To illustrate the transformative power of education, the president wove a careful political mythology around his own nine months working as a teacher in a low-income public elementary school. As a twenty-year-old college dropout in 1928, Johnson followed a girlfriend to south Texas, where the couple planned to earn a little money by teaching school. Johnson found work in the dusty cattle village of Cotulla, home to three thousand residents. He had attended subpar schools in central Texas Hill Country, but he was appalled by the even worse conditions at the segregated Welhausen School, where he taught the children of Mexican American laborers. The school had no extracurricular activities, no lunchtime, and no athletic equipment. The students and their parents struggled with basic English and lived in homes without indoor plumbing or electricity. Johnson wrote to his mother to ask her to send 250 tubes of toothpaste. Because he was male, he was quickly appointed principal. He instituted an “English only” rule on school grounds, founded a debate team that competed against nearby schools, assigned classic poems for students to recite from memory, and required teachers to stay after school to tutor children who needed extra help. His students would remember him as a strict disciplinarian who spanked children who spoke Spanish or talked back to their teachers. But by most reports, Johnson was an inspiring educator nonetheless. He began each school day by telling the story of “the little baby in the cradle”—a poor Mexican American child who sometimes grew up to be a teacher, sometimes a doctor, and sometimes even the president of the United States.
Johnson has been accused, in the words of historian Irwin Unger, of viewing education as “a magic cure for social failure and economic inequality.” But Johnson’s political messages about the children he knew in Cotulla were in fact quite complex. Rather than paint schools and teachers as saviors who could overcome the challenges of poverty (to borrow the phrasing of so many contemporary school reformers), Johnson described his teaching years with considerable humility. He recalled students who came to school hungry and who wordlessly understood that they were despised by whites for their brown skin and foreignness. In a March 1965 speech to Congress on “the American promise,” he portrayed himself as a young teacher walking home from work exhausted and lost in thought, simply “wishing there was more I could do”:
But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
As a mere classroom teacher, Johnson implied, he could not fully address the social challenges his students faced. To do more for them he would need to advance not only an education program, but also a broad agenda to negate the disadvantages of poverty and racism. There would be expanded access to food stamps, affordable housing, and afterschool and summer programs. There would be a federally funded preschool program for the poorest children, called Head Start. Johnson framed this agenda in nearly religious terms. “I want to be the president who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races and all regions and all parties,” he told Congress. “I want to be the president who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.” While there remains a consensus that income and educational opportunity are deeply linked, never again would a national school reform agenda be accompanied by so aggressive an antipoverty push.
Yet Great Society education programs were often badly implemented, with results that were difficult to quantify. A 1971 report to the federal government on ESEA-funded summer programs in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poor Brooklyn neighborhood, illustrates the problem. The evaluation found that a 510-child preschool program was “significantly effective.” The children were immunized and received medical, dental, and eye exams. In the classroom, they reviewed letters and numbers, learned table manners, and made flowerpots out of juice cans. But another program, for disabled children, met in dirty classrooms. Tests that were supposed to diagnose the students’ academic needs were never delivered, and many teachers were chronically absent. In an African American culture program, the dance teacher claimed it was too hot to dance, and she let the children hang out while she played one record of African music over and over again. A teacher in a program on Hispanic culture seemed to know little about Latin America except that Christopher Columbus had once landed on Puerto Rico. Test scores showed that a few of these programs increased children’s reading comprehension and spelling skills, but the results were generally uneven, and some programs were not assessed at all.
Anecdotes like these quickly led to political hostility to Johnson’s broad—and expensive—conception of school improvement. In the short term, however, the president’s policy incentives worked very effectively to advance at least one of his education priorities: the integration of southern public school students. In September 1966 white administrators across the South reviewed Johnson administration regulations and reluctantly concluded that they would miss the chance for federal funding, or get sued, if they did not integrate schools. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the school board began cautiously, not by reassigning students, but by transferring two black teachers to white schools. White parents panicked. Dozens of them flooded a school board meeting, where superintendent W. W. Elliott told them that although integration “upset our stomach,” the district had no choice given Washington’s insistence. Alabama governor George Wallace—the man who had bellowed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”—disagreed. He announced he would use police power to remove black teachers from white public schools. The threat of violence worked, at least temporarily; the two black teachers were too scared to return to work. But by 1970, even white supremacists like Wallace begrudgingly accepted at least token school desegregation in exchange for significant federal education funding.
