Justice Matters' First Washington DC Convening is a Great Success!

Washington DC: Stella reports on convening that engaged parents and educational professionals from around the country

On June 15^th, Justice Matters' “Voices on the Ground: Connecting parents, students and activists to national education policy” brought together parents of color, community organizers and policy analysts to critically discuss the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA) also known as No Child Left Behind. The event was hosted at the National Education Association offices.

From the morning panel, to the work group meeting and finally at our Justice Matters’ Happy Hour at the local DC Busboys & Poets Café, community activists, policy professionals, parents and other education professionals met, networked, formed new relationships and strengthened old ones.

Community organizers, parents, policy analysts, and teachers came from around the country to participate: Chicago, Illinois; Jackson, Mississippi; New York, NY; West Contra Costa County, CA; Washington DC; and Cambridge, MA.

One distinct message came through loud and clear: in order for public schools to become healthy, strong centers for all students we must connect community voice and racial justice to education policy and politics.

The DC convening was a first step in filling a huge void – the need for parents of color, policy analysts, and community organizers to come together and build a consensus on what our students need.

So stay tuned for more opportunities to work together in making racial justice and community engagement a reality in education policy.


And be sure to download a copy of our latest policy brief, Racial Justice and the Obama Administration’s Education Agenda on our blog that was presented at the DC convening. We welcome comments, ideas and thoughts on all our posts.

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Download Our New Working Paper: "Racial Justice and the Obama Administration's Education Agenda"

With federal reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) approaching, Justice Matters employs a racial justice lens to evaluate the Obama Administration's public education agenda. The administration's plans, as demonstrated in A Blueprint for Reform, the 2011 fiscal year budget, and the Race to the Top initiative, maintain and even bolster some of the problematic elements in the current legislation, widely known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In Racial Justice and the Obama Administration's Education Agenda, Justice Matters examines how students of color will fare under the values and principles guiding the plans for reform. We take an in-depth look at approaches to parent and community engagement proposed by the administration and conclude with an outline for an alternative racial justice strategy.


Download the full paper at http://justicematters.org/jmi_sec/jmi_spub/publications.html

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Public Education as a Civil Right: Reauthorization Must Reflect ESEA's Original Purpose

Jack’s op-ed carried by the California Progress Report uncovers the original intent of ESEA/NCLB as enacted in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and suggests that legacy be lived up to during the reauthorization process:

With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) getting underway on Capitol Hill, a meaningful anniversary will pass unobserved in Washington. Forty-five years ago this Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson signed the act, rebranded by the Bush Administration as No Child Left Behind, into law. With the stroke of a pen, the federal government’s role in public education was revolutionized, placing emphasis on ensuring educational opportunity in low-income communities.

A Revolution in Education

The law came as a critical step in the Great Society legislation package designed to fight poverty and racism. For Johnson, who was trained as a schoolteacher and had taught in a poor Latino community in Texas, ESEA held as much potential for fighting racial injustice as the Civil Rights Act passed the previous year. With the federal government mandating desegregation, education commissioner Francis Keppel designed ESEA to ensure students of color were not just seated in classrooms, but that they also received a high quality education and had the real opportunity to continue to college.

In the decade following its inception, ESEA played an instrumental role in the desegregation process. Through Title I, the portion of the law providing funding for schools with large populations of low-income students, the Department of Education gave districts a strong incentive to follow through with desegregation promises. If they didn’t, they would miss out on federal dollars. At the same time, the policy also guaranteed resources for struggling schools when states and districts failed them, providing an essential boost for schools serving communities of color that had been neglected for years.

Legacy Lost?

Since becoming law, ESEA has been reauthorized by Congress about every five years. This process allows for policy modifications and improvements, as seen by the addition of funding provisions for English language learners and massive investments in educational innovation.

However, promises made during the reauthorization process have often fallen flat. For instance, in 2002 George W. Bush promised substantial increases in Title I funding for low-income schools. The money never materialized and to date the fund remains discretionary and not mandatory, leaving it susceptible to political horse-trading in the budget process.

With reauthorization three years overdue, the Obama Administration released its blueprint for education reform last month, outlining a model of improvement through increased competition and accountability. Federal spending on competitive grants is to be increased by $3 billion while the amount for formula grants, that is guaranteed money for struggling schools in poor communities, will be slightly reduced.

Title I funds, the federal government’s main tool for achieving equality in educational opportunity, will remain stagnant. With the four intervention models mandated for the nation’s lowest performing schools highly punitive, Title I schools should be given as many resources as possible to avoid becoming worst case scenarios.

