Combatting Racism

The election of a black President, far from demonstrating our progress as a society in eradicating racism, ripped away a polite veneer of covert racism to reveal the racist core of American culture. At no other time since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s have we been called on as a people to confront not only our racist past but also our racist present.

Racism to a large degree is founded on and fostered by ignorance, and ingrained by segregation. The public schools have never been a complete answer to the problem of racism, but they have, at times, been one mechanism for addressing issues of inequality, of which racism is an inherent element. In fact, schools in the distant past contributed to our national racism, for example, during the “separate but equal” period under doctrine set down by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It wasn’t until 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that “separate but equal”—a mantra as disingenuous as Fox News’ “fair and balanced”—was discarded and a national effort was begun to dismantle school segregation.

However, racial minority status and low socioeconomic status are strongly linked.  Any number of scholarly reports have affirmed a correlation between poverty and poor school achievement, and minority children are mostly likely to feel the consequences. Indeed, the spurious emphasis on evaluating students and schools on the basis of standardized test scores is a tacit expression of racism. Instead of spending thousands of dollars to line the coffers of testing corporations, a glance at existing economic census data would yield substantially the same results in identifying “successful” and “unsuccessful” schools. Superficial interpretations and misuses of test data are, at their center, racist—by result, if not (and I am being generous here) by intent.

“Success” is misdefined if it is characterized solely by test scores. Set aside the question of testing altogether, and the deck is still stacked against poor and minority students by the structure of our society. Public education has the potential to address racism but that potential is diminished during the current era because the persistent attacks on public education are imperiling its very existence. Overuse and misuse of standardized tests, union-busting, cuts in funding, and other destructive maneuvers by policy makers at every level have undermined public education and are contributing to the destruction of American democracy.

Public education could be a powerful instrument in the battle to eradicate racism. But public education in its currently weakened state is on life support. Until we, as a society, stop attacking and start rebuilding our nation’s public education system, we cannot realistically hope that our schools will be able to contribute meaningfully to the elimination of the racism that mars us as a society.

Common Core: 1. Getting Started with Standards

Following is the first of eight posts that examine the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), despite the word state in the title, define a national curriculum in two subject areas: mathematics and English language arts. The new standards for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade have the potential to profoundly affect education across the United States. Forty-five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates schools on American military installations worldwide, have adopted them at this writing. Some states, however, are rethinking whether adoption is a good thing.

CCSS has generated both confusion and controversy. One way to dispel some of the confusion is to look at the origins of these standards. They are, in fact, merely the latest in a long line of attempts to define the purposes of education and to establish guidelines for what student should learn.

A starting point for the modern era is 1892. That year the National Education Association appointed a “Committee of Ten,” composed mainly of college presidents and led by Harvard University’s Charles Eliot. The controversy at the time was whether high school should be seen as an end in itself or as a preparation for higher education. The committee concluded that all schools should maintain a single rigorous academic curriculum and that all students should master it. This is essentially the same philosophical stance as the new CCSS.

A shift from this stance occurred in 1918, when the National Education Association published the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.” These principles endorsed different curricula for different students with a focus on the whole child. They were a reaction to the rigidity of the single-minded academic curriculum promulgated by the Committee of Ten that was seen as detrimental, in particular, to immigrants and a cause of the increasing dropout rate during that era because the one-size-fits-all curriculum failed to consider the effects of students’ socioeconomic status. Poverty disadvantages students, and the rigid curriculum did nothing to address this problem. A more child-centered curriculum could better take into account external issues, such as poverty.

The next landmark occurred in 1940, with the culmination of the “Eight-Year Study” by the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, which had taken up the charge laid down by the Cardinal Principles. The study found that students engaged in a progressive education programs fared better than their counterparts in traditional programs. Progressive students attained better grades, demonstrated more intellectual curiosity, and participated in more student groups.

The progressive wave was challenged during the national hysteria following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, when America saw itself as falling behind in what was emerging as the space race during the Cold War period. In 1958 the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed. This law provided funds to states and local school districts to beef up the teaching of mathematics, the sciences, and foreign languages. NDEA was the first major federal initiative in public education, which was (and remains by law) largely a state and local responsibility.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence of progressive education with many critics decrying the traditional curriculum as a perpetuation of social inequality. The U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 had declared that state laws establishing racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which had set in place a “separate but equal” doctrine that proved to be unworkable. The Brown decision was a tipping point for the civil rights movement that played out over the next two decades and added impetus to the revival of progressive education.