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The Post-Deseg Era

Brown v. Board of Education probably did more to change America than any other Supreme Court decision the twentieth century. And now Brown’s time has passed.

Since the Reagan Administration, the Supreme Court has steadily eroded the complex edifice of desegregation. The latest blow came with the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision that banned the use of race in making assignment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, Wash. To use race, the Court ruled, districts must show a “compelling reason,” which was lacking in those districts.

A new challenge to desegragation might come from Milton, Massachusetts, a classic New England community located just south of Boston. As The Wall Street Journal reports, white parents are organizing to challenge the new assignment of white kids to a predominantly black elementary school in the town of 26,000.

Which raises the question: Can desegregation ever work? Can we imagine a way to offer kids of all races and economic backgrounds a chance to learn together?

The answer is yes. But it’s an answer that liberals and their allies in the NEA, AFT, NAACP, and other organizations do not like. The answer is school choice.

Let’s remember the heart of the Brown case. Black kids did not have any choice but to go to different schools than their white brothers and sisters. They got stuck in schools that were clearly inferior. The buildings were old and broken down, the textbooks and supplies inadequate, the teachers overwhelmed with huge classes. The stigma alone of the separate-but-equal doctrine undermined real opportunity for learning.

Because of his desperate desire to make a unanimous ruling, Chief Justice Warren shied away from saying how, exactly, blacks and whites were to be brought together. Warren bravely decided to take on the most divisive issue in America, but he also avoided the hard issues needed to make the decision work. Just do it, somehow, and good luck.

Warren’s greatest blind spot — and our blind spot for generations — was the assumption that schools had to be organized by districts, which managed a number of schools in their areas. That’s how schools have been organized in America since the beginning of compulsory education in the nineteenth century.

That false assumption has only strengthened over the years. Under the consolidation movement, districts got bigger and bigger, so they played an ever-more significant role in managing public education. The number of districts has declined from 117,000 in 1940 to about 15,000 today. Mega-districts have become the local empires of learning. Within the bounds of state law, district bureaucracies implement policies for curriculum, teachers, facilities, busing, special services, extracurricular activities.

As districts got bigger and bigger, so did schools. Since 1940, the number of schools in the U.S. has declined from 200,000 to 86,000. Half of all high school students attend schools with over 1,500 students, and 70 percent go to schools with more than 1,000, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Schools with 2,000 or 3,000 students are common, and some schools have more than 5,000 students. Big schools do not work as well as small schools.

So what’s so special about big districts? Why should districts make all these decisions? Why not leave the decisions to schools? And why not let parents shop around for the best school for their kids?

The best cure for public education is not adopting more rules — for desegregation, curriculum, testing, certification, transportation, after-school activities, and on and on — but to break up the enterprise and allow parents to send their kids wherever they want.

Let the states set basic standards, provide some assistance, and let go. Let schools organize themselves. If a cluster of schools wants to collaborate on transportation, purchasing, special ed, and more, fine. But let the schools run the show. Let schools compete for students. Let schools look for ways to get better, without the nightmares of bureaucracy and politics they now face.

The obvious logistical problem is that the best schools will attract more kids than they can handle. Fine, have a lottery. You’re concerned about racial balance? Fine, weight the lottery so that you get a reasonable mix of black, white, brown, and yellow.

And the worst schools? They’ll have to shape up or go out of business. They’ll have to spend less time doing paperwork and more time making sure every class is exciting and rigorous. If they fail — when students opt for other schools — they should go out of business or get a change of management. Give someone else a chance.

Some people worry that full-fledged school choice would lead to narrow, sectarian schools that create intimidating cultures to outsiders. They worry about fundamentalists taking over and teaching creationism. But it shouldn’t be too hard to require schools getting public dollars to follow basic rules of fairness and professionalism.

The greatest development in American education in the last generation has been the rise of charter schools. Charter schools get public funding but are allowed to bypass many of the rules for teacher hiring, curriculum, and building-level management. Any student in the district can enter a lottery to go to a charter school. The result is an impressive blending of racial and economic diversity — not to mention committed, focused teachers and staff.

District administrators, of course, hate charter schools. Every child who leaves the standard schools for charter schools says, in effect, “you failed me.” Charters also put pressure on the district to improve.

