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| Chapter 1Rafe Esquith was beginning his third year of teaching in Los Angeles public schools. His class of 40 fifth graders came from low income homes where English rarely was spoken, and the best reader among them was two years below grade level. So he decided to teach them Shakespeare.
Five families agreed to let their children rehearse Macbeth for two hours after school. Within weeks, Esquith had kids gleefully soaking up the drama of blood and betrayal in medieval Scotland. They were learning words they had never heard before. Soon Esquith received a note from school leaders: "Mr. Esquith, it is not appropriate that you stay after school to teach Shakespeare. It would be better if you did something with the children that is academic."1
It would not be the last time that the narrow thinking of big city school administration got in Esquith's way. And yet, he continues to teach, inspiring his fifth graders to excel far beyond the low expectations often placed on poor, immigrant children. He has proved that a teacher who thinks big—harder lessons, larger projects, extra class time—can help disadvantaged children in ways most educators never imagine.
His students live in the heart of Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood better known for crime than for opportunity. Their school, Hobart Boulevard Elementary, has more than two thousand students; 90 percent live below the poverty level. Few expect any but the smartest and luckiest to rise beyond the limitations of their environment. Rafe Esquith does.
Esquith expects a lot from his 10 year olds, and he gets it. They voluntarily arrive at school by 6:30 in the morning, work through recess, and stay until 5:00 p.m. And they come to class during vacations and holidays. Their hard work shows up in test scores, consistently scoring in the top 5 to 10 percent of the country.
"Like all real teachers, I fail constantly. I don't get enough sleep. I lie awake in the early morning hours, agonizing over a kid I was unable to reach. Being a teacher can be painful." But Esquith finds hope and inspiration in his classroom, Room 56. "We've created a different world in Room 56. It's a world where character matters, hard work is respected, humility is valued, and support for one another is unconditional."2
With abiding faith and passion, Esquith leads his fifth graders through a rigorous core curriculum of English, mathematics, geography, and literature. But he goes further, creating a real world learning environment: Students must apply for a job, such as banker, office monitor, clerk, janitor, or police officer. Each child receives a monthly "paycheck" in classroom currency. They pay rent to sit at their desks—the closer to the front of the room, the higher the rent. Students can make extra money by getting good grades and participating in extracurricular activities; they can also be fined for breaking class rules or getting poor grades. The classroom motto is "Be nice, work hard. There are no shortcuts."
Though none of Esquith's students speaks English as a first language, they all read literature far above their fifth grade level—Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Esquith also takes his students beyond contemporary literature and into a world at the heart and soul of his teaching: an intensive immersion in Shakespeare—reading his plays, studying his life and times. This year long study culminates in April, when students present a full length, unabridged production of Shakespeare.
These student actors have been wildly successful. They have opened for the Royal Shakespeare Company, performed A Midsummer Night's Dream in Los Angeles, and appeared at the Globe Theater in London. At first, Esquith and his wife, Barbara Tong, funded his program out of their own pockets. Today, donations from major corporations and private individuals cover the cost of the class's travels and performances.
"If you're a young teacher or parent who has often wanted to break from the pack but has been afraid to do so, I can tell you that I've done so and am still standing. I have many scars and bruises, but I have, as Robert Frost tells us, taken the road less traveled. And it's made all the difference."31 Rafe Esquith, Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire (New York: Viking), p. vi.2 Ibid., pp. vi–x.3 "Rafe Esquith Offers His Fiery Teaching Methods," All Things Considered, January 22, 2007 (www.npr.org). Chapter 2 Would you rather go to school or join a Secret Agents Club? Want to do both? Look no further than The Lab School of Washington and its colorful leader Sally L. Smith, who started this "school modeled after a party" more than forty years ago. The school offers innovative programs for children and adults with learning disabilities, emphasizing experiential learning and the arts. Explained Smith, "I am in the business of saving lives." She started with her youngest son. Gary Smith was born with severe learning disabilities. By the first grade, he struggled with the alphabet and math, yet easily solved puzzles and expounded on the similarities between Greek myths and Navajo rain dances. School officials quickly decided that Gary could not be taught. So Smith drew upon her background in psychology and cultural anthropology to create new approaches to teaching her son and tapping into his talents. Children's birthday parties provided initial clues. When I had birthday parties for the kids, I always picked a theme, whether it was Indians or secret agents or the Civil War. We made costumes, castles and tents, festive feasts; all were concrete activities with focused involvement. Suddenly it dawned on me that this kid couldn't tell you two plus two is four but through everything we did at birthday parties, he was learning. So I thought, what am I doing in these parties that is working?1 Her answer: "Total immersion of the senses." Smith discovered that children with learning disabilities are often visual thinkers and