In schools where integration was implemented thoughtfully, teachers of both races described a new sort of idealism about the power of education. At West Charlotte High School in North Carolina, black and white teachers attended workshops to learn from each other’s experiences. “We got bonded,” remembered Eunice Pharr, a black teacher at the school. “As the students came in, I noticed the faculty helped the students to bond. I get chills just thinking about the situation. It was so exciting to me.” At newly integrated Woodlawn High in Birmingham, Alabama, teacher Cleopatra Goree, who was black, styled herself after Angela Davis, wearing an Afro and a fringed leather vest. She created a history curriculum built around the African American experience, with lessons on the Middle Passage, black soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and Reconstruction and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. Both her black and white students enjoyed it, she thought—even though the parents of a few of her white students actually belonged to the Klan. “I learned to love the students,” Goree said, the white ones too. “I learned them just like I did my black students, and we became endeared to each other.”
Desegregation could improve schools surprisingly quickly. In the 1960s, the all-black First Ward Elementary School in Charlotte had a playground littered with glass shards and an outdated library. When white children began to attend the school in 1970, political pressure to improve the school increased. The school board soon renovated the playground, built a fence to keep children from running into the street, and purchased new classroom supplies. A PTA made up of both black and white parents established curricular partnerships with a local science museum and an African American cultural center.
But all too often, school desegregation was accompanied by a number of the troubling complications predicted by Brown’s black critics. Where integration led to staff redundancies and school closings, black schools were disproportionately closed and black teachers were disproportionately dismissed or demote
d, regardless of their seniority, qualifications, or success in the classroom. Across the South, there was a sense, especially among whites, that black teachers were acceptable only for black children. Many white parents assumed black teachers were less qualified than white teachers, though black and white teachers held college degrees at nearly equal rates. And fears of miscegenation may have made white parents anxious about sending their teenage daughters to schools in which young black men worked.
White school boards used a number of strategies to obscure the role racism played in decisions to terminate black educators. During the integration process, black teachers were more likely than white teachers to be reassigned to subjects or grade levels in which they did not have expertise; then they were given poor evaluations and fired for incompetence. New black teachers were also being hired at a slower rate than new white teachers. Many southern school districts began to require teacher candidates to take a controversial standardized test, the National Teacher Examination, known for producing higher scores among whites. By the 1960s, both the AFT and the NEA supported integration and, from their Washington headquarters, decried racially motivated dismissals. But the post-Brown merging of black and white union affiliates in most states meant black teachers no longer had dedicated organizations to turn to with grievances. The federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare estimated that between 1954 and 1971, the nation lost 31,584 black teaching positions and 2,235 black principalships, even as the total number of jobs in public education grew.
For black teachers, a transfer to an integrated school was considered a vote of confidence; for white teachers, it was considered a demotion. Willie Mae Crews taught English at Hayes High School in Birmingham, once known as the “Little University” for the city’s black community. In 1970 Crews, who was black, joined the Hayes integration committee and was dismayed by the white students—mostly those with disciplinary problems—and white teachers the city Board of Education assigned to the school. Some of the new white faculty members assumed they would have to lower their academic standards to teach poor black children—pretty ironic, Hayes thought, since it appeared to her that black teachers, many of them with graduate degrees and few options for employment outside of education, had been teaching at a higher level than their white counterparts who had attended only low-quality normal schools.
Meanwhile, administrators handpicked guidance counselor Helen Heath, also black, to leave Hayes and desegregate a middle-class white school in Birmingham, Glenn High. Heath recalled that the white principal at Glenn was racist. He encouraged white students to avoid Heath and visit the white counselor instead. But she valued the opportunity to help high-performing black students in a newly integrated setting realize that they, too, were “college material.” It is impossible to know what role merit played in reassigning Heath and other competent black educators away from historically black schools, since the process was so corrupted by obvious discrimination. But Heath believed historically black schools like Hayes had been “stripped of their excellent teachers, and they were substituted by unprepared white teachers.” Education researcher Clifton Claye observed in 1970 that “senile” white teachers were being assigned en masse to formerly black schools.
