Kansas joins the anti-CRT MAGA madness.

Dorothy: 'I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.' 
Toto: Nope. It's 2021 and we're still in freak'n Kansas.

State Sen. Caryn Tyson, R-Parker, announced last week that she would be preparing a bill that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in all Kansas schools. It's worth noting that Critical Race Theory isn't now and never has been taught in the state's public schools, unfortunately. It's just that CRT has become the latest Republican racist dog whistle in America's white belt. 

Jayhawk State Republicans are the latest to join the MAGA feeding frenzy on public schooling. More than a dozen red states are currently pushing bills targeting anti-racist teaching. 

Actually, it was Idaho that became the first to formally pass a law banning CRT from the schools.

Tyson's bill will likely succeed given that the GOP still dominates state politics as it has since Kansas became a state back in 1861. Back then, of course, the Republican Party in Kansas was quite different, embracing "free state" politics and opposing slavery. My, how things have changed.

For today's Kansas, this is just another brick in the wall, a continuation of the state's legacy of school segregation and an imposed right-wing/religious curriculum on its schools. 

It wasn't for nothing that the 1954 landmark court decision supposedly outlawing school segregation was called: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. 

Carrying on the tradition...in 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to delete virtually any mention of evolution from the state's science curriculum, in one of the most far-reaching efforts by right-wing creationists to supplant science teaching with religious doctrine.

The Topeka Capital-Journal  editorialized at the time that ''creationism is as good a hypothesis as any for how the universe began.''

And on it goes. 

Nikole Hanna-Jones

The new curriculum battlefield stretches far beyond Kansas and beyond K-12 education. Today, in North Carolina, UNC’s board of trustees is scheduled to hold a special meeting amid intensifying pressure over its failure to approve tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times Magazine.

Professor Hannah-Jones created the 1619 Project, a multimedia series from The Times Magazine that re-examined the legacy of slavery in the United States and provided educators with the tools they needed to do authentic teaching about race and racism. The use of the 1619 Project by teachers in school districts across the country prompted the right-wing backlash that we're seeing in states like Kansas.

She has gained the public support of more than 200 academics and other cultural figures who published a letter last month saying the board had displayed a “failure of courage.”

On Friday, UNC students held a protest in support of tenure for Hannah-Jones. Hopefully, their voices will be heard. 

Buttigieg's white blindspot on school deseg

“I have to confess that I was slow to realize ― I worked for years under the illusion that our schools in my city were integrated because they had to be because of a court order,” the Democratic presidential candidate said at a North Carolina talk with the Poor People’s Campaign. . -- Mayor Pete Buttigieg

There's no need for me to beat up on Pete Buttigieg any further, now that the master of the white blindspot has all but eliminated himself as a serious presidential candidate.

But I just have to say that I spent a good deal of time in South Bend high schools a decade ago and it only took me about a minute-and-a-half to notice that the schools were racially segregated. Why did it take him so long?

Of course, I wasn't the first to notice. The district has been signing onto consent decrees and deseg plans for the past 40 years, plans which were largely ignored. Last year's Focus 2018 plan, essentially did an end-run around the consent decree in favor of "school choice". It reminded me of the way Chicago failed to respond to deseg orders right up until 10 years ago when Arne Duncan got a federal judge to relieve the district of its obligations under its own consent decree.

South Bend schools are governed by the South Bend Community School Corporation, which has a board of publicly elected members. I say this only to remind myself and my fellow elected school board supporters that an elected board is hardly a panacea when it comes to racial desegregation.

According to the Notre Dame Observer:

In South Bend, "...black and Latino students are disproportionately punished, suspended and dismissed from schools, crippling chances of academic achievement and obstructing efforts for “equitable and supportive learning environments for all students.” Black students are disproportionately arrested in public schools as compared to white students, resulting in a school-to-prison pipeline fueled by zero-tolerance policies. Beyond school discipline, residential segregation and the ill effects of concentrated poverty further disadvantage minority students trapped in segregated schools.

The road to Democratic victory in 2020 runs through the black community, and I suspected the Buttigieg campaign was a loser when I watched his announcement to run back in April, in a cavernous South Bend former Studebaker factory, filled almost entirely with white supporters.

Buttigieg has led a rejuvenation of his city's downtown area, true. But his is a gentrification strategy that left out a quarter of the population living as outsiders and living at or below the poverty line. That's a quarter filling most of the seats in South Bend's public schools.

Last week, The Root’s Michael Harriot penned a viral op-ed billing Buttigieg as “a lying motherfucker” for stating eight years ago that lower educational achievement within impoverished minority communities boils down to a lack of role models.

Not my choice of words, but I understand.

What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

Students wait for the bus in front of Bouchet Elementary Math & Science Academy in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. More than 74% of students whose neighborhood school is majority black schools are bussed to majority-black schools. (Manuel Martinez/WBEZ)

I'm reading Sarah Karp's WBEZ story about Chicago's experiment with school desegregation and recalling how Arne Duncan helped get a federal judge to quash the city's deseg consent decree.

Karp writes:

Most of the city’s 78 magnet and test-in schools — including classical, gifted and selective enrollment — were created under the decree as a way to lure in a diverse group of students. But even after the court order was lifted, school district officials said they believed integration was important, and they started integrating by the socioeconomic status of children.

