaders in New York tended to point to shifting economic factors, like a serious budget crisis in the middle 1970s, rather than to the changing racial demographics of the student population. But the fact of economic ups and downs from year to year, or from one decade to the next, could not convincingly explain the permanent shortchanging of the city's students, which took place routinely in good economic times and bad. The bad times were seized upon politically to justify the cuts, and the money was never restored once the crisis years were past.
"If you close your eyes to the changing racial composition of the schools and look only at budget actions and political events," says Noreen Connell, the director of the nonprofit Educational Priorities Panel in New York, "you're missing the assumptions that are underlying these decisions." When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, "the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who just don't count—children we don't value."
This, then, is the accusation that Alliyah and her classmates send our way: "You have ... We do not have." Are they right or are they wrong? Is this a case of naive and simplistic juvenile exaggeration? What does a third-grader know about these big-time questions of fairness and justice? Physical appearances apart, how in any case do you begin to measure something so diffuse and vast and seemingly abstract as having more, or having less, or not having at all?
Around the time I met Alliyah in the school year 1997-1998, New York's Board of Education spent about $8,000 yearly on the education of a third-grade child in a New York City public school. If you could have scooped Alliyah up out of the neighborhood where she was born and plunked her down in a fairly typical white suburb of New York,she would have received a public education worth about $12,000 a year. If you were to lift her up once more and set her down in one of the wealthiest white suburbs of New York, she would have received as much as $18,000 worth of public education every year and would likely have had a third-grade teacher paid approximately $30,000 more than her teacher in the Bronx was paid.
The dollars on both sides of the equation have increased since then, but the discrepancies between them have remained. The present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island. The present New York City level is, indeed, almost exactly what Manhasset spent per pupil eighteen years ago, in 1987, when that sum of money bought a great deal more in services and salaries than it can buy today. In dollars adjusted for inflation, New York City has not yet caught up to where its wealthiest suburbs were a quarter-century ago.
Gross discrepancies in teacher salaries between the city and its affluent white suburbs have remained persistent as well. In 1997 the median salary for teachers in Alliyah's neighborhood was $43,000, as compared with $74,000 in suburban Rye, $77,000 in Manhasset, and $81,000 in the town of Scarsdale, which is only about eleven miles from Alliyah's school. Five years later, in 2002, salary scales for New York City's teachers rose to levels that approximated those within the lower-spending districts in the suburbs, but salary scales do not reflect the actual salaries that teachers typically receive, which are dependent upon years of service and advanced degrees. Salaries for first-year teachers in the city were higher than they'd been four years before, but the differences in median pay between the city and its upper-middle-income suburbs had remained extreme. The overall figure for New York City in 2002-2003 was $53,000, while it had climbed to $87,000 in Manhasset and exceeded $95,000 in Scarsdale.
There are expensive children and there are cheap children," writes Marina Warner, an essayist and novelist who has written many books for children, "just as there are expensive women and cheap women." The governmentally administered diminishment in value of the children of the poor begins even before the age of five or six, when they begin their years of formal education in the public schools. It starts during
their infant and toddler years, when hundreds of thousands of children of the very poor in much of the United States are locked out of the opportunity for preschool education for no reason but the accident of birth and budgetary choices of the government, while children of the privileged are often given veritable feasts of rich developmental early education.
In New York City, for example, affluent parents pay surprisingly large sums of money to enroll their youngsters, beginning at the age of two or three, in extraordinary early-education programs that give them social competence and rudimentary pedagogic skills unknown to children of the same age in the city's poorer neighborhoods. The most exclusive of the private preschools in New York, which are known to those who can afford them as "Baby Ivies," cost as much as $24,000 for a full-day program. Competition for admission to these pre-K schools is so extreme that private counselors are frequently retained, at fees as high as $300 an hour, to guide the parents through the application process.
At the opposite extreme along the economic spectrum in New York are thousands of children who receive no preschool opportunity at all. Exactly how many thousands are denied this opportunity in New York City and in other major cities is almost impossible to know. Numbers that originate in governmental agencies in many states are incomplete and imprecise and do not always differentiate with clarity between authentic pre-K programs that have educative and developmental substance and those less expensive child-care arrangements that do not. But even where states do compile numbers that refer specifically to educative preschool programs, it is difficult to know how many of the children who are served are of low income, since admissions to some of the state-supported programs aren't determined by low income or they are determined by a complicated set of factors of which poverty is only one.
There are remarkable exceptions to this pattern in some sections of the nation. In Milwaukee, for example, virtually every four-year-old is now enrolled in a preliminary kindergarten program, which amounts to a full year of preschool education, prior to a second kindergarten year for five-year-olds. More commonly in urban neighborhoods, large numbers of low-income children are denied these opportunities and come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in class activities and without even such very modest early-learning skills as knowing how to hold a crayon or a pencil, identify perhaps a couple of shapes and colors, or recognize that printed pages go from left to right.
Three years later, in third grade, these children are introduced to what are known as "high-stakes tests," which in many urban systems now determine whether students can or cannot be promoted. Children who have been in programs like those offered by the "Baby Ivies" since the age of two have, by now, received the benefits of six or seven years of education, nearly twice as many as the children who have been denied these opportunities; yet all are required to take, and will be measured by, the same examinations. Which of these children will receive the highest scores? The ones who spent the years from two to four in lovely little Montessori programs and in other pastel-painted settings in which tender and attentive and well-trained instructors read to them from beautiful storybooks and introduced them very gently for the first time to the world of numbers and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and varieties of solid objects, and perhaps taught them to sort things into groups or to arrange them in a sequence, or to do those many other interesting things that early childhood specialists refer to as prenumeracy skills? Or the ones who spent those years at home in front of a TV or sitting by the window of a slum apartment gazing down into the street? There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.
Perhaps in order to deflect these recognitions, or to soften them somewhat, many people, even while they do nor doubt the benefit of making very large investments in the education of their own children, somehow—paradoxical as it may seem—appear to be attracted to the argument that money may not really matter that much at all. No matter with what regularity such doubts about the worth of spending money on a child's education are advanced, it is obvious that those who have the money, and who spend it lavishly to benefit their own kids, do not do it for no reason. Yet shockingly large numbers of well-educated and sophisticated people whom I talk with nowadays dismiss such challenges with a surprising ease. "Is the answer really to throw money into these dysfunctional and failing schools?" I'm often asked. "Don't we have some better ways to make them `work'?" The question is posed in a variety of forms. "Yes, of course, it's not a perfectly fair system as it stands. But money alone is surely not the sole response. The values of the parents and the kids themselves must have a role in this as well you know, housing, health conditions, social factors." "Other factors"—a term of overall reprieve one often hears—"have got to be considered, too." These latter points are obviously true but always seem to have the odd effect of substituting things we know we cannot change in the short run for obvious solutions like cutting class size and constructing new school buildings or providing universal preschool that we actually could put in place right now if we were so inclined.
Frequently these arguments are posed as questions that do not invite an answer because the answer seems to be decided in advance. "Can you really buy your way to better education for these children?" "Do we know enough to be quite sure that we will see an actual return on the investment that we make?" "Is it even clear that this is the right starting point to get to where we'd like to go? It doesn't always seem to work, as I am sure that you already know," or similar questions that somehow assume I will agree with those who ask them.
Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don't even send their children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than $20,000 a year. During their children's teenage years, they sometimes send them off to very fine New England schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise to more than $30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time, so they may be spending more than $60,000 on their children's education every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.
As racial isolation deepens and the inequalities of education finance remain unabated and take on new and more innovative forms, the principals of many inner-city schools are making choices that few principals in public schools that serve white children in the mainstream of the nation ever need to contemplate. Many have been dedicating vast amounts of time and effort to create an architecture of adaptive strategies that promise incremental gains within the limits inequality allows.
New vocabularies of stentorian determination, new systems of incentive, and new modes of castigation, which are termed "rewards and sanctions," have emerged. Curriculum materials that are alleged to be aligned with governmentally established goals and standards and particularly suited to what are regarded as "the special needs and learning styles" of low-income urban children have been introduced. Relentless emphasis on raising test scores, rigid policies of nonpromotion and nongraduation, a new empiricism and the imposition of unusually detailed lists of named and numbered "outcomes" for each isolated parcel of instruction, an oftentimes fanatical insistence upon uniformity of teachers in their management of time, an openly conceded emulation of the rigorous approaches of the military and a frequent use of terminology that comes out of the world of industry and commerce—these are just a few of the familiar aspects of these new adaptive strategies.
Although generically described as "school reform," most of these practices and policies are targeted primarily at poor children of color; and although most educators speak of these agendas in broad language that sounds applicable to all, it is understood that they are valued chiefly as responses to perceived catastrophe in deeply segregated and unequal schools.
"If you do what I tell you to do, how I tell you to do it, when I tell you to do it, you'll get it right," said a determined South Bronx principal observed by a reporter for the New York Times. She was laying out a memorizing rule for math to an assembly of her students. "If you don't, you'll get it wrong." This is the voice, this is the tone, this is the rhythm and didactic certitude one hears today in inner-city schools that have embraced a pedagogy of direct command and absolute control. "Taking their inspiration from the ideas of B. F. Skinner...," says the Times, proponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula articulate their aim as the establishment of "faultless communication" between "the teacher, who is the stimulus," and "the students, who respond."
