Welcome to reality - trivia
Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X
july 2024
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teaching in america
For many teachers, this year’s uprising is decades in the making. The country’s roughly 3.2 million full-time public-school teachers (kindergarten through high school) are experiencing some of the worst wage stagnation of any profession, earning less on average, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than they did in 1990, according to Department of Education (DOE) data.
Meanwhile, the pay gap between teachers and other comparably educated professionals is now the largest on record. In 1994, public-school teachers in the U.S. earned 1.8% less per week than comparable workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank. By last year, they made 18.7% less. The situation is particularly grim in states such as Oklahoma, where teachers’ inflation-adjusted salaries actually decreased by about $8,000 in the last decade, to an average of $45,245 in 2016, according to DOE data. In Arizona, teachers’ average inflation-adjusted annual wages are down $5,000.
http://time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=time
Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today
The Conversation - raw story
April 05, 2023
Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it. Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov/Wikimedia Commons
Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.
Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.
It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”
Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.
From museums to scientific papers
One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.
The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”
But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.
Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.
Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.
The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism
Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 figures that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin.
This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.
Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.
It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”
Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.
From museums to scientific papers
One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.
The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”
But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.
Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.
Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.
The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism
Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 figures that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin.
This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.
Decades of Racial Bias Preceded College Board’s AP Black History Course Changes
The College Board still seems to feel comfortable disappearing the Black educational experience.
By Ngakiya Camara , TRUTHOUT
Published February 16, 2023
For weeks, prominent scholars and educators, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kimberlé Crenshaw and David J. Johns, have called out the College Board for removing contemporary topics and scholarship in Black history from the new Advanced Placement (AP) African American History course being piloted across 60 U.S. schools. Some of these revisions — regarding topics like Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration and reparations — were the same topics of concern outlined in a letter leaked by the Florida Department of Education, which described the College Board’s consistent contact with the DeSantis administration regarding the AP course structure. However, in two separate letters, the College Board denied revising the course on behalf of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The College Board declared instead that the rollout was predetermined, and that Florida’s administration merely sought to claim a nonexistent political victory “by taking credit retroactively for changes we ourselves made but that they never suggested to us.”
Despite the College Board having effectively “set the record straight” in their robust denial of negotiating with Florida’s administration about the course’s content, they have simultaneously made it clear that the revised framework isn’t exactly going anywhere either. This includes downgrading originally required topics like structural racism, racial capitalism, mass incarceration, reparations, intersectionality and Black Lives Matter to now be optional, while introducing research topics like Black conservatism. And while the College Board’s president claims that the removal of works by contemporary Black scholars was because the sources would have been “quite dense” for students, Black educators across the country have a different, more valid theory. Ronda Taylor Bullock, a former teacher and head of the nonprofit anti-racist education center called “we are,” argues that these revisions are the erasure of Black voices and history. The College Board is “cowering to white supremacy — cowering to political power, versus recognizing the academic merits of how the curriculum was from the beginning,” Bullock said.
In fact, cowering to white supremacy and political power may be easy for the College Board because it is an institution forged from racism and eugenics, and designed to preserve higher education for the white, wealthy and privileged. And today, it continues to work exactly the way it was initially intended.
An Instrument of Racism
The College Board is the lucrative nonprofit at the forefront of the college entrance exam establishment and it administers SAT and AP exams. Such exams, especially the SATs, have historically been used by colleges across the country to determine students’ learning capabilities and predict how well they will do in higher education. However, Ibram X. Kendi, Black scholar and author of How to Be an Antiracist, emphasizes that since their inception, standardized tests have been an instrument of racism: “[T]o tell the truth about standardized tests is to tell the story of the eugenicists who created and popularized these tests in the United States more than a century ago.”
In fact, the College Board adopted the SAT test from infamous eugenicist Carl Brigham based on his illusory publication A Study of American Intelligence in 1923, which decried Black people as the lowest on the racial, ethnic and cultural spectrum, and warned of the infiltration of non-white people into white spaces. The resulting exam Brigham developed sought to assess “aptitude for learning” rather than acquired knowledge, which appealed to eugenicists because this aptitude was seen as innate intelligence and thus deeply entrenched with one’s ethnic origins. As a result, aptitude tests could be used to limit the admissions of particular ethnicities deemed “lesser than,” including Black people and Jewish students, especially from Ivy Leagues. Fast-forward to today, the SAT is still accepted as the reliable evaluation for intellectual merit.
However, according to scholars Saul Geiser and Richard Atkinson, it is student GPA (irrespective of the quality of school attended) that is the better predictor of short- and long-term college outcomes. They emphasize that SAT scores actually correlate most with family income and parents’ education — so much so that the supposed predictive power of the SAT signifies the proxy effects of socioeconomic status. High school grades, on the other hand, are less indicative of socioeconomic status, and demonstrate more predictive power of college performance than the SAT even when controls for socioeconomic status are introduced. As a result, prioritizing high school performance over standardized test scores is more equitable, and would expand college opportunities for low-income and marginalized students.
Instead, Black and Latino students bear the brunt of a discriminatory standardized test system, with only 20 percent of Black students and 29 percent of Latino students meeting the benchmark for reading, writing and math portions of the test compared to 57 percent of white students. And these groups bear the brunt for many reasons. In fact, according to scholar Joseph A. Soares, biased test question selection algorithms structurally discriminate against Black people. He argues that, since experimental questions are given to students before the test’s administration, those practice questions where Black students outperform white students are removed so as to maintain the standard bell curve.
Furthermore, the college entry exam business — which includes payments per exam taken, exam prep courses, tutoring, and more — is a multibillion-dollar industry which exploits both parent and student desperation for successful higher education outcomes. As a result, these tests favor white and wealthy test-takers who can not only afford to pay the $60 for each test, but can also spend thousands on prep courses and tutoring, which is one of the only ways to actually improve test scores. This is not an option for poor marginalized folks, who barely have access to nearby SAT testing sites in their areas, let alone money to pay for a weekly SAT tutor.
The College Board’s Advanced Placement program — the system offering the new African American studies course — is yet another instrument of white supremacy which disguises inequity under the facade of intellectual exceptionalism. The AP program, which is said to provide advanced educational opportunities for thriving students, persistently grapples with a lack of Black student enrollment. In fact, Black students account for only 9 percent of AP students nationally despite making up 15 percent of the U.S. population. Access to AP classes remain limited for marginalized students whose schools either do not have AP courses available, or because discriminatory practices can particularly hinder Black and Brown students from enrolling in classes when they are available. Such practices include educator bias in recommending students for courses, admission policies that center students’ past achievements over their interests and ambitions and the failure to communicate with marginalized students about AP’s availability to them.
Feeling unwelcome in AP spaces is yet another prominent reason why marginalized folks may be under-enrolled within the courses. Such is the reason why courses like African American history are crucial, as they not only demonstrate a large portion of erased U.S. history, but they also reflect the real, lived experiences of Black students. Courses like these meet marginalized students where they are and create a space through which they can process and articulate such experiences. However, analyzing Black history through the Advanced Placement framework requires a deep reflection of the College Board system itself, which still seems to feel comfortable disappearing Black educational experience even as it establishes a meaningful curriculum.
Despite the College Board having effectively “set the record straight” in their robust denial of negotiating with Florida’s administration about the course’s content, they have simultaneously made it clear that the revised framework isn’t exactly going anywhere either. This includes downgrading originally required topics like structural racism, racial capitalism, mass incarceration, reparations, intersectionality and Black Lives Matter to now be optional, while introducing research topics like Black conservatism. And while the College Board’s president claims that the removal of works by contemporary Black scholars was because the sources would have been “quite dense” for students, Black educators across the country have a different, more valid theory. Ronda Taylor Bullock, a former teacher and head of the nonprofit anti-racist education center called “we are,” argues that these revisions are the erasure of Black voices and history. The College Board is “cowering to white supremacy — cowering to political power, versus recognizing the academic merits of how the curriculum was from the beginning,” Bullock said.
In fact, cowering to white supremacy and political power may be easy for the College Board because it is an institution forged from racism and eugenics, and designed to preserve higher education for the white, wealthy and privileged. And today, it continues to work exactly the way it was initially intended.
An Instrument of Racism
The College Board is the lucrative nonprofit at the forefront of the college entrance exam establishment and it administers SAT and AP exams. Such exams, especially the SATs, have historically been used by colleges across the country to determine students’ learning capabilities and predict how well they will do in higher education. However, Ibram X. Kendi, Black scholar and author of How to Be an Antiracist, emphasizes that since their inception, standardized tests have been an instrument of racism: “[T]o tell the truth about standardized tests is to tell the story of the eugenicists who created and popularized these tests in the United States more than a century ago.”
In fact, the College Board adopted the SAT test from infamous eugenicist Carl Brigham based on his illusory publication A Study of American Intelligence in 1923, which decried Black people as the lowest on the racial, ethnic and cultural spectrum, and warned of the infiltration of non-white people into white spaces. The resulting exam Brigham developed sought to assess “aptitude for learning” rather than acquired knowledge, which appealed to eugenicists because this aptitude was seen as innate intelligence and thus deeply entrenched with one’s ethnic origins. As a result, aptitude tests could be used to limit the admissions of particular ethnicities deemed “lesser than,” including Black people and Jewish students, especially from Ivy Leagues. Fast-forward to today, the SAT is still accepted as the reliable evaluation for intellectual merit.
However, according to scholars Saul Geiser and Richard Atkinson, it is student GPA (irrespective of the quality of school attended) that is the better predictor of short- and long-term college outcomes. They emphasize that SAT scores actually correlate most with family income and parents’ education — so much so that the supposed predictive power of the SAT signifies the proxy effects of socioeconomic status. High school grades, on the other hand, are less indicative of socioeconomic status, and demonstrate more predictive power of college performance than the SAT even when controls for socioeconomic status are introduced. As a result, prioritizing high school performance over standardized test scores is more equitable, and would expand college opportunities for low-income and marginalized students.
Instead, Black and Latino students bear the brunt of a discriminatory standardized test system, with only 20 percent of Black students and 29 percent of Latino students meeting the benchmark for reading, writing and math portions of the test compared to 57 percent of white students. And these groups bear the brunt for many reasons. In fact, according to scholar Joseph A. Soares, biased test question selection algorithms structurally discriminate against Black people. He argues that, since experimental questions are given to students before the test’s administration, those practice questions where Black students outperform white students are removed so as to maintain the standard bell curve.
Furthermore, the college entry exam business — which includes payments per exam taken, exam prep courses, tutoring, and more — is a multibillion-dollar industry which exploits both parent and student desperation for successful higher education outcomes. As a result, these tests favor white and wealthy test-takers who can not only afford to pay the $60 for each test, but can also spend thousands on prep courses and tutoring, which is one of the only ways to actually improve test scores. This is not an option for poor marginalized folks, who barely have access to nearby SAT testing sites in their areas, let alone money to pay for a weekly SAT tutor.
The College Board’s Advanced Placement program — the system offering the new African American studies course — is yet another instrument of white supremacy which disguises inequity under the facade of intellectual exceptionalism. The AP program, which is said to provide advanced educational opportunities for thriving students, persistently grapples with a lack of Black student enrollment. In fact, Black students account for only 9 percent of AP students nationally despite making up 15 percent of the U.S. population. Access to AP classes remain limited for marginalized students whose schools either do not have AP courses available, or because discriminatory practices can particularly hinder Black and Brown students from enrolling in classes when they are available. Such practices include educator bias in recommending students for courses, admission policies that center students’ past achievements over their interests and ambitions and the failure to communicate with marginalized students about AP’s availability to them.
Feeling unwelcome in AP spaces is yet another prominent reason why marginalized folks may be under-enrolled within the courses. Such is the reason why courses like African American history are crucial, as they not only demonstrate a large portion of erased U.S. history, but they also reflect the real, lived experiences of Black students. Courses like these meet marginalized students where they are and create a space through which they can process and articulate such experiences. However, analyzing Black history through the Advanced Placement framework requires a deep reflection of the College Board system itself, which still seems to feel comfortable disappearing Black educational experience even as it establishes a meaningful curriculum.
Trans Students and Their Teachers Face a School Year Full of Terrifying New Laws
BY Orion Rummler, The 19th
PUBLISHED September 1, 2022
Anita Hatcher, a seventh-grade English language arts teacher in the Florida Panhandle, worries what this school year will bring for her transgender students.
She’s not alone.
Trans students and their teachers in Florida, Alabama and Texas — three states where legislators and governors’ offices have been the most vocal in efforts to restrict trans youths’ access to bathrooms and gender-affirming care, on top of education restrictions and sports bans — are worried about what the new school year may bring.
“I’m most worried about the first time I take up a written test and someone’s name doesn’t match what’s on my roster,” said Hatcher, whose classes began August 10. She’s also worried about respecting her trans students’ names and identities — without outing them. “How can I call on a student, show them respect, be equitable, not out them, involve them in class discussion?”
Florida’s law restricting classroom discussion on gender and sexuality, nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” by advocates, went into effect in early July. It faces a lawsuit from Equality Florida backed by attorneys general from 16 states. While the bill’s explicit limitations apply to students through third grade, additional language in the bill mandates “age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate” lessons, which advocates say could affect LGBTQ+ students in higher grade levels.
For Hatcher, the fear among teachers in Florida is palpable and is even pushing some educators to leave, exacerbating a teacher shortage. Her school follows guidance set by Leon County, and she’s worried that even policies meant to be inclusive will out her transgender students. If a trans child uses a locker room or restroom that matches their gender identity, which the school district stresses that students are allowed to do, then their peers’ parents may be warned in writing: “A student who is open about their gender identity may be in your child’s Physical Education class or extra/co-curricular activity.”
That note would not be sent if the family has sought privacy about their child’s identity and accepted other accommodations “that will provide privacy for all students.” The guide does not define what such accommodations would be offered. Hatcher said that there hasn’t been training provided to faculty or staff at her school on the guide.
“Not every child is out at home before they’re out at school,” said Hatcher, who was a plaintiff in Equality Florida’s initial Don’t Say Gay lawsuit. With some of her own students, she has known about their LGBTQ+ identity before their parents. The Leon County school district did not respond to a request for comment.
In Alabama, a bathroom bill that also went into effect July 1 prohibits public schools from allowing classroom discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity for kindergarteners up to fifth grade. A separate Alabama law requires school counselors and teachers to tell parents if their child comes out as trans or gender-nonconforming.
Harleigh Walker, a 15-year-old trans girl at Auburn High School, is starting tenth grade this year. She’s worried about her other transgender friends’ mental health and safety, especially those who aren’t out to their parents — and about what could happen if her friends accidentally say the wrong thing near a teacher or counselor.
“I just don’t want to see a whole bunch of these trans kids going through possibly being outed to their parents,” she said.
Walker started classes August 9. So far, she hasn’t seen any incidents around bathroom or locker room access and is feeling optimistic. But, she also expects her school and others to get more strict as the year progresses.
When asked what policies have been put in place in response to recent anti-trans laws, Auburn High School principal Shannon Pignato said in a statement that “educators are not required to initiate contact with parents,” but “if a student discloses information, open communication among stakeholders is considered a priority especially in matters of mental health and safety.” Pignato did not respond when asked what information or stakeholders she was referring to.
In Alabama and Florida, individual teachers are being tasked with finding where to draw the line in response to new state laws as their school districts update policies and grapple with what those laws mean in practice.
A 13-year-old nonbinary transmasculine student in Birmingham, Alabama, who asked to be anonymous because he’s afraid that speaking publicly would make current bullying worse, said that his physical education teacher is not letting any students use the locker rooms during class right now — because he wants to use the boys’ locker rooms.
