Tag: Common Core

Missouri Fails All Children

These days, the Show Me State demonstrates a lot of things to people. Few of them any good. Yet none of the black eyes it has gotten compared to the…

These days, the Show Me State demonstrates a lot of things to people. Few of them any good. Yet none of the black eyes it has gotten compared to the damage its public education systems are doing to its children.

The latest stain on the states reputation can be seen in St. Louis, where protests against police brutality after Circuit Court Judge Timothy Wilson let former Police Officer Jason Stockley off the hook for murdering Anthony Lamar Smith is a reminder of the slaying of Michael Brown by another rogue cop in nearby Ferguson three years ago. The arrests of protestors and journalists by the Gateway City’s police department — as well as  arrogant chants ““Whose streets? Our streets” by those officers — has justified the NAACP’s move earlier this year to tell Black men and women to avoid the state like the plague.

But the biggest stain on Missouri’s present reputation has less to do with rogue cops and police misconduct and more with the low quality of its public education systems. Especially in St. Louis, where the (often state-controlled) districts within the city and county have become infamous for overusing harsh school discipline, providing few opportunities for high quality education, criminalizing the lives of youth, and restricting the ability of poor and minority children to escape the failure mills that litter the landscape. But as a Dropout Nation analysis shows, St. Louis merely mirrors the woeful lack of opportunities for the kind of college-preparatory courses children need for lifelong success.

Just 13.7 percent of the 292,558 children attending Missouri’s high schools took calculus, trigonometry and other forms of advanced mathematics in 2013-2104, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection. The woeful levels cut across nearly all socioeconomic backgrounds. Black children suffered the worst with just one out of every 10 taking calculus and advanced math that year. But White children did little better, with only 13.9 percent taking college-level mathematics; a mere 11.4 percent of Latino students, 13.5 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native peers, and 33.6 percent of Asian children taking those courses in the year surveyed.

The Show Me State does even worse in providing Advanced Placement courses that help prepare children for the rigors of higher education. Just 10.5 percent of all Missouri high-schoolers took AP courses in 2013-2104. This includes a mere 8.7 percent of Black students, 9.6 percent of Native peers, 10.3 percent of Latino high schoolers, and 10.4 percent of White students. Only Asian students were provided AP courses at high levels, with 26.7 percent of them taking those college-level classes that year. [Just six-tenths of one percent of all Show Me State high school students took International Baccalaureate courses, the other college preparatory coursework of choice for America’s students.]

Things get little better when it comes to physics, a science course that helps children gain preparation to take on higher ed classes that lead to high-paying careers in science and technology. Just 8.9 percent of high school students in Missouri took physics in 2013-2014. This is one area in which White students do worse than their minority counterparts. Just 7.8 percent of White high schoolers took physics versus 9.5 percent of Native students, 12 percent of Latino peers, 12.1 percent of Black students, and 17.4 percent of Asian peers.

The rationing of opportunity, of course begins long before children reach high school and can be seen in the middle school years in the numbers taking Algebra 1, a key course for college preparation. Just 11.8 percent of all Show Me State middle schoolers took Algebra 1 in 2013-2014. Again, Black children are failed miserably, with just 9.9 percent taking Algebra 1. But children from other backgrounds do little better. Only 10.4 percent of Latino middle school students, 11 percent of Native peers, 11.8 percent of White students, and 22.3 percent of Asian peers took Algebra 1 that year.

The path to denying opportunity begins in Missouri’s elementary schools, where children  (especially those from poor and minority households) are denied by teachers and guidance counselors into the gateways into what traditional districts consider to be higher levels of teaching and curricula.

Just 4.4 percent of Show Me State students are taking gifted-and-talented course. Certainly gifted-and-talented programs are questionable in their quality (as well as being a legacy of ability tracking, IQ testing frauds, and the other forms of racialism that began in the 20th century as a result of the belief that only some children are capable of learning at high levels). But they are also one of the few avenues children have for getting some semblance of high-quality education.

