Students Should Be Creative Innovators, Not Force-Fed Consumers of Status-Quo Knowledge
Sunday, 31 August 2014 09:57By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview/News Analysis |
| Mark Naison. (Photo: Haymarket Books) |
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The following is an interview with Bad Ass Teachers Unite author Mark Naison:
Mark Karlin: As the excerpt fromBadass Teachers Unite, Truthout chose a section you wrote called"Education Reformers and the New Jim Crow." You make the case in just two pages that the ruling elites are pushing privatization of schools by ignoring the social and economic realities surrounding many students of color and limited economic means. Can you elaborate?
Mark Naison: Much of what is in this piece comes from my perceptions of how Bloomberg-era school reform affected Bronx schools. When the Bloomberg administration decided to give letter grades to schools in 2007, largely based on student test scores, and followed it up by closing large numbers of Bronx public schools and replacing them with charters, one of the consequences was to drive out the community history projects I was doing in more than 20 Bronx schools. Public schools, fearing closure, now had no time for anything but test prep, and the charters had no interest in community history. It became clear to me, watching this happen, that the Bloomberg DOE had no interest in drawing upon the Bronx community's history and traditions as a source of inspiration and strength
There was also no room in school reform, Bloomberg style, for social justice pedagogy. During the last four years of the Bloomberg mayoralty, Bronx residents, especially young people, were up in arms about stop and frisk and the militarized policing that had descended upon Bronx neighborhoods. There were scores of protests and meetings in the borough, but schools were not actively participating in these protests, even though their students were those most affected. There was no attempt to link the most important social policy affecting young people in the Bronx to what was going on in the classroom. That to me symbolized school reform policies that aimed to insulate schools in low-income communities from the problems their residents faced, rather than have schools actively engage with those problems and help solve them.
Of three parts of the book, you devote the second to "youth issues and student activism." You also state on page 138 that it's time to transform into "liberated zones where teachers, students, and parents can talk freely about" how to improve their schools and empower their Students Should Be Creative Innovators, Not Force-Fed Consumers of Status-Quo Knowledge: