Forest Park Review 060921

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Forest Park Review, June 9, 2021

Forest Park Review, June 9, 2021

18

OPINION O U R

V I E W

Things we like

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ike many or most white Americans, we’d never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre. This was the horror of a hundred years ago last week in Oklahoma where an entire Black community in Tulsa was flattened, burned by a hate-fueled white mob which killed some 300 residents. Didn’t turn up in any history books from our collective youth. Just as the 1919 race riots in Chicago were not represented in our fourth-grade study of our city’s history. Also absent from our white-centric American history was Juneteenth, a celebration of the day in 1865 when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced the Civil War was long over and people who had been enslaved were free. We admit we’d never heard of Juneteenth until 10 years back when Rory Hoskins, then a village commissioner and now the mayor, raised it as a point of pride worth celebrating in town. His annual pool party at the park is a summer highlight that is back this year. A Juneteenth flag was raised at village hall this week. And Juneteenth events have grown from Forest Park into neighboring communities. Now Illinois is on the verge of making Juneteenth a state holiday. Hoskins certainly gets some of the credit for that. June is also Pride month, a recognition and celebration of the benefits we all receive in our embrace of our gay neighbors and friends. One of the great civil rights revolutions of our time is how quickly and fully most Americans have come to see the fairness and benefits of an inclusive approach to the LGBTQ+ communities. Forest Park has traveled that inclusive path. Indicators are the month-long recognition of Pride at the Forest Park Public Library and the partnership struck at the newly opened Play It Again Sports with the Howard Brown Community Health Center in the city. Exit Strategy has a special rainbow sherbet beer in June in honor of Pride. Forest Park is always at its best when it is at its most diverse and inclusive. We see it in our schools, we see it in increasingly diverse village commissions and elected boards. We see it when we shop and eat on Madison Street.

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9,000 ‘F’ grades and 9 holes in the bottom of the boat*

odney Alexander, president of the District 209 high school board, often sounds like a Black Baptist preacher. He has the cadences, riffs, vocabulary and the passion of, say, Hope Tabernacle’s Pastor Bill Teague here in town. To understand where he is coming from, you have to know that he is not an ordained pastor but nevertheless understands his work as president of the board of education as called, inspired, anointed and guided by God. It’s also important to know that his day job is working as a parole officer, and that may inform his emotional response to education in D209 when he talks about the “school to prison pipeline.” Above all else, when it comes to education, he is passionate about the students in the district’s three high schools. So when he gave his report to the African-American clergy assembled virtually at their monthly PTMAN (Proviso Township Ministerial Association Network) meeting on March 3, he became palpably upset when he noted that during the fall semester 9,000 ‘F’ grades were issued to students in the district by their teachers. Where his report fell short, I think, was his singling out D209 teachers as the main problem in the system. He told the ministers, “If student achievement in the district is going to improve, the culture and climate in the classroom in general and the mentality of teachers in particular has to change.” Although he said that he was not blaming teachers alone, he did come down pretty hard on them, particularly for resisting the move back into the classroom for in-person learning. “Paying for teachers to fail our students,” he declared in an interview with the Review, “will no longer be tolerated in District 209.” When I asked Maggie Riley, president of the Proviso Teachers Union, to respond to Alexander’s statement, she pointed her finger back at the administration. She said in an email, “The Proviso Teachers Union continues to find Mr. Alexander’s comments disheartening and demoralizing. Instead of deflecting and placing blame on the teachers, he should be addressing our district’s real problems.” She explained that D209 teachers want to be back in the classroom but only if they are safe. “We previously asked the district to have an industrial hygienist assess building conditions and offered to pay for that study. Despite there being no cost to the district, our request was refused.” She went on to claim that the problems causing poor academic performance are more deeply rooted. “The district’s ‘fix’ for the high number of failing grades,” she asserted, “is to instruct teachers to water down the curriculum and pass students to raise the graduation rate … too often promoting them to the next level class when they have failed the prerequisite course.” So I asked the D209 administration to give their perspective on the huge number of failing grades. Nicole Wilson is the district’s executive director of communications. Speak-

ing for Superintendent Henderson, she stated that the number of failing grades is “unacceptable” to him and his administration. One response, Wilson said, is that the district is requiring many students to retake one or more classes this summer. A major change, she noted, is the district’s move to a “No-Zero” policy, which gives credit to the effort students apply to their work as well as they how they perform on exams. She explained that poor academic performance is influenced by multiple factors, quoting a statement made by her boss in a press release dated March 12: “Letter grades do not always indicate a student’s knowledge or understanding of the material and they certainly don’t reflect the struggles that our students have to balance each day — from grappling with learning disabilities to navigating home-life issues that present learning barriers.” Supt. Henderson’s statement leads me to an analogy. If the boat we are rowing toward success in school and ultimately in life has nine holes in the bottom, plugging one of them won’t prevent it from getting swamped. Even if we plug five, we will still have to expend a lot of energy bailing water instead of rowing toward our destination. The question, of course, then becomes why is the D209 boat leaking? Teachers must bear some responsibility, but so should the administration. What about poverty? In my conversations with District 91 administrators over the years, they’ve told me there is an almost one-to-one correlation between a kid’s socio-economic situation and their academic performance. What about the feeder schools? What about the effect of remote learning on students because of the virus, especially those who don’t have the required technology? What about systemic racism? What about the absence of fathers in some many families? And as long as we’re on that subject, what about the justice system that keeps some of those fathers in jail because they are unable to raise the money to post bail? And finally, what about the students themselves? Alexander refers to them as “our babies,” which gets an emotional response. But these “babies” are capable of making babies. As a youth mentor told me, “Our kids might be victims but my job is to help them not think of themselves as victims.” Songs about unrequited love often use lines like “I guess I used my heart instead of using my head.” In our conversations about student achievement, it seems clear to me we need to use both. Making the boat seaworthy will require all of us — teachers, students, administrators, parents, feeder schools, early childhood learning opportunities, churches, the police, government, adults with no children, youth soccer coaches, etc. etc. The question then becomes: Is each of us on board? *I wrote most of this column a month before the Alexander/Medina battle went public.

TOM

HOLMES


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