A High School Education and College Degree All in One

A High School Education and College Degree All in One
By Abby Ellin

Chigozie Okorie likes to say that he’s the “high school student who never left high school.” He’s kidding, sort of: Not only did Mr. Okorie graduate from high school, he also collected an associate degree and a full-time job at IBM within four years. And he’s now studying communications at Baruch College and expects to graduate next year.

Not bad for someone who’s not even 20.

No one is more surprised than he. “When you say things out loud it becomes so much more shocking,” said Mr. Okorie, who grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. “I say it in my head, but it doesn’t impact me unless I say it around other people: ‘Wow, I’m going to graduate within a year with a bachelor’s and it only took me how many years?’”

Mr. Okorie’s job as a program associate in education at IBM requires him to spend much of his day at his alma mater, Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-Tech, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. P-Tech was started in 2011 as a partnership between the New York City Department of Education, the New York City College of Technology and IBM. It is a six-year program that gives students from lower-income backgrounds the chance to earn a high school diploma along with a cost-free associate degree in a STEM field. Some, like Mr. Okorie, do it in even less time.

“The question was, how do you better connect students with the future of work and create a seamless pathway for them to enroll in college?” said Rashid Davis, the founding principal of Brooklyn P-Tech. “When we started, more than 70 percent of students entering the City University of New York were graduates from the New York City Department of Education. However, more than 70 percent of those students needed remediation — meaning, they’re not completing a two-year degree in real two-year time. So the thought was, if you have this public-private partnership, could an early start lead to better outcomes?”

P-Tech’s mission is to do just that. During their time at P-Tech, students are paired with a professional mentor and are eligible for a paid internship at IBM. (Mr. Okorie helps run the mentorship program). On graduation, many go on to four-year colleges; others take full-time jobs at IBM, although they’re not required to.

“We’re not preparing kids for jobs necessarily at IBM, we’re preparing them for jobs in the IT industry,” said Grace Suh, vice president for IBM Education. “We’d love them to come work at IBM, but the idea is that we’re giving them the skills they require to do whatever kind of job and work in whatever place — whether it’s IBM or a start-up.””

So far, 110 schools in eight states and Australia, Morocco, and Taiwan fall under the P-Tech umbrella; California, Colombia and Singapore are set to open schools soon. More than 500 industry partners and 77 community colleges also participate.

P-Tech is filling a necessary void. According to June 2018 data from the Federal Reserve, American students and their families carry more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. A Brookings study found that nearly 40 percent of student borrowers may default on their student loans by 2023.

P-Tech students graduate with no debt. 

What’s more, college graduation rates among low-income students haven’t changed very much in 40 years. A 2016 report by the Pell Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy noted that the percentage of students from the poorest families who had gotten college degrees was 6 percent in 1970. By 2013, that number had increased only to 9 percent. And only 6 percent of college graduates from low-income, minority urban schools completed a STEM degree within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

Yet dual-enrollment programs like P-Tech, in which high school students take college or university courses, have been found to help students complete college.

“It’s not enough just to say ‘free college,’” Mr. Davis said. “There’s free high school across the country, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is finishing with the skills they need to be prepared to move on. So it really is the industry involved that actually can say ‘We know that students need more research skills, we know that students really need to know how to present projects, make an argument.’ That makes a difference when they’re trying to get a job.”

To the students at P-Tech, Mr. Davis is somewhat of a rock star. Mr. Okorie chose P-Tech — there are no required entrance exams — after attending a high school fair with a friend. After the friend met Mr. Davis, he excitedly told Mr. Okorie about him. “He said, ‘There’s this guy with crazy long dreads and he’s wearing these super cool yellow sneakers and he’s telling me I can get a job at IBM and an associate degree at the same time,’” Mr. Okorie recalled with a laugh. “Once he told me that and I spoke to Mr. Davis, they sold me.”

But beyond learning what they do want to do, P-Tech students learn what they don’t want to do.

Morsaline Mozahid, 17, will graduate from P-Tech in December with his associate degree. He thought he wanted to have a career as a video game designer, but after taking a computer and coding class at P-Tech he realized that he “kind of hated it.”

“It was boring for me,” he said.

He’s grateful to P-Tech for giving him the chance to discover this sooner rather than later and hopes to study medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Otherwise, he said, “I would have spent a year in college trying to figure it out.”

RAISING STUDENT PERFORMANCE THE RIGHT WAY CAN GOOD TEACHING BE TAUGHT?

Can Good Teaching Be Taught?
BY SARA MOSLE SEPT. 6, 2018

Cynthia Gunner is not easily daunted, but on an October afternoon in 2016, she was feeling especially discouraged. Gunner, 47, is a career educator who has worked for the Atlanta Public Schools for nearly 20 years, always in segregated neighborhood schools that primarily serve lowincome students on the city’s predominantly black southwest side.

Gunner got her start at Peyton Forest Elementary, a K-5 school where she completed her student teaching in the late 1990s and later taught fourth and fifth grades through the mid-2000s. Stints at other schools followed — as a classroom teacher, a literacy specialist and an assistant principal. And as of that fall, she was back at Peyton Forest as a first-time principal, a promotion that felt like a homecoming.

In 2009 and 2010, the Atlanta school system endured a cheating scandal that involved more than 40 schools. That turbulent time had begun to feel thankfully distant. But the goal of increasing student achievement remained. High-poverty, segregated neighborhood schools like Peyton Forest have, on average, low reading and math scores. In 2015, it ranked in the bottom 10 percent of Georgia public schools, which were then being targeted for potential state takeover, and had earned an F on the state’s annual report card. As a result, Gunner and her teachers were under intense pressure to increase scores. That afternoon, Gunner was visiting teachers’ classrooms, as she did most days, and was struck by the dispiriting reality of how many of the school’s roughly three dozen teachers were struggling.

Although most of them had taught for three or more years, several of the veterans were new to the building. Over the summer, Gunner scrambled to fill multiple openings, especially in third through fifth grade, which were subject to state testing and particularly acute scrutiny. One new hire, for a fourth-grade class, was Bianca McNeal, who grew up in southwest Atlanta and graduated from college in Savannah, where she was still living just the previous December. Gunner conducted the interview by Skype, as principals often have to, and was concerned about McNeal’s inexperience  — she was only 24 — but hoped, given her background, that she might have a rapport with students. “I’m going to take a chance on you,” she told the teacher.

Now Gunner, an imposing presence with a warm laugh, was turning from desk to desk in the back of McNeal’s classroom two months into the school year, kidding with students. She accused one of “throwing” her “under the bus” when he revealed her assistance on some work, prompting a rare laugh from McNeal, who with sober dutifulness was walking her students through a math problem. “So, the question,” McNeal said haltingly, “is how many students from each school will be inside the auditorium. We already have 140 and 110.”

“Her voice used to put me to sleep,” Gunner said as she exited the room, referring to the start of school. But she wasn’t being unkind; she was noting McNeal’s improvement. She was speaking in less of a monotone, and her lesson was better than several others Gunner witnessed earlier in the day during the school’s two-hour “literacy block.” Gunner had been dismayed by the absence of books, reading or sustained engagement with texts of any kind in several classrooms, where teachers were devoting inordinate amounts of time to isolated skills, such as a nearly half-hour lecture in one class on the prefix “re.” “Our children can’t read, but hardly any reading is happening,” she groaned.

In the hallways between classes, she’d put a hand against a wall to brace herself, to pantomime her suffering at what she was witnessing, or give an exaggerated squint, to indicate her bafflement or incredulity. Such humor, often self-deprecating, was how she kept her spirits up and cheered those around her. But her agony for students was real. Gunner was particularly discouraged after sitting in on one class where the teacher had gathered students around a blue PowerPoint with dense definitions of “subject” and “predicate,” apparently lifted from a teacher’s manual or curriculum guide, which she was trying to impose on first graders still struggling with deciphering words like “that” and “hat.”

