Education reform was really about urban socio-econmic cleansing
From our overstocked archives
SAM SMITH, 2010
Unanswered in all the noise about "education reform" is why, over the
past decade, America's establishment has become so obsessed with controlling
public education, a complete reversal of two centuries of American faith in
locally controlled schools.
There are answers that the op-eds will give you, such as the need to compete in
the global marketplace, but this is pretty weak stuff and not the raw material
for major presidential policy under two administrations.
There are answers that can be found in the general shift in government towards
data as a worthy substitute, or delaying tactic, for action. As long as you're
assessing something you don't actually have to do anything about it.
Then there's the milking of the cash cow of testing. For example, the
Washington Post now gets the bulk of its profits from the Kaplan education
division, profits bolstered by the paper's constant editorial boosting of the
test tyrants. And Neil Bush started a company designed to help students pass
the tests of his brother's No Child Left Behind policy.
Certainly there is precedent for this, such as the efforts to privatize Social
Security and subsidize health insurance companies, all part of a three decades
rip-off of public programs by private industry.
But how, for example, does one explain that this effort has been carried out
with such an extraordinary absence of knowledgeable educators or skilled
teachers? What has happened is as if we had tried to reach the moon with space
vehicles designed by economists, lawyers and corporate buddies of the
president.
It has, in the end, a hopeless mush of sleaze, stupidity and statistical
static, all having remarkably little to do with real education.
There is, however, an even more disreputable matter lurking in the background
that has not been exposed, debated or confronted - namely growing evidence that
the assault on public education is part of an urban socio-economic cleansing
that has long been underway as the upper classes attempt retrieve the cities
they surrendered to the poor many decades ago.
For several decades, I followed this phenomenon as a journalist in my hometown
of Washington, DC. It was a topic seldom mentioned in the corporate media and
not polite to mention at all in the better parts of town.
In 2006 I wrote, "Part of the socio-economic cleansing of the capital city
- still underway - included draconian measures to discourage the minority poor
from staying in DC. Some of these were fiscal -- such as a tax break for
predominately white first-time homeowners but no breaks for the lower income
blacks pushed out by them. But they also included a variety of punitive
measures including new restrictions on jury trials, increased lock-ups such as
for trivial traffic offenses, stiffer sentencing, soaring marijuana arrests, a
halving of the number of court-appointed defense attorneys, increased penalties
for pot possession, and the shipping of inmates to distant prisons
And in 2007: "This is a 60% black city undergoing socio-economic
cleansing. One suburban county has so many black former DC residents that it is
known here as Ward 9. But it's no joke. Here are just a few of things that have
happened: Huge budget cuts of which 60% of the burden fell on the poor; closing
of four of the city's ten health clinics; slashing the number of public health
workers; cutting the budget for libraries, city funded day care centers,
welfare benefits, and homeless shelters; creation of a tax-subsidized private
"charter" school system; dismantling the city's public university
including a massive cut in faculty, destruction of the athletic program and
elimination of normal university services; selling the city's public radio
station to C-SPAN; transferring prisoners to private gulags hundreds of miles
away; a dramatic increase in the number of lock-ups including for traffic
stops; and the subjugating of the elected school board to an appointed board of
trustee."
There were other signs: the destruction of public housing units, the removal of
a homeless shelter from the center city, and even a blockade of a crime- hit
black neighborhood - with entry permitted only for approved cause - not unlike
apartheid South Africa or the Israelis in the West Bank - about which the
liberal gentry class said nothing.
In other words, it was absolutely clear and absolutely unmentionable that the
upper classes - both white and black, incidentally - wanted the city back again
and were using a plethora of tactics to achieve this goal, especially after our
energy consciousness increased and it became apparent that the suburbs were no
longer the favored haven, but the ghettos of the future.
Furthermore, it was clear that satisfying this goal was behind most of the
major new city programs, ranging from the subway to the baseball stadium - only
please always call it economic development rather than getting rid of the poor.
Public education "reform" fit the plan in some ways. For example,
although it was widely claimed that charter schools did not discriminate in
their selection of students it was obvious that parents - a central factor in
any child's ability to learn - differed drastically between those with enough
ambition to apply for a charter school seat and those either indifferent or
with too much else on their mind. The charter schools were in this way a subtle
part of socio-economic cleansing as they helped to reduce the old public
facilities to what were once called "pauper schools."
Then there was the carefully crafted schemes for closing "failing"
public schools. But there is far more to schools than aggregate test scores.
They help define a community, anchor its loose pieces to common ground, and
provide a place for children to meet and play in a decent and clean
environment.