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras lifted the consent decree ending three decades of efforts to integrate Chicago schools. The decree’s bilingual education provisions, according to Kocoras, duplicated protections in state law. The ruling came despite evidence presented by DOJ lawyers in court that the district repeatedly failed to enroll English learners in bilingual education fast enough or provide them with required services.

Since then, writes Karp, CPS has continued busing and spending extra funding on magnet and test-in schools and also added 13 new ones plus more charter schools that have been shown to contribute to segregation. This year, the school district plans to spend $50 million for bussing and extra positions at these schools, which serve 62,000 students.

But, says Karp, the WBEZ analysis finds only about 20% of magnet and test-in schools meet the racial makeup goal set out in the court order, compared to 35% a decade ago. Under that definition, the goal was for white students to make up between 15% and 35% of the student body and black, Latino and Asian students to make up between 65% and 85%.

Six schools of the 65 in existence 10 years ago went from being considered integrated to not, while only one of the new schools has that mix of students. Among the schools no longer meeting this definition of integrated are Skinner North Elementary School, which opened in the last decade, and Walter Payton College Prep High School — two schools often named as the best in the city and the state. They have both seen significant increases in white students. 

Magnet schools and busing programs that were created and funded for the purpose of encouraging racial desegregation have since been turned into their opposites. Now magnets have increasingly become privileged selective-enrollment schools, anchors for neighborhood gentrification with expensive busing programs taking children miles away from their neighborhood schools and into segregated ones.

Niketa Brar on Hitting Left

Niketa Brar, executive director of Chicago United for Equity, and a frequent guest on Hitting Left, says magnet and selective schools have been used as a way to allow families to avoid the problems of the public school system. This is especially true in gentrifying neighborhoods, she said, where parents put their children on buses to be driven away from their local schools.

Brar tells Karp:

“They become little havens of white people feeling like they are participating in the public school system while actually keeping their children segregated from the impacts of a local neighborhood school that have the same resources that every other child in their neighborhoods gets.”

It's worth recalling that it was Pres. Obama's Secretary of Education and former CPS school chief, Arne Duncan, along with Mayor Daley and Duncan's successor Ron Huberman, who pleaded with Judge Kocoras to scrap the decree a decade ago. They claimed that the city had done all it could do to desegregate its schools and that the deseg struggle was "futile and a drain on district funds".

This,  even though research has shown that the period in which school deseg was in full play was when the district had made the greatest gains in measurable student learning and closing the so-called achievement gap.

Duncan maintained that if the consent decree was lifted, CPS could save $300 million, mostly in eliminating bus service to magnet and selective enrollment schools. It was all a lie. Busing service and selective enrollment programs and charter schools have been expanded. Only their purposes have changed.

Under Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's selective-enrollment schools became even more exclusive.

During the period of 1981 to 2015, the total population of African-American students in CPS plummeted from close to 240,000, 60% of all CPS students, to 156,000 or 39% of CPS. The loss of so many poor and black children and an increase in wealthier white students have since been ignored as an explanation for claimed rising test scores and graduation rates.

I'd argue that they, along with school resegregation, have lots to do with it.

We'll see if and how things change over the next four years with a new mayor and city council. 

Lots of candidates but no real debate on school deseg

Even though I have a lot is issues with Kamala Harris, I thought she was bold in confronting frontrunner Joe Biden and calling him out during the televised debate, for his opposition to "forced" school integration back in the '70s. Actually, as he pointed out, his position hasn't changed. He is still against a federal role in enforcing the Brown Decision.

His opposition to busing and his partnership with avowed "states-rights" segregationists like Eastland and Talmadge, seemed like fair game during the debate. Thanks to Harris, Biden himself was finally forced to apologize for touting his work with the racist senators.

In fact, I was surprised that not one of the other candidates, particularly white progressives like Sanders and Warren, had Harris' back at the time. None would even dare mention Biden's name during either of the two debates. This even though the road to the nomination obviously runs through him and the DNC leadership. If you're not willing to take on Biden, what's the point of running? Unless of course, you're just a stalking horse for Biden, trying to dissipate the opposition or an unprincipled kiss-ass, hoping for a V.P. slot or cabinet appointment if Biden wins.

Such is the intimidating power of the Pelosi party leaders who are really running Biden against young insurgents like Reps Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, rather than any of the announced primary candidates who were on stage those nights.

Pelosi, it seems, would rather lose the election to Trump than risk losing the leadership of the party to the leftists.

Then yesterday, out comes Tulsi Gabbard (who I liked before this) with a blistering attack on Harris, calling her confrontation with Biden, "a political ploy' to get attention".

Here's my tweet to Sen. Gabbard...

Questions for @TulsiGabbard (who I like)... A"political ploy"? Aren't you running for political office?

To get attention? Isn't that why you take part in televised political debates with the top dog?

What's your gain in attacking Harris, defending Biden on school deseg??? https://t.co/bLBvnIly0i

— Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) July 10, 2019

Gabbard also claimed Harris has been "levying this accusation that Joe Biden is a racist — when he's clearly not — as a way to try to smear him."

