On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety. Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”
The supreme court decision of 1954 ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. Thus began the civil rights movement that swept across the nation throughout the sixties and seventies. When I graduated college in 1968 and began teaching in Nashville, Tennessee at East Nashville High School, the equal rights movement provided the setting for a personal voyage that has served me well throughout my life.
Growing up in an East Tennessee small town, I had very few chances to even see a black person. When we went to the movies in my small hometown, I knew that the balcony was where black people were allowed to watch the movie, but I never gave the situation much thought. I learned that black students were bussed to a school somewhere, not close to our town; I did not know where that was.
As I began teaching in Nashville, citizens daily clashed throughout the city and in the schools about issues of bussing and integration. That year, 1968, was the first year that East Nashville High School became integrated. As the local black high school was closed, practically overnight the East High student population became 40% black and 60% white.
Our faculty was comprised of teachers already on staff at East Nashville High School, teachers that were included from the original all black high school, and at least one young white teacher fresh out of college. Our black and white classroom teachers and administrators attended a number of in-service training programs about human relations relative the needs of cultural harmony and academic equality. Those were high energy and sometimes contentious training programs.
In the midst of the turmoil and challenges, I was fortunate to work with a young black student who epitomized a student level of high ideals and aspirations, talent, intellect, and positive attitude that we needed and called upon to help lead our young people to more harmonious co-existence. She was in a couple of my English classes, my speech classes, and the National Forensic League (NFL) club which I was assigned to coach. She was popular in the student body and won a number of class officer elections. I coached her through three years of NFL local, state, and national tournaments. Two years in a row she and I traveled to the national tournaments of the NFL. She was a national finalist one year and again in the next year she was a finalist and won third place in the national tournament at Stanford University.
It is therefore, an honor and a source of personal pride that I have witnessed her shining success as an actress, world-wide leader in human rights efforts, and most famously known for her television show, The Oprah Winfrey Show
Andrea. I have heard Oprah speak so many times about teachers and giving credit and kudos to them for inspiring and leading so many young people, including herself, to embracing their potential that they had not recognized up to that point.
I’m so proud of you, fellow educator. Our work is important beyond measure.
I taught for decades in our public school system and then, after nominal retirement, for a decade in what is called the independent school system. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take over a dying school for gifted children and help bring it back to rude good health.
The first point is a given, for any serious teacher. I can think of no more fortunate circumstance in life than to have been a teacher as a vocation. Those who have been understand instantly what I mean when I say that teaching is a privilege of the highest order. Children are a wellspring of energy for teachers. They see the world in an inspiringly fresh way. Unless one is hardened to the point of sclerosis, teachers are changed forever by lessons of the greatest importance, each “taught” by a child who is just being his or her real self. We become fuller better human beings through teaching and receive much more than we give.
Yet our influence in children is hauntingly strong and as often as not a teacher does not know the students whom (s)he has influenced the most. Ask an adult of any age which teacher influenced their life the most, and they will instantly remember. Stories will gush from them. It is humbling and a little bit frightening to know what influence one can wield - for good or otherwise.
I have mixed feelings about the private vs public school system. In Canada, there is a greater range of teaching competence in public schools than in the private system by and large. The power of unions to protect teachers of limited energy, intellectual scope, goodwill, or moral values is shockingly strong. I say that with a heavy heart because I am a union supporter through and through and held executive positions in our teacher’s union. My wife and I put all of our children through public schools, but I didn’t hesitate to go to the guidance department and ask for changes to my child’s timetable if I knew that teacher would have a malign influence on them. We desperately wanted them to retain a love for learning for their lifetimes and knew there were teachers who effortlessly snuffed it out in their students. Yet they were never fired and inspections were token for the most part.
I would learn that the private school system was massively different. In two years at what is likely Canada’s most prestigious schools for girls, I had my eyes opened. The school was swimming in money, reputation, and “best practices”. But it was, when one scratched beneath the surface, a brutally Darwinian place, for both teachers and students. Teachers were paid well and treated like shit - in an upper crust sort of way of course. They could be fired with minimal notice - in fact I knew through chance that one was about to be fired before she did.
Most students looked through you rather than at you - to them it was natural to see their teachers as being on a par with other hired help their parents engaged - useful insofar as you taught what needed to be learned.
There was corruption - both large and small scale. Parents bought their way in with “special donations”, when their child didn’t qualify in the first place. The school’s reputation rose and fell on its global results on the province’s standardized testing. Naturally teachers in the tested subject areas taught to the test - a soul crushing experience. Naturally certain parents were discreetly contacted and it was discussed whether it might be better for their *sensitive* (read ‘not too bright’) daughter to stay home on those test days. Not surprisingly, that school always succeeded brilliantly and was able to use that as a lure to attract the next group of kids.
The teachers were uniformly competent and never much more, as far as I could see. The administration molded them to fit the school’s image - bright, perky, unfailingly pleasant, hard working, good with parents. I remember almost none of them today. The worst were fired. The best excused themselves and returned to the public school system before that precious, uniquely individual spark was snuffed out of them.
When comparing the two systems, I felt that in the end it came down to caveat emptor. The worst teachers are - in my country anyway - in the public system. The best teachers - they too are in the public system. Memory of them glitters in my mind like diamonds.
One telling anecdote and then I’ll close this mercilessly long post. The day I left the school forever (my choice I will add defensively :), I happened to be walking down the hall where the head administrator’s office was. It was a hot June morning. Graduating students were in the process of learning where they had been accepted for university. If they were staying in Canada, Queens and Western were the schools of choice. But the siren song of the Ivies in the United States was incredibly strong, and a high percentage of the girls pinned their hopes on being accepted at one of your country’s prestigious schools.
In any case, the door to the administrator’s office was open, and at the split second I walked by, I saw him slap an envelope down on her desk and bellow, “$200 000 and all I get out of it is an acceptance at Queen’s for Daniella”.
WOW, the impact you had on one life, and the ripple effect that Oprah has had by encouraging education, reading (her book club recommendations make a book a national best seller) gives me goosebumps. Thank you, and all educators, for your inspiration to the lives you touch!
Teachers are so vital. Sometimes being the sole anchor of love and care in a child’s life. The gifts they give keep on giving. Thank you Andrea for giving us all those gifts. 🙏🙏 Thank you for sharing a bit of your history. 💕
Andrea, I cannot thank you enough for the impact you had on Oprah and on hundreds of other students during your career. I found teaching to be a tremendous opportunity to learn from my students as well as to be an honor to be able to lead them through another year. "Teach" and "Peace" share a majority of letters. My heart goes out to the teachers of today.
Andrea, you are an unsung heroine/hero of our time -- as are all our best educators! My profound thanks to you, to Christine and Carla, and to all educators of our vibrant youth. Years ago, I was hit with the love of educating through teaching kindergarten classes -- I have graduated to standing before college classes where interaction with my students fills me with life, joy, new knowledge -- as well as deep sorrow for the agony the have all gone through during the past 18 months. Thank you, dear colleagues and fellow educators, past and present, for all that you have done and for having given of yourselves in such magnificent ways!
Rowshan, I share both the agony and the ecstasy! I hope you have a good semester (or quarter--whatever rolls in your world). I am going to officially be an emerita faculty member in a couple weeks but I still have a passel of students to get through the knothole backwards, which is my description of the capstone/thesis/dissertation process . . . The last 18 months has been hellish for everyone, and this upcoming term will be difficult. But I have hope in my students.
Thank you, Linda. Many, many congratulations to you on your new title of emerita as you retire and best of luck with your passel of students❣️ May they all pass through (pun intended) the knothole backwards, gently and with ease, as you shepherd them with your wisdom and academic expertise.
It continues to amaze me to see my students grown and standing before me at a grocery or football game reminiscing about our time together many years before. They are unanimous in telling me how a lot of things I taught them or told them didn’t really impress them until many years after. I told them that’s what a good teacher does. Gives you room for thought then and now.
Beautifully written, Andrea, and from a fellow teacher, thank you for showing so clearly the joy, the rewards of our profession. While most of our students do not become internationally known, I know every teacher has similar stories about students we have had the privilege of knowing, guiding and watching succeed. It’s not the summers “off”, it’s certainly not the money, but it’s what you have so beautifully described here that makes us love teaching.
Thank you, Gina. As much as I enjoyed the time off in the summers (when I did not work a temporary job) the reality was that it was "compulsory unemployment without unemployment benefits." I had to chuckle when people commented that it must be nice to have the summers off. True, it was, but it was also difficult. However, the last high school teaching job I had in California, the school district prorated our pay check so that we would have a summer income. That was nice.
It has to do your heart good to see your students succeed so wildly. Looks like with the visible evidence of just one student, you've made a lasting impact on our country.
Andrea, I read your comment too fast and didn’t take in that you taught Oprah Winfrey and clearly mentored her as well.
I’m gobstruck by how much good you did. Without your encouragement, she might have followed an entirely different trail.
I’m sure you must have influenced many other students in a great way because you gave so much of yourself to teaching.
Your story is so inspiring. I apologize for not commenting sooner. Obviously much good goes on in a classroom, but the most formative teacher-student experiences are in extracurricular, especially when they advance to such a level.
Dr. Richardson, thank you for your historical look at public education and the corruption of those education efforts by Republicans willing to steal money meant for public good.
Integration in the cities of America, not just southern cities, but northern cities too, was met by either privatization of education (as in Louisiana where parents established Catholic private schools to avoid integration), or segregation, as occurred in 100% of all Northern Cities via suburbanization.
Surprisingly, public education remained, in my youth, available for ALL races in the rural areas of the United States. I grew up in rural East Texas. There was one school, Slocum, ISD, that served miles of territory. By 1965 (13 years before Boston integrated), when I was 5 and entered school, Black kids were able to attend my public school. At that time, those schools were still taught by women whose choices had been limited to: Marriage, Nursing, or Teaching.
So, the smartest women in Texas went into teaching. I, and my, my Black classmates (some of them), benefited so very, very much.
So, while education failed in the cities of America, both north and south, for black Americans and white Americans, in the rural areas, Black Americans had equal access to education.
However, because Black Americans did NOT have equal access to jobs, the Black students often dropped out of school by age 14 due to many factors, all poverty related.
In 1976 I obtained a job to read the water meters in all of Slocum water systems homes. This was a great job and paid $50 per month. I needed only my ancient car, a big glove to move the black widow spiders under the covers out of the way to see the meter, and a desire to spend two days a month driving all over creation.
I had map so I could find every home with water.
As I drove southeast from Slocum, toward the Neches River bottom, the map showed a small road leading to what I thought was home with one meter. I drove down a dirt road, for quite a ways, and came out at a clearing where I could see one water spigot rising from the ground next to a water meter with a black cover on it.
But, in addition to the one water meter, there was a semi-circle of shacks s around the one single spigot. There were two outhouses behind the shacks. As I stood there looking for dogs that might bite while I tried to read the meter, one of my Black classmates came of a shack and asked me: “Mike, what on earth are you doing here?”.
For me, this was an easy question: “I have to read this water meter”.
Then, I asked: “What are you doing here?” He seemed confused. “I live here Mike”.
I looked around again. In that look around, my own perceptions about everything changed and have continued to evolve since. I realized that ALL of the black kids that went to school in Slocum lived in this small semi-circle of shacks. This was 1976.
So, sure, Education was available to them. The bus picked them up if they attended. But, they had no running water in their homes. Later I came to understand the parents could only get menial jobs. None of them owned any land which sustained the rest of the school’s kids.
I wrote an essay in college about this and, although my instructor DID believe my story, and made me read it aloud to my all white classmates, some thought I made it up to get an A, which, I did. But, the story is true.
Since then I have always noticed that my workplace, as an engineer, has been almost always devoid of Black engineers. In fact, in my entire career (here in the north and the south), I have seen three Black engineers in my organizations. Out of hundreds I have met.
It seems to me that it is always 1976 in America. Or 1876. Or 1776.
Mike S., thank you for this moving and revealing portrait of your educational experiences in Slocum, East Texas, both in and outside of school. We should all be stunned, as you were, that all your black classmates lived in a circle of shacks with only outhouses and one shared water spigot, in 1976.
I've been on a (too slow) path for a couple of years to move beyond passive sympathy for the suffering of people of color, in which I have given to charities that help those communities, but not taken any action in my own life. In other words, I had lived my life as a typical white person, mostly oblivious to my white privilege, and to all the ways that racism and oppression are structural in our society, and in the Boston area where I grew up and still live.
In adulthood, I and my then husband made the same choice his and my parents had in the early 1960's. As soon as we could afford it, we bought a house in an outer suburb, because that's where the houses were bigger and nicer, where real estate values were reliably high and where the good schools were. It never occurred to ys that we were reinforcing the de facto segregation of the Boston area, or that there might be any other rational or enlightened choice. Like, oh, buying a house in an older, more diverse neighborhood closer to Boston, and then joining the diverse community of parents working to ensure the local public schools provided all our children with a quality education. We didn't do that. We were lazy. We acted purely in our own interest, making the unconsciously racist choices that generations had engineered for us, with slavery, prejudice, redlining, and all the other tools of structural racism. We didn't think we were racists.
We bought the white northern liberal fiction. We thought that to be racist, you had to hate people of color, to wish them ill, and to take active, conscious steps to hurt them or to violate their rights, attitudes we were appalled by and actions we would never do. Racists were the haters in the South who lynched people of color, who murdered Emmet Till, who murdered civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. In my mind, racists were the white people who screamed vicious slurs at the nine children who integrated the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Racists were horrible people. Certainly not us.
A white privilege awareness workshop at church a couple of years ago was a necessary and long overdue eye opener, but I still live in a 99% white Boston suburb. The racist strategies that created the North's de facto segregation in the 19th and 20th century were so effective that these days, they are self-perpetuating. All the "nice", "I'm not a racist" white people like me just naturally make all the same choices to live in the white suburbs where the schools are good and the real estate values are high and the neighborhoods are "safe". And the 1-acre or 2-acre zoning ensures that the families of color trapped in generations of poverty by job, education, and lending discrimination, can't afford to move to those nice white suburbs.
I'd like to be part of the solution, and I'm looking for ways to do that, beyond donating money and working on raising my own awareness.
Hi Elizabeth. Well. I hope these suggestions are received in the best light. My attendance at churches varies. But I do include visiting a gospel church or an AME whenever the spirit strikes me. I’ve always felt a part of the service. As a teacher, I’ve had many many experiences with families that have enriched my life with different resources and approaches to everyday life. If possible, volunteer in a school different from the ones you attended or that are in your neighborhood.
Probably the most significant thing for me is that since college, never before in my suburban upbringing, I’ve counted as friends people of color that just ended up meeting me on my path. I just made sure never to pass the intersection without noticing who was there to know.
When you feel the desire in your heart to be with all people who are different and yet the same as you, then opportunity will greet you. We just have to be all colors on the inside. Then it gets easy.
Other ideas I've thought of include starting a college/life-launch fund for a young student of color. One of the many hurdles I face is that with one exception of someone dear to me whom I am already helping as I can, all the people of color I know are the ones I run into in my white-and-doing-fine world: People I've met in technology jobs and so forth. The structural racism of our society segregates all of
us so well that I have a puzzle to figure out: how to connect and form relationships with people of color who have *not* already defied all the odds and "made it" into the kind of prosperity that white people have. My best idea so far is to start attending my suburban church's diverse sister church in Boston--and keep showing up with an attitude of service and humility. But have I done it since I thought of it two years ago? Not yet, because ... excuses: I don't have time for the two-hour round-trip drive to the city, every Sunday I have something else important I have to do, where would I park, would my car get keyed or stolen, would I get mugged (all classic racist fears, even if they are not completely unfounded. Do I have the same fears when I think about spending an evening in pretty-white-upscale Cambridge? Nope.) So... umm... I'll figure out how to do it _next_ month....
It's not change and it doesn't count until I put it into action. Clearly I'm not done working on my own self.
I too, have long struggled to sort ways to reconcile what I saw when I was 16.
For all I know, that semicircle of shacks is what anyone would see today. I have not been back to that particular location since I gave up that job when I went to Texas A&M to become an engineer.
For 1000 reasons I have also not sorted how to help the complete absence of black engineers in the workforce.
I was only a manager with hiring ability for two years in my career (by choice I rotated back to technology development).
During that time as manager I found only one black engineer available at the schools my then company hired from at that time. I did not get to choose the Universities we hired from.
We hired one Black guy while I was manager. He was quickly promoted out of my group and onto other groups. I lost track of him.
One Black guy in a 38 year career was all I could muster help for.
What do you know of the "Slocum Massacre" of 1910? I had to do a search to find where Slocum was, and that was the first thing that popped up. Then I saw how close Slocum is to Nacogdoches...
Thank you Ally for the referral to the “Slocum Massacre”.
Helps make it clear why The Texas GOP is so desperate to hide its past and to keep its complete history from being taught in its schools.
I was a liberal Canadian attending SMU’s Cox School of Business and working in Dallas in the late 70’s in real estate development, an area largely dependant on understanding the community I was working in. Even though I had all the resources and introductions I could wish for I always felt I was in a social fog and could never fully grasp what was really going on around me. Most confusing we’re the always pleasant but somehow ominous “Ya’ll take care now, heah” that ended meetings with so many older conservative Texas businessmen.
Mike, in case you are not familiar with the history of the Catholic effort to educate African American students, you might be interested in "Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools" edited by Jacqueline Irvine and Michèle Foster. One contributor contends that the research supports the view of Catholic schools as "more effective for the education of African American students" (p. 21), and that "the deleterious affects of race, gender, and social class seem to be ameliorated, if not eradicated, in Catholic schools" (p. 39). A few religious orders in the Church dedicated themselves solely to teaching minorities precisely because the system didn't allow them in or treat them well. And "back in the day" those schools were supported by the parishes, not the government.
As you probably know, government support began with Everson vs. the Board of Education, 1947, when the SC decided that "government-funded bus transportation and non-religious textbooks for students enrolled in parochial (religious) schools" was permissible.
What began as a sensible decision, has become increasingly complex to navigate.
I say all this to counter the argument that Catholic schools were part of the problem of diverting money from public education. They were begun with good intentions but now have become part of the problem.
And this "problem" is "worsened" by the fact that students from Catholic schools are:
Mary. Thank you for your feedback and your kindness is assuming knowledge on my part.
The Catholic schools I referred to in the state of Louisiana were all white and served the same purpose as suburbs in the north. Legal means of segregation after integration in public schools.
Are you talking about high schools in Louisiana or elementary? I know there were several elementary schools run by a few different religious congregations of Sisters (I was in one of them). I don't have time right now to give you a link but can later if you'd like.
"In 1971, when segregation academies were gaining ground, the achievement gap between white and Black 8th grade students in reading scores was 57 points. In 1988, the year of the nation’s highest level of school integration, that gap had fallen to 18 points. By 1992, it was back up to 30 points, and it has not dropped below 25 points since."
1988 was one year after I graduated from a GREAT high school, albeit one in a pretty prosperous community. My dad and I didn't have a lot of money, but we had the cheapest house in South Eugene and I got to go to a fantastic school system. I took music all the way through. If it hadn't been for the journalism program at South, I don't know where I would be now. I might not have graduated.
Everything has slipped since, including my son through the cracks of the current educational system. Even in WA, budgets are constricted and there are 34 kids in classrooms. There's no time for journalism or music, or for teachers to help a kid who might not be responding to the industrialization of our education system in the way society expects. This was all preordained by the policies of the right wing in the 70s and 80s. And 90s and 00s and 10s.
We have to insist the Beltway media stop coddling the right wing and call them out every time. We have to stop coddling it ourselves. As liberals, we default to understanding. But understanding in the real world means we have to see and react to the real threat before us. There is no middle ground here. The right wing has purposefully inflicted real pain and suffering on the most vulnerable in our society, from it's very genesis.
In my mind, that makes them terrorists. We should never negotiate with terrorists. We have to unite to politically defeat the enemy at every turn, and not just in presidential elections. They have spent decades turning our local governments into a joke. On purpose. So I didn't use the word enemy lightly. That's what they are. We've been in a vice for many years now, the poor and increasingly the middle class beaten into submission, begging for work and terrified that our shitty-paying jobs might disappear. Many of us not able to survive on one check, and others of us one check or health scare from financial ruin.
It was all part of the plan. Until we recognize that we're debating the terrorists who executed the plan, the spiral will continue picking up speed. Get angry.
I have a strange thought this morning after reading Heather's letter and the comments to this point. NONE of this knowledge of the American power mongers' stranglehold, maintaining our caste systems, would have been so utterly revealed to so many if we did not have this foiled coup d'etat. The flagrant, shameless actions and kowtowing of this newer, republican, parasitic group, so used to power and privilege, underestimate how fast many of us are learning. The faster we learn and spread that knowledge, the faster we undo the Matrix they have woven us into since our foundations. This letter today is of such great importance and magnitude and what many of us have been saying about the dumbing down of American education.
The much needed high point I conclude this morning is that, even with their privileged ACCESS to education, it is apparent that most of these moneysucking ticks, did not really utilize their education. Appears more like many daddies just "purchased" degrees as we have witnessed very little critical thinking skills from today's republicans leaders and their followers. Appears it may be the middle classes who have truly benefitted the most by wanting to learn and utilizing what they could from their harder-earned access to higher education.
There are more of us than these patriarchal frat dinosaurs who really should be easy to put down since they do not demonstrate much strategic thinking, they just buy their way into. or out of, trouble. Generationally, they have dumbed themselves down. There are some clever ones who will be coming along. But at this very moment, we really have got this, if we want it. But we have to move quickly and our justice system needs to go into very high gear. It is on us to pressure this administration harder. That means stronger actions on our part. Or is my snorting and the pawing of my forefeet just demonstrating that my Taurean patience has all but vanished? Do I need reigning in for a bit longer? I very much identify with whomever coined the term The Raging Responsibles.
What do you think?
Heather, I love how you stimulate us. What a fabulous teacher for these times!
Same here in NH. The State Budget was passed by the Republican majority legislature and included tax breaks for RICH towns but not for poorer towns and gave public school funds via the school voucher program to religious/private schools and home schoolers and CUT public education funds as well, despite a great deal of public opposition.
The irony of how they named it the Dick Hinch Education Freedom Account (because they don't want to call it a voucher program, knowing how unpopular that concept is in NH), after the man who died of Covid one week after being sworn in as Speaker of the House.
Hello, Axeman! I was working for the county Sheriff's Office in 1988 and remember some fine classes from SEHS graduating during the 80's and 90's. I was always interested in the dichotomy between South and Sheldon during those years (and continuing today). A question: Did you know any of the students who wrote for 2--below? Hanna Olsen's Dad was a co worker of mine, and I think she may have been slightly younger than you are.
I was surprised no mention was made about the colossal charter school flop we had here in Ohio. It was Betsy DeVoss' dream project and had been the talk of Republican's everywhere until it crashed and burned like the Hidendburg. Kasich and all the state's GOP former proponents couldn't distance themselves fast enough.
The GOP’s Biggest Charter School Experiment Just Imploded
How a washed-up lobbyist built a charter school empire and siphoned millions from public schools.
Fascinating article. We had similar fraud going on in MI. Instances where a huckster optometrist opened charter schools and skimmed off millions in a variety of schemes. Also a state sponsored program entitled the Education Achievement Authority lasted about five years with a pitiful “online learning curriculum” and suspicious financial transactions. Seems the far right sees public school funds as an untapped profit market.
After the 2008 bubble collapsed and we had the Great Recession, school funds were seen as ripe for plucking. Lots of for-profit charter schools popped up, with administrators making huge salaries, poorly paid teachers and poorly educated students. There was also a large push for online schools or online textbooks, which of course, sold not only software, but lots of computers. Then we moved into online standardized testing.
What I never figured out is how in the mid60s, the New York State Regents exams, which we took on paper for a week, could be completely graded by the end of the following week, when we got report cards. However the PARRC exams, taken on computers, took months to get student results. Go figure.
My experience with charter schools is viewed as a teacher in a public middle school in Albuquerque. We have several good middle and high schools in the Heights, schools in the rest of the city are a mixed bag and are Title I and 100% free lunch. There are 4 excellent private schools, plus the Catholic schools. At the school where I worked, the community was mixed: high income estates and high poverty areas. Many of the wealthy parents applied for the private schools and a few students got in. The rest went to the public middle school, where the culture of valuing education outnumbered the hopeless and/or gang wannabe culture. With the advent of numerous charter schools, some of which are exemplary, many of the students who didn’t go to the private schools went to the charters. The balance of students valuing education teetered to the minority. The same good teachers were still there teaching, but disruptive classroom behavior became more of an issue. The peer and parental pressure to be good students was losing to the uninterested.
Excellent read. And all you Floridians need to read the companion article about Jeb Bush. In my view, Jeb was an awful Governor and did awful things. This among them.
I’m not sure about that. Jen would have been a lot more subtle and organized about dismantling our democratic government. In some ways, the former guy was a blessing. He was so blatant and erratic we finally started to see how much damage had been subtly done since the 80s and how much more he was trying to do. So now we’re awake before the coup has totally succeeded.
Just finished reading this amazing article. Thank you again. As with everything Republican, ECOT was just a corrupt entity for stealing money from the state and funneling that money to a private party.
Sometimes otherwise known as American Capitalism. For more information see Raytheon.
Ah, Raytheon. I worked there for two years. When I started, so did a new CEO, who thrilled Wall Street by closing manufacturing plants to reduce payroll. By a year later, the lack of workers had caused delays in deliveries, which in turn reduced company income. No bonuses that year - except for top management. The CEO who had caused the trouble got a bonus equal to my annual salary. All of that money, of course, came directly or indirectly from taxpayers. Screwy place. (To be fair, they did pay for all the night classes you could handle, thus becoming an excellent stepping stone. )
Mr. Johnson, no Republican will consider ECOT a failure. You are not observing amnesia. Republicans DESIRE to transfer public funding for the public good to their own pockets and, since Ronald Reagan, have been highly effective at doing so.
For example, the amount of money Raytheon the Blackwater contractor that sponsored multiple atrocities in Afghanistan have collected during the 20 years of war we sponsored precisely for corporate benefit is astronomical and could have funded a new school in half of all American Cities including gyms and a football field.
Transferring public money to private entities has enriched so many Americans that Republicans are now almost unstoppable in their power to corrupt, steal, and vanish public money like a magician on stage.
Sadly, many Democrats have also vanished public money into private coffers and all of Andrew Cuomo's buddies who went to prison for the "Buffalo Billion", with Cuomo somehow escaping that fate, are witness to that.
In fact, American Democracy may fail, may have already failed, because the framers did not foresee the power of corporations to corrupt representatives of the "people".
Also, even Donald Trump ran for profit educations centers because they are so easy to steal from and pocket the money while leaving the students behind and in debt. For profit schools are so available for crooks, that Trump, like a fruit fly to fruit, found them.
I don't share your pessimism, at least with regards to Ohio Republicans and ECOT, they owned it but will try to say they can fix it in the future. That's kinda on the back burner now as they try to deal with the First Energy bribery scandal.
Christopher, thank you for the comment. Ohio Republicans are unlikely to put the ECOT leadership in prison. Right?
However, the ECOT leadership sponsored public to private theft since they delivered no education.
So, nothing will change. Charlatans, who understand how to steal without going to jail, will continue to flock to Charter schools.
Nobody will arrest leaders of ECOT and show their arrest on morning and evening TV like they would show a Black man who stole a loaf of bread from the 7-11.
So, get used to charter schools. No better way to make an easy buck.
I'm often tempted to use my modern mind to diagnose those who came before but have come to realize it isn't the correct way to think.
While human technology has grown exponentially, human behavior is pretty much a flat line with the occasional bump up. Those bumps take the form of The Enlightenment which, if we're lucky come once every 1000 years.
I can't blame the framers for not being woke, maybe if they weren't walking the walk, they were talking about the self-evident truth of all men being created equal. They got the ball rolling but we humans keep putting bumps in the road.
Modern minds among the framer's contemporaries were quite "woke" and outspoken about the irony of enslavers seeking freedom from tyranny, while practicing and enjoying the fruits of their tyrannical practices of enslavement, and usurping land from indigenous peoples. Clutching those myths to our breasts and upholding them to our last breaths keeps democracy unrealized and beyond our reach.
🙏 I have been so waiting for this. The threat to public education is real. It is cloaked in promoting “choice,charter and home school”. It is radical. It is an immoral. It is rooted in racism, inequality, and “power over” politics.
“Home school” kids make on average $30,000 less per year than public school graduates. Home school kids loose out on socialization, critical interactions in development needed to succeed in a modern service and information economy. Home school is robbing children of a core right to participate in the creative economy. It is rooted in classism. It is a false salve for the poor who could never afford private school, cloaked as “charter” schools.
True story. I know a couple (through the theater), white, college educated (the wife graduated from Rice University), first class editors, employed by the Texas legislature to write bills, staunch Libertarians (almost on the cusp of being outright anarchists), who chose to home school their two children because they were opposed to the "brainwashing" of public school teachers. By the time their two had reached teens, neither of them could do any math - they could read, and they read vociferously...occultish fiction for the most part. But since neither parent could teach math and since the home school resources of which they availed themselves also provided very little math instruction, the children were uninterested in and could do NO math. So, at a late age, they enrolled them in a private "school" for teens, on the order of a Montessori school. This meant, again, that the children could choose their own curriculum. They did. It did not include math. The son "graduated" and is now 18. He has no skills. He is working part time for an egg farm. He removes eggs from nests and places them in egg cartons. When he can, he will do some yard "work" (he knows nothing about plants) for $12 an hour. He is saving this income for "college." When he did some work for me, I'd ask him how many hours he had worked (he IS an honest young man) and he'd reply - two or three hours, whatever it happened to be. I'd ask, how much do I owe you. He would pull out his cell phone (provided and paid for by his parents - as they also provided and paid for his SUV) and begin to calculate. He did not know enough math to even multiply 12X2 or 12X3. This is a true story. It is a sad story and a story of human waste, in my opinion.
But at this moment in time, home school is the only thing available to those protecting their children from the pandemic. Gov Abbott will not fund virtual learning. And for a district like the one where I work, we already give $50+ million to the state from the Robin Hood law. The district just can’t afford to fund virtual learning. Covid is rising among children, our most vulnerable population.
Gov Abbot is an immoral power weider, the likes of Sen. Hammond. Exposing and abandoning children to disease is not leadership. He is “forcing” kids either to risk disease at school or rob them of their right to an education. Home school is not an education. No good choices for Texas parents. Vote his ass out!
I’m kind of impressed with my friend who quit teaching to take care of her family. She’s a very intelligent person! She opted into a program that she had to enter her child’s progress. And they’re doing extracurricular activities. This kid is going to have to down pat! But it’s not very often the case. Most homeschool families choose a religious based program. They barely spend any time outside of bible study.
The first part of this bill is about Social Studies teachers legally can’t teach current events without a lot of restrictions which is being interpreted by the League of Women Voters as not even being able to discuss the importance of voting. Need to ask the lawyers how this could be construed. The second part section (4) is the critical race theory stuff.
(h-3) For any social studies course in the required curriculum:
(1) a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs;
(2) a teacher who chooses to discuss a topic described by Subdivision (1) shall, to the best of the teacher's ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective;
(3) a school district, open-enrollment charter school, or teacher may not require, make part of a course, or award a grade or course credit, including extra credit, for a student's:
(A) political activism, lobbying, or efforts to persuade members of the legislative or executive branch at the federal, state, or local level to take specific actions by direct communication; or
(B) participation in any internship, practicum, or similar activity involving social or public policy advocacy; and
(4) a teacher, administrator, or other employee of a state agency, school district, or open-enrollment charter school may not:
(A) be required to engage in training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex;
(B) require or make part of a course the concept that:
(i) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
(ii) an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
(iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual's race;
(iv) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
(v) an individual's moral character, standing, or worth is necessarily determined by the individual's race or sex;
(vi) an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
(vii) an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex;
(viii) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race;
(ix) the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States; or
(x) with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality; and
(C) require an understanding of The 1619 Project.
(h-4) A state agency, school district, or open-enrollment charter school may not accept private funding for the purpose of developing a curriculum, purchasing or selecting curriculum materials, or providing teacher training or professional development for a course described by Subsection (h-3)(3).
(h-5) A school district or open-enrollment charter school may not implement, interpret, or enforce any rules or student code of conduct in a manner that would result in the punishment of a student for discussing, or have a chilling effect on student discussion of, the concepts described by Subsection (h-3)(4).
Here in NH, the "divisive concept" of forbidding teaching of CRT has been passed in the Republican majority legislature, as was the use of school vouchers and a 24 week abortion outright BAN have also passed. (and the public reaction to those bills and a 24 week abortion BAN was so strong that none of those bills could pass as stand alone bills.) Therefore, that same Republican majority decided to IGNORE the will of the voters and decided to HIDE all three bills in the NH State Budget and the Republican governor gladly signed the Budget. Here in NH, much of public school funding is through property taxes, despite the fact that 18 years ago, the NH Supreme Court declared it an unacceptable means of funding because of it's inequality. Poor towns pay more in property taxes so the diversion of public school funds to RELIGIOUS and private schools, and home schoolers will result in higher property taxes for poor towns but NOT for rich towns. BTB, those diverted funds were NOT restored to public education. https://www.concordmonitor.com/My-Turn-School-funding-and-the-NH-Supreme-Court-39778293
One comment… you say “diversion of public school finds to religious and private schools and home schoolers will result in higher property taxes…”. I don’t understand? Doesn’t a reduction in the number of students in a public school proportionally reduce the cost of that school? It should. Net/net.
No, because costs are not perfectly proportional to numbers of students. For example, if a school building is designed to accommodate 500 students, the cost of maintaining it is the same even if there are only 350 students.
Joan, not necessarily. Costs can be very proportional to number of students. First, the operating costs of the buildings is normally less than 5% of the cost per student. I am an owner of commercial real estate and there is nothing better than the pandemic as an example of being able to adapt to changes. I was able to reduce costs (except for property tax) to balance my new income (50% of previous) with my costs. It can be done, and school buildings usually don't pay property tax. As for debt, schools usually get very good interest rates. Further, the building is an asset which appreciates.
If the reduction in students is permanent, then it becomes easier to accommodate.
The problem is usually the number of upper management with high salaries and consultants who are not reduced. We have a situation in our town where a private school was built to teach middle school children. We do not have a middle school in our town, so we needed to tuition these students to another town's public middle school. The cost was more than $20,000 per student. The private school cost to the town is less than $16,000, yet there is no reduction in the quality of education. (there is plenty of evidence for this, which is a topic for another time). It is a clear example of the inefficiencies of the public school system and the unwillingness to operate as a business must.
But it isn't just private schools that parents can choose for their children. These students may go to any school, public or private. Many choose to go to public schools that are closer to where they live or provide specific services these children cannot get in their own district school (public school closure and consolidation have been rampant, with no evidence of better education or cost savings, and cause students to spend a huge amount of time on school busses!)
The answers are not simple. Each district has a specific situation and problems. There are many solutions and they do work.
Tony, you make a good argument. The key question might be, what are guidelines that citizens and school boards can use, to determine whether or not a given proposal is truly in the best interests of the children. There has been so much open racism and corruption in the pushes to charter schools, that I distrust the whole idea, which of itself does not prove that the next attempt is without merit.
Time to make it akin to Italy where the Government can pass all sorts of laws but few actually get to hit the streets.....with due deference for those living in the Italy that I love.
I can assert with authority what teachers in Florida think about this type of legislative action that is happening in lockstep in the FL legislature.
#1 Someone or some thing is controlling this. No governor comes up with this by themselves. It is happening in too many states. Their conclusion is the entities controlling the Republican agenda such as the Heritage Foundation are “mandating” such action and meddling with kids to establish their vision of private “for some” elite education.
#2 Hence, teachers who cannot remain nonpartisan agree or disagree according to their personal political leanings. This is evident amongst teachers more than ever.
#3 The majority of teachers listen to the legislative mandates knowing that as soon as their students are before them and the door closes, they will continue to teach the students according to their own professional code.
#4 THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE. Florida continues to play around with the idea of policing teachers because they know damn well right they can legislate, for example, civics instruction, until “Red” in the face and still not be assured that teachers will “obey”. Hence, the ideas of body cameras and other ways to monitor teachers in the classroom are being explored— seriously by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, oh, I mean, Commissioner of Education and State Board. Measures that will affect salary, tenure, and certification.
#5 I know a lot of teachers. There is not a one of them that will ever be commanded, coerced, or ridiculed to betray their oath of service to the common good. They are professionals. Some better than others but all have worked towards degrees and certification necessary to teach in public schools. They may or may not agree with curriculum standards or requirements and know much is beyond their control regarding “materials”. However, their goal remains the same. “Help students learn. Keep them safe.”
In essence, I have had more than one say to me. “The code of conduct does not require me to give in to authoritarian bullsh*t. They better look in their own rear view mirrors”.
So to speak.
Never underestimate a teacher. It doesn’t surprise me at all about the effort to control them, and thus, the children.
And without going on about it, the underground swell rigorously opposing this is growing. Which began in earnest the moment that handmaid DeVos left the room.
The question is whether this will get to the point of being just too onerous to deal with even with the teacher's dedication to the children and teaching. If they resign, will that mean people that will go along with the Oberkommando will replace them and we'll have brain-washing classrooms rather than learning and critical thinking. The dream of the autocrats is to have uneducated people that are easier to control.
I’ll probably be running again next year for a local school board seat. During my last campaign, my platform included changing the architecture of public education. It garnered some interest and probably will even more so next year. That change can nullify the legislative manipulation in their tracks. The fastest thing to be eliminated from the options that were a part of pandemic year 2020 school year was the online and virtual learning model. It started picking up credible steam once teachers got their usual creative footing back. Let’s just say that the state did not favor it to the point that it is an option this year. “Everyone must be present and accounted for in brick and mortar”. Hmm. Wonder why.
Given correct planning time and resources, this is a model that can be far more than what was accomplished in 2020. My best resource in really thinking about this model was personnel in the military. Believe it or not. There’s a lot possible with virtual reality.
It was a perfect storm of thinking when the old adage fell upon public education last year, with a twist. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, set up the stand, and sell it. We got a little closer but I predict there will be more to come.
Texas legislature has a long history of micro-managing education ... to the detriment of the educational system. Factory line mass production model of education....
Yet they also will have a populace incapable of working in the high tech environments of the modern world. Corporations required well-educated employees. What will happen, in certain states, when citizens don't have the needed capabilities? What will happen to the economy of those states when a majority of their own citizens are incapable of doing any but the most basic jobs? Will the corporations that require highly educated personnel leave for regions where they can hire the kinds of people needed? So many who advocate for a dumbed-down citizenry fail to see the other side of the coin which may rebound to their own detriment.
I've little doubt and am fearful that there will be, among the many excellent teachers, a few quislings who will report perceived deviations from these legislated mandates.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the same folks who are pushing and providing the actual text for voter suppression bills in state after state are also behind the push to whitewash public education and transfer its resources to private schools:
I think there is enough in this bill that law suits should be initiated all over Texas by and for claiming injuries to minorities, genders, gender identity, teachers, administrators, school members, etc who feel abused by Texas state and school practices. Where are the exceptional attorneys for social justice out there? Let's get on this. It should be possible to bankrupt and tie up Texas in their own laws until the power grid freezes over again.
I would add that the Texas law might be used to go after all the private schools that turn away students of color, ethnicity, gender, religion that don't suit their biases, that have other discriminatory practices and offensive hurtful policies.
Try reading the above while pretending you don’t know the point is to legislate white male supremacy and block critical thinking. Doesn’t it say that no one can teach that any race or gender is better than any other? That racism is a betrayal of the ideals of this country? That no one should be treated as inferior based on their race or sex?
It seems to me that the actual language of this law leaves some room for teaching the virtues of equal treatment and the wrongness of the opposite.
Nat Turner was.....uppity. (As was Emmet Till) Turner's little rebellion was a vivid demonstration of education leading to critical thinking leading to individual actions; actions that were not at all beneficial to the existing power structure.
Lesson learned and a pillar supporting every oligarchy and dictator since.
Thank you again, HCR, for using a lesson in American history to shine a light on events transpiring today.
On the evacuation of Afghanistan, I was heartened to hear about US helicopters going out to pick up American citizens, and people deserving SIVisas and bringing them back to the airport for transport out of the country. Also they are taking out Afghan refugees as well. This is much more the America I want America to be -- leaving no one behind
Yes, and that is what HCR writes about today, the history of some Americans' efforts to leave other Americans behind, right here. Unfortunately, democracy allows them to carry out their undemocratic schemes because they have the right to vote. And they do. Without education, democracy doesn't work and that is why they attack it.
I've read two books on Nat Turner including 'Confessions'. He was an interesting fellow in that he was portrayed as a privileged 'house n*gger' and I think one of his jobs was to actually drive his master's daughter's buggy. In one of the books, some white man would come and 'visit' his mother at a certain time of day where he was told by his mom to go outside. He would go hide under the front porch and hear his mother argue and scuffle with the man - and then quiet. Later he would come from under the porch and rejoin his mother who tried to act as if nothing happened, but of course he knew better. This, along with the calling of god is portrayed as a catalyst for his later campaign of slaughter. News traveled slow in those days but it made a lasting impression. Nat Turner and other slaves' behaviors began to make owning slaves untenable. I taught at a private Quaker school where Turner was portrayed as a hero for freedom.
Education for POC and Whites is more important than ever because we still have people with a 'new' slave master mentality. One reason I say this , is because of all the particulars of the machinations that have been played out in Congress by Henry Hammond, R. Reagan, Devos and all. Because of you, I'm learning the particulars of how all this stuff works . We appreciate you HCR.
And now everyone will understand how Republicans view the pandemic as an “opportunity” to reek havoc, create chaos, despair and discord, our children un defended and made vulnerable to disease in much of our public school system, but mostly those in Red states.The results of sick kids at public schools will be used politically as a way to promote home school for the poor and vouchers for the dwindling middle class, and private charter schools for the wealthy. Which school above do you think will have plenty of Covid testing , mask wearing, enough spacing, and vaccine education and access?
I believe there is a big wrench in this diabolical thinking. As more kids get sick at public school more parents will vote Republicans out. Many religious evangelical private schools who have shunned science and vaccines will have catastrophic outbreaks.
As delta has an r knot closer to chicken pox and almost as high as measles, schools will need 90%+ vaccinations to keep kids safe and in person learning possible. Lower than 90% students and unvaccinated teachers is a disaster that is upon us. This fall is going to be darker than the fall of 1918 unless schools stay masked and all kids get masked.
For many yes, but not yet critical mass. What is the limit of human suffering before collective action is taken? The pandemic has already gone from crisis to tragedy. How tragic will be determined in the next few weeks and months.
A little more action by Patagonia's founder Yvone Chournard. Pulling his brand out of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort's retail stores. (easy guesstimate that is close to $1 mil in business) After the resort's owner and oil & gas oligarch Jay Kemmerer after he sponsored fundraisers for MTG, Gaetz, Jordan, and the rest of the clown show that is the Freedom Caucus.
Thank you for this link, Ted. There are a lot American people, including business owners, who have consciences, spurring them on is the job of all of us.
Yes, Ted that is the question. Part of getting to that critical mass is the people knowing who is responsible. The January 6th investigative arm is one avenue, but much more truth telling is necessary. More connection between grassroots organizations, the free-press and the Democratic party is necessary. Organization, mobilization of the willing and investigative reporting with strategic use of social media has to come alive-- what's the plan?
