(A couple caveats: first, an apology to Keith, to whom I wrote a personal message immediately after I read his post. We had discussed sitting down to talk in person, and I never quite responded to that—my deep apologies! I’ve been incredibly busy through the holiday season and beyond, and as I understand it, so has Keith. Second, Keith and I attended the hearings on different days, so while I have some sense of what he heard, I’m not privy to the details. Third, I’m no expert on racism and education, far from it. I’ve written—too infrequently—on the topic on this blog, first about immigrants and public education, then about the struggle for desegregation in Boston in the 1970s. But I’m firmly convinced that the question of racism is central to the crisis of education “reform” in America, and must be dealt with head-on. Lastly, an apology to you, ô cher lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère—for the length of this article.)

Racism and Schools

The starting point of this discussion is the assertion that our nation’s schools are now more segregated than they were in 1968. This means that not only are there schools where Black and Latino students are the majority, but that the majority of Black and Latino students go to schools where they are the overwhelming majority. The inverse is also true: white students, in their large majority, go to majority white schools. Without running the numbers directly, I’d guess that almost all of Rhode Island’s suburban schools are more than 90% white, while the urban “core” of Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, are more than 75% Black and Latino (I believe in Providence the number is between 85-90%). And, the current segregation of America’s schools has not been an enduring characteristic from time immemorial, but is rather a creation of the dismantling of desegregation programs of the 1960s and 70s.

In this interview from 2005, Jonathan Kozol lays out a clear timeline: from 1965 to 1990, school desegregation programs made serious advances in terms of school integration, equitable distribution of resources, lowering of class sizes, etc. These programs were supported by overwhelming majorities of parents of all races, particularly in so far as those parents had actually experienced desegregation programs in the education of their own children. The declines came as a result of the Rehnquist Supreme Court in the 1990s, which first destroyed court-ordered desegregation programs, then pulled the rug out from under the voluntary programs that some cities had quite successfully implemented. Kozol makes the serious point in this interview that:

The reason that school integration came to a halt in the early 1990s was not because of the objections of either Black or white members of the population. The overwhelming majority of parents of all races believe that racially integrated schooling is better not only for Black kids and Latino kids, but also is better for white children as well. Every poll demonstrates this clearly. Wherever voluntary programs exist, you have four or five applicants for every opening. Do Black and Latino parents believe in school integration? You bet they do. When the opportunity is real.

and later that:

First of all, why do white parents support the programs? I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you what I intuit from talking to so many people in these districts. Number one, they genuinely believe that it will be better for their own children to learn about the world that they really live in when they’re seven or twelve years old and not have to wait until they’re twenty-five or thirty and discover that they don’t know how to negotiate with people of other races. Ultimately, it’s enlightened self-interest.

Second, in the cases of some districts where there are a great many Latino children, many white parents strongly favor bilingual schools. And I don’t mean bilingual in the sense that it’s bandied about in California politics, where it’s an issue only applying to Latinos. I mean bilingual education for all races. I just spent some time in Milwaukee with the teachers from a spectacular bilingual elementary school where the white, Black, and Latino kids by fifth grade are speaking two languages comfortably.

In other words, where desegregation was undertaken in a serious and thorough-going manner, real progress was made in terms of equalizing the resources and opportunities provided to children of all races. In the research that I did, there were clear indications that: 1) school desegregation led to patterns of housing desegregation within cities; 2) resistance to desegregation came not from ordinary white parents, but from organized campaigns led by politicians and the rich; 3) “white flight” was actually a myth, explained in real terms not by the suburbanization of whites fleeing Black and Latino kids, but by lower birth rates among whites and a relative increase in population among Blacks and especially Latinos in the intervening period; 4) real progress was made in terms of narrowing the actual gap in academic achievement between students of color and white students, a gap which was (and is) present in spite of economic factors. There was nothing here that the vast majority of people wouldn’t agree with or benefit from—unless you were one of the 1%, or one of their hangers-on.

Unfortunately, the last generation has belonged to the 1%, in a serious way. Let’s first look at what has happened to cities in the United States. Here, I will admit, I have no sources to point to, but the well-known facts of life in America under the unbroken neoconservative, neoliberal Republican rule of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama. These are the facts: 1) that inner-city neighborhoods, especially Black neighborhoods, were targeted by the racist War on Drugs, which devastated Black communities everywhere; 2) that neoliberalism dramatically restructured American capitalism, destroying unions in the industrial sector and moving entire industries abroad (or more often, to the non-union U.S. South)–evidence of the destructive capacity of this movement can be freely found in the post-industrial cities of Detroit or Youngstown or Bridgeport or New Bedford; 3) that inequality in U.S. society has soared under the neoliberal regime, with the greatest impact on the most vulnerable, i.e. people of color, the very young and very old, the poor.

When it comes to schools, there’s one further aspect I want to point out here. Immediately after the Federal Court ruling desegregating Boston schools, the next very next ruling had to do with a bid by the city of Detroit to integrate its school district with those of the surrounding suburbs. The notion was to create a “mega-district” in which resources would be shared between the urban areas and their suburban parasites, and the children of those areas bussed to different schools in the metropolitan area so as to achieve racial integration. The federal court in the case struck down this plan, thus confining actual school desegregation to the urban areas—or rather, placing the burden for school desegregation on urban districts, and relieving the richer, whiter suburban areas of any responsibility in the matter. This decision, made in the mid-1970s, may have been motivated in part by the fact that major cities were suddenly experiencing massive budget crises, into which suburban areas did not want to be sucked. But it was also clearly motivated by the racism of the representatives of those areas, and the interests of the elite who have ever benefited from the parasitical relationship between cities and suburbs.

Before we move on, let’s take one last look at Rhode Island. Of what I have described in the preceding paragraphs, what’s not to be recognized here? Isolation and degradation of the urban areas, massive restructuring of the industrial base, attacks on unions, parasitism of the suburbs on the metropolitan center, racist “drug war” propaganda and action against the state’s Blacks and Latinos…you name it, we got it. This is where Keith’s criticism of the opponents of Achievement First rings true: much of the suburban opposition is put in terms of “this may be good for those schools, but not for our schools”, and the racist, exclusionary undertones are unmistakable. The problem, I would argue, lies primarily in the racist structure of Rhode Island’s socio-economic and political structure. The racism of the suburban opponents is an echo of a deeper system into which they are embedded, usually without their conscious knowledge. As Kozol put it:

the strongest opposition to integrated schooling among white people is among those who have never experienced it. Genuine participation in integrated schooling, when it’s done in a wise and sensitive way, is consistently the basis for support of integration by white people. When they don’t know anything about it, when their children have never been in an integrated setting, when they’ve never been in an integrated setting, they oppose it. We oppose what we fear, and we fear what we don’t know.

The battle over Achievement First, then, could be an excellent opportunity for activists to give the suburban folks a serious anti-racist education. The key is that defeating Achievement First is only the first step in a long-term campaign around public education, at the heart of which must be demands for school integration and affirmative action, i.e. anti-racist demands.

The Achievement Gap and the Reformers

There is an enduring “achievement gap” between students of color and white students in the United States. I think the best, most concise summary of this question is provided by Brian Jones in this article. I put the term in quotations because I think the causes of the gap are well-known and yet little discussed: poverty, racial discrimination and isolation, lack of equity in school funding and in all aspects of life as it’s experienced by people of different races. After all, “The median Black family has just 5 percent of the wealth of the median white family (with Hispanics much closer to Blacks than whites)–this is one of the most important ways that advantages and disadvantages are passed down over generations.” (This is part of a broader argument for affirmative action programs.) In short: destroy the inequality of wealth, eliminate racial isolation in society, and the “achievement gap” will disappear. If the statement seems simplistic, it’s not: though all the evidence points to this conclusion, the actual process of destroying racial and economic inequality in society will be an enormous, generational struggle.

This is where the Corporate Reformers enter the fray, from a skewed angle. They are not afraid to talk about race, it seems. They love to point to the “achievement gap”, and to data indicating that they can close the gap. But this argument, the evidence for it, and the practices they employ on the basis of it, only make sense from the distorted angle of an unquestioned acceptance of the actual inequality of our society. In other words, since we can’t possibly fix economic and racial inequality in society, let’s find a solution that at least funnels public money into private hands while we put up a neoconservative show of not being racist.

But the facts speak otherwise. It first struck me when I went to look up the Bushwick AF school in Brooklyn, whose principal is the son of a Jamestown school committee member. At the top of the page, it proudly proclaimed that the school was 99% Black and Latino. But this is precisely the sort of racial isolation that’s at the heart of our schools’ race problem, I thought. It’s essentially an argument for “separate but equal”. And so when Keith talked about the paternalism of the Corporate Reform crowd, it really struck a chord. This is precisely the issue—the corporate reformers share the paternalistic, colonialist outlook of the 1% of past centuries. It’s precisely the “let’s civilize the savages” theory that was used to justify European colonialism (and the American genocide against the Native Americans), translated into the language of 21^st Century “education reform”.

Charter schools do not close the “achievement gap”. They take a select portion of the student body of urban schools, weed out the “undesirables” from that population, and then claim success when their rarefied sample of students performs marginally better than their peers in the public schools on standardized tests—which are, in themselves, racist. That this is taken as somehow contributing to progress on the problems of race (though perhaps not racism) in our society, is an indication of just how backward the national discourse on race has become. It should also be pointed out that the charters drain the urban public schools of both resources and talented students, thus rendering the public schools “a school system of last resort”. It’s a re-creation of the school system that was declared unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that kick-started the civil rights movement in 1954.

Where does this leave us in Rhode Island? For one, it should be clear that not only is this model not good for schools in suburban areas, but it’s really especially not good for Providence schools. If anything, it’s worst for Providence schools. But if it’s not good for the suburban schools, there’s a link. Keith points out that the funding formula opened the door for the siphoning of money into the charters, and out of the Providence schools, certainly necessitating the closure of more schools in the future. This fact has led even otherwise corporate-reform-minded individuals to reject Achievement First, or at least to call for slowing down its introduction in Providence. But it’s that same formula that, in the name of providing urban schools with much-needed funds, has taken them out of certain middling suburban districts, in particular the regionalized districts that regionalized precisely because of the wisdom of economies of scale, and because they themselves were not Barrington (which, by the way, got a huge boost in the funding formula), possessing a large and generous tax base in a well-to-do community. (White) people in these communities may well express their opposition in terms underpinned with racism; but their racism is, in this case, the self-defeating Trojan Horse that blinds them to the actual commonality of interests with Blacks and Latinos in the urban districts. True, they do not suffer the marginalization and demonization of urban communities—but neither do they benefit from it. It’s a classic case of Frederick Douglass’s dictum, they divided both to conquer each.

Conclusion: Anti-racist demands must be the heart and soul of our struggle

The United States was founded on racist premises, and racism has been at the heart of our nation’s history at every moment along the way. It has always had a material foundation, first with the centuries-long genocide of the native peoples. It divided the laboring classes, first in the institution of slavery, then in the competition between Black and white wage workers after the end of Reconstruction. It took on new forms in the conquest of the northern part of Mexico and the institution of migrant labor that still forms the basis of the agricultural economy of this country. And it has reared its ugly head with every new wave of immigration the country—a country of immigrants—has experienced. It is a material phenomenon which will only be defeated when the physical economic system in which a small elite benefits from racism of all forms is itself completely smashed. In the meantime, racist ideas must be challenged at every step, but without any illusion that simply changing people’s minds will somehow abolish racism. That is impossible without system change. And it means that how we take on those ideas differs, depending on who holds them and to what end; and that the racism of ordinary white people will be most effectively changed when our struggle changes the material foundation of society.

This was what made me most uncomfortable about Keith’s conclusion: he seems to accept that the racism of individuals and the racism of social institutions is one and the same—and he, rightfully, wants no part of it. I would maintain that this attitude leads us (the activists) to a position of scornful non-engagement with people that we want, eventually, to win to our side. These are people who accept racist ideas to their own detriment. They are people who live in relative comfort in their largely white suburban communities, communities that are going to come under increased financial strain as the current economic crises continues (and in my opinion, it will do so until a major cataclysm clears out the current capitalist crisis). They are people who may be led either to continue trying to use racism to wall themselves off in a delusional escape from the crisis of the system, or to supporting a broad, mass, anti-racist struggle that transforms their world in ways they can’t currently imagine.

