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Who is Bill Ayers?
Earlier this week, a Wall Street Journal op-ed brought attention back to the connection between Senator Barack Obama and a '60s radical activist, Bill Ayers. As cofounder of the violent left-wing organization the Weatherman, Ayers has been called a domestic terrorist by many state operatives.
Currently, Ayers is an American elementary school theorist, and is connected to Obama through education reform efforts from his days in Chicago. But it merits asking, who is Bill Ayers? And what difference should it make in our estimation of the Democratic candidate for President of the United States?
This much is uncontested: Bill Ayers participated in the bombings of several public monuments, including the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the US Capitol Building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. He was a leading member of a radical, leftist terrorist organization called the Weatherman. He spent a short period of time in jail after turning himself in for these crimes in 1980. And he is affiliated with US Senator Barack Obama.
But what is the nature of that affiliation? And perhaps more importantly, what does Bill Ayers believe and how does he act today? Without question, if Senator Obama has in any way shown signs of supporting Mr. Ayers' admittedly guilty and violently radical past, his candidacy would be suspect. But there is no evidence that this is the case.
To begin with, the connection between Senator Obama and Mr. Ayers comes down to three principal items. First, and most notably, they served together on a Chicago school reform initiative called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an effort that designed community partnerships with local public schools and was also launched in fifteen other communities. Also serving on the board of the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago were individuals such as Patricia Graham, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Arnold Weber, former president of Northwestern University.
Critics may wonder how a self-admitted domestic terrorist rose to lead a well-reputed school reform initiative? Because Mr. Ayers, since his days with the Weatherman, has gone on the straight and narrow. He is currently a distinguished professor of education at the University of Chicago who has garnered attention for his academic efforts in pedagogy, along the way working with officials such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daly.
The second connection is that Mr. Ayers and Senator Obama also served together on the board of an anti-poverty foundation called the Woods Fund of Chicago, which continues to provide support to organizations that seek to educate and empower low-income residents of Chicago.
Third, Mr. Ayers contributed $200 to Senator Obama's Illinois State Senate election campaign in 2001.
So does Senator Obama support a hyper-radical leftist ideology of domestic terrorism, as some skeptics warn? Does he support an unorthodox, militant view of the role of public education? There is no evidence of it. After all, Senator Obama was only eight years old when Bill Ayers committed his violent acts.
I'd love to hear facts about their relationship and how it might impact the next five weeks if you have evidence or conclusions that I've missed here!
Interview with Education Chairman
On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., I spoke with Representative George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Democratic Policy Committee. He was eager to talk with me about outreach the party did during the first 100 days of the new Congress in 2007 to work with students on access to higher education.
Some friends who work on the Hill told me that he was a great guy, and very forward-thinking when it comes to technology and outreach, but I had no idea he would be as engaged to talk about the needs of students and ways in which we can continue our work after Election Day. It was a true honor, and I certainly look forward to seeing what is possible in the 2009 Legislative Session.
Oh, How Names Do Matter!
"I've always said you get 100 votes if you change the name." - California Congressman George Miller, the Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, discussing the likelihood of No Child Left Behind being renewed in the next president's administration.
Representative Miller's comment sheds light on an interesting phenomenon with the controversial law No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The American public overwhelmingly supports action to improve public education, even at the federal level. When asked in general whether they support the goals of the law--increasing student achievement and narrowing the achievement gap for low-income and minority children by holding schools accountable for student performance--large numbers of voters agree.
But when you ask someone how they feel about the actual law named "No Child Left Behind"? Cringe, sneer, boo.
Need numbers? Start with last month's Phi Delta Kappa / Gallup poll, which found that 67 percent of Americans thought the law should be changed or scrapped. Or how about this ETS poll, which found that Americans favored the law 56 percent to 39 percent when it was explained based on its component parts and goals, but were against the law 43 percent to 41 percent when it was actually referenced by name.
Maybe that's why the NCLB is the "10,000 pound gorilla" in the room that neither of the candidates is talking about.
But how, you ask, is it the case that so much about the law rides on the name alone, and not the actual substance? Part of it is a branding issue--interest groups actually opposed to the substance of the law such as the teachers unions have done a great job equating the brand of NCLB with teaching to the test and other unsavory, if vague, notions.
