Website of the School District of Philadelphia
Remarks
David W. Hornbeck
Philadelphia Superintendent of Schools
before the
National Council of Churches
Chicago, Illinois
November 11, 1998
Proposed NCC
Policy: Churches and Public Education
Theological Basis for the Policy
News Release: Churches Called to Provide Moral Leadership in
Public Education
Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, "To speak about God and not protest gross unfairness to our children is blasphemous." It is grossly unfair that, in America, no school system of any size, with any diversity of children, has ever educated the vast majority of its children to high levels of achievement. But I come to you with good news. From our experience in Philadelphia, I know that the barriers we face in public education are not educational ones. The barriers are ones of will, resolve and politics, both inside the system and outside. They arise from what a piece in the New York Times Magazine recently characterized as government of, by and for the comfortable. The moral leadership of the Servant Church is needed in public education.
I come to you because you are the ecumenical communion that in 1956 gave $5,000 to a young preacher in Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King, who was head of a fledgling organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association, out of whose spirit and energy the world was forever altered. I come to you because no important social change has ever occurred – the abolition of slavery, the abolition of child labor, establishment of the eight-hour work day, social security, OSHA, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the end of the Vietnam War – without the leadership of the church. I come to you today to make the case for the next great Civil Rights battleground of the nation – public education.
Education is the number one or number two issue in the country, in part arising from serious workforce and income challenges. Thirty-eight years ago there were about 17 people paying social security for every person receiving it; today, there are about 3 paying for every person receiving it, and the income of the payers is going down. Since the early 1970s, inflation-adjusted income for all but the upper end of the economic scale has declined. For young families, median income has plunged 33%. For young Black families, the drop was 46%; for young Hispanic families, 28%; and young Whites, 22%. In contrast, the incomes of families in the top 5 % of society were 55 % higher in 1996 than in similar families two decades before.
Given this growing gap, this experiment we call democracy is at risk. And further more, I would argue, the soul of the nation is at risk. In the next 30 minutes, during the time I speak to you, 200 children will drop out of school; 56 children will be born into poverty; 30 will be born at low birth-weight; 6 will be arrested for a violent crime; and 1 will be wounded by gunfire.
Marian Wright Edelman asks, "How then do we honestly examine and transform the values and priorities of the wealthiest nation in history, which lets its children be the poorest group of Americans and lets a child be killed by guns every hour and a half? How do we reverse the prevailing political calculus that would rather pay three times more to lock children up after they get into trouble than to give them incentives to stay in school and out of trouble, through good after school and summer programs, jobs, and service opportunities?"
At no time has the need for faith-based witness to the injustice visited daily on our children been greater than it is today. Those of us who profess our commitment to the child whom God sent to live among us are called to demonstrate our commitment to all of the children whom God has sent to live among us in 1998.
We are called to set a place for every child at God’s table. But we cannot understand that table to be set only on the other side of the veil of death. It is important that we set that table in this world. God did not redeem us by exercising his power in a world that cannot be seen. Instead, he sent Jesus to this world to live among us, commanding that the hungry be fed here; that the sick be made well here; that the homeless be housed here; that every child learn to read here and do math and do science and graduate on time and succeed in life beyond elementary and secondary school here. It is the church's job to create a way for children to live the life for which each child is created. The school is in many ways the churches' handmaiden in meeting that responsibility, for as this millennium ends, the tasks God has given our children will require the development of skills for which schools bear the burden and opportunity of meeting.
There is another demographic fact that is central to a discussion of education. My greatest joy these days is being a grandfather - of Holly, now age two. She centers my thinking about a lot of things. In 2030, when she is 34, so called minority kids will for the first time outnumber majority kids; indeed, given the age at which young people are having first children these days, it is quite possible that my first great-grandchild will be born in that momentous year. There is precious little evidence that we white people, who are native English speakers and who control most of the money and most of the power in the United States, have a clue about the urgency of majority/minority demographics in the context of education.
Of every 100 White kindergartners,
88 graduate from high school.
Of every 100 Black kindergartners,
83 graduate from high school.
Of every 100 Latino kindergartners
60 graduate from high school.
Of those same kindergartners,
25 Whites, only 12 Blacks and 10 Latinos graduate from college.
The United States Department of Education reports that 28.3% of low-income students are enrolled in a college preparatory courses, while 65.1% of high-income students are enrolled in this more demanding program. The reverse is true for vocational programs. Eight times as many low-income students are in vocational programs than high-income students.
African American and Latino high school graduates are far less likely to complete high school calculus, biology, chemistry or physics than white high school graduates are. Low-income students and minority students are significantly less likely to take algebra in the eighth grade than white students or more affluent students. Classes in high poverty high schools are more often taught by underqualified teachers, as are math and science classes with a high percentage of minority students.
The good news, as I said earlier, is that we have the knowledge and skill to help all children to achieve at high academic levels, be promoted and graduate on time, go successfully on to college, get a job, support a family and meet the obligations of good citizenship. However, while I can cite examples of successful individual students, classrooms and schools, no place exists in this country where it has become routine for all students to succeed. That is our challenge. Success can belong to every child just as surely as we can produce it for a few. There are Districts in all parts of the United States where there are signs of system wide success with students. They include El Paso, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston to name a few. The place I know best, of course, is Philadelphia.
The bottom-line, good news first. The Philadelphia Board of Education, two years ago, set a goal of 95% of our students reaching carefully defined world class academic standards in reading, math and science in one student generation of 12 years. They set rigorous performance targets for each of our schools of closing 1/6 of the gap every two years between the school’s baseline and the 12-year goal. The first two-year cycle ended this past June. The District’s students exceeded the high performance targets set for them.
In the context of our new higher standards, measured by our new tougher tests, 241 of our 249 schools made progress. 145 of our schools (56%) exceeded the very high two-year performance targets set for them. Moreover, these schools included our lowest income schools, our racially isolated schools and our schools with the highest proportions of English Language Learners. But what are notable are not the 145 individual school stories and the thousands of successful individual classrooms in those schools, although they are wonderful stories to tell. What is notable is that we have been able to bring success to scale. There are more than 103,000 students and 6,000 teachers in those 145 schools. I am not describing a handful of individual schools or classrooms experiencing the hothouse effect of carefully calibrated experimentation. I am describing the remarkable progress resulting from hard and smart work by ordinary students, parents, teachers and principals who, if you just counted the 145 schools exceeding their performance targets, would constitute the 23rd largest school district in the United States – larger than Washington D.C., Cleveland, Boston or Denver to name a few of the other 16,000 districts.
There is no magic to this accomplishment. We committed ourselves to the proposition that all of our kids would succeed. We defined high academic standards, measured their attainment with a better and tougher battery of tests and established an accountability system based on student performance that rewards, helps or penalizes teams of teachers, principals, and central administrators including the superintendent. We decentralized decisionmaking to local school councils and organized schools into small learning communities, each not bigger than about 400 students. We increased training for staff, parents and community people significantly. All five-year-olds now have full day kindergarten. Our students have books in the core subjects, and there is one computer for every ten students, better than the 1:30 ratio four years ago. We have a host of new partners, including almost 15,000 new parent and citizen volunteers, 350 employers providing apprenticeship slots for 3,500 of our students in grades 11 and 12. We’ve shifted large amounts of money from administration to instruction where it belongs. We’ve raised more than $150 million in private and publicly competitive grants. And we have done all of these things at the same time, which has meant that the system is changing, not just its individual parts.
But having rejoiced in the good news, I turn to the barriers we are encountering.
Dr. DuBois said the problem of the 20th century is the color line. As we close this century, I think we can safely say that the problem of the 21st century will remain the color line, expanded in its definition by adding at least language and income.
I set out earlier some of the devastating facts around race, language, income and education. I have also laid before you the case that our historic failure need not continue. I used Philadelphia to illustrate one place where we are solidly on the way toward all of the students achieving at high levels. Changes in classrooms are palpable in Philadelphia.
And yet, the changes are fragile. The hopefulness that is emerging for our 213,000 students faces three powerful barriers. The first of the barriers is the low expectation large numbers of individuals in every stakeholder group have of our children. There is a widespread belief that children of color, children for whom English is a second language, poor children and disabled children simply cannot learn at high levels. This expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A second big barrier in Philadelphia is a teachers union that is more committed to its institutional prerogatives than it is to the type of changes in adult behavior that will result in student success at the highest levels (happily, I can add that I do not include many thousands of the union members). An important manifestation of this official recalcitrance to change is the massive resistance to accountability. Again, the resistance is accounted for in the context of the union’s low expectations of the District’s students. In this instance, the union’s attorney was actually quoted in the newspaper as saying that "Teacher performance and student achievement have nothing to do with each other". The union’s vice-president later took a position on television that reflected the same attitude. If one does not believe that it is possible to succeed with students, it follows that accountability for success would be unfair. We simply reject the underlying premise.
A third barrier is an historic and bipartisan antagonism in many state capitols toward urban students. A major manifestation of this mistreatment of poor children in Pennsylvania is our disparity in funding. Philadelphia, for example, has more than $1,500 less per child per year than is spent on average in the surrounding 61 school districts. That’s roughly $45,000 per classroom. The highest spending districts in our region spend about $7,000 more per student, more than double what we can spend. That is about $210,000 more per classroom every year.
The mistreatment of poor children is not limited to urban sites in Pennsylvania. Indeed, several years ago a group of poor, rural school districts in Pennsylvania filed suit, alleging the state school finance formula to be unconstitutional. They lost at the trial court level as we did in our own constitutional challenge. Both cases are on appeal to the State Supreme Court. But the disparities in funding are even greater when the children are not only poor but also minority. That fact led the Mayor, the School Board and me to take the unprecedented step of filing a Title VI civil rights suit against the Commonwealth last February. In school districts with the same level of poverty on average, the districts with higher minority enrollment received $52.88 less per pupil for each increase of 1% in minority enrollment. In Pennsylvania districts with more than 75% minority enrollment, each student had $389 less than each student in majority white districts. In 1996 each student in Philadelphia had $458 less in support for his or her education than the average student in a school district statewide that was majority white.
There is a connection between low expectations and funding policy. If one does not believe that low-income, African-American and/or Latino kids can learn at high levels then the reasoning is that it makes no sense to level the financial playing field, for to do so would simply create more expensive ignorance.
Frankly, I could cite numerous examples of race, language, income, disability and/or low expectations being linked to limited educational opportunity. They include: the way students are admitted to some programs; the manner schedules are designed in some schools; the impact of contractual provisions on the assignment of teachers; the willingness of substitutes to go to some schools and not to others; the identification of gifted students; the content of professional development; college going advice given or not given to students. The list is long. We have made major headway in numerous areas, but let there be no doubt; we function inside a larger society that does not value its children and values its poorest least of all.
On a daily basis, permission is given in my state and yours to pursue policies that burden the life chances of poor kids. For example, we have welfare reform that, in March, will result in as many as 25,000 Philadelphia families and 100,000 of Philadelphia’s children living even more hand-to-mouth and shelter to shelter than they do today. This is an act of permission officially sanctioned by both the federal and state governments to mistreat our most vulnerable citizens. We pass English only laws. This gives permission to mistreat our children whose first language is not English, because people know they can get away with it in the larger community. We pay a child care worker $12,000 a year with no benefits and the average head of an HMO 162 times as much at $1.95 million. Why does an average welfare payment of $365 a month to a poor family undermine personal responsibility when, as Time Magazine recently reported, billions in corporate welfare is considered by many to be nation building. Why is the official policy of the nation to guarantee health coverage to a 66-year-old but not to a 6-year-old? Permission is officially and routinely granted to mistreat our children.
Public education and the disadvantaged children of this nation are at a crossroads. We need your moral vision and your political power. We need it forcefully and we need it now. Those who do not understand and/or care whether poor kids, black kids and brown kids succeed have out organized us, out voted us and out smarted us. But it is not too late. I illustrate the point again from Pennsylvania, but similar scenes at various stages are at work all across the country.
Two years ago the Mayor, City Council and its President, the Board of Education and I decided we would never again cut school based budgets as a way to balance the district budget. That led everyone to believe for most of last year’s budget season that we would run out of money sometime before this school year was over (parenthetically several one time financial windfalls now make it clear that we will not). But we took the position that never again would we place our children in the position of being second class citizens by cutting full day kindergarten and art and music teachers, all interscholastic athletics and special reading teachers. Thirty years of the Commonwealth starving Philadelphia’s children had already created the situation in which seven of every ten youngsters entering first grade were either out of school or performing years behind grade level before they exited the 12th grade. We felt it imperative that we take a stand.
The legislature and Governor interpreted the budgetary line in the sand and the court challenges as defiant. The state reaction was, not to address the problem, not to remedy the funding discrimination between black and white, rich and poor, not to deal with underlying educational needs related to early childhood education or class size or quality teachers or summer school or tutorial assistance for kids most at risk or books or computers or maintenance of buildings or any of a myriad of other things that would be fair to our kids. The reaction was to write and pass over one weekend a piece of legislation that would enable the state to take over the Philadelphia school district at any time. This was done with the observation that of the 501 school districts in the state, 500 of them knew how to live within their means. Only one did not. And that was unacceptable. The state had to put us in our place because we were demonstrating that, in their view, we did not know our place.
Never mind that our kids are achieving better or that our stewardship of our funds, defined by the proportion of each dollar spent on instruction, is better than the average in the other 500 school districts. The only thing that seems to matter is that we are not behaving ourselves against the standard that has been established for many years by state government. I should be clear that present Governor and the present state legislature did not create our situation. The mistreatment of Philadelphia’s kids is historic and it is bipartisan. Indeed, the distinction this administration and this legislature holds is that they can be the first to remedy this longstanding shamefulness.
Will we be taken over? Will we be the first school district in the country to be making significant progress academically with tens of thousands of at-risk children, without a hint of financial corruption, to be put in receivership because we don’t know our place? There is a decent chance that the answer to that question is yes. Can we turn back? Does the thought cross our minds to turn back? The answer is no. But poor and black and brown kids across the nation need faith communities to find their moral voice, to declare loudly and clearly to elected officials that whatever experiments they may want to try around vouchers and charters and home schooling for a few children that they must first level the academic playing field for the many, many children, who have been historically left out.
We cannot afford to continue the growing gap between the haves and have nots. I urge you to make the education of our throwaway kids the next great Civil Rights issue of this country.
And so now we come to that moment when we have to ask the question. What can we do? What can the church do? What is the responsibility of God’s people in the world of public education?
You can pray for all God’s children. Pray for the little ones as they struggle to survive and to achieve. Pray that they escape the dangers and distractions that can and do befall them. Pray that they have the strength to resist the forces of discouragement and self-doubt that sap their imagination and will to succeed. And pray for us older of God’s children across the nation in our roles as Governor, Mayor, legislative leader and Superintendent, as teachers and preachers, as corporate leaders and ordinary citizens. Pray that we exercise vision, judgment, compassion and courage as we take actions, daily, that literally determine life and death for the little ones.
You can resolve – but more, you can profess, - that there shall be no 3 or 4 year old without a quality preschool opportunity; that the same standards of academic achievement that apply to white, affluent, native English speakers will be expected of and for all children; that the tools of education such as books, computers, facilities and class size will be available without regard for residence or birth; that poor children and affluent children will have the same quality teachers. You can decide as a matter of policy that you will do whatever is necessary to ensure that every child will graduate from high school on time with the qualities necessary to succeed in college and/or in a job that pays enough to support a family.
You can decide to actively encourage every congregation to partner with local schools so that no school in the nation, especially those with concentrations of our children most in need, is without a partner to help produce tutors and mentors and safety corridors and sanctuaries of all kinds for our most vulnerable children and families. It should not be a heavy lift. It is my understanding that the NCC communions represent 213,000 parishes with an estimated 43 million Christians in attendance each week. Since there are only 87,000 public schools in the United States, there are almost three parishes and 500 active Christians for every school. We have the people. We need only respond, each of us, "Here I am, Lord. Send me!"
And then, as necessary, you can write letters and march shoulder to shoulder and file law suits and become amici in the lawsuits filed by others. You can make sure all your congregants are registered voters. Kids can’t vote. You have to do it for them. You can fast and, somewhere in this nation around issues of children, we are approaching a time when Resurrection City II will be required. You must organize it.
The basic morality of the nation is at stake in public education. The leadership responsibility to act courageously and imaginatively and to speak relentlessly and powerfully with a prophetic voice and moral authority rests with our communities of faith.
I paraphrase Matthew 25: 30ff. Jesus said, "I was hungry and you fed me; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited. Then the righteous said to Him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or naked or sick?’ And He said, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me." An educated child will have enough food to avoid hunger; will be able to buy clothes to hide his nakedness; will have health insurance, preventing sickness. When have we seen the Lord hungry, sick or without clothing? We see Him in our children? Public education can fulfill the Lord’s commandment.
I am reminded of the awesome story of Moses and the Children of Israel in the book of Exodus. The question that confronted Israel throughout was, "Will we be delivered from bondage? Will the Children of Israel enter the Promised Land?" God confronted Moses on Holy Ground and insisted that he meet the challenge of leadership. When we are on Holy Ground, God overcomes our resistance, requiring obedience. God called Moses to mission. Moses tried to get out of the call to mission. He said, "Who am I that I should go to the Pharaoh and bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt....They will not believe me....I am not eloquent....I am slow of speech and tongue." God is speaking to you and me on Holy Ground. He calls us to mission. He is saying to us loudly and clearly, no excuse is good enough. We, not someone else... somewhere else… are called to discipleship, to servanthood. It is we, not another, called to raise our children out of bondage. Leave no child behind. Hush, Hush, Someone is Calling My Name and yours and yours and yours and yours. We must not permit another season of bondage for our children.
Amen.
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