EAA Teach In, Marygrove College

In Kansas City, where EAA Chancellor John Covington was superintendent until he fled for Detroit, schools that tested the computer learning platform he has now put in our schools—those schools in Kansas City experienced dramatic declines in test scores.  After Covington left, the district lost its accreditation and subsequently abandoned the computer learning platform.  That’s the innovative model that Covington brings here, that the USDOE needs to shower with recognition and put at the head of the line for a Race to the Top grant.  What is going on here?We could have predicted its failure in KC, and in fact many did before it was imposed there.  Learning models where children from kindergarten through high school sit in front of computers that guide them through computer modules hour after hour destroy children’s enthusiasm for learning, their imagination, their creativity.  Learning is a social process-- we know that-- and social means human interaction; between teacher and student, and also among students in groups.  Do we really need to prove that a child sitting in front of a computer year after year is a formula for personal and social disaster?  We shouldn’t have to.  But even so, we have plenty of evidence that this method of teaching does not work.  Subjecting our children to this type of “learning” is really a form of child abuse.  If you did that to my child I would be so up in your face that you would want to flee Kansas City-- or wherever I found you-- too.  I love my children. We love our children. And we don’t want this prison prep curriculum.

2. The EAA curriculum is not evidence-based, and actually contradicts the research on effective teaching for urban youth

The EAA curriculum has several objectives, and several things it accomplishes, none of which have anything to do with learning, love of learning, or love of our children.  The EAA is very successful at accomplishing a few things, with a laser like focus.  It is effective at funneling public school money to providers of software packages.  And it is successful at cutting classroom costs—by enabling more students to be packed into a class, by enabling a less experienced lower cost non-unionized non trained “teacher” to be hired.  And the costs are being cut not to save taxpayers money, or to use the savings to rebuild our cities, but to pay more six-digit administrators and consultants, to funnel more public money to for-profit providers of services and materials.  So we have a lot of evidence on the effectiveness of the EAA—it is highly effective in changing the priority of schooling from the learning of children to the enrichment of the lowest forms of humanity.

Meaningful curriculum, as research shows us-- and really this one is also a no-brainer-- does not involve sitting students in front of a computer for hours every day. Rather, meaningful curriculum involves rich experiences that link what students encounter in school to what matters in their lives.  Evidence based curriculum would engage our children in what humans are designed to do—locate problems that obstruct the progress and fruition of the human community and solve them.  Our students should be taking their science knowledge to the community to uncover the pollutants that are shortening their lives, damaging their lungs, and impeding their ability to learn.  Our schools should be helping students to understand what they are also being taught in home and in church, or in the mosque-- that human suffering is to be addressed not by blaming those who suffer; that social science is about exploring the reasons why people are facing difficult circumstances in their lives; that our duty is to take our God-given gifts and our love of people to build the best society we can here on earth.  God gave us all brains and love and creativity—we need to honor God by using these gifts.  One of the things that our God-given intellect will give us is the recognition that our childhood poverty at 26 percent nationally is a crime against humanity, and would never be tolerated if people didn’t falsely believe that the majority of poor in our country are people of color.  In Finland, childhood poverty is at 4 percent, and they view that as much too high.  What are they learning in school that makes them see 4 percent as too high, and something that should be improved upon?  What are we learning in school that makes us tolerate 26 percent, and think that there is nothing we can or should do about it?  Did Finland get where they are by sitting their children in front of computer programs called Buzz provided by the Odyssey Corporation all day?  Is that how they are addressing the problem that they have 4 percent child impoverishment?  By giving them Buzz in the classroom?  And why does it surprise anyone that Finland has the best educational outcomes in the world and only four percent poverty? 

