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Vol. 12 Issue 16…Dedicated to the Dialogue on
Race…April 19, 2009
Intuit's Vibe
A Poem to Parents
By Mary Beth Stanley
All of you are parents
But you're also teachers, too
And if you want to help your child
I'll tell you what to
do.
Whenever you're in the kitchen
Let your child be your helping hands
And show them all the labels
And let them read the
brands.
Say beginning and ending sounds
And find some things that rhyme
And they will quickly learn to read
In a short amount of
time.
Let your children help you measure
The butter, eggs and flour
And let them help you set the timer
For thirty minutes or
an hour.
Then, when you have to leave your house
In the car or for a walk
Don't forget this is another time
To teach and learn
and talk.
Read all the street signs that you pass
And the house numbers by the door
And all the license plates on cars
And there is so much
more.
There are many words on buildings
And trucks and cars you meet
There are billboards standing tall
And shops on every
street.
Then when at last you do return
And you sit down together
Please take this opportunity to read
A book about
whatever.
Being a parent is very special
But as a teacher you are special, too
Just take the time to make learning fun
And your child will
love what you do.
Barbara Rose Johns
(1935-1991)
The case remained muffled in white consciousness, and the schoolchild
origins of the lawsuit were lost as well on nearly all Negroes outside
Born in 1935 in
The Johns family tobacco farm was
located in the small community of Farmville, which had a population of about
5,000 inhabitants in 1950. Roughly 45 percent of
Growing up in
To ease the overcrowding, rather than build a new school as promised, the
all-white school board built several plywood structures covered with tar paper
and heated with pot-bellied stoves. In contrast, the large and well-equipped
whites-only
In 1951, Johns took a stand against the unequal treatment of black and white
students in the county. She bravely stood in front of her fellow students at an
assembly and delivered an impassioned speech, urging them to join her in a
strike against the school system to force it to make changes. Following her
lead, on April 23, students marched down to the county courthouse to make
officials aware of the glaring differences in quality of white and black
schools. This was the first walkout of its kind.
Johns and her fellow classmates
contacted two lawyers, Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood Robinson III, who were
with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They
agreed to help with a lawsuit aimed at ending racial segregation. Named after
ninth-grader Dorothy Davis and 116 other students and parents of Farmville, the
case called Davis v. Prince Edward
later became part of Brown v. Board of
Education (1954) in which the United States Supreme Court declared
segregation unconstitutional.
Even after the decision in Brown,
For her role in the efforts to achieve equal education for black students,
Johns was harassed. Reportedly, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) burned a cross in the
family's yard. Johns was sent to
Now Let Me Fly
Barbara Johns Monologue (Excerpt)
Every morning I get on a bus
thrown away by the white high school on the hill. I sit on a torn seat and look
out a broken window. And when my bus passes the shiny new bus that the white
high schoolers have, I hide my face 'cause I'm embarrassed in my raggedy bus.
And when we get to R. R. Moton
High, the bus driver gets off with us, 'cause he's also our history teacher. He
comes in the classroom and fires up the stove and I sit in my winter coat
waiting for the room to get warm. You know the rooms, the ones in the
"addition" as they call it. We call them "the tar paper
shacks" because that's what they are, am I right? I'm embarrassed that I
go to school in tar paper shacks and when it rains I have to open an umbrella
so the leaks from the roof won't make the ink run on my paper.
And later in the day I have a
hygiene class out in that broken-down bus and a biology class in a corner of
the auditorium with one microscope for the whole school. I'm embarrassed that
our water fountains are broken and our wash basins are broken and it seems our
whole school is broken and crowded and poor. And I'm embarrassed.
But my embarrassment is nothing
compared to my hunger. I'm not talking about my hunger for food, though it
would be right nice to have a cafeteria with lunch instead of just sticky buns
like we get. No, I'm hungry for those shiny books they have up at Farmville
High. I want the page of the Constitution that is torn out of my social studies
book. I want a chance at that "Romeo and Juliet" I've heard about but
they tell me I'm not fit to read.
Our teachers say we can fly just
as high as anyone else. That's what I want to do. Fly just as high. I said,
fly. You know, I've been sitting in my embarrassment and my hunger for so long
that I forgot about standing up. So, today, I'm going to ask you to stand with
me. Before we fly, before we fly just as high as anyone else, we gotta walk just
as proud as anyone else. And that's what we're going to do!
