The Legacy of D.C.'s Dunbar H.S.

Up! Men and brothers, be noble, be earnest!

Ripe is the time and success is assured;

Know that your fate was the hardest and sternest

When through those lash-ringing days you endured.

-- Paul Laurence Dunbar

Don't miss this excellent NPR interview with Alison Stewart, author of  First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School. 

The nation's first black public high school, named after the great African-American poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and located less than two miles from the nation's capitol, opened its doors in 1870. But more than 140 years later, Dunbar — like many urban schools — has fallen on hard times. The crumbling, brutalist-style building is often described as a prison, and graduation rates hover around 60 percent.

But it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, the yearbook read like a Who's Who of black America.

"It's really amazing because we're talking about people who literally changed America, who changed the United States," journalist Alison Stewart tells host Audie Cornish on All Things Considered. "The architect of school desegregation, Charles Hamilton Houston, was a Dunbar graduate. Elizabeth Catlett, the artist. Billy Taylor, the jazz musician. The first black general in the Army. The first black graduate of the Naval Academy. The first black presidential Cabinet member. The lists go on and on."

In 2008, then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee handed Dunbar over to a private, outside group to run. By 2010 the group had run Dunbar further into the ground and was given the boot by Rhee's successor, Kaya Henderson. Since then, it's been one new "reform" after another with a revolving door of leadership. Sounds a lot like Chicago's DuSable H.S., now "reformed" out of existence by corporate reformers and charter privateers to make way for neighborhood gentrification.

Be sure and read the comments section which add some interesting history to Stewart's account.

The lies of Texas...

When Chicago's mayor and school boss, Rahm Emanuel, held up Houston as his model for school reform, it gave me the creeps. His rationale was that Houston schools are superior because of their longer school day and year. Rahm claimed that kids in Houston wound up with 4 more years of instruction. It was a political talking point admittedly fed to him by Jonah Edelman and Children First.

Now it's left to Rahm to explain why Houston's Lee High School is currently being made to emulate some Texas charter schools that have --wait, hold your breath-- A LONGER SCHOOL DAY.

But Rahm, I thought you said they already had a longer school day. I mean, how much longer can the day get in Lee's overheated classrooms before the school gets off the NCLB sh*t list. How about 10 hours? 12?

Of course more seat time is not a cure for the problems facing Lee High or any other high school in Houston (or Chicago). I know. I worked in the Houston schools back in the '90s -- two previous reform waves ago. Some of you might recall those as the "Texas Miracle" days.

Texas' football-crazy schools were all too big and we were trying to create smaller learning communities within them. While some important gains were made, we learned then that no single reform can fundamentally change and improve urban school systems so long as the majority of the kids were living in poverty. The SLCs were soon dismantled when Gates pulled the plug on funding. Many were turned into selective enrollment programs that creamed middle-class white kids and racially segregated the high performing students from the rest.

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Sam Dillon's NYT story about Lee H.S. , "Troubled Schools Try Mimicking the Charters," has many holes in it. First off, Dillon claims that this current charter school reform experiment, where traditional schools attempt to model some charter school innovation, "is the first of its kind in the country." Doesn't he know that the early teacher-led small and charter schools were created with that exact purpose in mind? The real problem has been that very few charters are doing anything so innovative that regular public schools couldn't or hadn't been doing for decades and without becoming privatized. Charters were just doing more (or less) of it and with different kids and coming out with basically the same (or worse) results.

What Dillon left out was the context and whole history of the reform at Lee (formerly called Robert E. Lee when it opened in 1962 as a bastion of racial segregation and white supremacy, even carrying the battle flag of the Confederacy). In past decade, whites fled from Lee as HISD's population grew poorer and more Hispanic. Lee was labeled by Arne Duncan as "a dropout factory." It wasn't. Houston was.

The real "problem." as Texas schools chief Robert Scott  complains about in this interview with AEI's Rick Hess, was Houston's "changing demographics."  I'll interpret: As more poor, black and brown kids attend city schools, resources are cut and test scores go down. Why? Because the tests, as Duncan has recently admitted, are more a measure of parents income than they are of anything going on in classrooms. Scott, who opted out of both rounds of Duncan's Race To The Top, tells Hess, "there is no such thing as a magic bullet in education. Anyone that tells you this one thing will change the course of your education system is either delusional or is lying to you."

Scott is right of course. That includes Rahm's magic bullet of a longer school day. What Scott doesn't address (and Hess never asks about) is Texas' concentrations of child poverty and how that impacts teaching, learning, and yes -- test scores. The teaching at Lee High School hasn't gotten worse. The school day hasn't gotten shorter. It's poverty and segregation that is plaguing Houston schools.

