All posts tagged Segregation

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Okay, so leaving aside the fact that Kansas City is apparently not in Kansas anymore, here were a couple of the big ILYBYGTH-themed news stories from last week. We’ve got more about school desegregation, Liberty U seceding, vouchers, and LGBTQ+:

School desegregation plans meet fierce opposition from affluent white and Asian parents, at AP.

I heard a lot of things said during these meetings which sounded almost verbatim like the things that were said in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s to prevent the integration of schools in Richmond and around the country.

New from Falwell: A new plan to secede from Virginia and join West Virginia. At RNS.

“Many counties (in Virginia) are taking a long hard look at escaping the barbaric, totalitarian and corrupt Democratic regime that is trampling on individual rights throughout the state,” Falwell said.

It’s getting harder and harder to oppose full rights for LGBTQ+: Fifth Third Bank announces it will no longer donate to a Florida charter-school program. Why? Because some schools were accused of anti-LGBTQ bias. At FlaPol.

Will anti-LGBTQ conservative outrage follow the anti-evolution pattern? Here at ILYBYGTH.

Larry Cuban: What tech can’t do in classrooms.

no piece of software, portfolio of apps, or learning management system can replace teachers simply because teaching is a helping profession like medicine and psychotherapy. Helping professions are completely dependent upon interactions with patients, clients, and students for success. . . . Designers and entrepreneurs overestimate their product’s power to make change and underestimate the power of organizations to keep things as they are.

Making the case for Espinoza, at L&L.

It is not unreasonable for the Montana Supreme Court to conclude that the state’s scholarship program violates the state’s Blaine Amendment, but there is every reason to conclude that the State’s Blaine Amendment violates the Free Exercise Clause. States should not be able to discriminate on the basis of religion unless they have a compelling reason to do so, and there is certainly no compelling reason in this case.

Our ILYBYGTH position: schools should remain what Americans in the 1800s called “non-sectarian.”
AND: States have not only a right, but a duty to exclude religious schools from tax-funded programs. Here’s why, at ILYBYGTH.

The weird politics of religious discrimination in today’s SCOTUS, at Atlantic.

But for Montana, to hear conservative justices tell it, the sin of religious bigotry is the mark of Cain, a stain that can never be completely washed out. The state’s educational system must be changed at once to atone for the 1889 no-aid provision. In fact, its guilt is so profound that it must revive a defunct school-scholarship program that included religious schools.

The new (old) eugenicism, at AS.

[Bret] Stephens’s line of argument displays a particularly problematic use of science (or at least an appeal to scientific authority) as a tool to justify specious claims. . . . The problems with Stephens’s column go well beyond the questionable scientific merit of a cherry-picked article. Much more troubling is the invocation of science as a neutral arbiter of truths about race and intelligence.

When colleges combine, will non-Christian faculty be purged? At NYT.

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by Adam Laats on February 3, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in ICYMI

Tagged Belmont University, Bret Stephens, Espinoza v Montana, Jerry Falwell Jr., Larry Cuban, LGBTQ, Segregation

Posted by Adam Laats on February 3, 2020

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2020/02/03/i-love-you-but-you-didnt-do-the-reading-157/

From the Archives: Why Chik-fil-A’s LGBTQ Decision Feels a Lot Like Evangelical Anti-Racism

It’s different. I get that. But this week’s furor over Chik-fil-A’s decision to defund anti-LGBTQ Christian groups feels a lot like the debates about race and racism among white evangelicals back in the late 20^th century. This morning, I’d like to share one episode from 1970-71 that feels eerily familiar to this week’s Chik-fil-A story. chik fil a protest

Here’s what we know: The chicken chain is doing great, apparently. Chik-fil-A is now the world’s third biggest fast-food chain, after Starbucks and Micky D’s. But its anti-LGBTQ reputation has limited the chain’s growth. As a result, Chik-fil-A announced this week that it will no longer donate to the Salvation Army or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. They will direct their philanthropy instead to groups with no anti-LGBTQ reputation.

Conservatives have reacted with predictable outrage. As crunchy conservative Rod Dreher put it,

I love Chick-fil-A, but it’s going to be a while before I go there again. This is nothing but gutless surrender.

Former Governor Mike Huckabee agreed, tweeting,

Today, @ChickfilA betrayed loyal customers for $$. I regret believing they would stay true to convictions of founder Truett Cathey. [sic] Sad.

Conservative pundits are not wrong when they complain that moral orthodoxy about LGBTQ rights has changed rapidly. They can claim to agree with President Obama, c. 2008, when he still opposed same-sex marriage. They can insist, like Rod Dreher, that their recently moderate opinions have turned them suddenly into “pariahs.”

That’s all true enough, but from a historical perspective the current LGBTQ debates sound hauntingly familiar. Conservatives won’t relish the comparison, but today’s rapidly shifting mainstream attitudes toward LGBTQ rights feel very similar to shifting racial attitudes after World War II. As I found in the research for Fundamentalist U, evangelical universities scrambled to keep up with those changes.

This morning I’d like to share more of a story that I didn’t have room to include in the book. One episode in particular seems relevant to today’s battle over the moral status of LGBTQ rights among conservative Christians.

The institution was the Moody Bible Institute, the year was 1970, and the moral question was racial segregation. MBI had invited fundamentalist celebrity John R. Rice to be a featured speaker at its annual Founder’s Day celebration. Rice had attracted notoriety recently for supporting the racial segregation at Bob Jones University.

Members of the MBI community protested. As one anonymous letter put it,

Dr. John R. Rice is an acknowledged racist. Earlier this year, he invited Lester Maddox, also a racist, to speak at the Sword of the Lord anniversary. Also, he published in his magazine why Bob Jones University refuses to admit Negroes. By other statements in the article, he showed clearly his racist position. We Do Not Want HIM IN CHICAGO. If you bring him here to speak, we will have one of the biggest demonstrations Chicago has ever seen. We will have all the publicity we need, radio, television, press, plus public demonstration of course every day of the conference, especially when he is going to speak and on the Alumni Day No matter what reason you have for bringing him here, there will be a demonstration by radical groups Let him stay down South with his racist companions. You can get all the police and protection, we are still coming. We are not coming to cause trouble. We are trying to ‘help’ you wipe out racism. We ‘love’ John R Rice too much to allow him to dehumanize himself here. IF you IMMEDIATELY drop his name from the list of speakers, and PUBLICLY declare this IMMEDIATELY, then there will be no demonstration. BUT again if you don’t, we are coming, black and white included.

What did MBI do? After consideration, the administration of William Culbertson agreed. They canceled Rice’s invitation. The manuscript of Culberton’s public statement shows how fraught the decision was. He went over and over the wording, cutting out sections that he thought would be too provocative. The things he cut are telling. Why, for example, might he have cut the phrase “of any kind?” Here’s the next-to-final draft, with edits included:

The Moody Bible Institute has for eighty-five years welcomed young people of all races and nationalities to its tuition-free training in the Bible. Through times of changing social mores the policy has always been to emphasize the salvation from God by which all men who believe are made one in Christ. We have sought, and do seek, to apply the spiritual principles set forth in the Word of God to the practical problems of our culture. We believe that there is nothing in the Bible that forbids interracial relationships of any kind.

In the present period of surging change we are grateful that among our racially mixed student body there seems to be little or no dissent, though some former students recently involved in civil rights activities have felt that we might have taken a more leading role than we have. We are absolutely opposed to injustice and exploitation of any kind. We are dedicated to the proposition that we are debtors to all men.

Just as with Chik-fil-A’s recent decision, MBI’s decision to disinvite a fundamentalist segregationist did not end the matter. The archival files are full of passionate letters in support of Rice and in support of MBI’s decision to disinvite him.

As one alum protested,

In cancelling Dr. Rice from this Conference you have robbed the Founder’s Week guests from great blessings, insulted a great man of God, and lost an opportunity to re-affirm the posture of Moody Bible Institute…[sic ellipsis in original] which by the way is in some question already, and more so now. … Last March, while attending a Pastor’s Conference in Hammond, I had dinner in the sweetshop at Moody. To my surprise the students for the most part were mop-headed and unkept and were hardly what one would think of as Ambassadors of Christ. . . . I know that your action has alienated me, my wife and my church.

Other members of the expansive MBI community celebrated. As one faculty member wrote,

I have never been prouder to be a member of the Moody Bible Institute faculty.

