As a student in segregated Atlanta, civil rights activist Lonnie King learned math from castoff books from the all-white Boys High.
When King complained to his math teacher that pages were torn from the tattered books, his teacher assured him, “Son, I will teach you what’s not in those pages.”
Today, King said the pages are there, but black children are not being taught all of them.
Speaking at a Spelman College panel last week on whether education is now a civil rights issue, King, 74, said, “Our schools are not in crisis, they are beyond crisis. It is the civil rights movement of our time. I am glad I lived long enough to participate in the first one and the second one.”
The obstacle is no longer dramatic underfunding of schools, but a lack of commitment to educating poor and minority children to the highest standards, said King, who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960.
Sharing the podium with King was Spelman President Beverly Daniel Tatum and Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington, D.C., city schools and founder of StudentsFirst, an education reform group.
(Rhee’s fiancé, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, was supposed to appear, but his plane was late. A former NBA star and a charter school leader, Johnson drew two rows of retired NBA pals who dramatically raised the average height of the 1,000 people in the audience.)
At times, the Spelman event became a recruitment drive for Rhee’s StudentsFirst, which counts 7,000 Georgians among its members and which pushed Senate Bill 184, a bill requiring that schools weigh classroom performance over seniority in determining teachers layoffs. The bill stalled in the final hours when the Senate and House disagreed on changes.
“These last-in, first-out policies mean that some great teachers, some of whom were teachers of the year, are getting a pink slip,” Rhee said.
In a telephone interview before she arrived in Atlanta, Rhee said her members generated more than 12,000 e-mails and calls to legislators on behalf of SB 184. “They came out in full force, and it’s unusual to see that kind of volume in education issues,” she said.
For the last four years, Rhee has been raising the national volume on education as both the controversial leader of D.C. schools and now the peripatetic CEO of StudentsFirst. Her candor — which teacher groups contend crosses over to hostility — won her several rounds of applause from the Sisters Chapel audience.
Despite a blitz of negative publicity in the last few months, including allegations that she inflated her own success as a novice teacher and media reports on possible cheating in Washington schools during her tenure, Rhee was the star of the night, swarmed at the end of the panel with rock-star-size adulation.
The audience accepted King’s contentions that Rhee’s willingness to address educational inequities — she called her own Washington schools “crappy” — was making her the victim of a propaganda campaign.
But Rhee adopted a conciliatory tone toward teachers, extolling the value of good ones and admitting her own failings as a first-year teacher. Her job as chancellor of the nation’s worst urban system was a “walk in the park,” she said, compared to what her teachers faced daily in their classrooms.
Rhee also dismissed the notion that she and teachers are at odds, noting that, “There is no group that has less tolerance for ineffective teachers than effective teachers.”
The evening’s scholarship came from Spelman President Tatum, who is the author of “Can We Talk About Race?” and “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”
It is not that schools are suddenly failing black and brown children, she said. Schools never set out to educate them to the highest levels. Rather than American education acting as a great leveler, it has acted as a sorter of who holds academic promise and who does not, Tatum said.
“The kids who were seen as not smart, who were defined as not being worth investing in, were often black and brown,” said Tatum.
“The problem that we have as a nation today is that we can’t afford to discard that many kids,” she said. “As more kids of color, the so-called minority children, are the majority, that population has to be invested in.”
The daughter of teachers, Tatum said, “You don’t have to be a perfect teacher to convey the fact that you believe in the capacity of your children to be excellent.
“When we talk about the achievement gap,” she said, “what we really have to talk about is the expectation gap.”
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