Reclaiming Urban Education

...Your parents a better education than their parents...

...You a better education that your parents...

...This gap between what we need our city schools to do and what they are organized and funded to do is what produces the overwhelming perception of public school failure that conservatives manipulate to advance market mechanisms as solutions...

...But the transformation of our economy from a manufacturing base to a knowledge base—and the consequent demand for higher skills—makes it no longer possible, as it was in the 1950s, to drop out of school with an eighth grade education, land a job in industry, and advance to a reliable position with decent pay and lifetime benefits...

...Instead, they argued that urban schools had never effectively educated most of America's poor students and children of color, and the dismal academic outcomes in urban districts demonstrated that we didn't know how to educate the so-called minority students who were becoming majorities in most urban systems...

...The median years in school for all Americans has increased from 9.3 years in 1950 to 12.9 years in 1993...

...Why is it still so easy to believe the fallacious myth of a golden education past, in which we successfully educated all students, including huge numbers of working-class, immigrant, AfricanAmerican, and Latino children...

...For the better part of the last century, we accepted DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 49 URBAN EDUCATION such outcomes as both inevitable and fair...

...New York State's improvement regimen assumes that effective planning will help these poorly performing schools improve...

...If public school parents, members of nonprofit service providers and community organizations, education advocacy and school reform groups, and the city's unions could mobilize around an agenda of genuine school improvement, sufficient public will might emerge to provide the resources our schools need...

...One could begin by comparing the expenditure on school facilities between 19001950, in constant dollars, to the same expenditure between 1950-2000...

...Your children a better education than you...

...But why, in 1983 and across the following decade, was it so easy to believe that poor public schooling was ruining our economy...

...This redistribution of teacher resources could be accomplished solely by implementing salary increment incentives...

...If our schools were never as good as many of us mistakenly believe, they must still be made far better than they are now...

...Since New York State's governor has decided to appeal, we have an interim of perhaps two years before the state's highest court issues the definitive ruling about whether, and to what extent, the state's methods of providing resources to New York City schools must change...

...Therefore our public education system must do what it has never before attempted—end all tracking and educate all students to a universally high standard of academic achievement...

...The critical question is how best to improve the appallingly low levels of capacity, particularly teacher capacity, that plague most failing schools, by increasing the resources necessary to provide adequate opportunities to learn...

...In Table I, colleagues at the New York University Institute for Education and Social Policy divided the city's thirty-two community school districts into five groups based on the extent of student need, as measured by the Board of Education's student need index...

...Whether or not the health of our economy requires a continuously expanding supply of highly skilled labor, it's clear that the economic future for dropouts or even high school graduates is bleak...

...But another part of the abandonment of the city's public schools involves rising expectations for children's futures...

...This is the one area in which the perception of the deterioration of public education is accurate, for we have not provided the resources necessary to educate New York City's public schoolchildren for most of the past half century, and certainly not since the fiscal crisis of the mid-seventies...

...But most poor schools have no capacity to plan themselves out of failure...

...Students are held back in grade or denied graduation...

...Currently, fewer than 15 percent of New York City's public schoolchildren are white, and almost 30 percent of the city's ageeligible school population attend non-public schools...

...But whatever the contributions of radicals to delegitimating urban schooling, the conservative onslaught unleashed in the early years of Ronald Reagan's administration fundamentally challenged the basic premises of public education, by arguing that only marketplace solutions could produce quality schooling...

...A Nation at Risk's central argument was that because public schools were failing to produce the skills our economy and society needed, our dominance of the international economy was being threatened by the tigers of Asia and a re-invigorated Europe...

...Their teachers fail their certification exams at higher rates and receive lower average salaries than the teachers in the lower need districts...

...The abandonment of New York City schools by much of the middle class is, in part, a concomitant of the movement to the suburbs that began as white flight in the 1950s and has continued as a middle-class exodus ever since...

...More than a thousand nonprofit organizations provide multiple forms of assistance and support to New York City schools...

...A key influence was the publication and wide-scale dissemination of A Nation at Risk, a tocsin sounded by a special committee selected by Terrell Bell, Reagan's first secretary URBAN EDUCATION of education...

...Now that we have regained our economic hegemony, the foolishness of the argument that schooling effectiveness determines economic growth and capacity, rather than the reverse, has become apparent even to conservatives...

...Consider the following New York City data...

...In order to rebuild public will and restore our city schools so that they can effectively educate all our stu48 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 dents, it is necessary to look at why we have so demonized urban public education, and what we might do about it...

...But when groups assess the quality of their children's education, the progression ends...

...These early assaults on the core assumptions of traditional American curriculum content, instructional methods, and school organization did not assume that we had produced better outcomes for urban students in some golden past...

...These data define a stark pattern of teacher resource maldistribution...