Pitfalls and Potentials

In the race to win federal funding, the strongest competitors among states and school districts are those who can best demonstrate their proposed reforms will yield real results for their students. It stands to reason that those who can invest the most money and manpower into their proposals will have the best shot.

If states or districts are strapped for such resources or even if they are simply administered poorly, it seems logical that they will struggle to be competitive. In this way, schools that serve poor communities of color may end up at an automatic disadvantage when vying for federal money. The Department of Education must take this fact into account when it is evaluating funding applications or the strategy will simply intensify inequalities.

Over the year, Congress will set to work reauthorizing ESEA. Reauthorization necessarily involves the classic dance of interest politics – unleashing lobbyists and activists armed with slogans and statistics. In the midst of the clamor, it’s possible to be sidetrack and lose touch with what the legislation was actually intended to do: guarantee quality public education for poor students and students of color. Given its civil rights legacy, that goal is the heart and soul of this law and it must be boldly reaffirmed.

                                                                           

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Meaningful Parent Involvement Measures Missing from Obama's Blueprint

Jack's op-ed carried by New America Media responds to the Administration's plans (or lack thereof) to reform the school-parent relationship in K-12 education:

When then-Sen. Barack Obama was campaigning in Chicago in June 2008, he chided black fathers for not taking an active interest in their children’s lives. “Yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more afterschool programs for our children,” he told a church congregation. “But we also need families to raise our children.”

Whether he was speaking the truth or talking down to families of color, it seemed clear that candidate Obama passionately believed that parents should play a critical role in a child’s success. On this at least, he was right. Study after study has confirmed that parent involvement—from helping with homework to volunteering–helps students succeed in school.

Rhetoric vs. Reality

Yet Obama’s fiery campaign rhetoric is vastly different from the president’s new plans for public education reform when it comes to parent engagement. Last month, the federal Department of Education released its proposal for renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known as No Child Left Behind. It proposes changes to teacher accountability, student evaluation and school administration, but says virtually nothing about engaging parents.

In fact, the president’s 2011 fiscal year budget actually eliminates funding for the 62 Parent Information and Resources Centers that have coordinated parent involvement programs across the country for the past eight years. Instead, the proposal would expand two initiatives—Promise Neighborhoods and 21st Century Learning Centers—with $1.4 billion.

But those initiatives do not specifically focus on parent involvement. The bulk of that money will go to competitive grants that can be won by states, school districts, and community-based organizations that establish a wide variety of programming to improve student achievement and expand the school day. Engaging parents in such programs is suggested, but not explicitly required.

No Guaranteed Support

More money for community-oriented programs might be good thing. However, with such funding taking the form of competitive grants, there’s no guarantee that schools serving poor students and communities of color will get the special resources they need to implement effective parent involvement strategies.

For example, some parents feel intimated by the background checks and fingerprinting process required by many volunteering programs. Other parents have difficulty communicating with teachers and counselors when no interpreters are available. But there’s no proposal on the table to require states and school districts to knock down such bureaucratic barriers or to encourage parent participation in school decision-making processes.

Perhaps education officials think that federal involvement in matters of parental engagement has been so ineffective in the past that it’s not worth trying again.  To some extent, they’re right. Parent involvement policies have been both poorly funded and inconsistently implemented. The administration’s proposals don’t address these shortcomings. Instead, they would introduce third party organizations into the relationship between schools and parents, complicating not simplifying it.

Parents as a Solution

Robust parental involvement also aids in the other issues of concern for education reform. It could help hold teachers and administrators accountable, improving the effectiveness of their work and student outcomes. If parents are well informed and involved, they could tell when a school is struggling and help to turn it around before worst-case scenarios unfold. Greater parent involvement means more hands to help when faculties are overwhelmed. As Howard Blume reports in The Los Angeles Times, the faculty-run Jefferson High School in South L.A. recently established policies that involve parents in discipline matters and allow them to sit-in on classes. The school is still struggling, but it’s beginning to see results.

Active parents are the missing factors in the public education equation. Their involvement should be an active right and not a passive privilege. Parents and families can reinforce what’s learned in the classroom and bring a wealth of knowledge into the school community.

With the administration making federal funding competitive to foster innovation, why not reward states and districts that make groundbreaking efforts to engage and include parents? After all, if parents want to do their part to ensure their children’s success then, as candidate Obama said in Chicago almost two years ago, “our government should meet them halfway.”

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Washington D.C.: JM's Recommendations to the House Committee on Education & Labor

Dear Chairman Miller, Ranking Member Kline and Members of the Committee on Education and Labor:

Justice Matters appreciates the opportunity to respond to the committee’s request for comments on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  The reauthorization process and outcome offer an historic opportunity to rethink the nation’s approach to public education, reclaim the purpose of the ESEA as a tool to ensure the rights of students persistently disserved by our nation’s public education system and rewrite the legislation to best meets those ends.

Justice Matters is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development, promotion and support of education policy rooted in community vision. We firmly believe that a transformed public education system must include racial justice for students of color; a growing yet consistently disenfranchised group in public education. Our analysis and recommendations will focus on identifying substantive means to meet these ends.

As the reauthorization of ESEA moves forward Justice Matters will judge and recommend policies based on the following core set of values:

• Commitment to the development of the full human and communal potential of all students, with a distinct commitment to students of color.
• Embracing what low-income students of color specifically bring to school – their culture, language, families and ways of being and knowing in the world. 
• Commitment to preparing low-income students of color for meaningful work, to care for their families emotionally and financially to participate in building a more just society.  

     A New Path

In the past the power of federal education policy has been neutralized in the face of entrenched disparities in resources and achievement between students of color and their white counterparts. We need a completely new approach.

Parent and Community Engagement

Bridging the divide between the schools serving students of color and the communities in which these students reside is crucial for the development and implementation of effective school, district and state policy. Parents, caregivers, community activists, and the like provide invaluable perspective and information on the unique issues their community’s children face and on more effective strategies to value their children’s experiences and promote their children’s potential. Normally, federal policy considers provision of services to parents; including literacy, child development, etc. We encourage the expansion of these important efforts. However, these policies must be partnered with meaningful ways to empower parents and community members and include them in the governance of their local schools.  Too often such attempts lack funding, specificity and rigor, resulting in ineffective programs. We can do better.

Neither the Obama Administration’s budget proposal nor its blueprint indicate a specific requirement for parent and community engagement in school governance. Moreover, all signs point to a rollback on current requirements for Parent Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs) , parental sign-off on district budget proposals and provisions of programming to build parent capacity for school involvement. These policies were never fully funded and lacked clarity in their mandate.

We recommend:      

• Explicitly outline a plan for parental and community engagement that results in a mandated infrastructure at the school, district and state level. The efforts should work to engage communities and parents with thought toward language and culture, disability and socio-economic status. This program could begin anew or work to expand, fully fund, strengthen and provide clarity to the existing PIRCs. We understand the current system is flawed, however, the need for meaningful parental and community engagement persists.
• Retain requirements for parents to sign-off on district budgets.
• Ensure parental and community involvement programs are fully funded. For example, PIRCs have not been fully funded.
• Provide incentives for schools and districts to partner with community-based organizations to develop and implement plans to empower parents and fully them and community members in school governance and school daily practices.
• Fully implement an accountability system to ensure that schools, districts and states comply with parent and community engagement funding requirements and participation guidelines. 

The Blueprint

As the Obama Administration’s Blueprint for Reform promises to guide subsequent discussions on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act we recommend that the following be taken into account in legislative discussions and policy development:

Provide greater flexibility in the means for school turnaround.  Schools at the bottom 5% often face a cross cutting set of complex issues. The solution for turning around such a school likely require strategies that reach beyond the four prescribed by the blueprint. Turnaround strategies should promote flexibility and encourage techniques that make student, teacher, parent and other community voices central in devising non-traditional and locally based strategies.

Explicit and substantive inclusion of parents in turnaround school decisions. Too often parents are the last to learn about plans for school closure, charter conversion, or major restructuring.  The blueprint indicates that the selected strategy should be locally decided, however, it is silent on which local voices must be included in the decision making process.

Rethink our approach to our most difficult schools. The blueprint promotes a model that advantages schools with greater means while disadvantaging schools with the greatest struggles, where many students of color are located. Although the more successful schools will find relief from punitive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) practices, and win the right to innovate. While for the lowest rung schools, the NCLB world will persist. Although the requirement will have changed from Adequate Yearly Progress to Career and College Readiness, and from achievement to growth, the pressure will persist to teach to the test.

