After a short report of NYC education news of the past week, Leonie spoke with Brian Jones, a former NYC public school teacher, education activist, and currently the Associate Director of Education Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Brian authored an essay in the new book, “Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice,” a compendium which includes stories, interviews, poems, lessons and more from educators, students, and parents. Brian’s essay in the book deals with the history of the struggle for racial equity in our public schools, and on the show, he explained how the Black Lives Matters at School movement began, what its four main goals are, and the origins and patterns of each of these goals in past movements and events. From February 1-5, Black Lives Matter at School Week will take place in schools across the country, including in NYC. For resources that teachers and schools can draw on in planning for next week, check out the Resources section.
Black Lives Matter at School Week With Brian Jones
Transcript of “Talk Out of School” podcast on Jan. 27, 2021
Leonie Haimson with Brian Jones, a former NYC public school teacher, education activist, and currently the Associate Director of Education Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Leonie Haimson (Host)
Hello everyone, my name is Leonie Haimson. Welcome to our show, Talk Out of School, on WBAI Radio 99.5 FM, and WBAI.org, where we focus on issues affecting public schools here in New York City, the state level, and nationally. Our show is also available for download as a podcast. Today my guest is Brian Jones of the Schomburg Center, who has contributed a fascinating essay in the new book, Black Lives Matters in School. Next week will be Black Lives Matter in School Week from February 1 through 5, and he's going to tell us what that means, what the goals of the movement are, how that relates to the history of the struggle for racial equity in our schools.
But first, some local news. Tonight the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on extending the Pearson contract to test kids as young as four years old for giftedness, which is really hard to justify in general, and especially in the midst of a pandemic. In general, as we discussed last week, this test has a segregating and biased effect, with the great majority of students testing high enough on this test being Asian and white, while the majority of students in the city are Black and Latinx. I wrote a piece for Gotham Gazette on Friday about why the test should be canceled. I also posted a leaked memo from the DOE which admitted the racially biased impact of these exams on my blog, and that especially given the widening inequities during the pandemic there's no way the results will be fair. I'll post these links in the podcast resources section.
The DOE admitted that it would cost about $5 million to administer the test this year, and yet the mayor is intent on continuing it. He appointed two more members to the PEP in the last few weeks, and has called other members in the last few days to try to get his way, we will see what happens tonight at the PEP meeting. I also watched part of a mayoral forum last night sponsored by the principals union. All the candidates that I watched said they supported mayoral control unchanged, only they would be more collaborative than the current mayor. The last time I heard that was when de Blasio was running for mayor eight years ago. We've had unchecked mayoral control in our schools for nearly 20 years now, and it's led to poor decision making an undemocratic policies in our schools.
Also this week, the New York State Education Department did announce that they intend to ask for a waiver from having to give the third through eighth grade exams and the high school Regents Exams in the spring, which is great. We talked about that last week as well. Let's hope the US Department of Education in the Biden Administration grants these waivers. Last night there was an excellent forum sponsored by FairTest about why these waivers should be granted, our newly elected representative from the Bronx Jamaal Bowman, and a former principal was on was on the forum, and I will also link to the recording in the resources section.
But now I'd like to turn to my guest Brian Jones, who is the Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Brian wrote a fascinating essay in the new book entitled "Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising For Educational Justice" that includes essays, interviews, poems, lessons, and more from educators, students, and parents, and deals with the history of the struggle for racial equity in our public schools. The Black Lives Matter at School is also a movement that sponsors an annual event called Black Lives Matters at School Week that will take place next week. Brian, thank you so much for being here.
Brian Jones
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
Leonie Haimson
Before we get to the book and the Black Lives Matters at School Week: Brian, can you describe your background and the personal evolution in your life that has taken to this point? You've done so many different things in a relatively short amount of time.
Brian Jones
Sure. As you know, you and I met when I was an elementary school teacher in Harlem, where I taught for in New York City's public schools for eight years, grades second through sixth. And then I did one last year, one ninth year of teaching in downtown Brooklyn. And during that time we met because you and I were involved in all of these battles against privatization, and charter school co-location and school closings and standardized testing, and all of these things. And I got to a point, I mean, many of the battles that I was fighting in in the buildings where I was working, and citywide, of course, were battles that we lost during the Bloomberg years.
