Merlene Davis Tells the Truth...Mainly

Who Controls history, controls the past.
Who controls the past, controls the present.

Arguments over history are almost always arguments over the present and I suspect an article last month by Merlene Davis in the Herald-Leader is no exception.

Davis re-visions the Fayette County Schools Equity Council and bestows upon Superintendent Stu Silberman the nod of acceptance from local civil rights leaders. Hers is essentially a story about race relations in the Fayette County schools from 1993 to the present. Certain heroes of the past are identified, and exalted. Some history is forgotten, while other history is remembered; revising the story for future generations.

I believe the story would benefit from a fuller exploration. Davis seems to prefer to “print the legend.”

Her legend is justified by the unmistakable arc of history - 400 years of oppression of African Americans – from slavery through Jim Crow and the civil rights movement to today’s search for meaning among our multi-racial citizenry with our multi-racial president. And to be sure, Davis’s heroes are deserving of much credit. I can only imagine the courage and personal resolve necessary to fight for civil rights over a period of decades. But that story should be told in a balanced fashion. Her heroes have never been mistaken for Dr King.

As befits her style, Susan Weston posted a response to the Davis column that was at once forward-looking and retrospectively gentle with all parties.

In those earlier days Davis describes, the Fayette issues were far from unique. In every school system that serves black students, there are enduring questions about whether success for those children is truly a priority. What stood out was that, in Fayette, the questions at last got a wide hearing, and the concerns finally got enough attention to generate substantive action. Some other districts now seem to be moving on a similar path.

Nice.

Davis has long been an advocate for civil rights in a town that doesn't always want to hear about its past. As a long-time columnist, Davis baby-sits African American issues to a citizenry that needs to hear it. She also deserves much credit for her support of GLBT equality, which illogically, puts her at odds with much of her core African American constituency; less so her white liberal readers.

But Davis also serves as a mouthpiece for a select group of activists whose work, while vital to Lexington's (and as Weston astutely points out, the state's) future, was at times more about criticizing school leaders than it was about seeking solutions to identified problems. As has been true of other political groups, these leaders wanted the issue more.

And that's what struck me about the article - Davis's loyalty. In politics, loyalty is coin of the realm and being a columnist is a political job of its own sort. But sometimes one’s loyalty conflicts with one’s ideology. Davis seems to lean toward loyalty. I tend to lean the other way.

"Stand with anybody that stands right,

stand with him while he is right

and part with him when he goes wrong."

— Abraham Lincoln

Davis notes that “the numerous squeaky wheels that had demanded academic and cultural turnarounds in Fayette County five short years ago have been oiled.” (More on this later.)

I have no doubt that that is true.

But have the old complaints disappeared? If not, just what oil was used to squelch the squeek?

Davis rightly credits the leadership of Fayette County Superintendent Stu Silberman for “changing the culture“ but also credits those activists who came before and “continually aired the dirty laundry of a district that had allowed children's education to fall well behind personal agendas.” She does not say what the alleged personal agendas were.

Neither does she say who’s minding the laundry these days. Silberman may be one heck of a superintendent, but what do the data say? Davis cites a soon-to-be-released Equity Council report that shows the achievement gap and the over-identification of blacks in special education classes have persisted as problems during Silberman's tenure. I don't know if the report addresses it, but the percentage of African American teachers has declined as well. If those issues screamed from news pages nearly every day in the late 1990s, but the data have not improved, yet the news pages are silent today; who's not doing their job?

Back in those days, Lexington-Fayette Urban League President PG Peeples was admittedly angry.