We're gonna walk out of this
school and over to the court house. Do you hear me? We're gonna walk with our
heads high and go talk to the school board. Are you with me? We're gonna walk
and talk. We're gonna walk out of this school and walk out ON this school.
We're gonna walk out in a strike, yes, I said strike, and we won't come back
until we get a real school with a gymnasium and library and whole books.
And we will get them. And it'll be grand. Are you with me? Are we gonna walk?
Are we gonna fly?
About Me: The location is
3/5 Compromised Graduation Rates
By John Burl Smith
A large percentage of black males
are chronically unemployed and underemployed; they die younger and are more
likely to be sent to jail for longer sentences than whites or other ethnic
groups. A report published by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, a
Massachusetts-based organization that advocates for equality in the classroom,
concludes as many others that black males are far less likely to graduate from
high school or college than whites.
The report, entitled "Given
Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black
Males," painted a very dismal picture of the prospect for young black
males. Shamefully, 55 years after Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, which
outlawed "separate but equal," followed by the court's demand of
"all deliberate speed" in providing equal education for slave
descendants, the gap in educational achievement continues. Only 47 % of black
male students in the
Even in states that ranked above
the national average, like
Assessing such gaps, Michael Holzman, the Schott study's author said, "If
a black kid moved from
Alluding to "Brown" he said, "The tragedy is that there are 700
schools in the United States that are 90 % black or more. Characteristically,
these schools have larger class sizes, less money is spent on materials, and
teachers are less well-educated. What this does for black kids attending what
amounts to segregated schools is dumb down their education. When black kids
have a chance to go to better schools, they do better."
Holzman's analysis dovetails with the historic 3/5 Compromise. Fact is,
relatively speaking, "nothing has changed" the conditions slave
descendants' challenged in Brown.
Black schools still receive fewer funds and resources for education than white
schools.
Today scientists have clearly
established that children at birth, for the most part, all have equal
intellectual capacities and capabilities. Consequently, the gap in performance,
Holzman pointed out so perceptively, which affects children in any number of
ways and develops over time, is a function of environmental influences.
For instance,
On the other side of the country, low graduation rates for blacks are similar.
Defending its graduation rate, Palm Beach cited a report issued by America's
Promise Alliance which claims, "Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest
cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 %, with the lowest
graduation rates reported in Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland. The report
found that only about half of the students in public schools in large cities
graduate. In
More appalling, the report found troubling data that showed urban public high
school students compared to their suburban and rural counterparts were not only
less likely to graduate but their prospects for getting into college were far
less. Researchers found many metropolitan areas also showed a considerable gap
in the graduation rates between inner-city schools and the surrounding suburbs.
For example, 81.5 % of the public school students in
If these statistics were
reflective of white students, the Obama administration, state and local
governments would be up in arms. This would be considered a national disgrace,
rather than the 3/5 Compromise in action. (Sources: www.sullivan-county.com, www.highbeam.com and www.ibiblio.org)
More about Prisons and Black Men
By John Burl Smith
The two institutions that have
had the greatest impact on the black community, black males in particular, over
the last three decades are college and prison. This unusual dichotomy has
shaped both its level of prosperity and poverty. Prisons have reduced the
number of young black men that would have entered college and many that may
have found gainful employment. Draining off what would have been some
productive individuals into to an unproductive system, prisons compete for
funds that may otherwise have gone to the black community as resources. This
peculiar configuration continues to rob black communities in untold ways.
Slave descendants emerging from bondage realized that the hope of education was
their only real avenue for rising above their wretched state. Unfortunately,
whites understood this long before emancipation, therefore they made educating
slaves - reading, writing and mathematics - a hanging offense. This 3/5
Compromise edit ensured slaves emerged from bondage ignorant and penniless.
Were it not for the black church and philanthropists, like St. Katharine
Drexel, who built hundreds of schools and several colleges, slaves and their
descendants may have languished in ignorance well into the 20th
century.
Rather than relenting, whites'
resistance to educating slave descendants intensified, ensuring the 3/5
Compromise lived on through segregation. Although the decision in Brown v Broad of Education of
Sociologists William Julius
Wilson and Robert Sampson cite the devastating impact
"de-industrialization" has had on major cities such as Chicago,
After Brown and during the civil rights movement, affirmative
action aided upward mobility, expanded opportunities for slave descendants and
propelled a sizeable increase in the black middle class. Once prospects for
blacks reached the 3/5 Compromise proportionality, whites responded as they did
following Reconstruction when they legalized discrimination against blacks with
segregation.
