Issues and Advocacy Framework Development on Education

Education Advocacy Issues

Massive institutional racism and structural inequalities still exist in the United States, especially in housing, public education and the criminal justice system in inner city areas. In every urban area, the quality of education available to poor and minority students is demonstrably worse by any measure than that of their white peers in the suburbs. This type of institutional discrimination is not caused by genetic or cultural deprivation but by the fact that the U.S. has always been and remains a highly segregated and unequal society based on race and social class. Of course, this violates the liberal, egalitarian and meritocratic ideals on which the nation was (supposedly), but after all, the U.S. managed to survive with slavery for almost a hundred years after its founding, and with legal segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks for a hundred years after that. Chicago, Detroit, East St. Louis, Camden, New Jersey all have crumbling public school systems serving mostly black and Hispanic students funded at levels far below those of white suburban districts. Ghetto neighborhoods also lack banks, supermarkets, parks and other public services, and have high levels of crime, gang activity, unemployment and drug dealing (Kozol 1991). Detroit serves as a particularly egregious example of structural racism, segregation and unequal funding between urban and suburban schools, and was also ground-zero for the Bradley v. Milliken case in the 1970s that effectively ended any new attempts at busing or school integration in urban America. The same problems remain as in the 1960s and 1970s, and are indeed worse than ever, and the proposed solutions have all been attempted in the past -- and usually blocked by suburban whites. No one is seriously attempting to implement school integration today or even a policy of equalized funding for minority schools, although this certainly should be done.

History of Segregation and Inequality in Urban Public Schools

Detroit is a classic Rust Belt city that has lost most of its industrial base over the last thirty years, and has been driven nearly into bankruptcy during the recent recession. It also has a long history of racial segregation and violence, while its public education system is among the worst in the country. In 1980-90 alone the city lost one-sixth of its population and over one-third of its residents lived in poverty, but compared to the inner city the white suburbs were relatively affluent. As with all American cities, residential segregation was nearly absolute, with the Detroit suburbs being 95% white and the inner city 76% black. Almost half of the children in the city live in poverty compared to 10% in the suburbs, and Detroit long ago earned the reputation as the "first Third World city" in the U.S., although it was by no means the last (Farley et al., 2000, p. 4). Suburban schools reflect the general social and economic conditions of the Detroit area as a whole and have always been as segregated as the communities themselves.

Detroit's history as the Motor City began in 1908 with the development of the assembly line by Henry Ford, who was himself a notorious racist, anti-Semite and financier of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. In both world wars, the motor industry expanded greatly and recruited blacks and poor whites from the South in large numbers, although blacks were employed in the lowest-paying unskilled jobs. Up to the 1930s, Ford and the other auto barons resisted unionization with great violence until the great sit-down strikes of 1937. Industrial unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) negotiated generous pay and benefits for their members and lifted workers out of poverty and into the middle class for the first time in American history. As those jobs began to disappear in the 1970s to the oil shocks and imports from Asia, so did the factories and well-paying union jobs in Detroit. Whites also moved to the suburbs after 1945, which remained almost completely closed to blacks, and in 1950-90 the white population of Detroit fell by 85% (Farley et al., p. 10).

White flight increased rapidly after the 1967 riots, which left much of the inner city devastated, to the point where less than 10% of whites in the metropolitan area still lived in the city by 1990. White incomes doubled in 1950-90 while black incomes actually decreased, and on average family incomes in the suburbs were twice as high as those of inner city blacks (Farley et al., p. 50). Thus the pattern of black poverty, segregated housing and schools and a failed public education system in the inner city was set decades ago. Short of the city annexing the suburbs -- which it has not been permitted to do since 1926 -- or a major influx of federal resources to decrease these inequalities, this situation is not going to change in any meaningful way. Since the 1960s, when the civil rights movement ended in urban riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King, there has been no political will in the United States to address these problems of poverty, racism, inequality and segregation. At best, the minority populations of the inner cities have been treated as a problem of social control and law enforcement.

In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol offered an absolutely horrendous description of public schools in inner city ghettos that at times reduced him to tears and rage. Chicago, Detroit, East St. Louis, Camden, Jew Jersey all have crumbling public school systems serving mostly black and Hispanic students funded at levels far below those of white suburban districts. Like Detroit, they are all Rust Belt cities and urban wastelands from which industry fled decades ago, leaving behind the poor, the disadvantaged and minorities who were unable to escape. These ghetto neighborhoods also lack banks, supermarkets, parks and other public services, and have high levels of crime, gang activity, unemployment and drug dealing. Public schools in these cities are examples of truly illiberal education in the United States in which not even a pretext of meritocracy exists. Kozol asks rhetorically whether Americans even believe in equality at all, and judging from the condition of these public schools the answer would seem to be negative. Everyone even slightly familiar with these urban public schools knows very well that they are "closely tied to class and race" (Kozol, 1991, p. 60). Most of them lack adequate textbooks and equipment, and even functioning playgrounds and bathroom facilities. Almost none of their students will go on to higher education and dropout rates are often as high as 80-90.

