Kappan Home PDK Home

Needed: A New Educational Civil Rights Movement Let us hope, Mr. Clinchy says, that we are not in for another century of continued educational injustice before we set the record straight and achieve a just, fair, and equitable system. By Evans Clinchy Illustration by Kris Hackleman

NOW THAT the great American post-World War II civil rights movement in education has apparently run its course and appears to be moving backwards, it is time to launch a new educational civil rights movement. Or at least it's time to take the old one in a new and more comprehensive direction for the 21st century.

I think we might all agree that the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education was the single greatest recognition in the 20th century that the parents and children of this country really do have educational rights. In that sense, it was the high-water mark of that century's educational civil rights movement.

The Brown decision made two vitally important points. The first was that the "segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal." The second and equally important finding was that "where a state has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."1

Not Wholly a Success

Following the Brown decision and subsequent court decisions, this country embarked on the long effort to desegregate all our public schools and provide all American children of every racial and ethnic group with those "equal educational opportunities." But if we look at what has happened since 1954, we can see all too clearly that that movement has turned out to be only a qualified success. While legal segregation has ended in this country and Southern school districts can no longer run officially segregated schools, many school districts -- especially inner-city districts in both the North and the South -- are at least as segregated as they were in 1954. Indeed, many districts, such as those in Boston, Chicago, New York, and other major cities, are more segregated.2

What's more, both federal and state courts are now moving toward declaring that many of our formerly segregated districts have made "good faith" -- if unsuccessful -- efforts to desegregate and are therefore legally "unified" and relieved of any further duty to integrate their schools. These same courts are also declaring that "race-based admissions policies" are unconstitutional and that districts may now return to the policy of racially identifiable neighborhood schools, the very policy that had originally caused the de facto segregation of schools in the North.

In addition, we are experiencing an increase in economic segregation throughout our system of public education. Those inner-city schools that house most of our minority children also house large concentrations of our poor children. What's more, the nation's rural schools serve disproportionately large numbers of just plain poor (though mainly nonminority) children.

And all of these schools are still very clearly victims of Jonathan Kozol's "savage inequalities." While suburban school districts may spend $12,000 to $15,000 on every student, city and rural school districts are fortunate if they can raise $7,000, a situation that puts every state in the union except Hawaii in violation of the Brown ruling that required states to provide public education on equal terms to all children and young people. Urban students and their teachers are all too often housed in ancient, crumbling buildings. Their schools are all too often staffed by poorly trained and underpaid teachers. Classes can be as large as 40 to 45 students and are supplied with ancient materials and little or no modern electronic equipment. At the same time, there is an inadequate array of community support services to assist the many children and young people and their families who live lives of extreme poverty.

All of this is happening at a time when the U.S. is not only the richest nation the world has ever seen but also a nation in which the already rich are garnering an ever increasing share of the national wealth while 20 million children still live in poverty. Neither those children nor their parents have adequate health insurance, adequate schools, adequate social services, or adequate jobs.

In short, despite the Brown decision, the nation has signally failed to provide anything like equal educational opportunity to all our children and young people.

Making Things Worse

As if all these inequities were not bad enough, we have now embarked on a new national agenda in education that, if it is perhaps not as overtly immoral as segregation, is surely as inhumane, undemocratic, and (many of us devoutly hope and believe) unconstitutional. This is the Goals 2000 federal agenda that is causing every state except Iowa to impose on all students and all schools a single standardized curriculum that embodies new, "higher," "tougher," "world-class" academic standards.3

Many of these new academic standards, according to many of the teachers, principals, and school administrators who must impose them, are hopelessly abstruse, excessively demanding, and quite inappropriate for the age and intellectual development of the children and young people who are forced to attempt to meet them. Indeed, a study conducted by staff members of Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning has estimated that it would take as much as 22 years of schooling for a student to meet all the standards in all the core subject areas that are being mandated by most states.4

This attempt to impose on all students a narrow, authoritarian, uniform definition of what it is to be an "educated person" is being cemented in place in nearly every state by the imposition of new, "tougher," "high-stakes," standardized, pencil-and-paper, most often multiple-choice tests that all students must pass before they can be promoted to the next grade or permitted to graduate from high school. All public schools are now being forced to "align" their curricula with these tests -- that is, to teach to and only to the academic orthodoxy that is contained in and thus authorized by the tests.5

