Commentary and opinion

‘Midway’ reminds us of what made America great

Matthew Ladner December 2, 2019

“Midway,” directed by Roland Emmerich, is based on real-life events in the clash between the American fleet and the Imperial Japanese Navy that marked a turning point in the Pacific Theater during WWII. While the Battle of Midway is a great reminder of American society’s admirable traits, the U.S. must continue to expand opportunity for everyone in the education arena to flourish in a growing and innovative society.

Trips to the cineplex are important holiday rituals in the Ladner clan, and Midway was on the viewing list this year. I enjoyed it. Looper issued a video with several scenes you might suspect were Hollywood embellishments. But nope, they actually happened.

See more here and here.

The Battle of Midway is a helpful reminder about many admirable aspects of American society. George Orwell said that to understand London, one had to visit Paris. Imperial Japan is a good stand-in for our un-America, which allows us to understand ourselves better.

Japan of the 1930s was a monarchy run by rival elites of the Army and Navy. The film does a decent job of portraying this rivalry and hints at the precipitating cause of the Pearl Harbor attack. Japan imported most of its oil from the United States at the time. Horrified by atrocities in Japan’s empire building in China, the United States passed an embargo on the sale of oil to Japan. The Japanese elite decided to secure new sources for oil but understood the need to knock out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor to do so.

All of this reminds me of a quote from Matt Ridley’s book, “The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.”

The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in “The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy,” because they endlessly seek to govern by design in a world that is best organized spontaneously from below. Public policy failures stem from planners’ excessive faith in deliberate design. They constantly underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangement, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.

Elitist societies, like the pre-Civil War American South, are prone to making rash decisions to suit the needs of their elite. Japan’s elite got the Pearl Harbor attack very, very wrong, and it cost their country dearly. Japan had employed similar tactics successfully against Russia earlier in the century, but the United States was no sclerotic Czarist Russia.

Despite putting a priority on Europe, the USA was far more than Japan would ever have been able to handle. At one point, for instance, the United States was producing a new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier per month. Japan brought six such carriers to attack Pearl Harbor and lost four of them at Midway.

The pilots who carried out the Pearl Harbor attack were the best trained in the world. Their planes were superior to ours at the outset. The elitism of pilot training, however, represented a severe weakness. Many of the pilots who carried out the Pearl Harbor attack died in the battle of Midway. Given that pilot training was akin to graduating from Harvard Law in the Japanese system, this was a huge problem.

Where did the United States get enough pilots to crank out a new fleet carrier every month? It went something like “Hey Tommy, you’re a bright kid and good in a fight. How would you like to become a fighter pilot?”

American planes improved in quality and quantity. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, realized the scale of their folly after the attack, stating, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

The Japanese elite had not just underestimated American industrial capacity and human capital; they also underestimated American ingenuity. “Midway” accurately portrays the crucial role played by American codebreakers in the pivotal Midway battle.

Yamamoto aimed to draw the remaining American aircraft carriers into a trap by attacking Midway Island. Admiral Nimitz learned of their plans and instead had our remaining carriers lying in wait to destroy the four Japanese carriers. A group of Navy musicians proved crucial to the codebreaking effort.

A key to American success in World War II was making good use of talent, whether in the form of repurposed musicians or Rosie the Riveter back in the factories. We were much better at this than Imperial Japan, but not as good, either then or now, as we could or should be.

Today, state, national and international testing data show that talent development is not normally distributed in the United States. White students in America sit comfortably among the ranks of the top European and Asian education systems, while American black and Hispanic students score closer to the averages of countries that expend a fraction of our financial effort:

Our ancestors weren’t afraid of foreign competition. They made the foreign competition afraid of us. If we want to “make America great again,” we need to expand the opportunity for everyone to flourish in a growing and innovative society.

Equipping children with literacy and numeracy is a key component of mobility. The performance of our education system is a major impediment to such an aspiration, and in fact, may have us trending toward a detrimental elitism of our own.

December 2, 2019 0 comment

Commentary and opinion Education equity School Choice

Newsday investigation: School attendance zones used as segregation tool

Matthew Ladner November 25, 2019

Matthew Ladner

In what Newsday refers to as one of the most concentrated investigations of discrimination by real estate agents in the half-century since enactment of America’s landmark fair housing law, its reporters have found evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities on Long Island.

The investigation revealed that real estate agents tend to show white prospective buyers homes in predominantly white neighborhoods and often avoid showing the same homes to minority buyers, among other problems. Moreover, the investigation showed widespread use of school district boundaries as a key tool in reinforcing racially segregated housing patterns.

Newsday conducted its investigation over a three-year period and used the “paired testing” technique employed by legal authorities to enforce federal anti-housing discrimination laws. This technique utilized undercover testers with similar financial profiles who requested identical terms for houses in the same areas with variation by race/ethnicity. The investigation not only revealed substantial bias against minority homebuyers; it also revealed that real estate agents employed school districts as a tool in reinforcing segregated housing patterns.

The investigation involved 25 trained undercover testers interacting with 93 real estate agents and included 240 hours of secretly recorded meetings and analysis of more than 5,700 real estate listings on Long Island. Two federal housing law experts independently analyzed the results for illegal “steering.” Newsday required both experts to agree on the evidence.

The investigation concluded that 39 percent of Hispanic testers and 49 percent of black testers experienced prohibited bias of varying sorts. For instance:

In nearly a quarter of the tests – 24 percent – agents directed whites and minorities into differing communities through house listings that had the earmarks of “steering” – the unlawful sorting of home buyers based on race or ethnicity. One example:

Amid MS-13 gang murders in Brentwood, a 79 percent Hispanic and black community, Le-Ann Vicquery, a Keller Williams Realty agent at the time of the investigation, told a black customer: “Every time I get a new listing in Brentwood, or a new client, I get so excited because they’re the nicest people.” She emailed the paired white customer: “Please kindly do some research on the gang-related events in that area for safety.”

Schools rather than gangs were the most common steering mechanism, with the racial makeup of the student body featuring prominently and with careful analysis of outcomes in short supply. “We’ve artificially created these school districts … try to move them and you will have World War III,” a local superintendent told Newsday.

You should read the entire piece, watch the videos and judge for yourself, but this reader finds it difficult to avoid the conclusion that high levels of housing and schooling segregation have been reinforced on an ongoing basis.

So, what to make of all of this?

The conclusion to draw is not that school districts or those operating them are inherently bad and/or racist. Rather, the unavoidable upshot is that zip code assignment sponsors and promotes the high levels of economic and racial segregation seen in both housing and schooling.

Sadly, given the strong relationship between school boundaries and real estate prices, millions of Americans with disproportionate levels of wealth and political capital have a financial interest in this status-quo. Long Island, for instance, is wealthy with a highly-educated population that was politically purple in 2016 and is highly segregated by both neighborhood and school district.

What can be done?

One thing that can and has been done is creation of schooling opportunities untethered to residential zip code. The magnet school movement has attempted to promote integration but faces political constraints.

Harvard’s Clayton Christensen famously noted that “organizations cannot disrupt themselves.” District magnet programs face political resistance from other district schools that see them as a threat to their enrollment. Decades after the development of magnets, they remain an important but niche offering nationwide, and there is no reason to expect this to change.

A key lies in K-12 options external to district authority and, crucially, that these options be available across community types. This allows the creation of education communities developed along educational preferences and affinities rather than geographic location. Charter and private choice mechanisms create incentives for districts to create their own specialized schooling offerings and to open their borders to open enrollment transfers.

The next thing you know, open enrollment just might be leading the choice charge.

We don’t have any realistic instant cures available, but voluntary mechanisms are not exclusive to other tactics such as more federal paired testing investigations of real estate firms. Far greater attention should be paid to equity issues in open enrollment, which lacks the lottery requirement ubiquitous to state charter laws.

The most ambitious effort at a remedy, in the form of busing, failed in part because many parents of all sorts didn’t want their children bused to distant schools. Families who have paid a large real estate premium to attend a preferred school make for highly motivated and politically powerful opponents. Magnet schools had a more palatable voluntarism, but they lacked scale.

