This issue is all about who allows whom to have power in the society. Anti-local control people don't have a problem with wealthy communities having local control over their school districts. For instance, no one gripes about the local control of Piedmont City Unified (CA), even though the district is labeled “failing” because it hasn’t made AYP since 2003 (median household income = $168,947).
There's probably some dividing line of wealth in a district, above which local control is a non-issue for the anti-local control crowd, but under which they consider local control to be abhorrent. We can't let the unwashed masses make their own decisions and have their own leaders, can we?
And if the complaint is that there is a dearth of strong local leadership talent at the grassroots level, then why don’t the reformers urge their philanthropist friends to pour money into long range efforts that will develop the leadership skills of more people in the local community? To me that would be a socially healthy way to proceed in a country which considers itself to be a democracy. Oh right, I forgot...if that ever happened it would disrupt the monopoly of who is in control.
“We have like 250 undergraduate student organizations. Now that means that there are 250 presidents, or leaders, of these organizations…So it really is a lot of opportunity for Yale students to learn how to work in teams, to learn how to work in groups toward a common purpose, and then have opportunities to rise to leadership roles within them.”
That approach sounds smart to me.
A lot of urban school students have been chronically deprived of clubs and similar healthy social opportunities. What better way to prevent those young people from having the types of experiences which might develop their leadership talents?
According to Lareau, one characteristic of working class and poor parents which would make them easy targets for the school privatization movement is that this group does not have the same type of social competencies as middle class parents. Lareau describes how these different competencies affect the types of interactions which the parents have with their children’s schools, for instance, working class and poor parents:
are less likely to customize interactions to suit their preferences
accept actions of persons in authority, but at times covertly resist them
are sometimes not as aware of children’s school situation
may resist school rules as unreasonable
have trouble getting “the school” to respond to their needs
give a lesson in powerlessness and frustration in the face of an important institution
are generally unable to make the rules work in their favor when they confront the institution
Because middle class parents rear their children in a “concerted cultivation” model, succeeding generations are instilled with a sense of entitlement. Working class and poor parents rear their children according to a “natural growth” model, which perpetuates a sense of constraint in their succeeding generations.
Nearly completely absent in education reform discussions is how schools could be improved by building stronger ways to foster a greater sense of entitlement in working class and poor families, as well as to guide them in ways to effectively implement it. This would be especially challenging to do with those who have experienced living under a weak or non-existent democratic model, or who have limited English-speaking abilities, but it would not be impossible and this is what the venture philanthropists should be spending their money on. Increased civic engagement on the part of parents would certainly provoke a greater bureaucratic response on the part of their school districts. Parents who feel empowered and competent who are advocating for change can accomplish a lot. Remember the Chinese fishing proverb?
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
But because building a greater sense of mastery for parents has not been sufficiently nurtured, and has even been sabotaged and discouraged by school bureaucracies, a door has been opened wide for the outside privatization forces to insert themselves into those communities. This is evident in the expansion of “we want your child, but we don’t need your input" charter schools. And as this feature is getting more and more firmly rooted in the ground, any and all remaining levels for an opportunity for true community engagement is being entirely wiped out. With school boards being abolished, no elections will be held, and no meetings will be conducted to invite public input. School enrollment is depending more and more on how successfully schools can market themselves to working class and poor parents, with pretty imprinted pencils, glossy color brochures and glowing promises.
The popular explanation of how it this all going to sort itself out is that parents “will vote with their feet.” This method causes an awful lot of disruption, as unhappy parents who don't have a say in how things are run, yank their kids out mid-year and wander over to the next school. Most parents would be perfectly happy if their children could stay put, if their input was regularly solicited, if their comments actually listened too, and if they were made to feel that they were respected and that their views were considered to be valid. This doesn’t happen enough in today’s school bureaucracies, and it hasn't for years. But it is entirely excluded when there is a top-down regime operating from afar, such as is the case with Oakland’s largest charter school provider, Aspire Public Schools. The members of its board of directors hail from far reaching communities, big businesses, and venture capital organizations, and none of them have anything to do with the People of Oakland. A middle class community would never permit its public schools to be run this way.
So along these lines, there was an interesting segment on The World the other day (12/9/09). Anchor Marco Werman spoke with Christian Science Monitor correspondent Fred Weir in Moscow about the Russian culture of accountability. Weir has been living in Russia for 23 years. The story pertained to the Russia’s culture of corruption, indifference and fatalism in relation to the tragic nightclub fire:
I think it’s an age old problem, probably because people are disconnected, and always have been, from authority and the means of getting things done. You know it’s very common for people in Russian to say, “Well nothing depends on me.” I think that’s part of the story and the corruption comes also from just an unaccountable bureaucracy. They’re not elected, they’re not transparent, they’re not susceptible to public pressure and they tend to use their positions – and this is an age old thing in Russia again – to enrich themselves…
…Russia has never had a functioning democracy. It doesn’t have the civil society, the kinds of unity avenues by which people, say in the United States, do insert themselves in the process, again not perfect, but you have so many different ways if you are an individual in a Western country to express yourself, be heard, to at least take a shot rhetorically at an official who you feel has wronged you.
You have so many different ways [in the U.S.] that just don’t exist in Russia, and never did. And this, of course, leads to the sense of impunity on the part of bureaucrats and officials who just don’t feel any need to respond to public pressure.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
...[change] involves actually changing that bureaucracy, dragging them out into the open, making them publicly accountable, having elections that are truly competitive and which would allow opposition figures perhaps to come into power. You know, allowing people in their communities to show initiative runs the risk of them challenging authority, and this is where Russian reformers always tend to draw the line after they’ve made these wonderful speeches. They want the country to modernize, but they don’t want opposition to form. They don’t want real, independent initiatives to take place, and that’s the conundrum that we always see.
Urban areas don’t need more charter schools and more passivity; this is a wrong and dangerous direction to take. For our democracy to stay strong, we need to start building the capacity of people to become regularly and effectively engaged. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is alarmed at the loss of civics instruction in school over recent years. She said:
... public education is the only long-term solution to preserving an independent judiciary and, more importantly, to preserving a robust constitutional democracy,” she said. “The better educated our citizens are, the better equipped they will be to preserve the system of government we have. And we have to start with the education of our nation’s young people. Knowledge about our government is not handed down through the gene pool. Every generation has to learn it, and we have some work to do.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
One unintended effect of the No Child Left Behind Act, which is intended to help fund teaching of science and math to young people, is that it has effectively squeezed out civics education because there is no testing for that anymore and no funding for that,” she said. “And at least half of the states no longer make the teaching of civics and government a requirement for high school graduation. This leaves a huge gap, and we can’t forget that the primary purpose of public schools in America has always been to help produce citizens who have the knowledge and the skills and the values to sustain our republic as a nation, our democratic form of government.
Related concerns are also expressed by James Boyd White in Part one of his essay, “Law, economics, and torture”. White is a law professor, literary critic, scholar and philosopher who has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1983:
As the government withdraws from the regulation of the economy, as it has been doing for decades now, its place is taken by private individuals or private organizations which have immense power over the lives of all of us.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The rhetoric supporting this movement speaks of government as the enemy, and the market as freedom for us all. But the power that is created by the disparity of wealth is real power and, unlike governmental power, it is not shaped or guided by law and democracy. Corporate owners and managers are not elected by the people, not subject to the constitution, not supposed – or even allowed – to be motivated by any ideal other than the acquisition of wealth and power, and usually not responsive to argument or complaint.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The consumer dream of our culture teaches us that we have no responsibility, no capacity for action, no right to demand meaning in our work and lives, and no obligation for the welfare of others. It induces the sense of learned helplessness I referred to earlier—which is exactly the opposite of the kind of vigorous independence and competence upon which democracy depends.
