Thank you, Bill. I learned a lot yesterday during the "Tuskegee" twitter convo, about both broader issues impacting education and American society, and about myself in terms of bias. I appreciate your passion, intellect, and willingness to communicate with me (and others), challenge me (and others), and ultimately teach me (and hopefully others) something very important. Kudos on the post here. Very well done.

John Travis, Feb 09 2014 on funnymonkey.com

Hi Bill, I agree with the metaphor used by the African-American teacher in comparing the EAA to the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments. I think it's a highly apt metaphor. I've alluded to this metaphor myself, in writing about corporate education reform. In a piece I published a couple years ago, I noted that America loved experimenting on the black body politic. I noted that America loved learning by experimenting on African-Americans. I'm not sure I actually used the word Tuskeegee, but it certainly is what I had in my mind. The idea is conducting an experiment on African-Americans because they are not valued by the experimenter. Like in Tuskegee, we know that there are better solutions available, but we continue to destroy black lives because we see that destruction as a means to other ends.

Tom Pedroni , Feb 09 2014 on funnymonkey.com

Reading the interview in which EAA schools were compared to the Tuskegee experiment, I was struck by the fact that I didn't know the race of the teacher who made the initial comparison. If I imagined he was white, then I had the same worries that you're addressing here -- that he was trivializing the murder of African-American men (in the name of so-called scientific research) by comparing it to any old experiment in which an untested idea is tried on human subjects for the first time. But if I read him as an African-American, I had a different reaction. I read him as trying to position what seems like a harmless educational intervention in the contexts of the dire consequence if can have for students of color. A thing that often happens when race comes up in this country is that white people poo-poo the legitimate concerns of black people (in particular). When black people trapped in the Superdome during Katrina say they thought they would all be rounded up and killed, white people who haven't experienced police violence, mass incarceration, and historical knowledge of things like the Tuskegee Experiment are all, "no way, that's crazy, the government isn't that racist." When people of color say, "This thing that you thing is generically bad feels to me like racially targeted state violence that will lead to the early death of many of my people," and white people say, "oh, stop exaggerating," that's bad news. So I'm still on the fence about how to read and react to the Tuskegee comparison.

Max Ray, Feb 12 2014 on funnymonkey.com

Hello, Max,

Thank you for your comment, and for the way you framed context as part of understanding these interactions.

Like you, I don't know how the teacher identified in the Eclectablog piece self-identifies.

There are a few places of concern for me with this, but it start with the fact that the comparison remains superficial: EAA is horrible/an experiment; Tuskegee was horrible/an "experiment"; therefore Tuskegee = EAA. By that logic, *any* horrible/experimental thing is directly comparable to what's going on in the EAA.

It's also worth remembering that Tuskegee played out over 40 years. The people affected by Tuskegee were lied to about the nature of their participation. After a cure for syphilis was discovered, the cure was withheld from participants, as they were told they were being treated. Some people enrolled in the military in WW2, and the lead "researchers" contacted military doctors to ensure that treatment was withheld. People in the study were given spinal taps and told that the spinal tap was part of the treatment. The effects of late stage syphilis, and its disruptive effects on families, was observed, and still, a readily available cure was withheld. That's a superficial summary of what played out as part of a government sponsored project for 40 years - from 1932 until 1972, when a whistleblower made this public.

And, to be clear, EAA is not a good thing. It's a bad model of schooling - between the working conditions, the experience level of some staff, lack of resources, flawed educational approaches, and siphoning public money to private companies (again, a short/incomplete summary) - there is a lot to criticize. But there is no high bar of "badness" that something needs to rise above in order for it to merit attention.

I want the conditions within EAA to improve because it's the right thing for kids in those schools, and it's the right thing for public education. It doesn't need to be as bad as [Thing X] in order to deserve attention, concern, or outrage.

And really, I probably would have let this go, but when this message and comparison started being amplified and defended as apt and right, I felt incapable of saying nothing. People really went to the mat to defend an analogy that is highly flawed, and ultimately counterproductive and alienating to people who care strongly about the issue. People can argue for the right things in the wrong ways, and the Tuskegee analogy strikes me as a clear example of this.

RE your comment on white people dismissing the concerns of PoC - fully agree. It happens way too frequently, and is one of the ways in which privilege manifests itself.

bill, Feb 12 2014 on funnymonkey.com

Bill - I'm with you. I jotted down this note at about the same time you wrote this piece:

"If education is the civil rights struggle of our time then where are those who are oppressed in the conversation. Right now when I hear about civil rights and public education it is wealthy white people calling for the change. This isn't what the struggle for civil rights really looks like. So what's really going on?"

I feel like we're missing something big here...

Glenn, Mar 03 2014 on funnymonkey.com

Mentioned in: This post from @funnymonkey from 2014. #MTBoS funnymonkey.com/2014/i-am-not-…

Anne Schwartz, Feb 11 2019 on twitter.com