Oddly enough, Black children are twice as likely to gain entry into gifted-and-talented programs than White peers, with 10.4 percent of Black children in such pathways in 2013-2014 compared to just 4.6 percent of White students. This may be a result of the fact that Missouri’s rural and small town districts, which serve the bulk of the state’s White children, don’t provide such gateways. Meanwhile, just 34 percent of Latino students, 4.7 percent of Native peers, and 22.9 percent of Asian students were in gifted-and-talented programs.

An even bigger problem: That far too many children are far more likely to be condemned by districts into special ed ghettos. Thirteen-point-seven percent of Show Me State students are condemned to special ed in 2013-2014, all but guaranteeing that they will not get high-quality teaching and curricula. Black and White children are particularly prone to being condemned to special ed ghettos, with, respectively 14.7 percent and 14.5 percent being placed there compared to 3.3 percent of Asian students, five percent of Native peers, and 8.7 percent of Latino children.

There are plenty of reasons for people in St. Louis and the rest of Missouri to protest. Police brutality is one. Educational abuse is the other.

Put simply: Children in Missouri are far more-likely to end up in special ed than taking gifted-and-talented programs or any other opportunity for high-quality education. Latino and White children, for example are respectively, two and three times more likely to end up in special ed than in gifted-and-talented gateways.

One of the underlying culprits lie with the Show Me State’s failure to adequately finance college-preparatory opportunities within traditional districts. While the states provides some funds for offering AP courses, it is dwarfed by the sums spent on special education. In 2015-2016, for example, the state spent a mere $415,875 on AP (as well as dual enrollment) courses, while spending $411.5 million on special ed. An additional complication will come in the next few years thanks to the federal government’s move two years to consolidate funds used to finance AP courses for poor and minority students into a block grant, effectively making it harder for districts to offer high-quality opportunities to their most-vulnerable children.

Meanwhile the state has done little to expand the number of public charter schools serving children of all backgrounds. Just 52 charters operate in the Show Me State in 2015-2016, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, all of them in St. Louis and Kansas City because of their status as failure mills. Given that Missouri children attending charter schools gain an additional 22 days of learning in math and 14 additional days of learning in reading (according to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes), the lack of high-quality charters hurts both children in big city and rural communities who need help. The efforts to

Making things even worse was the state’s decision three years ago to ditch Common Core’s reading and math standards. This move, a result of opposition from movement conservatives in the Show Me State, denied all children (including those who are poor and White as well as Black and Latino) the comprehensive knowledge they need to be prepared for college-preparatory coursework, and ultimately, for the rigors of coursework in the traditional colleges, technical schools, and apprenticeships that make up American higher education.

The Show Me State’s political and educational leaders — including current Gov. Eric Greitens and his predecessor, Jay Nixon — deserve to bow their heads in shame for the educational abuse and neglect they are perpetrating on all of the children in the state’s public education systems. More importantly, these officials need to expand opportunities for all of those children to gain the knowledge critical to their future success as well as that of the state. Until then, the rogue policing tolerated in Missouri will be merely its most-public embarrassment.

Comments Off on Missouri Fails All Children

Remember the Monica Queens

Her name was Monica Queen. We know little about her. Because we weren’t supposed to know her. Or the other Black people that came before or after. Rectifying that legacy…

Her name was Monica Queen. We know little about her. Because we weren’t supposed to know her. Or the other Black people that came before or after.

Rectifying that legacy of America’s Original Sin of racialism, which has become the focal point of the debate over the removal of Confederate statues after the terrorism in Charlottesville, is as much a part of reforming American public education as building brighter futures for all children.

Thanks to the U.S. Census done in 1870, we know Monica was Black. We also know she lived in Anne Arundel County, Md., when she was 10-years old.

We know Monica had a mother and father. Their names were William and Susan. Her father was a farmer, probably one of many sharecropping after the end of the Civil War. He was 37 at the time the census was taken. Monica’s mother was two years older than her father.

