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silveradeptOne of the rules of blogging and columning and writing says that if you Did Not Do The Research, expect to be hammered for it - in peer-reviewed journals, they may very well deny publication of your work if you're lacking in the scholarship. In syndicated columns, they have a lower threshold, of course, and depending on where you're syndicated, that threshold may be lower still. It's pretty well the only reason why someone would let the following see any sort of publication.
Mr. Williams brazenly claims education for blacks is fraudulent, with no evidence to back this up by standardized test score disparities and assessment results that consistently place black students behind white ones in reading and maths, then claims the solution to such things is charter schools, school vouchers, and the election of anti-union school administrators. To call this piece a "hack job" would be an offense to hacks everywhere. This is a primary-school essay that lacks support for all of its major theses. It is perhaps the germ of an idea that requires itself to be more fleshed out with support and research, rather than treated as a complete thought and thesis.
Let's start with a definition:
Besides, as Mr. Wiliams knows, because it will become the means by which he seeks to fix this "fraud", not all schools are chartered equal. Since public schools are funded by local property taxes in the United States, with occasional supplements from the federal and state governments, the amount of money available to public schools depends entirely on the affluence of the area surrounding that school.Poor areas generate little taxes and the school is underfunded. Rich areas generate more taxes, which generally results in better school funding and a better school system. There are exceptions, of course, and they're usually held up as examples of how you can starve a school system and it will still function just fine, honest, so lower those taxes more, but they are exceptions.
Because of this, parents naturally complained that their poor schools were not preparing their students for the world around them. (Notice, if you will, how many of those "poor" schools are also in heavily-minority areas - all those years of Jim Crow and other minority-unfriendly official and unofficial policies continue to influence us, even though we're supposed to be past the idea that minorities are inherently stupid or poor decision makers or some other nonsense.) Instead of finding ways to boost funding to the poorer schools, possibly through redistribution of the excesses of rich schools, the idea of "School choice" appeared - if your school sucks, then you deserve to be able to move to another school that's doing better. Assuming they have an open spot and they're willing to take you, that is. Or there are charter schools and vouchers, where a student's governmental spending goes with them, wherever they choose to go, be it public or private schooling.
Would it surprise you that the effect of these options is that the poor schools only get poorer and the rich schools get to pick and choose who they want to have in their schools, so they can look good and have good test scores? All the students who don't win the lottery to go to some other school get the public education that a poor area's taxes can buy. And their scores suffer, because they have no funding to provide anything other than the Core, they can't afford the extra things the richer schools do, they have hungry students, they have students whose parents are not at home because they have to work, they have the students who have learning challenges, but who can't get learning that works for them because there's no money for teachers who can teach it to them, and they have large class sizes on top of all of this. The environment they get is not conducive to learning, and the salaries paid to the teachers make the teachers ready to jump ship when a better offer arises, and more often than not, there are administrators and legislators breathing down the teachers' necks to prevent them from being innovative, because if things slide further, then the funding gets cut even more, and the spiral continues.
If there's a farud being committed here, it's not specifically aimed at black people, it's being aimed at poor people. That poor people tend to be minority says things about society at large, not just an education system that bases your chances of success on whether the houses in your neighborhood sell for enough money.
Which makes the proposed "solution" all that much more bullpucky. Charter schools and school vouchers let the lucky go to better places and the unlucky get nothing. Not to mention, those charter schools charge tuition, meaning on top of the vouchers, those students that want to go either have to find more money or fight for scholarships. That's the major part of the solution Mr. Williams proposes - take away the money from the poor schools and give it to the rich ones, possibly with a little extra.
His other part is based on a strain of thinking that is generally rife in conservatism, but really entrenched when it comes to education. Teachers are usually represented by a union, and whenever unions are involved, there's almost an automatic assumption by their opponents that unions prevent or make it obscenely difficult to fire people who are no longer productive to the organization, because they require such things as discipline processes and grievance resolution. Instead of just being able to say "Your students were the worst in the school on the tests, so you're fired", you actually have to go through trying to make things better, and that's just unacceptable delay when THE CHILDRENS are at stake. Unions are also bad because they generally bargain for livable and better wages for the people they represent, so the poor school systems that already don't have enough money are being roughed up by the mean unions to put more of their budget into staff salaries instead of education. The solution to both of these problems is to hire someone to be in charge that will tell the union that they can accept easier discipline procedures and less wages or they can go hang, if not someone who will break the union and try to make it so that it no longer represents the faculty, so they can fire easily and keep salaries down without being accountable to anyone.
Neither of these "solutions" actually does anything about the problem of sinking test scores and poor education. Structural components of funding will likely require revision to bring baseline funding to parity. Then experimenting with class sizes, instruction methods, and other possible solutions will have some sort of comparable effectiveness, because they'll all be starting from a relatively level playing field. At least, in the school. The society around the school has great influence on its success and failure, as do parents at home. Social settings will have to be accounted for, and perhaps the best fix for bad schooling is in doing something about the society around it so that parents don't have to work sixteen-hour days just to have enough to get by, so they can be there to help with nutrition and homework.
Each citizen of the country is guaranteed an education. Why Mr. Williams seems more than willing to abandon large swaths of that country from getting a good education, in contradiction to his assertion that education is currently defrauding large swaths of people out of their good education, is a mystery to me.
Mr. Williams brazenly claims education for blacks is fraudulent, with no evidence to back this up by standardized test score disparities and assessment results that consistently place black students behind white ones in reading and maths, then claims the solution to such things is charter schools, school vouchers, and the election of anti-union school administrators. To call this piece a "hack job" would be an offense to hacks everywhere. This is a primary-school essay that lacks support for all of its major theses. It is perhaps the germ of an idea that requires itself to be more fleshed out with support and research, rather than treated as a complete thought and thesis.