You know, we lost a lot, but we built a movement and learned some things, and I think spread a kind of knowledge about the problems of standardized testing, and the way that all of these systems work. And I feel like that knowledge has now kind of taken root in a deeper way that maybe the tide is turning in our favor. As you kind of noted in your opening remarks, and I think Lester Young's move to push for a waiver for all of these standardized tests in the middle of the pandemic. Obviously it's just a humane thing to do, but it also raises a question of, like, "well, wait a minute, did we need these things in the first place and what kind of role were they playing?" And the fact that they're trying to push through gifted and talented to figure out which four year olds are gifted, you know, is the most preposterous thing. And I say that as the child as the parent of a three year old who I definitely think is gifted but I'm not convinced that he's gifted in a way that means he deserves resources that other three year olds don't get.
Leonie Haimson
Yeah, just for our listeners' sake, Lester Young was recently appointed the Chancellor of the Board of Regents, so he is the man officially in charge of the State Education Department in terms of oversight.
Brian Jones
Thank you. And I'm sorry I got lost track of your question which was about my path. So anyway, the point is that I developed a desire to, and started discussing with colleagues at the CUNY Graduate Center, the idea of pursuing a PhD where I could step back from these battles and try to think about them and write about them at greater length, kind of hit pause in my life. You know, when you knew me I used to have a whole lot of hair. All of these battles stressed me out, I lost the hair on top of my head.
So I went to do a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Department of Urban Education, originally with the idea of being a kind of political scientists, and study these battles that I had just been involved in. And as I started trying to do that research I increasingly was drawn to the historical context in which they had emerged and particularly I was thinking about my experiences as a teacher in Harlem, and the kind of spooky parallels. I saw between a philanthropically endorsed movement for privatization that seem to be so focused on Black schools. And the fact that there's quite a history of that. So my firstpeer-reviewed journal article is a comparison of Booker T. Washington, and Geoffrey Canada, and the way in which there are these kind of historical symmetries in an attempt to co-opt Black education for other purposes.
Leonie Haimson
Now you debated Geoffrey Canada on a sort of, notorious NBC show called Education Nation which they used to do every year. They don't do it anymore. Can you explain to us who Geoffrey Canada is for listeners who might not know?
Brian Jones
Yeah, he's a former CEO of a large charter school operation. And it's broader than that, it's a whole network of services, called the Harlem Children's Zone. He really rocketed to prominence earlier in in the 21st century, on the basis of the services the kind of wraparound services that he was attempting to provide for children in Harlem and you would ask of course you know what's wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with that except that it seemed to be pitted against the public system and very explicitly about an agenda of tearing down and denigrating. It kind of made its bones on the argument that there could not be that the public sector could not do this and there should not be public schools in this business, that they were trying they were out to destroy us.
Leonie Haimson
What's interesting, I don't know whether you know this, but when Geoffrey Canada wanted to establish a school after establishing these community services in Harlem, he went to Joel Klein and he asked to create a public school, and it was Joel Klein who said no do it as a charter school. So his original motivation might not have been to pose his charter schools against the public school system. That was really the original thought of Joel Klein, who was our chancellor at the time, and you would have thought would have been there to defend and strengthen our public schools against the tide of privatization, but he was, he was like an inside job guy that was trying to work against the public schools at the same time as he was running them.
Brian Jones
Absolutely. And what emerged, I'm sure recall that there were many parents, Black parents in particular, who started seeing that some of the promises of these institutions weren't being carried out in the way that they were originally proposed. And so they began protesting, sometimes organizing. They organized a charter school parents union. And so those of us who were critical of the privatization agenda, I think we did so in a way that was never aimed at the parents or the teachers or the students, but was aimed at the kind of architects of the system pitting us all in competition against each other. And that got me thinking about this these patterns in Black education history, where yes, sometimes philanthropic entities come in with an agenda of their own and try to co-opt Black educational enterprises for their own ends.
But there's also something that develops inside institutions where people seeing what's going on, try to make them into what they want them to be. And so there's a kind of story of these institutions from below that you can tell as well, not just the kind of great leaders. And that led me to thinking about Booker T. Washington, and Tuskegee, and I'd heard that there were...you know, we learn about Booker T. Washington in dialogue with W.E.B. Du Bois, or in debate with him or what have you, but we hear less about what did students make of the school experience. It turns out there was something of a contest on the campus over what is this place going to be what is its promise, what do we want from it. Students protested, wrote, letters, petitioned-
Leonie Haimson
Whatyear are we talking about talking about here?