During the 1970s whites used the "war on crime" to launch the
business of incarcerating blacks. The prison-industrial-complex came online in
1982 and by 2003, 2,078,570 Americans were behind bars according to the Bureau
of Justice Statistics. The numbers breakdown this way: federal and state
prisons held 1,450,920 and 617,650 were in jails. Although blacks constituted
just 12.3 % of the
This is a national trend, not peculiar to any region. For example, blacks are
26 % of
Even with the "war on drugs," the crime rates dropped sharply in the
1990s and today, it is comparable to that of the 1960s. However, despite the
sharp reduction in crime, the prison population continues to grow and the
prison business continues to make huge profits during the current economic downturn.
Concomitant with greater access to higher education for blacks which began in
the 1970s, access to higher education is declining. The impact of the
prison-industrial-complex on the prospects of young black men is a clear and
present danger.
Mounting evidence reveals a disturbing trend. In 1980, there were 143,000 black
men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college. By 2000 these statistics were
reversed with 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college. The
war on drugs has taken a huge bite out of the productive potential of the black
community as these numbers continue to increase. They reveal clearly the racist
nature of
School to Prison Pipeline
The public school system is
failing black children. Rather than serving as the institution to train and
educate future leaders, public schools serve as holding pens for the criminal
justice system. Our children are being funneled from school to prison through
what has become known as the "School to Prison Pipeline" (STTP).
In a recent meeting of the Gwinnett County Parent Coalition to Dismantle the
School to Prison Pipeline, parents and teachers cited the disturbing trend that
sees children funneled out of public schools and into juvenile and criminal
systems. Many cited schools' "Zero Tolerance" policies in which
school officials hinder rather than help by harshly punishing even minor
offenses committed by young elementary school children. Several examples were
provided, including a student forced to attend an "alternative"
campus because her powdered drink mix resembled a drug substance.
Gwinnett has one of the state of
Allied with the Harvard Civil
Rights Project, NAACP and ACLU, the Gwinnett Parent Coalition is calling on
parents and other neighborhood groups to become actively involved and serve as
watchdogs of the public education system to safeguard our children and return
the public school system to its rightful role as the institution that teaches
and train our future leaders.
For more about the Gwinnett
Parent Coalition, its goal of dismantling the school to prison pipeline and how
you can become involved, visit www.cviog.uga.edu/childfamilypolicy/pipeline/standley2.pdf.
Teaching's Revolving Door (Excerpts)
By Barbara Miner
New teachers leave the profession
at an alarming rate - and there's no single reason or easy solutions.
In 2001, in the middle of the day
in the middle of the year, Tania Giordani walked off her job as a 7th-8th grade
science teacher with the Chicago Public Schools. Giordani, who had a master's
degree from Loyola University, had been with the Chicago schools for more than
two years and had planned on being a teacher for life. She originally taught at
a middle-class white school on the north side where test scores were exemplary
and resources were plentiful - so plentiful that she had science textbooks not
yet officially on the market.
At the same time, she felt unfulfilled, isolated, and sidetracked from her
vision of working in a diverse, urban setting. She asked to be transferred.
Giordani was unprepared for the conditions at her new school, however. The
problems were not with the African American, low-income neighborhood - Giordani
herself was African American and had grown up on the city's south side, where
the school was located.
But she hadn't expected that the
students and teachers at the school would have so few resources and so little
support from district administrators. What's more, she found she had little
hope that district policy makers would rid themselves of the racist assumptions
she believes were at the heart of the school's lack of resources and cavalier
attitude toward student learning.
Even today, Giordani can list the
problems with precision: her science textbooks were more than 20 years old,
sometimes with entire chapters missing, and there weren't enough for all her
classes. Her students had a late lunch period, and by the time they got to the
cafeteria, sometimes the food was gone. In the winter, the boiler routinely
broke and there would be minimal heat. The teachers rarely collaborated and,
worse, fought among themselves. The administration, meanwhile, seemed
indifferent to the problems and had a bunker mentality.
"The principal even told me my job was not to teach but to baby-sit, and
that my first priority was to keep the students safe," Giordani recalled
in an interview with Rethinking Schools.
Giordani had hoped that after the Christmas holiday break, she would be
rejuvenated and would no longer dread going to school each morning. No such
luck.