Many of us of a certain age attended public schools before the advent of standardized testing with public reporting by campus. There is little doubt that real estate agents served as the informal school brokers in that era as well. Lacking any objective data about school quality made them even more likely to rely upon white kids running around on the playground as a proxy for “good schools.”

Depressingly, the Newsday investigation shows how little things have changed.

November 25, 2019 0 comment

Commentary and opinion Education and Public Policy Jonathan Butcher School Choice Testing and Accountability

Guest commentary: NAEP should be a wake-up call for ed reformers, policymakers

Jonathan Butcher November 21, 2019

Jonathan Butcher

A recent comparison of K-12 children around the U.S. brought bad news for education reformers—an amorphous group of policymakers and advocates who are akin to locksmiths searching for the right combination of resources and policy ideas to unlock student potential. The news was bad for students, too, but since the scores do not affect a student’s report card, the results mattered more to the aforementioned locksmiths today.

The results will matter for students tomorrow.

As readers of this blog will know, the Nation’s Report Card, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is a set of math and reading tests given to a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders around the country every two years. The U.S. Department of Education also administers NAEP tests in other subjects and specific cities.

The more frequent math and reading results allow education locksmiths to gauge whether any number of inputs in the nation’s schools—from spending increases to new laws—are having their desired effects. With both more money and federal law firmly in place, observers were frustrated that national averages for 2019 reading and math scores fell from 2017 (with the 1-point improvement in fourth-grade math a small exception).

Rigorous research is required to appropriately link policies and school budgets to NAEP outcomes, but Florida’s aggressive upgrade to its K-12 education design in the early 2000s tracked closely with improved NAEP scores among minority students. The additional parent options in education, along with a focus on reading among third-graders and more attention to the use of Advanced Placement testing has been the subject of policy discussion around the country since.

This year, reformers pointed to similar reading-related policies in Mississippi to explain the state’s improvement in fourth-grade scores, while calling for “urgent action” elsewhere. The Council of Chief State School Officers even said the “urgency of improving outcomes for all students” was enough to plan … a meeting. This “urgent action” is why the results will matter for students tomorrow: That is when the changes will affect the classroom. Parents can only hope it is not too late by then.

Nationally, average scores among fourth- and eighth-grade students increased in math by 27 points and 20 points, respectively, between 1990 and 2009. Yet since 2009, and a decade is almost the length of a child’s K-12 career, the improvement stalled. Reading scores have improved by just three points in both grades since 1992.

It is these scores and other comparisons that have not changed that should bother reformers and policymakers alike in 2019. Last summer, Harvard University’s Paul Peterson wrote in Education Next that the test score gap on NAEP and international tests between students from low-income families and their more affluent peers has not changed since the 1960s. Peterson wrote later that the “performances on math, reading, and science tests of the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged students differ by approximately four years’ worth of learning, a disparity that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a century.”

Such findings temper enthusiasm for any year-to-year increases. So, too, do the results from NAEP’s other test, the Long-Term Trend Assessment (LTT). Average scores for 17-year-olds in math and reading have not changed since the 1970s (the LTT was last given in 2012 and is scheduled to resume in 2020). Students appear to lose any gains made in elementary and middle school by graduation.

Over time, these results have been depressingly more of the same, which should incentivize education reformers and policymakers not to do the same things. Such as: In the last two years, many state policymakers were either absent or complicit in teacher union attempts to keep students in assigned district schools by curbing charter school growth in Los Angeles and Chicago and blocking new private learning options in Kentucky and West Virginia.

These options are the most significant departures from the routine of school-by-zip-code because parents can help a struggling child immediately by moving them to a new setting with a charter school, private school scholarship or education savings account. Students will not have to wait for the urgent meetings to finish, hoping to find success this time.

Now that would be different.

