Hroptr9 Forum Member

Join Date: Apr 2011 Posts: 5

Let's Teach Those Brown Kids!, or, How I Became a WN I hope that this essay can shed some light on what is going on inside our public school system. I have always had some interest in WN philosophy and the general anthropology of our integrated society but it never really clicked until I started working in a charter school. This little essay contains a lot of things that in retrospect make me feel ill; it's disgusting what our children are going through in the name of "educational innovation." With that in mind, please take what you can from this and I hope you can find a way to use it.



Part 1: Let's Teach Those Brown Kids!, or, How I Became a WN



The vast majority of my experience and education is in business. I spent a lot of years chasing money and dealing in things that really didn't make a hell of a lot of a difference in the world. After a big life change I found myself in the position to be able to take a job as an academic director at a successful charter school. For obvious reasons I won't name it but I can tell you it is consistently the highest scoring school in the entire state. In fact, state tests are a joke to us now since the requirements are so low; within the past few years you've been able to "pass" certain tests with less than a 50% score. Suffice it to say we did a hell of a job of teaching students math, language arts, and science.



After many years of success we gained the detractors that any successful organization does. There were two main camps: the teachers' union and the other charter schools. The teachers' union used the same arguments they always have - I won't repeat them since they are largely inconsequential. The other charter schools (and state charter board members) did have some other things to say. Their main attack was that our school population was largely white (98%); they accused us of picking white students over others. Why would that matter? Statistically, white students outscore other races on every standardized test. They were saying that our tests should have been normed against the racial state average and not the aggregated state average because we didn't have any of the "at-risk population" that they had to deal with.



At this point it is worth rewinding a bit to explain how students joined our school. As a public charter school we are NOT allowed to pick our students - all interested students are entered into a lottery pool and drawn out when we have openings at the beginning of each year. Schools who try to rig or bypass the lottery system can face gigantic penalties or even be shut down. To enter the lottery, a family has to fill out an online application and then take at least one tour of our school, which lasts about thirty minutes.



With that in mind, our lottery pool (and therefore, our student population) was 98% white. Why is this significant? Unfortunately, in our state we have a rapidly increasing population of hispanics. Some of our schools have already had whites move into the minority group. What does this mean? A way I like to look at it is this: how willing are you to send your student to the best school possible? Disregarding private schools (many of which we beat), we are the best school in the state. All that is required to have a chance to send your student to this school is five minutes online and thirty minutes walking around. With that extremely small time investment in mind, we had a total of about 50 hispanic students in our pool of about 3500.



Back to the argument: So are we really picking the best students, or are the best families picking us? And if these are the best families, the ones most motivated to educate their students, what does it say about the difference between the white and hispanic races? Anyway, the point of all of this is that for reasons that are now obvious, we have a larger pool of white families/students than we should statistically have based on local demographics.



The arguments became more personal the last few years and it changed from, "You score higher because of the white students" to "Your teaching methods/staff/etc aren't any better, it's just your students". This really irritated our executive director. He, as well as all of us on staff, believe that our methods are in fact superior and that our staff is better trained and more effective. A lot of politicking happened behind the scenes with him, our board, and the state board which resulted in us getting a second charter - the politicking isn't really that important so I'll spare the details. The details of the charter, however, were important.



We were given a charter nearly identical to our first but with a few tiny but critical changes. First, we were given an area that is 80% mexican/black. Second, we were told by a board member (entirely off the record, of course) that if our lottery pool didn't match the local demographics and ended up 90%+ white again that we would face a hellish audit that would have spanned years, forward and backward. With that in mind our executive director, now revealed as bleeding-heart liberal, accepted the charter.



The school construction was started and we began the "recruitment" process. I use that word in quotes since we couldn't recruit in the typical sense of the word, all we could do was sign people up for the lottery. This, my brothers and sisters, is where I began to truly turn. The first few days of our campaign were hellish. Our executive director arranged for us to set up booths in local markets and businesses and asked me and the other directors to assign teams to these booths. At first, we balanced them out - let's put some people from all grade levels, a counselor, etc at each booth as we can answer all the possible questions. As hesitant as I was about this whole plan, I thought that maybe we could do some good.



After only one day it became apparent that this would not work. 99% of the people who approached our booths weren't interested in our school's academics - we started getting questions like, "Do y'all have daycares for free?" "We still get free lunches right?" "Do we really have to wear that broke down faggot uniform?", etc. A lot of kids showed up who weren't in school anymore, they had been kicked out of every single school in their geographic area. The very first day I had a woman spit on me and call our organization a bunch of skinhead crackers. By the second day I had teachers coming into my office crying that they didn't want to do it anymore, they didn't feel safe, and that they have been threatened. Our teachers, who had come to this area of town to do whatever they could to better it, were being harassed, threatened, and intimidated by everyone from real gang-bangers to the sows with ten kids, no husband and no job.



At the end of the third day I pulled all my directly reporting staff from the booths and told those who weren't under me that they should strongly speak to their director and see if we could change something. I exchanged words with our executive director and he finally agreed that it wasn't safe to put our staff (mainly 20-30, white, and female) in that kind of situation. I said I would be comfortable with ONE main recruiting station in a safe location with the staff rotating and having all the male presence we could. Thank god I have some real alpha-male types that took to it, otherwise we would have likely had to hire some type of outside security to handle things, it was that bad.



We managed to get enough in the lottery pool to stop recruiting and fill the school with the 80% brown that we needed to. 92% of our students qualified as low-income/at-risk according to Title I. The state was satisfied and we opened the school that fall.



Part 2: You('re) racis(t)!, or, Why Are We Here?