There were other challenges. One third-grade class still had a permanent substitute, and two other teachers, Gunner believed, were on the verge of quitting. Most of all, Gunner worried about her students, most of whom lived in four low-income apartment complexes, which saw a lot of transiency. Thirty-seven percent of the school’s students arrived or left midyear. The day before, a family showed up looking to enroll and was so poor that both the adults and children were barefoot and hoping for a free school lunch as much as classroom seats. When a school-board member asked Gunner at a district event early in the year what she needed as a new principal, Gunner immediately said a washer and dryer, so she could wash the clothes that many students wore day after day. Many students had experienced trauma — the violent death of a loved one or homelessness or physical, sexual or verbal abuse — and arrived in the mornings in emotional distress, easily dissolving into tears or erupting in fury. Over long weekends, students sometimes went untended or had little to eat, which made returning to school both welcome and difficult. Yet the school had only one full-time social worker and a counselor for more than 450 children.

Still, there were bright spots, as there were every day. One teacher had led a lively discussion on the differences between a folk tale and a fable before students read a story about a chipmunk that lost its stripes. And there was always the marvelous Ericka Fluellen, who had been teaching at the school for six years and who could keep several centers, where students were reading or writing independently, in motion in her third-grade class, while working effectively with a small group of students at her desk. What Gunner really needed, she thought, was more Ms. Fluellens. But teachers like that were always in short supply and weren’t exactly beating down the door to work at Peyton Forest. So part of Gunner’s job was to help the teachers she already had to improve — and to do so without igniting a revolt. schools employ 3.2 million full-time teachers, more than the number of lawyers, physicians and engineers in the United States combined. Because the job is demanding and pay is low compared with other professions requiring a college degree, finding effective teachers,  retaining them and helping those who need to get better is a never-ending challenge.

Yet starting in 2002, the federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind established guidelines for holding schools accountable for student scores on state tests, closed schools deemed ineffective and expanded the nation’s charter-school sector. A largely untested series of assumptions about teaching and its ability to increase student achievement began to drive education policy: that the best way to advance student outcomes was to increase teacher effectiveness, and that the way to do that was to hold teachers individually responsible for student performance on state tests, which in turn would ensure teachers found the means and motivation to improve. And nowhere, perhaps, did this idea blast off more quickly, rise as far and fall as hard and as fast as it did in Atlanta.

District officials aggressively pushed this reform agenda. Educators who didn’t meet the law’s ever-rising bar were fired or pushed out. And then test scores soared. Low-performing schools suddenly saw double-digit gains year after year. One school’s math scores jumped over 60 percentage points between 2005 and 2006. Philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation rushed to invest in Atlanta’s miracle.

As the city soon discovered and the country learned only belatedly, however, the belief that simply setting ambitious targets would catapult 100 percent of American students to rigorous, grade-level proficiency by 2014 — the original goal of No Child Left Behind — was always unfounded. Starting in 2008, the city’s schools came under scrutiny from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, followed by a state probe assisted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The inquiries determined that some teachers and administrators in the school system, their livelihoods on the line, coached students during the 2009 test or tampered with students’ answers in response to a toxic “culture of fear” and retaliation in the district. More than 150 people who worked in or oversaw Atlanta’s schools, including Peyton Forest, were eventually implicated in the cheating and lost their jobs or voluntarily left.

“It was ugly and horrible for everyone whether you were accused of cheating or not,” says Gayle Burnett, who worked in the district’s central office at the time and is now executive director of the district’s office of innovation. “You were hearing horror stories about people being intimidated. You were crushed by what people were admitting they had done.”

Yet many teachers had also been put in a terrible bind. While teacher effectiveness may be the most salient in-school factor contributing to student academic outcomes, it contributes a relatively small slice — no more than 14 percent, according to a recent RAND Corporation analysis of teacher effectiveness — to the overall picture. A far bigger wedge is influenced by out-of-school variables over which teachers have little control: family educational background, the effects of poverty or segregation on children, exposure to stress from gun violence or abuse and how often students change schools, owing to homelessness or other upheavals.

Under No Child Left Behind, new models for rapidly increasing student achievement at high-poverty, segregated neighborhood public schools like Peyton Forest were supposed to emerge, but few did. Success stories existed, but they almost invariably involved changing the population of students within those schools: either through greater integration in the case of traditional districts or by opening up charter schools that attracted an entirely new set of students through a lottery system. By contrast, turnarounds of traditional neighborhood schools were often considered so difficult that almost no charter groups were willing to take on the assignment, and among those that did nationally, very few succeeded in increasing scores.

Prosecutors in Atlanta indicted 35 people on racketeering, a federal charge usually associated with drug trafficking or organized crime. Most of the defendants pleaded guilty, but 12 people stood trial for the supposed conspiracy, and in April 2015, all but one of them were convicted. The sentences were jaw-dropping — 20 years, in some cases, with seven to serve — even though the recipients, all of them black in the city’s majority-black school system, were first-time offenders. Two weeks later, the judge, apparently recognizing that the terms were insupportable, reduced the most severe prison sentences to three years, punishments that were still uncommonly harsh.

An interim superintendent was appointed to clean house. “He fired everyone who was a director or above in the instructional end of the central office,” Burnett says, which also served to drain the district of institutional memory. “Nobody knew what we were doing or why,” she says of the years immediately following. Most teachers hadn’t cheated. “We had huge dips in performance after the state came in, but it didn’t fall all the way back — all of it wasn’t fake,” she says. “But no one believed anything good happened before.” For decades, would-be school reformers had argued that almost anything would be better than the status quo. But there was something worse than no reform, it turned out: unsuccessful reform, which made finding the will, resources and trust for better, future change that much harder.

This was the landscape Meria Carstarphen stepped into when she arrived in Atlanta in 2014 as the first permanent schools superintendent since 2011. She introduced a new “turnaround” strategy, partnering with organizations including two local charter operators that were willing to forgo a lottery to operate traditional neighborhood schools, and a small nonprofit based in upstate New York called the Rensselaerville Institute. Through its School Turnaround program, Rensselaerville specializes in providing leadership training to principals to help them become masters at recognizing and teaching good instruction in their schools.

Gunner was assigned a Rensselaerville specialist named Mildred Toliver, who would work with her over the next two years. At the heart of Rensselaerville’s approach, which is similar to other programs for beleaguered neighborhood schools in urban districts, was a belief that principals had to get out of their offices and into classrooms — not as a “compliance officer,” stringently holding teachers to account, but as someone who intervenes and works side by side with teachers to help them become the very best they could be.

Gunner grew up in Beaumont, Tex., in the 1970s, which she recalls as a lot like Atlanta today. “All the black schools were on one side of town,” she says, “and all the white on the other.” (Atlanta is the second-mostsegregated city in the country, after Chicago, according to one 2015 analysis, and has the highest level of income inequality of any metropolitan region, according to another in 2016.) Gunner didn’t attend an integrated school until 1981, after a federal court order compelled Beaumont to desegregate. She was entering sixth grade and was bused to a white school across town.

“It was the first time I’d ever seen a white principal or a white counselor,” she says. Gunner had tested into the gifted class the previous year. But at her new school, she was told a reading test she took disqualified her from the gifted program. Her mother, who worked for the Beaumont Independent School District as a teacher for homebound students, questioned the decision. So Gunner took the reading test again and passed. She was the only black student in the gifted track for most of middle school. “My mother,” Gunner says, “was always in there having to fight.”

Gunner eventually ended up at Spelman College, the historically black women’s college in Atlanta. She loved the city and stayed after graduation. When she was a young teacher at Peyton Forest in the 2000s during the No Child Left Behind era, the job was becoming so stressful — the principal who hired her was replaced for not sufficiently raising scores, according to testimony in the state investigative report on the cheating scandal — that Gunner considering taking a job in Buckhead, the affluent white suburb north of town. But that would have made her life’s work just a job and not the commitment to her community she wanted it to be, so she accepted a position at another elementary school, where her new principal became a life-changing mentor, showing her the difference a strong leader could make for teachers. She hoped to have the same impact at Peyton Forest.

Gunner tended to see her teachers there as belonging to one of three categories. First were the already excellent teachers like Ericka Fluellen. Second were several teachers like Bianca McNeal, the novice, who might not be strong instructors yet but were willing to put in the effort to improve. Third were the teachers “who can but won’t,” in Gunner’s phrase; these teachers had the capacity to become more effective educators but appeared to have no interest in doing so. They were already set in their pedagogical ways or didn’t think change at the school was necessary or possible or didn’t want to put in more effort, or there was some other reason Gunner couldn’t yet divine.

She spent most of her time pinning her hopes on the second category and being exasperated by the teachers in the third, who not only weren’t serving the students but also made life more difficult for their peers like McNeal, who needed better teaching models — a team — but didn’t have that. Throughout the fall, McNeal exhausted herself during the week, planning lessons late into the night and collapsing on the weekend. By early 2017, she felt she’d finally gotten over the hump and could catch her breath. Although she was so attached to the kids that she often let them stay with her for hours after school as she graded papers or prepared for the next day, she felt lonely and out of place among the adults. The other fourthgrade teachers were much older, and she often felt they were giving her the side-eye for keeping such long hours at the school. “I know they have kids and families at home,” she told me that winter, which she didn’t begrudge. But she also didn’t want them making her feel bad — asking her, for example, “Why would you do that?” — when she took several students to dinner or even once to Six Flags with her own money as a class reward. She did not feel comfortable turning to them for help and advice.

McNeal did what she did because her students’ hardships reminded her of some of her own. She grew up with her mother and an older brother in the Bowen Homes, a segregated public-housing project in northwest Atlanta. (Her parents weren’t together, but her father remained involved in her life.) The project was notorious for “warehousing families in concentrated poverty,” in the words of one Atlanta Housing Authority official, and was razed in 2009. “There was a lot of violence and drugs that a child shouldn’t have to see,” McNeal recalls.

Her mother worked for a time as a cafeteria worker, cleaning homes on the side. “There was never enough money,” McNeal says. She attended Frederick Douglass High School, most of whose students were low-income. Her teachers encouraged her to stay in school, take A.P. classes and join the debate team. When she couldn’t afford a dress for the prom, a teacher bought her one. McNeal’s mother was one of 17 brothers and sisters, and McNeal had scores of aunts, uncles and cousins on that side, but she was the first among them to attend college; she graduated ninth in her high school class and won a full scholarship to the University of West Georgia outside Atlanta, where she decided to enter the pre-med program.

But for all her hard work and her teachers’ generosity, she hadn’t received the academic preparation she needed. She did well in her English classes, but despite studying around the clock, she barely got through college chemistry and failed a required math class, causing the university to rescind a portion of her scholarship, which threatened her ability to continue. She learned about a teacher-preparation program at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, now part of Georgia Southern University, applied and received enough new financial aid to graduate. Eight months later she was at Peyton Forest, having sought out a majorityblack low-income school because she wanted to be the “second family,” she says, to her students that her teachers had been to her.

Gunner or a vice principal or one of the school’s literacy or math specialists was a regular presence in McNeal’s classroom. Gunner had been encouraged by Rensselaerville and her coach, Mildred Toliver, to give daily, concrete feedback that teachers could readily incorporate into their teaching instead of relying on a formal evaluation. At first, this made McNeal self-conscious, but after a while, she got used to it and welcomed the comments. But not every teacher felt the same way. One of them filed a complaint against Gunner, and a district “escalation” expert named David York, a former principal and teacher in his 60s, came to investigate and share his findings with Gunner. The teacher felt as if she were “being targeted” with excessive expectations, York said, declining to identify the teacher. He told Gunner the teacher “was stressed” and had “a lot going on at home.” She had also heard from another teacher that Gunner had called her a slacker. “I’m not a slacker,” the teacher had tearily protested, according to York. “I thought I was doing what she wanted,” she said, and “I can’t work under these conditions.” Gunner acknowledged that the teacher might feel under pressure. “We go into every room every day, sometimes twice a day, and that’s a paradigm shift for this entire school,” Gunner said. “I do think she’s sincere,” Gunner added, but, thinking about her teacher categories, she added, “What makes cases like this so hard is it gets to be where it’s will you — or can you?”

“I can’t say the efforts she’s putting forth are paying off,” York conceded, allowing that Gunner was “appropriately impatient.”

Gunner seized on the phrase. “Appropriately impatient! I like that!”

York encouraged Gunner to do more to recognize the teacher’s feelings. “You can’t tell someone how to feel,” York said, and noted that during his interview with the teacher, several former students visited the teacher’s classroom to get hugs, evidence that she was “having some kind of positive impact on kids.”

He also left Gunner with this warning. “She may quit,” he said, “and you might think, ‘Oh, goody!’ ” But Gunner, York noted, wasn’t likely to find a better teacher midyear and would very likely end up with another permanent substitute. “And then you’re going to have to figure out how to support her,” he said.

The teacher did eventually quit, and by early 2017, so had another. Managing these sudden departures was hard on students. Fluellen, the third-grade teacher, told me that students who had experienced other traumatic losses and felt as if school was “their safe zone” would often act out when their teachers left. And in fact, days after Gunner replaced the second of these teachers, who taught fifth grade, with an emergency substitute, she received an urgent call in her office over a school walkietalkie. A child in the class was “being disrespectful” to the new sub — not following directions and directing curse words at other students, though not at the teacher. Upset, the teacher was threatening to quit, too. Gunner thought that in the annals of fifth-grade antics, this was a situation a competent teacher should be able to handle. But she also couldn’t afford to have the parade of teachers continue, and she placed the offending child in a different class for the day. The sub quit anyway after just two weeks; only with the third teacher did the school finally find a consistent and capable instructor.

Gunner had a natural, take-charge assurance and almost frenetic energy that sometimes belied her own learning curve as a first-year principal. Straightforward with staff and expecting the same in return, she had little patience for what she liked to call “shenanigans” — excuses for repeatedly showing up late, for instance, or without a lesson prepared. But in her eagerness to see rapid improvement in the school’s instructional practices, she could sometimes overwhelm her staff with critical feedback and had trouble delegating authority — for example, giving such precise details of a message she wanted her assistant principal to convey to staff that the assistant principal finally blurted out, “What I hear you saying is you want to do this.”

It was Toliver’s job to help rein in some of these impulses. Toliver, who is 64 and has an instinct for what motivates people and an unflappable, seenit-all-before manner, worked with Gunner at Rensselaerville’s multiday workshops, mapping out matters involving staffing and student data. Toliver visited Peyton Forest one or more days each month, and she and Gunner would tour classes. They would discuss what they’d seen or what they hadn’t and wished to — and how to address both.

When, early in the year, Gunner and Toliver watched the teacher use the PowerPoint with first graders, Gunner was so frustrated by the lesson on top of the others she’d seen that she went on a tear once she and Toliver were back in Gunner’s office. If a teacher didn’t know this was inappropriate for 6-year-olds, “how do you teach someone common sense?” She resolved to deliver a long list of “nonnegotiables” to her teachers that afternoon; one of the items on the list was going to be “no PowerPoints in grades K-2!”

Toliver agreed that the lesson was “ridiculous.” But she gently steered Gunner in a different direction, encouraging her to let her assistant principal, who would be less intimidating to teachers, lead the meeting and let them brainstorm about “instructional norms” they could embrace as a group, instead of Gunner’s just delivering dictates from on high. And she encouraged Gunner not to deluge her teachers with too many things to change, or they would just end up shutting down. Gunner had to pick and choose wisely.

The approach was something David Jernigan, the deputy superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools and the founding executive director of Atlanta’s KIPP network of charter schools, thinks is critical. “As someone who’s been a principal as well — you can’t give a teacher a ton of feedback,” he said. “You have to be very focused, very targeted, make it actionable at that moment.” Figuring out what sorts of critiques were helpful for particular teachers was knowledge built over time, but that could be learned faster if you had a more experienced coach “walking around with you to test what it is that you’re seeing.” But for a coach to be able to give “tough feedback in a way that principals can hear,” Jernigan acknowledged, there had to be a trusting relationship first.

To Gunner, Toliver was “calmer, more mature and had a level of experience I just didn’t have,” but just as important, Toliver was someone Gunner could relate to. Toliver was also from the black side of a segregated Southern town, in her case Shreveport, La., but was a generation older. She was a first-year teacher in the early days of integration in Louisiana at a school with only a small number of black students. Her first class consisted of 23 students, all of them black, with third through sixth graders in a single class. It was like a one-room schoolhouse inside an otherwise affluent white school.

She taught seven more years and became a principal in Shreveport and later in Fort Worth, which contracted with Rensselaerville in 2002. Toliver was coached by Gillian Williams, a former teacher and principal who founded Rensselaerville’s School Turnaround program. (I knew Williams when we taught at the same school in New York in 1990.) Toliver liked how the program taught her to think about what it meant to be a leader, something she had never really considered, and also its relentless focus on the classroom, where the work of schools is actually done. When she left the school district, Williams hired her as a specialist. (Rensselaerville hires only specialists who have had successful leadership experience in low-  performing schools, and more than half of them are men and women of color.) “It was the first time someone had come in from the outside,” Gunner acknowledged, “that I actually listened to.”