hands on learners. The central nervous system of children with learning disabilities often scrambles information and impairs the orderly acquisition of knowledge. Smith calls it the "hidden handicap." Although students with learning disabilities struggle in learning environments focused on language and conformity, they can thrive in settings that use the arts as a gateway to learning. In the summer of 1967, Smith received a telegram from a long time friend and educator suggesting she start a school. She had twenty five days to find volunteers, create a curriculum, and hire teachers. Recalls Smith, "I had the audacity, and perhaps naïveté, to design and direct a school for my son and others like him, when there was no such thing available." The seeds of the Lab School were sown. And after forty years, Smith remained a tireless champion of arts based learning. The arts demand involvement. They counteract passivity. The arts ignite the whole learning process. The arts help organize knowledge. Our experience is that the arts hold children's attention and deal constantly with sequence and order—areas that cause the learning disabled so much trouble. The arts provide connections, linkages, and often clarify relationships.2 Smith designed the Academic Club Method, which encourages exploration and deep learning of academic content while building knowledge, language fluency, and critical thinking. The rigorous academic model combines various educational methods, including multisensory learning, cooperative education, discovery and project learning, and authentic assessment. Students study great thinkers, works of art, and literature in rooms decorated like ancient Egypt, a prehistoric cave, or a Renaissance hall. Students role play to learn the various stages of evolution. The Academic Clubs help students learn how to learn, not merely master facts. Many students with learning disabilities are not comfortable in the world of words and are called stupid or lazy. They may look typical, but they don't learn typically. They are visual thinkers. They see shapes, forms, contours, colors, textures, movement. When imparting knowledge we need to paint pictures in their minds through hands on project learning and active learning. We see astonishing successes when we honor their different styles of learning.3 Yet, for many years, Sally Smith encountered doubts and derision. "Here comes the arts and crafts lady" the friendliest doubters said with a sneer. She didn't waver. Today her students' achievements speak volumes: Over 90 percent of Lab School students go on to college. And the success is spreading. Before her death in 2007, Smith opened arts based schools in Baltimore and Philadelphia for students with learning disabilities. Our understanding of diverse ways of knowing continues to advance, in no small part because of the work and talents of Sally Smith.1 Sally Smith, No Easy Answers (Bantam Books, 1995). 2 Sally Smith, Learn It, Live It (Brookes Publishing, 2005). 3 Ibid, p. 21. Chapter 3 Why am I not allowed to speak Spanish at school? Why do Mexican students seem ashamed of speaking Spanish? Am I stupid for not learning English quickly so that I can do the assignments? Why are there no teachers who look like me and who share my culture and language? And why did my parents leave the warmth and comfort of Central America for the indifference and coldness of the United States?1 It was 1955. Carlos Julio Ovando had emigrated from Nicaragua and was anxious to show his teachers what he knew. But educationally disenfranchised by his linguistic and cultural background, he could not. The promise of religious freedom and economic stability had motivated the Ovando family's move to Corpus Christi, Texas. In Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship opposed the vigorous attempts of Ovando's father, a former priest turned Protestant minister, to convert Catholics. The family was exiled. Yet, their Latin American heritage remained strong. Even after the Ovandos emigrated, Nicaraguan cultural traditions continued in the Ovando home and discussions of spiritual values were central to the family's daily life. Whereas home was a cultural touchstone for Ovando, school was foreign territory. Unable to understand the lessons in English, he felt abandoned. At age 14, Carlos was placed in the sixth grade and wondered, "Why do teachers show little interest in who I am?" In Nicaragua, the family was entrusted with home life and the school took care of the academic lessons. But school was clearly not working for Carlos. I do not recall my parents ever asking to see my report cards or expressing interest in visiting my school to talk to my teachers about my progress. As in the case with many other newly arrived immigrants, it may be that while tacitly interested in my academic well being, my parents did not know how or were afraid to approach the unfamiliar American schools.2 Disconnected from school and doubtful of his own abilities, Ovando was experiencing education that was not so much immersion as submersion, the classic "sink or swim" approach, and Ovando was sinking, looking at America from the bottom of the pool. Ironically, a different kind of pool, a pool hall, proved to be the turning point in his life. The turning point in my academic career began when somebody in the church congregation saw me coming out of a pool hall and told my father. Soon after that, in the hope of saving me from sin, my father sent me to a Mennonite high school in northern Indiana.3 At the new school, a teacher saw Ovando in an entirely different way. Not so much English challenged, as Spanish blessed. He affirmed Ovando's Latin American roots and championed his native linguistic talent. Spurred by his teacher's encouragement, Ovando rediscovered confidence in his academic abilities. Rather than being punished for speaking Spanish, he was acclaimed for his language talents. He won honors, including college scholarships. Ovando now reveled in the world of ideas. He taught Spanish in a Midwest high school before going on to college teaching and writing. His work shows how language is much more than a set of words and grammar rules: It can be a cultural link for students, one that promotes academic achievement. Whereas critics see bilingual education as a threat to national identity, Ovando envisions a society built on the strengths of its diverse population. He challenges teachers to unlock each student's cultural touchstones: "Pedagogy that activates the student voice and embraces the local community provides a much richer environment for student understanding than pedagogy that treats students as if they were empty vessels into which knowledge is to be poured."41 Adapted from Carlos J. Ovando and Virginia P. Collier, Bilingual and ESL Classrooms: Teaching in Multicultural Contexts, 2nd ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1998), p. 2. 