The Obama administration is failing our need to address childhood poverty by maintaining policy and discourse holding schools accountable for social failures.

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Ralph Ellison gave an address for the National Book Award in January 1953, explaining about his Invisible Man--that its strength came from "its experimental attitude, and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction." In the speech titled "Brave Words for a Startling Occasion," Ellison built to this: "On its profoundest level American experience is of a whole. Its truth lies in its diversity and swiftness of change."

In June 2010, the news was bleak for children living in the U. S.: The rate of children living in poverty this year will climb to nearly 22%, the highest rate in two decades, according to an analysis by the non-profit Foundation for Child Development. Nearly 17% of children were living in poverty in 2006, before the recession began.

The "startling occasion" of Ellison's speech is far removed from today, but his words remain powerful now when we examine the lives of children in our free nation, especially when we consider children in the context of the plight of poverty and the tarnished promise of universal public education--both amid the promise of hope and change ushered in with the election of Barack Obama.

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the U. S. stands as one of the most powerful countries in the world that also tolerates one of the highest rates of childhood poverty among other affluent countries. A 2007 report detailed that "[t]he United Kingdom and the United States find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings for five of the six dimensions reviewed" related to childhood poverty.

As the evidence grew about the impoverished conditions of many children's lives in the U. S., simultaneously throughout that decade, the federal government pursued the most aggressive overhaul of the public education system in its history with the passing and implementation of No Child Left Behind. Under President George W. Bush and education secretaries Rob Paige and Margaret Spellings, the Department of Education promoted advocacy messages that often didn't correspond with the evidence, messages that portrayed the power of the federal government to change through accountability the course of an education system characterized as a failure for a century.

With the election of Obama, many anticipated hope and change, especially members of the educational community. Within a month of the reports about childhood poverty rates rising, however, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke against the rising tide of critics and defended their educational policies that rest on an essential claim that teachers and schools are at the heart of what we need to change in order to improve educational success.

"Of all the work that occurs at every level of our education system, the interaction between teacher and student is the primary determinant of student success" represents the central message coming from the Obama administration, pursuing a policy built on competition, Race to the Top, and both direct and indirect endorsements of charter schools, despite the evidence that neither accountability nor charter schools address the central problems facing public education.

The criticism of the Obama administration's education policy has increased from the left although many have begun to embrace what is being called brave and powerful messages and actions taken against teacher's unions and the "status quo," the rallying code word of those supporting Obama and Duncan.

To the critics, Obama sent this message on 29 July 2010: "... But I know there's also been some controversy about the initiative [Race to the Top]. Part of it, I believe, reflects a general resistance to change; a comfort with the status quo. But there have also been criticisms, including from some folks in the civil rights community, about particular elements of Race to the Top."

Just two days before, Secretary Duncan offered a similar refrain: "We have to challenge the status quo--because the status quo in public education is not nearly good enough--not with a quarter of all students and, almost half, 50% of African-American and Latino young men and women dropping out of high school."

School reform advocates supporting school choice and competition at the heart of that reform see a much different Obama than the critics from the left. Consider this blog post from Rick Hess's EdWeek blog: "Good for Obama. These are hard things to say, especially for a Democratic President facing a challenging fall, and he deserves much credit for hanging tough."

Good for Obama? These are hard things to say? Hanging tough?

When I read Obama's and Duncan's defenses of their policies by charging those opposing them as defenders of the status quo, and when I read people praising Obama for his bravery in the face of that status quo, I thought of Ellison--and the nature of brave words.

It is no brave thing said or done, the policies of the Obama administration, because the words and policies are built on mythologies and ideologies that we dare not question or speak against and not on the evidence of when and why our students fail.

The truth, the complicated truth uncovered if we move beyond political discourse, is that neither democracy nor capitalism will ever address the plight of children in poverty. Children have no political power since they cannot vote, and children have no capital with which to sway the market (except for their proxy roles spending the disposable capital of relatively affluent parents).

Brave words would include recognizing the "moral responsibility" noted by Ellison. Brave words would speak against assumptions that fail. Brave words would admit the following about both our social and educational failures:

• The achievement gap in education is a reflection of the equity gap in the lives of children. To scapegoat school and teacher quality as causes of the achievement gap perpetuates a social status quo that protects the interests of those already in power by deflecting our attention away from our cultural failures. Once students pass through the doors of any school, their lives and worlds are not magically erased. Education takes place in the context of lives and society. As a result, our schools are some of the most direct reflections of those lives and our society.

• Teacher quality is important, but holding teachers accountable for student achievement and firing teachers labeled failures based on those test scores mask the real in-school inequities perpetuated by teacher assignments. One direct and significant failure of public schools is that teacher assignments exacerbate the social inequities children suffer in their lives. Children fighting from the bottom of stratified lives often find themselves at the bottom of stratified existences in their schools as well.

Speaking to teachers in 1963, Ralph Ellison addressed then the exact educational concerns we have today (including the inordinate drop-out rate of African American males), and he challenged his audience to set aside deficit views of struggling children: "Let's not play these kids cheap; let's find out what they have."

But instead of blaming schools, teachers, or children themselves, Ellison proposed, "As we approach the dropouts, let us identify who we [emphasis in original] are and where we are."

Brave words.

Authors Bio:
An Associate Professor of Education at Furman University since 2002, Dr. P. L. Thomas taught high school English for 18 years at Woodruff High along with teaching as an adjunct at a number of Upstate colleges. He holds an undergraduate degree in Secondary Education (1983) along with an M. Ed. in Secondary Education (1985) and Ed. D. in Curriculum and Instruction (1998), all from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Thomas has focused throughout his career on writing and the teaching of writing. He has published fiction, poetry, and numerous scholarly works since the early 1980s. Currently, he works closely with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as a column editor for English Journal, Challenging Text, and the SC Council of Teachers of English (SCCTE) as co-editor of South Carolina English Teacher. His major publications include a critique of American education, Numbers Games (2004, Peter Lang); a text on the teaching of writing, Teaching Writing Primer (2005, Peter Lang); and books in a series edited by Thomas, Confronting the Text, Confronting the World--his most recent volume being Reading, Learning, Teaching Ralph Ellison (2008, Peter Lang). He has also co-authored a work with Joe Kincheloe (McGill University), Reading, Writing, and Thinking: The Postformal Basics (2006, Sense Publishers), and Renita Schmidt, 21st Century Literacy: If We Are Scripted Are We Literate? (Springer, 2009). His next books include Parental Choice? (2010, Information Age Publishing) and the first volume in a new series he edits, Challenging Genres: Comics and Graphic Novels (Sense Publishers). His scholarship and teaching deal primarily with critical literacy and social justice. See his work at: http://wrestlingwithwriting.blogspot.com/