Tag Archives: Education

Mrs. Bryant and the Beginning of Donald 1.5

03 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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A bright blue sky, just before the long storm, February 19, 2011. (http://www.photos-public-domain.com). In public domain.

We’ve reached the end of yet another school year, number 32 for me overall, between my twenty-two years between kindergarten and doctorate and my son’s ten years of K-9 (this doesn’t included the 13 years of overlap, in which my primary job has been as an instructor, or my wife’s two years of grad school). The end of sixth grade was not particularly violent. But it was a rough transition to nearly eight years of bumps, bruises, grinding poverty and psychological torture, and a constant struggle for my true self.

The one strong and calming influence in the midst of this gathering storm system was my sixth grade teacher at William H. Holmes ES, Mrs. Della Bryant. She was the fourth of my four Black teachers between first grade and middle school. Mrs. Bryant was as important to me on the cusp of becoming a teenager as Ms. Griffin was to my grounding as a student in first grade, and the crush I had on Mrs. Shannon in third. Because Mrs. Bryant didn’t just aspire for us to do well and get A’s. She wanted us to think big picture, and not just about high school or college. Mrs. Bryant encouraged us to think in larger, worldly terms, to take politics and religion and literature and the stuff of intellectuals seriously.

She indulged us, especially me and my then best friend Starling. So many times that year, Mrs. Bryant allowed us to debate current event topics in class, whether we had sufficient facts or not. The Iran hostage crisis, the 1980 election cycle and why Ronald Reagan would be worse than President Jimmy Carter (no one in our class played devil’s advocate), the legality of Israel unilaterally bombing an Iraqi nuclear weapons centrifuge site.

Those were among the moments I lived for in Mrs. Bryant’s class that school year. I lived for them not just because I liked showing off my knowledge. I already knew I was smart. I spent the following year saying “I am the smartest kid in the whole world!” to myself, and occasionally, to Humanities classmates who made me feel inferior.

No, those debates weren’t about my raw analytic power and great ability to remember. They were about discovering what I thought I knew about a topic, understanding what I didn’t know, and being able to articulate it all without losing my thoughts in the ether. And in all that, I discovered parts of myself. My forthrightness. My New York-style sarcasm. My sense of righteous anger. My ability to summarize a situation in order to derive or intuit possible responses, even solutions.

That was what Mrs. Bryant with her light but steady touch helped me get to in sixth grade. A sense of enlightenment that could survive the false gods of Hebrew-Israelite-ism, the false father of my then idiot stepfather “Judah ben Israel” née Maurice Washington, and the fallacy that I had any control over my world.

But that wasn’t all Mrs. Bryant helped me do that year. She encouraged me to take on other projects, especially contests. Like posters for Dental Health Month, or participating in Election 1980 activities, and journaling and writing down my thoughts about virtually everything. Mrs. Bryant did me the honor of having me introduce our graduation speaker at the end of sixth grade, nearly 37 years ago. It was a two-minute speech, but it was also in front of a couple hundred people. I don’t think I’ve even been as nervous being on radio or television. Most of that stuck with me for years, somehow surviving through years of crumpled neglect.

Mrs. Bryant was the one who shepherded me into the Humanities Program, something that I’d only heard about once before, inadvertently through Brandie Weston (who was a student at Pennington-Grimes) the year before. With my grades and test scores, I probably could’ve made into the Grimes Center a year or two earlier. That is, if my teachers Ms. Pierce and Mrs. O’Daniel had thought of me that way. But in the big scheme, it wasn’t that important. Mrs. Bryant did think of me that way, and went out of her way to say as much. “Mrs. Bryant’s encouragement, her insistence that I was ‘one of the best students’ she ‘ever had,’ made sixth grade a joyful time,” I wrote in my memoir.

