Shanker Blog

How Much Segregation Is There Within Schools?

Our national discourse on school segregation, whether income- or race-/ethnicity-based, tends to focus on the separation of students between schools within districts. There are good reasons for this, including the fact that the majority of desegregation efforts have been within-district efforts. Sometimes lost in this focus, however, is the importance of segregation between districts.

This distinction can be confusing, so consider a large metro area with a central city district surrounded by a group of suburban districts. There may be extensive racial/ethnic segregation of students between schools within those districts, with students of color concentrated in some schools and their White peers concentrated in others. But total segregation across the entire metro area is also a function of segregation between districts - i.e., the degree to which students of certain races or ethnicities are concentrated in some districts and not others (e.g., students of color in the city, white students in the suburbs). In a sense, if we view diversity as a resource, there are multiple "chokepoints" at which that resource is distributed down to the next level—from states to metro areas to districts to schools—and this can exacerbate segregation.

A recent working paper provides one of relatively few pieces of recent evidence suggesting that, in addition to racial and ethnic segregation between districts and between schools within districts, there may be an additional important "layer": segregation within schools.

Co-Teaching For Emerging Bilingual Learners: Theory And Practice

Co-teaching is an education buzzword frequently used in the context of instruction for students with special needs or English Language Learners (ELLs). When implemented thoughtfully and intentionally, co-teaching can be highly effective at meeting the unique needs of all learners. In this post, I will focus on co-teaching for English Language Learners, to whom I will refer to as “Emerging Bilingual Learners (EBLs), a more accurate label that highlights the assets these learners bring to the classroom. 

My argument, which is supported by research and my own professional experience, is that co-teaching is a particularly effective method for EBLs when one teacher is trained to meet the language needs of EBLs (and all learners) and the other focuses on grade level standards. Using co-teaching models, language is not the end goal, but rather a vehicle that enables EBLs to gain understanding of grade level content. The focus is not solely on the language that students are developing but rather on the academic content all students must acquire. This is important because it does not stigmatize students and it levels the playing field for each learner.

Not only does this inclusive model of teaching focus on the assets of every child, but it provides a more diverse learning environment while building trusting relationships amongst students' peers and teachers. The co-teaching model can be instrumental to fostering a greater sense of community within the classroom. Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) stresses the importance of instilling community pride into a classroom, where teachers and students have a reciprocal autonomous relationship. EBLs need to feel a deep sense of belonging in order to be willing to take risks and make mistakes.

In Memoriam: David K. Cohen

We are devastated to report the death of David K. Cohen, a founding member of the Albert Shanker Institute’s board of directors who honored us with his service for 20 years. David was a gifted teacher, a brilliant scholar, and an absolute mensch. He was an inspiration and mentor to his colleagues and the many students he taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan, and the many students they in turn will touch. 

David was the John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education Emeritus and Professor of Public Policy Emeritus at the Graduate School of Education and the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. For the past five years, he served as a visiting faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he had been a tenured faculty member from 1971 until 1984. He also served as  president of The Huron Institute (1971-86). He then served as the John Hannah Chair at Michigan State University’s College of Education (1984-93) before coming to the University of Michigan.

Prior to his academic career, David was a consultant on schools and race to the general counsel of the NAACP (1964-66) and then director of the Race and Education Project for U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1966-67), where his research established how Northern states preserved segregation by redrawing school district boundaries and how early federal funds for under-resourced schools did not greatly improve instruction.

In Memoriam: Edith Gerber Shanker

We are very sorry to report that Edith Gerber Shanker, or Eadie to her friends, passed away on September 19, 2020. She was a great lady whose voice, intellect and energy will be sorely missed.

Born in 1933 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Eadie was just a year and a half old when her mother died. Her father died when she was seven, and she and her siblings were placed in orphanages and then a foster home together. When she was old enough, she worked herself through New York’s City College, while supporting herself as a waitress. After beginning a Masters degree in English literature, she decided to become a teacher. 

She began teaching English at Junior High School 126 in Queens, NY, when, in September 1959, she went to a meeting to hear Albert Shanker speak. Al (who would eventually become the president of both the United Federation of Teachers and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers), recruited her to join the New York Teachers Guild, a precursor of the UFT. She became a union activist and served as a delegate at the UFT’s founding. She was also named as a picket captain in the UFT’s first strike in November 1960. Although the union only represented a small proportion of teachers, the strike caused enough of a disruption that the UFT eventually became the first teachers union in the nation to gain collective bargaining.

Strikes And Power: Reflections On The "Black Lives Matter" Strike Of NBA Players

The NBA players "Black Lives Matter" strike has been criticized by some on the left, suggesting that the "radical action" of the players was co-opted by the "neo-liberal" Barack Obama, much of it riffing off the discussions described in this article. This criticism makes me wonder about the depth of understanding of how strikes and collective action operate. And behind that lack of understanding are some naïve conceptions of power—what it is, of how it is built, and how it can be used.

Strikes are one form of collective action, an organized withdrawal of labor. The strike is designed to generate leverage that can compel action on the part of other actors—almost always, an employer. (Strikes can also be against the government, but most often they are against the government as employer—think of the Teacher Spring Strikes or safety strikes against government compelling teachers to provide in-person education in unsafe conditions.) Consequently, strikes almost always come with specific demands, and the leverage they generate is used to achieve as much of those demands as is feasible.

Strikes can have a symbolic component, an assertion of dignity by the strikers. Think, for example, of the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis, with the famous picket sign "I Am A Man." (Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 while supporting that strike.) The most powerful strikes have this component. But the symbolic component of a strike does not exist on its own: it rests on the foundation of the actual demands. In the case of the Memphis sanitation strike, the demands about the terms and conditions of work gave meaning and content to the assertion of dignity. Once this symbolic statement has been made, a decision to remain on strike should be based on what can be done to create maximum leverage and win as much of the demands as possible.