Several surveys of southern teachers during desegregation revealed that whites often expected little of their black students. White teachers were more likely than black teachers to report discipline problems with black children, and white teachers complained that black parents had “different values”—that they were less supportive of education or of good behavior generally. In 1965, thirteen-year-old Gloria Register integrated the formerly all-white Guy B. Phillips Junior High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She and other black students were told by white teachers to wash their faces and brush their teeth each morning. “It’s not as though we were monkeys from the zoo,” she remembered, “but that is how we were treated. And I was angry.”
The mainstream social science of the day may have buttressed such attitudes among white educators. In his 1965 essay “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Assistant Secretary of Labor and future New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that “the tangle of pathology is tightening” over the black community, with increasing numbers of children born out of wedlock and raised in segregated neighborhoods far removed from the social norms of middle-class white America. Black children with absentee fathers, he wrote, demonstrated low scores on IQ tests, not because they were genetically inferior, but because they had less parental stability and support. The following year, sociologist James Coleman submitted to Congress his report on “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” which attributed about two-thirds of the academic achievement gap between black and white children to family poverty and segregation. The two reports dovetailed in their suggestion that parents and neighborhoods were far more influential on children than teachers and schools. But they did not claim that education did not matter. The Coleman Report, in particular, continues to be misconstrued by both its supporters and its critics, who take it to assert that teachers are helpless in the face of poverty. What Coleman’s research really revealed was that compared to white students, the average black child was enrolled in a poorly funded school with less qualified teachers and fewer science and foreign language classes. Those black students who attended integrated, well-resourced schools, however, tended to earn higher test scores than black students in segregated schools, and reported feeling a greater sense of control over their lives. “Just as a loaf of bread means more to a starving man than to a sated one,” Coleman wrote, “so one very fine textbook or, better, one very able teacher, may mean far more to a deprived child than to one who already has several of both.” Coleman’s message was that although family income might be the biggest factor in student achievement, teachers and schools also mattered, especially for poor kids. Yet by calling attention to disparities like the relative lack of books in black homes—and by ignoring identical deficiencies among poor whites—the Moynihan and Coleman reports may have led some teachers to conclude there was little they could do in the classroom to help black students succeed. As research would begin to show definitively by the end of the decade, such low expectations for children could be self-fulfilling.
But prejudice and low expectations were not the only explanations for why too many schools failed to effectively educate black and low-income children. Many teachers lacked relevant experience or training in working with poor students of any race, and too many of them were ignorant of the strategies developed by African American educators, ever since the Civil War, to reach a student population simultaneously fighting racism, poverty, and political disempowerment. The education theorists Lisa Delpit and Gloria Ladson-Billings have articulated some of the tactics black teachers (like Charlotte Forten and Anna Julia Cooper) used throughout history to successfully educate black students. Strict discipline was employed less as a means of control and more as a way of demonstrating love for the child: I help you understand the consequences of your actions, teachers tell their students, because I am personally invested in your success. Effective black teachers sought close ties to their students’ parents, often socializing with them outside school and engaging them in conversations about their children’s education. Black teachers introduced black children to heroic figures from African American history, to build racial pride. And because many poor black children did not speak standard English at home, their teachers spent extra time on phonics and vocabulary building.
As early as 1965, the Johnson administration acknowledged the growing problem of black students, especially in the South, being taught by too few black teachers. U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel worried that without black role models at school, black children would be forced to face the upheavals of school integration alone. “We must not deceive ourselves that the exclusion of Negro teachers is not noticed by children,” he said. Even President Johnson, in a speech to the National Education Association, said he was conce
rned about dismissals. Yet neither the executive branch nor the courts held school districts accountable for more than token faculty integration. In 1965, after the New York City school board hired five hundred southern black teachers displaced by integration, NAACP lawyer Jack Greenberg wrote a letter to The New York Times complaining that it wasn’t enough. Policy makers must protect black teaching jobs in the South, he wrote, since black educators held a “uniquely important place in Southern society.” The Health, Education, and Welfare Department “has, with reluctance, adopted the formal position that teacher integration is necessary … We have, however, seen no enforcement from the department.” Indeed, the following year the embattled Tuscaloosa school board received a letter from HEW suggesting that in a majority-white school, one black teacher would suffice.
The Teacher Wars Page 14