Separate but unequal is the core value that determined the landmark decision in Brown vs the Board of Education and that was made in 1954.

When I started teaching it was 1996 and I was in a urban high school in Seattle and it was run by two women Administrators both black and one white male who is the Principal of that very school that in the last 5 years has made an amazing turnaround by becoming an International Baccalaureate School. It only took 20 years in which to do so and by adding an expensive prestigious program did it do so. And it today is pretty diverse with a much larger African and Spanish speaking cohort that ever existed in my day.

The two women Admins, Gloria Izard Baldwin and the VP, Patricia Atterberry moved on.   Baldwin only 2 years after I left was removed from her job due to a vote by the staff of no confidence.  In my career  two other women, one a Lesbian another a Latina  fared the same fates.  Was it because they were women, of color or alternative sexuality?  Probably some of those but they were actually horrific admins, one sent bizarre memos about people talking about her while the school was literally being set afire but I have seen men be the same yet rarely get run out on a rail.  Ted Howard Admin  of Garfield is one such example.  But like many Principals, Baldwin had no vote of confidence and was fired with a settlement of 6 figures and moved on.  I believe she was like many just moved to a new district and continued being incompetent.   She is dead now and whoever said don't speak ill of the dead apparently never met anyone they did not like.   I was only there a year and I had little to no positive encounters with her so hard to comment on her specifically but the fiefdoms that existed in that school at that time were largely the white men who ran their departments and those that had the "ear" of the Administration affected how Teachers and Students were treated and viewed.  And that has not changed in 20 plus years from what I can tell.

I still follow the contretemps of Seattle schools and the activist bloggers that dog the district who even now are starting to realize there is a point where you just throw in the towel.  There was a Principal at a challenged elementary with a history of problems in Seattle recently that was "temporarily" removed due to complaints but she is now back.  There is another at Washington Middle School has zero positive ratings by staff, Susan Follmer, who I  met and loathed in that first 5 minutes so I immediately quit the gig I was on and now three years later the stories of past lawsuits and current dynamics have proved me right.     There have been many others, such as the Principal of the Center School,  that was the focus of the infamous Jon Greenberg case, who had zero support by staff and she now is in charge of the World School.  The former Principal at  the World School, another incompetent,  a Concie Pedroza, who I met and had zero confidence or respect,  has since been promoted to Admin Coach in the district and is on some absurd board for the State regarding bilingual education and now earning a six figure salary. Up and out is the way they handle incompetence.

The Seattle school district is full of said former Admins who were promoted and many  Teachers who suddenly become acclaimed via an Editorial or profile in the news or those who  come up with a program or idea and suddenly they are shuttled out of their jobs or moved to another school where they rarely last unless they hire Lawyers.  Trust me it  is not unions keeping them there it is fear of litigation.    Unions are political lobbying organizations and serve themselves but they do not protect incompetent Teachers or competent ones. They don't have the resources or the individuals to do so but the public believes this so hence the rhetoric that supports that bullshit.  What goes on is that incompetent Teachers just get moved around (often by their own choice as they too don't want a target on their back) they just don't get promoted  and they funny they don't get six figure salaries; Again good Teachers are not seeking notoriety they are in the classroom teaching.  I don't think I've ever met any Administrators, well one who was actually good then he was fired but at a different school as his popularity did not follow him there.   Again that is how they do it in education, the chess shuffle and without support they can fire anyone.  And they do.   That is what it is in Education - churn and burn.

And right now the district of Seattle is struggling with a 13 million dollar deficit and if they fired even 6 of the idiotic coaches and interim managers they would hit nearly half to three quarters of that immediately.  That.will.not.happen.   

The reality is that Teaching is a mugs game and is one of the most bureaucratic dogmatic professions that fully exemplify the whole notion of Government ineptitude that dominates the reform movement dialog and opened the door to Trump.

We really believe that is a matter of choice and the idea of vouchers and charters will solve the problems of education that have gone on for decades.  The idea of public education is the last socialist frontier with the idea that having an equitable education will provide the foundation in which to attain the "American Dream".

Well to quote Steve Tyler,  DREAM ON.

I live in the land of choice.  A parent can have up to 80 schools here in which to choose, public and charter and then add the private ones it is like a candy store only with no good candy or the good stuff so expensive you can't afford it.

There are magnet schools, there are academies and there are elementary schools with focus on music, special needs, and stuff. What.ever.  Honestly the mess here in Nashville seems to center on branding and P.R. there is little to know if actual academics are a part of the focus as they seem to avoid that actual issue until the annual testing and grading begins. And by the way they want to "grade" schools here with A, B, etc to let people know that you go to a great school or just one below average.  Wow how would you feel working there or having a child go to a school that is a "D" school? You think that will motivate and encourage people to succeed?

As I have said, this place finally broke me.  No one in their right mind would or should teach here.  It is 4 a.m. and I have a sub gig at the first school I ever subbed at here.  I was told by the Teachers to to not take the bus nor walk around the area as it was not safe.  Just literally across the street is the campus to TSU and there are many buses that serve that school and it is broad daylight on a busy intersection by a freeway.  Okay, then.  What is the message there?  And the school is full of broken people, period.  I have not been back since August but I needed to get one day in this last day of the pay period to get my bonus of $25/day that you get if you work every day of a pay period.  Wow isn't that great that they pay us a bonus when they pay us $11/hr?  See my point?

