The Making of an Education Catastrophe- One
Activist’s Journey of Discovery
An Education Catastrophe has
descended upon the Nation’s public schools, while most of the public has been
asleep. It is making our children hate school, our best teachers leave the
profession, and is maximizing inequality in our schools and the larger society.
It is totally bi-partisan, and is as visible in Democratic states like New York
and Connecticut as in Republican states like Indiana and North Carolina. It
bears the imprint of President Obama as well as former President Bush, and it
supported by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country
What I am going to say here
is very personal. I am going to tell the story of my own evolution as an
education activist- about how a college professor whose field is African
American history discovered that public schools and public school teachers were
under attack, and decided to step forward in defense of both.
My journey into education activism began in the Spring of 2003 when I was asked to start an oral history project documenting the African American presence in Bronx Neighborhoods, which had been neglected by scholars of Bronx History as well as African American History in New York City. The project was embraced by scores of community residents, who wanted to tell stories that defied common stereotypes about Black neighborhoods in the Bronx being places of menace and danger. I found myself conducting as many as three interviews a week during the first two years of the project and before I knew it a portrait was emerging of the Bronx as a place of hope and opportunity for African Americans , West Indians and Puerto Ricans living in crowded Harlem neighborhoods in the 1930’s and 1940’s- a place where they could find safer streets, better housing and better educational opportunities for their children. This was a story that had never been told in print or broadcast media and was completely absent from the few existing books on Bronx history. It was an inspiring and important story of community building, but there was one feature of it that seemed to capture everyone’s imagination, the creation of an incredible live music culture in two multiethnic Bronx neighborhoods, Morrisania and Hunts Point, which included jazz, Afro Cuban music, doo wop and rhythm and blues. The mixture of three cultural traditions, the African American, the West Indian, and the Latin Carribbean, inspired extraordinary musical creativity, present in live form in clubs and theaters, schools and churches, and occasionally in apartments and on street corners. What we came across was truly incredible: Here were two neighborhoods in the Bronx, largely Black and Latino, with a few remaining Jewish and Italian residents, who contributed as much or more to American popular music as any places in the country.
When we
started publishing our findings and having articles written about our research
in New York’s major newspapers, our work
was discovered and seized upon by teachers and administrators in Bronx schools
as something that could be incorporated into their curriculum and inspire their
students, many of whom had a negative self image because they lived in the
Bronx. When this happened, my life began to change, and quickly. First, I was invited to make presentations to
meetings of social studies teachers working in Bronx high schools and middle
schools ; then to offer musical walking tours of the neighborhoods we studied
to teachers participating in Teaching
American History projects; and finally, and most astonishingly, I was invited
to train the staffs of 13 Bronx schools in how to organize community history
projects. This latter initiative was a huge undertaking. Over a period of two
months in the spring of 2006 , I was asked to supervise half day training sessions in all thirteen
schools and regularly visit them while them while they drew parents,
grandparents, school aides, security guards, and church and community leaders
into student research projects, heavily dependent on oral histories, that were
going to culminate in day long community history festivals at the end of April.
What took place in those schools provided
some of the most inspiring moments I had had in a forty year career as a
historian and history teacher. The teachers and principals in these Bronx
schools, many of whom had grown up in
the neighborhoods they taught in, showed incredible creativity in bringing
neighborhood history to life in their classrooms. With the help of students and
parents, they organized food festivals; choreographed dances and plays;
produced documentary films, created wall exhibits and collections of memorabilia,
put together short books of essays and poetry.
One school, PS 140 in Morrisania,
actually created a permanent “Old School Museum” to honor neighborhood
traditions in their building, and every school invited neighborhood residents
on festival day to see what their students had accomplished.
As an historian, this was a dream come
true. Research I had done had been
brought to life in the most concrete and meaningful form, to tens of thousands
of people by a group of amazing teachers and school administrators. I was
looking forward to expanding on these projects in coming years as our research
turned to new subjects, such as African immigration in the Bronx.
But then, the boom was lowered on the
teachers and principals in Bronx schools with startling suddenness, first through
rating systems that forced them to cancel any programs that took time away
from standardized tests, and then, when further escalated, turned them into
places of stress and fear where there was no room for community history, and
precious little for activities that students enjoyed like art, music, recess
and school trips.