November 21, 2019 0 comment

Advocate Voices Commentary and opinion Progressives and ed reform School Choice

Education choice and ‘How to Be an Antiracist’

Doug Tuthill November 20, 2019

Doug Tuthill

Ibram X. Kendi, best-selling author and Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, became at age 34 the youngest recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” Kendi is a former assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. PHOTO: Stephen Voss

When I was a teacher union president in the early 1990s, I gave an interview with our local newspaper in which I criticized the educational inequalities that were being exacerbated by public magnet schools. Many found my criticisms hypocritical because I was an education choice advocate who had helped launch one of our community’s first magnet schools a decade earlier and had enrolled my two children in a magnet school.

But not all education choice programs are inherently good. Those that perpetuate and increase inequalities undermine public education and the public good. My criticisms in that interview were not aimed at education choice in the abstract, but rather in how education choice was being implemented in our community.

I thought about that interview and the controversy that ensued as I was reading Ibram X. Kendi’s new book, “How To Be An Antiracist.” Kendi is a Florida A&M graduate (Go Rattlers!) and a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., where he teaches history and international relations. He is also the founding director of American University’s AntiRacist Research and Policy Center.

Kendi is a systems thinker. To Kendi, racism isn’t about white people disliking black people, or light-skinned blacks feeling superior to dark-skinned blacks. Racism is a set of systemic policies and practices that use race to perpetuate power inequities. Groups use racism to help maintain their social, political, and economic advantages.

Kendi defines anti-racism as actively working to dismantle those systemic policies and practices that use race to perpetuate power inequalities. And he says there is no neutral ground. All of our policies and actions are either racist or anti-racist, including our nonactions. Nonaction in the face of racism is racist because it allows systemic racism to persist.

“There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral,” Kendi writes. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”

As a systems thinker, Kendi supports racial discrimination when it is used to undermine systemic racism by redistributing power in ways that create greater equity: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is anti-racist. If discrimination is creating greater inequity, then it is racist. Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging an inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached.”

Kendi’s take on the systemic nature of racism and anti-racism are not new. The Black Power movement in the 1960s and ‘70s was built on a similar analysis, as articulated by activists such as Malcolm X, Kwame Ture (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Omali Yeshitela (International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement), and Bobby Seals and Huey Newton (Black Panther Party).

What is unique, at least to Kendi, is his personal journey. The path he describes in his book suggests he arrived at his understandings through personal experiences and the insights they fostered rather than an in-depth study of Black Power literature. His openness about his struggles to develop a satisfactory understanding of his relationship to racism as a young black man is refreshing and enlightening, although not without criticisms.

Thanks in large part to the ongoing advocacy of long-time educator and community organizer Owusu Sadaukai, or Howard Fuller as he is best known in the education choice community, today’s education choice movement is deeply grounded in an anti-racist and anti-poverty agenda. The movement has largely embraced Fuller’s social justice rationale for education choice and consequently focuses much of its energy on restructuring public education in ways that expand opportunities for low-income, minority, and special needs children and their families.

Without ever having met Fuller, Polly Williams, or other social justice warriors in the early education choice movement, my concerns in the early 1990s about how public magnet schools were increasing inequality aligned with Fuller’s agenda and eventually led me and many other left-of-center progressives to join the social justice wing of the education choice movement.

If Black Power advocates from Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) to Ibram X. Kendi are correct in identifying racism as the systemic use of race to perpetuate social, economic, political, and education inequities, how can my fellow progressives continue to defend public education policies and practices that advantage the powerful while systemically disadvantaging low-income people of color? How can they oppose Fuller’s social justice approach to education choice and still be anti-racist?

These are questions more progressives need to consider. They can start by reading Kendi’s book.

November 20, 2019 0 comment

Blog guest Chris Stewart Commentary and opinion Customization Education and Public Policy Education equity

Guest commentary: While we get lost in the wrong arguments, too many of our kids aren’t ready for the future

Chris Stewart November 19, 2019

Chris Stewart

Editor’s note: This commentary, first published Nov. 11 on Education Post, reminds us that the best way to prepare students for a rapidly changing world is to empower educators to create more diverse learning options and to enable all parents to access those learning options that best meet their children’s needs.

