Just in Case Things Weren't Clear

My recent post on the importance of effective teaching, school segregation and equitable school funding touched a nerve. On this site it received over 250,000 views. Additionally, it was republished in the Seattle Times, Washington Post, Hechinger Report, New York Observer and the Huffington Post.

The vast majority of the feedback, even from dissenters, was thoughtful and brought up points that I hadn’t considered, or angles I had contemplated but (for reasons of brevity) chose to leave out. The responses pushed me to reconsider some of the things I said in the piece. That is the Internet at its best.

However, one piece of feedback, a letter, stuck out to me. It arrived in the mail at my school this week and I want to share it with you. It reinforces much of what I said in the original piece about the contempt that many people in America have for people of color, and especially for black America.  It was dictated by its author, Ralph Fusco (probably to his paralegal), and I present it here to you as is, unedited and unredacted.

Letter from Ralph Fusco

In many ways the letter speaks for itself.

The casualness with which Mr. Fusco denigrates the whole of black America is breathtaking.

Although I disagree with almost every single word Mr. Fusco wrote, I appreciate his honesty and willingness to share his point-of-view. I am guessing, if asked, he would claim “I am not a racist.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates has jested previously, there no racists anymore. It’s apparent Fusco has (probably by choice) had very little interaction with actual black people (he is missing out, we are pretty awesome!).

Mr. Fusco isn’t some unhinged, hood wearing or toothless Confederate flag waver, nor is he a white-supremacist, from a compound in the Far West. He is probably an upstanding member of his community and active member of all the usual community organizations: Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, etc.

I do not believe his views are atypical, only his willingness to put them to paper. Many of our current social ills: un(der)employment, segregated housing patterns, mass incarceration, inequitable school funding, and disparate educational outcomes are underpinned by this type of thinking. It must be combated and public education is the best way forward. This is the work. This is the challenge.

I am glad that Mr. Fusco put it all out there.  

The Conversation I'm Tired of Not Having

I want to tell you a secret: America really doesn’t care what happens to poor people and most black people. There I said it.

In my position as a Teacher of the Year and a teacher leader (an ambiguous term at best), I am supposed to be a voice and hold positions on a host of ed policy issues: teaching evaluations, charter schools, test refusal, and (fights over) Common Core come to mind. I am so sick of reading about McCleary (Washington’s ongoing intragovernmental battle for equitable funding for K-12) I don’t know what to do with myself. But, increasingly I find myself tuning out of these conversations. As a nation, we’re nibbling around the edges with accountability measures and other reforms, but we’re ignoring the immutable core issue: much of white and wealthy America is perfectly happy with segregated schools and inequity in funding. We have the schools we have, because people who can afford better get better. And sadly, people who can’t afford better just get less--less experienced teachers, inadequate funding and inferior facilities.

There is simple lack of political will. The situation in education is analogous to the status of gun control. Last June, @DPJHodges tweeted that “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” Unless dozens of members of Congress are themselves directly impacted by gun violence, there is no major gun legislation coming anytime soon. We have retreated to our camps; there is no turning back. It is the same with school funding and school segregation.

If you are reading this blog, you've probably seen the images coming out of Detroit Public Schools: buckled floors, toilets without seats, roaches, mold and even mushrooms growing in damp, disgusting, mildewy classrooms. Like the images of American torture and abuse last decade in Abu Ghraib, these images should have shocked the nation. Instead, they elicited a collective national shrug, stretch and yawn.

The View from the Burbs is Sweet. Through white flight and suburbanization, wealthy and middle class families have completely insulated themselves from educational inequality. They send their kids to homogeneous schools and they do what it takes, politically at the local level, to ensure they’re well-funded, well-staffed, with opportunities for enrichment and exploration. Poor families lack competent and engaged administration (see Chicago, Detroit, etc), the levy money (locally, see Highline), capital budgets (see rural Central, WA), and the political capital wealthier families enjoy.

Ask yourself, would suburban schools ever be allowed to decay like what we saw in Detroit? Nope. What's happening in Detroit could never happen in Auburn Hills; what’s happening in Chicago could never happen in Evanston; what’s happening in South Seattle could never happen in Issaquah or Bellevue. Middle class America would never allow the conditions that have become normalized in poor and brown America to stand for their kids.

