Tag: Gary Orfield


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Education’s Status Quo to Parents: How Dare You Use Parent Trigger and Make Decisions!


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When it comes to the role of parents at the education decision-making table, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, school districts and folks such as Diane Ravitch…

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.

When it comes to the role of parents at the education decision-making table, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, school districts and folks such as Diane Ravitch think parents should be like kids: Barely seen and definitely not heard. If you don’t believe it, consider the reaction by the Compton Unified School District, the AFT’s local affiliate and such commentators as Valerie Strauss and Larry Ferlazzo to the move by parents at McKinley Elementary School to make use of California’s  Parent Trigger law and oust the district from management of the school.  From where the status quo folks stand, the McKinley parents exercising Parent Trigger are either dupes for nefarious charter school operators and evil, money-hungry foes of public education such as Ben Austin; or the parents are evil for daring to toss out decades of abysmal school management and classroom instruction. In their minds, it’s simply not possible for parents to actually be able to make their own choices.

Yet evidence abounds that when parents are highly-informed about the quality of education in their schools, driven to kick mediocrity and abysmal education to the curb, and given the tools to help their kids, they will certainly do so. Minorities and parents in high-poverty districts, for example, were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement, according to a 2005 study by University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University. The growth of the charter school movement, the continuing presence of Catholic schools, the growth of online and alternative education options such as Sylvan and Kaplan, and the work of such organizations as the State of Black CT Alliance in rallying support for school reform, are also signs that parents should be given their rightful places as kings and lead decision-makers in education.

Despite the evidence, the Ravitches and Ferlazzos  maintain an attitude that parents should stay at the kid’s table when it comes to actually making school decisions. And it isn’t limited to Parent Trigger. Whether one is in a middle class suburb or in a big city, the attitude is generally the same: Parents should stick to field trips, homework and taking blame when test scores and graduation rates are revealed to be abysmal or mediocre.

This is especially so in urban districts, where poor and minority parents — many of whom have suffered in the same dropout factories and failure mills their kids are now educationally imprisoned — are shunted aside as so much garbage. More often than not, many teachers look down at these parents as being their inferiors instead of treating parents as equals. The experience of Virginia Walden Ford, who launched the school reform movement in Washington, D.C., is echoed in a study by Sage Colleges professors Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg, who noted that urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.”

Certainly this attitude among the status quo is manifested in other ways: The opposition to charter schools among the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd (most recently expressed in a Miller-McCune interview with Erica Frankenburg and Gary Miron) on the ground that they foster resegregation; Miron in particular, ignores the reality that parents seek charter schools as high-quality options by declaring that “parents choose based on race and social class”. Then there is the embrace of the Ruby Payne-promulgated poverty myth — that poor parents are simply incapable of playing strong roles in education — among teachers and administrators. The low regard for even middle class parents among teachers, who label these families as “Burger King Parents” and “The Grass is Always Greener” for daring to demand more on behalf of their kids.

Certainly the reality that the players within the status quo — teachers union bosses, ed school professors, school administrators and even many teachers — don’t want to give up their power and autonomy is one reason for this opposition to parent power. The other reason lies with their conceit (one they share with some school reformers) that experts should actually make education decisions. After all, an ed school professor and a teacher with an array of grad degrees should have more knowledge about what kids should learn (and how it should happen) than some parent. Yet, as we have seen over the past 150 years — from the comprehensive high school model (created because of the misguided belief that immigrants and African Americans were incapable of mastering college prep work) to the array of new math theories that have fallen flat and even the traditional system of teacher compensation — the experts aren’t so good at this thing called education. Combined with other problems among status quo circles — including the rampant anti-intellectualism, willful ignorance of economics and unwillingness to consider the developments in sectors outside of K-12 — and this conceited view of parents turns from mere condescension to outright hostility.

Yet the rise of the modern school reform movement — and the emergence of charter schools, school choice and Parent Trigger — has all but assured that parents will be playing a stronger role in education. The underlying infrastructure for exercising decision-making — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is just coming into existence. Many parents are just beginning to realize that the old concept of education — that the school can educate every child without active engagement of families that goes beyond homework and field trips — has gone by the wayside. But as I wrote at this same time last year, the school reform movement (like the development of cellphones and other consumer goods) is fostering choice. And choice begets choice; once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the so-called experts — including NEA and AFT bosses and the Ravitches of the world — in their way.