2 Ibid, p. 2. 3Ibid, p. 3. 4Ibid, p. 24. Chapter 4Jeannie Oakes never dreamed of being a schoolteacher. "It was just too ordinary. I wanted adventure, unconventionality." So she embraced her passion for reading, earned a degree in American Literature, married, and had children. "It turned out that I was a lot more conventional than I thought I was!" While raising her children at home in the 1960s, Oakes decided that, she would become a teacher for the "same old fashioned reasons for which women have always taught—I wanted to be with my children when they came home from school every day."1 But the unconventional spirit in Jeannie Oakes hadn't disappeared. She championed the Civil Rights movement and anti Vietnam war activities. And she realized that teaching was a vehicle for social justice, that teaching could be far from ordinary. Her first day in the classroom made a lasting impression. She didn't announce to students they were taking basic English but recalls how within five minutes they knew and announced, "Oh, we're in the dumb class!" During the seven years Oakes taught middle and high school English in suburban Los Angeles, she struggled to be as good a teacher to low track classes as to the high ones, and was astonished how her own instruction and expectations changed for students placed in honors, average, and basic classes. She also witnessed how tracking dictated disparate lives in schools. "In a very public way, adults make judgments about students' current and future abilities that take on a hierarchical nature: We talk about top groups and bottom groups. And in the culture of schools, the top group becomes the top kids and the bottom group the bottom kids in a very value laden and defining way."2 Creating innovative classrooms that unlocked successful learning for diverse students became her challenge. Each new school year, Oakes developed new curriculum and instructional strategies, hoping to invigorate enthusiasm for learning in students and fellow teachers. Her calls for change met with administrative resistance and her voice was increasingly silenced. Her voice was heard as a doctoral student at UCLA, as Oakes researched with John Goodlad the varied aspects of life in schools. Oakes specifically explored how tracking and ability grouping limit the school experiences of low income students and students of color. Her landmark book Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (1985/2005) brings the inequities of tracking into the national spotlight, casting a riveting portrayal of how tracking creates segregation within schools and shortchanges quality learning and resources. Yet despite the attention, tracking remains one of the most entrenched school practices, relegating students to separate classrooms based less on ability and more on race and socioeconomic status. Oakes believes the persistence is rooted in a cultural notion that intelligence is immutable and that there is virtually nothing schools can do to alter a student's fundamental capability. She doesn't buy such a limited view. Kindergartners show an enormous interest in learning, and this cuts across socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic lines. But as kids go through school, if they don't have successful experiences, they learn their efforts do not pay off. So by high school, we see disinterest unjustly interpreted by teachers as low ability.3 For Oakes, then, the fundamental goal of equalizing opportunity is not simply to detrack but also to increase the quality of curriculum and instruction for everybody in schools so that success is not limited to those in the high track. This requires a powerful shift in conventional norms, one that defines intellectual capacity as not fixed but learned through interaction, problem solving, and critical thinking. Oakes recognizes that the process of detracking schools is not easy. School reform efforts are often met with resistance by those who benefit from the current system. This political dimension of inequality cannot be underestimated. Parents of high achieving students exert considerable pressure to ensure that their children have access to honors and AP classes. Moreover, teachers of high track students often resist efforts to detrack, enjoying the intellectual challenge and prestige that come from teaching these students. School administrators and teachers who have undertaken detracking efforts often tell her it is their most difficult undertaking—and most rewarding. Oakes understands why: "It's about fairness and creating better schools. And getting there is half the fun."4 A conventional career, perhaps. But Jeannie Oakes is an unconventional advocate for equity and change.1Carlos Alberto Torres, Education, Power, and Personal Biography: Dialogues with Critical Educators (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 224–25. 2John O'Neill, "On Tracking and Individual Differences: A Conversation with Jeannie Oakes," Educational Leadership 50, no. 2 (October 1992), p. 18. 3Ibid, p. 20. 