-Charles Donalson, African American male, student at

Oak Park and River Forest High School

Good schools aren’t good for everybody. That is one of the things I learned quickly as I began to study schools that were widely celebrated for achievement and diversity, but there was much more beneath the surface. America to Me, a new documentary series directed by Steve James of Hoop Dreams fame, has begun airing on Starz after receiving critical acclaim at Sundance earlier this year. The 10 part series is just four episodes in, but from its opening it’s clear that the series goes beyond celebrating the school’s diversity and is attempting to grapple with race and racism. On this alone, I recommend the series but that doesn’t mean it’s without issues.

The series, so far, highlights the lives of several students at Oak Park and River Forest (OPRF) High School in suburban Illinois. In addition to the students and parents who are followed throughout a year, we hear from faculty, administrators, and school board members. The students are involved in an litany of activities: wrestling, spoken word, cheer, drill, as well as students who do no extracurriculars. There are students who are freshman, seniors, heterosexual, non-binary, biracial, and the list goes one. Despite all this diversity, the main students and families followed by the crew are all Black (or at least have one Black parent). For viewers, this is great for showing what its like to be Black, in its many iterations, in a school like OPRF. Oak Park, as its commonly called, is the kind of school that has great amenities, receives academic accolades, and whose optics look like they’re pulled from a college campus website. Still, the experience of Black students there is markedly different. For example, in 2015, 23% of the student body was Black, but 53% of students who got suspended were Black. For decades now, even in schools that are well-appointed, Black students have bore the brunt on unequal treatment. For Black folks, this is not an entirely new story, but that is also why Charles’ words that open this post are so important. Charles doesn’t start with the achievement gap or Black underperformance–we have no shortage of writing or documentaries on that, instead he highlights the pervasive culture of white advantage.

If there is one thing that is glaringly absent from America to Me it is the voices and experiences of White students and families who accrue the spoils of suburbia whether traversing town or selecting advanced placement courses.

If there is one thing that is glaringly absent from America to Me it is the voices and experiences of White students and families who accrue the spoils of suburbia whether traversing town or selecting advanced placement courses. In my own book, Inequality in the Promised Land, I found it essential to make sure the voices of White families were present for a few reasons. First, by speaking with white families, I heard their perspectives and experiences rather than simply inferring them from the accounts of others. Other scholars who studied suburbs, such as John Ogbu, only studied Black families, and attributed academic failure to Black children’s “academic disengagement” while assuming White families’ achievement was a result of hard-work and high functioning. In the social sciences, long traditions of deficit thinking limit us from seeing what’s actually happening. Second, once I put the voices of White and Black families in conversation the relational dynamic between the two became clearer. Black families were not simply disadvantaged, White families were hyper-advantaged and they routinely hoarded resources.

When it comes to suburban spaces, including the villages of Oak Park and River Forest, the history of racial exclusion is not simply in the past, it shapes where people live today and how people are received in public spaces like schools. The critics’ responses to America to Me have been favorable, but as I read comments on YouTube, IMDB and other sites, they are far more critical. Many of the comments argue that if there is an issue with Black academic success in the school it is rooted in Black children’s effort and their home environment. This old trope has long been challenged by research, but in remains a common explanation among popular audiences, even educators who are meant to help produce equitable learning environments.

The entrenched belief in Black dysfunction and normative White responses is captured in one telling moment in an interview in episode one.  Sami Koester, a student on the cheerleading team, confesses that Deanna Paloian (bka Coach D) the lead cheerleading coach who is white, is now different. “The Coach D that I used to know from when I was 12, she was a lot nicer. She did tell me that she has to put herself in authority more because all the girls are Black and she has to like put up her own fight to make sure that she gets what she wants.” Coach D argues she coaches the girls, who are predominantly black (the drill team in predominantly White), like a football coach and she is not afraid to hurt feelings or be bluntly honest. She peppers her speech with “girlfriends” as she wears a Beyonce themed shirt. Her approach is met with mixed reception from the Black girls under her guidance. Some suggest, “She yells at us like a mom” while others highlight Coach D’s approach may be rooted in her racial mismatch which heightens attitudes and sassiness. The filmmakers don’t make a effort to suggest which came first, adults’ attitudes or children’s responses, but it becomes clear that often the most “well intentioned” can create dangerous environments for Black children.

In episode four, viewers get a deeper look at Aaron Podolner, a White Physics teacher who was born and raised in Oak Park, and his approaches to race inside and outside of the classroom. He “invites” (I’m not sure how much choice they had to actually opt out) two Black students–Jada Bufford and Charles Donalson to read his memoir on race and comment on how he’s handled race in the classroom. In the classroom, Jada challenges Podolner to respect the boundaries of students and mentions how when she asked him not to comment or make jokes about her hair, he persisted. She points out that in his attempt to “relate” he is missing the very students he claims to care about. Podolner misses her point entirely and tone deathly centers himself and his difficulties as he responds,

“I think it’s hardest because we get a lot of pressure here, as teachers, to, like, make a difference, to fix black people, to improve scores. We’re not given any ways to do it. So that’s like, someone like you [motions to Jada and Charles] could be a great resource to us teachers.”

I was literally forced to rewind the show to make sure I heard correctly that Podolner matter of factly invoked the idea that Black children are broken. This is not an uncommon belief among educators, though not often stated. Despite equity commissions and task forces, Black deficit thinking still pervades and governs large parts OPRF. Du Bois famously asked, “How does it feel to be a problem?” and more than 100 years later Black students in OPRF and settings like it could give long monologues on its pains.

In another scene, Podolner sits down with a Jessica Stovall, a Black-White biracial English teacher, as they work to form a teachers equity group to address racial inequality at OPRF. Stovall astutely challenges Poldner, “I understand you’re so passionate about helping your Black students. I know that about you. But I do notice when I start to push you on talking about the miseducation of our White students then you’re less likely to want to engage in those types of conversations.” Podolner describes how he wants to demonstrate to Black and White kids that he “knows more than the average white guy” about Black culture, which he thinks will disturb the classroom dynamics of whiteness and white supremacy. Like many well-intentioned White educators I’ve spoken with and worked with, this attempt at cultural connection does little to disturb white social norms, though I am sure it makes Podolner feel good, all while it silences girls and women like Jada Bufford and Jessica Stovall who desire an entirely different classroom and culture, not one that “gives points” for Black cultural knowledge.

Within each episode, you’re likely to smile at fond moments and grimace at missteps, which is the mark of a compelling series. At core though, I hope the series ultimately listens to the Jada and Charles’ who know OPRF will not be different until it becomes a non-White space. The “browning” of OPRF won’t make it a non-White space; critical engagement and challenging everyday practices of white supremacy like: opportunity hoarding, sliding standards, and deficit thinking will. Making our schools, and this country, non-White spaces will take more than seeing Black suffering, it will mean that White advantages must be relinquished and White accountability must emerge. The omission of White students (as main characters) and families worries me that the project could unintentionally reify ideas that when racism impacts life, the onus on repair and restitution lies with the people most affected by racism. I’ll be watching to see where this goes, I hope you will too!

Since seeing the video last night, it looks like the title has been changed from “Morehouse College Dubois Divas” to “The Du Bois Dance Team.” According to the description, this was a performance at 2015-2016 Mr. Freshman Pageant. The video was shared with ire in a Morehouse fb group I’m in. Brothers raised questions about damaging the brand of Morehouse, why these young folks should not attend our alma mater, and comments were laced with a host of homo and femmephobic rhetoric. I was glad to see the video and to see the four young cats work it out and turn up the crowd. Why you ask? Give my piece for 2010 a read and you’ll understand a bit more. [i uploaded a pdf so it doesn’t get washed away in url scraping].

Too often, people see folks like the ones in this video and write them off as “deviant”, “damaging” and “not-men” without knowing anything of their identification, character or constitution. The Morehouse we should be is one where diversities of gender expression, as well as sexual expression, are welcomed as long as you are doing your best to meet the crown that is placed above your head.

As news that 11 educators from Atlanta Public Schools were convicted of racketeering charges made national headlines last week, cheers of “justice served” quickly rang out.

That is far from the truth of the matter.

Let me be clear, 11 employees of APS were found guilty of the terrible act of cheating, but they are not the ones who should be behind bars. Who should be there? The people who have stolen our children’s education since the early 2000s with a brand of high-stakes testing that breeds competition rather than collaboration and offers achievement gap mania rather than offering assistance to schools and students with the greatest needs. These thieves of public education are the bigger problem than 11 educators in Atlanta.

Read more at EBONY http://www.ebony.com/news-views/atlanta-cheating-scandal-punishes-the-wrong-culprits-504#ixzz3YF3hf0IQ

Right now you can pick up the book (paperback or hardback) at Stanford University Press (use discount code S14SOC) or via Amazon. I’ll be announcing more about its availability in brick and mortar stores as well as in other formats (ibooks, kindle). I look forward to you reading along with me!!

On June 10th, a Superior Court judge in California struck down California’s teacher tenure laws. While you may not be a California resident, I can tell you this is going to matter for your state, your children and your schools. In the national debate on educational reform, one of the most vilified terms is “tenure.” The Vergara case on its face appears to be about increasing student opportunities, but in reality it is all about weakening both the diversity of the teaching force and teachers’ labor protections. This is not a case of students’ interests winning out over teachers’: there are no victors in this decision.

What is tenure? First, tenure is different at the K-12 level and the higher education level. As a college professor, tenure is a property interest in one’s job, roughly the equivalent of becoming a partner at a law firm or medical practice. It makes the person with tenure a long-term part of the management of the business or institution.

But this is not the meaning of tenure in K-12 education—tenured teachers are not like law firm partners (if you don’t believe me ask a teacher to see their paycheck stub!) For educators of the nation’s youth, tenure means the right to due process.

Read more at EBONY

Photo courtesy of Brett Levin

R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy is a professor of sociology at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. This month, his book Inequality in the Promised Land: Race, Resources, and Suburban Schooling is being released through Stanford University Press. In this interview with Neighborhoods and Nations, he gives an overview of the research underlying the book’s insights on the everyday, and often insidious, forms of discrimination black students and their families face in schools across America. In doing so, Professor Lewis-McCoy paints a portrait of a new suburban landscape, one that fails to be “the promised land” of broader opportunities and resources that struggling families, particularly people of color, can rely on in equal shares.

How would you contextualize this work in relation to your past and ongoing research? Would you say that ‘race and education’ is a primary focus for you as a sociologist? 

My research for Inequality in the Promised Land continues my ongoing interest in how race and class shape educational opportunity. This year marks 60 years since the US Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate facilities are inherently unequal facilities.” When most people think of schools they think of them as the engine of social change or potentially the “great equalizer.” Unfortunately, when we look deeper, we see that schools are a mixed bag—some schools are flying high, while others are failing.

Read More at Neighborhoods and Nations

If you missed it, here’s a quick summary: with the words  “Hood Disease” emblazoned next to her head, Wendy Tokuda of the San Francisco Bay area’s CBS affiliate KPIX delivered the following, “Even the Centers for Disease control says that these kids often live in virtual war zones and doctors at Harvard say they actually suffer from a more complex form of PTSD, some call it ‘hood disease.’” The story then began to discuss the set of complex issues that many youth of color in high poverty areas experience daily and some of their consequences on academic engagement.Tokuda’s reporting made it appear as if Harvard scholars coined and were studying “hood disease” which set off a firestorm and multiple questions about research, Harvard, and the sources of the story. A trip to Tokuda’s personal Facebook page reveals that she derived the term “hood disease” from Mark Beasley. Who is Mark Beasley you ask? Beasley is one of Tokuda’s Facebook friends.

The jokes should write themselves here, but this is the sort of propaganda that reinforces dangerous stereotypes about people of color, especially those with economic challenges. Even if you dismiss the ill-fated term,  the report is still framed in a way that makes it seem that the issues that youth in urban high poverty neighborhoods face are actually a disorder that they co-create.

Within the social sciences there is a long history of suggesting that problems among Black and impoverished communities are a function of their own practices and beliefs and divorced from larger social problems. In 1965, the Moynihan Report famously popularized the concept of “tangle of pathology” that argued Black female headed households perpetuated poverty, not lack of access to jobs and economic resources. Later arguments about the “culture of poverty” came to dominate academic and social policy circles resulting in divestments from communities of color and the belief that Black culture was the issue and the role of social structure was minimal, if meaningful at all.

Essentially, Blackness is the disease—or so the narrative goes.

Read more at EBONY

In President Obama’s last State of the Union address 

The answer is no, but that does not mean the effort is without merit. To create serious traction any effort to help young males of color must battle on two fronts: the empowerment of young males and changing the institutions and systems through which these young males travel. Choosing one front and not the other is a dangerous move.

Read more at Ebony.com.

While cameras follow Idris and Seun, the film is more about their parents’ educational and social negotiations than the boys’. Idris’s parents (Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson) double as central subjects and filmmakers. A moment that stood out to me was Michele Stephenson’s commentary on their choice to send Idris to a historically and predominantly White private school. “Initially I didn’t want to even go to the interview at Dalton. I didn’t want Idris to be part of this elite school that didn’t give him any sense of grounding or sense of self. You know? A bunch of rich white kids disconnected from the larger world that [are] self-involved etc., etc. But going to the school, experiencing commitment to diversity and comparing it to the other schools that I went to, I finally gave in. I can’t say that I regret it. It’s going to hopefully allow him to compete at the top level with his peers.”  Stephenson’s analysis is like many Black parents who seek high quality education for their children but simultaneously recognize that schools are often alienating to students of color, at best, and devaluing of them, at worst. Seun’s parents share similar concerns about the issues that they face as they steward young Black males through school.

Both families’ initial reservations seem to be well placed, but when we look at Idris’s and Seun’s paths through Dalton their parental concern didn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes. Seun and Idris were the only two Black boys in the class in primary school and soon were referred to special tutoring services to which none of their classmates were referred. As time passed, both families encountered pressure from the school administration to evaluate their sons for learning disabilities and behavioral problems, and both struggled with peer acceptance. Early on in the film Seun is diagnosed with dyslexia and eventually struggles to stay afloat academically at Dalton, leading him to leave Dalton and attend Benjamin Banneker Academy in Brooklyn for high school (a predominantly Black school with an African-centered school philosophy).

Idris remained at Dalton through high school and had a very different educational experience than Seun.  Throughout the film Idris’s parents question the ways Dalton characterizes their son: disruptive, unfocused, hard to manage. His parents highlight his academic acumen but also question his lack of follow through and drive when it comes to academic matters. The school pressures Idris’s parents to test him for ADHD but they resist (it should be noted that Idris’s father is a psychiatrist). In contrast to his parents, Idris wants to be diagnosed because he believes if medicated his test scores may improve, a pattern that he believes has occurred with his classmates. Ultimately he gets assessed and is excited to receive an ADHD diagnosis.

Both Idris and Seun’s experiences reminded me of my educational journey. During my freshman year (and first year) at a similarly elite private school in Connecticut, school administrators encouraged my parents to have me screened for learning issues. Faculty of color at the school privately pulled my parents to the side and informed them that there was a pattern of over-diagnosis of students of color. My parents, excited to have me in such a renowned school, heeded the school administration’s advice to undergo evaluation and ultimately, they were told I had a “learning disability” though no type was ever specified. This led to ” academic accommodations” but also led to teachers treating me differently in the classroom.

