Posts tagged as:

arne duncan

On Why Your Colorblindness Can Strike Me As Covertly Racist ( #EdChat Edition )

by Jose on February 2, 2010 · 4 comments

in life

Damage after Hurricane Katrina, School Bus

Let me make it plain: conversations in too many sectors have this strange relationship with race these days, and by strange, I mean covertly racist. This sentiment is best exemplified by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s latest quote about New Orleans (thanks, Fred Klonsky):

“I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better.’”

Classy move there, Secretary. (Your apology’s a little late, which is right on time.) I have so many problems with this statement, I’d be here until tomorrow discussing its implications. However, let me just highlight a few:

1) As I mentioned in the same blog I borrowed this from, the cataclysmic events of the day and the thousands of lives lost and ruined by this disaster only seem to mean one thing to Arne: a rise in test scores. If we get rid of the lowest-performing students through collateral damage and natural disaster, who are we to disparage that as scores rise? The districts with higher performing students didn’t get affected nearly as much. Plus, if we can destroy the public sector of education and replace it with privately funded institutions who only accept certain types of children, then those students who don’t get to go to those schools, in effect, don’t count. They’re on the bottom end of the “outliers.”

Which brings me to …

2) If those voices are silenced, then how does some people’s “color-blindness” affect how this conversation proceeds? Well, his defenders will most likely say, “He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” “His boss is a Black president!” and “Look at the second part of that statement. Black people DO have to do better!” These statements and others like it already denote a racial tone because it suggests that color is to be ignored in a system that places values on race as is or that the retorts aren’t substantiated because there’s a Black person involved within a 5-mile radius. It also suggests that, when in conversation with a diverse group of people, since there “is no color,” then the dominant peoples’ voice (cultural values, speech patterns, stereotypes, etc.) should be used, and thus nullifying the conversation since everyone’s supposedly on the same plane, even when they’re not.

and …

3) It makes it easier to ignore participants whose experience is different from the dominant populace, and this doesn’t just apply to race, but sex, age, etc. Rather than addressing these issues, too many educators rather run away from these topics because of their limited experience with race or they don’t want to deal with that part of themselves. At the end of the day, it doesn’t just hurt participants of color, but Whites as well, since their opinions hinder true dialogue and embed further intellectual segregation, even when they think they mean well.

I bring all this up because I ran into a conversation online where the chatroom was mostly of one dominant culture, and a few others observed that they couldn’t get into the conversation because it’s mostly ed-tech crap. (Yes, I said crap.) When someone tried to bring up the need for more discussion about pedagogy and / or achievement gaps, these parts were ignored, and that’s the worst part.

Ignorance doesn’t just take the form of hatred (ignorance of fact), but also when one actually ignores the other (ignorance of being).

Unlike my blogger colleagues who discuss race, I won’t seek to validate my opinion by speaking of the myriad of friends I have and who understand this discussion, no matter what race. Rather, I extend this phrase: color-consciousness. It means that true diversity exists outside of the flavors that exist in your spice rack, or the flavor of liquids you used today.

And more to the point, it means people aren’t simply collateral.

Mr. Vilson, who never drank Cristal, but them f***as racist …

p.s. – Dr. Beverly Tatum covered this extensively in Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? Pick it up if you haven’t.

{ 4 comments }

At The End of the Day [The Letters Series]

by Jose on November 18, 2009 · 1 comment

in life

This week, I’m writing a few more letters to different people, whose names shall be removed from the post, but who nonetheless are amalgamations of real characters. I won’t be mincing words this week, and in these letters, I hope to address some issues I find in education as a whole through these letters. If need be, I’ll apologize later. Actually, I probably won’t.

Barack Obama at School

Barack Obama at School

Dear Barack Obama,

It’s me again, hoping you’ll soon respond to my letters. As always, I have respect for you and what you’ve done thus far in office (most of the stuff anyways). At the very least, you’ve brought many issues into the national zeitgeist in ways only few have the power to do, particularly education. My letter comes on the heels of a Meet the Press interview with your Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in tow with Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich. As the video plays, I found myself shaking my head at almost every assertion these men made. While I expect a shallowness over educational issues from afternoon specials and morning wake-up shows, I still don’t expect that from men who have positioned themselves as “educational gurus.”

Very little about their collective histories build confidence in me or many others in their ability to understand the intricacies of the classroom, from the pedagogy and praxis of the everyday K-12 classroom and the management of an actual school because and despite restrictions from underfunded districts to the egregious practices of college loaners and their universities and the ultra-selectivity of the economically and / or racially underprivileged into post-graduate programs. Even if these individuals have tried to make a conscious effort to discuss the numbers behind their message, they sound more like they’ve dined at the corporate line table rather than actually having thorough conversations with people on the ground.

Let’s say we actually took the socialized system of public schools and turned them all over to private corporations and “non-profits.” When the next recession hits, as capitalism is prone to do, will we finally see a bailout then? Will the government have to step in and tell these “CEOs” to take paycuts but turn their backs when they take private trips to islands for professional development? Will our children have to shred all their papers and use the remaining documents for ticker tape, too? Will some of us teachers walk out with only socks and remaining curriculum in our suitcases? Or will we have a situation akin to Major League Baseball where we’ll hire “scabs” like proferred by Teach for America in lieu of qualified teachers with masters and / or years of experience in their profession?

A big part of me gets it, too. The one thing that most people seem to agree upon is that student achievement trumps everything else when it comes to education. However, the ends doesn’t always justify the ends, especially if the ends depend on unsustainable means. When I heard “Teachers have to come into a classroom and believe that they’re going to be ready and disciplined,” it says to me that we have yet to understand the conditions in which our children grow up and how so few actually make it out of the same system we come out of. When I heard “If the schools are failing, we just won’t give them money,” it sounds like it’s a problem that’s already been happening and it’ll continue promulgating the difference between the haves and the have-nots (for that matter, the halved or the halved-not).

To wit, in New York, we had plenty of schools who received the highest rating possible from the NYC Department of Education’s grading system, an A. By plenty, I mean 77.6%. Conversely, we only had 2 schools who received an F. Now, looking at the metrics, one might think NYC has done rather well, and deserves the monies from the Race to the Top fund. At a second glance, we see just how these numbers have manipulated so many of us. Our overcrowded, underfunded, parted, and soulless edifices can’t compare to the gloss Bloomberg’s coated over his office.

But maybe asking those three to visit a very low-performing school, even with Secret Service in tow, would mess up their shine. At the end of the day, as in the beginning, sunshine doesn’t gleam on brick and mortar. Yet the new glass ones aren’t so transparent either …

Mr. Vilson, who wants nothing more than Obama to read …

{ 1 comment }