John Brittain is defined, in large part, by the law. This is evident not only in his impressive resume, but in a worldview that is filtered through the law.
Brittain is also a man who spent three decades of his professional life in the academic world, including the post of Dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University in Houston. He is a school desegregation specialist and was a lead lawyer in the filing of the landmark Sheff v. O’Neill school desegregation case (1989). He recently left his position at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to teach law again at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.
This is a person who knows the law, our educational system, and how those two entities fit together. For these reasons, he was invited to speak on “Uniting for Power in Education” at the AALC conference.
He began his talk with this statement: “Education, education, education. That’s the key to social mobility.” He followed that up by citing six fundamental civil rights: education, housing, employment, voting, self-help protest and criminal justice. “But”, he noted, “there is no federal right to an education.”
“Education,” he said, “was the hallmark of civil rights.” The question now is should we continue to push for education or should we focus on jobs? When the NAACP selected education as a fundamental right, the rationale was that with an education a person could get a good job, get housing and vote. This dichotomy between which should be primary, jobs or education, is still relevant and a subject for debate. But the pendulum might be tilting toward education.
If education is seen as the primary civil rights remedy, then integration must also be a primary goal. Brittain pointed out that what we see today is de facto segregation, that is segregation that is not a direct result of a legal mandate to maintain racially separate schools, and not de jure segregation, which is state mandated. Since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), however, schools are rapidly re-segregating and are as racially segregated today as they were in 1970.
So where are we today? Brittain says that poverty has replaced race as the most statistical factor in poor schools. “There are no white ghetto schools. White poverty is spread out—black poverty is concentrated.”
“We now have the greatest amount of money ever to spend on education, but how will those funds be tracked at the local level? . . . We also need to track education stimulus dollars.”
He advocates more parental empowerment and says we should be looking at how we train parents. “Comprehensive education centers for families would help parents in learning new math and other new education methods that would then enable parents to help their children,” he said.
In a follow-up interview after his speech, he was asked about teacher recruitment and culturally responsive teaching.
“The issue is how can we take our successful model for educating the vast majority of students in this nation and apply it to teaching largely poor and minority students. There is a concern that the schools of education do not attract the brightest students coming into college or coming out of high school. How can they make education more attractive to higher performing students? The Teach for America program worked out an arrangement with the U.S. Department of Education and state education authorities that allowed teachers to teach who did not graduate with a degree from a school of education and did not take teacher certification tests. Perhaps we need to allow education majors to be more inter-disciplinary.”
Brittain pointed out in his talk that the majority of young men in prison do not have a high school education. Is there a correlation between prison and a lack of education? “Yes, there is a direct statistical relationship for a cohort of young men of color, between the approximate ages of 19-27, who do not have a high school diploma and are incarcerated. In my radical and critical assessment of higher education, it was not designed originally to serve the interests of higher mobility, but to serve the needs of the ruling industrial complex,” he said. “And, it should be noted, prison is not a deterrent to bad conduct.”
An article Brittain co-wrote for the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, entitled “Racial Disparities in Educational Opportunities in the United States”, [click here (pdf)] was provided conference members. That article states that the No Child Left Behind Act grants substantial privileges to the U.S. Department of Defense to “collect basic contact and educational information about students ages 17 and older for the purpose of military recruitment.”
Brittain is clear in his response to this arrangement. “Our volunteer army preys on the marginal high school men, and now women, for military recruitment. Furthermore, from a long-standing academic level, and in my ACLU role, I’ve always been against Junior ROTC in high school. It is not an innocuous supplementary educational activity, like the 4H Club, designed to enrich the high school student’s experience. Rather, it is the beginning of the indoctrination that if a person joins the military, the number one goal of the military is to protect the national security and teach men and women how to kill the enemy.”
And, consequently, have a disposable population at the ready? “Correct. Therefore, I thought it was improper for the public school system to give the military this access. By the way, the military gets access that no other outsider gets in terms of the list of students and their contact addresses. Plus, they get access inside the schools that no other outside entities get to recruit students. It’s unfair and unsafe for young minds.”
At the end of his speech to the AALC, Brittain accepted the invitation to become a Gamaliel Strategic Partner. He will be a fine addition. Look for a follow-up issue of Organizing devoted to Strategic Partners in the weeks ahead.
Nancy T. Hoch