The over-diagnosis of Black boys (and to a lesser extent Black girls) with learning disabilities occurs across educational and economic settings. In Inequality in the Promised Land I discuss how parental desires and school staff desires often clash—and what can be done to change that. For many Black parents in well-resourced schools, these dynamics often meant begrudgingly accepting diagnoses they didn’t agree with or being coerced by school cultures that seemed to devalue their children but potentially provided strong academic foundations. This type of trade-off is too common.

In American Promise, we see two families attempt to get the best education for their sons while still dealing with the hazards of race (and to some degree class). The promise of American opportunity will remain unrealized until Black families, as well as poor families, have equal opportunities to reap the benefits of well-resourced schools without suffering pyscho-social consequences along the way.

On Nov. 19, 2013, the University of Michigan’s Black Student Union tweeted, “We want to hear your unique experiences of being Black at University of Michigan! #BBUM.” That Tweet has sparked international conversations and is angling to change the way University of Michigan operates.

While some dismiss “hashtag activism” — the use of social media to raise awareness and sometimes launch campaigns about social issues — the BBUM (Being Black at the University of Michigan) campaign may help prove that activism that emerges via the Internet can shift policy and realities on the ground, particularly when it comes to colleges and universities.

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I have to admit, until recently I didn’t really know who Chief Keef was. I recognized his name from the hit “I Don’t Like,” but not much else. I starting inquiring about him more as he feuded with Lupe Fiasco, Lil Jojo got killed, and people started telling me, “Chief Keef is a problem.” The more I learn about him, the more I feel endeared to and concerned for him, as with many of our young Black males. As the rapper gets more and more attention, we have to realize that he is only one person. And like many of our youth, he is trapped in crises of identity, community and opportunity. Until we start to shift those things we can expect to see more loss in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other metropolitan cities.

Identity Crisis

“Know thyself”— two words that can be as simple or complex as we make them. The process of self-discovery is one fraught with benefit and consequences; nonetheless, it is a journey that all must undergo. While we spend a great deal of time telling our young people what to do and socializing them into what to consume, we often miss the chances to help them discover themselves and help them figure out what their role on the planet is, not just what they can make money doing.

Chief Keef, entrenched in a heavy gang culture, is a prime example. To him, Chicago’s Black Disciples is central to who he is and who he should be. Each of his tweets carries #300, a reference to the gang, and he’s been known to only state his age as “300.” A gang, for many, meets a craving for community; however, as this bleeds into an all-consuming sense of identity, the consequences can be large. Gangs are not likely to leave today or tomorrow. Chicago is no stranger to gangs; in fact, they are so much a part of the city’s history that there have been numerous attempts to organize them for progressive social action and governmental intervention to destabilize political alliances.

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Tips 1 and 2: Strong Summers/After-School Times and Clear Communication with Teachers

Tips 3 and 4: Understand the School’s Behavioral System and Identify Gaps Early

Tip 5: Foster an Intellectual Environment

I hope this creates a dialogue and space for nurturing Black boys to success.

As a child, I used to look forward to the fabled moments in recess and gym class when we would play “girls versus boys.” While rare, it was a chance to go head-to-head with my classmates for gender supremacy. The stakes in gym class were bragging rights at best, but when we look at the current educational landscape, the competition between boys and girls is a bit more complicated. In recent years, we have seen the gender gap—the gap in average scores between males and females—reverse with girls surpassing boys in academic subjects like science and reading. This, not surprisingly, has led to a reincarnation of the battle of boys versus girls. But this time, school culture and societal inequality will be up for grabs.

Recently, David Brooks penned an editorial in the New York Times on the gender gap in our schools. Brooks cited research evidence to suggest that schools are geared towards female students, leaving boys at a disadvantage. This is not a wholly original argument, and the response from Soraya Chemalay suggests that any disadvantages that males face in school are but a microcosm of the larger gender inequities that females face in the world-at-large. While both Brooks and Chemalay are rightfully concerned, we must be careful to ensure that the education of children will not be taken as a zero-sum game, where one gender must win and one gender must lose.

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On Thursday July 26, 2012 President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order creating the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for African Americans. The initiative creates a commission that is tasked with monitoring and improving the educational performance of African American students. At its best, Obama’s creation of this commission is groundbreaking and signals the start of a national commitment to the educational needs of Black children. At its worst, this could be a political hat tip but provide little force in shifting the trajectory of Black education. What will be the deciding factor between these two? You will be.

The creation of the commission should come as no surprise with the 2012 Election campaign in full swing. This is not to suggest that this is simply political pandering by Obama, rather I’m suggesting that the president knows keeping the African American electorate on his side is essential.

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A sacred space

I am part of the problem. I spend more time and money purchasing books online than going into brick and mortar bookstores. But there was a time when the bookstore was one of my favorite destinations because it held a wealth of information and people who showed me another side to my community, culture, and intellectual life. Black bookstores have never been mega-stores like Barnes & Noble but often have been small individually-run libraries of community enrichment.

Read More at Ebony

Additionally, I was featured in video for the Manhattan Times that discussed the closing of the Hue-Man. Special thanks to Sherry Mazzocchi. Also, don’t forget to support Hue-Man at their online portal and look for pop-up events in the coming months.

Recently, a picture

Sadly, the United States has become the leader of incarceration in the world and it is incarceration that is undoing the sanctity of our communities. not books. Unfortunately, if we don’t begin to prepare children and adults for what has become the virtual inevitability of dealing the prison system, we’ll be attempting to live in a fairy tale. We have come to the point where real life non-fiction is necessary for children and adults.

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Summer is finally

For more than two decades, educational researchers have noticed a pattern: during the summer, Black and poor children tend to have their academic growth stunted and in many cases have their educational achievement rolled back. While all kids fall back some in learning during the summer months, poor and Black kids are particularly susceptible to greater fall offs in achievement. This is known as “summer setback” or summer learning loss. Summer learning loss is most often tied to a family’s socioeconomic status (particularly things like income and wealth) and what activities their children do during the summer months.

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Despite the rhetoric of change and racial transcendence the schools that our children attend are deeply segregated. In fact, according to scholars like Gary Orfield, schools are more racially segregated now than they were in the Jim Crow South. However, today’s segregation is so pernicious because it is overlooked and we, as a country, continue to fail to address school segregation’s root in housing segregation. If we are to address the issue of quality schooling and segregation we must move beyond two common errors. The first error is believing that segregation is the problem. The second error is believing that segregation is not a problem. Read More

Also, check out the Schott Foundation’s recent report on NYC Schools – “A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City.”

Sixty four schools will likely close in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s recent announcement to close these schools has not been a media lightening rod. Instead, the case of Philadelphia is just the latest in a string of national stories of struggling urban districts shuttering school building doors to keep budgets afloat in turbulent financial times. But is that really all there is to it?

If we look more carefully, the patterns of national school closing are tied to poor academic performance among schools, but also the formerly controversial trend to close traditional public schools and opening charter schools. I say “formerly” controversial, because under the Bush administration there was a national debate about the expansion of charter schools, school choice, and educational privatization. Yet under President Obama, all three of these issues have gained traction with little national resistance or Democratic party challenge. Read More

“Black male success”. These three words are elusive in the press and too rarely associated with the brothers in our everyday lives. A recent report, however, may prove to be the game changer we so desperately deserve.

Dr. Shaun R. Harper, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, recently released results from a comprehensive study of Black males who have excelled at college and beyond. The report, “Black Male Student Success in Higher Education” is the first research report released by the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education (CSREE). In the study’s pages we get an all too rare glimpse into what enables success for Black males. Read More

As a child, I can remember my favorite toy at my local New Haven Head Start was a firefighter helmet. I was convinced that when I grew up that I would be put on a bright yellow coat, red helmet, and save the lives of people, cats, and burning properties that were on the brink of disaster.

