Do we need a Stokely Carmichael for school reform? It may help to have an MLK first.

If education is truly the civil rights issue of this time, then African-Americans — whose children are often failed the most by American public education — must be more-engaged in education decision-making than they are now. Even with artists such as John Legend and organizations such as UNCF and 100 Black Men joining hands with the school reform movement, far too many old-school civil rights organizations (especially the NAACP — which will unveil a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded agenda in January that includes a focus on desegregation) maintain alliances with defenders of the status quo that perpetuate the harmful effects of poor instruction, lousy curricula and abysmal standards and practices. The Grad Nation report released earlier this week by America’s Promise, instead of being good news, makes the reality as clear as ever.

Elinor Bowles offers her thoughts in this Voices of the Dropout Nation on what Black America must do to truly achieve the goal of equal opportunity in education sought out by an earlier generation of civil rights activists. Consider her perspective and think about what you think should be done.

Whatever one thinks of Waiting for Superman or its point of view, the movie has made the failure of public education part of the national conversation–a much needed development. American public education has failed to effectively address the needs of its students or the nation. Despite the reality, known since the mid-1980s, that the nation’s schools are grossly inadequate, there has been a deafening silence about their dismal failure, particularly in relation to the needs of students of African-American descent.

The murder rate goes up, the graduation rate goes down and our youth increasingly end up in the wrong institution . Regrettably, African-American adults and community leaders have been seemingly preoccupied with other problems. It seems to take all the energy most parents can mobilize to take care of the needs of their own children. Scattered group efforts at educational improvement have led to extremely few sustained attempts at change, with varying degrees of success. Education is, after all, a complicated and time-consuming affair.

The discussion generated by Waiting for Superman has been promoted and highlighted by Oprah Winfrey, MSNBC, numerous news and special TV programs, and an excellent article in the September 30, 2010, issue of The Root written by R. L’Heureux Lewis, an assistant professor of sociology and black studies at the City College of New York. His piece, “Waiting for School Reform,” provides an overview of the difficulties confronting efforts at educational improvement, including the enormous financial costs and the lack of comprehensive research. However, as noted in a comment by a reader, E. Cederwell, it only superficially touches on “the single most important element explaining the great disparities in any school’s ability to achieve educational success: the world outside the classroom, and in particular, the culture each young person is surrounded by.” Cederwell states that “the perceived value of learning and education . . . is hugely important. . . . Communities need to be ready to take a . . . searching examination, and, where indicated, be willing to commit to adopt certain values. This may be hardest of all.”

Query: What is the general culture and attitude within the African-American community toward the education of its youth, particularly those who are poor and often in great need of love and guidance as well as material things? In using the word “community,” we are not talking about a geographical space, but a cultural configuration of persons who have a shared history, values, and life circumstances. This focus elicits a multitude of complications, given the current lack of cohesion in the African-American “community,” which many believe is becoming irreparably splintered along economic lines.

The discussion generated by Waiting for Superman has focused on the funding of education and the roles of politicians, administrators, principals, parents, and especially teachers and unions. However, it has failed to seriously address the difficult, dominant, and ubiquitous role of the African-American community in school reform. What can African-Americans and their institutions do to send the message to our young people that education is important, that it is cool, that it is vital to the good life, that it is a requirement for an interesting and safe environment, that it can be exciting, and that it makes you a better, more desirable individual, mate and parent? How can we create an environment that convinces our young people that education has more rewards than merely hanging out and, for most people, more concrete rewards than athletics and music and selling drugs?

How can we make education a dominant, outstanding value in the African-American community like it was in the early 20th century? Those of us who were born in the early or mid-20th century remember the dictum that “you’ve got to be twice as good.” And we all know the important role of the family in forming character and promoting educational values. But as African Americans we also know that many of our families today have been so damaged by a variety of forces that they do not have the will or the resources to be what we are saying they must be in terms of an educational support system for their children. And while we must do everything possible to help them overcome their liabilities, if their children are to be rescued we must also do everything within our power as a community to compensate for what parents lack.

