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STUPID DIALOGUES ABOUT STUPIDITY
A Working Paper on the Crisis in the New York City
Schools
By Dr. Lenora Fulani, Ph.D.
I.
The release of standardized test
scores showing that in New York, Black and Latino children perform poorly in
comparison to white and Asian children simply reaffirms what everyone already
knows: our schools are failing.
Mayor Bloomberg was recently blasted
by some Black elected officials for saying that minority parents didn’t
comprehend the extent of the problem. He was criticized for suggesting that
Black parents are stupid, and some - Councilman Charles Barron leading the way
- called his remarks racist.
Mayor Bloomberg was not calling Black parents stupid.
But he should have. Because in many ways they are.
Politics being what they are, I understand that the Mayor can’t say that. But I
can. I’m Black. I’m an educator. I’m a parent. I direct a privately funded
supplementary education program that has succeeded where the public schools
have failed. Consequently, I feel authorized to say it. Black and Latino
parents are dumb. They’ve been dumbed-down. So have their kids. You can’t, on
the one hand, say the schools have been failing us for more than a generation,
but then expect (or pretend!) that everyone in the minority community somehow
managed to get smart. It doesn’t work that way. If the schools are bad, one
consequence is that people come out uneducated. Isn’t that the very problem
we’re trying to address?
While Councilman Barron’s remarks
about the Mayor were ridiculous, they were also calculated. Racialism is the
official currency of political New York and Brother Barron and his mentors know how to play
that game well. Mr. Barron appears more interested in promoting himself as an
“authentic” Black voice on the City Council, than in finding ways to help the
Black community escape the deplorable “status quo.”
Barron is not alone in making silly
and self-serving remarks about the crisis in our schools. Manhattan Borough
President C. Virginia Fields, observing that many city schools are starving for
resources, said, “I hope this moves us to do something.” Spoken like a true -
even if well meaning - bureaucrat, Borough President Fields misses the point.
The issue isn’t money. The issue is the quality of the education, the relevancy
and effectiveness of the learning model on which the educational system is
based. Throwing more money at a bad model solves nothing. Arguably, it makes
things worse. In effect, Fields is not proposing a solution to our education
crisis. She is simply representing the views of a special interest group -
namely, Black Democratic Party-allied educators - and trying to get more money
to hire her supporters.
Fields is concerned about the impoverishment of some
city schools and she should be. They’re impoverished because they are in
impoverished communities. But let’s be real. If she genuinely wants to tackle
the poverty issue, she should call for an immediate redistribution of New York wealth. Then the poor people - most of whom are of color - wouldn’t be so poor. And the schools
wouldn’t be so poor, either.
II.
What is wrong with our schools? The
answer is not a big mystery. The schools weren’t made and the teaching isn’t
designed for most of the kids who go there. Why are the Black and Hispanic kids
failing at two to three times the rate of other - mainly white - kids? Because
the schools - and the prevailing model of learning - were created for white
kids, for kids with a certain life experience and world view that Black and
Latino kids don’t have. That pedagogical foundation - though periodically
“critiqued” as racist, Eurocentric, etc. and periodically “reformed” through
movements for desegregation, decentralization, community control and a
“culturally correct” curriculum - has never been seriously engaged, examined
and reconstructed. For all of its fervor, the political-cultural critiques and
the related efforts at reform have failed.
The operative fact of life here is
that Black kids see and experience the world differently than white kids. White
kids - because of the elongated history of the dominant culture - see
themselves as insiders, as connected to the mainstream of American life.
Black and Hispanic kids see themselves as outsiders, as people trying - but not
fully able - to get in. Put in other, perhaps more provocative terms, the white
experience is one of superiority. The Black and Hispanic experience is one of
inferiority.
This hierarchical view is infused
into the entirety of our culture. While the television talk shows have debated
this - to death - it remains a simple social fact. Turning this recognizable
state of affairs into a political polemic against racial oppression or the
evils of the system will miss the point. This is how things are. And one
of the consequences of this reality is that if you create a model of learning
that is designed for the superior people, and for there to be superior
people, you shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t work for the inferior
people. It wasn’t designed to work for us.
III.
The last 35 years of reform efforts
in New York City revolved around goals of integration, community
control and cultural equality. The 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute - which
shaped the contours of education reform for a generation - saw the United
Federation of Teachers (UFT), the community based African American Teachers
Association (ATA), the parents, the Board of Education, Mayor John Lindsay and
a large retinue, from the Ford Foundation to the courts to the New York State
Department of Education, engaged in a series of confrontations over control of
the schools. This led ultimately to various forms of community control,
including the local community school boards, and the rise of a new Black
political class in New York Democratic Party politics.
