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Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Equity after Katrina
VUE Number 10, Winter 2006
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Transformation, Not Tinkering: School Reform after Hurricane Katrina
By Dennie Palmer Wolf and Hal Smith
Dennie Palmer Wolf is director of Opportunity and Accountability and Hal Smith is a senior research associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author Biographies
Reformers have proposed individual strategies for achieving educational equity and excellence at scale that, by themselves,
are inadequate. Residents of New Orleans and other cities afflicted by "stressed levees" deserve a transformation of their
educational systems, not mere tinkering around the edges.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed the illusion that families and children, no matter how poor, are protected by a government's basic guarantees to its citizens in times of danger. The storm also revealed that we are even further than we thought we were from fulfilling our nation's promise of public education for all its children. As the stories of the residents of New Orleans who ended up on rooftops and in shelters revealed, the six or eight or twelve years that poor people in New Orleans had spent in public school classes left them without the skills, means, or connections to reach safety or trust broadcasted warnings. It was not the hurricane that left the worst trail of destruction at their children's schools; it was the long-term habit of undereducating, isolating, and ignoring poor Black children.
The images on the news were dramatic enough. But what the television footage couldn't show was the deeper disrepair. Ninety percent of the city's schools were failing academically. They were also failing in a human sense. As children from New Orleans relocated to schools in Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and Houston, their families reported breaking down in tears at what was, to them, an unfamiliar sight: their children in schools with current textbooks, certified teachers, guidance counselors, evaluation prior to special education placements, bands with instruments, and school staff who called their children by name.
It is a convenient fable that a storm like Katrina is a rare occurrence and that New Orleans, with its stressed levees, cross-generational poverty, and dysfunctional schools,was an unusually vulnerable city. Hundreds of miles away from the storm surge, Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and many other cities have stressed levees of their own: persistently dangerous public housing, joblessness, high youth-incarceration rates, and school facilities that lack adequate heat and are infested with vermin (see, for example, Fine, Bloom & Chajet 2003). In those cities, just as in New Orleans, public education is too often an integral part of, rather than an antidote to, the chronic storm system of being poor – and ignored – in America.
Poor children fare badly throughout their educational careers. Despite incontrovertible evidence about the benefit of preschool education, thousands of poor children continue to enter kindergarten unprepared – and the most recent congressional spending bill cuts into the funding for Head Start. In New York, for two generations, the high school graduation rate for African Americans and Latinos has hovered around 40 percent. At the highereducation level, of the Hispanic and African American students who make the effort and save money to start college, fewer than half end up graduating in six years. Yet, recent Supreme Court decisions struck down the use of affirmative-action policies in college admissions, ignoring the substantial benefits to individuals and the communities to which they contribute (Bowen & Bok 1999). The reality reflected by these statistics and the lack of public will to seek and apply large-scale, effective strategies – not 150-mile-an-hour winds or nine-foot flood surges – make up the storm that relentlessly batters the lives and aspirations of poor families across generations.
Archives
Equity after Katrina
VUE Number 10, Winter 2006
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Transformation, Not Tinkering: School Reform after Hurricane Katrina
By Dennie Palmer Wolf and Hal Smith
Dennie Palmer Wolf is director of Opportunity and Accountability and Hal Smith is a senior research associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author Biographies
Reformers have proposed individual strategies for achieving educational equity and excellence at scale that, by themselves,
are inadequate. Residents of New Orleans and other cities afflicted by "stressed levees" deserve a transformation of their
educational systems, not mere tinkering around the edges.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed the illusion that families and children, no matter how poor, are protected by a government's basic guarantees to its citizens in times of danger. The storm also revealed that we are even further than we thought we were from fulfilling our nation's promise of public education for all its children. As the stories of the residents of New Orleans who ended up on rooftops and in shelters revealed, the six or eight or twelve years that poor people in New Orleans had spent in public school classes left them without the skills, means, or connections to reach safety or trust broadcasted warnings. It was not the hurricane that left the worst trail of destruction at their children's schools; it was the long-term habit of undereducating, isolating, and ignoring poor Black children.
The images on the news were dramatic enough. But what the television footage couldn't show was the deeper disrepair. Ninety percent of the city's schools were failing academically. They were also failing in a human sense. As children from New Orleans relocated to schools in Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and Houston, their families reported breaking down in tears at what was, to them, an unfamiliar sight: their children in schools with current textbooks, certified teachers, guidance counselors, evaluation prior to special education placements, bands with instruments, and school staff who called their children by name.
It is a convenient fable that a storm like Katrina is a rare occurrence and that New Orleans, with its stressed levees, cross-generational poverty, and dysfunctional schools,was an unusually vulnerable city. Hundreds of miles away from the storm surge, Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and many other cities have stressed levees of their own: persistently dangerous public housing, joblessness, high youth-incarceration rates, and school facilities that lack adequate heat and are infested with vermin (see, for example, Fine, Bloom & Chajet 2003). In those cities, just as in New Orleans, public education is too often an integral part of, rather than an antidote to, the chronic storm system of being poor – and ignored – in America.
Poor children fare badly throughout their educational careers. Despite incontrovertible evidence about the benefit of preschool education, thousands of poor children continue to enter kindergarten unprepared – and the most recent congressional spending bill cuts into the funding for Head Start. In New York, for two generations, the high school graduation rate for African Americans and Latinos has hovered around 40 percent. At the highereducation level, of the Hispanic and African American students who make the effort and save money to start college, fewer than half end up graduating in six years. Yet, recent Supreme Court decisions struck down the use of affirmative-action policies in college admissions, ignoring the substantial benefits to individuals and the communities to which they contribute (Bowen & Bok 1999). The reality reflected by these statistics and the lack of public will to seek and apply large-scale, effective strategies – not 150-mile-an-hour winds or nine-foot flood surges – make up the storm that relentlessly batters the lives and aspirations of poor families across generations.
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