The introduction of Skinnerian approaches (which are commonly employed in penal institutions and drug-rehabilitation programs), as a way of altering the attitudes and learning styles of black and Hispanic children, is provocative, and it has stirred some outcries from respected scholars. To actually go into a school where you know some of the children very, very well and see the way that these approaches can affect their daily lives and thinking processes is even more provocative.
On a chilly November day four years ago in the South Bronx, I entered P.S. 65, a school I had been visiting since 1993. There had been major changes since I'd been there last. Silent lunches had been instituted in the cafeteria, and on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days the students were obliged to sit in rows and maintain perfect silence on the floor of a small indoor room instead of going out to play. The words SUCCESS FOR ALL, the brand name of a scripted curriculum—better known by its acronym, SPA—were prominently posted at the top of the main stairway and, as I would later find, in almost every room. Also frequently displayed within the halls and classrooms were a number of administrative memos that were worded with unusual didactic absoluteness. "Authentic Writing," read a document called "Principles of Learning" that was posted in the corridor close to the principal's office, "is driven by curriculum and instruction." I didn't know what this expression meant. Like many other undefined and arbitrary phrases posted in the school, it seemed to be a dictum that invited no interrogation.
I entered the fourth grade of a teacher I will call Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-thirties who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of about a dozen teachers in the building who were sent into this school after a single summer of short-order preparation. Now in his second year, he had developed a considerable sense of confidence and held the class under a tight control.
As I found a place to sit in a far corner of the room, the teacher and his young assistant, who was in her first year as a teacher, were beginning a math lesson about building airport runways, a lesson that provided children with an opportunity for measuring perimeters. On the wall behind the teacher, in large letters, was written: "Portfolio Protocols: 1. You are responsible for the selection of [your] work that enters your portfolio. 2. As your skills become more sophisticated this year, you will want to revise, amend, supplement, and possibly replace items in your portfolio to reflect your intellectual growth." On the left side of the room: "Performance Standards Mathematics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving and Reasoning. M-6 Mathematical Skills and Tools ..."
My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children sitting to the right of me. The teacher's response to this distraction was immediate: his arm shot out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat. The young co-teacher did this, too. When they saw their teachers do this, all the children in the classroom did it, too.
"Zero noise," the teacher said, but this instruction proved to be unneeded. The strange salute the class and teachers gave each other, which turned out to be one of a number of such silent signals teachers in the school were trained to use, and children to obey, had done the job of silencing the class.
"Active listening!" said Mr. Endicott. "Heads up! Tractor beams!" which meant, "Every eye on inc."
On the front wall of the classroom, in hand-written words that must have taken Mr. Endicott long hours to transcribe, was a list of terms that could be used to praise or criticize a student's work in mathematics. At Level Four, the highest of four levels of success, a child's "problem-solving strategies" could be described, according to this list, as "systematic, complete, efficient, and possibly elegant," while the student's capability to draw conclusions from the work she had completed could be termed "insightful" or "comprehensive." At Level Two, the child's capability to draw conclusions was to be described as "logically unsound"; at Level One, "not present." Approximately 50 separate categories of proficiency, or lack of such, were detailed in this wall-sized tabulation.
A well-educated man, Mr. Endicott later spoke to me about the form of classroom management that he was using as an adaptation from a model of industrial efficiency. "It's a kind of `Taylorism' in the classroom," he explained, referring to a set of theories about the management of factory employees introduced by Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s. "Primitive utilitarianism" is another term he used when we met some months later to discuss these management techniques with other teachers from the school. His reservations were, however, not apparent in the classroom. Within the terms of what he had been asked to do, he had, indeed, become a master of control. It is one of the few classrooms I had visited up to that time in which almost nothing even hinting at spontaneous emotion in the children or the teacher surfaced while I was there.
The teacher gave the "zero noise" salute again when someone whispered to another child at his table. "In two minutes you will have a chance to talk and share this with your partner." Communication between children in the class was not prohibited but was afforded time slots and, remarkably enough, was formalized in an expression that I found included in a memo that was posted on the wall beside the door: "An opportunity . . . to engage in Accountable Talk."
Even the teacher's words of praise were framed in terms consistent with the lists that had been posted on the wall. "That's a Level Four suggestion," said the teacher when a child made an observation other teachers might have praised as simply "pretty good" or "interesting" or "mature." There was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school: "Authentic Writing," "Active Listening," "Accountable Talk." The ardor to assign all items of instruction or behavior a specific name was unsettling me. The adjectives had the odd effect of hyping every item of endeavor. "Authentic Writing" was, it seemed, a more important act than what the children in a writing class in any ordinary school might try to do. "Accountable Talk" was some thing more self-conscious and significant than merely useful conversation.
Since that day at P.S. 65, I have visited nine other schools in six different cities where the same Skinnerian curriculum is used. The signs on the walls, the silent signals, the curious salute, the same insistent naming of all cognitive particulars, became familiar as I went from one school to the next.
"Meaningful Sentences," began one of the many listings of proficiencies expected of the children in the fourth grade of an inner-city elementary school in Hartford (90 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic) that I visited a short time later. "Noteworthy Questions," "Active Listening," and other designations like these had been posted elsewhere in the room. Here, too, the teacher gave the kids her outstretched arm, with hand held up, to reestablish order when they grew a little noisy, but I noticed that she tried to soften the effect of this by opening her fingers and bending her elbow slightly so it did not look quite as forbidding as the gesture Mr. Endicott had used. A warm and interesting woman, she later told me she disliked the regimen intensely.
Over her desk, I read a "Mission Statement," which established the priorities and values for the school. Among the missions of the school, according to the printed statement, which was posted also in some other classrooms of the school, was "to develop productive citizens" who have the skills that will be needed "for successful global competition," a message that was reinforced by other posters in the room. Over the heads of a group of children at their desks, a sign anointed them BEST WORKERS OF 2002.
Another signal now was given by the teacher, this one not for silence but in order to achieve some other form of class behavior, which I could not quite identify. The students gave exactly the same signal in response. Whatever the function of this signal, it was done as I had seen it done in the South Bronx and would see it done in other schools in months to come. Suddenly, with a seeming surge of restlessness and irritation—with herself, as it appeared, and with her own effective use of all the tricks that she had learned—she turned to me and said, "I can do this with my dog."
There's something crystal clear about a number," says a top adviser to the U.S. Senate committee that has jurisdiction over public education, a point of view that is reinforced repeatedly in statements coming from the office of the U.S. education secretary and the White House. "I want to change the face of reading instruction across the United States from an art to a science," said an assistant to Rod Paige, the former education secretary, in the winter of 2002. This is a popular position among advocates for rigidly sequential systems of instruction, but the longing to turn art into science doesn't stop with reading methodologies alone. In many schools it now extends to almost every aspect of the operation of the school and of the lives that children lead within it. In some schools even such ordinary acts as children filing to lunch or recess in the hallways or the stairwells are subjected to the same determined emphasis upon empirical precision.
"Rubric For Filing" is the printed heading of a lengthy list of numbered categories by which teachers are supposed to grade their students on the way they march along the corridors in another inner-city district I have visited. Some one, in this instance, did a lot of work to fit the filing proficiencies of children into no more and no less than thirty-two specific slots:
"Line leader confidently leads the class.... Line is straight....Spacing is right.... The class is stepping together... . Everyone shows pride, their shoulders high ...no slumping," according to the strict criteria for filing at Level Four.
"Line is straight, but one or two people [are] not quite in line," according to the box for Level Three. "Line leader leads the class," and "almost everyone shows pride."
"Several are slumping.... Little pride is showing," says the box for Level Two. "Spacing is uneven.... Some are talking and whispering."
"Line leader is paying no attention," says the box for Level One. "Heads are turning every way. ...Hands are touching.... The line is not straight. ...There is no pride."
The teacher who handed me this document believed at first that it was written as a joke by someone who had simply come to he fed up with all the numbers and accounting rituals that clutter up the day in many overregulated schools. Alas, it turned out that it was no joke but had been printed in a handbook of instructions for the teachers in the city where she taught.
In some inner-city districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of elementary schools have now been overtaken by these ordering requirements. A student teacher in California, for example, wanted to bring a pumpkin to her class on Halloween but knew it had no ascertainable connection to the California standards. She therefore had developed what she called "The Multi-Modal Pumpkin Unit" to teach science (seeds), arithmetic (the size and shape of pumpkins, I believe—this detail wasn't clear), and certain items she adapted out of language arts, in order to position "pumpkins" in a frame ofstate proficiencies. Even with her multi-modal pumpkin, as her faculty adviser told me, she was still afraid she would be criticized because she knew the pumpkin would not really help her children to achieve expected goals on state exams.
Why, I asked a group of educators at a seminar in Sacramento, was a teacher being placed in a position where she'd need to do preposterous curricular gymnastics to enjoy a bit of seasonal amusement with her kids on Halloween? How much injury to state-determined "purpose" would it do to let the children of poor people have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it's something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools across most of America?
"Forcing an absurdity on teachers does teach something," said an African-American professor. "It teaches acquiescence. It breaks down the will to thumb your nose at pointless protocols to call absurdity `absurd.'" Writing out the standards with the proper numbers on the chalkboard has a similar effect, he said; and doing this is "terribly important" to the principals in many of these schools. "You have to post the standards, and the way you know the children know the standards is by asking them to state the standards. And they do it—and you want to he quite certain that they do it if you want to keep on working at that school."