Now, despite Mrs. Bryant, I wasn’t prepared for going to school every day with 150 other know-it-all’s, many of whom would never have to worry about Con Edison bills being overdue or having no food to eat for three or four days at time. Or, the constant threat of domestic violence and abuse at home. Heck, between Humanities’ decided demographic affluence and ideological Whiteness, I doubt that most of my eventual classmates worried about anything other than getting A’s until puberty took full hold.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window, “Mrs. Bryant never warned me that Humanities would be overwhelming because my social skills outside of Holmes were as well developed as a spoiled seven-year old’s.” I simply didn’t handle the transition from a 98-percent-Black elementary school to the mostly White Humanities program very well. Then again, with so much going wrong at home, I didn’t handle much of anything well in the 16 months after sixth grade.

But one thing I carried from my year with Mrs. Bryant was that I could survive and succeed despite it all. To observe and listen, and not just speak off the cuff. To be patient, and keep working. Frankly, it was likely because of teachers like Mrs. Bryant that I discovered my first superpower, my ability to think, remember, and write. And in that discovery, bury the pains of earlier abuses that would’ve surely killed me (or at least, led to a successful suicide) by the time I turned fourteen. Mrs. Bryant, wherever you are, and whatever you’re up to, I say, with love, many, many thanks!

My Mom’s Migration Story, 50 Years Later

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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I would be a pretty terrible son and historian to not discuss the fact that this July and August marks fifty years since my mother moved to New York from little ol’ Bradley, Arkansas. For those who think fifty years on anything revolving around race and class is “a long time ago” or “ancient history,” consider the following. At the time Mom moved across the country to Gotham, the Civil Rights Movement had entered its northern, splintered phase, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was barely a year old, and the very first episode of Star Trek with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy would air that September.

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966, August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966 (highlighted in blue with yellow dots), August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

On balance, with any neutral but fair eye at all, I’d have to say that Mom’s transition has been more failure than success. Five decades of crisis after crisis, of having a handful of fleeting moments of peace and progress followed by years of abuse, misery, poverty, and sorrow. That could be the summary I’d write about Mom’s fifty years of post-migration experiences in New York and in Mount Vernon.

But, let’s start from the top, through Boy @ The Window:

After drifting a bit after her high school graduation, one of Mom’s first cousins came for a visit to Arkansas in the summer of ’66 and told her that there was good-paying work in New York City. Her cousin lived in the [170s, the Tremont section of the] Bronx, a hotbed of Black migration and West Indian immigration in those years. Without much thought, Mom took a four-day bus trip from Texarkana to New York to what she hoped would be a new life. Given the alternative of tenant farming and generational poverty, New York must’ve seemed like going to heaven.

Mom had it rough long before my father and my older brother Darren and I had come along to be a burden. She lived with her cousin for nearly a year in the Bronx, paying $15 a week for a one-bedroom flat, before good luck turned to bad and then back to wonderful. They had both lost jobs at some factory, but had heard through the other late Black arrivals in the Bronx and Mount Vernon about good paying jobs at Mount Vernon Hospital. When Mount Vernon Hospital hired Mom to be a cook in their dietary department, she and her first cousin went their separate ways living-together-wise. They’d stay in touch until ’78, when Mom’s first cousin moved to Virginia, presumably for work with the Navy.

In the interim, Mom met my father at a juke joint on Mount Vernon’s South Side. It was a place where only Southern Black migrants would be comfortable. They didn’t have to pretend to like the grime, the hustle, the noise, and the taunts that New York and New Yawkers threw at them every day. They could be themselves. They could be shy, apprehensive, even, about their time in a place where everyone joked about their Southern accents and their slow ways. I think that’s what made my father attractive to Mom. Here was someone who made Mom sound much less Southern by comparison. At the same time, my father worked in the city, had a job as a janitor with the Federal Reserve Bank, and knew the Subway better than she knew the route from her one-room flat on Adams Street to Mount Vernon Hospital.

My Mom at 48 years old, Yonkers, NY, December 23, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

My Mom at 48 years old, Yonkers, NY, December 23, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

Within a year of meeting, Mom gave birth to my older brother Darren. Mom often said that she “wasn’t a teenager” when Darren was born in December ’67, as she had turned twenty six weeks earlier. Yet as I finally pointed out during the intervention fourteen years ago, “But you got pregnant when you were nineteen,” all to let Mom know that the stigma of teenage pregnancy was more about her and her insecurities than it was about what White folks thought, especially back then.