Right on, Ted, and I love your use of the homonym in "reek havoc" instead of the standard spelling "wreak havoc." I bet you're right that their strategy banning masks in schools is exactly to provoke a rate of illness that they think will make parents clamor for school vouchers and support of private-ish charter schools. The Republicans do, indeed, reek.
Vis a vis communicability of chicken pox, I contracted it at age 22 when visiting friends whose two kids were supposed to be past the communicable stage! It was *awful*! And it was during a summer in D.C., working on my master's thesis (Library Science) without air-conditioning. Needless to say, I got the Shingles vaccine as soon as it was available.
NPR just had a report on the privatization of teacher certification training in Texas, now expanding into other states. A private company initiated the program, and is expanding rapidly into Republican controlled states.
Texas State representatives voted to approve this private training program against the recommendations of their State Ed Dept claiming Texas needed to certify teachers faster and in larger numbers. The certification requirements had been a degree from a accredited teaching college with passing a certification test which the state administered. The same as most states.
The Texas Ed Dept argued that teacher shortages were highest in predominantly minority and impoverished communities. The new private training program apparently certified teachers without teacher college degrees and little or no preparation to teach. The Texas Ed Dept reported after the new program got established that these new teachers turned over and left teaching at a significantly higher rate than conventionally educated and certified teachers, leaving the minority and impoverished communities in even worse condition. Still, the new private teacher certification company is expanding into other Republican states.
As you might imagine, there are many young and older Americans trying to find an occupation to make a living. Teaching is one of the most difficult occupations to prepare for, to match yourself to, to become sufficiently dedicated to, and to not burn out. The consequences of teaching is clearly among the most important to each child becoming an effective adult. There should be no shortcuts in educating, training and supporting our teachers, schools and students.
The following is a 2014 NPR report. I could not find this past week's program on this topic. I presume it was a more recent report. But this 2014 report covers the same issue.
Rise In Alternative Certification For U.S. Teachers : NPR Ed
Teach for America has been around for 30 years and places teachers in the vast majority of states across the country. The whole idea of TFA was to put inexperienced, unlicensed college graduates - especially from “top” schools like Ivies - into schools filled with poor Black, Hispanic, and Native kids (especially charter schools where there is a constant churn of new teachers). It has been described as akin to The Peace Corps but it is anything but. For one thing they earn the same salary as their fellow first year teachers who have degrees in education. They are worked to death (often in very coercive ways) until they move on after two years to their “real” careers by enrolling in law or business school. This is by design. A steady supply of inexperienced teachers keeps costs down - no pensions! Since many states now require that all teachers become licensed within a few years of starting, TFA created their own licensure program with classes taught by experienced TFA teachers for those who want to remain in education.
What's equally saddening is how many people think being a teacher is an easy gig! The turnover you mention is undoubtedly due to the untrained teachers realizing how difficult it really is.
Very simply, if you can stop a people getting an education, you can control them more easily; a people thus can become either a cowering mass or a mob....both intent merely on survival and/or hurting their perceived enemies. Emotional calls to defend the nation, and other such propaganda missives always against the proverbial "other", incite amongst those so ill-informed an emotional response as they have no basis on which to make a logical, reasoned analysis of the situation. Many respond by seeking by all means to please the "masters" and thus share their priviledges........others rebel as they have managed to retain innate faculties and can use them to lead the people away from the dark and into the light.
Reminds me of George W.'s wild west, cowboy mentality to what he dubbed the Axis of Evil-"You are either with us or against us!" (Nothing against cowboys, I know some great ones!). Then he proceeded to really wake up the sleeping lion in the desert which we are still paying mightily for.
I appreciate that there are many of us here, under HCR's tutelage of real history, "...ready to help lead from the dark into the light."
The Republicans would assuredly like us to forget that a third of the "cowboys" were Black, another third Native American and only the residue were White.
Free public education is an ongoing threat. (to authoritarians)
Virginia's elite "positively feared learning among the general population." Here is Governor William Berkeley's infamous, reply in 1671, when asked about the state of schools in Virginia:
"I thank God," he declared, "there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a ] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government . God keep us from both."
Further ..."It might be noted that Virginia learning ways were not the product of slavery, or of rural poverty. They were fully developed before slaves appeared in large numbers, and when that colony was one of the richest in British America." "Albion's Seed", David Hackett Fischer, (1989), pp. 347 - 349.
Education has always been controlled by the oligarchs and still is.
Heather, this letter needs to be in every local newspaper from coast to coast and everywhere in between. I wonder if there is a way to petition our local news sources to publish her letters?? Does anyone in that business have any suggestions? Thank you again for another out of the freaking ballpark and across the railroad tracks letter. 🙏❤️
Agree…but… it needs more than newspapers. This critical issue, public education and those that threaten it needs a multi media, multi platform, multi channel defense. Education is an institution that sustains democracy. We need to defend it with conviction and reach.
💯 agree but changes to our educational system are a long term goal. More immediately we need parents/school boards to protect the freedom to learn the truths which we were not taught. The local newspaper and editorials are important to a majority of the older people living in rural Maine. I wonder if other rural areas don’t see the same. I have been taking a break from online comments since Biden took office. His win was such a relief and there is always so much that matters and needs doing. IMHO getting Heather’s voice into our local Bangor Daily News would help with “enlightenment”.
Sign up for your local paper, and, in prominent articles, post links to HCR's writing.
that is what I do, but, unfortunately, fewer and fewer Americans read to get their information. Rather, they get everything from video which is about 1/60 the speed of reading.
Don, so IF she is OK with that what is the best way to do that? Just send her letter in and ask them to publish it as a letter to the Editor? I’m guessing they have word limits? Would an OpEd allow for the length a little better? Sorry, I have no clue.
An OpEd would be better but even then, a local paper is likely to have a limit on the number of words. I've had to cut & cut & cut to get the most simple Letter to the Editor published in my local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune (owned by the LA Times). The limit for a Letter to the Editor is 150 words or less.
Most papers have a 500 word limit on letters and Heather would know better than I do how many of her missives fall under that limit. It might be more effective to send the letter under each of our names and quote Heather up to the limit.
Having spent a career in the public sphere of education, I am struck by a certain irony in this historical perspective. All that effort to disenfranchise first slaves, and then any and all POC - all that money to fund private systems (more on this below) - all that effort to deliberately dumb down certain populations in our nation apparently has achieved some victory on that front, but has backfired to a massive degree when you consider those who are addicted to Fox, OANN, QAnon and other "fake news" outlets. That addicted following for the most part is white...and in my opinion, not very bright white at that. These are the folks who are refusing to become vaccinated and are dying Delta deaths. These are the folks who believed that on August 13, their wannabe king would be "reinstated." These are the folks who, armed with various and sundry weapons and decked out in Trump paraphernalia, stormed our capitol on January 6th. These are the REALLY dumbed down members of our society. If they even attended a school - public or private - they learned nothing about civics. I would guess that the most many of them achieved was a GED.
With that out of my craw, I'll turn to those private entities of which many, like Fox, OANN, and others, are funded by deep pocketed dark money, religious organizations, and others just out for a quick buck using tax payer dollars to pay for their "schools." How do I know this? Well, once upon a time, one aspect of my job was to review charter school applications for a sizeable chunk of the state of Texas. I was to review them, and if they were found to be anywhere in the ballpark of being a "school" (quotes used deliberately), I would approve them. Having been a principal and assistant superintendent, having a doctorate in educational leadership, having worked at the state level, I was not ignorant of what a "school" was and should be. So, reading applications that, in many cases, were written in PENCIL, were misspelled, had no clue about budgeting or any costs associated with running a staffed facility, and were otherwise merely shams and jokes, I was and continue to be appalled at the push to privatize our public school system. I have not one kind word for Betsy DeVos and others of her ilk. And as for the white flighters in the South, many of those public dollars went to "private" schools that were nothing more than religious institutions.
OK. I'm done with my rant. Sorry, friends! This Letter nicked me in the quick!
With appreciation for you rant, my sense is that the majority of Republicans attached to the cult are better educated than you surmise. I went to college and grad school with a lot of 'dumb', incurious students. Grievance, misplaced sense of superiority, upbringing, cultural assumptions, mediocre and or bias' curriculum can keep the 'herd' in the pen. They are certainly not a herd of geniuses.
I agree. And when you consider those members of Congress (Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, Kennedy and others) who have actually graduated with LAW degrees from highly reputable universities, it seems obvious they are not "a herd of geniuses"! I'm not sure to which "herd" they belong, but it is nefarious to my way of thinking!
Why be shy, Clarence Thomas is an easy name to say. Unless you have someone else in mind, I don't have an opinion about his intelligence -- his opinions - that is another matter. Thomas is the most conservative and the quietist in the group. He graduated in the middle of his class at Yale Law School, and I do have an opinion about his behavior with Anita Hill. I can't stand Alito and don't care for any of the other Republicans, with the exception of Amy Coney Barrett. I know her background, but she hasn't been on the court long enough for me to utter a thought about her opinions.
Years ago, my city had a public meeting about an application to create a charter school. It quickly became apparent that the applicants simply wanted to start a business, and had hit on the charter school idea only because they expected to get guaranteed customers and free facilities. They wanted to take over some land and buildings used for community gardens and a community shares farm, claiming their school would be agriculture based - in Massachusetts, where the school year and the growing season overlap only slightly. They also declared they would serve special needs students. I was teaching in a special needs school at that time, and by chance was sitting behind these applicants in the meeting room. They knew nothing at all about special needs kids. They figured they would get the approval, take the land and the money, and then figure out how to fulfill their promises. Fortunately, the school board saw through them and did not grant approval. I've had a soft spot in my heart ever since for the politician who showed up and articulated our concerns.
Like so much in US society, our entire public and private education system has been upended and rendered dysfunctional by the gale winds of unfettered capitalism.
That was an interesting read. Thank you. I read it aloud to my husband who works an engineering job without having a college degree and is routinely passed over for promotions by those with much less practical experience than he has. Lots to think about there.
Just this afternoon, I talked with a friend who goes back to my junior high days, and he's been in much the same position as my father and your husband all his life. He went into the Navy instead of college, and learned a lot about electronics, and a whole lot more since then. Neither my father nor my friend ever had the temperament for a college education. I did, but did not have the temperament for a career in academia. There is so much mythology, posturing, and outright deceit involved in all our social rankings, and in the benefits that come with them.
Aha! So if our educational system continues to be low priority in this country then it would seem to enable a future where the 1% could rule alongside the Republican minority... I'm way oversimplifying but can't help noticing that China over the decades has evolved as a country to be reckoned with, because education has been highly valued there. On the other hand, in this country it seems that people of color have a difficult time getting a higher education due to cost, time, and opportunity, so the cycle continues to this day.
On the topic of Nat Turner, on this day so many years ago what he incited and executed was horrifying. Two wrongs never make it right.
I hope you finally went to bed, Dr. Heather! 💜 Thank you for another illuminating history lesson.
When I was in Hong Kong in 1998, I watched an educational program part of their regular TV scheduling. It was on Eigen values which is quite advanced math! Nothing watered down and insipid about their education system!
Thank you Dr. Richardson. I am reminded....
The supreme court decision of 1954 ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. Thus began the civil rights movement that swept across the nation throughout the sixties and seventies. When I graduated college in 1968 and began teaching in Nashville, Tennessee at East Nashville High School, the equal rights movement provided the setting for a personal voyage that has served me well throughout my life.
Growing up in an East Tennessee small town, I had very few chances to even see a black person. When we went to the movies in my small hometown, I knew that the balcony was where black people were allowed to watch the movie, but I never gave the situation much thought. I learned that black students were bussed to a school somewhere, not close to our town; I did not know where that was.
As I began teaching in Nashville, citizens daily clashed throughout the city and in the schools about issues of bussing and integration. That year, 1968, was the first year that East Nashville High School became integrated. As the local black high school was closed, practically overnight the East High student population became 40% black and 60% white.
Our faculty was comprised of teachers already on staff at East Nashville High School, teachers that were included from the original all black high school, and at least one young white teacher fresh out of college. Our black and white classroom teachers and administrators attended a number of in-service training programs about human relations relative the needs of cultural harmony and academic equality. Those were high energy and sometimes contentious training programs.
In the midst of the turmoil and challenges, I was fortunate to work with a young black student who epitomized a student level of high ideals and aspirations, talent, intellect, and positive attitude that we needed and called upon to help lead our young people to more harmonious co-existence. She was in a couple of my English classes, my speech classes, and the National Forensic League (NFL) club which I was assigned to coach. She was popular in the student body and won a number of class officer elections. I coached her through three years of NFL local, state, and national tournaments. Two years in a row she and I traveled to the national tournaments of the NFL. She was a national finalist one year and again in the next year she was a finalist and won third place in the national tournament at Stanford University.
It is therefore, an honor and a source of personal pride that I have witnessed her shining success as an actress, world-wide leader in human rights efforts, and most famously known for her television show, The Oprah Winfrey Show
Andrea. I have heard Oprah speak so many times about teachers and giving credit and kudos to them for inspiring and leading so many young people, including herself, to embracing their potential that they had not recognized up to that point.
I’m so proud of you, fellow educator. Our work is important beyond measure.
I taught for decades in our public school system and then, after nominal retirement, for a decade in what is called the independent school system. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take over a dying school for gifted children and help bring it back to rude good health.
The first point is a given, for any serious teacher. I can think of no more fortunate circumstance in life than to have been a teacher as a vocation. Those who have been understand instantly what I mean when I say that teaching is a privilege of the highest order. Children are a wellspring of energy for teachers. They see the world in an inspiringly fresh way. Unless one is hardened to the point of sclerosis, teachers are changed forever by lessons of the greatest importance, each “taught” by a child who is just being his or her real self. We become fuller better human beings through teaching and receive much more than we give.
Yet our influence in children is hauntingly strong and as often as not a teacher does not know the students whom (s)he has influenced the most. Ask an adult of any age which teacher influenced their life the most, and they will instantly remember. Stories will gush from them. It is humbling and a little bit frightening to know what influence one can wield - for good or otherwise.
I have mixed feelings about the private vs public school system. In Canada, there is a greater range of teaching competence in public schools than in the private system by and large. The power of unions to protect teachers of limited energy, intellectual scope, goodwill, or moral values is shockingly strong. I say that with a heavy heart because I am a union supporter through and through and held executive positions in our teacher’s union. My wife and I put all of our children through public schools, but I didn’t hesitate to go to the guidance department and ask for changes to my child’s timetable if I knew that teacher would have a malign influence on them. We desperately wanted them to retain a love for learning for their lifetimes and knew there were teachers who effortlessly snuffed it out in their students. Yet they were never fired and inspections were token for the most part.
