The Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, proclaimed in late May 2016, “There’s one more thing we have to do to make America wealthy again. And you have to be wealthy to be great, I’m sorry to say it.” What good is wealth if social justice and progress is not the by-product? 

For most of us, wealth is a wholly inadequate measure of this nation; wisdom, decency and compassion must surely be included as essential variables in any formula for greatness.

First, we are already among the wealthiest nations on the planet. However, we have allowed avarice to drive our economics and permitted the concentration of ostentatious wealth in the hands of too few. Vast intergenerational wealth has been amassed through the centuries-long exploitation of uncompensated and under-compensated labor.

In his landmark work “Between the World and Me”, Ta-Nehisi Coates laments the hypocritical nature of the message he received in the Baltimore City Schools, “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.” When managing misbehavior replaces academic instruction, intellectual development is stifled.

Such circumstances are vexing for both students and professional educators. The narrator offers praise for some of his individual educators, but criticizes a “system” that focuses on punishment and places children in peril by returning them to the streets as a consequence for misbehavior in school. The argument is not without merit.

Fear of reprisal is a singularly poor motivator for any child. Policies of “zero-tolerance” have proven ineffective at modifying undesired behaviors in the school house. 

Children, especially those children from harsh domestic environments, need more hours in instructional scenarios, not fewer. Those classrooms, however, also need to have the resources to do more than crowd children into sweat boxes for some portion of the day. Elevating young minds beyond their circumstance requires that educators possess the capacity to captivate.

We can no longer take pride in the occasional “against-all-odds” success story while failing to nurture the promise inherent in every child.

“The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental,” Joel Spring said in “Education and the Rise of the Corporate State”. Educational triage was the primary goal: identify the most capable students, and then ensure that the rest arrive at the functional literacy required to follow instructions on the assembly line and sufficient numeracy to balance a checkbook.

Schooling, back then, had little to do with optimizing learning outcomes and more with learning to acquiesce to tedium and drudgery as preparation for the conditions likely to be encountered in the industrial workplace.

During the age of the robber barons, corporatists imported cheap labor from abroad to keep the cost of labor hopelessly low and profits high for the investor class. Now, they incorporate abroad, access labor at bargain-basement prices offshore, and avoid paying taxes in the United States while taking full advantage of our free market while returning little in the bargain. The public coffers suffer as a result. 

Call the oligarchic elites of America what you will: capitalists, plutocrats, one-percenters, or political puppeteers! They consist mostly of obsessive hoarders-of-wealth. They utilize tiny portions of vast, inter-generational fortunes to persuade the political class that their power-and-privilege constitutes the natural order of things.

Is this society really intent on leaving no child behind? Then, why do we still employ an educational model that assumed a large portion of the school age population would never obtain a diploma? In his landmark work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Paolo Freire explained it quite succinctly. “It would be indeed naïve to expect the oppressor elites to carry out a liberating education.” That duty, therefore, falls to the rest of us. 

Wish a heartfelt “Happy New Year!” to all educators embarking on the new school year for it has become clear that many of our national leaders are oblivious of the eternal optimism that compels dedicated educators to stand before their students each fall.

Just a year ago, two candidates for president suggested last year that Americans will need to work harder to get ahead. Another fantasized about punching teacher leaders in the nose. Then, Governor John Kasich declared that as “King of America,” he would abolish all teachers’ lounges “where they sit together and worry about ‘woe is us.'”

It is clear that too many candidates for office are clueless about the real lives of those they hope to govern.

First, the nature of the typical school day does not furnish time for lounging anywhere at all. “Lounge” is a terrible misnomer; “Planning Room” would be more fitting. However, for most classroom instructors, the lounge constitutes little more than a way station to address biological needs while suffering the interminable quest to find a working photocopier.

On the rare occasions educators do engage in ‘woe is us’ discussions, it generally occurs in the interminable queue at the lone functional photocopier, likely clutching a ream of paper purchased at retail and a document they need to reproduce for class, awaiting their predictable turn to submit a request for the repair service when the machine inevitably sputters to a stop.

For the record: the teachers’ lounge is frequently the least utilized space in a school.

---

[This Commentary first appeared in the Prince George’s Gazette on February 5, 2015. It has been revised. ]

“It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better. We must try to recognize what in our accepted tradition is damaging to our fate and dignity—and shape our lives accordingly.” Albert Einstein

The time has come to do more than set aside the month of November for the so-called honoring of Native American History. Speaking as a lifelong and ardent fan of the local professional football team, add one more voice to the chorus of those who believe that the retirement of the name to the annals of history is too long overdue. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz addressed this history of the word in “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” where she points out that, “The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.” 

Many instances of social injustice would likely have polled quite well early in their implementation. It is more likely that the results of the recent poll regarding the team’s name have more in common with the “Stockholm Syndrome” than with indifference to such an objectionable epithet. As Paolo Freire posited in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation.” 

After moving the team from Boston to Washington, the original owner-and-founder of this franchise, George Preston Marshall, exhibited utter indifference for furnishing equal opportunity to people of color. Likely in an effort to avoid a civil rights lawsuit, the league compelled him to desegregate his team despite the owner’s long held tradition and beliefs. It was manifestly the right thing to do.

Many would welcome a similar action today with regard to a team name that is certainly no less dehumanizing than the hiring practices of decades ago. One need not look much farther than the dictionary to find this name associated with such words as “derogatory” and “disparaging“. 