Despite the seeming lack of involvement of the black community in the education of its youth, many individuals and groups actually are addressing this question. Individuals and organizations are providing scholarships, from the Ron Brown Scholar Program, which contributes close to $800,000 in scholarships annually, to people who contribute a couple of scholarships of $500 a semester to youth in their church. People are becoming mentors and big sisters and big brothers. They act as tutors for specific subjects. Professionals and business people visit schools and lecture about the work they do and how students can prepare themselves for various careers. Others invite students to visit or work in their offices during summer vacation. Churches provide space and material for after-school programs. It’s not that nothing is being done. It’s that we need much, much more and we need to do it more loudly and, in some instances, in a more organized way. We need to find more ways to publicly recognize and reward those children who work hard to achieve. We need everybody to know how important education is.

Perhaps we need a national organization to do for education what SNCC did for voting in the 1960s. Maybe we can call it something like Community Campaign for Educational Excellence. Perhaps we need to clearly explain what is meant when we say that “education is today what civil rights was in the 1960s.” We need to make it clear that we are talking about a similar urgency and significance and deterrent to equality, not about tactics like marches or content like legislation. The civil rights movement of the 1960s eliminated the state and local laws that restricted the movement and behavior of blacks. The educational movement of the 21st century must create educational institutions that serve the needs of all of the country’s children.

There are multiple ways the African-American community can change its culture in order to create an environment where education is recognized and honored. These ways are limited only by the imagination. There are, however, three basic requirements: First, we must care about all African-American children and have a burning need to save them from the lives of violence and crime and unemployment and meaninglessness that so many of them are living or facing. Second, we must truly believe that all children can be educated. And third, we must be willing to reach out and touch — to contribute our time, our energy, and our material resources, however limited they may be, to the salvation of our youth. African-American youth, given today’s dominant economic and social condition and trends, are in grave danger. What do we intend to do?

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$228 billion

U.S. spending on criminal justice in 2006-2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics; prisons and jails accounted for just 33 percent of the total.

$562 billion

U.S. education expenditures in 2006-2007, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Current K-12 spending accounts for $477 billion or nearly the entire total.

$1.5 billion

Amount spent on prison construction in 2006-2007. It accounts for less than 1 percent of criminal justice spending.

$63 billion

Amount spent on school construction in 2006-2007. It accounts for 11 percent of overall education spending and 13 percent of K-12 spending.

Earlier this month, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous declared that the civil rights group’s Gates Foundation-sponsored education agenda would include a focus on moving spending away from prisons and incarceration to what he declared to be an underfunded K-12 education system. But as the statistics show, education spending outpaces criminal justice spending by a two-to-one margin — and school construction funding outpaces prison construction spending by more than 40-to-1.

As Dropout Nation noted this past January, the reality isn’t so much that the America doesn’t spend too much on prisons or that too much is spent on education. It’s that the country spends far too much on both inefficiently and ineffectively. We spend $228 billion on criminal justice badly largely because we spend $562 billion on education abysmally. So long as we continue a status quo in American public education that would best comparable to medical malpractice, millions of our kids will end up behind bars.

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This week’s Dropout Nation Podcast focuses on the internal cleansing school reformers and other caring adults must do to reform American public education. Far too many within traditional public education are either defending the status quo of systemic academic failure, anti-intellectualism, obsolete organizational structures and poor practices that perpetuate a dropout crisis in which 150 teens every hour drop out into poverty and prison. Strong action in reforming public education — including calling out those defenders — is key to improving and elevating education for our children.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

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Within the past month, the NAACP and other old-school civil rights groups have weighed in on the nation’s achievement gap and President Barack Obama’s school reform efforts — and have come out on the wrong side. This has resulted in questions about their relevance — and the appropriateness of their tactics — in an age in which black parents have come out strongly for charter schools and other reform measures that give parents power over the quality of education for their kids. It also stands in contrast to the work of onetime fellow-traveler Al Sharpton (whose own embrace of school reform has been chronicled here) and a new generation of educators such as Dr. Steve Perry, the CNN commentator and principal of Capital Prep charter school in Connecticut.

Watch this video from last year — long before the current debate over the role of civil rights groups (and their ivory tower allies among the Kahlenberg-Orfield crowd) in education — and consider whether the NAACP and other groups have outlived their usefulness. And, whatever your thoughts, how can they become relevant again.

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Observations on what is happening in school reform today:

Fizzled Out of Touch: Last week, the NAACP and other groups pronounced that they were coming out with a grand manifesto challenging the Obama administration’s school reform efforts. Folks such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow/PUSH coalition were to show up and complain about how the administration’s approach to education was failing the very poor students it was supposed to help — even though their own prescriptions were little more than overheated old-school concepts that have never worked in the past 40 years. But by Monday, two of the groups — including one run by charter school supporter Al Sharpton — declined to participate in the grand attack. The manifesto (which did have some laudable goals) was trashed by all but the most-stubbornly pro-status quo of pundits. And by Thursday, some of the players were declaring that they were behind Obama while the administration — including the president and  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan –  took turns slapping around the groups over policy.

Certainly the Obama administration did a successful behind-the-scenes effort of diffusing the old-school civil rights tirade. The lack of support for the manifesto from the National Council of La Raza and other Latino civil rights outfits also weakened their efforts. But it was more than that.

Within Black America, there is a lot of disagreement between old-school civil rights players — who continue to see integration, busing and equity lawsuits as the cure for achievement gaps between blacks and whites — and the younger generation of African-Americans, who understand that more-systemic reforms (including breaking ranks with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers) is critical to black economic and social advancement. This generational and attitudinal divide (which has only become louder in the past couple of years) has resulted in many of the groups becoming irrelevant in the school reform conversation — and the discussion about improving the lives of African-Americans overall.

The NAACP, in particular, can no longer claim to be representative of all African-Americans — especially on education. It has spent most of the past two decades dealing with internal discord and overcoming its creakiness. Over the past two weeks, it has seen its stature fall further as it rushed to judgment over Shirley Sherrod and spent more time on racist elements within the Tea Party movement than on considering Duncan’s demand for them to join the school reform movement. As more blacks — especially celebrities such as John Legend and Fantasia — have become more-supportive of charters and the Race to the Top initiative, they are finding other organizations and methods to wield influence and mobilize like-minded colleagues (of all races) towards their own concerns. They have cut the NAACP out of their considerations.

Meanwhile other old-school civil rights groups are rife with constituencies who are charter school supporters — and in fact, started their own schools; integration-minded constituents can rile up anger all they want, but the groups can’t afford to alienate school reformers within their own groups without endangering their own pockets. When it comes to Obama — the nation’s first black president — the groups must also be careful, especially since some of its leading members (such as Jackson) were none too fond of him back when he was a U.S. Senator (and in some cases, didn’t even back him during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton).

For these groups to remain relevant, they must adapt the school reform agenda, as the United Negro College Fund has done under Michael Lomax (who sits on the board of the Education Equality Project); the 100 Black Men is another example; , it cofounded the Eagle Academy Foundation, which operates two boys-only charters in New York City. If they don’t, they will face more than another Chicago-style tongue-lashing from the Commander-in-Chief.

Still Not Fessing Up Save for the back-and-forth between Andy Rotherham and Michael Petrilli, inside-the-Beltway education sparring tends to be done politely in dry language (and more viciously during drinking sessions). But on Thursday, the Center for American Progress’ presentation of its report on the low quality of teacher training programs brought out a battle royal between the American Association  of Colleges for Teacher Education — the leading trade group for the nation’s ed schools — and the leading critical of ed school training of teachers (and, nearly everything else about how teachers are recruited, retained and paid), the National Council on Teacher Quality.

