Who’s right: Arne or Michelle [Alexander]?

Arne Duncan: “I believe education is THE civil rights issue of our generation, the only sure pathway out of poverty, and the only way to achieve a more equal and just society.” (Facebook, Info page on May 20, 2010)

Michelle Alexander: “I believe that the mass incarceration of people of color in the United States is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time. And that it is a tragedy of as great proportions as Jim Crow was in its time.” (Bill Moyers Journal interview, April 2, 2010) [SEE THE CHART BELOW!]

---

BIOs

Arne Duncan (b. 1964) earned a bachelors degree in sociology from Harvard then played professional basketball in Australia for four years. He returned to the U.S. where investment manager John Rogers employed Duncan to run Rogers' new non-profit education foundation (Ariel Education Initiative). Duncan eventually also sat on a number of non-profit boards and was also “on a team that later started a new public [charter] elementary school.” John Rogers and Duncan had attended the same private school in Chicago and were longtime basketball buddies. Duncan started working for Chicago Public Schools in 1999 – first as Deputy Chief of Staff for CEO Paul Vallas, then as its CEO. He became U.S. Secretary of Education in 2009. Duncan credits his childhood experience of spending afternoons in his mother's inner-city tutoring program “with shaping his understanding of the challenges of urban education.”

Michelle Alexander (b. 1968 approx.) is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court, and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, where she served as Director of the Civil Rights Clinic. She joined the Ohio State University faculty in 2005 and now holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Her recently released book is “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Which mind has processed the issues more, Arne's or Michelle's? For my money, I’m going with Michelle Alexander, whose message is absolutely chilling, and totally correct. Arne Duncan is an intellectual lightweight who has embraced repetition of the favored mantras of the ed deform crowd.

Consider the following facts:

1. Since 1957, the proportion of the African American population with a high school degree has increased by 300% (18.4% to 79.2%) and the proportion of the African American population with a 4-year college degree increased by almost 500% (2.9% to 17.2%). Data is from the April 2004 Kirwan Institute PowerPoint report “Social/Economic Indicators by Race: Disparity 1954 and Today.”

2. Even with the significant increase in educational attainment mentioned above, African American unemployment has consistently been about twice as high as white unemployment, at least since the 1950s. What gives with that!? [See the chart below]

3. What's worse is that the number of incarcerated African Americans has increased 800% since the 1950s! Despite only small fluctuations in the violent crime rate in the past 35 years, we’ve gone from 300,000 people in jails and prisons in 1972 -- to 2.3 million today, with an additional 5 million on probation and parole. A grossly disproportionate number of the incarcerated have been people of color. Families and communities have been devastated.

4. We are the worldwide incarceration champions. The U.S. is #1 in the number of prisoners per capita at 715 people per 100,000. To put this in perspective, Russia is #2 at 584, Canada is #73 at 116, and Japan is #126 at 54.

So that's what Michelle Alexander is talking about.

What is problematic for the United States of America is not our public schools and school teachers. THE problem is that our national character has some major flaws.

And now that the men are in jail and/or unemployed and families are in continual chaos, and now that neighborhood schools have been utterly neglected for years, are popularly called "failures," and are being 'innovatively disrupted' by the ed deformers, the state is going after the mothers and grandmothers: 

Calif. bill could jail parents if kids miss school (Fresno Bee, May 13, 2010)*

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The state of California would hold parents responsible if their children are chronically truant under a bill the state Senate approved Thursday.

The bill would let prosecutors charge parents with misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine if their kids miss too much school. Judges could delay the punishment to parents as an incentive to get their children to class.

It applies only to parents or guardians of children age 6 or older in kindergarten through eighth grade. Prosecutors would have to prove the parents failed to reasonably supervise and encourage the student to attend school...

This tough love idea will be sure to affect low-income African American women disproportionately, but given our compulsion to incarcerate people of color, it makes perfect sense.

These are other things to consider:

• People in this country chose to disinvest in urban public education long ago.
• They/we chose to tolerate high and chronic unemployment in urban minority communities.
• They/we chose to corner inner-city residents into needing to resort to an underground economy.
• They/we chose to adopt policies that would incarcerate huge numbers of African American men.
• They/we chose to turn the other way when the tradition of marriages and two-parent families in these communities started heading to extinction.