In speaking of the drill-based program in effect at P.S. 65, Mr. Endicott told me he tended to be sympathetic to the school administrators, more so at least than the other teachers I had talked with seemed to he. He said he believed his principal had little choice about the implementation of this program, which had been mandated for all elementary schools in New York City that had had rock-bottom academic records over a long period of time. "This puts me into a dilemma," he went on, "because I love the kids at P.S. 65." And even while, he said, "I know that my teaching SFA is a charade ... if I don't do it I won't be permitted to teach these children."
Mr. Endicott, like all but two of the new recruits at P.S. 65—there were about fifteen in all—was a white person, as were the principal and most of the administrators at the school. As a result, most of these neophyte instructors had had little or no prior contact with the children of an inner-city neighborhood; but, like the others I met, and despite the distancing between the children and their teachers that resulted from the scripted method of instruction, he had developed close attachments to his students and did not want to abandon them. At the same time, the class- and race-specific implementation of this program obviously troubled him. "There's an expression now," he said. "'The rich get richer, and the poor get SFA."' He said he was still trying to figure out his "professional ethics" on the problem that this posed for him.
White children made up "only about one percent" of students in the New York City schools in which this scripted teaching system was imposed,2 according to the New York Times, [Fearing a Class System in the Classroom; A Strict Curriculum, but Only for Failing Schools, Mostly in Poor Areas of New York - New York Times 19jan03] which also said that "the prepackaged lessons" were intended "to ensure that all teachers—even novices or the most inept"—would be able to teach reading. As seemingly pragmatic and hardheaded as such arguments may be, they are desperation strategies that come out of the acceptance of inequity. If we did not have a deeply segregated system in which more experienced instructors teach the children of the privileged and the least experienced are sent to teach the children of minorities, these practices would not be needed and could not be so convincingly defended. They are confections of apartheid, and no matter by what arguments of urgency or practicality they have been justified, they cannot fail to further deepen the divisions of society.
2 SFA has since been discontinued in the New York City public schools, though it is still being used in 1,300 U.S. schools, serving as many as 650,000 children. Similar scripted systems are used in schools (overwhelmingly minority in population) serving several million children.
There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to be; we measure almost everything else that happens to them in their schools. Do kids who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be? You do not find the answers to these questions in reports about achievement levels, scientific methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance. Documents like these don't speak of happiness. You have to go back to the schools themselves to find an answer to these questions. You have to sit down in the little chairs in first and second grade, or on the reading rug with kindergarten kids, and listen to the things they actually say to one another and the dialogue between them and their teachers. You have to go down to the basement with the children when it's time for lunch and to the playground with them, if they have a playground, when it's time for recess, if they still have recess at their school. You have to walk into the children's bathrooms in these buildings. You have to do what children do and breathe the air the children breathe. I don't think that there is any other way to find out what the lives that children lead in school are really like.
High school students, when I first meet them, are often more reluctant than the younger children to open up and express their personal concerns; but hesitation on the part of students did not prove to be a problem when I visited a tenth-grade class at Fremont High School in Los Angeles. The students were told that I was a writer, and they took no time in getting down to matters that were on their minds.
"Can we talk about the bathrooms?" asked a soft-spoken student named Mireya.
In almost any classroom there are certain students who, by the force of their directness or the unusual sophistication of their way of speaking, tend to capture your attention from the start. Mireya later spoke insightfully about some of the serious academic problems that were common in the school, but her observations on the physical and personal embarrassments she and her schoolmates had to under go cut to the heart of questions of essential dignity that kids in squalid schools like this one have to deal with all over the nation.
Fremont High School, as court papers filed in a lawsuit against the state of California document, has fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law requires. Of the limited number of bathrooms that are working in the school, "only one or two . . . are open and unlocked for girls to use." Long lines of girls are "waiting to use the bathrooms," which are generally "unclean" and "lack basic supplies," including toilet paper. Some of the classrooms, as court papers also document, "do not have air conditioning," so that students, who attend school on a three-track schedule that runs year-round, "become red-faced and unable to concentrate" during "the extreme heat of summer." The school's maintenance records report that rats were found in eleven classrooms. Rat droppings were found "in the bins and drawers" of the high school's kitchen, and school records note that "hamburger buns" were being "eaten off [the] bread-delivery rack."
No matter how many tawdry details like these I've read in legal briefs or depositions through the years, I'm always shocked again to learn how often these unsanitary physical conditions are permitted to continue in the schools that serve our poorest students—even after they have been vividly described in the media. But hearing of these conditions in Mireya's words was even more unsettling, in part because this student seemed so fragile and because the need even to speak of these indignities in front of me and all the other students was an additional indignity.
"The problem is this," she carefully explained. "You're not allowed to use the bathroom during lunch, which is a thirty-minute period. The only time that you're allowed to use it is between your classes." But "this is a huge building," she went on. "It has long corridors. If you have one class at one end of the building and your next class happens to be way down at the other end, you don't have time to use the bathroom and still get to class before it starts. So you go to your class and then you ask permission from your teacher to go to the bathroom and the teacher tells you, `No. You had your chance between the periods ...'
"I feel embarrassed when I have to stand there and explain it to a teacher."
"This is the question," said a wiry-looking boy named Edward, leaning forward in his chair. "Students are not animals, but even animals need to relieve themselves sometimes. We're here for eight hours. What do they think we're supposed to do?"
"It humiliates you," said Mireya, who went on to make the interesting statement that "the school provides solutions that don't actually work," and this idea was taken up by several other students in describing course requirements within the school. A tall black student, for example, told me that she hoped to be a social worker or a doctor but was programmed into "Sewing Class" this year. She also had to take another course, called "Life Skills," which she told me was a very basic course—"a retarded class," to use her words—that "teaches things like the six continents," which she said she'd learned in elementary school.
When I asked her why she had to take these courses, she replied that she'd been told they were required, which as I later learned was not exactly so. What was required was that high school students take two courses in an area of study called "The Technical Arts," and which the Los Angeles Board of Education terms "Applied Technology." At schools that served the middle class or upper-middle class, this requirement was likely to be met by courses that had academic substance and, perhaps, some relevance to college preparation. At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the technical-arts requirement could be fulfilled by taking subjects like residential architecture, the designing of commercial structures, broadcast journalism, advanced computer graphics, a sophisticated course in furniture design, carving and sculpture, or an honors course in engineering research and design. At Fremont High, in contrast, this requirement was far more often met by courses that were basically vocational and also obviously keyed to low-paying levels of employment.
Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-dressing as well. When I asked her teacher why Mireya could not skip these subjects and enroll in classes that would help her to pursue her college aspirations, she replied, "It isn't a question of what students want. It's what the school may have available. If all the other elective classes that a student wants to take are full, she has to take one of these classes if she wants to graduate."
A very small girl named Obie, who had big blue-tinted glasses tilted up across her hair, interrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gusto that she'd taken hairdressing twice! When I expressed surprise that this was possible, she said there were two levels of hairdressing offered here at Fremont High. "One is in hairstyling," she said. "The other is in braiding."
Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment and then suddenly began to cry. "I don't want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I'm trying to go to college. I don't need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else."
"What would you rather take?" I asked.
"I wanted to take an AP class," she answered.
Mireya's sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys who had been silent up till now: a thin, dark-eyed student named Fortino, who had long hair down to his shoulders. He suddenly turned directly to Mireya and spoke into the silence that followed her last words.
"Listen to me," he said. "The owners of the sewing factories need laborers. Correct?"
"I guess they do," Mireya said.
"It's not going to be their own kids. Right?" "Why not?" another student said.
"So they can grow beyond themselves," Mireya answered quietly. "But we remain the same."
"You're ghetto," said Fortino, "so we send you to the factory." He sat low in his desk chair, leaning on one elbow, his voice and dark eyes loaded with a cynical intelligence. "You're ghetto—so you sew!"
"There are higher positions than these," said a student named Samantha.
"You're ghetto," said Fortino unrelentingly. "So sew!"
Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are hound to be reflected to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But, even so, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or six-year-olds, or by teenagers, for that matter, than concerns about "successful global competition." Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into "robots," found no reason to dispute the charge. "Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your home?" he asked, and "will never snatch your pocketbooks. . . . These robots are going to be producing taxes."
Corporate leaders, when they speak of education, sometimes pay lip-service to the notion of "good critical and analytic skills," but it is reasonable to ask whether they have in mind the critical analysis of their priorities. In principle, perhaps some do; but, if so, this is not a principle that seems to have been honored widely in the schools I have been visiting. In all the various business-driven inner-city classrooms I have observed in the past five years, plastered as they are with corporation brand names and managerial vocabularies, I have yet to see the two words "labor unions." Is this an oversight? How is that possible? Teachers and principals themselves, who are almost always members of a union, seem to be so beaten down that they rarely even question this omission.
It is not at all unusual these days to come into an urban school in which the principal prefers to call himself or herself "building CEO" or "building manager." In some of the same schools teachers are described as "classroom managers."3 I have never been in a suburban district in which principals were asked to view themselves or teachers in this way. These terminologies remind us of how wide the distance has become between two very separate worlds of education.
It has been more than a decade now since drill-based literacy methods like Success For All began to proliferate in our urban schools. It has been three and a half years since the systems of assessment that determine the effectiveness of these and similar practices were codified in the federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, that President Bush signed into law in 2002. Since the enactment of this bill, the number of standardized exams children must take has more than doubled. It will probably increase again after the year 2006, when standardized tests, which are now required in grades three through eight, may be required in Head Start programs and, as President Bush has now proposed, in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades as well.