But Harris never called Biden a racist. In fact, she pointedly prefaced her critical remarks by stating, "I do not believe you are a racist and I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground."

In fact, a week later Harris revealed that she has essentially the same position as Biden on deseg being a local issue.

Common ground, indeed.

After silence at the debate, Bernie puts out his ed plan and Warren defends Harris.

Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled his education plan during a visit to South Carolina on Saturday. (Travis Dove, New York Times)

Did Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren read my post from yesterday? You know, the post that chastised them and the rest of the candidates for their silence on education issues during the debates? Also the one that was critical of them all for not having Kamala Harris' back when she took on Joe Biden over the issue of school deseg?

Probably not. But by yesterday afternoon, as if on cue, Team Bernie released his full-blown education plan during a visit to South Carolina. His so-called, Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education includes opposition to for-profit charter schools and calls for an end to public funding for charter school expansion on the grounds that charters promote school segregation.

This, about the same time as Sen. Warren was tweeting her defense of Sen. Harris against the racist backlash she's facing for her confrontation with Biden.

Well, actually, Bernie's plan had been published in the Times well over a month ago so yesterday's story obviously had nothing to do with my blog. But it's nice to feel validated anyway.

However, the question still remains -- why nothing from him during the debate? And why did he, Warren and the others remain silent while Harris was confronting Biden? Still waiting for an answer.

Something in the comments section would be adequate, senators.

The attacks against @KamalaHarris are racist and ugly. We all have an obligation to speak out and say so. And it’s within the power and obligation of tech companies to stop these vile lies dead in their tracks.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 29, 2019

Education not an issue for Dem debaters until the Harris/Biden clash over deseg

Demand for School Integration Leads to Massive 1964 New York City School Boycott

"Forcing integration upon us is not a nimble concept."  -- Alabama Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1956

For most of the 20 Democratic Party candidates onstage Wednesday and Thursday nights, or for the debate moderators, education wasn't an important enough campaign issue to deserve a mention. Not a word was spoken about the hottest ed issues like charter schools, vouchers, pensions or testing. Common Core Standards, ESSA, it seems, were yesterday's news. There was not even a poke at Trump's ed secretary, Betsy DeVos or at Trump himself.

That's nothing new for party presidential campaigns. I remember the 2015 debates when education issues never came up. At the time, Prof. Julian Vasquez Heilig wrote in the Progressive,

Perhaps the silence is due to the fact that the Democrats have basically adopted the Republican approach to education from the 1990s.

If anything has changed in the past four years, that hasn't. This week, hardly an ed word was spoken. Not a word, that is, until Sen. Kamala Harris stole night two with her devastating "That little girl was me," confrontation with Joe Biden. After prefacing her obviously well-planned punch to Biden's mid-section with "I do not believe you are a racist," Harris laid bare his role in the busing battles of the '70s.

Biden seemed totally unprepared or ill-prepped. He sputtered and lashed out at Harris personally.

I was a public defender. I didn’t become a prosecutor. I came out and I left a good law firm to become a public defender, when, in fact — when, in fact, my city was in flames because of the assassination of Dr. King, number one.

What the hell all that has to do with anything is beyond me. Was this whiter-than-white, male, former vice-president of the United States really throwing shade at an African-American woman for becoming a successful lawyer and prosecutor? Yup.

Then after invoking Dr. King's name and recounting his long history of civil-rights advocacy and his relationship with Pres. Obama, Biden actually doubled down on his opposition to the Dept. of Education's role in enforcing the Supreme Court's Brown decision. The argument went like this:

HARRIS: But, Vice President Biden, do you agree today — do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?

BIDEN: I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed. 

HARRIS: Well, there was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California, public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.

BIDEN: Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision.

HARRIS: So that’s where the federal government must step in.

BIDEN: The federal government ——

HARRIS: That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That’s why we need to pass the Equality Act. That’s why we need to pass the E.R.A., because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.

This exchange brought back nightmarish memories of  Obama's former Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan claiming that he was for school integration but not "forced integration." Then there was his assistant, Peter Cunningham's apologia for school segregation in U.S. News & World Report, which claimed that "integration is expensive and takes money away from other necessary improvements."

In other words. Biden, while ill prepared, wasn't speaking out of school. He was simply repeating, in his own stumbling, bumbling way, the party line going back decades. It's just that his timing was off.

And it's not like any of the other candidates had Harris's back when push came to shove. The silence on their part (including on Bernie Sanders's part) was deafening.

How can they all be running against Biden, yet be so afraid to take him on?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

From Boston Review

Trump on the telephone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

“You know what? It’s yours,” Trump said of Syria. “I’m leaving.” -- WaPo

Texas elementary school speech pathologist, Bahia Amawi

When asked if she considered signing the pledge to preserve her ability to work, Amawi told The Intercept: “Absolutely not. I couldn’t in good conscience do that. If I did, I would not only be betraying Palestinians suffering under an occupation that I believe is unjust and thus, become complicit in their repression, but I’d also be betraying my fellow Americans by enabling violations of our constitutional rights to free speech and to protest peacefully.” -- The Intercept

 N.C. Gov. Roy Carter

“Municipal charter schools set a dangerous precedent that could lead to taxpayer funded re-segregation,” his statement says. -- Charlotte Observer

The Intercept

 To call the First Step Act limited would be an understatement. The legislation would hardly make a dent in America’s mass incarceration problem. --  Commentary

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Employees at a Pacific Northwest burger chain triggered a new policy after employees wore buttons that read “Abolish ICE” and “No one is illegal” with their uniforms.

