An end to desegregation efforts in Little Rock?

One of my students' favorite stories is the story of the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. The story of the Little Rock Nine, and how they persevered, and the way that the Cold War influenced the calculus of the federal response is always good for provoking that deep level of thinking that history education excels at providing.

What surprises my students is that desegregation efforts in this country are still ongoing. Being kids, they assume that "all that" was settled a long time ago (remember, I wasn't even born in 1957, and they think that I am ANCIENT, so that colors their perceptions, naturally). I have to remind them that desegregation efforts continue even where we live and all around the country, but that they are coming to an end as one asks the question of just how long it takes to ameliorate the harm from discriminatory policies under Jim Crow laws and de facto practices throughout the United States.

Last week a federal judge okayed the end of payments from the state of Arkansas to the Little Rock school district:

A federal judge has halted longtime state payments intended to help integrate three Arkansas school districts, including Little Rock, site of one of the most bitter desegregation fights in U.S. history.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian S. Miller, who oversees the districts' federally ordered desegregation efforts, found the payments were "proving to be an impediment to true desegregation" by rewarding school systems that don't meet their long-standing commitments.

Judge Miller's recent rulings triggered protests by the school districts. But some lawmakers and state officials hailed the decision to shut off the payments, which totaled roughly $1 billion over the past two decades.

Lawyers for Little Rock and the other districts said the loss of as much as $70 million for the year that begins in August would cause budgetary chaos. The state payments amount to about 10% of the Little Rock budget and about 9% for each of the other two districts. The parties have until Friday to seek a stay of the order.

The Little Rock case is among the last of the landmark school desegregation battles, experts say, coming 57 years after the Supreme Court rejected the notion that schools could be racially separate but equal in Brown v. Board of Education.

Federal judges have declared hundreds of school districts desegregated in recent years. Such rulings end court supervision designed to make sure districts move to desegregate—but also can lead to a cutoff of state money to run magnet schools and other programs to integrate campuses.

"School desegregation litigation is on its very, very last legs," said Wendy Parker, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law.

One reason is that Supreme Court decisions have lowered the bar for school districts, allowing them to leave court supervision if they could prove they have made good-faith efforts to comply with their desegregation plans and have eliminated the vestiges of past governmental discrimination "to the extent practicable."

At the same time, schools are enrolling more diverse student populations, according to a 2007 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

...it took until 1983 for a federal courts to fully approve desegregation plans there. By that time, Little Rock's student body was increasingly African-American (today it's almost 70% black). So the district sued two neighboring districts and the state, contending that their actions had hampered its desegregation efforts, in part by exacerbating residential segregation.


One example: Officials moved a black public-housing development (public housing then was racially segregated) into Little Rock from Pulaski County.

The parties settled in 1989, with the state agreeing to make payments to Little Rock, North Little Rock, which also majority black, and the Pulaski County Special School District, where white students outnumber blacks. The state agreed to help pay for six racially balanced magnet schools in Little Rock, as well as transportation for students who transfer to schools where they are a racial minority.

In 2007, the federal court declared that Little Rock was in compliance and free from court oversight. The other districts quickly asked the court to grant them the same approval, with the understanding, their lawyers say, that the accompanying financial support would be settled later.

Judge Miller, a self-described "middle-aged black judge" who was nominated by President George W. Bush and joined the bench in 2008, took over the case in 2009. He held extensive hearings on the matter, including testimony on persistent achievement gaps between black and white students.

The judge ruled May 19 that narrowing educational disparities is not legally required, though he expressed frustration. "Few if any of the participants in this case have any clue how to effectively educate underprivileged black children," he wrote in a 110-page order.

The judge found that North Little Rock was largely in compliance with its desegregation plan. But he ruled that Pulaski County still had significant shortcomings, such as spending money on new buildings in affluent white communities while leaving buildings in poor areas in bad condition.