• There was a large achievement gap: there still is.
• Black students were overrepresented in the special education population: they still are.
• The burden of balancing diversity in the schools rested almost solely on blacks: so far as I know, that got fixed.
• Under former Superintendent Peter Flynn the district played games by hiding relevant student achievement data from the school board: the sun now shines on school data. I remember former board and Equity Council member Nancy Stage's exasperation at one particular meeting in the mid 90’s when it was pointed out that the district was coding schools data to shield the identity of the individual schools, therefore removing public scrutiny.
• In 1998 the Equity Council threatened to resign en masse when Flynn told them they could not investigate personnel matters: access to personnel information being limited by state law. (H-L May 6, 1998)
• In the mid-1980s, the Kentucky Human Rights Commission criticized the Fayette County school district for having fewer black teachers than three decades earlier, when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools. In 1984, 11.6 percent of teachers were black. (H-L June 3, 2001)
• There were too few African American teachers to serve as role models for our black students: district sources tell me there is no expectation placed on principals to recruit and retain people of color at all. In 2007-2008, only 10.2% of Fayette County’s certified staff was African American (274, compared to 2,684 whites); only9.2% of the classroom teachedrs. This would have been cause for complaint in 2001 when Lisa Deffendall, writing for the Herald-Leader, reported the district's total work force was 84 percent white, 14 percent black and 2 percent other races. (H-L June 8, 2001)
• That year former Superintendent Robin Fankhauser demoted two black school administrators and laid off 310 workers, 19% of whom were African American, prompting cries of racism: Spurred on by then US Representative Ernie Fletcher, Peeples, Rev Bob Brown and others rallied under the banner of “No Confidence. No Trust.”
• One of the school administrators whose demotion was being protested was Louis Hughley Jr., who called Fankhauser’s staff reduction plan racist. Hughley complained but predicted that black advocates wouldn't have the stamina to keep the issue alive. Hughley is a Lexington native who attended local public schools and then taught in them for 26 years. He said he's seen "one-night stand" protests too many times before. (H-L June 3, 2001) "I called it periodic civil war," P.G. Peeples told Davis. Hughley went on to become Principal of Knight Middle School in Jefferson County where his CATS Index of 62.9 places Knight among the lowest performing middle schools in the state, meeting only one of ten measurable objectives. I can’t imagine Stu Silberman NOT demoting any Fayette County principal with similar numbers. Hughley raised eyebrows when he wrote to Fayette Circuit Judge Louis Paisley, in 2000, asking for leniency for convicted child molester Ron Berry. A Louisville jury convicted Berry of 12 counts of sodomy with boys under 16 years old and recommended that he serve three years in prison. Hughley said, Berry had “suffered enough and deserves no further punishment." Hughley made news recently when he issued a directive to his Knight faculty that they could no longer have students removed from class for failure to follow directions, profanity or vulgarity...and more; the kind of discipline policy that permits poor discipline. The edict was later rescinded.

Davis remembers the good Equity Council, the bad central office and the ugly achievement gap. But I have a lot of personal memories (and records) from that period as well. What she says is true enough, but it is totally slanted and much is left out.

For all the good it did, the Equity Council was like the worst school your child might attend; where the cool kids ran the show and only certain kids got to play. It’s easy enough to justify historically marginalized folks asserting themselves, but as a member committed to helping, I’d have to say it didn’t always make sense. If one were willing to sit by and say “Yes, PG! Brilliant, PG!” Then, all was well. But if one raised a serious issue, even an issue council members said was a problem…well...get this:

On a couple of occasions the Equity Council had complained about the over-identification of African Americans in special education classes. I had asked the Council to investigate a situation in the medical community where it appeared that hyperactive poor children (without insurance) were being forced into special education referrals for “Other Health Impairment” but the Equity Council did not see fit to even look into it. Instead, I was told the Equity Council was deeply concerned about such issues and it would be assigned to a committee. I never heard another word about it. The Equity Consultant never contacted me for more information. In fact the only time I ever heard Peeples bring the issue up was when a presentation was made to the board, with the press in attendance, about the status of our district’s special education program. Peeples again expressed its deep concern that African
American students were over-identified in special education.

When one is named to the Equity Council the first order of business is supposed to be the member’s assignment to committee. But I was denied participation in committee meetings and wasn’t even assigned to a committee for 15 months. I finally complained out loud - Equity Council style - only to be criticized by Davis as being against the council.

But what really hacked folks off was when I blew the whistle on Equity Council leadership for pushing black members off the council when they disagreed with Peeple’s leadership. In a letter to the school board I revealed that two African American members (Virgil Covington and Wanda Garr) reported receiving threatening “visits,” and feeling “unwelcome,” the latter courageously confirming her concerns in an open meeting.

Davis wrote that I had “done nothing constructive” since being on the council and wondered aloud if I had “ever bothered to look into why so many black boys are assigned to special-education classes.” (H-L Feb 1, 2001)

By the time Silberman was hired, in 2004, we had gone through five superintendents in three years, including two interims. I had written an OpEd in the Herald-Leader on the crisis of leadership that existed in the Fayette County school; and now believe that Silberman has completely cured that particular issue. (H-L May 10, 2004)

But as Davis points out, “Silberman…has not been seen walking on water.”

After he had been in Fayette County for about a year, Silberman was interviewed by District Administration Magazine. They wrote,

When he took the position this past summer, he became the sixth superintendent since 1994. But he's quick to note in his sweet southern drawl that the turnover wasn't due to his predecessors' failures. Fayette has suffered some hard fiscal knocks--including being labeled a "hold harmless" district, with stagnant state funding since 1992, because it's considered property-rich. The financial situation translated into staff and student programming needs going unfulfilled.

But when interviewed by Davis he said, "It was a pretty tough place to come to...Overall, the culture of the district was pretty toxic."

My take, which I shared with him at the time, was that Fayette County had a lot of talent, but needed a strong leader. They got it. But they did not get a super-human savior whose best rhetoric and effort would eliminate the powerful social and economic factors that make achievement gaps so tough for schools alone to cure.

"Culture is established from the top down," Peeples told Davis. We've come a long way but we're not there yet."

“Millions of miles,” according to Silberman.

Or hundreds, if one looks at the data.