An interview with Howard Eagle - activist and candidate for school board

This is the second time veteran social studies teacher with the Rochester City School District and political activist - Howard Eagle is running for school board. The other candidates for the Democratic Party's Primary Election, September 18th, are Willa Powell, Malik Evans, Melisza Campos, and Allen Williams.

[Rocheter Indymedia Editorial Collective is not endorsing Howard Eagle by publishing this interview.]

RIMC: What uniquely qualifies you as a potential member of the school board?

First of all, my twenty years as a social studies teacher in the Rochester City School District, my experience as a parent, and my long-term involvement of my activism in the community around educational issues, but not always educational issues. So I do have a track record of involvement and working on behalf of those who are voiceless.

RIMC: This is your second time running for school board…

Second time. I ran in 2003 and in both cases I am running a primary against the designated candidates by the Democratic Party.

RIMC: Explain how you are a member of the Rochester Teachers Association (RTA), yet they didn’t endorse you and there are political reasons behind that.

Yes absolutely. I’ve been active in RTA for the entire 20 years that I’ve worked in the school district and some people attempt to paint me as anti-union, which is ridiculous. In fact because of my outspokenness and challenging much of the status quo, if it were not for being a union member I probably would have been fired long ago. So I respect workers’ rights to organize, so that’s not the case even though people have tried to paint me that way. But I’ve also challenged Dr. Urbanski and the unions when they’ve been wrong, when they’ve done things that are not necessarily in the best interest of children.

RIMC: Is there any way to summarize briefly some of the disagreements that you’ve had with the leadership of the RTA?

Certainly, a couple instances come to mind right away. When Dr. Urbanski and the leadership of RTA want to make certain that the community is not aware of certain positions that they are taking on issues they have this habit of just spontaneously calling executive sessions. I know the by-laws of RTA very well and executive sessions can only be called under certain conditions. So there have been meetings that I have refused to leave. In fact, on two different occasions the leadership of the union called the police because I refused to leave, but I was exercising my rights as they exist in the by-laws of the RTA. In one case the police did nothing. In the other case the leadership actually moved the meeting from East High School – which is a public area where the representative assembly are normally held, to the Mapledale Party House, a private establishment, and the called the police in that case also, and in that case the police did arrest me on charges of disturbing the police, but they only held me for a little while.

RIMC: When did this event occur?

This must have been around 1995

RIMC: So a long time ago, so politicians have long memories, because this action came back to nip you on the endorsement process…
Those kinds of things but not just those things. I’ve also challenged Urbanski twice for the presidency. I ran against him twice, not because I thought I could beat him but because he commands a very strange kind of blind loyalty among the membership. Well it’s not that strange when you think about it. But he does command blind loyalty because he delivers raises and so forth and he’s not always the most adamant person about keeping teachers accountable. In fact in some cases the leadership has a tendency to defend teachers when they are wrong and that’s the kind of stuff I speak out about. And so he certainly has a long memory and he remembers that I challenged him. For me that was a matter of raising issues that wouldn’t have been raised and in terms of being able to do that, it was successful.

RIMC: You have referred to the state of urban education in Rochester and elsewhere as a “crisis.” Define what you mean by a crisis and how Rochester’s schools fit that description?

Rochester is a prime example but is representative of the whole nation. When you have anywhere between 39 percent and 50 percent graduation rate, and when children are dropping out left and right, and thousands of students are sitting in high school who can barely read and write and in many cases are reading an writing in several grade levels below where they should be. And I am just speaking of reading and writing, the basic skills, so any higher order skills, critical or analytical thinking, that is out of the question. But this is not a new crisis, it is very old, and it is not unique to Rochester though, that’s a national crisis. It exists in particularly in urban settings and it is interesting and refreshing to see acting superintendent Dr. William Cala call it what it is. He said he sees a district that is very troubled and a situation where we are not focused on the children, reaching the children, and dealing with the issues that block learning.

RIMC: What are some criticisms you’ve had with the current school board’s way of doing business? What reforms, if any, do you propose for the process in which they operate?

We know that the school board, as an institution, does not take parent and community involvement seriously when they allow only two minutes to address them at the board meetings. And they never talk back. They just sit their like bumps on a log. So if we are serious about parent involvement as the district says it is, and the rhetoric has been spewing out for decades about the importance of community involvement, then that ought to be reflected in the way you operate. And it clearly is not, not only at the central office and the board level but at the building level. There are many many parents that will tell you about their attempts to get involved and receiving a clear message that their involvement is not welcome. The rhetoric just doesn’t match the practice overall.

And I am baffled when the question comes up about budgeting. Mayor Bill Johnson used to talk about the fact that, unless you are a trained budget analyst it is almost impossible to understand the budget. I don’t know if he has straight out said so, but he has kind of indicated that it is done that way intentionally, so that people can’t understand what’s in it and can’t see where the money is going. This way you can’t really evaluate the programs. It’s almost impossible to determine where the money is being spent. But we know much of it is not reaching the classroom, and even if it is, it’s reaching the classroom in ways which are not effective. The evidence of that is in the children. Can they read, can they write, can they think critically, can they pass an exam?

RIMC: You were put on a one-year assignment to study alternative education models across the nation…

Let me give some quick background on that matter. When what is now called Wilson Foundation was Madison, some of us working there saw a clear pattern. The school district was going to dump a lot of children because they were trying to create a feeder institution for Wilson High School. And so we went to the Superintendent and said that we’re not opposed to the plan that you’re trying to develop but we see what’s happening with many of these young people and we think they need some alternatives, and not just them but students throughout the district. And at the time Dr. Rivera agreed whole-heartedly and he made the offer. He asked me to be on assignment for a year to study best practices of alternative education. I went to the community to people I know are educators who I knew were committed and together with them developed a full-fledged proposal for alternative education. Our understanding was that we would have a 50-student pilot program that would eventually evolve into a school.

Some of the carrots that were dangled for me was that I could travel across the country researching alternative models. But by now we ought to be wise enough to know that unless you really go into a situation and spend some time there, programs can look really good in an esoteric way. And since it would only be a two or three day visit, we took the position that we could design a local model that fits our situation that is authentic in terms of what our children, and that we can of course look at what other people are doing but we could look from afar. We didn’t need to waste a lot of time and money traveling. I don’t know if they were taken aback by that position but it certainly seemed that way. Anyways when it came to implementing the program, Dr. Rivera had a sudden change of mind, instead of implementing a 50-student pilot as he had promised to do, he wanted to work with 15 students. And he didn’t agree to me directing the program, I was to be just a teacher. And we had an understanding from the beginning that I was interested in directing the program and wanted to have some leverage in choosing the people who would work their.

That is one of the things with alternative education, if it’s really authentic, you have to choose the staff very carefully. You need people who are committed to doing things differently and committed to working with students who are the most difficult to reach. So you can’t just put anybody in that kind of program and expect it to work even if you have all the other elements. You can have all the resources you need but the wrong human resources, more than likely you’re still doomed to fail. And so that effort was in essence a waste of taxpayers’ money.

RIMC: Are there any particular current members of the school board you wish to unseat? If so what are the reasons for that? Do you want to call anyone out…

No I don’t think that would be wise at this point…

RIMC: Maybe particular behaviors you can speak to…

Well I have said all along that we need bold, knowledgeable, people who are clear about what the issues are have concrete ideas on how to make the change as opposed to general abstractions. We need people who are really going to buck the status quo. So you paint the position and you think about who’s there and you tell me who is there that has bold leadership that will question the status quo. I think that Van White, the newest board member stands out. I don’t see anyone else taking any bold steps.

If we win the election, we are willing to work with anyone. But we hope people will take advantage of the knowledge of someone that has labored on the front lines, really at the level where the rubber hits the road; in the classroom is where it’s really at. Hopefully people will respect and accept that experience.

RIMC: Describe your efforts with C.U.R.E, and the impetus behind that group’s formation.

It stands for Citizens United for Real Education. It was a grassroots effort that grew out of the belief on the part of a few educators, parents, and community members that their needed to be an authentic, independent parent organization. But not just parents working in isolation, but parents working with educators, community members but with the focus on parents organizing parents. So we met for a year and put together a program and approach to organizing parents. It is really one of the hardest tasks that exist – to organize parents in the Rochester City School District.

RIMC: Why is that?

Oh there are so many reasons but we have to place the condition in a historical perspective. It is not simplistic.

RIMC: I don’t know if we have time for that…

I am sure we don’t….But you can’t understand it unless you do place it in a historical perspective. Because that condition didn’t just pop up one day, it came from somewhere.

RIMC: I think that is something that people maybe in the suburbs when they look at the city school district they don’t understand that point.

I agree they do not.