What McKinley represents is a response to the status quo: How dare you argue that families can’t think for themselves! How dare you limit our kids only to the proverbial sky! And by the way: Work with us or get out of the way! You’re either part of a better future or just boulders to be pushed aside.

The hostility against parents among education’s status quo is essentially anti-children. What these experts are tacitly arguing is that the educational, economic and social destinies of kids — especially our poorest children — don’t matter a wit. It’s time for parents to shunt these folks aside and take the power that is rightfully theirs.

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Watch: Dr. Steve Perry and Al Sharpton on Civil Rights Groups and Education


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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…

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 relevanceand 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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Why Desegregation Must Be Secondary to Systemic Reform


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Among the dominant themes in education this year is the debate over the importance of integration and desegregation in school reform. From the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd launching rhetorical volleys…

The battle to improve education for blacks, minorities and the poor remains the same. But we can’t fight it with the same approaches. (Photo courtesy of Salon)

Among the dominant themes in education this year is the debate over the importance of integration and desegregation in school reform. From the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd launching rhetorical volleys against charter schools, to the battle between old-school civil rights groups and President Barack Obama, the question of whether education has swung too far from a goal of assuring that blacks, whites and Latinos sit together in classrooms and lunchrooms has become as much a discussion as Race to the Top and the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Certainly the question mostly arises from the battles over who will shape the reform of American public education (teachers unions and their allies versus school reformers) and how (charter schools versus magnet schools; competitive reform programs versus additional funding). But, as Education Next points out through its interview with Steve Rifkin and Susan Eaton, there is also whether or not we should continue to hold on to a noble ideal. For those who are dedicated to desegregation above all else, as Easton is, integrating all of society offers “untapped potential” to make society more diverse, add richness to our individual and collective social thinking, and even improve economic and social progress for all. After all, it is what civil rights activists of the 1960s always wanted. Right?

Not exactly. The ideals of the civil rights movement weren’t so much about bringing all children of different races and creeds together in order to promote a more-harmonious world. It may have been an ideal to which Martin Luther King may have appealed in order to win support from whites (and he clearly believed it himself). But for the rest of the movement (think Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young and Malcolm X),  it wasn’t the goal. For civil rights activists, the primary mission was to allow for blacks and other minorities to be full members of the economic and social mainstream — that thing called equal opportunity under the law. This included improving the quality of education for black and minority children, who were segregated — both physically and fiscally — from what was then considered high-quality schools. They were tired of black students sitting in wretched school buildings, being unable to attend the best school near their homes, and not having up-to-date textbooks from which to study.

Desegregation and integration became the accepted means of achieving this goal for two reasons: The first being the realization that blacks wouldn’t achieve it immediately through the fiscal means (equal funding of schools) simply because segregationist whites controlled school boards and other political mechanisms. The second being that they thought that the way blacks would gain a better education (and greater entree into society) by merely rubbing shoulders with white kids and attending their schools.

Certainly integration achieved some good by helping middle class blacks gain greater access to society; but they, like their white middle class schoolmates, were already guaranteed some level of it. But it didn’t do much for poor blacks or Latinos (or even for poor whites). These kids were already treated as afterthoughts by teachers in traditional public school classrooms in their neighborhoods; desegregation merely guaranteed that they would get desultory instruction and curricula in more-diverse classes.

Meanwhile minority neighborhoods suffered the consequences. Although there were some high-quality schools in those neighborhoods before desegregation, most of them were of the abysmal quality that led to Brown in the first place. Desegregation could have led to those schools getting what would have been for the time high-quality teachers and better school leadership if the civil rights leaders and school administrators were willing to do the work. This didn’t happen. Instead, the combination of busing, suburban flight, poor school district leadership and the economic malaise that took hold after the Great Society era led to these schools falling further into academic failure status (and that’s when they weren’t shut down altogether). As a result, minority neighborhoods — especially ones home to poor blacks — fell into wretched disrepair.