I would learn that the private school system was massively different. In two years at what is likely Canada’s most prestigious schools for girls, I had my eyes opened. The school was swimming in money, reputation, and “best practices”. But it was, when one scratched beneath the surface, a brutally Darwinian place, for both teachers and students. Teachers were paid well and treated like shit - in an upper crust sort of way of course. They could be fired with minimal notice - in fact I knew through chance that one was about to be fired before she did.
Most students looked through you rather than at you - to them it was natural to see their teachers as being on a par with other hired help their parents engaged - useful insofar as you taught what needed to be learned.
There was corruption - both large and small scale. Parents bought their way in with “special donations”, when their child didn’t qualify in the first place. The school’s reputation rose and fell on its global results on the province’s standardized testing. Naturally teachers in the tested subject areas taught to the test - a soul crushing experience. Naturally certain parents were discreetly contacted and it was discussed whether it might be better for their *sensitive* (read ‘not too bright’) daughter to stay home on those test days. Not surprisingly, that school always succeeded brilliantly and was able to use that as a lure to attract the next group of kids.
The teachers were uniformly competent and never much more, as far as I could see. The administration molded them to fit the school’s image - bright, perky, unfailingly pleasant, hard working, good with parents. I remember almost none of them today. The worst were fired. The best excused themselves and returned to the public school system before that precious, uniquely individual spark was snuffed out of them.
When comparing the two systems, I felt that in the end it came down to caveat emptor. The worst teachers are - in my country anyway - in the public system. The best teachers - they too are in the public system. Memory of them glitters in my mind like diamonds.
One telling anecdote and then I’ll close this mercilessly long post. The day I left the school forever (my choice I will add defensively :), I happened to be walking down the hall where the head administrator’s office was. It was a hot June morning. Graduating students were in the process of learning where they had been accepted for university. If they were staying in Canada, Queens and Western were the schools of choice. But the siren song of the Ivies in the United States was incredibly strong, and a high percentage of the girls pinned their hopes on being accepted at one of your country’s prestigious schools.
In any case, the door to the administrator’s office was open, and at the split second I walked by, I saw him slap an envelope down on her desk and bellow, “$200 000 and all I get out of it is an acceptance at Queen’s for Daniella”.
It seemed a fitting memory for my last day.
Thank you, Christine.
WOW, the impact you had on one life, and the ripple effect that Oprah has had by encouraging education, reading (her book club recommendations make a book a national best seller) gives me goosebumps. Thank you, and all educators, for your inspiration to the lives you touch!
Ditto! Goosebumps! All other careers begin with an education. And this just shows the impact a teacher has!
Thank you, Denise.
Thank you, Nancy.
Teachers are so vital. Sometimes being the sole anchor of love and care in a child’s life. The gifts they give keep on giving. Thank you Andrea for giving us all those gifts. 🙏🙏 Thank you for sharing a bit of your history. 💕
Thank you, Christy.
Andrea, I cannot thank you enough for the impact you had on Oprah and on hundreds of other students during your career. I found teaching to be a tremendous opportunity to learn from my students as well as to be an honor to be able to lead them through another year. "Teach" and "Peace" share a majority of letters. My heart goes out to the teachers of today.
Carla, thank you.
Andrea, you are an unsung heroine/hero of our time -- as are all our best educators! My profound thanks to you, to Christine and Carla, and to all educators of our vibrant youth. Years ago, I was hit with the love of educating through teaching kindergarten classes -- I have graduated to standing before college classes where interaction with my students fills me with life, joy, new knowledge -- as well as deep sorrow for the agony the have all gone through during the past 18 months. Thank you, dear colleagues and fellow educators, past and present, for all that you have done and for having given of yourselves in such magnificent ways!
Rowshan, I share both the agony and the ecstasy! I hope you have a good semester (or quarter--whatever rolls in your world). I am going to officially be an emerita faculty member in a couple weeks but I still have a passel of students to get through the knothole backwards, which is my description of the capstone/thesis/dissertation process . . . The last 18 months has been hellish for everyone, and this upcoming term will be difficult. But I have hope in my students.
Thank you, Linda. Many, many congratulations to you on your new title of emerita as you retire and best of luck with your passel of students❣️ May they all pass through (pun intended) the knothole backwards, gently and with ease, as you shepherd them with your wisdom and academic expertise.
It continues to amaze me to see my students grown and standing before me at a grocery or football game reminiscing about our time together many years before. They are unanimous in telling me how a lot of things I taught them or told them didn’t really impress them until many years after. I told them that’s what a good teacher does. Gives you room for thought then and now.
Salud, Rowshan!
Salud, Christine!
Those chance meetings and reminiscences are such blessings: the most gratifying and requiting gifts in an educator's life, aren't they?
On many levels, my students have become my raîsons d'être. They give me the energy to keep on going at almost 74. 😉
Thank you, Rowshan. Best wishes for a comfortable and peaceful year.
And to you, Andrea!
Beautifully written, Andrea, and from a fellow teacher, thank you for showing so clearly the joy, the rewards of our profession. While most of our students do not become internationally known, I know every teacher has similar stories about students we have had the privilege of knowing, guiding and watching succeed. It’s not the summers “off”, it’s certainly not the money, but it’s what you have so beautifully described here that makes us love teaching.
Thank you, Gina. As much as I enjoyed the time off in the summers (when I did not work a temporary job) the reality was that it was "compulsory unemployment without unemployment benefits." I had to chuckle when people commented that it must be nice to have the summers off. True, it was, but it was also difficult. However, the last high school teaching job I had in California, the school district prorated our pay check so that we would have a summer income. That was nice.
It has to do your heart good to see your students succeed so wildly. Looks like with the visible evidence of just one student, you've made a lasting impact on our country.
And the world with the school for girls she has made!
Thank you, Ally.
This is a fantastic post, Andrea!! Thanks for sharing!!
Thank you, Linda.
That’s so amazing Andrea! Thank you for sharing your story! For me as a teacher it’s the inspiration I need after that tough first week.
I feel for teachers beginning a new school year under such circumstances as the pandemic and political scene.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride! Our principal has already had to quarantine. But I’m hopeful it’s going to be a good year!
Good luck Denise, such tough circumstances. Sending good thoughts.
Kudos to you, Andrea, for your important career and for sharing this beautifully written piece.
Thank you, Mim.
Andrea, I read your comment too fast and didn’t take in that you taught Oprah Winfrey and clearly mentored her as well.
I’m gobstruck by how much good you did. Without your encouragement, she might have followed an entirely different trail.
I’m sure you must have influenced many other students in a great way because you gave so much of yourself to teaching.
Your story is so inspiring. I apologize for not commenting sooner. Obviously much good goes on in a classroom, but the most formative teacher-student experiences are in extracurricular, especially when they advance to such a level.
You must feel so good about your career.
Thank you, Eric. I do so appreciate your kind and wise words.
Wow. Thanks for this inspirational story and your work. The nation needs more teachers like you.
Beautiful, Andrea! Thank you for this wondrous story and for your wondrous heart!
Sophia, thank you.
Dr. Richardson, thank you for your historical look at public education and the corruption of those education efforts by Republicans willing to steal money meant for public good.
Integration in the cities of America, not just southern cities, but northern cities too, was met by either privatization of education (as in Louisiana where parents established Catholic private schools to avoid integration), or segregation, as occurred in 100% of all Northern Cities via suburbanization.
Surprisingly, public education remained, in my youth, available for ALL races in the rural areas of the United States. I grew up in rural East Texas. There was one school, Slocum, ISD, that served miles of territory. By 1965 (13 years before Boston integrated), when I was 5 and entered school, Black kids were able to attend my public school. At that time, those schools were still taught by women whose choices had been limited to: Marriage, Nursing, or Teaching.
So, the smartest women in Texas went into teaching. I, and my, my Black classmates (some of them), benefited so very, very much.
So, while education failed in the cities of America, both north and south, for black Americans and white Americans, in the rural areas, Black Americans had equal access to education.
However, because Black Americans did NOT have equal access to jobs, the Black students often dropped out of school by age 14 due to many factors, all poverty related.
In 1976 I obtained a job to read the water meters in all of Slocum water systems homes. This was a great job and paid $50 per month. I needed only my ancient car, a big glove to move the black widow spiders under the covers out of the way to see the meter, and a desire to spend two days a month driving all over creation.
I had map so I could find every home with water.
As I drove southeast from Slocum, toward the Neches River bottom, the map showed a small road leading to what I thought was home with one meter. I drove down a dirt road, for quite a ways, and came out at a clearing where I could see one water spigot rising from the ground next to a water meter with a black cover on it.
But, in addition to the one water meter, there was a semi-circle of shacks s around the one single spigot. There were two outhouses behind the shacks. As I stood there looking for dogs that might bite while I tried to read the meter, one of my Black classmates came of a shack and asked me: “Mike, what on earth are you doing here?”.
For me, this was an easy question: “I have to read this water meter”.
Then, I asked: “What are you doing here?” He seemed confused. “I live here Mike”.
I looked around again. In that look around, my own perceptions about everything changed and have continued to evolve since. I realized that ALL of the black kids that went to school in Slocum lived in this small semi-circle of shacks. This was 1976.
So, sure, Education was available to them. The bus picked them up if they attended. But, they had no running water in their homes. Later I came to understand the parents could only get menial jobs. None of them owned any land which sustained the rest of the school’s kids.
I wrote an essay in college about this and, although my instructor DID believe my story, and made me read it aloud to my all white classmates, some thought I made it up to get an A, which, I did. But, the story is true.
Since then I have always noticed that my workplace, as an engineer, has been almost always devoid of Black engineers. In fact, in my entire career (here in the north and the south), I have seen three Black engineers in my organizations. Out of hundreds I have met.
It seems to me that it is always 1976 in America. Or 1876. Or 1776.
Nothing changes............for Black folks.
Mike S., thank you for this moving and revealing portrait of your educational experiences in Slocum, East Texas, both in and outside of school. We should all be stunned, as you were, that all your black classmates lived in a circle of shacks with only outhouses and one shared water spigot, in 1976.
I've been on a (too slow) path for a couple of years to move beyond passive sympathy for the suffering of people of color, in which I have given to charities that help those communities, but not taken any action in my own life. In other words, I had lived my life as a typical white person, mostly oblivious to my white privilege, and to all the ways that racism and oppression are structural in our society, and in the Boston area where I grew up and still live.
In adulthood, I and my then husband made the same choice his and my parents had in the early 1960's. As soon as we could afford it, we bought a house in an outer suburb, because that's where the houses were bigger and nicer, where real estate values were reliably high and where the good schools were. It never occurred to ys that we were reinforcing the de facto segregation of the Boston area, or that there might be any other rational or enlightened choice. Like, oh, buying a house in an older, more diverse neighborhood closer to Boston, and then joining the diverse community of parents working to ensure the local public schools provided all our children with a quality education. We didn't do that. We were lazy. We acted purely in our own interest, making the unconsciously racist choices that generations had engineered for us, with slavery, prejudice, redlining, and all the other tools of structural racism. We didn't think we were racists.
We bought the white northern liberal fiction. We thought that to be racist, you had to hate people of color, to wish them ill, and to take active, conscious steps to hurt them or to violate their rights, attitudes we were appalled by and actions we would never do. Racists were the haters in the South who lynched people of color, who murdered Emmet Till, who murdered civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. In my mind, racists were the white people who screamed vicious slurs at the nine children who integrated the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Racists were horrible people. Certainly not us.
A white privilege awareness workshop at church a couple of years ago was a necessary and long overdue eye opener, but I still live in a 99% white Boston suburb. The racist strategies that created the North's de facto segregation in the 19th and 20th century were so effective that these days, they are self-perpetuating. All the "nice", "I'm not a racist" white people like me just naturally make all the same choices to live in the white suburbs where the schools are good and the real estate values are high and the neighborhoods are "safe". And the 1-acre or 2-acre zoning ensures that the families of color trapped in generations of poverty by job, education, and lending discrimination, can't afford to move to those nice white suburbs.
I'd like to be part of the solution, and I'm looking for ways to do that, beyond donating money and working on raising my own awareness.
Hi Elizabeth. Well. I hope these suggestions are received in the best light. My attendance at churches varies. But I do include visiting a gospel church or an AME whenever the spirit strikes me. I’ve always felt a part of the service. As a teacher, I’ve had many many experiences with families that have enriched my life with different resources and approaches to everyday life. If possible, volunteer in a school different from the ones you attended or that are in your neighborhood.
Probably the most significant thing for me is that since college, never before in my suburban upbringing, I’ve counted as friends people of color that just ended up meeting me on my path. I just made sure never to pass the intersection without noticing who was there to know.
When you feel the desire in your heart to be with all people who are different and yet the same as you, then opportunity will greet you. We just have to be all colors on the inside. Then it gets easy.
Elizabeth. Thank you for sharing a path many have taken.
Regarding resolution: A way to begin transition is to will your home to a black family.
If enough people do this instead of preserving the property as white things can change.
Other ideas I've thought of include starting a college/life-launch fund for a young student of color. One of the many hurdles I face is that with one exception of someone dear to me whom I am already helping as I can, all the people of color I know are the ones I run into in my white-and-doing-fine world: People I've met in technology jobs and so forth. The structural racism of our society segregates all of
us so well that I have a puzzle to figure out: how to connect and form relationships with people of color who have *not* already defied all the odds and "made it" into the kind of prosperity that white people have. My best idea so far is to start attending my suburban church's diverse sister church in Boston--and keep showing up with an attitude of service and humility. But have I done it since I thought of it two years ago? Not yet, because ... excuses: I don't have time for the two-hour round-trip drive to the city, every Sunday I have something else important I have to do, where would I park, would my car get keyed or stolen, would I get mugged (all classic racist fears, even if they are not completely unfounded. Do I have the same fears when I think about spending an evening in pretty-white-upscale Cambridge? Nope.) So... umm... I'll figure out how to do it _next_ month....
It's not change and it doesn't count until I put it into action. Clearly I'm not done working on my own self.
One thing we can do is fight for The Voting Rights Act.
Yes indeed, Andrea.
I too, have long struggled to sort ways to reconcile what I saw when I was 16.
For all I know, that semicircle of shacks is what anyone would see today. I have not been back to that particular location since I gave up that job when I went to Texas A&M to become an engineer.
For 1000 reasons I have also not sorted how to help the complete absence of black engineers in the workforce.
I was only a manager with hiring ability for two years in my career (by choice I rotated back to technology development).
During that time as manager I found only one black engineer available at the schools my then company hired from at that time. I did not get to choose the Universities we hired from.
We hired one Black guy while I was manager. He was quickly promoted out of my group and onto other groups. I lost track of him.
One Black guy in a 38 year career was all I could muster help for.
I've thought about doing this for a Native American family.
Excellent idea, Mike. That I can do. Thank you.
Mike, that's a really interesting idea. I'm going to think about whether I could make that work.