Marisa Novara, of the nonprofit Metropolitan Planning Council

“If mayoral candidates actually used the s-word, and acknowledged that segregation is rooted in racism, and acknowledged government’s culpability as a vehicle for and perpetuator of racism, then we might have a very different mayoral race. We might have candidates willing to embrace solutions that go beyond programs to actual structural change.” -- New York Times

Natalie Y. Moore, author of "The South Side"

[Harold Washington's] elections marked the last time an interracial coalition was forged to change who runs this city. I don’t want to dwell in nostalgia, but I do think that could happen again. -- New York Times

Northwestern Prof. Kari Lydersen

“In Chicago, from almost Day One, [Rahm Emanuel] was seen as Mayor 1%. He took on the unions right away. He came in and made clear he was planning to run the city as a business. He didn’t have time for regular people... Even now, people outside Chicago don’t get the extent to which he’s been Mayor 1%. -- Sun-Times

David Sirota

Emanuel’s administration also reportedly oversaw a police dark site where suspects were allegedly imprisoned without charge – and the Democratic mayor’s appointees infamously blocked the release of a videotape of Chicago police gunning down an unarmed African American teenager. -- Guardian

Former IL Gov. George Ryan

 “Hell, I’m 84 years old,” he chirped. “I’m just really looking forward to rekindling memories and  dreams we had back in 1999 for my first trip to Cuba in hopes of getting the embargo lifted." -- Sneed

 David Madland, Senior Fellow at Center of American Progress

“Unions boost wealth for all workers, and the wealth jump is the biggest for communities of color. It’s not just unions helping one group, it’s helping all groups and providing the most help for the people who need it the most.” -- Bloomberg

Jean Gump, an American hero, dead at 90

It's May Day and thousands of us will be marching for social justice in Chicago, as we do every year. This year, I'm drawing inspiration from Jean Gump, who recently passed away at age 90. Jean grew up on Chicago's south side and was a life-long civil rights and an anti-war activist. She served four years in federal prison for her participation in an anti-war protest on Good Friday, 1986.

She organized against the racism of the Daley machine in Chicago and along with her children, joined Dr.  King in his 1966 march in Marquette Park against segregated housing. She also marched with Dr. King in Selma.

Sun-Times columnist, Neil Steinberg blogs about Jean this morning:

As a member of the Niles West High School P.T.A. in the late 60's, Jean Gump often sided with students against teachers and administration concerning Vietnam War protests. She became involved in protests against handguns and for rights for the handicapped. On two occasions, she supplemented her already large family by taking refugee families from Vietnam into her home.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

Gump was part of a group called the Chicago Life Community focused on protesting nuclear weapons and other tools of mass destruction. The group protested weekly outside the downtown Chicago headquarters of Morton Salt, protests aimed at the military weapons business of what was then Morton Thiokol Inc. Those protests, her daughter said, led to frequent arrests.

It was Good Friday, March 28, 1986, when Gump and two others cut a fence and approached a missile silo at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Gump and the others were arrested. She was sentenced to eight years in the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. Her sentence was later reduced to six years and she was released after serving four years and one month of the sentence. She refused to pay $424 in damages, a refusal that resulted in missing a son’s wedding because the conditions of her parole didn’t allow her to leave the state of Michigan during the parole period.

This Reader article from 1987 describes Jean Gump's moral conviction as well as her courage and commitment to civil disobedience.

 Ironically, Gump's sentence left her holding the key to her own jail cell, which she could unlock at any time. If she paid the damages and agreed not to participate in more protests, the government would be willing to free her for time served, says her husband, Joe. But for Jean that's impossible.

"It's hard being in prison, it's really hard, but I wouldn't be anywhere else. All the while I sit here everyone knows that disarmament is a crime but building weapons to destroy the world isn't a crime. It's something to think about."

Her husband, Joseph, died in 2014. In 1987, he was convicted of conspiring to damage another Missouri missile site. He was imprisoned for three years.

Jean Gump was last arrested in 2010 at the age of 84 following a protest at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Here's a powerful statement from Jean's New York Times obit:

 Most people go to prison for violating their conscience. The Gumps were sentenced for rigidly cleaving to theirs. Ms. Gump’s moral code could be condensed into a single sentence: “If you don’t act against it, you must be for it.”

Two-tier school system reproducing segregation and inequality

Modern school reform has become nearly synonymous with racial re-segregation and two-tier education. There's one tier for the elite and one big tier for the rest of us. Sociologists call it social-reproduction, wherein school systems become institutions that transmit social inequality from one generation to the next.

The election of Donald Trump and his selection of Betsy DeVos, with her single-minded emphasis on "school choice", as education secretary, promises to make the gap between the tiers even wider. But the use of charters, vouchers and selective-enrollment schools as competitive forces vis-a-vis traditional public schools predates Trump/DeVos by decades.

Ironically, selective-enrollment schools and charters originally were envisioned as tools for desegregation. Selective enrollment and magnet high schools in particular were created in the 1970s after consent decrees forced school districts to desegregate.

