Lloyd Barbee; Some Negroes are trying to get blacks to go and get a segregated education

fwd: re: Racially isolated voucher schools fail children of color
Voucher schools paradigm a George Wallace segregationist initiative
Failing voucher schools purpose is to segregate children of color
Barbee: What [some negroes] are now calling choice in education...
they're trying to get blacks to go and get a segregated education
Leon Todd: How MPS Board offened U.S. Constitution and deliberately
passed legislation to segregate the public schools [below]

Good schools, bad scores?

A beloved charter school in Harlem faces closure because of poor test scores. But parents, with few options, are fighting to keep its doors open.

By Teresa Méndez
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW YORK – It's 8 a.m., and students and parents are slogging through slushy Harlem streets on their way to the John A. Reisenbach Charter School. Families filter through the school's cheery orange lobby until 8:30 a.m., when breakfast ends and classes begin.

It's a Friday like any other here - a weekly "Color Day," when students celebrate school spirit by wearing the hues of their floor - orange, green, and blue - rather than their usual oxford shirts and gray pinafores or slacks.
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A school grows in Harlem

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Except, this day, and this month, are like no other. State evaluators who oversee New York charter schools have recommended that Reisenbach be shut, due in part to the school's results on eighth-grade state tests. The State University of New York (SUNY) Board of Trustees plans to meet Tuesday to decide whether to act on that recommendation.

The threatened closure has parents and experts both raising questions about a school's less tangible aspects - qualities no standardized test can measure. How, for instance, do you quantify the environment here - the safe, carefully monitored hallways, or the eager confidence of the students?

"These are important pieces that are part of these schools that perhaps can't be measured under traditional measures of accountability," says Luis Huerta, a professor at Columbia University's Teacher College in New York. Reisenbach's future may come down to "accountability" - modern education's trendiest buzzword, applied to everything from sweeping reform under the No Child Left Behind Act to the work of beleaguered local school boards.

But the charter school movement in particular is built solidly on the offer of greater autonomy in exchange for a promise to perform. So poor test results have serious consequences.

After seeing their children off, a handful of parents paused to talk. Some were disheartened: Wary of traditional public schools, they say they can't afford private or parochial alternatives.

"It's like a punch in the stomach," says Tiffany Foster, whose daughter Briah is in second grade. "All schools in Harlem are failing. Where does that leave my child?"

Both Craig Cobb and his daughter, Brittan who is a third grader, have fallen in love with Reisenbach.

Like other parents with children at Reisenbach, Mr. Cobb is smitten with the high level of parental involvement. Others rave about the safe, courteous atmosphere, an eighth-grade curriculum that includes reading Shakespeare and newspapers, and extras like drama class and a choir as reasons to keep the school open.

For many Reisenbach families, if the school closes, their only option will be a return to neighborhood schools, many of which are considered the city's worst.

Cobb sees Reisenbach as a work in progress - albeit one in need of assistance.

Among the state's first charter schools, Reisenbach is one of three to face re-chartering this year. The two other schools that opened in 1999 have fared a bit better.

Daniel Oscar, president of the Learning Project, a nonprofit that manages Reisenbach, says the school may have started too quickly - with four months from proposal to opening. It's had building troubles, shaky finances, and high teacher turnover.

There is no doubt that the school has not delivered on its promise to raise test scores. The report by SUNY's Charter Schools Institute (CSI) says Reisenbach "has failed to meet the terms of its charter and is not likely to improve student learning and achievement."

But administrators say the school has now hit its stride, with six new classrooms and more state dollars as enrollment has grown. Teacher morale is high. Last year, however, only 13 percent of Reisenbach's eighth-grade class met state standards in English; only 7 percent in math.

Eric Premack, codirector of the Charter Schools Development Center at California State University, Sacramento, cautions that such tests should be used over time - gauging long-term progress rather than relying on "snapshots."

But to others, hard numbers protect a school and should be relied upon. Benjamin Chavis, principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Calif., is a firm believer in scores, and skeptical of "feel good or other less quantifiable" measures of success.

In 2000, its fourth year, his school nearly had its charter revoked. But by 2001, a year after Dr. Chavis arrived, he'd turned the school around. Now, its scores are among the best in the state. "You can't win by saying, 'This is a safe school,' " he says. "That's a ridiculous argument."

Yet Reisenbach parents, teachers, and administrators point out that 2002 was the first year the school had an eighth- grade class. Some students tested had been there just five months, having arrived from failing neighborhood schools.