And in discussing propaganda and advertising, White says
…one characteristic of both forms is that nothing is meant, everything is said for the moment, all on the assumption that the people who make up the audience have no memory and no capacity for critical thought. A world is created where thought is not possible. In neither domain—the consumer economy or the world of politics and government—are we defined as responsible participants in a world of shared life and action. Rather, we are manipulated objects of an empire.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
…the reason we do not rebel at the immense and unfair transfer of wealth, and all that is associated with it…is that in some sense we do not believe that we really have democracy at all any more, at least in the sense in which we once thought we did.
With restricted autonomy and “learned helplessness,” calling ourselves a democracy is a falsehood. To make our public schools better and to keep our democracy strong, this is the situation we need to begin to reverse, and quickly.
A frequent commenter to The Education Report, the Oakland Tribune's blog, recently shared his views with me about school board members. Calling himself Nextset, he has remained anonymous for years, but has revealed to readers that he is an African American lawyer who grew up in the East Bay. He's conservative, attended Catholic schools, and is probably about 60 years old.
Nextset: I’m intrigued by this comment, “The public school board members should be the town fathers (or the female equivalents) - the industrialists, the professionals, the people that hire and fire a thousand workers.”
Someone else recently mentioned to me that the profile of the school board in days-long-ago was something similar. I have no personal knowledge of those times.
So who would these people be? Are they really out there somewhere? My guess is that if they are, they don’t care much about the public schools — nor even have them on their radar — because they have never used them, not even the “better” ones in the hills. And this would perhaps be because their desire for social class self-segregation is so extreme, and it has also been that way for many years.
Give me some ideas here.
Nextset Says:
Sharon: The ruling class of a town or region traditionally were the (male) local industrialists or their nominees, the leaders of the local professional community, law enforcement, the religions. These were the same people that traditionally controlled the local draft boards, the county supervisors and the city councils.
They used their civic positions to develop the town/city for the future. They drew up the plans for the public infrastructure and public monuments and buildings. They controlled local judiciary appointments and elections. They generally saw to it that the city thrived and grew.
By operating the local school boards they made sure that the proletariat was prepared to enter industry, military and even to go on to higher education. The upper class tended to have their own schools but public schools in areas not dominated by the lower middle class were run to feed to Universities. Piedmont, for example.
You never saw on school boards the likes of what we have now. Single mothers, lower middle class politicians, non-professionals, non-university educated.
The bunch I’m describing can typically be found in Rotary Clubs - and not the ancillary smaller clubs, the big-town main clubs like Downtown Seattle Rotary. Membership was invitation only and exclusive. Blackballing was practiced.
When these people ran schools you didn’t have schools that worried about students being happy or pacified.
Things have changed. Most of the change points to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. At least it was at that point that agendas were altered.
The ruling class disidentified with public education and turned it over to the lower class - that is operators from the lower middle class. The uppers stopped taking school board seats. As a result the operation of the schools changed from future oriented and more authoritarian to female dominated/social worker thinking. So the urban schools crash and burn.
Successful societies are not matriarchal. And permissiveness doesn’t work, especially if you are trying to get upward mobility for the lower classes. You just give them all the rope to hang themselves.
Nextset Says:
Cont:
The changes in the early 1960s saw the democratic party coalition of ethnics & labor consolidate electoral power in the urban areas. The largely republican town father types retreated and democratic machine candidates took over school boards. Back then the urban school boards were stepping stones to higher office. While the boardmembers were stepping they introduced pacification to the largely ethnic constituency with lots of feel good measures that served to drive the white and republican families out of public schools and the urban areas. Eventually the disidentification with public schools were so great the town father candidates didn’t even want the school board seats and districts such as OUSD, LAUSD, Detroit School District, Cleveland School District, etc were turned over entirely to lower class & minority candidates as well as left wing/social worker types.
It may also be seen that from that time manufacturing and industrial production started moving to Taiwan and other parts east, Town Father types became disinterested in hiring public school products and politically abandoned the public schools to the social democrats.
The Rotary Crowd today run smaller businesses and are only interested in hiring University Graduates for their (smaller) law firms, banks, consultancy businesses and political offices. So they are still great movers and shakers in college boards. You no longer see the owners and operators of a local soft drink bottling plant, steel mill, factory etc at Rotary. The industrialists are just gone and the ruling class of the Brave New World no longer seem to need the public schools.
