How Can We Align Educational Reform with the Purpose of a Democratic Education?

In the article, “Is This What Democracy Looks Like,” published in our Fall 2011/Winter2012 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy author Deborah Meier (2012) considers how current educational reforms may actually resist democracy. In this discussion, Meier identifies the purpose of a democratic education as “to prepare all of our students without exception to become members of a smart ruling class, while also living productive, socially useful and fully human lives” and asserts that current reform efforts are ineffective in achieving this purpose. “Democracy Left Behind,” a report from the University of Colorado Boulder by Kenneth R. Howe and David E. Meens (2012), also reveals the ways in which current reform efforts fail to meet the needs of a successful democratic society.

Aligning Educational Reform with a Deliberative Democracy

By, Celina Meza
Editorial Staff, Journal of Educational Controversy

In the report, “Democracy Left Behind” Howe & Meens discuss the consequences of No Child Left Behind (No Child Left Behind [NCLB], 2001) through the framework of Amy Gutmann’s (2004) concept of deliberative democracy. A deliberative democracy is a society in which citizens play an active role in deliberation, critical discussion and decision-making, of the policies that govern them. 

In terms of educational policy, there are three main principles that constrain a deliberative democracy:

1. Non-repression—freedom from interference and freedom to engage in deliberation. This takes the form of local control in decision-making, in which communities collectively determine the policies that govern them.
2. Non-discrimination—the prevention of exclusion or denial of entire groups of children, especially in passive repression.
3. The democratic threshold—a standard of equality in which all children are permitted to an education that prepares them with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to engage in democratic discussions and decision-making. 

In 1983 a report from the U. S. Department of Education titled “A Nation at Risk” warned that the current public education system was contributing to “a rising tide of mediocrity” (A Nation at Risk, p.1) that threatened the global economic competitiveness of the U. S. Prompted by rhetoric around the perceived achievement crises, in the 1990’s NCLB was presented as a solution to hold local school districts accountable to nation-wide education standards. 

NCLB enacted two policies to hold schools accountable: Standardized testing and public school choice. With standardized testing, all students are tested on the basics in reading, writing and mathematics. Based on student test results, Title 1 funds sanctions and rewards. Districts that do not meet standard are required to provide Supplemental Educational Services (SES). The first step of SES goes to funding third party tutoring (for example, Sylvan Learning Center). Next, districts are encouraged to take corrective action in firing staff and administrators and adopting new curricula. If test scores still don’t rise to standard, districts must offer an alternative school choice. School choice originally grew out of conservative advocacy for local control in the 1960s in the effort of fighting racial desegregation. Now, under NCLB, school choice gives parents the option to exit schools they are unhappy with to attend others and makes schools subject to market competition. In addition, failing schools may be reconstituted as charters under private management.

NCLB did not arise out of concern for closing the equity gap, but rather out of concern for the achievement gap, thereby shifting the focus from helping areas in high need for the sake of equity to raising the nation-wide achievement for the sake of national competitiveness. So it is no surprise that Howe & Meens find that the policies of NCLB fall outside of the principles of a deliberative democracy in a number of ways. 

First, the implementation of standardized testing threatens the principle of non-repression immediately by removing the power of deciding upon standards out of local control. Next, democratic power is taken away from local communities through corrective action under SES when communities cannot determine their own needs. Local control is also threatened by school choice when third party private businesses and philanthropists come in to manage charter schools.

Second, the principle of non-discrimination is threatened by the method of sanctions and rewards based on standardized testing and by exclusion caused by school choice. Unsurprisingly, schools in wealthier areas test higher than schools in low-income areas. It is also true that schools in low-income areas tend to have large populations of historically marginalized groups such as Black and Latino Americans. “Democracy Left Behind” reveals that though urban schools are in disproportionate need of help, they comprised only 27% of the schools that received funds and 90% of the schools that received sanctions. In addition, Howe & Meens suggest “test-based accountability creates a perverse incentive for schools to allow and even encourage low-performing students to leave” (p. 8). The pressure of accountability and inequity of funding has contributed to increased dropouts, suspensions, and expulsions in historically marginalized ethnic groups. Thus, in an effort to close the achievement gap, standardized testing has resulted in passive repression that furthers the equity gap between the historically marginalized and the dominant.  

Though school choice has the potential to foster democracy, the way that school choice is implemented is not democratic: Howe & Meens find that school choice actually exacerbates segregation. When school choice in not uniformly offered in all communities, it does not give parents equal opportunity to exit one school to attend a better one. In addition, the current implementation fails to ensure the protection of marginalized and historically disadvantaged groups. As a consequence, parents with power can figuratively hijack school choice to advance their own children—thus furthering segregation between the historically advantaged and the marginalized.

Third, the democratic threshold is threatened by restriction of curriculum in order to teach to the test and by segregation caused by school choice. With the threat of corrective action under SES, teachers are pressured to design their curricula around what have been called the basics, those topics that will be tested. However, the basics do not cover the knowledge and skills necessary to be an active citizen. For example, a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center concludes, “across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history” (as referenced in Howe & Meens, 2012, p.12), though this part of our history is essential knowledge for all American citizens in a deliberative democracy. In addition, we must have diverse and integrated schools to dialogue across differences and develop the skills and dispositions necessary for democratic deliberation. School choice that leads to segregation limits the democratic potential of the context in which children learn. 

In conclusion, Howe & Meens offer four recommendations to better align educational reform with the purpose of a democratic education:

1. Provide additional support for staff, parents, and community to get involved in schools in need rather than implementing sanctions.
2. Focus the curriculum to content and skills necessary for democratic citizenship rather than curriculum that teaches to the test.
3. Hold accountability through democratic procedures (such as elected school boards), rather than through privatization of public resources in SES and school choice.
4. Ensure access to equal educational opportunities and diverse context for learning by including enrollment constraints as part of school choice policy. 

References

Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic education. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Howe, K. R., & Meens, D. E. (2012). Democracy left behind. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy  Center.