We have to decide what we value.  It’s clear what the perpetrators of the EAA value, because that is what they are—perpetrators.  They do not value our children. They value the profits that they can get because we love our children.  Because we keep funding school improvement because we love our children.  They prey off our love.  They know they can’t get us to stop investing money in our children.  They had an "Aha!" moment.  They said, "You know what, these people are going to keep voting for money for their schools.  What we need to do is give up on stopping them wanting more money for schools—what we need to do instead is capture that money." They use our love of our children against us.  They take our money for schools, and think of how they can get as much of that money as possible for themselves.  This leads me to my final point: that

3. The EAA is specifically designed to move education for youth of color out of the hands of communities of color.  It is a rollback of the gains of the civil rights movement, and parallels the imposition of boarding schools on the indigenous in this continent.  Its underlying assumptions, purpose, and mode of operation is essentially the same. Like the boarding schools, it uses looted land and treasure to accomplish its ends. 

The existence of the EAA is premised on the belief that the solution to Detroit’s educational woes is to remove schools from majority control by people of color, and put them into majority control by European Americans.  That’s why I call it the White Man’s Burden in my title.  They honestly believe that if they can just relieve Blacks of the control of their communities, it will all get better, because they just love Detroit’s children so much more than Detroit’s families do.  With all of these reforms, whether it’s governance of the city or governance of the schools, the underlying belief is that schools and communities of families of color can succeed if only adults of color don’t control them.  You can look at what they are bringing and see that at each level.  And we need to pay attention to this.  Most of us already are.  Their belief is that the core of the problem is African American control of African American childrearing.  That there is something in African American culture that is bringing ruin everywhere. That’s what they believe, whether they are completely honest about it to themselves, or conscious of it themselves or not.  We can tell by their actions—what they do reveals much about their core beliefs.  They believe that the essential problem in our cities is Black culture, and that they can save Black youth by separating them as much as possible from Black governance, Black educators, and Black families.  Black governance, by not allowing those that the people of Detroit elect to govern the city and schools to actually govern.  Democracy is okay for White people, they believe, but Black people just can’t handle that.  When White people elect a criminal loser—and really let’s face it they are all criminal losers—when we elect Richard Nixon, for example, we don’t say let’s take away the right of White people to elect the President—look who they voted in, look at the low turnout for the election.  But they do when Black people elect someone like Kwame Kilpatrick. Never mind that his campaign was bankrolled by White corporate elites. No, Black people shouldn’t vote for their leaders anymore.  That’s for White people, they believe.

Teachers—they believe what we need to do is fire DPS teachers en masse, including the many teachers of color among them, move schools to the EAA, and hire as many teachers from the disproportionally White young female and privileged Teach for America as possible.  And Detroit’s children should spend longer school days and longer school years in these new better schools with less Black governance and less Black teachers, more time away from Black families and their influence.

Because behind all this, they see Black culture as pathological.  They see that as what needs to be broken… Black culture… the very thing that helped African Americans to survive 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, everything. The thing that is celebrated as the impetus of democratizing movements all over the world—people in China invoking MLK when they fight for their freedom-- that’s the problem-- Black culture and how you separate Black students from Black culture.  How do you move the control of Black children as much as possible out of the control of Black adults?  Well, you disband the school board, and you put the Governor or the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in charge.  And you take the teaching force of 15 Detroit Public Schools, fire all the teachers, and replace veteran African American teachers, male and female, with mostly female young White women. Separate Black students from Black elected leadership.  Separate Black students from significant presence of Black educators.  Instead put them in front of White fresh-faced untrained inexperienced "teachers" who believe they are there to save the poor Black and Brown children from their communities.  As a teacher educator, I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard young White teachers say, “They don’t value education.  They see nothing but dysfunction at home.” Finally, maximize the time that Black students spend in this increasingly separated environment—increase the school day and the school year.  While it’s true that the hours from 3 to 5 pm are among the most dangerous for our youth, the solution is to put them together with adults who love them during those times, not sit them in front of a computer.  If you want Black youth paired with responsible adults who love them, then fix the transportation system so parents can get home in a decent amount of time.  Make it possible for families to support themselves with one job per adult, not 3 jobs per adult.  Build a bus system so children can get home after school, not need to walk through dilapidated streets and under railroad bridges.  Or create quality enrichment experiences in the community in the after school hours.  Instead of uniting Black youth with more responsible and loving adults in the community, all of these changes, whether done consciously or not, move Black and Latino students out from under the tutelage of adults of color, as elected leaders, as educators, and as family.  That’s what they believe needs to be done to save youth of color who they want the general public to believe they love more than you do.