Lawyers for both school districts say they disagree with those findings and will appeal. But the judge surprised most parties in the case by finding that one reason the two districts were not already compliant was that they wanted to continue receiving the state's desegregation money.

He wrote that "the State of Arkansas is using a carrot and stick approach with these districts but that the districts are wise mules that have learned how to eat the carrot and sit down on the job. The time has finally come for all carrots to be put away."

Lawyers for the districts say their clients knew the state wanted to stop paying the money, but they expected to be able to negotiate the end of the state payments over a longer period of time.

Christopher Heller, who has represented Little Rock in the case since 1987, said the cutoff may imperil the district's successful magnet-school program.

Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, a Democrat, said the school districts have enough money to maintain their programs. "Clearly a lot of people worked very hard to right wrongs, to the benefit of a lot of children," he said. But the litigation, he said, has "reached a point of being viewed as counterproductive."

"Wise mules?" I know LOTS of people in education to which that term could apply. Hilarious.

But wait, there's more!

Yesterday, a federal appeals court issued a stay of the order . Since I cxouldn't find the story anywhere but from the Associated Press, and since they threaten to throw you to the hyenas if you copy their information, I guess you'll just have to go to the link. I'll wait.

(whistling)

Oh, you're back. So here are the questions: Has the state of Arkansas made good faith efforts to end desegregation? Have the pofficials of the school districts receiving the money used the funds wisely? Anyone from Arkansas got any information?

You know, teaching is sometimes a dirty business....

I've been reviewing the Nixon administration with my regular history students, and so I shall borrow his patois to tell my tale-- without, hopefully, the sense of overarching paranoia mixed with hubris that only Tricky Dick could manage to maintain within one personality without getting psychological whiplash. The words of that great sage of never giving up are boldfaced for you, for those that want to play along as I tell my tale.

Ms. Cornelius has been dealing with a few issues, my fellow Americans, that not even my little dog Checkers could wag away. My favorite uncle passed away, as did my godmother. The advanced placement test is upon us, and time weighs heavily against AP teachers everywhere as an enemy every bit as wily and inscrutible as Chairman Mao, and yet meet it we must. But as I remind my students, *a man is not finished when he is defeated, a man is finished when he quits.* So I want you to know that I have not given up, but I have just been fighting the good fight, and I apologize for my recent silence. Here is my tale:

Ms. Cornelius did get to have the pleasure of writing my second referral of the year today, when a colleague who does not have exactly the classroom management skills one would wish for asked me to help remove a student from her presence. Now, *the greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker,* so in I stepped into the abyss. Small wonder that this nattering nabob of negativism refused to come with Ms. Cornelius despite repeated, mild requests in front of a roomful of other students. *We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.* I usually am all about this plan of action: *Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.* He refused to leave until he knew what he had done from his teacher, and she told him, but he still refused to move nor did he listen to me when I told him to come with me, calmly, seven times, because, you know, *I am not a quitter.* Finally, for the first time in my long career, I was forced to call for our police officers to lend me their assistance to remove his presence from the room, as the expression on the miscreant's face became insanity tinged. *But I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.* When the nabob saw that I actually did request the presence of the coppers, he suddenly jumped up and brushed past me to the door. So the three cops and I got to walk him to the principal's office. *I believe in the battle-whether it's the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.* After I left him in the care of a principal, I returned to the class, and the students did wonder at my calmness in the face of blatant insubordination heightened with a little frisson of danger. "How did you keep your cool, Ms. Cornelius? He was BAAADDD!" they wondered. "*Don't get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.*" I replied, and they did marvel. But that's why we're here, to provide examples of how to overcome adversity in a way that doesn't get you fired or suspended. So there was a little lesson. It's what we do.