As a side note, I think it’s of little use to criticize the demands of people in urban schools when they don’t specifically take up the question of racism within a three-minute time period. Keith says, “When I hear people pretending that all that’s wrong with Providence public schools are faulty facilities and the lack of recess, I hear a uncritical denial of the systemic and individual racism and classism that plague our classrooms in the forms of bad policy and educational malpractice.” Again, I was not at the same hearing he attended, but I think I know the people he’s talking about here, and I venture to say that they were not “pretending” that these are the only problems of the schools. In fact, they’re not wrong to take them up, and they can be understood very simply in the terms of the racism of our society. Who wouldn’t imagine that the lack of recess at urban schools must have a connection with the assumption that Black and Latino students are likely to go without the freedom to go outside as adults? This has, in fact, happened to a huge portion of the adult population of people of color in the United States. It’s called prisons. So rather than criticize well-meaning activists, let’s extend the conversation and engage ourselves fully in the process of building an inclusive, anti-racist movement for public education with a broad, transformational vision.

Let’s think of this: imagine that Rhode Island undertakes two major initiatives at once. On one hand, the state decides to start taxing the rich at appropriate rates, including the “non-profit” institutions of Brown University and the Providence Place Mall (together, their property taxes would contribute $50 million per year to the city of Providence). On the other hand, the state reorganizes the 36-odd school districts into one consolidated district, fully funded directly by the state of Rhode Island itself. (If the state wants to take part of the property taxes that are now used by the local districts to fund this, that’s fine with me—so long as property taxes are no longer the primary basis for school funding.) The new consolidated state-wide district would provide its teachers with a state-wide contract that combines the most generous provisions of all the existing contracts. The state coordinates the existing teacher-training programs with the universities, implementing a strong affirmative action program that aims to recruit and train Black and Latino teachers in large numbers, thus overcoming the racial gap between students and teachers that exists particularly in urban districts. The state provides quality neighborhood schools at the K-8 level to all areas, with reduced class sizes, and a particular emphasis on funneling resources to the schools in the most economically and racially disadvantaged areas. And at the high school level, the state manages a system of racially-integrated high schools, in which kids in the suburban areas leave behind their provincial communities and learn about the real diversity of their society, long before they get to college or beyond. This system would open up tremendous space for educational innovation and experimentation, free from the constraints of budget crises.

This vision could only be achieved by a serious struggle from below, one that puts anti-racist demands at the heart of its program, one that promotes activists of color while carrying out systematic anti-racist education among the white parents, teachers and students who stand to benefit from the struggle. Only a unified struggle along these lines can ultimately guarantee victory to our movement to defend and advance public education.

Two things started the evening off right: first, the mic check from Occupy Providence folks.  Brilliant!  If anything, I think we missed opportunities for other mic checks to wrap up the AF folks and throw them off their game.  But it was a promising sign that the first AF speaker was completely on the defensive, warning their sponsors at RIDE that “they were going to hear a lot of misinformation”.  It was clear that the RI-CAN / DFER / RIMA / AF folks (don’t they have enough organizations already?) were freaked by the WE-CAN website.  Oh snap!  Someone calls their bluff and they lose their sh*t!

Naturally, the AF folks had stacked the first part of the list.  So it took a while to get through the same tired routine before the voices of opposition could be heard.  The initial ProJo report put the number at 75, but I’d say it was closer to 100 or perhaps more.  The room seemed more evenly stacked this time, unlike at the Cranston hearing back in late May where the AF people were vastly outnumbered.  By my reckoning, it was a lot of the same people they had back then, with the addition of a few Latinas who made a point of speaking in Spanish without translation.  I was quite happy when Ferdinand called them out on this during his comments, much later on.  Of course, they have more Providence friends now, such as Susan Lusi and Keith Oliveira, a man who should probably be ashamed of his use of political connections to open doors for charter schools.  But on the whole, it looked to me like much the same act.

Two of their speakers of note: first, the ridiculous Cathy Kaiser, chair of the Jamestown School Committee.  Her son is the principal of the Achievement First Endeavor Middle School in Brooklyn, the one discussed in the videos posted on the WE-CAN website and first seen by many in Providence via The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.  At one point, she shushed the crowd, saying, “the students at Achievement First Schools know how to listen!”  Yes, of course—because they’re afraid not to!  It was condescending to the point of ridiculous.  The other pro-AF speaker of note was the one that most irritated me: Sabina Matos, the one woman on the Providence City Council.  I remember when Sabina was wearing a Ché t-shirt back during May Day 2006.  Now she’s a shill for the corporate takeover of education.  She should be ashamed, and so should everyone who worked for her election.

From our end, it was good to see so many folks who’ve come through the Coalition at different points, coming back around.  I think this is the nature of our struggle: during the lean periods, a core of activists holds together a basic network that is ready to go into action when the struggle comes back around.  The very existence of that network each time makes the action more effective, and each action expands the network.  For now, that is the dynamic, slow though it may be.  Also quite interesting to me was the range of people speaking out against Achievement First this time—there were a number of folks from North Providence, all (with one humorous exception discussed below) solidly in the anti-AF camp.  The best was the first, Rodrigo deSilva, a resident of NP and a Cranston teacher.  He was the first anti-AF speaker, and among other brilliant things he said, he pointed out that “per-pupil expenditure” is a fluid question.  NP would certainly have to pay transportation costs for students going to the AF school in Providence—and this extra cost would increase the overall expenditures of the district, and thus also the per-pupil expenditure…leading to even more money going into AF coffers.  Quite insightful.

A number of others spoke well.  Dan Wall pointed out: if AF wasn’t good for Cranston three months ago, why is it good for Providence now?  Jeanne Link talked about how Lima has met AYP for six years—despite the mold and the ceiling leaks, which she had blown-up pictures to document, an important point in the discussion.  And Cathy Crain’s comments were actually quite good—a certain disgruntled character actor-turned-teacher noted to me after she spoke, “She annoys me less now,” which is a tremendous statement coming from this person.  One thing that emerged through these comments was the difference in taking on AF in Providence versus in Cranston.  There, it was the mayor’s insults against the underfunded but good schools that raised the ire of the community and provoked a massive backlash.  In Providence, the argument against AF is merged with the demands to put more money into Providence schools, to improve the physical plant of the schools and to reduce class sizes.  This will be an important step in advancing the argument in Providence—and in drawing new people into the movement.

Tom Hoffman openly questioned the language in the application, beautifully stumping the AF people, none of whom bothered to respond to his question.  The RIDE official refused to answer the simple question: how does the RIDE stipulation that the school accept students equally from each of the communities apply to a proposal that essentially leaves open the possibility that a disproportionate number could come from Providence, or even Providence alone?  He drove through the point that the law is essentially being disregarded, or changed by the very people who are supposed to abide by it.

And to be frank… I love insulting corporate hacks to their faces.  It’s one of the most thrilling things I get to do these days.  The one “North Providence” person who supported AF was none other than Anna Cano Morales, RI-CAN  staffer and a member of the Central Falls School Board who voted to fire the teachers in 2010.  Apparently she can be on the school board in CF but live in NP!  It was a joy and a pleasure to call out this opportunist, who simply introduced herself as “a homeowner and parent” in North Providence.  These people have no shame until we throw it at them.

There are some significant issues with this whole charade.  As Regent Betsy Shimberg (an ardent AF supporter, but who was very friendly to me last night) explained, these are RIDE hearings, held by the office of Transformation, and RIDE reports their findings to the BoR.  The reports RIDE hands to the BoR can contain all sorts of information—and from the last time around, there’s an indication that the RIDE report contained mischaracterizations of the comments and included unannounced information about the speakers.  RIDE is NOT a disinterested party in this process.  Furthermore, the locations of the hearings are close to NP and Cranston, respectively, but not in those communities (let alone Warwick).  Why?  Could it be that the opposition in those communities would be crushing?  There’s plenty that is disingenuous and plenty that is flat-out nefarious in all of this process.  No one should have illusions in the “democratic” nature of these hearings.

There are, of course, some issues for our side.  It is true that, unlike the last time around in Cranston, we do not have a mass movement to rely on.  There was quite an array of people there, but to call that crowd a “movement” would be quite a stretch.  My concern is that without that mass movement, we are in a weaker position overall, even if our opponents are standing on shaky ground.  That said, I think we should also be wary of short cuts and quick fixes.  I think the We-Can website is an excellent site, and a very good resource.  But I would caution against those who might be tempted to use that site, or more, to use a list of organizations that sign on, as evidence of a mass movement.  Only the physical people that make up the mass movement can be the mass movement, and it’s our job as activists to attempt to organize what we can, to prepare for the emergence of that movement at various points.  Good media and connections to other organizations and such are all good things, but they cannot substitute for actual organizing of people, a thing which is easier at certain points and harder at others.  We’re in a period of ebb at this point; but as the budget crunch happens again in the spring, as it does every spring, there will likely be new openings for the network of activists to ride the wave of the mass movement, to organize new people in the struggle, to educate new people on the stakes not just of the budget cuts, but of the struggle against the entire corporate reform agenda.  Patience is never an easy thing, but usually necessary.

So what next?  I think there are a few steps we should start on immediately:

1.  The connections and histories of the individuals in the various organizations—RIMA, RI-CAN, AF, and Democrats for Education Reform—need to be examined and publicized.  By this, I mean both their internal, Rhode Island connections, and also their connections to the national corporate reform machine (Broad, Gates, Walton Family, etc.)  Mme Defarge, there’s knitting to be done.

2.  Much as I hate the term, we need to work on “outreach” to particular communities, including:

• the Latino community in Providence, by means of a community forum in Spanish, organized in conjunction with key immigrant rights leaders.  While the main audience for this is the mass of Latino parents, the forum should be well-attended by white Anglo teachers and activists as a genuine gesture of solidarity.  There is much that people outside the immigrant community do not understand about the dynamics that are impacting immigrants, and it pains me everytime I hear people ask “where are the Latino parents?”, whatever tone the question is posed with.
• Providence teachers.  This requires the framing of the argument along the lines discussed above: we reject Achievement First and demand these improvements to our schools.
• The communities of Warwick, Cranston, and North Providence.  There is significant opposition from school boards, city councils, and superintendants in all three districts; we should link up with the officials, but more importantly, with the parents and teachers in these communities.  Bringing them into the Coalition to Defend Public Education, even if they may not stick around after this battle, would be a very significant step in organizing state-wide resistance to the corporate reform movement.

3.  We need to organize a big rally.  The Cranston rally in late August was crucial to the defeat of AF in round one; we need to mobilize along those lines for round two.  It appears that the next official steps will be a hearing on the AF application at the BoR meeting on January 5, and then a possible vote by the BoR on January 19.  I would suggest that we start building for a mass rally at the State House, targeting Governor Chafee, perhaps for MLK Day or that weekend.  While we should mobilize for the hearings, etc., I think it would be best to build our own rally to target the application, just as they Cranston folks did in their community—only this time, let’s mobilize EVERYONE from all the affected communities and beyond.  Let’s have speakers from each community lend their voice to the struggle.  Every crisis is an opportunity, so let’s seize this one.

(Thanks to Alex Lucini for the title of this piece.)

School desegregation became the law of the land with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court ruling in 1954.  However, it was only implemented through that series of mass struggles from below known as the Civil Rights movement.  Boston was a particular flash point in this struggle in the mid 1970s, when court-ordered busing of students to achieve racial integration began.  The importance and intensity of the Boston struggle stemmed from the finding of systematic racism on the part of the Boston School Committee by a federal judge, from intense resistance to the judge’s solution that was organized by racist politicians and community activists, and from the courage and determination of Boston’s Blacks not to be intimidated into continued acceptance of de facto segregation.

The problem is that despite the court rulings and the struggles to implement them, segregation persists.  Orfield and others have noted that while 63.6% of Black students were in schools that were less than 50% white in 1972, by 1994 that rate had increased to 67.1%.  “Overall, the level of Black segregation in U.S. schools is increasing slowly, continuing an historic reversal first apparent in the 1991 enrollment statistics” (1997, p. 7).  In addition, a number of school desegregation programs around the country have been dismantled or threatened, including Boston’s relatively successful program of Controlled Choice (Willie, 1998).  In the face of the erosion of the gains of the Civil Rights movement, we must ask: what has been the effect of the desegregation efforts of that era on schools and students?  With reference largely (though not exclusively) to Boston, I will review the history of school desegregation and busing in the courts and in the streets.  I will then examine the results of school desegregation: the impact of the struggle on student achievement and public opinion; the myth of white flight; and the status of integration since the mid 1970s.