The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest) and many testing experts believe that the single, high-stakes tests currently in use are too long, too complicated, and both academically unfair and inaccurate because they often test what has not been studied and pose questions that are well above any student's level of cognitive development. They are also often badly administered and in thousands of cases incorrectly scored. All of these testing malfeasances are causing unjustified anguish for children and parents across the land.6

One fact that renders invalid the practice of using any single high-stakes test to determine whether students can be promoted from grade to grade or allowed to graduate from high school is that none of the high-prestige colleges and universities would ever dream of using any single measure to determine whether to admit students. Even though the SAT is used by these institutions, the New York Times has pointed out that an institution such as Wesleyan University will "weigh a student's race, ethnicity, home town as well as course selection, athletic prowess, alumni connections, artistic skill, musical talent, writing ability, community service and the quality of the school" from which the student comes. High-prestige colleges and universities want to make sure that their entering classes are "not only academically sound and ethnically and racially diverse but also well-stocked with poets, running backs, activists, politicians, painters, journalists and cellists." And they will often use criteria other than test scores in choosing to admit students who have lower test scores than other applicants.7 The practices of these highly selective institutions clearly spell out the kind of broad, inclusive, and all-encompassing criteria we should be using in assessing the progress of all students as they move from kindergarten through high school.

But to this range of sterling and necessary human endeavors, we need to add the full range of technical and mechanical skills, few of which are going to be acquired by going to college. Just as we need poets, running backs, and cellists, we need skilled (and equally well-paid) farmers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, sheet metal workers, auto mechanics, construction workers, chefs, and so on, and the full range of skilled and even unskilled service industry people. After all, it is these skilled and unskilled workers, many of them with only a high school education or less, who actually keep the social and economic worlds working.

Punishing Students for the Failure of Schools

But there is more to this sad story. In an effort to end what the school authorities call "social promotion," policies are being adopted that force students who do not pass the tests to go to summer school and to be "retained" in grade if they still fail to pass the tests. Or take the case of Boston, where students who don't pass the eighth-grade state test are not held back but are instead forced to go to summer school and, if they still fail the test, are then placed in "transition" classes in the ninth grade. This, according to Judith Baker, a veteran Boston high school teacher,

is the same exact thing as tracking used to be. [The students] are denied electives or creative programs, they take double English and math, and if they fail these, they will probably go into transition 10th-grade and 11th-grade classes. . . . Although there is an attempt to bolster these courses, they are essentially remedial. They create "higher" and "lower" tracks, just by taking the majority of entering ninth-graders into what automatically becomes the school's "lower" track. These "transition" classes throw the entire curriculum sequence off, because they delay until later grades many required courses, and by the time students fulfill their requirements, they will never have had a chance to take an elective, an honors or AP course, anything remotely interesting.

Students are responding by being sullen and bored, by failing (the guidance counselor for grade 9 went home with a stuffed shopping bag full of warning notices), and by other negative behavior. I have heard of no positive behavior, academic or other, associated with the "transition" course.8

So what are the utterly expectable results of this wave of so-called school reform? The reformers say that "all children can and now will learn" -- if only they and their teachers settle down, work hard, and concentrate on those lessons that will help them raise their test scores. Forget about those "savage inequalities." Success can be achieved solely by hard work and teaching to the standards and the tests.

But there is no secret about who the children and young people are who are going to fail those tests and, indeed, are already failing them all over the country. They are precisely the poor and minority children and young people -- especially those with limited proficiency in English -- who inhabit those savagely unequal schools. (Madison Park High School, where Judith Baker teaches, has a student body that is made up almost entirely of minority students and students who qualify for federally subsidized lunches.)

Indeed, the latest figures on dropouts in Boston, according to the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, are that over the period 1995-99, during which the state and local high-stakes testing program was instituted, the annual dropout rate for all students increased by 34%. For African Americans, the rate of increase has been 28%; for Hispanics, 40%; for Asians, 43%; and for whites, 37%.

Not Good for Anybody

Now I hasten to add that I am not suggesting that the largely majority and most often suburban students who pass the tests are thereby being supplied with a good and proper education. I steadfastly maintain that the narrow, authoritarian, uniform, "high-standards," academically and politically orthodox definition of what it means to be an educated person is no better for well-to-do, white suburbanites than it is for low-income, inner-city minorities. Indeed, the kind of education that everyone should be getting is precisely the kind of schooling that will produce those poets, running backs, activists, politicians, painters, journalists, and cellists that the elite colleges want and need and the farmers, carpenters, electricians, auto mechanics, and so on that American society as a whole wants and needs.

