“… it’s the same educators who saw the litany of issues that encumbered their work in NYC schools that ought to serve as our schools’ best ambassadors. But the lack of real vision and leadership, the silencing of those who could provide that leadership, the systemic attitudes towards folks who even attempt to elevate social justice, the sheer number of deaths happening around friends and families, the reverberations of the voices they hear in their own communities about this pandemic, and the colleagues who fear being called racist over actually addressing and redressing racism in their own professional spaces makes for a concoction that might make this profession too much to bear.

It’s visible aggression.

Any conditions that compel the teacher to take note of failures rather than of healthy growth give false standards and result in distortion and perversion.— John Dewey,¹

Academic Fredrik deBoer has written a book, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice (All Points Books, 2020), that questions the enormous value attached to people based on their academic talent. The author defines the Cult of Smart thus: “It is the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence is the only true measure of human worth. (p 5-6)

We cannot continue to promote the same unjust and oppressive educational structures that have endured for centuries. Rather, we must reimagine education and recruit a racially diverse teaching force.

Twenty-five percent of districts said children in kindergarten through second grade were supposed to receive more than three hours of remote instruction every day but another 25 percent of districts reported only one hour or less. The two-hour-a-day difference narrowed a bit in higher grades but even by high school, many students received 1.5 fewer instructional hours every day than others (3 hours vs. 4.5 hours). Over several months of school closures, the daily difference in hours added up to a lot of instructional time. My back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it at more than 100 hours. (My math: 2 hours a day x 5 days a week x 12 weeks of school closures = 120 hours.)

 “One key question is why these differences occur and what do these differences mean for students,” said Mike Garet, head of the survey team at the American Institutes of Research (AIR), a nonprofit research organization. AIR presented early results from its “National Survey of Public Education’s Response to COVID-19” at a virtual session of the Education Writers Association’s national seminar on July 22, 2020. AIR sent out surveys to more than 2,500 of the nation’s 13,500 school districts in May and plans to release results periodically to inform education policymakers during the pandemic. This early report represents a 19 percent response rate so far and includes data from nearly 500 districts across 49 states and covers a wide range of both urban and rural regions.

I was surprised to learn that the difference in instructional hours can’t be simply explained by poverty. When researchers diced the survey data up CONTINUE READING: PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures - The Hechinger Report

Finally integrating and raising the academic level of all our schools- public and private- is all the reparations we as a people would need for this country to finally reach its potential for ALL our people. As superb writer and intellect James Baldwin and many others have known for generations, an "educated people, of any color, are so extremely rare that it is unquestionably one of the first tasks of a nation to open all of its schools to all of its citizens."

We did this historically with the unprecedented opening of our schools early on in our country's history for our European "huddled masses yearning to be free." But what we didn't anticipate was that these once European downtrodden peasant dreamers would then turn around and do to Africans, Latinos, and other minorities, what had once been done to them in Europe- in aid of nurturing their own now inflated egos and feelings of superiority. They now saw themselves as the new American ruling class, even though they were now objectively and regrettably no different than the earlier European incarnation they and their ancestors had once despised, suffered under, and  CONTINUE READING: Finally Integrating Public Education Is All The Reparations We Need - Perdaily.com