History of School Desegregation: Court Rulings

The era of school desegregation started with the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954, which overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision allowing for “separate but equal” schools, restaurants, cities, etc.  The Court ruled that school facilities were never “separate but equal”, and that therefore, the schools should be actively desegregated.  However, as Fife (1996) observes: “It is important to note that the justices invalidated de jure segregation in their decision.  De facto segregation was not invalidated” (p. 48).  The Court ruled in the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education decision in 1971 that busing was a legal measure in the promotion of school desegregation.  This was a major step forward, since busing was and remains the most concrete and active means of enforcing desegregation.  However, the scope of Swann was limited with the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision.  The Court ruled against a plan in Detroit that would have established a metropolitan unitary school system encompassing three counties, thus integrating mostly Black city schools with mostly white suburban schools.  Fife (1996) says of this decision: “The justices have limited the scope of public school desegregation only to those districts that have demonstrated de jure segregation.  The focus, and indeed the public discourse concerning schools desegregation, still lies on single school districts.  Because of prevailing residential patterns over the past thirty years or so, this means that school desegregation has remained largely an urban phenomenon, and suburban America has been excluded to a considerable extent” (p. 51).  As Dentler (1997) notes, “President Nixon’s appointment of William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court began to subvert the Brown decision… [T]he federal policy commitment to school desegregation [had] lasted for only a few years during the Johnson Administration” (p. 9).

History of School Desegregation: The Struggle in Boston

In 1965, Massachusetts passed the Racial Imbalance Act, becoming the first state to enact a law banning segregated schools, even de facto—though it had no means of enforcement.  The Act finally became real on June 21, 1974, when Federal Judge Arthur Garrity ordered desegregation of the Boston schools through busing, a plan known as Phase I.  The plan was actually rather modest: “[A] large number of students in Boston were already being bused at the time desegregation was mandated by the Court… the school desegregation plan called for busing only 15,000 students—or half the number that were already being transported to school before the court-ordered desegregation” (Reed, 1982, pp. 198-199).  However, judicial rulings are one thing—their implementation is quite another.

The struggle in Boston began in earnest on September 9, 1974, the first day of school under Phase I.  A mob of anti-busing whites surrounded South Boston High School and pelted buses carrying 56 Black students with fruit, beer cans, and rocks (Hillson, 1977, pp. 23-36).  These demonstrations were accompanied by school boycotts of white students against the desegregation order, organized by the group Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR).  ROAR was joined at rallied by the Ku Klux Klan and other virulently racist groups, transforming the mood of the city into one of racist terror.  A football game between South Boston and East Boston, predominantly white neighborhoods, featured a half-time anti-busing rally complete with the burning effigy of a school bus.  Black students faced daily harassment in school classrooms and hallways, from white students and teachers (Hillson, 1977, pp. 187-198).  A pulled fire alarm at Hyde Park High School on April 29, 1976, saw Black students running a gauntlet, ambushed by stone-throwing white students (Hillson, 1977, pp. 248-249).  Even whites were subject to racist violence: for example, Tracy Amalfitano, a white pro-busing activist in South Boston who received phone threats and other harassment, whose family car was torched several times, whose windows at her house were repeatedly broken, and whose sister’s beauty parlor was wrecked (Hillson, 1977, pp. 106-107).  The violence only subsided with the Supreme Court’s rejection of an appeal by ROAR and others of Phase II, Judge Garrity’s plan for expanding desegregation in the 1975-76 school year.  However, the force behind the implementation of integration—and the real heroes of the whole story—were the Black students who had the courage to ride the buses and attend the white schools, who refused the back down even in the face of violence and abuse.

Anti-racist, pro-busing forces, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Student Coalition Against Racism, also mobilized support, calling rallies of 12,000 on December 14, 1974 and 15,000 on May 15,1975, the anniversary of the Brown decision.  Racists, led by ROAR, demonstrated in the same spot the day after both times, pulling out only 2,000-3,000 people each time.  Most Bostonians supported busing or were neutral on the issue; the resistance came from well-organized anti-busing groups, led by prominent local politicians who claimed to speak for all white folk in Boston.  ROAR, the most prominent of these, was organized by Louise Day Hicks, a Democrat who had served on the Boston School Committee and the City Council.  The rhetoric of these demagogues stressed opposition to “forced busing” and support for “neighborhood schools”—which, in a city as segregated as Boston, meant maintaining that segregation.  The anti-busing movement received moral support even from President Gerald Ford, who said, “I respectfully disagree with the judge’s order” (Hillson, 1977, pp. 35-36).  Ross and Berg (1981) noted: “It is not insignificant that during the first year of implementation in Boston, not one white city official expressed anything more than begrudging and equivocal support for the court order” (p. 680).  Stevens (1997) adds: “Public officials in general, locally and in Washington, have never been advocated of school desegregation” (p. 6).  This tacit support of segregation made a tremendous difference in the ease with which desegregations was implemented: “In communities where public officials and other social authorities gave support and direction to the desegregation effort, violence was negligible or nonexistent” (Willie, 1997, p. 15).

Results: Does Desegregation Improve Learning and Achievement?

The data on this issue reveal modest but significant gains in the achievement of Black students.  Buell (1982) notes that Black students’ test scores were consistently lower than those of white students from 1976-1980, but the book gives no data prior to busing with which to compare.  Also, dropout rates increased in the late 1970s in some but not all schools; yet “[c]omparison of all city high-school graduates… uncovered a 2 percent increase in the junior college proportion in 1976-1980” (p. 162).  Later on, Whitman and Friedman (1992) pointed out that “desegregation has no measurable effect on which academic achievement.  But for Black students, desegregated classrooms can lead to modest reading gains, particularly before third grade” (p. 65).  In a Hartford, CT survey by Robert Crain, “[Black] students in the integrated schools were less likely to drop out of school, get arrested or become teen parents, and they were more likely to graduate from college, hold good jobs and live in integrated neighborhoods” (Whitman and Friedman, 1992, p. 65).  The explanation for improved performance and quality of life after school likely resides in the fact that, whereas before desegregation school funding and resources were unfairly allocated in favor of whites, the process of desegregation forced school boards to fund schools more evenly, and even to institute remedial programs or building renovation in those schools that had previously been disadvantaged.  The harmful effects of the cessation of desegregation programs are also documented: in Norfolk, VA, “test scores dropped at the 10 target schools after the end of busing.  In 1991 Black third-graders in the target schools scored 5 percentage points lower than Black third-graders in the remaining integrated elementaries on a battery of tests.  Last year Black third-graders in the target schools tested 10 percentage points lower” (Kunen, 1996, p. 43).

Public Opinion

Despite the tone set by most media coverage of school desegregation, and certainly contrary to the rhetoric of both Democratic and Republican politicians, busing and even more so desegregation have wide support.  Stevens (1997) collected a wide array of statistics: a poll by Louis Harris in 1986 showed that in 1976, Americans opposed busing 78% to 15%, but by 1986, 53% opposed busing, versus 41% for it, a massive shift of 25% of the population.  Parent satisfaction with busing rose from 54% in 1981 to 71% in 1986, with the biggest gain among white parents.  In addition, Stevens quotes a 1991 Boston Globe survey which found that 76% of Blacks, 60% of Hispanics, and 41% of whites were in favor of busing.  And a 1994 USA Today poll showed that 84% of Blacks and 52% of whites thought more, not less, needed to be done to integrate schools.  While support for integration rose among all races, the often hidden class dimension of the struggle for desegregation and generally of racism in America reared its head: “The truth, however, is that poorly educated Americans and low-wage workers are far more likely than college graduates and the wealthy to support busing… And the most supportive parents turned out to be precisely those whose kids had been bused” (Whitman and Friedman, 1992, p. 65).  As noted above, desegregation plans affected mainly major city school systems and left suburban systems—which contained a much larger proportion of better-off middle-class students—untouched.  All of this casts doubt on the traditional image of the enlightened middle- or upper-class liberal.  In contrast, working-class whites are actually more supportive of desegregation.

The Myth of “White Flight”

A common claim of opponents of desegregation is that busing actually drove whites out of the public schools, and they point to decreasing white enrollments as proof of this assertion.  In Boston, after the desegregation order, white student enrollment declined by ten percent each years, twice the pre-busing average (Ross and Berg, 1981, p. 674).  However, Willie (1997) notes: “It is true that Boston lost 17% of its white students the year after the 1975 comprehensive student assignment plan was ordered.  But Boston also lost 5% of its Black students that year” (p. 16).  In fact, “Harvard Professor Gary Orfield found that which enrollment fell substantially after the 1970s, even in cities that had stopped busing or had no desegregation orders”  (Whitman and Friedman, 1992, p. 65).  Hillson (1977, p. 265) claims that “white flight” in Boston is largely disproved by the fact that prior to the court order, names of white students sometimes appeared several times on enrollment rosters so as to inflate enrollment figures and bring more federal aid into the school.  The desegregation process abolished this practice, thus eliminating a supposed number of white students who were never actually there in the first place.

Lauren McDonald (1997) provides the most devastating refutation of the theory of white flight.  She demonstrates that the end of the Baby Boom coincided eighteen years later with the declining white enrollments.  “Coincidentally, children born during the peak birth years for both Massachusetts and Boston, 1956, 1957, and 1958, were graduating from high school in 1974, 1975, and 1976, respectively.  As a result, Boston and its surrounding suburbs were losing their potentially largest twelfth grade classes during the mid-1970s.  At the same time, these districts had one of their smallest first grade classes entering in the past twenty years” (p. 23).  This combined with white emigration to the South and West and with a new influx of non-white immigrants to lower the overall proportion of white students in Boston public schools—and it was this demographic shift that gave any credibility to the “white flight” argument.  Many on the left or in liberal circles accepted white flight, and with it the notion that the white working class was largely racist and would take any opportunity to evade integration.  As noted in the above section on public opinion, this stereotypical notion is often incorrect and should therefore be rejected.  The theory of white flight, however, is most dangerous when wielded by opponents of integration, for it provides a respectable cover for an actual, underlying racist intention:

“White flight is not commonly viewed as a negative social phenomenon because whites left for racist or prejudicial reasons.  Instead, white flight is often viewed as a negative social condition because the absence of whites in the urban public school system means that the schools have little hope of being successful.  The underlying message is that predominantly minority school systems need white students in order to be considered good school systems.  This idea is not only racist and prejudicial at best, but can be detrimental to public policy decisions that affect urban education.  Focusing on the students who are currently enrolled, their needs, abilities, and willingness to learn will be a far more progressive approach to take in the future.”  (p. 29)

Has Integration Succeeded?

The answer to this question is not rosy, but neither is it simple.  The work of Orfield et al. (1997) cited at the beginning points toward increasing racial isolation.  Due to the prohibition on combining urban and suburban school districts—as a result of the Milliken decision—“Detroit’s public school system is not 94% minority.  By 1990, in the 18 largest Northern metropolitan areas, Blacks had become so isolated that 78% of them would have had to move in order to achieve an evenly distributed residential pattern” (Kunen, 1996, p. 41).  Furthermore, Willie (1990) notes that 80% of minority students in Connecticut are concentrated into 14 districts.  But Stevens (1997) points out that hundreds of school districts still have desegregation programs in place.  He says, “It is true that racial isolation in the schools is still a common pattern.  On the other hand, there are more desegregated schools that there were 20 years ago.  In 1968, nearly two-thirds (64%) of all Black pupils in the United States attended one-race Black schools that were 90% or more Black.  As of 1994, the percentage of Black pupils in such schools is one-third (34%)” (p. 6).  With reference to Boston, Buell (1982) remarks: “the simple claim that Judge Garrity only made racial imbalance worse than ever before is wrong.  Despite the increase in 50 percent or more Black schools documented above, his edicts virtually eliminated the less-than-1 percent and 75 percent or more Black enrollments so common before busing” (p. 157).

Contrary to those on the right who decry progressive reforms in the schools as a vehicle for social change, Peterman (1986) cited a number of studies that demonstrated that school desegregation had the objective, unintended effect of desegregating the community.  Kunen (1996) adds: “School desegregation also leads to housing desegregation, not only by promoting tolerance but also, to put it bluntly, by making it impossible to avoid an integrated school by choosing where you live.”  He gives the example of Louisville, KY, where, “by 1990, though only 17% of the area’s residents were Black, a mere one-quarter of 1% of the population lived in a census tract without Black neighbors” (p. 44).  Effective school desegregation programs have the effect of combating racially discriminatory practices in other areas of society.  We should not be surprised, then, to find that the cause of school desegregation has suffered not only from direct attacks, but from the more general societal trend throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s by which the right wing has rolled back affirmative action and other gains of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  It is this overall social fluctuation, perpetuated by politicians and big businesses who stand to gain from increased prison and military spending at the expense of social spending, that effectively explains why racial isolation and separation persist, rather than any fundamental flaw with the drive toward integration.

Conclusion

Willie (1990) states: “It is fair to classify most of the court-ordered school desegregation plans as patchwork, pragmatic efforts… In several communities throughout the United States this kind of piecemeal action has generated confusion and controversy” (p. 74).  While this is no  doubt true, it does not in itself explain the deflection of school desegregation.  What is more important is this: despite evidence of positive effects of desegregation and busing, despite public opinion in favor of it, politicians and right-wingers have been able to roll back desegregation, to put a negative spin on it veiled racist code words, etc.  It would be interesting and useful to have more research on the few successful desegregation programs in the country, and even more so to have more research on the effects of the dismantling of integration plans, as this latter condition has prevailed throughout the past decade.  However, the question “what still needs to be done?” is not about research or academic nit-picking.  It’s about the actual struggle to end racism and make racial integration and equality a permanent fact in our society.  As for outlets for dissemination of this message, all possible avenues must be explored and exploited, particularly teachers’ unions and parents’ organizations.  However, if we wish to go beyond mere dissemination of information and actually change public policy, this will require the direct action of teachers, students, and parents in support of integration and for more funding and resources for public schools.  The original struggle for desegregation may have had a judicial mandate, but implementation of that mandate only occurred because thousands of people took to the streets to enforce it.  As Fife (1996) notes, recent court decisions have shifted oversight of desegregation away from the courts toward local officials, and this will mean a vastly decreased role for the judiciary in future efforts toward desegregation.  This puts a premium on the actions and struggles of ordinary people to end segregation and racism.

REFERENCES

Buell, E. H. (1982). School Desegregation and Defended Neighborhoods: The Boston Controversy.  Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co.

Dentler, R.A. (1997).  Past, present, and future in school desegregation: A review.  Equity and Excellence in Education, 30 (3), 8-12.

Fife, B. L. (1996).  The Supreme Court and school desegregation since 1896.  Equity and Excellence in Education, 29 (2), 46-55.

Hillson, J. (1977).  The Battle of Boston.  New York: Pathfinder Press.

Kunen, J. S.  (1996, April 29).  The end of integration.  Time, pp. 39-45.

McDonald, L. E.  (1997).  Boston public school white enrollment decline: White flight or demographic factors?  Equity and Excellence in Education, 30 (3), 21-30.

Orfield, G., Bachmeier, M. D., James, D. R., and Eitle, T. (1997).  Deepening segregation in American public schools: A special report from the Harvard Project on School Desegregation.  Equity and Excellence in Education, 30 (2), 5-24.

Peterman, W. A. (1986).  Integration, resegregation, and integration maintenance.  Equity and Excellence in Education, 22 (4-6), 90-99.

Reed, R. J. (1982). School boards, the community, and school desegregation.  Journal of Black Studies, 13 (2), 189-206.

Ross, J. M. and Berg, W. M. (1981). “I Respectfully Disagree with the Judge’s Order”. Washington, D.C.: The University Press of America.

Stevens, L. B. (1997). Conventional wisdom and school desegregation.  Equity and Excellence in Education, 30 (3), 5-7.

Whitman, D., and Friedman, D. (1992, April 13).  Busing’s unheralded legacy. U.S. News and World Report, pp. 63-65.

Willie, C. V. (1990).  Diversity, school improvement, and choice: Research agenda items for the 1990s.  Education and Urban Society, 23 (1), 73-79.

Willie, C. V. (1997).  What we learned about urban education planning and governance from the Boston school desegregation experience.  Equity and Excellence in Education, 30 (3), 13-20.

Willie, C. V. (1998).  Memorandum to the Boston, Massachusetts, School Committee.  Equity and Excellence in Education, 31 (3), 13-17.

Alternate Title #2: PROTEST DUNCAN.

Alternate Title #3: OCCUPY ARNE.

So, the principal’s secretary at my school forwarded the following, with a note expressing great pleasure that a student from our school had been selected as an alternate on the panel asking questions of Secretary Duncan.  Oh joy.  Here’s the invitation:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will be visiting Rhode Island November 2, 2011, for a Town Hall Meeting.  Sponsored by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, this event is a wonderful opportunity for students, teachers, parents, administrators and the community members to join in on the discussion about education reform on the state and national levels.   Please join us for this exciting event!  Details and RSVP information below:

“Town Hall Meeting”

With

The United States Secretary of Education

Arne Duncan

November 2, 2011

 

The Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC) is pleased to invite you to a Town Hall Meeting featuring United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to be held on November 2, 2011.

Co-sponsored by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the meeting will be held at the Providence Career and Technical Academy at 41 Fricker Ave., Providence, RI.

The program begins at 3:15 pm and ends at 4:15 pm. Secretary Duncan will offer brief remarks and respond to questions from a panel of education and community leaders, followed by questions from the audience.

I hope you are able to join us to hear from Secretary Duncan and that the discussion will provide additional insight into the future of education and the changing federal role. For more details, please see the attached agenda.

 

RSVP your attendance no later than October 26th to Marguerite Paredes by email (m_paredes@ripec.com) or by calling 521-6320.

Thank you.

___­_______     I will attend

 

__________     I am unable to attend

 

Hayley Jamroz

Executive Staff Assistant

Office of the Commissioner

RI Department of Education & Secondary Education

255 Westminster Street

Providence, RI  02903

401-222-4690

401-222-6178 (fax)

www.ride.ri.gov

Now, as you probably guessed by the fact that I’m posting this so late on October 26, well, I forgot to RSVP.  Shucks…now I’ll never get to dialogue with Secretary Duncan!

But let’s cut to the chase.  This event is a highly scripted “town hall” meeting organized by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council and sponsored by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown, and also…Citizens Bank!  Yes, folks, the technocrats are wining and dining the key architect of school deform, with support from the bankers.  Duncan, who could not be bothered to come to Rhode Island when he applauded (and perhaps also plotted?) the firing of Central Falls teachers, will be in public for exactly an hour.  The attendance will be tightly controlled by RIPEC, and questions will only be taken from those invited to ask questions.  Oh, and afterward, Duncan will be speaking at a RIPEC dinner, admission to which costs a mere $300 per plate!  One wonders if the message of “we are the 99%” has been lost on the guy in charge of our nation’s public schools when he’s clearly aiming to hang with the 1% in Providence.

All of this raises a twofold question for me, and I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.  Why, exactly, is it that Duncan is speaking in Rhode Island under the auspices of RIPEC, and not those of RIDE?  Is this simply a strange coincidence? Is this an intentional insult to Deborah Gist (something I doubt)?  Or is there some deeper motive at play in all this?

I tend to think that it’s the latter of these possibilities. It seems that all the education deformers are now talking shop in “economic development forums”, such as the one held in Bristol a couple weeks ago, starring our favorite local rich kid Angus Davis.  “Economic development”, i.e. giving more public money to the private sector under the aegis of “reform” or “development” is precisely the thrust of the Race to the Top.  Elizabeth Harrison’s recent report on the distribution of RTTT funds in Rhode Island sheds some interesting light on the pattern whereby all the money has gone to consultants, mostly for the purpose of “data collection”, the new teacher evaluation system, and bypassing the state’s education schools with a Teach for America-like shortcut designed to cheapen and degrade the profession.  And lastly, of course, is the whole charter school drive—also a part of RTTT, and promoted in no small part by real estate mogul Eli Broad.  Why real estate?  Because much public wealth is tied up in old public school buildings which are now being handed over to the private sector on the cheap.  These are fabulous new sources of easy money for people who have the right connections, and who know how to dress up their real intentions with educational jargon.

The trend of education deform is that they’re trying to get away with providing education on the cheap, while throwing even more public money at the rich.  The irony of this is that they’re attempting this massive robbery of the common good right in the midst of the deepest economic crisis in 80 years—a crisis caused by their own system!  With the Occupy Movement now spreading throughout the entire country, the mandarins of the economy—both public and private—are suddenly exposed for how out of touch they are with the reality of the bottom 99% (or at least the bottom 90%).  They would rather attack us than listen to us.  Fortunately, our side is learning how to speak back in a way they can’t ignore.

Please attend the protest against Arne Duncan in Providence on November 2.  We’ll start around 3pm at the Providence Career and Technical Academy on the corner of Fricker and Cranston Streets, marching from there down to the Rhode Island Convention Center for another rally at 5pm in front of Arne’s dinner with the 1%.  Let’s show Duncan what democracy looks like!

But then, what teacher is encouraging young people to go into the profession now?  The reason for our collective malaise is fairly simple to locate: the public sector, and teachers in particular, have been under a sustained economic and ideological attack for at least the last three years.  I think it’s not hyberbolic to state that there is now underway a serious program to fundamentally restructure teachers’ working conditions and wages, with disastrous results for teachers at all points within their careers—not to mention the damage it does to students through increased class sizes, narrower curriculum and elective offerings at the secondary level, and a teaching staff that is ever more under the gun to enforce the testing juggernaut on students.

The Big Picture

Two economic reports published earlier this month shed light on this situation.  These reports provide the background to the downward spiral to the economy, the maelstrom that teachers are being sucked into.  Of course, not just teachers—this is a massive crisis affecting all sectors of the working class—but the microcosm of teachers is enough to illustrate the twisted logic of the system.

In a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Phil Oliff and Michael Leachman bring out the devastation wrought by budget cuts to schools.  This is stunning: “Elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states, and in at least 30 states school funding now stands below 2008 levels – often far below.”  The report goes on to chart just how severe these cuts have been, and how devastating for local districts, which on average rely on states for almost half their funding.  I won’t go into the details—you can and should read the report for yourself—but suffice it to say, this reduction in state funding has hit poor and urban districts the hardest.  The report is quite sharp in its critique—that this reduction to the poorest districts has hit right as those districts are seeing an exacerbation of the poverty in them, i.e. right when they need a real boost in funding.  And also: all the laid-off teachers means less consumer spending in an economy that desperately needs consumers to start spending.

The other report comes from Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute.  As part of a broader report on the dire state of job growth (or lack thereof), she outlines the damage done to the educational sector:

Almost half (-278,000) of the decline in state and local government jobs was in local public  education, which is largely jobs in public K-12 education (and the majority of workers  in public K-12 education are teachers, but there are also teacher aides, librarians, guidance counselors, administrators, support staff, etc.). On the other hand, over the same period, public K-12 enrollment increased by 0.6 percent (using the actual and projected enrollment growth rates found in Table 1 here). Just to keep up with this growth in the student population, employment in local public education should have grown at roughly the same rate, which would have meant adding around 48,000 jobs. Putting these numbers together (i.e., what was lost plus what should have been added to keep up with the expanding student population) means that the total jobs gap in local public education as a result of the Great Recession and its aftermath is around 326,000 jobs.

This decline means not only larger class sizes, but also fewer teacher aides, fewer extra-curricular activities, and a narrower curriculum for our children. Furthermore, this number almost surely understates the real gap. Between 2008 to 2010, the number of children living in poverty increased by 2.3 million, and is likely even higher today. Increased child poverty increases the need for services provided through schools. Instead, public schools have fewer personnel and fewer resources to educate more students, and more students with greater needs.

Back in Rhode Island

The CBPP report might actually make you glad you live in Rhode Island and not, say, California or South Carolina or New Mexico.  But it has not been pretty.  Let’s look at the data from 2007 vs. 2010 to 2011.  The first thing to note is that we’re up from last year: state spending on education in 2010 increased by 2%, or roughly $94 per student.  But on closer inspection, we are still down 4.4%, or $219 per student, since 2007.  So we may have bounced back between last year and this year, but that means that the bottom was even lower–$313 per student in cuts last year compared to 2007.

But what of our lovely Fair Funding Formula?  I described the outcome of the formula in a snarky way in my letter to Arne Duncan back in May, but I think the basics of it hold true: urban districts got a small boost, but not enough to get them out of crisis; certain suburban districts, especially the regionalized ones, got hit very hard (Central Falls, stunningly, also falls into this category); and Barrington got a big reward for providing more than 90% of its school funds from local property taxes, certainly a luxury that not all communities could afford.  Kevin Faria analyzed the formula on his blog some time back; it’s worth the read to catch up on the formula.  The main flaw is that the formula assumes that the pie does not need to be bigger, or that it cannot be bigger; it simply gets divided differently, with the benefits to some districts far less than the devastation to others.

Then there’s the question of recent contracts and the restructuring of teacher compensation across the board.  I wrote a couple months ago about the contract pattern emerging in the state: pay freezes for the next couple of years, combined with a restructuring of the step system, such that pay scales that used to be ten steps will now be eleven or twelve, as in Cranston and Providence.  In one anonymous district, there’s even talk of fourteen steps—and a different fourteen step scale for hires starting next year.  All of this is not even to talk of the increases in health care, the freezing or eliminating of stipends for advanced degrees, the restructuring of schools to eliminate positions, the impact of the new evaluation system, etc.  Add on to all this the massive attack on teacher of public employee pensions, and we’re looking at the outright impoverishment of a whole category of workers who used to think they were guaranteed something more than misery in their old age.

In short: what we are looking at is an epochal restructuring of the entire public education system on a basis that cheapens the labor of educators and reduces the services offered to students.  It’s an attempt to do education on the cheap, using the economic crisis as an excuse for deeper and deeper cuts.