So any failures of the schools are BECAUSE of the consequences of these other things. Our domestic problems were never caused by the schools, and our schools never be able to fix them.

*If they can lock up the moms for this offense, shouldn't they also be locking up some of the crooks from Goldman Sachs?

ADDED ON JANUARY 27, 2010: PLEASE SEE THESE RELATED PERIMETER PRIMATE POSTS

• Where Sociology, Criminology, and Charter Schools Converge
• Last night’s stunning Bill Moyers Journal : Part One featured Bill Moyers’ interview with Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander. Part Two was Moyers’ essay on the growing income inequality.
• A Real Crisis

When looking at the "Prison Admissions by Race" graph below, please note that the figures indicate in numbers, not percentages. And be aware that the African American population in 1930 was about one tenth (1/10) the size of the White population. In 1997 it was about one sixth (1/6).

Poetry: Reading Hayden's Frederick Douglass to the Dealers

READING HAYDEN’S FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO THE DEALERS

By George Higgins

Like attaching safety pins on baby diapers

I tie a Windsor knot over the alleged drug dealer’s shoulder.

The brightly colored Salvation Army ties

I bought in bulk before my lecture

flutter like big box kites at Cesar Chavez Park

around their muscled necks.

Twelve recently arrested alleged street dealers, eighteen to twenty-one

sit around the conference table at Probation Hall,

executives in their orange molded plastic chairs.

I try to mentor them by measuring their necks

and arms; I teach them how to iron shirts.

My auntie showed me how says one.

She flicks the water from a bowl like that he demonstrates.

I use one of them clip-ons says another boldly.

The lady probation officer interrupts

Uh-huh, you still need to learn how to tie a tie.

When I recite the Hayden poem they won’t look up.

++++++++++++

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

By Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.


++++++++++++

View a graph of African American incarceration rates here.

A Real Crisis

“Social/Economic Indicators by Race: Disparity 1954 and Today,” Ohio State University, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, PowerPoint presentation (slide 22 of 36), April 2004;

http://4909e99d35cada63e7f757471b7243be73e53e14.gripelements.com/presentations/BrownPresDisparityData.ppt

As Richard Rothstein, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, and others have reported, schools have been steadily providing an ever-increasing level of education to American students, despite all the constant haranguing we hear about about an education “crisis” today.

Crisis: 1a. A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point. b. An unstable condition, as in political, social, or economic affairs, involving an impending abrupt or decisive change (American Heritage Dictionary)

There was never a golden age of education prior to this era, unless it was the time when public schools and their teachers were not under this current aggressive and vicious attack, which was initiated and is being sustained by the corporate class. It is they, using political puppets, who have actually now created a true crisis in public education, by invading school districts to implement their chaotic, top-down transformations!
The war against public schools, and the teachers who work in them, is serving two purposes. One, in the true neo-liberal fashion, it is paving the way to the privatization of public education. Secondly, it has provoked a constant chatter and bickering about "education reform" which serves as a distraction from the more important issues and crises which the corporate/political leadership continually refuse to address.
I urge readers to look at the data in the PowerPoint presentation produced by Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, “Social/Economic Indicators by Race: Disparity 1954 and Today.” (I am unable to set the link but you can locate it with Google). This April 2004 document reveals facts about African American/White disparities in Education, Housing, Poverty, Employment, Income, Crime, and Health.
For instance:
In the past several decades, educational attainment for African Americans has increased considerably.

• Since 1957, the proportion of the African American population with a high school degree has increased by 300% (18.4% to 79.2%) and the proportion of the African American population with a 4-year college degree increased by almost 500% (2.9% to 17.2%).
• High School dropout rates for African Americans have decreased substantially in the last thirty years, dropping from 33.5% in 1974 to 17% in 2002.
• College enrollment rates have increased from 36% in 1960 to 57.7% in 2002 for African Americans (an increase of 66%). College enrollment rates for Whites increased by 45% during this forty-four year time period.

