Andrew Hutman, Teach for America and the case against the "reform" movement

Everyone who cares even the slightest about education policy in the United States needs to read this article by Illinois State History Professor, Andrew Hutman on the Jacobin Magazine website.  It is entitled "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders", and has recently gained much more traction in education circles with it's reprint in Valerie Strauss's Washington Post education blog, The Answer Sheet under the title "Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda".

It is an article that primarily discusses the fact that the Teach for America (TFA) program, and the influence it has had on this newest "education reform" movement.  Hutman talks about how TFA, and the reform movement as a whole, seems to care about the education of poverty-stricken students in the United States (and many in the reform movement, including Wendy Kopp, probably do care in their deep down).  But the reality of what their policies actually do is to push for "reforms" in favor of austerity and business-friendly interests.  Most of those involved in public education, including those who have been involved in the SOS movement, already know this.  But for those who don't, Hutman has done an amazing job of essentially laying out the case against the so-called "education reform" movement like no one else has since Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Here are some excerpts from Hutman's article.  First, his take on the true identity of TFA:

TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.

On the myth that TFA would "enhance the image of the teaching profession":

On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010. [In 2011 the acceptance rate was 11 percent.]

Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education. 

Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.

Hutman on the idea of how programs and reforms fix the problem of "teacher quality" by kicking out bad teachers, and bringing in good ones:

Following the economic collapse of 2008, which contributed to school revenue problems nationwide, massive teacher layoffs became the new norm, including in districts where teacher shortages had provided an entry to TFA in the past. Thousands of Chicago teachers, for instance, have felt the sting of layoffs and furloughs in the past two years, even as the massive Chicago Public School system, bound by contract, continues to annually hire a specified number of TFA corps members. In the face of these altered conditions, the TFA public relations machine now deemphasizes teacher shortages and instead accentuates one crucial adjective: “quality.” In other words, schools in poor urban and rural areas of the country might not suffer from a shortage of teachers in general, but they lack for the quality teachers that Kopp’s organization provides.

After twenty years of sending academically gifted but untrained college graduates into the nation’s toughest schools, the evidence regarding TFA corps member effectiveness is in, and it is decidedly mixed. Professors of education Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez, in the most thorough survey of such research yet, found that TFA corps members tend to perform equal to teachers in similar situations —that is, they do as well as new teachers lacking formal training assigned to impoverished schools. Sometimes they do better, particularly in math instruction. 

Yet “the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well,” Vasquez Heilig and Jin Jez discovered, “than those of credentialed beginning teachers.”  It seems clear that TFA’s vaunted thirty-day summer institute—TFA “boot camp”—is no replacement for the preparation given future teachers at traditional colleges of education.

 On how successful most Charter Schools are:

But successful charter schools, Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom. This is why charter schools are the preferred mechanism for delivery of education reform: as defined by Kopp, charter schools are “public schools empowered with flexibility over decision making in exchange for accountability for results.” And yet, “results,” or rather, academic improvement, act more like a fig leaf, especially in light of numerous recent studies that show charter schools, taken on the whole, actually do a worse job of educating students than regular public schools.

On Teacher Unions and the reform movement:

Rather, crushing teacher’s unions — the real meaning behind Kopp’s “flexibility” euphemism — has become the ultimate end of the education reform movement. This cannot be emphasized enough: the precipitous growth of charter schools and the TFA insurgency are part and parcel precisely because both cohere with the larger push to marginalize teacher’s unions.

On TFA, Race to the Top, and the "business" of High-Stakes Testing:

TFA’s complicity in education reform insanity does not stop there. From its origins, the TFA-led movement to improve the teacher force has aligned itself with efforts to expand the role of high-stakes standardized testing in education. TFA insurgents, including Kopp and Rhee, maintain that, even if imperfect, standardized tests are the best means by which to quantify accountability. 

Prior to the enactment of Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind in 2001, high-stakes standardized testing was mostly limited to college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). But since then, the high-stakes testing movement has blown up: with increasing frequency, student scores on standardized exams are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations, upon which rewards and punishments are meted out. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy — the brainchild of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools — further codifies high-stakes testing by allocating scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively implementing these so-called accountability measures.

