school reform movement and the education of African American youth, The

Journal of Negro Education, The, Fall 2000 by Edwards, Ralph, Gonsalves, Lisa M, Willie, Charles V

This special issue of the Journal of Negro Education examines how the current School Reform Movement is meeting and failing to meet the educational needs of African American youth. Such an examination is necessary, we believe, because as a national phenomenon that importantly shapes the lives of Black children, the School Reform Movement itself is being shaped by networks of predominately White business, legislative, and educational elites. And while it is true that, under this leadership, schools now seem to be focusing more on instruction than they did in the past, the instructional frameworks they employ are often incompatible with Black cultural and pedagogical traditions, as several articles in this issue will illuminate. As one consequence of this fact, the academic performance of African American students continues to lag behind that of their White counterparts, at least by the measure of standardized tests, which seems the only measure the school reform oligarchy truly accepts.

Let us leave aside for the moment the limitations and biases inherent in standardized tests, and also their utility for stigmatizing disadvantaged populations to better justify the inequities visited upon them. Beyond these considerations, high-stakes testing functions as an integral component of the de-personalized, technocratic school reform paradigm. Other elements of this paradigm include the imposition of so-called "tough" curriculum standards, more attention to student assessment data than to pedagogy or to students themselves, and various forms of punishment (e.g., grade retention, diploma denial) against students who fail to perform satisfactorily on state examinations.

In this educational climate, the principle of equity receives little more than rhetorical attention. Consider, as an example, the matter of teacher quality. If it is only fair to judge students by the same performance standards, is there not also the strongest obligation to provide them with equal opportunities to meet those standards? Indeed, given the critical connection, which Linda Darling-Hammond discusses in this volume, between teacher quality and how well students learn, would not true fairness require that students at educational risk be taught by the most qualified, rather than the least qualified teachers-- the latter comprising a disproportionately high percentage of the teaching forces in most urban areas? To our knowledge, the question of teacher equity across diverse socioeconomic populations is not even a serious item on the school reform agenda.

Therefore, while we support the increased attention schools now seem to be giving to instruction, as African American educators, the editors of this issue find the current approach to school reform seriously flawed in at least two respects. First, it has failed either to address, or, in some cases, to even recognize serious inequities in the distribution of both material and human resources among diverse student populations. As a result, students in greatest educational need (especially urban students of color) are being condemned to the same fatal educational disadvantages to which they have been subjected for as long as we can remember. Secondly, the school reform movement has imposed a technocratic, de-personalized, and unnecessarily punitive instructional framework on the process of education, thus suppressing the humane and relational approaches to learning that are traditional within the African American educational, cultural, and social experience.

It is this tradition of humane and relational educational approaches that emerges as the central theme of the articles contained in these pages. Within that tradition, educational processes, whatever they happen to be, rest upon deeper, more fundamental, human principles. These include confidence, trust, a sense of community, and high expectations for success among teachers, both for their students as learners and of themselves as nurturers of the priceless human potential they perceive in their students.

The thematic tone for this perspective is clearly set in Professor Charles Willie's article titled, "Confidence, Trust, and Respect: The Preeminent Goals of Educational Reform." In discussing the reciprocal principles of confidence and trust, Professor Willie points out that, "It is because teachers evidence confidence in their students that students risk trusting their teachers. The same may be said of children and their parents and of their relationships with other adults." Speaking explicitly about trust, Dr. Willie observes that, "Trust is based on reliable evidence that the other accepts one as one is before attempting to initiate changes in behavior, that the other respects one's whole being and is interested in one beyond a specific utilitarian purpose." This last point deserves special attention in a contemporary global economy that tends to value profits over people and where even children are often regarded mainly as future instruments of production.