RIMC: They haven’t really taken the time to understand that point.

Don’t have a reference. But even that is an indictment of the public education system in a sense. Because you talk about social studies and history, this is where people should get that kind of understanding. Conditions just don’t come out of nowhere, they just don’t develop on their own. They come from policies from the past, practices, and laws of the past. So in a sense that is an indictment on the education system that is perpetuating ignorance of critical issues.

RIMC: And that brings me to the next question. What is your take on the newly approved African and African-American Studies curriculum added in the City?

Many of the people in the community are not aware of this, but Van White has said it publicly that Wallace Smith and myself took this idea to him. But really to a degree the idea has been distorted. We weren’t thinking of just a department of African and African-American Studies, we were thinking about a department of African and African-American Affairs. See African-American people bring some very unique issues with them to school and there is no focus and effort to deal with those issues the really to impact our ability to educate. And so we were saying yes we need to deal with curriculum but it is not all about curriculum, there are other critical issues that need to be dealt with and this department could address some of that.

RIMC: Do you think the racial imbalance of a primarily Caucasian staff administering and teaching a primarily Black student body has a noticeable effect on the overall academic performance of city students?

People talk about the 85-85 rule. 85 percent of the children being of color while 85 percent of the teaching staff is white. And it’s not this simplistic issue about can white teachers teach black children, that is not the conversation at all. But the conversation is about the importance of understanding culturally who you’re teaching. And in many cases we have a disconnect when it comes to that. And it is like people are from two different worlds. And there is all this talk about professional development but that is one of the areas that professional development should be concentrated in. But it’s not, so we saw that as a possible function of a department of African and African-American Affairs.

Recruitment is the issue too. Who’s being sent to recruit? We were told just a couple weeks ago that the latest class from Morehouse College in Atlanta graduated 200 young men in education. So we when these recruiters go out from the city school district, we’re not sure where it is they’re looking. We are not sure that they even know what they are looking for. So this is something that we saw as a potential function the department could take on in addition to the scholarship.

RIMC: I am going to stay on this point a little more. Last night during the candidate forum you talked about in the halls, outside the classroom with delinquent behavior, there is a way to intervene that some teachers are understanding and some aren’t. Can you speak to that…

My comments on that were made around the whole issue of safety. While security is mainly responsible for safety, safety is everyone’s responsibility in a schools’ environment. If you don’t have rapport, if you don’t know understand who they are – see this brings us right back to the point of cultural knowledge, if you don’t know how to interact, many teachers tend to ignore inappropriate behavior. And they ignore it at a level before it escalates into a fight. If they had that kind of knowledge from on-going training, they would be able to intervene at the lower level before it escalates. We have some teachers who are afraid of children, which is a ridiculous thing. I don’t believe you can teach children if you are afraid of them.

RIMC: Do you think the distance from a culture allows teachers to forgive too much with the issue of cultural relativity going too far. I say oh that’s just how they do things and then end up walking the other way.

Yes that speaks to lower expectations. Let me tell you of an experience I will never forget. This happened many years ago. I was sitting in a classroom with Dr. Rivera with and English teacher and several other teachers discussing basic skills. The English teacher said to the group of us “sometime my students write in slang and I allow that and I know that’s part of their culture.” And I waited and Dr. Rivera and I looked at each other and I hoped that that was not acceptable for him but he never said a word. But I couldn’t keep my mouth close. I said, “hole on you need to stop. You need to know that that is not part of African-American culture. That’s slang, that’s pop culture and while that’s cool on the streets and so forth, that should not be allowed in the classroom.”

Now, that should have been the superintendent calling that question. But I wonder to this day, had I not said anything was he going to. So you see this is an example of what I mean by bold leadership. How can you be at the top of the system in terms of supervision - the superintendent, and here is someone working under you and allow them to make that statement and remain silent. It just baffles me.

RIMC: Do you think there is a problem of perception of the city schools and city life in general as a more hostile environment for the education and nurturing of children? And what kind of impact do you think the flight of middle-class whites, Hispanics and blacks to the suburbs has on the city school district?

We know that in general before white flight and middle class flight, the conditions in the schools were better. There were more resources, involvement, but even in that situation we still had a crisis in the midst of better conditions. And now the better conditions are gone, as far as parent that aren’t struggling so much, that have more resources, and all we have left is the crisis.