The news out of Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel has autocratic power over the public schools, is that the city's selective-enrollment high schools have become even more exclusive. In 2009 the Chicago deseg consent decree was liquidated by a federal judge with support from Arne Duncan and selective-enrollment and charters have dropped all pretense of being about racial equality.

DNAinfo reports:

Getting into a selective enrollment high school got even harder this year — so much so that members of next year's freshman class at Walter Payton College Prep High School who won one of the coveted seats outright earned at least 898 points out of a possible 900 points, according to cutoff-score data released by the district.

While some provisions are made to admit a quota of "economically disadvantaged" students to schools like Payton, those students are often re-segregated or tracked to lower tiers within the school itself.

The implications extend far beyond high school, impacting college admissions and job opportunities. The two-tier system also places enormous pressure on parents and students starting in pre-school and up through elementary and middle grades. It's this pressure that feeds the system of tracking and sorting based primarily on standardized tests.

DNAinfo reports that anxiety is running high across the city as eighth-graders learn whether or not they have been accepted into one of Chicago's selective-enrollment high schools.

"It's insane," 47th Ward Ald. Ameya Pawar said of the pressure on middle-schoolers."To try to build one's life around a test score of 99.8 or 99.7? That's not what an education is supposed to be about."

He's right.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Elizabeth Warren on lifting the charter cap

"Public officials have a responsibility not just to a small subset of children but to all of the children, to make sure that they receive a first-rate education," Mass Live

Donald Trump

"African-Americans will vote for me after Dwyane Wade's cousin killed in shooting." -- Politico

Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial

“… many children in the GNETS Program are consigned to dilapidated buildings that were formerly used for black children during segregation…” -- Think Progress Justice Department Sues Georgia For Segregating Disabled Students

Dana Milbank on ham sandwich

They’re not defending the indefensible Trump but accusing me of being in the tank for Clinton. And I do support Clinton — but only in the sense that I would support a ham sandwich for president if it were the only thing standing between Trump and the Oval Office. -- Washington Post

Maine Gov. Paul LePage's war on POC

When you go to war... you try to identify the enemy. The enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of hispanic origin." -- Tribune

Rev.  William Barber

"Vouchers: You don't just resegregate bodies, you resegregate budgets, curriculum, & political will to do anything" pic.twitter.com/fIo5IPFDCM

— No Takeover of MPS! (@NoMPSTakeover) August 27, 2016

Trump

Dwyane Wade's cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2016

Training time

Lori Lightfoot, head of the Police Board and the Police Accountability Task Force at yesterday's city council meeting.

More Training?... I'm having a hard time following this city council debate. How many training and sensitivity sessions do you need to attend before you stop shooting an unarmed black kid 16X or gunning down an alleged teenage car thief with a bullet in the back?

Cunningham responds... Be sure and read Peter Cunningham's lengthy response in the comments section of last Thursday's blog post. Peter begins by conceding that "concentrated poverty and segregation are part of the problem." But then admits he's lost when it comes to a political strategy to solve either one.

That's a strange admission coming from someone who spent the past seven years as a policy maker at the highest levels of government. It seems to me that should have been one of the first questions Obama's people asked when interviewing him for the Asst. Sec. of Ed post. It shows that deseg and anti-poverty were not very high of the current D.O.E.'s list of priorities.

But since Cunningham is frank about being strategically clueless, I will respond to his comment more fully in the next few days. Readers are, of course, welcome to join in.


Best Tweet of the day.

Woke up this morning and found out that @realDonaldTrump has turned into @JebBush. Kafka's Metamorphosis in reverse. Cockroach into man.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) August 25, 2016

The voice of corporate-style school reform

Peter Cunningham (right) flack for corporate reformers like Arne Duncan & Eli Broad

Last week, I got into a twitter spat with former Asst. Sec. of Education Peter Cunningham over the issue of school desegregation. He claims that in his heart he's for it, but that it's a lost cause. Better to stop wasting money and energy on fighting segregation and poverty and just focus on creating new "good schools", argues Cunningham.

He accuses me of fighting "yesterday's battles". I'll cop to that, I suppose. Then claims that I'm an agent of the status quo. That's funny.

Forever fighting yesterday's battles @mikeklonsky. You want integration? improve schools. You want segregation? Keep protecting status quo.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 16, 2016

He's a teachers union basher and part of the "no excuses" crowd who claims we're just using issues of racism and poverty as excuses to keep from working hard on school reform.

@NickKilstein My point: some folks use poverty as an excuse to avoid hard work of improving schools. Some now using segregation.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 18, 2016

He even wrote a major piece on the topic, "Is School Integration Necessary?, published in U.S. News & World Report.

I maintain that concentrated poverty and racial segregation are at the very root of our country's school problems and that it's impossible to build "good schools", charter or public, apart from the ongoing community-based struggles for equity and against segregation.

Cunningham thinks I'm picking on him. He even claims that I and his many critics are "obsessed" with him. That's a little weird.

Give it time @ryangarza89. Soon you will be obsessed with me like @mikeklonsky. Not so much @KatieOsgood_.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 18, 2016

The reason so many progressives are taking aim at Cunningham is not that they're obsessed. Rather it's because he's become the main flack for corporate-style school reform.

I'll say one thing for him, he's prolific on Twitter (like me) and likes to engage with lefties. Sees that as his role.

He was the public voice and often the script-writer at the DOE for Arne Duncan's Race To The Top and his efforts are now totally underwritten by anti-public-school power philanthropists like Eli Broad and the Waltons. 

Now that Duncan has virtually disappeared from the education policy debate and the words Race To The Top are taboo for any politician hoping to win an election, Cunningham has become the most visible national target for public education advocates and social-justice activists.

He shouldn't be complaining about all the heat he's taking. That's why they pay him the big bucks.

Peter Cunningham's reform apologia: 'Fighting segregation and poverty too expensive'.

White ladies' signs read: "We want equal & segregated schools"

Peter Cunningham's latest apologia for school segregation, in U.S. News & World Report, is basically a defense of current reform policies that have been shown to re-segregate schools. It represents more than just the opinion of a lone education gadfly. Cunningham is paid millions to speak for some of the most powerful and wealthiest among those who influence national ed policy.

It's run up the flag pole at a time when corporate-style "reform" has come under attack from civil rights groups and teacher unions, and appear to be losing their cachet, even within the Democratic Party establishment.

Cunningham tries to come off as a tormented soul, torn between his personal and "pragmatic" side, the latter arguing that ending poverty and integration are just too "politically difficult and financially expensive" and therefore, instead of spending hundreds of billions more to reduce poverty and reduce segregation, we should just "double down on our efforts to improve schools."

At a recent DFER-sponsored forum at the DNC, Cunningham laid out his anti-deseg line in an obvious attempt to influence Clinton's education agenda. He answered a question about school integration this way:

"Maybe the fight's not worth it. It's a good thing; we all think integration is good. But it's been a long fight, we've had middling success. At the same time, we have lots and lots of schools filled with kids of one race, one background, that are doing great. 

There nothing original in Cunningham's comments. If they strike you as a throwback to Plessy v. Ferguson and the separate-but-equal doctrine, you're definitely on to something. As we learned back then, when it comes to schooling, separate is never equal. Following the Brown v. Board decision in 1954, the difficulty and protracted nature of the struggle against de facto segregation and poverty has caused some to throw in the towel.

Cunningham is basically echoing the call of his boss at the D.O.E., former Sec. of Education Arne Duncan. It was he who tried to put the kibosh on a Justice Dept. civil right suit against the state of Louisiana, which would have blocked expansion of the state's school voucher system.

When asked about the suit being pushed by his fellow cabinet member, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder, Duncan said he was opposed to "forced integration," echoing the language of the old southern segregationists. The suit was then dropped, to the applause of segregationists.

Current battles are going on in states like N.C. where privately-run charter schools are being used to promote re-segregation and evade civil right law. The Voting Rights Act itself has been dismembered by a conservative-led Supreme Court in 2013. And now, the new K-12 Education law, ESSA, has shifted much more authority back to the states and away from federal oversight, setting the stage for even more school deseg efforts.

It's in this context then, that Cunningham's "pragmatic" call to abandon the cause of school desegregation is all the more pernicious.

Rahm's education chief: 'Not our job to desegregate...'

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced in 2013 he was building this $19 million annex onto Lincoln Elementary School, even though the school shares a border with a school that has plenty of space for additional students.

In the report, CPS official Janice Jackson said that segregation is "part of history of Chicago" and "not a CPS issue." -- DNAInfo

Chicago's broke-on-purponse schools system is in a financial death spiral. But that hasn't stopped Mayor Emanuel's hand-picked school board from spending millions on brand new schools and expensive additions, in places where neighboring schools have plenty of space for extra students.

Their goal, it seems, is for nothing less than a whitenized Chicago, reconstructed ("reformed") on the foundation of a two-tier school system.

New construction is disproportionately going to schools that serve the white, middle class, while leaving predominantly poor black and Latino neighborhood schools underutilized, poorly resourced and maintained and threatened with closure. A system more segregated than at any time since 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that separate-but-equal was anything but equal.

What’s more, Emanuel plans to keep doing this, using revenue from a record property tax hike passed last year, according to documents uncovered by WBEZ.

When questioned about the WBEZ report, Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson, fronting for Rahm, denied any and all responsibility for the resegregation policies.

Chicago's Willis Wagons

Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, says the pattern WBEZ found sounds a lot like the 1960s.

“It goes way back in Chicago to ignore boundaries to preserve segregation,”  

“Back in the initial civil rights era battles over school desegregation in Chicago, they built temporary classrooms – they called them Willis Wagons – on the black schools in order to avoid integration with the white schools that were half empty next door. And now, historically, it just gets flipped in the opposite direction, but it’s the same objective, or the same consequence, which is to preserve segregation.”

Remember, it was then-CEO Arne Duncan who had the court's deseg consent decree vacated, claiming the district had done all it could do to desegregate. The new school construction plan shows just the opposite. Rahm and the board are consciously and actively promoting an investment strategy of patterned school segregation.

Chicago has officially and illegally reverted to separate-but-equal, without the equal part.

Rahm's schools chief: 'Not our job to desegregate...'