The files in Culbertson’s archives are full of similar pro- and anti- letters about the decision to ban John R. Rice. The controversy proved so heated that MBI ended up canceling its entire Founder’s Day celebration for 1971. There just was no way they could continue without an embarrassingly public dispute about their moral commitment to racial integration.

anti john rice demonstration warning letter

Evangelical anti-racism, c. 1970. Does this smell like today’s Chik-fil-A?

It’s impossible not to hear echoes of the 1970 debate at MBI in today’s debate at Chik-fil-A.

We need to be careful, of course. The history of racism and segregation cannot be simply equated to today’s LGBTQ debates. The process by which evangelical institutions make these decisions, however, seems remarkably similar.

When mainstream moral values change, conservative evangelical institutions have difficult decisions to make. Do they go along with the changes? Do they re-examine their own moral assumptions in the light of changing social mores? Or do they stick to their guns, deciding that traditional ideas about issues such as racism and sexuality are in fact part of their compromise-proof religious commitment?

3 Comments

by Adam Laats on November 19, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in From the Archives, Higher (Power) Education, Schools in Black and White, Teaching Sex and Sexuality

Tagged Chik-Fil-A, John R. Rice, LGBTQ, Mike Huckabee, Moody Bible Institute, Rod Dreher, Segregation

Posted by Adam Laats on November 19, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/11/19/from-the-archives-why-chik-fil-as-lgbtq-decision-feels-a-lot-like-evangelical-anti-racism/

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

From Satan at the polls to Jack London in Alaska–this was a humdinger of a week. Here are a few of the stories that caught our eye:

Ha: From the “Christian Onion.” New poll results say that a majority of conservative evangelicals would vote for Satan, at BB.

A new LifeWay Research poll confirmed Wednesday that a majority of conservative evangelicals would vote for Satan, the Prince of Darkness, should he run for public office as a Republican candidate. . . . “Lucifer? Yeah, I’d vote for him, as long as he claims to be a Republican,” one member of a study focus group said. “He’s got some character flaws, sure—who doesn’t—but we’ve got to remember that ensuring we Christians get some fleeting political power is far more important than whether our chosen candidate does a little soul-devouring on the side.”

More evidence: (Some) liberal parents will fight against school integration, at NYT.

The virulent opposition in an area that its founder once declared to be “color blind” shows that the issue remains deeply divisive among liberals when it comes to their own children.

Not easy: Can you listen to the hard truths from the other side? At The Atlantic.

When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. Who could possibly be proud that they see no humanity at all in the images that science has made so painfully clear? When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody.

Donald Trump Jr. heckled off stage at UCLA…by conservative protesters.

Ohio bill would allow students to be wrong, if their religion said they were right.

if a student submitted biology homework saying the earth is 10,000 years old, as some creationists believe, the teacher cannot dock points.

The rise of Catholic fundamentalism? At RNS.

why not? Since the late 1970s, conservative Catholics and evangelicals have been allies in the culture war that has shaped American partisan politics.

Hong Kong protests turn colleges into citadels, at NYT.

When parents had to choose between integrated schools and bad schools, they chose the bad ones. Memories from white students at “segregation academies,” at Slate.

The stories up so far represent segregation academies as chaotic, understaffed, and underplanned. The point, it’s clear, was not education but separation. Bridget Smith Pieschel, who went to the all-white Winston Academy in Louisville, Mississippi, starting in 1969, reported that at first, there was “no art; no foreign language; no science lab; no band; no chorus” at her school. But, as a child, she said, “I took everything at face value. I believed that my school was ‘better,’ more ‘refined,’ ‘safer.’ ” Alan Huffman, who went to one of the many Southern seg academies founded by the “respectable” white supremacist Citizens’ Councils, remembered that it had a “mix of brilliant and horrible teachers.” “Anyone, it seemed, could get a job teaching in one of its pre-fab classrooms,” he remembered, “including a woman who admonished us for acting up in class by saying, ‘Y’all should be grateful—if it weren’t for teachers like me, y’all would be going to school with n—–s.’ ”

Nikki Haley’s new book doubles down on Trumpism, at The Guardian.

She clearly sees a future in which bigotry and populism will continue to define the Republican brand, and believes that her personal survival requires her to toe the party line as closely as possible.

Jack London’s Alaska gold rush, at Smithsonian.

The inspiration for Buck is the dog on the left.

There are still evangelicals who aren’t “evangelical,” at RNS.

