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Welcome back, dead white males

October 8, 2012 by

Welcome back, dead white males  writes Mark Bauerlein, an Emory professor of English, in a New York Daily News op-ed. Common Core Standards adopted by 45 states plus D.C., require students to “demonstrate knowledge of 18th-, 19th- and early-20th-century foundational works of American literature,” as well as foundational historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence. It’s about time, writes Bauerlein.

For bookish types and patriotic citizens, too, the canon of Ben Franklin’s “Autobiography,” Emerson’s essays, “The Scarlet Letter” and “Huck Finn” is a personal inspiration as well as a sacred heritage.

But to the people in control of high school English — those who craft standards, select anthologies, monitor curricula and teach classes — that great tradition is not a treasure. It’s a threat.

Until the 20th century, they note, nearly all authors were white males, and the cultures in which they thrived cast females and people of color as inferior.

In the last 30 years, high school students have read quota-driven anthologies instead of classic literature, Bauerlein writes.

We’re told that female, black and brown students must encounter inspiring female, black and brown characters and authors — or else they won’t realize that they can become successful adults.

English teachers have to comply, whether they like it or not. Common Core gives teachers “a solid defense against identity quotas in the classroom,” Bauerlein writes.

Via Core Knowledge Blog.

Filed Under: Books, Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Who killed the liberal arts?

September 12, 2012 by
    Who Killed the Liberal Arts?  Joseph Epstein blames his fellow professors in a Weekly Standard essay.

    (Professors) in their hunger for relevance and their penchant for self-indulgence, began teaching books for reasons external to their intrinsic beauty or importance, and attempted to explain history before discovering what actually happened. They politicized psychology and sociology, and allowed African-American studies an even higher standing than Greek and Roman classics. They decided that the multicultural was of greater import than Western culture. They put popular culture on the same intellectual footing as high culture (Conrad or graphic novels, three hours credit either way). And, finally, they determined that race, gender, and social class were at the heart of all humanities and most social science subjects. With that finishing touch, the game was up for the liberal arts.

    Epstein became a liberal arts major because he didn’t think he could pass accounting.

    He’s responding to Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, which complains that most students enroll in college to earn job credentials, not to pursue an education.

    This cartoon says it all.

Filed Under: Careers, College, Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

NCLB waivers let states set goals by race

August 30, 2012 by

Virginia will revise its new goals for student achievement, but will continue to set “different achievement goals for students according to race, family income and disability,” reports the Washington Post.  That’s OK with Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The Obama administration has allowed states to set different goals for different groups of students, as long as the low-performing students are required to make greater rates of progress, so that the gap between struggling students and high-achieving students is cut in half over six years.

The District and 27 of the 33 states that have received waivers from the Obama administration under No Child Left Behind have also set new goals that call for different levels of achievement for different groups of students.

In Maryland, for example, state officials say they want Asian students to progress from 94.5 percent proficient in math in 2011 to 97 percent by 2017. During the same period, the state wants black students to improve from 68 percent to 84 percent. The black students are expected to reach a lower endpoint but they would have to improve at a faster rate.

Virginia’s goals qualified the state for a NCLB waiver. While 89 percent of Asian students and 78 percent of whites are expected pass state math tests in 2017, only 65 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of blacks and 49 percent of special-education students are expected to pass.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Open the exam school doors

August 29, 2012 by

New York City’s elite exam schools, such as Stuyvesant High and Bronx School of Science, admit very few low-income, black or Hispanic students, writes Michael Holzman, research director for the Schott Foundation for Public Education, on Dropout Nation. Open up the exam schools to disadvantaged students, writes Holzman.

According to a recent series on the local New York City NBC television affiliate, “a dramatic race gap persists at the city’s most elite public high schools, a product of a single standardized entrance exam that privileges students who have been intensively primed and prepped through expensive private tutoring programs.”  The reporters go on to point out that “At Stuyvesant High School, widely viewed as the crown jewels of the top public high schools, just two percent of incoming ninth-graders are black, and 3.5 percent are Hispanic . . . In the general New York City public school population, the two groups comprise a total of 77 percent.”

Many Stuyvesant students — 115 of  843 in a recent year — came from private schools and the suburbs, Holzman writes. Those from public schools tested into Gifted and Talented programs in kindergarten. But children don’t have an equal chance at a gifted education: Some areas of the city test 7 percent of kindergarteners, while others test 70 percent.

