A cry in the black education wilderness

The great disappointment of my ongoing crusade to foment a revolution in black education has been the lack of a response, and even hostility, from black leaders in this community. Naturally, I expected everyone to drop what they were doing and hop onto my education movement bandwagon.

To be sure, black readers in general have responded positively and in droves to the call for a black education movement along the lines of our historic civil rights movement. They have said they agree that this movement must demand rigorous academic standards and a high level of parental responsibility and community involvement to ensure black children's success.

In a comment typical of many I've received, a reader wrote, "We as black people must begin to create a culture of valuing education ... if we are to ever pull our children out of the river of underachievement in which they find themselves. I believe that this can be done, but it will require a new and different determination on the part of the black community, and every black parent in particular, before it will be achieved."

Another reader wrote, "I am just frustrated at our community's complacency towards education and the willingness of so many parents to allow their children to waste their young years on activities that do not help them become competitive in academia. ... I'm making the effort to convert as many [people] as I can. I think I successfully turned my husband around. He was wiling to buy his children-to-be their first car but would not fund their college education. Now THAT had to change."

Of course, many people are doing interesting and important work to promote high standards in black education.

Helen M. Berger runs Houston Preparatory Academy's U-Prep model in which academically promising students from poor northeast neighborhoods are provided four weeks of intensive instruction in reading, writing and math. Afterward, a select few students who meet the high admission and academic standards of some of Houston's best private schools enter those schools with scholarships and the social and academic support of U-Prep to ensure their success.

Sylvia Brooks, president & CEO of the Houston Area Urban League, after reading my columns calling for new black leadership to head a black education movement, called to point out all the work the local Urban League is doing in that field. In fact, the promotion of equal access to education is one of the main goals of the Urban League's advocacy mission, and I applaud that.

Kevin Hoffman, the president of the Houston school board, posed a couple of questions when I complained to him about black leadership on education. "Do you go off and have a public tantrum, or do you work inside the system in which you were elected?," he asked. "Do you want to represent as an insider getting things done or as an outsider making a fuss on the front page?"

Without patting himself on the back too hard, Hoffman noted the significant number of new schools that will be built in black neighborhoods and of old ones that will be renovated under the district's new bond issue. Point well-taken.

My thinking has been that a natural place for the new black education movement to grow could be black churches. I have imagined church leaders organizing tutoring sessions for young members, recognizing and rewarding good grades and bringing in experts to teach test-taking skills and to help parents support their children's educational endeavors.

So, not long ago, I spoke with Rev. Michael Williams, pastor of Joy Tabernacle church. In writing a column afterward, I focused on those issues which he and I held in common, such as parents' major role in early education.

Williams chastised me later for not playing up his other points, such as that "serious and significant inequities" in funding and facilities exist in white and black communities, and that "American institutional life is designed to support white supremacy and public education is no different."

I had chosen to ignore some of his more outrageous statements, such as that "college is overrated for black people" and that many good jobs exist for people without college degrees.

Even if that were true, why would Williams, who also happens to be a trustee of the Houston Community College board, preach that to young people?

People who believe, as Williams apparently does, that black people are powerless to achieve excellence in their lives because they are oppressed victims ought to take a note from all the people who are out there working hard to show black children how bright the future can be. That's real leadership.

Georgsson, an editorial writer, is a member of the Chronicle Editorial Board andrea.georgsson@chron.com

Democratic mayors challenge teachers unions in urban political shift ......”The mayors want a raft of changes. They want to replace the uniform pay scale with merit pay. They seek to expand public charter schools, which are largely non-union. Some want to lengthen school days, requiring teachers to work more hours.

And nearly all of these mayors have set their sights on the one workplace protection that teachers have held central for more than 100 years: tenure.

The unions say many of the “fixes” embraced by the mayors are trendy ideas without evidence that they help children learn. Instead, they allow politicians to appear as if they are making improvements without having to confront the profound problems of urban schools, labor leaders say.