They might be wrong or crazy. But one thing they obviously are not is Trumpy. Tell that to the next person who equates “evangelical” with right-wing, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal and think instead of a certain rabbi from Palestine.

Are students “helots?” One Detroit teacher gets in trouble for comparing students to Greek slaves, at Chalkbeat.

History nerds: Is the new Midway movie any good? History review at HNN.

Military buffs will adore it, but the average person will sit through, liking certain parts very much and frowning at others. . . . Midway is far better than the recent staid and slow Pearl Harbor that starred Ben Affleck. I just wish that Midway was a sturdier historical movie and explained the battle, and that part of World War II, better. Despite its drawbacks, Midway is a rip-roaring military saga and a testament to the men who won it. The Americas are seen as brave and heroic in the film, but so are the Japanese.

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by Adam Laats on November 18, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in ICYMI

Tagged Abortion, catholicism, Creationism, evangelicalism, Hong Kong, integration, Midway, Segregation, teaching slavery

Posted by Adam Laats on November 18, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/11/18/i-love-you-but-you-didnt-do-the-reading-147/

Have Conservatives Already Won the Culture War?

No. No, no, and no. The argument in today’s Washington Post that American conservatives have a “huge, long-term advantage” in our long-simmering culture wars can only work if we water down our definition of “conservatism” to be entirely meaningless. I’m no conservative, but if I were, I would horrified not encouraged by the implications.

Are conservatives winning? No. They often don’t even want to remember what they used to fight for.

David Byler doesn’t want conservatives to panic. He admits conservatives have lost the long-term battles over the definition of marriage, gender, and proper sexuality. But he thinks that conservatives have a huge—ahem—trump card up their sleeves, one that too many of them don’t recognize. As Byler puts it,

Despite the perception that institutions that conservatives hold in high regard — the military, police, the two-parent nuclear family and religion — have taken hits, the public has a high level of trust and attachment to them. And that faith gives conservatives a huge, long-term advantage.

It doesn’t take much of an expert in the history of American conservatism to see the big problem in this argument. Namely, if conservatism today means only a defense of the military, the police, the family in general and religion in general, then it has become a wispy half-memory of what conservatism meant in the recent past.

After all, not very long ago, American conservatives fought for things (and lost) that might seem to today’s conservatives either a fanciful dream or an embarrassing reminder of their real past.

To pull just a few examples from my research into twentieth-century conservatism, twentieth-century conservatives fought for nothing less than evangelical dominance of the public square, forcible racial hierarchy, and total male dominance of political life.

Example #1: In 1922, Kentucky’s legislature debated the nation’s first anti-evolution bill. The bill would have done far more than ban the teaching of evolution from the state’s public schools and universities. A Senate amendment would have forbidden any public library in the state from owning any book that would

directly or indirectly attack or assail or seek to undermine or weaken or destroy the religious beliefs and convictions of the children of Kentucky.

Example #2: In 1928, the conservative leader of the Daughters of the American Revolution explained her vision of the proper role of women in public life. As she put it without apparent irony,

We need some cheer leaders for America; we need some fearless citizens to sit on the side lines and do a little talking in the interest of this country.

Example #3: Jumping to 1960, fundamentalist stalwart Bob Jones Sr. published his thoughts on race and religion. His sermon, “Is Segregation Scriptural?” offered his thoughts on the dilemma of racism among white conservative evangelicals. Did Jones think segregation was a Christian necessity? Short answer, yes. Why? It was not because non-white people were inferior. It was not because they were any less Christian. Nevertheless, Jones insisted,

Wherever we have the races mixed up in large numbers, we have trouble. . . . God never meant for America to be a melting pot to rub out the line between the nations.

What’s the point? The point is NOT that today’s conservatives secretly want to bring back racial segregation, male-only politics, or evangelical control of public institutions. Some of them might think that such things would Make America Great Again, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that many conservatives really want to return America to those old inequities.

The point, rather, is that conservatives have always fought a rear-guard action against cultural change in the United States. In 1960, some religious conservatives wanted to maintain racial segregation as a God-given right. In 1928, some patriotic conservatives wanted to keep women on the side lines, limited to cheering for good political ideas. In 1922, some conservatives hoped to impose a frank theocratic law on their state, banning any books that might challenge evangelical Protestant ideas.

Today’s conservatives are generally fighting for other things, such as reducing abortion rights, restricting LGBTQ rights, and saying “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.” Even on those limited aims, conservatives are losing, just as their predecessors in the twentieth century lost their fights to keep public institutions Christian, to keep politics male, and to keep the races separate.

In order to make a claim that conservatives are winning, David Byler needs to water down conservatism so much that it becomes an awkward stand-in for society as a whole. Yes, conservatives tend to be fonder of the traditional family and of religion in general, but those things are not the province of conservatives alone. Plenty of people who consider themselves progressive also hold family and religion dear. And to say that conservatives are dominant because lots of Americans respect the army and police is almost beyond the need for refutation. Yes, lots of Americans—of all political opinions—respect the army and police. That is not a strength of conservatism but a strength of our society as a whole.

Byler concludes by insisting that “Conservatives have the winning hand. They just don’t know it—and that’s why they might lose.” It’s just not true. Conservatives have always had a losing hand, but they have managed to eke out temporary victories when they have played it well. Long-term conservative victories have come from conservatives’ impressive ability to reshape and reform what it means to be “conservative.”

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by Adam Laats on September 8, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in In the News

Tagged Bob Jones Sr., Conservatism, Creationism, David Byler, Grace Brosseau, Segregation

Posted by Adam Laats on September 8, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/09/08/have-conservatives-already-won-the-culture-war/

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Hot enough for ya? Even in this July heat wave, the interwebs kept cranking out stories about schools and dinosaurs n stuff. Here are some of the top items in this week’s news roundup:

“We Believe in Dinosaurs:” the new radical-creationist documentary is out. A review at LHL.

Lots of talk about Biden, busing, and the 1970s.

Portrait of Biden’s 1970s anti-busing career at NYT.
The history here at ILYBYGTH:
- ) Biden didn’t want to end up the next Kennedy.
- ) The real question isn’t why busing failed, but where it succeeded. The context of school-reform history has lessons.
What did busing do? At Chalkbeat.
Senator Harris was right—busing works. At Salon.
Don’t say “busing” when you mean “integration,” at NYT.

Israel’s minister of education comes out in favor of LGBTQ “conversion” therapy, at Newsweek.

Interview with Elaine Howard Ecklund on the love affair between science & religion, at BBC.

Divinity is out at Liberty U., but pop music is in, including The Jonas Brothers’ dad. At RNS.

The passion we have is not just to train a bunch of people to go into the music industry — or just go into the Christian music industry, for that matter — but to be equipped as musicians that go into the music industry fully equipped to do what they believe God’s called them to do, whether it’s the mainstream market or the faith-based market.

What should an online teacher do when she sees a child being abused on the other side of the planet? At EdSurge.

What do you call yourself when you’re Catholic but you feel evangelical? How about “born-again Catholic”? At RIP.

East Carolina University couldn’t have denied Trump a forum to “send her back” even if they wanted to, at CHE.

Feminist “hate speech:” The gender wars roil academic philosophers, at IHE.

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by Adam Laats on July 22, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in ICYMI

Tagged Answers in Genesis, Busing, Creationism, Jonas Brothers, LGBTQ, Liberty University, Segregation

Posted by Adam Laats on July 22, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/07/22/i-love-you-but-you-didnt-do-the-reading-130/

The Right Historical Question about Busing

Ever since Senator Kamala Harris accused Vice President Joe Biden of cozying up to segregationists, the issue of busing has been back in the headlines. Instead of asking why busing failed or why it worked, the right question should be about where busing worked. The lesson from the twentieth century is clear: When reformers try to use schools to ram through social change, even with the purest of intentions, it won’t work.

What Biden was scared of in 1975:

Vice President Biden’s political problems about busing came about long before Senator Harris’s accusations. Months ago, the Washington Post ran an exposé about Biden’s leading role in the 1970s as an opponent of court-ordered desegregation. Biden 2020 has been forced to defend decisions made by Biden 1975, and it hasn’t been easy.

Since the debate, historians and commentators have skewered the notion that busing did not achieve its aims. As Nikole Hannah-Jones pointed out, the issue was never about busing itself, but about stark racism. The problem was not that busing didn’t work to integrate students of different races and backgrounds, but precisely that it did.

Historically, the politics of school integration are part of a broader pattern of school reform. Whenever reformers have tried to use schools to change society for the better, they have discovered the difficult truth. Namely, whatever the issue—racial integration, socialism, or progressive education—when reformers fail to enroll community support, their efforts at social improvement have been crushed. When they do, however, the results can be surprisingly effective.