I came along two years later, Mom married my father in ’70, and things started falling apart soon after. Mom never gave herself a chance to live the city, and not just work in it. Mom never gave herself time to grow beyond her insecurities and her vanity about her looks. She never really tried to make her aspirations for joining the Navy or going to college happen. The latter, at least until after I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in ’87.

As I wrote about Mom’s/our family’s fall into welfare poverty by ’83 in Boy @ The Window,

Sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later, Mom must’ve been thinking that Mount Vernon was a hellish pit that got hotter every time she tried to make her and our lives better. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded, a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The ‘I love you, Donald’ faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

Yes, this is all truly sad. There was way too much too soon for Mom. Family, marriage, abuse, poverty, and internalized issues around race, sexism, misogyny, Black masculinity, evangelical Christianity (and the whole Hebrew-Israelite debacle), and all in New York. It would’ve been overwhelming for anyone whose income never saw $20,000 in any year prior to temp work in ’99, and $30,000 until working for Westchester County Medical Center in 2003.

There are so many mistakes Mom made, with me, my siblings older and younger, in choosing mates, and with work. I’ve written about roughly half of them. But, awful or awesome, without Mom’s momentary hope and courage — often the very definition of Black migration, especially to New York — I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

Bill Cobsy, The Nexus of Father Figure and Power Corruption

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Jell-O Pudding Pops ad with Bill Cosby, circa 1983, November 20, 2014. (http://pinterest.com).

Jell-O Pudding Pops ad with Bill Cosby, circa 1983, November 20, 2014. (http://pinterest.com).

In the aftermath of my Mom’s second divorce in September ’89, she would sometimes engage me in conversations about manhood and fatherhood. It was as if she didn’t think of me as a man in really any sense at all. This despite years of handling adult responsibilities and running interference between her and my now ex-stepfather Maurice.

George Michael, "Father Figure" video screen shot, 1988. (http://vevo.com).

George Michael, “Father Figure” video screen shot, 1988. (http://vevo.com).

One Christmas holiday day in ’90, we were sitting in the living room at 616 watching a rerun of The Cosby Show on NBC, then the most popular show on the most popular network in the US. My Mom asked me, “If you could pick your father, you’d want it to be Cosby, right?” I stared blankly at my Mom, wondering where the heck that question came from. I didn’t say anything. But my Mom took that as me thinking, “Yeah, he would’ve been a great father for you.”

At the time, I certainly thought that Bill Cosby would’ve been an entertaining father, if I’d been lucky enough to have a near-billionaire as my dad. What I really wanted was my father, Jimme Collins, to get himself sober, to be lucid enough to talk to now that I was in my twenties. Beyond this, I didn’t give Cosby or my Mom’s question and comments much thought.

Over the years, I’ve watched TV dads come and go, frequently with some tragedy or controversy. Robert Reed of The Brady Bunch (1969-74) fame comes to mind, with his in-the-closet status and his early death from colon cancer and HIV complications. So too does Conrad Bain, because of the backlash Diff’rent Strokes (1978-86) received as a result of its dated way of treating issues such as race and poverty with his character Phillip Drummond as the father to two Black kids, not because of his personal life. But Bill Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, an obstetrician and gynecologist (talk about irony) and father of four daughters and one son, became for many “America’s Dad,” a title that the media has celebrated recently in the wake of The Cosby Show‘s thirtieth anniversary of its first airing earlier this fall. He was supposed to be above reproach.

Bill Cosby in midst of his "Pound Cake" speech (with Rev. Jesse Jackson in background), NAACP 50th Anniversary of Brown decision gala, Washington, DC, May 17, 2004. (http://blackpast.com).

Bill Cosby in midst of his “Pound Cake” speech (with Rev. Jesse Jackson in background), NAACP 50th Anniversary of Brown decision gala, Washington, DC, May 17, 2004. (http://blackpast.com).

