Year: 2010

State Policy Implications of the Model Core Teaching Standards

State Policy Implications of the Model Core Teaching Standards

Reading Time: < 1 minute

[box class=”grey_box”]By Deanna Hill, Circe Stumbo, Kathleen Paliokas, Deb Hansen, and Peter McWalters. This draft discussion document was written on behalf of CCSSO’s Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) as a companion document to Model Core Teaching Standards: A Resource for State Dialogue. Disseminated at CCSSO’s 2010 Summer Institute, it was written to assist the organization’s influential network of chief state school officers and the education community as they make decisions about standards adoption and implementation.[/box]


Library image (cc) Marco Antonio Torres

The Meaning of Memorial Day

The Meaning of Memorial Day

Reading Time: 3 minutes

“What is Memorial Day for, Mom?”  This was the question from my 9-year-old son as we sat at the dinner table on the night before the holiday  His 6-year-old brother cocked his head at me, eyes wide, waiting for “the answer.”  As I related to him what I had always been told (i.e., that it’s a day to remember the soldiers who died for our country), I realized that I didn’t know anything about the origin of the holiday or even which war prompted it.  Unsatisfied with my own knowledge, I did some quick research and uncovered something interesting but not surprising–a counterstory.

The majoritarian story credits General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Union Army’s veterans organization), for his 1868 call for all veterans and their communities to hold ceremonies and decorate the graves of soliders who had died in the Civil War.   This practice spread across the nation.  Thereafter, cities in both the north and south claimed the first Memorial Day, but none date back as far as what Yale historian David Blight discovered in his research.

According to Blight, Memorial Day was created by blacks, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, in Charleston, South Carolina.  As Blight tells us:

“Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.”

[Blight also reminds us that states in the south celebrate(d) Confederate Memorial Day: April 26 (the day General Joseph Johnston surrendered to General William T. Sherman) in many deep South states; May 10 (Stonewall Jackson’s birthday) in the Carolinas; and June 3 (Jefferson Davis’s birthday) in Virginia.]

I now have a counterstory to tell my sons–one that places people of color in the center.  And, I was reminded of a lesson I have learned and, for some reason, must keep relearning.  “All such stories … are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.”  Thank you, David Blight.

Read the full David Blight article here.

Read an interesting blog article on the topic here.

White Privilege Conference 2010

White Privilege Conference 2010

Reading Time: 4 minutes
White Privilege Conference 2010
On April 7-11 the eleventh annual White Privilege Conference (WPC 11) was held in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.  I had my first opportunity to join with over 1700 people from across the nation and participate in a learning community in which participants engaged in a challenging educational experience to understand whiteness, privilege, power and oppression.  As the organizers clearly pointed out, each participant comes to the WPC in a different place with regard to their journey toward this understanding and each participant is asked to share responsibility for holding one another accountable to allow for a shared experience that fosters the opportunity for understanding, respecting and connecting.  The theme for WPC 11 was to focus on Health Inequities:  Strategies. Action. Liberation.  With some 140 workshops and Institutes lead by some of the nation’s premier scholars, researchers, teachers and advocates, 15 film screenings by outstanding film makers  and 5 keynote addresses, this was the most comprehensive professional development experience and celebration of its kind.
Embedded within and conducted throughout was year three of the WPC Youth Leadership Conference which paired youth participants and adult facilitators in an innovative program to explore the issues of white privilege, white supremacy and oppression.  The creative format, using best practices in youth engagement, featured interactive dialogue techniques from theater of the oppressed, sacred talking circles, open space caucuses and affinity groups.  The ideas and understandings born of these interactions were then shared with the adult conference using a range of performing arts based methods.  I am continually amazed at how resonant the issues power, oppression and privilege are with our youth and their ability to make meaning of the presence and impact of these forces in their everyday lived experiences in transformative ways.
Circe and I had the honor of presenting our workshop, “Us” and “Not Us”:  “Othering” in Education Policy and Practices, twice during the 4-day event.  Along with the close to 50 workshop participants, we set out to establish through examining language, text, images and lived experiences in historical and contemporary contexts, that “othering” is and has been central to the domination and oppression of people of color in the United States.  The process of establishing whiteness as normal and non-whiteness as deviant is essential and endemic to those systems (financial, legal, educational, political and social) structured to establish and sustain the nation’s way of life and is one way in which we perpetuate systemic racism.  We investigated how educational policy and practice work to establish whiteness as the norm and positions students of color in homogenous groups hindered by deviation from that norm, “othering” students of color, and collaborated with participants to reveal  forms of “othering” and ways to work against extending this practice.
Being a part of this community of thinkers, learners and doers with indomitable wills to recognize, understand and call out white privilege for the continued establishment of the beloved community is central to the mission of West Wind Education Policy Inc.