One of Toliver's main messages is that to be helpful to teachers, you can’t just tell them what they’re doing wrong; teachers have to actually see what good teaching looks like, and they need to see how to do it with the children they are actually teaching. Fluellen told me that so much of instruction for teachers is generic and not relevant to schools like Peyton Forest. “Sometimes people will say, ‘Here’s a video of best instructional practices,’ and teachers are like, ‘Well, that’s not my kids — our kids can’t do that.’ ” To address this, Rensselaerville advises principals to set up a “model classroom” as an on-site resource and inspiration for teachers. Gunner made Fluellen’s third-grade class one of the school’s model rooms.

One afternoon in March 2017, shortly before dismissal, when the nerves in many classrooms are beginning to fray, Fluellen remained unruffled. She didn’t engage as students got annoyed by classmates’ making objectionable faces to their peers. When one’s boy anger at a girl seemed in danger of escalating, Fluellen wordlessly tossed him the class’s stress ball, which he began to squeeze, calming him for a time. Students then broke up into groups, as orchestral music softly played, to either rewrite a story about a girl on a soccer team from a first-person point of view or to interview classmates about their sports preferences for a math exercise on graphing data. At her desk, Fluellen had a third group and was playing a game with flashcards and giving high-fives to those who won.

Another way to teach teachers is for principals to go into classrooms themselves, a message Gunner took to heart. That same March, she helped McNeal, the fourth-grade teacher, grade essays that her students had written about Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. In the process, McNeal realized she had missed a key element of the assignment: comparing and contrasting the two figures, not just writing about each in turn.

A few days later, McNeal retaught the lesson with Gunner looking on. This time, McNeal explained that students were to write “all the similarities” in one paragraph and “all the differences” in another, bookended by an introduction and conclusion, two elements most of her fourth graders omitted entirely. Yet as McNeal got started, it was clear that most students still had no idea what an introduction entailed. As McNeal began to address this, she didn’t provide a preamble to pique students’ interest or draw them in, something she’d struggled to do all year.

Gunner jumped in to model a different approach. She dropped her loud teacher voice several registers, as if to invite students into a delicious conspiracy. “What if this was the very first day of school,” she all but whispered. “And you came and sat here. And you’d never seen your teacher before, right? And I walk in and said” — Gunner now strutted dramatically into the class, raising her voice back to thunder level — “ ‘Turn to Page 12, we’re going to be doing Problems 1 through 10!’ ” Several students giggled. She asked them what they would think. Tentative at first, a boy finally ventured he’d wonder who she was.

“You’d be confused, right?” Gunner signaled that his answer was correct. “But what if I came in and said” — her voice sweet and low again — “ ‘Good morning, my name is Ms. Gunner. I’m your new fourth-grade teacher, and today we’re going to be studying math.’ ”

Not only, she pointed out, would they know who she was and what was going on, they’d know the direction the class was going in — the same way a good writer helps a reader by hinting at the direction of an essay in the beginning. For the next 10 minutes, Gunner teased out with students how this literal introduction applied to introductions in their writing. By the lesson’s end, students were calling out when a classmate’s proposed opener was “effective” or when it was just “turn to Page 12 and do Problems 1 through 10,” a phrase students were now using as shorthand for bad writing.

But not every class was progressing. One day late in spring 2017, Gunner and Toliver were on their usual rounds. They looked in the window of a fifth-grade classroom. The students were horsing around, without any apparent work to do. The teacher was sitting at her desk, engrossed by her phone as she rapidly tapped the screen. She continued to tap without looking up. Gunner would get exasperated with teachers who didn’t circulate among students but sat at their desks for an entire lesson. But as soon as she opened the door, the teacher would usually get up and begin looking over students’ shoulders.

Now when Gunner swung the door open to enter, the teacher kept tapping, apparently unaware that her supervisors had just arrived in her classroom. The students looked at them and back at the teacher, wide-eyed, waiting for something to happen, as Gunner and Toliver continued to observe. Finally, one of the students alerted the teacher to their presence. But the teacher didn’t stand up. She simply put down the phone and gave Gunner an expressionless look. When they left, it was Toliver who was momentarily agitated, telling Gunner, “I’d write the teacher up,” meaning putting a formal complaint in her file, a move that principals typically take when trying to create a paper trail before deciding to fire someone. It would not prove necessary; the teacher left at the end of the year.

As spring advanced, anxiety about the state tests, which were in late April, after spring break, began to mount. Gunner worried students would be hungry and otherwise at loose ends over the vacation, making them ill prepared for days of tests upon their return. Gunner and other staff met individually with “bubble” students from each grade, whom she, Toliver and the school’s leadership team had identified as having the best chance of jumping from “developing” to “proficient” in reading, math or both.

Gunner couldn’t always hide her own anxiety, which sometimes permeated whatever space she was in. She would call out to students randomly in the hallway, “Only 21 days to the test!” or “Only 14 days to the test!” Over the last decade, pep rallies before state tests have become rites of passage in schools, as familiar as the prom. Peyton Forest had theirs. The atmosphere became increasingly frantic, as Gunner began to encourage teachers to do extra lessons on reading and math, even if this meant neglecting other subjects. Gunner complained to Toliver about a teacher who conducted a science experiment involving dirt and water, which resulted in a lot of mud. Gunner didn’t relish the expenditure of time “so close to the test” on something other than reading or math. “We’re going to have to have a tough conversation about that,” Toliver told me, referring to what she saw as a counterproductive narrowing of the curriculum. To read well, students needed familiarity with a range of experiences and exposure to broad subject matter. The original intent of the standards movement had been to infuse schools with richer, more substantial content. But the nation had ended up with an “accountability” movement instead.

In May 2017, Gunner got the raw results from the state’s tests. The school’s scores had improved: In reading, the percentage of third-throughfifth-grade students who were scored “proficient” had moved to 15 percent from 12 percent. In math, the jump was greater: to 21 percent from 11. And when the state calculated the school’s College and Career Ready Performance Index (C.C.R.P.I.) score, which adjusts for factors like poverty, the school did sufficiently well to move from an F on the state report card to a D.

Still, given how hard everyone had worked, Gunner had hoped for an even bigger rise. Over that summer, 12 more teachers decided not to return to Peyton Forest. In the hunt for replacements, Gunner decided that it was better to be frank about the demands of the job and the needs of the students than to try to sugarcoat the challenges and then have a teacher be surprised and quit.

Even so, a fifth-grade teacher quit two weeks into the new school year, and in November, three more teachers abruptly left. Still, there were some positive signs. By fall 2017, enrollment at the school had grown by more than 15 percent, a sign to Gunner that word on the street about the school was good. No longer a first-year principal and having shown some small gains, Gunner felt the pressure ease. She opened a “lit lounge” in the school, a room that looked like a child’s fantasy clubhouse, with colorful rugs, beanbag chairs and donated games like air hockey and even an electronic bowling alley. Students could win lit lounge privileges by behaving in a way that demonstrated that month’s character word, such as “risk-taker” or “courageous.” There were pajama reading parties and Friday movie nights and money for field trips, under a district plan to give principals more control over their budgets.

By this spring, there was a palpable difference in the school. Reading classes included more actual reading, and from class to class, students were toting library books. Fluellen was now an instructional coach and had started a “new-teacher academy” to help develop and retain the school’s recent hires. Teachers were meeting weekly after school in grade and subject teams, discussing instructional problems they had in class and helping one another to resolve them. McNeal, no longer tentative, showed a group of her colleagues a new way to teach adding fractions.

Last month, the scores arrived for this past school year. The reading scores climbed to 21 percent “proficient.” Some of the biggest gains were in fourth grade, where McNeal taught the entire grade language arts. Math inched up another point to 22 percent. (The C.C.R.P.I. score and state report card grade won’t be calculated until later this year.)