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced in 2013 he was building this $19 million annex onto Lincoln Elementary School, even though the school shares a border with a school that has plenty of space for additional students.

In the report, CPS official Janice Jackson said that segregation is "part of history of Chicago" and "not a CPS issue." -- DNAInfo

Chicago's broke-on-purponse schools system is in a financial death spiral. But that hasn't stopped Mayor Emanuel's hand-picked school board from spending millions on brand new schools and expensive additions, in places where neighboring schools have plenty of space for extra students.

Their goal, it seems, is for nothing less than a whitenized Chicago, reconstructed ("reformed") on the foundation of a two-tier school system.

New construction is disproportionately going to schools that serve the white, middle class, while leaving predominantly poor black and Latino neighborhood schools underutilized, poorly resourced and maintained and threatened with closure. A system more segregated than at any time since 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that separate-but-equal was anything but equal.

What’s more, Emanuel plans to keep doing this, using revenue from a record property tax hike passed last year, according to documents uncovered by WBEZ.

When questioned about the WBEZ report, Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson, fronting for Rahm, denied any and all responsibility for the resegregation policies.

Chicago's Willis Wagons

Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, says the pattern WBEZ found sounds a lot like the 1960s.

“It goes way back in Chicago to ignore boundaries to preserve segregation,”  

“Back in the initial civil rights era battles over school desegregation in Chicago, they built temporary classrooms – they called them Willis Wagons – on the black schools in order to avoid integration with the white schools that were half empty next door. And now, historically, it just gets flipped in the opposite direction, but it’s the same objective, or the same consequence, which is to preserve segregation.”

Remember, it was then-CEO Arne Duncan who had the court's deseg consent decree vacated, claiming the district had done all it could do to desegregate. The new school construction plan shows just the opposite. Rahm and the board are consciously and actively promoting an investment strategy of patterned school segregation.

Chicago has officially and illegally reverted to separate-but-equal, without the equal part.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

UNO's Rangel with Rahm Emanuel

UNO leader Juan Rangel 

...said in a written statement that the spending “must be put in the right context." -- Sun-Times

 Student Dontae Chatman

“My school is threatening to take away our field day to students who refuse PARCC, I think we all should get treated the same way, if we take it or if we don’t take it.” -- Sun-Times

NYT Columnist Frank Bruni

It’s hate worn down into resignation, disgust repurposed as calculation. Stopping a ludicrous billionaire means submitting to a loathsome senator. -- Lose With Cruz: A Love Story

Author Natalie Y. Moore

With Rahm Emanuel's 2013 school closings, Moore's concerns were compounded: "Foreclosures and short sales had already rocked my block and Bronzeville as a whole. How could a vacant school affect property values?" -- Reader

Barack Obama

I'm more worried about climate change than ISIS. -- Fusion

Steve Nelson, head of the Calhoun School

Duckworth and others have inadvertently added “you’re not gritty enough” to the long-standing “you’re not smart enough” as ways for schools and teachers to continue their unnatural practices. -- Huffington

New study finds many charters feeding school-to-prison pipeline

"It's disturbing to see so many of these schools still reporting such high suspension rates because that indicates charter leaders continue to pursue 'broken windows,' 'no excuses' and other forms of 'zero tolerance' discipline." -- Daniel Losen, the Center's director and the study's lead author. 

A first-ever analysis of school discipline records for the nation’s more than 5,250 charter schools shows a disturbing number are suspending big percentages of their black students and students with disabilities at highly disproportionate rates compared to white and non-disabled students.

This from UCLA's Center for Civil Rights Remedies at The Civil Rights Project. It identifies 374 charter schools across the country that had suspended 25% or more of their entire student body during the course of the 2011-12 academic year.

The study also finds:

• Nearly half of all black secondary charter school students attended one of the 270 charter schools that was hyper-segregated (80% black) and where the aggregate black suspension rate was 25%.
• More than 500 charter schools suspended black charter students at a rate that was at least 10 percentage points higher than that of white charter students.
• Even more disconcerting, 1,093 charter schools suspended students with disabilities at a rate that was 10 or more percentage points higher than that of students without disabilities.
• Perhaps most alarming, 235 charter schools suspended more than 50% of their enrolled students with disabilities.

The study reveals that less than half of all charters fall into the high-suspension category. But that's still a hell of a lot. This count includes only schools with at least 50 students enrolled and excludes alternative schools, schools identified as part of the juvenile justice system, virtual schools and schools that enrolled fewer than 10 students with disabilities. 

The passage of ESSA could make the problem even worse. While the new law calls upon states to take steps to improve learning conditions, including preventing the overuse of suspension, state laws that govern charter schools can exempt them from oversight. 

State accountability plans must still be submitted by every state for review by U.S. Education Secretary John King this coming fall. While a state could choose to monitor suspension rates, it also could choose to do the minimum about discipline, including exempt charter schools. 