3 A school I visited three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, was littered with "Help Wanted" signs. Starting in kindergarten, children in the school were being asked to think about the jobs that they might choose when they grew up. In one classroom there was a poster that displayed the names of several retail stores: J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and a few others. "It's like working in a store," a classroom aide explained. "The children are learning to pretend they're cashiers." At another school in the same district, children were encouraged to apply for jobs in their classrooms. Among the job positions open to the children in this school, there was an "Absence Manager" and a "Behavior Chart Manager," a "Form Collector Manager," a "Paper Passer Outer Manager," a "Paper Collecting Manager," a "Paper Returning Manager," an "Exit Ticket Manager," even a "Learning Manager," a "Reading Corner Manager," and a "Score Keeper Manager." I asked the principal if there was a special reason why those two words "management" and "manager" kept popping up throughout the school. "We want every child to be working as a manager while he or she is in this school," the principal explained. "We want to make them understand that, in this country, companies will give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself, no matter what you've done." I wasn't sure what she meant by "no matter what you've done," and asked her if she could explain it. "Even if you have a felony arrest," she said, "we want you to understand that you can be a manager someday."
The elements of strict accountability, in short, are solidly in place; and in many states where the present federal policies are simply reinforcements of accountability requirements that were established long before the passage of the federal law, the same regimen has been in place since 1995 or even earlier. The "tests-and-standards" partisans have had things very much their way for an extended period of time, and those who were convinced that they had ascertained "what works" in schools that serve minorities and children of the poor have had ample opportunity to prove that they were right.
What, then, it is reasonable to ask, are the results?
The achievement gap between black and white children, which narrowed for three decades up until the late years of the 1980s—the period in which school segregation steadily decreased—started to widen once more in the early 1990s when the federal courts began the process of resegregation by dismantling the mandates of the Brown decision. From that point on, the gap continued to widen or remained essentially unchanged; and while recently there has been a modest narrowing of the gap in reading scores for fourth-grade children, the gap in secondary school remains as wide as ever.
The media inevitably celebrate the periodic upticks that a set of scores may seem to indicate in one year or another in achievement levels of black and Hispanic children in their elementary schools. But if these upticks were not merely temporary "testing gains" achieved by test-prep regimens and were instead authentic education gains, they would carry over into middle school and high school. Children who know how to read—and read with comprehension—do not suddenly become nonreaders and hopelessly disabled writers when they enter secondary school. False gains evaporate; real gains endure. Yet hundreds of thousands of the inner-city children who have made what many districts claim to be dramatic gains in elementary school, and whose principals and teachers have adjusted almost every aspect of their school days and school calendars, forfeiting recess, canceling or cutting back on all the so-called frills (art, music, even social sciences) in order to comply with state demands those students, now in secondary school, are sitting in subject-matter classes where they cannot comprehend the texts and cannot set down their ideas in the kind of sentences expected of most fourth- and fifth-grade students in the suburbs. Students in this painful situation, not surprisingly, tend to be most likely to drop out of school.
In 48 percent of high schools in the nation's 100 largest districts, which are those in which the highest concentrations of black and Hispanic students tend to be enrolled, less than half the entering ninth-graders graduate in four years. Nationwide, from 1993 to 2002, the number of high schools graduating less than half their ninth-grade class in four years has increased by 75 percent. In the 94 percent of districts in New York State where white children make up the majority, nearly 80 percent of students graduate from high school in four years. In the 6 percent of districts where black and Hispanic students make up the majority, only 40 percent do so. There are 120 high schools in New York, enrolling nearly 200,000 minority students, where less than 60 percent of entering ninth-graders even make it to twelfth grade.
The promulgation of new and expanded inventories of "what works," no matter the enthusiasm with which they're elaborated, is not going to change this. The use of hortatory slogans chanted by the students in our segregated schools is not going to change this. Desperate historical revisionism that romanticizes the segregation of an older order (this is a common theme of many separatists today) is not going to change this. Skinnerian instructional approaches, which decapitate a child's capability for critical reflection, are not going to change this. Posters about "global competition" will certainly not change this. Turning six-year-olds into examination soldiers and denying eight-year-olds their time for play at recess will not change this.
"I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations," said President Bush in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. "It's working. It's making a difference." Here we have one of those deadly lies that by sheer repetition is at length accepted by surprisingly large numbers of Americans. But it is not the truth; and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor, and if it is not forcefully resisted it will lead us further in a very dangerous direction.
Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the labyrinthine intertwining of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take to change this. If it takes people marching in the streets and other forms of adamant disruption of the governing civilities, if it takes more than litigation, more than legislation, and much more than resolutions introduced by members of Congress, these are prices we should be prepared to pay. "We do not have the things you have," Alliyah told me when she wrote to ask if I would come and visit her school in the South Bronx. "Can you help us?" America owes that little girl and millions like her a more honorable answer than they have received.
Jonathan Kozol is the author of many books, including Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace. This article was adapted from The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, to be published this month by Crown.
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JONATHAN KOZOL / Harper's Magazine v.311, n.1864 1sep2005
Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.
In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.
Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S. Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were white.
A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. "I've been at this school for eighteen years," she said. "This is the first white student I have ever taught."
One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. It is even more disheartening when schools like these are not in deeply segregated inner-city neighborhoods but in racially mixed areas where the integration of a public school would seem to be most natural, and where, indeed, it takes a conscious effort on the part of parents or school officials in these districts to avoid the integration option that is often right at their front door.
In a Seattle neighborhood that I visited in 2002, for instance, where approximately half the families were Caucasian, 95 percent of students at the Thurgood Marshall Elementary School were black, Hispanic, Native American, or of Asian origin. An African-American teacher at the school told me—not with bitterness but wistfully—of seeing clusters of white parents and their children each morning on the corner of a street close to the school, waiting for a bus that took the children to a predominantly white school.
"At Thurgood Marshall," according to a big wall poster in the school's lobby, "the dream is alive." But school-assignment practices and federal court decisions that have countermanded long-established policies that previously fostered integration in Seattle's schools make the realization of the dream identified with Justice Marshall all but unattainable today. In San Diego there is a school that bears the name of Rosa Parks in which 86 percent of students are black and Hispanic and only some 2 percent are white. In Los Angeles there is a school that bears the name of Dr. King that is 99 percent black and Hispanic, and another in Milwaukee in which black and Hispanic children also make up 99 percent of the enrollment. There is a high school in Cleveland that is named for Dr. King in which black students make up 97 percent of the student body, and the graduation rate is only 35 percent. In Philadelphia, 98 percent of children at a high school named for Dr. King are black. At a middle school named for Dr. King in Boston, black and Hispanic children make up 98 percent of the enrollment.
In New York City there is a primary school named for Langston Hughes (99 percent black and Hispanic), a middle school named for Jackie Robinson (96 percent black and Hispanic), and a high school named for Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the great heroes of the integration movement in the South, in which 98 percent of students are black or Hispanic. In Harlem there is yet another segregated Thurgood Marshall School (also 98 percent black and Hispanic), and in the South Bronx dozens of children I have known went to a segregated middle school named in honor of Paul Robeson in which less than half of one percent of the enrollment was Caucasian.
There is a well-known high school named for Martin Luther King Jr. in New York City too. This school, which I've visited repeatedly in recent years, is located in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood, where it was built in the belief—or hope—that it would draw large numbers of white students by permitting them to walk to school, while only their black and Hispanic classmates would be asked to ride the bus or come by train. When the school was opened in 1975, less than a block from Lincoln Center in Manhattan, "it was seen," according to the New York Times, "as a promising effort to integrate white, black and Hispanic students in a thriving neighborhood that held one of the city's cultural gems." Even from the start, however, parents in the neighborhood showed great reluctance to permit their children to enroll at Martin Luther King, and, despite "its prime location and its name, which itself creates the highest of expectations," notes the Times, the school before long came to be a destination for black and Hispanic students who could not obtain admission into more successful schools. It stands today as one of the nation's most visible and problematic symbols of an expectation rapidly receding and a legacy substantially betrayed.
Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation fifty years before—and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly agreed-upon convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor like "racial segregation" in a narrative description of a segregated school. Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults, and surrogate vocabularies are repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as 3 or 4 percent of students may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for instance—and where every other child in the building is black or Hispanic—are referred to as "diverse." Visitors to schools like these discover quickly the eviscerated meaning of the word, which is no longer a proper adjective but a euphemism for a plainer word that has apparently become unspeakable.
School systems themselves repeatedly employ this euphemism in describing the composition of their student populations. In a school I visited in the fall of 2004 in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, a document distributed to visitors reports that the school's curriculum "addresses the needs of children from diverse backgrounds." But as I went from class to class, I did not encounter any children who were white or Asian—or Hispanic, for that matter—and when I was later provided with precise statistics for the demographics of the school, I learned that 99.6 percent of students there were African American. In a similar document, the school board of another district, this one in New York State, referred to "the diversity" of its student population and "the rich variations of ethnic backgrounds." But when I looked at the racial numbers that the district had reported to the state, I learned that there were 2,800 black and Hispanic children in the system, 1 Asian child, and 3 whites. Words, in these cases, cease to have real meaning; or, rather, they mean the opposite of what they say.
