UPDATE on: Motion to preclude evidence of racial discrimination in school funding

Three weeks ago, I offered my non-lawyer, teacher opinion on Pennsylvania House Speaker, Representative Bryan Cutler's motion to preclude evidence of racial discrimination in an upcoming school-funding trial here in PA. Lawyers argued that and another motion in Commonwealth Court three weeks ago to the day.

UPDATE

Both of the motions were largely denied, including the one that would bar the presentation of evidence of racial discrimination in school-funding.

🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨 Significant victory in PA school funding case: Commonwealth Court to allow evidence about racial disparities in funding at trial. Judge largely rejects legislative leaders' attempt to block evidence of racial disparities https://t.co/cxv2koNFim #FundOurSchoolsPA

— Education Law Center (@edlawcenterpa) July 28, 2021

Judge In Commonwealth Court PA School Funding Case Rules To Allow Evidence About Racial Impact Of Underfundinghttps://t.co/2lI61fqgBP

— Public Interest Law Center (@PubIntLawCtr) July 29, 2021

To be clear, I am not now nor will I ever be satisfied with the historic and inadequate funding that public schools in

largely urban,

largely impoverished,

and

largely Black and Brown

communities receive.

By allowing evidence of these disparities at a trial on public school funding, it will be on the record, official, made clear--again--for everyone to see and hopefully rectify. 

School District of Philly "excited" about return to in-person learning in the fall

It's nice that the School District of Philadelphia is "excited" about the full re-opening of schools. I get it. No doubt many of our students and their parents are as well. Teachers, too. Bet.

JUST IN:

In a statement responding to new CDC guidance, the School District of Philadelphia says it's "excited about the full re-opening of schools." #PhlEd pic.twitter.com/ahnwgGRmOn

— Avi Wolfman-Arent (@Avi_WA) July 9, 2021

What I hope isn't lost in all of the district's excitement and giddiness is the fact that we are emerging from a once in a lifetime global and deadly pandemic. Just as with the teaching and learning that occurred since March, 2020, we've never done this before. Be merciful.

What I hope isn't lost in all of their excitement and giddiness is the fact that we're still experiencing a great deal of racial, political, and social unrest in addition to that once in a lifetime global and deadly pandemic. I wrote about that here and broached it in almost every meeting I attended for the SBTL* part of me. Be merciful.

What I hope isn't lost in all of their excitement and giddiness is the fact that many of our young people will be returning to classrooms without some of their classmates and friends. I tweeted about that. Be merciful.

As if the past year and change hasn't been traumatic enough, for many of our kids, going back to school in the fall w/o their friends/classmates who've been killed may be...a lot💔🙏🏾😢

— Stephen R. Flemming, Ed.D. (@kellygrade6) July 6, 2021

What I hope isn't lost in all of their excitement and giddiness is that fact that "social-emotional learning/SEL" (the term is getting a little trite if you ask me) isn't a "thing" to checklist. I heard someone from another school begin a sentence with, "Once we did our SEL, we...[did whatever came next in class]"😐Be merciful.

Preliminarily here's what I'd like to see:

• PD - For professional development, lean on school-level educators and students, the ones who've experienced all of this March, 2020 - present, granularly. Those building-level educators of course include teachers, but also support staff who've taken on teaching roles. Yup. That happened throughout the district. Oh and pay those who want to do it. Heard there's some federal money floating around. For students, give them credit. Feature them.

If you haven't taught students during this challenging era, don't professionally develop me for a time such as this. You can't. 

• Flexibility - Be very flexible, understanding, and empathetic in everything. Don't just say it, be it. Don't know how? Ask us, those for whom you have job-related expectations and we'll tell you how.

• Listen to and talk with educators, students, and parents at our locations, in our spaces, often. Come to us, in-person, since you're excited. No surveys, emails, forms, questionnaires except maybe as a follow-up.

My hope is that we have learned something during this tumultuous time period and that this new learning will translate to new doing. 

Fin.

For now.

Be safe!

*School-Based Teacher Leader

Motion to preclude evidence of racial discrimination? In school funding?

[Originally written as a Guest Opinion for a local community newspaper two weeks ago]

In 2014, the William Penn School District along with five other school districts across the state plus seven parents, the NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference, and the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools filed a school funding lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Education and others. According to the Public Interest Law Center, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs, “the state has adopted an irrational and inequitable system of funding public education that does not provide the resources students need to meet state standards and discriminates against students based on where they live and the wealth of their local communities.”

 

After years of hearings, motions, and more, a trial date has finally been set for September of this year. While this is certainly encouraging, one motion brought by Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler is not as encouraging. The motion in essence would bar the plaintiffs including the William Penn School District from presenting evidence of racial discrimination in school funding at trial. In the motion, Speaker Cutler posits “this court should preclude evidence of racial discrimination because any evidence or argument regarding the adverse impact that may occur on the basis of race as a result of the system of education funding is unconnected from the cause of action pled…”

 

Except that Speaker Cutler is wrong. The suit notes that the state’s system for funding “discriminates against students based on where they live and the wealth of their local communities.” In America, generally, where we live and our wealth are almost inextricably connected with our race and thus on school funding. The nexus of housing, wealth, and race is historic and intentional.