“It’s just really stupid and they’re making a giant deal out of it,” he said, adding that the situation has made him feel singled out by a teacher who has otherwise been supportive and who has tried to use his correct name and pronouns. The decision was explained to him privately during their second PE class, he said. When he went to see his counselor to address the issue, she explained that the school, which is privately run, planned to have further discussions on what to do.
Joseph Rawlins, who teaches special education at Atlantic Coast High School, a public school in Jacksonville, Florida, also oversees the school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance. The GSA meets regularly virtually on Microsoft Teams and in-person twice a month — with its first meeting this year scheduled for Thursday.
Under the state’s new laws, Rawlins has to figure out how to affirm and protect trans students in his classroom — as well as within a club that is meant to give LGBTQ+ students a place to be themselves and to freely talk about their identities.
“What’s the point of a GSA if I can’t make it a safe space?” he said. It’s difficult to know what is and isn’t safe to share for students who don’t want to be out to their families or to the rest of the school — including their name and pronouns. It’s also unclear when teachers are obligated to call home to report a student, although his district in Duval County has finalized new rules in its student support guide.
In a draft version of the Duval County school rules released in May and reviewed by The 19th, student ID cards can be updated to reflect a student’s name that affirms their gender identity — after the parent has been notified. The same rule applies to class rosters, yearbooks, and school newspapers. Atlantic Coast’s principal declined to comment on the school’s policies over email.
The line that must be crossed to alert a student’s family, in Rawlins’ mind, is if a student asks for a roster change or for their yearbook to be updated with their preferred name — anything that has a digital or paper record. Figuring out the rules of engagement is even harder considering the law went into effect only a month ago, but Rawlins said he feels supported by his school and the district in trying to untangle the mess.
Now, when students send emails to teachers before classes start explaining their name and pronouns — and when that name doesn’t match the legal name on the class roster — they’re potentially incriminating themselves, Rawlins said. Before classes began August 15, one student sent an email to eight teachers alerting them to his name and pronouns — and made it clear that his family does not support addressing him that way, Rawlins said.
“Well, now what do we do? Because a kid has sent through a public school email system, now it’s a matter of public record that they want to go by these pronouns, they want to use this name. But they don’t want parents to find out,” he said.
Those scenarios are prompting teachers like Rawlins to ask their students if they are sure that they want to follow through with what they’re asking for — to be acknowledged and affirmed in their gender identity — and if they understand what Florida’s law says.
“It’s just tough,” he said. “For some of them, it’s fine, because they’ve got supportive families. For those kids, things are actually going pretty well this year. … But for those who don’t have a supportive household, it’s tough right now.”
In Texas, the legislative body is out of session after introducing more than 40 bills targeting transgender youth last year, out of which only one passed into law. And at the local level, efforts to restrict education are making headway. A school district in Grapevine, Texas, recently voted to require students to use bathrooms dictated by their sex assigned at birth and to encourage teachers to ignore students’ requests on using their current pronouns, the Texas Tribune reports.
For one 16-year-old trans girl with a supportive family who’s starting her junior year in Austin’s Independent School District, this year marks feeling more confident — in her sense of style, in having more friends and being more able to express herself after transitioning during pandemic school shutdowns. She asked to be anonymous due to Texas’ attempts to criminalize families that obtain gender-affirming care for trans minors.
She feels safe at her school largely due to supportive teachers and friends — and because not many of the people she knows at school know or care that she is transgender. This year, teachers asked students to fill out a Google doc with their pronouns and preferred name — and if those are the same at home and at school. That helped her feel at ease.
“I am worried about other kids who aren’t as well off or as privileged as me,” she said. “If there’s a kid and they’re trans, but they’re not out to their parents or they haven’t had that gender marker change or the name change … it’s hard to go through school while also being validated and just respected.”
Jason Stanford, spokesperson for the Austin school district, said that the district aims to be welcoming for LGBTQ+ and trans students, who should be able to use bathrooms according to their gender identity, or single-stall facilities if that student is worried about bullying.
“If I have to choose between an angry parent and making a kid feel safe, me and everyone I work with is going to make the same choice,” he said. “I think too often in these discussions, we center the emotional security of adults at the expense of children.”
She’s not alone.
Trans students and their teachers in Florida, Alabama and Texas — three states where legislators and governors’ offices have been the most vocal in efforts to restrict trans youths’ access to bathrooms and gender-affirming care, on top of education restrictions and sports bans — are worried about what the new school year may bring.
“I’m most worried about the first time I take up a written test and someone’s name doesn’t match what’s on my roster,” said Hatcher, whose classes began August 10. She’s also worried about respecting her trans students’ names and identities — without outing them. “How can I call on a student, show them respect, be equitable, not out them, involve them in class discussion?”
Florida’s law restricting classroom discussion on gender and sexuality, nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” by advocates, went into effect in early July. It faces a lawsuit from Equality Florida backed by attorneys general from 16 states. While the bill’s explicit limitations apply to students through third grade, additional language in the bill mandates “age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate” lessons, which advocates say could affect LGBTQ+ students in higher grade levels.
For Hatcher, the fear among teachers in Florida is palpable and is even pushing some educators to leave, exacerbating a teacher shortage. Her school follows guidance set by Leon County, and she’s worried that even policies meant to be inclusive will out her transgender students. If a trans child uses a locker room or restroom that matches their gender identity, which the school district stresses that students are allowed to do, then their peers’ parents may be warned in writing: “A student who is open about their gender identity may be in your child’s Physical Education class or extra/co-curricular activity.”
That note would not be sent if the family has sought privacy about their child’s identity and accepted other accommodations “that will provide privacy for all students.” The guide does not define what such accommodations would be offered. Hatcher said that there hasn’t been training provided to faculty or staff at her school on the guide.
“Not every child is out at home before they’re out at school,” said Hatcher, who was a plaintiff in Equality Florida’s initial Don’t Say Gay lawsuit. With some of her own students, she has known about their LGBTQ+ identity before their parents. The Leon County school district did not respond to a request for comment.
In Alabama, a bathroom bill that also went into effect July 1 prohibits public schools from allowing classroom discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity for kindergarteners up to fifth grade. A separate Alabama law requires school counselors and teachers to tell parents if their child comes out as trans or gender-nonconforming.
Harleigh Walker, a 15-year-old trans girl at Auburn High School, is starting tenth grade this year. She’s worried about her other transgender friends’ mental health and safety, especially those who aren’t out to their parents — and about what could happen if her friends accidentally say the wrong thing near a teacher or counselor.
“I just don’t want to see a whole bunch of these trans kids going through possibly being outed to their parents,” she said.
Walker started classes August 9. So far, she hasn’t seen any incidents around bathroom or locker room access and is feeling optimistic. But, she also expects her school and others to get more strict as the year progresses.
When asked what policies have been put in place in response to recent anti-trans laws, Auburn High School principal Shannon Pignato said in a statement that “educators are not required to initiate contact with parents,” but “if a student discloses information, open communication among stakeholders is considered a priority especially in matters of mental health and safety.” Pignato did not respond when asked what information or stakeholders she was referring to.
In Alabama and Florida, individual teachers are being tasked with finding where to draw the line in response to new state laws as their school districts update policies and grapple with what those laws mean in practice.
A 13-year-old nonbinary transmasculine student in Birmingham, Alabama, who asked to be anonymous because he’s afraid that speaking publicly would make current bullying worse, said that his physical education teacher is not letting any students use the locker rooms during class right now — because he wants to use the boys’ locker rooms.
“It’s just really stupid and they’re making a giant deal out of it,” he said, adding that the situation has made him feel singled out by a teacher who has otherwise been supportive and who has tried to use his correct name and pronouns. The decision was explained to him privately during their second PE class, he said. When he went to see his counselor to address the issue, she explained that the school, which is privately run, planned to have further discussions on what to do.
Joseph Rawlins, who teaches special education at Atlantic Coast High School, a public school in Jacksonville, Florida, also oversees the school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance. The GSA meets regularly virtually on Microsoft Teams and in-person twice a month — with its first meeting this year scheduled for Thursday.
Under the state’s new laws, Rawlins has to figure out how to affirm and protect trans students in his classroom — as well as within a club that is meant to give LGBTQ+ students a place to be themselves and to freely talk about their identities.
“What’s the point of a GSA if I can’t make it a safe space?” he said. It’s difficult to know what is and isn’t safe to share for students who don’t want to be out to their families or to the rest of the school — including their name and pronouns. It’s also unclear when teachers are obligated to call home to report a student, although his district in Duval County has finalized new rules in its student support guide.
In a draft version of the Duval County school rules released in May and reviewed by The 19th, student ID cards can be updated to reflect a student’s name that affirms their gender identity — after the parent has been notified. The same rule applies to class rosters, yearbooks, and school newspapers. Atlantic Coast’s principal declined to comment on the school’s policies over email.
The line that must be crossed to alert a student’s family, in Rawlins’ mind, is if a student asks for a roster change or for their yearbook to be updated with their preferred name — anything that has a digital or paper record. Figuring out the rules of engagement is even harder considering the law went into effect only a month ago, but Rawlins said he feels supported by his school and the district in trying to untangle the mess.
Now, when students send emails to teachers before classes start explaining their name and pronouns — and when that name doesn’t match the legal name on the class roster — they’re potentially incriminating themselves, Rawlins said. Before classes began August 15, one student sent an email to eight teachers alerting them to his name and pronouns — and made it clear that his family does not support addressing him that way, Rawlins said.
“Well, now what do we do? Because a kid has sent through a public school email system, now it’s a matter of public record that they want to go by these pronouns, they want to use this name. But they don’t want parents to find out,” he said.
Those scenarios are prompting teachers like Rawlins to ask their students if they are sure that they want to follow through with what they’re asking for — to be acknowledged and affirmed in their gender identity — and if they understand what Florida’s law says.
“It’s just tough,” he said. “For some of them, it’s fine, because they’ve got supportive families. For those kids, things are actually going pretty well this year. … But for those who don’t have a supportive household, it’s tough right now.”
In Texas, the legislative body is out of session after introducing more than 40 bills targeting transgender youth last year, out of which only one passed into law. And at the local level, efforts to restrict education are making headway. A school district in Grapevine, Texas, recently voted to require students to use bathrooms dictated by their sex assigned at birth and to encourage teachers to ignore students’ requests on using their current pronouns, the Texas Tribune reports.
For one 16-year-old trans girl with a supportive family who’s starting her junior year in Austin’s Independent School District, this year marks feeling more confident — in her sense of style, in having more friends and being more able to express herself after transitioning during pandemic school shutdowns. She asked to be anonymous due to Texas’ attempts to criminalize families that obtain gender-affirming care for trans minors.
She feels safe at her school largely due to supportive teachers and friends — and because not many of the people she knows at school know or care that she is transgender. This year, teachers asked students to fill out a Google doc with their pronouns and preferred name — and if those are the same at home and at school. That helped her feel at ease.
“I am worried about other kids who aren’t as well off or as privileged as me,” she said. “If there’s a kid and they’re trans, but they’re not out to their parents or they haven’t had that gender marker change or the name change … it’s hard to go through school while also being validated and just respected.”
Jason Stanford, spokesperson for the Austin school district, said that the district aims to be welcoming for LGBTQ+ and trans students, who should be able to use bathrooms according to their gender identity, or single-stall facilities if that student is worried about bullying.
“If I have to choose between an angry parent and making a kid feel safe, me and everyone I work with is going to make the same choice,” he said. “I think too often in these discussions, we center the emotional security of adults at the expense of children.”
THE EDUCATION OF A RACIST!!!
IT STARTS AT HOME AND CONTINUES IN AMERICA'S PUBLIC SCHOOL!
We Found the Textbooks of Senators Who Oppose The 1619 Project and Suddenly Everything Makes Sense
ByMichael Harriot - the root
5/06/21
...The Root decided to see what some of the signatories to Mitch McConnell’s Strawberry Letter knew about slavery and Black history. We dug through state curriculum standards, yearbooks and spoke with teachers to see which interpretation of history the white tears-spewing politicians learned when they were in elementary and high school. In doing so, there are certain things we realized:
Knowing this, we dug through bios, school archives and academic resources to find out how these GOP legislators gained their knowledge of America’s past. In most cases, we were able to find the exact textbook each legislator’s school district used for one of the state or American history courses. In other cases, we were able to find contemporaneous descriptions of the textbooks from academic journals or reports. To our surprise, most received a well-rounded education on the history of Black people in America.
Just kidding. They all learned variations of the same white lies. And, apparently, they’d like to keep it that way.
Here’s what we found.
Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)
What she said: “The 1619 Project is nothing more than left-wing propaganda. Tennesseans don’t want it in our schools. We want our children to learn about our nation’s history.”
What she read: Although she represents Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn attended elementary and high school in Laurel, Miss. In 1959, the year Sen. Marsha Blackburn would have entered kindergarten in Mississippi, the state legislature handed control of choosing textbooks to Gov. Ross Barnett. At the request of the Mississippi State Society of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the state had already mandated a ninth-grade course in Mississippi history, which means Blackburn learned the history of her state from John K. Bettersworth’s textbook Mississippi: a History.
The New York Times wrote in 1975 that Bettersworth’s catalogs “treat blacks of old as complacent darkies or as a problem to whites.” When The Root reviewed the text, we noticed that the entire history of the 250-year institution of slavery was reduced to five pages. Bettersworth’s book was based on UDC propaganda that taught children that the slave master treated his slaves “as his own,” but noted that most of the human chattel were so lazy that “it took two to help; one to do nothing.” However, Bettersworth was sure to point out the kindness of the masters who educated the enslaved “as they taught their own children.”
Mississippi: A History also treats the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education case as a travesty, insisting that Mississippians were largely satisfied with segregated schools. “Incidents had been extremely rare,” it explained. “[F]or by and large, each race—its parents, its pupils and their teachers, had found it advantageous to remain in an ‘equal but separate’ status.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy play an outsized role in the way we learn history. Formed in the late 19th century, the group is not only responsible for most of the Confederate monuments in America but perhaps their biggest memorial to the white supremacist utopia known as the Confederacy is how they instilled their beliefs in schools across America. By turning Southern housewives into lobbyists for the Lost Cause ideology, they transformed history into a fictional version of the past, complete with happy slaves and brave, honorable white men who just wanted low taxes. By the early 1920s, they had become so powerful that a history book didn’t stand a chance of being approved if it contained a negative portrayal of the Antebellum South or the Civil War.
Blackburn’s alma mater, Northeast Jones, integrated in the fall of 1970, the year after Blackburn graduated.
---
Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
What he said: “Why should the false revisionist history not be used as the basis of K-12 education across the nation? Not because of ‘cancel culture,’ which you support. But because it wrong & deliberately deceptive.”
What he read: Because Ted Cruz attended private Christian academies for his entire educational career, we could not verify the specific book used by Cruz’s elementary school to teach Texas history. However, his Advanced Placement U.S. History class—required in Second Baptist High School’s curriculum—likely used the eighth edition of The American Pageant, which contained most of the same passages outlined earlier. As late as 2016, the text still contained racist themes, according to CBS.
If Second Baptist High School adhered to the standards of the Texas Department of Education, we can surmise that Cruz had to learn speeches from Jefferson Davis, but not that slavery caused the Civil War, which wasn’t taught in Texas schools until 2018. Texas’ social studies curriculum “deemphasized slavery, questioned New Deal entitlements and mandated study of the “optimism’ of ‘thankful’ immigrants,” before 2010, according to the Texas Tribune. The state also believed Harriet Tubman was too sensitive a subject for third-graders but taught that slavery was the “third-most-influential cause of the war.”
