Some Victory for Humanity
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
May 2, 2010

Readings:
From The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
How to Teach by Ric Masten

Message: Some Victory for Humanity

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Children are real beyond all lies.

A child – let us say she is seven –
a child is curious about the world.
She has a sense that she could learn things
and learning those things might give her more power over her life.
She is trying to figure out
what is true for her –
what are her principles? What does she care about most?
How will she be different from her own parents?
From her friends?

And she shows up to school –
sits around a table,
and another day begins.
Our child is reasonably interested in what is being taught.
But her attention drifts occasionally –
after all, she is only seven or eight.
The best part of the morning is the project they are working on together as a class – a large model of a frontier town in the old American West.

After that, lunch.
Recess is too short,
and the class is fidgety in the afternoon.
But there are science experiments to try,
and before you know it,
our child is getting on the bus to go home.

This school day is only a portion of her day –
if she wakes at 7 and goes to bed 13 hours later,
has 6 hours of school, 180 days a year,
then school is 22% of her waking life.

There is so much more – her time with her parents,
friends, church, community.
Sports, if any. TV.
Where does she live?
What does she eat?
Are her parents involved her life and her learning?

These questions I will leave to your imagination for now.

But we can say this:
this child, and all those like her,
first and foremost –
she is an actual human being.
With feelings, hopes, dreams, skills and challenges.
Yes, she is the future.
But she is also now.
She is a real person.
She is not a data point.
She is not a “future worker” or a “test taker” –
she will spend some of her life working
and taking tests,
but that is what she does, not who she is.

Children are real beyond all lies –
let’s remember this first.

Keep that child in your mind,
and come with me –
let’s talk together about public schools.

Here’s the basic truth:
since this country was founded,
we’ve had at least three separate education systems.
One is for the elites and the most powerful –
Private boarding schools, fancy campuses,
Robin Williams standing on a desk reciting Whitman – O Captain, my Captain
you know what I mean.

The second school system is for the middle-classes.
Students at these schools believe
that education is a ticket to success.
These schools offer college preparation classes,
and lots of activities,
and all the rest.

The third school system is for the underclass.
The forgotten.
The immigrant, the migrant,
the child whose parents don’t have a better choice.
Often, this school system was only absence –
slave-owners prohibited education, after all.
It was too dangerous.
These were the schools that were neglected.
Old text books, crumbling buildings.
The message was:
you don’t have a chance,
so we’re not going to waste our resources on you.

In the middle of the last century we finally caught up with Horace Mann,
and began to insist that our schools be places
where all students were welcome.
Brown v. Board of Education was 1954,
but a lot of places resisted any attempt
to integrate this second system –
the one for the middle-classes –
and the third system.
The first system, of course,
was always exempt.

But courts continued to intervene and insist –
you cannot treat children unequally in public education.
Over the decades, some folks –
members of this church, many of them,
tried to make that true in Rockford,
but they didn’t get very far.
It took forty-five years since Brown v. Board of Education –
before the courts intervened here, too.

Some things are hard to change.
What happened across the country –
and here too –
was that folks made a new second system.
They built it in the suburbs.
The Interstate Highway System,
which built the suburbs,
was authorized two years after the Brown court decision.

And our three-tiered system survived.
Banks and realtors and governments
steered whites and a few middle-class people of color
to the places with “good schools.”
Violence, red-lining, and all the rest were used –
and still are –
to keep the systems largely separate.

People talk about how there is a school crisis in this country.
But there has always been one –
its just that the people in power didn’t really care
about the third system.
Racism, poverty, oppression –
that’s what we are talking about.
There’s no school crisis.

The crisis is this:
children who live in the third school system –
now we call it “the urban school” –
too many children who live in this system
are denied, too often, the chance to live their best life.

People talk about the school crisis in Oakland,
but not in Santa Barbara.
They talk about it Harlem,
but not a few miles away in Westchester.
They talk about in Chicago,
but not in Deerfield or Naperville.

The nation’s guilty conscious is troubled
by the opportunities which seemed to be denied
to the mostly poor, mostly children of color,
who attend our urban schools.

Who is to blame for this lack of opportunity?
Who is to blame for the achievement chasm,
the so-called gap that separates the children of the haves
from the children of the have nots?

We have a guilty conscience,
so someone must be to blame.

And the truth is, that we
have a good sense of what needs fixing:
To ensure more equal opportunity –
or, at least, to establish a floor
below which no child should have to begin –
we need to attend to everything:
employment opportunities, social services,
better crime prevention, better infrastructure,
better food choices, and also the more intangibles:
a far stronger sense of responsibility,
especially for fathers,
less TV, more hope.

Five hundred years of oppression, denial, and hopelessness
are not reversed overnight.

But that’s hard.
So we decide to blame someone:
and since we are dealing with children,
well, the schools are a natural target.

Look, our urban schools could be better,
there’s no doubt.
schools can be a tool whereby the disadvantages
of oppression, racism, and poverty
are combated.
It takes a huge investment to do that –
but there are examples.
The KIPP Charter Schools,
which have much longer days and school years,
which insist on strict discipline and parental involvement,
these schools are making a huge difference for those students.
In the Harlem Children’s Zone,
longer school days and school hours
are paired with intense support for parents –
before their children are even born,
as well as social work and adult education –
and it’s working.

Schools can make a difference
for children whose horizons of opportunity
are limited by current and historic discrimination
or by lack of wealth
or even by parents who are, for whatever reason,
insufficiently attentive to their children’s possible future.

Schools can make a difference,
but they are not to blame.