The view from the top

"It's not a conversation where we want to do all of the talking," said Holder, flanked by a cadre of local officials. "We want to listen to educators, to parents, to students and to experts in the field and find out the best ideas for addressing this urgent problem." (Tribune)

Arne Duncan returned to Chicago along with Attorney General Eric Holder, to solve the youth violence problem and apparently to do some political butt-covering for himself and Mayor Daley, writes the Tribune's John Kass.

Duncan came bearing a check for $500,000 for troubled Fenger High leaving many wondering why it took the beating death of a 16-year-old student to get badly needed dollars into Fenger to pay for counselors and proper staffing at the school? And what about Chicago's other high schools?

Duncan and Holder stayed as far away from the angry Roseland community as possible, holding up instead inside the exclusive Four Seasons Hotel, while angry parents and community activists remained outside. They carried signs reading: "You can't solve it, your system caused it."

Evangell Yhwhnewbn, a community activist also known as "Mama D," questioned how effective the meeting could be if community members were not allowed to participate. "It's the same people doing the same thing and they expect a different result. It's not going to happen," she said. (Fox)

Duncan claimed they did not meet at the school to avoid a "circus."

“There was no circus,” said Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, who is championing his own anti-violence plan spearheaded by faith- and community-based organizations. “It was relatively calm. The question remains: Where were they? We have a plan for President Obama, and we wanted to share it with his officials. It has been ignored by President Obama.”

It sounds like Catalyst reporter Sarah Karp really pissed Duncan off when she dared question the role his school closing policies may have played in contributing to the violence around Fenger.

Duncan bristled when I asked him whether the district’s turnaround strategy had anything to do with increasing violence at Fenger, calling the notion “absolutely ridiculous.”

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Postscript: The Tribune's Kass did some of his mayoral butt-covering as well. Kass writes:

Daley is the mayor. Daley is not the father. He didn't raise the kids who commit the crimes. He didn't fail to instill respect for life in those who swing the clubs or pull the triggers. You can't blame him for the bad and indifferent parenting of others.

How soon Kass forgets. This story is from the April 11, 1992 issue of Sun-Times is about Daley's son Patrick who, along with Daley's nephew, took part in a bat-wielding brawl of their own, which witnesses claimed, was a racist attack on an Asian kid around the Mayor's Grand Beach retreat. As expected, young Patrick received only a slap on the wrist. Club-swinging boys will be boys, you know.

ST. JOSEPH, Mich. Mayor Daley's 16-year-old son was sentenced to six months' probation and 50 hours of community service and was ordered to write letters of apology for his role in a brawl at the Daley summer home last month. Patrick Daley also was ordered to refrain from drinking or attending parties where alcohol is served illegally and to pay $150 in court cost and a portion of the $1,800 spent investigating the fracas. Appearing before Judge Stuart Meek Jr. in Probate Court, Michigan's version of juvenile court, Patrick Daley pleaded guilty to charges of furnishing alcohol to minors and disturbing the peace at the summer home in Grand Beach, Mich.

Here's chapter 2 of the Daley family brawlers.

Also see Catherine Gewertz at Edweek ("Is youth violence in Chicago worse because of school closures?")

Economics of dropout rates

EdNews Junkie posts and interesting comment on both my blog and Gewertz'. Here's my response:

Junkie,

No doubt you are right about the economics of dropout rates and test scores. Clark County was the fasting growing county in the nation. They were building new schools hand over fist, even before there were any communities to support them. Now Nevada has become the state with the fastest rising foreclosure rate in the nation and Clark County leads all counties in foreclosures.. Time to rethink validity of state accountability measures and the notion that schools alone must shoulder the entire responsibility for reform.

Miami's 'zone' -- no gains for high schools

Catherine Gewertz, posting on Edweek's new High School Connecttion Blog, reports that Miami/Dade's School Improvement Zone, set up under former Supt. Rudy Crew, was a bust that produced little in the way of measurable high school improvement, according to the district's own evaluation.

According to the study, the School Improvement Zone produced "at best an inconsistent impact that was limited to the elementary grades" and "was not found to have had a consistent positive impact at the secondary grades." The district study compared the 39 Zone schools with 39 demographically similar schools, and found the Zone schools turned in worse scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in most subject areas than did the other schools.

The Zone was a cluster of 8 low-performing high schools and feeder schools with its own administrative team. Reforms focused on extra math and reading instruction, and longer school days and years. It's now up to the school board and the post-Crew leadership team to figure out a new high school reform strategy.

Miami/Dade has some of the largest high schools in the nation as well as one of the lowest high school completion rates.