Education Week - December 9, 2015 - 21

college-prep curriculum available for black children who
wanted to pursue higher education. Du Bois wrote that
the federally promoted plan would "deliberately shut the
door of opportunity in the face of bright Negro students."
Jones, of course, was hardly the only progressive intellectual at the time to advocate a vocational-only
education for African-Americans. Other prominent progressives who did so include Walter Hines Page, Ray
Stannard Baker, President Theodore Roosevelt, and John
Dewey. In Schools of Tomorrow (1915), Dewey and his
daughter Evelyn depicted an all-African-American vocational school in Indianapolis in which young people had
an almost entirely nonacademic curriculum. The Deweys
contended that such an education was appropriate for
children from African-American and immigrant households.
The federal report was the culmination of a war over
black education that had gone on since Union troops
began occupying the South during the Civil War. On
one side were the proponents of academic education for
eligible blacks, who included Howard University's Dean
Kelly Miller and Du Bois among African-Americans; and
Northern missionaries and neo-abolitionists (like Moorfield Storey, the first national president of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
among whites. The opposite, pro-vocational side included
Booker T. Washington among blacks; and Southern industrialists, progressive policy intellectuals like Jones,
and progressive philanthropies like the Phelps-Stokes
Fund among whites.
The progressives sought to impose a program of only
vocational education on virtually all blacks. These progressives, in the words of academics-advocate Kelly
Miller, thought "that every Negro ... should be taught a
hand trade." As Du Bois saw it, "the emphasis ... has to do

The progressives
sought to impose a
program of only
vocational education
on virtually all
blacks."

PAGE 23 >

Alex Brandon/AP-File

WILLIAMSON M. EVERS is a research fellow at Stanford
University's Hoover Institution. He was an assistant U.S. secretary
of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development from
2007 to 2009, during the George W. Bush administration.

firmative act of discrimination. It also says a
lot about the person wearing it, displaying it,
and defending it. It's hard to understand that
treating people respectfully means defending
the slur you wear or allowing it to be worn
on teachers' and students' chests. It's hard to
believe the school district is benchmarking its
actions against those of other districts when
a school in neighboring suburban Virginia
reacted immediately with education, counseling, and policies to ensure that an incident in
which students were photographed wearing
the N-word at school and sharing it on social
media didn't occur again. (Unsurprisingly, a
local network-affiliated news program, when
broadcasting the story, blurred the word on the
students' shirts.) Were it any other slur, would
the school board not react immediately? Given
the amount of money that the Washington NFL
team pours into public relations and community outreach, it strikes me that the issue of
educational civil rights has become a political
football for the school district.
In the Washington region, the Bureau of In-

dian Affairs, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, tribal lobby
offices, and tribal law firms all employ a steady
number of Native Americans who leave their
tribal homes and uproot their families to serve
their communities and their two nations-their
tribe and the United States government. Native American student enrollment in the Montgomery County schools is around 280 students.
The fact that we are a minority among minorities in the region is not an excuse for ignoring
our children's rights to an education environment free of racist imagery and discrimination.
Of the Native Americans I know in Washington, there are Ojibwe, Navajo, Choctaw, Apache,
Cherokee, Passamaquoddy, and Mohawk,
among many others. There are no Redskins. n
JARED HAUTAMAKI is a federal-agency attorney and a
former legislative staff aide to U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr.,
D-Mich. He is an enrolled tribal member of the Sault Ste.
Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians from Michigan's Upper
Peninsula.