4Torres, Education, Power, and Personal Biography, p. 230. Chapter 5 A Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, Jonathan Kozol had no idea "what it was like to be a poor kid in America." He quickly learned. In 1964, the Klu Klux Klan in Mississippi murdered three young civil rights workers. The injustice ignited a need to act. I'd never been involved with racial issues. I was not particularly political. In fact, I wasn't political at all. But this event had an extraordinary effect. I volunteered to spend the summer teaching at a black church which had set up a freedom school. When September came, I walked into the Boston school department and said, "I'm going to be a teacher."1 He was assigned to the fourth grade of an urban school in Boston, a school so impoverished he didn't have a classroom. Kozol and his disenfranchised students camped out in an auditorium. In an effort to resuscitate their interest in learning, he shared his favorite poetry. Students recited lines, asked questions, even cried as they identified with the words of Langston Hughes. Although the words of the black poet may have inspired students, the author was not on the school's approved reading list. Kozol was fired. He chronicled his first year teaching in Death at an Early Age (1967), which alerted the nation to the wrenching injustices found in impoverished schools and the resiliency of their students. For almost four decades, Kozol's compassionate spirit has given voice to the poor. In his best selling book, Savage Inequalities (1991), he describes life in destitute schools from East St. Louis to the Bronx. Kozol writes of schools so overcrowded that students get desks only when other students are absent. Of students who go for part, most, or all of the year without textbooks. While decrying this tragedy, Kozol does not find an answer in voucher programs. [T]he idea behind choice (within the district), basically, is that if you let people choose, everybody will get the school they want. [But] people very seldom have equal choices, and even when they theoretically have equal choices, they rarely have equal access. People can't choose things they've never heard of, for example. And lots of the poorest folks in our inner cities are functionally illiterate. In many of our inner cities, as many as 30 percent of our adults cannot read well enough to understand the booklets put out by school systems delineating their choices. Even if they can understand and even if the school system is sophisticated enough to print these things in five different languages for all the different ethnic groups in cities like New York or Chicago, there's a larger point that those who hear about new schools, good schools, first are almost always the well connected. And so, what often happens is that while everybody theoretically has the right to choose any school, the affluent, the savvy, the children of the academics, the children of the lawyers, the children of the doctors, the children of the school superintendent tend to end up in the same three little boutique elementary schools. And I call them boutique schools because they're always charming, and the press loves them, and they always have enough racial integration so it looks okay for the newspaper or the TV camera. But, in fact, they are separated by both race and class, and more and more by class. What happens is that the poorest of the poor often do not get into these schools or very small numbers get in. Large numbers of the kids who nobody wants end up concentrated in the schools that no one chooses except by default... Now the dark, terrifying prospect of vouchers or a choice agenda, of a so called market basis for our public schools, is that rather than encourage a sense of common loyalties among people, choice will particularize loyalties. It will fragmentize ambition, so that the individual parent will be forced to claw and scramble for the good of her kid and her kid only, at whatever cost to everybody else. There's a wonderful quote from John Dewey. He said "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely. Acted upon, it destroys our democracy." ... The best known voucher advocate, John Chubb, of the Brookings Institute, in Washington, says something—I'm paraphrasing him—like this: "Democratic governance of schools is what's wrong with schools. We need a voucher plan in order to break the bonds of democratic education, because it hasn't worked." That's what he says. When I hear that, I think to myself, "Wait a minute. We've never tried democratic education." We haven't yet given equal, wonderful, innovative, humane schools—at the level of our finest schools—to all our children.... I think we should try it first, see how it might work.21Mardell Raney. Interview with Jonathan Kozol. Technos 7, no. 3 (Fall 1998), pp. 4–10.2Reprinted with permission of Educational Leadership 50, no. 3 (November 1992), pp. 90–92. Chapter 6 One day in 1967, fifth grader Alfie Kohn received a class assignment. As expected, he wrote his name and the date at the top of the paper. The title he chose, though, was unanticipated: "Busywork." He doesn't remember the announced purpose of the assignment. He does remember that it was busywork. Over three decades later, Alfie Kohn still discriminates between genuine learning and mindless school routine. As a teacher, researcher, and journalist, his work carries a common theme: Educational excellence comes from personalized learning, from recognizing the uniqueness of each student, not from a lockstep curriculum. As a teacher, he remembers: I lovingly polished lectures, reading lists, and tests. I treated the students as interchangeable receptacles—rows of wide open bird beaks waiting for worms. Finally I realized I was denying students the joy of exploring topics and uncovering truths on their own.1 In his own education, Kohn adopted this personalized approach to learning. As an undergraduate at Brown University, he created an interdisciplinary major, and dubbed it normativism. He again took an unbeaten path at the University of Chicago, writing his graduate thesis on humor. "Learning