The idea that the problem is in the schools –
that victory is in the classroom,
if you will –
this idea has led us, over the last decade or so,
to focus on two strategies to transform our urban schools.
Both strategies are learned from the corporate world,
where they work pretty well.

First – high-stakes testing and data.
Second – school choice, vouchers, and what is called “accountability.”

Diane Ravitch used to believe in both these things.
She worked for the first president Bush,
and she supported No Child Left Behind ten years ago.

But a decade later, Ravitch looked all the data,
and she was surprised and dismayed.
States get to write their own tests,
and set their own standards for passing –
and on those state tests, scores have gone up across the board.
But on the National Assessment of Education Progress,
which states don’t teach to and don’t control,
but which measures the same content,
scores are flat.

Some charter schools are great.
But some are awful.
Just like public schools, and on average, they do about the same –
even though most charter schools
don’t accept students whose parents don’t sign up,
or students who are English-Language Learners,
or students with special needs,
or students who are discipline problems.

high-stakes testing
and the choice / accountability movement
also suffer from and contribute to
what we might call the Pump Up the Volume syndrome.

This movie came out in 1990,
starred Christian Slater
as a high-school student who had an underground radio station.
The school – Hubert Humphrey High,
fictionally located in the Arizona suburbs,
was a typical suburban school.
The plot revolves, partly,
around the fact that the principal of the school,
after certifying the number of students for state money,
expels all the students who she thinks will get low SAT scores,
so that the school will look better.
It typified the sense we had then –
and I’m sure students have even more today –
that they are instruments for adults
and not their own people.

Of course, this isn’t fiction.
Ravitch details how so many of the so-called successes
of school reform –
charters, small schools, etc –
“succeed” for this reason –
they find ways not to accept or to remove
the students who are more of a challenge,
whose needs are greater,
who are, in other words, the most oppressed in our unequal society.

Ravitch’s main point is this:
there is no silver bullet.
Not charters. Not vouchers. Not so-called accountability.
Not public school choice.
Not management changes.
Not high-stakes testing.

You want great schools?
Then you have to work it.
Well-trained experienced teachers,
who have the respect of their leaders, and parents, and the community
for whom they work.
High standards for student behavior.
Good, consistent curriculum.
Not a new-fangled model every year –
but a sequential rigorous curriculum
that includes reading, writing, math as basic building blocks of education,
but also includes all the subjects that help a person
become a responsible citizen and self-determined adult:
history, art, science, health, music, social sciences, geography.
Ravitch also wants principals and administrators who are experienced teachers,
who respect teaching.

And yes, we need more hours and more days,
and we need heavy, sustained intervention in neighborhoods and families
who have more than their fair share of life’s challenges.
If we believe in equality and opportunity,
if we believe that a child should not be penalized for their parents,
let alone the oppression visited upon that child’s grandparents,
if we believe that,
then we will need to do a lot more than educate that child.
The schools can be a place where this extra intervention happens –
because it is a community institution and a place of hope –
but we have to stop saying that it is the fault of our schools,
let alone our teachers,
that too many of our children live in debilitating, back-breaking,
hope-crushing poverty.

What about Rockford?
Well, of course, everything I’ve said applies to us.
We’re right in the middle of it.
I’ve been getting involved
And I’m going to be getting more involved –
so look out.

So far, I’ve met with the superintendent, just briefly.
I’ve reviewed in detail the district’s draft strategic plan.
I’ve talked with other folks who care a lot about this –
teachers, parents, business leaders, clergy –
I’ve been listening.

And we have a problem.
The main problem is this:
I don’t think we’re spending enough time
looking into the eyes of that seven year old child.
Children are real beyond all lies,
but we forget about the children,
their hopes and dreams and possibilities.
We get so wrapped up in the personalities –
she said what! did you know this gossip, or that?
and the media is particularly awful about this –
they make it all about personalities and about the fight.
This isn’t about personalities.
It’s about policies and the children they affect.

We loose track of the vision:
a holistic, comprehensive education
that helps children understand the world they live in,
and gives them the tools to keep learning through their whole lives:
the ability to ask questions, make connections,
appreciate differences and commonalities.

Instead, we worry about management practices,
contract negotiations,
and all the rest.

We religious folks – we’ve got to be more responsible.
That’s our job.

Education is an opportunity for freedom –
I wish I could do all the things I can do
education unlocks doors and opens possibilities.
It’s our job to remind ourselves and others of this fact –
that, as Horace Mann put it,
education abolishes slavery.

It’s also our job to remember the other thing he said, slavery abolishes education.
It’s our job to see the bigger picture –
to say, look:
we need to stop saying that five hundred years of oppression,
violence, murder, disenfranchisement,
five hundred years, and still happening today,
can be solved by the schools.
It’s bigger than that.
The schools are a great civic institution,
as Mann believed, essential to democracy,
and they can be a place where we add resources
to help parents before their children even enter school,
to connect social services and other helps
to families and neighborhoods.
But this is bigger than the schools alone.

We have a problem in this town.
A lack of vision.
A culture of blaming.
An excessive devotion to the struggles of the past.
An irresponsible media.
A frightening lack of trust and respect.

There is no magic fix.
But these things can change.
It starts with a commitment to actual children,
to real human lives,
to the possibility behind those eyes,
to the spark and the spirit
which lives in every human soul.
It is about, first, keeping in mind the length of one’s legs.

Our history of different school systems
for different classes –
it will one day have to end.
We are too interconnected.
We are too related.
Our destiny is one destiny.
We stand or fall together.

This is the essential religious witness:
we are each other’s keepers,
each other’s teachers and students,
we are responsible and accountable.
We are family.

We are one world.