Elizabeth, you have told many white people's stories. I'm one of them.
What do you know of the "Slocum Massacre" of 1910? I had to do a search to find where Slocum was, and that was the first thing that popped up. Then I saw how close Slocum is to Nacogdoches...
Thank you Ally for the referral to the “Slocum Massacre”.
Helps make it clear why The Texas GOP is so desperate to hide its past and to keep its complete history from being taught in its schools.
I was a liberal Canadian attending SMU’s Cox School of Business and working in Dallas in the late 70’s in real estate development, an area largely dependant on understanding the community I was working in. Even though I had all the resources and introductions I could wish for I always felt I was in a social fog and could never fully grasp what was really going on around me. Most confusing we’re the always pleasant but somehow ominous “Ya’ll take care now, heah” that ended meetings with so many older conservative Texas businessmen.
I knew nothing of the Slicum massacre growing up. Zero.
Like you, I learned of that massacre from a Google search.
I have a dear friend who grew up in Nacogdoches and graduated in 1980. She has told me stories...
Mike, in case you are not familiar with the history of the Catholic effort to educate African American students, you might be interested in "Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools" edited by Jacqueline Irvine and Michèle Foster. One contributor contends that the research supports the view of Catholic schools as "more effective for the education of African American students" (p. 21), and that "the deleterious affects of race, gender, and social class seem to be ameliorated, if not eradicated, in Catholic schools" (p. 39). A few religious orders in the Church dedicated themselves solely to teaching minorities precisely because the system didn't allow them in or treat them well. And "back in the day" those schools were supported by the parishes, not the government.
As you probably know, government support began with Everson vs. the Board of Education, 1947, when the SC decided that "government-funded bus transportation and non-religious textbooks for students enrolled in parochial (religious) schools" was permissible.
What began as a sensible decision, has become increasingly complex to navigate.
I say all this to counter the argument that Catholic schools were part of the problem of diverting money from public education. They were begun with good intentions but now have become part of the problem.
And this "problem" is "worsened" by the fact that students from Catholic schools are:
- more likely to graduate from college
- Higher average SAT scores. ...
- Higher reading and math scores. ...
- Are service-oriented ...
What are we going to do?
Mary. Thank you for your feedback and your kindness is assuming knowledge on my part.
The Catholic schools I referred to in the state of Louisiana were all white and served the same purpose as suburbs in the north. Legal means of segregation after integration in public schools.
Are you talking about high schools in Louisiana or elementary? I know there were several elementary schools run by a few different religious congregations of Sisters (I was in one of them). I don't have time right now to give you a link but can later if you'd like.
Thank you, Mike.
You look, you see and you remember. Thank you, Mike
Very interesting story, Mike. Thank you for sharing.
"In 1971, when segregation academies were gaining ground, the achievement gap between white and Black 8th grade students in reading scores was 57 points. In 1988, the year of the nation’s highest level of school integration, that gap had fallen to 18 points. By 1992, it was back up to 30 points, and it has not dropped below 25 points since."
1988 was one year after I graduated from a GREAT high school, albeit one in a pretty prosperous community. My dad and I didn't have a lot of money, but we had the cheapest house in South Eugene and I got to go to a fantastic school system. I took music all the way through. If it hadn't been for the journalism program at South, I don't know where I would be now. I might not have graduated.
Everything has slipped since, including my son through the cracks of the current educational system. Even in WA, budgets are constricted and there are 34 kids in classrooms. There's no time for journalism or music, or for teachers to help a kid who might not be responding to the industrialization of our education system in the way society expects. This was all preordained by the policies of the right wing in the 70s and 80s. And 90s and 00s and 10s.
We have to insist the Beltway media stop coddling the right wing and call them out every time. We have to stop coddling it ourselves. As liberals, we default to understanding. But understanding in the real world means we have to see and react to the real threat before us. There is no middle ground here. The right wing has purposefully inflicted real pain and suffering on the most vulnerable in our society, from it's very genesis.
In my mind, that makes them terrorists. We should never negotiate with terrorists. We have to unite to politically defeat the enemy at every turn, and not just in presidential elections. They have spent decades turning our local governments into a joke. On purpose. So I didn't use the word enemy lightly. That's what they are. We've been in a vice for many years now, the poor and increasingly the middle class beaten into submission, begging for work and terrified that our shitty-paying jobs might disappear. Many of us not able to survive on one check, and others of us one check or health scare from financial ruin.
It was all part of the plan. Until we recognize that we're debating the terrorists who executed the plan, the spiral will continue picking up speed. Get angry.
I have a strange thought this morning after reading Heather's letter and the comments to this point. NONE of this knowledge of the American power mongers' stranglehold, maintaining our caste systems, would have been so utterly revealed to so many if we did not have this foiled coup d'etat. The flagrant, shameless actions and kowtowing of this newer, republican, parasitic group, so used to power and privilege, underestimate how fast many of us are learning. The faster we learn and spread that knowledge, the faster we undo the Matrix they have woven us into since our foundations. This letter today is of such great importance and magnitude and what many of us have been saying about the dumbing down of American education.
The much needed high point I conclude this morning is that, even with their privileged ACCESS to education, it is apparent that most of these moneysucking ticks, did not really utilize their education. Appears more like many daddies just "purchased" degrees as we have witnessed very little critical thinking skills from today's republicans leaders and their followers. Appears it may be the middle classes who have truly benefitted the most by wanting to learn and utilizing what they could from their harder-earned access to higher education.
There are more of us than these patriarchal frat dinosaurs who really should be easy to put down since they do not demonstrate much strategic thinking, they just buy their way into. or out of, trouble. Generationally, they have dumbed themselves down. There are some clever ones who will be coming along. But at this very moment, we really have got this, if we want it. But we have to move quickly and our justice system needs to go into very high gear. It is on us to pressure this administration harder. That means stronger actions on our part. Or is my snorting and the pawing of my forefeet just demonstrating that my Taurean patience has all but vanished? Do I need reigning in for a bit longer? I very much identify with whomever coined the term The Raging Responsibles.
What do you think?
Heather, I love how you stimulate us. What a fabulous teacher for these times!
Sorry-- I meant " so use to power."
You got it right the first time. It’s a tricky phrase.
I have been angry since the 80s. Watched in in real time. Spoke out and still speak out. Deaf ears.
Same here in NH. The State Budget was passed by the Republican majority legislature and included tax breaks for RICH towns but not for poorer towns and gave public school funds via the school voucher program to religious/private schools and home schoolers and CUT public education funds as well, despite a great deal of public opposition.
The irony of how they named it the Dick Hinch Education Freedom Account (because they don't want to call it a voucher program, knowing how unpopular that concept is in NH), after the man who died of Covid one week after being sworn in as Speaker of the House.
Hello, Axeman! I was working for the county Sheriff's Office in 1988 and remember some fine classes from SEHS graduating during the 80's and 90's. I was always interested in the dichotomy between South and Sheldon during those years (and continuing today). A question: Did you know any of the students who wrote for 2--below? Hanna Olsen's Dad was a co worker of mine, and I think she may have been slightly younger than you are.
I was surprised no mention was made about the colossal charter school flop we had here in Ohio. It was Betsy DeVoss' dream project and had been the talk of Republican's everywhere until it crashed and burned like the Hidendburg. Kasich and all the state's GOP former proponents couldn't distance themselves fast enough.
The GOP’s Biggest Charter School Experiment Just Imploded
How a washed-up lobbyist built a charter school empire and siphoned millions from public schools.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/the-gops-biggest-charter-school-experiment-just-imploded/
Fascinating article. We had similar fraud going on in MI. Instances where a huckster optometrist opened charter schools and skimmed off millions in a variety of schemes. Also a state sponsored program entitled the Education Achievement Authority lasted about five years with a pitiful “online learning curriculum” and suspicious financial transactions. Seems the far right sees public school funds as an untapped profit market.
After the 2008 bubble collapsed and we had the Great Recession, school funds were seen as ripe for plucking. Lots of for-profit charter schools popped up, with administrators making huge salaries, poorly paid teachers and poorly educated students. There was also a large push for online schools or online textbooks, which of course, sold not only software, but lots of computers. Then we moved into online standardized testing.
What I never figured out is how in the mid60s, the New York State Regents exams, which we took on paper for a week, could be completely graded by the end of the following week, when we got report cards. However the PARRC exams, taken on computers, took months to get student results. Go figure.
My experience with charter schools is viewed as a teacher in a public middle school in Albuquerque. We have several good middle and high schools in the Heights, schools in the rest of the city are a mixed bag and are Title I and 100% free lunch. There are 4 excellent private schools, plus the Catholic schools. At the school where I worked, the community was mixed: high income estates and high poverty areas. Many of the wealthy parents applied for the private schools and a few students got in. The rest went to the public middle school, where the culture of valuing education outnumbered the hopeless and/or gang wannabe culture. With the advent of numerous charter schools, some of which are exemplary, many of the students who didn’t go to the private schools went to the charters. The balance of students valuing education teetered to the minority. The same good teachers were still there teaching, but disruptive classroom behavior became more of an issue. The peer and parental pressure to be good students was losing to the uninterested.
I would imagine 10 Yacht Betsy had her grubby little paws involved in that one too!
Excellent read. And all you Floridians need to read the companion article about Jeb Bush. In my view, Jeb was an awful Governor and did awful things. This among them.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/jeb-bush-digitial-learning-public-schools/
Still, Jeb would’ve been a much better POTUS than the charlatan from NYC who beat him.
I’m not sure about that. Jen would have been a lot more subtle and organized about dismantling our democratic government. In some ways, the former guy was a blessing. He was so blatant and erratic we finally started to see how much damage had been subtly done since the 80s and how much more he was trying to do. So now we’re awake before the coup has totally succeeded.
Jeb, not Jen. Autocorrect
Excellent modern complement to HCR's historical piece today. Thank you.
Just finished reading this amazing article. Thank you again. As with everything Republican, ECOT was just a corrupt entity for stealing money from the state and funneling that money to a private party.
Sometimes otherwise known as American Capitalism. For more information see Raytheon.
Ah, Raytheon. I worked there for two years. When I started, so did a new CEO, who thrilled Wall Street by closing manufacturing plants to reduce payroll. By a year later, the lack of workers had caused delays in deliveries, which in turn reduced company income. No bonuses that year - except for top management. The CEO who had caused the trouble got a bonus equal to my annual salary. All of that money, of course, came directly or indirectly from taxpayers. Screwy place. (To be fair, they did pay for all the night classes you could handle, thus becoming an excellent stepping stone. )
You're welcome. It needs to be resurfaced more often to treat the GOP's convenient amnesia regarding Charter Schools.
Mr. Johnson, no Republican will consider ECOT a failure. You are not observing amnesia. Republicans DESIRE to transfer public funding for the public good to their own pockets and, since Ronald Reagan, have been highly effective at doing so.
For example, the amount of money Raytheon the Blackwater contractor that sponsored multiple atrocities in Afghanistan have collected during the 20 years of war we sponsored precisely for corporate benefit is astronomical and could have funded a new school in half of all American Cities including gyms and a football field.
Transferring public money to private entities has enriched so many Americans that Republicans are now almost unstoppable in their power to corrupt, steal, and vanish public money like a magician on stage.
Sadly, many Democrats have also vanished public money into private coffers and all of Andrew Cuomo's buddies who went to prison for the "Buffalo Billion", with Cuomo somehow escaping that fate, are witness to that.
In fact, American Democracy may fail, may have already failed, because the framers did not foresee the power of corporations to corrupt representatives of the "people".
The
Also, even Donald Trump ran for profit educations centers because they are so easy to steal from and pocket the money while leaving the students behind and in debt. For profit schools are so available for crooks, that Trump, like a fruit fly to fruit, found them.
Great analogy, "like a fruit fly." So one-tracked, pesky and hard to get rid of once they are in.
and there you have it. :-)
I don't share your pessimism, at least with regards to Ohio Republicans and ECOT, they owned it but will try to say they can fix it in the future. That's kinda on the back burner now as they try to deal with the First Energy bribery scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
Corruption has been an ebbing and flowing feature of government from the beginning. Sadly the spigots are currently wide open.
Christopher, thank you for the comment. Ohio Republicans are unlikely to put the ECOT leadership in prison. Right?
However, the ECOT leadership sponsored public to private theft since they delivered no education.
So, nothing will change. Charlatans, who understand how to steal without going to jail, will continue to flock to Charter schools.
Nobody will arrest leaders of ECOT and show their arrest on morning and evening TV like they would show a Black man who stole a loaf of bread from the 7-11.
So, get used to charter schools. No better way to make an easy buck.
ok, I need to edit better but I meant to write Raytheon AND the Blackwater contractor. Apology.
Those enlightened framers corrupted American Democracy by allowing enslavement to continue.
I'm often tempted to use my modern mind to diagnose those who came before but have come to realize it isn't the correct way to think.
While human technology has grown exponentially, human behavior is pretty much a flat line with the occasional bump up. Those bumps take the form of The Enlightenment which, if we're lucky come once every 1000 years.
I can't blame the framers for not being woke, maybe if they weren't walking the walk, they were talking about the self-evident truth of all men being created equal. They got the ball rolling but we humans keep putting bumps in the road.
Modern minds among the framer's contemporaries were quite "woke" and outspoken about the irony of enslavers seeking freedom from tyranny, while practicing and enjoying the fruits of their tyrannical practices of enslavement, and usurping land from indigenous peoples. Clutching those myths to our breasts and upholding them to our last breaths keeps democracy unrealized and beyond our reach.
Raytheon needs a new market. Huum? Wonder where that will be?
Hopefully not China.
Perhaps your front door?
Just Shared this!!! Thank You ❣
You're welcome.
🙏 I have been so waiting for this. The threat to public education is real. It is cloaked in promoting “choice,charter and home school”. It is radical. It is an immoral. It is rooted in racism, inequality, and “power over” politics.
“Home school” kids make on average $30,000 less per year than public school graduates. Home school kids loose out on socialization, critical interactions in development needed to succeed in a modern service and information economy. Home school is robbing children of a core right to participate in the creative economy. It is rooted in classism. It is a false salve for the poor who could never afford private school, cloaked as “charter” schools.