For me, those dreams of being a firefighter waned over time, but for many other African-Americans the dreams of rising as a firefighter have been forced to give way due to discriminatory promotion and hiring practices. While these issues are not new, they are now getting more national attention due to rising numbers of court cases and challenges to outdated hiring and promotion practices. Read More

Image courtesy of reena rose photography

If you cannot see the video, click here.

Silver screens across the nation will soon be buzzing with “Waiting for Superman” directed by Davis Guggenheim and the team that brought us “An Inconvenient Truth.” Backed by media powerhouses like Oprah, the film has the potential to change the nation’s perspective of education and what needs to be done. While this is promising, conspicuously absent from these bubbling discussions on changing education is the issue of race. The absence of race is not just a pitfall of the film; race as a taboo topic permeates most of the education reforms being considered.

Read more here.

The achievement gap. These three words have launched a million initiatives, all with the goal of closing the average differences in test scores between black and white students. While more and more people are getting in on education reform and more attention is being placed on it due to films like Waiting for Superman, we cannot make the mistake of thinking that black students who are not in the inner-city are safe from inequality. In fact, the gap in test scores between black and white youth in the suburbs is only slightly smaller than the urban and national gaps that we observe. As we turn out attention towards reforming education, we must think about inequality in the promised lands of suburbs.

Read more here.

Education reform is a hot topic these days, thanks to the recent release of the much-hyped documentary, Waiting for Superman.  Directed by the same team that produced the award-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary takes a hard look at the dilemma of American educational failure. Viewers get a heart-tugging tour de force of issues plaguing low performing American public schools. What viewers do not get, however, is an education on the realities that hamper real reform. The problems that our schools face are complex, but director Davis Guggenheim and crew tell viewers the solutions are simple and “we know what works.” While that’s a powerful statement, there is little research — or reality — to back up that claim.

The truth is, when it comes to implementing education reform, we don’t know for sure what works.

Read more here

Waiting for Superman is a powerful film about educational reform and the potential of our schools from the same team that brought us the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Unfortunately the filmmakers leave the audience hoping for a change that is as likely as a caped crusader appearing in real life.

While the film taps into the concerns that many of us have towards a failing educational system, it fails to provide a full portrait of what is really happening in the nation’s schools. If you’re interested in heart wrenching stories, see this film. But if you are interested in changing education make sure you bring your x-ray vision so you can see beyond the veil of what the filmmakers are advocating.

For more click here

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Yesterday the NYTimes ran an interesting Op-Ed piece on Charter Schools by Charles Murray entitled, “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test.” I read through it quickly and thought it to be arguing two main things: standardized tests were weak measures and that school choice was a democratic right. Both of these things meshed well with my ideology and then I arrived to the bi-line and read Charles Murray. I froze, kept reading and sure enough it was the Charles Murray. Murray’s name not ringing a bell? Well Murray was one of two authors of the uber-controversial book The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve, of course, ultimately argued that there were racial differences in intelligence, no matter how you “sliced the pie.” So this may lead one to wonder, “Why or how on earth would Murray be writing about Charter schools and supporting them?” Well to answer that you have to understand his back story.

The Bell Curve’s most controversial chapters (13 and 14) really drove home their message that intelligence (g-factor) was more prevalent among certain racial groups and lower among others. Rightfully so, many top scientists rose up to strike down the Bell Curve’s thinly veiled statements of racial superiority and inferiority. The Bell Curve was not Murray’s first set of handiwork, he is often regarded as the man who dismantled the welfare system. In Losing Ground, he essentially argued that the welfare system enabled bad behaviors and used national dollars to invest in the entrenchment of poverty. This argument, I often hear parroted by people, the catch is a great deal of research carefully demonstrates the contrary (please see any of William Julius Wilson’s or Sheldon Danziger’s bevy of books on the subject). The common sensical nature of Murray’s argument have allowed him to stay around and advance arguments that dance along and get close to idea of eugenics (the science of “bettering humans” usually by “trimming the gene pool” -this was one of Hitler’s goals during the Jewish Holocaust).

Murray in the editorial takes a step back to the question of education which he addressed in Real Education a couple of years ago. I admittedly could not stomach the whole book as he argued “four simple truths”: 1) ability varies, 2) half of america’s children are below average, 3) too many people are going to college and 4) America’s future relies on how we educate the academically gifted. They seem benign enough, right? Well put them together with his past work and you get a neat line of logic suggest (my interpretation):

Ability levels vary, so not all kids are going to do well, in fact half of kids are poor students, the other half are doing okay. So of the half that is okay, there’s really about 10 percent that should be going to college and let’s invest in those 10 percent rather than investing in the other 90 percent.

Still not seeing why it connects to the Bell Curve. If you asked Murray, what do the races of the top 10 percent look like? He’d honest respond earnestly and with his “scientific evidence” to say they’re majority White. Ah, do you see it now? The folks at the top are White and should be invested in, the folks at the bottom are non-White and shouldn’t be getting all those “hand-outs” and “special programming.”

Murray has been consistently attacked for this type of reasoning, so charter schools mark a quaint respite for his ideas. He points to the Milwaukee evidence that demonstrated that charter school and traditional public schools performed roughly equal. He suggests that home environment means a great deal for intelligence ( he doesn’t think standardized tests measure intelligence (g-factor) so they’re a weak measure) and school thus can do little to shift what students walk in. He, like many mis-readers of the Coleman Report, suggest schools CAN DO little, when Coleman actually argued schools DID DO little to affect student achievement. For Murray, choice is good because you no longer have to suggest that poor people get few options. In fact, charters are cheaper on state’s to operate and offer the basic democratic right of choice. He’d likely concede that we shouldn’t expect these schools to do anything for the children who are part of the deeply impoverished and severely unintelligent (this is his reasoning not mine).

In the end, you get a well crafted Op-Ed that says, “despite lack of success Charter schools are good.” But what operates behind the veil matters the most! His piece is animated by a lack of belief in the students within these schools and he doesn’t think schools can to move these youth towards prosperity intellectually, socially or materially. While I’m neither a fan nor hater of charter schools, I realized that who is in your camp matters. Murray’s commentary reminds me of the adage, “Everyone on the sidelines is not cheering for you.” The question is, are we savvy enough to know who is for us and against us?

There is a quiet storm brewing in American schools. While the nation is keeping close watch on health care reform and the nation’s economies, the base of our school system, traditional public schools, are failing and may have a new competitor. When Bush was in office, the question of traditional public school vs. charter schools was hotly debated. Many suggested that charter schools should not be expanded because they undermined traditional public schools, didn’t protect their employees, and were not successful at educating students despite their promise. However, under the Obama administration, there is much less public debate and quietly charter schools are being advanced as a solution to the dilemmas of urban education. The quiet arrival of charters should be raising questions and debate, but it is not.

The No Child Left Behind Act signed in by George W. Bush in 2002 placed a great deal of weight on schools to equalize student test scores by 2014. Well, we’re 4 years from the deadline and we’re about as close to that goal as we are Jetsons flying cars. Recently, Barack Obama introduced his education reform blueprint, which takes aim at creating college and career ready students by 2020. The bill places a great deal of emphasis on teachers and school administrators to turn around sinking schools and offers consequences for the failure to do so.

No one wants a failing school and only a few know how to successfully turn around a failing school. On top of that, failing schools are often located next to other failing schools which makes a failing school district. Few know how to turn around a failing school, but nearly no one has shown us they know how to turn around a failing district. The issue is not just creating success in one school, but creating success in multiple schools!

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Introduction with remarks from Dr. Obie Clayton (Sociology), President of Morehouse College Robert Franklin, and Dr. David Wall Rice (Psychology)

Dr. Horace L. Griffin‘s ( Pacific School of Religion) talks on The Black Church and Black Macho. Griffin goes in depth and breaks down his passage through Morehouse as a religious fundamentalist and arrival to a deeper and more rich spirituality. Griffin breaks down his misogynist and homophobic views and his development into a more equity driven gay Episcopal minister. He is author of Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Church.