Meier, D. (2012). Is this what democracy looks like? A personal retrospective . Journal of Educational Controversy , 6(1), Retrieved from http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal 

National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983). A nation at risk. Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office.

No Child Left Bbehind Act of 2001. 107 P. L. 110. 115 Stat. 1425. 2002 Enacted H.R. 1

Southern Poverty Law Center (2011). Teaching the movement: The state of civil rights education in the United States 2011. Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Latest on the Federal Court Decision on the Banning of the Mexican-American Studies Program in Tucson, Arizona

Editor:  Readers will remember our article titled, "The Hypocrisy of Racism: Arizona's Movement towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid," by Augustine F. Romero, from our Fall 2011/Winter 2012 issue of the journal. Since its publication, we have tried to keep readers updated on the events in Arizona that resulted in the banning of the Mexican-American Studies Program in the schools of Tucson, Arizona.  A decision from the federal courts has just come down on March 8th.  Here is a link to the decision, Acosta v. Huppenthal .  Essentially, the law, HB 2281, was upheld except for one provision that barred courses "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group."    The court upheld other provisions of the law that bar courses promoting the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote racial or class resentment, and those that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals. 

 We provide both a press release from the Save Ethnic Studies website about a possible appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and a statement from the Office of the Attorney General.

Statement from Save Ethnic Studies Website:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, March 11, 2013

Contact:

Law Offices of Richard M. Martinez

(520) 327-47-97

SES Statement on Tashima Ruling: The Path Forward

Late in the afternoon of March 8, 2013 Judge Tashima issued the long anticipated ruling concerning the pending motions for summary judgment. The motions were initially submitted in 2011 and argued in March of 2012.

The plaintiffs' motion sought to invalidate HB 2281 (A.R.S. § 15-111 and 112) as unconstitutional because it is impermissibly vague and overbroad, precluding speech and infringing students' "right to receive" under the First Amendment. Although Judge Tashima recognized that the students' First Amendment rights in the classroom were at stake, and found one provision of the statute unconstitutional, A.R.S. § 15-112(a)(3) - "classes designed primarily for pupils of a particular group ethnic group", the decision left intact the remainder of the law that was used to prohibit the teaching of Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District.

The Acosta/Arce case is not over. The immediate task is to decide what is the next step: seek reconsideration of the decision or file an appeal to the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision will be made within the next few days. It was always understood that this case would end up before the Ninth Circuit, and we have been preparing for this inevitable step for the past year. We have assembled a legal team that includes professors from the Seattle University Law School and the Bingham McCutchen law firm. Their contributions to the appellate process will be invaluable.

Once an appeal is filed, briefing will be submitted by both sides and a hearing will occur. This step will likely take about 18 to 24 months. The legal process is never as quick as we all hope for. This is especially true when important constitutional rights are at stake.

The effort to invalidate HB 2281 will continue. Too much is at stake. The right of every student to learn and teacher to teach the history, literature and culture of Latinos in Arizona is currently prohibited. Mexican American Studies proved to be a valuable educational program that instilled students with a positive academic identity. Much better academic skills, grades, graduation rates along with increased matriculation to college consistently occurred in every year the program was offered.

The mandate to successfully educate every student irrespective color, gender, culture or economic status is in crisis. As a nation we have failed miserably to reach this goal. We can and must do better. Ethnic studies provide a critical curricular option that must be available to every school district to consider, implement and maintain.

HB 2281 is the product of fear and a profound misunderstanding of the role of culture, language and history. These are areas of learning that do not divide us as a nation but provide a vehicle to promote understanding, respect and success. We cannot allow this fear to spread to other jurisdictions and eliminate important programs that already exist or the development of new programs.

The American dream has always included the universal hope that our children do better than we did. Irrespective of color, gender, culture or language every student must have the right to know who she is and how she fits into our complex and challenging society.

The path to obtain and maintain our civil liberties is continuous. In this lucha we all move forward. Your support is vital. Stand with us united in our common effort to be make our nation "a more perfect union".

The educators, students and community of Save Ethnic Studies.


Statement from the Office of the Attorney General:

Attorney General Tom Horne Wins Federal District Court Case Against Tucson Ethnic Studies Program


Phoenix (Monday, March 11) – Arizona’s law prohibiting courses that teach ethnic solidarity, rather than treating other students as individuals, was upheld as constitutional in a Federal District Court ruling issued Friday. The law was held to be constitutional, with one minor exception, Section (A)(3). The case was personally argued by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne in Federal District Court in Tucson.

In a statement Horne said, “This is a victory for ensuring that public education is not held captive to radical, political elements and that students treat each other as individuals - not on the basis of the race they were born into.”

Enforcement of the law resulted in cancellation of Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American Studies Program after an independent Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) found that the program presented material in a “biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.” The ALJ also stated: “Teaching in such a manner promotes social or political activism against the white people, promotes racial resentment, and advocates ethnic solidarity instead of treating peoples as individuals.”

The State law prohibits courses if they violate any one of four prohibitions, including “promote resentment toward a race or a class of people”, “are designed primarily for peoples of a particular ethnic group”, or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of peoples as individuals.” The Court found only “designed primarily for peoples of a particular ethnic group” to be unconstitutionally vague, and upheld the other standards under which Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies Program was eliminated.

The Statute was challenged on numerous grounds, including violation of free speech, and unconstitutional vagueness – they were denied. The Court held that the State’s legitimate concern here was to reduce racism, as set forth in the declaration of policy in the statute that states: “The legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not to be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.” The Court found that the prohibitions in the statute are reasonably related to the goal of reducing racism at the schools.

In a related action, another Federal Law Judge had issued a ruling in the Tucson desegregation case calling for the development of culturally relevant courses, an Order that has been appealed by Attorney General Horne. However, that Order also stated: “The State is free to enforce its laws as it did in 2011 when it took action against TUSD for Mexican-American Studies courses, if it believes any culturally relevant courses developed and implemented in TUSD violate state law.”

Office of the Arizona Attorney General

School-to-Prison Pipeline Issue Now Online

We are pleased to announce that our special issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on the School-to-Prison Pipeline and the School-to-Deportation Pipeline is now online at: http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v007n001/


Readers are invited to contribute a rejoinder to any article in this issue.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Civil Rights and a Civil Liberty Issue

The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Civil Rights and a Civil Liberty Issue


An Editorial Preview of Upcoming Issue



The School-to-Prison Pipeline stands as a direct contradiction to the vision of the public school as an institution for promoting and sustaining a democratic republic. Each year thousands of students are funneled through the public schools into the juvenile justice system as a result of school policies and practices that increasingly criminalize students rather than educate them. Most are students of color, students with disabilities, and students from impoverished neighborhoods. How and why this is happening is the focus of this issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.



Research indicates that both the number of school suspensions and expulsions have increased dramatically as well as the kind of behaviors and infractions that result in suspensions and expulsions. Data from the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights indicate that over three million students are suspended and over 100,000 students are expelled each year. 1 This rate has almost doubled in the past thirty years. Research also shows a relationship among expulsions, suspensions and school dropouts and subsequent involvement in the juvenile justice system. According to national figures, “high school dropouts are three and one-half times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested, and more than eight times as likely to be incarcerated.”2

Zero-tolerance policies, the overuse of school discipline and juvenile court referrals, exclusionary discipline policies, excessive policing in schools, the criminalization of disability-related behaviors, and pressures and abuse from the high-stakes testing environment are often cited as contributing factors. Together these policies and practices have resulted in the violation of three of our most basic democratic principles:

1. Right to an Education

2. Right to Non-Discrimination

3. Right to Due Process

The disruptions and denial of education as a result of suspensions, expulsions and exclusionary disciplinary policies have threatened the right to an education, especially when students are given indefinite expulsions without recourse to an alternative education route. The disproportionate impact on different student populations, especially on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems, has resulted in discriminatory treatment. And the process that often funnels students from the public school into the juvenile justice system often violates fundamental due process procedures. Most important, if the philosopher and educator, John Dewey, was correct in his theory that children learn what they experience, what are these school policies and practices teaching our children about the fundamental principles of our democracy?

A reconstructed example illustrates all three violations. A young student of color in an urban school in an impoverished neighborhood is confronted by a police resource officer in the hallway. Suddenly the young student finds himself in handcuffs and arrested for speaking back and for defiant and disrespectful behavior. Infractions that would have been treated as a school disciplinary incident have now become a criminal act. This often results when the concepts of school discipline and criminal acts are not clearly defined in a school policy, and the role of school administrators and police resource officers are not clearly distinguished. The role of police is to ensure safety and stop criminal acts, not to discipline students for breaking school rules. Are these misunderstandings that result in criminal arrest due to a lack in the training of school resource officers in cultural differences and a failure to understand the special needs of adolescent development? How aware is the student of his or her rights to due process at this point. How will this experience lead to school alienation and future dropout? What has this incident taught the student about our democratic principles? The complexity of any specific incident has led many authors in our issue to talk about a “persistent nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads” rather than a simple pipeline that our young people get caught up in.3

The purpose of this issue of the journal is to bring awareness and understanding to this complex nexus of events. The issue is going online at a very opportune moment. The United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held its first ever hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline on December 12, 2012, an event that brought national attention to the problem. In this issue, our authors complement the testimony that was given at the hearing with a deeper, multidimensional analysis.

The following controversy was posed for authors to address:

The School to Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?

There are five different sections.

Section 1 includes authors’ responses to the controversy itself and covers multiple perspectives and dimensions of the problem.

Section 2 looks at other related pipelines like the “School to Deportation” Pipeline.

Section 3, entitled, “From Theory To Activism: Perspectives from Youth Advocacy Groups In Washington State,” brings together a description of the activism and recommendations by groups in the trenches who have been trying to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The groups include the Center for Children and Youth Justice, Team Child, the League of Education Voters and the Washington State Education Ombudsman, an office that may be the first of its kind in the nation.

Section 4 provides the reader with a video of an interview with one of our authors. Justice Bobbe Bridge, former justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, who started the Center for Children and Youth Justice, discusses a more proactive approach that the courts can use to reach young people who are truant and disengaged from the school before they enter the school-to-prison pipeline. We have also inserted a video from an earlier forum that the journal sponsored in which Rose Spidell, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, talks about the cases that have come to the ACLU and the actions that were taken. In the near future, we will put online other video interviews with our authors. The videos can be accessed by clicking on the “Authors Talk” link on the journal’s menu.

We finally conclude in Section 5 with three book reviews on the subject.

I want to thank my guest co-editor, Daniel Larner, for all his work in helping to conceptualize this issue and select the included papers from our many submissions. Dan is a professor at the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University and has been a longtime member of the ACLU Board of Directors in Washington State. In addition to his courses in theatre arts, Dan also teaches courses in civil liberties at the college. His editorial reflects his own unique perspective on this topic from a lifetime devoted to promoting civil liberties and teaching young people to understand the meanings and significance of these cornerstones of our democracy. Readers can read an earlier article by Dan that was published in the Winter 2010 issue of the journal, entitled, “Educating Politicians as Playwrights: Toward a Sustainable World in Creative Conflict.”



1Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Civil Rights Data Collection, available at http://ocrdata.ed.gov/.

2Bridge, B.J., Curtis, L.E., Oakley,N., “No Single Source, No Simple Solution: Why We Should Broaden Our Perspective of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline and Look to the Court in Redirecting Youth from It,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013.

3Gebhard, A., “Schools, Prisons and Aboriginal Youth: Making Connections,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013.

A Look at Today’s Immigration Policy Debate within the Context of U.S. Immigration Legislative History

Editor: As we mentioned in our earlier post, we have supplemented our upcoming issue on the school-to-prison pipeline with a section on the school-to-deportation pipeline. Warren Blumenfeld, Associate Professor at Iowa State University, has just published the article below on the Education Liberation Listserv and has given his permission to circulate it. In his article, Professor Blumenfeld helps us to see the current debate within a larger context of U.S. immigration legislative history.

Immigration and Racism

By Warren Blumenfeld

Ohio State University

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless,

Tempest-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!...”



Like the noble words from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” engraved on a bronze plague affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, these sentiments express a foundational tenet on which the United States itself stands. In direct contradiction to this sentiment, however, immigration policy has not lived up to these guiding principles, based instead on essentialist and stereotypical notions of race, ethnicity, and religion.

In the current national debates over immigration reform, in its January 30, 2013 editorial, for example, the conservative National Review referred to “Hispanics” as “hostile to free enterprise,” and “[t]hey are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately likely to receive some form of government support. More than half of Hispanic births are out of wedlock.”

These racially- and ethnically-charged representations of minoritized people perpetuate a long and dishonorable tradition of preventing “the huddled masses to breathe free.”

We need to keep in mind that the notion of “race” is socially constructed. The concept of “race” arose concurrently with the advent of European exploration as a justification and rationale for conquest and domination of the globe beginning around the 15th century of the Common Era. Though “race” is a human-imposed invention, however, its implications have far reaching consequences impacting individuals and groups in profound ways.

While given the option of living in peaceful co-existence, European invaders stepped upon this land guided by the conviction that Providence destined them to expand from Atlantic to Pacific (from “sea to shining sea”) led by the so-called Anglo-Saxon “race.” This they used as justification in their unquenchable thirst for land ultimately resulting in their forced removal and physical and cultural genocide of indigenous peoples, and an unjustified imperialist-inspired war with Mexico.

“This continent,” a congressman declared, “was intended by Providence as a vast theatre on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race” (quoted in Takaki, 1993, p. 176).

The Puritans fled England for the “New World” to practice their “Purer” form of Christianity, believing God had chosen them to form “a biblical commonwealth,” which would not tolerate any separation of “church and state,” or, indeed, any religious beliefs outside their own.

The newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act in 1790 excluding all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and American Indians, the latter whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for an estimated 35,000 years. The Congress refused to grant American Indians rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though it continued to deny Asians naturalized citizenship status.

Protestant American “Nativist” prejudices against Irish Catholics escalated in the mid-1850s when the so-called “Know Nothing” movement attempted to prevent Catholics from ascending to public office. After 1860, Irish were met with “HELP WANTED: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY” signs hanging in store windows.

Congress passed the first law specifically restricting or excluding immigrants on the basis of “race” and nationality in 1882. Attempting to eliminate entry of Chinese (and other Asian) workers who often competed for jobs with U.S. citizens, especially in the western United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to constrict their entry into the U.S. for a 10-year period, while denying citizenship to Chinese people already on these shores. The Act also made it illegal for Chinese people to marry white or black U.S.-Americans.

The editor of a newspaper in Butte, Montana summarized the exclusionist sentiment regarding the Chinese held by many U.S. citizens: “The Chinaman’s life is not our life, his religion is not our religion….He belongs not in Butte” (Swartout, 1992, p. 78).

The Immigration Act of 1917 further prohibited immigration from Asian countries, in the terms of the law, the “barred zone,” including parts of China, India, Siam, Burma, Asiatic Russian, the Polynesian Islands, and parts of Afghanistan.

Fearing a continued influx of immigrants, legislators in the U.S. Congress in 1924 enacted an anti-immigration law (Origins Quota Act, or National Origins Act) setting restrictive quotas of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, specifically Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slaves (so-called “PIGS” groups viewed as representing Europe’s lower “races”), including Jews (the later referred to as members of the so-called “Hebrew race,” considered the lowest of all the European “races”). The law, however, permitted large allocations of immigrants from Great Britain and Germany.

In addition, the law included a clause prohibiting entry of “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” which was veiled language referring to Japanese and other Asians dating back to the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricting citizenship to only “white” people and affirmed by a 1922 U. S. Supreme Court ruling (Takao Ozawa v United States) in which the government denied Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant, the right to become a naturalized citizen because he “clearly” was “not Caucasian.”

Congress, in 1939, refused to pass an emergency measure, the Wagner-Rogers Act, which would have permitted entry of 20,000 children, primarily Jewish, from Eastern Europe over existing quotas. According to Laura Deleno Houghteling, cousin of F.D.R. and wife of the U.S. commissioner of immigration, who spoke out against the proposed legislation: “20,000 charming children would, all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

The 1952 the McCarran-Walters Act overturned the 1924 law. Later, framed as an amendment to McCarran-Walters, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed “natural origins” as the basis for U.S. immigration. The 1965 law increased immigration from Asian and Latin American countries and religious backgrounds.

Horace Kallen, a Jewish immigrant and sociologist of Polish and Latvian heritage coined the term “cultural pluralism” to challenge the image of the so-called “melting pot,” which he considered inherently undemocratic. Kallen envisioned a United States in the image of a great symphony orchestra, not sounding in unison (the “melting pot”), but rather, one in which all the disparate cultures play in harmony and retain their unique and distinctive tones and timbres.

Returning to today, if we learn anything from our immigration legislative history, we can view the current debates as providing a great opportunity to pass comprehensive federal reform based not on “race,” nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social identity categories, but rather, on humane principles of fairness, compassion, and equity. We have a wonderful chance now to avoid the mistakes of the past and finally to “lift [the] lamp beside the golden door!”

References:

Swartout, R. R., Jr. (1992). From Kwangtung to the big sky: The Chinese experience in frontier Montana. In R. R. Swartout, Jr. & H. W. Fritz (Eds.), Montana heritage: An anthology of historical essays (pp. 63-82). Helena: Montana Historical Society.

Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little Brown.

Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).