Still, says Mr. Oscar, the Learning Project president, there are other ways to hold a school accountable short of closure: a probationary charter, corrective action, requiring those in charge to step down. In fact, the school's director and its board members have offered to resign.

"There are a menu of options available," says Oscar. But closure "strips 432 families of their options."

The argument for shuttering struggling charters goes like this: If the only choice parents have is between a failing charter school and a failing district school, there is no parental choice.

But in the case of Reisenbach, the CSI report leaves some room for hope: "The school's full enrollment, waiting list, student-retention rate, and survey responses indicate a high level of parent satisfaction."

Ms. Popp's (pronounced Pope) first-grade class may be one reason. Her students are rowdy, but attentive.They pop out of chairs for bathroom breaks, but are engaged in a lesson on nouns.

Down the hall, Ms. Yu's kindergartners - her "scholars" as she calls them - are taking a spelling test.

And as for the larger test - the test of Reisenbach's future - some students are as intent as their parents. Two eighth graders explain what shutting the school would mean to them. Jonathan Mitchell worries about his third-grade cousin. Where will he go?

Jahari Mayfield worries about her teachers. "It's a good school," she says. "The teachers are going to lose their jobs. And jobs don't come easy."

Jahari attended a district public school before Reisenbach. "That school was bad. You got to roam the hallways," she says. At Reisenbach, she says, "They teach us right from wrong."

Some argue schools with low test scores but high community support deserve more time to prove themselves.

In 1998, California's Oakland Charter Academy was in a position similar to Reisenbach's. One of the first charter schools in its district, it squeaked through its first renewal. Test scores were bleak, faculty turnover high. But parents rallied to support the Latino educators who understood their Spanish-speaking children and their community's values. Since then, the school has made modest gains in scores - and received its third renewal.

Standards for charter school survival vary widely from state to state - with New York raising the bar higher than most. In many other states, Reisenbach's performance would be considered acceptable.

As of 2002, only 6.7 percent of US charter schools had closed, says the Center for Education Reform - mostly due to financial mismanagement.

In the past, the organizations that grant charters have been thought lax.

Now, says Bruce Fuller, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, if they move to shut down schools loved by communities, they may face their own questions of accountability.

"Do these chartering agencies see their role as policemen ... ? Or is their role more political - trying to help these schools raise kids' learning curves? Those are two fundamentally different connotations linked to the word accountability."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0224/p11s01-legn.html

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Subject: Milwaukee: a plantation meeting house with a bwana [white master]

fwd: re: Lloyd Barbee: Milwaukee is a plantation meeting house with a bwana

fwd: re: • Barbee: Milwaukee is a plantation meeting house where there's a
bwana (white master) mentality and little interest in fairness
• What [some negroes] are now calling choice in education... they're
trying to get blacks to go and get a segregated education
• Todd: How MPS Board offened U.S. Constitution and deliberately
passed legislation to segregate the public schools [below]

At the heart of Barbee's many causes was education

From the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Jan. 31, 2004

Raconteur. Radical. Reformer. By the end of his life at age of 77, Lloyd Barbee - an attorney and former member of the state Assembly - had been a bit of each.

--------------------------
Still Separate and Unequal: 1974 File Photo: As a state representative, Lloyd Barbee (D-Milwaukee), shown in this 1974 photo, quickly earned a reputation as someone willing to push for social change, even when there was little chance for political success.

Quotable: I wasn't interested in merely dismantling the system. I wanted to really integrate the system, at the teaching level, administrative level, clearly at the student level and other services.
- Lloyd Barbee, on his lawsuit against the Milwaukee Public Schools

Brown vs. Board of Education: 1954-2004

JOURNAL SENTINEL SPECIAL REPORT: http://www.jsonline.com/news/brown/
-------------------------------

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down legal segregation, most African-Americans in Wisconsin remain far behind whites in education, jobs, housing, safety and family stability. This ongoing series examines why.

A native of Memphis, Tenn., and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, by the time he came to Milwaukee in 1962, Barbee had already become involved in the NAACP and politics. But at the heart of his many causes was education.

He founded the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC), and the committee became the vehicle for desegregation efforts and ultimately a class-action lawsuit against the city's School Board.

Barbee wanted few accolades for attempts at deconstructing segregated schools. He had become so fed up with the status quo that shortly before he died, he told his family he did not want a public funeral.

They gathered instead at his Glendale home to remember a man who attempted to tear down vestiges of Jim Crow in a northern school district that was reluctant to change. It was characteristic Barbee.