But how much more a school like Peyton Forest can improve without addressing the more systemic challenges it faces is anyone’s guess, and past experience is not encouraging. In the years after No Child Left Behind was enacted, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely considered the gold standard for measuring achievement over time in American schools, rose marginally in reading but more so in math, suggesting that an initial injection of energy and attention into districts may have goosed scores. But they have since stagnated, remaining flat for roughly a decade. Teaching does matter, and it can improve. But there is little evidence — at least to date — that it can counter the effects on children of attending neighborhood schools that remain racially and economically isolated.

On Gunner’s worst days, she told me once, “I don’t think people really think it’s possible,” referring to turning around neighborhood schools like Peyton Forest. On days that aren’t her worst, Gunner tries to focus on the job right in front of her. And it is a job, in fact, that she loves. The profession, as it is currently constituted, seems to require a bifocal vision: an ability to see the dispiriting big picture, but also an ability to see the child close at hand.

How our education system undermines gender equity

How our education system undermines gender equity

How our education system undermines gender equity And why culture change—not policy—may be the solution 

Joseph Cimpian, Monday, April 23, 2018 

There are well-documented achievement and opportunity gaps by income and race/ethnicity. K-12 accountability policies often have a stated goal of reducing or eliminating those gaps, though with questionable effectiveness. Those same accountability policies require reporting academic proficiency by gender, but there are no explicit goals of reducing gender gaps and no “hard accountability” sanctions tied to gender-subgroup performance. We could ask, “Should gender be included more strongly in accountability policies?”

In this post, I’ll explain why I don’t think accountability policy interventions would produce real gender equity in the current system—a system that largely relies on existing state standardized tests of math and English language arts to gauge equity. I’ll argue that although much of the recent research on gender equity from kindergarten through postgraduate education uses math or STEM parity as a measure of equity, the overall picture related to gender equity is of an education system that devalues young women’s contributions and underestimates young women’s intellectual abilities more broadly.

In a sense, math and STEM outcomes simply afford insights into a deeper, more systemic problem. In order to improve access and equity across gender lines from kindergarten through the workforce, we need considerably more social-questioning and self-assessment of biases about women’s abilities.

As soon as girls enter school, they are underestimated
For over a decade now, I have studied gender achievement with my colleague Sarah Lubienski, a professor of math education at Indiana University-Bloomington. In a series of studies using data from both the 1998-99 and 2010-11 kindergarten cohorts of the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, we found that no average gender gap in math test scores existed when boys and girls entered kindergarten, but a gap of nearly 0.25 standard deviations developed in favor of the boys by around second or third grade.

For comparison purposes, the growth of the black-white math test score gap was virtually identical to the growth in the gender gap. Unlike levels and growth in race-based gaps, though, which have been largely attributed to a combination of differences in the schools attended by black and white students and to socio-economic differences, boys and girls for the most part attend the same schools and come from families of similar socio-economic status. This suggests that something may be occurring within schools that contributes to an advantage for boys in math.

Exploring deeper, we found that the beliefs that teachers have about student ability might contribute signiæcantly to the gap. When faced with a boy and a girl of the same race and socio-economic status who performed equally well on math tests and whom the teacher rated equally well in behaving and engaging with school, the teacher rated the boy as more mathematically able—an alarming pattern that replicated in a separate data set collected over a decade later.

Another way of thinking of this is that in order for a girl to be rated as mathematically capable as her male classmate, she not only needed to perform as well as him on a psychometrically rigorous external test, but also be seen as working harder than him. Subsequent matching and instrumental variables analyses suggested that teachers’ underrating of girls from kindergarten through third grade accounts for about half of the gender achievement gap growth in math. In other words, if teachers didn’t think their female students were less capable, the gender gap in math might be substantially smaller.

An interaction that Sarah and I had with a teacher drove home the importance and real-world relevance of these results. About five years ago, while Sarah and I were faculty at the University of Illinois, we gathered a small group of elementary teachers together to help us think through these findings and how we could intervene on the notion that girls were innately less capable than boys. One of the teachers pulled a stack of papers out of her tote bag, and spreading them on the conference table, said, “Now, I don’t even understand why you’re looking at girls’ math achievement. These are my students’ standardized test scores, and there are absolutely no gender differences. See, the girls can do just as well as the boys if they work hard enough.” Then, without anyone reacting, it was as if a light bulb went on. She gasped and continued, “Oh my gosh, I just did exactly what you said teachers are doing,” which is attributing girls’ success in math to hard work while attributing boys’ success to innate ability. She concluded, “I see now why you’re studying this.”

Although this teacher did ultimately recognize her gender-based attribution, there are (at least) three important points worth noting. First, her default assumption was that girls needed to work harder in order to achieve comparably to boys in math, and this reflects an all-too-common pattern among elementary school teachers, across at least the past couple decades and in other cultural contexts. Second, it is not obvious how to get teachers to change that default assumption. Third, the evidence that she brought to the table was state standardized test scores, and these types of tests can reveal different (often null or smaller) gender achievement gaps than other measures.

On this last point, state standardized tests consistently show small or no differences between boys and girls in math achievement, which contrasts with somewhat larger gaps on NAEP and PISA, as well as with gaps at the top of the distribution on the ECLS, SAT Mathematics assessment, and the American Mathematics Competition. The reasons for these discrepancies are not entirely clear, but what is clear is that there is no reason to expect that “hardening” the role of gender in accountability policies that use existing state tests and current benchmarks will change the current state of gender gaps. Policymakers might consider implementing test measures similar to those where gaps have been noted and placing more emphasis on gains throughout the achievement distribution. However, I doubt that a more nuanced policy for assessing math gains would address the underlying problem of the year-after-year underestimation of girls’ abilities and various signals and beliefs that buttress boys’ confidence and devalue girls, all of which cumulatively contributes to any measured gaps.

More obstacles await women in higher education and beyond 
Looking beyond K-12 education, there is mounting evidence at the college and postgraduate levels that cultural differences between academic disciplines may be driving women away from STEM fields, as well as away from some non-STEM fields (e.g., criminal justice, philosophy, and economics). In fact, although research and policy discussions often dichotomize academic fields and occupations as “STEM” and “non-STEM,” the emerging research on gender discrimination in higher education finds that the factors that drive women away from some fields cut across the STEM/non-STEM divide. Thus, while gender representation disparities between STEM and non-STEM fields may help draw attention to gender representation more broadly, reifying the STEM/non-STEM distinction and focusing on math may be counterproductive to understanding the underlying reasons for gender representation gaps across academic disciplines.

In a recent study, my colleagues and I examined how perceptions on college majors relate to who is entering those majors. We found that the dominant factor predicting the gender of college-major entrants is the degree of perceived discrimination against women. To reach this conclusion, we used two sources of data. First, we created and administered surveys to gather perceptions on how much math is required for a major, how much science is required, how creative a field is, how lucrative careers are in a field, how helpful the field is to society, and how difficult it is for a woman to succeed in the field. After creating factor scales on each of the six dimensions for each major, we mapped those ratings onto the second data source, the Education Longitudinal Study, which contains several prior achievement, demographic, and attitudinal measures on which we matched young men and women attending four-year colleges.

Among this nationally representative sample, we found that the degree to which a field was perceived to be math- or science-intensive had very little relation to student gender. However, fields that were perceived to discriminate against women were strongly predictive of the gender of the students in the field, whether or not we accounted for the other five traits of the college majors. In short, women are less likely to enter fields where they expect to encounter discrimination.


And what happens if a woman perseveres in obtaining a college degree in a field where she encounters discrimination and underestimation and wants to pursue a postgraduate degree in that field, and maybe eventually work in academia? The literature suggests additional obstacles await her. These obstacles may take the form of those in the field thinking she’s not brilliant like her male peers in graduate school, having her looks discussed on online job boards when she’s job-hunting, performing more service work if she becomes university faculty, and getting less credit for co-authored publications in some disciplines when she goes up for tenure.

Each of the examples here and throughout this post reflects a similar problem—education systems (and society) unjustifiably and systematically view women as less intellectually capable.

Societal changes are necessary

My argument that policy probably isn’t the solution is not intended to undercut the importance of affirmative action and grievance policies that have helped many individuals take appropriate legal recourse. Rather, I am arguing that those policies are certainly not enough, and that the typical K-12 policy mechanisms will likely have no real effect in improving equity for girls. The obstacles that women face are largely societal and cultural. They act against women from the time they enter kindergarten—instilling in very young girls a belief they are less innately talented than their male peers—and persist into their work lives. Educational institutions—with undoubtedly many well-intentioned educators—are themselves complicit in reinforcing the hurdles. In order to dismantle these barriers, we likely need educators at all levels of education to examine their own biases and stereotypes.