Solutions, anyone?

There’s one place I’d love to see solutions coming from, but I’m not holding my breath.  That’s the federal government.  A brief review of the record: the original American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 did pump some real stimulus money into the economy, but that amount was small change compared to the scope of the crisis.  Plus, it was counterbalanced by the neoliberal side of the bill which dished out massive tax cuts to the same rich that Bush’s tax cuts had already made much more wealthy.  Later, when Obama had the chance to end the Bush tax cuts, he and the Congressional Democrats wouldn’t do it.  Last summer, the Education Jobs Fund was supposed to put $10 billion back in to schools—but just as with the bank bailout, there was ample evidence to the effect that the money was being hoarded for other uses, and not put back in to restoring cuts, rehiring teachers, etc.  Now, in the wake of the deficit deal which promises to destroy Social Security—something Bush could not do—we have so much bluff and bluster about needing new jobs legislation.  Sorry, but I don’t buy it.  Here’s a good critique of the b.s.

So if not there, whence a solution?  Well, the next place to look would be from the state.  The CBPP report also chides states for not finding new sources of revenue, i.e. not raising state taxes on the rich.  Of course, there is endless hue and cry about how bad it is for Rhode Island’s rich who pay so many taxes.  You know, those major contributors like GTECH and Fidelity Investments, or Jonathan Nelson, Providence’s resident billionaire whose wealth increased by $300 million last year.  Yeah, that guy is feeling the pinch of our state taxes, no doubt!  But instead, we have a treasurer and a governor (backed by the unions, who never seem to realize that they should give up backing any candidates at all and just make demands) who are laying the burden for the state’s economic woes…at the doorstep of the people who are taking pay freezes and cuts and getting laid off!  In this context, it’s unlikely that municipalities will be able to make up the difference.  They are already reeling from cuts to their state aid, and will likely be unable to raise much more in revenue from local property taxes when the real estate market is still in the dumps.

This all comes back to one thing: the necessity of resistance.  The Occupy Movement is opening up new vistas of political resistance to the austerity agenda that is being imposed on us.  I believe that there’s still a long way to go before this movement has the strength to stop the austerity agenda.  The example of Greece is both inspiring and sobering in this regard.  But for the first time since the onset of the economic crisis, ordinary working-class Americans are starting to break out of the shame of suffering in isolation, and to generalize from their own situation to society in general.  For years, we heard “TINA”: There Is No Alternative to the free market, privatization, neoliberalism.  Now, there is no alternative but to fight against the system.

So to that end, I would like to invite one and all to come protest Arne Duncan when he comes to visit Rhode Island next week.  There is much we could say about the rottenness of the man in charge of our nation’s educational system, but I’ll leave that for another day.  To be honest, I have a hunch that I’m going to get a “talking to” on account of my own participation in this effort.  Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to be out of a job myself come next school year.  But that’s not going to keep me from fighting.  And now, finally, it looks like it’s not going to keep many more people beyond me from fighting, either.

The Occupy Movement is the concrete expression of the deep, gut-level anti-capitalism that has been fermenting in the minds of hundreds of millions of workers in the U.S. and internationally.  It’s a hitherto almost completely unconscious lens through which most people have seen the world, without even recognizing the difference between that lens and the distorted funhouse mirror of the mainstream media.  The MSM, by the way, has been caught utterly unawares by this movement.  They appear to be completely befuddled by how a movement of hippies and socialists, unemployed kids and professional activists, could so quickly rise up and double the popularity of their darling, the Tea Party.  The fact of Occupy Wall St. and its satellite occupations all over the world has completely changed the political discourse in all of society—and that without making any concrete demands!  The message of “we are the 99%”, for all the problems with that formulation upon closer inspection, has been wildly successful at restating the question on the proper basis.

The Occupy Movement is not simply an expression of outrage at the system, but also a sign of bigger things to come.  One of the first proto-programmatic statements of the movement was the page wearethe99percent.tumblr.com, on which people started to post the now iconic images of themselves holding up signs about the dire economic straits they’re in.  It’s a sure sign of radicalization when people start to generalize about their conditions, and lose the shame of suffering in isolation.  Even more promising is the fact that police repression in New York and Boston has completely failed to stem the tide of the movement.  But perhaps the most promising thing about the movement is the potential for people to generalize from the occupation of public places to the occupation of their workplaces.  To the extent that this movement links up with organized labor (and with unorganized labor in the process of getting organized), it will concretize its demands in far more effective ways than by simply coming up with a laundry list in a General Assembly.  And, to the extent that this happens, the labor movement in this country will be reborn and regenerated, given new life and a new source of energy with which it will transform the society at large.

Some of this has already started to happen—and to happen specfically with teachers.  Here are a few highlights, starting with the labor march in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. that took place on October 5.  In this video are a number of activists with the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), the group that produced the film “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman”.  In Chicago, the Chicago Teachers’ Union passed a resolution in solidarity with Occupy Chicago.  In Seattle, teacher Jesse Hagopian spoke to the crowd at Occupy Seattle’s October 15 labor solidarity and antiwar rally.  And in Los Angeles, a second occupation has started: Occupy LAUSD, which is occupying the space in front of the Los Angeles Unified School District Headquarters.  This is especially significant, given the tremendous numbers of teachers and educational staff who’ve been laid off in LA and around the country over the past three years.  The layoffs are on the order of more than 250,000 jobs in public education in that time, even as the number of children living in poverty—those who need the most in services—has grown tremendously.  And here in Providence, the October 15 march to kick off Occupy Providence featured an elementary school teacher speaking out against the attack on public education led by the supposed leader of the public schools, Deb Gist, who has been working hard with other bureaucrats to introduce Achievement First charter schools to Rhode Island.

The broader significance is this: the Occupy Movement has reignited the notion that ordinary people should be allowed to speak out, should be allowed to protest, and most important, should be allowed to control their own lives.  If this notion makes headway within the public education sector, it will mean that teachers, parents and students should control education.  It means that, rather than viewing teachers as greedy individuals out to harm children for their own benefit, we are actually all together the 99% who have to struggle collectively against the impact of budget cuts, the social factors that make education harder, and the fanatical drive toward standardized testing and “accountability” that is making the educational experience intolerable for teachers and students alike.

So, if you’re ready to find an occupation, here’s what you can do:

1.  Join Occupy Providence (or the occupation in your area).

2.  Attend the Coalition to Defend Public Education’s Teach-in on Achievement First.

3.  Come to the protest we’re organizing against US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who is speaking at a $300 a plate dinner in Providence on November 2.

Teachers, students and parents: we are the 99%!

*****

The Foundations for Language Learning: What Brain Research Has Shown

The starting point for understanding language acquisition is the developmental research started by Eric Lenneberg in the 1960s.  As summarized in Brown (1994), Lenneberg hypothesized a “critical” period for learning languages that coincided with the developmental phase known as “lateralization”, in which the brain assigns tasks to either the left or right sides.  The critical period, then, is a phase in which, due to its plasticity and incomplete development, the brain is most able to incorporate the cognitive structures and practices necessary for language learning.  This phase lasts roughly from the age of two to puberty.  Brown (1994) also relates the conclusions of work done by Walsh and Diller, in which they posited—and found evidence for—the claim that “different aspects of a second language are learned optimally at different ages…” (55).  Walsh and Diller concluded that pronunciation is a lower-order process based on earlier maturation processes, while grammar and syntax are higher-order functions that develop later; thus, the critical period may be most applicable to the question of pronunciation and accent, while having relatively little effect on the rest of language learning.  The critical period applies to both first and second (or other) language learning, and presents an extreme limitation on second language learning later in life.  While language learning is not impossible after the critical period, it is severely limited, and reaching a high level of proficiency (or native-like proficiency, when applied to second language learning) is basically impossible.

Erika Hoff-Ginsberg (1998) cites numerous case studies which demonstrate this last point.  Perhaps the most important is the case of “Genie”, a severely abused girl who was locked in a closet by her father and deprived of all linguistic interaction until age 13.  After her rescue from that situation, Genie was only able to attain the linguistic level of an average 5-year-old—despite intensive linguistic rehabilitation efforts.  Linguistic interaction is not simply verbal: a study with deaf children showed that those who learned American Sign Language after infancy did not perform as well on comprehension and productions tests as the early learners.  In terms of second language learning, the most interesting research involves immigrants and their proficiency in the language of the new country.  Studies showed that the most important factor influencing proficiency was not how long the person had lived in the new country, but rather his or her age upon arrival in that country.  The key to linguistic proficiency among young learners is neural plasticity: “…the structure of the young brain is malleable and shaped by its own activity.  The mature brain, in contrast, is stable, and does not have the same capacity to reorganize itself.”  (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998: 35)

Michael Long (1990) reformulated the notion of the “critical period”, arguing instead that it should be thought of as “sensitive periods”.  He redefines the notion this way: “There are sensitive periods governing the ultimate level of first or second language attainment possible in different linguistic domains, not just phonology, with cumulative declines in learning capacity, not a catastrophic one-time loss, and beginning as early as age 6 in many individuals, not at puberty, as is often claimed.”  (Emphasis added, 255)  Given the general evidence that children in normal circumstances develop linguistic ability at roughly the same age and at roughly the same rate across languages and cultures, Long states that there is indeed a maturation schedule in the development of linguistic proficiency.  He then looks at a number of cases in which children’s language learning has been delayed for various reasons, including a number of the cases cited by Hoff-Ginsberg (1998).  The subjects in these cases developed linguistic skills at a faster rate than normal for regular children, but the end results of their linguistic rehabilitation left them significantly behind the norm, as demonstrated in the case of Genie.  Thus Long concludes that the fact that adults can learn a second language faster than children does not mean they learn it better.

Next, Long turns to studies on second language acquisition, which show a temporary advantage for older children and adults over younger children, in that they acquire second language more quickly, with particular facility in questions of basic morphology (grammar) and syntax.   However, this advantage eventually gives way to the fact that, over time, early learners are able to develop a far deeper command of the language:

Long-term studies (those comparing achievement after several years of foreign language study and/or residence in the SL [second language] environment) have found that younger starters consistently outperform older ones, and that only those who begin an SL as quite young children are ultimately capable of native-like attainment, even after many years of target language exposure.  Learners starting later than age 6 often become communicatively fluent, but also often finish with measurable accents in phonology and, with progressively later starts (e.g., after age 15 for morphology and syntax), with “accents” in other linguistic domains, too.  (265)

This leads Long to posit multiple sensitive periods, affecting different linguistic domains at different times, and with a relation to—but not mechanically tied to or determinant of—general cognitive development.  Long cites the work of Thomas Scovel, who conducted a study in which both native and non-native speakers of English, children and adults in each group, were asked to identify whether the speakers on a number of recordings and writers of short paragraphs were native or non-native speakers of English.  He found “a sensitive period for production on an SL or second dialect phonology by providing evidence of the age-related evolution of accent recognition in [native speakers] and of a sensitive period for accent recognition in non-natives.”  (269)  Additionally, many of the non-native speakers were easily identified as such through their spoken samples, but were not easily identified in their writing—indicating that those who begin learning a second language at a certain point (identified by Long to be between ages 6 and 15, roughly) may attain native proficiency in morphology and syntax, though not in phonology.  Hence, there must be multiple sensitive periods, most obviously for pronunciation on one hand and for grammar and usage on another, but also for learning and learning strategies, recognition of correct pronunciation and usage, etc.

Lastly, Long looks at the potential causes of sensitive periods, which are more generally characterized as maturational constraints: affective or social factors, input factors, cognitive factors, and neurological factors.  Long cites a number of studies that invalidate the claims for affective causes, and points out as well that such claims are: imprecise in locating the causal relation between affect or social situation and the effect on sensitive periods; nearly impossible to measure in any meaningful way; and flat out contradicted by the evidence that sensitive periods occur at roughly the same age across socio-cultural divisions.  Long very summarily dismisses the question of input factors, arguing that wide-ranging types of input and varying amounts of input have been shown to be irrelevant in numerous studies; those that do show them to be significant have serious methodological flaws.  Cognitive factors may well have a role to play, and are most certainly implicated at some level.  However, if it were only a matter of differing cognitive abilities, “we would expect to see evidence of different acquisition processes and sequences…In fact, there has been little evidence of such differences to date, at least where child/adult SLA comparisons are involved…presumably because common general cognitive processes are at work in language learning…”  (277).  Long ends with a discussion of neurological factors, and in particular the loss of plasticity of the brain over time.  Through a process known as myelination, the brain differentiates its functions and assigns them to certain neural pathways around which grow myelin sheaths—a literal “hardening” of the brain.  Neurological development, then, is bound to have an impact on cognitive factors, and so both have an impact on language learning ability.  As a last point, it is worthwhile to note that Long is aware of certain differences between how children and adults learn second languages: in particular, adults have access to metacognitive processes that allow them to see not only the similarities, but also the differences between the first and second languages; subsequently, while adults lack the neural plasticity that allows them to internalize a second language in a deep, almost subconscious way, they nonetheless retain the ability to learn second or other languages.  “Very high standards can be attained starting later, of course, but not, it seems, native-like standards.  Some ability appears to have been irreversibly lost.”  (266)

Before moving from foundations to results, we should briefly discuss this last point further.  Though there are parallels, adults learning a second language are in a qualitatively different situation than children learning a first language.  The next question is: how do adults and children differ in their learning of a second language?  Dulay and Burt (1972) hypothesized that “the child’s organization of L2 [second language acquisition] does not include transfer from (either positive or negative) or comparison with his native language, but relies on his dealing with L2 as a syntax system.”  (244)  In other words, young learners use the same process to grasp a second language as they use to grasp their first language; due to the low level of cognitive development, these learners do not use metacognitive faculties (unlike adults) to supplement their learning.  Therefore, Dulay and Burt (1974) proposed “the existence of universal child language learning strategies” (37) and showed in the same work that Chinese and Spanish-speaking children naturally picked up English morphemes (i.e. grammatical structures) from their English-speaking peers in the same order.  These students learned English apparently without interference from their first language, meaning that the mistakes they made were not mistakes in which they tried to graft Chinese or Spanish morphology onto English, but rather mistakes of the same type made by English-speaking children in learning English.  Brown (1994) responded to Dulay and Burt by noting other studies that do show first-language interference in children, and thus he asserted: “It may be more prudent to assert that the first language, for cognitive and affective reasons already discussed, does not pose the same degree of interference in children learning and second language as it does in adults.” (66)   He continues:

Adults, more cognitively secure, appear to operate from the solid foundation of the first language and thus manifest more interference.  But it was pointed out earlier that adults, too manifest errors not unlike some of the errors children make, the result of creative perception of the second language and an attempt to discover its rules apart from the rules of the first language.  The first language, however, may be more readily used to bridge gaps that the adult learner cannot fill by generalization within the second language; in this case we do well to remember that the first language can be a facilitating factor, and not just an interfering factor.  (66)

Harley (1998) notes:  “Tasks that assess morphology, syntax, and literacy-related skills represent a cognitive dimension of language proficiency on which older, cognitively more mature learners will predictably do better…In contrast, communicative tasks measuring basic interpersonal communications skills, such as oral fluency and phonology, are less likely to show an advantage for cognitive maturity.”  (28)  It is important to note here that Long’s notion of sensitive periods—in the plural—helps to account for this fact.  Harley concludes that “the most prominent advantage one might expect from the additional time gained by an early start is a greater facility in oral communication.”  (29)  On the surface, this conclusion appears to be at odds with Long’s conclusions, in particular, that native-like proficiency is impossible to achieve for those who begin learning a second language after the sensitive periods have ended.  However, this contradiction may be solved by examining what the intended result is: basic proficiency, or native-like proficiency?  This question may be answered in various ways, and can only be practically answered by the appropriate institution—government departments of education, professional organizations, school districts, or foreign language departments.  In any case, it is clear that advantages accrue to those learners who start second-language education earlier in life—and in most cases, earlier than the 9^th grade start that is common for most American students.  Particular attention must be paid to the notion of sensitive periods for language acquisition—and, as I will show later in this paper, how these periods are particularly important for cognitive and intellectual development of students.

How Early Second-Language Learning Programs Work

While it is generally true that foreign language education is less valued in the United States than in other parts of the world, and while most foreign language programs in the U.S. are limited to secondary and post-secondary schools, nonetheless there have been experiments in this country with foreign language education for younger students.  Though there is tremendous diversity among these programs in terms of structure, methodology, and goals, Gladys Lipton (1992) has identified three major trends.  These are what she refers to as: FLES, FLEX, and Immersion.

Foreign Language Exploratory programs (FLEX) are meant to develop cultural knowledge and to introduce students to some of the basic expressions of the language; thus, linguistic proficiency is not part of the goal.  FLEX classes usually meet less often than normal classes.   Many FLEX programs have been used as after-school programs, with the resulting downside that students—and adults as well—treat the instruction less seriously.  As a result, FLEX programs are not generally as useful at the elementary level.  Middle schools also use the FLEX model as a separate course during the regular school day, as a way of introducing students to the various languages offered at higher levels.  Though these courses have little effect in terms of preparing them for serious instruction, they do serve the important function of introducing students to foreign cultures, often at an age which, as shown later, may be considered a “sensitive period” for learning about foreign cultures.  On the flip side of FLEX is immersion, a model in which 50% or more of instruction in all academic areas is in the second language.  These programs usually start students out using the target language nearly 100% of the time, though second language use is often reduced in later years.  As should be obvious, functional linguistic proficiency is the goal of immersion programs.  This type of program requires strong parent support, and as a result, is found mostly in magnet or private schools.  It is clearly also the rarest of the three types of elementary foreign language education.

Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) is probably the most standard and practical of the three trends.  It is a “traditional”, sequenced program in which students meet for one period of time each day.  The content of FLES courses may be related to the school curriculum, but can also operate somewhat independently, thereby accommodating the general need for thematic units in FLES instruction.  The goal of a FLES curriculum—which, to be effective, must generally run throughout the elementary school years and be articulated with programs at the middle and high school levels—is functional linguistic proficiency in the target language.  However, given the different cognitive development of elementary school students as opposed to older children, different teaching methods are in order.

Lipton (1998a) recommends a functional approach to teaching FLES, including an emphasis on vocabulary and on listening and speaking proficiency.  Grammar is generally de-emphasized, as it requires students to have a developed sense of English grammar and syntax, something that is difficult and rare at that level.  Additionally, reading and particularly writing are delayed as well, for much the same reason that grammar is side-lined.  Repetition is important, but one must avoid rote exercises if possible.  Quoting the word of David Ausubel, Brown (1994) notes that, “people of all ages have little need for rote, mechanistic learning that is not related to existing knowledge and experience.  Rather, most items are acquired by meaningful learning, by anchoring and relating new items and experiences to knowledge that exists in the cognitive framework.”  (60)  As a result of this, Lipton (1998a) recommends the use of techniques such as: Total Physical Response (TPR), in which students are encouraged to respond to commands and to apply the spoken word directly to the object or action it signifies; and TPR Storytelling (TPRS), which expands on basic TPR by means of the construction of stories that involve the entire class at times through direct student intervention in the story, at others through question and answer about the story, and at still others through acting the story out.  As Lipton (1998b) notes: “Nothing is assumed to be learned the first time, without coming back for expansion and for utilization in different contexts.”  (69)  TPRS is extremely useful in that it achieves both the repetition and the meaningful contextualization of the language necessary to learning, while also remaining open for precisely the type of expansion and change of scenery that Lipton suggests.  TPRS also allows the opportunity for as much real-world intervention (props, personal experiences and anecdotes, application to situations outside the classroom) into the instruction as possible, in a structured, logical way, as determined by the teacher—who is the ultimate arbiter of the story.  As Miller (1998) notes: “The multisensory approach is essential…The student must interact with the language in as many ways as possible: auditory, visual, touch, taste, kinesthetic.  Save the symbol (the written word) for later—as ‘later’ as possible!  Once a word or idea is well-established orally, its sound can be paired with the graphic.”  (53)

As often unfortunately happens in foreign language instruction, the impulse for FLES came from outside events.  The motivation was not to create a generation of well-cultured individuals, but was rather a mixture of fear and nationalistic fervor: FLES was first implemented in the United States after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.  Despite the unfortunate cause, many foreign language teachers and schools jumped on the opportunity, and FLES programs blossomed in the 1960s.  However, by the 1970s, many of these programs started to die out, and there was a general feeling that the experiment had not been horribly successful.  Audrey Heining-Boynton (1990) notes among the reasons for this: a) a lack of qualified teachers who were both proficient in the target language and certified to teach elementary school children; b) unrealistic or vague goals for many of the programs—ranging from an undefined goal of “proficiency” to a clearly defined, but nearly impossible goal of native proficiency; c) bad teaching methods, such as: the grammar-translation method, which relied heavily on the written word, long and decontextualized vocabulary lists, grammatical instruction, and translation as the primary goal of instruction; or the audio-lingual method, which relied on rote memorization and decontextualized oral repetition; d) lack of articulation with higher levels of instruction; e) lack of serious evaluation of the programs (which would be difficult particularly if the program did not have clearly defined goals); and f) lack of parent (and by extension, community and governmental) support.  As a result, FLES remained marginal to the elementary school curriculum in the United States, and continues to be marginal to this day.

One exception to this trend was the state of Iowa, which implemented a serious state-wide focus on foreign language education in the mid-1980s and actually put funds into teacher training and teacher and program support in the elementary schools.  Marcia Harmon Rosenbusch (2002) found that it was precisely this willingness to fund stated priorities that was the key to the success of these programs.  The number of active programs in Iowa decreased in the mid-1990s due to cuts to that funding; however, Harmon Rosenbusch notes two positive residual effects that have continued even in the absence of state funding: 1) State policy on teacher qualification, and the initial funding provided by the state, led the state universities to change their programs and their requirements, thereby allowing them to continue to produce highly qualified FLES teachers.  2) Again due to the state’s initial funding priorities, many FLES programs became curricular, as opposed to the extracurricular model that had been dominant prior to the start of the state initiative.  This meant that students, parents, and educational institutions as a whole took foreign language education at all levels much more seriously; that shift in attitudes has continued to this day, and is largely responsible for the fact that, while the number of programs has declined, many programs are still going strong and are funded by the local school districts themselves.

The Results of Early Second Language Learning: Empirical Observations

More recently, research efforts have turned to studying the effects of early second language learning, with a focus on the outcomes of FLES programs.  These outcomes extend beyond the narrow realm of increased oral communication skills.  As Shrum and Glisan (2000) suggest: “…there is evidence to suggest that the advantages on language study for younger learners include a heightened level of oral proficiency, more complex cognitive processing, higher performance on standardized tests and tests of basic skills, and a greater openness to other cultures.”  (77)  In another review of case studies, Deborah Wilburn Robinson (1998) notes that “High proficiency translates into positive cognitive consequences” (37).  Among these cognitive benefits: a) FLES students outperformed monolingual students in metacognitive processing, and also analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, the top tier of  Bloom’s taxonomy; b) FLES students in grades 3-5 outperformed English-only students on English Language Arts tests, even when English-only students had increased English instruction as compared to their bilingual peers; c) students with 4 or more years of foreign language—but fewer than four years of math—performed equally well as students with four or more years of math on the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). However, she warns that “a certain level of L2 proficiency is necessary before cognitive benefits are discerned” (38).  What we can conclude from this is that students who learn foreign languages from an earlier age actually develop greater cognitive skills, better problem-solving, and a greater awareness of their own communication and thought processes—all of which require language as their medium.  As a result, the student’s metacognition is greatly enhanced as he or she takes knowledge accumulated at a young age and reconsiders it in light of his or her own cognitive development, in particular the development of the ability to analyze what is already there and to come to terms with existing differences in the two language structures of which he or she was hitherto ignorant.  Good FLES instruction creates good thinkers.

FLES also brings with it benefits that are not directly academic in nature, but have to do with the social and emotional dimensions of a child’s development.  Lipton (1998b) cites studies that show that FLES students have better academic self-image and more of a sense of achievement as a result of their engagement with another language.  Part of this may have to do with the FLES instruction engages not just the logical, linguistic portion of a child’s intellect, but also engages the child in a different experience of the world through the use of the target language. Kennedy et al. (2000) conducted research using an attitudinal survey from which they concluded that: “…affective variables contribute more to the end result of second language acquisition than do intelligence, aptitude, method of teaching utilized in the classroom, or time spent learning the language.” (279)  Kristin Hull-Cortés (2002) found in another attitudinal survey that learner attitudes to foreign language among FLES students were influenced by the use of the learned, i.e. non-dominant language at home, as well as by teacher methods.  It seems to me that both of these studies make very clear the importance of adults’ attitudes toward FLES, and the impact of these attitudes on young learners.  What needs clarification here is Kennedy’s assertion that teaching methods are irrelevant in FLES, and the fact that this contradicts Hull-Cortés’s findings.  I have found through personal experience in the classroom (albeit with other children) that teaching methods have a great impact on students’ attitudes to the class and to the content.  Furthermore, good foreign language teaching methods, such as TPRS, use of songs, experience with cultural artifacts such as food or other cultural products, etc., by their nature engage the students on an affective level.  Furthermore, engaging students affectively is a matter not of increasing their potential to learn the second language, but rather of increasing their willingness to learn it—and that, just as much as cognitive development, will have an impact on the final outcome.  So Kennedy et al. are not wrong about the importance of the affect in foreign language instruction—but we must be aware that this is only part of the picture.  Teaching methods are quite important, and must be appropriately designed for the students’ age and cognitive level, taking into account the importance of affective factors and meaningful context in students’ learning of a second language.

