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June 19, 2013
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 Paul Cummins: A Generation in PerilPosted on Sep 26, 2006The founder of the trailblazing Crossroads and New Roads schools in Santa Monica grapples with a report which concludes that more students now attend de facto segregated schools than before Brown v. Board of Ed. The June 21, 2006, issue of Education Week presented two depressing and seemingly related articles. The first, a front-page article headlined “Race Report’s Influence Felt 40 Years Later,” revisited the 1966 U.S. Office of Education’s mammoth 737-page study “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” now known as the Coleman Report. Its major finding was that “Black children started out school trailing behind their white counterparts and essentially never caught up…. What mattered more,” writes Debra Viader, “in determining children’s academic success was their family background and, of course, the economic deprivations of those families.” The study also found that white schools were better equipped, that white schools had teachers who themselves scored higher in various tests, and that black students did better in schools that were predominantly middle-class than they did in lower-class schools. The Coleman Report was published 1966, and now, 40 years later, it is still profoundly relevant. Recent studies confirm the basic, not-so-surprising findings that uneven playing fields still yield inequities. The second EdWeek article, on the back cover page, was titled “Helping Children Move From Bad Schools to Good Ones.” In this piece, author Richard D. Kahlenberg cites several studies which, in fact, confirm aspects of the Coleman Report. One recent study from Florida found “that middle-class schools are 22 times more likely to be consistently high-performing than are high poverty schools.” Kahlenberg also notes that the No Child Left Behind Act’s attempt to enable students to transfer from low-performing (bad) schools to higher-performing (good) ones has been a dismal failure. For example, of the 3.3 million students in Title I schools eligible to transfer in the 2003-04 year only, 31,500 (less than 1%) did so. Why? For one reason: the “good” schools dont want these students and find ways to refuse to take them in. Advertisement 1. There has been little progress since 1966 in integrating our society. In fact, there are now more students attending de facto segregated schools than before Brown v. Board of Education; 2. Young black children are sacrificed on the altar of segregated neighborhoods and schools; 3. The best the Department of Education seems to offer is an ineffectual plan of allowing some children to leave sinking ships. But what of the passengers remaining on the ships? What about not only repairing but streamlining the ships until we can find it in our hearts and budgets to create a truly integrated society? I do not believe that we can afford to simply write off generation after generation of impoverished children and families and not pay a terrible social price. And, of course, we are paying that price today. We have virtually abandoned inner-city schools to the neighborhood morasses they face, and yet we still expect the schools to succeed—when we would never expect our middle- or upper-class schools to have to deal with such problems on their own. I speak of unemployment, drugs, gangs, crime, lack of medical care, lack of decent housing—none of these are problems created by schools, but they damage inner-city schools and make success for the children almost impossible. Schools are the repository of those social ills, not the creators. So, “allowing” 1% of the children to transfer into “good” schools is hardly a solution. It is, instead, a cynical and mean-spirited deflection from real solutions.
Cummins co-founded Crossroads School (Santa Monica, Calif.) in 1971, the Crossroads Community Foundation in 1991 and New Roads School in 1995, and was a co-creator in launching Camino Neuvo Charter Academy. Cummins holds degrees from Stanford (BA), Harvard (MAT) and the University of Southern California (MA, PhD), and he taught English at Harvard School and the Oakwood School in California as well as at UCLA. He is the author of several books, including “Proceed With Passion: Engaging Students in Meaningful Education” (Red Hen Press, 2004). Previous item: Molly Ivins: New News Is Bad News Next item: Robert Scheer: A War on Intelligence New and Improved CommentsIf you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy. |
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By John Brown, September 27, 2006 at 1:53 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Warning flags have been flying over Americas public schools for some time now. The nearing storm is a creation of this nations wealthiest and most powerful corporate leaders. They are men who wrote their mission statement at the Business Roundtables education meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1989. They came down from the summit as the newly formed Business Coalition for Education Reform with a message for the privileged: evacuate the public schools!
The ensuing New Orleans-style exodus has since transformed the public schools into Americas Superdome. Huddled inside of those school buildings now are the mostly Black and Latino children of poor and working-class parents. Their broken bodies and spirits will be found amid the wreckage after the very idea of universal public education has been demolished.
The corporate game plan is advanced when a crushing tedium and a spiritless boredom is inflicted on public school children under the guise of rigor. Testing is for public schools. Start testing the pre-teen child in the third grade. Keep testing every year until the schools become testing factories and then testing sweatshops where children labor to no useful end. The music, art, dance, theater, physical education and vocational classes are for private schools. Recess and field trips are for rich kids!
Their game plan is advanced when teachers are mired in endless, mind-numbing, irrational record keeping requirements because education must be data driven to be effective and efficient. They count on the weight of this mountain of meaningless paperwork to contribute to the disillusionment and physical collapse of teachers before the final blows are struck.
Their game plan counts heavily on racism. While they fully intend to leave behind African-American, Latino, Native American and immigrant children, they will wring their hands in public over the achievement gap because it helps obscure some other gaps in the nations social fabric. Of the household assets gap, average white families owning 14 times what average Black families own, they are silent. Of the infant mortality gap, more than twice the rate for Black mothers, they speak not. Same goes for the life expectancy gap, the health care gap, nutrition gap, the employment gap
They are forced to buy influence in the Black community. It is enemy territory and snake oil salesmen like Armstrong Williams and charlatans like Rod Paige must carry their message. The US Department of Education had to pass thirty pieces of silver to Williams for his No Child Left Behind promotion. Paige put a blackface on the phrase the soft bigotry of low expectations and was able to call the biggest education fraud in history the Houston Miracle with a straight face. He was rewarded with a spot in George Bushs cabinet.
Their game day slogan is No Excuses because it helps excuse away certain damning realities. Historically low levels of federal education spending and lower state funding of public schools, No Excuses. The perfect correlation of poverty and low standardized test scores, No Excuses. The re-segregation of Americas schools, No Excuses. Excuses are reserved for corporate downsizing, the outsourcing of jobs, escaping from pension and health care plans through bankruptcy, corrupt accounting practices and insider trading, offshore tax avoidance schemes, and obscene profit making.
Report thisBy Jerry Wesner, September 27, 2006 at 7:05 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
I can’t question any of these findings, nor do I find them surprising. What it is saying is that poverty breeds ignorance, which breeds poverty. The “bad” school is essentially what happens when children of poverty are in a school. They don’t advance, so the school can’t. Our middle-class white grandchildren enter kindergarten years ahead of the poor minority children, because their parents know how to parent. They are read to from birth. They are taken to the zoo, to museums, to parks, to appropriate movies. They are introduced at home to excellent computer programs and sites, and monitored carefully in their use. Parents who lack these skills and resources raise children who are developmentally handicapped. How can these home environments be changed to challenging, supporting ones? I wish I knew. I wish anybody knew.
Report thisBy Frank Krasicki, September 27, 2006 at 5:59 am Link to this comment
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Schools are the repository of those social ills, not the creators.
About six months ago, the New York Times did a study of the potential for logistically moving students from failing schools to non-failing schools and came up with the punchline. Failing schools are clustered in ways that make it impossible to move kids from one failing school to an adjoining one because the adjoining one is probably failing as well.
Furthermore, even if we could instantly close all failing schools or even a large portion there would not be enough room anywhere else to put them without a prohibitively massive building and hiring program. And what to do with the good teachers of the failing schools?
On my education blog, I resign myself to segregated schools as a choice America exercises. In my lifetime, this problem has been identified and ignored. Let’s face it, it is no accident and nobody truly cares except that it look like someone else’s fault.
I take schools at face values and add collaborative learning tools as a potential way to ease the failing school phenomenon. Tools exist today that allow teachers from suburban schools to share classes with urban schoools using Google chat, Writely, and other freely available software.
Studies have shown that minority students will work to the level of the expectation in predominately white classes. AND studies have shown that kids embrace virtual others more easily than physically proximate others.
We can leverage these phenomenon to get suburban and urban populations collaboratively working together writing and reading English, math, and whatnot. The possibilities are in front of us.
One last thing, an unreported casualty of the segragated and so-called “failing school” socio-drama is that teachers in urban schools appear to be bearing the brunt of backlash for teaching there. Their professional evaluations are often much harsher because of the pressure for these failing schools to meet NCLB numbers. This is subtle, profoundly unfair, and an unintended but largely ignored consequence of NCLB stress testing.
regards,
- Frank Krasicki
Report thishttp://region19.blogspot.com
By rob payne, September 27, 2006 at 12:41 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
As is typical of all predators the weakest and most defenseless are the usual target and who could be more defenseless than the children of the poor?
Sometimes I get the impression that the main concerns for Bush are his fantasies on how history will recall the Bush presidency. My own best guess is he will be remembered as the Walter Mitty of American presidents. James Thurbers fictional character comes to life in the persona of George Bush. Walter Mitty imagined himself as a wartime pilot among other things which is sort of reminiscent of Bush and his fling with a jet fighter that he flew once or twice in between vacations and fishing trips on his private lake.
“WE’RE going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell!” . . .
The warrior prez George Bush, full of vim and vinegar or full of something at any rate and what a dashing figure he cut as he landed on the Lincoln an aircraft carrier named after a president that Bush could not be farther removed from and whose shoes he could not fill with both feet and his hands together. Mission Accomplished! The Old Man aint afraid of hell!!
Bush evidently imagines history will, unlike most of us, be able to look back on his presidency and two hundred thousand years from now his policies will come to full fruition.
I can hardly wait.
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