Hmm. Who put that sticker there?
I’ve been teaching history and civics in a public high school for the last 21 years. I have come to expect that the public at large will fundamentally misunderstand what it is that teachers do each day. I have come to expect that public education will continue to be the favorite scapegoat for those seeking elected office or pursuing an agenda of privatization. I have come to expect attacks from the right-wingers who want creationism and prayer in schools and hate teachers unions.
But I will not stand for getting the shiv from the left too.
Denise Oliver Velez’ and the SPLC's assertions about the “failing” grades of public schools to adequately teach civil rights history is simplistic at best, and irresponsible at worst. Follow me below the fold to find out why.
I’ve been an active member of this community for more than a decade, starting with the War in Iraq and John Kerry’s election campaign. I was an avid volunteer for Barack Obama in 2008, registered over 300 voters personally, donated to his campaign each month, and reserved a DC hotel room before he had even secured the nomination, so confident was I that he would become our nation’s first African-American President. When he swore the oath, I was there, standing in the middle of a frozen January National Mall, watching it happen.
All of this to say, I am not just some anti-civil rights troll, union hack, or closeted bigot. I am one of you, the vocal, active and educated left.
For two decades, I have taught Advanced Placement United States History and Civics, as well as a class called Ethnic Studies, all of which place significant emphasis on civil rights.
Where Miss Velez’ and the SPLC veers off the logical track is that they are basing their conclusions about civil rights education on what is in a state’s standards, not on what is in a state’s classrooms. That is to say, one does not accurately predict the other. In two decades, I’ve encountered waves of standards “reform”: Student Learning Objectives (SLOs), Essential Academic Learning Requirements, Outcomes Driven Developmental Model, No Child Left Behind and now the Common Core, not to mention waves of standardized testing: the WASL, the HSPE, the RBA, and now EOC exams, all of which had little to no positive effect on what was happening in a classroom each day. The standards are, at best, wonderful lists of things we were already teaching. I mean, it’s not as though teachers are just waiting around for the state to tell them civil rights education is important. We know it is. We are teaching it already. The standardized tests are, at best, a blunt, inaccurate measure of complex human beings and content, and mostly just take away or interrupt class time in which we could teach anything, civil rights included.
I have worked with teachers in nine western states at over 30 workshops about teaching historical thinking skills, classroom approaches to curriculum, and teaching written analysis. Not only is civil rights education a part of those workshops, I have yet to run across a teacher who believes they shouldn’t be, or who didn’t already teach them as part of their overall curriculum.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a fine organization. I have given money to them in the past, and I use some of their materials in my classroom. In this case, they have assigned letter grades to entire states and their schools, and while they may be universally recognizable to the general public (A is good, F is bad), they tell us nothing in particular about civil rights education, and they encourage people to make sweeping generalizations about the public schools, as well as to pursue policy changes based on those generalizations.
What should concern Velez and the SPLC is something that actually is directly and negatively impacting civil rights education in the nation’s classrooms: our disastrous obsession with testing and data. Because of state assessments first based on No Child Left Behind, and now based on the Common Core, we lose significant amounts of time (I have lost 14 classroom days so far this year) in which we could and should be teaching. Realities like that, and they are nationwide I assure you, defy whatever is in a state’s curriculum standards.
I, and thousands of teachers like me, teach civil rights in spite of public assaults on our profession and the outright theft of our teaching time and our students. I teach six hours a week after school, on my own time, to compensate for what has been taken from me in the classroom.
If we are serious about real education in America’s classrooms, and about improving education overall, then we have to push back against the testing industrial complex, and resist the knee jerk assumptions and sweeping generalizations about schools and teachers that are so pervasive in our society.
We have to accept the fact that education is as nuanced and complex as your children are, and that no simplistic, one-sized-fits-all approach will positively impact education.
We need to listen to the experts, and those experts are in our classrooms. They work very hard, they are very well educated, and they know their subjects and their students better than anyone on the outside of education.
We need to fully fund the schools, and reform the funding formulas that help to perpetuate educational inequality.
And we need to follow the path of every other major industrialized nation and offer free or nearly free college and technical education to every student who qualifies. This tells every student, no matter their economic or social background, that they can break the cycle of poverty through their own efforts.
Denise Oliver Velez doesn’t like being challenged. You can read the comments section following her column as proof of that. But don’t jump on the bandwagon of people who pummel the public schools from the outside, all while having little to no knowledge of what is actually happening inside. They may be sincere and well intended, but that doesn't mean they are right.
Start questioning the reformers and trusting the teachers. We know what we are doing. We always have.