After NCTQ boss Kate Walsh tore into ed schools for lacking rigor in their teacher training curricula — especially in special education — and state teacher certification agencies for their cozy ties to those schools and their parent universities, AACTE’s Jane West accused Walsh of making “sweeping statements” that were “off the mark”, as well as attacked its underlying methodology for evaluating ed schools (especially in Texas, the site of NCTQ’s latest ode to teacher quality failure). West then went on to praise the quality of special ed teacher training — and went on a tirade about the school reform movement’s failures to address special ed overall.

So as not to give the impression that Dr. West fully ignored the problems of ed school training, she did admit that there are issues. But she largely laid their causes at the feet of state legislatures (for laws that are restrictive about teacher data), school districts (for their unwillingness to share that information because of fears of violating FERPA), and the lack of political will to shut down poor-performing programs. But there are problems with those excuses. Ed Crowe, the author of the CAP study, reminded West that other professions — including medicine and nursing — took strong efforts to improve training and certification long-before state regulators got into the game. Besides, as Crowe said, “political will isn’t a gift”, groups gain it as a result of doing the hard work to gain consensus (or steamroll opponents).

By the way, don’t forget that AACTE is a huge recipient of funds from the National Education Association — the most-fervent obstacle to teacher quality reforms — including the use of student test data in teacher evaluations (which AACTE members would also use in their own evaluations). This includes $252,262 in 2008-2009 alone.

Meanwhile, Dr. West seems to forget that NCTQ’s research stands up to scrutiny — especially when one considers the evaluations of ed schools by others. This includes CAP — whose report is blistering in its criticism of ed schools — and Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, who noted that 54 percent of teachers are trained at schools with low admissions requirements. These issues have become more embarrassing as alternative teacher training outfits such as Teach For America have emerged as the high-quality teacher training regimes of choice for school districts. As Walsh — who wants ed schools to actually turn around their performance — noted: “Most superintendents are eager to hire [Teach For America's] bright young talents.”

What ed schools fail to realize is that it is their very desultory quality of training that has helped sustain the nation’s educational crisis. They are also the reason why teaching isn’t highly respected as a profession (even though teachers are highly beloved as individuals). By keeping their collective heads in the sand, ed schools are merely aiding their own slide into irrelevance and worse.

Given that Teach For America (along with The New Teacher Project) trains just 7,000 of the 200,000 or so new teachers who come into American public education every year, ed schools must stop the rhetorical shuck-and-jive. Or else they will end up being replaced by the alternatives.

Standing in the Shadows of Fail: Detroit lived up to its reputation as the place where common sense — and care for the futures of children — goes to die. Despite the efforts of Mayor Dave Bing and even U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan, the city council voted 6-to-3 to not place upon the ballot a referendum that would have placed Motown’s atrocious school district under mayoral control. Why? Some, including onetime acting mayor and former city council president Ken Cockrel, declared there was no public demand for it.

Now, one apparently hasn’t been reading the local papers, or looking outside. But this doesn’t matter. From day one, seven of the nine council members were opposed to mayoral control. The current city council president declared it publicly. Old-school groups (who form the base for these members) were opposed to it, as were the school board (which hasn’t had control of the district since it fell under state receivership last year). They essentially opposed reform in spite of decades of evidence that the public school system is the new Superfund Site of American public education.

So let’s be clear about this: Once again, Detroit’s city council behaves irresponsibly towards its citizens — especially its children — because its majority has lost site of what matters most: The children who must attend this atrocity of a school system. For these politicians, the discussion about mayoral control is just another game. But for the kids and their families, it’s a lot more than that. It’s their educational, economic and social destinies at stake. Perhaps the parents should exercise their power and send their children to any of the new charter schools being opened in the city in the coming years. And while they are at it, vote out the city council once and for all.

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Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News

With  old-school civil rights groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement — and its commitment to improving the quality of education for all children — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from February on why their approach to educational equity doesn’t work. The only way educational equity will actually be achieved for every child is by addressing how public education is structured — including giving parents their proper place as kings at the education decision-making table, and improving the quality of curricula in every school. Not only does this commentary apply to these groups, but to fellow-travelers such as the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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