Dr. Michael J. Strambler (Yale School of Medicine) breaks down questions of educational motivation among African-American males. He reviews and challenges the current set of explanations which assume low motivation and anti-academic attitudes of Black youth. He then identifies some promising practices for reforming schools to positively affect Black male student experience and performance.

Dr. Shani Harris Peterson (Spelman College) presents on sex, media, and its implications for health. She challenges the audience to interrogate videos, including Snoop Dogg’s “Beautiful.” She also masterfully negotiates a set of questions that essentialize Black women as golddiggers and Black men as African royalty.

This is my talk and I’ll be offering more comments tomorrow in a post on Black Male Privilege (BMP) which includes the link. Also, check out Sister Toldja’s salute to my talk (blushing) and more importantly the subject matter of BMP.

Lastly, the panel closes with a question and answer session where a number of issues are clarified and challenging thoughts offered.

They deserve better, but do we know how to make better for all?

Now some will read this and view me as a pessimist around education, in fact, I am the furthest thing from it. My vision and goal is to have an urban education system where chances of success exceed chances of failure, where families have options, were school staff are supported, and youth become critical thinkers. Is that too much to ask? If you look at the condition of our cities public schools you would begin to believe the answer is yes, that is too much to ask. On the Left, there’s often the cry that resource inequalities are the reason for poor performance. On the Right, the call suggests that instead of working hard, schools, teachers, and students are hardly working and inefficent. Unfortunately the people trapped in the middle of these ideological battles are poor, Black, and Brown families lodged in failing schools in: Detroit, Baltimore, New Haven and the list goes on. The biggest confusion that I see emerging around urban education is the highlight of a few successful schools in a city and mistaking that as the probable, that is what will likely happen, in the city as the whole. These schools are the possible, they are what can happen against dire conditions but they are not probable.  These exceptional schools, like breakfast sausage, are quickly consumed by people but most are afraid to look at what it goes in to making the end product. These schools, which have gone by many labels such as No Excuses, High Flying Schools, Tough Love or Miracle Schools all reflect a desire to point out exceptional success, but with little scrutiny of how this success emerges, if this success is sustainable, and if this success can be replicated. Most, if not all of the schools talked about in these articles and segments, have had huge investments of resources both material and non-material (e.g. dollars, partnerships, unmitigated administrative power, strict standards of enrollment, parental mandated behaviors) which are not reported on in news stories. They carry with them conditions and rules that if you clamped most urban schools with and demanded conformity to in wide-scale would surely mean the casting out of many students, abuses of labor law, and spikes in test but not the sustained development of critical thinkers. What often looks like a miracles upon first glance for a small group would be a nightmare for the mass upon deep investigation.

The reality is that the schools you see championed on the news for exceptional performance are in part being elevated to support mental and material divestment in traditional public educational systems. You sit and say, “If they can do it, why can’t the others?” These schools appear to be anomalies at first glance, but with further reading you see why they look as they do and why often their success is not sustainable or transferable. Replicating success in urban schools has been policy alchemy since the days, and even before, Ron Edmonds and continues to demonstrate that urban education will not be solved until we can see a system wide change in results for children. Despite the caution of social analysts like Richard Rothstein, the trumpets of success of a few urban schools continue to defeaningly blare out the cries of whole cities in educational disrepair.

Some will suggest are being used to suggest the thing missing from our schools is hard work, but that too is an incomplete picture. While all schools could be improved marginally with more hard work, the solution is often not simply pulling harder on bootstraps or throwing dollars. In fact, we have seen time and time again, that neither in isolation works. If educational research has taught us anything, it is that we do not know the formula for success in contemporary urban schooling. There is little to no evidence that more charter schools are better for kids in urban areas. There is little to no evidence that more charter schools improve the “market” of urban schools. There is little to no evidence that success in one year on a standardized test will be repeated in the next. There is little to no evidence that cities schools perform at an equal level to suburban schools consistently. Yes, this portrait is bleak, but it is the state of affairs. This is a hard truth to swallow, this is why in part people continue to point to “the miracles.”

To me, the situation of urban education is much like the common cold, as technology advances, we find more and more options that tend to abate sickness, cover the symptoms, but still there is no cure. Like the snake oil salesmen of the past, what works for one, seldom works for many, or may not work at all. I am hesitant to listen to anyone who tells me, “We know what works” because suggesting so would be based on the possible, while ignoring the probable.

I’ve been trying to avoid writing this for some time now. As an alumnus of the institution, it’s hard for me to see you in such condition. Many of my fellow alumni complained of your disrepair and your besmirched image when they heard about students being beaten for their sexuality, shooters graduating, and cross-dressing, but I have bigger concerns. While all these things mattered to me, they did not disturb me because of what was being done to the image of our institution; they disturbed me because they demonstrated that Dear Old Morehouse was terribly unequipped to deal with the realities and lives that Black men in America live now. In fact, it is the Old Morehouse that is more dangerous to me than any student with a gun, sagged pants, or high heels would ever be. Let me explain.

When I visited Morehouse for the first time, it was about 1994, I remember seeing hanging banners and brochures that talked about the development of leaders, community servants, and caring connected brothers. The culmination of these developments was to be the Morehouse Man. I remember reading about the crown that Morehouse held up for its students so that one day they too would embody the Morehouse Mystique. I was sold. I was ready to be in that number. I was ready to be at the only institution of higher education dedicated fully to the education of men of African descent in the United States. But like most things, I soon found out all that glittered was not gold.

courtesy of nyleharris flckr stream

When I arrived, I remember hearing brothers commonly refer to the Morehouse Mistake, not Mystique. I remember seeing Samuel L. Jackson toted out as a shining alumnus, only to learn he was actually kicked out while he was there. I was there when I realized Morehouse students had no trouble admitting rape happened, but sadly refused to admit that Morehouse students could or would rape their Spelman sisters. I know, now I’m airing dirty laundry, in your eyes, but hear me out. Morehouse, if you are committed to Black men, then you’ve got to do better. You, no WE, have got to work to make better men for the 21^st century, not the 20^th. It often feels like each time I hear about your “new moves” and “plans” you’re becoming more committed to making a middle class Black man who would exist in the 1950s or 60s, not in 2009. From clothing to interviews, Dear Old Morehouse, there is much more happening with and to Black men than you’re equipped to handle.

See, in the past, Morehouse was about accepting and graduating the “cream of the crop” amongst the Black bourgeoisie and claiming the production of the Black intelligentsia. We all know, at least at the House, that Martin Luther King, Jr. — our most well known alumnus– came from a relatively well-to-do background and he wasn’t the most stunning student. But it would be on the red clay hills of Georgia that he got a deeper social, spiritual, and political education which would lead him to change the world. It is that image that you fed us and feed young brothers who come to the gates these days. You celebrate your role as one of the top feeders to graduate schools and Fortune 500 companies among institutions of higher education.  You highlight that our alumni are Rhodes Scholars, former surgeon generals and are changing the world around the globe, as many institutions do. The problem is, those men are the ones who made it, and it is likely that they still would have made it without Morehouse. Sometimes I think you point to exceptional success from the past in an effort to keep people from noticing what you are doing wrong or simply not doing it the present. So many who come to our campus, who desire to be better men, are not given what they need because you are asking them to trade themselves for your idea of success. Dear Old Morehouse, success does not look, sound, or feel the same for all.