In the late 1930s, for example, textbook author Harold Rugg came under fire for his popular textbook series. The series had been adopted by schools nationwide and the books were used by millions of American schoolchildren. As World War II heated up, however, conservative groups such as the America Legion came to believe that the books had a subversive, anti-American intent. The books, conservative critics charged, hoped to transform American society into a socialist state.

Professor Rugg protested that he was no socialist; he claimed a “deep loyalty to the historic American version of the democratic way of life.” Yet he admitted that he really did hope to transform society. In Rugg’s vision, decisions about proper curriculum should not be left in the hands of the ignorant community, but rather decided only by “competent experts” like himself. He dismissed protesters as irrational ignoramuses and their impassioned rallies as mere “Wednesday-evening testimony meetings of Holy Rollers.”

A generation later, a similar textbook controversy roiled Kanawha County, West Virginia. Protesters in 1974 and 1975 worried that a new textbook series derided traditional American values. In part, the protesters were right. As one editor of the books later recalled, he really had hoped the books would inject the “progressive energy” of 1960s radicalism into classrooms nationwide. The books took a “strong stand for pluralism and multicultural expression” that the editors hoped would overthrow the “conventions” of traditional schools and classrooms.

A laudable goal, but like Harold Rugg’s vision of “expert”-centered educational reform, the top-down reformism of the 1970s textbooks failed. Protesters in Kanawha County boycotted their schools; they convinced their Parent-Teacher Association that the new progressive textbooks were “literally full of anti-Americanism, anti-religion, and discrimination.”

The same lessons apply to the history of 1970s school desegregation—“busing”—that Biden and Harris have brought back to the headlines. On one hand, the policy of busing students to mitigate segregation often worked to improve both racial integration and educational outcomes.

On the other, busing policies often met ferocious political backlash from outraged white parents and activists. Most famously, as historian Ron Formisano described so powerfully, in Boston anti-busers rejected the attempts of Judge W. Arthur Garrity to impose more racial equality in schools.

All cities were not Boston, however. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the simple black-and-white politics of busing looked different. When President Reagan trotted out his anti-busing rallying cry in 1984, it fell on deaf ears. Busing, Reagan charged,

takes innocent children out of the neighborhood school and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants, and we found out that it failed.

What Reagan didn’t realize, and many people in today’s revisit to the 1970s busing debates seem to have forgotten as well, was that some white people embraced busing. The crowd in Charlotte met Reagan’s dog-whistles with stony silence, and the next day the Charlotte Observer insisted that the city’s “proudest achievement is its fully integrated public school system.”

White voters hate busing, right? …right?

Certainly, North Carolina was no racial utopia. But the differences between Boston and Charlotte serve as an important reminder of the real question in school segregation and busing. They are reminders that go back long past the 1970s, to Harold Rugg and before.

Whatever the issue, when social reformers hope to use schools to effect wide-ranging improvements in society, they can only hope to succeed if they enlist the support of at least a portion of the local community. Harold Rugg did not realize that people outside his college would not simply cede control of their textbooks to his “expert” hands. Protesters in West Virginia were not willing to accept books thrust upon them by editors fueled by the “progressive energy” of the radical 1960s.

The successes of busing, too, were not limited to improvements in integration and educational success. When integrationists managed to line up local support, as with Charlotte’s Democratic Party, busing also achieved significant political support. When they didn’t, as with Boston’s aggrieved segregationists, busing failed.

4 Comments

by Adam Laats on July 16, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in In the News, school reform, Schools in Black and White

Tagged Busing, Harold Rugg, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kanawha County, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ronald Reagan, Segregation

Posted by Adam Laats on July 16, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/07/16/the-right-historical-question-about-busing/

The Only Percentage that Matters in Charter-School Politics

It seems like it should be a pretty straightforward equation, right? If charter schools are better for more students, they should be supported. If not, not. As today’s battle in California makes clear, though, those numbers and calculations are never as simple as they appear. For one thing, there has always been a huge hidden absolute value in educational politics that wonks tend to ignore. By paying attention to that hidden number, politicians will have a clearer path forward.

Justice, yes. But how?

