A Letter to Our Next President

(A version of this paper will appear in the Journal of Teacher Education)

Dear Mister/Madam President:

The very fact that this letter begins with addressing either a man or woman in the office of President of the United States is in itself a cause for celebration and a tribute to the historic nature of this year's presidential contest. For this we all—regardless of political persuasion—should feel more deeply invested in the promise of democracy to include all Americans regardless of race, class, and gender.

My letter to you is linked specifically to the question of public education and what I believe are the more pressing issues facing your administration and the nation at large regarding the future of public education in our society. To address these issues I want to speak specifically to the question of what has been called popularly, the racial achievement gap.

The "Achievement Gap" has been on the lips of almost every politician, education researcher, education leader, and education policy maker in the nation. The provision of the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, more conventionally known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that profoundly illuminated this achievement gap was the requirement to disaggregate student test score data based on categories like race, special needs, and English language proficiency. We know that African American and Latino students score substantially lower than their White and (some) Asian American counterparts. According to the National Governors' Association, the achievement gap is, "a matter of race and class. [And], across the U.S., a gap persists between minority and disadvantaged students and their white counterparts." It further states, "this is one of the most pressing education-policy challenges that states currently face" (http://www.subnet.nga.org/educlear/achievement/ retrieved electronically 10/27/05). We want to erase this achievement gap. Indeed, that sounds like a noble and good goal.

However, as a new president with presumably a new vision I want to suggest that it is important to begin re-thinking or re-conceptualizing this notion of the achievement gap. Instead of an achievement gap, I believe we have an education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006). The debt language totally changes the relationship between students and their schooling. For instance, when we think of what we are combating as an achievement gap, we implicitly place the onus for closing that gap on the students, their families, and their individual teachers and schools. But, the notion of education debt requires us to think about how all of us, as members of a democratic society, are implicated in creating these achievement disparities.

Permit me to use an economic metaphor to explain what I mean by this notion of an education debt. No doubt you have already sat down with a team of economic advisors who have briefed you on the economic challenges the nation faces. One of your first jobs will be to construct a budget to present to Congress. If you keep within spending limits people will celebrate your ability to produce a balanced budget. But, no matter how successful you are in producing the current budget, lurking prominently in that budget on line 3 (after defense and entitlement programs) is debt service. That is the debt that the nation has accumulated since its beginning. It does not go away by balancing the budget of one fiscal year and it robs us of opportunities to do creative things for our present and future because we must continue to pay the huge bills of the past.

I liken the yearly exercise of constructing the federal budget to the notion of the achievement gap. Every year public schools publish the results of standardized test scores. At some schools we celebrate and say we have "balanced the budget." At other schools we bemoan the fact that the standardized test scores reveal that we have produced yet another "deficit budget." Again, lurking behind this yearly exercise of producing achievement test scores is the education debt of longstanding inequities and educational disenfranchisement. I believe this debt is historical, economic, and moral.

Facing Our History[1]. One of the oft-stated critiques of Americans is the sense that we do not know our histories. I have deliberately spoken here of a plural form of the term history. The complexity of our nation is such that even as it moves throughout time, it has not moved in a straight line or in the same way for every group or individual. The history of groups intersect, overlap, and diverge producing many histories, not just one single, unitary one.

As you look at our histories you will see that over long stretches of the American narratives their have been systematic and regular exclusions of certain groups of children (and their families) from the schooling and public education process. Scholars in the history of education like James Anderson (1989), Michael Fultz (1995), and David Tyack (2004) have documented the legacy of educational inequity in the U.S. Those inequities initially were formed around race, class, and gender. Gradually, some of those inequities began to recede, but clearly they persist in the realm of race. In the case of African Americans education was initially forbidden during the period of enslavement. After emancipation we saw the development of freedmen's schools whose purpose was the maintenance of a servant class. During the long period of legal apartheid, African Americans attended schools where they received cast off textbooks and materials from White schools. In the rural south, the need for farm labor meant that the typical school year for rural Black students was about 4 months. Indeed, Black students in the south did not experience universal secondary schooling until 1968 (Anderson, 2002). Why then would we not expect there to be an achievement gap?