Brian Jones
The end of the 19th century. As soon as the school came into existence, and there's even evidence of a strike within the first decade of the 20th century on the campus. So I journeyed, my dad went to Tuskegee, he and I went there together when I was a doctoral student, when I was a graduate student working on this. We traveled to Alabama to Tuskeegee's campus, to dig into the archives and find this story of that students strike in 1905. And, you know, we found it in one document and I almost burst into tears because you know, suddenly, a great idea was crumbling. But one of the librarians there then pulled out these students, large bound volumes of the student newspaper from the 1960s, and it turns out of course like in many other campuses Tuskegee had a student uprising in the 1960s that was massive, and that also resonated with these questions of Black education, and Black educational institutions and the legacy of Booker T. Washington, and what are we about here, and what are our goals and what is this education for.
And so again and again we see Black students trying to change the nature of their education, trying to take hold of it, and reorganize it, often connected to their growing and enlarging political aspirations. And I think similar things are going on in the country today. When we have a new generation that's coming up that has a broader vision for how our world ought to be that are challenging the priorities of the world that they find themselves born into.
And similarly, they want a broader education. They want an education that's that enables them, that gives them the room to take up these bigger questions. And that's where the standardized testing and the privatization agenda, and the hyper competitive approach to education pushes in the opposite direction, because it assumes that the only questions worth asking are questions that Pearson is asking, and, and the answers to those questions are answers that Pearson knows best in advance.
Leonie Haimson
Right, and the Common Core was designed by a guy named David Coleman who basically said, "we don't care what you think or feel" to the students. And in their answers and explication of texts, they are not supposed to apply any historical context to what they're reading so as an example they use Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address and your and students are supposed to analyze that without any context of why he said it and where he was at the time. So in a sense the Common Core is exactly opposite to what you're talking about, which is trying to allow students to think about the larger historical context in which they live.
Brian Jones
Absolutely. And whenever you're trying to mean that's immediately what comes up when you're trying to change something, as I was when you're trying to change a circumstance you find yourself in, you suddenly want to understand the history of this circumstance, well how did we get here. And usually what the history reveals the more you dig into it is that the present you find yourself in is not how it has always been, but it has been created. And it was often fought over, and it was the outcome of particular choices and particular battles, and it could have been otherwise. And the fact that the are present that we find ourselves in could have been otherwise is very powerful thing too. It's a very powerful thing to discover. When you're somebody when you've decided that the present that you're living in needs to change.
Leonie Haimson
So let's move to Black Lives Matters and schools, when did this movements start and can you explain its goals?
Brian Jones
Sure. Well, what I try to argue in this essay in the book is that this movement started much longer ago than that, what we're in now is a new phase of a long movement along Black educational movement, and that contrary to, so let me say this and then I'll say when this space started, and we have this movement. But, you know, one of the things that we live with in this country is our assumptions about Black parents and students that ignore this long history of Black folks, fighting for education at all levels in many different respects ever since we were brought here. And, in light of that history, the way that we're kind of denigrated or talked about as people who don't value education is just preposterous.
So, I'm always trying to dig into these stories about black education history and I find that it's, it just continues to astound and amaze how people in the most challenging circumstances you can imagine, constantly seek out educational resources, and that's so many of our Black history stories, even stories that you think you know well about Black history, when you scratch the surface there's an educational aspect to it. I mean just fun examples are the Black Panther Party was actually founded by two community college students who met in community college.
My own institution, the Schomburg Center has so many amazing people who've moved through it, but I recently started working there I discovered that Ella Baker, famed Ella Baker, who changed the world with her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with King's organization, the SCLC, and of course, as a director of branches with the NAACP, but out of college she got her start working where I work at the Schomburg Center doing educational work with young people that very much was a starting place for her and thinking about the importance of teaching black history, of how you engage with young people, and we see her practices that she started there we see those developing further in her later work, her later organizing work. So anyway, there's so many stories, and they often move through educational institutions one way or another.
So this is a long story of Black people fighting for learning and liberation, and seeing those things as connected, but this new phase started in 2016 actually at an elementary school in Seattle, where teachers were going to have a day of affirming their Black students. There was a Black men's organization that was going to, you know, shake the hands of the students as they walked into the school that day, and the right wing media got hold of it and there was a bomb threat. And so this whole thing had to be shut down. But then the teachers decided to get defiant, and Jesse Hagopian who's well-known educator and activist in Seattle, got connected to those teachers and to some union activists education union activists in the area. And they actually decided to make this a bigger issue and to endorse and propose that everybody wear t-shirts, let's say Black Lives Matter. And so they made these t-shirts, and then next thing they knew thousands of teachers, mostly white teachers just like everywhere else in America, are wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts, just to stand up for this attempt to affirm Black students at one little elementary school.