I’ve long been disappointed with Cosby, though. For his culture-of-poverty arguments against welfare mothers, crack babies and pregnant teenagers. For his frequent need to chastise Blacks living in poverty for not knowing “proper moral behavior” (this from a person who purportedly holds a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts). Not to mention his double-standard on monogamy.

Now even the oblivious set has become aware of the growing number of accusations from women who’ve said that Cosby had allegedly committed rape and other forms of sexual assault going back at least thirty-two years. I’ve been aware of these accusations and rumors for nearly twenty years, in the wake of Cosby’s son Ennis’ death in ’97. I hoped that these accusations were false ones at first. Who would want to believe that “America’s Dad,” the Jell-O Pudding and Pudding Pop Man, was also drugging and raping women in his spare time?

I think what we need to recognize the most, maybe even more than systemic racism or our culture of imperialism and violence, is that this society of ours is somewhere between an oligarchy and a plutocracy. Bill Cosby’s stance on race, community and morals has only mattered because of his fame and fortune, not because of his expertise and certainly not because of his professional experience. Bill Cosby’s a comedian, an actor, a philanthropist and a philanderer, and perhaps a rapist as well. Americans all too frequently fall for the facade of father figures and others whom seem to say what we want to hear. When all those with power and money really want to do is to wield that power and money to their own capricious and narcissistic ends.

Unbearable Being Of Whiteness

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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White supremacist and deadbeat grazing fee payer Cliven Bundy at his ranch, Bunkerville, Nevada, April 11, 2014. (Jim Urquhart/Reuters via http://www.newsweek.com).

White supremacist and deadbeat grazing fee payer Cliven Bundy at his ranch, Bunkerville, Nevada, April 11, 2014. (Jim Urquhart/Reuters via http://www.newsweek.com).

There have been few things more disappointing than seeing how frequently the structures, institutions and individuals in this country cut Whites slack for things that would have me out of work, in jail or long dead. If I were a human rights attorney specializing in racial justice, I’d want to take a sledgehammer to my head at least five days a week, every single week, given the ridiculous things that occur and how the mainstream media reports them.

Cliven Bundy is the latest in a long, long, long line of White supremacists whom the media have turned into heroes. Bundy has the distinction of refusing to pay over $1 million in grazing fees for his cattle over a tw0-decade period, even though his cattle grazed on federally-owned land in Nevada. When federal agents came to his ranch to seize his cattle, instead of paying his fees, Bundy and his neo-Nazi/militia buddies brazenly displayed their guns and rifles for the whole world to see. Bundy and company complained that the government had violated their rights as ranchers — rights to an endless free lunch for their cattle, apparently.

The sad truth is, all one would have to do to change the perception here would be to make Bundy and the rest of his master-race-band Black. There would’ve been a shootout, and not necessarily with law enforcement, either. The mainstream media would’ve called them terrorists, militants, anarchists and Black Panther-wannabes. And that would be the end of the story.

Then there’s Ethan Couch, the now seventeen-year-old who ran over and killed four people on a road outside of Fort Worth, Texas, not to mention permanently disabling one of his teenage passengers. A judge sentenced Couch to ten years’ probation, in no small part because a psychologist testified that Couch suffered from affluenza. Affluenza, of course, is the inability to link bad behavior with consequences due to parents inadvertently teaching the lesson that wealth buys the privilege of not having to suffer any consequences. Last I checked, affluenza appears nowhere in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. 

Affluenza Awareness Poster Child (of character King Joffrey from Game of Thrones), April 24, 2014. (Roflbot via http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/).

Affluenza Awareness Poster Child (of character King Joffrey from Game of Thrones), April 24, 2014. (Roflbot via http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/).

If I did this, even at the age of ten, my Black ass would be in juvenile detention, especially in Texas, and likely transferred to a high-security prison as soon as I started puberty. It wouldn’t have mattered if Dr. Phil himself had testified that I suffered from the poverty pox. I would’ve been treated as close to an adult in the Texas criminal justice system as the system would’ve allowed. The media wouldn’t have whispered a protest, much less bought the poverty pox defense or tried to treat it as a plausible psychological disorder (of course, grinding poverty does result in PTSD for millions, but let’s not tell that to the mainstream loonies).