When I wrote up that referral, I made sure to use the THREE MAGIC WORDS. These three words are: INSUBORDINATION, DISRESPECT, and (threatened) INTIMIDATION. Now, we have been strongly admonished to never use the three magic words in referrals. We have been told it is not the privilege of teachers to determine when we ourselves have been the unwilling recipients of these behaviors-- that the administrator in question will decide if you have been disrespected and threatened in such a manner, even though that administrator was not there at the time. Even if that administrator spent all of two years in the classroom. But my motto when writing referrals as in writing this blog in this: *Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.* And the truth is this little miscreant has screamed in the face of more than one staff member and student in his time. Now I believe that actions speak loudly. *My concern today is not with the length of a person's hair --nor with the depth of the sag that he busts-- but with his conduct.* And his conduct is something that I can diagnose just fine, thank you. So in went the three magic words, which do tie an administrator's hands in terms of response. And that is exactly what I intended, since this principal is known for distributing mercy where it does not flourish but rather only encourages more problems. So I went ahead and used those three words, (and being me, I even circled them for effect) come what may in terms of annoyance on his part. *If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything.*

And so, my fellow Americans, continue to fight the good fight until the end of the school year. It's your duty.

CE and BCE: An evil plot or a non-issue?

A school district in the St. Louis metro area in undergoing a bit of a kerfuffle over the use of the disgnations of CE and BCE in lieu of BC and AD in social studies classes. From Tim Townsend, religion writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Dean Mandis, insurance executive and father of two students in the Rockwood School District, stood before the district's superintendent and seven School Board members Thursday night at Crestview Middle School. He had three minutes to broach an issue that had been bothering him for a month or so.

Wearing a navy, pinstripe suit with a patterned purple tie and black leather loafers, Mandis adjusted his rimless glasses, took a breath and began.

Mandis' daughter, an eighth-grader, had come home from school recently with evidence that she was being taught something other than the traditional calendar dates of B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for "in the year of the Lord.")

Instead, her teacher was quizzing social studies students on alternative calendar designations that are increasingly common in higher education — C.E., for Common Era and B.C.E., for Before the Common Era.

"Introducing B.C.E./C.E. in conjunction with B.C./A.D. in the classroom is to deny the historical basis of the dating system and ultimately leads to confusion," Mandis told the board. Mandis said this teacher's decision was "irresponsible" and possibly "a dangerous and slippery slope."

In the hallway outside the meeting, Mandis initially said he was uninterested in the religious issues at stake. But he eventually admitted he wasn't bent out of shape because of an affront to the Gregorian calendar.

"This is a movement that's occurring nationally," Mandis said of the adoption of the B.C.E./C.E. system. "The intention is to secularize our schools and our country."

Thomas Madden, a history professor at St. Louis University and director of the school's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, said the movement to use C.E. and B.C.E. in western academia began in the 1980s and is "much more prevalent" now.

"B.C. and A.D. are references directly to Christ, so B.C.E. is supposed to be more sensitive to non-Christians," Madden said. The idea is that when B.C. and A.D. are not used, "non-Christians don't have to be confronted with numbers that reference Christ's birth."

A similar debate surfaced in Kentucky in 2006 when a staff member at the Kentucky Department of Education proposed substituting the newer designations for B.C. and A.D. in middle and high school social studies classes across the state.

But Christians fought the proposal, and it died before it could be implemented.

"Since our inception, Christianity has played a key role in the formation of our nation, and there's no reason to back away from that reality simply because some bureaucrat authorized a shift," said Kent Ostrander, executive director of the Kentucky Family Foundation, which led the charge against the change.

Last year, former state Sen. John Loudon, R-Chesterfield, filed legislation to make B.C. and A.D. Missouri's "official dating standard," so the state could not "use any other designation."

"It was met with a jaundiced eye," Loudon said. "People said, 'No one's deliberately trying to scrub the calendar of any mention of Jesus Christ.' But, in fact, there is an effort, as evidenced by what's happening in Rockwood."

Craig Larson, Rockwood School District superintendent, scoffed at the suggestion that his teachers are attempting to secularize their students.

"There's no agenda here," he said. "We're just teaching kids how to understand dates."