“We don’t want to have honest conversations about poverty and segregation and race and class, all those other sorts of ills,” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “Those are really tough issues. So this gives them an excuse to focus on something else.”….

Naomi Schaefer Riley and the Corruption of the Academy Even though The Chronicle of Higher Education long ago reflected the leftist agenda of its readership, I never could have imagined it would stoop so low as to fire someone for writing a piece at variance with the political correctness it has come to uphold. But it did. The Chronicle fired Naomi Schaefer Riley for revealing what almost everyone on any campus knows, but is reluctant to say, about black studies: it is a political cause masquerading as an academic discipline, and if there were real intellectual, and not political, standards on campus, it would be shut down.

There is, however,a larger issue: not only is what Schaefer Riley says true about why black studies should be closed down, but her statements could also be easily extended to many fields in the social sciences and humanities. The vulnerability of the campus on this issue is why the Chronicle chose the unseemly and totally inappropriate device of censorship. It was so willing to placate its audience of ideological leftists massing with pitchforks in hand that it inadvertently gave Riley's exposé on black studies far and away more visibility than it would otherwise have achieved."..............

Policies proposed to boost boys [and men] of color ....[CA] "State leaders should revise school testing and funding, extend health care coverage for those aging out of foster care, and make it harder for schools to suspend and expel - all to improve the odds of success for boys and young men of color in California.

Those are among dozens of recommendations from a state legislative committee that spent the past year and a half looking into why the state's minority youth are less healthy, have lower test scores and are more likely to be incarcerated than other young people.

.....Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color, led by Assemblyman Sandré Swanson, D-Alameda, will introduce more than 50 pages of policy and legislative recommendations...

......[Swanson] plans to ask Assembly Speaker John Pérez to appoint a new chair so the committee can continue its work next year, and see whether lawmakers should create a state commission on the status of boys and men of color.

Here is a sampling of recommendations from the state Assembly's Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color:....."

Disciplining Students Is Racist? Among all the bizarre ideas that emanate from the callow and sciolistic mind of the modern American liberal, the statistical disparity argument is one of the most fallacious. It has permeated and destroyed so many aspects of society. It is now being offered by Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, in the area of disciplining school students.

.....Duncan, in 2010, dramatically announced that the Dept. of Education (ED) “will be issuing a series of guidance letters to school districts and postsecondary institutions that will address issues of fairness and equity. We will be announcing a number of compliance reviews to ensure that all students have equal access to educational opportunities, including a college-prep curriculum, advanced courses, and STEM classes. We will review whether districts and schools are disciplining students without regard to skin color. … African-American students without disabilities are more than three times as likely to be expelled as their white peers. African-American students with disabilities are over twice as likely to be expelled or suspended as their white counterparts. Those facts testify to racial gaps that are hard to explain away by reference to the usual suspects.”

[SNIP]

.....But the most scathing criticism came from Commissioner Todd Gaziano. He is very familiar with the Obama administration’s penchant for unequal enforcement of civil rights laws, having battled Attorney General Eric Holder’s stonewalling of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case that the USCCR tried to conduct.

Gaziano wrote, “As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Ricardo Soto explained in his statement to the Commission, the Department’s regulations prohibit ‘race-neutral policies, practices, or procedures that have a disparate impact on the basis of race, color or national origin.’ Although this phrasing has been part of the executive branch’s lexicon for some time, it is still worth pausing a moment on the Orwellian doublespeak of anything having a ‘disparate impact on [a] basis’ to show how hard the Department must strain to use some of the words of the statute in service of the opposite of what they provide. Because a disparate impact is usually understood as an unintended effect, and may include many unintended effects, this formulation awkwardly attempts to equate unintended ‘impacts’ with the actual basis (or ground) for the action. Putting aside this nonsensical use of the English language, Soto’s testimony accurately described the Department’s disparate-impact theory …” .........

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