True story. I know a couple (through the theater), white, college educated (the wife graduated from Rice University), first class editors, employed by the Texas legislature to write bills, staunch Libertarians (almost on the cusp of being outright anarchists), who chose to home school their two children because they were opposed to the "brainwashing" of public school teachers. By the time their two had reached teens, neither of them could do any math - they could read, and they read vociferously...occultish fiction for the most part. But since neither parent could teach math and since the home school resources of which they availed themselves also provided very little math instruction, the children were uninterested in and could do NO math. So, at a late age, they enrolled them in a private "school" for teens, on the order of a Montessori school. This meant, again, that the children could choose their own curriculum. They did. It did not include math. The son "graduated" and is now 18. He has no skills. He is working part time for an egg farm. He removes eggs from nests and places them in egg cartons. When he can, he will do some yard "work" (he knows nothing about plants) for $12 an hour. He is saving this income for "college." When he did some work for me, I'd ask him how many hours he had worked (he IS an honest young man) and he'd reply - two or three hours, whatever it happened to be. I'd ask, how much do I owe you. He would pull out his cell phone (provided and paid for by his parents - as they also provided and paid for his SUV) and begin to calculate. He did not know enough math to even multiply 12X2 or 12X3. This is a true story. It is a sad story and a story of human waste, in my opinion.
I remember a similar tale about a young check-out person who didnt have a clue what change to return to a customer! Sad!
it's a very sad story and I suspect an all too common one.
But at this moment in time, home school is the only thing available to those protecting their children from the pandemic. Gov Abbott will not fund virtual learning. And for a district like the one where I work, we already give $50+ million to the state from the Robin Hood law. The district just can’t afford to fund virtual learning. Covid is rising among children, our most vulnerable population.
Gov Abbot is an immoral power weider, the likes of Sen. Hammond. Exposing and abandoning children to disease is not leadership. He is “forcing” kids either to risk disease at school or rob them of their right to an education. Home school is not an education. No good choices for Texas parents. Vote his ass out!
I’m kind of impressed with my friend who quit teaching to take care of her family. She’s a very intelligent person! She opted into a program that she had to enter her child’s progress. And they’re doing extracurricular activities. This kid is going to have to down pat! But it’s not very often the case. Most homeschool families choose a religious based program. They barely spend any time outside of bible study.
All Heather talked about this evening is alive and well in Texas. It is horrifying to read the text of the bills in the Texas House such as this one:
Texas House Bill 3979
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/HB03979F.HTM
The first part of this bill is about Social Studies teachers legally can’t teach current events without a lot of restrictions which is being interpreted by the League of Women Voters as not even being able to discuss the importance of voting. Need to ask the lawyers how this could be construed. The second part section (4) is the critical race theory stuff.
(h-3) For any social studies course in the required curriculum:
(1) a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs;
(2) a teacher who chooses to discuss a topic described by Subdivision (1) shall, to the best of the teacher's ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective;
(3) a school district, open-enrollment charter school, or teacher may not require, make part of a course, or award a grade or course credit, including extra credit, for a student's:
(A) political activism, lobbying, or efforts to persuade members of the legislative or executive branch at the federal, state, or local level to take specific actions by direct communication; or
(B) participation in any internship, practicum, or similar activity involving social or public policy advocacy; and
(4) a teacher, administrator, or other employee of a state agency, school district, or open-enrollment charter school may not:
(A) be required to engage in training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex;
(B) require or make part of a course the concept that:
(i) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
(ii) an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
(iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual's race;
(iv) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
(v) an individual's moral character, standing, or worth is necessarily determined by the individual's race or sex;
(vi) an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
(vii) an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex;
(viii) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race;
(ix) the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States; or
(x) with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality; and
(C) require an understanding of The 1619 Project.
(h-4) A state agency, school district, or open-enrollment charter school may not accept private funding for the purpose of developing a curriculum, purchasing or selecting curriculum materials, or providing teacher training or professional development for a course described by Subsection (h-3)(3).
(h-5) A school district or open-enrollment charter school may not implement, interpret, or enforce any rules or student code of conduct in a manner that would result in the punishment of a student for discussing, or have a chilling effect on student discussion of, the concepts described by Subsection (h-3)(4).
Wow. Texas has gone from the wild wild lawless west to an authoritarian state?
Here in NH, the "divisive concept" of forbidding teaching of CRT has been passed in the Republican majority legislature, as was the use of school vouchers and a 24 week abortion outright BAN have also passed. (and the public reaction to those bills and a 24 week abortion BAN was so strong that none of those bills could pass as stand alone bills.) Therefore, that same Republican majority decided to IGNORE the will of the voters and decided to HIDE all three bills in the NH State Budget and the Republican governor gladly signed the Budget. Here in NH, much of public school funding is through property taxes, despite the fact that 18 years ago, the NH Supreme Court declared it an unacceptable means of funding because of it's inequality. Poor towns pay more in property taxes so the diversion of public school funds to RELIGIOUS and private schools, and home schoolers will result in higher property taxes for poor towns but NOT for rich towns. BTB, those diverted funds were NOT restored to public education. https://www.concordmonitor.com/My-Turn-School-funding-and-the-NH-Supreme-Court-39778293
And hiding bills in budgets should be against the law!! Especially when there was an outcry against them.
One comment… you say “diversion of public school finds to religious and private schools and home schoolers will result in higher property taxes…”. I don’t understand? Doesn’t a reduction in the number of students in a public school proportionally reduce the cost of that school? It should. Net/net.
No, because costs are not perfectly proportional to numbers of students. For example, if a school building is designed to accommodate 500 students, the cost of maintaining it is the same even if there are only 350 students.
Joan, not necessarily. Costs can be very proportional to number of students. First, the operating costs of the buildings is normally less than 5% of the cost per student. I am an owner of commercial real estate and there is nothing better than the pandemic as an example of being able to adapt to changes. I was able to reduce costs (except for property tax) to balance my new income (50% of previous) with my costs. It can be done, and school buildings usually don't pay property tax. As for debt, schools usually get very good interest rates. Further, the building is an asset which appreciates.
If the reduction in students is permanent, then it becomes easier to accommodate.
The problem is usually the number of upper management with high salaries and consultants who are not reduced. We have a situation in our town where a private school was built to teach middle school children. We do not have a middle school in our town, so we needed to tuition these students to another town's public middle school. The cost was more than $20,000 per student. The private school cost to the town is less than $16,000, yet there is no reduction in the quality of education. (there is plenty of evidence for this, which is a topic for another time). It is a clear example of the inefficiencies of the public school system and the unwillingness to operate as a business must.
But it isn't just private schools that parents can choose for their children. These students may go to any school, public or private. Many choose to go to public schools that are closer to where they live or provide specific services these children cannot get in their own district school (public school closure and consolidation have been rampant, with no evidence of better education or cost savings, and cause students to spend a huge amount of time on school busses!)
The answers are not simple. Each district has a specific situation and problems. There are many solutions and they do work.
Tony, you make a good argument. The key question might be, what are guidelines that citizens and school boards can use, to determine whether or not a given proposal is truly in the best interests of the children. There has been so much open racism and corruption in the pushes to charter schools, that I distrust the whole idea, which of itself does not prove that the next attempt is without merit.
Right. These freedom loving patriots don't like government controlling their lives ...?
Irony, irony, irony.
Time to make it akin to Italy where the Government can pass all sorts of laws but few actually get to hit the streets.....with due deference for those living in the Italy that I love.
I can assert with authority what teachers in Florida think about this type of legislative action that is happening in lockstep in the FL legislature.
#1 Someone or some thing is controlling this. No governor comes up with this by themselves. It is happening in too many states. Their conclusion is the entities controlling the Republican agenda such as the Heritage Foundation are “mandating” such action and meddling with kids to establish their vision of private “for some” elite education.
#2 Hence, teachers who cannot remain nonpartisan agree or disagree according to their personal political leanings. This is evident amongst teachers more than ever.
#3 The majority of teachers listen to the legislative mandates knowing that as soon as their students are before them and the door closes, they will continue to teach the students according to their own professional code.
#4 THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE. Florida continues to play around with the idea of policing teachers because they know damn well right they can legislate, for example, civics instruction, until “Red” in the face and still not be assured that teachers will “obey”. Hence, the ideas of body cameras and other ways to monitor teachers in the classroom are being explored— seriously by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, oh, I mean, Commissioner of Education and State Board. Measures that will affect salary, tenure, and certification.
#5 I know a lot of teachers. There is not a one of them that will ever be commanded, coerced, or ridiculed to betray their oath of service to the common good. They are professionals. Some better than others but all have worked towards degrees and certification necessary to teach in public schools. They may or may not agree with curriculum standards or requirements and know much is beyond their control regarding “materials”. However, their goal remains the same. “Help students learn. Keep them safe.”
In essence, I have had more than one say to me. “The code of conduct does not require me to give in to authoritarian bullsh*t. They better look in their own rear view mirrors”.
So to speak.
Never underestimate a teacher. It doesn’t surprise me at all about the effort to control them, and thus, the children.
And without going on about it, the underground swell rigorously opposing this is growing. Which began in earnest the moment that handmaid DeVos left the room.
The question is whether this will get to the point of being just too onerous to deal with even with the teacher's dedication to the children and teaching. If they resign, will that mean people that will go along with the Oberkommando will replace them and we'll have brain-washing classrooms rather than learning and critical thinking. The dream of the autocrats is to have uneducated people that are easier to control.
I’ll probably be running again next year for a local school board seat. During my last campaign, my platform included changing the architecture of public education. It garnered some interest and probably will even more so next year. That change can nullify the legislative manipulation in their tracks. The fastest thing to be eliminated from the options that were a part of pandemic year 2020 school year was the online and virtual learning model. It started picking up credible steam once teachers got their usual creative footing back. Let’s just say that the state did not favor it to the point that it is an option this year. “Everyone must be present and accounted for in brick and mortar”. Hmm. Wonder why.
Given correct planning time and resources, this is a model that can be far more than what was accomplished in 2020. My best resource in really thinking about this model was personnel in the military. Believe it or not. There’s a lot possible with virtual reality.
It was a perfect storm of thinking when the old adage fell upon public education last year, with a twist. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, set up the stand, and sell it. We got a little closer but I predict there will be more to come.
Texas legislature has a long history of micro-managing education ... to the detriment of the educational system. Factory line mass production model of education....
Yet they also will have a populace incapable of working in the high tech environments of the modern world. Corporations required well-educated employees. What will happen, in certain states, when citizens don't have the needed capabilities? What will happen to the economy of those states when a majority of their own citizens are incapable of doing any but the most basic jobs? Will the corporations that require highly educated personnel leave for regions where they can hire the kinds of people needed? So many who advocate for a dumbed-down citizenry fail to see the other side of the coin which may rebound to their own detriment.
Good point!
I've little doubt and am fearful that there will be, among the many excellent teachers, a few quislings who will report perceived deviations from these legislated mandates.
Authoritarianism, full blown.
I just Shared this on Facebook 😣
Holy crap!
I just Shared this on Facebook!!!😥
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the same folks who are pushing and providing the actual text for voter suppression bills in state after state are also behind the push to whitewash public education and transfer its resources to private schools:
* https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-a-smart-alec-threatens-public-education/2012/02
* https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/07/27/alec-inspires-lawmakers-to-file-anti-critical-race-theory-bills/
* https://www.salon.com/2021/03/27/conservative-groups-are-writing-gop-voter-suppression-bills---and-spending-millions-to-pass-them/
* https://truthout.org/articles/rand-paul-and-alec-are-working-together-to-suppress-the-vote/
We need an icon for ‘your post is very good, the reality you point toward is awful.’
Thank you for sharing these links. Please continue to expose what ALEC is doing.
I think there is enough in this bill that law suits should be initiated all over Texas by and for claiming injuries to minorities, genders, gender identity, teachers, administrators, school members, etc who feel abused by Texas state and school practices. Where are the exceptional attorneys for social justice out there? Let's get on this. It should be possible to bankrupt and tie up Texas in their own laws until the power grid freezes over again.
I would add that the Texas law might be used to go after all the private schools that turn away students of color, ethnicity, gender, religion that don't suit their biases, that have other discriminatory practices and offensive hurtful policies.
Try reading the above while pretending you don’t know the point is to legislate white male supremacy and block critical thinking. Doesn’t it say that no one can teach that any race or gender is better than any other? That racism is a betrayal of the ideals of this country? That no one should be treated as inferior based on their race or sex?
It seems to me that the actual language of this law leaves some room for teaching the virtues of equal treatment and the wrongness of the opposite.
Hard to pretend while examining our history.
That is just stunning. And horrifying.
Dystopian.
Thanks for sharing
Nat Turner was.....uppity. (As was Emmet Till) Turner's little rebellion was a vivid demonstration of education leading to critical thinking leading to individual actions; actions that were not at all beneficial to the existing power structure.
Lesson learned and a pillar supporting every oligarchy and dictator since.
Thank you again, HCR, for using a lesson in American history to shine a light on events transpiring today.
On the evacuation of Afghanistan, I was heartened to hear about US helicopters going out to pick up American citizens, and people deserving SIVisas and bringing them back to the airport for transport out of the country. Also they are taking out Afghan refugees as well. This is much more the America I want America to be -- leaving no one behind
Yes, and that is what HCR writes about today, the history of some Americans' efforts to leave other Americans behind, right here. Unfortunately, democracy allows them to carry out their undemocratic schemes because they have the right to vote. And they do. Without education, democracy doesn't work and that is why they attack it.
I've read two books on Nat Turner including 'Confessions'. He was an interesting fellow in that he was portrayed as a privileged 'house n*gger' and I think one of his jobs was to actually drive his master's daughter's buggy. In one of the books, some white man would come and 'visit' his mother at a certain time of day where he was told by his mom to go outside. He would go hide under the front porch and hear his mother argue and scuffle with the man - and then quiet. Later he would come from under the porch and rejoin his mother who tried to act as if nothing happened, but of course he knew better. This, along with the calling of god is portrayed as a catalyst for his later campaign of slaughter. News traveled slow in those days but it made a lasting impression. Nat Turner and other slaves' behaviors began to make owning slaves untenable. I taught at a private Quaker school where Turner was portrayed as a hero for freedom.
Education for POC and Whites is more important than ever because we still have people with a 'new' slave master mentality. One reason I say this , is because of all the particulars of the machinations that have been played out in Congress by Henry Hammond, R. Reagan, Devos and all. Because of you, I'm learning the particulars of how all this stuff works . We appreciate you HCR.
Yes, Bill, appreciating HCR.
And now everyone will understand how Republicans view the pandemic as an “opportunity” to reek havoc, create chaos, despair and discord, our children un defended and made vulnerable to disease in much of our public school system, but mostly those in Red states.The results of sick kids at public schools will be used politically as a way to promote home school for the poor and vouchers for the dwindling middle class, and private charter schools for the wealthy. Which school above do you think will have plenty of Covid testing , mask wearing, enough spacing, and vaccine education and access?
I believe there is a big wrench in this diabolical thinking. As more kids get sick at public school more parents will vote Republicans out. Many religious evangelical private schools who have shunned science and vaccines will have catastrophic outbreaks.
