In Brief [4-22-22]
the weekly review of education advocacy, news, and progress
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein
#PURPLE: This week marks six years since Prince passed away too soon. Of all my influences, he was tops. Read what I wrote about his touch on my life in 2016 when the sting of his passing was fresh and raw.
STILL, WE RISE: There may only be 2% of teachers that are Black men, but 2022’s Teacher of the Year is one of them. Congratulations to Kurt Russell, a history teacher from Ohio.
LEARNING EVERYWHERE: Did you know that Morehouse College offers courses to Georgia’s “extremely large” population of incarcerated people? According to a story in Black Enterprise, the college partners with Common Good Atlanta to offer humanities courses in critical thinking, creative writing, the history of Black entrepreneurship, literature, philosophies of freedom, and the Constitution.
INEQUITY, BY DESIGN: A study by Public Source called “Pittsburgh Public Schools’ employee salaries show disparities between Black and white staff” looked at the $303 million that Pittsburgh spends on its 4,676 employees.
Here’s what it found:
White employees made around $18,000 more than Black employees on average, and men earned about $7,000 more than women on average.
White men earned an average of $25,000 per year more than Black women.
Of the 1,850 K-12 teachers in 2021:
86% were white
70% were women
62% earned between $90,000 and $120,000
58% living in the suburbs
69% of the students are of color and mostly low-income.
Imagine the implications of a mostly poor school district serving historically marginalized students who are not on track to enjoy life in the American economic mainstream, being served by a socially and politically consequential teaching force made up of college-educated, middle-class, suburbanite white women deeply vested in the system remaining as-is.
You’ve heard this from me before. You’ll hear it again.
I don’t know a ton about Pittsburgh, so I won’t attempt to speak about their education politics. But in Minneapolis, where I was a school board member and still engage in activism, the staff-student cultural mishmash creates a righteous cycle of “progressive” virtual signaling about “standing with teachers” even when those teachers push a self-interested occupational agenda that conflicts with the educational needs of marginalized children.
Like Pittsburgh, our teacher demographics don’t match students. But, a deeper problem is that white and wealthier children in Minneapolis get more expensive teachers with more teaching experience, and that is subsidized through a hidden form of school finance voodoo that charges Black children in low-income schools more for their lesser paid, lesser experienced, lesser effective teachers (the issue is complicated, but see this overview I wrote in 2016).
I wish I could explain this easily and quickly. It’s complicated.
My dogged journalist friend Beth Hawkins wrote about how charging schools for an “average teacher salary” instead of an actual teacher salary meant districts were spending between $916 to $3,859 per pupil, with poorer students getting the smaller amounts.
This chart from Beth’s story shows how wealthier schools get more teachers who earn above the district salary, while the poorest schools have the teachers paid far below the average.
Read Beth’s 2014 story here.
THE MATH DOESN’T WORK: The New York Times reviewed 21 of the math textbooks that were rejected for alleged thought crimes by Florida’s Department of White Nationalist Education. In 2021, the Department warned textbook publishers not to include “social-emotional learning and culturally responsive teaching” in their materials. Now, it looks like that warning wasn’t heeded and the books were barred.
These were the NYT’s findings:
There was almost nothing about race in the books, but instances of Social Emotional Learning - a new target of the Q-Anon right. SEL teaches students disciplines like self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness, and relationships skills. According to the NYT, “Research suggests that students with these skills earn higher test scores.”
The textbooks ask students to rate how their learning, a strategy called metacognition.
There were some “mindset” questions (“how can you understand your feelings?”) that were added to straightforward math problems. Experts recommend the consideration of feelings as a way to “soothe math anxiety” and boost math identities in students.
The rejected textbooks made references to character traits associated with SEL, like perseverance and cooperation, and also stressed the importance of “effortful learning” and “learning together.”
Judd Legum’s amazing substack column also covered the Florida math book battle.
There was no discussion of race, racism, or anything that could be construed as related to CRT in any of the [rejected] textbooks. While the vast majority of the textbooks focused on basic math skills, they also encouraged students to reflect on how they learn and work with their classmates. In general, the textbooks encouraged young students to be nice to each other and themselves.
This could be considered SEL, which focuses on "social and emotional competence" and helping “children develop emotional literacy when it comes to their feelings and other people’s.” But nothing in any of the rejected textbooks could be described in good faith as "dangerous" or "indoctrination."
One rejected textbook, Florida Reveal Math Grade 1, includes a series of questions under the heading “Math is… Mindset.” These questions include: “How can you show that you value the ideas of others?” and “What helps you understand your partner’s ideas?”
The truly ironic point of all of this anti-CRT moral panicking is that it proves CRT to be true in one way: what white people say becomes the universal way for us all. Florida’s Governor DeSantis isn’t in the least bit concerned about the nonwhite parents and students who fight to be included in systems of power and education. That fight has meant battles to be included and seen in the texts and to have their unique concerns for full humanity addressed. After years of progress, they are rebuffed because white parents want comfortable classrooms.
Thinking critically about the impacts of race on our society isn’t comforting.
With the stroke of a governor’s pen, a state leader can act on behalf of white parents and children to say “we don’t want any of that stuff in our system.”
And, there is no recourse. Because, systemic racism. Same as it ever was.
TAKE THIS JOB: TikTok has an entire section of teachers using the app to gleefully report they are leaving the classroom. They report being tired, wanting more from a job, and feeling as though their work is thankless from every angle. But the ethics of leaving teaching positions in the middle of the year is (and should be) questionable. We teach our kids to stick with endeavors even when they get tough, especially when others are counting on us and we made a commitment to do a thing. In Texas, there has been a 60% increase in the number of teachers reported by their districts to the state for “contract abandonment,” which means not honoring their teaching agreement with the district. The consequence of quitting in Texas is the possible revocation of a teacher’s license to teach.
THE INEQUITY BLUEPRINT: I’m tired of the talking point that says “public schools have to take all comers!” Ma’am, stop the nonsense. The “all-comers” claim is overused as a defense of public schools against calls for private school vouchers, and sometimes as a critique of charters schools that critics say don’t take their fair share of “those kids.” But the case for tax-funded common public schools will never be credible if we never address the many ways that traditional districts sort kids into different spaces where the opportunity to learn ranges from privileged to ghetto.
Here are a few key ways that - when taken together - form a blueprint for public school inequity that we should address if great schools for all is the goal:
For-Profit Charter school dumping
These issues are fixable. But we need visionary education leaders who are concerned about the advancing army of dissatisfied parents and private school choice philanthropies can choose to do more than deflect and defend their aged enterprise.
They could meet the moment by thinking big and renewing the promise of public school choice systems to the point that there would be no need to worry about private school competition.
They could start by doing the incredibly hard work of addressing their system’s longstanding inequities. How? By rethinking district boundaries so they don’t redline the disinherited students out of the reach of resources and the top drawer learning opportunities; renewing the potential of magnet schools that truly serve all kids, not just those who test well; restarting contract alternative schools so that they provide strong, therapeutic academics rather than acting solely as a dumping ground for expelled students; and restoring the lost promise of charter schools as schools of hope in the public school choice portfolio.
It’s just a thought.
LAUGH SO YOU DON’T CRY:
May the peace of the Lord be with you, today and always.