And then the next year teachers in Philadelphia, where they have a very activist oriented and racial justice oriented caucus within the teachers union, those teacher activists got hold of this idea. So suddenly it became between Philadelphia and Seattle a national conversation about taking the energy and the ideas of the Black Lives Matter movement, and having them take root in school. And so then from Philly and Seattle it spread to New York and it kind of became a thing where suddenly they decided, I can't take any credit for this, they decided to have a Black Lives Matter at school week. And this was a kind of week of action in the spirit of many Black history initiatives and, you know, I write in this book about Carter G. Woodson starting Negro History week in 1926, which in the 70s became Black History Month. And similar to that effort, this effort is very much do it yourself. It's here are some tools make of it what you will.
So in some places, educators are protesting or making demands of of administrators or of school officials, and in other places, or and or it also looks like things they're doing in the classroom to teach Black history of that month or raise critical conversations in the classroom. I'm sorry during that week. And so the week also combines that kind of do it yourself, operate at different scales, at the scale of your classroom, at the scale of your school, or even your whole city or district. People are making of it what they will, but it also carries with it four demands, and I think that's really important because we are living in a time where yes things do need to change in the classroom, and the conversations, and the curriculum, and those kinds of things need to change, and there are demands that we need to make of school officials.
So the demands are to hire more Black teachers, to end zero tolerance to fund counselors, not cops in schools to mandate black history and ethnic studies. And there's a fourth that I'm suddenly forgetting.
Leonie Haimson
So, yeah, hiring more Black teachers, mandating Black History, ending zero tolerance, and hiring counselors.
Brian Jones
Right, those are the four, yes, thank you. So that's the movement, so then it's sprung up and now it's it more dozens of cities have taken it up and it's spreading to more and more cities every year and this book, as you described, is voices of teachers, voices of students, voices of parents, voices of educators who are describing the work they've done to try to bring this into their schools. And one last point on this is that I think it's interesting that the Black Lives Matter movement has many manifestations. It has many organizational manifestations. To my knowledge, this is a unique one, in that it's taking root in an institution that is so central to, as we're increasingly discovering during this pandemic, so central to everyone's life, to school. It's a workplace. And it's a community center, and it's kind of the heart of so many communities.
So, this is a really, and also all of this organizing is done not by in a not-for-profit, nobody's getting paid, nobody has any titles, this is a truly independent grassroots movement that is taking root in this really important sector of our society. And I think that holds a lot of promise for this movement and for the broader reckoning that we're trying to have about why Black lives should matter in our society.
Leonie Haimson
And what's fascinating is it started long before, you know, all the uprisings and the protests this summer, which really, I think, gave new prominence to the meaning of Black Lives Matter, among many groups across the country. So let's go through some of these goals and and issues one by one. You've talked a little bit about the understanding about the history of teaching black history in our schools. And then there's also the ethnic studies, the movement to put ethnic studies in our schools. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Brian Jones
Absolutely. It is, you know, kind of decried and defamed, as you know, preaching hatred of white people preaching anti Americanism, I mean whatever you know ridiculous accusations you want to hurl. But what I've seen, of people who work in ethnic studies and have promoted the teaching of ethnic studies in K-12, Black History and ethnic studies, it is about dethroning white supremacist narratives, and teaching people to take another look at American history and contemporary society through the experience of particular groups of people, which can be extremely instructive whether you identify with that group of people or not.
I don't identify my person or family ancestry with the Mexican or Mexican-American experience. Yet, the more I learn about their history and their experience in this country and in relation to this country, the more I learn about myself, in a way, and my place with them in this world. We have a problem in this country when people are surprised by armed groups of white supremacist showing up places demanding things. I think we should be shocked but not surprised. And if we teach these other stories from American history that it turns out are actually quite central to understanding American history, then I think our students will be shocked and outraged, but not surprised because they'll see the through-line of white supremacist violence in the country's history.
Leonie Haimson
So, ethnic studies is a required course in certain school districts across the country, there is, I think, a growing amount of research showing that students who have that opportunity are more engaged and tend to do better in school, but it's not a required course in New York City at the high school level, at the middle school level, or anywhere. Why is that and is there a movement to to push for that anywhere?