Though improving education for minority kids was its
goal, the strange fruit of its labors is visible in the latest test scores. At
the start of the movement, the schools were largely segregated and Black kids
were reading two years below grade level. Today the city schools are still largely
segregated and the performance of Black kids in eighth grade English is such
that only 24% met the test standard as compared with 57% of whites.
Obviously, many factors contributed to this
devastating standstill. The economic
status of most Blacks has not improved substantially over the last generation,
in spite of the growth of a Black middle class. The Black militants who led the
struggles in Ocean Hill-Brownsville and then became absorbed into the
Democratic Party and its associated bureaucracies including the education
system itself, lost sight of and/or did not have the conceptual or political
tools necessary to achieve the goal of quality education for minority youth.
There is no doubt the community control movements were
based on an acute awareness of the Black-white, inferior/superior differential
referenced above. But their approach to solving the problem was seriously
mistaken. Among other things, it was rooted in a nationalistic identity politic
that has poorly served and profoundly miseducated the Black community. (If a
Black person teaches you that 2+2=5, you’re in as much trouble as if a white
person teaches you that.)
The premise of the Black-led community control
movements - personified by the ATA - was that “a black lower class … was ‘economically
deprived but culturally rich.’”
In other words, the politic of the community control movement was “a defense of
the culture of the black poor.”
In light of the intransigence and hostility of the UFT - the chief antagonist -
that made some sense tactically. But at the level of educational philosophy, it
is ridiculous. The notion that the Black community is “culturally different,
not culturally deprived,”
covered over the fact that we were - and are - culturally deprived. Believing
that the educational achievement of poor Black kids would be advanced by simply
glorifying our culture without creating a methodology that at once accepts our
inferiority and ignites development is impotent. No wonder the community
control movement - which involved tens of thousands of concerned parents and
dedicated community activists and educators - failed to produce any gains in
educational achievement. Its premises were profoundly flawed.
The legacy of the community control
movement was a redistribution of political power. But simply because Black
people broke into the ranks of school administrators, principals,
superintendents and elected officials didn’t make the school system
automatically more responsive to Black kids. The students who went to New York public schools from 1968 on - and many are now the
parents of our current public school student population - were educated in the
“reformed” system. But that new system simply perpetuated the educational
status quo. Instead of celebrating Negro History Week, the kids celebrated
Black History Month. But they didn’t learn how to learn.
IV.
With the Barron/Bloomberg fight
making headlines, I was invited to appear on KISS-FM’s “The Week in Review”
show to discuss the flap over the Mayor’s remarks. On the show, journalist
Peter Noel tried to confront me over my criticism of Barron. He insisted that
Black people know what’s best for Black people because they’re Black. Why? What
evidence is there for that position? Given the oppression, suppression and
miseducation of Black people, wouldn’t it make more sense to presume that it’s
difficult for Black people to see and understand themselves? Mayor Bloomberg,
perhaps without even realizing it, was observing this in his controversial
remarks.
It is no accident that Bloomberg, a
Republican businessman as opposed to a Democratic bureaucrat, has something of
a grasp of the problem. The Democrats, after all, created the current school
system, including all of its so-called reforms. That makes it difficult for
them to lead the way in an overhaul. They are too invested in the status quo:
witness the insistence of the Black (and many white) liberals that the Board of
Education not be dismantled, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of its
failure. Bloomberg believes that he can fix what’s wrong with the schools, in
no small part because he wasn’t a participant in creating the current setup.
V.
American education policy has always
been hierarchical - a reflection of the broader society of which it is a part.
For much of our country’s history, poor people didn’t get educated at all. Once
public education was institutionalized in the late 1800s, it was based on a
hierarchy ranging from “smart” to “dumb.” As the demographics changed, the
hierarchy became racialized, but the model of learning was still the same,
geared to the “smart” kids, to the insiders.
Non-hierarchical models do exist and
are in use in supplementary education programs today, including in the programs
I helped to create - the All Stars Talent Show Network and the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth.
Our model, developed by the Stanford
University-trained philosopher and psychotherapist Dr. Fred Newman, is a
learning model based on performance and activity that relates to what people -
including young people - create and then builds off of that. The emphasis is on
development. At an All Stars talent show, for example, what counts is simply
the performance, that the kids get up on stage and perform (i.e., grow). There is no independent or standardized criteria for what’s a
“good” performance (i.e., talent). We don’t seek to create perfect kids, or to
measure kids against some notion of what they should be. We try to create
environments in which young people can at one and the same time be who they are
and become who they are not. The
imposition of externalized norms - “identity” (nationalist or otherwise) - is a
straitjacket, because it tells young people only who they are. That impedes
their growth and development.
The problem - i.e., the cultural and racial bias of
the schools - is that the entire educational enterprise is based on
establishing criteria for how kids are supposed to perform. In
math. In English. In life.
If they don’t meet that criteria, they have failed.