The racial politics of charter schools in California has gotten confusing. A basket of bills to limit charter growth has stalled. They seemed like a slam dunk at first. They were supported by the state NAACP and introduced by an influential member of the state’s California Legislative Black Caucus. Recently, however, three local NAACP chapters came out against the charter limits.

It has become extremely unclear if the African-American community in California supports or opposes charter expansion. Why?

Both sides can point to powerful statistics. African-American leaders who oppose charter expansion can cite the 2016 national NAACP anti-charter resolution. Charter schools, the NAACP charged, lack transparency; they divert funds from public schools; they expel and suspend African-American students at unfair rates; and they promote a

de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.

For their part, charter supporters can point to their own powerful data. From Brookings, for example:

there is a subset of charter schools serving overwhelmingly black and poor students in large cities using a so-called “no excuses” education model in which students have experienced dramatically higher achievement than comparable students attending regular public schools.

And from CREDO at Stanford:

Black charter students in poverty have 36 more days of learning in reading and 43 more days of learning in math than their counterparts in TPS [Traditional Public Schools].

So are charter schools good for low-income African-American and Latinx kids or not?

The numbers and calculations can mask the most important statistic of all. Parents don’t wonder if 15% of local students will attend charters or public schools. They don’t fret if only 72% of children in their district are meeting reading or math goals, or if 81% of students are graduating from high school. No, for families dealing with crappy local schools, there is only one percentage to worry about: What kind of education is available for 100% of my kid?

This hidden number is the most important and explosive educational statistic of all. People who support charter expansion can’t wait for someday. They can’t trust sclerotic school boards to change things overnight. They need a better school today, and they need it to have room for their kids.

This 100%ism explains why support for charter schools differs by race among members of the Democratic Party. White Democrats tend to oppose charters at higher rates than do African-Americans or Latinx ones. Moreover, support for charters has dropped fast among white Democrats, but not among non-whites. This fact led the editors of the Washington Post mistakenly to chide leading 2020 Democratic politicians to support more charters. As the WaPo editors concluded,

We hope candidates keep in mind the polls that consistently show support for charters among black and Hispanic voters. It’s easy to oppose charters if you are well-off and live in a suburb with good schools. We hope we will also hear from candidates who know about the value of charters from their experiences — including as a mayor who used them to begin to turn around a failing district, as a partner in an administration that promoted charters, as a schools superintendent who made a place for charters.

There’s a better way.

Here at ILYBYGTH, we agree wholeheartedly with parents’ rights to demand better public schools today, not someday. We support students’ rights to have a high-quality education in their own neighborhoods, surrounded by their friends and support networks. Most of all, we agree with the idea of doing what works to help students become better people and better scholars, instead of merely doing what has always been done before.

But none of that means we should ignore the equally desperate problems of charter schools. School districts have other options besides charters to turn to. Most notably, magnet and specialty programs within traditional public-school districts can accomplish the same things as charter schools, while still allowing transparency and public oversight over the schools and without draining funding from the public-school system.

There is no simple answer to racism, segregation, and poverty. But taking money out of the public-school system is not the way to start. Instead, politicians need to remain aware of the most important statistic in education and find a way to provide families with good schools right now for 100% of their kids. They just don’t need to do it with charters alone.

2 Comments

by Adam Laats on June 4, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in In the News, school reform, Schools in Black and White

Tagged California, Charter Schools, NAACP, Racism, Segregation

Posted by Adam Laats on June 4, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/06/04/the-only-percentage-that-matters-in-charter-school-politics/

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Your humble editor spent most of the week buried in the NSB, but a few stories still caught our attention:

White evangelicals still love The Donald, at PRC.

How has religion contributed to political polarization? An interview with Peter Wehner and Melissa Rogers at R&P.

What I think is much more disturbing is this enthusiastic embrace of Trump. That I think is inexcusable. Because Christians, above all, ought to be people who understand that they’re citizens of a different city. There ought to be some distance from politics and the ability to speak truth to power. It’s fine for Christians to praise particular court appointments and particular policies, but when Trump engages in an effort to annihilate truth, when he engages in dehumanizing tactics, when he is cruel, when he unleashes his cascade of lies, they ought to speak to that too and unfortunately a lot of prominent white evangelical Christians don’t.

Another lawsuit: Christian parents accused of banning yoga in GA public school.

The long background of tussle over yoga in public schools, here at ILYBYGTH.

