Elite Attackers of Public Schools Don't Admit the Impact of Economic Inequality, Racism on Education
Wednesday, 27 August 2014 09:56By Mark Naison, Haymarket Books | Book Excerpt
(Image: Nick Thompson)Wayne Au, editor of Rethinking Schoolsand coeditor of Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools, writes of the book, Badass Teachers Unite: "In this powerful collection of essays, education activist and historian Mark Naison offers teachers, parents, students and anyone else concerned with the health of public schools in this country some invaluable tools in the fight against corporate education 'reform.' Badass Teachers Unite is a clarion call for all of us to reclaim public education in the name of social justice."
Naison's broadside attack on the co-opting of public schools is in the same vein as Jose Vilson's This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class and Education (previously featured as a Truthout Progressive Pick).
The following is an excerpt from Bad Ass Teachers Unite, which you may obtain from Truthout by clicking here.
Education Reformers and the New Jim Crow
If somebody told me 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York, dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them and by devoting every ounce of teachers' energies to raising their test scores, I would have said, "What planet are you living on?" Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and these stresses created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less completing homework. People living in middle-class communities couldn’t imagine these forces. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors, as well as people imparting skills. At times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components.
The leaders of the education reform movement, from Secretary Arne Duncan - to the head of Teach for America, to Michelle Rhee, to the heads of almost every urban school system - regard discussions of neighborhood conditions as impediments to the quest to achieve educational equity and demand that teachers shut out the conditions they are living in. Teachers must now inspire, prod and discipline their charges to achieve results on standardized tests that match those of their middle-class counterparts living in more favorable conditions.
The position they are taking, that schools in depressed areas can be radically improved without doing anything to improve conditions in the neighborhoods they are located in, flies in the face of the common sense of anyone who lives or works in such communities, so much so that it represents a form of collective madness! The idea that an entire urban school system (not a few favored schools) can be uplifted strictly through school-based reforms, such as eliminating teacher tenure or replacing public schools with charter schools, without changing any of the Elite Attackers of Public Schools Don't Admit the Impact of Economic Inequality, Racism on Education: