Neena Satija Photo
When Billy Johnson (pictured) was a student at Wilbur Cross High School, his parents were constantly working. They didn’t have time to help him with schoolwork or girls. So when it came time for getting his driver’s license, a teacher took him to take the test. A teacher bought him his prom ticket and tuxedo. Another teacher even picked out his date.
“They practically adopted me,” Johnson told audience members and state legislators at a town hall meeting on education reform at Yale Law School Saturday, which was followed by a keynote panel entitled “The Real Politics of Education Reform.”
As parents, students, teachers, administrators, legislators and education experts passionately discussed the merits of educational reforms, Johnson’s story embodied one of the most contentious debates of the afternoon – How much of a role could parents actually play in closing Connecticut’s achievement gap?
Johnson is now principal of Stark Elementary School in Stamford.In his opinion, teachers have far more of an impact than administrators or parents. “You can have an impact, but the impact is the bodies you put in the classroom,” he said.
For Anthony Colón, a former school administrator and now an educational consultant, it’s parents who have the biggest role of all.
“No one knows my kids better than I do,” he said.
He gave an example from his experience as executive director of a charter school in Oakland, California, where parents dug trenches to provide electricity for a portable classroom.
The situation was the reverse for Steve Perry, a CNN education contributor and founder of Capital Preparatory Magnet School, a school that has sent 100 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges. When it comes to worrying about parents, he said, “I don’t have time.” He spoke of parents who, despite dozens of calls from him, wouldn’t attend their child’s sports games or pick them up from school. So Perry was forced to pick up the slack.
“Let’s just be honest about this,” said Howard Fuller. “Some parents just don’t care.” Fuller founded and teaches at the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. He was the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. He also chairs the board of a small private school whose students are supported entirely by vouchers.
“I have held my phone out here” – he said, gesturing as far away from his ear as possible – “for 24 minutes while a parent cussed me out.”
“and all I was trying to do was help their child.”
He recalled an incident where a parent became furious when their child expressed the desire to go to college; the parent accused the child of thinking he was “better than the rest of us.”
Some audience members found that hard to swallow. They said often schools don’t give parents enough of a voice or make them feel welcome. It was a parent, after all, who introduced the panel that included Colón, Fuller, and Perry.
“We are about to embark on the new civil rights movement, ladies and gentlemen,” said Gwen Samuel, a local parent, as people filed out of the hour-and-a-half town hall meeting and into the next panel discussion. The town hall meeting had become a standing-room-only event in a room seating about sixty people, and most stayed for the panel that followed, which lasted more than two hours.
State legislators Douglas McCrory, Toni Walker, Toni Harp, and Jason Bartlett.
Both discussions, organized by the Campaign for Leadership in Education, Achievement and Reform Now (Campaign LEARN), roused the audiences and the panelists.
“You guys aren’t mad enough!” Hartford State Rep. Douglas McCrory said to a chorus of “amens” and a round of applause. “We’re losing, folks. Our kids are dying.”
He wasn’t the only one to use those words that afternoon. Perry used them too. “I have to educate in a war zone…I’m not talking about some metaphorical death,” he said. “They are literally dying in these horrible public schools.”
“It’s unimaginable that 55 years after Brown [v. Board of Education], we’re in an auditorium discussing the achievement gap,” said Howard Fuller. “What chance to our children have?”
“None,” came a voice from the front of the audience in the law school auditorium.
“What is history going to say about our children?” Fuller continued.
“Nothing,” the voice said again.
The role of parents was just one of many issues that the audience and panelists sparred over. Two audience members asked lawmakers to consider changing high school graduation requirements to include four years of math and science, rather than only English. Nods and applause followed their questions.
Then New Haven State Rep. Toni Walker respectfully disagreed.
“More of our kids will end up not finishing high school,” she said. Walker said she wants to fix the achievement gap first, then tackle high school requirements.
The discussions hit home in particular for New Haven public school students in attendance. Brittany Green (at left in photot), a 17-year-old junior at the Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, spoke at the town hall meeting about many of her friends who had dropped out of school. They had no motivation to continue, and no teachers to guide them.
“There’s a lot of teachers in school that don’t care. And it shouldn’t be like that,” she told the audience. “If you’re saying that we’re the next generation, you need to help us. … All we need is somebody to talk to, somebody to be there.”
She’s also frustrated about the way the school curriculum is taught, with such an emphasis on standardized testing, she said.
“From the time we arrived, it’s tests, tests, tests, tests, tests,” she said after the event. “What’s after that test?”
As for the effectiveness of panels and meetings like this one, she was cautiously optimistic: “It goes beyond listening…it’s showing you’re going to do something that counts.”