By no means has the disparity between these races been erased, but there has been a huge, steady improvement in the educational attainment of African Americans over the past 50+ years. Obviously, all the schools are not "failing" and there is no educational “crisis!”
You may wish to ask yourself why it is that Broad, Gates and the other business-minded education reformers don’t ever care to address, via their "venture philanthropy," these other social/economic indicators:

• African American child poverty rates were approximately double the rate of white child poverty in the 1990’s.
• African American unemployment has been approximately twice as high as white unemployment, at least since the 1950s.
• Disparity in income has actually grown been reduced since 1954. The median African American family income in 1954 was 55% of the white median. In 2002 this figure had grown to 62%.*
• In 2000, the median assets ($7,500) for African American households was 9.5% of the median assets for non-Hispanic whites ($79,000).
• The number of incarcerated African Americans has increased 800% since the 1950s, the number of incarcerated African Americans surpassed the number of Whites incarcerated in the late 1980s.

It is of utmost importance to note that, despite the tremendous increase in educational attainment over the past 50+ years on the part of African Americans, their achievements have not decreased the racial disparities for their employment or family income.* This simple truth reveals that the current propaganda about education being "the answer" to all of the socioeconomic problems of African Americans is a lie.
As for the last point in the bulleted section above, the incarceration figures are displayed in the graph at the top of this post. It is from the Kirwan Institute PowerPoint and I apologize for it being so faint.
The two lines and trajectories look quite similar, until one realizes that that the figures are in numbers, not in percentages, and that the African American population in 1997 was about one sixth (1/6) the size of the White population (it was 1/10th in 1930).
The TRUE crisis is the impact these figures are having on the current and future generations of the urban African American community. SO WHY NOT APPLY VENTURE PHILANTHROPY TO DEVELOP SOLUTIONS TO THIS PROBLEM? For instance, Broad and Gates could use their multi-millions to lobby other corporate powerhouses to forgo some of their astronomical, global profits, and create some jobs for people living in America's urban areas!
According to a February 2008 Washington Post article about a released Pew Center study:

More than one in 100 adult Americans are in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released Thursday.
With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States. [And we consider ourselves to be the world's overseer and guardian of human rights!?!]

The article also states that, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased 127 percent, while spending on higher education rose 21 percent. One estimate is that incarceration costs approximately $27,500 a year, many more times than the average public school per pupil spending.
I did learn though, recently, that Oakland Unified spends nearly this much on the students enrolled in Community Day. This very small secondary school (10 students last year) is for students who have committed extremely severe disciplinary infractions and who have been expelled from the district as a result. At the school they receive educational and mental health services, working closely with clinical therapists and case managers. During 2006-07, the total expenditure per pupil at this school was $20211. This is ten students getting too little, too late.
There is no doubt that the public schools have been made into scapegoats that are blamed for not being able to carry the burden of our nation's failures on their own. Teachers and schools are being forced to jump through senseless, exhausting, futile, and demoralizing hoops which have been set up by the corporate schemers, while so many other things that need to be addressed are being completely ignored.
Public schools and their teachers are NOT the cause of our nation's problems, nor have they ever been. I am not an urban public school teacher, but, as an active and engaged parent, I have watch them deal with the challenges at their schools for nearly 17 years. Honestly, I believe it is time for them to stand up to the bullying and madness, feel confident about speaking the truth, and rebel. Teachers: you are being ground into the ground, and you don't have to take it anymore!
IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Read Incarceration and Crime: A Complex Relationship, a 2005 report produced by The Sentencing Project. The extreme incarceration rate is exhibited in multiple graphs which are then contrasted with other graphs which exhibit a crime rate which has remained nearly steady. As the report states:

Negative Impacts on Family and Community – The rapid growth of incarceration has had profoundly disruptive effects that radiate into other spheres of society. The persistent removal of persons from the community to prison and their eventual return has a destabilizing effect that has been demonstrated to fray family and community bonds, and contribute to an increase in recidivism and future criminality. Moreover, these trends are exacerbated as prisoners are increasingly incarcerated in facilities hundreds of miles from their homes. Research by the Urban Institute in a number of cities indicates that a critical predictor of success for persons returning to the community is family connections, and prospects for employment are strengthened for persons who are able to maintain some degree of attachment to their former networks of contacts. However, as the use of incarceration continues to grow, there is a resultant decline in these contacts, and a harmful impact on the individual, the family, and the community at large.

A huge number of kids are entwined in this scenario. They should become the focus of the education reform efforts.

*I’ve now taken the liberty to change the original phrasing which I had copied from the Kirwan Institute report, because it was misleading. h/t to Ron for pointing this out. The gap between the incomes has indeed been reduced. In 1954 the ratio of African American/White family income was $13,481:$24,206, or 55.7%. In 2002, the ratio was $33,598:$54,067, or 62%. However, while this is an improvement, it is still a remarkable disparity.