The Intersection of Black Lives matter and Adult Education: One Community College Initiative

 

Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle

December 2015May 2016 Charles Lenchner community organizations, Labor, politics, racism, trade unions, Winter 2016

Born as a Twitter hashtag, Black Lives Matter has evolved into a potent alternative to the political paralysis and isolation that racial jus­tice proponents have faced since the election of Obama. In just over two years, the young move­ment has reinvigorated confrontation politics, giving voice to a popular and righteous rage, establishing a new touchstone of grassroots resistance, and ending the acquiescence that has crippled progressive forces in the age of Obama. The upsurge, which has centered on the crucial, galvanizing issue of police misconduct, also shows signs of addressing larger questions of social inequity. With continued momentum, Black Lives Matter may help reverse the coun­teroffensive against workers and people of color that has defined the long aftermath of the 1960s and 1970s liberation struggles.1 To sur­pass the relatively ephemeral accomplishments of precursors such as Occupy Wall Street, how­ever, the emerging movement must draw on and modernize the creative traditions of popu­lar insurgency. It must become a sustained, truly mass struggle, confronting ferocious backlash and overcoming multiple challenges while developing its considerable strengths.
Black Lives Matter began, quite modestly, as #BlackLivesMatter. The hashtag was created in 2013 by Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—California and New York-based organizers active in incarceration, immigration, and domestic labor campaigns—after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder in Florida of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. The slogan’s deeper significance as the rallying cry for an incipient movement crystal­lized in 2014 during the Ferguson, Missouri uprisings against police brutality. In the words of activists, the hashtag leapt from social media “into the streets.” Black Lives Matter, which Garza has called “a love note” to black com­munities, now serves as shorthand for diverse organizing efforts—both sporadic and sus­tained—across the country. The most recogniz­able expression of widespread black outrage against police aggression and racist violence, the phrase has engendered a spirited, if decen­tralized, movement.
Birth of a Contemporary Human Rights Movement
The variety of local campaigns associated with Black Lives Matter confounds attempts to por­tray the movement in fine detail. Still, the con­tours of a modern human rights struggle are discernible. Black Lives Matter is youthful, though it has reenergized older activists who are eager to connect with a new generation of organizers. It arises from an organic black pro­test tradition, while drawing impassioned par­ticipants of all colors. Its leadership departs sharply from the model of the singular, charis­matic clergyman or politician. Founded by black women, two of whom are queer, the movement has galvanized an array of grass-roots activists in multiple communities. Few are full-time organizers, though many have had encounters with racialized policing or other­wise are personally affected by mass incarcera­tion. Many are also feminist, LGBTQ, working-class or low-income, social media savvy, and streetwise. Like other members of the movement, they are waging an unpreten­tious, democratic, militant crusade, determined to remain autonomous both from the American political establishment and from old guard leaders, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, seen as more invested in punditry than in popu­lar struggle.2
It is this commitment to independence and militancy that has shaped the tactics of the movement. Demanding accountability for rac­ist violence and an immediate end to the murder of black people at the hands of the state, Black Lives Matter activists have used a host of dis­ruptive techniques to advance their cause. Their mainstay has been occupation—of highways, intersections, sporting events, retail stores, malls, campaign events, police stations, and municipal buildings. They have organized “die­ins,” marches, and rallies in multiple cities, viewing creative disturbance as a means of dra­matizing routine attacks on black life.3 Tellingly, the mantra of such demonstrations has evolved from “Hands up, don’t shoot!” to the more emphatic “Shut it down!” Whether the move­ment categorically rejects—or simply mis­trusts—electoral politics remains unclear. What is evident is that most Black Lives Matter adherents recognize the inherent shortcomings of appeals to politicians, the courts, and other “acceptable” channels of redress, and have wholeheartedly embraced the arena of the street.
Political Tendencies within the Movement
This bold strategy has by no means stopped or even slowed the crescendo of violence. The achievements of Black Lives Matter are nevertheless striking. First, the movement has remained largely unfettered by “respectability politics,” the belief that subjugated groups can win support for their cause simply by adhering to conventional standards of decorum. As expo­nents of Black Lives Matter are keenly aware, rituals of propriety will not dignify dark skin that society as a whole detests and degrades. Movement participants have refused to engage in victim blaming. They have resisted dead-end narratives that emphasize “black-on-black crime” or that prescribe cultural rehabilitation while eschewing righteous dissent. (Such per­spectives reinforce the racist premise that black pathology—not white supremacy—is chiefly responsible for the state’s systematic assault on black people.)
They have amassed concrete victories, too. Scattered instances of police officers being charged and disciplined for misconduct suggest that popular outcry can help force concessions from even the most repressive system.4 The movement’s real success, however, lies in popu­larizing radical discourse and providing a vibrant model of democratic participation. As the move­ment’s founders have written,

When we say Black Lives Matter, we are
broadening the conversation around state
violence to include all of the ways in
which Black people are intentionally left
powerless at the hands of the state. We
are talking about the ways in which Black
lives are deprived of our basic human
rights and dignity . . . How Black women
bearing the burden of a relentless assault
on our children and our families is state
violence. How Black queer and trans
folks bear a unique burden from a hetero
­patriarchal society that disposes of us like
garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us
and profits off of us, and that is state
violence.5

Such rhetoric suggests that far-reaching change—not the mere amelioration of police abuse—is the objective.
Black Lives Matter’s elements of spontane­ity and self-organization reflect a grassroots surge rather than a measured and conciliatory airing of grievances. Although by no means consistent or complete, its attempts to center those closer to the margins—women, queer people, and various non-elites—through the production of blogs, reports, missives, and by simply invoking the names of unsung victims of police violence (“Say Her Name,” as a related campaign is dubbed), signal an ethos of inclusiveness and a desire for a fundamental rearrangement of power relations.
Similar traits have defined past social move­ments. One thinks immediately of the uncom­promising spirit of the civil rights–Black Power era, and particularly of the militancy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Like Black Lives Matter participants, SNCC’s young members also belonged to a generation radicalized by a shocking, highly publicized murder—the 1955 killing of Emmett Till by southern racists. Other historical analo­gies may be drawn. The street insurrectionists (labeled “rioters”) of the 1960s in some ways anticipated modern activists who face milita­rized police in urban centers.
In the current generation of protests, one detects resonances of Black Power’s insistence on self-definition and human rights rather than on mere social inclusion. Of course, determination to preserve black life in the face of white suprem­acist violence has always been a radical principle, from the anti-lynching crusades of Ida B. Wells around the turn of the twentieth century, to the Negro Silent Protest Parade of 1917, to the pro­tests surrounding the Scottsboro Boys case of the 1930s, to the 1951 We Charge Genocide petition by the Civil Rights Congress, to the exertions of the Deacons for Defense and the Black Panthers at the peak of the postwar movement. What ani­mated these struggles—and those of countless leftist and labor causes—was their insurgent nature and the uncompromising character of their rank and file participants, traits that Black Lives Matter exemplifies.6
The Struggle for Racial Justice  in the Age of Obama
That said, calling “the movement for black lives” (a broad designation encompassing the many formations informally linked to Black Lives Matter) a “new civil rights movement” may obscure how dramatically the social land­scape has shifted in recent decades. If Obama’s presence in the White House symbolizes accep­tance by many Americans of the ideal of a mul­tiracial society, the modern era also has witnessed the construction of a mass incarcera­tion regime that viciously targets black commu­nities. Dominant conceptions of “race relations” posit interpersonal relations, or the visibility of black elites, as critical indexes of progress. Such measures obscure both the persistence of sys­temic racism and the extent to which racialized practices have fueled the explosive growth of the carceral state. Enforcing racial hierarchy has been a central task of policing since the days of slave patrols. Today, however, the criminal jus­tice system performs social control tasks—the regulation of black bodies, the harnessing of black surplus labor in the name of corporate profit—once fulfilled by Jim Crow segregation and other overt forms of discrimination.7
Ironically, the sheer scope and intrusiveness of the modern carceral state provide distinct opportunities for organizers. By confronting racist patterns of policing, Black Lives Matter is addressing a reality that touches the lives of a wide segment of people of color. Structural rac­ism in the post-segregation era generally has lacked unambiguous symbols of apartheid around which a popular movement could cohere. Yet mass incarceration and the tech­niques of racialized policing on which it depends—“broken windows,” stop-and-frisk, “predictive policing,” and other extreme forms of surveillance—have exposed the refurbished, but no less ruthless, framework of white supremacy. In poorer black and brown commu­nities, recognition that cops serve primarily to monitor and subjugate rather than “to serve and protect” has fostered both deep resentment and radical, oppositional consciousness.8
It has also created the potential for multira­cial, class-conscious movements. However, despite the emergence of Black Lives Matter offshoots such as “Native Lives Matter,” no national alliance of people of color has coalesced on the issue of police violence. More extensive collaboration with Latinos and undocumented populations—both groups that have participated in Black Lives Matter protests—would signal a major victory for the movement. For the moment, the relative diversity of many Black Lives Matter formations has yet to engender a consciously multiracial political surge from below, as in the “rainbow radicalism” that marked some phases of Black Power organizing during the 1960s and 1970s. Lingering intereth­nic tensions and divisions, as well as the bur­dens of daily economic survival, continue to militate against the rebirth of such an expansive “rights” consciousness and ethic of solidarity. The existing movement has drawn the backing of white leftists and certain student organiza­tions. Yet confrontations between Black Lives Matter proponents and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, in which activists interrupted campaign events to demand more robust engagement with questions of structural racism, have elicited deep hostility from some of the candidate’s supporters. Thankfully, such interventions have revived debate about the dynamics of race and class (and the role of white privilege) in American progressive politics.9
The relationship of Black Lives Matter to white working-class and poor people, who also face elevated rates of police abuse, remains unclear. The false universality of the assertion that “All Lives Matter” appeals to many white workers, especially those inclined to dismiss black claims in the name of a fictive post-racial ideal. However, racially diverse groups of workers, including active members of the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign, have joined Black Lives Matter protests. (Collaboration between the movements has remained informal and fairly sporadic.) And although labor as a whole is split on the issue, some unions with large memberships of people of color have urged the AFL-CIO to withdraw its support for police unions, which often serve as mecha­nisms for suppressing civilian challenges to, and oversight of, law enforcement. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has issued statements of support for Black Lives Matter, but has yet to grant the movement the vigorous backing it has offered the Fight for $15 struggle. Complicating the relationship between labor and the movement for black lives is the reality that the livelihood of some work­ers (e.g., prison guards) depends on the carceral state. Ultimately, Black Lives Matter may help intensify the growing pressure on the contem­porary labor movement to revive its social jus­tice roots. As a whole, however, Black Lives Matter activists have largely neglected to engage progressive trade unionism or to iden­tify labor as a major ally.10
Internal Divergences and External Threats
Even as it contemplates external alliances, Black Lives Matter is grappling with its own internal tensions. The movement has avoided ties to mainstream electoral politics, which has long been a barren realm for the pursuit of gen­uinely progressive visions of transformation. Upon learning of their formal endorsement by the Democratic Party last fall, Black Lives Matter organizers promptly repudiated the statement of support and reaffirmed their com­mitment to autonomy. Yet elements within the movement (thus far not organized as distinct cliques) clearly wish to converse with, rather than merely confront, elites such as Hillary Clinton. A robust skepticism toward—rather than a strategic or ideological aversion to— electoral politics appears to characterize much of the movement. (This is an area of real poten­tial conflict in the future.) Although many Black Lives Matter exponents see exerting mass pressure as their sole imperative, others have begun to formulate specific policy demands. Time will tell whether this impulse leads to substantive reform or merely to a con­servative transition “from protest to politics.”11
Some organizers wish to transcend reform­ism altogether and pursue a revolutionary path. Leftists within and beyond Black Lives Matter have urged the movement to confront its ideo­logical contradictions (including relatively ambiguous stances on electoral politics and the principle of class struggle), disavowing any trace of collaboration with the ruling class and identifying capitalism itself—and not merely white supremacy—as the enemy. Leaders of the movement have displayed signs of a race-class analysis that acknowledges the inseparability of economic justice and black liberation. (A Black Lives Matter website identifies both black pov­erty and “genocide” as forms of state vio­lence.)12 However, the movement has yet to articulate a clear analysis of the economic underpinnings of white supremacy. Until it does so, it is unlikely to develop a specific agenda of social redistribution with which to bolster its promising rhetoric of systemic change.
Questions of gender and sexuality appear to have generated the most significant fissures within Black Lives Matter. Although black women have been on the forefront of the move­ment, some supporters continue to frame the struggle in terms of a putatively masculine prerogative of self-defense. The corporate media, for its part, consistently presents police brutality and extrajudicial killing as crises primarily for black men. By organizing vigils, rallies, and other events in the name of murdered women and girls, campaigns such as “Say Her Name” have fought the erasure or marginalization of the stories of black women, who face stunning rates of police assault and incarceration.
LGBTQ activists have used similar tactics to battle marginalization, even as they toil on the frontlines of struggle. Queer participants staged a constructive intervention during the Movement for Black Lives National Convening in Cleveland last summer, taking to the stage during one session to decry what they saw as elements of transphobia and heterosexism within the larger movement.13 Willingness to reassess patriarchal and heteronormative lead­ership, it seems, will be a major test of Black Lives Matter’s long-term viability.
The competing political tendencies within Black Lives Matter have yet to become full-fledged factions. External opposition remains by far the greatest threat to the movement. The very phrase “black lives matter” has elicited tremen­dous anger and scorn in some quarters. (GOP candidates such as Ted Cruz have rallied their political base simply by reveling in the back­lash.) Protesters in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere have been labeled “looters” and “thugs.” (The latter term appears to be the racial code word of the moment.) Conditioned to accept the premise of black criminality, a large portion of white America instinctively reads black demands as cases of cynical, special plead­ing. Many Americans continue to practice the art of evasion, embracing expressions such as “All Lives Matter,” “Police Lives Matter,” and most bizarrely, “Southern Lives Matter” (a response to criticism of the display of Confederate flags).
Even avowed opponents of anti-black violence have condemned militant resistance, choosing instead to issue “calls for healing and injunctions against anger.”14 Like “All Lives Matter,” such appeals seek to deflect, discredit, or suppress black protest.
Police themselves have been the most forceful agents of the Black Lives Matter backlash. The anti-racist movement is facing the kind of intense state repression that crushed Occupy Wall Street. Police spokespeople and apologists have encour­aged the demonization of the struggle, and have propagated the absurd claim that Black Lives Matter actually provokes assaults on cops. Meanwhile, the apparatuses of state violence have mobilized for a disgracefully one-sided war. Urban police forces have repeatedly confronted unarmed protesters with military-grade weap­onry, a symptom of despotism that Americans seem to tolerate only because the most visible targets of such deployments are black. Anticipating further unrest, some law enforce­ment agencies have amassed a fearsome arsenal, including acoustic cannons, weaponized drones, and the foul smelling “skunk spray” used by the Israeli military in the subjugation of Palestinians. It is not surprising to learn that U.S. police and military forces view Black Lives Matter protest­ers as enemy combatants, subject them to exten­sive surveillance, and discuss their conquest in precisely the terms of a colonial occupation.15
These acts of coercion show no signs of cow­ing the resistance. Black Lives Matter, though still young, has entered a decisive phase. Whether it can expand its popular base will depend on its capacity to strengthen links to other embattled groups and grassroots movements, explicitly address the spate of violence against transgender people of color, and develop a firm ideological foundation while retaining its resiliency and élan. If it can do so, the movement may well pose a deeper challenge to existing social and political arrangements, prefiguring a more humane future and forging a theory and practice of mass struggle for our time.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter­est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes

1. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).
2. Jamilah King, “#blacklivesmatter: How Three Friends Turned a Spontaneous Facebook Post into a Global Phenomenon,” The California Sunday Magazine, January 3, 2015, available at https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015­03-01/black-lives-matter/; Brit Bennett, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and a Generation Waking Up,” New Yorker, July 15, 2015, available at http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural­comment/ta-nehisi-coates-and-a-generation­waking-up; Glen Ford, “Tamir Rice and the Meaning of ‘No Justice—No Peace,’” Black Agenda Report, June 17, 2015, available at http://www.blackagendareport.com/tamir_rice_ no_justice_no_peace; Khury Petersen-Smith, “Black Lives Matter: A New Movement Takes Shape,” International Socialist Review, Spring 2015, available at http://isreview.org/issue/96/ black-lives-matter; “Rev. Sekou on Today’s Civil Rights Leaders: ‘I Take My Orders from 23-Year-Old Queer Women,’” Yes! Magazine, July 22, 2015, available at http://www.yesmag­azine.org/peace-justice/black-lives-matter-s­favorite-minister-reverend-sekou-young-queer; Alicia Garza, “A Love Note to Our Folks,” N+1 Magazine, January 20, 2015, avail­able at https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/ online-only/a-love-note-to-our-folks/; Steven W. Thrasher, “‘We’re Winning’: Jesse Jackson on Martin Luther King, Obama and #black­livesmatter,” The Guardian, August 16, 2015, available at http://www.theguardian.com/us­news/2015/aug/16/jesse-jackson-martin-luther­king-obama-and-blacklivesmatter.
3. Nina Shapiro, “Marissa Johnson Part of a New, Disruptive Generation of Activists,” Seattle Times, August 15, 2015, available at http://www .seattletimes.com/seattle-news/marissa-john­son-a-generation-of-activists-who-believe-in­disruption/; Bree Newsom, “When Oppression Is the Status Quo, Disruption Is a Moral Duty,” The Root, August 7, 2015, available at http:// www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/08/ when_oppression_is_the_status_quo_disrup­tion_is_a_moral_duty.2.html.
4. Ken Klippenstein and Paul Gottinger, “6 Police Officers across the US Were Charged with Murder This Week, Proving Strength of Protests,” U.S. Uncut, August 20, 2015, available at http://usuncut.com/news/six­indictments-of-killer-cops-this-week-proves­blacklivesmatter-is-working/.
5. “About the Black Lives Matter Network,” available at http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/.
6. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt, 2006); Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008); Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007); Roderick Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).
7. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). For more recent scholarship, see the March 2015 issue of Journal of American History (Vol. 102, no. 1).
8. Edward J. Escobar, “The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post–World War II America,” Journal of American History 102 (2015): 174-84.
9. Sam Frizell, “Sanders and O’Malley Stumble during Black Lives Matter Protest,” Time, July 18, 2015, available at http://time.com/3963692/ bernie-sanders-martin-omalley-black-lives­matter/. For more on “rainbow radical­ism,” see Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 159-90.
10. “The #FightFor15 and the Black Lives Matter Movement March Together,” #Fight for 15, available at http://fightfor15.org/april15/main/ the-fightfor15-and-the-black-lives-matter­movement-march-together/ Evan McMorris-Santoro and Jacob Fischler, “Unions Split, Take Sides after Ferguson,” BuzzFeed News, August 22, 2014, available at http://www. buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/organized-labor­ferguson#.ypeP1eyM2w; “Justice For Eric Garner,” 1199SEIU, available at http:// www.1199seiu.org/justiceforgarner#sthash. PtVUi50a.dpbs; “Denouncing Police Unions: A Letter to the AFL-CIO,” UAW Local 2865, available at https://docs.google.com/ document/d/1QCWE4Tx0ti-vse9tbUBi­cL7v4lO-mOj2QC8Yk7HMcEM/edit?pli=1; Shawn Gude, “The Bad Kind of Unionism,” Jacobin Magazine, Winter 2014, available at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/the-bad­kind-of-unionism/; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 786-811; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Lois Weiner, “A Labor Movement That Takes Sides,” Jacobin, September 7, 2015, avail­able at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/ black-lives-matter-labor-day-dyett-strike/.
11. Amanda Terkel, “Black Lives Matter Disavows Democratic Party’s Show of Support,” Huffington Post, last updated August 31, 2015, available at http://www. huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-lives-matter­dnc_55e48104e4b0c818f6188cab; “Black Lives Matter Infighting Leads to Splinter Group with Comprehensive Policy Agenda,” Your Black World, August 21, 2015, available at http://yourblackworld.net/2015/08/21/black­lives-matter-infighting-leads-to-splinter-group­with-comprehensive-policy-agenda/; Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary, February 1965, 25-31.
12. Bruce A. Dixon, “Where’s the #BlackLives Matter Critique of the Black Misleadership Class, or Obama or Hillary?” Black Agenda Report, August 6, 2015, available at http:// blackagendareport.com/node/4624; Carmen Berkeley, “An Open Letter to the Black Community From 100 Black Youth,” Huffington Post, July 15, 2013, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carmen-berk­ley/an-open-letter-to-the-bla_b_3596688.htmll; Matt Peppe, “The Baltimore Uprising and the U.S. Government’s Record on Human Rights,” Global Research, May 6, 2014, available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-baltimore­uprising-and-the-u-s-governments-record-on­human-rights/5447509; Barbara Ransby, “The Class Politics of Black Lives Matter,” Dissent, Fall 2015, available at https://www.dissentmag­azine.org/article/class-politics-black-lives-mat­ter; “About the Black Lives Matter Network,” available at http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/.
13. Kali Nicole Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection,” Journal of American History 102 (2015): 25-33; Priscilla Ward, “My Anger Is Justified: Why Black Women’s Rage Is Necessary for Change,” forharriet, August 16, 2015, available at http://www .forharriet.com/2015/08/my-anger-is-justified­why-black-womens.html?m=1; Josh Kruger, “#SayHerName Protest Exposes Tension among Philly Activists,” Philadelphia Citypaper, July 27, 2015, available at http://citypaper.net/ philly-sayhername-protest-exposes-fissures­in-activist-community-calls-for-feminism­and-intersectionality/; Amanda Teuscher, “The Inclusive Strength of #BlackLivesMatter,” The American Prospect, August 2, 2015, available at http://prospect.org/article/inclu sive-strength-blacklivesmatter; Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014, available at http://www.thefeministwire .com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/; Danielle C. Belton, “The 5 Biggest Challenges Facing #BlackLivesMatter,” The Root.com, August 12, 2015, available at http://www.theroot.com/ articles/culture/2015/08/the_5_biggest_chal­lenges_facing_blacklivesmatter.html.
14. David Weigel and Katie Zezima, “Cruz Leads a GOP Backlash to ‘Black Lives Matter’ Rhetoric,” Washington Post, September 1, 2015, available at http://www.washington­post.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/09/01/ cruz-leads-a-gop-backlash-to-black-lives­matter-rhetoric/; Philip Holloway, “Police Lives Matter,” CNN.com, September 4, 2015, available at http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/31/ opinions/holloway-police-lives-matter/; Ayo Coly, “Healing Is Not Grieving: We Must Not ‘Move Forward’ In the Wake of Massacre,” Truthout, July 3, 2015, available at http://www .truth-out.org/opinion/item/31693-healing-is­not-grieving-we-must-not-move-forward-in­the-wake-of-massacresupremacists-without­borders.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&sm prod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0.
15. Rania Khalek Rights, “St. Louis Police Bought Israeli Skunk Spray after Ferguson Uprising,” Electronicintifada.net, August 13, 2015, avail­able at https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ rania-khalek/st-louis-police-bought-israeli­skunk-spray-after-ferguson-uprising?utm_ source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter; Lee Fang, “Acoustic Cannon Sales to Police Surge after Black Lives Matter Protests,” The Intercept, August 14, 2015, available at https:// firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/14/after­ferguson-baltimore/; Jay Syrmopoulos, “New Released Documents Reveal U.S. Military Labeled All Ferguson Protesters as ‘Enemy Forces,’” The Free Thought Project.com, April 18, 2015, available at http://thefreethought­project.com/released-documents-reveal-u-s­military-labeled-ferguson-protestors-enemy­forces/#JWHBwl087vuzUiPQ.01; Matt Ago rist, “No Longer a Conspiracy Theory: First State Legalizes Weaponized Drones for Cops,” The Free Thought Project.com, August 26, 2015, available at http://thefreethoughtproject. com/longer-conspiracy-theory-state-legalizes­weaponized-drones-cops/; Paddy O’Halloran, “‘They Will Not Take the Street’: Ferguson and Colonial Histories,” Counterpunch.org, August 20, 2015, available at http://www.counter­punch.org/2015/08/20/they-will-not-take-the­street-ferguson-and-colonial-histories/.