She had three siblings, two brothers named John and Charles. She also had a sister. Her name was Miranda. All three were younger than her. But we don’t know if Monica was the oldest — and given that mortality rates were even higher for African Americans than for Whites, she may have not been.

Chances are that Monica was born into slavery. But given that the Old Line State had an equal number of freed and enslaved African Americans by the time she was born — a year before the Civil War — it is also possible that she was born free. But we won’t ever likely know.

Both Prince George’s County and Anne Arundel County only have birth and death records going back to 1898, long after Monica’s days on this earth. Records from circuit courts, which date from between 1865 to 1884, don’t account for all births because people weren’t required to report them, and neither do many churches (which did record births in the 19th century).

Sacred Heart Church, the birthplace of Catholicism in America, is also part of the immoral legacy of the nation’s Original Sin, with slaves buried without markers on its grounds.

But that’s only if Monica was free. If she was born a slave (more likely given that she doesn’t appear on the census of freed people taken a decade before), she didn’t even have a birth certificate. This is because enslaved Africans, being considered property and less than human under the laws of the United States and the State of Maryland, weren’t thought  worthy of such accounting.

Sometimes their first names — since they weren’t deemed worthy of having surnames — were accounted for by slave masters in various deeds, wills disposing of them to relatives, and other documents. But much of those bits of evidence have either been lost, burned, or hidden among all the other records in various archives.

The U.S. Census did account for slaves in a separate schedule in order to count at three slaves as one person; after all, each slave was considered three-fifths of a person in order to keep southern states such as Maryland from counting those they enslaved (and denied the right to vote) as people for political power. But those records also provide little other than first names. Because Black people like Monica Queen and her family weren’t considered people under law.

We know nothing about what happened to Monica in the intervening years. We don’t know if she ever fell in love, or had a beau, or even had a chance to have one. We do know that Monica died on October 9,1889, a Wednesday. But we don’t from what disease or ailment or accident she succumbed.

All we know is that after she died, Monica was buried in a far-off corner of Sacred Heart Church in Bowie, Md., far away from the graves of the White families who were its parishioners.

Enslaved Black people were given so little consideration that few recorded their existence. They were never supposed to be known as people.

Monica isn’t the only Black person buried on the Sacred Heart grounds. There are also the unmarked graves of slaves owned by Jesuit priests who ran the church and White Marsh, the Catholic Church plantation that once surrounded it. Even as the clerics heard confessions from the White families who lived in the community, started what is now Georgetown University, and began to build up what became the first diocese in the United States thanks to the elevation of John Carroll as bishop in 1790, they also profited, both personally and as members of the Catholic order, from the labors of enslaved Africans who were human being just like them.

Many of the White Marsh slaves would be sold off in 1838, both to satisfy the demands of Rome (which no longer wanted any part of the immorality) and to keep Georgetown afloat. Those that died before then are buried somewhere on the Sacred Heart grounds. Somewhere because, save for occasional mentions in journals and various records for financial purposes, the Jesuits didn’t think enough of the people they held in bondage to mark their existence on earth.

With 154 of those former plantation acres now being sold by the Jesuits to a developer, Elm Street, to be developed into homes, there is good chance that those graves will disappear.

What we don’t know about Monica or about the former slaves, and why that has come to pass, should be kept in mind by school reformers and others as the nation engages in the debate over the removal of statues to Confederate War dead as well as in dealing with how the legacies of America’s Original Sin perpetuate the public education systems that serve all of our children.

Contrary to the arguments of President Donald Trump and others who want to preserve Confederate statues, these objects were erected solely to erase the dark reality that people were fighting to secede from the union in order to keep people like Monica Queen in bondage. Those hunks of stone and metal were also part of a century-long campaign to render them and their descendants invisible, to declare their achievements unremarkable, and to forget that their talents and other contributions were to the overwhelming benefit of generations of White people.

It is high time for all the Confederate statues, tools of propaganda for covering up the immorality of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, to come down.