 

During the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal entity at the time, engaged in practices that in essence cut off capital for improvements in areas they deemed “hazardous,” drawing red lines on maps that often reflected where African Americans lived. In an examination of HOLC and banking institutions’ redlining practices, economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, in an August 2020 paper, concluded HOLC’s “redlining maps reduced home-ownership rates, house values, and rents and increased racial segregation in later decades.” We are in those later decades and housing, wealth, and race are most certainly interconnected. We even have terms like “socioeconomic status.” Why the need for such a term if, as can be inferred by the speaker’s motion, the issues of housing, wealth, and race are mutually exclusive? I am not an expert on the law and don’t purport to be one, but it is my opinion that any discussion and supporting evidence of racial discrimination in school funding in Pennsylvania must certainly be broached during this trial.

 

In nearly all of the districts named in the lawsuit, the student body is made up largely of students of color. In 2017, the last year of data on the U.S. Department of Education’s website, Black students made up 89.9% of the student body in the William Penn School District alone. Therefore, to not bring up the topic of race in a lawsuit on discrimination in school funding is on its face immoral if not racist outright.

 

The motion brought by Speaker Cutler appears to be the latest salvo in a cultural war by one political party in particular on issues of race. They seem dead set on undercutting any attempt to understand how decisions of our country’s past impact people of color today and Black Americans in particular. Whether it’s the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, or a willingness to make voting in America harder, their weaponization of law and policy targeted toward communities of color is the exact reason why we must make school funding equitable across the state. Subjects like social studies and science need not be subjects we teach when have a few extra minutes as teachers, especially in the elementary and middle grades. Learning the truth of the history of the United States will better help us as a society understand, for example, why Black Americans make up approximately 13.4% of the U.S. population but 38.3% of those in federal prisons. That’s just one example.

 

Our young people must have access to the resources they need to think critically, make informed decisions, and ultimately participate in and fight to strengthen the fragility of our supposed inclusive democracy. That cannot happen without a funding formula that is equitable and fair and takes into account the racial composition of the students in our schools and districts and how policies and laws on housing, wealth, and race have historically worked in our disfavor.

 

Court documents show that arguments on the motion offered by Speaker Cutler are set for July 7th.

I Asked | Bill Cosby's vacated verdict/sentence

I like hearing from the youth. Sometimes their perspectives offer a fresh, divergent, or just different take on issues. Whether it's our own class, student-led podcast, Behind the Eyes of Our Youth or a class poll I'll throw up to them and to our larger class community of current and former students, their parents, and those family and friends who just like to keep up with us.

They've chimed in on topics like abolishing/defunding the police, police-free schools, Chauvin's sentence, and the phone wars.

Let me add this to the discussion on police-free schools....I hear social media and I hear mainstream media. So, I ask my students. I've offered no hint of an opinion, as I'm still formulating mine. #phled pic.twitter.com/kdemHMliOs

— Stephen R. Flemming, Ed.D. (@kellygrade6) July 25, 2020

😭😭😭😂😂 I got some #'s from my class community (currents/formers/parents, etc.) 👇🏾 pic.twitter.com/gY41PIlxi5

— Stephen R. Flemming, Ed.D. (@kellygrade6) June 14, 2021

When news broke of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision to overturn the conviction of Bill Cosby, I wanted their quick thoughts on it. Here's how I put it to them and here's how they voted.

I kept a journal this past school year

2017

One year ago, today, I started a journal.

Old school.

Paper and pen. 

Dates. 

Times. 

Reflections. 

Journal.

The last time I recall keeping a paper/pencil journal, I was a student-teacher.

On June 24, 2020 I received a series of emails confirming that I would, in fact, be the School-Based Teacher Leader (SBTL) for English at Martin Luther King High School. The next day, I started chronicling that journey because I wanted to capture what would never again be; my being a first-year SBTL in a global pandemic, amidst racial, social, and political unrest. 

My goal was to capture my feelings and reflections at particular moments in time, be they feelings about meetings, the class I taught, feel-goods or frustrations. Those moments in time were whenever I wanted. 

I won't dedicate this particular post to an exhaustive review of my pen-to-paper reflections, but there is one entry I'd like to focus on in particular.

Here's an excerpt from one of my lengthier musings in the wake of the murder of one of our students and of Walter Wallace.

10/28/20

On Monday I found out Hyneef Poles was killed. I cried. Then Monday(?) afternoon/evening Walter Wallace was shot and killed by police--here in Philly...

These two events were the backdrop of an email that I sent to the English department. It's also the backdrop of our "this week," including our CPT.

Today my colleagues and I just said whatever needed to be said. We were vulnerable. [Teacher] talked about how she teared up in class...[Teacher] talked about how her...class...allowed themselves to be vulnerable....