Another part is just a general lack of understanding about what the law actually entails; a post hoc ergo propter hoc effect, so to speak. Public schools have been struggling, particularly in low-income urban and rural areas, for quite some time in the US. Yet today's observers tend to attribute this failure to the most recent event in education policy: NCLB. It's no better logic than attributing my winning $10 on an instant lotto ticket because I had a banana for breakfast, but it's a common enough fallacy that NCLB would be probably unpopular regardless of its name.
However, one thing is certain. Both candidates have been smart to strategically steer clear of mentioning NCLB in their campaign speeches. It's toxic, and it's just as easy to score points by talking about education as a values issue instead of the nitty-gritty that seems to make NCLB so controversial. Seems like we'll have a big gorilla just hanging out until the election is over, when some new catchy name will be unveiled to headline a law that will most likely be strikingly similar to the existing No Child Left Behind Act.
New McCain Attack Ad Obliterates The Line
This is the time of the election cycle when things get painful. Candidates and campaign staff, on the one hand, have to dig deep to make tough decisions about tactics and targets with limited time and resources as November 4th draws close. And they do so amidst heigtened attention even after some 20 months of non-stop campaigning with hardly any sleep.
But the most painful part of the campaign season for most ordinary Americans is how we are subjected to senseless lies and irresponsible attack ads which make it virtually impossible to make any kind of accurate judgment about what the two candidates would do for our country.
One of the most disgusting ads I've seen in quite some time was put out just two days ago by the McCain campaign. Understand that I would be the first to call out the Obama campaign if they had put the ad out instead -- my interest here is in challenging either candidate when they misrepresent their own positions and records on the ever-important issue of public education reform, or in this case, when one misrepresents his opponent's views. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the issue is too vital to millions of children and indeed the very future of our nation to play partisan political football with. Judge for yourself in the following 30 second clip being shown in various battleground states:
The ad basically alleges that Barack Obama thinks it is more important to teach kids about sex than it is to teach them how to read. It begins by misrepresenting a series of Education Week and Washington Post articles that actually speak approvingly of Senator Obama's maverick and reform-minded views on school reform, and then goes on to suggest in voice-over -- on top of a picture of a smirking Obama -- that his only accomplishment in education is a sex education bill for kindergarteners. The not-so-subtle implication is that Senator Obama is actually a run-of-the-mill sleezeball or perhaps worse, a pedophile.
The truth? Senator Obama is actually well-regarded by reform-minded education thinkers who respect his bold uncoupling of the Democratic platform on education from the narrowly-focused goals of teachers unions which have dominated Democratic views on school reform for the last half century. And the sex education bill that he passed while in the Illinois Senate? It actually supported age-appropriate sex education that would help teach children how to protect themselves from sexual predators and pedophiles. In other words, if one watches the McCain ad while considering the truth, the ad actually implies that Senator McCain is against providing children with critical information that may help them avoid sexual abuse.
But Aaron, wait! Who are you to say that the McCain ad is mis-representing the Washington Post and Ed Week positions on Senator Obama's education platform? Aren't you no worse than the McCain ad if you don't provide facts to back up your assertions? Fair enough. So don't take it from me that the Washington Post and Ed Week support Senator Obama. Take it from them, directly, here (the Washington Post actually fires back at the McCain camp directly for twisting its words), and here for the original Ed Week piece.
Is Ed in '08 Making A Splash?
The economy. War in Iraq. Health care. Energy and environmental policies. All of these issues, at different times, have dominated the headlines of the 2008 presidential election cycle. So too, have campaign strategies, personal attacks, and the occasional speaking gaffe.
Lost in these headlines, however, has been one key topic that may well have as much impact on the future of our nation as all the rest: education. Indeed, school reformers interested in pushing education into a more prominent position of debate between Senators Obama and McCain have more or less held a backseat over the past several months.
This is not how the leaders of at least one non-profit organization envisioned the election cycle. Ed in '08, a $60 million effort funded principally by the Gates Foundation to raise the election day prominence of public education as an issue. The group has made major ad buys in radio, print, and even on TV without much impact--one TV ad is embedded here:
Why hasn't education been more talked about? It's hard to say. After all, it's not as though the voting public isn't interested in public education, and it's not like there aren't meaningful debates to be had over key issues like teacher pay, charter schools, pre-kindergarten, and school accountability. One possibility is that other news have been "sexier" in the sense that they are more timely and seemingly urgent--the housing crisis and gas prices fit this description. Another possibility is that the two campaigns do not disagree enough on the major questions (both are more or less in support of NCLB with modest revision) to be the point of a debate. Either way, it doesn't bode well for America's children that more public attention has been paid thus far to John McCain's real estate holdings and Barack Obama's wife's dress color than to their schools.