Over the decades, that campaign to cover up the evils of slavery (and erase the memories of Black people like Monica Queen) were at least partly successful in seeping into American public education. This includes the 188 schools (as of 2015) named after Confederate leaders that served nearly 200,000 children, many of whom are the descendants of enslaved Africans. It also includes state-approved textbooks influenced by so-called “Lost Cause” historians that conveniently ignored the overwhelming evidence that the Civil War was fought to preserve slavery (and not “states rights”).

Certainly the effort to remove the Confederate statues and names from public schools is part of the long-overdue admission that we have indulged a false narrative about the nation’s past, one that keeps us from bending the arc of history towards progress for every American. It is also an important step in providing all children with a thorough education about their nation that includes the bad and ugly alongside the good and honorable.

At the same time, removing those propaganda tools of racism is a redress to those owed more than can ever be repaid.

The creditors include the descendants of enslaved Africans who live today. They have been forced for far too long to pay for those statues and schools through their tax dollars, as well as deal with the legacies of state-sponsored racism that perpetuate themselves through public education and criminal justice systems.

But it isn’t just about the statues themselves. For far too long, Black people have been forced to accept and expect erasure, and denied knowledge of those who came before them. After all, unless they are descendants of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s slave (and likely sister-in-law) Sally Hemmings, few African Americans can trace their Black ancestry beyond the 1870 census or, as in the case of your editor, before 1830, when a man named Samson would appear on the rolls of a slave owner in Virginia.

Removing the statues is just another step towards celebrating those who came before them. The next step includes building statues of heroes such as Nat Turner and religious leader Richard Allen, as well as commemorating the contributions of enslaved Africans and others whose ordinary lives were just as heroic.

The other creditors are the enslaved and oppressed Black people of the past, who cannot collect on the debt, but deserve repayment anyway. Reimbursement for the torture, rape, murder, and denial of liberty done to them during their lives. Refund for being denied the ability to register the births of their children and put memorials on the graves of their loved ones. Payback for the memories they had lost forever to the ages because they weren’t considered human beings.

Restoration of their proper places as builders of the nation is the least we can do.

The final creditors are the Black children of today who are like what Monica Queen was at age 10 — and for whom we want futures better than what Monica had. For reformers, this means the transformation of American public education so that they (as well as all children) are provided high-quality education. It means building upon the implementation of Common Core’s reading and math standards by using original sources (including the records on slavery) to expand the minds of every child. This also includes overhauling the history lessons taught so that they know all that truly happened in this nation, especially to their ancestors.

And yes, it means renaming every school named for those evil Confederate leaders who wanted to keep our Black children in bondage. We would never send Jewish children to schools named after Heinrich Himmler. We shouldn’t be doing the same kind of thing to Black children.

Monica Queen deserved more in life than she ever got. Now we have a chance to make her name — as well as the names of every enslaved Black American — known and properly recorded for history. Even when we know just a little about them.

Comments Off on Remember the Monica Queens

Warning: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /home/dropoutn/public_html/wp-content/themes/ralphkrause/ralphkrause/parts/mjr.php on line 47

Education Absolutes Worth Thinking Over


Warning: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /home/dropoutn/public_html/wp-content/themes/ralphkrause/ralphkrause/parts/mjr.php on line 47

The single-biggest problem in discussions about reforming American public education is that nearly all players think their belief is gospel. Both defenders of traditional public education’s status quo, and school…

photo

The single-biggest problem in discussions about reforming American public education is that nearly all players think their belief is gospel. Both defenders of traditional public education’s status quo, and school reformers hold certain ideas that they think lead to the one and only solution (or the most-important solution of all). The reality is that it will take a wide array of solutions — including ending the culture of mediocrity and disdain for data that permeates throughout our schools and districts today.