Let's start with a definition:
Fraud - deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage. (Def 1, Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2010, available at http://dictionary.reference.com)So, for education for blacks to be "fraudulent", it would have to be proven to be fraud - the education for blacks would have to be provably different than that for other groups, and it would further have to be proven that such disparity was done intentionally to disadvantage black people. Test scores do not a fraud proof make. Based solely on the scores mentioned, one could claim that white education is fraudulent because they don't do as well as Asian students in certain subjects (remember that piece from some time ago where the authors basically said universities were becoming "too Asian", by which they meant that the mostly-meritocratic process of university admissions was apparently biasing toward Asians, because they tended to have stronger admissions profiles, and that such a thing was bad because it meant the students would study at school instead of having fun on their parents' dime? Yeah...). There's still a line of thought that says standardized tests have inherent cultural biases that need to be overcome, for one thing. That should be fairly simple. There are social issues involved - do white culture and black culture have different values regarding the value of education? Do we, as a society, expect white people to get college degrees and CEO jobs and black people to get multimillion-dollar athletic contracts, degree optional? What other factors than the education system might be influencing how education happens in the United States?
Besides, as Mr. Wiliams knows, because it will become the means by which he seeks to fix this "fraud", not all schools are chartered equal. Since public schools are funded by local property taxes in the United States, with occasional supplements from the federal and state governments, the amount of money available to public schools depends entirely on the affluence of the area surrounding that school.Poor areas generate little taxes and the school is underfunded. Rich areas generate more taxes, which generally results in better school funding and a better school system. There are exceptions, of course, and they're usually held up as examples of how you can starve a school system and it will still function just fine, honest, so lower those taxes more, but they are exceptions.
Because of this, parents naturally complained that their poor schools were not preparing their students for the world around them. (Notice, if you will, how many of those "poor" schools are also in heavily-minority areas - all those years of Jim Crow and other minority-unfriendly official and unofficial policies continue to influence us, even though we're supposed to be past the idea that minorities are inherently stupid or poor decision makers or some other nonsense.) Instead of finding ways to boost funding to the poorer schools, possibly through redistribution of the excesses of rich schools, the idea of "School choice" appeared - if your school sucks, then you deserve to be able to move to another school that's doing better. Assuming they have an open spot and they're willing to take you, that is. Or there are charter schools and vouchers, where a student's governmental spending goes with them, wherever they choose to go, be it public or private schooling.
Would it surprise you that the effect of these options is that the poor schools only get poorer and the rich schools get to pick and choose who they want to have in their schools, so they can look good and have good test scores? All the students who don't win the lottery to go to some other school get the public education that a poor area's taxes can buy. And their scores suffer, because they have no funding to provide anything other than the Core, they can't afford the extra things the richer schools do, they have hungry students, they have students whose parents are not at home because they have to work, they have the students who have learning challenges, but who can't get learning that works for them because there's no money for teachers who can teach it to them, and they have large class sizes on top of all of this. The environment they get is not conducive to learning, and the salaries paid to the teachers make the teachers ready to jump ship when a better offer arises, and more often than not, there are administrators and legislators breathing down the teachers' necks to prevent them from being innovative, because if things slide further, then the funding gets cut even more, and the spiral continues.
If there's a farud being committed here, it's not specifically aimed at black people, it's being aimed at poor people. That poor people tend to be minority says things about society at large, not just an education system that bases your chances of success on whether the houses in your neighborhood sell for enough money.
Which makes the proposed "solution" all that much more bullpucky. Charter schools and school vouchers let the lucky go to better places and the unlucky get nothing. Not to mention, those charter schools charge tuition, meaning on top of the vouchers, those students that want to go either have to find more money or fight for scholarships. That's the major part of the solution Mr. Williams proposes - take away the money from the poor schools and give it to the rich ones, possibly with a little extra.
His other part is based on a strain of thinking that is generally rife in conservatism, but really entrenched when it comes to education. Teachers are usually represented by a union, and whenever unions are involved, there's almost an automatic assumption by their opponents that unions prevent or make it obscenely difficult to fire people who are no longer productive to the organization, because they require such things as discipline processes and grievance resolution. Instead of just being able to say "Your students were the worst in the school on the tests, so you're fired", you actually have to go through trying to make things better, and that's just unacceptable delay when THE CHILDRENS are at stake. Unions are also bad because they generally bargain for livable and better wages for the people they represent, so the poor school systems that already don't have enough money are being roughed up by the mean unions to put more of their budget into staff salaries instead of education. The solution to both of these problems is to hire someone to be in charge that will tell the union that they can accept easier discipline procedures and less wages or they can go hang, if not someone who will break the union and try to make it so that it no longer represents the faculty, so they can fire easily and keep salaries down without being accountable to anyone.
Neither of these "solutions" actually does anything about the problem of sinking test scores and poor education. Structural components of funding will likely require revision to bring baseline funding to parity. Then experimenting with class sizes, instruction methods, and other possible solutions will have some sort of comparable effectiveness, because they'll all be starting from a relatively level playing field. At least, in the school. The society around the school has great influence on its success and failure, as do parents at home. Social settings will have to be accounted for, and perhaps the best fix for bad schooling is in doing something about the society around it so that parents don't have to work sixteen-hour days just to have enough to get by, so they can be there to help with nutrition and homework.
Each citizen of the country is guaranteed an education. Why Mr. Williams seems more than willing to abandon large swaths of that country from getting a good education, in contradiction to his assertion that education is currently defrauding large swaths of people out of their good education, is a mystery to me.