Today's CPT was needed...

I also emailed Dr. Hite this week and asked if any scheduled walk-throughs could be postponed. He actually replied--agreeing with me.

7:23pm

P.S. My handwriting is so sloppy--sheesh. I can definitely write better than this.

My Twitter Spaces chat with 2 Black male educators

I tried something new today and on a whim.

I hosted a Twitter Spaces chit-chat. One, I wanted to see what it was like. Two, I wanted to speak with a few Black male educators about the positives of this past school year. For this "let's see what this app can do" convo, these two brothers, @MrFlemmingMEd & @pastorsalis, joined me.

Tweet to @TwitterSpaces

Some of the takeaways about the positives of this past year?

• The ability to still establish and maintain those crucial student:teacher relationships
• nixing the "Do Now" in favor of "Temperature Checks"
• Morning Meetings/Town Halls/Community Meetings
• Being able to travel the world virtually with students
• Trying new things like...launching a podcast with students😉

The moral? Try something new. Find the light in darkness. Relationships matter.

CRT in Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry

UPDATED 6/24/21

I hear there's quite the brouhaha in this country over the "teaching" of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in our public schools. Who'd have thunk? 😐I should note that teaching is in quotes because I see CRT as more of a lens and a paradigm than a school subject. Update: I've since learned that "Classic Critical Race Theory" is a school subject in law school. I knew it was rooted in law, but thought that it was *just* a lens and not a course. I learned this from Kimberlé  Crenshaw.

Creator of term ‘Critical Race Theory’ Kimberlé Crenshaw explains what it really is https://t.co/KUMUv8dcC6 via @msnbc

— Stephen R. Flemming, Ed.D. (@kellygrade6) June 22, 2021

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, whose name we don't hear enough of as she's the OG of CRT + education, summarizes, "...CRT actually attempts to make plain the racialized context of public and private spheres in our society" (Ladson-Billings, 2003). In education, she has and continues to look through this lens to "explicate new epistemological perspectives on inequity and social injustice" (Ladson-Billings, 2003).

In short, the social construction of race is woven tightly into the fabric of this country and the CRT looking glass seeks to make race's threads visible, including in education.

While there's lots of discussing and debating, I'm sitting here like, "the censoring of Black teachers, in particular, isn't new." What better way to censor Black educators than to fire them in the era post-Brown v. The Board. In fact, the very book that is the main subject of this post faced some backlash as noted in this letter to the Seminole County School Board in 2004. Taylor, herself, broaches the subject in her 1998 acceptance speech of the 1997 Alan Award.

This isn't to suggest that because this tale's as old as time that we shouldn't resist it. The exact opposite. I've also been thinking that it really doesn't matter to me what laws or policies are enacted, the lens through which I've experienced the world as a Black man and the history behind those experiences is what it is. I continue to learn and teach through that lens and that cannot be legislated out of me. 

Big ups to those K-20+ educators of all colors and stripes, honest resisters in Black and majoritarian media and politics, and those in other sectors who are pushing back. Black resistance isn't new. Black teachers' resistance isn't new. Dr. Jarvis Givens describes these Black teachers' resistance pedagogies as subversive or fugitive.  I suppose because it's  2021 and loathsomely blatant that it makes it all the more..."Wooooooow, y'all racist ratchet bigots really still in y'all feelins about Black existence and truth-telling!" One only need Google "1619 Project" to see how their tightly wound briefs really are in a knot.

All of that said...

The real reason why I'm here is because I thought of a particular event in Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry published in 1976.

You may remember Mr. Granger, one of the primary racists and landowners, interrogating Mrs. Logan, in front of her class, about what she was teaching because he "don't see all them things you're teaching in here (the textbooks)." What things? She taught about how slavery was wicked and how whites and the country benefitted, and still do, off of free enslaved African labor. That's a critical look at white wealth accumulation via enslaved Black labor. 

Mama Logan simply replies, "That's because they're not in there."

"Well, if it ain't in here, then you got no right teaching it," since the books had been approved by the school board. Because, of course, school board approval is the standard, especially an all white southern one. 

Mama Logan tells him, "I can't do that."

"And why not?"

"Because all that's in that book isn't true."

Short story shorter, she was fired.

We will see that, if we haven't already. Teachers will be fired. I'm especially concerned for my colleagues who are non-unionized and in spaces where due process might be negligible at best. I suppose the question is, what will we do about it? I reckon the answer is, continue to fight, to teach, to tell the truth about the heinous genesis of this country. 

In the words of the late Ida B. Wells. "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them."

Forgive my scribble. I cannot not read a book and not mess it up. I forget the year I did this scribbling.

"Mama's teaching got...her fired."

Did I really just APA this? lol

Yes.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2003). It's your world, I'm just trying to explain it: Understanding our epistemological and methodological challenges. Qualitative Inquiry, (9)1, 5-12 doi: 10.1177/1077800402239333

Taylor, M. D. (1976). Roll of  thunder hear my cry. New York, NY: Penguin Books USA, Inc.