The first sign of the test obsession that
was to have such negative consequences
came when the New York City Department of Education decided to create and publish letter grades for public schools
based on a rating system developed by statisticians working under a Columbia
Law School Professor named James Leibman who became the school system’s first “Accountability
Officer.” Leibman’s goal in doing this
was in the words of the New York Times to help the city” get rid of
incorrigibly deadbeat principals and underperforming city schools” but he managed to create a rating system that
was both wildly inaccurate and deeply
demoralizing to the city’s principals and teachers. One sign of this was that
the elementary school where my wife was principal, widely considered one of the
five best elementary schools in the city, got a “B” rating, but what infuriated
me the most was that the best inner city school I had ever spent time in PS
140, the school which had created the Old School Museum, and whose Principal
Paul Cannon spent 7 days a week in the school, was giving a rating of “C”
For me, the C rating given PS 140 was a huge wake up call. Somehow, number crunchers with no experience on the ground in schools were seizing control of education policy and in the name of “shaking up the system” were unfairly attacking and stigmatizing some of the best educators in the system. Almost every day School Chancellor Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg were quoted defending the ratings and denouncing the staffs of the schools getting low grades- which included many of the schools in the Bronx I worked with- as ‘failing.”
Things got even worse a year later after
Barack Obama was elected President. Not
only did the President unveil a new education policy, Race to the Top, which
required States receiving federal funds to close schools designated as
failing, and remove half their staffs,
he publicly praised a Rhode Island Superintendent for firing the entire
teaching staff of Central Falls HS in Rhode Island who refused to agree to
procedures that broke their union contract
The tone and substance of President
Obama’s initiative led Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg to ratchet up their
“anti-teacher rhetoric” and close large number of schools they
had designated as “failing.” Soon, a
wave of demoralization and despair began to sweep through the staffs of the
great Bronx schools I had worked in.
Everyone was depressed. Everyone was afraid to speak out. I decided I
could be silent no longer. I wrote a piece called “In Defense of Public School
Teachers” and posted it on my blog. It went viral. Teachers all over the city
and all over the nation wrote me to thank me for speaking out. They begged me
to tell the world what about the awful things happening to teachers all over
the country. I was so moved by this
that I decided to start a “Teachers Talk Back Project” that
produced videos of teachers willing to
tell their stories and created a list serve where teachers could speak their
mind under their own or assumed names
By now, I was so deluged with
heartbreaking comments from teachers about how people with no classroom
experience were shaping education policy and making it impossible to do their
jobs that I was in a constant state of agitation. I could not stop writing
about what I was learning, and could not stop telling teachers stories and
before long I was contacted by leaders of two education activist organization-
Save Our Schools- and United Opt Out- to speak at events they sponsored in
Washington.
Meanwhile, things in Bronx schools kept
getting worse and worse. By 2010, as
schools started closing en masse in Bronx neighborhoods, often replaced by
charter schools, and as the fear of closing hung over every school that
remained open.- I was no longer being invited to do History projects in Bronx
schools,- the public schools were afraid to devote time to them, the charter
schools weren’t interested. With “accountability” being the obsession of School Reformers local, state
and national-testing and test prep had become the be all and the end of education in Bronx. Community history was a
luxury no public school felt it could afford.
But a decline in the richness of the
curriculum s was not to be the worst thing that I observed in Bronx Schools. As
New York City, in order to receive of Race to the Top funding, began rate
teachers as well as schools on the basis of student test scores, people began coming
to me with horror stories that indicated that high stakes testing was starting to
undermine the mental, and in some cases the physical health of Bronx teachers
and students. A little more than a year ago, a chapter chair of a elementary
school near Fordham which was in danger of closing told me that a third of the
teachers in his school were under medication for Depression and anxiety. When I
raised this issue with other teachers I knew in the Bronx, they told me that
such conditions were widespread in every school they knew. The pressure on
teachers had become intolerable because they all feared for their jobs.
Worse yet, the pressures had been
transferred to their students. All over the Bronx, I was hearing, recess and after schools
programs were being used for test prep rather than exercise and play because
everyone was terrified by the consequences if test scores went down. Doing that anywhere approaches the definition
of child abuse- doing it in the borough with the highest child obesity rates in the nation approaches
cruel and unusual punishment. I began shouting this from the rooftops! Does anyone
realize what we are doing to these children? Does Michelle Obama realize that
while she is trying to fight Child Obesity through better diet and more exercise,
her husband’s Race to the Top policies
are undermining her efforts by assuring that non-stop test prep is all
that goes on in schools in the nation’s poorest communities?
But as it turned out, I was wrong about one
thing. The destructive consequences of high stakes testing and test driven
teacher ratings weren’t only being felt in high needs school districts, they
were being experienced by schools in
almost every demographic profile. I learned this in April of last year when I
became involved as an advocate and a speaker for a parent led test revolt that
emerged in New York State. In that
capacity, I met parents all over Long Island whose children had started to hate
school, and in some cases, were experiencing clinical levels of stress because
they were being forced to take tests that were developmentally inappropriate or
because non stop testing had pushed out everything enjoyable from their school
experience. They were enraged that
schools that worked well had become fear-filled places, that teachers and
students were miserable, and that things
were about to get much, much worse as all tests were to be aligned to the
Common Core Standards. Worse yet they
said- no one was listening to them. The politicians had bought into to the idea that schools were
failing and that testing and more testing was the only way to improve them. The
only way to stop them, they had become convinced, was to stop the system in its
tracks-to have their children opt out and refuse to take the tests.