What’s wrong with high-stakes testing? They warp the system, at Curmudgucation.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Mayor deBlasio condemns racial segregation in elite NYC high schools, at Chalkbeat.

3 Comments

by Adam Laats on March 25, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in ICYMI

Tagged evangelicalism, High-stakes Testing, Segregation, Trump, Yoga

Posted by Adam Laats on March 25, 2019

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2019/03/25/i-love-you-but-you-didnt-do-the-reading-113/

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

A chock-full week in evangelical higher ed with a heavy dose of teachers’ strikes. Thanks to everyone who sent in stories and tips:

Our lead story: The Master’s University struggles with the worst legacy of Fundamentalist U: The personality cult. At CHE.

a group of reviewers acknowledged that Master’s is doing some important things right. Under MacArthur, they said, the institution has engendered deep loyalty from faculty, students, and donors. At the same time, the report depicted Master’s as an accreditor’s nightmare: an insular and oppressive institution where loyalty to the president and his church has sometimes trumped both academic and financial concerns.

Not quirk, not an idiosyncrasy. TMUS’s problems are part of the long legacy of the dilemma of evangelical higher ed. Here at ILYBYGTH.

Get thee behind me, accreditors.

How does a “Bible Belt Ivy” thrive? College of the Ozarks wows the number-crunchers at Forbes.

From former CofO faculty at Righting America: What makes the College of the Ozarks unique among evangelical institutions? “…the degree to which its Christian commitments are subsumed in a militaristic patriotism.”
How do hard-line institutions like CofO survive? Not in spite of their extremism, but because of it. Here at ILYBYGTH.
What was CofO like before it went down the “Christian Nationalist” road? At RA.

In remembrance of Pearl Harbor:

Are college faculty really as radical as conservatives think? Ed Burmila says not even close, at UW. HT: MM.

The American right is so heavily invested in the fantasy of radical leftist professors that no evidence can convince them otherwise. . . . If you have considerable time on your hands and wish to see just what kind of leftists run universities, go to the graduate school and propose unionizing Research Assistants, Teaching Assistants, and other itinerant quasi-employees. You’ll discover quickly that senior faculty — the same ones who can’t wait to show you their picture with Tom Hayden or some other talisman of progressive cred — turn into staunch capitalists in a hurry.

Not funny. Columbia students shut down comedian, at IHE.

Bolsonaro’s educational culture war in Brazil, at the Economist.

A new wrinkle: Culture war via Facebook. Here at ILYBYGTH.

Tech and reform: Why does every generation think its old ideas are new? By Larry Cuban.

The first teacher strike at a charter school. What will it portend? At NYT.

…the wheel of “reform” spins back around…

Liberty U loves Trump, and hires a football coach with a record of hiring prostitutes, at ESPN.

The key to de-segregation? Minnesota’s new reform at Slate. HT: CC.

single-family zoning proved as effective at segregating northern neighborhoods (and their schools) as Jim Crow laws had in the South.

The author of one of the best books about the 1920s KKK explains the complicated history at NPR.

How can we teach about painful historical topics? How about one person’s story at a time, at The Atlantic.

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by Adam Laats on December 10, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in ICYMI

Tagged Bolsonaro, College of the Ozarks, evangelical higher education, History education, Ku Klux Klan, Liberty University, Pearl Harbor, Segregation, Teacher strikes, The Masters University

Posted by Adam Laats on December 10, 2018

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2018/12/10/i-love-you-but-you-didnt-do-the-reading-99/

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

The ILYBYGTH International offices shut down last week for the Thanksgiving holiday, but the rest of the world kept spinning. Here are some of the stories that we missed:

Something new, nothing blue: Daniel K. Williams on the fact that rural white voters nationwide have united behind the GOP, at HNN.

Progressive women: Want to convince Trump voters to see things your way? It’s harder than you think, at The Nation.

Just as you don’t want to be the obedient wife of some porn-addicted Christian bully, they don’t want to be a slutty baby-killer like you.

Neighborhoods integrate, but schools stay segregated. Why? At Chalkbeat.

What is life like in a Chinese re-education camp? At NPR.

What do evangelicals need to read Revelation right? Imagination, says Scot McKnight.

This Book of Revelation sets afire the imagination and should be turning us off to literal pictures. . . . Revelation was written for imaginations not for sketch artists.

Lessons from Watergate: Does a Blue House spell the end of Trumpism? At the Atlantic.