Dropout Nation has spent pages and podcasts taking down some of those viewpoints — including the notion that poverty is the underlying cause of achievement gaps and the nation’s dropout crisis, and that some kids are incapable of handling college prep curricula. At the same time, we have also made clear that school choice is just one imperfect (and sometimes incomplete) answer to solving our dropout crisis. Below are some more beliefs that are sorely mistaken: need to be embraced with other aspects of reform:

It’s All About Standards: Embraced by the standards and accountability types in the school reform movement (including supporters of the new Common Core State Standards), it’s based on a belief that more-rigorous curriculum standards will help in holding schools and districts accountable for results, in developing tests that actually measure what students are learning and in structuring better curricula and instructional practices. This certainly makes sense. After all, without standards for learning, schools, districts and states would simply continue with the decades of educational malpractice that has led to the current woes within public education.

The problem? Start with the reality that standards won’t mean much is school curricula isn’t aligned with them. Essentially, one can create rigorous standards and explain clearly what every child should learn — and it will be useless without assuring that the curricula follows according to them. This is a critical issue because so many of the curriculum developers are either skeptical of the underlying rationale for the standards or (wrongly)  any kind of curriculum standards whatsoever.

The second problem lies with how to ensure that that the standards are actually being enforced at the school level; essentially one will have to hope that everyone involved behaves honorably (unlikely) or that a state or federal agency will hold feet to the fire (which, based on past history, still means more gamesmanship). States have struggled with this challenge for decades. Thanks to the embrace of Common Core, this will now be a national struggle as well. While folks such as Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute dance around the issue by arguing that a national non-profit board can handle the job, past experience (including that of the U.S. Department of Education with some provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act) suggests otherwise.

Ultimately, you must still improve teacher quality (along with developing more-rigorous and aligned curricula) in order to make all this work.  This means ed schools must be overhauled in order to better recruit and train teachers. It also means expanding the pool of alternative teacher training programs, and expanding Teach For America and other existing programs.

It’s All About Curriculum: The flip-side is the line of argument advanced by Robert Pondisco and his employers at Core Knowledge, among others. It is based on a couple of rather seductive notions with the usual rings of truth. The first: That teachers are only as good as the curriculum they use in instruction. The second: That standards are meaningless without strong content that provides students both with skills and background knowledge

But as with so many beliefs, rings of truth  doesn’t mean absolute truth. Forget for a moment that none of the groups actually agree on which curricula is best for improving student achievement in any subject (much less all subjects): The  curriculum-is-the-solution crowd forget that curricula doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by a series of underlying standards, goals and beliefs; it is taught by teachers who must have the subject-matter competency, entrepreneurial drive and care for the lives of children needed to be good instructors; and the underlying rigor (including teacher and curriculum evaluation) must be reinforced by  strong, thoughtful principals and superintendents. If the curricula is divorced from standards, then it will be ineffective and will cause systemic problems up and down the line (including frustrating efforts to evaluate teachers and the most-important matter of all — ensuring every child learns). If the curricula is taught by lousy teachers, the kids won’t learn. And if school leadership doesn’t do its job of fostering a culture of genius, high-quality curriculum will become low-quality in an instant.

As standards is only one part of the formula for school reform, so is curriculum. Standards and curricula both need to be of high-quality in order to be worth their respective salts. And you need systemic reforms in place in order to assure that the curricula does its job.

It’s All About  Economic Desegregation: The usual line trotted out by the Jerry Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd is one based on the Civil Rights Movement concept of integration and busing. Minorities and the poor, according to this view, can’t receive the same quality of education as their white middle-class peers unless they attend school with these peers. Based on this logic, it’s better to just ship poor kids to the schools attended by middle class kids instead of improving the quality of schools in poor neighborhoods.

Kahlenberg in particular has spent the past two decades trotting out studies and school districts that supposedly prove this line of thinking. A couple of decades ago, it was Wake County, N.C. (even though its achievement gaps were never truly closed and the desegregation effort involved only a smattering of all students). These days, it is the D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Md., the subject of a recent report by Heather Schwartz, a Rand Corp., researcher brought in by  Kahlenberg’s employer, the Century Foundation. This, despite the fact that Montgomery County (in which only 65 percent of black males graduate from high school, according to the Schott Foundation  for Public Education) isn’t exactly the model Kahlenberg and Schwartz claim it to be.