...ANOTHER POSSIBILITY iS mobilizing those constituencies who still have a stake in good public schools...

...All the groups vote overwhelmingly that their grandparents got a better education than their great-grandparents, their parents got a better education than their grandparents, and their own education was better than their parents...

...Conservatives have turned this widespread discontent with urban education into a full-scale attack on what they call the public education monopoly, and they have made urban districts the focus of the struggle for the survival of American public education...

...Any lower level of expectation will doom too many students to such limited intellectual development that their life chances will be severely diminished...

...Our high school graduation rate has steadily increased for the past three decades, as has our college-going rate...

...American public education has never provided more than an eighth grade level of skills to most students in most urban systems...

...punishing schools for failure does not necessarily help them improve...

...It is no coincidence that poor children of color have replaced the children of the middle class in New York City's schools in the same period...

...The critical question is how to articulate those consequences and mobilize the public will necessary to improve our public schools...

...Those of us who believe that public schools are crucially linked to democratic politics and who are committed to make public schools effective for all children must constantly fight a dual battle—against the abandonment of public education to marketplace solutions and for the radical changes necessary to make public schools serve all students well...

...The New York State Regents' increasing reliance on performance outcomes has forced principals, district superintendents, and chancellors to sanction students and poorly performing schools...

...One answer is through legal challenge...

...Marketplace efforts to improve American public education have not done well in the past, and the evidence for any clear effects of vouchers in current experiments in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Florida is quite spotty...

...What forces have shaped this mistaken perception of the deterioration of public education...

...They have lower proportions of teachers who are licensed and experienced...

...The critical problem is not how best to sanction failing schools...

...Parental hopes and expectations, especially those of parents of color, have far transcended the city school system's capacity to educate their children for successful futures...

...They could provide the core instructional leadership, mentoring and coaching, and professional development that the other, less experienced teachers desperately need...

...Scholastic Aptitude Test scores declined during the 1960s and then leveled off, but the testtaking pool has expanded so enormously—and includes such a more diverse pool than the predominantly white, male, Protestant applicants of the 1950s—that the lower scores are easily explained by the breadth of the new takers...

...schools are identified as failures, forced to adopt a planning regimen, and may be closed if their failure persists...

...the schools and students that need high-quality teachers the most are least likely to receive them...

...NORM FRUCHTER directs New York University's Institute for Education and Social Policy...

...and David Berliner and Bruce Biddle's The Manufactured Crisis...

...The first stage of the lawsuit by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity against the State of New York, a suit arguing the state's obligation to provide increased opportunity to learn for the city's public schoolchildren, has been concluded...

...52 n DISSENT / Fall 2001...

...how many of those families might be mobilized to fight for a better education for their children...

...It is not hard to demonstrate that continuing to neglect our city schools will impose severe consequences in wages forgone, in safety net costs, and in continually escalating prison expenditures across the ensuing decades...

...Ronald Ferguson's research on student outcomes in Texas indicates that students of more qualified teachers produce higher test scores...

...Recent research suggests that the linkages between teacher quality and high-outcome student learning are quite direct...

...I would be surprised if the ratio difference were less than five to one in favor of the earlier period...

...The Wrong Way The struggles of New York City's poorly performing schools to improve the skills of their inexperienced teachers demonstrate the failure to provide sufficient opportunity to learn for the city's public school students...

...Though most efforts are still in the initial stages, each group has had little difficulty organizing a core of neighborhood parents for sustained and vigorous school improvement campaigns...

...Last spring, for example, the New York City schools chancellor attempted to turn over the management of five failing schools to the forprofit Edison Corporation...

...Assigning six master teachers would allow us to place one master teacher at each grade level in most elementary schools and two in each middle school grade...

...Providing six master teachers— trained to work as an improvement team— would undoubtedly improve student performance in those schools...

...IRONICALLY, radical advocacy for schooling reform may well have prepared some of the ground for conservative efforts to delegitimate public education...

...We are not likely to improve our city's poorly performing schools until we change the distribution of quality teaching resources so that the poorest schools get, and keep, a substantial cohort of high-quality teachers...

...Until the past few decades, we have sustained, without apparent ideological or moral difficulty, a schooling system supposedly based on meritocratic principles that tracked students quite rigorously by race and class, sent far less than half to college, and consigned the rest to predictable locations in the labor force...

...Consider the early works of Herbert Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, John Hold, and Ivan Illich...

...The grassroots defeat of this measure is just the opening round of what promises to be a drawn-out privatization war in New York City...

...inevitably, more than half the room says that their children are receiving a worse education than they did...

...As our public school students became less white and less advantaged, the political will to support their education has evaporated...

...We have never set a goal of universally high standards for all our public school students, and our city school systems are neither organized nor funded to achieve it...

...I should say deterioration of urban public education, because poll after poll assures us that suburban and small-town parents and citizens are quite content with the quality of their public schools...

