1 sec interweb search gave 24mil results for “failing schools narrative”
David Berliner, former dean of the school of education at Arizona State University and a past president of the American Educational Research Association writes here about a topic that plagues integration efforts: the FAILING SCHOOLS Narrative.
This FAILING SCHOOLS Narrative has been with us for a long while (my non-historians guess? The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 1983’s publication of Nation at Risk followed by years of high-stakes testing and NCLB etc etc etc). It’s a thing. And it’s a thing that has been called, among other things, racist, inaccurate, and a tactic used in the employ of school privatization. Regardless of the lens though which you want to look at this narrative, it has surely produced much of the hysteria that has fed the beast of segregation.
As Berliner points out, the FAILING SCHOOLS Narrative is also based on an incomplete picture; when we look beyond the means and averages, he writes, “wealthy children attending public schools that serve the wealthy are competitive with any nation in the world…. [S]ome of our students and some of our public schools are not doing well. But having “some” failures is quite a different claim than one indicting our entire public school system.” He writes about the “lower caste” that we have relegate our low-income students to, the use of “local control” to define school district boundaries, and the “apartheid-lite” American system of schools.
But yet!!!! At the solution-suggesting point in his article, Berliner says that the right question to ask is this: “What might work to produce higher achievement for low-income children attending schools that serve low-income families?”
!?!? How about NOT consigning low-income students to low-income schools? How about NOT concentrating poverty? How about NOT segregating students of color from white students? How about NOT asking that question?!
Berliner goes on to provide “equity solutions” to bring up achievement for poor, black and brown students like: summer school for poor kids, parent education programs, housing vouchers, after school programs, etc etc. All of these maintain separateness. How can someone this deep in the work, someone who has thought about these numbers and cited segregation as “apartheid-lite” not see integration as an answer?
But. *sigh.* Anyway. For those of us engaged in this work of integration and struggling to articulate it to friends and fellow-parents… we can think about and talk about how this FAILING SCHOOLS Narrative is (a) false for white kids (and especially wealthy/wealthish white kids) and (b) racist, inaccurate, incomplete, and profiteery.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/06/what-the-numbers-really-tell-us-about-americas-public-schools/?utm_term=.99042d2c45d5#comments
And here… in similar vein of NOT TALKING INTEGRATION:
“How can a democracy effectively function without citizens who are able to learn, live and work with others who are different than them? How can we truly build a shared set of values and understanding?… Students in both wealthy and poor schools need to learn what life is like on the other side of the tracks…. Engaging with one another and with our world begins in our schools. Our children need the opportunity to learn from a diversity of people and perspectives. They will then be better equipped to engage with their public institutions and leaders.”
Yes to all of that. But his solution? “promote exchange programs, online interactions between students from different schools”
OMG. What about, you know, being in the SAME DAMN CLASSROOM?!
http://hechingerreport.org/opinion-diversity-schools-criti…/
Thank you for sharing this. It’s such a complex issue, and what’s really stuck with me from one of your earlier posts is how it’s on WHITE people to push integration, since we are the ones that caused the segregation to begin with. I do want to see more integrated schools, like the one my white children attend and where they are in the racial minority…AND in the meantime we have to figure out how to serve children in currently segregated low-income schools because they can’t afford to sit around and wait for white people to figure it out, sadly. I think we do both, keeping both the immediate situation and the long game in mind.
agreed. 1000%. you’re absolutely right — it is both. we just need equity AND integration to BOTH be in the conversation all the time. 🙂