The history of American Indian education is equally egregious. It began with mission schools to convert and use Indian labor to further the cause of the church. Later, boarding schools were developed as General George Pratt asserted the need, "to kill the Indian in order to save the man." This strategy of deliberate and forced assimilation created a group of people, according to Pulitzer Prize writer N. Scott Momaday, who belonged nowhere (Lesiak, C., 1991). The assimilated Indian could not fit comfortably into reservation life or the stratified mainstream. No predominately White colleges welcomed the few Indians that successfully completed the early boarding schools. Only historically Black colleges like Hampton Institute opened their doors to them. There they studied vocational and trade curricula.

Latina/o students also experienced huge disparities in their education. In Ferg-Cadima's report, Black, White, and Brown: Latino school desegregation efforts in the pre- and post Brown v. Board of Education era (2004) we discover the longstanding practice of denial experienced by Latinos dating back to 1848. Historic desegregation cases such as Mendez v. Westminster and the Lemon Grove Incident detail the ways that Brown children were (and continue to be) excluded from equitable and high quality education.

It is important to point out that the historical debt was not merely imposed by ignorant masses that were xenophobic and virulently racist. The major leaders of the nation endorsed ideas about the inferiority of Black, Latino, and Native peoples. If as the new leader of the nation you care about our existing educational inequities you cannot ignore the history out of which our current educational disparities emerged.

Follow the Money. Having just completed a successful presidential campaign you know as well as anyone how much money is required to make a successful run for elected office. But what is your sense of how much money it takes to educate young people to fully participate as democratic citizens? The legacy of separate, segregated schooling has produced incredibly inequitable funding streams that helped to create this education debt. In current day dollars the funding disparities between urban schools and their suburban counterparts present a telling story about the value we place on the education of different groups of students.

Chicago Public Schools spend about $8, 482 per pupil while nearby Highland Park spends $17, 291 per pupil. Chicago Public Schools have an 87 percent Black and Latino population while Highland Park has a 90 percent White population. Per pupil expenditures in Philadelphia are $9, 299 per pupil for its 79 percent Black and Latino population while across City Line Avenue in Lower Merion the per pupil expenditure is $17, 261 for a 91 percent White population. New York City Public Schools spends $11,627 per pupil for a student population that is 72 percent Black and Latino, while suburban Manhasset spends $22,311 for a student population that is 91 percent White. (figures from Kozol, 2005).

One of the earliest things one learns in statistics is that correlation does not prove causation, but we must ask ourselves why the funding inequities map so neatly and regularly onto the racial and ethnic realities of our schools. Even if we cannot prove that schools are poorly funded because Black and Latino students attend them, we can demonstrate that the amount of funding rises with the rise in White students. This pattern of inequitable funding has occurred over centuries. For many of these populations, schooling was non-existent during the early history of the nation and clearly Whites were not prepared to invest their fiscal resources in what were perceived to be strange "others." The fundamental question is why does the nation regularly allocate 10 thousand dollars per pupil less for African American and Latino students than it does for White, middle class students? This ongoing funding disparity is another component of the education debt.

Give us the ballot. The third aspect of this education debt of which I speak is the socio-political debt. You know better than most how important the franchise is to a free society. In addition to being able to vote, democratic citizens need the right to participate in a variety of decision making processes that impact their children's and communities' schools. For long periods of our history communities of color have been excluded from the political process. In 1965 the Congress wisely passed the Voting Rights Act to begin to eradicate the socio-political debt.

In March of 1965 in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia the gap in voter participation between White and Black voters ranged from 63.2 to 22.2 percent. In 1988, after more than 20 years of the Voting Rights Act, the voting disparities between White and Black voters in those southern states ranged from -2.0 (meaning that 2 percent more Blacks voted than Whites) to 7.4 percent (Grofman, Handley & Niemi 1992). While you are probably intimately familiar with this voter participation information (after all, knowing voter habits is a big part of what campaign staffs do), I call this to your attention to remind you that the dramatic voter participation changes I referenced are a result of bold and decisive action on the part of President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress to remedy a longstanding wrong. In upholding the constitutionality of the act the Supreme Court ruled:

Congress has found the case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims (South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28, 1966).

The closest example of such a dramatic "paying down" of the education debt is affirmative action. Rather than wait for students of color to meet predetermined standards the society decided to recognize that historically denied groups should be given a preference in admission to schools and colleges. Bowen and Bok (1999) found that in the case of African Americans this policy helped create what we now know as the Black middle class. In today's political environment the notion of affirmative action has fallen into disfavor and is treated as if it represents special preference for undeserving people.

