Spotlight on Schools …

one teacher's perspective

Several years ago I was at an Alabama State School Board meeting when the state president of the Eagle Forum accused the Board of trying to use schools as social engineering machines. My thought was - aren't all schools by their very nature indeed social engineering machines. So, what kind of society do we want to engineer? To create a society we want, we have to focus on the nature of our schools.

(I miss the Red Clay Ramblers and Tommy Thompson)

Sadly schools, like our hospitals and prisons, are sorely lacking. I spent much of my teaching career in a mill town and felt the real objective of the system was to train people to be fodder for the mills. Sit in rows and be obedient so you can get ready to work on the line. But I visited schools far worse ...schools in abject poverty. Communities with no mill, only agriculture...modern day slavery.

An Alabama story about Jeff Sessions and our schools....

In 1956, as a way to sidestep Brown, Alabama voters amended the state Constitution to deprive students of a right to public education. Public support for school funding collapsed in its aftermath. As a result, by the early 1990s, huge disparities in funding separated Alabama’s haves and have-nots. Alabama’s wealthiest school district (and also one of its whitest), Mountain Brook, in suburban Birmingham, spent nearly twice as much per student as the state’s poorest, Roanoke, in a declining manufacturing town about two hours southeast.

It was a cleaver ploy. Create small satellite towns outside the city. Then start school systems in each one of those little towns, and make sure the real estate agents didn't sell any “undesirables” a house in the community.

As Ralph Nader often points out, we accomplish more through the courts than the body politic. Nearly 30 of Alabama’s poorest school districts, with support from disability rights groups, civil rights organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit against the state. The most vocal critics of school reform, including the far-right activist Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, warned that it would bring “socialism” to Alabama. After nearly three years of litigation, Judge Eugene W. Reese of the Alabama Circuit Court found the inequitable funding unconstitutional and ordered the state to come up with a system to remedy the inequity.

Attorney General Sessions led the battle against the decision. He argued that Judge Reese had overreached. An activist court was usurping the power of the state’s duly elected officials to solve the problem on their own. For the next two years, Mr. Sessions sought to discredit Judge Reese and overturn his ruling. During that time I served as the only teacher on the Governors Education Commission. I got quite an education of my own during those years.

When Mr. Sessions insisted that as attorney general, he was representing the Alabama State School Board, the board members protested that he did not represent their position. No matter. He fought on. Finally, in 1997, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld Judge Reese’s finding that the state’s educational inequity was unconstitutional. But, as Mr. Sessions (by then a senator) had hoped, the court left the remedy to the state’s increasingly conservative Legislature, which made only modest changes in the state’s school funding structure. Alabama’s public schools, still underfunded, still separate and unequal, ranked near the bottom nationally, stand as one of Jeff Sessions’ most enduring legacies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/opinion/jeff-sessions-other-civil-rig...

Funding isn't all the story, but it is a big slice. Some states do try to address needs of poor children, but most are lacking an effective way to target children of poverty.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/06/how-education-fund...

Many schools are going to a four day school week, our local Georgia schools only operate four day per week.

http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/our-school-funding-crisis-has-a-c...

Of course the RW answer is privatization with charter schools.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/the-unaddressed-link-between-p...

...close scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students.

In Finland, with its famously high-performing schools, schools provide food and free health care for students. Developmental needs are addressed early. Counseling services are abundant.

There’s a very strong positive correlation between income and SAT test scores. (For the math geeks out there, the R2 for each test average/income range chart is about 0.95.) On every test section, moving up an income category ($20,000) was associated with an average score boost of over 12 points.

https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-inco...

Listen to these two students discuss their very different schools (4 min)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xdfVAPvv9A

Recently I caught a Chris Hedges show focused on education. Chris Hedges discusses how to salvage the American education system with Nikhil Goyal, author of Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice. He has a similar take to my view. (30 min)

https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/384088-failing-education-system-nikhil/

One of my favorite education writers is Diane Ravitch. She explains why schools shouldn't be run like a business while criticizing a PBS pro-school privatization series (12 min or read the summary)

http://www.thirteen.org/metrofocus/2017/06/june-12-2017-diane-ravitch-sc...

https://dianeravitch.net/2017/06/13/pbs-runs-three-hour-special-promotin...

The 1% are also busy buying school boards. The recent school board election in Los Angeles drew close to $17 million in donations, much of it in the form of untraceable “dark money” from a familiar cast of enormously wealthy donors. Scholar Rebecca Jacobsen walks us through who and what is behind this big money trend. Listen to the 30 min podcast here:

https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/buying-influence

Or read an excerpt here:

https://dianeravitch.net/2017/06/13/the-96-billionaires-who-decided-to-b...

Higher ed faces many problems too. Here's the story about Jared Kushner's undeserved acceptance to Harvard...in 1998, when Jared was attending The Frisch School and starting to look at colleges, his father had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in annual installments of $250,000.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-kushners-curio...

Richard Wolff addresses the problems of Higher Education. (5 min)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YDiF2ia4ng

He goes on to explain how colleges are misusing Adjunct Professors (4 min)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB_Zv8lO0KI

And finally Richard addresses DeVos and her school privatization plans by explaining public schools out perform charters. (6 min)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmAoz5vC2PU

Look at Betsy DeVos recent hires in the Department of Ed. It speaks volumes

http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/recent-devos-hires-bode-ill-for-s...

Funny that no matter the topic, the issue seems to hang on or is explained by inequality. A nation's greatest resource is its youth. We encourage and promote those children of privilege, and punish (often imprisoning) those who are destitute. What kind of society do we want? No matter what we want for tomorrow, the future is being cast in the schools of today.

I look forward to your comments and stories about schools and education. I'm in Virginia this weekend and will try to drop in sometime during the day. Next week I want to focus on what schools could be and dream of a better future. In the meantime I hope you have a good Sunday.