Permission granted to forward, post, or publish this commentary: warrenblumenfeld@gmail.com

Journal of Educational Controversy to Take Part in MLK Activities

The Journal of Educational Controversy will be participating in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Conference here in Bellingham, Washington. The conference is an annual event sponsored by the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force that is now part of the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center. It will take place at the Whatcom Community College on Saturday, January 19, 2013. The theme of the conference this year is: “Gaining a Voice in a Democracy: Tools for Empowerment.” Our session will complicate the vision of the American school as an institution for gaining a voice in our democracy by looking at the contradictions posed by our upcoming issue on the school-to-prison pipeline. The session will be facilitated by editor, Lorraine Kasprisin, and author, Maria Timmons Flores. Professor Flores will discuss her paper, “A DREAM Deported: What Undocumented American Youth Need their Schools to Understand.” A section on the “School-to-Deportation Pipeline” will supplement articles on the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” in the issue. Our session will provide the political and legal context of the problems, causes and possible solutions, along with suggestions on what schools can do. Young students will join us to talk about their lived experiences, the messages they hear, and the barriers and bridges that drive them one way or another.


Other events honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Bellingham include:

A free breakfast at Bellingham High School at 10 a.m.; Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community to Community Development, will be the featured speaker on Jan 21.

Poverty Action March begins at 11 am at Bellingham High School on Jan. 21. (The march is inspired by the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington D.C. that was being planned by Dr. King and others, only months before his assassination, to bring attention to economic and social disparities for Americans living in poverty.)

Service projects include a Read-In at Village Books, painting at the Boys and Girls Club and volunteering to support the elderly through the Chore Program.

Tangled Web Conference on Race, Immigration, Poverty and Prisons; Western Washington University, Jan. 17-18.

Martin Luther King Conference, Whatcom Community College, Jan. 19.

Readers can read an excellent article, “Martin Luther King’s Legacy: Gaining a Voice in Democracy” by Victor Nolet, Professor at Western Washington University and member of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force Planning Committee at the website of the Bellingham Herald.

Providing a context for this national day of remembrance, Professor Nolet writes:

Imagine a year in which you are invited to the White House to meet with a sitting president, your daughter is born, you are arrested and placed in solitary confinement, you deliver a historic and nationally televised speech, and you are named person of the year by Time Magazine. That was Martin Luther King’s year in 1963! In 1963, at the age of just 34, Martin Luther King was considered by many to be the moral leader of the Civil Rights movement. He was an ordained clergyman, a gifted orator, a labor activist, and an accomplished scholar with a doctorate from Boston University. He also was considered by many to be a revolutionary, a radical, and according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an enemy of the United States. By all accounts, Martin Luther King was a complicated and controversial figure.

To read the entire article, go to: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/01/13/2824796/mlk-legacy-gaining-a-voice-in.html

Testimony at U.S. Senate Hearing Links High-Stakes Testing to the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Editor: In a post below we announced that the U.S. Senate had planned to hold hearings on the school-to-prison pipeline problem. Monty Neill, Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), argued at the hearing that high-stakes testing has been a contributing factor leading to the school-to-prison pipeline.  Below is his testimony.  Watch for our upcoming issue on the topic in the Journal of Educational Controversy.
 


FairTest ____ National Center for Fair & Open Testing
P.O. Box 300204
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

December 10, 2012

U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights
224 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Re: Hearing on Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Dear Chairman Durbin, Ranking Minority Member Graham, and Members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights:

Thank you for the invitation to submit testimony for the subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing on ending the school-to-prison pipeline.

My name is Monty Neill, and I am Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). FairTest advances quality education and equal opportunity by promoting fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial evaluations of students, teachers and schools. FairTest also works to end misused and flawed testing practices that impede those goals. We place special emphasis on eliminating the racial, class, gender, and cultural barriers to equal opportunity posed by standardized tests.

As part of its mission, FairTest has addressed how the high-stakes uses of standardized tests, particularly as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), have led to increased disciplinary sanctions against students. This has disproportionately affected students of color, students with disabilities, and those from low-income families and communities. High-stakes tests are those that play the sole or primary role in educational decisions, such as determining high-school graduation or school sanctions under NCLB (FairTest, 2004, 2012).

Zero tolerance discipline and high-stakes testing policies have similar philosophical underpinnings and similarly destructive results. Both stem from a 1980s movement to impose more punitive policies in criminal justice and public education. Together, they have helped turn schools into hostile environments for many students. The result is a “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which large numbers of students are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Too many young people end up in prison, at a cost many times greater than that of a good education. It is a senseless waste of resources and human potential, damaging to both individuals and society.

How does high-stakes testing contribute to the pipeline?

High-stakes testing turns many classrooms and schools into test prep centers rather than offering rich, engaging, well-rounded instruction. Narrow, rote instruction bores and alienates students. Many tune out, feeling they are little more than their scores (FairTest, 2004), and leave school. In addition, exit exams result in many thousands of students leaving high school without diplomas (FairTest, 2008). These tests have been found to lower graduation rates without improving the quality of education (Hout & Elliot, 2011). Some students see no realistic option other than dropping out. Others fail the tests or are deliberately pushed out to manipulate school performance statistics. Regardless of which specific cause, young people who leave or are pushed out are much more likely to end up in trouble or in prison.

Tests and zero tolerance work hand in glove.

NCLB has raised the stakes attached to test results, especially in urban, low-income districts, which face severe sanctions for failure to boost test scores. Zero tolerance imposes harsh penalties for nonviolent infractions, some as harmless as drawing on desks with erasable markers (Herbert, 2010). It provides a pretext for removing low-scoring students and improving a school’s test score bottom line. The superintendent of the El Paso public schools was convicted and imprisoned for initiating district policies to remove low-scoring students from school (Fernandez, 2012). In Florida, researchers found schools gave low-scoring students longer suspensions than high-scoring students who committed similar infractions (Figlio, 2003). Zero tolerance and high-stakes testing reinforce each other, creating a downward spiral.

Punitive culture promotes strategies to weed out ‘troublemakers’/low scorers.

