Cuomo is not inclusive in rebuilding education
Recently, admitting “we’ve done pretty much everything wrong,” in planning for the global pandemic, Yale School of Public Health Dean Sten Vermund vowed to learn from those mistakes. One lesson is that, future planning “needs to include more input from doctors, nurses, and the people making decisions at patients’ bedsides, not just those looking at theoretical situations and legal frameworks.”
Observing our frontline providers of educational services provides valuable lessons for future planning as well. We have seen how public schools provide much more than instruction, giving students food, health care and emotional support and services. We have also seen the severe limits of online instruction, both in the disparity of access and in its ineffectiveness compared to inperson teaching — particularly for vulnerable students. Public schools after the pandemic will require more resources to provide individual attention to students’ myriad needs.
These lessons seem to be lost on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo enlisted two tech billionaires, Bill Gates, the failed education reformer, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to “reimagine” public schools after the pandemic. Cuomo revealed his myopic view of public schools: “The teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class and you do that all day ... all these buildings, all these physical classrooms. Why, with all the technology you have?” Excluded from Cuomo’s task force on reopening schools was any teacher, parent or student from New York City, which serves more than 1 million students, most of whom are African American, Latinx and low-income.
The COVID pandemic has disproportionately impacted African Americans and Latinx. Yet not only has Cuomo not sought input from these communities, his policies in response to the pandemic have specifically harmed them.
Excluded from Cuomo’s task force on reopening schools was any teacher, parent or student from New York City, which serves more than 1 million students, most of whom are African American, Latinx and low-income.
In April, Cuomo cut school aid in the exact amount school districts were supposed to receive from the federal government under the CARES act. The CARES act is intended to help school districts with the additional costs of providing instruction and services during the pandemic. An analysis by my colleagues at the Education Law Center determined that Cuomo’s pandemic cuts disproportionately hurt New York’s poorest districts, which are also predominately African-American and Latinx.
Sadly, the combination of disinvestment in and ignoring input from communities of color, particularly African American communities, is a shameful American tradition. As professors Noliwe Rooks, Vanessa Siddle Walker and Elizabeth Todd-Breland have documented, AfricanAmerican teachers and families have fought for equal access to resources and educational opportunities for African-American students since early in this nation’s history. They pioneered notions such as culturally relevant curricula well before the civil rights movement, and were the often invisible heroes of that movement. Early on, activists across the country connected citizenship with equity in educational funding and opportunities; and they maintained that focus consistently, no matter what form the reform they advocated took.
This history contrasts sharply with the narrative that has been propagated by the White power structure — a narrative that pathologized AfricanAmerican families as not caring or not knowing about their children’s education. America’s halfhearted moves toward integration are one example. African-American integration activists coupled their demands for integration with demands for adequate resources. Indeed, as Berkeley’s Rucker Johnson has demonstrated, integration paired with increased funding results in lasting positive academic and life outcomes. Those activists also sought to ensure that integration would not result in Black teachers losing their jobs. For Whites, integration was often framed as “saving” Black students from their own communities. So, White-led integration resulted in transporting African-American
students out and shipping white teachers in, and rarely involved increased funding. Had leaders listened to AfricanAmerican activists in pursuing integration, we would likely have more integrated student bodies and teaching staff today.
As scholars Sally Nuamah and Domingo Morel have shown, when the will of the African American communities is ignored in education policy decisions, those communities lose trust in political institutions. Parents in Chicago futilely protested the 2013 mass school closures by then-mayor Rahm Emmanuel — closures which disproportionately displaced African-American students, and failed to improve achievement or save money. Another result of the school closures was political disengagement in these communities.
When those in power ignore those closest to our neediest students, effective school reform measures get overlooked. The ripple effects on political participation may even be worse. In an era when political engagement by our most disenfranchised communities may be the key to saving this democracy, we ignore their input at our peril. It will be a shame if other governors follow Cuomo’s lead and “do everything wrong.”