Editorials
- Racism and the Crisis of Urban Education
- Statement on Reparations
- Native American Struggle: One Century into Another
- César Chávez: "Presente"
- Organizing and Voter Ed: Tough, Tedious, and Vital
Racism and the Crisis of Urban Education
Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.... The freedom to learn... has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be.
--W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Freedom to Learn" ([1949] 1970b, pp. 230-231)
The Crisis in Our Schools
Quality schools are an issue of human rights for young people. Our public schools should provide all students with a quality education. At present, in urban and poverty areas, they do not. (Haycock, Jerald and Huan, 2001) Public schooling is in crisis, particularly for children living in poverty in urban aras.
Author Jonathan Kozol, in his latest of several books, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, has chronicled the destruction of democratic opportunity in the schools of most of our major urban areas. Children in these schools, claims Kozol, have been battered by a high pressure, remedial, drill based curriculum where "these kids" are mis taught isolated skills in an apartheid setting.
Inequality and white supremacy is created and re-created each year in our schools. One group of students learn skills and confidence and they are prepared for their future, whle other students learn their place (at the bottom) of a stratified and difficult economic system.
Of the 11.5 million poor children living below the official poverty line—39.8 percent of all African American children, 32.2 percent of all Latino children,17.1 percent of all Asian children, 38.8 percent of Native American children, 12.5 percent of all White children—most attend underfunded, poverty-stricken schools, where a remedial drill and kill curriculum is the norm. (Children’s Defense Fund, 2000). Students in these schools learn that the society does not choose to provide them with decent school buildings, computers, counselors, well prepared teachers or even the time to be children.
We need to learn to live and work together, to at least tolerate one another, or we may yet tear our society apart. Public schools are the one institution in which we all participate, and where we need to teach young people tolerance, cooperation, and the skills and dispositions of democracy, of living and working together. Instead, in our under funded schools, we too often teach class privilege, separation, alienation, bitterness, and defeat.
In most of our major urban centers, except Seattle, a new majority of students have emerged- one composed of diverse people of color; African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, multi-racial kids, and many more. In the face of this dramatic shift, the population of teachers remains over 78% European American.
This division would not be so much a cause of concern except that, according to the 2000 Reading Report Card of the National Center for Educational Statistics, while 40% of White students are proficient in reading in the 4th. grade, only 12 % of black students are proficient, 16% of Hispanic students and 17% of Native American students are proficient. The achievement gap in math scores is equally stark. The gaps between groups have remained relatively unchanged during the 1990's, a decade of presidents, governors, mayors and legislators all making promises about "school reform".
The longitudinal studies of achievement in the National Reading Report Card demonstrate that, after 20 years of announcements, programs, and pronouncements, achievement levels of U.S. Children remain remarkably stable and remarkably unequal.
We do not have a general education crisis in the nation, we have a crisis for Black, Latino, some Asian and poor white kids. We are not providing the children of the new majorities with ," a fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be."
As Berliner and Biddle well demonstrated in The Manufactured Crisis, (1995) and in "Unequal Funding in the United States," (2002), schools for middle class kids, Black, Latino, Asian and European American fundamentally fulfill their purposes. But the schools for poor African American, Latino and European American children fail. And while this failure effects all poor children, it disproportionately impacts the children of African Americans, Latinos and Asians, Fully half of all their children are in failing schools. Not 10%, not 20%, but over 50% of these children are being failed.
The problem is not race. There is no intellectually defensible evidence of differences in learning abilities by race. The problem is racism. Racism is the developed and strengthened in the continuation of radically unequal learning conditions.
Schools are more segregated by race today than they have been for decades. ( Orefield, 2001) A close look at the defacto segregated urban schools serving people of color reveals, for example, that we have the greatest number of teachers without appropriate preparation in our lowest performing schools. We have teachers with degrees in Social Studies and Art teaching math. Guess what, the students don't learn as much math as they should. In some urban areas, teaching out of field approaches 40% of the total.
We now have significant evidence from New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, and many of the major city school districts that we can have an African American superintendent, and staff, or a Latino superintendent, spend 3-5 years on new programs, and leave the district having made little substantive difference in students test scores.
WE need to invest in urban schools, provide equal educational opportunities in these schools, and recruit a well prepared teaching force that begins to reflect the student populations in these schools.
Rather than invest money in reform, most states have followed the lead of the Business Roundtable and conservative foundations and the Clinton and Bush administrations and increased emphasis on testing to improve scores. This is the heart of school reform passed by the Bush regime in PL 107-110 , the misnamed, No Child Left Behind Act.
In California, it’s the API (Academic Performance Index) in Texas, the ( AEIS) Academic Excellence Indicator system) and in Illinois, the Illinois Standards Assessment Systems in Massachusetts it’s the MCAS. What you will find when looking at these scores in each of these systems is -surprise- schools with high concentrations of student in poverty have very low academic performance rankings. We are spending millions of dollars to find out what we already know rather than to improve the schools.