I almost feel like you’re in denial; we can’t keep living a lie. I’ve got to tell you five things that you seem to deny too often. First, Affirmative Action did change you and who attended you. Affirmative Action allowed a number of the brothers who would have attended HBCUs in the past to attend traditional Ivys. We have to recognize that we don’t have the economic resources to compete with the Harvards, Yales or even smaller liberal arts schools. Many brothers get drawn to these schools because they have a financial safety net and set of offerings that make it difficult for them to sign on Morehouse’s dotted line. Second, the day of male breadwinner and unquestioned male leadership is done. While the sisters at Spelman were over there involved in the freedom struggle with us, they were also noticing we were often working on “liberation for half a race.” While we spend copious amounts of time sitting in orientations and Crown Forums that convince us that we’ve “made it” because so many brothers didn’t, we’re falsely inflating ourselves and using these bloated egos to plot the path towards a wayward progress. Third, style is one of hallmarks of Blackness. Spending time trying to reduce and refashion style is like harnessing youth, a noble thought but likely to leave you more embarrassed than successful. Hip-Hop culture is here to stay and reflects a lot of what we face as a people and what many in our community aspire to emulate. Hip-Hop culture is art and yes, art and life do imitate one another. Hip-Hop is, was, and shall be anti-establishment; the more you regulate it, the more it will battle you. Fourth, gay men are Morehouse Men and they should no longer be silent and covering. For too long, Morehouse treated gay and queer brothers like the Loch Ness monster, often talked about but never fully confirmed. News flash: being non-heterosexual is neither a psychological nor a social deviance. It’s reality! Fifth, Black boys are in crisis and you have to adapt to this crisis as well. With 50% of Black boys who begin high school in the inner-city not graduating with their classmates on time, you must realize your pool of applicants and admits is going to look different. These brothers mostly come with 4.0 potential, not 4.0 GPA’s. The question becomes, what can we do to move potential to reality?! What are the supports we’re putting in place for the brothers who beat the odds and make it to the House? I am honestly not sure if you are ignorant or simply ignoring, but either way, we’ve got to do better. I seriously think that if you start to deal with these five facts, you can move from being Dear Old Morehouse to a Dear New Morehouse.

Oh I can hear you now, “Brother, we are getting ‘new’!” Unfortunately your “new” is old. With each passing year, I swear you move a step backwards towards your former self… or at least an image that you believed yourself to be. From interviews to dress codes, you’re trying to create a brand of respectable middle class black males that went out with the last sputters of the Civil Rights Movement. Yes, alumni get excited when they hear, “we will no longer tolerate…” because we all have a narrative about how Morehouse was and how it has changed. Don’t be surprised if people co-sign on your reversal of the clock without seeing the bigger picture. They’ll support more assemblies, more Crown Forums, more rules, less braids, less sagging, less gays… oops, just kidding on the last one. I know that subject is touchy in our community. Have you forgotten, it was not what was outside that made the Morehouse Man it was what was inside? The most valuable lessons are those learned collectively through struggle, failure and success.  Not from imposition, dress codes, or dress policies. College is one of the few times that Black men may be able to explore fuller and truer selves and your hallowed halls are the ideal place to do so. Instead, you threaten to lock down and narrow those very halls. I want to hear that you’re developing new models of manhood, ones that are not patriarchal, ones that deal with the needs of Black men and boys who need healing, ones that let boys become the Men of their choosing and of their community’s wanting. Few of the rules that you are implementing are creating a healthier pathway for Black men, they’re simply polishing the same “broken” brothas and yet you wonder why it is not working.

Quite regularly now, I receive emails asking “What is Morehouse doing?” Some come in agreement, some come in disagreement, but the ones I value most are the those that come from a place of love for the development of all Black men. The individual policies that you have drawn up are just echoes of the world that Black males now create and inhabit. If Dear Old Morehouse is truly interested in living up to its missions and declarations, the ones that got me to attend, the ones that got me to link up and sing, the ones that got me to love my institution enough to critique its actions, then we’ve got to begin from a point of understanding and expansion, not from a point of rigidity and constriction. Unless we acknowledge that Dear Old Morehouse must become Dear New Morehouse to serve the whole of our community, we’ll be doing this sad dance every 8 months. I look forward to your response and hope WE can grow to meet that crown of which Howard Thurman so eloquently made us aware.

In humility and community,

Dr. R. L’Heureux Lewis

Ndugu Dumi Eyi di yiye

Class of 2000

Today, President Barack Obama will deliver an address to the children of the United States on the value of education. The speech has been met with a firestorm of reaction and disapproval by critics on the right, many of whom have called it a dangerous form of indoctrination.

There is a clamor about this type of speech being unprecedented – even though George H.W. Bush gave an address to U.S. school children in 1991 – and dangerous. But the real danger lies in the lack of emphasis education has received in Obama’s administration and what our young people may be learning about education’s value in our current economy.

The majority of Obama’s administration has been taken up with foreign affairs such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Domestically, attention has been concentrated on the recession and health care reform. While these problems and resulting policies are important, what happens to the youth of America arguably sets the tone for the next half a century.

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civil rights and beyond. I will be on the “Building a Progressive Agenda Towards Quality Education” at 2:30 with Judith Brown-Dianis (Co-Director the Advancement Project), Dr. James Loewen (Author of Sundown Towns and Lies My Teacher Told), Dr. Charles Willie (Professor Emeritus Harvard), Dr. Edison Jackson (President Medgar Evers College-CUNY).

Murray Hill Suite, New York Hilton Hotel

This exciting Education Advocacy Workshop takes
the participants through a series of scenarios taken
from the very real challenges African American
students face in public education systems across
the country. The issues will range from student
assignment and assessments to teacher quality
and resource equity, from high takes barrier testing
to zero tolerance policies. For each scenario, the
panelists will encourage and coordinate discussion
by the workshop participants. This approach is
intended to increase the opportunity for the
exchange of analytical, tactical and strategic
approached with the context of both our strategic
priorities in education and our organizational
framework. This workshop will also review winning
strategies to reduce structural, political, financial
and other barriers, towards the goal of realizing
equal access to quality education.

Maxine Smith (NAACP Board of Directors Chair) will moderate the session which has a unique format. While each panel member will provide some evidence about their area of expertise, the bulk of the session will be responding to real life scenarios around education posed from the audience. This is a unique opportunity to move between scholarship and action, please come out if you’re in the area!

Imagine the terror of a mother frantically trying to cut down her child seconds after finding him hanging from an extension cord in his bedroom. Picture the trauma of a 10-year-old girl desperately trying to hold up her older brother after finding him hanging from a noose in an upstairs closet.

These tragic scenes unfolded in the past several weeks as two beautiful 11-year-old black boys, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, Massachusetts and Jaheem Herrera of DeKalb, Georgia, chose to end their lives rather than endure another day of being bullied in their schools.

According to reports, the parents of both children had repeatedly warned school officials about the daily torment and torture that their children were subjected to during school. However, neither parents nor educators were able to intervene in time.

While most acts of bullying do not lead to traumatic acts of suicide, bullying happens to young people all the time. Studies indicate that 65% of teens have been verbally or physically harassed or assaulted during the past year. 39% of teens report that students in their school are frequently harassed because of their physical appearance and another 33% report that students in their school are frequently harassed because of their perceived or actual sexual orientation.

But why are our kids killing themselves? Is there something different about bullying today that makes facing the daily onslaught more painful than life itself for some of our youth? Questions like these beckon to adults reeling from the shock of these events, in part because many think that that bullying is just a part of life–something that everyone has to deal with when they are growing up. Many adults are also puzzled by the impact of bullying on children who are targeted as “gay” because they assume that being gay, lesbian, and or bi-sexual is more acceptable today than in the past.

Click here to read full article

The New York City Council‘s Committee on Higher Education will have a hearing Tuesday to discuss the CUNY Opportunity programs such Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) and the Black Male Initiative (BMI) which provide access and support to important communities. The budget cuts of NY are real and will have real consequences if people don’t stand up and make sure programs like these are supported!