I was deeply moved by the activism of
these mostly white, middle class suburban parents and teachers. From my vantage point in the Bronx, I had
underestimated the depth and breadth of the Educational Catastrophe descending
on the nation. Teachers everywhere were being driven out of their jobs and
stripped of their autonomy and creativity. Children everywhere were being deluged
with tests, and subjected to a one size fits all curriculum that, in all too
many instances, smothered their unique talents and aptitudes. And rather than
backing off in the face of these unhappy consequences, the nation’s policy
makers were ratcheting up the stress levels on students, teachers and families
by imposing an untested , poorly formulated set of Common Core Standards on
school districts throughout the nation with breakneck speed.
To give some idea of what kind of things are
happening to students as a result of high stakes testing, and the evaluation of
teachers, schools and school districts based on test results, I want to share
with you a story out of suburban Long Island that I was old just last week. If
you multiply it by ten thousand, it will give you a good idea of what is
happening every day to children in the nation’s public schools.
Kyle is a 7th grader this
year. Kyle's mom says Kyle has always had difficulty mastering core subjects
but his grades have been passable. He is brilliant in some things. She says he
can put together/take apart anything. He has fixed TVs, and can repair most
anything around the house. At school, while his grades remained mediocre in
core subjects, he excelled in band and tech. In fact, the only way his mom
could persuade Kyle to keep up his efforts in the other subjects was the carrot
of band and tech. Kyle went to school because of band and tech. Well,
this past September, the school advised Kyle's mom that because Kyle did so
poorly on the assessments he is mandated to attended double periods of math and
English. They took the place of band and tech. Kyle's mom called me crying, not
knowing what to do, because now Kyle is refusing to go to school.”
I don’t know about you, but I can’t live
with this happening to so many of our nation’s children. I am going to speak
up, and speak out until the Testing madness is pushed out of our public schools
and until we built a school experience around what empowers and engages
children and makes teachers want to remain in their jobs for life.
Four months ago, My
Friends and I created an organization which fights for just those things. It’s
called the Badass Teachers Association,and it now stands 31,000 strong with local
organizations in every state. We invite you to join us in the effort to
push back the Test Regime and make our
schools a place where teachers love to work and students love to learn.
I will end my speech by doing something I learned while doing
History Projects in Bronx Schools- Rapping. Here is a little jam I wrote for
the Connecticut wing of the Badass Teacher Association- the Connecticut BATS
I’m proud to join Connecticut BATS
In a state where Deformers wear many hats
From Dr Steve Perry to Governor Malloy
Teaching and learning is what they destroy
Through funding charters and a Special Master
They undermine great teachers and sow disaster
They think testing is the way to put Students
first
While the creative spirit is dying of thirst
But the BATS in this state won’t let them win
For their love for students comes from deep within
They fight for the arts, the right to play and dream
And refuse to let schools become a Big Money
Scheme
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI read for a living as a HS librarian. These are the best words I have read this year. Still have not read Reign of Error; it is on its way.
ReplyDeleteThis is wonderful Mark!
ReplyDeleteThank you Mark.
ReplyDelete593
ReplyDeleteVenisti, quam vidisti, vicisti.
ReplyDeleteVenisti, quam vidisti, vicisti.
ReplyDeleteBrilliant
ReplyDeleteBrilliant !
ReplyDeleteSpoken like s true Badass. Bravo!
ReplyDeleteOMG Mark ... You have absolutely laid it out and NOW I truly see why BATs is so incredibly relevant! You spoke from your soul - and I imagine that I am just one of millions of teachers who identify with the 'felt sense' you portray.
ReplyDeleteI am just one of the 31,000 ... You have, with stunning precision, nailed down so many issues in education today - in such a compelling fashion that rank and file people who know nothing about what is going on in education rise up and take notice.
Within the fluidity of BATs, I have truly found a 'niche' for me ... precisely because you as an educator value the entirety of education, not just 'this' or 'that'.
BATs is a model of inclusion - the kind of model that doesn't first set up the paradigm of where people fit, but rather is welcoming 'enough' so that the vast diversity of professionals, parents, kids and community known in 'education' ... find their own 'space', find others who connect, and start the hard work needed to make changes.
I see things happening via BATs that has never been considered within existing education paradigms. BATs *is the future*.
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