What civil rights leaders of the first generation (and the second-generation old-school activists who succeeded them and now head up the NAACP and other groups today) didn’t understand was that the segregation wasn’t the only cause of low quality of education for blacks in American public education — and not even the biggest culprit. The real problem was systemic: A public education system in which most teachers weren’t trained by ed schools to work with poor and minority children; the use of ability-tracking to segment students deemed worthy of college preparatory education from those (namely minorities, immigrants and the poor) considered too cognitively inferior for such work; and the comprehensive high school (which further exacerbated the effects of ability tracking); the concept of zoned schooling, which prevents parents from exercising choice (and exacerbates racial, ethnic and income-based segregation). These issues were easy to miss in part because of the lack of good data on school performance, and the reality that even for poor blacks, the lack of a high-quality education had less to do with precluding them from middle class-paying work than racial bigotry in the rest of society.

By the 1970s, these problems were exacerbated thanks to the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. The contracts they structured with districts (along with their successful lobbying efforts at the state level), gave veteran instructors wide berth in picking their teaching assignments; longtime teachers who didn’t want to work with the poorest children or those from racial minorities they may have deemed unteachable, could easily avoid them by selecting the more-middle class (and less racially- and economically-diverse) schools. Magnet schools, because they are often selective, require kids to be on the right ability track (and support from gatekeepers) to get into them, and warehouse high-quality teachers from the rest of the school district, could never solve these problems.

Within the past 40 years, we have figured out most of the systemic problems and their underlying causes. Solving them requires a far different approach than simply integrating school populations (or simply increasing school funding, as the equity lawsuit crowd would prefer). The approach must be different: The traditional system of teacher compensation and seniority-based benefits must be changed in order to bring high quality teachers to schools serving poor and minority communities; charter schools and other school choice options must be expanded in order to provide every parent with a range of high-quality options to serve their children; families must also be given their proper role as kings and consumers in education decision-making; college preparatory curricula must be the floor — and not the ceiling — in every school throughout the nation in order to assure children that they will be prepared for the future.

The high levels of racial, ethnic and income segregation won’t cease in urban communities until school systems are of the high quality all parents — middle class and poor alike — demand. In suburban communities, segregation won’t stop until you make inter-district school choice — allowing parents to send their children anywhere they choose — a reality. This means opening the doors to school choice (as well as confronting suburban parents fast and hard about their prejudices). Old-school civil rights activists and their colleagues in the Orfield-Kahlenberg crowd must realize this — and also acknowledge that they are reinterpreting civil rights history in ways that were never so.

Additionally, most minority parents have no interest in it. Since many of them were part of the very desegregation efforts of the past four decades, they recognize, as onetime busing supporter Charles Ogletree did, that integration is “a false promise”. As taxpayers, they have as much right as their wealthier counterparts to expect high-quality schools in their neighborhoods. More importantly, what is the point of a harmonious society when half of the population is poorly educated, likely to end up in prison, and will fall onto the welfare line? A nation in which a broad set of its population remains poor, uneducated and ghettoized will not remain harmonious for long.

Meanwhile the problems of race and ethnicity currently bubbling up these days — including the complex debate over Arizona’s immigration enforcement law — stem from problems that have long been part of the American political and social landscape. Immigration has been a lightning rod since 1882 when Congress passed the first round of immigration restrictions in order to stop Chinese migrants from coming to our shores. Racial and ethnic discrimination has been part of the American fabric for centuries longer. Education can help foster more-diverse mindsets; but it will take more than schools to deal with these deep-seeded legacies. Social integration can happen in other contexts (and already does); this will continue to happen as America becomes a majority-minority country. And what it means to be American isn’t defined by schools anyway; that’s why we have civic holidays such as Independence Day and rituals such as the Pledge of Allegiance.

This isn’t to say that desegregation and school reform cannot coexist. If anything, school choice could foster more diversity by opening opportunities for parents to send their children to schools anywhere they see fit, be it a traditional public school in the neighborhood, a magnet in another district, a local charter or even the Catholic diocesan school in the next neighborhood. School reformers — especially those working in the big cities and in the Beltway — also cannot forget about the importance of desegregation and integration. Expanding the minds and horizons of children is also important to their academic and social success; the lack of middle-class background knowledge, for example, may be the reason why many minorities perform poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the gatekeeper for college entrance. Working with organizations and cultural institutions to enrich their experiences (and broaden the perspectives of reformers themselves) is important to do and should be done.

