In 2013,
Michael Katz and I edited a collection of brief essays on a range of topics
that get short shrift in the current school reform discussion, from poverty to
English Language Learners. The book is called Public Education Under
Siege, and I am happy to tell you that it is now out in paperback at a much
lower price: $19.95.
I'm reprinting below one of the
essays in the book, Janelle Scott's take on the reformer's appropriation of the
language of the Civil Rights Movement, "Educational Movements, Not Market
Moments."
***
For at least two decades,
conservatives have argued that school choice was the last unachieved civil
right. In 2010, some powerful moderate
voices echoed their view and invoked the name of Rosa Parks to support it. At an early screening of the documentary Waiting for Superman, which claims charters
are the solution for the persistent failure of urban public schools, Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan announced that the film signaled a “Rosa Parks moment”
that would initiate a new movement for school choice.
Other adherents—philanthropists,
policy advocates, and leading pundits— have echoed Duncan’s association of Rosa
Parks and the broader Civil Rights Movement with market-based school choice. In
so doing, they have reduced the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott to a single act by
one brave woman. In fact, that pivotal
event was the work of thousands of African Americans and their supporters who
struggled for nearly thirteen months to desegregate public transportation in
Alabama’s capital after Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white
customer. In addition, Parks and many of
her fellow activists engaged in intensive preparation at the Highlander Center
to be ready to risk their lives in acts of civil disobedience. Moreover, the
concerns of these civil rights activists extended far beyond transportation;
they were fighting to end America’s version of apartheid and achieve the full
rights of citizenship. As the movement
grew, it also advocated the end of poverty and the withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Vietnam.
This misunderstanding of the
history of the civil rights struggle reveals one of the key flaws in the push
for market-based educational solutions.
The top-down, managerial, approaches pursued by leading school reformers
ignores the vital, grassroots efforts underway in low-income communities, many
of which directly challenge the market approach to schools that embraces
competition, choice without equity provisions, and privatization. These local activists are deeply concerned
with a range of problems that prevent public schools from giving poor and
working-class children a good education: rampant unemployment, the lack of
affordable housing, environmental degradation, and a flawed immigration
policy. They want the state to
distribute equitable and sufficient resources across communities, not simply to
individual schools and parents. And they
worry that choice stands to further stratify communities by race and poverty.
These issues are especially being articulated in the wake of mass school
closings and teacher terminations in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and
Philadelphia.
***
Advocates for market-based
reforms are disconnected from such grassroots concerns. In searching for spokespeople—exemplars of
struggling parents and students to represent the need for market-based
reform—they neglect the vibrant efforts of those working for educational equity
for entire communities.
A good example of inequity
concerns the huge gap between funding for urban and suburban school
districts. In 2011, a broad swath of
entrepreneurial school reformers, pundits, and even some from the civil rights
community compared two African American women—Kelley Williams-Bolar from Akron,
Ohio, and Tanya McDowell from Norwalk, Connecticut—to Rosa Parks after they
were arrested for falsifying their address so their children might gain access
to schools with more resources outside their urban neighborhoods. Comparisons to Parks were widespread—a Google
search of “Williams-Bolar Rosa Parks” yields over twelve thousand results. For example, in a February 2011 post, Kyle
Olson, a blogger for Big Government,
appealed to education reformers to take advantage of the “human face” Williams-Bolar
had provided to advocate for an expression of school choice. His post juxtaposed the classic photograph of
Parks being fingerprinted by Montgomery police officers with Williams-Bolar
being handcuffed in Akron.
Olson and his fellow market
advocates might have thought to ask Williams-Bolar how she saw herself, and
why, if charter schools were the salvation, she had bypassed the six community
schools (as charters are known in Ohio) operating in Akron. While she acknowledged that the
Copely-Fairlawn school district—the suburban district she had sought out—had
higher performing schools, she wanted to send her daughters there so that they
could go to their grandfather’s home nearby after school while she had to be at
work. The girls were too young to be
home alone. In fact, on February 3,
2011, she told the Akron Beacon Journal
in an article entitled, “Center to File Mother’s Appeal,” “I’m not perfect and
I’m not a Rosa Parks. I’m just a mom
looking out for her kids.” Although
better schooling was one issue for Williams-Bolar, safety and security for her
daughters, given her need to work and support them, was a key motivation for
her breaking the law. For her and many
who seek safer, better schools, there is no real choice.
***
The problem in part lies in the
rigid boundaries decreed by courts, beginning in the 1970s, which effectively
exempted suburban schools from the requirement to take part in metropolitan
desegregation plans. With suburban
schools off-limits, school choice largely operates inside urban school
districts, and market advocates who decried Williams-Bolar’s treatment did not
call for a movement to eradicate district attendance boundaries. Some choice plans, such as magnet schools,
mean to facilitate desegregation on a voluntary basis and do, on the whole,
promote integration. Others, such as
charter schools and vouchers, offer few ways to promote equality of opportunity
beyond individual parental empowerment. Many
urban parents do avail themselves of these latter options. But this amounts to choosing between
problematic traditional public schools and alternatives they have had little
role in shaping; they may be participating in an individual moment of
empowerment, but their choice making is not part of a broader movement for equality
of opportunity for all students.
Contemporary school reformers
have not helped matters by undercutting democratic processes. Most favor abolishing elected school boards
and local school councils. Yet, the
latter were hard won by community control activists frustrated by earlier eras
of school reform featuring centralized, managerial leadership dominated by
white men inattentive to the needs of poor students and students of color. Both Chicago and New York City recently did
away with their elected boards of education and put mayors in charge of their
schools. In many cities, private
organizations have been given the power to set up and expand charter schools.