In absolutely every case, the quality of education available to poor and minority students is demonstrably poorer by any measure than that of their white peers in the suburbs, as researchers like Jonathan Kozol have pointed out many times. This is not caused by genetic or cultural deprivation but by the fact that the U.S. has always been and remains a highly segregated and unequal society based on race and social class (Ryan, 1976, p. 16). Of course, this violates the liberal, egalitarian and meritocratic ideals on which the nation was (supposedly) founded, but such hypocrisy has rarely seemed to disturb most white Americans in the middle and upper classes. After all, the U.S. managed to survive with slavery for almost a hundred years after its founding, and with legal segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks for a hundred years after that. Meritocracy in the United States has always been a complete myth in the sense that every individual regardless of color or social class has equal opportunities in life (McNamee and Miller 2004).Students who graduate from these places will be lucky to read at an elementary schools level, and they realize by 5th or 6th grade that they are being cheated and do not have nearly the same educational opportunities as whites in suburban schools. Indeed, the disparities are so great that they might as well be living in separate countries, with the inner cities being part of some impoverished Third World nation. Only the threat of lawsuits or shutdowns by state and federal officials brings about even slight improvements in schools like these, because there is simply not enough money to go around.

Proposed Policies

Strong democracy in inner-city public schools requires the empowerment and mobilization of low-income, minority, youth, and other marginalized and under-represented groups who are being poorly served by the present segregated system. Major decisions that affect the poor, the marginalized and minorities from major public policy decisions require the active participation from all sectors of society. It also requires changes in the curriculum and pedagogy so that these will reflect that values of strong democracy and maximum participation by groups that are presently ignored and marginalized. To accomplish this end, the following recommendations should be enacted:

• Renewed efforts to integrate the inner-city and suburban schools, through busing, exchange programs, or attracting larger numbers of whites or immigrants back to the inner city.

• Abandoning the system of property taxes and also seek more funding from the state and federal government to equalize the per capita student spending in urban and suburban schools.

• Developing a strong democracy through a truly innovative and progressive curriculum that will empower the students and assist more of them in moving on to higher education. This curriculum will emphasize civics and active participation of citizens in political and economic life, as well as the history and contemporary struggles of the poor, minorities and the working class.

• Changes in pedagogy that will move-away from the teacher-centered to the student-centered classroom and more active participation of students and parents in the learning process, as well as the school administration and the development of the curriculum.

• Seek more state, federal and private funding for improved textbooks and other learning resources, computers, school supplies and laboratory equipment.

States paid about 50% of the budgets in these inner city schools and the federal government about 6%, but these funds are never sufficient to even come close to evening out the disparities with white suburban schools. Since funding is based on property taxes and the value of property is much lower in these segregated ghetto communities, this is "the decisive force in shaping inequality" (Kozol, p. 55). Even though property taxes tend to be higher in large cities, they have much higher costs for police, fire services and public health care than the suburbs so the schools often get shortchanged. Since the federal government permits tax deductions for property taxes and mortgage interest payments, this amounted to a subsidy for segregation and inequality. In 1984, these federal deductions amounted to $41 billion while aid to public schools was only $7 billion.

Kozol is correct in insisting that social inequality is the norm in the United States that will never be repaired by changes in teachers, pedagogy, tests or classroom methods. He points out that of course "there are wonderful teachers…almost everywhere in urban schools, and sometimes a number of such teachers in a single school," but this is not the norm by any stretch of the imagination (Kozol, p. 51). Inner city school teachers are older and badly paid compared to those in the suburbs, and the cities rely on poorly paid substitutes and temporary and part-time teachers as well. They have no funds for remedial classes, sports facilities, libraries or textbooks. No parents with money would ever send their children to schools like these if they had any other choice, and few teachers would work there unless they were unemployable anywhere else. Unfortunately, the majority of them simply pass the students from one grade to the next, expecting little of these poor and minority students and caring less.

In the 1960s, New Left community organizers who worked in these inner-city ghettos used the term participatory democracy to describe their vision of a new society in which the poor, minorities and working class would take control of the institutions that affected their lives, including public schools. This is what Benjamin R. Barber refers to as a "strong democracy" in which "every member of the community participates in self-governance" (Barber, 1989, p. 355). Obviously this is a far cry from the situation in these segregated ghettos today, and indeed the vision of an activist and mobilized citizenry in these places was hardly welcome to police and government officials in the 1960s and 1970s. In a strong democracy, the people would not be passive spectators, merely voting for representatives every few years and then allowing them to govern. In this broad and expansive democratic vision, public talk would not be limited to the well off, educated and articulate, but all would be invited into the conversation (Bauman, 2001, p. 16). Nor would the elites do all the talking and force the masses simply to listen, no more than the teacher in the classroom would be doing all the lecturing while students sat quietly and passively taking notes. It would go beyond liberal theory of competing factions, parties and self-interested individuals and "passive consumers of political services" and instead consider broader ideas about the meaning of a good society (Barber, p. 356).