Our entire organization was drained trying to fill this school, both with staffing and materials. I ended up losing about 50% of my staff, another part of our school lost 70%. The parents at our first school started getting really irritated, asking questions like "Why are we losing our teachers to that school?" "What is this costing our school?". Personally, I felt like they had a right to be concerned. The vote to approve the charter was on the public meeting schedule but it wasn't given nearly the hype and importance it should have, I remember there being one or two parents there and they didn't really seem to know what was going on anyway. One asked if it would impact the first school and the chairperson simply said it wouldn't and moved on. A little more stakeholder discussion would have likely stalled or stopped it, but hindsight is 20/20.



The first few weeks the school was open were chaos. We suspended 11 students the first day, and 6 more the second. We already had gang presence in our hallways; in an exit interview with one of gang members who was leaving for safety concerns I was told that the gangs had been looking to infiltrate the school the second they heard about it. After a lot of questioning (I had to rephrase everything, he didn't understand what a percentage was) he communicated that about 60% of the students were gang affiliated. Within the first week we had multiple windows broken out, computers stolen, and an attempted after-hours break-in. Staff were constantly informed that "You('re) racis(t)" for enforcing rules. If a student was disciplined for skipping class, we were racist. If a student was expelled for bringing a weapon to school, we were racist. If someone got a bad grade on homework (the very rare occasion that they did it), we were racist. It became an in-joke for some of the thicker skinned staff; if someone didn't do what you wanted they were a racist.



Things calmed down slowly but steadily as we kicked the more disruptive students out, eventually we settled into a state that we knew there were a lot of gang affiliation but they weren't manifesting in anything that was imminently violent or dangerous. Still, the threat was always there and many of our staff were scared. We lost three teachers, two of which were career. We lost a lot of good students (mainly white, which increased our other numbers to the delight of the state) who thought that it would be a change from their normal school but turned out to be the same. That is probably the thing that bothered me the most. Our goal is, and has always been, two fold: academic and character development. Wherever a student is in either area, we try to accelerate them as much as possible. Instead, we were acting as prison guards, trying to keep violence to a minimum and make sure people were where they were supposed to be.



Every day I would see white students that I knew were scared to death because they were being postured and threatened constantly; it made me sick to my stomach. I'd suspend the worst few offenders for threatening behavior and more would take their places. White girls had it especially bad; they were constantly degraded and always caused a stir wherever they went. We were constantly disciplining students (always black or hispanic) for touching them. One girl begged me to suspend her so she wouldn't have to come anymore - I asked her where she would go and she started crying saying that it was even worse in the other schools. I asked how it could be worse and she said that at least we were trying to stop it, at other schools she'd been pushed up in corners and molested as teachers just walked by; if they made eye contact the gangs of boys (animals, really) would threaten them if they didn't keep walking.



I could write pages and pages more about incidents like this; I'd rather not as I'd like to actually have an appetite tonight.



Skip ahead to the end of the year. Testing preparations at the first school were going ahead beautifully - students were doing well on pre-tests, they were interested, engaged, and really in the mood to attack the test. The new staff we had hired was well-integrated into our systems and things were back to about where they were before. At the new school, things were better than the beginning of the year but not much better. We had lost a total of about sixty students. The state was giving us strife about the number of expelled students we had; we had the documentation to back every single expulsion so we weren't worried at all. Their biggest concern was that we were expelling such a high percentage, nearly triple the second highest school. They couldn't seem to wrap their heads around the idea that local schools were that dangerous and that schools were under-reporting; it just didn't make sense to them. This is the kind of rational thinking we had at a state level.



Testing week came and our first school passed with flying colors, actually beating the previous year's scores. The new school bombed, relatively speaking. I say relative because they scored far, far below our first school. The funny thing is, they actually beat the state average. Yes, we beat the state average with all that bull**** going on. The detractors then turned their argument toward, "Yeah, but it wasn't as high as your first school, you aren't as good as you think" "It was a first year anomaly", etc.



What did I learn through all of this. First, our methods do work. Even with a population that I can honestly call one step away from prison or the zoo, we scored above the state average. The few times they were in class or listening, it was working. Some students who actually did want to learn (less than 20) saw their grade level equivalencies almost double. We had proven, at least to some degree, that we were teaching better than public schools.



Second, race did matter. The other charter schools were right when they said we were testing higher because of our high percentage of whites. They had been making what is essentially a WN argument the whole time - that white students/schools perform better. We'd approached it from the wrong way and made wrong conclusions, saying that it had nothing to do with the race, everything to do with the instruction. Methodologies did have something to do with it, but not as much as we thought. Trying as hard as we could, using every resource we could muster, our methodologies produced small gains in a black and hispanic population. Our second school has been open a few years now and we are seeing incremental gains. When we built our third school a few years later (with a 80% white population) we saw the same success we did at the first, passing the second in the first year.



An interesting side note... As a charter school we were funded with state money as well as federal grants. Last year, our second school made up about 1/3 our total population but brought in 2/3 of our funding, mainly from federal grants. Try to hold in your vomit as you process that little fact - the government is rewarding schools like that. Our block grants for advanced student and enrichment programs? About 1/20th of our budget.



So there it is. I know that I am only realizing now what many of you have for years. If you would have asked me ten years ago about WN ideals I would have told you that they were interesting but not practical - now I think the only way we can really survive is to follow them. I'll never let my children go to a school like our second. I'd never let me wife or anyone I cared about work in an environment like that. Yet every single day, white students, white men and women go to that because they have no choice.



And they tell us a multi-racial society is the answer...