The Brown decision changed America for the better but the education reform movement is today's civil rights struggle. If we want to help poor and minority children get a decent education, we must expand charter schools and voucher programs. See link to excellent column by Juan Williams from the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29williams.html
Williams writes:
LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.
With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.
Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.
And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.
By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.
The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there’s no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers’ unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students.
http://www.nytimes.com/
The solution to inequality in educational opportunities is a fight that must be waged at the local level.
Newark NJ Mayor Corey Booker http://tinyurl.com/3yhb82 is a Democratic school choice proponent working to improve his city's failing school system. Writing in City Journal, Steven Malanga describes Booker's attempts to promote equal opportunity through education reform. http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_cory_booker.html
Malanga writes:
What may be Booker’s greatest challenge is waiting in the wings: reviving Newark’s atrocious school system. Right now, Booker doesn’t have control of the schools; the state took over the Newark system after a damning 1994 investigation found widespread mismanagement and corruption in the elected board of education. Since then, the state, under a court order, has poured billions of dollars into the city’s schools, so that Newark now spends nearly $17,000 per pupil a year—about 75 percent more than the national average.
Yet the money has done little good, since the state has pursued few educational innovations and hasn’t taken on entrenched educational interests (above all, the teachers’ union), which still control much of the system. Student performance has continued to plummet. “High school achievement rates have virtually flipped, from almost 70 percent of graduating Newark kids passing the state’s high school proficiency exam when the state took over, to only about 30 percent passing it now,” says Richard Cammarieri, a member of the Newark schools advisory board. E3 executive director Dan Gaby bluntly describes the system as “in crisis,” estimating that it spends an astonishing $1.3 million for every qualified student it manages to graduate from high school.
Booker’s first order of business if he gets control of the system, which remains an open question, will be to appoint a strong chancellor, along the lines of the Chicago schools chief or New York City schools chancellor. He wants to bring to Newark many of the promising education reforms he sees around the country: closing and replacing chronically failing schools (Newark has some 30 of them), letting parents choose which schools within the system to send their kids to, and inviting more operators of successful private schools into the city to run charter schools. “I have stopped going to lotteries for admission to charter schools because I was so saddened to see parents who have run out of options for their children,” Booker says.
Booker has thrown his weight behind a state bill, sponsored by Democratic legislators, that gives tax credits to companies that contribute to a scholarship fund for Newark students who want to attend private schools or jump to public schools in better-performing districts. Critics, especially the state’s powerful teachers’ union, have branded the scholarship money a surreptitious voucher program that will eventually harm public schools, and the state’s governor, Jon Corzine, has yet to endorse the legislation. But Booker responds: “Who can object to a pool of money that will give poor children the same opportunities as middle-class kids?”
Booker could have even tougher education battles to come, especially in ending seniority rules that allow veteran teachers to pick where they want to work, regardless of performance, and rewriting bureaucratic regulations that make it tough to fire bad educators. “If you can’t change those things, you will fail in any effort to fix this system,” says Gaby.
http://www.city-journal.org/
Educational reform is critical to assuring that our children have equal opportunities regardless of racial or economic background. I think that this statement from Miami's Urban League best sums up why school choice is a matter of basic fairness and common sense.
"The Urban League of Greater Miami opposes the view that all public education dollars must be used in public schools. We do so just as strongly as we have opposed the policy that all public housing dollars be spent on public housing projects, or that all public health dollars go only to public health clinics. These funds are meant to help individuals, not institutions. The citizens should be free to direct them to the best housing, the best doctor, or the best school they can find – whether public or private."
http://tinyurl.com/37jjpy
Williams writes:
LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.
With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.
Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.
And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.
By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.
The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there’s no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers’ unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students.
http://www.nytimes.com/
The solution to inequality in educational opportunities is a fight that must be waged at the local level.
Newark NJ Mayor Corey Booker http://tinyurl.com/3yhb82 is a Democratic school choice proponent working to improve his city's failing school system. Writing in City Journal, Steven Malanga describes Booker's attempts to promote equal opportunity through education reform. http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_cory_booker.html
Malanga writes:
What may be Booker’s greatest challenge is waiting in the wings: reviving Newark’s atrocious school system. Right now, Booker doesn’t have control of the schools; the state took over the Newark system after a damning 1994 investigation found widespread mismanagement and corruption in the elected board of education. Since then, the state, under a court order, has poured billions of dollars into the city’s schools, so that Newark now spends nearly $17,000 per pupil a year—about 75 percent more than the national average.
Yet the money has done little good, since the state has pursued few educational innovations and hasn’t taken on entrenched educational interests (above all, the teachers’ union), which still control much of the system. Student performance has continued to plummet. “High school achievement rates have virtually flipped, from almost 70 percent of graduating Newark kids passing the state’s high school proficiency exam when the state took over, to only about 30 percent passing it now,” says Richard Cammarieri, a member of the Newark schools advisory board. E3 executive director Dan Gaby bluntly describes the system as “in crisis,” estimating that it spends an astonishing $1.3 million for every qualified student it manages to graduate from high school.
Booker’s first order of business if he gets control of the system, which remains an open question, will be to appoint a strong chancellor, along the lines of the Chicago schools chief or New York City schools chancellor. He wants to bring to Newark many of the promising education reforms he sees around the country: closing and replacing chronically failing schools (Newark has some 30 of them), letting parents choose which schools within the system to send their kids to, and inviting more operators of successful private schools into the city to run charter schools. “I have stopped going to lotteries for admission to charter schools because I was so saddened to see parents who have run out of options for their children,” Booker says.
Booker has thrown his weight behind a state bill, sponsored by Democratic legislators, that gives tax credits to companies that contribute to a scholarship fund for Newark students who want to attend private schools or jump to public schools in better-performing districts. Critics, especially the state’s powerful teachers’ union, have branded the scholarship money a surreptitious voucher program that will eventually harm public schools, and the state’s governor, Jon Corzine, has yet to endorse the legislation. But Booker responds: “Who can object to a pool of money that will give poor children the same opportunities as middle-class kids?”
Booker could have even tougher education battles to come, especially in ending seniority rules that allow veteran teachers to pick where they want to work, regardless of performance, and rewriting bureaucratic regulations that make it tough to fire bad educators. “If you can’t change those things, you will fail in any effort to fix this system,” says Gaby.
http://www.city-journal.org/
Educational reform is critical to assuring that our children have equal opportunities regardless of racial or economic background. I think that this statement from Miami's Urban League best sums up why school choice is a matter of basic fairness and common sense.
"The Urban League of Greater Miami opposes the view that all public education dollars must be used in public schools. We do so just as strongly as we have opposed the policy that all public housing dollars be spent on public housing projects, or that all public health dollars go only to public health clinics. These funds are meant to help individuals, not institutions. The citizens should be free to direct them to the best housing, the best doctor, or the best school they can find – whether public or private."
http://tinyurl.com/37jjpy
1 comments:
Vouchers show promise, but there's little evidence that charter schools will be a great improvement over regular public education classrooms. Juan Williams, in his book, "Enough," discusses at length the cult of victimhood that is depriving black youngsters of the commitment and vision that is elemental in educational success. Williams certainly couldn't discuss -- in a short op-ed piece -- all the other variable needed in an ambitious overall of African-American education. Much of the change has to be at the individual and family level.
Have you thought about quitting the Democratic Party? You're pushing uphill with your efforts at moderation. The 2006 midterm results, Bush's misfortunes and mistakes, and the netroots bloggers are working together to embolden left forces in a drive to establish social democratic hegemony in the U.S.
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