was meaningful because I started with the question and then drew from whatever fields were useful in exploring it, rather than being confined to the methods and topics of a particular discipline."2 When he visits classrooms today, Kohn is often disheartened. Rarely does he witness such engaged learning. Instead, he sees students usually learning just to pass a test. Kohn challenges today's popular clamor for higher standards and increased testing. "Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole."3 He passionately warns educators, policymakers, and parents that raising standardized test scores is completely different from helping students to learn. And the pressurized culture of testing exacts a high cost. Every hour spent on such exam preparation is an hour not spent helping students to think creatively, to tackle controversial issues, and to love learning. Common standards often begin with "all students will be able to..." and Kohn sees a harmful message in such wording: Individual differences don't exist or are unimportant. Often justified in the name of accountability or rigor, standards turn schools into fact factories. Students may recite Civil War battles, distinguish between phloem and xylem, and memorize prime numbers in hopes of meeting predetermined standards of excellence. Will they? Kohn doesn't think so. With a focus on standards of outcome rather than standards of opportunity, real barriers to achievement—racism, poverty, low teacher salaries, language differences, inadequate facilities—are lost in the sea of testing. "[A]ll students deserve a quality education. But declaring that everyone must reach the same level is naïve at best, cynical at worst, in light of wildly unequal resources."4 Equally troublesome is testing's unbalanced reward system. As a bonus for good scores, more money is often given to successful schools and less to those already deprived. Callous is how he describes such a retreat from fairness and the implication that teachers and students need only be bribed or threatened to achieve. Alfie Kohn also knows that change in schools can be slow. Standardized curriculum and testing are fueled by concerns of competition in our global economy and reinforced by a tradition of teacher centered instruction. "I am not a utopian. I am as aware as anyone of the difficulties of creating schools that are genuinely concerned about learning and about meeting children's needs, but that causes me to redouble my efforts rather than throw up my hands."51Jay Matthews, "Education's Different Drummer," The Washington Post (January 9, 2001), p. A10. 2Ibid. 3Alfie Kohn, "Standardized Testing and Its Victims," Education Week (September 27, 2000). 4Alfie Kohn, "One Size Fits All Education Doesn't Work," Boston Globe (June 10, 2001), p. C8. 5Jay Matthews, "Education's Different Drummer." Chapter 8 Jane Roland Martin "Domephobia," the fear of things domestic, is Jane Roland Martin's word for gender bias in schools and in society. She coined the term when she compared the distinct educations Jean Jacques Rousseau designed for his fictitious students Emile and Sophie. Martin was frustrated that whereas the boy, Emile, was said to revel in intellectual exploration, Sophie was to receive second rate training—to be a wife and a mother. Martin deplores the disconnect between intellectual development and the development of abilities to love and care for a family. She recognizes that today's schools continue to craft different expectations for males and females. In fact, she knows this inequity firsthand. Teaching philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston for over thirty years, Martin found herself fighting to have her intellectual voice heard in a traditional male discipline. Her experience of bias fueled her anger that equal opportunity education is still so far from reality. Yet, Jane Roland Martin knows "women are barometers of change." Feminism today, like Sophie's education three hundred years ago, gives men and women a special gift—a new perspective on gender roles. At the dawn of a new millennium, women's roles at work and in the family are indeed changing. Not only are women wives and mothers, they are corporate CEOs, medal winning soccer players, and Supreme Court justices. Yet even as society may champion the greater earning power and talents of women, we are seeing a backlash against the more liberated roles of women. The trouble? The changes have cast as fiction the rosy Norman Rockwell portrait of the American family: More than half of all mothers work outside the home and single parent homes number 1 in 5. These numbers stir concern that day care is bad, working mothers are neglectful, and the well being of the nation's children is threatened. What society may see as problematic, Jane Roland Martin envisions as opportunity. Historically, the physical, emotional, and social needs of children have been met by family, primarily mothers. Today, women are drawn by economic need and personal desire to enter the workforce. Martin sees these changes as a defining moment for schools, a chance to re create within schools the nurturing tasks traditionally performed at home. Martin's critics say no, schools should focus only on intellectual development. Not Martin. A social reconstructionist, she challenges schools to open their doors to what she calls the 3Cs—caring, concern, and connection. As more children are cared for outside the home, she fears the 3C curriculum is in danger of being lost. And American society has paid a heavy price for ignoring such domestic needs. Social inequalities continue and children are often the victims. Martin has an antidote: Transform schoolhouses into "schoolhomes." The schoolhome is far different from traditional "factory model schooling, which views children as raw material, teachers as workers who process their students before sending them on to the next station on the assembly line, [and] curriculum as the machinery that forges America's young into marketable