The damage to school climate and decreased engagement with school foster problem behaviors, which schools and districts too often counter with zero tolerance discipline. Since NCLB, the use of strategies such as withdrawing students from school rolls or sending them to alternative schools or GED programs has increased. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions are also on the rise nationally, with startling increases in many states (Advancement Project, 2010).

Students of color and the disabled increasingly bear the brunt.

Racial disparities in student suspensions and expulsions are large and increasing. Black students are more than three times as likely to be suspended (Losen and Gillespie, 2012). Between 2002-03 and 2006-07, expulsions decreased by 2% for white students, but increased 33% for blacks and 6% for Latinos. Similar disparities exist for students with disabilities (SWD). In Ohio, for example, SWDs were twice as likely to be suspended out-of-school as their peers in 2007-08. And in Texas, in 2005-06, students enrolled in special education accounted for 11% of the student population but 26% of all out-of-school suspensions (Advancement Project, 2010). Vastly disproportionate numbers of low-income, racial minority, SWDs and English language learners fail state exit tests and do not obtain diplomas (FairTest, 2009).

Prison populations reflect disparate impact of zero tolerance, testing.

The student groups affected by these policies are more likely to drop out and become caught up in the juvenile justice system, making them more likely to land in prison. People of color and those with disabilities are overrepresented in U.S. prisons. Approximately 8.8% of public school children have been identified as having disabilities that impact their ability to learn, but students with disabilities are represented in jail at a rate nearly four times that (Quinn, 2005). One in nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, compared to one in 30 for men in that age group in general (Pew, 2008).

To undo the damage: reform assessment, reverse zero tolerance.

Zero tolerance is not working. However, alternative prevention and intervention strategies being implemented around the country have been proven successful. For example, a community push for new discipline policies in Denver Public Schools led to a 63% reduction in referrals to law enforcement and a 43% reduction in out-of-school suspensions (Advancement Project, 2010). tThe New York Performance Standards Consortium (2012), a network of New York high schools that have state permission to use performance tasks instead of standardized tests, reports its 5% suspension rate is less than half the city’s 11%. This success, they conclude, is rooted in using alternatives to standardized tests.

The work of the Judiciary Committee, therefore, could positively influence not only juvenile justice legislation but have a positive impact on the Senate’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We recommend that this Committee, perhaps together with the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, investigate the ways in which high-stakes testing interacts with overly harsh disciplinary policies to harm young people, undermine school climate and damage educational outcomes. To end the Pipeline, it will be necessary to also end the overuse and misuse of standardized tests.

I would be pleased to discuss these issues with you further. I can be reached at 617-477-9792 or by email at monty@fairtest.org.

Thank you.

Monty Neill, Ed.D.

Executive Director

FairTest

References

Advancement Project (2010). Test, Punish, and Push Out: How “Zero Tolerance” and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth Into the School-to-Prison Pipeline. http://www.advancementproject.org/resources/entry/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-funnel

Advancement Project, Education Law Center – PA, FairTest, The Forum for Education and Democracy, Juvenile Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (2010). Federal Policy, ESEA Reauthorization, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. http://www.fairtest.org/position-paper-nclb-and-school-prison-pipeline.

FairTest (2004). Failing Our Children: How "No Child Left Behind" Undermines Quality and Equity in Education; An Accountability Model that Supports School Improvement. http://www.fairtest.org/node/1778

FairTest (2008). Why Graduation Tests/Exit Exams Fail to Add Value to High School Diplomas. http://www.fairtest.org/gradtestfactmay08

FairTest (2009). What’s Wrong with Graduation and Promotion Tests. http://www.fairtest.org/whats-wrong-graduation-and-promotion-tests

FairTest (2012). NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from this Policy Failure? http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home Fernandez, M. (October 13, 2012). “El Paso Schools Confront Scandal of Students Who ‘Disappeared’ at Test Time,” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/education/el-paso-rattled-by-scandal-of-disappeared-students.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Figlio, D. (2003, November). “Testing, crime and punishment.” Gainesville: University of Florida. http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/figlio/.

Losen, D., and Gillespie, J (2012). Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School. The Civil Rights Project. http://www.otlcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resources/opportunity-suspended-center-civil-rights-remedies-aug-2012.pdf.

Neill, M. (June 18, 2010) “A Better Way to Assess Students and Evaluate Schools.” Education Week. Available at http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/better-way-to-assess-EdWeek6-18-10.pdf.

Herbert, B. (March 5, 2010). “Cops vs. Kids,” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/opinion/06herbert.html

Hout, M. & Elliott, S., Editors (2011). Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in
Education. Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education;
National Research Council. Available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12521

The Pew Center on the States (2008). One in 100: Behind bars in America 2008, 5. http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/8015PCTS_Prison08_FINAL_2-1-1_FORWEB.pdf

Quinn, M., et al. (2005). Youth with Disabilities in Juvenile Corrections: A National Survey, Council for Exceptional Children. Vol 71, No. 3, pp. 339-345. http://www.helpinggangyouth.com/disability-best_corrections_survey.pdf

Thoughts for the New Year from Dean Francisco Rios

Editor:  We begin the new year with both sorrow and inspiration.  The horrific events  in Newtown, Connecticut brought a deep sorrow over an inexplicable, senseless act of a violence on innocent children, but it also reminded us of the selfless acts of courage and dedication by those who stepped forth to protect the children.  Below is a moving piece from the dean of the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University that was recently published in our local newspaper, the Bellingham Herald.  We thank Dean Francisco Rios for his permission to reprint his reflective thoughts for our readers.  Readers can read another article by Dean Rios in the current issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.

School tragedy shines light on teachers as everyday heroes

by Francisco Rios

After more than 35 years as a teacher, teacher educator and now the dean of Wooding College of Education at Western Washington University, I listened with sorrow and dismay to the details as they emerged from the terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

I sent a difficult-to-compose notice to our faculty and staff asking that they take a moment to reflect, in the way they best believe, on the horrific events and the pain being felt by bereaved families and a devastated community. I welcomed the moment of silence offered by Western President Bruce Shepard on Saturday during commencement to honor those whose lives had been taken needlessly and unexpectedly. I was deeply moved as I listened to President Obama's compassionate message to an interfaith gathering on Sunday in Newtown, looking for hope in the nearly hopeless.