The School as a Staging Area

I offer you an example from “Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City” by Elijah Anderson (1999), Chapter 2 (Campaigning for Respect), pp. 93 to 98.

In my view, any discussion about reform in inner-city schools that does not overtly refer to an understanding of Anderson’s observations and conclusions will miss the target and be pointless. A full internalization of the message in the body of his work will be needed to comprehend the situation, before any reformer even attempts to develop a truly useful strategy.

THE SCHOOL AS A STAGING AREA

The inner-city school is an outpost of the traditions of the wider society. Racially segregated and situated in an impoverished inner-city community in which violence, drugs, and crime are rampant, it is characterized by the street/decent dynamic. During their early years, most of the children accept the legitimacy of the school, and then eagerly approach the task of learning. As time passes, however, in their relentless campaign for the respect that will be meaningful in their public environment, youth increasingly embrace the street code. By the fourth grade, enough children have opted for the code of the street that it begins to compete effectively with the culture of the school, and the code begins to dominate their public culture—in school as well as out—becoming a way of life for many and eventually conflating with the culture of the school itself. Such a school becomes a primary staging area for the campaign for respect.

In this social setting, decent kids learn to code switch, while street kids become more singularly committed to the street. Such a division, as previously stated, is largely a function of persistent poverty and local neighborhood effects, which include social isolation and alienation, but it is also strongly related to family background, available peers, and role models. For many alienated young black people, attending school and doing well becomes negatively associated with acting white. In what is essentially a racially black street-world, as shown in Tyree’s case, one develops a strong need to show others he can handle himself socially and physically on the ghetto streets, a powerful community value in and of itself. This “street knowledge” is esteemed, and the quest for it and the consideration for those who have it begin to predominate, ultimately competing with, if not undermining, the mission of the school.

With each passing year the school loses ground as more and more students adopt a street orientation, if only for self-defense in the neighborhood. But often what is out on the streets is brought into the classrooms. The most troublesome students are then encouraged by peers to act out, to get over on the teachers, to test authority by probing for weaknesses. Particularly during mild weather, many students in the upper grades attend school sporadically or stop coming altogether, because street activities effectively compete for their time. Even while in school, they walk the halls instead of attending class, and their encounters there often mirror those on the street, marked by tension and fights.

Some of the seriously street-oriented kids may have mental health issues; some have been abused by their parents; others are depressed. The most troubled may fight with teachers, bring guns and knives to school, and threaten people. The idea of deprivation and anger is important here. In this highly competitive setting, the most deprived youths, who can easily be made to feel bad, sometimes become jealous of peers. To avoid feeling bad, these kids may lift themselves up by putting others down. A common tactic is to “bust on” or “signify” at someone, verbally teasing the person, at times to the point of tears. Sometimes the prettiest girls can get beaten up out of jealousy. From so much envy and jealousy, beefs easily erupt, beginning with ritual “bumping” and ending in serious physical confrontations to settle things. Bumping rights are then negotiated, determining who is allowed to bump whom, to pick on whom, and in what circumstances. In essence, these young people are campaigning for place, esteem, and ultimately respect.

In this situation, the school becomes transformed in the most profound sense into a staging area for the streets, a place where people come to present themselves, to represent where they come from, and to stay even with or to dominate their peers. Violence is always a possibility, for the typically troubled school is surrounded by persistent poverty, where scarcity of valued things is the rule, thus lending a competitive edge to the social environment. However, the trophies to be won are not of academic kind, rather they are those of the street, particularly respect. In this campaign, young people must be prepared not only to fight, but also to take great care with their appearance. The right look means not wearing old or “bummy” clothes, or sneakers that are worn or dirty or out of style. Esteem is so precarious that it can be taken away with just a word, and kids are constantly challenge to defend what they have. Social life becomes a zero-sum scenario: “If you have something and exhibit it, it means I’m less. Who do you think you are by doing that?” The decent kids mimic the street ones, behaving in street ways that often confuse teachers (and also prospective employers and police who might be incapable of distinguishing the decent from the street). Some teachers are unable to differentiate between he two groups. Overwhelmed by clothes, the look, or the swagger, they cannot discern the shy kid underneath, which may be why teachers classify the majority of young people as “street.”