Before graduating in 1988, Cruz was a member of the ultra-libertarian Constitutional Corroborators, the high school junior varsity team for the Free Enterprise Institute, which still promotes the belief that the Civil War was mostly about tariffs and economics. We also know that Cruz’s alma mater was affiliated with the pro-Confederate Southern Baptist Convention, which finally reckoned with its racist past in 2018. The institution seceded from the larger organization in 1845 over slavery.
---
Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
What he said: “I think America is a unique experiment that stood the test of time. We’re better today than we were 10 years ago and, hopefully, 10 years from now, we’ll be better. Striving to be better is always the goal. But, no, I do not believe my state, I do not believe my nation, is systematically racist.”
What he read: Although Brown v. Board of Education officially outlawed segregation in 1955, Lindsey Graham’s school district in Pickens County, S.C., didn’t desegregate until 1970. So it’s understandable why he learned history from The History of South Carolina, published from 1840 until 1970 by three generations of descendants of pro-Confederate William Simms. While Simms’ early versions opined about the “irresponsible, uneducated, unmoral and, in many cases brutish Africans,” Graham likely used the 1958 edition where Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Simm’s granddaughter, had a much more progressive view.
“Most masters treated their slaves kindly,” wrote Oliphant. “Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one. As slaves, they were trained in the ways of civilization. Above all, the landowners argued, the slaves were given the opportunity to become Christians in a Christian land, instead of remaining heathen in a savage country.”[...]
READ MORE
- There is no one Social Studies curriculum: Most states’ departments of educations create a K-12 social studies curriculum that sets a minimum standard for what students should learn by a certain grade (Here is Georgia’s). The rest is usually left up to the districts, schools and even the teachers.
- There are two histories: As someone who was homeschooled, this was a revelation to me. The majority of K-12 students cycle through two levels of social studies. The basics of geography, civics and history are usually taught in elementary and middle school. Students learn another, more detailed history and civics curriculum in high school that usually includes separate courses for civics/government, world history, and American history.
- But really, there are three histories: Many states mandate a “state history” course, usually from a limited selection of one or two state-approved textbooks. In some cases, the state course totally contradicts what the students learn in American history classes.
- Sometimes there are four histories. There are some states where students take two different state history courses—one elementary level class and one high school level class.
- ...Or six histories: Take Georgia, for instance. In elementary school, students learn the basics of American history and state history. In middle school, they take world history and another year of state history. In high school, they do it over again, with mandatory courses in world history and U.S. history. However, in Georgia, and in most states, students use textbooks from different publishers and authors, many of which tell completely contradictory versions of the same stories.
- But no Black history: Aside from cursory mentions of the Civil War, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, most state educational curriculums don’t specify how much history should be dedicated to Black history. In Georgia, students have courses on Native American history, Latin American and Caribbean culture, a course that combines African and Asian geography, but nothing specifically on Black history.
Knowing this, we dug through bios, school archives and academic resources to find out how these GOP legislators gained their knowledge of America’s past. In most cases, we were able to find the exact textbook each legislator’s school district used for one of the state or American history courses. In other cases, we were able to find contemporaneous descriptions of the textbooks from academic journals or reports. To our surprise, most received a well-rounded education on the history of Black people in America.
Just kidding. They all learned variations of the same white lies. And, apparently, they’d like to keep it that way.
Here’s what we found.
Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)
What she said: “The 1619 Project is nothing more than left-wing propaganda. Tennesseans don’t want it in our schools. We want our children to learn about our nation’s history.”
What she read: Although she represents Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn attended elementary and high school in Laurel, Miss. In 1959, the year Sen. Marsha Blackburn would have entered kindergarten in Mississippi, the state legislature handed control of choosing textbooks to Gov. Ross Barnett. At the request of the Mississippi State Society of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the state had already mandated a ninth-grade course in Mississippi history, which means Blackburn learned the history of her state from John K. Bettersworth’s textbook Mississippi: a History.
The New York Times wrote in 1975 that Bettersworth’s catalogs “treat blacks of old as complacent darkies or as a problem to whites.” When The Root reviewed the text, we noticed that the entire history of the 250-year institution of slavery was reduced to five pages. Bettersworth’s book was based on UDC propaganda that taught children that the slave master treated his slaves “as his own,” but noted that most of the human chattel were so lazy that “it took two to help; one to do nothing.” However, Bettersworth was sure to point out the kindness of the masters who educated the enslaved “as they taught their own children.”
Mississippi: A History also treats the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education case as a travesty, insisting that Mississippians were largely satisfied with segregated schools. “Incidents had been extremely rare,” it explained. “[F]or by and large, each race—its parents, its pupils and their teachers, had found it advantageous to remain in an ‘equal but separate’ status.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy play an outsized role in the way we learn history. Formed in the late 19th century, the group is not only responsible for most of the Confederate monuments in America but perhaps their biggest memorial to the white supremacist utopia known as the Confederacy is how they instilled their beliefs in schools across America. By turning Southern housewives into lobbyists for the Lost Cause ideology, they transformed history into a fictional version of the past, complete with happy slaves and brave, honorable white men who just wanted low taxes. By the early 1920s, they had become so powerful that a history book didn’t stand a chance of being approved if it contained a negative portrayal of the Antebellum South or the Civil War.
Blackburn’s alma mater, Northeast Jones, integrated in the fall of 1970, the year after Blackburn graduated.
---
Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
What he said: “Why should the false revisionist history not be used as the basis of K-12 education across the nation? Not because of ‘cancel culture,’ which you support. But because it wrong & deliberately deceptive.”
What he read: Because Ted Cruz attended private Christian academies for his entire educational career, we could not verify the specific book used by Cruz’s elementary school to teach Texas history. However, his Advanced Placement U.S. History class—required in Second Baptist High School’s curriculum—likely used the eighth edition of The American Pageant, which contained most of the same passages outlined earlier. As late as 2016, the text still contained racist themes, according to CBS.
If Second Baptist High School adhered to the standards of the Texas Department of Education, we can surmise that Cruz had to learn speeches from Jefferson Davis, but not that slavery caused the Civil War, which wasn’t taught in Texas schools until 2018. Texas’ social studies curriculum “deemphasized slavery, questioned New Deal entitlements and mandated study of the “optimism’ of ‘thankful’ immigrants,” before 2010, according to the Texas Tribune. The state also believed Harriet Tubman was too sensitive a subject for third-graders but taught that slavery was the “third-most-influential cause of the war.”
Before graduating in 1988, Cruz was a member of the ultra-libertarian Constitutional Corroborators, the high school junior varsity team for the Free Enterprise Institute, which still promotes the belief that the Civil War was mostly about tariffs and economics. We also know that Cruz’s alma mater was affiliated with the pro-Confederate Southern Baptist Convention, which finally reckoned with its racist past in 2018. The institution seceded from the larger organization in 1845 over slavery.
---
Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
What he said: “I think America is a unique experiment that stood the test of time. We’re better today than we were 10 years ago and, hopefully, 10 years from now, we’ll be better. Striving to be better is always the goal. But, no, I do not believe my state, I do not believe my nation, is systematically racist.”
What he read: Although Brown v. Board of Education officially outlawed segregation in 1955, Lindsey Graham’s school district in Pickens County, S.C., didn’t desegregate until 1970. So it’s understandable why he learned history from The History of South Carolina, published from 1840 until 1970 by three generations of descendants of pro-Confederate William Simms. While Simms’ early versions opined about the “irresponsible, uneducated, unmoral and, in many cases brutish Africans,” Graham likely used the 1958 edition where Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Simm’s granddaughter, had a much more progressive view.
“Most masters treated their slaves kindly,” wrote Oliphant. “Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one. As slaves, they were trained in the ways of civilization. Above all, the landowners argued, the slaves were given the opportunity to become Christians in a Christian land, instead of remaining heathen in a savage country.”[...]
READ MORE
Low Literacy Levels Among U.S. Adults Could Be Costing The Economy $2.2 Trillion A Year
Michael T. Nietzel - FORBES
Sep 9, 2020
A new study by Gallup on behalf of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy finds that low levels of adult literacy could be costing the U.S. as much $2.2 trillion a year.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. That’s a shocking number for several reasons, and its dollars and cents implications are enormous because literacy is correlated with several important outcomes such as personal income, employment levels, health, and overall economic growth.
Commenting on the significance of the study, British A. Robinson, president and CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation, said, “America’s low literacy crisis is largely ignored, historically underfunded and woefully under-researched, despite being one of the great solvable problems of our time. We’re proud to enrich the collective knowledge base with this first-of-its-kind study, documenting literacy’s key role in equity and economic mobility in families, communities and our nation as a whole.”
The new research by Gallup attempts to estimate the gains in GDP that could result from improving adult literacy rates for the nation as a whole as well as in the individual states and major metropolitan areas. Here’s the basic methodology of the study, entitled “Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States,” under the direction of lead author Dr. Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup’s principal economist.
Rothwell relied on an international assessment of adult skills called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) that classifies literacy into several levels. The Department of Education used those results to create and publish estimated literacy levels for every U.S. county.
Adults who scored below Level 3 for literacy on the PIAAC were defined as at least partially illiterate. Adults below or at Level 1 may struggle to understand texts beyond filling out basic forms, and they find it difficult to make inferences from written material. Adults at Level 2 can read well enough to evaluate product reviews and perform other tasks requiring comparisons and simple inferences, but they’re unlikely to correctly evaluate the reliability of texts or draw sophisticated inferences. Adults at Level 3 and above were considered fully literate. They’re able to evaluate sources, as well as infer sophisticated meaning and complex ideas from written sources.
To estimate national income gains, the study compared the incomes of people with different levels of literacy. Since literacy varies by age, race, gender, and other demographic characteristics, the study adjusted for these factors in order to better determine how income rises with literacy for individuals who are otherwise alike. That allowed it to estimate the average income gains that could be expected for an individual moving from below-proficiency in literacy to minimal proficiency.
A similar approach was used at the county and state levels, using newly created literacy estimates from the U.S. Department of Education and estimated income differences based on data from the Census Bureau.
“This study translates into dollars and cents what the literacy field has known for decades: low literacy prevents millions of Americans from fully participating in our society and our economy as parents, workers and citizens,” said Robinson. “It lies at the core of multigenerational cycles of poverty, poor health, and low educational attainment, contributing to the enormous equity gap that exists in our country.”
She continued, “This research clearly shows that investing in adult literacy is absolutely critical to the strength of our nation, now and for generations to come. It proves that what Barbara Bush said more than 30 years ago is still true today: ‘Literacy is everyone’s business. Period.’”
Key Findings
Income is strongly related to literacy.
The average annual income of adults who are at the minimum proficiency level for literacy (Level 3) is nearly $63,000, significantly higher than the average of roughly $48,000 earned by adults who are just below proficiency (Level 2) and much higher than those at the lowest levels of literacy (Levels 0 and 1), who earn just over $34,000 on average.
Because individuals with varying levels of literacy different in several other ways, such as age, gender, urbanicity, race, ethnicity, and parental education, the authors controlled for those differences and found that while the large income differences between people with different literacy skills shrank, they were still quite large:
Eradicating illiteracy would yield huge economic benefits.
If all U.S. adults were able to move up to at least Level 3 of literacy proficiency, it would generate an additional $2.2 trillion in annual income for the country, equal to 10% of the gross domestic product.
Areas with the lowest levels of literacy would see the largest gains.
States that have a disproportionate share of adults with low levels of literacy would gain the most economically from increasing literacy skills. For example, in Alabama, an estimated 61% of adults fall below Level 3 literacy on the PIACC. If they could be moved to Level 3, the gains would be 15.6% of Alabama’s GDP.
By contrast, gains from eradicating illiteracy would be relatively small - 5% of local GNP - in Washington, D.C., where 47% of the population is nonproficient. In North Dakota, where there’re relatively high-paying opportunities for less educated workers, the individual gains from literacy are smaller. North Dakota also has low rates of nonproficiency (45%). These two factors in combination explain why North Dakota would see income gains of only 3.9% of its GDP.
Big economic gains would be achieved in large metropolitan areas.
The study also found that the nation’s largest metropolitan areas – including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas – would all gain at or just above 10% of their GDP by bringing all adults to a sixth grade reading level
_____________
“The U.S. confronts a long-standing challenge of high-income inequality, with strikingly large gaps in wealth and income between people of different races,” said lead author, Jonathan Rothwell. “On top of these long-term challenges, the Covid-19 pandemic has weakened the economy and overlapped with a robust movement addressing racial injustice. Eradicating literacy would not solve every problem, but it would help make substantial progress in reducing inequality in the long-term and give a much-needed boost to local and regional economies throughout the country.”
“Eradicating literacy would be enormously valuable under any circumstances,” Rothwell continued. “Given the current economic and health challenges, there is even more at stake in ensuring that everyone can fully participate in society.”
According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. That’s a shocking number for several reasons, and its dollars and cents implications are enormous because literacy is correlated with several important outcomes such as personal income, employment levels, health, and overall economic growth.
Commenting on the significance of the study, British A. Robinson, president and CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation, said, “America’s low literacy crisis is largely ignored, historically underfunded and woefully under-researched, despite being one of the great solvable problems of our time. We’re proud to enrich the collective knowledge base with this first-of-its-kind study, documenting literacy’s key role in equity and economic mobility in families, communities and our nation as a whole.”
The new research by Gallup attempts to estimate the gains in GDP that could result from improving adult literacy rates for the nation as a whole as well as in the individual states and major metropolitan areas. Here’s the basic methodology of the study, entitled “Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States,” under the direction of lead author Dr. Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup’s principal economist.
Rothwell relied on an international assessment of adult skills called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) that classifies literacy into several levels. The Department of Education used those results to create and publish estimated literacy levels for every U.S. county.
Adults who scored below Level 3 for literacy on the PIAAC were defined as at least partially illiterate. Adults below or at Level 1 may struggle to understand texts beyond filling out basic forms, and they find it difficult to make inferences from written material. Adults at Level 2 can read well enough to evaluate product reviews and perform other tasks requiring comparisons and simple inferences, but they’re unlikely to correctly evaluate the reliability of texts or draw sophisticated inferences. Adults at Level 3 and above were considered fully literate. They’re able to evaluate sources, as well as infer sophisticated meaning and complex ideas from written sources.
To estimate national income gains, the study compared the incomes of people with different levels of literacy. Since literacy varies by age, race, gender, and other demographic characteristics, the study adjusted for these factors in order to better determine how income rises with literacy for individuals who are otherwise alike. That allowed it to estimate the average income gains that could be expected for an individual moving from below-proficiency in literacy to minimal proficiency.
A similar approach was used at the county and state levels, using newly created literacy estimates from the U.S. Department of Education and estimated income differences based on data from the Census Bureau.
“This study translates into dollars and cents what the literacy field has known for decades: low literacy prevents millions of Americans from fully participating in our society and our economy as parents, workers and citizens,” said Robinson. “It lies at the core of multigenerational cycles of poverty, poor health, and low educational attainment, contributing to the enormous equity gap that exists in our country.”
She continued, “This research clearly shows that investing in adult literacy is absolutely critical to the strength of our nation, now and for generations to come. It proves that what Barbara Bush said more than 30 years ago is still true today: ‘Literacy is everyone’s business. Period.’”
Key Findings
Income is strongly related to literacy.