Brian Jones
I think that's a really good question and I don't fully know the answer because every time I find myself speaking with educators or even officials within the DOE they all seem to be in favor of this, so it seems like now, certainly Carranza, the schools' Chancellor, has spoken in favor of of culturally relevant curricula, of broadening the curricula. That's now on the agenda of the State Board of Education. It seems to me like everything is lined up to make this a no brainer at this point, so I actually don't know the answer to why it hasn't been done yet, but it seems like now would be the time.
Leonie Haimson
Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit about how the current demand to fund counselors, not cops, started years ago, or one of the manifestations in the past. In 1936 with the story of a 14 year old Black New York City student named Robert Shelton. I found this one of the most interesting parts of your essay.
Brian Jones
Yeah. You know, I don't know if it's accurate to say that this demand starts with that story, but I start with this story because I think it illustrates something that is really true about the Black experience, especially in northern and western schools, through the process of the Great Migration. And it's also an important story because it punctures our sense of racism as something that's kind of institutionally rooted in the south, and that people were fleeing and therefore were liberated from when they arrived in the north.
And actually the experience of black students black migrants when they arrived in northern schools, was pretty bad across the board. And of course there are exceptions. In some ways, Malcolm X's treatment in his school that famous story the autobiography is that he gets one of the better treatments. His teachers like him, he gets good grades, he's well liked in his classroom, but of course there's that famous story in the autobiography when it comes time to talk about careers. Many of his classmates want to be lawyers or doctors and he really wants to be a lawyer, and his teacher tells him that he has to be realistic, and that being realistic means that despite his academic success in the class, he should aim for being a carpenter. Nothing wrong with being a carpenter, but clearly there's a systematic idea that somebody who's Black could not aim, or should not be aiming, for the professions, or those professions.
So, yeah, the story is a heartbreaking story from Harlem, in 1936 of a 14 year old student Robert Shelton, who's dropping his little sister off at an elementary school PS5 gets into some kind of an altercation. I've read a few different accounts of this. It's kind of unclear what was happening, but gets dragged into the principal's office by the principal Gustaf Shoengen, who then beats him, and beats him so badly that he requires stitches in his head. And so Black parents, organize, to get this principle removed and Ella Baker, shows up again and she's there helping these Black parents to organize. And it's, it's not an example of police in schools, but it has this resonance with some of the videos we've seen of Black students being grabbed and kind of thrown to the ground. I saw one again today on social media that I just, I could barely look at, but it's a young Black woman being body slammed to the ground by a police officer in a school, and then is still unconscious on the ground.
But certainly by the 1940s, so the Robert Shelton case is 1936, and by the 1940s, we're starting to see police in several northern states, police in schools. And then it just builds and it builds with the kind of carceral logic of police and prisons as a way to deal with Black and brown youth in our cities. And so I think it takes on a new life in the 1990s, ironically after a spate of school shootings mostly involving white students shooting up their schools. And then there's a real acceleration of the idea that the police should take over school safety. They should become the school safety officers.
And so now today in New York City we have plenty of students who have more police officers in their schools than guidance counselors, and so on the same way that we're having this kind of reckoning with mass incarceration and over policing, stop and frisk, when we turn to the school and ask the same question, we see a growth of carceral logic of arresting young kids, of locking kids up, of having police officers deal with questions of school safety and discipline that has a long racist history that what I'm trying to say begins with the arrival of Black students in large numbers in northern schools and they're dealt with, with these racist logics
Leonie Haimson
And something called zero tolerance, which I don't know, do you know the historical origins of when that became - so it's not only that you have more and more cops in the schools in New York City and elsewhere, but that kids can actually get arrested for things like being late to class being in the hallway when you know five minutes after their class is supposed to start and that, leading to, you know, altercations and a kid being pulled off to the police headquarters. I mean, more and more arrests happening at the same time for things that in the past might have been thought of as minor disciplinary issues or not really even disciplinary issues at all.
Brian Jones
Absolutely. I mean, from what I found was that I tried to trace the term to the US Customs services anti-drug program in the 1980s. And so it's linked to the kind of war on drugs, and the idea that, "oh if we take a zero tolerance approach that that will solve the drug problem" and you know, of course, we understand that this solves nothing. That all of these kind of putting handcuffs on people and dragging them off to be incarcerated, or just loading them up with punishments, doesn't really solve anything
Leonie Haimson
And makes it worse. I mean you're pulling kids out of school. They're obviously not going to succeed very well in their classes if they're arrested and whatever, suspended for long periods of time, put in these alternate suspension centers where they're learning nothing really discourages kids from pursuing a high school diploma. So, these things have serious negative consequences on the opportunity for these kids to learn.