On April 7-11 the eleventh annual White Privilege Conference (WPC 11) was held in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.  I had my first opportunity to join with over 1700 people from across the nation and participate in a learning community in which participants engaged in a challenging educational experience to understand whiteness, privilege, power and oppression.  As the organizers clearly pointed out, each participant comes to the WPC in a different place with regard to their journey toward this understanding and each participant is asked to share responsibility for holding one another accountable to allow for a shared experience that fosters the opportunity for understanding, respecting and connecting.  With some 140 workshops and Institutes lead by some of the nation’s premier scholars, researchers, teachers and advocates, 15 film screenings by outstanding film makers  and 5 keynote addresses, this was the most comprehensive professional development experience and celebration of its kind.

West Wind had the honor of presenting our workshop, “Us” and “Not Us”:  “Othering” in Education Policy and Practices, twice during the 4-day event.  Along with the close to 50 workshop participants, we set out to establish through examining language, text, images and lived experiences in historical and contemporary contexts, that “othering” is and has been central to the domination and oppression of people of color in the United States.  The process of establishing whiteness as normal and non-whiteness as deviant is essential and endemic to those systems (financial, legal, educational, political and social) structured to establish and sustain the nation’s way of life and is one way in which we perpetuate systemic racism.  We investigated how educational policy and practice work to establish whiteness as the norm and positions students of color in homogenous groups hindered by deviation from that norm, “othering” students of color, and collaborated with participants to reveal  forms of “othering” and ways to work against extending this practice.

Also embedded within and conducted throughout the conference was year three of the WPC Youth Leadership Conference, which paired youth participants and adult facilitators in an innovative program to explore the issues of oppression and white privilege.  The creative format, using best practices in youth engagement, featured interactive dialogue techniques from theater of the oppressed, sacred talking circles, open space caucuses and affinity groups.  The ideas and understandings born of these interactions were then shared with the adult conference using a range of performing arts based methods.  I am continually amazed at how resonant the issues power, oppression and privilege are with our youth and their ability to make meaning of the presence and impact of these forces in their everyday lived experiences in transformative ways.

Congratulations and thank you to the remarkable groups of people who organized, supported and made WPC 11 possible!  We look forward to continuing to be a part of this community of thinkers, learners and doers with indomitable wills to recognize, understand and call out white privilege for the continued establishment of the beloved community.

Imagine

Imagine

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Tim Wise’s latest blog post titled “Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of White Privilege” asks readers to play a game in which they imagine the public reaction to current events if the main actors were not white but black folks or other people of color.  At first glance, the set up felt a little hokey to me.  It reminded me a bit of Matthew McConaughey’s character’s strategy in the movie “A Time to Kill”–to get the white jury to imagine the young black girl’s suffering…and then to imagine she was white.  However, I have to admit that the game–like the jury argument–was pretty powerful.

For example, Wise invites us to (and I quote):

  • “Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters–the black protesters–spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government. Would these protesters–these black protesters with guns–be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.
  • Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry, screaming, black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.
  • Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”

Wise concludes that “Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it.”  He goes on to say that is what white privilege is all about:  “The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.”

