SET UP TO FAIL: THE PROBLEM WITH URBAN EDUCATION

Ever since the publication in 1966 of sociologist James S. Coleman report Equality of Educational Opportunity, there has been a raging debate about how to close the racial gap in educational achievement.

Coleman's report ignited a firestorm of controversy. Using data from over 600,000 students and teachers across the country, Coleman and his team of researchers concluded that academic success was related more to the social composition of the school, the student's sense of control of his environment and future, the verbal skills of teachers, and the student's family background, than to the quality of the student's school.

The researcher's most controversial finding, and the one that most policy makers and the media focused on, was that Black students do better in racially integrated setting.

By the mid-1970s, however, after a decade of intense opposition to busing by White parents and White flight to the suburbs to avoid school integration, Coleman concluded in another report that school integration had failed, and that the window of opportunity to achieve quality integrated education had closed.

Coleman's change of heart angered many of his former supporters, especially in the progressive community. Though they were unsuccessful, some members of the American Sociological Association even tried to expel him (he later was elected president of the association in 1991).

By the 1980s, a new education reform movement emerged. Shaped largely by conservative free-market ideas, this movement has held sway since – well, at least until now.

Diane Ravitch, a preeminent education historian, former assistant secretary of education under the first President Bush, and one of the leading voices for the right-wing educational establishment, has done the unimaginable. Ravitch has reversed positions on issues she has held for decades, such as standardized testing, vouchers, privatization, and the No Child Left Behind Act.

Why the change of heart? She has finally accepted a growing body of social scientific research that shows that market-based reforms are not raising student achievement. What they are doing, she now argues, is harming public education.

Ravitch now calls much of the right's educational agenda – which, it should be noted, has been largely kept in place by the Obama Administration – a fad.

"School reform today is like a freight train, and I'm out on the tracks saying. 'You're going the wrong way!'" Ravitch said in a recent interview for the New York Times.

Ravitch's shift, however, comes much too late to save what appears to be a casualty of the right-wing educational reform movement, the Kansas City, Missouri, school system and its poor, mainly black and brown, student population.

In a stunning development, just before the start of classes in the fall, the Kansas City school district plans to shut down nearly half its schools. The moribund school system has seen student enrollments drop by nearly half over the last decade, largely as a result of students leaving for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools, and the suburbs.

What the Kansas City school system plans to do in just a few short months is absolutely mind boggling. In a desperate effort to close a $50 million deficit and belatedly respond to years of declining student enrollments, the district will cut hundreds of jobs (roughly 700 of 3,000 employees) and shuffle thousands of students. The reorganization plan calls for closing 29 of 61 facilities, including 26 traditional schools and three leased buildings that house early childhood programs.

The implosion of the Kansas City school system is, undoubtedly, a dream come true for right-wing educational reformers. For decades, they have been arguing that government controlled schools are obsolete and that certain administrative and structural changes – including choice, charters, merit pay and accountability – are necessary to fix the nation's ailing public schools.

Because you can always point to a few success stories, many will continue to cling to these fads. One outcome of the Kansas City fiasco, though, is not in doubt: thousands of poor, mainly black and brown students – casualties of market-based reforms – are being left behind to suffer.

So, how do we "really" close the educational gap?

On the one hand, I am a staunch believer that equality of opportunity is strongly correlated with equality of schools' resources, such as the number and quality of textbooks, teachers, facilities, and so on. Likewise, raising expectations and improving parental involvement are keys to improving educational achievement of Black and Latino schoolchildren.

However, higher expectations, more participation by parents, and more money for schools will not solve the problem – as an example, the Kansas City school district received more than $2 billion as part of a landmark school desegregation case.

I am convinced that efforts to close the racial gap in educational achievement will continue to fail until the nation deals with the problem of pervasive, concentrated urban poverty.

Over the years, I have become increasingly convinced of the validity of William J. Wilson's thesis about the devastating effects of concentrated poverty in America's central cities, disproportionately inhabited by black and brown people.

Wilson's argument is that since the 1960s, poor ghetto neighborhoods, occupied primarily by blacks and Hispanics, have experienced increasing rates of socioeconomic isolation, dislocation and disorganization, problems "created by the constraints and opportunities that the residents of the inner-city neighborhoods face in terms of access to jobs and job networks, involvement in quality schools, availability of marriageable partners, and exposure to conventional role models (the quote is from Wilson's book, The Truly Disadvantage)."

According to Wilson, as a consequence, poor ghetto neighborhoods have become increasingly characterized by inner-city joblessness, teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, female-headed families, welfare dependency, serious crime and feelings of low self-efficacy.

This is the social context that far too many black and brown children are growing up in (Kansas City, Newark, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Flint, Hartford, Bridgeport, Charlotte, Memphis, Little Rock, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Liberty City, and on, and on, and on).

James Coleman got it right back in 1966: the social context in which an education takes place matters.

Our children are being set up to fail. It should come as no surprise to any of us when they do.

This Ain’t No Spectator Sport: Black Scholars Fighting For Social and Racial Justice In The Age of Obama

When it comes to discussing my political views or advocating for what I care for, most people who know me know that I do not pull many punches. Over the years, as my understanding of and thinking about racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, materialism, economic exploitation, militarism, violence and various other systems of oppression deepens, I've intensified my activism and become more strident in my critiques.

Indeed, I believe that raising one's voice in opposition to injustices is a moral obligation that falls upon all of us, especially black scholars such as me.

Black scholars occupy a unique position in American society. Freed from the oppressive labor conditions most black people have experienced throughout our presence in America, whether it be the slave plantations and kitchens of white people or the steel factories and manufacturing plants of the North, for those of us privileged to work in the academy – an arena that allows us to teach, intellectualize, and write – we have a special obligation to not sit on the sidelines.

Of course, not everyone in the academy shares my belief about the black scholar's moral obligation or the necessity of struggling against injustices. Instead, most black scholars situated in the academy are spectators; they sit on the sidelines like fans at a football game, cheering for their favorite team and booing the other.

But, W.E.B. Dubois did not sit on the sidelines. Neither did Alain Locke or Mary McLeod Bethune. And neither did other scholar/educator/activists such as Benjamin Mays, Carter G. Woodson, Katherine Dunham, Vivian Harsh, Harold Cruise, and John Hope Franklin.

It is on their shoulders that WE all stand.

While I believe it is necessary, being an agent for social change is not easy. Struggling against a perceived injustice was much easier when we faced an enemy that we could easily identify. During the 1950s and 1960s, Jim Crow segregation was an easy target for black scholars and civil rights activists to organize and fight against.

Even then, there was never complete unanimity around the type of tactics and strategies to be used to topple America's apartheid system. Some preferred to fight oppression in the streets using direct action while others preferred to fight it out in the courts.

By the late 1960s, as the movement spread to the urban ghettos of the North, roused by revolutionary struggles in Africa and Asia, some preferred an armed struggle while others preferred to attack white supremacy and alleged black inferiority through the embrace of African culture, history, and philosophy.

Many black scholars were at the center of it all.

America has changed significantly over the past 40 years. Racism has become more subtle even as racial inequality deepens in many areas of American life. Many black scholars have retreated to the sidelines.

A particularly difficult question for black scholars today is, 'how do we fight for social and racial justice today when a man of color occupies the White House?"

As a black scholar, one of the most difficult conversations for me to have and not feel like I'm being viewed as a traitor to the race is about the policies of President Barack Obama.

Compared to other racial and ethnic groups in America, black people are pretty satisfied with the direction of the country under President Obama.

According to a Gallup poll survey conducted in October, nearly half (47 percent) of blacks say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country, as does 51 percent of black Democrats.

By comparison, 10 percent of Republicans, 22 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 38 percent of white Democrats, and 41 percent of all Democrats are satisfied with the direction of the United States.

It is abundantly clear that black people love President Obama. Most black scholars refuse to criticize his policies, I believe, out of respect and love for the President and an earnest desire to protect him against white angst fueled by racism. I also believe that many of us fear being labeled traitors to our race for criticizing the President.

I believe that this is a foolish position to take for black scholars. We must not evade our responsibility to "speak truth to power" no matter what the hue of the president of the nation.

The war in Afghanistan is a perfect example of why loyalty to the President, no matter what he does, can be dangerous.

After nearly a year of escalating the war in Afghanistan and his words from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech explaining why he did it, it is clear that President Obama – picking up from his predecessors in the White House – has become the Chief Purveyor of American Violence in the world.

I was born in 1966. Every decade of my life, the United States has been at war with someone. No matter who occupies the White House (Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama), their justification for war is always the same: like President Obama, they argue that the only way to protect America and spread democracy and freedom is through massive doses of violence.

As I reflected on Obama's Nobel Prize speech, I thought about the words Dr. Martin Luther King spoke during his famous Riverside Church speech in opposition to the Vietnam War: "Somehow this madness must cease?"

Unfortunately, because of America's historical appetite for war and the nation's seemingly insatiable desire for revenge against those who attacked us on 9/11, peace may not be a match for the war madness. Perhaps Dr. King was right when he said at Riverside: "The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve."

Whether the issue is Afghanistan, shrinking health care reform, or the bailout of fat cats on Wall Street, as black scholars, we must not hide from our obligation to speak the truth to power out of racial loyalty or for fear of the potential stigma of being labeled race traitors because of our objections to the President's policies. Indeed, with a person of color in the White House, our voices are needed now, perhaps, more than ever.