So I’m tired. I’m tired of employers making excuses for lazy twenty-three year-olds whom happen to be White, saying that “they’re young.” As if someone incompetent and lazy in their work deserves more consideration than a Black man or woman in their mid-twenties because they are White and have a college degree? Ridiculous!

I’m tired of teachers and professors who explain away inconsistencies in someone’s academic record, saying “thery’re brilliant” or “he’s a genius.” Is boredom really an excuse for not working hard or completing assignments? Is a higher SAT score really a justification for ignoring borderline personality disorder or the potential for violent behavior? It is the epitome of arrogance to excuse immoral or criminal behavior on the basis of high analytical intelligence, but I’ve seen it enough times to know that it’s a normal part of Whiteness’ wages.

I’m tired of the mainstream media reporting the ludicrous as normal and the normal as ludicrous as they ignore their own complicity in upholding Whiteness’ wages. Frazier Glenn Miller (Overland Park, Kansas shooting, Jewish community center) and Wade Michael Page (Oak Creek, Wisconsin shooting, Sikh temple) committed acts of domestic terrorism, hate crimes based on Whiteness. But whenever these shootings occur, the mainstream theme talks about mental illness, about whether racism is an illness. Maybe in a couple hundred years, individual racism will be in DSM-XV. What about the structural and institutional racism that ensures the privileges of Whiteness, though?

Frazier Glenn Miller mugshot, April 14, 2014. (European Pressphoto Agency via http://nymag.com).

Frazier Glenn Miller mugshot, April 14, 2014. (European Pressphoto Agency via http://nymag.com).

I’m tired of injustice being called justice. How can a kid in the back of a squad car in Arkansas shoot himself in the head with his hands handcuffed and his arms behind his back (that kind of contortionist act would be a highlight of Cirque de Soleil!)? Seriously? Marissa Alexander shoots a warning shot to ward off her abusive husband and protect her kids, but she can’t use self-defense as her defense? Come on!

I’m really am tired of the bullshit. It’s a wonder sometimes that I don’t have high-blood pressure (except when I’m dealing with incompetent nurses). But hey, the forces of Whiteness still have time to drive me there if I let them.

Common Core Advocacy As A Job Requirement?

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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The James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy (aka, The Hunt Institute), building and logo, 1000 Park Forty Plaza, Durham, NC, January 16, 2014. (http://www.beacondevelopment.com and Facebook.com).

The James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy (aka, The Hunt Institute), building and logo, 1000 Park Forty Plaza, Durham, NC, January 16, 2014. (http://www.beacondevelopment.com and Facebook.com).

A few months ago, I applied for a Director of Programs job with The Hunt Institute in Durham, North Carolina. I know, I know. I should’ve known better, considering their ties to the Common Core, but I didn’t. In my defense, I did it through the University of North Carolina job website. I received an email on Monday to set up a Thursday interview, followed by another email on Tuesday asking me to write a hypothetical two-page brief “intended for a state legislator that describes why standards and assessments are important; how they interact; and what legislators need to understand about implementation.” (Keep in mind, The Hunt Institute is supposed to be a nonpartisan nonprofit organization).

Below is the brief I wrote in response (also, here):

Over the past decade and a half, you have been a key advocate of public education reform. You have helped pave the way for the adoption of Common Core Standards and a series of comprehensive assessments for students across the state. You have also served on committees that have urged the implementation of new measures for teacher effectiveness, measures based in no small part on the resulting scores that students and schools obtain on the new comprehensive assessments. Your rationale and that of your colleagues has been to cite the need to close the achievement gap between low-income students and students of color on the one hand, and high-income and White students on the other. Although this goal remains laudable, the means that you have advocated and the state of North Carolina has adopted will do more harm than good on the path toward educational equity and the nurturing of high academic achievement regardless of race and socioeconomic status.