Nashville Public Schools are a farce. They do not compensate Teachers, they don't compensate Subs and they pretty much treat everyone like dirt.  It is a culture of fear and compliance. I think that is a Southern thing and then I thought no, that is Government and bureaucracy.  The fear part that however is a Southern thing it is rooted in the religion thing that dominates the culture here.  God is a punishing bastard who sees and knows all and you don't want that do you?

So when I heard this on Terry Gross I thought I don't think we agree at all.  I am all for separate but equitable.  We cannot have equal that is impossible bar in which to reach but we need to define what is equitable and that is by the community and the school in which it serves.  It is complex and it requires deep understanding and deep pockets.  A school of wealthy white kids will not need the same as a school of largely poor, disabled, children of color, children of immigrants who speak a second language other than English, children who come from trauma or even children who are of exceptional intelligence.  They all have separate needs and they are not equal. But you can have schools that address that and in turn are equitable.

The reality is that we need to also define integration and what that means. Is it solely based on color or is it about economics. What about language and culture and matters of faith? Again perhaps versus forcing it versus enabling it to happen organically may be a better solution.

Now we just have to agree as to what that means and the parameters in which to attain it.  To quote the immortal Steve Tyler again - DREAM ON.

How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'


January 16, 20176:00 AM ET
Heard on Fresh Air

Fresh Air
School choice and school segregation
LA Johnson/NPR

Sixty-three years after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many schools across the country either remain segregated or have re-segregated.

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal.


"There's never been a moment in the history of this country where black people who have been isolated from white people have gotten the same resources," Hannah-Jones says. "They often don't have the same level of instruction. They often don't have strong principals. They often don't have the same technology."

Still, when it was time for Hannah-Jones' daughter, Najya, to attend kindergarten, the journalist chose the public school near their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, even though its students were almost all poor and black or Latino. Hannah-Jones later wrote about that decision in The New York Times Magazine.

Before she joined The New York Times to cover racial injustice, Nikole Hannah-Jones was an award-winning reporter at Propublica.

For Hannah-Jones, sending Najya to the neighborhood school was a moral issue. "It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it's also upheld by individual choices," she says. "As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children ... we're not going to see a change."

Hannah-Jones adds that her daughter is thriving at school. "I know she's learning a lot," she says. "I think it is making her a good citizen. ... It is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her or not any less worthy than her."
Interview highlights

On why she chose to send her young daughter to the public school in her neighborhood

The original mission of public schools ... is this understanding that no matter where you come from, you will go into the doors of a school and every child will receive the same education.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

One of the things I've done in my work is kind of show the hypocrisy of progressive people who say they believe in inequality, but when it comes to their individual choices about where they're going to live and where they're going to send their children, they make very different decisions, and I just didn't want to do that. So for me it was a matter of needing to live my values, and not being someone who contributed to the inequality that I write about.

On the importance of having students from different races and income levels in the public schools

The original mission of public schools ... is this understanding that no matter where you come from, you will go into the doors of a school and every child will receive the same education.

And no, my daughter is not going to get an education that she would get if I paid $40,000 a year in private-school tuition, but that's kind of the whole point of public schools.

And I say this — and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent, because a lot of other parents look at you a little like you're maybe not as good of a parent — I don't think she's deserving of more than other kids. I just don't. I think that we can't say "This school is not good enough for my child" and then sustain that system. I think that that's just morally wrong. If it's not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools?

Brown v. Board happens, and the way that we're taught it or the myth about it is immediately our nation repented and went into an integrated future together. That's not what happened. There was massive resistance, and we don't see real desegregation occurring in this country until 1964, and really most rapidly from 1968 on. ...

Then you see pretty rapid desegregation particularly in the South, but then that changes, and in 1988 we start to go backwards. So we reach kind of the peak of schools integrating, of black students attending majority white schools at the highest rates that they ever have in the country, and then we start to see school districts re-segregating, which means black students are starting to go to schools that are more and more segregated. And school districts that had had a degree of integration are losing that integration. ...

On American resistance to desegregating schools and housing

When I started what I kind of call the segregation beat about five years ago ... I think we had stopped talking about this as a problem. If you look at No Child Left Behind, which comes out of the Bush administration, that was all about giving up on integration in schools and just saying, "We're going to make these poor black and Latino schools equal to white schools by testing and accountability."

So no one was discussing integration anymore. I think it's because ... we never really wanted this. ... It's always had to be forced, and as soon as ... our elected officials and our courts lost the will to force it, most white Americans were just fine with that. ...

One of the things that I really try to do with my work is show how racial segregation and racial inequality was intentionally created with a ton of resources. From the federal government, to the state, to city governments, to private citizens, we put so much effort into creating this segregation and inequality, and we're willing to put almost no effort in fixing it, and that's the problem.