"I view Milwaukee," he once said, "as a plantation meeting house where there's a bwana (white master) mentality and little interest in fairness."

The following interview was conducted in 2000 for The Duncan Group's film on race relations in Milwaukee, "Through One City's Eyes: Race Relations in America's Heartland." It was not included in the film. These excerpts were compiled by Journal Sentinel reporter Leonard Sykes Jr. They are seen here for the first time in an abbreviated form.

Q. Why - when so much attention was on open housing - did you choose to get involved with the issue of school desegregation?

A. Education was important to me. There was no question that most of the people who were being educated in the Milwaukee area were being educated by the public schools. The government (bragged) about the way it was operating the school system. I mean both the administration and the School Board had sort of taken their leave. We had decisions being made that were racial. But they didn't call them racial. When the intact busing was used, black children and teachers were put on buses when the school building was being renovated. They were bused over to predominantly white school areas and they would have to take their brown bag lunches with them. But they didn't eat their lunch in the white schools. They would have to take them back to the predominantly black schools that were being remodeled and renovated. They would eat there and then they would put them on the bus and take them back. . . . I knew then that I had a long battle. We called it "school segregation, northern style." The liberals called it "de facto segregation."

Q. Can you describe some of the issues that you thought needed facing?

A. I'm going to use percentages rather than numbers. Fourteen percent of all the Milwaukee public schools were basically African-American - or "negro" in those days. They were concentrated in certain schools in the inner city. When some schools, say, like North Division, began to have a larger number of blacks attending that school, they would transfer whites. But blacks couldn't get a transfer. And they switched the policy from what's called an open transfer policy. You had to have a reason to transfer. Race was never mentioned except for the very few. But blacks just didn't get transferred.

Q. So what exactly did you and the . . . movement want to achieve?

A. We wanted what we called "equal educational opportunity."

Q. Why did you and MUSIC focus on the School Board?

A. Because the School Board was given first an ultimatum. We (wanted) the School Board (to) do seven things - including stop intact busing (and) hire more black faculty members. The board said it would not do any of those things. And we asked them to take a position that integrated quality education was an ideal - and that (as) a school board that had only 14 percent of their student body that was black that they should do that - just as a principle. They refused to do that. And it was equally clear that they thought I was basically a sarcastic sharp-tongued lawyer who wasn't that serious about education. They underestimated me really.

Q. How did you move from the more radical techniques to the decision to pursue a lawsuit?

A. It was calculated to get an organization to concentrate on what was necessary to do. And the city attorney represented the School Board on up to the time of the trial, then they had a private law firm. By that time I was left by myself.

Q. You fought this suit for 10 years. Now looking back, how successful was the battle for school desegregation?

A. The effort was partially rewarding. It took a long time for the decision. Then we had to deal with the appeal process and retry those issues that the court said we had to retry. When the decision was made, it was a doable system. I wasn't interested in merely dismantling the system. I wanted to really integrate the system, at the teaching level, administrative level, clearly at the student level and other services.

Q. So how do you react to the criticism of some (who) now charge that busing hasn't worked?

A. There were some blacks (who) think it is wrong for blacks . . . to be educated next to whites. It's what some people did with the abortion issue - they turned it around and made it look like you're talking about choice. I don't even want to get into that necessarily. But it's the same issue. Some people got some slogans, particularly when the white racists got into the education business as they have. What they are now calling choice in education . . . they're trying to get blacks to go and get a segregated education. They claim that it's beneficial and they want the state to pay for it! And I'm definitely opposed. First of all, I think that it's illegal. And the second place, if these people who want segregation can convince certain people . . . that the public school is failing . . . you go out and get white bigots to make them fail more. I'm opposed to that.

From the Feb. 1, 2004 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/jan04/204117.asp

http://www.jsonline.com/news/brown/

-----------------------------------

Lloyd Barbee: Mentor, Role Model and Facilitator
Wisconsin Senior Advocate
Special Lloyd Barbee Honorary Issue
November/December
by Leon Todd

How MPS Board offened U.S. Constitution and deliberately
passed legislation to segregate the public schools

As a role model, Attorney Lloyd Barbee made a lasting impression on me personally, and strongly influenced my philosophy of life shortly after I was elected to the MPS School Board 1975. I knew of Barbee and what was known in the community as the Barbee Suit against the school board to bring justice to African American children who had been deliberately subjected to extreme forms of racial isolation and a perverse and deliberate segregationist policy.