What I’m saying, to be kind, is that Kahlenberg and Orfield are touting a strategy (originally developed by an earlier generation of civil rights activists out of political necessity) that hasn’t worked in improving student achievement. If anything, integration has done more to keep poor and minority kids from getting high-quality education in their own neighborhoods. Magnet schools, for example, haven’t

The biggest problem with integration is that it tacitly argues that there is no way to improve the quality of education our poorest kids receive in their own neighborhoods; in essence, no one should bother reforming education so poor kids can have high-quality schools in the communities in which they live. This view ignores the success charter schools operators such as the Knowledge Is Power Program and Catholic diocesan schools in improving student achievement right in those very neighborhoods. There are other words for it, but we’ll keep them out of this family publication.

Integration is no substitute for complete, systemic and much-needed overhaul of American public education.

It Comes Down to Working Things Out at the School Level: A good number of folks, including Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, articulates this perspective (which is what used to be called site-based or school-based decision-making). From where they sit,  school bureaucracies, policymaking bodies and legislative edicts merely set up a framework for school activity — and not even a good one at that. Ultimately, the people best-suited to deciding school activities — from curriculum to hiring, evaluating and compensating teachers — are school principals,  who are closest to the ground. This perspective makes sense on its face: No matter how robust the school data system or well-informed the superintendent or state legislator, these players aren’t anywhere near the classroom and cannot observe every bit of activity that happens daily in schools.

But the school-based decision-making viewpoint ignores the complex structure that is American public education, one in which hiring and firing decisions are made not by principals and not even by superintendents, but largely controlled by collective bargaining agreements, state laws and federal and state regulations. Moving all teacher hiring-and-firing decisions down to principals (a move taken in New York City) definitely helps

If we moved to a private sector-driven education system, fully decentralized all districts or even adapted the Hollywood Model — my formula for reforming governance and delivery of education — then the site-based approach would work. Until then, we must reform every aspect of American public education in a systematic way.

You have to make all teachers better: This belief, held by many teachers union officials and teachers such as 2009 California Teacher of the Year Alex Kajitani and David B. Cohen, assumes that every teacher is capable of high-quality instruction. From where they sit, teachers need help developing their classroom instruction. Performance management should not use objective student performance data (especially test data) for hiring and firing teachers; instead, evaluations (along with so-called peer review) should be used to help laggards get better.

Nothing wrong with trying to believe that. But in the real world, some folks just aren’t fit for certain jobs. This doesn’t mean that they are terrible people and it doesn’t mean they can’t be successful in other lines of work. What it does mean that they won’t do a good-to-great job — be they lack the skills, talent, temperament or desire — in a particular field. No matter how much additional training or assistance they receive, they won’t do any better. Teachers are no exception. An instructor is no more successful in improving student achievement after 25 years of teaching than an instructor working for four years, according to a report by Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen of the Center for Reinventing Public Education. This means that a teacher that is poor-performing after four years in the classroom is unlikely to get any better 21 years down the line (and vice versa for her high-quality colleague). Given everything that we know at this moment about the impact of high-quality and low-quality teaching, we can’t afford to continue exposing kids to instruction by teachers who don’t make the grade.

Teachers union bosses and teachers have to face this reality: Many of of their colleagues lack either the subject competency, empathy for children, or entrepreneurial zeal needed to be high-quality teachers. Quite a few lack all three characteristics. They are all too willing to mire themselves, their students and their colleagues in mediocrity in order to collect their paychecks. These teachers cannot be made better. The best solution is to improve how we recruit and train teachers, and develop performance management systems that separate good-to-great teachers from those who aren’t.

Editor’s Note: Originally, I had mentioned that Core Knowledge was opposed to standards. Robert Pondisco took time to note that Core Knowledge did support Common Core. For accuracy’s sake, I have made the proper correction. Apologies to all for the error.

3 Comments on Education Absolutes Worth Thinking Over

Type on the field below and hit Enter/Return to search