The average annual income of adults who are at the minimum proficiency level for literacy (Level 3) is nearly $63,000, significantly higher than the average of roughly $48,000 earned by adults who are just below proficiency (Level 2) and much higher than those at the lowest levels of literacy (Levels 0 and 1), who earn just over $34,000 on average.
Because individuals with varying levels of literacy different in several other ways, such as age, gender, urbanicity, race, ethnicity, and parental education, the authors controlled for those differences and found that while the large income differences between people with different literacy skills shrank, they were still quite large:
- the difference for people below literacy Level 1 and those at Level 3 was $23,979
- the gap between people at Level 2 and those at Level 3 was $13,193.
Eradicating illiteracy would yield huge economic benefits.
If all U.S. adults were able to move up to at least Level 3 of literacy proficiency, it would generate an additional $2.2 trillion in annual income for the country, equal to 10% of the gross domestic product.
Areas with the lowest levels of literacy would see the largest gains.
States that have a disproportionate share of adults with low levels of literacy would gain the most economically from increasing literacy skills. For example, in Alabama, an estimated 61% of adults fall below Level 3 literacy on the PIACC. If they could be moved to Level 3, the gains would be 15.6% of Alabama’s GDP.
By contrast, gains from eradicating illiteracy would be relatively small - 5% of local GNP - in Washington, D.C., where 47% of the population is nonproficient. In North Dakota, where there’re relatively high-paying opportunities for less educated workers, the individual gains from literacy are smaller. North Dakota also has low rates of nonproficiency (45%). These two factors in combination explain why North Dakota would see income gains of only 3.9% of its GDP.
Big economic gains would be achieved in large metropolitan areas.
The study also found that the nation’s largest metropolitan areas – including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas – would all gain at or just above 10% of their GDP by bringing all adults to a sixth grade reading level
_____________
“The U.S. confronts a long-standing challenge of high-income inequality, with strikingly large gaps in wealth and income between people of different races,” said lead author, Jonathan Rothwell. “On top of these long-term challenges, the Covid-19 pandemic has weakened the economy and overlapped with a robust movement addressing racial injustice. Eradicating literacy would not solve every problem, but it would help make substantial progress in reducing inequality in the long-term and give a much-needed boost to local and regional economies throughout the country.”
“Eradicating literacy would be enormously valuable under any circumstances,” Rothwell continued. “Given the current economic and health challenges, there is even more at stake in ensuring that everyone can fully participate in society.”
How public schools fail to recognize Black prodigies
the conversation
February 16, 2021 8.27am EST
Jamaal Abdul-Alim: Why do public schools so often fail to identify gifted Black students?
Donna Ford: The No. 1 reason for the underrepresentation of Black students in gifted education is the lack of teacher referrals, even when Black students are highly gifted. I definitely think stereotypes and biases hinder educators from seeing Black students’ gifts and talents. In most schools in the U.S., if you are not referred by an educator, you will not move through the identification pipeline for gifted education programs and services, as well as Advanced Placement. It starts and it stops with teachers.
This is why Black families have reached out to me. They’re saying, “This predominantly white-female discipline” – meaning teachers – “is doing my child an injustice.”
They’re saying, “I’m frustrated, I don’t know what to do other than pull my child out and home-school.” You don’t see a lot of Black home-schooling. If the parents are able to do it, they have the means.
Abdul-Alim: Are these children really prodigies or do they just have parents who are just really actively involved and concerned about their children’s education, and recognize the public schools are doing them a disservice?
Ford: There’s a lot of controversy in the field about how children become gifted, no less a prodigy. To me, it’s not just nature or nurture. It’s both. So nature is they have the capacity, the potential. And then nurture is they have the experience, the exposure, the opportunity, access. And that includes the families who have the means and wherewithal to advocate for their children or to nurture whatever potential is there. But personally and professionally, I believe that the most important factor – for students being very gifted and prodigies – is the environment. That means their families, and their cultural, social and economic capital.
Abdul-Alim: But doesn’t that kind of point away from the idea of these children being “prodigies”? Because if the thing they have in common is well-educated parents who have high incomes, it seems like almost any child in that situation could achieve similar educational results.
Ford: A prodigy just means that you have children who are performing at the level of an adult; that’s the basic definition of a prodigy. So that has nothing to do with their income and families, education, etc. It is about how they are performing. They’re playing the piano like an adult who has taken lessons. They picked up on these skills and skill sets very easily. Or they are inventing mathematical formulas that you would only see adults doing. They’re in middle school and can do the work of college-level students. You can have this potential, but if you don’t have these opportunities at home, at school, even in the community, then the gifts and talents that you have may not come to fruition at the highest level.
Abdul-Alim: When families come to you about whether or not to enroll their young child in college, what do you generally advise them to do or to consider?
Ford: There’s a lot of variables to consider. One is the child’s emotional and social maturity. I think their size is important. Are they small for their age? That can contribute to some social and emotional issues, in particular bullying or isolation. Do they have siblings who are older who might be intimidated or negatively affected by their younger sibling being accelerated?
Abdul-Alim: What is your advice to families who can’t afford to home-school, but who have children who could very well be higher-performing if given the opportunity? How does society provide opportunities for children who fall in that category?
Ford: I want the families to become familiar with what the barriers are. So when Black families have contacted me about their child not being identified as gifted or not being challenged like their white classmates, then I point them to the Civil Rights Data Collection website, which is run by the U.S. Department of Education. I have them look specifically at what the data says for representation in gifted programs and Advanced Placement classes. I ask them to look at suspension and expulsion by race and corporal punishment, if that exists in their schools, which it does in some states, and very last, take a hard and critical look at all the data.
You can go straight to data for your child’s district or school building. And so, they can come armed with these demographic data showing underrepresentation in gifted and Advanced Placement, but overrepresentation in certain categories of special education as well as discipline, such as suspension and expulsion. And when they come informed, then sometimes – not always – the educators are put on notice. And they do what they’re supposed to do anyway, which is share information with families about how to gain the resources and opportunities that their children need.
Donna Ford: The No. 1 reason for the underrepresentation of Black students in gifted education is the lack of teacher referrals, even when Black students are highly gifted. I definitely think stereotypes and biases hinder educators from seeing Black students’ gifts and talents. In most schools in the U.S., if you are not referred by an educator, you will not move through the identification pipeline for gifted education programs and services, as well as Advanced Placement. It starts and it stops with teachers.
This is why Black families have reached out to me. They’re saying, “This predominantly white-female discipline” – meaning teachers – “is doing my child an injustice.”
They’re saying, “I’m frustrated, I don’t know what to do other than pull my child out and home-school.” You don’t see a lot of Black home-schooling. If the parents are able to do it, they have the means.
Abdul-Alim: Are these children really prodigies or do they just have parents who are just really actively involved and concerned about their children’s education, and recognize the public schools are doing them a disservice?
Ford: There’s a lot of controversy in the field about how children become gifted, no less a prodigy. To me, it’s not just nature or nurture. It’s both. So nature is they have the capacity, the potential. And then nurture is they have the experience, the exposure, the opportunity, access. And that includes the families who have the means and wherewithal to advocate for their children or to nurture whatever potential is there. But personally and professionally, I believe that the most important factor – for students being very gifted and prodigies – is the environment. That means their families, and their cultural, social and economic capital.
Abdul-Alim: But doesn’t that kind of point away from the idea of these children being “prodigies”? Because if the thing they have in common is well-educated parents who have high incomes, it seems like almost any child in that situation could achieve similar educational results.
Ford: A prodigy just means that you have children who are performing at the level of an adult; that’s the basic definition of a prodigy. So that has nothing to do with their income and families, education, etc. It is about how they are performing. They’re playing the piano like an adult who has taken lessons. They picked up on these skills and skill sets very easily. Or they are inventing mathematical formulas that you would only see adults doing. They’re in middle school and can do the work of college-level students. You can have this potential, but if you don’t have these opportunities at home, at school, even in the community, then the gifts and talents that you have may not come to fruition at the highest level.
Abdul-Alim: When families come to you about whether or not to enroll their young child in college, what do you generally advise them to do or to consider?
Ford: There’s a lot of variables to consider. One is the child’s emotional and social maturity. I think their size is important. Are they small for their age? That can contribute to some social and emotional issues, in particular bullying or isolation. Do they have siblings who are older who might be intimidated or negatively affected by their younger sibling being accelerated?
Abdul-Alim: What is your advice to families who can’t afford to home-school, but who have children who could very well be higher-performing if given the opportunity? How does society provide opportunities for children who fall in that category?
Ford: I want the families to become familiar with what the barriers are. So when Black families have contacted me about their child not being identified as gifted or not being challenged like their white classmates, then I point them to the Civil Rights Data Collection website, which is run by the U.S. Department of Education. I have them look specifically at what the data says for representation in gifted programs and Advanced Placement classes. I ask them to look at suspension and expulsion by race and corporal punishment, if that exists in their schools, which it does in some states, and very last, take a hard and critical look at all the data.
You can go straight to data for your child’s district or school building. And so, they can come armed with these demographic data showing underrepresentation in gifted and Advanced Placement, but overrepresentation in certain categories of special education as well as discipline, such as suspension and expulsion. And when they come informed, then sometimes – not always – the educators are put on notice. And they do what they’re supposed to do anyway, which is share information with families about how to gain the resources and opportunities that their children need.
Fighting school segregation didn’t take place just in the South
the conversation
February 10, 2021 8.15am EST
Whether it’s black-and-white photos of Arkansas’ Little Rock Nine or Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of New Orleans schoolgirl Ruby Bridges, images of school desegregation often make it seem as though it was an issue for Black children primarily in the South.
It is true that Bridges, the Little Rock Nine and other brave students in Southern states, including North Carolina and Tennessee, changed the face of American education when they tested the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated the desegregation of public education. But the struggle to desegregate America’s schools in the 1950s and ‘60s did not take place solely in the South. Black students and their parents also boldly challenged segregated schooling in the North.
Mae Mallory, a Harlem activist and mother, serves as an example. Her name may not be the first one that comes to mind when it comes to 1950s school desegregation battles. Yet Mallory made history – and changed the face of public education – when she filed the first post-Brown suit against the New York City Board of Education in 1957.
Prompted by her children
Mallory got involved in education activism after her children – Patricia and Keefer Jr. – told her about the deplorable conditions of their segregated school, P.S. 10 in Harlem. Mallory joined the Parents Committee for a Better Education and became a vocal advocate of Black children’s right to a safe learning environment.
The turning point came when she indicted the racist school system in her January 1957 testimony before the New York School Board’s Commission on Integration. Mallory embarrassed the board by remarking that P.S. 10 was “just as ‘Jim Crow’” as the Hazel Street School she had attended in Macon, Georgia, in the 1930s. Her testimony was an integral part of the parental complaints that forced the board to construct a new building and hire new teachers.
A larger battle
Encouraged by this victory, Mallory began a fight to end the New York City Board of Education’s segregation practices. Existing zoning maps required her daughter, Patricia, to attend a junior high school in Harlem. Mallory argued that this school was inferior to others in the area and would not adequately prepare her daughter for high school. Instead, she enrolled Patricia in a school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The board blocked Patricia’s enrollment. Mallory took action. With the help of a young Black lawyer, Paul Zuber, she sued, claiming existing zoning policies relegated her daughter – and other Black children – to segregated, inferior schools. Filed three years after Brown, Mallory’s suit forced the Board of Education to face the fact that segregation was a persistent problem in New York City public schools. Eight other mothers joined Mallory’s fight. The press dubbed them the “Harlem 9.”
Making headlines
Once filed, Mallory’s suit became front-page news in The New York Times. A year later, however, the case stalled. In an effort to spur the suit along, the Harlem 9 instituted a boycott of three Harlem junior high schools. Zuber knew that the mothers would face charges of violating compulsory school attendance laws. This, in turn, would force a judge to rule on their suit.
In December 1958, Judge Justine Polier sided with the Harlem 9, declaring: “These parents have the constitutionally guaranteed right to elect no education for their children rather than to subject them to discriminatory, inferior education.” The Harlem 9 gained the first legal victory proving that de facto segregation existed in Northern schools. The decision galvanized local Black parents, causing hundreds to request transfers for their children to better schools.
A compromise
The parties reached a settlement in February 1959. The Harlem 9’s children would not enroll in the schools for which they were zoned. Nor would they be able to engage in “open choice” – the parents’ request to send their children to a school of their choosing.
Instead, they would attend a Harlem junior high school that offered more resources, including college prep courses, although it was still largely segregated. The Harlem 9 would be allowed to continue with their ultimately unsuccessful civil suit against the board. The mothers had also filed a million-dollar lawsuit seeking damages for the psychological and emotional toll their children endured in segregated schools. This was a compromise on all fronts. However, Mallory and the other mothers gained a substantial victory in forcing the court and the Board of Education to confront the segregation that existed in New York City public schools. Their boycott also became a unifying strategy for subsequent struggles, most notably for the 1964 New York City school boycott. During this boycott, hundreds of thousands of parents, students and activists engaged in a daylong protest of segregation and inequality in public city schools.
The Harlem 9’s fight serves as an important reminder that school desegregation protests were popular and successful in the North as well as in the South. It also provides insight into the prominent role Black women had in these struggles and the diverse range of strategies they deployed – from championing “open choice” to school boycotts – to help their children have access to equal education.
Even more importantly, perhaps, their fight demonstrates the importance of appreciating the different ways in which Black women compelled schools to make good on the Brown decision – a fight that, nearly 70 years later, is still being fought. The Supreme Court’s mandate in the Brown decision that public schools desegregate with “all deliberate speed” is unfinished. Nationwide, Black children remain in schools that are segregated, underfunded and overcrowded – much as they were when Mallory began her fight.
It is true that Bridges, the Little Rock Nine and other brave students in Southern states, including North Carolina and Tennessee, changed the face of American education when they tested the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated the desegregation of public education. But the struggle to desegregate America’s schools in the 1950s and ‘60s did not take place solely in the South. Black students and their parents also boldly challenged segregated schooling in the North.
Mae Mallory, a Harlem activist and mother, serves as an example. Her name may not be the first one that comes to mind when it comes to 1950s school desegregation battles. Yet Mallory made history – and changed the face of public education – when she filed the first post-Brown suit against the New York City Board of Education in 1957.
Prompted by her children
Mallory got involved in education activism after her children – Patricia and Keefer Jr. – told her about the deplorable conditions of their segregated school, P.S. 10 in Harlem. Mallory joined the Parents Committee for a Better Education and became a vocal advocate of Black children’s right to a safe learning environment.
The turning point came when she indicted the racist school system in her January 1957 testimony before the New York School Board’s Commission on Integration. Mallory embarrassed the board by remarking that P.S. 10 was “just as ‘Jim Crow’” as the Hazel Street School she had attended in Macon, Georgia, in the 1930s. Her testimony was an integral part of the parental complaints that forced the board to construct a new building and hire new teachers.
A larger battle
Encouraged by this victory, Mallory began a fight to end the New York City Board of Education’s segregation practices. Existing zoning maps required her daughter, Patricia, to attend a junior high school in Harlem. Mallory argued that this school was inferior to others in the area and would not adequately prepare her daughter for high school. Instead, she enrolled Patricia in a school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The board blocked Patricia’s enrollment. Mallory took action. With the help of a young Black lawyer, Paul Zuber, she sued, claiming existing zoning policies relegated her daughter – and other Black children – to segregated, inferior schools. Filed three years after Brown, Mallory’s suit forced the Board of Education to face the fact that segregation was a persistent problem in New York City public schools. Eight other mothers joined Mallory’s fight. The press dubbed them the “Harlem 9.”