The corporate reform agenda, advanced by elected officials from Gray Davis to George Bush, produces in our low income schools a grim, remedial form of drill for the test, usually stressing phonics. This remedial format is a failing attempt to assist low achieving kids. However, in the hands of overworked teachers, working in untenable working conditions, including too many distruptive kids who need serious supportive social services, the remedial, skills based curriculum often actually slows down, frustrates, and bores the good readers in the room.
One would think that we could all agree that children ought to be able to attend public schools that are safe, where gangs and narcotics are not common, where roofs don’t leak and plaster doesn’t fall from the ceilings. We ought to be able to at least assure our students that the toilets work and fresh water is available. But the Williams V. California Suite, and the Campaign for Fiscal Equity Decision in New York clearn show we cannot. (ACLU-SC,2000)
The Williams complaint alleges:
" Tens of Thousands of children attending public schools located throughout the State of California are being deprived of basic educational opportunities available to more privileged children attending the majority of the State's public schools. State law requires students to attend school. Yet all too many California school children must go to school without trained teachers, necessary educational supplies, classrooms, or seats in classrooms. Students attempt to learn in school that lack functioning heating or air conditioning systems, that lack sufficient numbers of functional toilets, and that infested with vermin, including rats, mice, and cockroaches. These appalling conditions in California public schools have persisted for years and have worsened over time."
A fundamental purpose of schools is to prepare future citizens to be stakeholders in society. Public schools are one of the few institutions designed to produce a public, civic community. Schools distribute knowledge. Unequal schools distribute knowledge unequally. When schools distribute knowledge unequally, as they do, they contribute to the social stratification of the economy and the decline of democratic opportunity.
Schools do not exist in a vacuum. They are not isolated from their neighborhoods and communities. Inequality in schooling reflects inequality in society.
Most parents care about their kids. And, the parents in urban areas are increasingly angered, offended, and frustrated when public officials refuse of offer a decent opporutnity for their children. Some see a racial conspiracy, some blame teachers' unions. Many have given up on democracy and public life and turn to cynicism or dispair. Others have been sold on vouchers as an alternative.
A progressive left exists among teachers. The excellent journal Rethinking Our Schools, (circulation over 40,000) and the web site (www.rethinkingschools.org) created by some teachers in and around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, engages, stimulates, validates, and inspires teachers who recognize the central role of urban schools to the anti racism struggle in our nation, and who choose resistance to the anti teacher, corporate agenda in schools.
So, while schools should be a site for building democracy and equal opportunity, this opportunity can only be created with significant new investment in schools in low income areas. Investment requires a political decision. Our elected officials, both new Democrats and Republicans have refused to make this decision each year in most local, state, and federal budgets. As state after state faces the current budget crisis, they are cutting education funding rather than improving funding.
The persistence of inadequate, unsafe, and disruptive conditions clearly indicates that voters and elected officials accept the failure of many of our children, particularly the failure of students of color in urban areas. Although a few districts have improved, and many dedicated teachers continue to struggle against the scandal of urban public schooling, individual efforts are not enough. We need substantial and effective reform.
Research summarized by the Education Trust (www.edtrust.org) and my own experience working with teachers in urban schools for over thirty years lead me to conclude that we know how to improve these schools. I explain many of the details in my book Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (Merrill/Prentice Hall 2000) A new editon will be out in 2004.
Improving these schools will cost a great deal of money. We would have to spend as much on the poor kids in the cities as we spend on the middle class kids in the suburbs. The testing and accountability models presently popular with politicians will not work. And the privatization models being tried in Philadelphia and elswhere will fail.
A choice between two futures.
Schools can continue as they are. One segment of the society will be well educated and prosperous, and another segment will fail. The schools would continue to serve to train some workers for subservience and to maintain and extend the current racial divisions which permit the political domination of the corporate ruling class. The economic crisis for working people and people of color will continue to accelerate.
Alternatively, schools can be transformed into places where all students, rich, middle class and poor, receive compelling, interesting education. Such democratic reform would engage teachers and their unions as equal, trusted, respected partners in progress. Authentic school reform, which requires both teacher union, and teacher participation, could play a major role in healing a divided nation. The challenge is both pedagogical and political.
"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claimes have been born in earnest struggle….. if there is no struggle, there is no progress." Frederick Douglas. 1849.
Duane Campbell is a Professor of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at Calif. State University-Sacramento. He has been working in urban schools since 1964. His most recent book is Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (Merrill/Prentice Hall 2000) A new edition will be out in 2004.
Duane is also Chairman of the Anti Racism Commission of DSA. Our work can be found at