But for the poorest parents and for minority families — whose options are often limited to the worst that American public education offers — they’ve seen desegregation and want something a lot better: Great schools for their kids and opportunities to learn in order to fully be a part of the American mainstream. And as committed as I am to a color-blind society, both in principle and in my own life, this middle-class black man can hardly disagree.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to comment.

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Rewind: The Dropout Nation Podcast: Why Civil Rights Activists Should Embrace School Reform


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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 —…

Two kids attending the Bronx Charter School for Better Living

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 NetworkZune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

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The Dropout Nation Podcast: Why Civil Rights Activists Should Embrace School Reform


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive…

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive approaches to improving equity and equality for the nation’s poor black and Latino children and embrace approaches offered by the school reform movement.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley and the Education Podcast Network.

Update: You can now download the Podcast from Zune Marketplace.

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Read: Snowbound Edition


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What’s happening today in the dropout nation: When the National Education Association took control of the Indiana State Teachers Association last year, Association after the collapse of its insurance trust…

What’s happening today in the dropout nation:

  1. When the National Education Association took control of the Indiana State Teachers Association last year, Association after the collapse of its insurance trust fund, it was more than just a colossal embarrassment of alleged financial mismanagement – and a loss of coverage for its 50,000 rank-and-file members. After decades of winning expensive compensation packages that have made teaching one of the best-paid professions in the public sector, the collapse of ISTA — along with $600 billion in pension deficits and underfunded retirement liabilities — exposes teachers unions to increased scrutiny — especially as taxpayers may end up on the hook for the unions’ failings. Read more about the collapse — and how it could help spur teacher compensation and quality reforms — in my latest Labor Watch report.
  2. Tom Vander Ark sums up the problem with the Obama Administration’s decision to essentially gut the No Child Left Behind Act by eliminating its Adequate Yearly Progress provisions: Doing so will abandon the promise of assuring that every child no matter their race or economic status, can attend a great school staffed by high-performing teachers. Of course, as I hinted last week in The American Spectator, the administration may be doing this (along with boosting education spending for FY 2011) in order to placate the NEA and AFT, whose help they will need in order to keep control of Congress.
  3. The folks behind The Lottery are rallying folks around an “Education Constitution” demanding teacher quality reforms, expansion of school choice and other reforms. Check it out and sign it.
  4. The U.S. Department of Education releases a timely report on an important — if rarely-considered — use of school data: Improving teaching, staffing, student diagnostics and other matters at the district, school and even classroom levels. As I wrote last year in A Byte at the Apple, school data will only be the most useful once the information is delivered and made accessible in ways teachers, administrators and parents find appealing and useful. Right now, however, this is still a problem.
  5. Speaking of useful data, the Consortium on Chicago School Research has a series of papers examining the on-time graduation progress of the Windy City’s high school students. Each of Chicago’s high schools are examined in depth. Read them. I am.
  6. EducationNews is re-running another one of teaching guru Martin Haberman’s fine essays, this on whether the right people are entering teaching. Given the efforts to reform ed schools and weed out laggards before they even apprentice, the piece is as timely as ever.
  7. And, with Gary Orfield’s study of charter school segregation gaining attention from newspapers and school reformers alike, Sonya Sharp of Mother Jones points out the one thing everyone forgets: Traditional school districts are just as segregated (and often, even more segregated) no matter where we go. Joanne Jacobs also offers a compendium of the arguments (including those by your friendly neighborhood editor). And, by the way, here is a piece I wrote a few years ago about diversity and public schools.
  8. Intramural Sparring Watch: Big Edreform Andy #1 (also known as Andrew Rotherham) This Week in Education‘s Alexander Russo (and his employer, Scholastic) for for allegedly running “hearsay” claims against Massachusetts’ education secretary, Paul Reveille, for his supposed intervention in the authorizing of a local charter school. Russo, by the way, has taken potshots against Rotherham and his folks at the Education Sector (which Rotherham, by the way, is leaving by the end of March) for years. Most recently, he accused EdSector of allegedly mucking around with a report authored by EdSector’s now-departed cofounder. Yeah, I’m exhausted from just writing about this.

Meanwhile, check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on the reauthorization of No Child, along with my pieces this week on charter schools and segregation. The next podcast, on civil rights activists and education reform, will be available on Sunday before the Super Bowl. And since you are all stuck inside, get your debate on.

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