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Arguably the biggest difference between the 2016 presidential election and now in 2020 — minus impeachment and general angst over the current Tweetalomaniac residing in the White House — is that candidates are finally having a national conversation on K–12 education. The Democratic party went so far as to dedicate a forum to it (one Saturday night when no one was watching). That might be a bright spot of good news during an otherwise sobering, and highly uncertain, campaign cycle.

The bad news is that folks, as predicted, are going about that all wrong. And that’s not doing a thing for Black voters who are not only (1) the most important demographic in the Democratic primary, but who are also (2) the most impacted by any dramatic change in the K–12 classroom.

Back to the good news, first: a little relief that presidential candidates, unlike those in 2016, are properly putting horse before cart in today’s education debate. Last round, any talk about education centered on student loans as opposed to the fundamentals conversation for K–12. It was as if students under 18 struggling through America’s very obvious education crisis didn’t exist and, naturally for candidates, didn’t count as voters, anyway. Hence, whenever education came up, debates reflexively landed on student loans and the exorbitant cost of college, as if young people were magically appearing on the post-secondary landscape or that whole world of K–12 learning was something optional — or that you didn’t need to get into college. Not only did that education debate get hijacked by understandable Millennial panic over how to pay for all this loan debt, but education didn’t even register as a 2016 exit poll issue, much less whether folks were parents. Marriage seemed to rate high among priority questions, and for some strange reason (as if we weren’t all raised by some form of parenting, good or bad), child-rearing did not.

It wasn’t until 2018 midterm election exit polling that we found out most voters weren’t parents — or, at least, identifying as such. Indeed, only 30% of all voters identified as parents of children under 18, and the vast majority — 70% — are not parents of children under 18. Still, a good number are.

In the meantime, pollsters might want to ask themselves: How did parents end up not being considered a key voting bloc? That could explain the reason for selective ignorance on education from national candidates, despite the fact that public schools are a combined $706 billion enterprise — and that’s just for per pupil expenditures alone. But, in 2020, as candidates look closer at 2018 data, they’ve noticed that with the majority of Democratic Party voters identifying as parents of kids under 18 (54%) maybe it’s time to bring up the dismal state of K–12 education as a prominent topic.

While it’s been something of a dental exercise to extract Democratic candidate views on education during primary debates, we are finally getting a major “forum” about it. Candidates are also sharing more about what they’d like to do to “fix” American K–12 education: most scramble to outdo the other on teacher raises; some want “charter schools” and “school choice” obliterated; others have suggested that in doing so, parents will be left to their own devices; one candidate, who’s no longer in the hunt, suggested a longer school day.

Simply having a conversation on schools might sound encouraging, but it’s really not in the present state. What we’ve ended up with is a race to satisfy various special interests or that advocate flavor of the month. Right now, it just so happens that’s teachers unions — who’ve flexed quite a bit of striking muscle in recent years and have won concessions from state and local governments in places such as Oklahoma, West Virginia, North Carolina, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere.

But, that doesn’t automatically make the debate either progressive or productive, especially in the context of Black voters and Black community needs. That’s not near enough. In fact, the current Big Education Debate is merely a battle of lobbying brands, a sort of Popeye’s chicken sandwich versus Chick-Fil-a cage match in which it’s all focused on public schools versus “charter schools,” and all boiling down to money — who’s getting the most? And while competing lobbies bruise one another up in the partisan gridiron, parents — particularly Black parents — are on the sidelines wondering “WTF? Is my child going to get a good education or what?”

For Black parents, this is particularly evident, according to the latest data, and much more alarming. No other demographic group has it as bad on the K–12 front. Black families know this all too well. Bad enough that Black children are the most disproportionately impacted by poverty — 31% versus 26% for Latinos and 10% for both whites and Asians — but performance indicators show pillar skills such as reading in a serious decline, with the median National Assessment of Educational Progress report card among Black 8th graders dropping 5 points. In fact, Black reading scores — at 244 — were the lowest out of all racial demographic groups, with Native Americans the second lowest at 248.

The 8th grade Black student mathematics scores are also as bad: once again, Black students — at 260 — score the lowest among any racial demographic group in math proficiency.

Conditions inside schools, most prominently public schools, continue to worsen across the nation. Tales of Black elementary and secondary students literally trapped in dysfunctional, environmentally toxic and prison-feeder school districts continue to mount from coast to coast. In Philadelphia, for example, a city where the population is 45% Black, Black students account for nearly 60% of all district high school dropouts. Aging buildings throughout the City of Brotherly Love are creating a public health crisis for the majority Black district with high levels of lead, asbestos and other chemicals forcing desperate parents into a rock and a hard place while the city fails to remediate.

And there are stories of individual school districts such as San Diego's Grossmont Union High School District where suspension and expulsion rates for Black students are 10% (when they are just 7% of the district population), 4 percentage points higher than the national average of 6%. Interestingly enough, Grossmont recently dismantled the only successful publicly-funded program it had to mitigate the problem — Learn4Life — simply because of a charter-designated technicality.

These aren’t isolated incidents: the American K–12 system is, as we know, one massive "school-to-prison pipeline," an incarceration factory in which Black boys face punishment rates three times higher than their white male peers, Black girls facing suspension rates four times higher than their white female peers. And while the overall pre-school population is 18% Black, somehow they ended up becoming nearly half of all pre-school students suspended. Eventually, Black students are 30% of all students either referred to police or those ultimately arrested.

The systematic attacks on Black students, however, don't stop there. School districts end up putting Black families in impossible predicaments: forced to put up with institutions that, based on the data, aren’t advancing the collective academic abilities of Black youth and unable to escape districts saddled with inequitable, segregated funding formulas based on zip code and neighborhood racial make-up.

Still, we can't blame this on just funding, especially when working models are out there. Could it have something to do with the antiquated Industrial Revolution era regimen many education leaders are still wedded to? Other, more modern and culturally competent models do exist that are ready to work with school districts and adjust learning modules to distressed or traumatized populations. In California, for example, there is the non-traditional public schools Learn4Life model servicing 50,000 mostly Black and Brown students, a uniquely tailored initiative (with an 89% success rate) focused on “individualized learning” approaches. That has shown enormous success with improving the futures of those same students, particularly those disproportionately suffering from suspension, expulsion and fragile economic circumstances.

Yet, the scorched-earth debate over teacher interests versus charter interests rages on without any evidence-based exploration into such workable models, whether that’s Learn4Life in California or the IDEA “guaranteed college” public schools operating throughout the South, or school districts exploring “dual K–14 enrollment” with local colleges, or even LeBron James' much-hyped I Promise school in Ohio. We should be eagerly examining these models and asking: How can I apply this to my community in need?

Instead, too many districts are allowed to keep Black students failing in their schools through bad performance or dropping them out without a better plan to fix it. But, then they also want to keep vulnerable Black students out of any other models that are proven to help them. How cruel and destructive is that?

Any debate about the future of American K–12 education must be one focused on the most innovative solutions towards optimal student achievement. We're missing that conversation. And with public schools no longer majority white, the conversation on student achievement must focus on establishing high intellectual standards for Black and Brown children. Candidates, policymakers and stakeholders are too busy waging a war to see how best they can placate an interest group. As a result, these debates aren’t student-centric; they are centered on political control and power. But district constituents, which include Black parents, should not expect nor do they deserve low academic performance combined with such high suspension and expulsion rates. It’s now time to identify and demand those successful programs providing a valuable resource for students seeking academic success and greater socio-economic mobility — and an escape from oppressive school systems.

Thinking it's just a matter of giving teachers raises won't cut it. Unless we do something ambitious to protect Black students from institutions that fail to serve them, we will continue to put our children on a path to nowhere. Black communities should resist that trend by demanding an education debate with real substance and innovation.

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Charles D. Ellison is an award-winning thought leader, political strategist, commentator and advocacy expert with nearly two decades of applied expertise in the arena of politics, public policy, campaigns and elections, crisis management and emerging/digital media strategy. (via wurdradio.com)

Charles Ellison

Writing since August 2017 · 3 stories contributed