Brian Jones
Absolutely, and they avert our eyes from the question of, if there is so much disturbance, that you think the thing to do is call in the police, what is going on in the first place. What is going on in the first place in school and in our society that leads young people to be in such discord with this institution that's supposed to be holding them and educating them and nurturing them. Clearly something has gone wrong, that none of the carceral solutions actually solve.
Leonie Haimson
Now another goal of Black Lives Matters in Schools is to stress the need to hire more Black teachers. Again, there's research showing that for Black students having at least one Black teacher is correlated with a much higher, significantly higher, chance of success in school. But we've seen in the recent past, and then the less recent past, a decline in the number of Black teachers in our schools, starting with Brown v. Board of Education. Can you explain how that happened?
Brian Jones
Yeah, and that also goes to the question of what's it like in school, I mean they're connected. So, Brown v. Board of Education, we, I think rightly by the way, hold up as a victory over Jim Crow schooling, over the idea of inequality in schooling, racial segregation in schooling. All of that is important to note and to mark and Black educators and activists at the time, both celebrated Brown and worried about it. And I think because they understood what was likely to happen next, which is what did happen next.
But this is another moment where it didn't have to be that way. Because, in order to prevent disaster, Black educators, principals, and teachers, got together and drew up plans. And they said, "okay, so we're going to desegregate the schools. How's that going to go down? Here's an idea. You're going to take some of our Black students, some of our teachers and some of our principals should go with them so that somebody is there in the school who knows them. And we can work with the white educators, or other educators, to talk about how we're going to do this. This could be a kind of power sharing operation here, in which we're going to collaboratively desegregate our schools."
Leonie Haimson
Or alternatively some of the white students could have gone in and integrated the Black schools, and we have some of the same principals and teachers, but that didn't happen.
Brian Jones
That didn't happen, and so I say that just as an example, we're going to send some over there, but of course we're also going to receive and it's going to be back and forth. It's going to be reciprocal. That didn't happen, unfortunately, and the way it did happen was experienced by Black schools and Black communities as profoundly disempowering. That is that all the power resided with white politicians and authority figures in the school system, who then did desegregation the way they wanted to do it, on the assumption and the idea that Black schools were intrinsically by their nature inferior and Black teachers are inferior and Black principals are inferior.
And so that kind of theory of Black inferiority played out in the way that desegregation happened. First of all, 90% of Black principals lost their jobs. And that's why we could refer to this as Brown was both a moment of hope and optimism. It was also a catastrophe in the way that it played out, and between 1954 and 1965, 50% of Black teachers lost their jobs because who wants to hire an inferior Black teacher. And so the pattern of Brown became, as I think your comment was just noting, instead of students going both ways, it became about placing Black students in white schools.
Leonie Haimson
Keeping the white power structure and authority in place. Now, you also write that more recently, many Black teaching jobs were eliminated as a result of the neoliberal push for the Common Core, more testing and expansion of charter schools. I call this the corporate reform movement, which was promoted by both parties, and I recall how a teacher at a public forum that Dennis Walcott was at, who was then our chancellor after Joel Klein, and after Kathy Black's short lived reign, was asked by a Black teacher about this sharp decline in the number of Black teachers in New York City schools. And Dennis Walcott, who by the way is Black as well, said "we don't care about race we care about quality," with the implication that the reason for the decline in the number of Black teachers was that they were somehow less qualified which shocked me at the time, but perhaps should not have.
Can you explain how the rise of the corporate reform and expansion of charter schools, and even Teach for America, resulted in this decline of Black teachers in our schools.
Brian Jones
Right, so this is the second catastrophe, so we have catastrophe upon catastrophe for Black teachers. So, the corporate reform movement, as you call it, the privatization movement, targeted big, urban centers, where we have concentrations of Black and Brown students. And even though Black teachers are a tiny percentage of the nation's teaching force, they are concentrated where Black students are. And so, you know, if Black teachers are, you know, I think single digits nationwide, but they're 25% of the teaching force in Chicago, for example.
Leonie Haimson
Black and Brown students are the majority of our public school students right now, so there's a huge disparity nationally, and even in a lot of urban school districts.
