The Myth and Traction of the “Failing” Urban School Narrative

I’m going to assert something here many may deem controversial: so long as a school is staffed properly, is structurally safe, and sufficiently supplied – there’s no such thing as a “failing school”. While conceptions of the “failing school” has been around since the early 1970s, through 1983’s A Nation At Risk report that held American public education as being dreadful strains on this nation’s economic prosperity, accompanied by vivid imagery swaths of Americans of all races and income levels accepted as what a “failing school” looks since Lean on Me, and since the passage of NCLB when George Bush bemoaned the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and later Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT), the reality stubbornly stays put: there is no such thing as a “failing school”. For those who will reflexively take issue with that statement, I will explain…

Extensive arguments decrying the state of urban public schools are directly tied to student performance student performance on standardized state assessments, graduation rates, advanced placement enrollment, student performance on SATs and ACTs, and college enrollment. Comparatively, the statistics in these areas with affluent districts are comparatively dismal, they distract from larger, ecological issues that initiated their existence. Largely, and perhaps deliberately, disregarded with respect to “failing schools”, is that these institutions serve a predominantly socially and economically disadvantaged student body, and that the schools’ surrounding communities struggle with broader societal issues like unemployment, crime, racial segregation, and concentrated generational poverty. These coalescing realities negatively reliably impact student achievement and thus, school achievement in real and substantive ways. Often, however, public attention is near exclusively directed at the low academic achievement within urban school districts as if children grow up immune from such accumulating realities, or that “excellent” teachers in “excellent” schools  can sufficiently overcome the contexts in which poor students live.

Policymakers’ and education reformers’ preoccupation with improving “failing schools”  rarely attempts to identify, much less addresses powerful ecological factors and social contexts wherein these schools are situated. Some dismiss the legitimacy in even attempting to mitigate larger societal ills in order to improve education, despite vast bodies of research that links academic performance of schools and individual students to their respective socioeconomic environments. Lance Fusarelli’s School reform in a vacuum: Demographic change, social policy, and the future of children (2011)  argues that widespread decay and systemic divestment of large urban areas has more impact on educational outcomes, than all reforms and curriculum changes over the past thirty years. Other urban education research suggests the outcomes in urban public schools in poor neighborhoods is directly tied to a lack of political power held by the local community, prolonged poverty, and racism that undermines students’ potential and development . Such concepts, concerning the relationship between schools and their environments are not new in urban education research. The Equality of Educational Opportunity report (1966), commonly referred to as the “Coleman Report”, concluded the socioeconomic status in which schools are situated, coupled with the socioeconomic backgrounds of students impacts student academic outcomes. Other researchers go even further to suggest a school’s social composition is not only highly impactful to academic achievement, but it is even more so than a student’s own economic background. Truly, the research on this topic is clear. “Failing schools”, are indicators of targeted, steadfast political negligence of urban publics and their low-income residents of color.

That said, perhaps even more offensive but nonetheless true, is the reality that the “failing schools” myth is not singularly about compounding decades of racist political and economic policies, but also is code for who attends such schools. Middle class white children do not make up the student bodies of “failing schools”. Middle class black children do not make up the composition of “failing schools”. The “failing schools” terminology is reserved specifically for educative spaces attended by primarily low-income minority children from high-poverty neighborhoods. “Failing schools” created neither. Schools do not drive, nor create failure, they reveal where governmental and economic failure has taken place. Big difference.

This should prompt the question: why then all the focus by the media, education reformers and politicians on “failing schools”:

1. There is a profit motive in that following NCLB and RTTT, public education has become the next frontier, much like the housing and tech sectors, from which corporations and investors can access the near $800B for education Through creating standardized assessments and their curriculum, school improvement programs, test prep technology, teacher professional development and charter schools, education reform is an endless gold mine from which to extract billions of dollars
2. Ideological reasons in that the principal funders of the education reform movement are ultra-rich billionaires who believe that public education, like other public services, should be a viewed as commodity and not a right. They believe government should increasingly seek to privatize public services. Further, they view the delivery of public education to be an inefficient drain on the economy inefficient drain on the economy due to primarily, public schools’ unionized staff and public worker benefits. Fundamentally, such billionaires like John Arnold, Eli Broad, the Walton Family and others are anti-union, which is why they are staunchly pro-charter – a sector of schools with a highly ununionized labor force.  
3. Political expedience in that rather than having to admit that government at all levels and politicians like themselves, have failed generations of the urban poor and bear culpability and face criticism for it, policymakers recognize it is simply easier to lay blame at the feet of “failing schools” and their staffs. Further, from liberals to conservatives, from the US presidency to local school boards, political elections are influenced heavily by billionaires’ education reform dollars and their advocacy groups.
   1. Additionally, the disparity in school spending between “failing schools” (urban schools educating low-income students of color) and their suburban counterparts is near universal. Again, the dichotomy in spending reflects political decisions indicating who and what localities are worthy of public investment, and which are not

• To divert attention away from where blame rightfully belongs. Income inequality in America is worse than it’s ever been. Though more people are working, the value of the dollar has dropped precipitously since the early 1970s. While the federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 per hour and many states have laws mandated an hourly wage near $12 per hour, the rightful minimum wage should be closer to $22 per hour. And because the political will to address this lingering economic wrong is fleeting, more poor Americans are working longer for less. This has a ripple effect in low-income students’ achievement. In that more low-income earners are making less money compared to the cost of living, that forces the most vulnerable to spend more time away from their children, and potentially bolstering their child’s academic skills, to be at work to simply provide a living. Twisted Irony here: the Walton family, worth $175B and the richest family on earth are rabidly anti-union, and major funders of charter schools and education reform, yet notoriously pay their workforce comprised of predominantly women and mothers, poverty wages. The hypocrisy astounds.  

Back to my initial point: There’s no such thing as failing schools, just policy failures and its many manifestations. High unemployment, high poverty, high housing instability, high levels of incarceration, and, yes, “failing schools” are indicators of the way government and the ultra-rich have disregarded entire communities for nearly forty years, and diverted blame in the process. Afterall, “failing” schools didn’t happened on their own, and never have.   

…for those who will ask, “Would you send your child to such a ‘failing school’?” My answer to that is, “I have, and she loved nearly every part of it.”