New York City should abolish the very high-stakes test used to pick students for its selective high schools, Holzman argues.

. . . the school district should adopt a system used for college admission in various places around the country:  a quota, based on enrollment, from each middle and junior high school.  If a school enrolls, say, one percent of the city’s grade eight students, then one percent of the pool of students admitted to the specialized high schools should come from that school.  Each school should be permitted to set their own criteria for identifying those students, as who knows students better than their teachers?

Instead of paying tutors to help their kids cram for the test, parents might move their children to middle schools where they’d be in the top one percent, he speculates. These parents would pressure schools to improve.

Why not create more exam schools?

“We’ve been neglecting the education of high-ability youngsters,” write Checker Finn and Jessica Hockett, who’ve written a book on exam schools, on Ed Next.

States, districts, and individual schools, pressed by federal policies and metrics, have concentrated attention and resources on low-achieving and other “at-risk” youngsters, while paying scant heed to the fate of smart, eager pupils.

. . .  this negligence (coupled with our wariness of “elitism”) has produced a dearth of places and pursuits for able youngsters, both at the elementary and secondary levels.

. . . When access to rigorous programs is limited, or entry into them is handled simplistically (e.g., a child’s score on a single test), plenty of kids who might benefit don’t get drawn into the pipeline that leads to later success . . .

Educated, motivated parents will get their kids into top public schools or pay for private school, they write. Students whose parents don’t have the savvy to “work the system” lose out.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Virginia schools: ‘together and unequal’

August 28, 2012 by

“Together and unequal” is the new motto for Virginia schools, writes Andrew Rotherham, a former state school board member, in the Washington Post. With No Child Left Behind’s rewrite in limbo, Education Secretary Arne Duncan allowed states to set new performance targets. Virginia “took the stunning step of adopting dramatically different school performance targets based on race, ethnicity and income.”

President George W. Bush famously talked of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” in education, meaning the subtle ways educators and policymakers shortchange some students by expecting less of them.

Virginia’s new policy is anything but subtle. For example, under the new rules, schools are expected to have 78 percent of white students and 89 percent of Asian students passing Virginia’s Standards of Learning math tests but just 57 percent of black students, 65 percent of Hispanic students and 59 percent of low-income students. The goals for special-education students are even lower, at 49 percent. Worse, those targets are for 2017. The intermediate targets are even less ambitious — 36 percent for special-education students this year, for instance. Goals for reading will be set later.

Instead of setting lower targets for minority and poor students, Virginia could “provide substantially more support to these students and their schools,” writes Rotherham, a partner at the nonprofit Bellwether Education and an education columnist for Time.

The expectations aren’t high for any students (except maybe Asians), Rotherham adds on Eduwonk.

Virginia doesn’t give parents much choice if they’re not satisfied with the neighborhood school, he notes.

There are fewer than a handful of charter schools in the Commonwealth and Virgina’s charter school law consistently is ranked among the nation’s worst by policy organizations, public school choice is vociferously resisted, and county borders are treated like international lines when it comes to almost any hint of letting students cross them for better schooling options. I’m not a big supporter of private school choice but if the best Virginia can do is say to citizens and parents that its public schools will have 59 percent of poor students and 57 percent of black students passing state tests five years from now then what exactly is the argument for not allowing their parents to seek out better options?

The Obama administration signed off on Virginia NCLB waiver, Rotherham writes. Are they OK with this?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Discipline by race

July 31, 2012 by

Racial quotas in school discipline could be coming to Maryland, writes Hans Bader in the Examiner.

“As a lawyer who used to bring civil-rights cases for a living, I am very disturbed” by the Maryland State Board of Education’s proposed school discipline policy, Bader writes.

This proposed rule violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution by pressuring schools to discipline students based on their race, rather than their individual conduct and the content of their character.

. . . (The rule) would require school systems to discipline and suspend students in numbers roughly in proportion to their racial percentage of the student body, and require school systems that currently don’t do so to implement plans to eliminate any racially “disproportionate impact” over a three-year period. Thus, it is imposing quotas in all but name.

The Obama administration has supported the use of “disparate impact” to evaluate school discipline policies.

The Maryland board also wants schools to discipline special education students — including those diagnosed with behavioral disorders — at the ame rate as other students. However, there’s no plan for gender balance in school discipline.

Of course, reducing out-of-school suspensions makes a lot of sense, if it can be done without threatening the safety of other students.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Desegregation is dead…

May 20, 2012 by

… so says Professor David Kirp (Public Policy, Berkeley) in this morning’s New York Times.  It’s a piece that begs, I think, of a firm response.  And because it’s about desegregating schools, I think it’s appropriate material for this blog.  Here’s how his piece gets under way, though you should read the whole thing.

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments…. But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices.

The balance of Professor Kirp’s essay, which laments the fading of court-ordered desegregation orders, can be summed up as follows:

(1) Desegregation/integration produces empirical academic benefits for Black students.

(2) Desegregation/integration produces no empirical injuries or drawbacks for White students.

(3) Therefore Desegregation/integration is a good thing.

(4) The courts should support good things.

(5) Therefore the courts should support Desegregation/integration.

To be fair, this is my summary of his work.  I could be misrepresenting it, though I obviously don’t think I am.

Now I’m willing to grant him (1) and (2); he’s a public policy expert and presumably he’d know better than I would whether the evidence supports these things.  I’ll even grant him (3), so long as we keep it at “a good thing” and not “an unqualifiedly good thing, all-in.”  If something gives relevant benefits, and doesn’t have the most obvious sorts of drawbacks one might suspect, odds are that it’s a good thing.

But I seriously question what I’ve presented as his implicit premise (4).  Kirp seems to lack a certain understanding of how the law works, as demonstrated by the fact that he has linked to Milliken v. Bradley (418 U.S. 717 (1974)), but doesn’t seem to actually understand what the case is about.  That’s a serious charge to level at an academic, so let me explain.  Along the way, I think it will become clear both why I think (4) is wrong, and that Kirp does indeed hold it as a view.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Education Law Tagged With: , , , ,

Blackface vs. make-up

May 18, 2012 by

A second-grader in Colorado was assigned to dress up as a historical figure for a “wax museum day”.

Given the sheer amount of time and attention given to Martin Luther King in the typical school year, it might come as no surprise that this second-grader wanted to come as King.

Sean’s mother, Michelle King-Roca, told Denver’s 7News her son was really excited about the project.

“He said, ‘Mom, I want to wear a black suit because that’s what he wore, a black tie, a white shirt, and also I want to do my face black and wear a mustache,’” said King-Roca.

Hilarity ensues.  Well, sort of.

After complaints from a faculty member that took issue with the blackface, the principal asked Sean to remove the face paint or leave the school.

* * * *

A spokeswoman for the principal told KRDO that some students, as well as the faculty member who initially complained, felt the costume was offensive. It’s the principal’s job to make sure the school is a safe environment for students, she said.

Face paint violates the school’s dress code policy, she said.

Sigh.  These people (and by “these people” I mean the morons who perpetuate this sort of stupidity — morons of all races) never get tired of proclaiming perfectly well-intentioned things to be offensive, do they?

I had always thought that there was an obvious (and reasonable) distinction between “Blackface” proper — the gross cariacature of Black people using extremely dark make-up that gave an illusion of giant-sized lips, usually coupled with vulgarly offensive steretyped acting or singing — and simple stage make-up to alter one’s apparent skin tone in an attempt to make one’s costume a better costume.    Was I wrong?

I was once in a production of Fiddler on the Roof once as a Russian Dancer.  It occurred to me, as I was doing make-up on opening night, that there weren’t many Mexican-Americans in turn of the century Russia.  So I thought for a moment, and decided to make myself into something of a Mongol-blooded Cossack — with a slightly darker foundation and some clever eye make-up.  I certainly didn’t think I was being racist.

But maybe I was mistaken.  Maybe really dark foundation isn’t just make-up, to be used when the appropriate need arises… but is really foundation exclusively for use by black people.  I mean, nothing says racial harmony like having a make-up counter with products you can’t buy because of your race, right?

You might be forgiven if you thought that the point of a costume was to, you know, look like the person as whom you are dressing.  If I’m going to dress as Kareem Abdul Jabbar, I’m not just going to need some darker make-up — I’m going to need stilts and a nametag that says “Roger Murdock”.

My friend Bradley (who is quite dark-skinned, as such things go) is going to need some pale make-up and a wheelchair if he wants to be FDR.

But maybe that would be offensive, too.

Could we all agree that, were it possible to buy an MLK silicone or latex mask, that wouldn’t be racist?  But what’s the difference, really?

(Good luck trying to find one, though.  I looked for twenty minutes; maybe it is offensive.)

 

UPDATE: Minor ambiguity in the second sentence corrected.

Filed Under: Culture, Education Tagged With: , , ,

Study: Teachers go soft on minority students’ work

May 8, 2012 by

After reading a poorly written essay, teachers offered comments and advice. Those who thought the writer was black or Latino provided more praise and less criticism, according to a Rutgers study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology (JEP), reports Science Daily.

(The study) involved 113 white middle school and high school teachers in two public school districts located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area, one middle class and white, and the other more working class and racially mixed.

“Many minority students might not be getting input from instructors that stimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement,” said Kent Harber, Rutgers-Newark psychology professor.

George W. Bush called it “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Talking about Trayvon

April 11, 2012 by

Should teachers talk to their students about the Trayvon Martin controversy in Florida?  As always with current events, it’s a sensitive question.

Jeffrey Carpenter and Scott Weathers at Education Week say yes; it’s a teachable moment.  (Subscription barrier)

Teaching for Change has an (obviously politicized, since it’s Teaching for Change) list of suggestions about how to discuss the issue with young children.

But perhaps one should just talk — as a teacher was fired in Michigan for, it seems, running a fundraiser with her students for Trayvon Martin’s family.

I think that teachers discuss it, but only as a sort of concrete springboard for more abstract issues.  They should probably avoid talking specifically about the details of the controversy unless they’re going to do at least several hours of serious research into the various alleged facts of the case and the various ways the narratives have shifted since their inception.  Is Zimmerman white?  That’s a complex question.  Was Trayvon shot for wearing a hoodie?  It’s not clear the hoodie had anything at all to do with anything; Zimmerman only mentioned the hoodie after he explained to the operator why the man was suspicious, in response to a question about what the man was wearing.  Was Zimmerman injured?  Did he mutter “coons” or “cold”?  At the very least, teachers should be aware that these are questions, and not facts.

There’s also the question of understanding the legal issues.  I’ve personally seen two teachers discuss the matter with their students in the last few weeks.  While both teachers were well-intentioned, intelligent, and quite up-front about their own biases in the case, and handled themselves admirably insofar as they were discussing delicate, politically charged issues,  they both fell victim to a simple lack of legal understanding.  They didn’t really understand the burdens that police face in making an arrest and their knowledge of the facts was very clearly limited to one or two sources that they’d read.  It’s not that the teachers were really doing anything wrong — like I said, they tried very hard to present the issue fairly and to make clear their own presumptions– but they just didn’t really know what it was they didn’t know.  And that’s treacherous ground for an educator.

I’m not saying that teachers need to be lawyers.  That’s clearly asking too much; I am a lawyer, and I’m not at all sure I’d want to talk to a high school class about this case because there’s so much I just don’t understand about what’s going on.  If I did talk to a high school class about this, it would be primarily to flag issues and explain what I (and, by way of the lesson, the students) simply don’t know.  But even if I’m being overcautious, if the teachers aren’t going to take the time to understand, for example, that “Stand Your Ground” laws probably have nothing to do with the case, then I think they really should just avoid talking about it in anything except the most general of terms.

The Martin-Zimmerman situation is, fundamentally, a legal issue right now.  (Or it should be, if we want to avoid simply defaulting to mob rule.)  That means that the applicability of various statutes and burdens and presumptions really, really, matters.   The law really matters.  If you want to discuss the situation in detail with your students, if you want to make it a teachable moment and not just an opportunity to inflame passions, then you either need to do the hard work of gathering the often conflicting allegations and bits of evidence and  understand what’s going on with the law, or you need to accept the limitations of your knowledge, make them explicit, and only speak more generally about society’s racial tensions, the sorts of problems that face minority youth (which are real; I know from my own experience), the way that the law protects us from mob rule, and other related issues.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,
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