So the expected is happening. The poor and minority children and young people who do not pass the tests are being humiliated and labeled as "failures." It is interesting to note here that most states, including Massachusetts, are not imposing such tests on students in private schools, thus enabling rich parents to buy their children's way out of any such humiliation. The always unlevel playing field is growing even steeper for the poor and for minorities as each day passes.

And it is not just the students who are being punished. If those poor and minority children in public schools don't pass the tests, their teachers and principals will also be labeled "failures" and threatened with the loss of their jobs or the takeover of their schools by the state.

As these thousands of poor and minority children and young people continue to fail the tests and to be publicly excoriated as failures, what is going to be their inevitable reaction? As at Madison Park, they will believe the labels certifying them as failures, they will realize what that failure means in terms of their chances in life, and large numbers of them will drop out of school as quickly as they legally -- or illegally -- can. And if you, as a school administrator, can rid your school of its low-scoring failures, you have hit upon a surefire way to guarantee that the test scores of your school and school district will go up and that your school and district will be considered "successes."

A Suspicious Agenda

This scenario leads to the dark suspicion that this is precisely what some of the reformers -- not all of them, of course -- may have had in mind all along. They certainly seem to be seeking to build an increasingly two-tiered system of American society: one tier for the small number of successfully "educated," largely nonminority winners who have succeeded in school and a second tier for the many failures who will be left to serve the needs of the increasingly wealthy successes.

Many of these reformers, having given up on the possibility of building a truly democratic system of public education that can provide a high-quality education for all children, now advocate that we abandon any such attempt and move instead toward a completely privatized system by providing all children with vouchers that can be used to pay at least part of the tuition at private schools. There is also a burgeoning movement to create publicly supported charter schools that parents can choose, schools that are for the most part independent of local school districts and are usually directly responsible to state governments.

Insofar as these charters are and remain genuinely public schools with guaranteed access for all poor and minority students and are not exempted from the standards and tests required of other public schools, they constitute a legitimate choice for both parents and teachers. Unfortunately, many of these charters are being run by profit-making corporations, and in many instances they are not being adequately supervised by the states. Thus charter schools appear to be increasingly serving the nonminority, middle-class portion of the population, including many students whose parents either have been paying or at least could pay for tuition at private schools. (Recall that charter schools tend to be located in urban centers where large numbers of minorities reside; thus statewide figures for charter school attendance can be skewed to make minority enrollments appear proportionally larger than they are.)

Who Is Doing All of This?

This authoritarian, antidemocratic national educational regime of high standards and high-stakes testing is being imposed almost entirely by self-appointed experts with at best weak credentials in education -- primarily state and local politicians, including governors and state legislators, and state department of education bureaucrats. These are the folks who have attended three national education "summits" called by the National Governors' Association, by foundation officials, and by the CEOs of such leading corporations as IBM. The rallying cry at these gatherings is that the new, viciously competitive, capitalistic world economy requires that any nation that hopes to survive must produce large numbers of technologically adept, well-behaved, mentally skillful workers to staff those multinational corporations and the vast service industries that support not only the corporations but society as a whole.

Over the past several years, this strictly economic argument has been revealed as a deceptive myth, for despite our purported educational woes, the U.S. economy has somehow managed to become the most powerful economic engine in the history of the world. As the eminent social and educational thinker Richard Rothstein has pointed out, when A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, the economy appeared to be in big trouble. It was then widely believed that this poor economic performance was the result of the shoddy quality of the nation's public schools. In those days, the unemployment rate (and in many minds the unemployability rate) was over 6%, and the school dropout rate was twice that.

Now, in these early years of the new millennium, the unemployment rate is 3.9%, and even high school dropouts are finding jobs. The American system of public education, however, is not being credited as one of the chief causes of this economic miracle. Nor have those governors and state legislators, those state department of education bureaucrats, those foundation officials, and those corporate CEOs held another national education summit to announce that their highly touted reform agenda of high standards and high-stakes testing may be totally wrongheaded, educationally damaging, and even economically counterproductive.9

But No Devils Here

Now, before I attempt any further exploration of what is going on here, let me be very clear on one point. Despite any and all suspicions to the contrary, I refuse to believe that those governors and legislators, those corporate leaders and foundation executives, the many state bureaucrats, and even those leaders of teacher unions and learned professors in our colleges and universities who support and help implement this arrogant, inhumane agenda are evil people. Nor are they uniformly ultraconservative "right wingers" or "leftist revolutionaries." Indeed, they inhabit every niche of the political spectrum, sharing only the undemocratic, authoritarian belief that they have the right and, indeed, the moral duty to impose their limited and limiting version of educational truth on all children, all young people, all parents, all teachers and other educators, and thus on all public schools throughout the land. I do not doubt that they genuinely believe that what they are advocating is in the best interests of the nation and even in the best interests of the schoolchildren -- and especially the poor and minority children -- of this country and their parents.

A New Civil Rights Movement

But a growing number of parents, older students, teachers, frontline school administrators, school board members, and leading educational thinkers have come to believe that these self-appointed experts could not be more misguided in their efforts to impose what they call "school reform" on all of our public schools. Indeed, we see this movement as a flagrant and open violation of the basic human educational rights of the citizens of this nation.

By "basic human educational rights," I mean not only the two set forth in the Brown decision but also those contained in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 26 of that Declaration says first that "everyone has a right to education. Education shall be free [i.e., publicly supported] at least at the elementary and fundamental stages. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit."

The Declaration then goes on to state the two fundamental rights that have the most relevance to the argument here: "Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms," and "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."10

Article 26 clearly states that all children have a right to an education that is aimed at the "full development" of the individual human personalities of all children -- not just their academic capacities but all their social, political, and artistic capacities as well. The full range of these capacities is what the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner believes are the "multiple intelligences" that all children have: not only the verbal and logico/mathematical intelligences (the only ones usually dealt with in school and tested on the tests), but also the visual, kinetic, musical, naturalistic, social, and personal intelligences -- in short, the range of capacities that will produce those poets, running backs, activists, politicians, painters, journalists, and cellists.

Both Diversity and Choice

The part of Article 26 that guarantees parental choice recognizes two of the most stubborn and important facts about any truly democratic system of education. The first is that children and young people do not come in any single size, shape, or collection of attributes, capacities, talents, or intelligences. The second fact is a corollary truism: there cannot be any single educational environment that is going to be suitable and appropriate for all children. As Susan Ohanian has put it, "One size fits few."11

It is in part because of the broad diversity among children and young people that there is an equivalent diversity of educational philosophies, educational curricula, and educational methodologies. That diverse spectrum starts with the very conservative, traditional, rigorously academic, "back-to-basics" approaches, such as the Paideia Schools of Mortimer Adler and the Core Knowledge Schools of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Somewhere in the middle are schools such as those advocating the "continuous progress" of students and those that specialize in particular areas of the conventional curriculum, such as the arts or science and technology. At the other end of the spectrum are the schools that would most likely call themselves "progressive" -- such as Montessori and Waldorf schools, "open" schools, integrated day schools, or microsociety schools. It is from this broad array of educational possibilities that parents have a right to choose the kind of public schooling they believe best fits the individual educational needs of each of their children.

Those of us who reject the new totalitarian educational agenda believe that this right of choice is guaranteed not only by the U.N.'s Universal Declaration but by the U.S. Constitution through its guarantees of free speech and free assembly. Surely, under those guarantees and under the basic democratic principle that governments may act only with the consent of the governed, parents have the right to specify the kind of public schooling they want their children to have and thus what they wish to have taught to their children in a publicly supported institution called a school. This right of choice is limited only by the First Amendment separation of church and state and by the now watered-down 14th Amendment civil rights decisions that still say that all public schools should be at least as integrated as the school district in which they exist.

But Not Just Parental Choice

It is those two unbending facts -- the diversity among our students and the diversity of educational belief and practice -- that make educational diversity and choice absolute requirements of any reasonably fair, just, and democratic American education system. And I don't mean just parental choice of the schools their children will go to. Teachers and other professional educators also have the right -- called "academic freedom" by college and university professors and guaranteed by the First Amendment -- to choose the kind of schooling they wish to practice, since they share with parents that diversity of educational belief. It is this dual right of choice for both parent and professional -- along with the right to the full development of each child's personality -- that must overrule any state's power to impose a single standardized curriculum and a single high-stakes testing system on all children, all parents, and all professionals.

A Diversity of Standards and Assessments

Let me also be clear about one more thing. To say that one is against the imposition of a single set of solely academic standards and a single high-stakes, solely academic test -- which together add up to the establishment of a single, solely academic intellectual orthodoxy -- is not to say that there should be no high educational expectations and no system of public accountability in American public education. Has anyone ever heard of a school that does not propose that its students read and write well and do all appropriate forms of basic arithmetic?

But above and beyond these valuable "basics" and quite possibly a commitment to help students develop their capacity for high-level reasoning, it is the task of the parents and the professional staff of each freely chosen public school to decide and spell out in detail what that school conceives its educational mission to be. This would include what its intellectual (rather than academic) standards are, what and how it proposes that teachers should teach and students should learn, and how it proposes to measure its progress toward achieving those desired ends. And if a school decides that a standardized test would be useful, it is, of course, free to use one.

What's more, there is also the basic right of parents operating within such a system of strictly public school choice to opt out of manifestly failing schools and to choose other public schools that they believe will provide the better quality of education they are seeking. This same principle of "free market" public school choice allows teachers to leave failing schools and choose "better" ones. As both parents and teachers abandon failing schools and opt for schools they see as "better," the overall quality of the system is not only likely -- but is perhaps bound -- to improve. At the very least, this is an organizational theory that many people would like to see put to the test.

How then might this new system of American education be organized and operated? After each school selected by both parents and professional staff members has spelled out its educational mission, it is the task and responsibility of the locally elected school board, acting as the agent of state government, to review each school's stated mission and goals to make sure that what the school plans to do falls within the broad limits of democratic belief and practice and the U.S. Constitution. The board would then monitor each school's yearly performance as measured against its stated goals.

It is then the task of the state to monitor the civil rights performance of local school districts and to make sure that every school in every district is equally and adequately funded. And it is the task of the federal government to monitor the civil rights performance of the states and to make sure that the schools of every state are equally and adequately funded. No savage inequalities are permitted anywhere.

Not a New Idea

It is interesting -- but not at all surprising -- that what I am proposing here is hardly a new idea. Indeed, back in the latter part of the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-constructor with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, set forth these ideas in the following fashion:

In our present society the bulk of the people have no opportunity for the full development of all their powers and capacities. . . . The accumulation of wealth is now mainly effected by the misdirected energy of competing individuals; and the power that wealth so obtained gives them is often used for purposes which are hurtful to the nation. There can be no true individualism, no fair competition, without equality of opportunity for all. This alone is social justice, and by this alone can the best that is in each nation be developed and utilised for the benefit of all its citizens.

"Equality of opportunity," Wallace went on to say,

is absolute fair play as between man and man in the struggle for existence. It means that all shall have the best education they are capable of receiving; that their faculties shall all be well trained, and their whole nature obtain the fullest moral, intellectual, and physical development. This does not mean that we shall all have the same education, that all shall be made to learn the same things and go through the same training, but that all shall be so trained as to develop fully all that is best in them. It must be an adaptive education, modified in accordance with the peculiar mental and physical nature of the pupils, not a rigid routine applied to all alike, as is too often the case now.12

The Path to a New Movement

Now it is unfortunately true that recent federal court decisions, one in Florida and one in Texas, have ruled that those two states have the right to set academic standards and to administer a single high-stakes test to all students in order to determine whether those standards are being met, even though poor and minority students in those states are failing the tests at an alarming rate. This, of course, suggests that, until there is an eventual ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, all states are free to pursue their present autocratic course.13

Concerned parents, teachers, school administrators, and test experts in all the states, refusing to accept these decisions as final, are preparing further challenges to the authoritarian agenda of standards and testing in state legislatures and in state and federal courts all across the land. No court decision is unalterable. After all, it was the Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that established the doctrine of "separate but equal," which was eventually overturned by the 1954 Brown decision.

It will almost certainly take a new educational civil rights movement, such as the one proposed here, to bring about the kind of just, fair, equal, and truly democratic system of American public education we want and deserve. Let us hope as well that we are not in for another century of continued educational injustice before we set the record straight and achieve that just, fair, and equitable system.

PDK Home | Site Map
Kappan Professional Journal
Last updated 15 March 2001
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kcli0103.htm
Copyright 2001 Phi Delta Kappa International