Today is the last day of school for New York City schoolchildren.
Back in the day, the Board of Education was headquartered at 110 Livingston Street.
Students celebrated the end of the school year with this little ditty:
No more pencils. No more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks.
With states and cities threatening layoffs, teachers may be giving their principals dirty looks.
The teachers unions are lobbying for a $23 billion jobs bill that would save up to 300,000 education jobs nationwide. With growing concerns about deficit spending, the bill is not likely to pass.
But a teacher bailout with no strings attached would represent a missed opportunity to reform teacher seniority rules. The “last hired, first fired” rule consigns too many children to classrooms with ineffective teachers.
I am a product of the NYC public schools, but seniority rules are not unique to the Big Apple. Indeed, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter recently signed into law Senate Bill 191, which ties teacher tenure to students’ performance.
I harped on teacher tenure during the charrette on education reform organized by DeWayne Wickham, the director of the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina A&T State University.
Modeled after the annual conference for the study of the “Negro Problem” that Dr. W.E.B. DuBois convened at Atlanta University, the charrette brought together African American leaders, including Dr. Mary Frances Berry, the Rev. Al Sharpton, former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume and futurist Nat Irvin II, to identify solutions to the black-white achievement gap.
For more than 50 years, a lot of smart folks have thought about education reform. Fifty years later, there are nearly 2,000 “dropout factories” – 12 percent of the nation’s high schools – where fewer than 60 percent of students who start as freshman make it to their senior year.
According to the Alliance for Excellent Education, 28 percent of the nation’s students of color are enrolled in one of these dropout factories. These lowest-performing schools account for 58 percent of black high school dropouts.
It’s time to go back to the future when educators like Mrs. Williams, who taught at P.S. 3 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, inspired students to succeed.
And principals knew what worked -- qualified teachers, high expectations, safe schools and parental involvement.
Dr. Berry stressed the “need to look at the fabric of what’s going on in the community…It depends on what’s happening in the schools and what is happening in the surrounding community.”
She noted that studies show academic achievement doesn’t improve with charter schools or vouchers. Instead, they’re “a political solution not a reform initiative. They’re not performing any better than the schools they were intended to reform.”
Rev. Sharpton agreed that “the whole community does matter. Parents have to be engaged, empowered and not dismissed.”
Irvin reminded us that “the future may be closer than you think it is.”
With that in mind, the thought leaders issued a call to action:
For all of these reasons, we call for the convening of a national charrette on the problems of black schoolchildren that will bring a broad cross-section of stakeholders together to design a comprehensive rescue plan.
A national convening is not about more talk. Rather, it is about mobilizing stakeholders to focus like a laser on the crisis of black public schoolchildren.
The future has arrived. The Class of 2020 will enter second grade in the fall. It’s time to get back to what works.