Nearly everyone left the city school district for the suburbs due to lack of adequate economic opportunity here, and this is one of the reasons we advocate for more support. And this is one of those circular arguments; if home doesn’t do it then how do you expect us to do it. The reality is that home is not doing it, the family has broken down, and the whole community has broken down to some extent. Which is all the more reason why we have to put support under the children, not to say we can’t do it. But it should be driving us more than ever to do this for the children. But we have to do it systemically. That is if we want them to be successful. Some people make the argument that there are forces that don’t want them to be successful.

RIMC: They don’t give them the tools for the next generation to progress.

Absolutely. It is lucrative for some people. The status quo is lucrative. It provides jobs, certainly for those who work in the criminal justice system.

RIMC: What is your opinion on the District’s model of school choice vs. the traditional neighborhood-schooling model? How successful or unsuccessful has this program been?

You know there must be something I am missing. I don’t see any difference. I don’t see any qualitative or quantitative difference in the condition for most children now that there is a so called “choice policy” from the condition they were in before. It works for some children if you talk to some parents.

RIMC: But you have to talk to the write parent, so it is only a token amount. But the majority of parents are not getting their children into the school they want, and this is all across the city?

Absolutely, the conditions haven’t changed. If you go and talk to parents, they’ll tell you I didn’t get my first choice, second choice, or my third choice. I got the fourth choice. Some people are really playing that out like it has made a real difference. Maybe I am missing something.

RIMC: Okay, going to switch modes now. So far we have identified criticism which in a way we have to do before we find solutions. Can you name your top three reforms you will work towards.

I’ll give you four.Your statement is right the way you framed it. We have to identify the problems before we solve them. But we have to do more than just name the problems we have to really understand the problems and how they came to exist, how they are imbedded in the system. The first part of my platform is the need to develop adequate basic skills in our children – reading, writing, math. Now we have to acknowledge that many children come to school far behind their peers right from the start. But the system treats children as if everyone is in the same place. They begin to get students ready for those standardized tests almost from kindergarten – the one-sized-fits-all model of operating. And because the standardized tests are driving everything we don’t have time for developing the basic skills. We have to bring that about systemically, so it’s not hit or miss.

RIMC: Wait let me stop you there for a minute. A lot people are going to say systems are measured by tests, so how are you going to take away those tests and still measure the progress of the students?

If the students have adequate basic skills, they can pass any test. Students don’t pass a test because they can’t read or write, basically. People put a lot of mystery around the failure. There’s really no mystery to it.

But let me be more specific in terms of what I mean by systemic change. If you know you have many children entering the system who are lagging behind right from the beginning then you need real mechanisms in the system to deal with that. Now this gets to be a tricky subject. I used to be against any kind of tracking. But I have done almost a 360. If young people come into the school underdeveloped, then they must be put into some kind of intensive program to get them up to speed and then put them back into the general population where they should be. But only people are going to be able to do that not programs.

RIMC:You’re not going to be able to make a test that does that….

No, no there is no test. And people talk about differentiated instruction. That’s a lot of rhetoric. You need people to work individually with students. And that is an expensive proposition because in some cases you are going to need one-on-one attention.

The second item in our platform is to end all forms of social promotion. It is better to retain a child for a year and give them the solid basic skill before just sliding them along to the next grade level. There are thousands of children in high school that can barely read and write. You can trace it. Those are the same young people that get involved in gangs and drugs. There is nothing in place for them.

And this brings be to the third item on the platform – providing alternative education.

We’re not talking about doing the same in an alternative manner. We are talking about something fundamentally different. And one component of alternative education for the young people I just described, must include some kind of job incentive, some kind of job training, apprenticeships. We know much of this population is attracted to that, hands-on skills. And not just the dirty jobs that nobody wants, but real marketable skill. And again, this is an expensive proposition. That’s another reason why people don’t really want to look seriously at this.

The fourth point of our platform is that we make our practice matches our rhetoric in regards to sustained parent and community involvement. So again we have to put mechanisms in place to make sure that happens. They put parent liaisons in the schools, that was the right direction. They need to be going into homes, working on relationships. And we have to learn how to tap into extended families. Even if the support isn’t coming from their immediate family, there are extensions to that family that we can tap into. We have to be willing to do this, but it is not easy and it’s not cheap.

So those are the four points we’re running on, those are the things we’re hopeful about. If I am elected I plan on using my position as a bully pulpit to spearhead those changes and get more people involved.

RIMC: Thank you Howard.

Thank you.