Education

OP-ED: Black Future Month: The Need for Black Teachers

Published

10 years ago

February 12, 2015

By Kimberly Mayfield-Lynch and Kitty Kelly Epstein

American schools need Black teachers. There is considerable documented evidence that Black students do better when they have more African-American teachers.

White and Latino and Asian kids also benefit from learning to respect the leadership and wisdom of the Black adults who teach them. Teachers of all ethnicities learn cultural competence by working with each other.

Furthermore, because teaching is a stable job with benefits, economic justice demands that it be available to local residents whose communities suffer from the highest unemployment and the lowest income levels.

American schools also need Latino, Asian, and indigenous teachers, and we will be discussing the specific needs and barriers that face these communities in a follow-up column. Seventy-three percent of students and only 29 percent of teachers come from non-Anglo groups

The educational system makes it difficult for Black and other non-Anglo adults to enter the field.

Policy makers know very well that standardized tests have always operated to the detriment of people of color, ever since they were first created by Eugenics advocate Lewis Terman.

In fact the National Teacher Exam (NTE) was specifically used in Southern states to keep Black teachers out of the classroom in the wake of desegregation (*See reference below) In quiet circles and backrooms the test was referred to as the Negro Teacher Eliminator. The current version of the NTE is the CSET (California Subject Matter Exam Test).

State and federal governments have added several other forms of standardized testing that are required of every prospective teacher.

In addition, new teachers are generally required to carry out unpaid student teaching, and this is an overwhelming financial burden for many Black families, given the racial wealth gap.

Oakland has historically done more than most districts to remedy this problem and break down these barriers.

In the early 1990s, the school board led by President Sylvester Hodges frequently asked staff for reports on hiring by ethnicity. In the late 1990s, the district created the Oakland Partnership Program, which recruited, supported and prepared many of the district’s best teacher-leaders and administrators, including Keith Brown who now serves on the OEA Board; Mia Settles, Kyla Johnson, and many others in the district administration and schools.

A few years later, the Effective Teachers for Oakland Task Force, organized by then Mayor Ron Dellums and led by Dr. Mayfield-Lynch, recommended the creation of programs to diversify the teaching force.

The district accepted this recommendation, and hired Dr. Rachelle Rogers-Ard to lead Teach Tomorrow in Oakland (TTO), a program that has become a national beacon for effective teacher recruitment and retention.

Education Week and the Center for American Progress have both extolled the diversity and quality of the program.

Four elements make the program especially effective at recruiting and retaining diverse teachers.

First, because the programs recruits local residents and the support is intensive, three-quarters of TTO teachers have been retained over five years. This is exceptional, given the national statistic that half of all teachers quit within five years.

Second, an element of the selection process involves seeing the prospective teacher work with young people.

Third, the support system is intimate and culturally competent. People who need help with finishing required tests get both hand-holding, and rigorous instruction The new teachers join as cohorts, are celebrated for their work and have specific professional development targeted to their needs.

Finally, the program has the beautiful mix of connection and autonomy, which makes school district programs work. Like the African-American Male Achievement Project, TTO is part of the district, but it also has some autonomy and self-direction.

The small cost of running TTO is more than compensated by the fact that it eliminates some of the financial and programmatic cost of constant teacher turnover.

(*Wayne Urban in Essays in Twentieth Century Southern Education: Exceptionalism and Its Limits (1998) p. 188).

Dr. Kimberly Mayfield-Lynch is chair of the Education Department at Holy Names University; a former Oakland teacher; and the parent of an Oakland student.

Dr. Kitty Kelly Epstein is host of the radio program Education Today on KPFA FM and author of “A Different View of Urban Schools: Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory and Unexplored Realities” (2012) Peter Lang.

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Activism

LIVE! — TOWN HALL ON RACISM AND ITS IMPACT — THURS. 11.14.24 5PM PST

Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST

Published

2 weeks ago

November 12, 2024

Oakland Post

Discussion Topics:
• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
• What trends are you seeing concerning Racism? Is it more covert or overt?
• What are the top 5 issues resulting from racism in our communities?
• How do racial and other types of discrimination impact local communities?
• What are the most effective ways our community can combat racism and hate?

Your questions and comments will be shared LIVE with the moderators and viewers during the broadcast.

STREAMED LIVE!
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/PostNewsGroup
YOUTUBE: youtube.com/blackpressusatv
X: twitter.com/blackpressusa

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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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California Black Media

On Your November Ballot: Prop 2 Seeks to Modernize Public Education Facilities

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities. If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (Courtesy Photo)

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities.

If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Supporters argue that the money is critical for making safety improvements in schools, as well as modernizing science labs, performing arts spaces and kindergarten classrooms. School districts in lower-income areas have no other way to pay for these improvements.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38% of students attend schools that don’t meet the state’s minimum safety standards. The research shows that schools with sub-standard facilities tend to have students with lower attendance rates, lower morale and lower overall academic performance.

California Black Media spoke with a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson on why she believes it should be a YES vote on Prop 2.

“Measure US, Los Angeles Unified’s Local Public Schools Safety and Upgrades Measure on the November ballot would provide $9 billion to upgrade Los Angeles public schools for safety and 21st century student learning and college and career preparedness. The average annual cost to property owners is estimated at 2.5 cents per $100 of assessed (not market) property value. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education adopted a Resolution on October 22 to support Los Angeles Unified’s Measure US, and State Propositions 2 and 4,” the spokesperson said.

Opponents argue that the state should include school repairs in its regular budget instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. Opponents also argue that the proposition would not directly impact students. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is on record as one of the organizations opposing the proposition.

“Proposition 2 is $10 billion of bonds, new state debt, to pay for school facilities. It is almost certain to result in higher property tax bills, because school districts must provide a ‘local match’ of funds in order to receive money from the Prop. 2 state bonds. That will lead to districts issuing new local school bonds, which are paid for by adding new charges to property tax bills,” said Jarvis.

Opponents also have voiced concerns about what they view as an inequitable distribution of funds. They believe that lower-income school districts should receive a greater share of the state’s sliding scale for matching funds.

“Enrollment is declining in both K-12 district schools and community colleges and the declines are projected to continue. But Proposition 2 commits California to pay an estimated $18 billion, including interest, for school buildings that may not even be necessary. Vote no on proposition 2.”

A “yes” vote gives approval to the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

A “no” vote will prohibit the state from issuing $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.