The Teacher Wars (18 page)

In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, desegregation was moving so slowly that no one could say for sure how
Brown
might ultimately affect the education of black children, or the employment of black teachers.
A decade after the ruling, over 90 percent of southern black students still attended all-black schools. Of the 333,000 black children who had been integrated, 80 percent lived in border states, not in Deep South strongholds of massive resistance. In Mississippi, not a single black child had been allowed to enroll in a white school.
Why?
Except in a few high-profile cases, such as President Eisenhower's use of federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School, neither the courts nor the executive branch stepped in when white schools turned away black students, when local banks denied credit to black parents who petitioned for their children to attend white schools, or when employers fired those black parents in retaliation.

All that changed in 1964. President Johnson's enormous popularity in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, as well as his peerless legislative maneuvering, allowed him to establish an unprecedented role for the federal government in local public education.
Previous efforts to expand Washington's influence over local schools had brought limited results. The launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite in 1957 prompted Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which provided several hundred million dollars to prepare high-achieving students for careers in the sciences, math, engineering, and foreign languages. The law did not address educational inequalities driven by race and class. John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960 promising to pass a comprehensive federal education aid package, a liberal dream dating back to Reconstruction. But Kennedy's efforts were stymied when fights broke out on Capitol Hill between lobbyists representing Catholic bishops, who wanted funding for parochial schools, and those representing teachers unions, who opposed aid to religious schools and prioritized higher pay for teachers. Then, during the frustrated decade after
Brown
, desegregation was the law, but not the reality.

When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Department of Justice could finally sue schools that resisted or delayed integration. The following year, the Voting Rights Act allowed many southern black parents to register to vote for the first time. That meant black citizens could threaten to unseat politicians and school board members who opposed integration. By 1972, less than 10 percent of black students in the South attended an all-black school. Though true school integration would prove relatively fleeting in many neighborhoods, it had, at least temporarily, been achieved.

The most lasting Great Society change for the nation's schools came through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA),
the precursor to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind. The 1965 law, initially funded at the massive level of $1.2 billion per year, united the Left and center around a new role for Washington as a standard setter for state education agencies and local schools. While the NDEA had targeted funding toward the best and brightest students, ESEA was all about “compensatory education” for the 19 percent of low-income public school students falling behind in poor, largely black and Hispanic schools. Federal aid would now be offered or withheld depending on whether local policy makers followed national directives, such as supplying low-income schools with up-to-date textbooks, establishing school libraries, and pulling at-risk students out of class for supplemental tutoring. States that offered their low-income students more state-level funding would be rewarded with more money from the federal government. Johnson portrayed this expansion of the federal bureaucracy in stirring, soaring rhetoric. He signed ESEA in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, with his own elementary school teacher at his side. “
By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said. “And we rekindle the revolution—the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance. As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty. As a former teacher—and, I hope, a future one—I have great expectations of what this law will mean for all of our young people.” Those sky-high expectations placed on educators—as revolutionary foot soldiers in the War on Poverty—are still with us today.

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”:

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 demoted, 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.