The multi-billion dollar testing industry — dominated by a few large corporations that specialize in the making and scoring of standardized tests — has become an entrenched interest, a powerful component of a growing education-industrial complex.

On Testing and Cheating:

More recently, cheating scandals have likewise discredited several celebrated reform projects. In Atlanta, a TFA hotbed, former superintendent and education reform darling Beverly Hall is implicated in a cheating scandal of unparalleled proportions, involving dozens of Atlanta principals and hundreds of teachers, including TFA corps members. Cheating was so brazen in Atlanta that principals hosted pizza parties where teachers and administrators systematically corrected student exams. Following a series of investigative reports in USA Today , a new cheating scandal seems to break every week. Cheating has now been confirmed not only in Atlanta, but also in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Dayton, and Memphis, education reform cities all.

On TFA, inequality and corporate money:

In contrast to such “success,” the TFA insurgency has failed to dent educational inequality. This comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp of the tight correlation between economic and educational inequality: TFA does nothing to address the former while spinning its wheels on the latter. 

In her writings, nowhere does Kopp reflect upon the patent ridiculousness of her expectation that loads of cash donated by corporations that exploit inequalities across the world — such as Union Carbide and Mobil, two of TFA’s earliest contributors — will help her solve some of the gravest injustices endemic to American society.

Kopp shows some awareness of the absurdities of her own experiences — including a “fundraising schedule [that] shuttled me between two strikingly different economic spheres: our undersourced classrooms and the plush world of American philanthropy” — but she fails to grasp that this very gap is what makes her stated goal of equality unachievable. In short, Kopp, like education reformers more generally, is an innocent when it comes to political economy. She spouts platitudes about justice for American children, but rarely pauses to ask whether rapidly growing inequality might be a barrier to such justice. She celebrates 20 years of reform movement success, but never tempers such self-congratulatory narcissism with unpleasant questions about why those who have no interest in disrupting the American class structure — such as Bill Gates and the heirs to Sam Walton’s fortunes, by far the most generous education reform philanthropists — are so keen to support the TFA insurgency. Kopp is a parody of the liberal do-gooder.

 The philosophy of TFA:

In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?

 

Parenting, Poverty and Academic Success

Photo from Cool Health Tips  

"How About Better Parents?"  That is what Thomas Friedman suggests in one of his most recent editorials in the New York Times.

In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

He uses research from the often-cited Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which decided to look at factors from outside of the classroom to see what made successful students.  There were three major findings they found:

• Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.


• The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socio-economic background.


• Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.

Friedman also cites a study by the Center for Public Education, and the Center's Director, Patte Barth, to support this.

“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”

To say that good parenting is important in the academic quality of a young person may seem blatantly obvious to some.  But the reality is that it is probably the most important component in a young person's success.

This simple truth often get's overshadowed in our current national education debate by issues of teacher quality, and how those evil teacher unions want to keep bad teachers in our schools.  That is not to say that good teachers, or good schools for that matter, can't make a difference.  I would even argue that there are probably some things we could do to improve the way teachers are assessed, and there are reforms that can be made to the way schools manage tenure.

But that quote about how "there is no substitute for a good teacher" can be applied tenfold to a good parent.  All teachers know this to be true.  That doesn't mean they give up on student's who struggle or refuse to work.  Often times, they will make extra efforts to reach out to those students.  This isn't to suggest that there aren't good parents who have children that perform poorly in school, or vice versa.  But that general correlation between good parenting and academic quality becomes blatantly obvious whenever a teacher makes a phone call home to a parent, or when parent-teacher conferences come around (if the parent even picks up the phone or shows up to conferences at all). 

Going back to the editorial, something that Friedman barely touches on is the issue of poverty.

Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”

I won't say that Friedman was wrong to gloss over poverty in his editorial, because the point of the piece was about good parenting.  Yes, good parenting is a more important factor in a student's academic success than what type of socioeconomic background that student comes from.  But what type of parent a person can be to their child is highly influences by their socioeconomic status.

 

Image from The Affordable Housing Institute

 
There are numerous factors that play into this: Do the children live in a one-parent or two parent household?  Is one or both of the parents working multiple jobs with late hours?  Do they have time to read to their children (or taken them to a museums or get them involved in other enrichment and supplemental activities)?  Are the parents homeless (thus putting the emphasis of their time on finding food and shelter rather than what book are they going to read)?

None of this is to suggest that an adult living in a lower-socioeconomic background can't be an excellent parent, or a child from a lower-socioeconomic background can't be an excellent student.  But the conditions of poverty make parental and academic success a lot harder to achieve.  This cannot be underestimated.  I would like to close this post by citing a post I wrote back in February on the issue of poverty and academic success of students in American schools:

 The truth of the matter is that, all things considered, American schools are no worse than most countries around the world.  If anything, our schools as they exist in many neighborhoods are just as capable of outperforming schools in Finland, China, or any other industrialized nation.  There certainly are things that our country can do better to improve the quality of schools and education as a whole.  But the main reason that a school district usually struggles to begin with is poverty.  The reason that inner-city school districts struggles with lower test scores, higher drop-out rates, violence, increased teen pregnancy, and so on is because of the poverty that most of the students and their parents live in.  Everyone knows this is the case, and has known it for years.  For all of the well-being and economic success our country has had compared to the rest of the world, poverty (and all of the societal problems that are linked to it) is the great albatross around America's neck.

"Absurd" Education Proposal by Newt

 Picture from Polk County GOP

Newt Gingrich has a history of saying stupid things.  Here is a new one that I found on a NYT blog post generously titled "From Gingrich, and Unconventional View on Education".

In poverty stricken K-12 districts, Mr. Gingrich said that schools should enlist students as young as 9 to14 to mop hallways and bathrooms, and pay them a wage. Currently child-labor laws and unions keep poor students from bootstrapping their way into middle class, Mr. Gingrich said.

“This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” he told an audience at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on Friday, according to Politico.

“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine,” Mr. Gingrich said. “You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

 AFT President Randi Weingarten puts it very simply:

“Who in their right mind would lay off janitors and replace them with disadvantaged children — who should be in school, and not cleaning schools,” Ms. Weingarten said. “And who would start backtracking on laws designed to halt the exploitation of children?”

UPDATE:

Newt apparently had some other things to say about children working outside of school as well:

He added, "You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars."

"They all learned how to make money at a very early age," he said. "What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don't do it. Remember all that stuff about don't get a hamburger flipping job? The worst possible advice you could give to poor children. Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day even if you are in a fight with your girlfriend. The whole process of making work worthwhile is central."

The former House Speaker acknowledged that it was an unconventional pitch, saying, "You're going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America and give people a chance to rise very rapidly."

To be fair, there is something to be said about young people getting jobs that helps to instills a sense of hard work, and appreciate what they earn.  Even if that means working for lower-wages, and doing more physically laborious tasks.  That are what jobs for younger people (who are being primary supported by parents and guardians) are supposed to be like. 

I hope that some of the ideas Mr. Gingrich is proposing, however, doesn't mean he wants to alter child-labor laws, as some are suggesting.   I also hope that Mr. Gingrich isn't simply suggesting that working as a child means that one will automatically rise out of poverty.  The primary causes of poverty are numerous and complex, and it is going to take a lot more than kids learning the meaning of hard work to combat it.

The Message of the SOS March

Of all the events I missed writing about during my 5 month hiatus, the Save Our Schools March that took place in Washington, D.C. was probably the thing I wish I could have covered the most.  I wasn't in D.C., but I would have been there if I could have afforded it.  I ended up watching most of the speeches on the internet.  I thought I would share some of them here.

First, there is the speech from actor Matt Damon, whose Mom is an educator:



Secondly, there is Diane Ravitch, who has become one of my heroes this past year for sticking up for teachers against the so-called "education reform" movement.



Finally, here is a message from John Stewart (another one of my heroes).



The message of this march was an important one.  There are so many problem in education, but the focus of how to fix the problems and the resources that are used all go to the wrong places.  Instead of blaming poverty (and all of it's effects) for the achievement gap, we blame teachers and teacher unions.  Instead of individuals with vast amounts of experience in education to run our schools, we hire individuals with ties to big businesses.  Instead of trying to make society more equitable and secure, we fire teachers and close down schools.  Instead of trying to improve the public schools we have, we open charter schools as a panacea that can refuse to take students who need the most help.  Instead of teaching a holistic curriculum that emphasizes practical application of concepts and critical thinking skills, we narrow our curriculum to reading and math, and teach kids how to take multiple choice tests.  And when that isn't good enough, people get desperate and cheat.

If you want a good summary of what is really wrong with public education today, watch this recent interview with Ravitch and New York City school teacher Brian Jones on Democracy Now.


Oh, and for fun, watch Matt Damon school a reporter from Reason TV on education policy.  You are the man, Jason Bourne!

Thank You, Jon Stewart!

Teacher bashing is nothing new, but since the events is Wisconsin started two weeks ago, it has seemed to reach an all time high by many in the media.  In the clips below, Jon Stewart takes a look at this phenomenon.  Not only are teachers being blamed for the budget crisis that affects nearly every state across the country, but some of the oldest, most overused and unnecessary put downs of teachers are being used by pundits who feel most teachers have it easy.  As The Daily Show played clips of these pundits talking about what a cushy job teachers have, I sat in cold silence with a smirk on my face, while my wife yelled at the TV because they clearly didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

Jon Stewart, certainly out of a love for his mother who is a teacher, takes on these pundits, and defends teachers against these charges.  Anyone who is a teacher or who has a loved-one who is a teacher knows that teaching is anything but cushy (with the exception of the Fox News pundit in the first video below whose Mom is a teacher).  There are many long hours outside of their work day where they are grading papers, planning lessons, or talking to parents.  Chances are, if a teacher isn't spending time outside of their 8-hour contract period doing work, they aren't very good at their job.  Yes, there are summer breaks, but many teachers teach summer school, tutor, take a second job to earn extra income, or spend time coming up with new lesson ideas and getting ready for the upcoming year.  Often times, they are doing a combination of these.

Finally, there is the issue of teachers having a cushy pay in comparison to those in the private-sector workforce.  I will admit that in today's economy, the pay of a teacher probably looks pretty good compared to the many jobs people are now forced to get because of hard times.  But five years ago, when I decided to become a teacher, this was not the case.  While teachers have always had their detractors, it was widely agreed that teachers were overworked and underpaid.  One woman I knew growing up who is a now-retired professor of education joked that whenever I get married, I will know that girl is not marrying me because of the money I make (and I can honestly say that is true).  But times have changed, and suddenly teachers have it easy, they are overpaid, and are living off the the hard-earned money of the taxpayer (how dare we do that).  Fortunately, Jon Stewart challenges this thinking, and brings in some much-needed reality to this debate.

Here is Part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Crisis in Dairyland - Angry Curds
www.thedailyshow.com
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Here is Part 2, a message to the teachers from Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Crisis in Dairyland - Message for Teachers
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

I am Proud To Be in a Union!

 

Make no mistake about it, what is going on with the protests in Wisconsin is a very BIG DEAL!  

OK, so it is not as dramatic as what is going on countries like Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, and Tunisia.  Some have wanted  to compare Governor Walker to Mubarak or Gadafi, and compare the protests in Madison to the protests Tahrir Square.  These are not the same thing.  Not even close.  Anyone who compares Walker to Mubarak, or Hitler, or any other dictator are blowing things way out of proportion.  And no one who is protesting in Madison is risking their lives like the people protesting in Northern Africa or the Middle East.

Now that I have that out of the way, let's get back to the point that what is going on in Madison is still a BIG DEAL!  Make no mistake, what Governor Walker is trying to do is more than just a save money in the Wisconsin budget.  It is not as if the public-employee unions in Wisconsin are just being selfish, and aren't willing to compromise. Everyone understands these are hard times for state budgets, and the unions in Wisconsin have acknowledged this.   But what Walker is trying to do is bust the public-sector unions in the state of Wisconsin.  

This story is not only about the future of unions in Wisconsin, but it is also the beginning of a greater battle for the future of unions in the United States.  By no means are unions perfect, and I will not pretend that every union that has ever existed has fairly represented the interests of it's members.  Indeed, I will not pretend that I don't have some issues with the union I belong to.  Nonetheless, I understand that the value of unions are too important, and I am still damn proud to be a member of a union.  All things considered, unions are really the only groups left of any relative influence in our political process that can claim to stand up for the interests of working Americans, and not big business.  

 Why are unions so important?  Well, here is a video put out a few years ago by a group in Australia regarding some of the things unions have fought for over the years.  Some of what is discussed are exclusive to Australia, but a number of these things exist in the United States as well because of unions.

Last week, Rachel Maddow did a piece on her show about why the story in Wisconsin is so important to the future of labor, and why unions are so important to our republic, both now and throughout modern American history. 

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 Finally, I recommend this piece by Paul Krugman on the situation in Wisconsin.  Here is an excerpt:

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.
You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.
There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

As I am writing this, I worry that someone who comes across this piece might think I am writing some type of left-wing propaganda.  Yes, I am a proud liberal, and I am sourcing two very prominent American liberals in this post (Maddow, Krugman).  But please, if you are reading this, I hope you will look at the bigger picture of what is going on with this story, regardless of what your politics are.  This is one of those issues that is beyond left and right.  It is more than a state budgetary matter.  It is about the influence of big business and corporations, and the future of working class Americans.  Whatever your politics are, if you are a working American, I ask you to understand the importance of this story.  Then, Get Mad!  Then, Get United!

Some Articles on American Education on MLK Day.

Dana Goldstein points out that schools are more segregated today than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968.  She also notes the following:

And make no mistake--integration is one of the most powerful school reform tools in the kit. 

Here's how we know that: At the macro level, four decades of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress--the "nation's report card"--show that the achievement gap between white and minority students shrunk fastest during the 1970s and 1980s, the era of Court-mandated school desegregation. Between 2004 and 2009, on the other hand--our NLCB, "standards and accountability" era--the achievement gap between white children and black and Latino children did not shrink at all.

Sarah Mead explains that simply making MLK a day of services, as well intentioned as it is, misses the point in teaching what MLK was really about:

I'm particularly uncomfortable with the decision to make King's holiday a "day of service," on which young people are encouraged to engage in service projects. Not that there's anything wrong with any of these projects. They're nice things to do. But the progress of the civil rights movement didn't come from people working in soup kitchens, cleaning up parks, or doing similarly nice, service-y things. It came from people nonviolently but directly standing up to unjust power structures and engaging in civil disobedience. People actually broke unjust laws--and got arrested for it. Teaching our kids that this is a day about service seems to get the message dead wrong--or at least to suggest that our nation and world are no longer plagued by injustices that require more than volunteer work to right them.

In the South, many school districts do not let there students off school for MLK Day (along with other holidays) in order to make-up for missed snow days.

I have two things to say to these school districts: First, given your less than stellar history on race relations, using MLK Day as a snow day is not the smartest move (at least from a purely PR standpoint).  In fact, it is quite disrespectful and offensive.  Secondly, you should do what other districts in the country do for missed snow days: build in snow days when making your calender, and if you use them up, add on days to the end of the year. 

Finally, there is also this piece from my favorite education writer these days, Diane Ravitch.  She  published this on last year's MLK Day.  She asks if you can imagine Martin Luther King standing along side businessmen and billionaires in favor of more testing and charter schools. I know that what is known as "education reform" gets a lot of positive attention from progressives and leaders in the African-American community these days.  However, MLK was a supporter of public workers and unions, and would just as likely been on the side of supporting public schools, teacher unions, and more money for poor districts (not based on test scores).  He would also have likely pointed out that the real culprit of the achievement gap was poverty.  The NYC Educator blog shares Mrs. Ravitch's views on MLK and union support by quoting him:

"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome."
-- MLK Jr., Illinois AFL-CIO Convention, 1965.