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Jewish World Review May 5, 2010 / / 21 Iyar 5770 Black parents ‘have to save your own children’ By Nat Hentoff
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
While the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the teachers' union, is greatly alarmed that a black state senate candidate for governor — Anthony Williams — in the May 18 primary is gaining ground by advocating parents' right to choose schools for their children, an increasingly dramatic battle for school choice is under way in New York City that may also indicate an ongoing national trend.
Though Michael Bloomberg calls himself "the education mayor," in his school system, where 71 percent of eighth-graders are black and Hispanic, only 17 percent last year were freshmen in the specialized high schools that attract college admissions directors (New York Post, April 27).
Moreover, in the elite citywide "gifted kindergarten programs," nearly 70 percent of the students, as reported in the April 30 New York Times, "are white or Asian, the reverse of the racial composition of the school system as a whole."
I have never forgotten a black parent at a New York City Council hearing on education in the late 1950s testifying: "If General Motors had a failure rate for their cars that our schools do for our children, they wouldn't be in business."
It is not surprising, therefore, that as more of the city's black parents become aware of such charter schools that actually work, such as the Harlem Children's Zone and Harlem Success Academies, they are applying eagerly for those schools.
As Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, told troubled parents in Charlotte, N.C. (Charlotte Observer, March 12): "Nobody's going to save our children. You have to save your own children."
While some of the charter schools — all are publicly funded but can refuse to have teacher unions — are criticized justly for not admitting children with learning disabilities (and other special needs), others are assuring that their students will not be dropouts or otherwise have dead-end lives. By now, "about one in five students in central Harlem — 3,100 — are enrolled in charter schools. Thousands more are on waiting lists … 91 percent of charter students passed the math test, while 72 percent of District 5 zoned students did.
At one of Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success Academies, "95 percent of third-graders passed the English exam last year, and 100 percent passed the math. But only 51 percent of third-graders at P.S. 149 passed the (English language) exam, and 79 percent passed the math" (New York Post, April 19).
What enrages the city's charter school parents — and those who deeply hope to be parents of charter school students — is the fiercely incessant opposition to charter schools by the New York State United Teachers union and its New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers. In the state legislature, the teachers union has successfully reduced charter-school funds.
Meanwhile, "four high-performing Ichan charter schools … netted 1,739 applications for just 74 kindergarten slots." And in the Achievement First network of charter schools — whose demanding academic and disciplinary standards remind me of my alma mater, Boston Latin School (where Samuel Adams was also an alumnus), there were 3,800 applications for 588 open seats" (New York Post, April 14).
My own labor union background began at 15, during the so-called Great Depression, when in high school I organized a renowned Boston candy store, Sunday's candies, that employed students after school hours and on weekends. We fought for a raise from 35 cents an hour to 50 cents, and we won because we threatened to strike a month before Christmas. I later helped organize WMEX, the Boston radio station where I worked and helped organize other shops.
But how can I feel comradeship with a teachers union in New York, where I now live, that — as an April 29 Daily News editorial reveals — "perniciously turns the world on its head by complaining that, because charters are concentrated in poor minority neighborhoods, they segregate 'African Americans and Latino students in a separate school system?'"
It is true that there are more segregated public schools around the country than when the Supreme Court unanimously decided in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that public-schools segregation was inherently unconstitutional. Long before there were charter schools, the High Court's Brown ruling was largely undone by lawful (not intentionally bigoted) residential segregation accompanying white flight to the suburbs, as well as to private schools. The failure of "Brown" had nothing to do with charter schools.
Has the New York State United Teachers union no shame?
Let me introduce a charter school not in New York state but in Pennsylvania, where state Sen. Anthony Williams was a founding member in 1999 of the Hardy Williams Charter School. This is how his school's core curriculum on mathematics works:
"Students need to construct their own understanding of each mathematical concept so that the primary role of teaching is not to lecture, explains or otherwise attempt to transfer mathematical knowledge, but to create situations for students that will foster THEIR making the necessary mental constructions."
I have no idea how many math teachers in the Pennsylvania teachers' union accomplish this level of necessary critical thinking among their students; but I do know that if Anthony Williams wins the Democratic primary on May 18 and then becomes governor, there will be more charter schools in Pennsylvania and therefore more lifelong learners among students in that state. The mission of the charter school he helped found is "to demonstrate the heights of academic achievement that … students (can) routinely attain when provided superior educational opportunities."
That's what Harlem parents and others around the country of all backgrounds want — and all their children deserve.
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