To be sure, much of the students’ behavior may be purely defensive, which requires significant expenditures of social energy. This situation intends to victimize the weakest players and certainly disrupts the business of the school. In time, when unattended, the street element (and those who would be “street”) dominates the school and its local terrain. In the most troubled schools, the street element becomes so powerful that beefs and scores can only be settled by death. Again, most of the young people in these settings are inclined toward decency, but when the street elements rule, they are encouraged to campaign for respect by adopting a street attitude, look, and presentation of self. In this context the decent kids often must struggle to maintain their credibility, like the fifteen-year-old boy I observed who typically changed his “square” clothes for a black leather jacket (thereby adopting a street look) after he got around the corner from his home and out of his mother’s view. In order to preserve his own self-respect and the respect of his peers, he would also hide his books under his jacket while walking to school, bidding to appear street.

In school as in the neighborhood, adolescents are concerned with developing a sense of who they are, what they are, and what they will be. They try on many different personal roles, and they experiment with many scripts. Some work, others don’t. How do the roles of decent and street play out in their search for an identity, and what parts do others play? What stages do the young people go through? What is the “career” of identity as this career takes shape?

Observing the interactions of adolescents in school and talking with them reveal how important school authority is to young people, but too often the authority figures are viewed as alien and unreceptive. The teachers and administrators are concerned that their own authority be taken seriously, and claims to authority are always up for grabs—if not subject to out-and-out challenge.

Young people, of course, do not go about developing their identities based solely on privileges and rewards granted by teachers, but this dynamic does exist to some degree. Often students perceive (more or less accurately) that the institution and its staff are utterly unreceptive to their street presentations. Mixed with their inability to distinguish the decent child from the street child, the teachers’ efforts to combat the street may cause them to lump the good students with the bad, generally viewing all who display street emblems as adversaries. Here, their concerns might be as much with teaching as with controlling their charges.

In response, the decent children place ever greater stock in their ability to code-switch, adopting one set of behaviors for inside the building and one for outside. But, as indicated above—particularly in the heat of the campaign for respect—the two roles often merge, and what is considered proper in either setting can become one and the same. When this confusion goes unchecked, discipline in the school situation becomes elusive, particularly for those children who seem “to get away with it.”

When students become convinced that they cannot receive their props from teachers and staff, they turn elsewhere, typically to the street, encouraging others to follow their lead, particularly when the unobtainable appears to be granted only on the basis of acting white. The sour grapes attitude notwithstanding, a powerful incentive for these young people then emerges, especially for those sitting on the cultural fence, to invest themselves in the so-called oppositional culture, which may be confused with their ”black identity.” Such a resolution allows these alienated students to campaign for respect on their own terms, in a world they control.

Impacted by profound social isolation, the children face the basic problem of alienation. Many students become smug in their lack of appreciation of what the business of the school is and how it is connected with the world outside. In addition, they seldom encounter successful black people who have gone through school and gone on to do well.

Education is thus undermined because the mission of the school cannot equal the mission of the kids. To accept the school would be to give in and act white, to give up the value of the street for some other thing. And the value of that other thing has not been sufficiently explained to the children to make them want to give up the ways of the street and take on the ideology of the school. So the outpost of mainstream society tries to deliver its message to kids in an environment that has little regard for that society. In fact, the code of the street, and by extension the oppositional culture, competes very effectively with traditional values. As the young people come to see the school and its agents are unreceptive to them, embracing the oppositional culture becomes more important as a way to salvage self-esteem. The mission of the school is called into question, if not undermined.

Alienated black students take on the oppositional role so effectively that they often become models for other disaffected students. They do it because they are profoundly at odds with the with culture and can see themselves as visibly different. But other alienated students may mimic them because they are such strong models.

The culture of the street doesn’t allow backing down. When the boys at the Youth Study Center (Philadelphia’s juvenile detention facility) saw a video on conflict resolution as an alternative to fighting, they just school their heads. They knew that you never back down. That is to set you up as a doormat. You have to be tough. If you show fear, others will exploit it. So you always have to give the impression that you are strong, that you are a “thorough dude.” Even a teacher who shows fear becomes vulnerable and can be emotionally undone by the kids. When that happens, the kids know they’ve won. So there is an adversarial relationship between the teachers and the students. The teachers’ role is to keep the kids in line. The students’ role is either to behave or to try to get over on the teacher.

The school is a microcosm of the community in a sense. Although police and disciplinarians are on patrol, kids are parading up and down the halls, socializing, even buying and selling drugs. The same things are going on inside the school as outside it. Yet it remains a haven, a place where one can go and expect relative order.

The Big Nut to Crack

Dear Ms. Mitchell,

I am writing to you from Oakland, California where I am longtime public school parent and public school activist. I have a deep interest in urban public school issues and read a great deal about them. Today I discovered your recent piece about Arne Duncan on an education blog called “This Week in Education.”

I want to let you know that I am grateful for your article and for posting the video of your interview with Mr. Duncan. I am particularly appreciative that you asked him why his focus is on test score data rather than on quality of life issues at schools, such as improving school climate, focusing on children's social and emotional issues, and developing ways to counter early expressions of urban violence. From my point of view, his response clearly demonstrated a simple lack of understanding.

I firmly believe that today’s education reformers are missing the mark because they are not addressing these things first. And I also believe that perhaps the reason for this is because they have never personally experienced the schools attended by children of the underclass, nor are they much willing to tap into the substantial body of knowledge of people who have. Too many of them have attended private schools and Ivy League colleges, and are only willing to send their children to the same. They're in charge of education for the masses, but are very much out of touch.

There is no doubt in my mind: the conditions relating to urban violence, and how they impact urban school climates, are the most pressing problems in our nation's inner city schools. They are the main barriers to better student performance and higher teacher retention. And as charter schools draw off the strongest families in our cities, the concentration of students from less-able parents – who are also the ones who present the greatest challenges – is becoming higher and higher at the traditional public schools.

Honestly, despite all the money and energy being thrown at urban school reform, we’re really not seeing much of an effect, because the path which has been taken is not correct. Frank public recognition of the biggest problem, and finding ways to address it, is nowhere to be found in typical ed-reform discussions.

The best source I've discovered for learning about the behavioral dynamics in the inner-city setting is Elijah Anderson, sociology professor at Yale, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City" and is also the editor of an insightful new book, “Against the Wall: Poor, Black, Young, and Male.” Both President Obama and Arne Duncan – as well as policymakers and America's citizens – would learn a great deal from Anderson’s work.

And on a related note, last winter I read a blog comment by a professor at Chico State University (Tony Waters on Bridging Differences) in which he referred to America’s “incarcerated class.” His phrase immediately rang true for me. The tragic and exponential rise in African American incarceration rates over the past decades is both causing, and resulting in, damage to many, many children. An increasingly tragic cycle is being produced.

This is a comment I posted yesterday on The Education Report:

On nearly every post here at the Education Report, people will eventually make comments that relate to the chronically intolerable/near-intolerable conditions caused by student misbehavior and its effects. Has anyone else noticed?

The in-hospitability of urban public school climates is NOT solely an OUSD issue, it’s present nationwide. The amount of student misbehavior that schools are expected to cope with these days is a big, widespread problem and has come about as a result of complicated and tragic societal forces, and decisions that seemed right at the moment but produced negative effects over time.

Does anyone know an entire school district with similar demographics that’s managing these challenges extremely well? Which specific schools in Oakland have this issue totally under control? How much do the student, teacher, and principal demographics influence their practices? How much can the techniques be replicated at other sites, and how can that be done?

Do some schools boast about their accomplishments, but then operate by rules or in conditions that can’t be transferred on a wider basis? Is the exclusive enrollment practiced by charters (like refusing to deal with the types of students in Special Day Classes or those who are more defiant) the only way to go? If so, where then should those many more difficult students be educated? Just how much of the difficult student behavior can be suppressed? What are the legal and civil rights issues that need to be considered?

I once heard a sociologist refer to America’s “incarcerated class.” Looking at the African American incarceration rates over the past decades, and thinking about the families those rates affect, maybe he’s onto something. So is it time yet to publicly admit that we probably have an established caste system in the US, and that the problems we’re talking about just might be connected to that?

The issue about school climate is THE “big nut” to crack. Finding strategies to deal with this difficult issue should have been placed at the very top of the urban educational reform list.