products."1 Instead, Martin's schoolhome focuses on students' individual emotional and cognitive needs. It embraces the experience of all learners and welcomes racial, cultural, and gender diversity. Martin's vision of schools reflects her vision of American society as everyone's home: Instead of focusing our gaze on abstract norms, standardized tests, generalized rates of success, and uniform outcomes, the ideas of the schoolhome direct action to actual educational practice. Of course a schoolhome will teach the 3Rs. But it will give equal emphasis to the 3Cs—not by designating formal courses in these but by being a domestic environment characterized by safety, security, nurturance, and love. In the schoolhome, mind and body, thought and action, reason and emotion are all educated.2 The schoolhome will incorporate the 3Cs into our very definition of what it means for males and females to be educated. Creating such nurturing and equitable schools will require "acts of both great and small, strategic and utterly outrageous. The cause demands no less, not one whit less."31Jane Roland Martin, The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 41. 2Jane Roland Martin, "Women, School, and Cultural Wealth." In Connie Titone and Karen Maloney (eds.), Thinking Through Our Mothers: Women's Philosophies of Education (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill, 1999), pp.161–62. 3Jane Roland Martin, Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the Academy (New York: Routlege, 2000), p. 182. Chapter 9 Growing up in South Carolina (vintage 1940s), Marian Wright Edelman learned to counter the summer heat with a swim. African American children were not allowed in the public pool, so Marian and her friends did their summer swimming, diving, and fishing in the creek, even though it was polluted with hospital sewage. One of her friends decided that the bridge spanning the creek would be a good diving platform, but that decision turned out to be fatal: He broke his neck on impact. His death was one of several tragedies that taught Edelman early lessons on the deadly impact of race segregation. In recalling those tragedies, Edelman says: "You never, ever forget."1 Marian Wright Edelman's family provided a refuge from this racial hatred. Her father was a Baptist minister, her mother a devout Sunday School teacher, and both instilled a sense of service. Sharing a bed, a meal, or a pair of shoes with foster children or neighbors in need was a common event for Edelman and her four siblings. Because public playgrounds were closed to black children, her parents made Shiloh Baptist Church a community resource center for black sports teams, Boys Scouts, and Girl Scouts. Edelman learned that "[s]ervice is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time."2 During the 1960s, Edelman worked as a volunteer at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), campaigning for passage of the Voting Rights Act as well as finding legal assistance for students jailed during sit ins and demonstrations. As she sorted through requests for NAACP assistance from poor black citizens, Edelman realized that law could be a vehicle to social justice. She attended Yale University Law School and became the first black woman to pass the bar exam in Mississippi. Although she practiced civil rights law, Edelman's work with poor children helped her to see that they were the most vulnerable and voiceless group in our society. Children "had no one to speak out on their behalf—no one to make sure that there were laws and government policies in place to protect them."3 During the next four decades, Marian Wright Edelman became their voice. Edelman founded the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) in 1973, with the mission to "Leave No Child Behind." The CDF works to ensure that every child has a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life. The CDF strives to protect all children—and particularly children of low income and minority families—through research, community organization, federal and state government lobbying, and public education. Among those who worked for the CDF was a young Wellesley graduate named Hillary Rodham, who continued to advocate for children's rights later when she became the First Lady and then U.S. Senator from New York. CDF also sponsors Freedom Schools that recruit college students to serve as mentors to over 12,000 students both after school and during the summer. Edelman understands the lasting influence mentors give students, and she has a message for all teachers: "Teaching is a mission, not just a task or a job. I don't care how fancy the school, how low the student teacher ratio (which I believe should be lower), how high the pay (which I think should be higher): If children don't feel respected by adults who respect themselves, and don't feel valued, then they lose and all of us lose. Make it a reality that all children, especially poor children, are taught how to read, write, and compute so they can have happy and healthy options in their future. We need to understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways."41 Marian Wright Edelman, The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 8; 2 Ibid, p. 6; 3 Marian Wright Edelman, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), p. 28; 4 Ibid, p. 22. Chapter 10 "Flight delayed." For most, those two words evoke frustration and impatience. But for Morris Dees, a delayed flight was a life changing event. At the airport bookstore, he bought a used copy of Clarence Darrow's The Story of My Life. Although he had long admired Darrow for his defense of John Scopes in the famous "Monkey Trial," Dees had not known of Darrow's decision to leave the security and success of corporate litigation to practice civil rights law. Darrow's choice inspired Dees. "[A]ll the pulls and tugs of my conscience found a singular peace. It did not matter what my neighbors would think or the judges, the bankers, or even my friends. I had found an