Wise ends his post with “Game over.”  Yet, the game was on for one commenter who chose to challenge Wise point-by-point.  In the commenter’s mind:

  • The group of gun-toting protesters was representative of the country’s demographics (predominantly white), the protest was not “restrictively” white, and there must have been some black participants, thus…not white privilege.
  • The video Tim posted did not show anyone spitting on members of Congress (no “hard” evidence) and the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a Tea Partier, thus…not white privilege.
  • People criticized George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Sarah Palin’s daughter, thus…not white privilege.

This, I suggest, is also what white privilege is all about.  It’s the ability to deny the significance of race, to narrowly define racism so as to exclude all but the most extreme (think KKK), to point to black participation as legitimizing/de-racializing, and to disregard this nation’s racist past as irrelevant to its present.

Perhaps we should play Wise’s game for real (but in our own context on issues that we care about) and see how the public responds.  I’d be willing to bet the prototypical (white) American won’t be thinking about black folks’ constitutional rights…and no one will be calling us patriotic.  Rather than game over, I say game on.  Imagine that!

You can find Wise’s post at www.timwise.org, but you will have to click on Blog (At Red Room) to find it.

An Equity Lens for ESEA Reauthorization

An Equity Lens for ESEA Reauthorization

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Recently, bi-partisan leadership in the U.S. Congress invited suggestions for the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  In our comments, West Wind urged Congress to pay explicit attention to equity not only as an over-arching goal of reauthorization, but as a frame for reviewing each and every provision.

Our experiences over the past twenty years suggest that without such explicit attention, we simply will not achieve equitable results.  For decades we have worked on standards, assessments, and data systems and we have been tracking inequities.  But our responses have been limited at best.

For example, in response to demonstrated “gaps” in reading achievement by race, we focused explicit attention on reading while we systematically avoided addressing underlying issues of race.  And, even in the cases where the rising tide of improved student achievement did lift all boats state- or region-wide, it did not decrease racial disparities.

We believe must study and disrupt the underlying causes of the patterns of disparities we are tracking. By examining ESEA through the lens of equity, we might just come up with strategies to finally achieve our vision of equitable outcomes.

Transforming Teaching and Leading: A Vision for a High Quality Educator Development System

Transforming Teaching and Leading: A Vision for a High Quality Educator Development System

Reading Time: < 1 minute

[box class=”grey_box”]By Deanna Hill, Judy Jeffrey, Peter McWalters, Kathleen Paliokas, Alice Seagren, and Circe Stumbo. This white paper outlines the agenda of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) to identify critical design elements of a high quality educator development system and to provide states with a tool to identify work to be done in each element. It articulates a vision for teaching and leading as part of a broader vision for transforming the public education system toward excellence and equity.[/box]


Library image (cc) Allegra

Race Neutrality in the Obama Era

Race Neutrality in the Obama Era

Reading Time: < 1 minute

A recent story in the L.A. Times titled “Despite pressure from black activists, black support for Obama’s race-neutral stance is high” suggests that “average black folks” buy into Obama’s stance/strategy that a rising tide will lift African American boats.  Without taking issue with Washington on whether the black folks he interviewed in Charlotte, NC are “average,” I find  it hard to believe that whether black folks buy into a revised version of trickle-down economics is really the issue.  We have long been told (and politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have proven) that a black politician with an overtly black agenda is not acceptable to white America.  Thus, we understand that a race-conscious stance/strategy would be political suicide for Obama.  That said, I do not believe Obama’s stance is entirely race-neutral.  Rather, Obama is focusing on issues that are critical to eliminating racial disparities–issues like universal health care and quality education.  Further, he is doing so with the express intent to benefit all. Perhaps if we recognized that eliminating racial disparities is in the best interest of all of our citizens–and in the best interest of our democracy–our first African American president could be more explicit.  Until then, we may have to settle for a black president who has to couch his strategies in terms of interests the white power structure believes are theirs alone.  And, in doing so, we might actually see some change we can all believe in.