Consider the name change a first step to address the more than 500 broken treaties that litter our history. Exactly how do we honor Native Americans by reducing their cultural heritage to the archaic ethnic stereotypes represented by our corporate logos? What reverence is expressed by reducing those proud and vibrant peoples to caricatures and mascots? How can we remain so oblivious to the wrongs committed in the name of civilization? 

Historically, the indigenous peoples of North America suffered a horrific tragedy when Europeans starting landing on these shores. The invaders exploited modest scientific advances in chemistry and metallurgy to produce weaponry that facilitated the conquest and usurpation of two continents. Explorers from the colonial powers, in the name of their respective monarchs, immediately started planting flags, claiming territories and absconding with precious metals.  

The Hernando De Soto expedition rode through what is now called Florida, Georgia & Louisiana massacring entire villages. At one point his crew drove an entire village into a swamp and waited for them to drown. The Jesuit priest accompanying the expedition described De Soto in his journals as Satan incarnate. The accounts confirm the description.

Ultimately, however, the pathogens in the crew’s blood did the most damage. Eight in every ten adults of the 12 to 20 million citizens of the 500 Nations would fall to smallpox, mumps, measles and chickenpox prior to the arrival of the pilgrims in New England decades later. During the epidemic that followed, scarcely sufficient survivors remained to bury the dead.

Our own nation’s treatment of the surviving descendants fails to withstand close scrutiny on the moral plane. The incidents, too numerous to detail here, betray our collective intent: the Trail of Tears, the massacre at Wounded Knee, internment camps and reservations, the first effort at germ warfare at Fort Pitt, the wanton extermination of buffalo from the plains. Post-revolutionary America, with its lofty constitutional language intact, rejected incorporation of the native peoples and chose eradication instead.

Achieving a critical mass for change will require discipline. All those who believe it time for a reboot of the franchise will need to echo the words of the world weary Hinmatóowyalahtq’it, known to Europeans as Chief Joseph, and relay the message to the team ownership that as long as the name offends anyone, we will watch no more, forever. 

[The original version of this Commentary appeared in the now defunct Prince George’s Gazette on Thursday August 14, 2014.]

“An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal.”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Enacted in response to the report of the Thornton Commission, the Bridge to Excellence Act  promised equity of educational opportunity for all children in the state of Maryland. During the coming session that opens so close to the holiday in honor of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., let us implore both houses of the Maryland legislature to give serious consideration to the 620 page report of the Kirwan Commission which outlines the need for an increase of $2.6 billion to be invested in children.

Ultimately, how our state chooses to address the educational needs of all children concerns us not only as citizens, but as immortal beings. Our fates are wrapped up in the fates of the most powerless among us, those who cannot vote. To paraphrase Dr. King, we cannot become all that we might become until all our children become all they are destined to become. 

True equity & adequacy of educational opportunity for all children is in both the spirit and the letter of the Bridge to Excellence Act. The conclusions of Dr. Alvin Thornton’s celebrated commission made it clear. Dr. Thornton once said “We know the characteristics of successful, well-resourced schools; we simply allow lesser schools to exist.” It must be noted that the Free State still allows “difference” to be made legal in the schoolhouse and it would honor Dr. King’s memory if that could be remedied.

Because, long ago, “class size” was ruled not to be a “working condition” in the state of Maryland, neighboring school systems may avail themselves of different staffing ratios that create vastly different learning environments for children. There is no equity when my school system can only afford to hire forty-seven teachers per thousand students and your jurisdiction is able to afford sixty teachers per thousand. Teaching thirty-to-forty economically disadvantaged students will never be the same job as teaching twenty, or fewer, affluent students with access to a superfluity of resources at home.

Nor is there adequacy when my school system must choose between gasoline for the school buses or books for the media center while your school system manages to budget for both. Maryland has allowed such margins to exist for decades and the cascade of effects all roll down on teachers and students. The response of teacher burnout and teacher turnover in the understaffed and inadequately-equipped jurisdictions yield adverse effects on student achievement. That is difference made legal. 

Six decades after Brown vs. the Board of Education, it is simply unconscionable that too many children-of-color and children-of-poverty attend schools that are ill-prepared to deliver the services mandated by the state, the nation, and our stipulated moral values. Sadly, business model accountability measures threaten to deliver only a stick where carrots are required. In ‘The Purpose of Education’ Dr. King wrote, “Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.” 

It is no longer a mystery that the most effective schools tend to be blessed with greater resources – both human and material – the only mystery is why our political structure cannot achieve consensus on how to make those resources available to every child in every school. This despite the mandate of Article 8 in the Constitution of Maryland “The General Assembly, at its First Session after the adoption of this Constitution, shall by Law establish throughout the State a thorough and efficient System of Free Public Schools; and shall provide by taxation, or otherwise, for their maintenance.”

The passion that helped fill the streets of Annapolis in support of the Thornton recommendations must be rekindled, and we must call on our legislators to have the courage to stand for all children in all zip codes. Article 8, too, is a constitutional promissory note, not unlike the one alluded to by Dr. King in his most famous speech. Maryland has made strides in moving toward equity in the schoolhouse, though to be truly just on the moral plane, a thorough-and-efficient system of free public schools must make “sameness” legal for all children and the time for social justice for children is always “right now”. 

 

---

[The original version of this Viewpoint appeared in the now defunct Prince George’s Journal during January 2008. It has been revised for “timeliness”… ]