Making headlines
Once filed, Mallory’s suit became front-page news in The New York Times. A year later, however, the case stalled. In an effort to spur the suit along, the Harlem 9 instituted a boycott of three Harlem junior high schools. Zuber knew that the mothers would face charges of violating compulsory school attendance laws. This, in turn, would force a judge to rule on their suit.
In December 1958, Judge Justine Polier sided with the Harlem 9, declaring: “These parents have the constitutionally guaranteed right to elect no education for their children rather than to subject them to discriminatory, inferior education.” The Harlem 9 gained the first legal victory proving that de facto segregation existed in Northern schools. The decision galvanized local Black parents, causing hundreds to request transfers for their children to better schools.
A compromise
The parties reached a settlement in February 1959. The Harlem 9’s children would not enroll in the schools for which they were zoned. Nor would they be able to engage in “open choice” – the parents’ request to send their children to a school of their choosing.
Instead, they would attend a Harlem junior high school that offered more resources, including college prep courses, although it was still largely segregated. The Harlem 9 would be allowed to continue with their ultimately unsuccessful civil suit against the board. The mothers had also filed a million-dollar lawsuit seeking damages for the psychological and emotional toll their children endured in segregated schools. This was a compromise on all fronts. However, Mallory and the other mothers gained a substantial victory in forcing the court and the Board of Education to confront the segregation that existed in New York City public schools. Their boycott also became a unifying strategy for subsequent struggles, most notably for the 1964 New York City school boycott. During this boycott, hundreds of thousands of parents, students and activists engaged in a daylong protest of segregation and inequality in public city schools.
The Harlem 9’s fight serves as an important reminder that school desegregation protests were popular and successful in the North as well as in the South. It also provides insight into the prominent role Black women had in these struggles and the diverse range of strategies they deployed – from championing “open choice” to school boycotts – to help their children have access to equal education.
Even more importantly, perhaps, their fight demonstrates the importance of appreciating the different ways in which Black women compelled schools to make good on the Brown decision – a fight that, nearly 70 years later, is still being fought. The Supreme Court’s mandate in the Brown decision that public schools desegregate with “all deliberate speed” is unfinished. Nationwide, Black children remain in schools that are segregated, underfunded and overcrowded – much as they were when Mallory began her fight.
Why are so many 12th graders not proficient in reading and math?
the conversation
February 10, 2021 8.14am EST
Math and reading scores for 12th graders in the U.S. were at a historic low even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive shift to remote learning, according to results of the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress released in late 2020. We asked three scholars to explain why so many high school seniors aren’t proficient in these critical subjects.
Elizabeth Leyva, director of entry-level mathematics, Texas A&M University-San Antonio
One might expect the jump from high school to college mathematics to be a natural progression, or a small step up in difficulty or expectations. But over time it has actually become a chasm, and that chasm continues to grow.
More students are taking advanced coursework – algebra II or higher – in high school. But studying the material doesn’t mean that a student has truly learned it. As a result, a student can pass a course which should be a college preparatory course, such as algebra II, yet fail a standardized placement exam, or not score high enough on SAT/ACT tests to be deemed “college ready.”
Most high school teachers hold their students to a different set of expectations than college faculty do. In many cases, the policies are set by the school district, so high school teachers are simply upholding rules that the community and parents have pushed for. This can include allowing students to submit late work, retest on assessments they performed poorly on and use a calculator for most assignments.
The rationale is well intentioned; high school students are young learners, and may need multiple opportunities to master a concept.
Multiple opportunities to pass means more students pass. But this generous assessment strategy has unintended consequences on student motivation and accountability. The effect is that students can earn a passing grade but not retain or master the material in a meaningful way. This is how a student can receive a B in algebra II, for example, but land in a developmental class when they enter college.
David Purpura, associate professor of human development and family studies, co-director of the Center for Early Learning, Purdue University
When looking at the striking data for 12th graders from the national report card, policymakers, researchers, parents and teachers often ask: What’s going on with high school math? Should we change math instruction at this age?
However, the performance trends at middle and elementary schools are similar.
Math is often taught with few explicit connections across individual classes. Sometimes these classes follow a certain order: for example, algebra I and algebra II. But the content in and across the classes isn’t being thoroughly connected. For example, in the early elementary years, we talk about addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division. We move on to fractions, and then algebra. Yet this still treats these concepts as separable rather than integrated.
But math is an interrelated web of knowledge with new information building on previously learned information. And, this acquisition of knowledge begins early. There are significant individual differences in children’s math performance even prior to kindergarten.
I believe children aren’t receiving a strong enough foundation for basic math skills in the earliest years. Preschool teachers spend less than five minutes per day on numbers. Nearly a third of classrooms provide no number instruction at all.
In kindergarten, the level of math instruction is typically well below what children already know and can do. The misalignment could be attributable to the low expectations set forth in the Common Core Standards – the academic standards shared across the majority of states. Over 85% of children are able to meet certain end-of-kindergarten expectations before they even enter kindergarten. These disparities continue through elementary school.
So, the question in my mind isn’t: Why are so many high school seniors not proficient in math? The question is: How can teachers better link math concepts across all grade levels and improve learning?
To start, I believe schools and communities need to make math a bigger priority in the earlier years – even before kindergarten. Research shows that testing students regularly and tailoring lessons to meet their individual needs can build their math skills appropriately.
Emily Solari, professor of reading education, University of Virginia
How kids learn to read is a well-researched aspect of human learning. Scientists have identified what happens in the brain when children learn to read and why some children have difficulty mastering this skill. Despite this wealth of evidence about how reading develops, only 37% of 12th gradersread at a proficient or advanced level, according to the national assessment.
While standardized tests are not the perfect measure of reading ability, they do provide a pulse of reading attainment across the country. Importantly, the scores show significant differences in reading performance between particular groups of students. Profound gaps exist between white and Black students and white and Hispanic students.
The education system is fraught with inequities that have a greater negative impact on historically marginalized students – particularly those who are Black, Hispanic, poorer or have a disability. Recent data suggests the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these gaps. Improving the system, and how students are taught reading, is a matter of equity.
Why, if there is solid evidence on how children learn to read, has this not translated into classroom practice and better reading outcomes for students?
Studies show that children should be taught the alphabetic system – the relationship between the sounds of letters and their written form – in order to learn how to read words. The ability to read words combined with vocabulary and language development is essential to reading comprehension.
In addition to what is taught, how children are taught to read is also important. Reading instruction should have a clear scope and sequence, with skills building on each other over time.
However, a recent survey suggests that about 75% of teachers use curricula that teach early reading using a cueing approach. And, 65% of college professors teach this approach to new teachers. This method does not align with the scientific evidence of how children learn how to read.
Sometimes called “MSV” – shorthand for meaning, syntactical and visual – the cueing approach emphasizes reading whole words over learning the alphabetic code. This method of teaching reading can be especially problematic for children who are having difficulties learning how to read.
To improve students’ reading ability, I believe schools, districts and states must push multiple levers simultaneously. This includes making sure instruction, curriculum and testing all align with the science of reading, and that teachers and administrators are provided adequate professional development about reading instruction.
Further, teacher education programs must commit to preparing teachers who understand how reading develops in children’s brains and how to implement teaching practices that are based on current evidence.
Elizabeth Leyva, director of entry-level mathematics, Texas A&M University-San Antonio
One might expect the jump from high school to college mathematics to be a natural progression, or a small step up in difficulty or expectations. But over time it has actually become a chasm, and that chasm continues to grow.
More students are taking advanced coursework – algebra II or higher – in high school. But studying the material doesn’t mean that a student has truly learned it. As a result, a student can pass a course which should be a college preparatory course, such as algebra II, yet fail a standardized placement exam, or not score high enough on SAT/ACT tests to be deemed “college ready.”
Most high school teachers hold their students to a different set of expectations than college faculty do. In many cases, the policies are set by the school district, so high school teachers are simply upholding rules that the community and parents have pushed for. This can include allowing students to submit late work, retest on assessments they performed poorly on and use a calculator for most assignments.
The rationale is well intentioned; high school students are young learners, and may need multiple opportunities to master a concept.
Multiple opportunities to pass means more students pass. But this generous assessment strategy has unintended consequences on student motivation and accountability. The effect is that students can earn a passing grade but not retain or master the material in a meaningful way. This is how a student can receive a B in algebra II, for example, but land in a developmental class when they enter college.
David Purpura, associate professor of human development and family studies, co-director of the Center for Early Learning, Purdue University
When looking at the striking data for 12th graders from the national report card, policymakers, researchers, parents and teachers often ask: What’s going on with high school math? Should we change math instruction at this age?
However, the performance trends at middle and elementary schools are similar.
Math is often taught with few explicit connections across individual classes. Sometimes these classes follow a certain order: for example, algebra I and algebra II. But the content in and across the classes isn’t being thoroughly connected. For example, in the early elementary years, we talk about addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division. We move on to fractions, and then algebra. Yet this still treats these concepts as separable rather than integrated.
But math is an interrelated web of knowledge with new information building on previously learned information. And, this acquisition of knowledge begins early. There are significant individual differences in children’s math performance even prior to kindergarten.
I believe children aren’t receiving a strong enough foundation for basic math skills in the earliest years. Preschool teachers spend less than five minutes per day on numbers. Nearly a third of classrooms provide no number instruction at all.
In kindergarten, the level of math instruction is typically well below what children already know and can do. The misalignment could be attributable to the low expectations set forth in the Common Core Standards – the academic standards shared across the majority of states. Over 85% of children are able to meet certain end-of-kindergarten expectations before they even enter kindergarten. These disparities continue through elementary school.
So, the question in my mind isn’t: Why are so many high school seniors not proficient in math? The question is: How can teachers better link math concepts across all grade levels and improve learning?
To start, I believe schools and communities need to make math a bigger priority in the earlier years – even before kindergarten. Research shows that testing students regularly and tailoring lessons to meet their individual needs can build their math skills appropriately.
Emily Solari, professor of reading education, University of Virginia
How kids learn to read is a well-researched aspect of human learning. Scientists have identified what happens in the brain when children learn to read and why some children have difficulty mastering this skill. Despite this wealth of evidence about how reading develops, only 37% of 12th gradersread at a proficient or advanced level, according to the national assessment.
While standardized tests are not the perfect measure of reading ability, they do provide a pulse of reading attainment across the country. Importantly, the scores show significant differences in reading performance between particular groups of students. Profound gaps exist between white and Black students and white and Hispanic students.
The education system is fraught with inequities that have a greater negative impact on historically marginalized students – particularly those who are Black, Hispanic, poorer or have a disability. Recent data suggests the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these gaps. Improving the system, and how students are taught reading, is a matter of equity.
Why, if there is solid evidence on how children learn to read, has this not translated into classroom practice and better reading outcomes for students?
Studies show that children should be taught the alphabetic system – the relationship between the sounds of letters and their written form – in order to learn how to read words. The ability to read words combined with vocabulary and language development is essential to reading comprehension.
In addition to what is taught, how children are taught to read is also important. Reading instruction should have a clear scope and sequence, with skills building on each other over time.
However, a recent survey suggests that about 75% of teachers use curricula that teach early reading using a cueing approach. And, 65% of college professors teach this approach to new teachers. This method does not align with the scientific evidence of how children learn how to read.
Sometimes called “MSV” – shorthand for meaning, syntactical and visual – the cueing approach emphasizes reading whole words over learning the alphabetic code. This method of teaching reading can be especially problematic for children who are having difficulties learning how to read.
To improve students’ reading ability, I believe schools, districts and states must push multiple levers simultaneously. This includes making sure instruction, curriculum and testing all align with the science of reading, and that teachers and administrators are provided adequate professional development about reading instruction.
Further, teacher education programs must commit to preparing teachers who understand how reading develops in children’s brains and how to implement teaching practices that are based on current evidence.
Schools often fail to identify gifted and talented students – especially if they are Black, Latino or Native American
the conversation
October 14, 2020 8.28am EDT
About a decade ago, I was working with a large, urban school district on creating a gifted and talented program that would include all kids, regardless of their race or income.
In this district, Black children and children from poor families were rarely identified for gifted education services. These services include enrichment, special classes and focused projects intended to help students excel in areas in which they show signs of exceptional potential and talents.
I visited one school, near a prestigious university in an upscale neighborhood, where 48% of all students received services for gifted and talented students. There, about 50% were white, 22% Black and 12% Asian. Few were being raised in low-income families. At another school I visited a short 10-minute drive away, no students were identified. This school was located in a poor neighborhood. Ninety-eight percent of the students were Black, and all of them qualified for free or reduced-price meals.
Having reviewed national data in detail as scholars of gifted and talented education, my colleagues and I have found that inequities like this exist across the country and in most school districts.
State report cards
First, we examined census data from the Office of Civil Rights for the years 2000, 2012, 2014 and 2016 regarding gifted students from every U.S. public school to see how many students attend schools that identify youth with gifts and talents. We found that 42% of public schools did not identify a single student.
Then, we looked for patterns regarding race and ethnicity and income levels among the schools that do screen students and designate some of them as gifted and talented.
When we published our findings in 2019, we issued report cards for every state and for the U.S. overall. We gave 17 states failing grades because fewer than 60% of their public schools identified anyone as gifted and talented. Six more got a D.
Racial and ethnic disparities
Interestingly, we found that Black, Asian, white and Latino children were equally likely to attend schools that identified gifted students, although Native American students were less likely. As a result, we determined that access alone does not explain why Black and Latino students are underrepresented in gifted education.
I consider these racial inequities to be staggering.
About 15% of all students are Black, but only 8.5% of students identified as gifted and talented are Black. Roughly 27% of students are Latino, yet only 18% of the students determined to be gifted and talented are Latino. This pattern also holds for Native American and Native Hawaiian students.
Nearly 59% of gifted and talented students are white even though only 48% of all students are white. Asian students are even more disproportionately represented: They comprise 5% of all students, but nearly 10% of students identified with gifts and talents.
Along with racial and ethnic patterns, we found that poverty played a role.
High-poverty schools are slightly more likely to identify students as gifted than others. Despite that, they identified only about 58% as many gifted students as low-poverty schools – those largely attended by more affluent children.
Nationally, only 8% of the students attending high-poverty schools were identified, versus 13.5% of students of students enrolled at low-poverty schools.
‘Missing’ students
There were 3.3 million U.S. students identified as having gifts and talents in the 2015-2016 school year. Based on our findings, we estimate that even more – another 3.6 million – ought to be designated this way.
These students are missing from the official data because their school does not identify any students as gifted and talented, they attend a high-poverty school or because they are Black, Latino or belong to another underidentified group.
For example, only 276,840 Black students were identified as gifted and talented in 2016. We estimate that as many as 771,728 would be identified this way if systems were working properly.
Fixing the problem
Many students benefit when they receive gifted and talented services at school. They become more motivated to learn and more likely to earn good grades, while developing positive social and emotional skills.
In previous research, my colleagues and I found that students from underserved groups who receive gifted and talented services at school benefit even more than their affluent classmates.
One way schools can make the process more equitable is by letting students qualify for these programs in multiple ways. This helps because a single test, on which privileged students may outscore others, does not serve as the only or the most important avenue to being identified as a gifted and talented student.
I believe that all schools should examine their current systems for identifying students with gifts and talents with an eye toward equity. If needed, they should step up their efforts to ensure that students from underserved communities get a fair shot, and also develop programs to nurture these students – as the school district I advised a decade ago eventually managed to do.