Research And Evidence Can Help Guide Teachers During The Pandemic

This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our guests today are Sara Kerr, Vice President of Education Policy Implementation at Results for America, and Nate Schwartz, Professor of Practice at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Other posts in the series are compiled here.

Teachers are used to playing many different roles, but this year they are facing the most complex challenges of their careers. They are being asked to be public health experts. Tech support specialists. Social workers to families reeling from the effects of layoffs and illness. Masters of distance learning and trauma-responsive educational practices. And they are being asked to take on these new responsibilities against a backdrop of rising COVID-19 cases in many parts of the country, looming budget cuts for many school districts, and a hyper-polarized political debate over the return to school.

To make any of this possible, educators need to be armed with the best available science, data, and evidence, not only about the operational challenges of reopening that have dominated the news cycle but also about how to to meet the increasingly complex social-emotional and academic needs of students and their families. They don’t have time to sift through decades of academic papers for answers. Fortunately, the nation’s education researchers are eager and ready to help.

A Black Policeman's Sister On Police Reform And Police Unions

My late brother was a police officer and, before his retirement, our late grandfather was the Acting Commissioner of Public Safety in the U.S. Virgin Islands. So it’s fair to say that I come from a police friendly family. Before coming to work for the Shanker Institute and before that, the AFT, I worked for the AFL-CIO alongside trade unionists from all trades and professions. So it makes it all the more painful to see the asinine responses that police unions have had to charges of police bias and brutality toward African Americans, especially since these charges can so easily be proven to be valid (see here, here, here and here). And, as the mother of a Black male teen, I am terrified to send him out into the world where his very existence may be seen as a threat (see here, here and here).

One of ironies here is that recent calls to “defund the police” and “reform the police,” if executed with rational foresight, would actually go a long way to making the job easier for rank and file police officers. I remember my brother telling me that the call he hated the very most was responding to a person who was having a psychiatric episode. He thought that breaking up a fight or a robbery or even a murder would be preferable, because he had been trained how to respond in those situations. With mental instability, he had no clue: Should he try to talk them down? If they were violent, what was the proper use of force? How should he defend himself and others? Or should he just wait for medical personnel to arrive? In every case, he had to play it by ear. The call to “defund the police” is not actually a call to abolish police departments, as some on the Right have claimed. Instead, it’s a proposal to move some police funding to other municipal agencies that have more expertise in addressing the social ills that are now dumped on police departments as a last resort—such as mental disability, homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse, etc. The proposal, then, is to strengthen local social services to the point that they can relieve police forces of some of the functions that they are disastrously ill equipped to handle.

We Choose To Reimagine Education: Centering On Love And Emotionally Responsive Teaching And Learning

This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our guest authors today are Tia C. Madkins, assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, and Alexis Patterson Williams, assistant professor in science education at the University of California Davis. Other posts in the series are compiled here.

Receiving new and conflicting information about COVID-19 is sending families, educators, and communities into a tailspin. Schools remain closed, students and their families are frustrated with remote schooling (RS), and school reopening plans are being revealed slowly—if at all. Many conversations about the upcoming school year have been rooted in fear of what could go wrong. We argue that it is critical to start our conversation from a place of hope and reimagine what could go well in PK-12 education. This requires reimagining PK-12 education through the lens of love. If we don’t use this moment to reimagine education, we are missing an incredible opportunity, which will leave our children wondering why we didn’t work harder to leverage the moment to make their lives and schools better.

State Budget Cuts And School Districts With Pre-Existing Conditions

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published projections of state budget shortfalls due to the pandemic. The total estimated shortfall for fiscal years 2020-2022 is $555 billion. This includes $290 billion in FY2021 alone, a deficit over 25 percent larger than that in the worst year of the Great Recession (2009). 

Compared with the sickness and death caused by Covid-19, state budget shortfalls are just collateral damage (though remember that states spend a lot on healthcare). But it could be a lot of damage. Unlike the federal government, virtually all states are required to balance their budgets every year. They cannot spend more than they raise in revenue, which means any deficits must be balanced out by cuts. Suppose we take these CBPP projections at face value, and subtract from them existing federal aid forthcoming and total state budget reserves. That, according to CBPP, still leaves states about $400 billion short for this past fiscal year and the next two (and there could easily be shortfalls in subsequent years).

Virtually all public school districts will feel this pain, but it will not be felt equally. Higher poverty districts are more dependent on state revenue, since more affluent districts generate more revenue from local sources (mostly property taxes). But the situation is even worse: higher poverty districts are already spending far less than they need to be. In a sense, the pandemic is going to be particularly harsh on districts with pre-existing conditions.

Remote Learning: What Helped A Network Of Progressive Schools

This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our guest today is Ann Cook, executive director and co-founder of the New York Performance Standards Consortium and formerly the co-founder and co-director of the Urban Academy Laboratory High School, a New York City public school. Other posts in the series are compiled here.

On Sunday, March 15, 2020, New York State and City officials announced the closure of all schools. By the end of that week, most NYC city public schools had moved to educate their students remotely. By the end of May, in city council hearings called to assess the effect of remote learning on the 1.1 million New York City school children, Education chair, Mark Treyger, was expressing concern.  

Across the nation there were dire reports of the impact of ‘missed time,’ of a widening achievement gap, the inequities of the digital divide, concerns about privacy and the emotional fallout of screen time. Students weighed in. In a letter to the Times, one NYC student commented: