Submitted by Granville Leo Stevens, Aug 23, 2007 18:26

If readers probe beneath the common mantra of the Manhattan Institute's formidable stable of scholars to examine the cores of Dr. McWhorter's observations, they would see that after eliminating his obvious disrespect for Kozol's dated and unsubstantiated assertions for the alleged benefits of reduced class sizes, they would see he is correct regarding the necessity of educating Black and Latino, poor, immigrants and special needs students without excuses and without the Quixotic chase of integration in urban public schools.

A large part of Kozol's comments here at a Drop-Out Conference earlier this year at Baruch College were in support of the on-going opposition to the "Bloomberg-Klein" school reforms that are intended to level the playing field and reorder capital and human resources across the system. Kozol and others, now remarkably including eminent Professor Diane Ravitch seem to support the desirability of small class size without taking the necessary next steps of dealing with the longstanding difficult matter of uniform teacher quality. The UFT-friendly audience showered Kozol with standing applause and a union executive ripped into something Professor Noguera said about teacher quality, among many prescriptions everyone found to be insightful and prabably effective remedies.

Klein's middle class parent opponents generally come form schools that work and, understandably, have resisted any change in the status quo that might theoretically diminish or de-sabilze the quality of their children's educational experiences, school staff and outcomes in enclaves that include the West Village, Upper Westside, Douglaston, and Gramercy, among others.

McWhorter and other emerging African American scholars, educators, and parents, including the undersigned, who might be labeled correctly or incorrectly as "right leaning" with respect to matters of educating all American youth, equitably, have seen the failure of urban school systems over the last four decades and have correctly concluded that we must try something different than a union-dominated agenda to resist voluntary, financially "incentivized" teacher assignments so that we can place more high-quality teachers in high need schools.

Moreover, Kozol's dream of Brown vs. Board of Education has had very limited utility in addressing the de facto school segregation, based on residential housing patterns that everyone sees on a daily basis in New York City. In order to close the glaring and disgraceful academic achievement gap that has Blacks and Latinos at the subterranean stratum compared with the upper opposite end occupied by Asians and Whites, we must be able to place more high quality and experienced teachers with lower turn-over rates, with students who need them most. In that way, we can begin to fulfill the original promise of the CFE litigation.

Besides, if we were to follow the outdated views of Jonathan Kozol (and he current mythical promise represented by a half century old Supreme Court decision with respect to integration), whose work has been of unparalleled significance in graphically pointing out sinful disparities in school conditions, there would not be enough White kids to go around to integrate a system that is 75% Black and Latino. Besides, why would most White parents want to have their children leave such schools as Stuyvesant (4%) Black, Bronx Science, Townsend Harris and the new "screened" schools that have cropped up in recent years. (Ironically, many of these parents and the liberal experts they cite have fought to resist public charter schools, with lottery entrance criterion, that have been over-subscribed in Harlem and other areas with long histories of failure where many experienced teachers do not opt tread.

De facto segregated schools are here and are likely to be around into the distant future. Why not acknowledge Kozol at alia for all they have done to get us where we are today but now be guided by different voices to take us into the future. As much as it is detested, NCLB-mandated sub-group categorization and data collection lay out the ugly truth of race (ethnic), class, and gender disparities - much of which Kozol has revealed through his work. Why not face these challenges head on and strive to have excellent neighborhood schools and centralized specialized school options for all parents? The drop-out, graduation, disciplinary, special education referral/placement, and incarceration rates; and human and civil rights principles demand immediate and aggressive remediation.

Rather than burying and banning the 'n' word, it's time to provide a quality education for all our children with culturally empowering curricula, uniform high quality and diverse teaching staffs and administrators, thereby enabling them to make good decisions and contibut to a democratic society. What messages are we sending them when we do otherwise? What behaviors are we modeling for them to follow? Scary.

The headstrong style of management and failure to engage parents and be transparent must be greatly improved during the implementation phases of Los Ninos Primero and Contract for Excellence. However, let's not change direction from the path we are on, provided we are listened to and can tweak in acordance with policy, and shared decision making provisions of 100.11 of the State Education Department Regulations.

Granville Leo Stevens

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