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Yesterday, I attended the Bowling Green City Commission Special Work Session on the Homeless. First, I want to thank our Mayor Todd Alcott for both his selection of venue, The Sloan Convention Center, and his use of an independent organization, the Kentucky League of Cities, as moderator. These choices created a forum where all voices could be heard.

Approximately 70 citizens, 15 public servants, representatives from 16 public service organizations, and the Bowling Green City Commission were present. Only public service organizations were allowed to present.

The presenters were:

Anti-eviction Network

Hotel Inc.

BRASS

Habitat for Humanity

Bowling Green Housing Authority

Veterans brigade

LifeSkills

Salvation Army

United way of Southern Kentucky

Department of Veterans Affairs

Room In the Inn

Bowling Green Human Rights Commission

Key takeaways:

Three organizations serve the homeless by providing a place to stay. The Salvation Army has 80 beds, Room In the Inn has beds available November through March, and the Bowling Green Housing Authority provides additional rooms. The remaining organizations provide vouchers, coordinate services, and provide other periphery services for broader communities, including the homeless.

There was no consensus on what should be done.

There was no common definition of homelessness.

There was no broad support for a City Homeless Coordinator.

Common ground:

Everyone agreed that homelessness is a challenge and that the city has a role to play.

There was general support for using public grant monies to address the issue – but a number of ideas regarding how to do so. Some of these include:

1. Creating a centralized location, funded by the city, where all organizations serving the homeless would be located. This ideas is based on the Single Point of Entry concept, where this location would serve as a drop in center for people in crisis.

2. Creating a city trust fund for low-income housing.

3. Hiring outside consultants to advise the city about how to provide adequate low-income housing.

Mayor Alcott noted that homelessness is bigger than Bowling Green, and any action would require the city and the county to act jointly. He asked commissioners to take what was presented, and use that to assist them in managing the city. No follow up meeting was scheduled.

Closing comments:

Warren County Conservatives, the Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky, and other conservatives attended en force, and that voice was noted. It was obvious that many want to address homelessness, but the majority did not want a city homeless coordinator.

Dana Beasley Brown was an embarrassment. She left the meeting for 20 minutes during the presentation phase and tried to hijack the meeting on two occasions. First she appeared to be behind an effort that invited a homeless man to discuss his plight, even though it was outside the purview of the meeting. Second, Beasley Brown used time designated for asking questions to extend more speaking time for one organization – Hotel Inc. These efforts appeared to be a direct solution pitch imploring the city to hire a Canadian firm to advise on homeless issues.

The following picture best describes the solution presented by Beasley Brown. It lists organizations that do not participate in the Continuum of Care. Beasley Brown’s plan only includes those that do participate in the Continuum of Care. The organizations in her proposal don’t provide housing for the homeless.

Update, 4/29. I made a five-minute video as a companion piece to the essay described to below. In it I describe what critical theory is, how it can be useful, but why it has to be rejected as the single lens through which we address issues of racial achievement gaps:

In my latest essay for The Chalkboard Review, I argue that racial bias may be a real phenomena among educators, and it may partially explain the persistence of achievement gaps based on race. But indoctrinating teachers in critical race theory or imposing CRT in the curriculum isn’t the answer. In fact, CRT actually prevents a meaningful exploration of how implicit bias shows up in schools and how we might do better by students.

Research from education advocacy group TNTP, billed as “The Opportunity Myth,” shows that students of color and students from low-income backgrounds regularly receive classroom assignments that are below grade-level expectations. In fact, the Opportunity Myth study found that in 4 out of 10 classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment). 

Does racism play a role in this abysmal display of low expectations? Perhaps. The biased belief that students of color are incapable of completing rigorous assignments almost certainly does. But a fair number of minority teachers and administrators would also have to be guilty of this assumption.

Is white privilege at work in this pattern? Perhaps – to the extent that teachers assume white students are capable of high achievement and therefore challenge them with rigorous work. So racial prejudice may indeed make a difference in student outcomes. But what do we do about that? And does that explain everything about these differences?

CRT advocates would say we have to expose these implicit biases in educators—presumably the minority teachers with low expectations for students of color also hold those views because of some mysterious pattern of white supremacy—and insist that students receive more “culturally responsive” instruction like the CRT-approved but historically inaccurate pablum of the 1619 project or ethno-mathematics where concepts like finding the right answer in a math class is an alleged reflection of “whiteness.” 

Instead of imposing ineffective, CRT-inspired equity trainings or ideologically-driven curriculum on students, what if we just showed educators the research on low expectations and then trained them in understanding what high-quality, rigorous instructional resources look like and how to use them? For all students. From my own personal experience when I’ve confronted teachers and administrators with the Opportunity Myth research, they recognize the pattern and tendency to use the past performance of struggling students to justify giving them low-quality assignments, and they immediately want to help their schools do better.

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