King, like his predecessor Arne Duncan, is not likely to hold charters' feet to the fire on segregation, high suspension rates, or their treatment of students with disabilities. King himself is a former charter operator. In 1999, he co-founded one of Boston’s first charter schools, Roxbury Prep, a so-called “no-excuses” charter which had a 60% suspension rate in 2012, highest in the state. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino

“I completely and utterly reject the ‘bad apples’ argument,” Tarantino said. “Chicago just got caught with their pants down in a way that can’t be denied… and the chief of police, is he a bad apple? I think he is. Is [Chicago Mayor] Rahm Emanuel a bad apple? I think he is. They’re all bad apples. That just shows that that’s a bullshit argument. It’s about institutional racism. It’s about institutional cover-ups that are about protecting the force as opposed to the citizens.” -- The Wrap

Mark Konkol

In our town, everybody knows all roads lead to the mayor's office, no matter who’s in power. -- DNAInfo

Arne Duncan

“It’s hard to educate a kid that’s dead.” — Washington Post

Civil Engineering Prof Marc Edwards

 "They discovered scientifically conclusive evidence of an anomalous increase in childhood lead poisoning," Edwards wrote Monday on the website he created to track Flint's water crisis, "but stood by silently as MDEQ officials repeatedly and falsely stated that no spike in blood lead levels (BLL) of children had occurred." -- Huffington

Woodburn, Oregon Supt. Chuck Ransom 

"By becoming a dual-language district, we’ve made a statement about how much we value diversity and different viewpoints. We’ve been a big player in helping to bring prosperity and solidarity." -- Huffington

Mika Brzezinski to Rick Santorum 

Why aren’t you working on white men with guns? -- Think Progress

Duncan's legacy

"It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education." -- Diane Ravitch

Arne Duncan says he will remain at the D.O.E. "until the final bell". At this point, no one really cares.

The damage is already done and with billions of Race To The Top money no longer in his back pocket, he has no more juice with states, school districts, or with Congress. According to most surveys, his version of school reform has been badly discredited (I hope I helped a little) and many feel he will be remembered as the worst ed secretary ever. 

Diane Ravitch documents the destruction left in his wake:

*He used his control of billions of dollars to promote a dual school system of privately managed charter schools operating alongside public schools; 

*He has done nothing to call attention to the fraud and corruption in the charter sector or to curb charters run by non-educators for profit or to insist on charter school accountability or to require charters to enroll the neediest children;

*He pushed to require states to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students, which has caused massive demoralization among teachers, raised the stakes attached to testing, and produced no positive results;

*He used federal funds and waivers from NCLB to push the adoption of Common Core standards and to create two testing consortia, which many states have abandoned;

*The Common Core tests are so absurdly “rigorous” that most students have failed them, even in schools that send high percentages of students to four-year colleges, the failure rates have been highest among students who are English language learners, students with disabilities, and students of color;

*He has bemoaned rising resegregation of the schools but done nothing to reduce it; [Here, I would add that Duncan openly opposed, what he referred to as "forced integration" and abandoned fellow cabinet member, AG Eric Holder on his deseg suit in Louisiana--mk].

*He has been silent as state after state has attacked collective bargaining and due process for teachers;

*He has done nothing in response to the explosion of voucher programs that transfer public funds to religious schools;

*Because of his policies, enrollments in teacher education programs, even in Teach for America, have plummeted, and many experienced teachers are taking early retirement;

*He has unleashed a mad frenzy of testing in classrooms across the country, treating standardized test scores as the goal of all education, rather than as a measure;

*His tenure has been marked by the rise of an aggressive privatization movement, which seeks to eliminate public education in urban districts, where residents have the least political power;

*He loosened the regulations on the federal student privacy act, permitting massive data mining of the data banks that federal funds created;

*He looked the other way as predatory for-profit colleges preyed on veterans and  minorities, plunging students deep into debt;

*Duncan has regularly accused parents and teachers of “lying” to students. For reasons that are unclear, he wants everyone to believe that our public schools are terrible, our students are lazy, not too bright, and lacking ambition.

Diane could have also included Duncan's unflagging support for autocratic mayoral control of urban school districts. He made mayoral control an essential piece of his top-down school reform model and went so far as to say he would consider his time as education secretary a “failure” if more mayors didn’t take over city school systems by the end of his tenure.

They didn't. It was and he is.

Final Note: According to a report in the S-T, while Duncan remains in D.C., is wife and two daughters returned to Chicago with the children to attend the expensive and private University of Chicago Lab School.

I leave it to Valery Strauss at WaPo to point out the obvious:

…now his children will attend a progressive private school in Chicago, a school that does not follow key school reform policies that his Education Department has set for public schools.

It does not, for example, use the Common Core State Standards (though many teachers there support them). It does not bombard its students with standardized tests or spend weeks each semester in test-prep mode. It does not evaluate teachers by student standardized test scores. In 2013, 20 Lab teachers signed a letter to Duncan protesting his policies that promote standardized test-based school reform. Also among the signatories were teachers from the Ariel Community Academy, a public school founded by a team of people that included Duncan.

[...]
Another irony is that Duncan will be sending his children to a private school in a city where he ran the public schools for seven years; he then went on to control federal oversight of the nation’s public schools for another seven years. One wonders if there is not a single public school — or public charter school — that Duncan could have chosen after being personally responsible in some way for the improvement of the public education system in Chicago.

Arne Duncan chooses a school free from his influence http://t.co/NIA1aWRXNf Because you know he has to do what is BEST for his kids

— linda (@breezydayz) July 10, 2015