In this district, Black children and children from poor families were rarely identified for gifted education services. These services include enrichment, special classes and focused projects intended to help students excel in areas in which they show signs of exceptional potential and talents.
I visited one school, near a prestigious university in an upscale neighborhood, where 48% of all students received services for gifted and talented students. There, about 50% were white, 22% Black and 12% Asian. Few were being raised in low-income families. At another school I visited a short 10-minute drive away, no students were identified. This school was located in a poor neighborhood. Ninety-eight percent of the students were Black, and all of them qualified for free or reduced-price meals.
Having reviewed national data in detail as scholars of gifted and talented education, my colleagues and I have found that inequities like this exist across the country and in most school districts.
State report cards
First, we examined census data from the Office of Civil Rights for the years 2000, 2012, 2014 and 2016 regarding gifted students from every U.S. public school to see how many students attend schools that identify youth with gifts and talents. We found that 42% of public schools did not identify a single student.
Then, we looked for patterns regarding race and ethnicity and income levels among the schools that do screen students and designate some of them as gifted and talented.
When we published our findings in 2019, we issued report cards for every state and for the U.S. overall. We gave 17 states failing grades because fewer than 60% of their public schools identified anyone as gifted and talented. Six more got a D.
Racial and ethnic disparities
Interestingly, we found that Black, Asian, white and Latino children were equally likely to attend schools that identified gifted students, although Native American students were less likely. As a result, we determined that access alone does not explain why Black and Latino students are underrepresented in gifted education.
I consider these racial inequities to be staggering.
About 15% of all students are Black, but only 8.5% of students identified as gifted and talented are Black. Roughly 27% of students are Latino, yet only 18% of the students determined to be gifted and talented are Latino. This pattern also holds for Native American and Native Hawaiian students.
Nearly 59% of gifted and talented students are white even though only 48% of all students are white. Asian students are even more disproportionately represented: They comprise 5% of all students, but nearly 10% of students identified with gifts and talents.
Along with racial and ethnic patterns, we found that poverty played a role.
High-poverty schools are slightly more likely to identify students as gifted than others. Despite that, they identified only about 58% as many gifted students as low-poverty schools – those largely attended by more affluent children.
Nationally, only 8% of the students attending high-poverty schools were identified, versus 13.5% of students of students enrolled at low-poverty schools.
‘Missing’ students
There were 3.3 million U.S. students identified as having gifts and talents in the 2015-2016 school year. Based on our findings, we estimate that even more – another 3.6 million – ought to be designated this way.
These students are missing from the official data because their school does not identify any students as gifted and talented, they attend a high-poverty school or because they are Black, Latino or belong to another underidentified group.
For example, only 276,840 Black students were identified as gifted and talented in 2016. We estimate that as many as 771,728 would be identified this way if systems were working properly.
Fixing the problem
Many students benefit when they receive gifted and talented services at school. They become more motivated to learn and more likely to earn good grades, while developing positive social and emotional skills.
In previous research, my colleagues and I found that students from underserved groups who receive gifted and talented services at school benefit even more than their affluent classmates.
One way schools can make the process more equitable is by letting students qualify for these programs in multiple ways. This helps because a single test, on which privileged students may outscore others, does not serve as the only or the most important avenue to being identified as a gifted and talented student.
I believe that all schools should examine their current systems for identifying students with gifts and talents with an eye toward equity. If needed, they should step up their efforts to ensure that students from underserved communities get a fair shot, and also develop programs to nurture these students – as the school district I advised a decade ago eventually managed to do.
Poor, minority students at dilapidated schools face added risks amid talk of reopening classrooms
the conversation
July 31, 2020 8.23am EDT
Classrooms, gyms and cafeterias at schools across the U.S. have remained empty for months now. And despite some districts beginning to reopen, many others will remain closed amid fears that prematurely restarting in-person classes could cost more lives in the pandemic.
Local, state and federal officials wrangle over how to make schools safe, with concern over how to sufficiently disinfect and ventilate schools. But for low-income students, their teachers and families, returning to school is a more risky proposition due to the age and condition of the buildings to which they would return.
In a 2018 report to Congress, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that “low income students and students of color are often relegated to low-quality school facilities” that lack “physical maintenance.” This can “negatively impact a student’s health,” the commission concluded.
I have seen this firsthand. As a former school superintendent and now as a university professor working with K-12 schools, I see the inequities experienced by some of the U.S.‘s most vulnerable students as a stark reminder of the opportunity gap holding many back. By requiring them to attend schools in desperate need of maintenance, I fear that the schools and classrooms attended by low-income students of color could become epicenters of a second wave of pandemic.
Funding gap
Even before the pandemic, some schools were a health risk. When data was last collected, in the 2012-13 school year, the average school was found to be 44 years old. High-poverty schools – those with more than 75% of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches – were typically older, closer to 50 years old. This is important as aging school buildings are more likely to have problems with air quality, asbestos and a variety of of other environmental toxicants. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that 19% of schools have “unsatisfactory” ventilation.
Bringing U.S. school buildings up to acceptable standards would cost US$145 billion annually, according to the National Council on School Facilities. This compares to $99 billion average yearly spending on K-12 facilities – leaving an annual gap of $46 billion.
Students attending aging, inadequate schools are more likely to be low-income minority students. This isn’t a new problem. Back in 1996, the General Accounting Office released a report noting that the schools in most need of repair are in cities with a minority enrollment of more than 50% and with more than 70% of the students classified as poor. Yet in a report released earlier this year, the GAO noted that per-student spending on repairs and construction remained 30% lower in high-poverty districts compared to low-poverty areas. More than 60 years on from the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that ruled separate was not equal, Black and brown students are still not given a fair chance.
Part of the problem is how schools are funded, which typically includes large contributions from local property taxes. As a result, richer districts can more adequately fund repairs and new buildings. Inadequate facilities in city schools – often seen as a legacy of white flight post school desegregation – are evidence that low-income students of color have been left behind. Many school districts are facing pressure to reopen despite the inadequate state of school facilities to protect the health of students and teachers. Indeed, under a recent Senate proposal for school reopening, two-thirds of the $70 billion funding offer will go only to schools that reopen.
Lost learning
The pandemic has underscored the importance of hygienic practices. In schools, this requires reliable plumbing and clean water in fountains, bathrooms and cafeterias. Meanwhile, effective air circulation and dependable HVAC systems can help reduce airborne contaminants.
This does not portend well for the ability of school facilities designed and built from a time long past to cope with the risk of COVID-19.
Reopening facilities before concerns over the safety of buildings are allayed could also lead to excessive absenteeism for both students and teachers. As it is, poor school building conditions have been linked to students missing school.
[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]
The dilemma that returning to school poses for lower-income parents and their children is yet another example of the inequitable opportunities for students of color. These are children for whom staying at home is likely to have a larger impact on their chances of educational success. A recent McKinsey report estimates that even with advances in online learning, the likely overall loss of learning resulting from the pandemic for a middle school student will be around 7 months. But, for Black, Hispanic and low-income students the loss is greater – ranging from 9 months for Black students to 10 months for Hispanic students and more than a year for low-income students. Research from the past two decades has already shown that education achievement is associated with building age, maintenance and repairs – factors that could now affect how how and when students go back to school.
Carrot and stick
Yet, in spite of all that we know about the quality of school facilities and their impact upon the health and learning of students, schools are threatened with the withholding of federal dollars if they don’t reopen. This carrot-and-stick approach does not appear to be rooted in the best interests of the students, teachers or their families. Instead, school reopening is seemingly viewed as key to an economic recovery that might determine the political future of this country.
The Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 sent Black children into hostile environments as the nation struggled with its moral compass. It appears that Black and low-income students of color might soon be sent into school buildings, some of which date from before that decision. This time, whether it is happening with their best interests in mind is at best debatable.
Local, state and federal officials wrangle over how to make schools safe, with concern over how to sufficiently disinfect and ventilate schools. But for low-income students, their teachers and families, returning to school is a more risky proposition due to the age and condition of the buildings to which they would return.
In a 2018 report to Congress, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that “low income students and students of color are often relegated to low-quality school facilities” that lack “physical maintenance.” This can “negatively impact a student’s health,” the commission concluded.
I have seen this firsthand. As a former school superintendent and now as a university professor working with K-12 schools, I see the inequities experienced by some of the U.S.‘s most vulnerable students as a stark reminder of the opportunity gap holding many back. By requiring them to attend schools in desperate need of maintenance, I fear that the schools and classrooms attended by low-income students of color could become epicenters of a second wave of pandemic.
Funding gap
Even before the pandemic, some schools were a health risk. When data was last collected, in the 2012-13 school year, the average school was found to be 44 years old. High-poverty schools – those with more than 75% of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches – were typically older, closer to 50 years old. This is important as aging school buildings are more likely to have problems with air quality, asbestos and a variety of of other environmental toxicants. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that 19% of schools have “unsatisfactory” ventilation.
Bringing U.S. school buildings up to acceptable standards would cost US$145 billion annually, according to the National Council on School Facilities. This compares to $99 billion average yearly spending on K-12 facilities – leaving an annual gap of $46 billion.
Students attending aging, inadequate schools are more likely to be low-income minority students. This isn’t a new problem. Back in 1996, the General Accounting Office released a report noting that the schools in most need of repair are in cities with a minority enrollment of more than 50% and with more than 70% of the students classified as poor. Yet in a report released earlier this year, the GAO noted that per-student spending on repairs and construction remained 30% lower in high-poverty districts compared to low-poverty areas. More than 60 years on from the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that ruled separate was not equal, Black and brown students are still not given a fair chance.
Part of the problem is how schools are funded, which typically includes large contributions from local property taxes. As a result, richer districts can more adequately fund repairs and new buildings. Inadequate facilities in city schools – often seen as a legacy of white flight post school desegregation – are evidence that low-income students of color have been left behind. Many school districts are facing pressure to reopen despite the inadequate state of school facilities to protect the health of students and teachers. Indeed, under a recent Senate proposal for school reopening, two-thirds of the $70 billion funding offer will go only to schools that reopen.
Lost learning
The pandemic has underscored the importance of hygienic practices. In schools, this requires reliable plumbing and clean water in fountains, bathrooms and cafeterias. Meanwhile, effective air circulation and dependable HVAC systems can help reduce airborne contaminants.
This does not portend well for the ability of school facilities designed and built from a time long past to cope with the risk of COVID-19.
Reopening facilities before concerns over the safety of buildings are allayed could also lead to excessive absenteeism for both students and teachers. As it is, poor school building conditions have been linked to students missing school.
[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]
The dilemma that returning to school poses for lower-income parents and their children is yet another example of the inequitable opportunities for students of color. These are children for whom staying at home is likely to have a larger impact on their chances of educational success. A recent McKinsey report estimates that even with advances in online learning, the likely overall loss of learning resulting from the pandemic for a middle school student will be around 7 months. But, for Black, Hispanic and low-income students the loss is greater – ranging from 9 months for Black students to 10 months for Hispanic students and more than a year for low-income students. Research from the past two decades has already shown that education achievement is associated with building age, maintenance and repairs – factors that could now affect how how and when students go back to school.
Carrot and stick
Yet, in spite of all that we know about the quality of school facilities and their impact upon the health and learning of students, schools are threatened with the withholding of federal dollars if they don’t reopen. This carrot-and-stick approach does not appear to be rooted in the best interests of the students, teachers or their families. Instead, school reopening is seemingly viewed as key to an economic recovery that might determine the political future of this country.
The Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 sent Black children into hostile environments as the nation struggled with its moral compass. It appears that Black and low-income students of color might soon be sent into school buildings, some of which date from before that decision. This time, whether it is happening with their best interests in mind is at best debatable.
The astonishingly stupid bleach-drinking epidemic shows just how broken America truly is
June 12, 2020
By History News Network- Commentary - raw story
Something is broken. Our President recently suggested that injecting “disinfectants” could protect Americans from the Coronavirus. Trump’s remarks may have been influenced by a letter he received from Mark Grenon, who sells “Miracle Mineral Solutions” containing industrial bleach as curatives for ailments ranging from cancer to autism to, coincidentally, the coronavirus. During his vague remarks, Trump never directly advocated “drinking bleach.” However, public health officials, having heard him refer to bleach in a separate tangent, felt compelled to urge the public not to ingest bleach or other household disinfectants. Nevertheless, many (displaying the same critical thinking as the President) have followed the suggestion, as if it were not obviously preposterous and harmful. How has it come to this?
For some decades, we’ve seen the slow and steady decline of the humanities and the recognized value of a liberal arts education more generally. In the past decade, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the American Historical Association have reported time and again that departments are being merged and closed, as they see the number of majors shrink by 30 to 50 percent. Perhaps it just anecdotally related, but the decline started when tuitions started to rise, when neo-liberalism took over university administrations, and corporate mindsets started to rule institutions of higher education. On the one hand, corporate-minded administrations measure faculty for their productivity (quantity over quality), and, on the other hand, they charge an arm and a leg for the right to study. This is the case even at public institutions, whose very existence ostensibly serves a social mission. (One of us is lucky to be part of a public university that constantly invests in and expands its College of Liberal Arts and the Department of History).
To justify skyrocketing tuitions this corporate system of rule created an equation between acquisition of a university degree and ability to generate high income afterwards. The system’s failures have grown increasingly apparent, but it has succeeded in defining the ground upon which the humanities have had to justify their existence. Various departments have striven to prove that their graduates can secure positions that allow them to earn salaries high enough to pay back the loans they took out to cover tuition.
This has resulted in the proliferation of new tracks defined by the labor needs of Wall Street banks, corporations, think tanks, and numerous industrial sectors from health care to tourism. In other words, humanities departments had to re-invent themselves according to a commodified logic of value that does not recognize the true value of the humanities, how they relate to other fields of knowledge, and how, together, the arts and sciences are necessary to the holistic well-being of society.
This logic of profit margins simply cannot explain the centrality and value of the study of the humanities to the creation of a thinking person. Aside from being crucial to the cultivation of skills such as problem-solving, innovation, forethought, and insight, at a very basic level the humanities cultivate critical reading and thinking skills that create a more responsible consumer of news, a person that—simply put—would not drink bleach to fight a virus. Studying the many branches of the liberal arts – the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts, in a balanced combination—helps students think about current events as part of longer and larger processes. It outfits them with intellectual tools of analysis, critique, and creative thought, and teaches them to think in more sophisticated and broad-ranging ways about power relations, outcomes of particular courses of actions, and their implications.
This moment provides a chance to pause our current direction, to rethink what is of value to us, and to reinvest in our future. Corey Robin’s recent piece in the New Yorker makes the case for investing in public education especially during a financial crisis (not putting it on the chopping block first). Investment in public infrastructure is well known for being a smart way to handle recessions. Proposals by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren regarding tuition-free public universities and colleges, and the willingness of Vice President Joe Biden to consider major policy changes regarding funding of public institutions of higher learning, followed by a bill recently introduced by Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer that offers free tuition to all first-responders, show how it is past time that we, as a society, address this crisis.
We argue that this investment can reinvigorate universities while providing the best means by which to prevent the broad public ignorance that is manifested these days by the willingness of people, apparently from the President down, to treat recommendations to drink bleach as sound advice. Regardless of specialization, even in business or engineering, university training should include, as a core component, a liberal arts program. Within the liberal arts, we must preserve the holistic relation of music to math, or between economics and philosophy, for instance. A relinking of the humanities, social, and natural sciences can help build a healthier and smarter society more capable of navigating distressingly unreliable public information. It will also allow beleaguered humanities departments to recreate themselves on a different basis. Ideally, departments and disciplines will step up to consider their relation to one another, their synergistic strengths and complimentary work. This must be a broad-based discussion, one that is between disciplines and professional fields.