For kids who are already “outsiders” to the dominant culture and its
“standards,” the predisposition for failure is already high. The way to engage
that is neither to lower standards nor to artificially inflate the
self-importance of the kids with appeals to Black identity or the record of
Black achievement. Instead, we must create environments in which what they do
has value and contributes to their becoming both more and other than who they
are. That is developmental learning. It is an approach that is designed for
Black and Hispanic kids who have been underdeveloped by the society.
VI.
The field of supplementary education
is where the most innovative applications of the insights of developmental
learning can be found.
How do children learn to develop and develop as
learners? By becoming more worldly or, to use the Harvard
philosopher Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s term, more cosmopolitan.
Approaches which fuel this aspect of the learning curve are sometimes called
“cultural” or “experiential” learning. Educational researchers, Columbia University’s
Dr. Edmund Gordon, who also heads the Minority Task Force on Educational
Achievement of the College Board among them, have discovered that high quality
“outside of school” learning experiences - like family trips to the museum, a
day at the office with a parent, music lessons, dinner table conversations
about current events - enhance children’s capacities in the classroom. Dr.
Gordon has noted that white and middle class students who regularly participate
in these kinds of cosmopolitan adventures are generally the highest achievers.
Poor, mainly minority students, who do not have access to these situations and
environments, perform poorly in school.
Supplementary education practitioners have created
models for supplying these kinds of experiences for the kids who do not
otherwise have them. Some supplementary education programs - including the ones
I run - use performance as a tool for helping the kids “go beyond themselves” -
i.e. to break out of their narrow, parochial ghetto-based identities. We
organize partnerships with successful adults on Wall Street, in media, business
and the arts, and provide young people with opportunities to interact with them
in corporate and other settings.
Programs like the All Stars Talent Show Network and
the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth provide young people with the training and
rehearsal they need to “perform” in these situations. They learn how to write a
resume, dress for success, or produce a talent show. They also learn to talk to
white people, something that our inner-city kids almost never do unless it is
to an authority figure like a teacher or a police officer. Many of our kids
grow up without ever leaving their own communities. It is not uncommon for
teenagers in Brownsville or Far Rockaway to go years at a time without ever
visiting Manhattan. The world of power, culture and discovery is beyond
their reach.
Once in these supplementary education programs, kids
develop the capacity to achieve in the classroom. But the fact that these supplementary
“cultural” programs (or outside of school experiences, as in the case of more
advantaged kids) impact so significantly is also a measure of the insufficiency
of the prevailing learning model for everyone. In most schools, young people
are not related to as learners but as passive recipients (some bad, some good)
of the information necessary to pass a test to make it to the next grade.
Students who are better adapted to, i.e., more successful in the hierarchical
learning model, do better. Most of them are white. Even so, development,
personal growth and the broadening of intellectual and cultural horizons are
nowhere in the picture.
VII.
What should New Yorkers do about the
current crisis? Here’s my prescription. We should abolish the Board of Education
and give the Mayor control of the school system. The Mayor should immediately
establish a nonpartisan Commission for a New Learning Model that calls upon the
most innovative theorists and practitioners with expertise in learning and
development to chart a new educational course for the City’s schools. The City
Council should support the Mayor’s efforts and help to advise him on effective
education programs that operate in their districts. The parents should begin
local conversations and public dialogues about what kind of community input and
control they want to have in a restructured school system, addressing questions
such as: Should the local school boards be preserved? In what
form? Should something new come to take their place? Each community should
prepare to make a decision on these issues. Ultimately, every community should
hold an election to make these determinations. The election should be conducted
via door-to-door and phone canvass so that everyone who wants to may
participate. Plus, the parents should talk honestly to their kids. They should
tell them they know the schools are bad and that they are trying to make them
better.
The United Federation of Teachers, which represents
the many hardworking teachers of our City, should support the Mayor in this
effort and should go one step further: the UFT should change its position
opposing vouchers and stand with the parents who want this critical reform. The
purpose of vouchers is not to destroy or undermine the public school system -
it’s to stimulate educational innovation “in the field” and create a
competitive marketplace of ideas to produce quality educational opportunities
for our kids.
What should our kids do? They should continue to go to
school and study as hard as they can under the circumstances. If they can
access a supplementary education program, they should learn about the new
methods of learning,
And what should Black educators - who care deeply
about our kids and their future - do? They should stop protecting a system that
has failed.
April 2002
New York City
DR. LENORA FULANI, a developmental psychologist and
educator, received her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is co-executive producer of the All Stars Talent
Show Network and the Director of the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth. Dr. Fulani may be reached at 212-962-1811
or via email at national@cuip.org
New York County Independence Party - 225 Broadway, Suite 2010, New York, NY 10007
Phone: 212-962-1699 - Fax: 212-803-1899
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