On Eve of DNC, School Leaders Call for Change
A diverse and highly respected group of leading education reformers from across the country gathered today in Denver, CO to challenge Democratic officials to fight for fundamental changes to the nation's public schools. Elected officials such as Adrian Fenty and Cory Booker, the mayors of Washington, DC and Newark, NJ respectively, were joined by a slew of prominent school experts and civil rights leaders who called for a commitment to six key steps to fighting the achievement gap that plagues low-income and minority students.
The six steps include: providing universal access to pre-kindergarten programs for low-income children; expanding parent choice and access to charter schools; improving standards and accountability systems so that high achieving schools and teachers can be rewarded and modeled; extending school days and the school year to help low-performing children; improving teacher recruitment and hiring practices; and re-examing school funding within the realms of teacher pay and after school programming.
The six proposals are hardly radical ideas; each of them has been suggested to improve student achievement at one time or another. What is interesting, however, is the timing and target of the call--a plea for action by widely respected Democrats who see education as an issue that can propel the Obama - Biden ticket to victory in November.
A recent PDK / Gallup poll seems to confirm this possibility. In the poll, respondents were asked which presidential candidate they would vote for if they were choosing solely on the basis of improving public schools. 46% said they would vote for Senator Obama, compared with only 29% who supported Senator McCain (the remaining 25% said they did not know).
The poll result is noteworthy for two reasons. First off, it shows a clear issue-motivated party preference on the part of voters that did not exist in either the 2004 or 2000 president elections, when President Bush was virtually tied with Sen. Kerry and Vice President Gore on the question of who would improve public schools more. To the extent that this preference is deeply held, education seems to be an issue on which Senator Obama has potential to draw voters to his camp.
The second interesting element of the poll is that the clear candidate preference has emerged in spite of a relatively quiet campaign season when it comes to the issue of education. It is one thing that voters express preferences on economic issues and the Iraq war, where both candidates have spoken extensively on the subject and where clear distinction exists. But voters support Senator Obama on education even without a clear sense of how he differs substantively from Senator McCain. One wonders if Senator McCain would be wise to draw comparisons between his education platform and Senator Obama's, rather than contrasts as a way to reduce the gap expressed by likely voters.
China, the Olympics, and the Competition that Matters Most
I write this entry from Beijing, China just one day before the start of perhaps the most highly anticipated and controversial Olympics in recent history.
At different times and by different observers, these Beijing Olympics have been referred to as both visionary and subversive. Depending on who you listen to, China's hosting of the epic contest is either a proud moment for a rapidly developing nation seeking to join the global community, or a perversion of major values that civilized nations should seek to affirm.
The feeling on the ground here in Beijing, at least among ordinary Chinese citizens, leans heavily toward the former view. Taxi cab drivers, construction workers, and middle-class office workers alike have expressed a great deal of excitement about the upcoming games, proud that their country is serving host to over five million international guests. Even as heavy smog and pollution sweep the skies, the energy is palpable across the country.
But as viewers in the United States tune in to observe the games, it is the un-televised competition happening betweeen students in American public schools and Chinese schools that matters most for the 21st century. By one count, China produces more than nine times more engineers than does America--a gap of 650,000 to 70,000. A Canadian global think tank estimates that within two years, 90% of all engineers holding doctorate degrees will live in Asia.
Some of this owes to the fact that China has 1.4 billion people to America's 300 million. But only some. The reality is, China has yet to tap into a huge reserve of potential that resides in its rural areas where many children do not yet have access to public education. Once that takes place, and by some estimates it is already starting, America will fall even further behind.
So as US fans cheer a likely victory of our basketball team led by Lebron James and Kobe Bryant over the Chinese National Team on August 10th, what remains to be seen is whether the same fans will realize soon enough that the competition that matters most is not on the court, but rather in the classroom.
McCain Addresses NAACP
Lots of happenings in the past few weeks to catch up on, perhaps none more interesting than a speech given by Senator McCain to the NAACP two weeks ago where he officially unveiled his education platform for the presidential campaign.
While the edu-world consensus seems to be that there wasn't too much in the way of earth-shattering policy suggested in the speech, there were at least a couple items that caught my attention.
The first observation has to do with the over-arching positioning behind Senator McCain's proposals. It's pretty clear that he has no intent of making education anything close to a center-piece of his campaign, instead choosing to allow education to serve as an echo and reinforcement of themes upon which he and his advisors have already bet their campaign livelihoods. For instance, the second and third sentences of his education platform declare:
"Now is the time to demand real, new reform earned through discipline, grinding work, tough choices and leadership. John McCain has dedicated his career in public service to the hard and sometimes unpopular work of achieving meaningful reform."
Sure, sounds great, but I couldn't help but notice that the same two lines could have been used in a campaign statement on health care, energy policy, campaign finance, the housing crisis--heck the two lines could be an intro to Senator McCain's position on Major League Baseball and steroids. My point here is not to criticize the Senator, especially since he has some thoughtful viewpoints on teacher pay, teacher recruitment, and school choice later on in his plan. But I do mean to point out that the first question his campaign asked when weaving an education platform was not, "what is best for children?" but rather, "what makes the most sense for this campaign?" To be fair, Senator Obama has arguably done the same on the issue.
Second observation has to do with Senator McCain's opponent and the issue of race. He spent a good minute in the opening of his speech praising Mr. Obama in front of a predominately African-American audience, both graciously and eloquently. But I wonder how much of Senator McCain's remarks and choice of venues--in front of the very same NAACP that he refused to speak at in 2007--have to do with this recent poll from the Public Education Network that shows that African American and Latinos actually support the No Child Left Behind Act more than do white voters, by a pretty significant 3-to-2 margin.
Bold Education Ideas for Senators McCain and Obama
News yesterday from the presidential campaign trail was that Senator McCain was preparing to give an address before the NAACP next week discussing his plans for how the federal government can help improve public education outcomes in America. While his talk, even by his own campaign's admission, is unlikely to be as deep and detailed as Senator Obama's parallel speech on education more than a month ago, word is that he will discuss No Child Left Behind and a handful of more intricate issues such as teacher pay-for-performance.
The fact that none of the presidential candidates have been so measured in their approaches on education -- even Senator Obama's 19-minute address six weeks ago did not contain any headliners -- indicates that they have both bought into the current orthodoxy of education reform in Washington, DC: the standards-based accountability movement. This is the movement that has resulted in states setting standards for what students should know in each subject area by each grade level, and implementing testing systems to measure whether those standards are being met.
In principle, the standards based accountability movement is a sound strategy that owes much of its genesis to successful business practices designed to monitor and enhance productivity. But unlike the business world, where workers rarely object to the idea that they will be held to a set of performance indicators to determine their efficacy, we have seen a fair deal of back-lash from educators and other stakeholder groups against the standards based model in education, particularly on the testing front.
I have often been quick to play devil's advocate against this brand of backlash, asserting the general logic that anytime an institution is suddenly and openly confronted with its own failures (and in the institution of public education, the magnitude of those failures is immense indeed), that the institutional stakeholders will reject and rail against the accountability system that reveals its weaknesses. But it must also be admitted that there is some degree of resonance to what those who object to NCLB and standards-based school reform are saying. The appeal of their arguments can be described this way: is the end goal and sum-total of what we are trying to achieve in public education reform really just an increase in the number of students who correctly fill-in some arbitrary percentage of bubbles on an annual test?
To be sure, those bubbles, the arbitrary percentage, and the tests themselves represent real skills that are indicators of what our children need to know to compete in the world economy. But that's also the problem: they are only indicators. If Susie Q. passes her state-written 4th grade reading proficiency test she still has a ways to go before she has earned her way into a prosperous participation in the global economy.
None of this would be a problem if we didn't have better indicators. That is to say, most people agree that institutions, whether public or private, ought to be held accountable to meeting their stated purposes, and we should use the bets-tailored indicators possible to decide if they are in fact succeeding. But in the case of public education, I believe we do have better indicators to determine whether our schools are meeting the goal of preparing all youth for productive future lives as democratic citizens and members of an ever-changing global work force: college completion rates and, by extension, high school drop-out rates!
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A Lot of Carnage
As the school year winded down for the 240 middle school students and 20+ staff at my school, there was a lot of carnage.
In the last week, two of the students who I had thought made a great deal of progress were expelled because of a fight involving a thrown garbage can and a brandished fire extinguisher. This would have been the most notable occurence of the day, except that earlier in the day the 8th grade math teacher finally called it quits. He had shown remarkable resolve by staying in the classroom despite not getting along with the students or much of the administration for most of the year. But twenty minutes before the fire extinguisher fight, the math teacher stormed out of the building and quit after he was pelted in the face by a group of several students who used fruit cup, oranges, and other foods as ammunition.
But the end of the school year was actually less bloody for the students and teachers than it was for the administration. My principal had been fired a month before the end of the year and replaced with a new principal who had a stronger background in urban education. The last month of the school year was thus filled with a great deal of stress for the other two administrators (a dean of students and a director of curriculum and instruction), along with the few teachers who were hoping to return. In theory at least, the new principal would be evaluating those who hoped to return to decide who would make the cut and return next year.
Well on the day after school let out, we found out that both the dean of students and the director of curriculum & instruction were fired. Which means that not a single administrator will be carried over from the school's first year into year two.
What are the implications of this? For the students, I have to say that it is a good thing. Sometimes when an organization fails at its mission, there is something to be said about sticking with the people who made up the organization so that they can improve based on lessons learned. Other times, institutional memory can be a bad thing if unsuccessful practices become ingrained. In the case of our school, we needed a brand new fresh start.
But there are broader implications as well. Our school is far from the only one in the nation where administrators and teachers are being fired (or deciding not to return) left and right. In a profession where half of the employees quit their jobs within five years there are a whole host of problems that arise. Indeed, any serious policy response to teacher quality problems has to address problems with retention as urgently as it addresses recruitment.
A Roomful of Lawyers and the Right to Education
I’ve spent the past two days at a conference hosted by the National Access Network, an alliance of organizations that works to support state-level legal efforts to increase educational opportunity.
The fact that such an organization exists, servicing a growing body of lawyers who have tried state-level education lawsuits in nearly all of the 50 states, may seem something of an anomaly to casual observers of civil rights in America. After all, we are barely more than a half-century removed from one of the most well-known lawsuits in American history, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which established as a matter of national jurisprudence that schools could no longer discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. So the concept of equal educational opportunity has long been at the very heart of the battle for civil rights.
The anomaly is that even as civil rights have become increasingly a matter of federal court action—from Miranda rights to free speech rights to other matters of equal protection—the progress of lawsuits on the federal level to further education as a civil right has long since ground to a halt. Whether it was the 1973 Rodriguez US Supreme Court decision which ruled that children do not have any kind of a right to education in the federal government, or the 2007 Seattle / Louisville decisions which effectively ended the legacy of Brown-initiated desegregation efforts, the federal courts have been a place where education advocates have gone only to get bad news over the past three decades.
In the wake of these negative rulings at the federal court level, a quietly impressive—and at times, heroic—group of lawyers have risen up to fight on behalf of children in the states instead. The basic nature of the challenges that these lawyers have brought is to question whether states, all of which have some limited clause requiring the provision of public education, have met a certain standard to provide educational opportunity to their children. Some of the lawsuits have fought for more equitable distribution of resources between wealthy and poor districts; others have argued instead for an adequate level of resources in every school district within a state, equity notwithstanding. The trial record is a mixed one, but the adequacy lawsuits have been particularly successful, winning 20 out of 28 state cases at the state Supreme Court level.
The recognition among lawyers that these state lawsuits are the “only game in town” has grown into a truism, with any discussion of raising a new federal level claim scorned upon as unrealistic. The problem with foregoing action at the federal level, be it legal or political action, is that it impels an end game where we have 50 different sets of standards, resources, and ultimately educational opportunities—and children will win or lose depending on what state they are born in. That might have been okay two hundred years ago or even a half century ago when youth in different states faced unique economic challenges, but that is no longer the case today.
All of this made my participation at the conference, representing Our Education’s 20,000+ students who believe that quality education ought to be a federal right guaranteed to all American children no matter what state they live in, something of an oddity. In a roomful of brilliant lawyers who have spent thousands upon thousands of hours fighting to force statehouses to do better by children but who have generally looked at the federal government without much hope, the idea of a constitutional amendment is at best naïvely optimistic, and at worst, a detraction of resources and energy away from more winnable strategies.
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Light on Opportunity or Light on Interest?
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/campaign-2008/2008/05/08/presidential-candidates-have-little-opportunity-to-talk-about-education.html?PageNr=1A US News & World Report article published earlier this month provides an accurate overview of how education has been treated on the presidential campaign trail so far this election cycle.
In short, education has played an insignificant role in both of the primaries, and appears to be headed in the same direction in the general election. None of the three remaining candidates have staked out bold positions on the most important K-12 and higher education issues, and none of them have made much in the way of headlines in terms of promises or policy proposals.
Both Senators Obama and Clinton appear to be content with criticizing funding levels for NCLB, clamoring for increased loans to help with college affordability, and drawing moderate lines on teacher pay and quality initiatives. One disjunction between the two is that Senator Clinton has toed the teachers union supported line of rewarding teachers based on how well whole schools are doing whereas Senator Obama has taken the more controversial stance of rewarding only those individual teachers who are dramatically improving student achievement.
For his part, Senator McCain has had even less to say about education. He doesn't even yet have a full education platform published on his campaign website, and has really only issued standard GOP responses on education, trumpeting such ideas as school choice, merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and sometimes even vouchers. To the degree that education remains a low-priority issue, it will benefit Senator McCain since he has little expertise on the matter, especially given a traditional Democratic advantage among voters who consider education to be a key election day issue.
My only challenge to the article regarding low attention paid to education on the campaign trail is to the title. US News has the piece printed under the headline, "Presidential Candidates Have Little Opportunity to Talk About Education." I question whether this gets to the heart of the matter, or if it actually gives the candidates a bit more credit than they deserve regarding this issue which, after all, may be one of the most pressing policy matters facing our nation's future.
To me, the presidential candidates have plenty of opportunity to address whatever issues they deem to be important. After all, we're talking about candidates who give multiple speeches each day talking about all of the changes they'd like to make to the country. Senator McCain, for instance, has had no trouble making headlines with his unique views on global warming and climate change--issues which he has raised on his own, without having to wait for the right "opportunity". In other words, I'm afraid the candidates have not lacked in opportunity to address education, but have instead lacked sufficient interest to make it a crucial topic. And if you're wondering why none of the candidates (not just this year, but really for the past half-century since K-12 education has become a federal issue) have made K-12 school reform a priority, allow me to ask you a question to offer a hint why education will take a backseat for the foreseeable future: how many elementary, middle, and high school students are allowed to vote?
Are Unhappy Students the Exception or the Rule?
If you want to know how good a school is, here's a novel idea: ask the students.
At a bad school, you'll hear complaints that are well-founded, such as a number of the quotes from a powerful report published earlier this week in Washington, DC .
One elementary school student complained, "Give us harder work, not the busywork that we already know."
A middle school student, when asked about her teachers, said that "they let you know you are failing but then let you go on struggling and then send you to summer school."
A student at the same school reflected, "Teachers don't teach us a thing throughout the entire period. When visitors come, they start working."
And at one of the city's high schools, one history class had an almost unbelievable lesson plan, where students were asked, "Where is your favorite place to shop?"
The concept of students complaining about school is not a novel concept, of course, especially at this time of the year when summer is just around the corner and patience grows thin on the part of adults and students both. But there is something telling in these comments from DC's students--and its telling more because of who says them, than what they are saying.
After all, were you really all that surprised to hear that it was students from an inner-city with high levels of poverty complaining about bad teachers, low expectations, and overall low quality of education? I hear similar statements from students all the time in my school, and I have to confess that they are often on point. In short, reports of student discontent are numerous in DC, St Louis City, and other areas with high concentrations of low-income and minority children, and they often hit on important themes, such as those having to do with low quality teachers or run-down school buildings.
Meanwhile, if a school is actually pretty good, you'll likely hear a combination of compliments and complaints. The difference about the complaints, however, will be marked. Instead of focusing on obvious problems such as inept teachers, broken facilities, lack of safety, and inadequate student support and discipline, in the nicer suburbian schools, complaints will sound a lot more like the student in the video below, which is to say high on passion and energy, but low on common sense. (Message to student: you are right that some teachers focus too much on rote memorization, but trust me when I say that learning vocabulary words does serve a purpose in the end!)