And the making of urban
educational policy is shaped by unprecedented amounts of private money. For example, under Michelle Rhee, former
chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools, several foundations, including the
Walton Family Foundation and the Robertson Foundation, pledged millions of
dollars to underwrite school reform, money contingent on implementation of the
reforms. This practice, increasingly
common in cash-starved school districts, stands to distort the policy process
and limit the influence of local community movements that have long fought for
voice and control under more traditional school governance forms.
Because most elite reformers
are disconnected from local struggles, they do not engage the issue of
socioeconomic and racial inequality, even as the United States is experiencing
the most profound wealth gap since the 1920s. Parents cannot be solely focused on securing
better schools for their children as long as so many are unemployed or underemployed
and have neither safe nor affordable housing or access to health care.
Civil rights organizations such
as the NAACP have long opposed market-based educational policies that do
nothing to address racial segregation and class stratification in minority
communities. This stance brings them
into coalition with teachers’ unions, which are portrayed as the prime villains
in the accounts of school reformers.
But, in fact, teachers’ unions—often with African American members in
the lead—have consistently supported lawsuits to desegregate schools and bring
about fiscal equity between urban and suburban districts.
***
Grassroots activists have also
opposed the larger attempt to put private agencies in charge of setting up and
managing schools. For at least a decade,
organizers across the country have fought against school privatization in San
Francisco, New York City, Philadelphia, and other cities. Charter schools managed by charter management
organizations have expanded in New York City, bypassing the need for parents in
existing schools to vote for conversion by starting new schools
altogether. These schools have expended
significant resources to market themselves to parents, and, indeed, many of
them have been in high demand from parents given the deplorable state of many
local schools. Yet opposition also
exists. More recently, organizers have
pushed back against the growth of charter schools in Harlem and the
privatization and state takeover of schools in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina.
Not surprisingly, market
reformers have been highly critical of these opposition efforts. For example, Dennis Walcott, the former Chancellor
of New York City schools, accused the NAACP and teachers’ union of playing the
“race card” when, in June 2011, they filed suit to stop charter schools from
taking up space in existing schools.
Walcott and his supporters dismissed the overcrowding and inequitable
distribution of scarce resources by accusing his critics of racial
manipulation.
Yet such detractors, who would
otherwise lend their support solely to the expansion of market-based schooling
options, miss a vital opportunity to collaborate with organizations that are
seeking to increase educational opportunity for all students. Groups like Rethinking Schools, as well as
other organizations such as the Education Opportunity Network, Parents Across
America, Class Size Matters, New York Collective of Radical Educators, Forum
for Education and Democracy, Coalition for Essential Schools, and A Broader,
Bolder Approach to Education are examples of organizations advocating for an
alternative vision of good public education.
These organizations promote public schools that are open, nested in
communities, have excellent teachers and school leaders, and are well
resourced, diverse, and democratic.
Despite a lack of funding and political support, they have the potential
to reorient current efforts toward more democratic, high-quality, and
representative public education. Their
task is to build networks that bridge communities, as the civil rights movement
did decades ago.
***
The current generation of market-oriented
school reformers is motivated by good intentions, and they are no doubt sincere
in their stated desire to emulate the goals and heroes of the Civil Rights
movement. And there do exist
high-quality and equity-minded charter schools that resist market framing of
their schools and students. But tensions persist over the advocacy of school
choice as the prevailing civil rights issue when its focus is frequently on
individual parental empowerment. We see
this focus in the attempt to make “National School Choice Week,” first launched
January 2011, an event in which parent and student stories of struggle and
triumph in relation to market policies are featured in national and local news
media. The message is that individual
rights equate a mass movement. It is
clear that leading school reformers seem to largely view the great civil rights
struggle as the work of atomized individuals and consistently denigrate
contemporary activists whose ideas of how fix urban schools clash with their
own.
Certainly, the liberty and
dignity of each individual were key tenets of the civil rights movement. But freedom activists kept their eyes on the
prize of benefits for entire communities and worked to democratize schools and
other institutions so they would not continue to be ruled by those who already
enjoyed the privileges of wealth and a place at or near the top of the racial
hierarchy. Today, when the economic
crisis has eroded the gains of the black and Latino middle classes and deepened
the poverty of other Americans of color, and when the Supreme Court recently
vacated a key provision of the seminal Voting Rights Act, school reformers
continue to insist that poverty, disenfranchisement, and unemployment are “no
excuse” for not performing well on standardized tests and deride critics of the
privatizing and segregating effects of some choice policies as being defenders
of an unequal status quo. In fact, these
market critics seek a much more equitable schooling system that would disrupt
what Jonathon Kozol famously termed, in the title of his popular 1991 book, Savage Inequalities.
Can we imagine Martin Luther
King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, or Rosa Parks marching on Washington
to secure the right for parents to compete in lotteries for spaces in
free-market schools? Rather than these
figures, the managers of such reformed in fact seem to be emulating another
iconic cultural figure: Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian
economist whose 1962 best-selling book was entitled Free to Choose.
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This is all very pretty and admirable. But while I applaud your looking at the blue collar worker who tends our tables and cleans our bathrooms, I also think of the 75% contingent faculty -- who like you -- also do intellectual labor, yet we get paid peanuts for it, like the Walmart workers or MacDonalds workers who are demanding to organize today.
ReplyDeleteYet many here in the outlier states cannot even organize, as we have no collective bargaining, and our pretty words of justice and truth only get us ousted from the university silo.
So you will have to excuse me; I cannot applaud you, though I may think your heart is in the right place.
In sol(idarity),
Ana M. Fores Tamayo, Adjunct Justice
Petition: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/better-pay-for-adjuncts
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/AdjunctJustice