Teachers of Color and Urban Charter Schools: Race, School Culture, and Teacher Turnover in the Charter Sector

This article explores working conditions in charter schools with varying rates of teacher turnover. Ethnographic data with 28 racially diverse teachers explores teachers’ experiences, their explanations for moving charter schools, and patterns of movement when teachers leave a charter school for another school. A brief conceptual framework was used to understand multiple dimensions of working conditions in charter schools for teachers of color. Findings indicate teachers most often made structural moves between charter types, primarily from charters managed by nonprofit organizations to standalone charter schools. Teachers of color describe tensions with sociocultural conditions that limited culturally inclusive practices. Discussion includes implications for policies that push to replicate charter schools in communities of color, particularly schools with poor working conditions associated with high turnover and weak propensities to retain teachers of color

Teach for America e sua paradoxal iniciativa sobre diversidade: Raça, política, e o deslocamento de professores negros nas escolas urbanas

This article examines the paradox of Teach For America’s diversity gains and its support for policies that contribute to Black teacher decline in urban communities. TFA has countered claims that its expansion is connected to teacher displacement, but its two-pronged structure—as an alternative certification program and an influential policy actor via its leadership model for education reform—requires a critical analysis of the impact of its policy commitments on Black teachers. I propose steps to better align TFA’s policy orientations with its diversity values by leveraging TFA’s policy influence to support better working conditions for teachers in urban schools, democratic school turnarounds, and teacher organizing linked to broad social justice movements.En este artículo se examina las paradójicas mejoras de Teach For America en el área de diversidad en Estados Unidos y su apoyo a las políticas que contribuyeron a la disminución de los docentes negros en las comunidades urbanas. TFA ha negado las afirmaciones de que su expansión se conecto con el desplazamiento de esos docentes, pero su estructura dual—como un programa de certificación alternativa y como actor político influyente a través de su modelo de liderazgo para reformas educativas—requiere un análisis crítico de la repercusión de sus compromisos políticos en docentes negros. Propongo un modelo para entender mejor las orientaciones políticas de TFA y sus valores sobre diversidad mediante el análisis de la influencia política de TFA y su apoyo para mejorar condiciones de trabajo de los maestros de escuelas urbanas, proyectos de mejoras de escuelas, y la organización docente vinculados a movimientos que reclamas una justicia social amplia.Este artigo descreve e é examina as paradoxais melhorias de Teach For America na área de diversidade nos Estados Unidos e seu apoio às políticas que contribuíram para o declínio de professores negros em comunidades urbanas. TFA nega alegações de que sua expansão foi relacionados com o deslocamento desses professores, mas a sua estrutura dual—como programa de certificação alternativa e como um ator político influente através do seu modelo de liderança para a reforma educativas—exige uma análise crítica do impacto dos compromissos políticos de TFA sobre os professores negros. Proponho um modelo para entender melhor as orientações políticas de TFA e os valores sobre noção de diversidade, analisando a influência política do TFA e seu apoio para melhorar as condições dos professores em escolas urbanas, projetos de melhoria das escolas e as organização educacionais ligados a movimentos que estão reivindicando uma justiça social ampla

NEPC Review: A 21st Century School System in the Mile-High City

A report published by the Progressive Policy Institute calls for aggressively closing more public schools and expanding charter schools and charter networks. It highlights reforms adopted by Denver Public Schools, notably a “portfolio model” of school governance, and argues that these reforms positively impacted student test scores. However, causality cannot be determined, and the report did not attempt to isolate the effect of a multitude of reforms—including charters, performance pay, and a new performance framework—from larger complex forces shaping student demographics in the city. Written in a reportorial voice, the only data presented are in the form of simple charts. The lack of conventional statistical analyses thwarts the reader’s understanding. The report also characterizes the reform’s adoption as a “political success” born of a healthily contentious electoral process. In doing so, it downplays the role of outside forces and moneyed groups that influenced the form of reforms, and it disregards missed opportunities for meaningful engagement with community stakeholders. Finally, while the report acknowledges the district’s failure to close achievement gaps and admits limitations with the evaluation system, it never explains how a successful reform could generate a widening gap in performance between student groups by race and class

Teacher Dissent in Neoliberal Times: Counter-Publics and Alternative-Publics in Teacher Activism

In this essay, Terrenda White examines distinct forms of activism by two influential organizations: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Teach for America (TFA). Despite differences between these groups, both have created new discourses and alliances among teachers in the public sphere &mdash; what White calls &ldquo;teacher publics.&rdquo; These new alliances, White argues, can be conceptualized as counter‐publics and alternative‐publics. CTU is a counter‐public because its activities counter the tradition of top‐down insular unionism and embrace &ldquo;social movement unionism&rdquo; where teachers are part of an expansive coalition for social transformation, including contesting city and state bureaucracies for adequate resources and equitable practices on behalf of minoritized communities. TFA has also created expansive coalitions for change, embracing a &ldquo;new professionalism&rdquo; that rejects public contestations with state leaders for resources. As an alternative‐public, TFA engages a network of private philanthropists and business leaders to generate change in public education through market‐based initiatives that challenge bureaucratic control of teachers and schools and that incentivize competition, audit culture, and data‐driven decision‐making. These two cases, because their approaches to educational change are so different, provide fertile ground for White's evaluation of what new forms of activism mean for the democratic goals of public schools.</p

Rethinking “Innovation Schools”: Strengths and Limitations of Autonomy-Based School Improvement Plans in Contexts of Widening Racial Inequality

School districts around the country have launched new reform strategies that are designed to expand autonomy for public schools, often called &ldquo;Innovation Schools.&rdquo; Pursuant to these state- and local-level plans to create more autonomous schools, school leaders are granted greater amounts of authority over school operations such as curriculum, budgeting, and hiring, while districts continue to manage services related to teacher payroll and benefits. The authors explore what supports districts should provide to empower educators in improving education quality, and what role districts should play in the reforms. The brief provides recommendations to further autonomy and democratic participation while ensuring that the responsibility for addressing equity is shared at the district and the school levels.</p

Why Boundaries Matter: A Study of Five Separate and Unequal Long Island School Districts

If ever there were any doubt that Long Island, New York, is home to some of the most fragmented, segregated and unequal school districts in the United States, the January 2009 Long Island Index Report, provides ample evidence that this is indeed the case. The quantifiable inequities across the 125 school districts on Long Island in terms of funding, demographics, and student outcomes highlighted in that report portray how important district boundary lines are, even within relatively small geographic spaces. Building on the Index’s presentation of quantitative data, this report offers a more in‐depth examination of district‐level disparities and what they mean in the lives of students, educators and parents across these boundary lines. Although the spatial separation of students across district boundaries has not been the central ‐‐ or even peripheral –focusof education policymakers for the last three decades, we argue that the social science evidence on the consequences of such separation warrants a renewed consideration of these issues. Indeed, in the current era of education reform, with its strong emphasis on standards, accountabilityandmarket‐based policies, little attention has been paid to the relationship between place and opportunity or the way in which “place” is circumscribed by race/ethnicity and poverty to profoundly affect students’ educational experiences. Furthermore, even as the policy gaze has drifted away from these issues, research evidence is mounting that separate can never be equal in public education because of the tight connection between public schools and their larger contexts. This is particularly the case when those larger contexts are restricted by boundaries that demarcate different property values, tax rates, public revenues, private resources, working conditions, family income and wealth, parental educational levels and political clout. All of these factors, which are both internal and external to the schools themselves, profoundly affect the day‐to‐day experiences of children. As a result, we cannot lose sight of why we care about issues of segregation by race/ethnicity or socio‐economic status, particularly as the school‐age population in this country becomes increasingly diverse and as more African American, Latino and immigrant families migrate from cities to the suburbs. Arguments for turning our backs on the problems of segregation and the inequality it perpetuates and focusing instead on how to educate children to high standards “where they are” – be that in all‐black and Latino schools with high levels of poverty or in predominantly white and/or Asian schools with high concentrations of wealth – resonate with current conceptions of what is “wrong” with public education and how we can fix it. This report attempts to build a bridge between the plethora of data documenting the high degree of segregation and inequality in places like Long Island and our nation’s collective understanding of the “problems” facing public education today. We do this by bringing the voices of more than 75 Long Islanders into the discussion and dialogue about public education and what it looks and feels like across school district dividing lines of race, ethnicity, and class. What we hear in these voices – whether they are privileged, affluent white students in a low‐needs district or educators struggling to provide an “adequate” education for the poorest students of color in a high‐needs district – is how the separateness defines them and their educational opportunities. We have learned that school district boundaries in places like Long Island matter a great deal to the students and educators who toil within them each day and to the parents and other property owners who purchase homes in a housing market that is partly defined by their existence. The strong relationship between the disparate educational experiences of children whose schools and opportunities are divided by these boundaries and the unequal values of the property their parents purchase is perhaps the single most important challenge to the so‐called American Dream that we can document. The fact that these disparities are so starkly defined by race/ethnicity and social class should give us pause in a country that likes to think of itself as “post‐racial” and “colorblind.” This report documents the multiple ways in which place and race/ethnicity matter in terms of students’ educational opportunities, and how the two combined and intertwined as they are today in districts, schools and classrooms, define students’ and educators’ sense of possibility and self‐worth in a manner unlikely to ever be undone. These deep‐seated messages become ingrained in the students’ identities and in the reputations of their schools, districts and communities – allowing a self‐fulfilling prophecy to play itself out as students matriculate through the educational system with starkly different opportunities, outcomes and connections to higher education. These ingrained differences in identities and reputations, then, become part of the everyday common sense that legitimizes the current fragmented and segregated system. In a vicious cycle, the resulting inequality becomes, for those on the more affluent and privileged side of the divide, the ammunition for their resistance to change the boundaries or even to allow students to cross them. These complex issues are only understood through the kind of qualitative data that this research brings to bear on the subject of school district fragmentation and segregation. Through the eyes of Long Islanders in five disparate school districts we can see these connections and relationships. This analysis, therefore, helps us understand why ‐‐ despite survey data from Long Island showing members of all racial/ethnic groups state that something should be done to break down the barriers across district boundaries ‐‐ those with the most power and privilege preserve the boundaries around their school districts and thus around other districts as well (The Long Island Index, 2009). This form of double consciousness ‐‐ bemoaning inequality while perpetuating the insidious system that maintains it – represents the 21st Century’s version of the American Dilemma (see DuBois, 2003; Myrdal, 1946)

Still Separate, Still Unequal, But Not Always So Suburban : The Changing Natured of Suburban School Districts in the New York Metropolitan Area

Woven throughout the history of the United States is a narrative of human movement. The story of this country, we argue, is a tale of the constant flow of people across geographic spaces—both voluntary and forced immigrations, migrations, and the settlements of villages, city neighborhoods, and suburban communities. Beginning with Native Americans\u27 ancestors who traversed the Bering Straight, movement has been a central, identifying theme of this nation. The flow of several waves of European immigrants onto colonial shores and across the plains and the haulage of millions of Africans via the slave trade redefined the United States demographically and geopolitically, as did the mass migration of freed African Americans from the South to the North and from the farms to the cities in the 20th century. The post- World War II construction of suburbia enabled the European immigrants and their decedents to migrate from the cities to the suburbs en masse, changing not only the character of suburbia but also the cities and ethnic enclaves they left behind. As if choreographed by the federal government, local zoning laws and real estate markets, this flow of whites to the suburbs was synchronized with the arrival of African American migrants into specific and highly contained city neighborhoods. But even the resulting racially segregated pattern of vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities that seemed fairly stable by the late 1970s across most metro areas was subject to change. Beginning in the late 1960s, new waves of immigrants, primarily from Latin America and Asia, entered the urban neighborhoods abandoned by their European immigrant predecessors. By the 1980s, growing numbers of African Americans had begun migrating to the suburbs. And, in the last decade, more Latino and Asian immigrants have chosen suburban communities as their port of entry to the United States. At the same time, whites— particularly affluent and well-educated professionals—are migrating back into cosmopolitan and gentrified city neighborhoods, opting out of increasingly diverse suburbs

Culture, Power, and Pedagogy in Market Driven Times: Embedded Case-Studies of Instructional Approaches Across Four Charter Schools in Harlem, NY

In the midst of market-based school reforms urging choice, competition, and high-stakes production of test scores, the complexities of pedagogy and its relationship to culture, power, and student learning are often overshadowed. While research on teaching in culturally diverse contexts has contributed to the development of inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy (Banks et. al, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Gay, 2000), the fate of these practices in the face of market pressures require critical examination by those concerned with equity in schools serving disadvantaged children (Buras, 2010; Macrine, 2009; Picower, 2011). Based on a year of extensive interviewing with twenty-two instructional leaders across an urban market of charter schools, as well as interviews and participant-observations with twenty-eight teachers in four purposefully selected charter schools, this study explores whether and how school leaders and teachers make sense of competition and student culture as resources for learning in classrooms, particularly in a predominantly low-income, black/African American, and Latino community in New York City. The study also made use of school documents and reports compiled overtime by schools and charter authorizers at the city and state level. Findings indicate that a heterogeneous charter sector of independent charter schools shifted overtime to reflect homogenizing tendencies associated with the rise and concentration of schools managed by an influential bloc of private charter management organizations (CMOs). At the intersection of such shifts were teachers and instructional leaders, many of whom describe 'trading-off' on inclusive and diverse approaches to teaching in an effort to yield more tangible and marketable outcomes in the form of test scores. Case studies in four schools, however, revealed important distinctions, as differently managed schools negotiated differently the degrees to which social and cultural boundaries were formed between schools, students, and the surrounding community in which it operated. These negotiations shaped different approaches to teaching and learning and outlooks on competition. The significance of the study is its negation of a culture-free and/or value-neutral assumption about market policies, primarily by illuminating the tension and impact of such policies on specific pedagogical forms and goals. More importantly, market policies are examined in light of social (re)production theory and the extent to which deregulation disrupts or perpetuates unequal social and cultural relations of power between schools and traditionally marginalized communities