Explicitly Address Push-out Forces in Schools. The startlingly high drop-out rate among students of color demonstrates a need for extraordinary effort in determining its cause and developing solutions. Current proposals, the blueprint and discussion have ignored the devastating contribution zero tolerance and other harsh disciplinary policies have made toward low graduation rates and conversely high incarceration rates among students of color. Study after study shows stunning racial disparities in how these policies are enforced. Collection of data indicated in the blueprint is a start. However, schools and districts should be forced to review their discipline policies and draw on healthier and more effective approaches to improve school climate.

Promote racial and ethnic diversity among teachers. The administration recognizes the importance of teachers in creating healthy learning environments. However, it has failed to recognize the importance of greater racial and ethnic diversity among them. Beyond racial and ethnic diversity, we must promote teachers recruited from the communities they will serve.

Greater requirements for equity. As written, the blueprint offers strong ideas on the need for greater resource yet the language is soft. ‘Over time’, districts will be required to ensure their high poverty schools receive equitable state and local funding. States will be ‘asked’ to develop a plan to tackle resource disparities. Resource equity is a central problem in public education. States and districts will require mandates and timetables to ensure success.

It may all come down to values.

What may be most troubling and most difficult to pinpoint and illustrate is the lack of core values in the blueprint and in education reform discussions thus far. We have lacked a national discussion of the core values upon which a transformed educational system should be based. In its place we’ve based reform almost entirely on economic necessity and dropped the civil rights legacy upon which the ESEA is based. We’ve infused competition into government funding ensuring that some students will end up losing the competitive grant game. Through No Child Left Behind we’ve learned of the glaring disparity between students of color and their white counterparts, yet we continue to explicitly recognize this reality and create public policy accordingly. We continue to place race neutral policy solutions on problems steeped in race. Until we can have these frank and open discussions we may be faced with revisiting these same issues on the next round of ESEA reauthorization.

Sincerely,

Justice Matters 

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Washington D.C. Dispatch: Ravitch on her NCLB change of heart, but where's the race analysis in the discussion?

Amina's on the ground take on Diane Ravitch, Carmel Martin, and others discussing the Education Secondary Elementary Act (ESEA) (but avoiding race) at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC:


Diane Ravitch, toast of the town among progressives, today presented her latest book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, to a capacity crowd at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington D.C. What brought the people? Likely her scathing critique of No Child Left Behind, this made all the more interesting and oddly legitimate since she was a former member of the Bush administration and vocal proponent of the legislation. Today Ravitch outright denounces the sanctions of NCLB and high stakes testing. She’s also taken on some popular Obama administration ideas particularly charter schools and privatization of public education.

The New Blueprint

In contrast to Ravitch, the EPI panel also included Carmel Martin. Martin, of the Department of Education, was described as a principal author of the administration’s newly minted ESEA blueprint. It’s interesting as she spoke about the blueprint I got a striking feeling that we were hearing a kitchen sink approach to education policy making; they’re really throwing a bit of everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. For progressives there are some pretty nasty ingredients in the mix, but they’re laced with something sweet to make them go down a little easier. Although they may have covered all their bases, and are doing a lot of “things”, the finished product misses the mark on creating a grand idea for truly transformative change.

Standardized testing will remain, but it’s based on student progress; an improvement maybe; yet it still doesn’t answer the problem of teaching to the test. For turnaround schools they offer some unproven and harsh methods; close them, convert them to charters, fire teachers and principals; but before you want to rip your hair out in frustration; they add a fourth option of intensive planning and professional development. How many districts will really use the fourth option? They’re strong arming states to remove charter school caps; we’d say that opens the floodgates to charter school creation and mass privatization of public schools; they say they haven’t mandated the creation of these schools, they just want to make sure they’re an option for districts.

A Sad Reality

Overall the event was great but tempered by a sad reality. Where’s the racial and ethnic diversity in the voices speaking on this issue? Where are the voices of the people on the ground? But this (from what I’ve seen thus far in the DC policy world), is nothing new. The problems in the schools persists despite all this highbrow conversation; maybe they’re missing something. In fact, an actual District of Columbia Schools social worker and parent addressed the crowd bringing all the high minded dialogue to eye level. We are teaching to the test, we have extreme needs that aren’t being met, the schools are in crisis, she lamented. In response, a panel member, offering all due respect of course, proceeded to dispel and temper her reality by pointing out that test scores in DC public schools have actually been improving and perhaps, things weren’t quite as bad as she’d perceived them. Perhaps this goes a long way in telling progressives what’s sadly lacking in the present day policy making mix in Washington DC.

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