Unfortunately, educational reformers from the corporate world — who don’t understand or care about what is really going on in the trenches — are in control right now. They’ve been leading us down the path where everyone fixates on test scores, and scapegoats teachers, etc. because those are strategies that will eventually lead to the corporate world making a buck. Education entrepreneurship in a wide number of forms (tutoring, test materials, coaching, etc.) is now a huge, and growing, billion-dollar business, which developed from specific intent. In the 1980’s these people realized that the billions spent on public education was an untapped well of profit, so they made their political connections and have taken charge ever since. And so far we have let them.

If both OUSD and the City of Oakland would set its main focus on improving school climates, and if the school board and our superintendent addressed it at every turn, we could become a model for the rest of the nation — we’re a district of manageable size. But they will need firm pressure AND help in the form of fresh ideas and feedback. Constant put-downs and abandonment of the public schools don’t do anything to help our community as a whole.

How about more people writing letters to demand that the district turns its attention to school climate? How about asking the district to form a task force &/or department that compiles research, generates ideas, makes recommendations, monitors progress, and keeps up an exchange with the community? How about demanding that charter schools take their fair share of more challenging students? How about asking charters to use some of their innovation potential and extra funding to develop special programs for managing the more difficult students?

At any rate, these are the issues education reform needs to be dealing with, and I am certain you know this, too -- because of the questions you chose to ask Arne Duncan. How sad that his best response was “It’s crazy, it just doesn’t make any sense to me” and that his friend, John Rogers, said basically the same thing.

If these powerful people deeply understood the message in Anderson’s work, they would have been able to move beyond just describing things as “crazy.” They would know that the antisocial behavior exhibited by urban youth these days is, oddly, an adaptive and very human response to chronically horrific economic conditions. To understand urban violence, people need to read Anderson's explanation about the issue of "respect."

And if more people were aware of all these things, then maybe there would be hope for developing the plan for what needs to be done next.

Sincerely,

S.H.

Duncan, Robber Barons, and Victims

Clay Burrell over at Change.org is bothered by Arne's Duncanisms. Scary Duncan has been out and about saying all sorts of things. As Burrell excerpted:

In a recent interview, Secretary Duncan discussed how he went about assembling his team, targeting people like Ms. Melendez who came from modest backgrounds, had a passion for the work, and showed an entrepreneurial spirit—and were willing to take what was likely a big pay cut to work in a federal job. No education policy or district superstars with big egos were welcome, he said.

“If they’re scared off because they won’t make more money ... or if they wanted a certain job title, ... that’s not the kind of person we want,” Mr. Duncan said. “We want people for whom this is a real passion. This is mission-driven work. Everyone is taking pay cuts.”

To which Burrell responded

Call me crazy, but you'd think people who were "education policy superstars," who spent their lives in classrooms and later in research, would qualify as "passionate" more than the "missionaries" with an "entrepreneurial spirit." People like, you know, Linda Darling-Hammond, who's devoted her life to knowing through research how to improve education, rather than taking a left turn from entrepreneurialism out of some "money + passion = change you can believe in" zeal.

... Duncan's rhetoric smacks of a sort of anti-intellectualism and pro-entrepreneurialism, and his staff picks reflect that as well. His DoE staffers are overwhelmingly connected more to Eli Broad and Bill Gates than to universities and classrooms.

To put this all into perspective, it's time to review how Duncan got his position.

Duncan earned a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard. That is pretty much the extent of his intellectual foundation. After graduating, he immediately went to Australia to play professional basketball for four years.

When he returned to Chicago, Duncan needed a job (Wanted: employment for a not-particularly-go-getting, perpetually grinning, newly married, only-bachelor-degree-earning Ivy League graduate). Fortunately John Rogers - a fanatic basketball-playing, longtime friend and private high school co-alum - had become extremely wealthy and needed someone to run a new, small, local education-related non-profit he was starting. He slipped Duncan right in to that position. One of the enormous benefits of attending elite private schools is making these sorts of useful connections; it's probably more important than the education itself.

Duncan's only accomplishment in working in urban education at this point was that he had tutored poor kids in high school. We all know how much he likes to tell this story over and over again. By the way, his mother forced ALL of her kids to tutor at her center; she also wouldn't ever let them watch TV.

After a few years of running his friend's non-profit, this mushy, likable bureaucrat got a job in Chicago Public Schools as Deputy Chief of Staff, most likely because of his great connections. A few years later, Mayor Daley appointed the malleable Duncan as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. This was just after the public-school-system-hating, Broad-connected, education reformer-destroyers had settled down in town. I'm sure they immediately recognized that Duncan would be perfect to work with, and be the sort of perfect blank they could mold.