I saw the superintendent of schools in Cambridge, Mass., days after the district defeated plans for a new charter school in the district a few years ago. She was ebullient. “We won!” she exulted. Then she paused. “But I have to admit, just the threat of the charter school has made us focus better.”

The problem is that there aren’t enough charter schools. There aren’t enough choices. There isn’t enough pressure on standard districts and their schools. Just as Judge Harold Greene busted up Ma Bell, we need to bust up our educational empires.

The fundamental error of the Brown decision — an understandable error, so let’s not beat up the Warren Court — was assuming that schools could only operate with a strong district system.

Fix that error, and you have a chance for real integrated education.

BACKGROUND ON BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

The landmark 1954 decision, in which the Court unanimously declared the practice of assigning students to different schools based on race unconstitutional, has brought together blacks and whites in countless districts. More important, it has changed the basic mindset of average Americans. A vast majority now accepts that the idea of “separate but equal” is an inherently incoherent idea. For people to enjoy the full range of opportunities of education and other public benefits, we all need to be in it together.

But Brown has produced its own incoherence. For the sake of deseg, we count white and brown noses, take kids out of their communities, put kids in alien schools, and take away the most intimate decisions from families. The whole process often takes everyone’s eyes off the prize — fair educational opportunity for all — and into arcane bureaucratic and legal mazes.

The Brown decision, of course, invalidated the Topeka school district’s operation of separate schools for white and black children. A Kansas law allowed communities with a population of 15,000 or more to assign students by race. That’s what Topeka did. In 1951, 13 Topeka parents joined a class action suit against the city of Topeka, claiming the such separation constituted unequal treatment and was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The case made it to the Supreme Court, where newbie Chief Justice Earl Warren organized the unanimous decision. In its decision, the Court called for districts across the U.S. to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”

The problem, of course, was that Brown was not a “self-executing” decision. The Court could not simply order districts to “do this,” and expect its orders to be done. Districts across the nation — from supposed liberal outposts like New York and Boston to the proudly segregated states of the old Confederacy — adopted a dizzying array of delay tactics. As the years passed, hundreds of districts got stuck in the increasingly contorted system of district gerrymandering, busing routes, consolidation, procurement, funding formulae, and competing demands (like special ed). The longer the scre=um, the more contorted deseg became.

A decision originally intended to end formal segregation became a catch-all for curing the ills of racism and inequality, poor school buildings and inadequate school supplies, neighborhood segregation and growing frustration over the “American dilemma” of race.

To be sure, Brown produced a number of impressive success stories. The Charlotte-Mecklenberg district in North Carolina is noted for its aggressive and creative approach to bring kids of all hues together.

Making Writing and Reading Fun

WASHINGTON–Once each hour at Congress Heights Elementary School, kindergartners and 1st graders gather and neatly put away their supplies in the “Writing to Read Center.” Without instructions, with few words among themselves, the students line up at the door to return to their regular classrooms.

They file out in two lines–one for boys, the other for girls–and soon the room is filled again with a new group of equally well-mannered students who go to their five work stations and get to work without any directions from the teacher or aides.

It is a scene that would not have surprised Frank N. Freeman or Benjamin DeKalbe Wood, who 50 years ago wrote the book that would inspire a retired teacher named John Henry Martin to start the writing experiment that involved these Washington public-school students.

Freeman and Wood, who studied the effects of typewriters on the classroom performance of about 15,000 elementary-school students from 1929 to 1931, found that the children were fascinated with the machines and had much better work habits when they used them.

The Depression-era researchers quoted a 1st-grade teacher: “I notice an awakening sense of responsibility; the children remember to put away typewriters and leave offices in order; they are pleasant and polite in choosing helpers …”

Not incidentally, the researchers also found improvements in academic performance. They were less certain of the typewriter’s value in lower grade levels, mostly because of the inadequate testing methods for younger students.

On a recent tour of schools experimenting with his “Writing to Read” program, John Henry Martin did not express any doubt that his contemporary version of the program works.

Tests have shown, he said, that a combination of computer, typewriter, workbooks, and pictures makes it possible for children to write almost as soon as they enter school.

“I proclaim it,” he told a group of Washington principals. “It works.”

The “it,” the Florida-based consultant says, is a classroom situation that combines “truly interactive” machines with a child’s natural desire to know and express himself in words. After seven years of developing and testing his idea, Mr. Martin concluded it worked because children of varying backgrounds scored well above national norms in reading and writing tests.