This is not an advocacy for indoctrination, but for better socially-oriented graduates. Discussion on policies and ideologies will be more productive for all when the sides are informed and able to see and think through matters. The return may or may not in making big bucks in post-graduation, whose guarantee was always more a fantasy than a reality, but the purpose is something more important, like repairing the backbone of American society so that someday, more of us may be able to stand up, hopefully, together.
Lior Sternfeld is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University.
Mana Kia is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.
For some decades, we’ve seen the slow and steady decline of the humanities and the recognized value of a liberal arts education more generally. In the past decade, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the American Historical Association have reported time and again that departments are being merged and closed, as they see the number of majors shrink by 30 to 50 percent. Perhaps it just anecdotally related, but the decline started when tuitions started to rise, when neo-liberalism took over university administrations, and corporate mindsets started to rule institutions of higher education. On the one hand, corporate-minded administrations measure faculty for their productivity (quantity over quality), and, on the other hand, they charge an arm and a leg for the right to study. This is the case even at public institutions, whose very existence ostensibly serves a social mission. (One of us is lucky to be part of a public university that constantly invests in and expands its College of Liberal Arts and the Department of History).
To justify skyrocketing tuitions this corporate system of rule created an equation between acquisition of a university degree and ability to generate high income afterwards. The system’s failures have grown increasingly apparent, but it has succeeded in defining the ground upon which the humanities have had to justify their existence. Various departments have striven to prove that their graduates can secure positions that allow them to earn salaries high enough to pay back the loans they took out to cover tuition.
This has resulted in the proliferation of new tracks defined by the labor needs of Wall Street banks, corporations, think tanks, and numerous industrial sectors from health care to tourism. In other words, humanities departments had to re-invent themselves according to a commodified logic of value that does not recognize the true value of the humanities, how they relate to other fields of knowledge, and how, together, the arts and sciences are necessary to the holistic well-being of society.
This logic of profit margins simply cannot explain the centrality and value of the study of the humanities to the creation of a thinking person. Aside from being crucial to the cultivation of skills such as problem-solving, innovation, forethought, and insight, at a very basic level the humanities cultivate critical reading and thinking skills that create a more responsible consumer of news, a person that—simply put—would not drink bleach to fight a virus. Studying the many branches of the liberal arts – the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts, in a balanced combination—helps students think about current events as part of longer and larger processes. It outfits them with intellectual tools of analysis, critique, and creative thought, and teaches them to think in more sophisticated and broad-ranging ways about power relations, outcomes of particular courses of actions, and their implications.
This moment provides a chance to pause our current direction, to rethink what is of value to us, and to reinvest in our future. Corey Robin’s recent piece in the New Yorker makes the case for investing in public education especially during a financial crisis (not putting it on the chopping block first). Investment in public infrastructure is well known for being a smart way to handle recessions. Proposals by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren regarding tuition-free public universities and colleges, and the willingness of Vice President Joe Biden to consider major policy changes regarding funding of public institutions of higher learning, followed by a bill recently introduced by Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer that offers free tuition to all first-responders, show how it is past time that we, as a society, address this crisis.
We argue that this investment can reinvigorate universities while providing the best means by which to prevent the broad public ignorance that is manifested these days by the willingness of people, apparently from the President down, to treat recommendations to drink bleach as sound advice. Regardless of specialization, even in business or engineering, university training should include, as a core component, a liberal arts program. Within the liberal arts, we must preserve the holistic relation of music to math, or between economics and philosophy, for instance. A relinking of the humanities, social, and natural sciences can help build a healthier and smarter society more capable of navigating distressingly unreliable public information. It will also allow beleaguered humanities departments to recreate themselves on a different basis. Ideally, departments and disciplines will step up to consider their relation to one another, their synergistic strengths and complimentary work. This must be a broad-based discussion, one that is between disciplines and professional fields.
This is not an advocacy for indoctrination, but for better socially-oriented graduates. Discussion on policies and ideologies will be more productive for all when the sides are informed and able to see and think through matters. The return may or may not in making big bucks in post-graduation, whose guarantee was always more a fantasy than a reality, but the purpose is something more important, like repairing the backbone of American society so that someday, more of us may be able to stand up, hopefully, together.
Lior Sternfeld is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University.
Mana Kia is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.
Here’s how the new Title IX regulations will affect sexual assault cases on campus
the conversation
May 7, 2020 8.24am EDT
1. Has the definition of sexual harassment become more narrow?
Yes. Under the prior guidance, a single incident, if severe enough, might meet the definition of sexual harassment. The new rules state that sexual harassment must be unwelcome conduct that is so “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive” that it effectively denies a person access to the school’s education programs or activities. An isolated incident of unwelcome remarks of a sexual nature, for example, would not meet the revised definition. The new rules also clarify the sexual harassment definition to specifically include sexual assault, dating violence and stalking, which need not satisfy the severe and pervasive standard.
2. How do the new regulations affect victims?
Victim advocates are concerned that the new rules will discourage victims from coming forward. As before, educational institutions, public and private, that receive federal funds must have a Title IX policy that addresses sexual misconduct. Under the new rules, colleges and universities must now conduct live hearings with cross-examination in connection with sexual misconduct complaints. Critics believe this will intimidate and cause further emotional harm to sexual assault survivors.
In addition, schools may use a new evidentiary standard that will make it harder for complainants to prove that a violation of sexual misconduct policy took place.
Before, schools could use a standard of “preponderance of the evidence” – which means more likely than not – to prove a Title IX policy violation. Now, schools may use a “clear and convincing” evidence standard. Clear and convincing proof means that the evidence presented must be highly and substantially more probable to be true than not. This higher standard is used in certain civil cases that involve high risk of loss or fundamental concerns such as free speech under the First Amendment. Under the new rules, schools will be permitted to choose between these two evidentiary standards for use at all stages of their investigation and proceedings. Victim advocates are concerned that schools will utilize the higher standard of proof to reduce the number of lawsuits from accused perpetrators who are disciplined under the policy.
3. What are the most significant changes for the accused?
The rule changes arguably provide more due process protections for alleged perpetrators that many observers and some courts found were lacking in the past. For instance, there have been successful lawsuits against universities that expelled or otherwise disciplined students for policy violations without conducting a full and fair hearing. Accused students must now be given written assurance that they are presumed innocent, which was not previously required. They also may use lawyers or legal advisers to cross-examine their accuser. This was not included in the prior guidance. Further, the accused will receive greater protections under the clear and convincing evidentiary standard because it will be more difficult to prove that the alleged conduct was a policy violation.
4. What do schools have to do now that they didn’t before?
Schools must now carefully review and revise their policies to ensure that they are compliant with the new regulations. The final rules take effect Aug. 14, 2020, which is particularly challenging given the major demands on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. If a college or university has not utilized live hearings, they must now coordinate and train staff and personnel to develop and implement the new investigation and hearing requirements, including virtual hearings if necessary.
Yes. Under the prior guidance, a single incident, if severe enough, might meet the definition of sexual harassment. The new rules state that sexual harassment must be unwelcome conduct that is so “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive” that it effectively denies a person access to the school’s education programs or activities. An isolated incident of unwelcome remarks of a sexual nature, for example, would not meet the revised definition. The new rules also clarify the sexual harassment definition to specifically include sexual assault, dating violence and stalking, which need not satisfy the severe and pervasive standard.
2. How do the new regulations affect victims?
Victim advocates are concerned that the new rules will discourage victims from coming forward. As before, educational institutions, public and private, that receive federal funds must have a Title IX policy that addresses sexual misconduct. Under the new rules, colleges and universities must now conduct live hearings with cross-examination in connection with sexual misconduct complaints. Critics believe this will intimidate and cause further emotional harm to sexual assault survivors.
In addition, schools may use a new evidentiary standard that will make it harder for complainants to prove that a violation of sexual misconduct policy took place.
Before, schools could use a standard of “preponderance of the evidence” – which means more likely than not – to prove a Title IX policy violation. Now, schools may use a “clear and convincing” evidence standard. Clear and convincing proof means that the evidence presented must be highly and substantially more probable to be true than not. This higher standard is used in certain civil cases that involve high risk of loss or fundamental concerns such as free speech under the First Amendment. Under the new rules, schools will be permitted to choose between these two evidentiary standards for use at all stages of their investigation and proceedings. Victim advocates are concerned that schools will utilize the higher standard of proof to reduce the number of lawsuits from accused perpetrators who are disciplined under the policy.
3. What are the most significant changes for the accused?
The rule changes arguably provide more due process protections for alleged perpetrators that many observers and some courts found were lacking in the past. For instance, there have been successful lawsuits against universities that expelled or otherwise disciplined students for policy violations without conducting a full and fair hearing. Accused students must now be given written assurance that they are presumed innocent, which was not previously required. They also may use lawyers or legal advisers to cross-examine their accuser. This was not included in the prior guidance. Further, the accused will receive greater protections under the clear and convincing evidentiary standard because it will be more difficult to prove that the alleged conduct was a policy violation.
4. What do schools have to do now that they didn’t before?
Schools must now carefully review and revise their policies to ensure that they are compliant with the new regulations. The final rules take effect Aug. 14, 2020, which is particularly challenging given the major demands on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. If a college or university has not utilized live hearings, they must now coordinate and train staff and personnel to develop and implement the new investigation and hearing requirements, including virtual hearings if necessary.
The Supreme Court decision that kept suburban schools segregated
July 24, 2019
By The Conversation - Raw Story
America recently marked the 65-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education – a landmark case intended to abolish the “separate-but-equal” doctrine of racial segregation in schools.
But the racial makeup of today’s schools actually owes itself to a series of other court decisions – including one issued 45 years ago on July 25, 1974. The Milliken v. Bradley decision sanctioned a form of segregation that has allowed suburbs to escape being included in court-ordered desegregation and busing plans with nearby cities.
The Milliken decision recognized “de facto” segregation – segregation that occurs as a result of circumstances, not law. This allowed schools in the North to maintain racially separate schools at the same time southern schools were being ordered by the courts to desegregate. By giving suburbs a pass from large mandated desegregation attempts, it built a figurative wall around white flight enclaves, essentially shielding them from the “crisis” of urban education.
Upholding segregation
Outside a few voluntary and limited programs such as METCO in Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts, or Chapter 220 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that enabled a small number of children from cities to attend schools in the suburbs or more affluent areas, northern school districts remained largely segregated.
The decision ruled that social segregation was permissible and therefore exempt from court-ordered, “forced” desegregation plans. That is, the court said, if segregation occurred because of certain “unknowable factors” such as economic changes and racial fears – not a law – then it’s legal.
Originating in Detroit, a major destination of the Great Migration, the mass movement of southern African Americans to northern cities, the decision dictated how desegregation would proceed outside the South, if at all.
Federal courts had issued rulings that helped eradicate legal segregation – primarily in the South – through the 1968 Green v. School Board of New Kent County and 1969 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decisions, even employing military force.
But the nation largely understood segregation to be an issue confined to the South. Milliken brought the freedom struggle’s call for integration to the North.
A new legal front
Twenty years after the Brown decision, the NAACP, Urban League and civil rights activists documented how segregation led to underfunded and inferior schooling across the North in cities like Chicago, New York and Detroit.
Black activists in Detroit like Rev. Albert Cleage, the NAACP and black parents in segregated housing and schools began to demand education reform as the freedom struggle intensified during the 1940s.
They demanded things that ranged from community control to integration in all schools as opposed to token desegregation. By 1970, the NAACP demanded a desegregated school system as promised by Brown and filed a lawsuit against the governor, William Milliken.
As the Milliken case worked its way through the courts from 1970 to 1974, the nature of public education was changing. Millions of whites abandoned the cities for suburban enclaves. Like the rest of the North, Detroit experienced dramatic population shifts that decimated public schools. From the 1950s through 1970s, Detroit lost over 30% of its white population to the suburbs, where the population climbed to over 3 million. By the 1970s students of color comprised nearly 75% of a once majority-white system. More affluent whites and the few families of color who fled left behind a depleted tax base that starved public schools, as described in Jeffrey Mirel’s “The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System.”
Desegregation dreams deferred
To address the issue of persistent segregation, the Supreme Court consented in the 1971 Swann v. Mecklenburg decision to busing students outside their neighborhood schools in North Carolina as a solution to segregation.
Following the spirit of Swann, a United States district judge for the Eastern District of Michigan named Stephen J. Roth, issued one of the most extensive desegregation orders of the era in 1972. Roth’s plan called for the two-way integration of 780,000 students across not only Detroit, but school districts in a tri-county area.
The plan was never put into action because of the 1974 Supreme Court Milliken decision.
Districts could still voluntarily bus – but busing was so unpopular and politically untenable in 1974 that few attempted it in any serious manner. A narrow 5-4 majority of justices determined that “racial imbalance” in Detroit – and by inference in other U.S. cities – was caused by “de facto” segregation.
Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurring opinion that segregation in Detroit was “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.” In other words, the justices in the majority – most of them appointed by President Richard Nixon – found that the suburbs should not be subject to busing.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the lead counsel for the NAACP when the Brown case was brought to the court and who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967, wrote: “After 20 years of small, often difficult steps (toward equal justice under law) the Court today takes a giant step backwards.” He said the Court revived “the same separate and inherently unequal education … afforded in the past.”
Milliken put forth the convenient narrative that segregation in the North was natural and therefore permissible. It also freed northern school districts from being forced to participate in large-scale solutions to segregation and unequal education outside their boundaries.
I believe continuing to ignore Milliken covers up the ongoing segregation of America’s schools today and the nation’s collective, ongoing failure to improve public education in the spirit of Brown.
But the racial makeup of today’s schools actually owes itself to a series of other court decisions – including one issued 45 years ago on July 25, 1974. The Milliken v. Bradley decision sanctioned a form of segregation that has allowed suburbs to escape being included in court-ordered desegregation and busing plans with nearby cities.
The Milliken decision recognized “de facto” segregation – segregation that occurs as a result of circumstances, not law. This allowed schools in the North to maintain racially separate schools at the same time southern schools were being ordered by the courts to desegregate. By giving suburbs a pass from large mandated desegregation attempts, it built a figurative wall around white flight enclaves, essentially shielding them from the “crisis” of urban education.
Upholding segregation
Outside a few voluntary and limited programs such as METCO in Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts, or Chapter 220 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that enabled a small number of children from cities to attend schools in the suburbs or more affluent areas, northern school districts remained largely segregated.
The decision ruled that social segregation was permissible and therefore exempt from court-ordered, “forced” desegregation plans. That is, the court said, if segregation occurred because of certain “unknowable factors” such as economic changes and racial fears – not a law – then it’s legal.
Originating in Detroit, a major destination of the Great Migration, the mass movement of southern African Americans to northern cities, the decision dictated how desegregation would proceed outside the South, if at all.
Federal courts had issued rulings that helped eradicate legal segregation – primarily in the South – through the 1968 Green v. School Board of New Kent County and 1969 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decisions, even employing military force.
But the nation largely understood segregation to be an issue confined to the South. Milliken brought the freedom struggle’s call for integration to the North.
A new legal front
Twenty years after the Brown decision, the NAACP, Urban League and civil rights activists documented how segregation led to underfunded and inferior schooling across the North in cities like Chicago, New York and Detroit.