Meanwhile, having never attended public schools, nor be willing to use them for his own kids, Obama really didn't know all that much about public education. However, for years he had been regularly playing basketball with Duncan, who he met through Michelle's brother (a close friend, and former Princeton basketball teammate, of John Rogers). This is a tight foursome, folks.

And that's how our nation is now stuck with a cheerful, but bumbling, average bureaucrat who Obama has assigned authority for running the whole show. I repeat: one of the benefits of attending elite private schools is making these sorts of useful connections. Did I mention that the Obama's sent their girls to the same Chicago private school that Duncan and Rogers attended?

Duncan's presence at the Department of Education is not because of an incredible intelligence, a wide range of experience, or an exceptional level of knowledge; it's because he provides the White House with a level of comfort and familiarity (and honors mutual friend Rogers for his years of Obama political $upport, and who knows who else). By the way, Rogers’ ex-wife is the White House social secretary.

Mr. Casual "call me Arne" Duncan wouldn't select cabinet members with more intellectual gravitas than he has because he is fundamentally insecure about his own. He certainly realizes his status would be challenged by the presence of someone who is actually distinguished in the field of education, and who may not agree with him on every point, and who would probably win all the debates.

The fact that Duncan signed on to both the Broader Bolder Approach and the Education Equality Project (manifestos with two VERY different points of view) demonstrates to me that the mutable Duncan wasn't sure where to stand. He makes a perfect puppet for the corporate edu-schemers.

By the way, Alexander Russo recently blogged about Arne’s weighing in on a number of issues including raising the driving age in Ohio (against), a split lunch at Patterson Elementary next year (for), and changing monthly board meeting locations for Chattanooga public schools to the Denny's on Dalton Boulevard (against). Why would he do this? Sorry, but it makes me wonder about his level of intellect.

On the recommendation of Elijah Anderson, I am now reading Blaming the Victim, a classic work by William Ryan. As someone who is paying attention to the methodology of the corporateer-led destruction of public education, all in the name of doing "good," I couldn’t help but be struck by two lines on page 20:

In order to persuade a good and moral man to do evil, then, it is not necessary first to persuade him to become evil. It is only necessary to teach him that he is doing good.

This explains the disconnect I sense between the rhetoric spewed by the corporateers and Harvard MBA-type reformers, (“Education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century!”), and the fact that they never make a peep about the extent of our nation’s poverty and how it affects impoverished families, or our growing class divisions. Fervently believing that what they are saying and doing is good, they bristle and aggressively confront anyone who challenges their position. They declare that those who disagree with them is 1. a racist and 2. a traitor to the cause of wanting to help poor, disadvantaged children. Only their perspective is "good."

Ryan’s book was originally published in 1971. A revised edition was released in 1976 with a new introduction. By then Ryan says he had enlarged his vision of who the “victims” in American society really were.

In fact, everyone who depends for the sustenance of himself and his family on salary and wages, and who does not have a separate source of income through some substantial ownership of wealth, is a potential victim in America. He is vulnerable to the disaster of catastrophic illness in a private-enterprise medical-care system; he is vulnerable to the deliberate manipulation of inflation and unemployment; he is vulnerable to the burden of grossly unfair taxes; he is vulnerable to the endemic pollution of air and food and to the unattended hazards of the factory and the highway that will likely kill him before his time; he is vulnerable to the greed of the great oil companies and food corporations.

The victims in American society are not simply the 10 percent of us who are Black, the 15 percent or so who are officially below the “poverty line." The majority of us who are non-Black and, officially at least, non-poor, are also victims. At least two-thirds, perhaps three-fourths of us are relatively poor compared to the standards of the top 10 or 5 percent, and relatively vulnerable. Others own America, we’re just workers, whether we realize it or not. Some of us may think we’re flying pretty high and are much better off than those below us, but in the end, we’re just ‘house niggers,” allowed better food than the “field niggers” and wearing fancier clothes. But none of us owns even a corner of the cotton field. Massa owns it all and Massa – the two or three per cent who essentially own America—is the real problem.

It's probably good to be clear about who is really running things; it is Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Wal-Mart family, and other millionaires and billionaires along that line. If you are under the impression that we live in a democracy, this will bother you, or perhaps not.