When I continue to refer to BNW I’m thinking of that state where you are born into your class, live, associate, school and date only within your class, and take occupation based on your class and social position with little upward mobility.
This is the opposite of what we had in the mid-20th Century where with public school education (and a military stint?) one could come from a farm or a trailer park and still reasonably expect to move into medicine, law practice, or senior positions in industry or civil service. Black or White.
Many of the highest civil servants in the EastBay from the previous era - Black and White individuals - came from poor families in rural areas of the USA, relocated here for WWII jobs. I am thinking of specific Superior Court Judges and Police Chiefs. That kind of social mobility is what we are destroying with schools such as OUSD. By the time a lower middle class student at OUSD reaches 18 they are so far behind in education, training, and Deportment (most important) that such students for the most part are unable to survive the cut-throat competition from the private school (professional class) students and may not even want to compete because they find the new experience of competition unpleasant. I saw this at UC Berkeley and at LawSchool where the black public school students seemed to be shell shocked at the way things were and just fell away. (The UC Berkeley black drop rate is pretty notorious. The black bar pass rate is published every 6 months on the state bar website.)
I believe the mortality rates of these kids are worse because they weren’t stressed enough previously.
I want OUSD to run a tougher school, and that takes a far tougher school board than we have here.
So this would explain the tremendous drive by the venture philanthropists to wipe out local control (i.e. publicly elected school boards), but ONLY in communities with school districts that that are majority low-income, and thus with less educated parents.
The school districts in middle-class, more affluent communities are considered capable of managing themselves, so they won’t be challenged by the “reformers” in the same way.
Someone I read described this new method of school reform as an upcoming American apartheid system of education. Someone else who personally experienced Africa in the late 1950’s told me the direction we are heading reeks to him of Africa’s days under European colonialism. Of course it all is a result of our continuing desire for class, and to a lesser extent, racial segregation. Having actual ghettos in our cities makes this easy to do.
I know that in Chicago, mayoral control of the school district has resulted in his appointing a set of millionaires to the school board, where they work with the appointed superintendent to manage things. (http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=668)
In NYC, billionaire Bloomberg took control of the school district, appointed Joel Klein, a former US prosecutor, to be the schools chancellor and has given him complete authority to do what he pleased. There is some sort of fake community panel that was created; it has no teeth and goes along with whatever he says. The general public voice is pretty much totally ignored.
In DC, Mayor Fenty has done the same thing as in NY; he appointed Michelle Rhee to run the district.
In each of the cases above, there is a set of behind-the-scenes high-level operatives, people like billionaire Eli Broad, and others. Some are local, but many are not.
From what I’ve been told, the stealth group here in Oakland was led by Gary Rogers, father of Brian Rogers. I know of at least one instance of his group meeting with Ward early on to give their two-cent’s worth for how things should go. This is all going on under the public’s radar, and this is how these people want it to be. They won’t like this post.
I suppose there’s always been someone managing the “ignint” masses, but it seems like it is getting to be more and more. I definitely think these elites are going about this public school reform-business wrong in two very important ways.
First of all, they are too alienated from the local community and therefore, can’t be trusted. Good leaders need to be in touch with the masses and consider their needs and views, otherwise it is simply strong-arm imposed fascism. As far as I know, we are still a democracy and people — even poor, uneducated people — should be able to have a say.
Everyone wants a good school in their neighborhood, and no family wants to see a school they are fond of and has a history and connections with, be labeled as “failing” and then get “disappeared.” The ram-it-down-their-throats method used by this current group creates a lot of hostility and is going to backfire once people catch on.
The second problem is the way that all these business people, and the people they hire to do their bidding, are products of a specific, relatively newly emerged MBA culture (just since the 1980’s). This group believes that anyone with an Ivy League MBA can manage anything, even though they have no “domain knowledge.” Learn more about this mentality by listening to http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2009/03/bbg_20090329.mp3.