Brian Jones
Right, but Black students are distributed differently and so, especially Black students tend to be segregated in the schools where they attend. And so that's where Black teachers are. And so all of the kind of the weight of standardized testing, of the kind of 'test and punish' regime has fallen most heavily on those schools. And that means that what they've done is to ratchet up the stakes of those standardized tests, and not only the student's future was hanging by those tests, but also the teachers future, in some cases the school's future, the school leadership's future. And so we had, you know, these kind of "we're gonna publish the rankings of teachers, based on the test scores of their students" which was debunked, and it's the kind of scientific possibility of doing it by statisticians as something that was not plausible, yet they did it anyway as a kind of political move.
But all of that regime fell most heavily on the places where Black teachers were concentrated, and so we see where the kind of reform movement got its way the most. Places like New Orleans, where after Hurricane Katrina, they just demolished black schools and tried to wholescale replace them with a network of competing charter schools, kind of semi-public or semi privatized or fully privatized charter schools. That also meant a replacement of Black teachers with white teachers. New Orleans, for example, saw 50% of its Black teachers pushed out of the profession. So, it's the way in which these policies fell on Black schools that ends up targeting Black teachers, and I think that's a really important point because there's a way in which also that movement, tried to pit students against teachers. It was like they were gonna swoop in and wrap themselves in the robes of the Civil Rights Movement and questions of racial justice, on behalf of students and against their teachers.
The problem is that of course, first of all, young people grow up to be adults, and some of them, you know, might want to be teachers at some point. But secondly, there's a way in which this movement also worked against the idea of teachers that might come up from a community and teach in their own community, and therefore have deep knowledge of the students and the parents, and therefore more accountability to the community.
Leonie Haimson
So we saw many students protesting the closure of their schools in New York City, protesting the firing of their teachers in some cases, and especially in New Orleans, but other places, also, the replacement of experienced long time teachers, with the mostly white recently graduated from college Teach for America corps of teachers who had, I don't know, three weeks six weeks of training over the summer, but were considered somehow to be better teachers because they went to better colleges, and had higher SAT scores. I mean this was really part of the formative ideology behind Teach for America, that if only our students have smart teachers like us, they would automatically do better. And of course, you know that did not work out at all.
But I think that TFA was, was part of the origin of a lot of the corporate reform policies, and the people who came out of TFA, many of whom only worked for two years or less in our public schools, are now the leaders. Principals, superintendents, DC think tanks on the staff of Congress people that formed a lot of the policies behind the corporate reform establishment or movement. So I think that that's part of it as well. I wanted to talk about how some of these apparently discrete goals are really interrelated. For example, many charter schools do feature no excuses, philosophy, which leads to high suspension rates as well. So can you talk about how all these things may interrelate in a way.
Brian Jones
Absolutely, and, you know, I think one of the, one of the things that's come about because of competition between schools is that competitors are forced to imitate each other. And so, you know, we can make this critique of charter schools, but we also have to be, I think, willing to say, you know, some public schools then bought into this and then tried to compete on the same basis and say we're going to have uniforms, we're going to have zero tolerance, we're going to have better standardized test scores, we're gonna focus more exclusively on the test.
Leonie Haimson
Because they had to, to escape being closed or having teachers fired.
Brian Jones
And it's a way in which we kind of have privatization without privatization. There's so much competition within the public system, especially in a place like New York City. There's so much competition over who's going to be able to go to which school at the earliest grades, not even a question of high school, that, you know, that's why this ridiculous gifted and talented test at age four sort of thing. There's so much competition within the public system that it's problematic, and as you noted leads to grossly disparate measures so to take the flip. And this is another dynamic of Black history and Black education struggle, is that Black lives do matter when we value Black experience, school, everybody wins and actually improves school for everybody.
A kind of historical example that I often think about is Reconstruction. And in the south there were many white students, many white young people who never went to school. The South didn't have public schools, tax supported, they didn't believe in that. And so it was during Reconstruction after the Civil War that, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, public education for all, that free public supported education for all, was a negro idea. Something Black people fought for, and as soon as they got it, this is when the South was doing so with Republican administrations. The white supremacist Democratic Party was driven out of office. They were defeated in the Civil War. Union soldiers are occupying the South, and so Black people and their allies suddenly get elected to state legislatures, and say we should have schools. We should have public hospitals. And so many white kids in the South who went to school for the very first time did so because Black people were fighting for everybody to have access to school.
And similarly I think the push to make our schools the kind of place where you don't get locked up, and where you don't have police officers roaming the hallways, are going to create the kind of saline conditions for teaching learning for everything. The idea of having black teachers, there's a funny, not funny, but it's true, t-shirt that says everybody deserves a Black teacher. So absolutely, I think there is, there is a way in which the demands of the Black Lives Matter at School movement are demands that are not only going to affirm and lift up and try to make our schools places of joy and learning for Black students, but if we are able to do that, and where we are able to do that, those are going to be great learning spaces for everyone.
Leonie Haimson
So as you've already mentioned, the issue of high stakes testing being discriminatory and leading to segregated schools is a big issue in New York City and elsewhere for good reason. And yet integration is not one of the explicit goals of the Black Lives Matters movement in schools. Can you explain why?
Brian Jones
That's an interesting point. It's a really interesting question. I hadn't quite thought about it that way, but that's something certainly that I think the movement should consider. I'm really impressed by the way that a new generation of young people have taken up this question. And I think that part of the way the discussion proceeds is that as soon as you bring this up because of the bitter experience of Black people with Brown, and with the disempowering experience of desegregation people, therefore, understandably concluded that that's not the way to go. That therefore what we have to try to do is build up our institutions such as they are and make them the best that we can with them.
And Black people long have experience of doing that kind of work. Many of the Black educational activists who we see at the forefront of the movement for integration were also people who were building strong Black community schools as well and so there's not an iron wall between these strategies when it comes to individual parents, teachers, students, activists, etc.
The current push by groups like Teens Take Charge and Integrate NYC, I think they raised a really important point that they are learning from the experience of Brown and the disempowerment of Brown, that it's not just a question of moving bodies around, but it's also about changing the culture of school, and that they are also therefore pushing for a strong anti-racist curriculum. This is where mandating ethnic studies and Black history comes in, hiring more Black teachers. It's about changing the culture of the school institution, so that if you do have changing demographic of who's in the building, the school can actually treat them in a humane way. You don't have a reproduction of Robert Shelton's experience in 1936 or Malcolm X's experience in Michigan,
Leonie Haimson
Or what happened after Brown versus Board of Education where black students were put in white schools with, you know, the same power structure that did not take account of their lives. Another thing that's not an explicit goal and I'm wondering about this Black Lives Matters in school is equitable funding is my main issue, which is class size which is shown to be a key driver of equity for opportunity and outcomes, especially for Black students. Why do you think that is?
Brian Jones
That's another great point. I mean, I think that the people I know, like personally who are involved in this movement are people who have supported both of those goals in the past. And pretty much everywhere you look and find people taking up the Black Lives Matter week of action, they have also been people who historically have supported both of those policy points. So how to place them in the context of this Black Lives Matter week of action is a good question. I don't know the answer to that, but I agree with you that the question of class size is paramount. And there's just, as you say, there's so much research that it's important.
I think part of the reason that there's so much resistance to it is that we as a society basically have always tried to do education for working class kids, and for poor kids, and for kids of color. Those are not automatically all the same people, but we have tried to do their education on the cheap as much as possible. And the hypocrisy of the elite leaders of the privatization movement saying that we don't need smaller class sizes when you just look at where they send their own children. Our schools that universally brag very prominently on their websites about how those schools have small class sizes. I mean that's the first thing that if parents are going to shell out $40,000 for second grade, the very first thing they want to know is what's the class.
Leonie Haimson
They will demand it. They will absolutely demand it, and private school charges a lot of money. We'll be able to survive without small classes. We have to wrap up now. Unfortunately there's so many other questions I had for you. I hope you might come back some time. But, you know, next week is Black Lives Matters in school week. Do you have any idea how many schools in New York City are participating?
Brian Jones
Oh, that's a good question too that I don't know the answer to, but it's many. The quickest way for people to find out and get involved is BlackLivesMatteratSchool.org. Check out that website, there's maps where you can see what people are doing all over the country. There's resource kits, where you can see how to get started. They've also decided that this is, you know, similar to the way that Black Negro History Week became Black History Month, there's a kind of expanding ambition for Black Lives Matter at School, so it's bursting the bounds of the week, and is now becoming also, in addition to this week, a year of purpose, so there's going to be events happening all throughout the year.
Leonie Haimson
That's great, and I will put that link in the resources section of the podcast. Thank you so much, Brian for explaining the need for Black Lives Matter in School, and giving us the historical context. This is Leonie Haimson, host of Talk Out of School on WBAI 99.5 FM Pacifica Radio. Our show is also available as a podcast if you missed the live version. If you hear it through Apple please leave a review. Also please consider becoming a WBAI Buddy to Talk Out of School by logging into give to wbai.org or by calling (516) 620-3602. I'll be back soon with another episode of Talk Out of School. Until then, be careful and be safe, and thanks so much for listening.