They think that Black people are the creators of poverty in our cities.  They seem not to remember that Black people made this country rich through slavery, unpaid or underpaid labor after slavery, lower pay with less advancement in industry, and so on.  They seem not to know that mostly White corporate elites abandoned the city because they could make greater profit by exploiting worse working conditions and lax environmental laws in the so-called Third World-- getting the next crop of people of color to enrich them.  No, that’s not what made Detroit poor and our schools poor, they believe.  They believe it's Black people and Black culture.

That’s why I say that EAA schools are like the BIA Indian boarding schools of previous decades and previous generations.  The explicit purpose of those schools was to break Native American culture, to first marginalize Native American people on reservations, and then to separate them from their children so that children could be assimilated; so that their native culture would whither and not be passed to the next generation.  Kill the Indian, save the man.

Most of the people in this state believe that Detroit is poor because Black people messed it up.  Now, think for a moment, how stupid and uneducated you have to be to believe that.  This is what they think, and they base their laws and reforms on what they think.  And that includes the ones in the Governor's office and in the legislature, and those who vote them into power.  They didn’t pay attention in school, so they apparently don’t know that Blacks were intentionally recruited to come to Detroit and other industrial cities to drive down wages, that when they arrived they were only allowed to live in certain neighborhoods and could only advance so far in their workplaces.  That the decline of Detroit didn’t start with the '67 rebellion, but started more than 15 years before that when jobs began leaving because profiteers could make better profits by hiring more “flexible” workers elsewhere.  That realtors engaged in block busting to scare Whites out of their neighborhoods so that they would sell their homes for less than they were worth. Those homes which realtors acquired for much less than they were worth, through preying on White racist fears, could then be sold for more than they were worth to Blacks, for whom housing options were quite scarce.  That the government then subsidized suburban sprawl, but only for those who were “good risks” for loans… racial codewords.  That we the taxpayers paid for the interstate highways and the corporate and housing subsidies that made it make sense to flee; that those factors—those interstates and those policies-- destroyed black communities and black businesses.

Most White people don’t know that, because they are ignorant of their own history, uneducated. They are the ones who need to be at the bottom of those achievement charts.  And that would be just the usual bad news if they weren’t also the ones who are running things right now.   It’s a much easier thing to say that Black culture caused all this. So much easier than actually learning something, than being educated. 

So now, take control of schools from Black people, take control of classrooms as much as possible away from Black people grounded in this community. Maximize the amount of time that students are in that environment.  “Civilize” students in that school.  Minimize the time they spend talking to each other, each at their own computer. 

I’ve been in suburban schools, in affluent suburban schools.  Believe me, they are not sitting 50 to a classroom in front of Buzz every day.  They are getting rich experiences, they have art, they have music, they have critical thinking and creativity.   That’s because they are teaching their children to lead the world and lead happy lives.  If Buzz was so great, wouldn’t they be getting Buzz in Bloomfield Hills?  No.  Guess what.  They're not clamoring for Buzz in Bloomfield Hills. But some people think Buzz is just right for people who live here in Detroit.  Some people are being prepared to lead the world, and some people are being prepared to fill the prisons and the fast food counters.

We don’t want that in Detroit.  We know that what makes our children love life, love their community, love learning, is rich school experiences; is using their knowledge, their love of learning, their creativity, their imagination to become men and women who can handle the problems they encounter in the community.  Who can think, who can rise up and push away the sorrow that is around us.  Who can develop the talents that God gave them, to further us, to further humanity.  The EAA is not about humanity.  That's why you can take your EAA and leave our community right now.