Assault on Kids and Teachers

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Tables

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Foreword

The penetrating analyses and hopeful vision of educational justice in this volume remind me of the African proverb, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go farther, go together.” The authors of each chapter offer us critical correctives for what is wrong with our education—from countering the dispossession of urban communities and the theft of public resources through privatization schemes, to refuting scapegoating cultural deficit ideology, to organizing and movement-building in specific sites of struggle, to rejecting the homogenizing corporate standardization in our schools.

We are fortunate that Roberta Ahlquist, Paul Gorski, and Theresa Montaño have courageously gathered together this timely collection of incisive essays that expose the appalling conditions and the state of public schooling for classroom teachers and teacher educators, critical scholars, activists, and communities. Taken together these essays demystify the neoliberal ideologies that drive reductionist, anti-democratic policies and practices that feed the school-to-prison pipeline, exacerbate the displacement of teachers of color, undermine meaningful teaching and learning through misplaced emphasis on testing and putative accountability measures in local contexts and across the United States.

Assault on Kids and Teachers goes beyond single-issue analyses to not only expose underpinnings of educational inequity that threaten the well-being of students in the most marginalized communities, but also reveal what is at stake for teachers and school leaders who are victimized when political ideology masquerades as educational reform. In language that is accessible to a wide audience, the authors illustrate educational and liberatory possibilities that are endangered unless people across the social spectrum have the critical tools to defend and radically restructure schools in order to abolish systemic societal inequities. ← ix | x →

What better antidote for these scary times, when many hard won social justice struggles are being attacked, than the inspiring solidarity among the diverse researchers, teachers, students, and community activists in these essays who are showing us how to fight back against the root causes of educational inequity and injustice? With this encouraging volume, we can certainly go farther toward social, educational, and racial justice together.

Joyce E. King, Ph.D.

Past President of the American Educational Research Association

Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership

Georgia State University

Fall 2017

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Introduction

Like many books about the corporate manipulation and erosion of public education—of both the democratic notion of “public” and the public practice of schooling—this volume springs from concern and indignation at the continuing attack on teachers and public schooling. The growing neoliberal influence on U.S. schooling is characterized by hyper-accountability, patterns of deficit ideology, and the privatization and corporatization of public schools (conditions that are explored in detail in our first chapter). The assault on teachers and students is a symptom, an illustration, of these bigger conditions. In other words, the question with which we grappled as we composed this book wasn’t simply how public schools were being eroded and teachers scapegoated. We also wondered, What are the sociopolitical conditions in which privatization and deficit ideologies could wrest this influence? How else are these conditions manifesting in schools and the larger society, and to whose benefit?

When we began to ask these questions, unpeeling the onion from the inside out, we started to uncover the sorts of ideological interconnections that underlie a rash of socially and politically unjust conditions in the U.S. and around the world. In order to understand the assault on teachers and kids in full, we need to understand it in context. So we continued digging for questions: What are the conditions in schools and the larger society that would facilitate the mass acceptance of such devastating deficit ideas? How have we—teachers, school leaders, education and community activists—been conditioned to embrace oppressive ideas and practices, often in the name of “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” “equality,” or “inclusion”? What explains the mass (although, of course, not universal) acceptance of deficit notions, not by those who mean to be oppressive, purposeful agents of hegemony, but by those who, as the rhetoric goes, want to see all kids succeed? ← xi | xii →

And, as we found, even these questions are not quite sufficient, as understanding is only the first step toward change. So we also came to ask, What can we do? How might we resist the corporatization and privatization of schools, deficit ideology, and hyper-accountability? How can we organize ourselves and build toward a different, more socially just, educational future? The result—Assault on Kids and Teachers—is our attempt to hasten this discourse towards thoughtful action for just change.

It also is our attempt to create a space for cross-engagement around these concerns. The contributors to this volume include scholars, but they also include classroom teachers and educational activists and people who identify at intersections of these descriptors. In our experience, conversations about educational and social transformation too often happen in not-so-mixed-company: at academic conferences, for example, or in books or journals produced and read largely by a particular target audience. Of course we acknowledge the importance of these different literatures, differently contoured urgencies, varying pragmatics. But we chose for the purpose of this volume to interweave broader perspectives and sight-lines from across the educational landscape—from those whose “data” are collected and analyzed in formal, “controlled,” ways; from those whose “data” comprise the informal and chaotic day-to-day implications of teaching or organizing under the weight of hyper-accountability and corporatocracy; and from those whose “data” fall somewhere on the continuum between the two. We believe the resulting storylines of this volume paint a fuller picture of the contemporary educational assault on teachers and kids than they might have painted had we drawn on a more narrowly defined sample of voices.

That word—assault—and our decision to build this book’s title around it, begs attention, as well. From the neo-conservative Tea Party to the Hoover Institution, from the Koch brothers to President Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, the rhetoric imploring our support for corporatocracy’s meddling in supposedly public spheres such as public education floats to us, it seems, in a never-ending loop. The language itself is insidious, full of corporate ideas wrapped in language meant to draw upon people’s deepest socializations as “American” champions of liberty, freedom, democracy, capitalism, and justice: “free market,” “Race to the Top,” “No Child Left Behind,” “school choice,” “merit pay.” As educator-activists, we are concerned particularly about the ways much of the discourse among advocates for educational equity and social justice has come to reflect this rhetoric; how the discourse about school reform has become mired in de-contextualized test scores, merit pay, and achievement gaps. In fact, there are few more poignant examples ← xii | xiii → of deficit ideology’s infestation of public education than this achievement gap discourse, which tends to locate the “problem” of, say, unequal educational outcomes as existing within economically marginalized communities, communities of color, communities in which people speak languages other than English at home, and other disenfranchised communities. And it does so by drawing upon simplistic mental models such as “grit” and the “culture of poverty,” which project stereotyped and, as Gorski details in his chapter on deficit ideology, inaccurate perceptions of their parenting, their attitudes about education, and their access to mentors while rendering systemic inequities such as systemic racism and economic injustice invisible. One function of this discourse—and, as contributors to this volume will attest, a purposeful function—is to train the collective scornful gaze down the power continuum so that efforts to reform public schooling focus squarely on “fixing” marginalized communities rather than redressing the policies and practices which marginalize them. Meanwhile, these policies and practices, from closing or under-funding neighborhood schools to redistributing resources out of public schools and into semi-public charter schools, independent schools, and private enterprise, continue to wreak havoc on marginalized communities. But as much as this, they threaten the very existence of the public sphere. And this, we contend, is assault on a massive scale. It is an assault on thought, an assault on opportunity, an assault on the possibility of an equitable and just world. It is an assault on all of us, but it is an assault most of all on children who are compelled to participate in it simply by being students in our public schools.

One of the purposes of this book and its conversation among a diversity of educators, activists, scholars, administrators, and parents, then, is to uncover and document this assault—to trace the educational roots of privatization, deficit ideology, and standardization, and to explicate and challenge their consequences. A second and equally critical purpose is to invite readers into a process of imagining a different future for public education, to consider ways of resisting the assault and constructing something more equitable and just. In this spirit, every contributor to this book has been asked, not only to provide a critical analysis along one or more of these lines, but also to imagine a just alternative and recommend paths of resistance.

Certainly we do not claim that we have covered these complex topics and their many contours exhaustively. In fact, as we prepare this volume for print, we find, as in any ardent attempt at inquiry, we often have uncovered more questions than answers. Thusly is laid the path toward real change. It is our hope that with this book we may nudge ourselves and readers onto, or a step or two further along, that path. ← xiii | xiv →

Organization and Snapshot

Although we have organized Assault on Kids and Teachers roughly around its three major themes—privatization and corporatization, deficit ideology, and standardization—these are inexact descriptors. Due to the interrelated nature of the topics covered in this book, several chapters address two or more of these themes or focus on points at which they overlap.

We begin with Roberta Ahlquist’s introductory chapter addressing the privatization of schools and of the public good. “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back with a Neoliberal Agenda and Popular Resistance” is a brief historical overview of privatization and charterization and the role of corporate players in this ‘reform agenda’. Ahlquist outlines a variety of forms of popular resistance that teachers, students, and communities can take to disrupt the assault.

In Chapter 2, Monique Redeaux-Smith, a teacher-activist, describes her participation in a hunger strike with teachers, students, and community activists to keep Dyett High School, a public, neighborhood school in the Bronzeville community, from being shuttered. Their actions were partially successful in that the school was not closed and monies were provided to support the continuation of the school. It is a tale that exposes the racist and discriminatory face of education privatization and celebrates the resilience and power of communities committed to resisting it at all costs.