The tools of labeling and all the incumbent illogic of such arguments are being used to try and discredit a 'white professor' here that I am pretty sure is me. In my pushing back against a blog's arguing for state versus federal roles in education, my push-back seemingly must have it hit a nerve before the state's rights blogger removed the push-back. As per normal, I was pointing to the illogic of the argument of the blog.
My push-back included a listing of federal actions taken to help insure there was a reality behind the Civil Rights Act and Brown decision that was more than lofty words, including busing. My argument was basically that local/state control of schools either leaves us locked in the past, or takes us back to the past. But it does not and cannot insure a good education for ALL students. I wasn't arguing a federal insures it either, but simply that federal involvement in so many districts is because local/state control fails so miserably to serve the disenfranchised along whatever dimension.
My comments inspired a tirade against a strawman abstract professor...you know...the 'Ivory Tower' group unlinked to any reality or REAL people... 
For all arguments against Federal involvement and for more local and state control, they have to answer...why were so many federal policies ever involved?
It was because local and state authorities, wrapped in their good ol' boy systems of privilege and power, and wrapped in flags and Constitutions, wanted to make headway on Civil Rights the old fashioned way..."I'm just not sure n***as are ready to compete in good schools. When they're ready...we'll open the doors. But I just don't see how they're ready yet..."
And on this past Tuesday night, any of us who felt 'not in my lifetime' would still have been very correct...for several more lifetimes. Why??
Let me help you know through a REAL professor so we can simply use the 'elitist socialist liberal professor' strawman to roast weenies and maybe make smores... 
Before I taught college, I taught high school. While teaching high school, I worked in the black community in jobs and community recreational development (i.e., helping insure sports programs were available to youth in urban areas). I lived in the urban core, right at the edge of the red-light district.
In teaching, I taught in Central High School, Kansas City. Central was 60 some miles away from where the Supreme Court had ruled in 1954, in Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, that 'separate but equal' was not equal. That ruling was 91 years after Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. And Central High School in 1976 had just desegregated their faculty...not their students...their faculty...22 years after Brown!)
Central's students would remain in 'separate but equal' limbo until 2003, when a federal judge who had overseen KC's pathetic efforts at desegregating schools for 26 years finally felt that the district "is unlikely to discriminate against African-American children again."
This is the dark truth of 'local control.' In a lawsuit in 1984, that followed on the 1977 lawsuit that made no changes, a federal court found that the KC school district and Missouri were liable for illegal segregation in Kansas City schools. Missouri agreed in 1996 to help the district to desegregate to the tune of $320 million. It took KC almost 50 years to accomplish the imperative of a Supreme Court ruling on local/state inequality. A local/state control advocates wet dream...50 years!! And 140 years after the Emancipation Proclamation!!!!
What did this 'segregation' look like???
The school, when I taught, was 100% black other than for white faculty. I was teaching Social Sciences. I had no textbooks for most of my classes, no periodicals, no chalk. I had on average more kids registered for a class than seats in the class...somewhere north of 42 kids (largest was 50+). They sat on window sills and heaters. Or they skipped class.
We had a program in the district called 'Push Out.' If a student 'D-F'ed a majority of subjects in any given 9 week period, they were pushed out and told to come back next year. Could be the first quarter of a year...told to come back next year. The object was population control - kids had an 80+% chance of never being seen again. Phew..now the few books there...they could be used by students who were 'more serious' in their learning.
We had another program, 'Lock-In' in which the principal would come over the horn at some point during a day, and say.."Teachers, move to your doors and lock them!" We were to move outside the door, lock them so student couldn't get in, then grab anyone scrambling through the halls. We were to hold them until principal, vice principal, counselors or police came by and checked the young person. If they had no pass to be in the hall, they were taken downtown and booked for trespassing.
Suspended during the day, and walking home across school grounds? No pass? Taken downtown and booked for trespassing.
And ya know, the great white suburbs of KC Kansas and Missouri just clung to thinking it wasn't their problem. They just made their livings off the city. But white flight had them living comfortably outside the city already. While I was teaching there, Shawnee Mission KS was the highest expenditure per student, per capita in the US, and only 22 miles from my classroom with no textbooks.