Black activists in Detroit like Rev. Albert Cleage, the NAACP and black parents in segregated housing and schools began to demand education reform as the freedom struggle intensified during the 1940s.
They demanded things that ranged from community control to integration in all schools as opposed to token desegregation. By 1970, the NAACP demanded a desegregated school system as promised by Brown and filed a lawsuit against the governor, William Milliken.
As the Milliken case worked its way through the courts from 1970 to 1974, the nature of public education was changing. Millions of whites abandoned the cities for suburban enclaves. Like the rest of the North, Detroit experienced dramatic population shifts that decimated public schools. From the 1950s through 1970s, Detroit lost over 30% of its white population to the suburbs, where the population climbed to over 3 million. By the 1970s students of color comprised nearly 75% of a once majority-white system. More affluent whites and the few families of color who fled left behind a depleted tax base that starved public schools, as described in Jeffrey Mirel’s “The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System.”
Desegregation dreams deferred
To address the issue of persistent segregation, the Supreme Court consented in the 1971 Swann v. Mecklenburg decision to busing students outside their neighborhood schools in North Carolina as a solution to segregation.
Following the spirit of Swann, a United States district judge for the Eastern District of Michigan named Stephen J. Roth, issued one of the most extensive desegregation orders of the era in 1972. Roth’s plan called for the two-way integration of 780,000 students across not only Detroit, but school districts in a tri-county area.
The plan was never put into action because of the 1974 Supreme Court Milliken decision.
Districts could still voluntarily bus – but busing was so unpopular and politically untenable in 1974 that few attempted it in any serious manner. A narrow 5-4 majority of justices determined that “racial imbalance” in Detroit – and by inference in other U.S. cities – was caused by “de facto” segregation.
Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurring opinion that segregation in Detroit was “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.” In other words, the justices in the majority – most of them appointed by President Richard Nixon – found that the suburbs should not be subject to busing.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the lead counsel for the NAACP when the Brown case was brought to the court and who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967, wrote: “After 20 years of small, often difficult steps (toward equal justice under law) the Court today takes a giant step backwards.” He said the Court revived “the same separate and inherently unequal education … afforded in the past.”
Milliken put forth the convenient narrative that segregation in the North was natural and therefore permissible. It also freed northern school districts from being forced to participate in large-scale solutions to segregation and unequal education outside their boundaries.
I believe continuing to ignore Milliken covers up the ongoing segregation of America’s schools today and the nation’s collective, ongoing failure to improve public education in the spirit of Brown.
The 15 US states with the lowest college graduation rates
Andy Kiersz - Business Insider
6/18/2019
The Department of Education provides data on the share of undergraduate students who complete their degree within 150% of the expected time - that is, graduating within six years for a standard four-year bachelor's degree. For each state, we took an average of those graduation rates among all the colleges and universities in that state that mainly award bachelor's degrees, as opposed to certificate programs or associates degrees.
Those graduation rates were among first-time, full-time students who entered college in the 2011-2012 academic year, six years before the 2017-2018 year, the most recent year for which data was available. State rates were calculated by taking the average rate among all schools in-state, weighted by the size of each school's entering class in 2011.
Those graduation rates were among first-time, full-time students who entered college in the 2011-2012 academic year, six years before the 2017-2018 year, the most recent year for which data was available. State rates were calculated by taking the average rate among all schools in-state, weighted by the size of each school's entering class in 2011.
education funnies
5 Ways Racism Is Still Embedded in American School Curricula
It's not just the school-to-prison pipeline that's reinforcing racism in public schools.
By Liz Posner / AlterNet September 28, 2017, 9:31 AM GMT
Some much-needed attention has been focused in recent years on the racist practices in our schools, including the ways in which American schools suspend and expel black and Latino students at higher numbers than white students. Certainly the practice of school discipline, by ignoring culturally responsive methods of teaching and redirecting student behavior, embodies much of the racism that is still normalized, practiced and even encouraged in some school districts. But in too many cases, the curriculum itself is embedded with racist, outdated beliefs.
1. 'Critical thinking' exercises ask fifth-graders to practice radical empathy with the Ku Klux Klan.
The New York Times recently reported that a South Carolina teacher recently asked a class of 10-year-olds the following question on a homework assignment: “You are a member of the K.K.K. Why do you think your treatment of African Americans is justified?”
At least one student went home crying, and the teacher has since been placed on administrative leave. This comes a month after our president endorsed empathy for white supremacists in Charlottesville by claiming that “both sides” had validity.
2. The brutality of American slavery is diminished.
As recently as 2015, a textbook published by McGraw-Hill was still softening the violence of racial history by referring to black slaves as “workers." McGraw-Hill later apologized and corrected the gaffe. A quarter of Texas students used the book before it was pulled from classrooms.
3. Colonial-era maps still used in Boston classrooms distort the importance of Europe.
The most widely used standard map in social studies and history classes in Boston is several centuries old, and actually portrays Northern Europe as much larger than it really is, while diminishing the scale of Africa. Advocates for newer maps say the old maps push a Eurocentric point of view that is steeped in colonialism.
4. Arizona forbids non-white students from learning their own history.
The Arizona state government shut down an ethnic studies course on Mexican-American history and culture in Tucson in 2011. This August, a federal judge condemned the move and said the racially motivated ban violated students’ constitutional rights.
5. Standardized tests put people of color into predictable boxes.
The offensive AP Government multiple-choice question created by a Pearson study guide underlies how multiple choice tests actually narrow students’ thinking methodology into “right” or “wrong” options. When applied to questions of race and politics, the result can only be damaging. Surely, a better lesson to teach children is that these questions are always complex and multilayered.
Perhaps our new education department will take on the challenge of producing and regulating a standard curriculum that does not disempower people of color or misprepresent or lie about American history. Oh, wait—Betsy Devos’ department has already shown it is more focused on protecting male rapists than addressing real problems in American education. So, all signs point to no.
1. 'Critical thinking' exercises ask fifth-graders to practice radical empathy with the Ku Klux Klan.
The New York Times recently reported that a South Carolina teacher recently asked a class of 10-year-olds the following question on a homework assignment: “You are a member of the K.K.K. Why do you think your treatment of African Americans is justified?”
At least one student went home crying, and the teacher has since been placed on administrative leave. This comes a month after our president endorsed empathy for white supremacists in Charlottesville by claiming that “both sides” had validity.
2. The brutality of American slavery is diminished.
As recently as 2015, a textbook published by McGraw-Hill was still softening the violence of racial history by referring to black slaves as “workers." McGraw-Hill later apologized and corrected the gaffe. A quarter of Texas students used the book before it was pulled from classrooms.
3. Colonial-era maps still used in Boston classrooms distort the importance of Europe.
The most widely used standard map in social studies and history classes in Boston is several centuries old, and actually portrays Northern Europe as much larger than it really is, while diminishing the scale of Africa. Advocates for newer maps say the old maps push a Eurocentric point of view that is steeped in colonialism.
4. Arizona forbids non-white students from learning their own history.
The Arizona state government shut down an ethnic studies course on Mexican-American history and culture in Tucson in 2011. This August, a federal judge condemned the move and said the racially motivated ban violated students’ constitutional rights.
5. Standardized tests put people of color into predictable boxes.
The offensive AP Government multiple-choice question created by a Pearson study guide underlies how multiple choice tests actually narrow students’ thinking methodology into “right” or “wrong” options. When applied to questions of race and politics, the result can only be damaging. Surely, a better lesson to teach children is that these questions are always complex and multilayered.
Perhaps our new education department will take on the challenge of producing and regulating a standard curriculum that does not disempower people of color or misprepresent or lie about American history. Oh, wait—Betsy Devos’ department has already shown it is more focused on protecting male rapists than addressing real problems in American education. So, all signs point to no.
The History of School Lunches
American school-lunch policy has always been at the mercy of broader ideological trends, from patriotic militarism to corporate neoliberalism.
Malcolm Harris
From Pacific Standard: As a question of national policy, school lunch is at once simple and extraordinarily complicated. Is providing school lunch primarily a question of charity, education, health, or even national security? Such questions matter: Over the last century or so, the precise reasoning behind why America fed its students had a strong influence on how we did it. And the rationale has changed more times than you'd think.
The First Free Lunches
By the end of the 19th century, most American states had instituted compulsory education. Boarding schools have always had their own food infrastructure; small day-schools drew students from the immediate community, and during lunch break they could go home and eat there. What students ate was not the concern of the school—or of the state. But some early advocates were concerned, because not all children were getting enough to eat. In the 1890s, the settlement-house movement of women-led social services was gearing up, and women's pre-suffrage political participation was taking form. In 1894, in Boston and Philadelphia, two reform organizations started providing nominally priced lunches to schoolchildren, and the school lunch was born.
Feeding Kids to Fight Communists
The Great Depression left millions unemployed and farmers unable to sell all their food, resulting in a lot of hungry folks. School lunches killed three birds with one stone: As part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, the government bought up surplus agricultural products and hired women to cook and serve them to school kids. Farmers could depend on the state as a buyer of last resort, and hungry kids would get one sure meal a day. But there was another motivation: Since World War I, the Department of Defense had been concerned about the effect of malnutrition on the populace's readiness for war. And far from seeing school lunches as a big-government intrusion, conservatives like Georgia Congressman Richard Russell thought students who had a good lunch would be "much more able to resist communism or socialism."
An Ethical Imperative
The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt worked to recruit the best and brightest social scientists to steer the national ship, and, when it came to school lunches, Roosevelt's administration tapped star anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead believed in an ethical imperative to feed hungry children—recalling the school lunches of her grandmother's day, when privileged kids had apples and the poor had the cores—and Mead brought that conviction to the executive branch. She reoriented the WPA program toward well-rounded meals, rather than simply depending on farm surplus. So that the food would appeal to everyone, Mead suggested muted colors, bland tastes, and a single seasoning: salt.
Expansion of School Lunches Ends
After World War II—and more concern about nutrition-related war-readiness—Congress passed the National School Lunch Act, which made the program permanent for the first time. Twenty years later, as a sally in the War on Poverty, Congress passed the Child Nutrition Act, which introduced breakfast programs and put the whole school-food system under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. American school lunches had been continually expanded for nearly a century when, in 1981, the Reagan administration cut school-food spending by $1.5 billion, raised eligibility standards, reduced portions, and, most famously, changed nutritional standards so that items like ketchup and pickle relish would qualify as vegetables. All of a sudden—and with little cause—money became the central school-lunch concern.
Enter the Corporate Suppliers
The cuts under President Ronald Reagan pushed districts to look for ways to economize, and corporate contractors saw a new market. Large multinational food service companies took over cafeterias to provide bland, colorless Mead meals—which happened to be a specialty of giant catering firms. Similarly, national fast food and soda brands offered districts lucrative deals for access to captive kids, returning the nation to what public-health researchers called a two-tiered school-food system, with the generic, free/cheap/subsidized pizza and pricey, name-brand premium pizza all in the same lunchroom. "For American agriculture," Susan Levine writes in her comprehensive history School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program, "the significance of the National School Lunch Program by the 1990s had shifted from surplus commodity outlets to major markets for the food and food-service industries."
Solving Lunch Debt
The midday scholastic meal hit the news most recently when writer Ashley C. Ford brought national attention to the issue of lunch debt. Many districts have overdue accounts; a 2016 survey of school nutrition directors found that schools have a median student-meal debt of $2,000. Students who can't pay are at the mercy of school authorities, who are at the mercy of budget constraints. In a reversion to the very beginning of the American school lunch, charitable individuals and groups raised many tens of thousands of dollars to pay off lunch debts around the country—all in two months. In just over a century, we have seen school lunch come full circle: from the women of the settlement houses to the settlement birdhouse of Twitter fundraising. If we regress any further—and I fear we might—there won't be any lunch at all
The First Free Lunches
By the end of the 19th century, most American states had instituted compulsory education. Boarding schools have always had their own food infrastructure; small day-schools drew students from the immediate community, and during lunch break they could go home and eat there. What students ate was not the concern of the school—or of the state. But some early advocates were concerned, because not all children were getting enough to eat. In the 1890s, the settlement-house movement of women-led social services was gearing up, and women's pre-suffrage political participation was taking form. In 1894, in Boston and Philadelphia, two reform organizations started providing nominally priced lunches to schoolchildren, and the school lunch was born.
Feeding Kids to Fight Communists
The Great Depression left millions unemployed and farmers unable to sell all their food, resulting in a lot of hungry folks. School lunches killed three birds with one stone: As part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, the government bought up surplus agricultural products and hired women to cook and serve them to school kids. Farmers could depend on the state as a buyer of last resort, and hungry kids would get one sure meal a day. But there was another motivation: Since World War I, the Department of Defense had been concerned about the effect of malnutrition on the populace's readiness for war. And far from seeing school lunches as a big-government intrusion, conservatives like Georgia Congressman Richard Russell thought students who had a good lunch would be "much more able to resist communism or socialism."
An Ethical Imperative
The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt worked to recruit the best and brightest social scientists to steer the national ship, and, when it came to school lunches, Roosevelt's administration tapped star anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead believed in an ethical imperative to feed hungry children—recalling the school lunches of her grandmother's day, when privileged kids had apples and the poor had the cores—and Mead brought that conviction to the executive branch. She reoriented the WPA program toward well-rounded meals, rather than simply depending on farm surplus. So that the food would appeal to everyone, Mead suggested muted colors, bland tastes, and a single seasoning: salt.
Expansion of School Lunches Ends
After World War II—and more concern about nutrition-related war-readiness—Congress passed the National School Lunch Act, which made the program permanent for the first time. Twenty years later, as a sally in the War on Poverty, Congress passed the Child Nutrition Act, which introduced breakfast programs and put the whole school-food system under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. American school lunches had been continually expanded for nearly a century when, in 1981, the Reagan administration cut school-food spending by $1.5 billion, raised eligibility standards, reduced portions, and, most famously, changed nutritional standards so that items like ketchup and pickle relish would qualify as vegetables. All of a sudden—and with little cause—money became the central school-lunch concern.
Enter the Corporate Suppliers
The cuts under President Ronald Reagan pushed districts to look for ways to economize, and corporate contractors saw a new market. Large multinational food service companies took over cafeterias to provide bland, colorless Mead meals—which happened to be a specialty of giant catering firms. Similarly, national fast food and soda brands offered districts lucrative deals for access to captive kids, returning the nation to what public-health researchers called a two-tiered school-food system, with the generic, free/cheap/subsidized pizza and pricey, name-brand premium pizza all in the same lunchroom. "For American agriculture," Susan Levine writes in her comprehensive history School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program, "the significance of the National School Lunch Program by the 1990s had shifted from surplus commodity outlets to major markets for the food and food-service industries."
Solving Lunch Debt
The midday scholastic meal hit the news most recently when writer Ashley C. Ford brought national attention to the issue of lunch debt. Many districts have overdue accounts; a 2016 survey of school nutrition directors found that schools have a median student-meal debt of $2,000. Students who can't pay are at the mercy of school authorities, who are at the mercy of budget constraints. In a reversion to the very beginning of the American school lunch, charitable individuals and groups raised many tens of thousands of dollars to pay off lunch debts around the country—all in two months. In just over a century, we have seen school lunch come full circle: from the women of the settlement houses to the settlement birdhouse of Twitter fundraising. If we regress any further—and I fear we might—there won't be any lunch at all
Basic high school civics lessons we knew in 1948. THIS WAS ON PAGE 1!
Snarkoleptic - demo. underground