New GI Bill Not Enough
Legislation passed by Congress this week will finally help US Armed Forces members cope with rising college tuition rates. Along with mental health care and homelessness, education is a key issue for returning vets.
But as the report above details, a skeptical President Bush may veto the bi-partisan bill. Understand, of course, that this is a declaration to support the troops when they come back home from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a email, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said:
"House Democrats also voted to create a GI Bill for the 21st Century that ensures our veterans have the right to an education when they return home. This part of the bill restores the promise of a full, four-year college education, and makes the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan part of the American economic recovery, just like the veterans of World War II were. "
In an emotional floor speech Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin) spoke in strong support of the bill:
But, of course, we all know that this is not enough. This past week we learned that Army Physicians in the VA have been falsifying diagnoses for soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (see email document below).
As Mike Connery accurately states, this is a disgrace.
According to Mike's report,
"A study by the RAND corporation, [approximates] 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan display symptoms of PTSD, or nearly 20% of veterans. . .only half of those 300,000 veterans have ever sought treatment.
A 2004 story in the LA Times reports no conclusive evidence to pin-point the causes of homelessness among veterans, but along with high housing costs, unemployment, and little education, past injuries and PTSD were also listed as root causes.
That same piece quotes Department of Veterans Affairs 2004 estimations that say homeless Vietnam veterans account for more than twice the number of soldiers, 58,000, who died in battle during that war.
According to an piece by MSNBC from November of last year,
"The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its programs specifically targeting homelessness."
A similar New York Times piece says that the VA and aid groups are bracing for those number to increase. Those interviewed for both stories that served in Iraq and Afghanistan who were homeless were all under 30.
As I said before, the New GI Bill is hopefully just the beginning in a series of legislation that will continue to help keep our promises to our soldiers.
54 Years Later, Problems Remain
Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The decision, reached by a unanimous Supreme Court, struck down laws that segregated schools on the basis of race. No longer would children of color be forced, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, to attend schools separate from those attended by whites.
What has been the impact of the court's ruling, now that we have the benefit of 54 years of wisdom in hindsight? There are three frameworks through which politicians, educators, and casual onlookers typically refer to the decision, and depending on which one you chose to adopt, the decision has been either completely successful, partially successful, or completely unsuccessful.
The simplest way to look at the impact of Brown v. Board is to make a purely legalistic analysis. In this lens, the Supreme Court set out to do one very simple thing: get rid of the pernicious practice--as ordained by local and state laws--of forcibly sending one group of children to school A and another group to school B based solely on skin color. Never mind whether school A is nicer, has better teachers, spends more money per child, increase student achievement more than school B; in the legalistic sense, the only goal to be sought was the realization by law of the court's finding that "separate but equal [schools] are inherently inequal".
In the legalistic sense, the Supreme Court succeeded completely. Fifty-four years after the ruling, there is not a single school district or state that affirms a policy of race-based segregation. There may be other reasons why a child cannot attend a particular K-12 school, but to public knowledge, race alone is not one of them.
Some, however, would argue that the legalistic analysis is too simple, and that the proper way to analyze Brown's impact is to measure whether black children are actually being enrolled in white schools at appropriate rates. Call this the intermediate frame of analysis; the idea that the actual goal of the Supreme Court in Brown was not just to outlaw school segregation as a policy, but rather to go one step further and actually integrate schools to some appropriate degree. In other words, in this analysis, getting rid of school segregation laws is only step one of a two-step process envisioned by the court. To determine whether the decision has been successful requires us to measure how far we have come in the second step (are our schools actually integrated), and not the first.
In this second way of looking at the decision, it's probably the case that we have experienced only mild success in the wake of Brown. Although for a while the pace of integration was fast post 1954, it has slowed and even reversed in recent years--segregation has actually been on the rise for blacks since the late 1980s. Of course, the difference is that today's segregation is not shoved upon blacks by Jim Crow laws, but rather subtly arrived upon as the complex result of demographic forces, housing markets, and school districting lines. In any case, a person adopting this framework likely looks at the past 54 years with mixed feelings: thrilled with the complete reversal of school segregation laws (which was hardly a given even in the 1960s), but concerned with rising de facto segregation in our schools.
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