opportunity to return to my roots, to fight for racial equality."1 He sold the profitable book company that he had started with a friend, and began to practice civil rights law full time. Dees had earned a law degree from the University of Alabama and had become quite successful, both at his small law firm and at his book company, Fuller & Dees, which became one of the country's largest publishing houses. The company was based in Montgomery, Alabama. While Dees turned profits, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the same city, focused on turning hearts. As Dees points out, back then, he didn't pay much attention to King. "The Movement happened all around me, but I was oblivious, too caught up in the finesse of business... until [that] stormy night in 1967 at a Cincinnati airport."2 Not that Dees was new to the racial struggle of the South. Growing up in Alabama, Morris Dees worked with black laborers in the cotton fields his father owned, an unusual partnership in the deeply segregated South of the 1940s. As he worked alongside them, he learned about the scars of prejudice, both physical and emotional. The seeds of his career in civil rights advocacy were sown on those Alabama cotton fields but needed time to take root. In 1969, Dees sued the YMCA. Fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, the YMCA still refused to admit African American youth to its summer camp. Dees filed a class action suit to stop the YMCA's policy of racial discrimination. The suit was a long shot. Private organizations were considered beyond the scope of civil rights law—the business and social stalwarts untouchable. Morris Dees didn't flinch, and because of Smith v. YMCA, the Montgomery YMCA was forced to desegregate. Lawyer Joe Levin, another Alabamian, followed Smith v. YMCA closely, impressed with the imagination and dogged determination of Dees. In 1971, the two joined forces to create a small civil rights firm, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Today the SPLC is a national nonprofit organization known for its legal victories against white supremacist groups, tracking of hate groups, and sponsorship of the Civil Rights Memorial. Dees's call for justice and understanding can be heard in the classroom as well. Dees has created Teaching Tolerance, a collaboration between the SPLC and teachers across the country. The project features a magazine, videos, and curriculum to help teachers and students collectively tackle issues of racial, religious, class, and gender bias. After completing a study that showed an increase of hate Web sites, Dees realized that "[h]ate has a new home. The Internet. We need to recapture the wonder of the Internet and use it to spread fairness."3 Dees and Teaching Tolerance created Tolerance.org, an interactive site of antibias lessons and classroom activities. After more than thirty years of litigation and education, Morris Dees has adopted this latest tool in his quest for social justice. "To everything there is a season. There will be a season of justice."41Morris Dees, A Season for Justice: The Life and Times of Civil Rights Lawyer Morris Dees (New York: Charles Scribner, 1991). 2Ibid. 3Morris Dees, "About Tolerance.org," www.tolerance.org (July 29, 2001). 4Dees, A Season for Justice. Chapter 11 A veteran of the classroom for nearly five decades, Larry Cuban has examined America's schools from varying perspectives. He has been a professor at Stanford University and a teacher in an inner city social studies classroom. But it was when Cuban was appointed superintendent in Arlington, Virginia, that Sharon Steindam first met him, and discovered some remarkable traits. Steindam, now Assistant Director of the National Study of School Evaluation, was a newly appointed school principal, and quite nervous about being evaluated by the new superintendent. But as she remembers, "He was the only superintendent that I worked for who truly used a variety of information about the school to help him determine how I was doing. He wanted to know why I felt certain students were doing well and others were not. And he was the most human superintendent I ever worked with. He would greet you in the grocery store and ask about your family. Cuban was a true leader, holding high expectations, providing meaningful feedback, and personally engaging."1 Cuban has witnessed many exciting efforts to reform and change America's schools. And yet, after sorting out nearly a century of change, he came to a fascinating insight: Teaching remains strikingly similar year in and year out. In How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1980, Cuban explores why. Historically, schools have been built around teachers, not students. Not just philosophically but physically as well. Classrooms featured desks all facing front, bolted to the floor, physically reinforcing the notion that the teacher is the center of instruction. As if the nuts and bolts were not strong enough, the curriculum proved the clincher. To survive instructing very large classes in eight or ten subjects, teachers became dependent on reading and dictating assignments directly from the text. Uniformity and standardization were emphasized. Principals told teachers what to do, and teachers told students what to do. The organizational climate did not nurture new teaching techniques. As if all these in school barriers were not enough to defeat change, teacher training all but guaranteed that the status quo would be maintained. New teachers were brought into the profession through a modeling or an apprenticeship program, doing their student teaching under the tutelage of veteran, often conventional, older teachers. It was a system geared to the passing down of traditional approaches and conservative attitudes from one generation of teachers to the next. Cuban also believes that the suppression of student based instruction was no accident. Schools were designed to mold a compliant workforce; student centered instruction was viewed as rebellious, dangerous, and