There is mounting evidence across the state – indeed, across the country – that more and more comprehensive testing and assessments have failed to achieve the desired result of closing the achievement gap. Teachers and principals have noted that the time devoted to testing and to preparing students for testing has grown to the point where they have time for little else in terms of student learning. Recent surveys of students have shown that student motivation for learning has declined as the amount of testing has increased. And the most undeniable statistic is that nearly half of the state’s veteran teachers (i.e., teachers who have been in the profession for more than five years) have resigned or retired since we began introducing new state standards and assessments a little more than a decade ago.

This isn’t to suggest that we go back in time to the period before the rise of new state standards and assessments in the late-1990s. Rather, this is a time in which we should reflect on the deficiencies of the current model and take the following steps to ensure that our standards and assessments actually encourage student learning and thus a closing of the achievement gap. Below is a list of recommendations before continuing to move forward with Common Core State Standards and school district/statewide testing regimen:

1. Reconsider the Common Core, or at the very least, disconnect the relationship between it and the state assessments. States all over the country, including North Carolina, have reported problems in taking these standards and using them to develop appropriate curricula for their students. The use of these standards, developed in less than a decade, with little input from teachers, administrators, in some cases including administrators in Raleigh, has meant little to no ability for teachers on the ground to match up the standards with the curriculum or the needs of their students. It is simply a too big, one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning that results in neither teaching nor learning. The effect has been to reduce our classrooms to laboratories, where our teachers serve as principal investigators, and our students as lab rats. We should have standards, but ones that better fit our state and the needs of our students. Not to mention ones that allow for teacher adaptations to encourage learning.

2. Revise the number, frequency and kinds of assessments that we are doing for our students. As it stands now, we are doing entirely too many assessments too early and too often for students in the state. Assessments start as early as the second grade, with school district and state level assessments occurring throughout the year, approximately once ever six weeks. For students, the psychological effect has been to turn education into a torturous and boring chore, rather than a fun and imaginative process of learning and development. Nearly every study that nonpartisan groups have conducted in the past seven years has shown this to be true. To be sure, we need to do assessments, but not two or more levels of assessment six or seven times a year, especially in the elementary grades. Rather, we should be doing one set of diagnostic assessments twice a year at the elementary school level, and once a year at the middle and high school levels, so that the students in greatest need of academic help can get that help. In practical terms, the money the state legislature currently has devoted to testing and the testing companies for our regimen of assessments could be better spent on diagnostic testing and additional tutoring for students in need of it.

3. Resist the need to tie teacher evaluations to assessment scores. This is simply the wrong way to go about determining a teacher’s ability to reach their students. Even the best researchers in the field on teacher effectiveness have shown that the best teachers can only improve a classroom’s performance on any given assessment regimen by about two (2) percent. From poverty to eating a healthy breakfast and getting a good night’s sleep, there are plenty of factors in assessment scores in which individual teachers have no control. Yet the irony is that because the state has adopted this form of teacher evaluation, it has all but eliminated the ability of teachers to be teachers – to think independently and to act with enough autonomy to best determine how to reach their students. This kind of teacher evaluation process has encouraged every teacher in the state to “teach to the test.” This has significantly reduced the amount of time teachers devote to such tasks as independent reading, geography, social studies and other subjects that, ironically, stimulate student learning. We certainly need better trained teachers. What this means, though, is that the state needs to create a process by which the standards for entering the profession are higher. This could include the use of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards assessments of teacher excellence early on, as well as consistent mentoring and professional development as early as their first day in the classroom.

In summary, the best way to move forward in terms of standards and assessments is for our state not to rely on them as a substitute for actual teachers and actual teaching as the means for improving student performance. What we have in terms of standards and assessments is cost-ineffective, and it actually defeats the goal of closing the achievement gap, the very goal we in this state are all after.

It’s difficult to respect a job process in which a prospective employer isn’t up front about a key component of the position, in this case, the need to promote Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluations based on student assessments. It’s also difficult when they insist they’re nonpartisan, even though taking on the role of advocate for this brand of education reform is decidedly a centrist-conservative position. But being asked to not interview after writing this hypothetical brief is the best example for why education, politics and a job search should never come together. Especially if we really care about education and kids.

