Why Can't the America that Creates 'This American Life' Also Integrate Our Schools?
Paul Tough, formally of the New York Times Magazine, wrote that school reform was the result of "liberal post-traumatic shock" from supposedly losing the War on Poverty. Believing that it was too hard to fight poverty, trauma, segregation and the other causes of education underperformance, reformers sought a test-driven, instruction-driven shortcut. This reductionism has continued to fail.
A remarkable This American Life series, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Chana Joffe-Walt, explains why there are no silver bullets and why we should embrace the challenge of integrating our schools in order to build an education system worthy of our democracy.
Hannah-Jones begins "The Problem We All Live With -- Part One" with the social science research that explains why NCLB-type reform has proven to be incapable of turning around schools with intense concentrations of students from extreme poverty. When schools face a critical mass of problems created by generational poverty and trauma, a "tipping point" is crossed. As explained by the Chicago Consortium for School Research, it is very unlikely that answers for failed schools will be found inside the four walls of the classroom. In schools located in the poorest neighborhoods, and that serve everyone who walks in the door, a system of socio-emotional supports must be established before instruction-driven, curriculum-driven polices can work.
Sadly, reformers who sought to deputize teachers as the agents for reversing the intertwined legacies of poverty and oppression dismissed such research as "low expectations" and "excuses." The accountability-driven reform movement only made sense if teachers knew how to overcome poverty -- even in our most segregated neighborhoods -- but didn't bother to do so. They convinced politicians and edu-philanthropists to test, sort, reward and punish their way to school improvement. In other words, opposing reforms based on teacher quality and competition, and advocating for comprehensive, science-based policies, was dismissed as giving up on poor children of color.
Hannah-Jones offers a corrective to that corporate reform ideology, and she reminds us that in 1983, St. Louis began "the nation's most successful metro-wide desegregation program." The desegregation experiment wasn't perfect, but "test scores for 8th and 10th grade transfer students rose. The transfer students were more likely to graduate and go onto college... In surveys, white students overwhelmingly said they'd benefited from the opportunity to be educated alongside black students."
One of the best things about Part One is its ending. The state of Missouri claims that it will do right by the Normandy district -- a school system it helped devastate -- by employing the usual reform tactics. They will reconstitute the system, increase Why Can't the America that Creates 'This American Life' Also Integrate Our Schools? | John Thompson: