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Separate, unequal.
While there have been many stories lately trumpeting an improvement in standardized test scores for New York City schoolchildren as of late, those reports have largely missed an absolutely appalling metric. Actually, it's easy to understand why the missed it because that data was not was not released by the Dept. of Education until specifically requested by City Councilmember and current Manhattan Bourough President candidate Eva Moskowitz.
According to the DoE, 9 out of 10 African American and Latino students do not graduate with a Regent's diploma, a rate that is "two thirds behind their peers".
Ahem. 9 out of 10?
Nat Hentoff has more. From the Village Voice:
On June 2, the city was ablaze with hosannas for the mayor and schools chancellor Joel Klein ("Jubilant Bloomberg, Klein Trumpet Test Scores," The New York Sun). The billionaire mayor swiftly paid for television ads to remind the voters about his recurrent pledge that his administration would be judged by his impact on a largely dysfunctional school system.
The tribute to Bloomberg and Klein did not, on that glorious day, mention Eva Moskowitz's charge that "9 out of 10 African American and Latino children are utterly unprepared for college, and therefore condemned to a significantly inferior economic status." (Also unmentioned: Only 18 percent of our high school students get Regents diplomas.)
Wow. That doesn't sound so good.
There's even more bad news. Back to Hentoff:
And after the press's Roman candles—"Student Scores Rise Sharply and Bloomberg Sees Vindication" (The New York Times), "Tests Score for Mike!" (Daily News)—there has been scarcely any attention paid to an equally grim report, "Leaving School Empty Handed" by Advocates For Children of New York (212-947-9779). This is "the first public report highlighting graduation and dropout rates and student outcomes for students receiving special education services in New York City."
Bloomberg's opponents for the mayoralty should get Eva Moskowitz's analysis of the black/Latino and white diplomas—the data of which had not been released by the Department of Education until she made a special request (if only she had run for mayor). And the candidates should also personally take notes—not just delegate the task to their staff—on "Leaving School Empty Handed."
Examining federal, state, and New York City school data from 1996 through 2004, Advocates For Children presents "shocking and abysmal graduation outcomes for New York City's most vulnerable children. Despite the fact that the great majority of students with disabilities should be able to meet graduation standards, these students overwhelmingly leave the school system without any diploma." (Only Alabama had a worse rate).
That's just not acceptable. It's unconscionable.
New York City schools: At least we're not Alabama!
Hentoff then gives some rather sage advice to the current crop of Dem mayoral candidates. It's smart politically, but it's also the right fucking thing to do for our children.
I haven't the slightest doubt that Joel Klein is taking this job—the most important of his career—very seriously, and that he is working, to some extent, on the problems that Eva Moskowitz and Jill Chaifetz of Advocates For Children raise. But if Fernando Ferrer, Virginia Fields, Anthony Weiner, and Gifford Miller are also serious about the future of these abandoned children with disabilities, and those victim to the double standards of the contrasting black/Latino and white diplomas, they have to focus in the months ahead on what Klein and Bloomberg are actually doing to save this huge number of students—and what can be done. (Klein has talked about the double standard, but what has he changed for most of these left behind?)
Recent months of furor by the mayor and his opponents on whether to desperately court the Olympics is disgusting when there has been no public focus on the disappearing future of so many black and Latino students—who not only make up a majority of youngsters with special needs but are also 72 percent of the system's total of 1,075,338 students.
I have to say that I agree wholeheartedly. The mayor and the governor seem to be much more interested in building this stadium or that stadium, in Quixotically chasing the Olympics and tooting their own horns than addressing or even acknowledging a serious and specific rot at the core of our public schools. The current Dem candidates for mayor would do well to heed Hentoff's advice and read the Advocate's report (it's available as a pdf from their site) and take this mayor to task for this egregious failure. It's a win-win for the candidates and the kids to make this an issue in this campaign. It's also just the right thing to do.
Test scores are up. Great. But, we are failing far too many of our most vulnerable students. They deserve better. Much better.
Whomever can stand up and deliver for these kids, for this city, will have my support.
This bothers me on so many levels
because I believe in educational freedom.
The government should protect our right to an education. The government should not be imposing how that education should be attained. Public Education should have never been confused with public schooling. Unfortunately Brown v Board of Education muddled the social-political discussion about equality in public education by confusing it with equality of access to public schools.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
There is overwhelming evidence that grading has nothing to do with enhancing or advancing child-development at any stage. That socialization is a code word for submission and obeissance. And we have heard time and time again about the "teaching to the test" techniques that come and go with every new evaluation method or period imposed on public school kids. Nowadays, most schools spend more than half their time teaching kids how to pass tests --a skill that has very little to do with learning and the development of critical thinking.
I say this because what I hate the most about this current system is that it is so suppressive. Not everybody was meant to go to college. I know people with college degrees that make less per hour than the supers that work here in my apartment complex. It's not a joke anymore when your plumber has a house in the Hamptons and you don't.
When I was teaching high school and later college, a lot of kids would come to me saying how they hated the idea of a college degree. They felt it was a waste of time, and I could not agree more. Only 1, maybe 2 kids in every single classroom of mine for the 7 years I taught at NYU college showed any real academic competency. Meaning, they knew what they were there for and they knew how to get it. With the students at Borough of Manhattan Community College, it was different. A lot of my students had lived a whole life and were going to school for "part two" of their lives : to get their diplomas, even maybe go on to graduate school. They had a higher competency for academic work because they new what they wanted and how to get it. It did not mean their IQs were higher than the elite kids I had at NYU and Rutgers. It just meant they were better prepared to play the game of college and win it.
Most kids had no clue what they are meant to do in college. Eight years ago what that meant was that the cluelessness of, say, my NYU students were costing them 60+ thousand dollars in student loans at 10%+ interest rate. That in itself creates a whole new host of socio-economic problems, as we can read in the interesting series of articles The Village Voice has been running under the moniker, "Generation Debt".
At the high school I taught in Brooklyn, my students would have benefited more with vocational programs. Lots were handy with their bikes and cars and electronics in general. Most came from the Dominican Republic and several Central American countries and had learn basic electronic, mechanic and/or carpentry skills. I had one kid who was a functionally illiterate wannabe hoodlum who found his calling in the cooking section of a home economics class.Home Econ and a badly funded shop class were the only vocational electives available to them.
[ Sigh ]
Then let's get to what has been bothering me about Gifford Miller's 17 seats proposal.
There is no way in freaking hell that the program can work with the current system we have. There's not enough schools. How much longer would it take to build a school than to change the law to allow at least for part-time school attendance? Or is the council going the route of leasing PRIVATELY OWNED real estate in order to run PUBLIC SCHOOLS? In other words, are they advocating a slush fund for the rich to get richer in the name of children's education?
We as progressives have to take one big step back and take a seriously long, hard look at the school system. If so many people in the blogosphere believe in open democracy and open source systems, why the hell can't we'all look at education with the same lens? Why do we need to feed a system that is as much about control and setting limits of use as any DRMed technology?
Thake it one step further : The same stories that feed the myth of the US as liberator of the oppressed all around the world, are the same stories that feed the myth of the US education as liberator of the oppressed all around our cities and ghettoes. It's "our democracy", "our values", "our way of life" that we are supposedly spreading. It's "our interests", "our future" that we are protecting. Both at home through the public schools, and abroad through war.
The question is who is "we" in those statements.
I am not being overtly dramatic about this : It is not a coincidence that the NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT has a provision that forces schools to give private information about their students to the Pentagon, to ease in their Army recruitment or risk losing federal funding.
[via AlterNet: No Child Left Behind By Military Recruiters]:
Democrats have a lot to learn about feeding the beast. The lack of vision when it comes to discussing education issues is one of them. The fear of thinking outside of the box is another.
Which takes me to Steve Jobs, the ultimate unschooler and life-long learner :
[via Steve Jobs to 2005 graduates: 'Stay hungry, stay foolish']:
The key to Jobs education success was not the school but two things :
(1) the desire to learn;
(2) an environment able to support him
in his learning journey.
What should be appaling about Jobs story is that the keys to his success came more as a privilege than a right. So in the end, the system allows for freedom of learning to those who can afford it. And every year, billions are squandered to sustain such a system of inequality.