Common Core Standards:  Hegemony and Racial Equity

Common Core Standards: Hegemony and Racial Equity

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The current effort to establish common core standards for college and career readiness for the nation’s public schools seems to suggest that the central need for reform in U.S. schools is to establish fewer, clearer, higher standards for what children should know and be able to do. That to do so will better prepare our children to compete in a global economy.  That such, combined with appropriately aligned assessment and instruction, would serve to raise the performance of schools, effectiveness of teaching, achievement of students, and the stature of the nation globally. Such conjecture, after decades of states and schools failing to prepare significant groups of students to be competitive in our own national economy, echo the dominant claims of meritocracy, race neutrality, objectivity and color-blindness of which we all should justly be skeptical. We needn’t be reminded that these failures are most prominent with our students of color.  Eliminating the racial disparities in the experience of students of color in our public schools has been and remains the country’s central challenge for school reform.

Nationally, in 2005 only 52 percent of Hispanic, 56 percent of African-American, and 57 percent of Native-American students graduated on time, compared to 78 percent of white students (Greene & Winters, 2002, 2005). Consider that only 47% of African American males graduated on time in 2006. Moreover, 42 of the 50 states have graduation rates for African American males below 70%. 35 of the 50 have rates below 60%, and 17 of the 50 states have graduation rates for these students below 50% (Schott Foundation, 2008).

Race has been a salient aspect of life in the Unites States since its very beginnings. As a standard in the robbery and annihilation of its indigenous peoples and as a concept to buttress the values, beliefs and practices to transport, enslave, and oppress another, racism is endemic to our nation’s institutions, public and private, not the least of these being our system of public education. As we now embark upon yet another movement to set standards, and I am bound to ponder how and why our nation’s educational leaders would again ignore the historical and contemporary context in which we undertake such an initiative. To convene, outline a process for, and develop standards, standards that do not recognize nor address race, culture or difference, standards developed it seems as if we – in the year 2010 no less – “took for granted that white supremacy had to be maintained” (Bond, 1935), is indeed a standard demonstration of the structural, systemic racism that plagues our global integrity and competiveness. It should not go without also mentioning that the performance of the very majoritarian targets (colleges and careers) we believe all our students should be ready for is and has been poor, at best, when it comes to enrolling, graduating and employing students and workers of color.

The effort to establish common core standards, construct multiple measures and design individualized instruction for a nation of such racially, culturally, linguistically and experientially diverse students and to NOT recognize, address nor even consider such plurality, should hardly be expected to bring about real and meaningful transformation of our education system to benefit all students. Race, ethnicity and language are central to what every person lives in our nation.  39 states, California, New York, Montana, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Tennessee and Washington among them, have funding, committees, standards and curricula requirements or other legal mandates to recognize, address and include the culture, heritage and contributions of our indigenous peoples (Native American Rights Fund, 2005).  The extraordinarily diverse population of our country and thus our schools would seemingly have to be a central consideration in the development of core standards.  The very thought that the development of common core standards has proceeded without deep, substatntive deliberations of race, culture, or differences raises question about our ideals.

So what is to be made of this current movement of standards adorned with politics, research, evidence-based and best practice? Perhaps we should consider the following wise admonition:

“Is the standards movement a quality control movement, as it is advertised, or is it a decoy for something else? We have been here before, with the standards movement. In fact, we reach a standards movement almost every three or four years. Some governor wants to manipulate the test score requirements or get a new test. Some president wants to manipulate test score requirements or get a new test. Somebody wants to change the standards of education, presumably as a way of raising the quality of schools and schooling and the achievement of children. I say presumably because I don’t think that I can remember a time when that was really the reason for having a standards movement. If you want to raise quality, then standards manipulation is probably the last place that you would start…..
I don’t care whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican who calls for it. Usually, when people put so much emphasis on standards as a school reform tool, it means that they want to look like they’re performing a reform effort, but they’re actually moonwalking. They look like they’re going forward but they’re going backwards” (Hilliard, 1997).

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