“It’s amazing,” Mr. Martin said, “that with the research of the last 50 years, and especially the last decade or so, we have failed to use the typewriter and other things … that are truly interactive.”

Mr. Martin’s project, financed by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), now involves 10,000 students from a variety of economic and educational backgrounds. Besides the 15 schools in Washington, the experiment includes districts in Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas, and universities in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, N.J., has contracted with IBM to evaluate the program.

The program is based on the premise that students already have many ideas to express by the time they enter school. A kindergartner has a working vocabulary of 4,000 to 5,000 words, said Mr. Martin, and just needs to engage more in “multi-sensory-receptive” activities to express ideas.

Children are wrongly taught to read before they learn to write, Mr. Martin says, but it has not always been that way. Prior to the early 20th century, students expressed their ideas in writing from “day one,” Mr. Martin said.

“In the past, children used a slate and chalk to, using the old expression, ‘make their letters,”‘ Mr. Martin said. “Sometime between 1910 and 1920, writing and reading were made into separate processes.”

‘Positive Reinforcement’

With the stress on reading before writing, Mr. Martin said, students do not receive the “positive reinforcement” that the behaviorist B.F. Skinner identified as an essential part of learning.

Children in the “writing to read” program work each day for one hour. They work with partners of their own choosing at work stations for computer work, typing, workbook exercises, creative writing, and listening to tape-recordings. They also work on miscellaneous projects, such as labeling and matching pictures with appropriate written material.

The students use all letters of the alphabet except Q and X, and a set of letter “blends” such as oi, ei, th, sh, sc, and gh.

Teachers and computer programs, which give and receive sound, teach the students how to pronounce the letters and blends and how to use them in words.

At the computer station, the student strikes the terminal’s keyboard when instructed by the program, then watches as the letters and blends fall into place to spell a word. At each step, the student hears then repeats the sound.

After completing 10 “cycles” of instruction, the student will have learned the 42 phonemes he needs to write about almost any subject. As soon as the student has mastered these basics, he can begin to write strings of related sentences and complete essays, paying attention to the grammar and spelling that before would only have hindered the writing flow.

The typing skills, which Mr. Martin said most students should be able to develop in the 1st or 2nd grade, will not only give the students a head start on working with computers but will also enable them to write much faster and more creatively throughout their lives, Mr. Martin said. Mr. Martin said his approach differs from the Depression-era experiment and from other current uses of computers in the classroom because his approach is “truly interactive.”

“The typewriter, by itself, is not interactive, and the cathode ray tube is not interactive,” he said. “What makes this interactive is that it gets students to make physical, bodily responses.”

Mr. Martin said that he adopted the program’s components only after eliciting such responses with a broad cross section of students–from the gifted to the average to the slow learners, from those in small groups to those in large groups.

The approach to writing was tested for two years with a group of 60 students at the University School of Nova University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The striking results there, Mr. Martin said, convinced IBM officials that a test with a larger sample was needed.

Joseph Randazzo, the University School’s headmaster, said 1st graders who learned under Mr. Martin’s program scored 2.7 on a reading grade-equivalency test, while others scored 1.8. Half of the entire group scored in the 94th percentile nationally on the test, Mr. Randazzo said.

Career Start

Mr. Martin started his career 45 years ago in a one-room schoolhouse in Alabama. After serving with the Navy in Europe in World War II, he worked as a teacher, principal, curriculum consultant, and superintendent in seven districts on Long Island and in New Jersey.

On the side, he has done extensive consulting, serving on panels for two U.S. Presidents.

Mr. Martin said he first became interested in the use of typewriters and other “multi-sensory” instruments when a friend recommended that he read the Freeman-Wood book, which carries the bulky title, An Experimental Study of the Educational Influences of the Typewriter in the Elementary School Classroom.

Mr. Martin has toyed with the idea for years since. Seven years ago–bored with a retirement forced on him by a heart attack–he decided to study it in a clinical setting. He took his proposals to Abraham S. Fischler, the president of Nova University, and soon started soliciting money for his work from the private sector.

The 1932 book, Mr. Martin says, now occupies the prized position on the coffee table in his Fort Myers, Fla., home.

-- “Children’s Interest in Machines Used to Teach Reading By Teaching Writing,” by Charles Euchner, appeared in Education Week on December 22, 1982