...Assume that some three hundred of the city's most poorly performing schools—two hundred elementary and one hundred middle schools—desperately need such a core team of master teachers...

...A coalition involving ACORN, Citizen Action, many of the city and the state's education advocacy and communitybased groups, and a range of publicsector unions including the United Federation of Teachers and the New York State United Teachers has created the Alliance for Quality Education, a statewide campaign to increase state investment in class size reduction, teacher quality, school facilities, and early childhood education...

...Note how consistently the direction of each variable mirrors student need...

...Colleagues in our Institute's Community Involvement Program work with some two dozen communitybased organizations to launch school improvement efforts in their neighborhoods...

...Moreover, boosting such teachers' annual pay with significant incentive bonuses would also increase the annual salary base on which their pensions are calculated...

...Nevertheless the conservative assault on public education continues unabated, innocent of evidence that we have ever effectively educated the children of the urban poor...

...Obviously, the school system that was demonized for our economic down-spiral has not been lauded for restoring us to economic supremacy...

...Reallocating high-quality teachers could be accomplished even more effectively if a mandate to serve in a failing school was one of the requirements of the final rung of a teacher career ladder...

...Many members of the city's unions, in both public and private sectors, have children in the city schools...

...State Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse has ruled that current state funding violates the constitutional requirement to provide a sound basic education to New York City's schoolchilDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 5 URBAN EDUCATION dren...

...Perhaps the unparalleled strength of the city's civic culture, as well as its nationally pre-eminent corporate sector, can be persuaded to enlist in the inevitable legislative battles that will result from a judicial verdict ordering the state to adequately fund the city's schools...

...For more particulars, see the comprehensive discussions in Richard Rothstein's The Way We Were...

...One way to encourage the redistribution of experienced teachers to low-performing schools would be a teacher career ladder, buttressed by a differentiated pay scale based on demonstrated competencies...

...The high-need districts have the schools, and students, with the lowTABLE I New York City Community School Districts Student Performance and Teacher Characteristics by Student Need 1997-98 Need Lowest Low-Mid Mid Mid-High Highest Community School Districts 2, 22, 25, 26, 29, 31 3, 11, 18, 20, 21, 27, 28 8, 13, 15, 17, 24, 30 1, 4, 5, 14, 16, 19, 23 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 32 Percent of Students Passing the CTB* 63 53 47 40 38 Average Teacher Salary $45,757 $43,986 $43,245 $41,705 $41,349 Percent of Teachers, Fully Licensed and Permanently Assigned 94.2 90.1 85.9 80.3 73.3 Percent of Teachers with More Than 5 Years Teaching Experience 67.7 63.5 61.2 60.5 58.4 Certification Exam Failure Rates** 8.1 17.2 22.5 25.1 30.0 *Standardized reading and math tests **School-level data from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity trial material 50 • DISSENT / Fall 2001 URBAN EDUCATION est academic performance...

...Reaching the top tier—a master teacher category—would be dependent on spending five years or more in a designated poorly performing school...

...Voucher advocates undoubtedly ask themselves a similar question...

...A fierce attack on the failures of urban education was launched during the 1960s by radicals, not conservatives...

...At a cost of approximately $60 million in a $12 billion annual school budget, this seems a doable task...

...The claims that structure A Nation at Risk's argument about the deterioration of public education have long been exposed as inaccurate...

...Take New York City Looking at the collapse of the political will to support New York's public education across the past fifty years would be an interesting challenge and, I would guess, a mirror for the national trend...

...In New York City, for example, the city's 1.1 million public school students represent at least 500,000 families...

...In most of the city's boroughs, groups organized by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), as well as groups organized by the Industrial Areas Foundation, have been mobilizing public school parents to demand school, district, and system-wide improvement...

...He has been a parent organizer, school board member, director of a high school for dropouts, and a foundation grants officer for education...

...Academic performance in urban areas is so far from achieving universally high outcomes that the goal seems impossibly utopian—and often cruelly cynical—to many urban educators...

...Yet we are moving, however painfully, toward a more draconian form of accountability, without the necessary leaven of any reciprocity such as improving opportunity to learn...

...A Nation at Risk claimed, in its most effective metaphors, that American education was "drowning in a sea of mediocrity," and that "if a foreign invader had penetrated America's defenses, it could not do as much damage to our national well-being as our public school systems were already wreaking...

...Assume that to begin such a scheme, we need to recruit and assign a core team of six master teachers to each of the system's poorly performing schools...

...The lower need districts serve the city's more advantaged students, while the higher need districts serve the city's more disadvantaged students...

...The radical attacks were designed to puncture the aura of complacency, denial, and low expectations that shielded urban principals, superintendents, and school boards and to argue for the investment of the resources, public will, and sustained commitment necessary to improve urban outcomes...