Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson will be the keynote speaker at the 4th Annual Urban Education Symposium: Reclaiming Black Males for Jacksonville’s Future. The event is from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Main Library Saturday.
I don’t know Gerard Robinson. I don’t know if he is a true believer or just a shill for the privatization of public education but I do know he is bad for Florida and especially to the individuals he will be speaking to on Saturday, the black community.
Florida through the FCAT has devastated our inner city mostly minority schools. So what is Robinson’s response? It’s to ratchet up the FCAT and he himself nonchalantly admits that an additional fifteen thousand tenth graders are likely to fail it next year. Where do these tenth graders go to school? Well the vast majority go to our inner city mostly minority schools. How many are going to drop out after they fail? What is an acceptable percentage?
An educator friend of mine said the new FCAT cut scores were like raising the bar on a pole-vaulter from twelve to fifteen feet. The problem is the pole-vaulter has never hit twelve. I said, oh, it’s like NASA of the sixties going, you know what lets skip the moon and head straight for Mars. Before we ratchet up the standards wouldn’t it make more sense to have more kids master the standards we already have?
He further shows how clueless and how distant he is from the reality of what is happening in our schools. In a Times Union interview he says what’s happened in Florida is actually mixed:
On one hand, you know all the atrocious statistics: the number who drop out, the number who graduate but are functionally illiterate, the number who end up in the prison system, we know that there are more black women than men enrolled in college. So that’s one side of the fence.
But there’s also another side if you look at the fact that Florida State University has had six Rhodes Scholar quarter finalists and two of them were actually black men. We need to equally celebrate the fact that two African-American Rhode Scholars for the nation have come out of Florida. You’ve got the president of STEMflorida, who is an African-American. So I just want to focus on the positive aspects not only in Florida but nationwide and use that to say that you’re bigger than you zip code and statistics may be fact, but they’re not always truth.
He equates the tens of thousands of African American kids graduated ill prepared for life with the success of a handful.
He says we have had a little good and a little bad.
No friends that’s not the case at all, we have had mostly bad and a sliver of good and his answer is to make things worse.
He shows how clueless he is when he says, The fact is that you may come from a home or neighborhood or zip code where many of the kids in your neighborhood didn’t finish — that may be a fact, but it’s not truth that you won’t finish high school, that you won’t go to college or that you won’t become a multi-millionaire.
Sure you might come out a millionaire but the odds are greater to the power of infinity that you’re not and him spewing such flowery rhetoric is boarder line criminal. We need realistic solutions to the problems in our struggling schools not flowery rhetoric.
We need year around schools for many of our kids so they have extra time to get the skills they need and then don’t lose them over the break. We need multiple curriculum's that play to kids strengths and interests instead of fitting them into a one size fits all everybody is going to go to college program and we need social workers and counselors because why so many kids act up in school often has nothing to do with school.
That’s what our kids need. Not some carpetbagger who hasn’t been in Florida for a year, saying, you can make it with just a little elbow grease.
Then he falls into the old blame the family trap. You know what that and fifty cents gets you? Whatever you can buy with fifty cents. We can no longer sit around and say if only little Johnnie’s dad would have given him a pop every now and then or Little Suzie's mom would have read to her that might have made it. No we need to draw a line in the sand and say schools are going to be platforms for change, it’s here where we are going to break the cycle of poverty.
He is right we have come a long way from Brown v. Board of Education, it’s just sad, that No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the rhetoric being sold from Tallahassee are taking us back to the time before.
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