One last aspect of the attitudinal benefits is well worth mentioning here.  Wilburn Robinson (1998) cites the results of a study on students’ attitudes to the cultures of the languages under study.  She notes: “The age of ten is said to be a crucial time in the development of attitudes toward nations and groups perceived as ‘other’.  Ten-year-olds were more friendly and open toward people they viewed as different from themselves than fourteen-year-olds” (41).  This may be evidence of yet another sensitive period, that of the recognition and acceptance of  other cultures.  Favorable exposure to other cultures at an early age—in this instance, late elementary school into middle school—may well have the effect of creating a more tolerant group of students.  Aside from the obvious social benefits in a country where 10% of the population has Spanish as its first language, this factor has in impact as well on students’ attitudes toward later second-language study.  As I found with my own 9^th grade Spanish 2 students, their attitudes toward Spanish speakers and their cultures were qualitatively different from anything I had experienced before; as a result, they have continued to have a more positive overall attitude toward the class, which has in turn had an effect on how much effort they are willing to put forth, and thus on their overall achievement.

Conclusion and Recommendations for the Future

From the literature I reviewed for this study, it is quite clear that children have a special relationship with and particular capacities in learning a foreign language that are different from those of adults—and even of teenage students.  There can be no doubt as to the benefits of early foreign language instruction on later stages of foreign language education; but it should also be quite clear that these benefits extend well beyond the foreign language classroom, and have a significant positive impact on students’ overall academic performance.  In particular, school districts that are concerned with standardized test scores in the age of No Child Left Behind should take note of the findings cited by Deborah Wilburn Robinson (1998).  As the Iowa experience shows, however, good FLES programs require resources beyond the individual school district—including administrative structures and teacher training programs that are adequately funded.  It will be the task of concerned educators, starting with foreign language teachers themselves, to work toward greater recognition of the need for good FLES instruction—and toward the realization of the programs and resources that FLES instruction requires.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, H. Douglas (1994).  Principles of Language Learning and Teaching.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

Dulay, Heidi C. and Marina K. Burt (1972).  Goofing: An Indicator of Children’s Second Language Learning Strategies.  Language Learning 22: 235-252.

Dulay, Heidi C. and Marina K. Burt (1974).  Natural Sequences in Child Second Language Acquisition.  Language Learning 24: 37-53.

Harley, Birgit (1998).  The Outcomes of Early and Later Language Learning.  In  Met (ed.), Critical Issues in Early Second Language Learning (26-31). Glenview, IL: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.

Harmon Rosenbusch, Marcia (2002).  The Impact of National and State Policy on Elementary School Foreign Language Programs: The Iowa Case Study.  Foreign Language Annals 35: 507-517.

Heining-Boynton, Audrey L. (1990).  Using FLES History to Plan for the Present and Future.  Foreign Language Annals 23: 503-509.

Hoff-Ginsberg, Erika (1998).  Is There a Critical Period for Language Acquisition? In  Met (ed.), Critical Issues in Early Second Language Learning (31-36). Glenview, IL: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.

Hull Cortés, Kristin (2002).  Youth and the Study of Foreign Language: An Investigation of Attitudes.  Foreign Language Annals 35: 320-332.

Kennedy, Teresa J., Jack K. Nelson, Michael R. L. Odell and Laurie K. Austin (2000).  The FLES Attitudinal Inventory.  Foreign Language Annals 33: 278-289.

Lipton, Gladys C.  (1992).  Practical Handbook to Elementary Foreign Language Programs (FLES*)  (2^nd ed.).  Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.

Lipton, Gladys C.  (1998a).  Guidelines for FLES* Programs.  In Lipton, Gladys C. (ed.),  A Celebration of FLES* (18-23).  Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.

Lipton, Gladys C. (1998b).  We Can Teach All Students: FLES* Students Rarely Fail! In Lipton, Gladys C. (ed.),  A Celebration of FLES* (69-72).  Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.

Long, Michael H. (1990).  Maturational Constraints on Language Development.  Studies in Second Language Acquisition 12: 251-285.

Miller, Elizabeth (1998).  A Salad of Language Learners.  In Lipton, Gladys C. (ed.),  A Celebration of FLES* (50-56).  Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.

Shrum, Judith L. and Eileen W. Glisan (2000).  Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction  (rev. ed.).  Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Wilburn Robinson, Deborah (1998).  The Cognitive, Academic, and Attitudinal Benefits of Early Language Learning. In  Met (ed.), Critical Issues in Early Second Language Learning (37-43). Glenview, IL: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.

The Board of Regents voted on Thursday to deny further development of the Rhode Island Mayoral Academy’s quest to bring Achievement First to Cranston.  This was a “small, complete victory”, in the words (not intended for our victory) of BoR chair George Caruolo.  Mary-Ellen Butke’s assertion that it was “only a vocal minority” that opposed the plan shows just how out of touch with reality she really is.  Yes, it was only the elected school board, the superintendent, the Cranston city council, and hundreds of Cranstonians opposed to it—clearly a minority!

I recommend a couple blog posts: Kiersten Marek’s short response really gives a sense of the thrill of victory.  Tom Hoffman’s blog has been extremely insightful all throughout.  I think he’s right that the fight will now shift to Providence, and that it will be completely problematic for the reformers.  That said, I don’t think it’ll be a walk in the park for us, either.  I also doubt that the charters will lose interest in Rhode Island: for venture “philanthropists”, defeat anywhere is unacceptable, and I’m sure they (if not Achievement First itself) will be back.

But before we get too far into what comes next, I want to reflect for a moment on the lessons of this victory.  We won this battle, but the war is still on—and it’s important to understand what worked and why.

1.  Protest Works.  Simple as it may be, this assertion is often quite controversial—if for no other reason than that so many activists have been to countless meetings where their demands, their arguments, their voices were all completely ignored.  Perhaps protest isn’t always enough—but without it, there’s no chance of winning the movement’s demands.

In this case, it was clear that there was solid opposition to the plan from everyone in Cranston—except Mayor Fung.  That was clear from the public forum on June 1, which had to be moved from the City Hall to the auditorium of Cranston East.  The isolation of the AF forces—and the fact that they were all from other places—was crystal clear.  This forced the Mayoral Academy folks to resort to all sorts of tricks at subsequent meetings of the Board of Regents, only to be put off until September.

When the mayors held their statehouse “rally”, it seemed that the pro-corporate forces were starting to line up their support, and those of us who are so accustomed to losing these battles prepared to fight and lose.  But what turned the tide was the rally in Cranston, with several hundred people from across the spectrum showing up to voice their opposition to a plan that would gut their schools even further.  This was clear from the letter Governor Chafee sent to the BoR, in which the opposition from Cranston is indicated as the key reason he cites to put the brakes on the whole project.  Much as Regent Shimberg was indignant at the rejection of the AF proposal, the BoR was clearly following the lead of the governor on this question—and they were all responding to the pressure from below.

One last note about this before moving on: I was personally unable to attend the rally, but from eyewitnesses it’s clear that a subtext of the rally was tremendous anti-corporate feeling.  One of the speakers from Providence was one of the most popular speakers—a promising sign in a city that often prides itself on not being Providence.  But along with that was a sense that we don’t want corporations taking over our schools.  They’ve already screwed up the rest of the economy, why would we hand our schools over to corporate plunderers?  I would argue that this gut-level anti-corporate sentiment is characteristic of the class of American wage workers, the vast majority of the population—and that it is nowhere represented in the American media portrayal of ou society.

2.  The Importance of democratic institutions: the Elected School Committee.  One of the fascinating things about the struggle in Cranston was the role played by members of the School Committee.  Their solid, informed, determined opposition to Achievement First was crucial in mobilizing the numbers of people they did.  Would Supt. Nero and other administrators have felt confident enough to speak up without the support of the people who employ them?  I don’t know any Cranston administrators personally, but I doubt they would have spoken out on their own.

The school committee members then also had access to the PTOs and other such avenues to put out the word about the rally, and to galvanize opposition.  Frankly, I find this stunning, and a vindication of what institutions that are democratic in form can do when they’re given democratic content, i.e. actually used to mobilize people in their own interests.  This is always the point about democracy: it’s useless if the “demos”, the people it organizes, are not actively engaged in every aspect of it.  That requires leadership—and the Cranston School Committee clearly provided that.  It’s an unusual example in a country where school committees—even elected ones—are often simply do-nothing bodies, rubber stamps for administrators, or patronage networks.

I think this aspect of the struggle is crucial for moving forward in Providence.  In his letter, Gov. Chafee points to the “broad support” for the AF charter school in Providence, citing mayor, city council and school board support.  Of course, Taveras is an anti-teacher union basher; the school board is appointed, and clearly serves the mayor’s will; and the Providence City Council is half windbags and toadies, half newbies who don’t know what they’re doing.  The untimely passing of Councilman Luna will make it even harder for Providentials to have a voice on the Council, and all the other potential progressive allies are both brand new and also less talented than Miguel.

The people of Providence have no voice through their institutions, which are less democratic in form than those of Cranston—and completely lacking in democratic content.  Given that previous struggles to stop school closings, teacher firings, etc., have run up against the brick wall of bureaucracy, the struggle for an elected school committee is going to be the motor for developing the voice of the people.  It’s that organized force, successful or not, that will be able to impact the existing institutions.  But if it’s successful, so much the better—for we’ll have an institution that we fought for and won, accountable to the grassroots and not to the powerbrokers.  This is not to say it will always be roses—but again, like protest in general, without this struggle and hopefully its eventual victory, we are certain to have the will of the corporate “reformers” and their paymasters imposed on us.

3.  Allies or Frenemies?  If you haven’t heard the term before, you can probably guess what it means.  This is an important question, precisely because the grassroots should never simply rely on the people in power, even if they do the right thing every now and again.  Even suppose we were to win an elected school board, and get activists on that board: anyone in that position would come under a lot of pressure from the powers that be to bend to their will and abandon their base.  Now flash back to our current crew of bureaucrats and politicians—and you see how urgent it is to get this question right.

The Board of Regents definitely turned over when Chafee came into office.  Angus Davis and some others among Gist’s supporters were thrown out, while more “progressive” people found seats on the Board.  It was nice to see the reformers be set back, but it was curious that Chafee did not sack Gist as well—the Commissioner is, after all, a gubernatorial appointee.  After the unions, and particularly the NEA, had campaigned for Chafee, it was frustrating to hear NEARI staffers say that we shouldn’t call for her resignation because “we don’t want to overplay our hand”.  In other words: election’s done, shut up and take what comes next.  As a result, the unions have been a bit quieter than they could or should be on some key fights, from the teacher firings in Providence to the pension issue to the destruction of seniority and the quiet acceptance of contracts around the state that make serious economic concessions.  This is a model that grassroots activists—however they vote individually—should not follow.

So the BoR voted down the AF plan, and all is right with the world.  We’re very happy with particular regents, such as Colleen Callahan and Robert Carothers, who respectively moved and seconded the motion to deny AF.  But let’s not forget the role of these people, who votedin our favor and may well do so again.  Callahan is an RIFT staffer who’s played a key role in developing the new evaluation model, which accepts the notion that “student achievement data” should be part of a teacher’s evaluation.  It’s shameful that the AFT has bought into the propaganda around this punitive system, and worse that they’ve worked to develop it.  I can’t help but think that part of Callahan’s being convinced of this system has to do with her role as part of a board that regulates the labor of teachers without their input.

Carothers’ story is that of a friendly, liberal college president whose historical mission at the University of Rhode Island was to privatize and destroy the old “public” nature of the institution.  I never felt any sympathy for fraternities until my time at URI, during which it became clear that he had used the bad behavior of the frats at various points as an opportunity: seize the frat house, refurbish it, and bring in a new grant-funded program that expands the private penetration of the public university.  When I was there over a decade ago, URI was then only about 25% funded by the state; the rest of it came from skyrocketing tuition and private grants.  Carothers himself was always able to put on a friendly face and paint himself as the champion of the students’ interests.  I remember once when his position was in jeopardy because of conflicts with certain people on the Board of Governors for Higher Education, he had a group of students who “occupied” the library in support of his administration.  Carothers must lie at the polar opposite end of the personality spectrum from Deb Gist, and he will consider the public sentiment before he takes action—but he is caught up in the same neoliberal frame of reference as the most brazen of the corporate reformers.

One other note about the regents themselves: not a single one of them voiced skepticism about or opposition to Achievement First itself, as a charter management operator; quite the contrary, several of them went out of their way to praise AF as a “high-performing” and “successful” charter.  They didn’t do this because they themselves think charter schools are an attack on public education; they did this because of the opposition from Cranston.

The last person on this note is the Governor himself.  I’ve never had a very high opinion of Chafee, frankly—he has always seemed mushy, dimwitted, and too eager to please.  His letter to the BoR shows that characteristic mushiness, that ability to “agree with everyone” when the parties hold diametrically opposed views.  This was obvious just from the discussion amongst the regents themselves: Shimberg insisted on the part of the letter where Chafee endorses the idea of an Achievement First school in Providence, while Callahan pointed to the part about “sharing best practices” in the following paragraph as the heart of the matter.  There is so much that’s problematic in his letter about charter schools, so many of the corporate reformers’ assumptions that he’s swallowed uncritically.  But the larger point is that he had something for everybody—and thus, really, nothing of value for anybody.  Chafee tries to bring together the Cranston folks with the Achievement Firsters, the fans of Diane Ravitch with the graduates of the Broad Academy, the people with the corporations.  It won’t work, and if we stupidly assume that Chafee is on our side, is opposed to charters, is at odds with Gist, etc., we will end up on the losing end.

4.  The Struggle must be State-wide.  I’ll conclude on this point, which I think leads logically to the question of “what next?”, and partially answers it.  The fact is: had this all been focused on Providence, AF would likely already have a contract.  Providence is not well-enough organized to fend off the attack on public education.  It’s central, because it’s the trend-setter for the state, the place where solutions can be found within the city.  But it’s also not sufficient, because the attacks on public education in the surrounding districts can be replicated and expanded in the capital city—and once rooted there, they set the tone for the rest of the state.  The reaction of the real “stakeholders” in the Cranston schools was the key to the defeat of AF—and now the whole state is on notice.  We have a good opportunity to advance the struggle from our newly-won position on the battlefield.  This position can be greatly fortified by the struggle for an elected school committee in Providence.  But it can only be held long-term if we can build alliances with people in other districts, if we can bring them into the Coalition to Defend Public Education and expand the reach of the best grassroots effort to defend public education this state has seen yet.

Second: my apologies for the lateness of this post.  Hurricane and false start to school and all.

The purpose of today’s post is to present the second in a series of arguments against handing over 1800 students from Cranston and Providence to the Achievement First Mayoral Academy.  Today’s reason: the solid opposition to the school from everyone in Cranston—except the Mayor.

If you missed it, there was a huge rally in Cranston last week, organized by members of the school committee.  The rally was a really stunning confirmation of the will of the people of Cranston, and of the potential power of democratic institutions mobilizing their citizenry in defense of public resources—in this instance, the schools.

Here’s the speech given by a member of the Coalition to Defend Public Education:

My name is Jen Davey and I’m a parent of 2 boys at Dutemple Elementary – a 3rd grader and an incoming kindergartener.

I have had a very good experience with Cranston Public Schools. I am consistently amazed by what Cranston teachers and administrators can achieve with the limited resources that they have. Thanks to Dutemple, my older son was reading at the fifth grade level at the end of first grade, and he has consistently been challenged by his teachers. At Dutemple, we are a Title I school educating kids from a variety of backgrounds. At Dutemple and in Cranston in general, we have a great school system that succeeds in educating children from a variety of different races, ethnicities and income levels.

The so-called “achievement gap” that Mayor Fung and Achievement First Mayoral Academy proponents talk about is not one that I see in this city, and certainly not at the elementary school level. We have a school system that succeeds. I really see no justification for the introduction of such a massive charter, which threatens to rob our public schools of 900 Cranston and 900 Providence students.

Here’s what most parents think: Rather than invest resources in an unproven and largely unregulated charter, one which would educate only a select few students who win a lottery, we would like to see more money invested in our public schools, which are open to all students, regardless of ability.

Here’s what parents would like to see from our public schools:

• We want our sports, gifted and music programs back.
• We want smaller class sizes.
• We want an environment where teachers have the creative freedom to educate the way they feel is most effective, without being bound by test scores.
• We want an environment where our input as parents in our children’s education is meaningful and valued.
• And finally, we want a positive message sent to our city’s students, parents, educators, and communities. We can and do succeed. Let’s demand the resources we need to keep succeeding.

We are Cranston Public Schools.

I think Jen’s argument sums up very succinctly what the issue is with charter schools: public resources are being handed to unaccountable, private entities.  This surrender of public resources is justified in the name of “the achievement gap” and the “crumbling schools”—when it is precisely because these public institutions have been starved of resources going back years.  Why should public tax money be paid to private operators as an “incubator of innovation”?  Why can’t we let people already in the public employ (i.e. public school teachers) have the resources and the freedom to try innovative approaches?  The whole thing is a smokescreen using fluffy liberal feel-good language to cover up a corporate theft of public resources.

The good news is: the people of Cranston aren’t buying it.

*****

There are, however, some points and questions that need to be raised, and I invite responses to any and all of these points:

1.  The Cranston rally—and the potential for a big turn-out at the Board of Regents meeting—stands as a stark example of what an elected school committee can do.  Again, not that it’s a panacea, but it’s also undeniable that part of the turn-out had to do with the opposition of elected officials to the charter school—and the ability of the elected school committee to mobilize parents via the PTOs.  This is a model of the people most directly involved in and affected by what happens in the public schools, standing up for their interests.

2.  The response in Cranston stands in stark contrast to the situation in Providence.  Here’s an appointed, lap-dog school committee rolling over and playing dead when told to by the Mayor.  The lack of real representation of the interests of the “stakeholders” in Providence—i.e., the parents, students, and teachers—is utterly shocking.  Or perhaps it’s just as shocking as the complete disregard that those appointed bureaucrats have for the actual feelings and demands of the people they effectively rule over.  To close schools in poor areas, claiming declining enrollments—and then to turn around and claim that these students are underserved by the public schools and deserve a “choice” in the form of a corporate-run school—this is utter, rank hypocrisy.

3.  One thing that does intrigue me: as much as I stand in awe and appreciation of what the Cranston School Committee has done, I’m also a union-supporting teacher, and I have a certain skepticism about school committees from that standpoint.  Specifically: what role did this school committee play in canceling the scheduled raise for Cranston teachers?  And how do Cranston teachers view this relationship?  This seems to me like a thorny question, and I’d like to hear from Cranston teachers what they think of this.

4.  One potential problem with the mobilization as it’s shaped up thus far: while Providence and Cranston themselves are far from homogenous municipalities, there is nonetheless a significant social and racial/ethnic difference between them.  There have been incidents in the past in which Cranstonians have expressed a certain prejudice vis-à-vis Providence students and Providence schools, a certain elitism that is both unwarranted and unhealthy.  Now it appears, from what I have seen, that this sentiment has been marginal to or absent from the Cranston-based activism around Achievement First.  I think this is an important development that needs to be built on.  Cranston and Providence have common interests in fighting off this corporate attack—and in fighting back against their mayors, who are clearly corporate puppets, despite their status as elected officials.  The quality of Cranston schools should also exist in Providence schools—and doesn’t, precisely because of the question of racism and poverty, and the unequal distribution of resources in the state.  Cranston parents and teachers have much more to gain from demanding equal resources for all—starting with their Providential neighbors—than they do from a narrow, provincial vision that focuses on grabbing resources for their own schools without looking at the big picture of school financing and its problems.

5.  The conclusion I want to draw from this is the following: that there is tremendous potential in Rhode Island school districts for fighting the corporate assault on our schools, and that this potential energy should find a common expression in a unified, state-wide, grass-roots organization that works with the local groups in struggle while also maintaining a broader vision of defending public education in the state, fighting against racial and socio-economic inequalities in the allocation of educational resources, and stopping the privatization and destruction of our public schools in a divide-and-conquer assault.  I think the Coalition to Defend Public Education has made some excellent progress on this account; and while it has maintained a level of activity throughout the summer, it should now be revitalized and expanded.  We need people from around the state, working jointly on the range of issues affecting public education, in order to coordinate our response and avoid provincial opportunism.  Charter schools, democratic governance, resistance to budget cuts, opposition to destructive “school reform” schemes and the expansion of standardized testing, and the defense of teachers’ professional and working rights and conditions—all of these things are interrelated and deserve attention from an organization of students, parents, teachers and community members, working in their own interests for the defense and improvement of public education for all.

In this series, I’m giving the floor to voices of those opposed to the charter school expansion.  To read the ProJo coverage, you’d think we barely exist.  Quite the contrary…

Also, if you’d like to oppose Achievement First (students last), plase come to the rally in Cranston tomorrow.

Now, our first contribution from Brown University student Zack Mezera, who prepared this statement for the School Committee meeting last night.

*****

My name’s Zack Mezera. I’m a student at Brown University, but I come here tonight as a “concerned citizen.”

First, hello Superintendent Lusi. I wish you the best of luck while Providence students are on your watch.

I am here against the Achievement First proposal. I think most people tonight will make the economic argument, and that’s fine, I’ve made that argument myself already. But I have other strong concerns.

1: Discipline. I know taking a hard line against students is in vogue nowadays, but these Charter Management Organizations cross the line. At Achievement First specifically, I’ve seen figures saying 16-22% of students are in detention daily, for benign infractions like dropping pencils or not facing forward in line. This does not prepare students for real life. Would you subject your children to this environment? Word on the street is, neither would official(s) in the Taveras administration.

2: Governance. Look at the proposal. Did you read it? AF, with Fung, chooses the governing board. This governing board, with AF, then chooses the members of the Board of Directors, which Fung chairs. Look at this procedure. It’s very similar to how you yourselves are nominated to the school board. EXCEPT here you’re approved by a democratic body, the City Council. With AF, you would be approved by a corporation looking for profits and self-preservation. And we’ve seen how dissatisfied the Providence School Board is with its own structure; hell, two of you have resigned over it. Yet 1) this is even worse, and 2) Taveras is telling you, again, that you have and should have no power. Now he wants you to willingly relinquish responsibility for up to 900 students?! If you’re supposed to keep watch over our students, voting for this is like handing the watch to a group (Achievement First) you do not fully understand. Or, as Tom Hoffman put it, voting for Achievement First is a vote of no confidence in your own abilities as a board. Supporting this, Sup. Lusi, amounts to an admission of no confidence in your own abilities, even before you’ve really started the job.

3: The only elected member of this proposed Board is Mayor Fung. (See exhibit 10, Achievement First proposal:) If a group of parents have a complaint, they will have to go through AF school administration, the vice-principal, the principal, then the something-like-a regional director, then the Board, which as we have seen by the nomination procedure is non-elected and will have no real incentive to condemn AF’s actions. Parents will then have to turn to RIDE, the Board of Regents, and finally Governor Chafee… We talk a lot nowadays about accountability for students and teachers, but how will the community hold this Board accountable, when the only uninvested elected official who can influence the Board is the Governor? And he’s already come out against AF. In short, this proposed Board will be near uncontrollable. Where are the checks and balances? If, like Councilman Zurier said on July 19, removing contract negotiation abilities from your power as Providence school board is a loss of checks and balances, how much more undemocratic is this proposal?

4. Again, look at the proposal, please. From the page on governance:

“The Board of Directors for Achievement First Mayoral Academies will have the responsibility of ensuring that each school is a high-functioning organization, that the school is an academic success, and that it is fiscally responsible. To ensure these criteria are met, the Board of Directors will

•Evaluate and monitor the school’s academic program; 

•Provide financial oversight to ensure fiscal integrity; 

•Engage in risk management to prevent charter termination and seek charter renewal; 

•Provide legal and ethical oversight – adhering to law, policies, and procedures in place to protect Directors, officers, and employees; and 

•Evaluate the principal and Achievement First by conducting an annual performance review.”

Point 3: What does “risk management to prevent charter termination” mean? Because that sounds to me like image control, like Achievement First’s board is supposed to be as concerned about its self-preservation as it is about student achievement. This is little different any corporation, whose primary responsibility is to achieve the highest profits for its shareholders. Achievement First, indeed.

Point 4: “protect Directors, officers, and employees” …Perhaps that’s why Achievement First defended the allegedly abusive Chi Tsang–who was allegedly too abusive for KIPP and was brought on at Achievement first instead. But Achievement First said Tschang “never hurt a single child”. I leave it to Achievement First to answer these allegations, but it shows extraordinarily poor judgment on their part. And again, if parents had a complaint about an administrator, the Board of Directors is obligated to “protect…employees”.

Again, it is not my job to provide further description on these issues,–although I am willing to provide what little more I can, and don’t hesitate to contact me. Instead, it’s your job as a board member to demand answers to these issues I have raised. If you do not, you have failed your civic duties.