Something deeply profound happens in the consciousness of the nation whenever these catastrophic events occur. But this was different in that it included the lives of 20 six- and seven-year-old children, each shot multiple times. Nothing will take away from the heart-breaking loss of young people who died before much of their lives had begun.

In returning to work in the college on Monday, I was thinking about the murder of these children and adults, and its implications for our work as students, staff and faculty in a college of education. Perhaps more than any other academic unit on a university campus, we feel compelled to respond because our work is centered on children and adolescents in families, schools and communities.

With the pain of loss of children in the forefront of our minds, I also thought about the six education professionals whose lives were also lost: two teachers (Lauren Rousseau and Victoria Soto), two teachers' aides (Rachel D'Avino and Anne Marie Murphy), a school counselor (Mary Sherlach) and the school principal (Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung). These are the roles we prepare individuals to assume, the work we undertake most closely and directly.

The people who choose to come into a profession where service to children and adolescents is a guiding light inspire us day in and day out. We know that they learn how to write lesson plans, organize classrooms, create assessments and modify instruction accordingly. But we also work diligently to ensure that they foster positive relationships with children and their caregivers. We ask them to regard classrooms, and the teaching/learning that occurs there, as sacred places. We teach them about the importance of being good stewards of the school, the local community and the profession. We foster an understanding that we are not just teachers, administrators, human service professionals and counselors - but our work is central to the very vitality of our nation's democracy as we pursue the broad public purposes of education: an informed and engaged citizenry.

Teachers are often thought of as "unforgotten heroes." As we grieve and mourn the tragic deaths of 20 children whose lives gave meaning to a community, let us not forget the courage and commitment of these six who were acting heroically to carry out their work as education professionals. Let us not forget the teachers who calmed their students and ushered them out of the school and into safety. We do so by ensuring that teachers who grace classrooms in our own local communities, states and a grieving nation are recognized for who they are: the forgotten heroes.

Francisco Rios is dean of Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University.



Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/01/03/2821815/school-tragedy-shines-light-on.html#storylink=cpy



Journal's Upcoming Issue on the School -to-Prison Pipeline will be the Topic of Hearing by the U.S. Senate

As our readers know, the next issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy will focus on the School-to-Prison Pipeline. We posed the following controversy in the issue:

The School to Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?

 We have just learned that Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, has announced he would hold a hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline this Wednesday, December 12, 2012. The focus will be on the overuse of school discipline and juvenile court referrals. It will take place at 2:00pm (ET) in Room 226 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

This may be the first Congressional hearing to investigate the growing increase in the number of students who are being funneled out of the public schools and into the juvenile justice system. Our upcoming issue of the journal will examine some of the possible causes and solutions to the problem and will include a video interview with former Washington State Supreme Court Justice, Bobbe Bridge, who started the Center for Children and Youth Justice, after leaving the Court.

We invite readers who attend the congressional hearing in Washington, DC to share their insights with us on the blog.

Bill Ayers' Petition -- President Obama: Replace Arne Duncan with Linda Darling-Hammond

Editor: Here is a slightly different version of our post below about Bill Ayers.  In it, he asks followers to sign and forward a petition to President Obama.  In it he recommends that the President appoint Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of State.  The petition currently has 810 signatures. A link follows the post.

Argues Ayers:

It is time to set American education on that course, and a strong step in that direction would be appointing Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. A teacher and recognized scholar/researcher for decades, Dr.Darling-Hammond will not be swayed by big money or political expediency or the latest fads. She will be independent, professional and principled. We can then return to the precious but fragile ideal that must power education in a democracy: Every human being is of incalculable value, and the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each.

Here is the full version:

President Obama: Replace Arne Duncan with Linda Darling-Hammond


By Bill Ayers


Dear Mr. President:  

You and Secretary Arne Duncan-endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits-now bear a major responsibility for a toxic agenda of "school reform."

The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united "school reform" agenda are these:

1) turning over public assets and spaces to private management;

2) dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and

3) reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score.

While there's absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed. Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education:

It's one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.

Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).

In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Every child deserves the type of education your children receive.

It is time to set American education on that course, and a strong step in that direction would be appointing Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. A teacher and recognized scholar/researcher for decades, Dr.

Darling-Hammond will not be swayed by big money or political expediency or the latest fads. She will be independent, professional and principled. We can then return to the precious but fragile ideal that must power education in a democracy: Every human being is of incalculable value, and the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each.

That's why I created a petition to President Barack Obama, which says:


"Mr. President: Prove your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background. Fire Arne Duncan and appoint Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. "


Will you sign my petition? Click here to add your name:


http://signon.org/sign/president-obama-replace-1?source=c.fwd

http://signon.org/sign/president-obama-replace-1?source=c.fwd&r_by=4535475&r_by=4535475
Thanks!

William Ayers

Bill Ayers’ Open Letter to President Obama

Editor: Readers will remember an article in an earlier issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy by Bill Ayers, entitled, “Singing in Dark Times.” The letter below has been circulating on the web with requests to interested readers to forward it on to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In his critique of the administration's direction for educational reform, Ayers points out three areas that have become particularly toxic and destructive for an education required for sustaining democratic life.


Writes Ayers:

The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score.

 We thought our readers would be interested in reading Professor Ayers’ most recent post.

An Open Letter to President Obama from Bill Ayers

By William Ayers

Dear President Obama: Congratulations!

I’m sure this is a moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate, regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.

The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.

Whether inept or clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that agenda.

The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score. While there’s absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed—fact-free, faith-based reform at its core, resting firmly on rank ideology rather than any evidence whatsoever.