A young single mother of two little girls, Giordani felt she had to protect
herself from what she believed was an insane job that left her so drained she
couldn't take care of her own family. That January, in the middle of the day in
the middle of the week, she made a decision. She took her students to lunch,
went to the principal's office, told him she was leaving, and walked out of the
school.
Giordani remains a teacher, but at a community college, primarily working with
students getting their GED. Her two daughters attend the Chicago Public
Schools, and she is active with parent advocacy groups. "I am not anti-
public schools," she says emphatically.
Asked to use the hindsight of eight years to help explain why she left,
Giordani pauses a moment and then says: "Lack of support for the teachers
and the students. Financial support, emotional support - both."
Tania Giordani's story is personally unique. But multiply her decision
thousands of times and you get an idea of one of the most serious problems
facing schools- every fall, school districts must hire about 270,000 new K-12
teachers to replace those who have left the profession.
The problem of teacher turnover is especially acute among new teachers, with as
many as half of new teachers leaving within five years. In urban districts, the
problem is worse. It only takes about three years for half of new teachers to
leave.
"Retaining teachers is a far larger problem than recruiting new
ones," notes Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at
Students, especially those in high-poverty schools, bear the brunt of the
problem. Too often they are taught by teachers who have not yet developed the
experience and skills to be most effective, or who aren't even teaching in
their area of expertise.
Studies have repeatedly found that the single most important variable in
student achievement is the quality of the teachers. But how does a school or
district develop and hold on to the best teaching staff possible?
There's no magic wand. Pay is clearly an issue - beginning teachers with a
bachelor's degree earned an average of $31,753 in 2004-05, far below that of
comparable college graduates. What's more, teachers in urban and rural schools
tend to get less than their suburban counterparts.
For more, including suggestions on retaining and hiring well-trained teachers,
visit Rethinking Schools Winter 2008/2009 at www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/door232.shtml.
Comments from the
The Dark Knight-Batman/White
Ninja/Zorro is currently attending a DeKalb County, Georgia "failing"
public school. In physical science, one of his major courses, he does not have
a textbook; none were distributed to his class this school year. By no means a
stellar student, he is neither a troublemaker nor a dummy. Unfortunately, the
school's instructors and its administration leave much to be desired; some
should be fired. Lulled asleep by teachers that do not provide much in the way
of inspiration, he had to be slapped awake by outside forces teeming with
motivation. When queried about the sorry state of affairs precipitating the
intervention, the Dark One/Ninja/Zorro exclaimed, "Grandma, I could do
better with a book!"
Disgruntled wants to know:
This week the Obama administration provided amnesty for the CIA operatives
and officers that employed harsh interrogation techniques (torture) on
suspected terrorists. The administration also released Justice Department memos
written by Bush administration officials justifying techniques that are
universally recognized as torture and consequently illegal under US and
international law. It is now obvious to everyone, except the brain dead, that
the Bush administration repeatedly violated the law. Since the
Disgruntled
says: Republicans are trying to demonize President Barack Obama for
increasing the size of government via his tax and spend policies. None of the
Republicans in Congress voted for his budget. George W. Bush added trillions to
the national debt with wars on two fronts fought on foreign credit. Bush
certainly did nothing to reduce the size and scope of government. However,
Republicans happily gave Bush whatever he wanted. Apparently for Republicans,
as long as the president funds a large military with bases around the world to
act as a global police force to protect the interests of their biggest
corporate contributors, provides plenty of cops to suppress and farm domestic
urban communities (blacks) and plenty of pork for their pet projects,
Republicans could care less about the size of government. However, let tax
revenues fund domestic programs that may benefit the poor, especially blacks,
then Republicans are up in arms ready to raise a ruckus over out of control
spending. There ought to be laws against such rank and racist hypocrisy!
Disgruntled
feels: Disheartening! In the Teen Graduating Crisis Survey released this
month by the Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) and the Taco Bell
Foundation, 31 percent of the teens surveyed cited getting a job to support
themselves or their families as the biggest obstacle they faced in graduating
from high school. During good and bad economic times, teens are far more likely
than adults to be unemployed. According to the March Bureau of Labor Statistics
employment data, which showed a national unemployment rate of 8.5 percent, the
rates for white and black teens were 20 and 32.5 percent, respectively.
Ironically, the unemployment rate for black teens actually fell 5.3 percent
from 38.8 percent in February. Given that so many black children are born into
poverty, the inability of black teens to find gainful employment and remain in
school is especially troubling when one considers the important role education
plays in lifetime earnings. It is even more disheartening when one realizes
that