My Take On K-12 & Higher Education & Corporatism

08 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Pink Floyd–The Wall (1982), February 16, 2012. (http://free-education.info). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low res and related to blog subject.

We often treat K-12 education and higher education as if they have nothing in common, as if they possess completely separate values and have developed in complete isolation from each other. But in this age where the American technocratic and the plutocratic elites want to privatize everything, there are clear connections behind and between emerging trends in corporatized K-12 education reform and with the rise of for-profit colleges and universities. These trends and connections aren’t good ones for the mass of American students, particularly for those who are poor and of color.

It’s pretty simply really. Both public education and postsecondary education have been under attack from profiteers and the politicians who do their bidding for at least a quarter century. In particular, the issues have been how to improve public schools so that poor Black and Latino kids can graduate high school on the one hand, and how to modify higher education so that the adult version of these kids can obtain a serviceable certificate or degree on the other. With these changes comes the theme of a watered-down education for the poorest twenty-five percent of Americans. It’s the new pathway to a sub-living wage job and tens of thousand of dollars of student loan debt.

A better way of presenting this reality, though, would be to overlay my own educational journey as a poor African American growing up in Mount Vernon, New York onto this corporatized educational insanity. I would’ve gone to public school to be sure. But instead of the SRA exam test that I took every year between third and sixth grade (not a high-stakes test evaluating teaching effectiveness, by the way), I would’ve seen some sort of comprehensive reading/mathematics test from at least second grade on.

Overcrowded classroom (with DOE Chancellor Joel Klein) with two teachers, PS 189, Brooklyn, NY, September 16, 2009. (Craig Warga/NY Daily News). Qualifies as fair use – blog subject with no comparable picture.

Given where I grew up, instead of having a group of veteran Black teachers for most of elementary schools, I would’ve ended up with some teachers from Teach for America or The New Teacher Project. For the technocrats surely would’ve held my teachers responsible for the sixty-percent poverty rate at my elementary schools, um, I mean, the low test scores. Teachers from these alternate certification programs tend to be well-meaning, perhaps even extremely smart, but not passionate or fully trained teachers. Certainly not like the highly dedicated African American teachers I had at Nathan Hale (now Cecil Cooper) and William H. Holmes Elementary, who held us all to high enough standards to prepare me for a gifted-talented magnet school program known as Humanities.

Of course, given the resources devoted to high-stakes testing, and the constant practice tests, there would’ve been the virtual elimination of music, art, PE, and creative writing. With that shift, there wouldn’t have been a Humanities Program, just a few classes for the best and brightest students. Instead, the option of a private charter school or a KIPP program may have been a possibility. With an average cost of $10,000, however, I doubt a $1,000 or $2,500 voucher would’ve made it possible for me to attend the one, and with KIPP schools being all about discipline, I would’ve thrived there about as much as fish thrive in the desert.

I would’ve moved on to middle school and high school, received algebra in ninth or tenth grade (if at all), struggled to enhance my reading, writing, science, math and other skills, and otherwise would’ve goofed my way to a high school diploma. Would I have taken an AP class, or had a Meltzer as a history teacher, or taken the PSAT or SAT? I’m not sure, but highly unlikely. Still, I would’ve graded with a diploma, with proof that my education was the equivalent of an average ninth or tenth grader’s, confirmed by a decade of standardized state tests!

Then, after three to five years of struggling to find full-time work above minimum wage, or after several years in the military, I’d make the choice between  a University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, DeVry University or some other for-profit college. I’d discover quite quickly that I was wholly unprepared for even the most watered-down online college curriculum, taking courses in a four, six or eight-week format (instead of the typical ten or sixteen-week semester format).

Romanian Army POWs from Battle of Stalingrad, February 3, 1943. (http://ww2incolor.com).

There would’ve been no agonizing choice between Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, no switch of majors from computer science to history, no big moment in my development as a person. All because I wouldn’t have had the kind of earth-shattering experience that attending college full-time and in-person often can be.