Jean Anyon is correct that the purpose of public education in America is social reproduction and reinforcement of the class system that already exists. Schools perpetuate this system by teaching working class children through rote memorization and drills to perform menial tasks under instructions from superiors, while those from the middle and professional classes are taught from an earlier age to be more creative and imaginative, to make connections, think in broader terms and be more independent. As for the poorest of the poor and minorities in the segregated ghettos, the dysfunctional schools there hardly teach them anything at all, and simply continue the system of segregation, marginalization and absolute inequality. Public education in the U.S. is based on "an unequal system of social classes" in which the children of the middle and upper classes are channeled to the universities, and the working class into service, industrial and technical occupations (Aynon, 1981, p. 210).

Progressive educators should be aware of this social process and intervene in it with a transformational pedagogy, at least in schools where the administration permits this. In working class schools, this means breaking with teaching methods like talk and chalk, copying notes, rope memorization and directed activities in favor of those that encourage reflection, creativity and imagination. These students are only being prepared for "mechanical routine work procedures," with minimal civics and social studies education that emphasizes facts and dates without any overall context or discussion of ideologies and social systems (Anyon, p. 212). Most definitely it does not teach the history of strikes, working class parties or slave revolts, nor does it assume that most of these students will ever go to college where they might hear about these. Unlike their middle and upper class peers, they received almost no information about other civilizations, cultures or religions, of even about capitalist institutions like banks and corporations, and their teachers had little enthusiasm for offering them anything but the 'basics' in a very dumbed-down form. At some point, these students do become vaguely aware of exactly what their future place in society is likely to be, and even though they might dislike this and rebel against it, their resistance is ineffective.

Students from middle class and professional backgrounds are more likely to be taught through creative writing, essays, special projects and individual and group activities. Depending on the schools and the desires of parents and administrators, this type of schooling might also be limited by the need to pass standardized tests and get into "good" colleges (Aynon, p. 214). Social studies classes placed more emphasis on comparative cultures and civilizations, as well as explaining systems and ideologies like capitalism, communism and socialism, although with military and economic elites and aristocracies treated in greater depth than slaves, servants, workers and peasants. In contrast to the physical rebellion, withdrawal and apathy in the working class schools, opposition in these more privileged environments tended toward "extreme individualism or narcissism" or excessive egoism (Aynon, p. 217). These students were more adept at finding ways to play or manipulate the system to their own advantage than their lower class counterparts, but this was also an important part of their socially reproductive education.

Policy Processes and VIBES? (Values, Interest, Beliefs, Ethics, Slangs)

After a lengthy lawsuit by civil rights groups in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal courts ordered school busing to achieve integration between the suburban and city schools in Detroit, but this was overturned by the Supreme Court in the 1974 Bradley v. Milliken decision, by a 5-4 vote. Since that time, racial segregation based on residence has remained the norm in the public school systems in every metropolitan area (deMarrais and LeCompte, 1999, p. 35). Since that time integration between urban-minority schools and white suburban schools has simply not occurred in the United States. Nor has funding ever been equalized between them despite numerous lawsuits over the decades, from New Jersey to Texas.

Blaming the Victim (1971, 1976) was first written at a time when the Nixon administration and neoconservatives like Daniel Patrick Moynihan were blaming the problems of blacks in the urban ghettos on a culture of poverty and dysfunctional family structure rather than centuries of racism, segregation and systematic structural inequality. For white middle class America at that time, the capitalist system functioned fairly well, so they found it more comfortable to blame the victims of that system for their supposed individual failings rather than undertaking the more difficult task of social and economic restructuring. They could then ignore the legacy of discrimination, hostile or indifferent teachers and administrators in the public schools, racist textbooks, overcrowding and underfunded education and health care systems that badly served poor and minority communities (Ryan 1971, 1976).

Low-quality schools were not the cause of poor minority achievement so much as a symptom of a much deeper social and economic problem. Those who blamed the black family and culture for poverty, crime, gangs and drugs were not like old-fashioned conservatives, racists and Social Darwinists -- at least not publicly -- even though they arrived at the same conclusions. Defenders of slavery and segregation always claimed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites, basically because of genetics. Therefore any attempt to abolish slavery or remedy social and economic injustices would be futile. This is exactly what the ancient Greeks and Romans asserted about 'barbarians' and 'savages', as did the colonizers of the New World when they first encountered indigenous peoples (Ryan 1971, 1976). It was a very convenient argument for them as well since it always justified the status quo, although modern-day liberal supporters of the social welfare state never said such things openly. Instead they mostly concentrated on repairing the individual defects of the poor and minority groups who were the recipients of social welfare, charity and educational programs. Much of this middle-class, liberal humanitarianism was simply arrogant, patronizing and paternalistic, although some universal social programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance went beyond this type of thinking and recognized that certain social problems truly were social rather than individual.