High school students whom I talk with in deeply segregated neighborhoods and public schools seem far less circumspect than their elders and far more open in their willingness to confront these issues. "It's more like being hidden," said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel* I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools. "It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."
* The names of children mentioned in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.
I asked her if she thought America truly did not "have room" for her or other children of her race. "Think of it this way," said a sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside her. "If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?"
"How do you think they'd feel?" I asked.
"I think they'd he relieved," this very solemn girl replied.
Many educators make the argument today that given the demographics of large cities like New York and their suburban areas, our only realistic goal should be the nurturing of strong, empowered, and well-funded schools in segregated neighborhoods. Black school officials in these situations have sometimes conveyed to me a bitter and clear-sighted recognition that they're being asked, essentially, to mediate and render functional an uncontested separation between children of their race and children of white people living sometimes in a distant section of their town and sometimes in almost their own immediate communities. Implicit in this mediation is a willingness to set aside the promises of Brown and—though never stating this or even thinking of it clearly in these terms—to settle for the promise made more than a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in which "separate but equal" was accepted as a tolerable rationale for the perpetuation of a dual system in American society.
Equality itself—equality alone—is now, it seems, the article of faith to which most of the principals of inner-city public schools subscribe. And some who are perhaps most realistic do not even dare to ask for, or expect, complete equality, which seems beyond the realm of probability for many years to come, but look instead for only a sufficiency of means—"adequacy" is the legal term most often used today—by which to win those practical and finite victories that appear to be within their reach. Higher standards, higher expectations, are repeatedly demanded of these urban principals, and of the teachers and students in their schools, but far lower standards—certainly in ethical respects—appear to be expected of the dominant society that isolates these children in unequal institutions.
Dear Mr. Kozol," wrote the eight-year-old, "we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks.
You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?"
The letter, from a child named Alliyah, came in a flit envelope of twenty-seven letters from a class of third-grade children in the Bronx. Other letters that the students in Alliyah's classroom sent me registered some of the same complaints. "We don't have no gardens," "no Music or Art," and "no fun places to play," one child said. "Is there a way to fix this Problem?" Another noted a concern one hears from many children in such overcrowded schools: "We have a gym but it is for lining up. I think it is not fair." Yet another of Alliyah's classmates asked me, with a sweet misspelling, if I knew the way to make her school into a "good" school—"like the other kings have"—and ended with the hope that I would do my best to make it possible for "all the kings" to have good schools.
The letter that affected me the most, however, had been written by a child named Elizabeth. "It is not fair that other kids have a garden and new things. But we don't have that," said Elizabeth. "I wish that this school was the most beautiful school in the whole why world."
"The whole why world" stayed in my thoughts for days. When I later met Elizabeth, I brought her letter with me, thinking I might see whether, in reading it aloud, she'd change the "why" to "wide" or leave it as it was. My visit to her class, however, proved to he so pleasant, and the children seemed so eager to bombard me with their questions about where I lived, and why I lived there rather than in New York, and who I lived with, and how many dogs I had, and other interesting questions of that sort, that I decided not to interrupt the nice reception they had given me with questions about usages and spelling. I left "the whole why world" to float around unedited and unrevised in my mind. The letter itself soon found a resting place on the wall above my desk.
In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many other schools in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx as well. I had made repeated visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In one makeshift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a funeral establishment in yet another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of the Bronx, class size rose to thirty-four and more; four kindergarten classes and a sixth-grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows. The air was stifling in many rooms, and the children had no place for recess because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym.
In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. "This," he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, "would not happen to white children." Libraries, once one of the glories of the New York City school system, were either nonexistent or, at best, vestigial in large numbers of the elementary schools. Art and music programs had also for the most part disappeared. "When I began to teach in 1969," the principal of an elementary school in the South Bronx reported to me, "every school had a full-time licensed art and music teacher and librarian." During the subsequent decades, he recalled, "I saw all of that destroyed."
School physicians also were removed from elementary schools during these years. In 1970, when substantial numbers of white children still attended New York City's public schools, 400 doctors had been present to address the health needs of the children. By 1993 the number of doctors had been cut to 23, most of them part-time—a cutback that affected most severely children in the city's poorest neighborhoods, where medical facilities were most deficient and health problems faced by children most extreme. Teachers told me of asthmatic children who came into class with chronic wheezing and who at any moment of the day might undergo more serious attacks, but in the schools I visited there were no doctors to attend to them.
In explaining these steep declines in services, political leaders in New York tended to point to shifting economic factors, like a serious budget crisis in the middle 1970s, rather than to the changing racial demographics of the student population. But the fact of economic ups and downs from year to year, or from one decade to the next, could not convincingly explain the permanent shortchanging of the city's students, which took place routinely in good economic times and bad. The bad times were seized upon politically to justify the cuts, and the money was never restored once the crisis years were past.
"If you close your eyes to the changing racial composition of the schools and look only at budget actions and political events," says Noreen Connell, the director of the nonprofit Educational Priorities Panel in New York, "you're missing the assumptions that are underlying these decisions." When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, "the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who just don't count—children we don't value."
This, then, is the accusation that Alliyah and her classmates send our way: "You have ... We do not have." Are they right or are they wrong? Is this a case of naive and simplistic juvenile exaggeration? What does a third-grader know about these big-time questions of fairness and justice? Physical appearances apart, how in any case do you begin to measure something so diffuse and vast and seemingly abstract as having more, or having less, or not having at all?
Around the time I met Alliyah in the school year 1997-1998, New York's Board of Education spent about $8,000 yearly on the education of a third-grade child in a New York City public school. If you could have scooped Alliyah up out of the neighborhood where she was born and plunked her down in a fairly typical white suburb of New York,she would have received a public education worth about $12,000 a year. If you were to lift her up once more and set her down in one of the wealthiest white suburbs of New York, she would have received as much as $18,000 worth of public education every year and would likely have had a third-grade teacher paid approximately $30,000 more than her teacher in the Bronx was paid.
The dollars on both sides of the equation have increased since then, but the discrepancies between them have remained. The present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island. The present New York City level is, indeed, almost exactly what Manhasset spent per pupil eighteen years ago, in 1987, when that sum of money bought a great deal more in services and salaries than it can buy today. In dollars adjusted for inflation, New York City has not yet caught up to where its wealthiest suburbs were a quarter-century ago.
Gross discrepancies in teacher salaries between the city and its affluent white suburbs have remained persistent as well. In 1997 the median salary for teachers in Alliyah's neighborhood was $43,000, as compared with $74,000 in suburban Rye, $77,000 in Manhasset, and $81,000 in the town of Scarsdale, which is only about eleven miles from Alliyah's school. Five years later, in 2002, salary scales for New York City's teachers rose to levels that approximated those within the lower-spending districts in the suburbs, but salary scales do not reflect the actual salaries that teachers typically receive, which are dependent upon years of service and advanced degrees. Salaries for first-year teachers in the city were higher than they'd been four years before, but the differences in median pay between the city and its upper-middle-income suburbs had remained extreme. The overall figure for New York City in 2002-2003 was $53,000, while it had climbed to $87,000 in Manhasset and exceeded $95,000 in Scarsdale.
There are expensive children and there are cheap children," writes Marina Warner, an essayist and novelist who has written many books for children, "just as there are expensive women and cheap women." The governmentally administered diminishment in value of the children of the poor begins even before the age of five or six, when they begin their years of formal education in the public schools. It starts during
their infant and toddler years, when hundreds of thousands of children of the very poor in much of the United States are locked out of the opportunity for preschool education for no reason but the accident of birth and budgetary choices of the government, while children of the privileged are often given veritable feasts of rich developmental early education.
In New York City, for example, affluent parents pay surprisingly large sums of money to enroll their youngsters, beginning at the age of two or three, in extraordinary early-education programs that give them social competence and rudimentary pedagogic skills unknown to children of the same age in the city's poorer neighborhoods. The most exclusive of the private preschools in New York, which are known to those who can afford them as "Baby Ivies," cost as much as $24,000 for a full-day program. Competition for admission to these pre-K schools is so extreme that private counselors are frequently retained, at fees as high as $300 an hour, to guide the parents through the application process.
At the opposite extreme along the economic spectrum in New York are thousands of children who receive no preschool opportunity at all. Exactly how many thousands are denied this opportunity in New York City and in other major cities is almost impossible to know. Numbers that originate in governmental agencies in many states are incomplete and imprecise and do not always differentiate with clarity between authentic pre-K programs that have educative and developmental substance and those less expensive child-care arrangements that do not. But even where states do compile numbers that refer specifically to educative preschool programs, it is difficult to know how many of the children who are served are of low income, since admissions to some of the state-supported programs aren't determined by low income or they are determined by a complicated set of factors of which poverty is only one.
There are remarkable exceptions to this pattern in some sections of the nation. In Milwaukee, for example, virtually every four-year-old is now enrolled in a preliminary kindergarten program, which amounts to a full year of preschool education, prior to a second kindergarten year for five-year-olds. More commonly in urban neighborhoods, large numbers of low-income children are denied these opportunities and come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in class activities and without even such very modest early-learning skills as knowing how to hold a crayon or a pencil, identify perhaps a couple of shapes and colors, or recognize that printed pages go from left to right.
Three years later, in third grade, these children are introduced to what are known as "high-stakes tests," which in many urban systems now determine whether students can or cannot be promoted. Children who have been in programs like those offered by the "Baby Ivies" since the age of two have, by now, received the benefits of six or seven years of education, nearly twice as many as the children who have been denied these opportunities; yet all are required to take, and will be measured by, the same examinations. Which of these children will receive the highest scores? The ones who spent the years from two to four in lovely little Montessori programs and in other pastel-painted settings in which tender and attentive and well-trained instructors read to them from beautiful storybooks and introduced them very gently for the first time to the world of numbers and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and varieties of solid objects, and perhaps taught them to sort things into groups or to arrange them in a sequence, or to do those many other interesting things that early childhood specialists refer to as prenumeracy skills? Or the ones who spent those years at home in front of a TV or sitting by the window of a slum apartment gazing down into the street? There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.
Perhaps in order to deflect these recognitions, or to soften them somewhat, many people, even while they do nor doubt the benefit of making very large investments in the education of their own children, somehow—paradoxical as it may seem—appear to be attracted to the argument that money may not really matter that much at all. No matter with what regularity such doubts about the worth of spending money on a child's education are advanced, it is obvious that those who have the money, and who spend it lavishly to benefit their own kids, do not do it for no reason. Yet shockingly large numbers of well-educated and sophisticated people whom I talk with nowadays dismiss such challenges with a surprising ease. "Is the answer really to throw money into these dysfunctional and failing schools?" I'm often asked. "Don't we have some better ways to make them `work'?" The question is posed in a variety of forms. "Yes, of course, it's not a perfectly fair system as it stands. But money alone is surely not the sole response. The values of the parents and the kids themselves must have a role in this as well you know, housing, health conditions, social factors." "Other factors"—a term of overall reprieve one often hears—"have got to be considered, too." These latter points are obviously true but always seem to have the odd effect of substituting things we know we cannot change in the short run for obvious solutions like cutting class size and constructing new school buildings or providing universal preschool that we actually could put in place right now if we were so inclined.
Frequently these arguments are posed as questions that do not invite an answer because the answer seems to be decided in advance. "Can you really buy your way to better education for these children?" "Do we know enough to be quite sure that we will see an actual return on the investment that we make?" "Is it even clear that this is the right starting point to get to where we'd like to go? It doesn't always seem to work, as I am sure that you already know," or similar questions that somehow assume I will agree with those who ask them.
Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don't even send their children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than $20,000 a year. During their children's teenage years, they sometimes send them off to very fine New England schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise to more than $30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time, so they may be spending more than $60,000 on their children's education every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.
As racial isolation deepens and the inequalities of education finance remain unabated and take on new and more innovative forms, the principals of many inner-city schools are making choices that few principals in public schools that serve white children in the mainstream of the nation ever need to contemplate. Many have been dedicating vast amounts of time and effort to create an architecture of adaptive strategies that promise incremental gains within the limits inequality allows.
New vocabularies of stentorian determination, new systems of incentive, and new modes of castigation, which are termed "rewards and sanctions," have emerged. Curriculum materials that are alleged to be aligned with governmentally established goals and standards and particularly suited to what are regarded as "the special needs and learning styles" of low-income urban children have been introduced. Relentless emphasis on raising test scores, rigid policies of nonpromotion and nongraduation, a new empiricism and the imposition of unusually detailed lists of named and numbered "outcomes" for each isolated parcel of instruction, an oftentimes fanatical insistence upon uniformity of teachers in their management of time, an openly conceded emulation of the rigorous approaches of the military and a frequent use of terminology that comes out of the world of industry and commerce—these are just a few of the familiar aspects of these new adaptive strategies.
Although generically described as "school reform," most of these practices and policies are targeted primarily at poor children of color; and although most educators speak of these agendas in broad language that sounds applicable to all, it is understood that they are valued chiefly as responses to perceived catastrophe in deeply segregated and unequal schools.
"If you do what I tell you to do, how I tell you to do it, when I tell you to do it, you'll get it right," said a determined South Bronx principal observed by a reporter for the New York Times. She was laying out a memorizing rule for math to an assembly of her students. "If you don't, you'll get it wrong." This is the voice, this is the tone, this is the rhythm and didactic certitude one hears today in inner-city schools that have embraced a pedagogy of direct command and absolute control. "Taking their inspiration from the ideas of B. F. Skinner...," says the Times, proponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula articulate their aim as the establishment of "faultless communication" between "the teacher, who is the stimulus," and "the students, who respond."
The introduction of Skinnerian approaches (which are commonly employed in penal institutions and drug-rehabilitation programs), as a way of altering the attitudes and learning styles of black and Hispanic children, is provocative, and it has stirred some outcries from respected scholars. To actually go into a school where you know some of the children very, very well and see the way that these approaches can affect their daily lives and thinking processes is even more provocative.
On a chilly November day four years ago in the South Bronx, I entered P.S. 65, a school I had been visiting since 1993. There had been major changes since I'd been there last. Silent lunches had been instituted in the cafeteria, and on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days the students were obliged to sit in rows and maintain perfect silence on the floor of a small indoor room instead of going out to play. The words SUCCESS FOR ALL, the brand name of a scripted curriculum—better known by its acronym, SPA—were prominently posted at the top of the main stairway and, as I would later find, in almost every room. Also frequently displayed within the halls and classrooms were a number of administrative memos that were worded with unusual didactic absoluteness. "Authentic Writing," read a document called "Principles of Learning" that was posted in the corridor close to the principal's office, "is driven by curriculum and instruction." I didn't know what this expression meant. Like many other undefined and arbitrary phrases posted in the school, it seemed to be a dictum that invited no interrogation.
I entered the fourth grade of a teacher I will call Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-thirties who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of about a dozen teachers in the building who were sent into this school after a single summer of short-order preparation. Now in his second year, he had developed a considerable sense of confidence and held the class under a tight control.
As I found a place to sit in a far corner of the room, the teacher and his young assistant, who was in her first year as a teacher, were beginning a math lesson about building airport runways, a lesson that provided children with an opportunity for measuring perimeters. On the wall behind the teacher, in large letters, was written: "Portfolio Protocols: 1. You are responsible for the selection of [your] work that enters your portfolio. 2. As your skills become more sophisticated this year, you will want to revise, amend, supplement, and possibly replace items in your portfolio to reflect your intellectual growth." On the left side of the room: "Performance Standards Mathematics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving and Reasoning. M-6 Mathematical Skills and Tools ..."
My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children sitting to the right of me. The teacher's response to this distraction was immediate: his arm shot out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat. The young co-teacher did this, too. When they saw their teachers do this, all the children in the classroom did it, too.
"Zero noise," the teacher said, but this instruction proved to be unneeded. The strange salute the class and teachers gave each other, which turned out to be one of a number of such silent signals teachers in the school were trained to use, and children to obey, had done the job of silencing the class.
"Active listening!" said Mr. Endicott. "Heads up! Tractor beams!" which meant, "Every eye on inc."
On the front wall of the classroom, in hand-written words that must have taken Mr. Endicott long hours to transcribe, was a list of terms that could be used to praise or criticize a student's work in mathematics. At Level Four, the highest of four levels of success, a child's "problem-solving strategies" could be described, according to this list, as "systematic, complete, efficient, and possibly elegant," while the student's capability to draw conclusions from the work she had completed could be termed "insightful" or "comprehensive." At Level Two, the child's capability to draw conclusions was to be described as "logically unsound"; at Level One, "not present." Approximately 50 separate categories of proficiency, or lack of such, were detailed in this wall-sized tabulation.
A well-educated man, Mr. Endicott later spoke to me about the form of classroom management that he was using as an adaptation from a model of industrial efficiency. "It's a kind of `Taylorism' in the classroom," he explained, referring to a set of theories about the management of factory employees introduced by Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s. "Primitive utilitarianism" is another term he used when we met some months later to discuss these management techniques with other teachers from the school. His reservations were, however, not apparent in the classroom. Within the terms of what he had been asked to do, he had, indeed, become a master of control. It is one of the few classrooms I had visited up to that time in which almost nothing even hinting at spontaneous emotion in the children or the teacher surfaced while I was there.
The teacher gave the "zero noise" salute again when someone whispered to another child at his table. "In two minutes you will have a chance to talk and share this with your partner." Communication between children in the class was not prohibited but was afforded time slots and, remarkably enough, was formalized in an expression that I found included in a memo that was posted on the wall beside the door: "An opportunity . . . to engage in Accountable Talk."
Even the teacher's words of praise were framed in terms consistent with the lists that had been posted on the wall. "That's a Level Four suggestion," said the teacher when a child made an observation other teachers might have praised as simply "pretty good" or "interesting" or "mature." There was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school: "Authentic Writing," "Active Listening," "Accountable Talk." The ardor to assign all items of instruction or behavior a specific name was unsettling me. The adjectives had the odd effect of hyping every item of endeavor. "Authentic Writing" was, it seemed, a more important act than what the children in a writing class in any ordinary school might try to do. "Accountable Talk" was some thing more self-conscious and significant than merely useful conversation.
Since that day at P.S. 65, I have visited nine other schools in six different cities where the same Skinnerian curriculum is used. The signs on the walls, the silent signals, the curious salute, the same insistent naming of all cognitive particulars, became familiar as I went from one school to the next.