My students, lacking textbooks, chalk, a library...they were supposed to compete for college desks with their suburban counterparts. So kids that had an athletic talent focused on sports as the only road they saw out.
I could have taught anywhere in the country. I chose to teach in urban schools because I wanted to, as close as I could, walk a mile in their shoes and understand the issues confronting urban schools.
I was thrown on a police car hood while waiting for a bus after school one afternoon, because I was a long-hair white standing amongst a large group of blacks, and the police figured I was selling drugs...a little long hair profiling... 
I then went on later to mentor hundreds of minority students at the university from urban schools across the midwest - Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and more. I heard horror stories worse than mine all the time.
That's the moral compass of state and local rights. "We got ours! Ya ain't gittin yers!" as if we live in separate cages, seperate worlds.
(cont'd below)
Copy & paste to friend: (Click inside box; Ctrl + C to copy; Ctrl + V to paste)
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read more blogs!
Blogs by observed50:
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| The Continuing Saga of Strawman Arguments - Now It's Professors |
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observed50
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Nov 6 @ 11:25PM
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(cont'd from above)
I know it's seductive to think my perspective on the world is a book perspective. But I didn't arrive at my world view from books...books helped me with the words...not the perception or experience. I grew up in rural white poverty on the edge of Appalachia, and have chosen many times to work in communities of stress because their suffering is real for me. I've been robbed numerous times, had vehicles vandalized, been threatened and chased.
And ya know...none of it happened in a book or in a tower.
I'll git matches for the strawman. Shall we use pork, beef or turkey weenies?? I'd offer crow...but heck..the burning of strawman is something for which we should go all out... 
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Josuha
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Nov 7 @ 12:09AM
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Allow me to suggest 'professor' that your 'system' resulted in one of the lowest education ratings compared to other countries in the world.
"The United States is falling when it comes to international education rankings, as recent studies show that other nations in the developed world have more effective education systems.
In a 2003 study conducted by UNICEF that took the averages from five different international education studies, the researchers ranked the United States No. 18 out of 24 nations in terms of the relative effectiveness of its educational system."
The Report goes on to say..
“The U.S. caters to students’ needs and wants,” said Matias Sueldo, a sophomore majoring in international relations who spent part of his education in Argentina. “Kids here learn to pass a test, but they don’t learn the concepts. In Argentina, you either know it or you don’t.”
Emily Gamelson, a junior majoring in history, thinks that the low student achievement in U.S. schools has a lot to do with the lack of competition. "
There is a book on the subject of the American educational decline.
In other words..I would'nt boast about your 'acheivements' in the education field.
We have students who cannot read past the 9th grade level and are being graduated.
"In an effort to change this education decline, the No Child Left Behind act was established in 2002 to help improve school performance in America. It requires that teachers are highly qualified, and students are given more tests in grades K-12. There has been an increase in pressure on teachers and students to achieve higher scores on state exams. However, did this law do the opposite? With the stress put on more tests come higher demands for the teacher to get the information across to the students, and for the students to attain higher scores. Since this law was passed, the emphasis has drifted from meaningful, and hands-on learning to getting a high grade.
“I feel like the No Child Left Behind law has hindered teaching in a way. Teachers are forced to teach their students the material needed to pass the tests.,” said Monica Lenny, fourth grade teacher. “If the students don’t pass, the teachers and the school hear it.”
In other words, they are simply passed.
I am not sure why you boast about your credentials..
Frankly, after reading the scores for American students compared to foreign nations, I would suggest a career change.
But I suppose you will blame lack of funding, or those blue suited meanies, or perhaps it is the enviroment.
Speaking of enviorment..I'm glad you brought it up..
Bars on the windows, guards in the hallways...nice enviorment..
But then again, we can blame the violence..
And because the parents and teachers don't do their job, we can make more laws and disarm people..
Give juvinile records to kids for penknives and cutting class.
Let us not speak of the corruption of the system, the incompentence of the Board of Education that is pressured by special interest and taxpayer money to pass these kids and not a peep from the schools.
But let's lock a kid up for bringing a butter knife for his peanut butter to school under the 'Zero Tolerance' policy.
But don't use common sense.
And yes..I am for states rights.
The Feds should have been kicked out of the system a long time ago and control returned to the community.
I am for telling the feds where they can stick their money..
I am for teaching, not a 'feel good' program where teachers are more babysitters than teachers.
I would strongly suggest homeschooling in lieu of this circus.
And frankly, if I had my way, looking at the test scores, and the dicipline and order of our city schools (which I have persoanlly witnessed..), I would have fired you and about 100,000 others and got someone in there who could have our children compete scholastically in the world and not at 18th place.
But I'm not in charge..
So it's your lucky day.
Catch'cha later 'strawman'..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNpLSaCirj8
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observed50
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Nov 7 @ 1:34AM
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Josh> I'm not sure what you're arguing...
Just to let you know...because you keep creating a strawman and implying it is me, trying to make me be somebody as if you know me, my work, and my style...as the saying goes...you haven't got a clue...not a single clue.
You keep pushing me into a strawman picture that you can run through with your pitchfork and then push your fellow villagers to burn the tower...but you haven't got a clue.
You've walked effectively in your shoes. Don't let that deafen you to the walk of other shoes.
First...who is it you're blaming for these low scores? Blacks? Government? Parents? Teachers? All the above??? I sense scattershot...but I'm not sure. Your argument jumps around a bit too much...
The original post was on local/state rights and schools. My push back was about Federal involvement in schools because it was the only mechanism to end racist policies in public education. To return schools to local/state control without Federal guarantees of access and opportunity will help too many communities again devolve into the racial
havoc of the past - have's and have nots. We've already been doing that across the last 20 years as busing programs and other desegregation efforts have been dismantled...and schools once again racially defined in so many places.
You point out other factors affecting schools. Without addressing those factors, they weren't what the original blog was about, nor what I was addressing.
Part of what you don't know about me...
1.) I love teaching, hate schools. I think teaching is one of the most sacred things we do. My sense is that education as designed in the US has destroyed most kids natural curiosity by 5th grade. By the time I had them at the university, all that remains of their natural curiosity is minimally warm coals.
2.) I hate teachers unions, and have since I was a kid. They protected poor teachers from being ushered away from chalkboards and into other forms of labor less damaging to young minds. I hated tenure at the University level, because tenure there and in public schools, though designed to protect teachers from politicized school boards and deans, serves far too often to again, protect the ineffectual and pathetic.
3.) School boards are simply one more human political effort that most often are not held accountable, and so contribute to all sorts of damage as well, like the imposing of religious values in science classrooms. Too often where I lived, people ran to get lights on the football field. Horrible achievement records, but goddamn...git me some lights on da football field!
4.) Had my ex and I had kids, I would never have sent my kids to public school, and even less to private school. My ex (also trained as a teacher) and I always planned on home schooling. I hate the dumbing down of public systems, and I hate the elitism of private systems. I use to teach on the dumbing down of American schools all the time. I wrote about it in an underground newspaper that I helped edit while a student in high school.
5.) I chose to go into teaching because I watched so many kids lives be adversely affected by schools -administrators, teachers, kids, curriculum - crushing kids spirits and possibility. When that young in your career, your first sense is...make a difference from the inside. Later on, you recognize the inside simply absorbs your energy, and then uses you as an example of why schools are good...when you're the one of two or three teachers in your building that have similar fire for their kids.
6.) I left teaching 8 years ago...and went into a business environment thinking the bottom line imposed greater accountability to organization and people. I was very wrong. But after close to 7000 students, I was exhausted from the lack of accountability in schools. Professors could suck the big whazoo and not a single student could do a thing about it. Students were too disempowered, parents were too ignorant of the situation, and departments seem to not care. Now I teach as a guest lecturer or do my own classes like in my community, on my own. I still love teaching...I simply hate schools.
But my hate for schools doesn't blind me to recognizing that they are critical passageways still for most folks to jobs and higher education. I know we suck in international comparison. But I am not sure what you think that says about Federal involvement in desegregation?? If blacks had simply been less 'uppity', we could still have white kids with white scores doing white better???
If you notice, it's only at the level of argument that people assert that they know how to make this all better. There isn't proof anywhere that 'we' know how...i.e., that it works for all who want their kids to have a good education.