Who are the people we want to be? This past summer the Supreme Court (Parents involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, 2007) determined that race could not be used to assign students to schools even when schools have creating a diverse learning environment as a central goal. The result of such a ruling is likely to contribute to the continued re-segregation of our schools. Orfield and Lee (2006) point out that not only has schools segregation persisted it has been transformed by the changing demographics of the nation. They also point out, "there has not been a serious discussion of the costs of segregation or the advantages of integration for our most segregated population, white students" (p. 5). So, while we may have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision three years ago we can point to little evidence that we really gave Brown a chance. According to Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield (2003) and Orfield and Lee (2004), America's public schools are more than a decade into a process of re-segregation. Almost three-fourths of Black and Latino students attend schools that are predominately non-White. More than 2 million Black and Latino students—a quarter of the Black students in the Northeast and Midwest—attend what the researchers call apartheid schools. The 4 most segregated states for Black students are New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California.

I recount this issue of school desegregation to remind you that although the current education legislation is entitled, "No Child Left Behind" we enacted when hundreds of thousands of children were already far behind. Indeed, they were so far behind that no attempt at leveling the playing field by just requiring that everyone pass the same standardized test would have any real impact on them.

The failures to fully implement school desegregation (and indeed, to retreat from it as a principle) along with our failure to provide school funding equity really contribute to the moral aspect of the education debt.ÂThese are the kinds of things around which a president can use his or her bully pulpit to rally the nation.

Payment past due. Almost every school child in our nation knows some portion of what we call Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. We focus on the dream portion of the speech but regularly omit the portion of the speech that admonishes us that African Americans and others had marched on Washington to get the nation to make good on a promissory note the nation had written to each of her citizens. Unfortunately, in the case of African Americans that promissory note came back stamped "insufficient funds." Dr. King (1963) refused to believe that, "the bank of justice is bankrupt" or that "there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation."

So today you as the next president you inherit both the assets and liabilities of the nation. Prominent in the liability column is something clearly marked "education debt." It requires your immediate attention and cannot be paid down by more testing, less funding, disinvestment in public schools, and attacks on teachers and their preparation. Since the debt is so enormous it cannot be paid down quickly. But, it cannot be ignored. The results of that debt show up every year in our increasing prison population, our rate of teen pregnancies compared to those in the technological world, our loss of economic competitiveness, and most important, the our low participation in the democratic process.

The primary mission of the public school is to make citizens. What kind of citizens can we make if we regularly tell some students that they are less worthy, less deserving, and less likely to be full-fledged citizens who will know what it means to participate in a democratic, multicultural society? You have an awesome responsibility as the leader of the wealthiest, developed nation the world has ever seen. Along with all of the security concerns, rising health care costs, and economic challenges you have to steer a course for how the federal government will respond to an education system that is failing us on many levels. The debt is massive but you have the next four years to start on a payment plan.

References:

Anderson, J. D. (1989). The education of Blacks in the south, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Anderson, J. D. (2002, Feb. 28). Historical perspectives on Black academic achievement. Paper presented at the visiting minority scholars series lecture. Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, UW-Madison.

Ferg-Cadima, J. (2004, May). Black, White, and Brown: Latino school desegregation in the pre- and post Brown v. Board of Education era. Washington, DC: MALDEF.

Frankenberg, E., Lee, C., and Orfield, G. (2003, January). A multiracial society with segregated schools: Are we losing the dream? Report of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Fultz, M. (1995). African American teachers in the south, 1890-1940: Powerlessness and the ironies of expectations and protests. History of Education Quarterly, 35(4), Winter, 401-422.

Grofman, B., Handley, L., and Niemi, R. G. (1992). Minority representation and the quest for voting equality. New York: Cambridge Press.

King, M. L. (1963, August 28). I have a dream. Speech delivered at the March on Washington, Washington, DC retrieved electronically from http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm on 09/12/07).

Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Crown Publishing.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From achievement gap to educational debt: Understanding achievement in schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3-12.

Lesiak, C. (1991). In the white man's image. Film recording. New York: Public Broadcasting Corporation.

Orfield, G. and Lee, C. (2004, January). Brown at 50: King's dream or Plessy's nightmare. Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University.

Orfield, G. and Lee, C. (2006, January). Racial transformation and the changing nature of segregation. Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University.

Parents involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (2007). U. S. 05-908.

Tyack, D. (2004). Seeking common ground: Public schools in a diverse society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Court Cases Cited:

South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28, 1966

[Seattle case]