threatening to educational and economic stability. To Cuban, technology is another phony revolution. In studying effective classrooms, he notes that teachers are very concerned with choosing electronic tools that are efficient. Teachers ask: How much time and energy do I have to invest in learning to use the technology versus the return it will have for my students? When students use the technology, will there be disruption? Will it bolster or compromise my authority to maintain order and cultivate learning? Even teachers eager to make use of new technologies face a serious stumbling block, given the pressures to design curriculum around standardized tests. And comprehensive teacher training to use technology effectively is still lacking. Only a small fraction of teachers find the new technologies efficient. The result: "Computers become merely souped up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago."2 Although Cuban recognizes that classrooms have undergone a few minor reforms—experimenting with online learning, greater informality between teacher and student, and even movable chairs—he concludes that instruction at the dawn of the twenty first century looks strikingly similar to classroom instruction nearly 100 years ago.1 Sharon Steindam, personal communication (June 26, 2001). 2 Larry Cuban, Oversold and Underused: Computers in Classrooms 1980–2000 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Chapter 12 "America is on trial," declared Margaret Haley, standing before the National Education Association convention. Poor salaries, overcrowded classrooms, and the lack of teacher voice in school policy and curricular decisions, she argued, all undermine teachers' effectiveness. Though Haley's charges sound disquietingly current, she was not critiquing today's curricular standards created by nonteachers, or the growing dependence on standardized tests to measure both students and teachers, or even the top down management style of some current school administrators. In fact, Margaret Haley gave this speech a century ago. In 1904, she became the first woman and the first teacher to speak from the floor of an NEA convention. Her speech, "Why Teachers Should Organize," condemned as undemocratic the practice of treating a teacher as an "automaton, a mere factory hand whose duty it is to carry out mechanically and unquestioningly the ideas and orders of those clothed with the authority."1 Haley was born in 1851 in Joliet, Illinois, to Irish immigrant parents who valued education and fairness. Haley learned to read from her mother, who used the Bible and a pictorial history of Ireland to educate her daughter. Her father was an active member of local stone quarry and construction unions, who shared accounts of heated union rallies with young Margaret as bedtime stories. Her father also championed the rights and talents of women, and taught Margaret about suffragette Susan B. Anthony and America's first woman physician, Elizabeth Blackwell. Such lessons planted the seeds for Margaret Haley's later efforts to empower women teachers. At Cook County Normal School, Haley eagerly studied the progressive ideas set forth by John Dewey, embracing the school as a democratic training ground for students and teachers. But when she entered the classroom in Chicago's poor stockyard district, she encountered a vastly different reality. The curriculum she used was uninspiring and imposed by educational bureaucrats, and she was expected to teach it to 50 or 60 sixth graders. In the warm months, swarms of bugs visited her classroom, and in the winter, Haley shivered along with her students. Working in such deplorable conditions, she increasingly understood that teachers needed to fight the factory mentality of schools. After 20 years of teaching in Chicago schools, Haley left the classroom to devote herself full time to educational reform efforts through unions. As vice president and business agent for the Chicago Teachers' Federation (CTF), Haley transformed the fledgling organization into a national voice fighting for, "the right for the teacher to call her soul her own."2 Haley's first action for the CTF was to force the Illinois Supreme Court to wrest unpaid taxes from five public utility companies—money that was earmarked for teachers' salaries. For Haley, now known as the "Lady Labor Slugger," the victory was one for both education and democracy: Teachers were given a raise and Chicago businesses were forced to uphold their civic responsibility. Unlike other teacher associations of the time, Haley deliberately limited the CTF to elementary school teachers. Women consequently dominated the organization, challenging the prevailing wisdom that women should remain quiet, confined to their classrooms. Through the CTF, teachers could become social activists. Under Haley's leadership, Chicago teachers won a tenure law and a pension plan, and were given power over curriculum and discipline. Haley also engineered a successful campaign to affiliate her union with the Chicago Federation of Labor. The status of teachers, in Haley's mind, was little more than that of a white collar proletariat, strikingly similar to blue collar manual workers. Although the CTF's alliance with labor shocked many teachers, the union ultimately helped the CTF gain political power. Though women could not yet vote, they worked with male labor workers to support a range of progressive issues: child labor laws, women's suffrage, and equal wages for men and women. A century ago, Margaret Haley called for teachers "to save the schools for democracy and to save democracy in the schools."3 Her tireless efforts and astute political skills helped create more humane schools for both teachers and students. Haley died in 1939.1 Nancy Hoffman, Woman's "True" Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1981), p. 291. 2 David Neiman (Producer), Only a Teacher, Part 2: Those Who Can... Teach (Princeton: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2000). 3 Ibid. |