Starting this fall, Philadelphia public schools will require all entering high school freshmen to take a course in African-American history. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, both national and local officials say they know of no other district that imposes such a requirement for graduation.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has been on the story since June 9, covering both the decision to require the course and immediate reaction to the news. Since then, the Inquirer has brought us summaries of the controversy over mandating such a course, news of national praise for the decision, and opinion pieces from varied viewpoints.
The New York Times, on the other hand, was slow to the story, running its first and so far only item about the decision last Saturday. We’ll cut the Times some slack on the timing — this is Philadelphia news, after all, so it makes sense that the Inquirer would beat the competition. But if you’re going to wait half a month to chime in on something, you’d better be sure your piece reflects the best of what’s already been circulating. And that’s where Michael Janofsky’s article in the Times comes up short.
Janofsky does get the facts down: Starting in September, a course in African-American history is mandatory for all incoming freshmen in the Philadelphia School District. He also gives us some background on the area: about two-thirds of the students in the district are black and “only two in seven are white or Hispanic.”
What Janofsky fails to capture is the full scope of the controversy surrounding this decision. We hear a lot of voices favoring the new history requirement: the school system’s chief executive Paul G. Vallas, the School Reform Commission chairman James E. Nevels, commission member Sandra Dungee Glenn, and a teacher who taught an African-American history elective in the spring, all of whom had calculated and effusive things to say to Janofsky about the new course.
And in the opposite corner? Well, John M. Perzel, the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives who expressed concern over making this course a requirement, “declined a request for an interview.” So Janofsky went to the most reasonable fall-back: two fairly apathetic teenagers hanging out by the recreation center in the tough Fishtown neighborhood (think “Rocky”) of Philadelphia.
These boys must have had some pretty fascinating things to say for Janofsky to allow them to carry the burden of representing one entire side of this debate on their small, 16-year-old shoulders. Let’s check it out:
Mike Budnick, 16, called the requirement “a bad idea” and said he was not especially interested in learning about black culture or heritage.
“I’m more interested in our history,” he said.
A friend of Mr. Budnick, Arbi Ferko, also 16, said, “It’s not our history to learn,” and pointed out, as other critics have, that the school had not sought to create courses on the history of other groups.
And just who are those “other critics” whom Janofsky alludes to in that brief aside? From the Times article, you’d never know. Said critics have no voice, beyond that of their two unelected pubescent representatives.
But the critics are out there, and all Janofsky had to do to find them was read the Inquirer articles that hit the newsstands weeks ago. There’s Chester E. Finn, a prominent education critic from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who wrote an op-ed for the Inquirer (he has also had his take on Philadelphia’s “blunder” as the main post on his blog for over a week). There’s Miriam Foltz, president of a parents’ association at a local middle school, whose offense at the compulsory African-American history course has been quoted in the Inquirer, CNN.com, and the Houston Chronicle, just to name a few. There’s even the line from commission chairman Nevels himself, saying that this plan falls short of his ideal vision: “I guess the ideal I would love to see is a rich, diverse, textural and contextual history of all those who make up the fabric of America,” he said in an Inquirer piece. Not even that concession made it into the Times.
We’re not saying reporters should never quote 16-year-old kids loitering on a playground. We are saying there are articulate Philadelphians on each side of this issue who have argued their case with passion, often in public forums. The least the Times could do is to introduce its readers to some of those who oppose the new curriculum.
–Samantha Henig
Samantha Henig was a CJR Daily intern.