This past week I attended a convening of the 56 State & Territorial Teachers of the Year in San Antonio. There I spoke to a veteran teacher (17 years in the classroom) from Maryland. Her school is located five miles from the nation’s capitol and in her career, she has never taught a white student. Never. Her county and its schools are completely segregated. We aren’t in this together.

This week, I also encountered a tweet from @mdawriter that stopped me cold in my tracks: “61% of Blacks, 55% of Hispanics support gov't intervention to address school segregation. Vast majority of whites (72%) say nope!” They’re perfectly satisfied with situation as is. Integration? Busing? Redrawing of school or district boundaries? Nope, nope, nope.

So what is to be done? The pessimist in me says nothing can be done. Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens. They consistently oppose higher taxes--especially tax expenditures for programs for “the other.”

I’d offer the answer lies in the teaching profession itself

If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening. Teacher quality matters. Too many in the profession are quick to awfulize students in poverty to rationalize poor results. Better teaching inspires students and gets better results. Better teaching engages students and keeps them in classrooms, rather than the streets. Better teaching is the one thing we never really talk about. Better teaching is the only mechanism we have left.

Our most needy students need our best teachers, yet our highest need schools have the least experienced teachers, the most turnover and are becoming burnout factories for those who remain. All the existing structural incentives for effective educators push them toward work in suburban schools, where they’ll be better supported and the workload is sustainable. Nobody wants to talk about this.

I am done with charter fights and Common Core spats. You won’t hear me caping for (or against) Danielson’s Framework. If you’re looking for me in the near future, you won’t find me at the edu-fundraiser or non-profit luncheon with a parking lot full of Teslas. For my own sake and the sake of my kids, I will be supporting organizations and people putting in work in these areas:

• Fighting the impacts of systemic racism and white supremacy in our schools and among teachers.

• Helping, through my speaking opportunities, to recruit passionate people, especially people of color into the profession.

• Supporting policies aimed at identifying, developing and retaining effective teachers.

• Advocating for the creation of systems that encourage our most effective and passionate teachers to stay in the profession and supporting them in working with our most needy schools.

• Encouraging policymakers to make the work of effective teachers rewarding and sustainable by trusting them and not burdening them with new and ever changing mandates.

• Giving teachers opportunities to lead, within the profession, while remaining in the classroom.

Take what you will from what is and isn’t on that list.

Now that we’ve made it this far, I realize I may have misspoken at the top--I am not done with ed policy discussions--but I am done with ones that don’t have to do with teaching.

Onward.

More than 140 Characters on Last Night's #DemDebate

It’s probably fate that I became a government teacher. When I was a little kid, I was a “Jack Kemp Republican.” I remember in November 1988 lobbying Mrs. Anderson, my 4th grade teacher, and encouraging her to vote for George HW Bush over Michael Dukakis. She was very patient with my politicking, before eventually asking me to remove my Bush in ‘88-styrofoam-convention hat. I have been politically active since then and my swings to and fro (throughout my life)  along the political continuum inform my practice as a government teacher.  This experience also informs how I approach people whom I disagree with, but would like to (or think I can) persuade.

With this is in mind, I’d like to elaborate on some ideas that I tweeted during the #DemDebate last evening.

The Party of FDR is now to the Right of Nixon: Much has been made in the media about Bernie Sanders’ self-identification as a Democratic-Socialist. Sanders chooses that label, as is his right. However, I think it would be more accurate and useful to describe him as a New Deal Democrat. In doing so, we highlight the lurch to the right of the entire American political spectrum. The tenets of Sanders’ economic policy: higher taxes rates on high income earners, tough regulation of corporations (especially banks), and calls for government programs and subsidies to reduce poverty, are only radical in today’s version of the Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a National Defense Hawk; she voted for the Iraq War (as a Senator from NY) and last night stated that her counsel was not heeded when she called, while serving as Secretary of State under Obama, for early US involvement in the Syrian Civil War.