Last week, Larson reacted to the debate on his blog.

"Within the last 10-15 years, CE/BCE has started to appear in student textbooks, usually along with AD/BC and sometimes with just one or the other mentioned," he wrote. "Teachers make sure that students are aware of both designations so they are literate when they encounter either notation."

Madden said the hypercompetitive textbook market has meant that more publishers are using C.E. and B.C.E. as a way to distinguish themselves as more religiously sensitive alternatives to traditional texts.

Both Larson and Bill Gerling, social studies consultant for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said there was no official policy on dates.

Gerling said the issue had not come up before, and that curriculum decisions are left up to district officials.

But, he said, "there are all kinds of calendars out there — Jewish, Muslim, Chinese — and if you're going to teach world history, you need to introduce kids to different cultures."

But such reassurances have not calmed some of the district's parents. More than 600 people have signed a petition demanding the continued use of B.C. and A.D., and declaring that the B.C.E./C.E. system "is inconsistent with the traditions and principles upon which our country was founded."

As it happens, foundings and births have been standard pegs for calendar measurements through history. A sixth-century Roman monk is credited with calculating the date of Christ's birth, and a century later, the English monk Bede began tying history to that date. The designations B.C. and A.D. were widely used by the 14th century.

"We have to have some way of measuring the year, and that measurement has to be pegged to something," said Madden. "Most cultures peg that measurement to something important to them."

Ancient Romans used the formation of the city of Rome. Muslims use the hijra, Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D.

Despite the increased use of B.C.E. and C.E., many scholars feel the designation is more cumbersome than traditional dating and is understood by fewer readers. The Chicago Manual of Style, used by many academics, has no preference for B.C.E. or C.E. The Associated Press Stylebook prefers B.C. and A.D.

But the most fundamental problem with the B.C.E./C.E. system is that at its root, the newer system is still a measurement of time based on the birth of Christ. The definition of "the common era" is the 2009 years since.

"Usually it's used to make the person using it feel better about themselves — that they're more sensitive and aware of other people," said Madden. "But it doesn't change what the numbers measure."

On Thursday night, School Board members sat behind a dais decorated with the slogan, "We do whatever it takes for students to realize their potential."

They had listened silently as Dean Mandis expressed his concerns. Then, as someone informed Mandis his three minutes were up, he came to the crux of his argument.

"Our students in the Rockwood School District," he said, "deserve to know what 2009 refers to."

Ever since the sixth century after the birth of Christ, when the monk Dennis the Short (Dionysius Exiguus) appended the abbreviations of "AD" and "BC" to dates in the Julian calendar (and miscounted, I might add), there has been controversy over how dates are calculated, much less designated, in the Western calendar.

Changing the abbreviations after dates doesn't change the fact that they are calculated-- incorrectly, I might remind you-- from the birth of Jesus Christ. This is a tempest in a teapot by those who see conspiracies in every change. And as a teacher, I would like to know that our students know what the details and the significance of historical events are over what the number may or may not mean.

No matter what letters come after the date, the fact that the date is supposed to be calculated from the birth of the Christian messiah is not changed. So really, the use of "CE" over "AD" doesn't matter that much, in my opinion. Christian beliefs are still driving the calculations, and obscuring that really doesn't make it any more or less of an imposition upon those who are not Christian.

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."*

A veto-proof majority in the House today passed a bill to overturn a Bush administration order which severely limited access to presidential and vice-presidential papers:

The presidential papers bill nullifies a November 2001 order, criticized by historians, in which Bush allowed the White House or a former president to block release of a former president's papers and put the onus on researchers to show a "specific need" for many types of records.

Among beneficiaries of the Bush order was Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, a former vice president and president.

The order gave former vice presidents the right to stop the release of their papers through an executive privilege that previously only presidents could use. And it extended to deceased presidents' designees rights to keep their papers secret indefinitely.

The House bill would give current and former presidents 40 business days to object to requests to view their papers, allow a sitting president to override a former president's claim of executive privilege and strip former vice presidents and the designees of deceased presidents of the power to use executive privilege to block access to their historical documents.

In its veto warning, the White House said the bill encroaches on the president's constitutional authority and the 40-day deadline would force presidents to use executive privilege to block information requests "out of an abundance of caution" and thereby invite litigation.

...Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives at George Washington University, said the average time to release presidential documents has grown to 78 months from 18 months since the Bush order, which he said directly contributed to one year of the lag.

A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate.

...A third bill, which passed 308-117, was aimed at speeding requests for government information made under the Freedom of Information Act. The White House stopped short of threatening to veto it but said it could not support the bill.

As a member of the American Historical Society, I am pleased to see bipartisan support for this long-overdue attempt to restore openness to government. It is ironic indeed to know that information about ME is open to myriad searches by the FBI, but nothing apparently is so feared in Washington as a historian having the ability to deny the spinmeisters their ability to obfuscate. This is a preliminary victory for our generation and generations to come. Let's hope the Senate does its bit.

Happy Ides of March! As Brutus proclaimed, "Sic Semper Tyrannis!"

*- Title quote by Galileo Galilei, another rebel for truth.


----And, in a similar vein, the wondrous Education Wonks have put together another awesome trip through the Edusphere with the Carnival of Education #110. If you don't explore the Carnival, you'll miss out on the best the internet has to offer!

In which the History Geek explains what ignorance about geography does to one

Well, as Gomer would say, surprise, surprise, surprise! Go-ooo-lly!

A crisis in central Europe was averted today as Swiss Army officials said "Ooopsie!" after accidentally wandering into the neighboring country of Liechtenstein. Adding insult to injury, apparently no one in Liechtenstein even noticed that the Swiss Army was there, so stealthy were they.

Ah, I see a hand raised in the back. Yes, you there, with the beret and the faint odor of absinthe on your black clothes? What? No, not the cartoon-loving pop artist Roy Liechtenstein, the greatest artist ever to have lived temporarily in Cleveland.
The teeny tiny country squished between Austria and Switzerland. Look:

ZURICH, Switzerland - What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into the neighboring Principality of Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

"We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem," Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something," he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.

The Swiss lost no time in taking their empty rifles and skedaddling back home, but even with their brief sojourn they spent more time in Liechtenstein than the first Princes of Liechtenstein, who did not even bother to visit their holdings for the first 120 years that they possessed them, much preferring Vienna to Vaduz. I'm not too sure we can actually call this an "invasion" per se, since Liechtenstein is dependent for its defense upon that same Swiss Army. This incident might make them reconsider that arrangement, or at least to suggest adding a tiny flip-out map or even a GPS device to those celebrated Swiss Army knives.

A little history: Once, Liechtenstein was a part of the Holy Roman Empire. Thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte (and how many countries in Europe can say THAT with a straight face?), the principality was released from any feudal obligations to any sort of German authorities in 1806. Even though Nappy was technically the new overlord of the principality, he apparently was distracted with destroying Prussia, crushing Poland, and forming the confederation of the Rhine to actually want to do anything with the principality, thereby echoing the assessment of the ruling Liechtenstein family.

Many of my students, who complain that history is so inconveniently filled with too many people, dates, and events to remember, would love this tiny landlocked country for its geography if not for its spelling challenges: the upper part of Liechtenstein is called "the Over Land" and the southern part of the country is called "the Under Land." Since over my many years of teaching I've had many a student insist that "North" is "Up" and "South" is "Down," this place would suit them just fine.

And apparently the Liechtenstein princes are still trying to act like the Swiss Army and escape back across the border. You have to love a country where the sovereign threatens to run away to Austria in a kind of reverse Sound of Music scenario if he couldn't get the people to vote him more power. What fun it would be if more leaders thought that way! I hear Canada is lovely this time of year.