Describing DC's plans to close eleven schools (mostly in order to build condos),
DC Statehood Party activist Chris Otten argued a few years ago, "There are
lots of ways we can use our publicly owned properties -- homeless services and
shelters, child care, before- and after-school care, services for children with
special needs, transitional housing and permanent affordable housing, health
care, literacy programs, training for jobs and workforce readiness, senior
services, gardening and green spaces, recreation. It's outrageous that Mayor
Fenty would rather transfer them to his friends and other well-connected and
powerful real estate and development interests."
But Fenty and other mayors were not only willing to get rid of such schools,
they were willing to damage community in the process and force young residents
to travel far away from their community and its values. It was not only bad
educationally cruel it was mean to the communities as a whole.
But these schools were located on suddenly valuable ground and so the
government stole from the children and their parents and gave to the
developers.
And there was something more at work.
It took the recent DC mayoral election to make me realize that I had been
putting too much emphasis on educational considerations in examining what was
happening. What I had missed was that the war on schools was not designed to
bring the upper classes into the education system but primarily as a a
marketing tool to bring the upper classes and corporations back to the cities.
The message was, as with crime sweeps, baseball stadiums and the subway. It was
now safe, folks, to live here.
In DC, the battle peaked between incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty, who with his
school chancellor Michelle Rhee was strongly committed to the Bush-Obama school
model, and his opponent and strong critic, Vincent Gray.
Eddie Elfanbeen did a precinct by precinct analysis of the contest. Some 31
precincts gave Fenty 75% or more of the vote while 53 gave him 25% or less. All
of the top Fenty precincts were heavily white while all the top Gray precincts
were heavily black. But more significant perhaps was that the former were all
upscale precincts while the latter were at the lower end of the income scale. .
This year Fenty got 80% of upscale white Ward 3 and 16% of far poorer and black
Ward 8.
Now, here's the hooker. Only five percent of the public school system consists
of white students. So why did it matter so much? For example, why did heavily
gay precincts - with a constituency least likely to ever use the school system
- give over 70% of their vote to Fenty?
It seems that it mattered because school test scores represent a symbol that
the city is getting the poor under control or out of the way. It was not about
educating the city's young but about marketing to the city's newcomers. Another
poll, for example, found that Fenty won overwhelmingly the vote of those who
had lived in DC less than ten years and Gray those who had lived there longer.
Thus, it was not unlike the crime war phenomena. Back in the nineties I noted
that "Between 1985 and 1988, in the wake of the revived drug war, murders
in Washington, DC soared from 145 a year to 369. During this period, the city's
office of criminal justice planning did an unusually detailed analysis of
homicides. The report illustrates [that] it was virtually impossible to be
killed in Washington if you were a young white girl living in upscale
Georgetown on an early Thursday morning in July. If, on the other hand, you
were a young black 20-year-old male living in low-income Anacostia, dealing
drugs on a Saturday night in June, your chances of being killed were far
greater than the overall statistics would suggest. And if you were not buying
or selling drugs at all, your chances of being killed in DC were about the same
as in Copenhagen."
But being safe and feeling safe are two different things. And, as with crime,
it was important for effective marketing to be seen as keeping the problem
population under control.
Of DC, Leigh Dingerson wrote recently:
"There’s nothing remarkably visionary going on in Washington. The model of
school reform that’s being implemented here is popping up around the country,
heavily promoted by the same network of conservative think tanks and
philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Family Foundation
that has been driving the school reform debate for the past decade. It is
reform based on the corporate practices of Wall Street, not on education
research or theory. Indications so far are that, on top of the upheaval and distress
Rhee leaves in her wake, the persistent racial gaps that plague D.C. student
outcomes are only increasing. . . Despite glowing reports from the adoring
media, D.C.’s education miracle is a chimera at best. . . "
But that, it turns out, was probably the point: to create a political illusion
that would support the city's myth, sell real estate, and attract new residents
and businesses. Just as it didn't matter that Washington's Metro was designed
in a way that actually increased rather than reduced street traffic, it didn't
matter that school reform didn't improve things. It only had to seem to change
things.
Meanwhile the real city remained.
In 2008, one in five DC residents was poor, a higher rate than in any year
since 1997-98. Since the late 1990s, some 27,000 more DC residents fell into
poverty. Thirty-two percent of the District of Columbia's children live in
poverty, nearly twice the national average. And in 2008 there were over 52,000
families on the waiting list for affordable housing.
But perhaps most important for the educational system, and
discussion about it, is something hardly ever discussed: in the first decade of
this century, employment among residents with a high school diploma fell to the
lowest level in nearly 30 years. Just 51 percent of DC residents at this
education level were working.
Every one in the system - parents, teachers, students - knew this reality and
reacted accordingly. This, more than any other factor, defined public education
in DC. But few wanted to face it.
After all, the poor don't balance your budget. Cutting their services and
shoving them out into new suburban ghettos can. And they certainly don't
attract tax paying residents and businesses. So you talk the talk of education
reform but walk the walk of socio-economic cleansing.
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