As delta has an r knot closer to chicken pox and almost as high as measles, schools will need 90%+ vaccinations to keep kids safe and in person learning possible. Lower than 90% students and unvaccinated teachers is a disaster that is upon us. This fall is going to be darker than the fall of 1918 unless schools stay masked and all kids get masked.
one more note, ted; The Republicans breed misery for profit as we bury the dead.
100%. How many children will we have to bury?
39 pregnant unvaxed women are in critical care in Alabama. 10 on ventilators. Becker’s hospital reports.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/uab-hospital-leaders-alarmed-over-number-of-pregnant-covid-19-patients-in-icu.html?origin=BHRE&utm_source=BHRE&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter&oly_enc_id=7976I9190745J1X
One tragic story after another, we have to start acting in a strategic and coordinated way, not recklessly and with a message. The numbers will grow.
Haven't we reached the boiling point? I am reading experience, depth, clarity and rage on the forum -- the truth.
Health insurance company’s have reached it Michigan. The un vaxed will have to pay. Once this is National, the pandemic will be over in a month.
https://www.wxyz.com/news/coronavirus/many-of-michigans-biggest-insurance-companies-will-no-longer-waive-covid-19-costs
There are still plenty of uninsured people. Those bills are either eventually “written off” or are paid by Medicaid.
For many yes, but not yet critical mass. What is the limit of human suffering before collective action is taken? The pandemic has already gone from crisis to tragedy. How tragic will be determined in the next few weeks and months.
A little more action by Patagonia's founder Yvone Chournard. Pulling his brand out of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort's retail stores. (easy guesstimate that is close to $1 mil in business) After the resort's owner and oil & gas oligarch Jay Kemmerer after he sponsored fundraisers for MTG, Gaetz, Jordan, and the rest of the clown show that is the Freedom Caucus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/21/patagonia-boycott-wyoming-resort-greene/
Thank you for this link, Ted. There are a lot American people, including business owners, who have consciences, spurring them on is the job of all of us.
Yes, Ted that is the question. Part of getting to that critical mass is the people knowing who is responsible. The January 6th investigative arm is one avenue, but much more truth telling is necessary. More connection between grassroots organizations, the free-press and the Democratic party is necessary. Organization, mobilization of the willing and investigative reporting with strategic use of social media has to come alive-- what's the plan?
Right on, Ted, and I love your use of the homonym in "reek havoc" instead of the standard spelling "wreak havoc." I bet you're right that their strategy banning masks in schools is exactly to provoke a rate of illness that they think will make parents clamor for school vouchers and support of private-ish charter schools. The Republicans do, indeed, reek.
Vis a vis communicability of chicken pox, I contracted it at age 22 when visiting friends whose two kids were supposed to be past the communicable stage! It was *awful*! And it was during a summer in D.C., working on my master's thesis (Library Science) without air-conditioning. Needless to say, I got the Shingles vaccine as soon as it was available.
It can take week or two for chicken pox to spread in a school. What Desantis and Abbot are doing is immoral.
“Entire school”
All healthy kids get vaccinated.
NPR just had a report on the privatization of teacher certification training in Texas, now expanding into other states. A private company initiated the program, and is expanding rapidly into Republican controlled states.
Texas State representatives voted to approve this private training program against the recommendations of their State Ed Dept claiming Texas needed to certify teachers faster and in larger numbers. The certification requirements had been a degree from a accredited teaching college with passing a certification test which the state administered. The same as most states.
The Texas Ed Dept argued that teacher shortages were highest in predominantly minority and impoverished communities. The new private training program apparently certified teachers without teacher college degrees and little or no preparation to teach. The Texas Ed Dept reported after the new program got established that these new teachers turned over and left teaching at a significantly higher rate than conventionally educated and certified teachers, leaving the minority and impoverished communities in even worse condition. Still, the new private teacher certification company is expanding into other Republican states.
As you might imagine, there are many young and older Americans trying to find an occupation to make a living. Teaching is one of the most difficult occupations to prepare for, to match yourself to, to become sufficiently dedicated to, and to not burn out. The consequences of teaching is clearly among the most important to each child becoming an effective adult. There should be no shortcuts in educating, training and supporting our teachers, schools and students.
More 411 on this. What is the name of the company and principle funding?
"Teach For America"
The following is a 2014 NPR report. I could not find this past week's program on this topic. I presume it was a more recent report. But this 2014 report covers the same issue.
Rise In Alternative Certification For U.S. Teachers : NPR Ed
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/09/12/347375798/for-teachers-many-paths-into-the-classroom-some-say-too-many
Teach for America has been around for 30 years and places teachers in the vast majority of states across the country. The whole idea of TFA was to put inexperienced, unlicensed college graduates - especially from “top” schools like Ivies - into schools filled with poor Black, Hispanic, and Native kids (especially charter schools where there is a constant churn of new teachers). It has been described as akin to The Peace Corps but it is anything but. For one thing they earn the same salary as their fellow first year teachers who have degrees in education. They are worked to death (often in very coercive ways) until they move on after two years to their “real” careers by enrolling in law or business school. This is by design. A steady supply of inexperienced teachers keeps costs down - no pensions! Since many states now require that all teachers become licensed within a few years of starting, TFA created their own licensure program with classes taught by experienced TFA teachers for those who want to remain in education.
I love it here. I'm learning so much more than if I wasn't. A lot of times its scary. A lot of times I want to look away, but I wont.
What's equally saddening is how many people think being a teacher is an easy gig! The turnover you mention is undoubtedly due to the untrained teachers realizing how difficult it really is.
Yes! Also see my longer reply to David’s comment.
Very simply, if you can stop a people getting an education, you can control them more easily; a people thus can become either a cowering mass or a mob....both intent merely on survival and/or hurting their perceived enemies. Emotional calls to defend the nation, and other such propaganda missives always against the proverbial "other", incite amongst those so ill-informed an emotional response as they have no basis on which to make a logical, reasoned analysis of the situation. Many respond by seeking by all means to please the "masters" and thus share their priviledges........others rebel as they have managed to retain innate faculties and can use them to lead the people away from the dark and into the light.
Reminds me of George W.'s wild west, cowboy mentality to what he dubbed the Axis of Evil-"You are either with us or against us!" (Nothing against cowboys, I know some great ones!). Then he proceeded to really wake up the sleeping lion in the desert which we are still paying mightily for.
I appreciate that there are many of us here, under HCR's tutelage of real history, "...ready to help lead from the dark into the light."
The Republicans would assuredly like us to forget that a third of the "cowboys" were Black, another third Native American and only the residue were White.
Free public education is an ongoing threat. (to authoritarians)
Virginia's elite "positively feared learning among the general population." Here is Governor William Berkeley's infamous, reply in 1671, when asked about the state of schools in Virginia:
"I thank God," he declared, "there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a ] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government . God keep us from both."
Further ..."It might be noted that Virginia learning ways were not the product of slavery, or of rural poverty. They were fully developed before slaves appeared in large numbers, and when that colony was one of the richest in British America." "Albion's Seed", David Hackett Fischer, (1989), pp. 347 - 349.
Education has always been controlled by the oligarchs and still is.
Heather, this letter needs to be in every local newspaper from coast to coast and everywhere in between. I wonder if there is a way to petition our local news sources to publish her letters?? Does anyone in that business have any suggestions? Thank you again for another out of the freaking ballpark and across the railroad tracks letter. 🙏❤️
Agree…but… it needs more than newspapers. This critical issue, public education and those that threaten it needs a multi media, multi platform, multi channel defense. Education is an institution that sustains democracy. We need to defend it with conviction and reach.
💯 agree but changes to our educational system are a long term goal. More immediately we need parents/school boards to protect the freedom to learn the truths which we were not taught. The local newspaper and editorials are important to a majority of the older people living in rural Maine. I wonder if other rural areas don’t see the same. I have been taking a break from online comments since Biden took office. His win was such a relief and there is always so much that matters and needs doing. IMHO getting Heather’s voice into our local Bangor Daily News would help with “enlightenment”.
Sign up for your local paper, and, in prominent articles, post links to HCR's writing.
that is what I do, but, unfortunately, fewer and fewer Americans read to get their information. Rather, they get everything from video which is about 1/60 the speed of reading.
Send them as letters to the Editor if Heather is OK with that.
Don, so IF she is OK with that what is the best way to do that? Just send her letter in and ask them to publish it as a letter to the Editor? I’m guessing they have word limits? Would an OpEd allow for the length a little better? Sorry, I have no clue.
Distill what you have learned from Heather into a letter of your own to the editor.
Her’s are so impactful. But certainly that would be a good second option. TY
An OpEd would be better but even then, a local paper is likely to have a limit on the number of words. I've had to cut & cut & cut to get the most simple Letter to the Editor published in my local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune (owned by the LA Times). The limit for a Letter to the Editor is 150 words or less.
That's sad, it's almost as though they don't want to hear a reasoned presentation.
The paper has, historically, been pretty conservative.
Thank you Judith.
Most papers have a 500 word limit on letters and Heather would know better than I do how many of her missives fall under that limit. It might be more effective to send the letter under each of our names and quote Heather up to the limit.
My own local paper limits Letters to the Editor to 150 words or less. Not sure about an Opinion piece (OpEd).
Having spent a career in the public sphere of education, I am struck by a certain irony in this historical perspective. All that effort to disenfranchise first slaves, and then any and all POC - all that money to fund private systems (more on this below) - all that effort to deliberately dumb down certain populations in our nation apparently has achieved some victory on that front, but has backfired to a massive degree when you consider those who are addicted to Fox, OANN, QAnon and other "fake news" outlets. That addicted following for the most part is white...and in my opinion, not very bright white at that. These are the folks who are refusing to become vaccinated and are dying Delta deaths. These are the folks who believed that on August 13, their wannabe king would be "reinstated." These are the folks who, armed with various and sundry weapons and decked out in Trump paraphernalia, stormed our capitol on January 6th. These are the REALLY dumbed down members of our society. If they even attended a school - public or private - they learned nothing about civics. I would guess that the most many of them achieved was a GED.
With that out of my craw, I'll turn to those private entities of which many, like Fox, OANN, and others, are funded by deep pocketed dark money, religious organizations, and others just out for a quick buck using tax payer dollars to pay for their "schools." How do I know this? Well, once upon a time, one aspect of my job was to review charter school applications for a sizeable chunk of the state of Texas. I was to review them, and if they were found to be anywhere in the ballpark of being a "school" (quotes used deliberately), I would approve them. Having been a principal and assistant superintendent, having a doctorate in educational leadership, having worked at the state level, I was not ignorant of what a "school" was and should be. So, reading applications that, in many cases, were written in PENCIL, were misspelled, had no clue about budgeting or any costs associated with running a staffed facility, and were otherwise merely shams and jokes, I was and continue to be appalled at the push to privatize our public school system. I have not one kind word for Betsy DeVos and others of her ilk. And as for the white flighters in the South, many of those public dollars went to "private" schools that were nothing more than religious institutions.
OK. I'm done with my rant. Sorry, friends! This Letter nicked me in the quick!
With appreciation for you rant, my sense is that the majority of Republicans attached to the cult are better educated than you surmise. I went to college and grad school with a lot of 'dumb', incurious students. Grievance, misplaced sense of superiority, upbringing, cultural assumptions, mediocre and or bias' curriculum can keep the 'herd' in the pen. They are certainly not a herd of geniuses.
I agree. And when you consider those members of Congress (Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, Kennedy and others) who have actually graduated with LAW degrees from highly reputable universities, it seems obvious they are not "a herd of geniuses"! I'm not sure to which "herd" they belong, but it is nefarious to my way of thinking!
I think at least one member of our Supreme Court meets those criteria.
Why be shy, Clarence Thomas is an easy name to say. Unless you have someone else in mind, I don't have an opinion about his intelligence -- his opinions - that is another matter. Thomas is the most conservative and the quietist in the group. He graduated in the middle of his class at Yale Law School, and I do have an opinion about his behavior with Anita Hill. I can't stand Alito and don't care for any of the other Republicans, with the exception of Amy Coney Barrett. I know her background, but she hasn't been on the court long enough for me to utter a thought about her opinions.
Well, that makes at least two. I was thinking of a more recent appointment, initials BK.
Oh, that cutie. Brett's defensive offensive performance at his hearing merits the Rodney Dangerfield, 'I don't get no respect' Award.
Years ago, my city had a public meeting about an application to create a charter school. It quickly became apparent that the applicants simply wanted to start a business, and had hit on the charter school idea only because they expected to get guaranteed customers and free facilities. They wanted to take over some land and buildings used for community gardens and a community shares farm, claiming their school would be agriculture based - in Massachusetts, where the school year and the growing season overlap only slightly. They also declared they would serve special needs students. I was teaching in a special needs school at that time, and by chance was sitting behind these applicants in the meeting room. They knew nothing at all about special needs kids. They figured they would get the approval, take the land and the money, and then figure out how to fulfill their promises. Fortunately, the school board saw through them and did not grant approval. I've had a soft spot in my heart ever since for the politician who showed up and articulated our concerns.
I've long been sensitive to the "magic bullet" panacea of education in the US: in my opinion, it's more magic than bullet.
Here's something I wrote back in 2014 that I think is relevant. https://themonthebard.org/2014/09/01/the-demise-of-higher-education/
Like so much in US society, our entire public and private education system has been upended and rendered dysfunctional by the gale winds of unfettered capitalism.
That was an interesting read. Thank you. I read it aloud to my husband who works an engineering job without having a college degree and is routinely passed over for promotions by those with much less practical experience than he has. Lots to think about there.
Just this afternoon, I talked with a friend who goes back to my junior high days, and he's been in much the same position as my father and your husband all his life. He went into the Navy instead of college, and learned a lot about electronics, and a whole lot more since then. Neither my father nor my friend ever had the temperament for a college education. I did, but did not have the temperament for a career in academia. There is so much mythology, posturing, and outright deceit involved in all our social rankings, and in the benefits that come with them.
Totally agree. Especially appreciate the irony in the comments about the "fake news" white population.
Aha! So if our educational system continues to be low priority in this country then it would seem to enable a future where the 1% could rule alongside the Republican minority... I'm way oversimplifying but can't help noticing that China over the decades has evolved as a country to be reckoned with, because education has been highly valued there. On the other hand, in this country it seems that people of color have a difficult time getting a higher education due to cost, time, and opportunity, so the cycle continues to this day.
On the topic of Nat Turner, on this day so many years ago what he incited and executed was horrifying. Two wrongs never make it right.
I hope you finally went to bed, Dr. Heather! 💜 Thank you for another illuminating history lesson.
When I was in Hong Kong in 1998, I watched an educational program part of their regular TV scheduling. It was on Eigen values which is quite advanced math! Nothing watered down and insipid about their education system!