Her economic policies, when viewed historically, put her to the right of Richard Nixon. Nixon (not so famously) proposed in 1969 the creation of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). The program, called the Family Assistance Plan, would have replaced the traditional welfare program (Aid for Families with Dependent Children or AFDC) with a guaranteed minimum national income:

For a family of four without any other income, the FAP would provide $1,600 (2013: $10,121). But a family that did have income from employment would get a declining amount of FAP dollars until family income reached $3,920 (2013: $24,798). A family of four that had been earning $12,652 in 2013 dollars would have had its income increased through the FAP to $18,725. Ultimately, the vast majority of benefits would have gone to the “working poor,” a significant departure from then-existing programs that denied welfare benefits to those who were employed. The FAP sailed through the U.S. House of Representatives comfortably, 243 to 155, but stalled in the Senate.

Can you imagine how Clinton or the eventual Republican nominee (Rubio, Cruz, or Trump) would pounce on that idea if proposed today?  Reagan won the last third of the Twentieth Century. The nation and the Democratic Party has shifted to the right. There are Democrats and there are progressives, but it is a mistake to think that all Democrats are progressive.

Clinton’s Stance Against Single Payer: Senator Sanders, like Donald Trump, is a supporter of Single Payer--Medicare for all--Canadian-style healthcare. During the debate, Senator Clinton struck from the right of Sanders (and Trump), stating the creation of a Single Payer Healthcare System would cause massive tax increases for American families. 

Sanders rebutted this point, but I think it deserves more elaboration than the moderators allowed for last night. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014 the average American household spent $4,290 on health care costs. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported that expenditures on healthcare when including government spending and subsidies is even higher, reaching near 1/5 of total GDP. “U.S. health care spending grew 5.3 percent in 2014, reaching $3.0 trillion or $9,523 per person.  As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 17.5 percent.” Meanwhile, Canada delivers their national healthcare system for roughly $11,00 per family of four.

At nearly $10,000 head, we already spend more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation, yet we have much lower outcomes than similarly wealthy nations. The difference between cost inputs and healthcare quality outputs, is the profit that American health insurance companies, drug manufacturers and hospital chains all reap--a point that Sanders weakly implied and Clinton is obviously aware of.

On a Kinder Gentler Drug War: Toward the end of the debate, the candidates turned their attention to crime and drugs. America is clearly experiencing an opiate crisis. During the debate, a kyron stated in that 2015 there has been 300+ deaths in the state of New Hampshire connected to opiates. That’s a shocking number for a state with only 1.3 million residents. However, I think it's worth pointing out the racial subtext of the issue.

The candidates all took a somber tone whilst discussing the path from "recreational prescription drug” to “heroin habit” to “death from overdose” that has taken so many American lives recently. Governor O’Malley, the former mayor of Baltimore and inspiration for Tommy Carcetti on HBO’s the Wire (that’s a whole other rabbit hole to go down), got misty on stage in sharing his thoughts on the opiate crisis.

I couldn’t help but think about how different a tune the party sang in the 80s and early 90s during the crack cocaine era. Last night, Clinton did not suggest needing another Crime Bill to solve the opiate problem, like the one her husband signed into law in 1994 and that Senator Sanders voted for. Nor did anyone suggest the need for new federal mandatory minimum sentences, like the ones imposed in the 1980s. Thanks to these policies, today nearly half of all inmates in Federal Custody are there on drug charges and a majority of them had little to minimal prior criminal offenses.

The response to crack in the 80s was an era of mass incarceration of black and brown youth at the Federal Level. But, with opiates politicians are singing a very different tune. One could say that they learned their lessons from the failed policies of the past, but I can’t help but reflect on the demographics of the heroin overdose victims--mostly working class, non-college educated whites, versus those who were perceived to be the victims of the crack boom.

So what? The 2016 election is pivotal. As Matt Yglesias pointed out in Vox in October, Republicans currently control both Houses of Congress, hold a 5-4 majority on Supreme Court appointments, control the majority of State Legislatures and hold 31 Governor's Mansions. With a win in 2016 Republicans would control every aspect of your national government. No party has had that firm a grip on power, ironically since the New Deal Era.