Continuing from Part II… Unionized educators, like unionized workers in other sectors, get paid more, have more workplace rights, and are afforded more opportunities to take on leadership roles. This is especially true among black women who are, by percentage, the most likely demographic to join public sector unions (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). Attacks on public sector employment and their unions, threaten the most reliable source of economic and occupational opportunity, specifically for Black women, who are, proportionally, more inclined to have college degrees. Moreover, it is important that we recognize that public education in the post-Civil Rights era was one of the few sectors of work where a Black person with a college degree could secure reliable employment with workplace protections. Yet, with policy-oriented and media based attacks on urban public schools where the highest percentage of unionized black educators are concentrated, it’s hard to interpret the attacks on urban schools as anything aside from a deliberate assault on Black teachers and Black children.
Since the early 1980s, business interests have been trying access education budgets for profit exploration because education has the 2nd largest domestic budget amounting to roughly $800B, and the super-wealthy and corporate interests wanted to access it – but they needed a rationale that the public would understand and accept while diverting the public’s attention away from what was really causing people economic pain.
The pretext for the education reform movement was that poor-performing schools in poor-performing districts with poor-performing teachers were the reason why students attending schools in the poorest communities had comparatively low graduation rates, lower attendance rates, and primarily lower test scores; and this was the reason why poor areas and poor families stayed that way. It was not the legacies of racism anddescrininatory legislation and it certainly had nothing to do with targeted disinvestment and decades of neoliberal governance — it was the schools’ fault. Poor performing schools were isolated as the reason for all of those things…
THIS sustained messaging accomplished three things:
- It provided a definition and identifier for “failing schools”;
- positioned “failing schools” as the reason and the solution for urban suffering which was really caused by centuries of racism/discrimination and decades of predatory (and racist) economic and housing policies;
- provided an identifiable and proximate target for parents to blame, and
- aided policymakers and lobbyists whose goals it was to shift money and influence to education corporations and charter management organizations (who DO have investors, and DO gain financially with each and every CMO charter, like KIPP, like Mastery, is established)
The Reform movement rested on the narrative that education is the “great equalizer” and, again, was forwarded by the ideological conservatives who believe in “small government”, (that the public should not spend for public services), and neoliberal democrats who believe that public services should be privatized for corporate benefit. Reform advocates had to show that urban public schools were not working. How would they be able to identify what school settings were not working? Through standardized testing of course.
Schools with students that scored poorly were labeled “failing” and schools were taken over by charter management organizations if not closed outright, and a disproportionate amount of experienced Black teachers lost their jobs.
Where do the highest concentrations of Black teachers work? In the very Districts that were deliberately and preemptively targeted by reformers and lawmakers to access those large urban district budgets, and because those areas have little in the way of democratic representation. What this looks like in practice: A teacher who grew up in North or West Philly, graduates from college and decides she wants to educate children where she grew up, and thus, is working at a neighborhood school attended by predominantly Black or Latino kids, but in a neighborhood that is high in economic poverty (not cultural or moral poverty) and everything that goes along with it. That teacher, because of where she decided to dedicate her energy, abilities, and care, was targeted to lose her job. And, that child’s school was targeted for takeover under the education reform movement.
While the above may not be the best illustration, it is meant to indicate the lies the public are told about public education: that education creates societal neighborhood conditions, and that those conditions influence politics and economics.
We’re told things like “education is the key to prosperity”, No Excuses, and “Zip Code shouldn’t determine destiny”. That’s nonsense and rails against education and sociological research. Economic prosperity is a function of class and social networks within it. Rich, connected folks don’t hang out with or engage with poor folks any more than poor folks hang out with rich folks. Our social networks are reflections of who we know and, who we’re around regardless of the grades we get in school. Our connections to jobs and opportunities are determined by our own income, and who we associate and have relations with.
The No Excuses mantra is propaganda. If a child’s parent is working second or third shift, which is disproportionately overrepresented by single mothers, or a parent is working multiple hourly jobs to make ends meet, and as a result there’s no one to go over a child’s homework or don’t master some fundamentals – that is an excuse. That’s a valid excuse for why a student’s academic outcome may not on par with students who don’t have that similar reality.
If a child is the oldest sibling and is responsible for walking younger brothers and sisters to school, picking them up from school and walking them home… has supervisory responsibilities over them, and thus that child cannot dedicate their full attention to their own studies – that is an excuse, and a valid one when outcomes are compared against students who do not share that reality.
If a child has lost someone to incarceration, violence, cancer…if a child’s been ingesting lead-laden water for long periods of time… suffering from asthma which causes them to miss excessive days in school… all of these are valid excuses that compromise academic performance that has nothing to do with the quality of teaching within a school but everything to do with poverty and neighbor ecology. And being that the bulk of these things take place in the poorest zip codes, anyone who says zip codes shouldn’t determine destiny, we’d have to call them liars. “Should” has nothing to do with reality. And in folks ignoring that economic situatedness, more than anything, influences students’ academic outcomes and economic opportunity, again, absolves government and politicians of their responsibility to fix economic inequality. But again, someone or something, not the wealthy, has to bear the blame even if its undeserved; and even if it’s a Black teacher or any teacher who chooses to teach in high poverty areas.
The above is a more accurate representation of the relationship between all three. Politics influences societal ecology which, in turn, influences public education outcomes. Schools are simply reflections, indicators of neighborhoods and policy choices – not initiators of either.
Test scores, just like any other quantitative metric that supposedly measures school quality, is an indicator of where economic classes reside geographically. Academics outcomes, test scores are directly proportional with the level of affluence wherein schools are situated — and this is a constant across all nations.
The assumption that the level of instruction is superior because of where, geographically, classrooms are situated is nonsense – but that is what the education reform movement does. It punishes teachers who decide to teach in the most economically depressed areas…
And their conclusions about good quality teaching and failing schools are grossly misunderstood and under scrutinized – deliberately I might add.
Downey et. al in “Are Failing Schools” Really Failing, concluded from their longitudinal study that schools deemed “failing” due to test scores – which is how achievement is defined – actually do extremely well in educating their students during the school year – which he calls “impact”. He also concluded that schools deemed “good”, often have less positive impact on student learning than the schools deemed failing. What do we do with that? Downey asserts that if schools were judged by impact rather than achievement, “failing schools” would score far better, and the “good schools”, worse. And yet, here we are…
Consider the losses of Black teachers endured in
Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Camden, NJ, Washington DC, and these aren’t all the cities reform took hold, there’s many more.
This represents the sustained erosion of black teachers since 2000. Wanna know why there’s less Black teachers today than there were 30 years ago, the answer is the education reform movement made it happen.
What do all these cities have in common? The finale, next…