In closing, you assert you would have fired your strawman 'me.' Such bizarre comments are just 'puffy-chested' comments. Knowing nothing, you assert you would have fired me??? Because I point out that without Federal involvement, schools would still be locked into their racialized districts?? Hell, as I said before, burn that crazy strawman...make some weenies and marshmallows. And git off the high-horse, sit down, and enjoy the fire.
Quit being so self-righteous asserting you know things about which you have no clue...because you don't ask...my arguments about your use of logic don't say a thing about my classrooms. Nada. They're simply posed to say the conclusions you're pushing don't follow from your assumptions.
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unionman154
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Nov 7 @ 1:55AM
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You have my admiration and respect Mark.
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KnittinKitten
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Nov 7 @ 9:37AM
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Mark, your postings are articulate, and definitely understandable. I appreciate learning from you and also how you gained your knowledge. You are an asset to any venue in which you choose to participate....
As for that other guy, I make no comment....actually, he speaks for himself...and it's quite loud and clear, isn't it. Your response was right on.  "nouf said!.
Fondly,
KK 
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blondhunger
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Nov 7 @ 10:10AM
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I would argue that the state level is more efficient as opposed to the Federal level which wrought with higher costs, more unnecessary bureaucracy, and further removed from the problem, will not succeed.
I have seen the catastrophic changes that have come over Kansas City, KS and I don't believe all that urban rot, drug warfare, and violence can be attributed to white people. My Dad was born there. His neighborhood was torn down to eliminate the crack houses that were operating there. Downtown is a nightmare. A subdivision that was primarily black was rennovated with federal funding back in the early 70's in less than 4 years it was back to it's former state. When rennovated once more, the same urban decay took place again even faster. Can't recall the name of it, but my father knew. This exhibits part of the problem that the blacks when given something are not going to automatically tow the line. People that work for a goal are much more likely to earn it. Federal funding in this case is a typical example of failure in that particular regime. Blacks need to stop making excuses for themselves and step up to the plate. They have an inherent cultural problem of irresponsibility that they need to solve by being honest and to quit blaming everyone else.
Yes, I'm quite aware of the racial injustice of the past, today it is much different with many of them taking advantage of the system or the system providing more than enough assistance such as Affirmative Action, ACORN, the ACLU, and the NCAACP who are setting unfair precedents. The pendulum of inequity swings both ways.
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observed50
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Nov 7 @ 11:40AM
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Blond> I won't argue about efficiencies or the benefits of locality. I have spent much of my life working on local issues, and see that part of the reason for doing so is because the federal government is are too far away from local problems to often be effective, care or have a clue.
The original blog and my response was about school policy and local/state control vs. federal, and the dismal showing of local control when it came to equal access and opportunity. There are many issues in which local control means local oligarchy, local tryanny, local insanity. Democracy, though a funky funky system, has all sorts of challenges when it relates to change and the need to change.
People, when they 'arrive', stop to secure what they have, regardless of whether the rest of the wagon train arrives or not. Small businesses want to compete. Big Businesses want to have laws that protect them from competition (e.g. bank bailout, Big Three Bailout, etc). Suburbia wants to use their property tax for 'their' schools...all others be damned.
It is in these circumstances, when local law most often tends towards the tyranny of democracy, that I see Federal intervention as being necessary and useful. If we waited for every valley to finally enforce "equal before the law," we would wait until hell froze over. Once people arrive, they don't want equal...they want 'equal for me.'
If we don't want to keep incarcerating classes of people as a matter of social policy, the only way we know of to decrease the likelihood of classes of people being inequitably represented in prison is to help ensure they have access to good schools, good education, good job training.
And locals don't have a track record worth mentioning in that regard.
That is all my blog was about...schools and equal access and opportunity...
For the rest of it, there is a lot social mythology that floats around about minorities and their ability to strive and achieve in social life. I'll be glad to discuss the empirical reality we find in data, and research. So much of the stuff we argue around coffee tables, bars, and the table at home is anecdotal flows like Josh's above, emotional, personal, but a piece of data doesn't make an argument...data sets make arguments. An anecdote is not explanatory, or capable of assisting us predict anything. It has a lot of power to the center of the story, but it has no power in data and logical conclusions.
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