An interesting article on Teach for America which highlights the Urban Institute’s study on positive effects of TFA teachers in North Carolina in high schools. And asks if cities are behind the curve in accepting TFA teachers.

Here’s a quiz: Which of the following rejected more than 30,000 of the nation’s top college seniors this month and put hundreds more on a waitlist? a) Harvard Law School; b) Goldman Sachs; or c) Teach for America. If you’ve spent time on university campuses lately, you probably know the answer. Teach for America

The article really seems to oversell the Urban Institute’s findings on North Carolina. There remain big questions about TFA teacher performance, just as big as there remain about traditional public school teachers. Either way, our children need the best they can get.

Speaking of Unions, quality, and obligations, the Union movement in Charter schools, like KIPP is gaining attention and supporters/dissenters.

So this spring Ms. Nelson, 39, once skeptical about unions, helped lead an effort to unionize the teachers at the school, KIPP AMP, thinking that a contract would provide a clearer idea of expectations and consequences.

But now, with the state’s labor board scheduled to vote Wednesday on whether to certify a union at the school, Ms. Nelson has changed her mind again, withdrawing her support from a unionization drive that she says is proving to be a distraction and more about power than children.

The issues of charter schools, which was during the Bush Administration very controversial, in the Obama administration goes largely unquestioned, but the issue of unionization is resurfacing some old tensions in education. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in New York, Detroit, and around the nation.

The NY Times publishes an Op-Ed on the futility of graduate education as it is currently structured.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

I don’t wholly disagree with the Op-Ed’s analysis but having sat on Graduate School executive boards, national committees on graduate education, there is a lot that he conflates in graduate training. In reality, divisions in degrees and programs is partially designed to provide a “division of labor” and outcome. But I’m definitely interested in greater interdisciplinarity and collaboration.

John Jackson writes about Mary Ann Mason’s commentary in the Chronicle on the relationship between gender and tenure (can’t find an online version of Mason’s original so I’ll post a quote from From the Annals of Anthroman).

Mason doesn’t think it is an arbitrary coincidence that the uptick in part-time/adjunct instruction has coincided with an increase in the number of women getting Ph.D’s. However, this isn’t the result of a sexist conspiracy hatched by some purposeful Patriarchy. According to Mason, it is the substantively gendered byproduct of a formally gender-neutral process.

I have had a number of conversations with current and aspiring graduate students who are women about the tenure process, this should be a must read article and consideration. The deep ways that inequality is structured in prima facie neutral terms.

There is also new report which details the gap in graduation rates between the city and the suburbs

It is no surprise that more students drop out of high school in big cities than elsewhere. Now, however, a nationwide study shows the magnitude of the gap: the average high school graduation rate in the nation’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.

The urban-suburban gap is interesting to me, but not nearly as interesting as the gaps that happen within more suburban. Guess we’ll have to wait until I drop “Inequality in the Promise land” to get some more insight into that.

While you’re waiting on me get my book worked out you need to check out “Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity” by Marc Lamont Hill. This is a serious book for all those who are interested in Hip-Hop, education, and youth culture at large.

A few years ago I wrote a post entitled “Playing the Rape Card” inspired by the tensions happening between Morehouse and Spelman around student rape. As I talked to brothers I went to school with and looked at comments on facebook about rape between Morehouse and Spelman I was disappointed. I was at first disgusted with our “knee jerk” reaction to allegations and our emphasis on “alleged rapes” when many of us have damn well known for years these issues plague our schools, communities and families. My post was well received by sisters who read it and commented, but very few from brothas. When I looked at my hit counter it was one of my “most popular” posts and when I asked brothas who read it their thoughts they said things like, “I agree.” But men weren’t really ready to “stand up and stand out” against the growing wall of ” Black male solidarity” with Morehouse. I found that brothers were silently consenting to my argument that rape is not fiction as well as silently consenting to rape. It’s time to break that silent consent as well. While I’m sure my post didn’t do much, I have high hopes that this film will begin to re-open that dialogue. I intended to just post the video quickly, but too many things came to mind. Thank you Laura Rahman for breaking the social contracts and I’ll continue to try to break silent consent.

Hattip to Byron Hurt for the video trailer.

Tomorrow, Wednesday evening, the City College of New York will host an important panel discussion on the No Child Left Behind Act. The panel is entitled, “Has No Child Left Behind Failed High Poverty Urban Schools?” was organized by Tiffany O’Neal a CCNY student and New York Life Fellow. I will be moderating the panel which features Christopher Edmin of Teacher’s College, Winthrop Holder teacher and author of Classroom Calypso, and Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute. More information on panelist is available here.
The panel will occur from 5 to 7pm in Shepard Hall Room 250.

The conversation promises to be lively and insightful.

Thursday, February 19, 2008 at 12 Noon
New York Post Offices
1211 Avenue of the Americas (between 47th & 48th Sts)
New York, NY

Second, I am absolutely impressed and empowered by the amount of student activism I’ve seen bubbling up nationally and in New York in particular over the past few months. While contemporary college students are often discussed as “disconnected” from social struggles or suffering from “apathy”, at a least a cadre of students have been pushing for greater social justice. A few months ago students at the New School took-over a building and received their demands, last night at about 10pm a coalition of students at New York University, occupied the marketplace of the Kimmel Center. Find out more about their demands, principled take-over, and recent details go here.

The reality is that the bulk of educational reforms have done little to affect the achievement gaps between students along lines of race, language, poverty, etc. Some argue this is because schools do little to affect the unequal lives that children walk into schools with. While I understand this and has been substantiated by some key research (namely the Coleman Report), I come from a different perspective. While the unequal social worlds that children live in affect their school performance, schools remain some of the most important institutions in our society. Not because they provide “rags to riches” opportunity, which they usually do not, but because they are the one location that we have the ability to tinker with to produce social change. Legally, all children under 16 must go to school and US public schools must education everyone who walks through their doors, which makes it probably the most difficult institution to ensure high performance in. Tinkering and reforming to produce sustainable results in education, in my estimation, is probably one of THE MOST difficult of social engineering tasks.

So what’s the big deal? To some, Nisbett has pointed out that there are programs that “eliminate the gap” or “reduce the gap” quickly. That’s the catch, the quick elimination of a gap does not necessarily mean the effective elimination of a gap. The programs that he cites do deal with improving or manipulating psychological variables to increase performance. This is basic educational psychology where the better or more efficacious one feels about one’s self, the more likely they are to perform well. But this does not mean that gaps in education can be reduced by this manner for three main reasons:

1) Single tests of achievement may be unrelated or weakly related to overall school performance

2) There are multiple forms of achievement gaps

3) There is not just an achievement gap but also a skills gap

On point one, it is totally possible for someone to perform well on a laboratory administered test, not pass math, and perform below grade level on a state-standards test. Psychometricians and education evaluators have a long tradition of finding differing performance between metrics for the same people. Even finding differences in performance in laboratory setting and in non-laboratory settings. To assume high performance on one evaluation in one setting will be closely correlated to the next is actually fallacious.

On the second point, while the No Child Left Behind Act has placed the idea of “the achievement gap” front in center, in reality there are many different forms of achievement gaps. There are those that happen, between schools, within schools and they can fall along race, ethnicity, gender, poverty, language or a host of other lines. While psychological interventions can improve the performance of small groups at a time, there is little to no evidence that “large scaled” psychological interventions will provide similar results. Additionally, Tom Cook’s work from long ago (Sesame Street Revisited) suggested that when all students receive an equal treatment/intervention, gaps in performance can still widen because “all boats rise with the tide” and there is really no such thing as an  “equal treatment.”

On the third point, to suggest that performance can be “gamed” by mental exercises is a dangerous idea. Having spent copious time in schools by way of researching and speaking, I can assure you that not all observed gaps are simply artifacts of tests. There are variable skill levels that students posses. While some students may have the skills that they do not fully engage, I have not seen full evidence that gaps are simply “effort” or “culturally” based. While I do this with much caution and caveat, I take a page from Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom who argue that observed gaps have a basis in differing levels of skills that students bring to the table such as reading ability, computational ability, etc. While I disagree at the magnitude of the skills gap they suggest, it is unequivocal to the me that, on average, students’ from disadvantaged backgrounds carry fewer skills into and out of school. The assumption that simple psychological intervention or, to be trite, “mind games” will substantially impact the gap is both dangerous and rather unfounded.

But alas, this is an editorial right, it’s not necessariliy connected to real world policy. Not true at all! I find a conspicious link between Nisbett’s argument about psychological interventions netting positive and real gains to the work of Roland Fryer, economist and Cheif Equity Officer of the New York Public Schools. The Incentive program that is being run in NYC presumes that students already have the skills necessary or that an incentive will make them “work harder” to gain the skills necessary to succeed. These types of programs worry me because they assume a baseline of non-effort for youngsters. While my teacher colleagues and I disagree on this often, I find that children do work hard and it appears programs like the incentive one are drawn from a deficit model where we presuppose children lack effort and will to succeed.

As the nation’s political landscape changes we must also be vigilant at documenting what does not change among the most vulnerable. I applaud Nisbett for re-surfacing this issue despite my disagreements.  In the end, it takes more than simply “incentives”, “mind games” or “tinkering” to transform the schooling of children, particularly Black children. What do you think it will take?

The arrival of the recession didn’t really hit me that much. I remember the basic economic principal that I was taught when I was younger, “As the supply of jobs goes down, demand for education goes up.” While this is still probably true, this past week’s events really made me take a deeper stock of my position as an academic and the ways that the University system is insulated, but not impervious. This past Friday, Clark Atlanta University dismissed 100 staff members, including 70 faculty citing financial difficulties. I was quickly humbled by this, because as an undergraduate I attended Morehouse College, spent large amounts of time at CAU, and now have colleagues who are faculty in the Atlanta University Center.

As teachers and researchers, professors have often held a privileged position in comparison to most Americans, but when an entire financial system is in disrepair, all will have to deal with the consequences. In fact, the number of staff on campuses are also vulnerable because institutions of higher education tend to cut support staff before faculty. It appears the bleeding has just begun.

While some will say that CAU’s problems are indicative of poor management that predates the financial crisis, which is not entirely untrue, we should be aware that this is a “canary in the mine.” Institutions like Clark Atlanta University and smaller schools, particularly HBCUs will be particularly vulnerable. I am told that Morehouse and Spelman also terminated all of their adjunct professors. Over a year ago I wrote about the histories and potentialities of these schools which are under distress. A year later, I fear that it has become more clear than ever that many of the schools that opened the doors of opportunity will likely be shutting their doors.

Sadly the irony of the timing in this is not missed on me. During Black History Month, with a stimilus plan (hopefully) on the brink of approval, we’ll wait with bated breath wondering if we can keep these bedrocks of Black History open.

Over a year ago, controversy over the Kahlil Gibran International Academy unfolded, if you don’t know who Kahlil Gibran was stop reading and click here – yeah, he’s that important, in Brooklyn. The visible battle over the mission of the school, its practices, and its leadership put the academy in the national spotlight fonr discussions of ethnicity, language, religion and identity. But soon, this spotlight faded and many have forgotten that the school still is in operation. Colorlines runs a great web article by Seth Wessler entitled, “Silenced in the classroom” on what is happening with the school now. Spoiler alert, its a far cry from its original intentions. The article does a great job of discussing how education can be informed or deformed by our political conditions. I excerpt below.

The Khalil Gibran school was to have been a refuge in the midst of post-Sept. 11 New York City, a place where a mixed group of Arabic speakers and non-Arabic speakers would learn together. The school, which opened in 2007 with a sixth-grade class, was designed to grow into a middle and high school in the spirit of the more than 65 dual-language schools in New York City, which teach in Spanish, Creole, Russian and other languages. By graduation, it was expected that Khalil Gibran students would have a command of Arabic and an understanding of the cultural context in which the language exists.

According to some of the school’s original students, parents and teachers, the Khalil Gibran school retains little more than its name as it enters its second year. It is no longer a place where tolerance and respect are fostered. Hassan Omar, the humanities and Arabic teacher who felt so intimidated that he cut images of mosques from textbooks, remembered, “When I first heard about the school, I thought it was a dream, with a rigorous curriculum and intensive language program. The dream collapsed and became a nightmare.”

Recently, Roland Fryer – economist, NYC Public Schools’ Chief Equity Officer, and the public’s latest cat’s meow, was on the Colbert Report (video below) discussing his incentives program. The program has been the subject of much debate, acclaim and most importantly visibility. The interview is brief, a little funny, but reminded me that our discussion of education remains far too short sighted. Not only does Fryer still make troubling statements in jest like, “It’s not racism, it’s reality”, which reminds me of something I would expect Herrnstein and Murray respond to discussions of the Bell Curve as racist. He openly admits that the effects for his incentive program are unknown. While the program narrowly focuses on improvement in achievement through incentives such as cash, I wonder what are the “spill over” effects on children and families psychologically and socially. Considering Claude Steele’s body of work on stereotype threat, there are a myriad of potential negative outcomes, but also what happens when we reinforce the model of child “as breadwinner” in homes with meager resources. I guess we’ll have to see the experiments results and I hope Fryer and NYCPS have made accommodations to test the “spill-over” issues among families … though I have a sneaking suspicion they have not. More commentary under the video.

Yesterday the NYTimes published a piece entitled “Uncertainty on Obama Education Plans” about Barack Obama’s upcoming cabinet choice for Secretary of Education. While people have been foaming at the mouth about appointments in defense, treasury, etc. education once again has been floating well beneath the radar. As I’ve discussed before, education, in my opinion, received far too little attention in the presidential campaign and is one of the most consequential policy issues because it deals literally with the future leaders of the USA. The article mentions names like Linda Darling-Hammond (professor at Stanford), Joel Klein (chancellor of nycps), Michelle Rhee (chancellor of dcps), and Wendy Kopp (founder of Teach for America) have been batted around as potential Secretary of Education choices. Discussing these folks would warrant an entire post, so I won’t right now. Maybe I’ll spin something off for TheRoot.com. At the least,  I will be following up this week with issues that are going to remain crucial in the ed field regardless of who the appointee is. Check back soon.

Hattip to Blacksmtyhe for putting me up on the Fryer video

This weekend, the City College campus will be filled with fresh young and old minds grappling with issues of inequality and access. I’m proud to say that City College is hosting the first CUNY Social Forum. The event will take place October 17th – 19th and will feature a great range of presentations, workshops, and organizations. If you’re not familiar with the significance of Social Forums click here. If you’re a activist, come out. If you’re an aspiring activist, come out. If you’re concerned, come out. If you’re not concerned, you’re not paying attention! And for that reason you should come out. The organizers have really gotten a number of issues on the table for discussion and action. Whether it’s increases in tuition, changing of standards for admission, or health care there will be a venue and voice for it this weekend. So hop on the train and get informed and active with the best of em.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. One of the most striking images I’ve ever encountered and occasionally have on my desktop is “The Soiling of Old Glory.” For me, the image captured the complex (albeit negative) emotions that surrounded busing as a solution to school segregation. While we often think of racial antagonisms as rooted in the South, these tensions were present all over the nation. The stain of racism is sometimes deepest in the parts of the country where White and Black live near, but not always next to, where we compete for resources, and where the things to be gained from hatred are the smallest. Boston, in the case of this photo, typifies that reality. Recently Slate ran a slideshow series on the image to accompany the new book on it. I don’t have the book, but I wonder could words ever capture the meanings and magnitude of this photo. I surely know I couldn’t.