The three pillars of this agenda are nested in a seductive but wholly inaccurate metaphor: Education is a commodity like any other—a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver—that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Within this controlling metaphor the schoolhouse is assumed to be a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads.

It’s rather easy to begin to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and “privatizing” a space that was once public, is a natural event. Teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes” (winners and losers) becomes a rational proxy for learning; “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior turns out to be a stand-in for child development or justice; and a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials (they call it “accountability")—is logical and level-headed.

I urge you to resist these policies and reject the dominant metaphor as wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral.

Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. Further, while schooling in every totalitarian society on earth foregrounds obedience and conformity, education in a democracy emphasizes initiative, courage, imagination, and entrepreneurship in order to encourage students to develop minds of their own.

When the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it. People are turned against one another as every difference becomes a potential deficit. Getting ahead is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned. It’s no wonder that cheating scandals are rampant in our country and fraudulent claims are commonplace.

Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education as the Secretary of Education begins to look and act like a program officer for some charity rather than the leading educator for all children: It’s one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.

You have opposed privatizing social security, pointing out the terrible risks the market would impose on seniors if the voucher plan were ever adopted. And yet you’ve supported—in effect—putting the most endangered young people at risk through a similar scheme. We need to expand, deepen, and fortify the public space, especially for the most vulnerable, not turn it over to private managers. The current gold rush of for-profit colleges gobbling up student loans is but one cautionary tale.

You’ve said that you defend working people and their right to organize and yet you have publicly and noisily maligned teachers and their unions on several occasions. You need to consider that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions. We can’t have the best learning conditions if teachers are forced away from the table, or if the teaching corps is reduced to a team of short-termers and school tourists.

You have declared your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background, and yet your policies rely on a relentless regimen of standardized testing, and test scores as the sole measure of progress.

You should certainly pause and reconsider. What’s done is done, but you can demonstrate wisdom and true leadership if you pull back now and correct these dreadful mistakes.

In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).

Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

Sincerely,

William Ayers

From Desegregation to “No Child Left Behind:” a New Memoir by a Civil Rights Fighter Who Made a Difference. James Meredith’s New Book, A Mission From God: A Memoir and Challenge for America.

September 30th marked the 50th anniversary of the historic desegregation of the University of Mississippi. James Meredith, the student whose courage made this milestone in the fight against segregation possible, has published a new book talking about his journey and challenging what he sees as misguided educational policies today. The book is entitled, Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America. We may publish a review of his book in a future issue of the journal, but readers may want to read the press release now.


PRESS RELEASE OF BOOK:

CIVIL RIGHTS HERO BLASTS OBAMA AND ROMNEY FOR DESTROYING AMERICAN EDUCATION

On the Eve of 50th Anniversary of his Historic Desegregation of the University of Mississippi on September 30, James Meredith Urges Citizens to “Storm the Schools”

September 21, 2012: Civil rights giant James Meredith, author of the provocative, just-released book A MISSION FROM GOD: A MEMOIR AND CHALLENGE FOR AMERICA (Simon & Schuster), charged today that both President Obama and Governor Romney are contributing to the destruction of American K-through-8 public education by proposing failed or unproven policies, supporting the continued waste of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds on education, and neglecting America’s children, especially the poor.

“There is no real difference between the two candidates and parties when it comes to the most critical domestic issue of our age, public education,” Meredith says. “Both Obama and Romney are in favor of multi-billion-dollar boondoggles and money-grabs that have little or no evidence of widespread benefit to K-through-8 children or the community at large, like over-reliance on high-stakes standardised testing; over-reliance on charter schools and cyber-charters; and the funding and installation of staggering amounts of unproven computer products in schools.”

According to Meredith, “Education is much too important to be left to politicians. They have failed. They came up with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, both of which are largely failures. It is time for parents, families and teachers to take back control, and to step up to their responsibilities to take charge of education.”

His solution? “Storm the schools,” says Meredith, echoing the challenge he issues in his book A MISSION FROM GOD, which has been compared by one reviewer to a work by Dostoyevsky and hailed by Publishers Weekly as “lively and compelling.” He says, “I call on every American citizen to commit right now to help children in the public schools in their community, especially those schools with disadvantaged students.” He also suggests that citizens flood the schools with offers to volunteer to read to young children, and flood every school board and political meeting to demand that politicians and bureaucrats justify, with concrete evidence, every proposal made and every dollar being spent on public education, line by line.

While Meredith does not endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, and does not endorse most individual education policy proposals, he is announcing a 4-point Manifesto to Rescue American Education, that calls for America to:

• Suspend billions of dollars of public spending on unproven high-stakes standardized testing and unproven computer products in schools, and redirect those and other necessary funds to;

• Support sharply boosting teacher quality, qualifications and pay, especially in the poorest neighborhoods,

• Expand early childhood education and community schools, especially in the poorest neighborhoods, and,

• Strengthen the back-to-basics fundamentals of K-8 education, including play-based learning for youngest students; add or restore history, civics, the arts, music and physical education to the core subjects of math, science and English; and provide proper nutrition, medical and social support services for poor children through the schools.

“The outrageous, unjust public shaming and scapegoating of teachers by politicians and self-appointed pundits must end, our problems are mostly not their fault,” says Meredith. “Teachers should be respected, revered, compensated, empowered, loved and supported to give our children the education they desperately need. And that will only happen when we, as a people, take back control of our schools.”

About James Meredith: Meredith’s one-man crusade to desegregate the University of Mississippi at Oxford exactly 50 years ago, on September 30, 1962, is considered one of the great turning points and triumphs of the civil rights era, and led the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to place Meredith at the top of his own list of heroes in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. In 1966, Meredith was shot while leading a “March Against Fear,” a campaign that helped open the floodgates of voter registration in the South.

Written with award-winning author William Doyle, A MISSION FROM GOD: A MEMOIR AND CHALLENGE FOR AMERICA is published to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the “Battle of Oxford” and reveals the inside story of James Meredith’s epic American journey and his challenge for Americans to save their education system.