As a Generation Xer, I was sold the dream in the 1990s that one day we would all telecommute to work, execute our daily duties in our pajamas and never wear business suits again.

Work as we knew it was going to change forever.

For a while, it seemed employers were upping their perk game to compete in a national war for top talent. Boomers had to change their ways if we were going to work for them. Then, reality beat us silly. An economic recession deflated our pipe dreams, a talent surplus ended the talent wars and we were back to the boomer-era job expectations.

With that lens, I’m interested in Matt Barnum’s new piece that rips into Emerson Collective—a philanthropic effort of Laurene Powell Jobs—for its XQ project, which he says is reheating and overcooking the “future of work” story. We need to prepare kids for jobs that don’t yet exist they say. “Humbug,” he replies.

Barnum concedes the job economy is changing (as it always does), but says the “rate” of that change is too slow to warrant the narrative about a “fast-changing future of work” that requires us to remake the education and workforce development systems that prepare students for careers and life.

While this is classic Barnum—a piece intended to take down a prevailing education reform premise that will certainly draw praise for his bravery—I think it misses the point. Yes, it’s true that the public can be too easily seduced by broad arguments for education reform (e.g., we’ll all be gig workers in the future), but the better question to ask is whether our system of education prepares students for gainful and personally meaningful positions in the American economic mainstream.

According to a report by the World Economic Forum, the problem of not preparing young people for the future is a global problem. They make exactly the type of claim Barnum’s experts discount: “On average, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be comprised of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today.”

Further, as we argue about whether or not the future of work is fast-changing, what do we do about the 3 million workers who were displaced between 2015 and 2017 because their employer closed its doors or “abolished” their jobs? About a third of them were not reemployed, and of those that were, almost half were not at the same pay level of their previous jobs.

That’s a shift in the economy. The kind that repeats itself often and leaves entire segments of society unable to earn enough to live.

Most of us are not experts in economics, but many of us have seen parents, friends and family laid off, dislocated, outsourced or repurposed at a lower cost. In fact, some of us have seen so much of this that as parents we are more sensitive to the reality that the way we consider work today may not be how it turns out tomorrow for our children.

When we hear “the robots are coming” we know it’s plausible that automation could boot many families out of the middle class. As middle-skilled jobs are replaced with high-skilled, better paying jobs for those who qualify—or lower paying for those who don’t—it doesn’t really matter if the rate of change isn’t as fast as XQ says. Working families and their children can’t pay their rent with split hairs in arguments between employed people.

Even if the promoters of “future work” orthodoxy embellish their story, does that overshadow the empirical fact that emerging markets and the churn of economic change create opportunities that rarely give America’s most marginalized children and families a fair shot at benefiting?

You want irony? I give it to you. The thing Barnum and I have in common is that we’ve been on the vanguard of employment opportunity created by shifts in the world of work. The changing nature of advocacy, activism, journalism, media, social media, blogging, scholarship and education commentary have created jobs, organizations and networks that employ an army of daily workers.

The difference between Barnum and me is that he represents a demographic group that is often a great beneficiary of emerging jobs and economies. I’m grateful representation of the group often left behind. So excuse me if I dismiss Barnum’s piece as the luxury of a leisure class.

I’ll stand alone on this. Others will cheer him on. Reformers can be a rueful, spiteful and juvenile group who love to privately celebrate the failures of philanthropies who have passed them by for grants or failed to recognize the brilliance of their ideas. For this group, Barnum is a contrarian Iron Man. (Barnum’s organization, Chalkbeat, is actually a current grantee of Emerson. Education Post once was but is no longer.)

In this moment of neo-socialist billionaire hatred, takedowns are the skinny jeans of journalism. Education philanthropies that take risks with their investments as a way of spurring change are an easy target. A tougher topic is how our system to prepare youth for life in the American economic mainstream is poorly suited to the task.

Instead of smugly debunking overstatements and lofty predictions about the future of work, our time would be better spent asking how well our children are being prepared for gainful work in the future.

November 19, 2019 0 comment

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