Lloyd's job was to convince a federal judge that the MPS Board of School Directors had knowingly constructed a systemic scheme of segregation and racial isolation by a series of constitutionally offensive actions and votes over a number of decades. In matters of segregation Southern style, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, had moved away from only looking at segregationist Jim Crow state laws as the only instrument of de Jure [by law] segregation, and had begin to vet the policies and practices of direct agents of the state like school boards.

In 1963 Barbee, 12 years before I was elected to the MPS Board of School Directors, and the NAACP launched an attack upon deliberate segregation in Milwaukee. When Barbee and the NAACP voluntarily offered concrete desegregation measures backed up by a history of clear and convincing school system acts which enforced racial isolation, a majority of the MPS board reaffirmed its commitment to an intentionally segregated school system. Under Barbee leadership, the NAACP and coalition of ethnically diverse groups responded to the board's stubborn segregationist policies by sponsoring demonstrations, a school boycott and a rational plan of alternative schools in 1964. When the MPS board remained stubbornly committed to its racist orientation, the NAACP asked Barbee to prepare a desegregation suit, Amos v. Board of School Directors, which began in July 1965, now 10 years before I was elected in 1975.

Over the next 10 years Barbee continued with his legal case to end the racist policies in Milwaukee and prepared a massive study which demonstrated how the MPS school board had voted for Jim Crow policies and implemented a deliberate construct of segregation and racial isolation in MPS. Three of those MPS school board votes and actions Federal Judge Reynolds found constitutionally offensive: 1) In-tact busing, a system of transferring Black children to all white schools because of over crowding and keeping the children racially isolated at the white school throughout the school day; 2) school attendance boundary gerrymandering for the purpose of constructing and maintaining segregated schools; and, 3) a systematic construction program of building additions. Each of these rulings was deployed to reinforce and guarantee Milwaukee's own quiet and unique style of American Apartheid: Jim Crow segregation up North. Further, Lloyd Barbee's research found that the school board had negotiated employee contracts that had led to inner city children having teachers with the least amount of experience and confined central city Black children to the oldest school buildings which were too often temporary barracks like the row upon row of stopgap barracks at Auer Avenue School. Parents of Black children complained to Barbee that their children who attended schools in the inner city had to use used second hand throw-away text books, reading and mathematics materials from the newer schools in the white neighborhood. The institutional racism these votes set up further guaranteed the making of a permanent racially identifiable underclass in Milwaukee.

Shortly after my school board election in 1975, Judge John Reynolds accepted Barbee's petition on the behalf of Black children and ruled in Amos that MPS must desegregate and end its deliberate policy of racially isolation children of color. Much to my shock and surprise, in that the board was a continuing body, I was named a defendant, one of fifteen board members. I was peeved and offended because I as a Black man had never deliberately voted to racially segregate anyone, particularly my own race.

Barbee argued successfully that the whole system should be ordered to desegregate, root and branch. Barbee told me that he did not want just a paper victory. He wanted a substantive end to the horrific racial isolation in the city. We worked together along with a committee of 100 to establish a system of magnet schools that became a key element in our diversity plan in 1976, which the court accepted. We worked together again in 1978 along with the new and successful Superintendent, Lee McMurrin, after Judge Reynolds issued a second opinion in Amos on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court to keep this city from going the nasty and invective way Boston, Louisville, and Denver had played out over school segregation issues. Milwaukee became a model city for desegregation, and HEW often sent other school districts that said it couldn't be done to Milwaukee to learn about how to make positive progress at dismantling and eliminating the barriers to public school diversity. Barbee, along with State Assemblyman Dennis Conta and a new MPS board, played an active role in setting up the successful Chapter 220 urban suburban racial integration program which also became a model program for HEW After I had left the school board in 1981, Barbee continued to play an active part in a 1984 spin-off lawsuit between MPS and suburban school districts.

Even when the American Nazi Movement came to a school board meeting to tell the school board that a Black brain weight less than the average white brain, in other words they were speaking about my brain, Lloyd was there to council and mentor a measured response.

The leadership legacy of Lloyd Barbee to a diverse school system and an integrated society will always endure despite the recent attempts of Neo-Racist to once again racially isolate various neighborhoods of our city. We would have truly been a lot worst off with him.

As my mentor, coach and role model, I was truly sorry to hear that Lloyd had passed away.

For further anecdotes and additions for Barbee's contributions contact:

Leon Todd
Phone: 414-444-9490
E-mail: leontodd@execpc.com

For additional articles on Lloyd Barbee contact
Wisconsin Senior Advocate
Ph: 414-385-9779
Fx: 414-385-9807
E-mail: wcsc@execpc.com
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