The Essence of
Wrongheaded School 'Reform'

By Michael Mulgrew

o area of human effort
is free from bad ideas
and mistaken theories, but the quest to
"reform" public education is particularly
awash in misguided
convictions. Concepts
like "merit pay," the scapegoating of teachers, and the alleged superiority of charter
schools manage to stay alive as policy options despite clear proof that they don't
work.
Merit pay for teachers. Judging teachers' merit-and pay-based on their students' test scores is a particularly meritless
notion that resurfaces regularly. A threeyear experiment by the National Center
on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt
University spent more than $1.7 million to
give bonuses to selected teachers in Nashville, Tenn., schools, and found, overall, that
students of teachers who didn't get
the money performed as well as students of teachers who did.
A similar three-year program in New York City-a
beloved initiative of former
Mayor Michael Bloomberg-spent $56 million
in group bonuses, but was
halted in 2011, after outside
researchers found that it had
had no effect on student performance. Texas dropped its meritpay program in 2013.
Since no one becomes a teacher
to get rich, it would be logical to
assume that educators would not
be strongly motivated by a financial
incentive. But people for whom money is
the ultimate reward-a description that
fits much of the Wall Street/hedge fund
"school reform" crowd-just won't believe
the truth, even when it is before their eyes.
Scapegoating teachers for schools'
poor performance. It is an axiom of
the reform movement that teachers are
to blame when a school is struggling, and
that it is vital to get rid of a stubborn cadre
of veteran instructors who can't be fired
and won't leave. New York state has enshrined this notion in its policy requiring
that all staff members of a group of "out of
time" schools-the state education department's designation for persistently lowperforming schools-be interviewed with
an eye toward pushing out the "unwilling
or ineffective."
But the United Federation of Teachers,
which I lead, looked at personnel records
for this group of struggling schools and
found that the problem was exactly the opposite. Hundreds of teachers-two-thirds
of these schools' total instructional force-
had fled the schools at the first opportunity. Of the more than 900 teachers who
headed for the exits from 2010 to 2015,
nearly half went to other public schools in
the city, looking for better teaching conditions and more-effective leadership. The
balance went to schools outside the city,
left teaching entirely, or retired.
One school had only about 20 percent of
its first complement left after five years.
Another had only two veterans among its
40 teachers; except for them, the entire

staff had turned over not once, but twice in
the last five years.
The irrepressible fictions of the
charter movement. No myth in the modern school reform narrative is more pervasive than the idea that charter schools
have somehow solved the riddle of public
schools and poor children.
The truth: Charters nationwide do not
have significantly better test scores than
public schools with similar populations.
Charters in New York City-now 10
percent of the school population, thanks
to Mayor Bloomberg's devotion to their
cause-overall score below the citywide
average in reading.
New York City charters begin by "creaming" the parents, appealing to a self-selected group with sufficient motivation to
search out the charters and enter their
school lotteries. (In doing so, they have effectively undermined the Catholic schools
in many poor neighborhoods,
which have targeted the
same families.)
In addition to this initial advantage, the more
"successful" a charter
school, the more likely it
can be found to employ
some or all of the followGetty
ing tactics:
* Enrolling significantly
fewer of the highest-need students than neighborhood public
schools, including the homeless,
English-language learners, and
those with the most serious physical and learning disabilities.
* Encouraging struggling students
to leave. A recent New York Times investigation found that one Success Academy charter school in Brooklyn had a "got
to go" list of students the principal was determined to get rid of; what's more, as such
students leave-by expulsion, counseling
out as bad "fits," or because the family is
moving-some charters refuse to admit
new children to replace them, a strategy
that keeps scores up.
* Adjusting the definition of "poor." While
charter students tend to be poor, a close
analysis reveals that in many successful
charters a significant percentage of students are significantly less poor than the
local average. Given the importance of family income in determining test scores, this
gives them a marked statistical advantage
over their peers in standardized testing.
More than 70 percent of the public school
students in New York City are poor under
federal guidelines. Tens of thousands of
them are reading and doing math at levels equal to or exceeding those in charter schools. The only secret that charter
schools seem to have discovered is how to
charm the wealthy and well-connected,
and how to promote themselves to people
who would rather embrace the myth than
carefully weigh the facts. n
MICHAEL MULGREW is the president of the United
Federation of Teachers, which represents 200,000
teachers, paraprofessionals, school secretaries, and
other professional staff members in New York City
public schools, along with home day-care providers,
nurses, adult education instructors, and retirees. He
spent 12 years as a classroom teacher at William E.
Grady High School, in Brooklyn.

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Education Week - December 9, 2015

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