Somehow, if I’d somehow survived the first semester or first year, I might’ve eventually graduated, albeit with a degree that will be of limited use in obtaining a good living wage. And with $70,000 in student loan debt and a degree from a disreputable for-profit college, forget about me going to graduate school to be a professor.

That’s what this K-16 system will lead to. Money flowing into the hands of illegitimate technocrats, testing companies, charter schools and for-profit institutions. Money and influence flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Teach for America. A permanent, if slightly better educated, low-wage underclass. That’s the now and future construction of K-16 education if we allow these trends to continue.

edX and Ex-lax (& Higher Education’s Future)

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture

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Ex-lax Chocolated Laxative, September 26, 2012. (http://overstockdrugstore.com).

Last May, Harvard and MIT announced a $60 million partnership that would provide free online courses to 600,000 students worldwide. That this came on the heels of an experiment in which former Stanford professor (and now co-founder of the Udacity.com online classroom platform) Sebastian Thrun made his “Introduction to AI” course available for free online in the fall of 2011 says something. The current model of providing a college education or postsecondary training – for-profit, public, community college or otherwise – will be dead for most students by 2030.

What will this new form of higher education look like? Will students who can now take a couple of Harvard or MIT online courses for free so overwhelm these schools that paying customers will also demand a free online education, and lead to the disintegration of higher education as we know it?

The answer lies somewhere in between higher education feast and famine. For the selected few, Ivy League and other elite institutions will continue to thrive, no matter the costs. Parents will continue to send their kids to Harvard, Stanford and Georgetown – and students will enthusiastically attend them – for far more than a degree. The social networks that students will build at these universities and use as alumni for jobs, careers and even marriages easily outweigh the high cost of tuition. Just ask the Obamas.

For most college students, though, edX is but the tip of the spear. Ultimately, a decade or so from now, going to college will be as simple as clicking on an app on your iPhone, iPad, or whatever an Apple, a Google or some other corporation comes up with next.

edX logo, May 2, 2012. (http://news.harvard.edu). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws – main subject of post.

No one institution or single university collaboration can take charge of this transition to a national and international online higher education experience, even with edX’s implementation. But with an Apple or a Google’s history of collaboration, technical expertise, and innovative vision, they can pull off the moving of the higher education platform to an accredited application. One that even Harvard, MIT and Oxford could get behind – though they may have to hold their noses at first.

By the time this transition is complete, online college – or, dare I say, iCollege – will look more like a combination of EA Sports’ Madden NFL ’13, Skype, Twitter and Facebook than the standard threaded discussions and video recordings we have today. It will be a process where any professor could be put in a lab with sensors and a classroom full of students asking every possible question and providing every possible answer to a series of topics that would add up to a course. And an Apple or a Google could do this over and over again for the thousands of possible courses an undergraduate student could take, in the US or anywhere in the world.

That alone would make this a decent revolution, at least technologically. Combining it with Apple’s or Google’s ability to negotiate agreements with accrediting agencies and with universities across the country, though, would make iCollege an all-out revolution. Because of these partnerships, the future iCollege would be light-years beyond the new edX, as this would enable students to transfer their credits to a UC Berkeley, Harvard or New York University if they so chose to take an in-person course whenever necessary.

Corridor in code, The Matrix (1999) screen shot, September 26, 2012. (http://luisangelv.wordpress.com).

This could be a one-time $500 million investment that could yield tens of billions in profits annually. In the process, it would make higher education much cheaper, more democratic and less exploitive of students and government resources. For an industry or job-related certificate: $5,000. For a two-year or associate’s degree: $10,000. For a four-year degree: $24,000.

There would be casualties, of course. Testing entities like the College Board, Educational Testing Service, and ACT will somehow have to adapt to this democratization of higher education or die out. The current set of for-profit institutions, community colleges and large state public institutions will have to become specialists in specific career training activities, partner within an iCollege consortium, or go out of business. Like it or not, this is the road that American and international higher education is on, one rapid stride after another. But it’s all for the better. Or at least, it could be?