"Meaningful Sentences," began one of the many listings of proficiencies expected of the children in the fourth grade of an inner-city elementary school in Hartford (90 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic) that I visited a short time later. "Noteworthy Questions," "Active Listening," and other designations like these had been posted elsewhere in the room. Here, too, the teacher gave the kids her outstretched arm, with hand held up, to reestablish order when they grew a little noisy, but I noticed that she tried to soften the effect of this by opening her fingers and bending her elbow slightly so it did not look quite as forbidding as the gesture Mr. Endicott had used. A warm and interesting woman, she later told me she disliked the regimen intensely.
Over her desk, I read a "Mission Statement," which established the priorities and values for the school. Among the missions of the school, according to the printed statement, which was posted also in some other classrooms of the school, was "to develop productive citizens" who have the skills that will be needed "for successful global competition," a message that was reinforced by other posters in the room. Over the heads of a group of children at their desks, a sign anointed them BEST WORKERS OF 2002.
Another signal now was given by the teacher, this one not for silence but in order to achieve some other form of class behavior, which I could not quite identify. The students gave exactly the same signal in response. Whatever the function of this signal, it was done as I had seen it done in the South Bronx and would see it done in other schools in months to come. Suddenly, with a seeming surge of restlessness and irritation—with herself, as it appeared, and with her own effective use of all the tricks that she had learned—she turned to me and said, "I can do this with my dog."
There's something crystal clear about a number," says a top adviser to the U.S. Senate committee that has jurisdiction over public education, a point of view that is reinforced repeatedly in statements coming from the office of the U.S. education secretary and the White House. "I want to change the face of reading instruction across the United States from an art to a science," said an assistant to Rod Paige, the former education secretary, in the winter of 2002. This is a popular position among advocates for rigidly sequential systems of instruction, but the longing to turn art into science doesn't stop with reading methodologies alone. In many schools it now extends to almost every aspect of the operation of the school and of the lives that children lead within it. In some schools even such ordinary acts as children filing to lunch or recess in the hallways or the stairwells are subjected to the same determined emphasis upon empirical precision.
"Rubric For Filing" is the printed heading of a lengthy list of numbered categories by which teachers are supposed to grade their students on the way they march along the corridors in another inner-city district I have visited. Some one, in this instance, did a lot of work to fit the filing proficiencies of children into no more and no less than thirty-two specific slots:
"Line leader confidently leads the class.... Line is straight....Spacing is right.... The class is stepping together... . Everyone shows pride, their shoulders high ...no slumping," according to the strict criteria for filing at Level Four.
"Line is straight, but one or two people [are] not quite in line," according to the box for Level Three. "Line leader leads the class," and "almost everyone shows pride."
"Several are slumping.... Little pride is showing," says the box for Level Two. "Spacing is uneven.... Some are talking and whispering."
"Line leader is paying no attention," says the box for Level One. "Heads are turning every way. ...Hands are touching.... The line is not straight. ...There is no pride."
The teacher who handed me this document believed at first that it was written as a joke by someone who had simply come to he fed up with all the numbers and accounting rituals that clutter up the day in many overregulated schools. Alas, it turned out that it was no joke but had been printed in a handbook of instructions for the teachers in the city where she taught.
In some inner-city districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of elementary schools have now been overtaken by these ordering requirements. A student teacher in California, for example, wanted to bring a pumpkin to her class on Halloween but knew it had no ascertainable connection to the California standards. She therefore had developed what she called "The Multi-Modal Pumpkin Unit" to teach science (seeds), arithmetic (the size and shape of pumpkins, I believe—this detail wasn't clear), and certain items she adapted out of language arts, in order to position "pumpkins" in a frame ofstate proficiencies. Even with her multi-modal pumpkin, as her faculty adviser told me, she was still afraid she would be criticized because she knew the pumpkin would not really help her children to achieve expected goals on state exams.
Why, I asked a group of educators at a seminar in Sacramento, was a teacher being placed in a position where she'd need to do preposterous curricular gymnastics to enjoy a bit of seasonal amusement with her kids on Halloween? How much injury to state-determined "purpose" would it do to let the children of poor people have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it's something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools across most of America?
"Forcing an absurdity on teachers does teach something," said an African-American professor. "It teaches acquiescence. It breaks down the will to thumb your nose at pointless protocols to call absurdity `absurd.'" Writing out the standards with the proper numbers on the chalkboard has a similar effect, he said; and doing this is "terribly important" to the principals in many of these schools. "You have to post the standards, and the way you know the children know the standards is by asking them to state the standards. And they do it—and you want to he quite certain that they do it if you want to keep on working at that school."
In speaking of the drill-based program in effect at P.S. 65, Mr. Endicott told me he tended to be sympathetic to the school administrators, more so at least than the other teachers I had talked with seemed to he. He said he believed his principal had little choice about the implementation of this program, which had been mandated for all elementary schools in New York City that had had rock-bottom academic records over a long period of time. "This puts me into a dilemma," he went on, "because I love the kids at P.S. 65." And even while, he said, "I know that my teaching SFA is a charade ... if I don't do it I won't be permitted to teach these children."
Mr. Endicott, like all but two of the new recruits at P.S. 65—there were about fifteen in all—was a white person, as were the principal and most of the administrators at the school. As a result, most of these neophyte instructors had had little or no prior contact with the children of an inner-city neighborhood; but, like the others I met, and despite the distancing between the children and their teachers that resulted from the scripted method of instruction, he had developed close attachments to his students and did not want to abandon them. At the same time, the class- and race-specific implementation of this program obviously troubled him. "There's an expression now," he said. "'The rich get richer, and the poor get SFA."' He said he was still trying to figure out his "professional ethics" on the problem that this posed for him.
White children made up "only about one percent" of students in the New York City schools in which this scripted teaching system was imposed,2 according to the New York Times, [Fearing a Class System in the Classroom; A Strict Curriculum, but Only for Failing Schools, Mostly in Poor Areas of New York - New York Times 19jan03] which also said that "the prepackaged lessons" were intended "to ensure that all teachers—even novices or the most inept"—would be able to teach reading. As seemingly pragmatic and hardheaded as such arguments may be, they are desperation strategies that come out of the acceptance of inequity. If we did not have a deeply segregated system in which more experienced instructors teach the children of the privileged and the least experienced are sent to teach the children of minorities, these practices would not be needed and could not be so convincingly defended. They are confections of apartheid, and no matter by what arguments of urgency or practicality they have been justified, they cannot fail to further deepen the divisions of society.
2 SFA has since been discontinued in the New York City public schools, though it is still being used in 1,300 U.S. schools, serving as many as 650,000 children. Similar scripted systems are used in schools (overwhelmingly minority in population) serving several million children.
There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to be; we measure almost everything else that happens to them in their schools. Do kids who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be? You do not find the answers to these questions in reports about achievement levels, scientific methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance. Documents like these don't speak of happiness. You have to go back to the schools themselves to find an answer to these questions. You have to sit down in the little chairs in first and second grade, or on the reading rug with kindergarten kids, and listen to the things they actually say to one another and the dialogue between them and their teachers. You have to go down to the basement with the children when it's time for lunch and to the playground with them, if they have a playground, when it's time for recess, if they still have recess at their school. You have to walk into the children's bathrooms in these buildings. You have to do what children do and breathe the air the children breathe. I don't think that there is any other way to find out what the lives that children lead in school are really like.
High school students, when I first meet them, are often more reluctant than the younger children to open up and express their personal concerns; but hesitation on the part of students did not prove to be a problem when I visited a tenth-grade class at Fremont High School in Los Angeles. The students were told that I was a writer, and they took no time in getting down to matters that were on their minds.
"Can we talk about the bathrooms?" asked a soft-spoken student named Mireya.
In almost any classroom there are certain students who, by the force of their directness or the unusual sophistication of their way of speaking, tend to capture your attention from the start. Mireya later spoke insightfully about some of the serious academic problems that were common in the school, but her observations on the physical and personal embarrassments she and her schoolmates had to under go cut to the heart of questions of essential dignity that kids in squalid schools like this one have to deal with all over the nation.
Fremont High School, as court papers filed in a lawsuit against the state of California document, has fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law requires. Of the limited number of bathrooms that are working in the school, "only one or two . . . are open and unlocked for girls to use." Long lines of girls are "waiting to use the bathrooms," which are generally "unclean" and "lack basic supplies," including toilet paper. Some of the classrooms, as court papers also document, "do not have air conditioning," so that students, who attend school on a three-track schedule that runs year-round, "become red-faced and unable to concentrate" during "the extreme heat of summer." The school's maintenance records report that rats were found in eleven classrooms. Rat droppings were found "in the bins and drawers" of the high school's kitchen, and school records note that "hamburger buns" were being "eaten off [the] bread-delivery rack."
No matter how many tawdry details like these I've read in legal briefs or depositions through the years, I'm always shocked again to learn how often these unsanitary physical conditions are permitted to continue in the schools that serve our poorest students—even after they have been vividly described in the media. But hearing of these conditions in Mireya's words was even more unsettling, in part because this student seemed so fragile and because the need even to speak of these indignities in front of me and all the other students was an additional indignity.
"The problem is this," she carefully explained. "You're not allowed to use the bathroom during lunch, which is a thirty-minute period. The only time that you're allowed to use it is between your classes." But "this is a huge building," she went on. "It has long corridors. If you have one class at one end of the building and your next class happens to be way down at the other end, you don't have time to use the bathroom and still get to class before it starts. So you go to your class and then you ask permission from your teacher to go to the bathroom and the teacher tells you, `No. You had your chance between the periods ...'
"I feel embarrassed when I have to stand there and explain it to a teacher."
"This is the question," said a wiry-looking boy named Edward, leaning forward in his chair. "Students are not animals, but even animals need to relieve themselves sometimes. We're here for eight hours. What do they think we're supposed to do?"
"It humiliates you," said Mireya, who went on to make the interesting statement that "the school provides solutions that don't actually work," and this idea was taken up by several other students in describing course requirements within the school. A tall black student, for example, told me that she hoped to be a social worker or a doctor but was programmed into "Sewing Class" this year. She also had to take another course, called "Life Skills," which she told me was a very basic course—"a retarded class," to use her words—that "teaches things like the six continents," which she said she'd learned in elementary school.
When I asked her why she had to take these courses, she replied that she'd been told they were required, which as I later learned was not exactly so. What was required was that high school students take two courses in an area of study called "The Technical Arts," and which the Los Angeles Board of Education terms "Applied Technology." At schools that served the middle class or upper-middle class, this requirement was likely to be met by courses that had academic substance and, perhaps, some relevance to college preparation. At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the technical-arts requirement could be fulfilled by taking subjects like residential architecture, the designing of commercial structures, broadcast journalism, advanced computer graphics, a sophisticated course in furniture design, carving and sculpture, or an honors course in engineering research and design. At Fremont High, in contrast, this requirement was far more often met by courses that were basically vocational and also obviously keyed to low-paying levels of employment.
Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-dressing as well. When I asked her teacher why Mireya could not skip these subjects and enroll in classes that would help her to pursue her college aspirations, she replied, "It isn't a question of what students want. It's what the school may have available. If all the other elective classes that a student wants to take are full, she has to take one of these classes if she wants to graduate."
A very small girl named Obie, who had big blue-tinted glasses tilted up across her hair, interrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gusto that she'd taken hairdressing twice! When I expressed surprise that this was possible, she said there were two levels of hairdressing offered here at Fremont High. "One is in hairstyling," she said. "The other is in braiding."
Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment and then suddenly began to cry. "I don't want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I'm trying to go to college. I don't need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else."
"What would you rather take?" I asked.
"I wanted to take an AP class," she answered.
Mireya's sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys who had been silent up till now: a thin, dark-eyed student named Fortino, who had long hair down to his shoulders. He suddenly turned directly to Mireya and spoke into the silence that followed her last words.
"Listen to me," he said. "The owners of the sewing factories need laborers. Correct?"
"I guess they do," Mireya said.
"It's not going to be their own kids. Right?" "Why not?" another student said.
"So they can grow beyond themselves," Mireya answered quietly. "But we remain the same."
"You're ghetto," said Fortino, "so we send you to the factory." He sat low in his desk chair, leaning on one elbow, his voice and dark eyes loaded with a cynical intelligence. "You're ghetto—so you sew!"
"There are higher positions than these," said a student named Samantha.
"You're ghetto," said Fortino unrelentingly. "So sew!"
Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are hound to be reflected to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But, even so, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or six-year-olds, or by teenagers, for that matter, than concerns about "successful global competition." Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into "robots," found no reason to dispute the charge. "Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your home?" he asked, and "will never snatch your pocketbooks. . . . These robots are going to be producing taxes."
Corporate leaders, when they speak of education, sometimes pay lip-service to the notion of "good critical and analytic skills," but it is reasonable to ask whether they have in mind the critical analysis of their priorities. In principle, perhaps some do; but, if so, this is not a principle that seems to have been honored widely in the schools I have been visiting. In all the various business-driven inner-city classrooms I have observed in the past five years, plastered as they are with corporation brand names and managerial vocabularies, I have yet to see the two words "labor unions." Is this an oversight? How is that possible? Teachers and principals themselves, who are almost always members of a union, seem to be so beaten down that they rarely even question this omission.
It is not at all unusual these days to come into an urban school in which the principal prefers to call himself or herself "building CEO" or "building manager." In some of the same schools teachers are described as "classroom managers."3 I have never been in a suburban district in which principals were asked to view themselves or teachers in this way. These terminologies remind us of how wide the distance has become between two very separate worlds of education.
It has been more than a decade now since drill-based literacy methods like Success For All began to proliferate in our urban schools. It has been three and a half years since the systems of assessment that determine the effectiveness of these and similar practices were codified in the federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, that President Bush signed into law in 2002. Since the enactment of this bill, the number of standardized exams children must take has more than doubled. It will probably increase again after the year 2006, when standardized tests, which are now required in grades three through eight, may be required in Head Start programs and, as President Bush has now proposed, in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades as well.
3 A school I visited three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, was littered with "Help Wanted" signs. Starting in kindergarten, children in the school were being asked to think about the jobs that they might choose when they grew up. In one classroom there was a poster that displayed the names of several retail stores: J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and a few others. "It's like working in a store," a classroom aide explained. "The children are learning to pretend they're cashiers." At another school in the same district, children were encouraged to apply for jobs in their classrooms. Among the job positions open to the children in this school, there was an "Absence Manager" and a "Behavior Chart Manager," a "Form Collector Manager," a "Paper Passer Outer Manager," a "Paper Collecting Manager," a "Paper Returning Manager," an "Exit Ticket Manager," even a "Learning Manager," a "Reading Corner Manager," and a "Score Keeper Manager." I asked the principal if there was a special reason why those two words "management" and "manager" kept popping up throughout the school. "We want every child to be working as a manager while he or she is in this school," the principal explained. "We want to make them understand that, in this country, companies will give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself, no matter what you've done." I wasn't sure what she meant by "no matter what you've done," and asked her if she could explain it. "Even if you have a felony arrest," she said, "we want you to understand that you can be a manager someday."
The elements of strict accountability, in short, are solidly in place; and in many states where the present federal policies are simply reinforcements of accountability requirements that were established long before the passage of the federal law, the same regimen has been in place since 1995 or even earlier. The "tests-and-standards" partisans have had things very much their way for an extended period of time, and those who were convinced that they had ascertained "what works" in schools that serve minorities and children of the poor have had ample opportunity to prove that they were right.
What, then, it is reasonable to ask, are the results?
The achievement gap between black and white children, which narrowed for three decades up until the late years of the 1980s—the period in which school segregation steadily decreased—started to widen once more in the early 1990s when the federal courts began the process of resegregation by dismantling the mandates of the Brown decision. From that point on, the gap continued to widen or remained essentially unchanged; and while recently there has been a modest narrowing of the gap in reading scores for fourth-grade children, the gap in secondary school remains as wide as ever.
The media inevitably celebrate the periodic upticks that a set of scores may seem to indicate in one year or another in achievement levels of black and Hispanic children in their elementary schools. But if these upticks were not merely temporary "testing gains" achieved by test-prep regimens and were instead authentic education gains, they would carry over into middle school and high school. Children who know how to read—and read with comprehension—do not suddenly become nonreaders and hopelessly disabled writers when they enter secondary school. False gains evaporate; real gains endure. Yet hundreds of thousands of the inner-city children who have made what many districts claim to be dramatic gains in elementary school, and whose principals and teachers have adjusted almost every aspect of their school days and school calendars, forfeiting recess, canceling or cutting back on all the so-called frills (art, music, even social sciences) in order to comply with state demands those students, now in secondary school, are sitting in subject-matter classes where they cannot comprehend the texts and cannot set down their ideas in the kind of sentences expected of most fourth- and fifth-grade students in the suburbs. Students in this painful situation, not surprisingly, tend to be most likely to drop out of school.
In 48 percent of high schools in the nation's 100 largest districts, which are those in which the highest concentrations of black and Hispanic students tend to be enrolled, less than half the entering ninth-graders graduate in four years. Nationwide, from 1993 to 2002, the number of high schools graduating less than half their ninth-grade class in four years has increased by 75 percent. In the 94 percent of districts in New York State where white children make up the majority, nearly 80 percent of students graduate from high school in four years. In the 6 percent of districts where black and Hispanic students make up the majority, only 40 percent do so. There are 120 high schools in New York, enrolling nearly 200,000 minority students, where less than 60 percent of entering ninth-graders even make it to twelfth grade.
The promulgation of new and expanded inventories of "what works," no matter the enthusiasm with which they're elaborated, is not going to change this. The use of hortatory slogans chanted by the students in our segregated schools is not going to change this. Desperate historical revisionism that romanticizes the segregation of an older order (this is a common theme of many separatists today) is not going to change this. Skinnerian instructional approaches, which decapitate a child's capability for critical reflection, are not going to change this. Posters about "global competition" will certainly not change this. Turning six-year-olds into examination soldiers and denying eight-year-olds their time for play at recess will not change this.
"I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations," said President Bush in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. "It's working. It's making a difference." Here we have one of those deadly lies that by sheer repetition is at length accepted by surprisingly large numbers of Americans. But it is not the truth; and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor, and if it is not forcefully resisted it will lead us further in a very dangerous direction.
Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the labyrinthine intertwining of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take to change this. If it takes people marching in the streets and other forms of adamant disruption of the governing civilities, if it takes more than litigation, more than legislation, and much more than resolutions introduced by members of Congress, these are prices we should be prepared to pay. "We do not have the things you have," Alliyah told me when she wrote to ask if I would come and visit her school in the South Bronx. "Can you help us?" America owes that little girl and millions like her a more honorable answer than they have received.
Jonathan Kozol is the author of many books, including Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace. This article was adapted from The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, to be published this month by Crown.
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