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The Collapse of Urban Public
Schooling
By Floyd W. Hayes, III In April 1983, more than a decade
ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education
of the U. S. Department of Education issued a report
that state unambiguously that “The educational
foundations of our society are presently being eroded by
a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very
future as a Nation and a people.”
The report, entitled A Nation at
Risk, likened the devastation of public education to “an
act of war.” “We have in effect,” the report warned,
“been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral
educational disarmament.” Many Americans seemed shocked
for a time by the report’s findings. They, however,
were not a new discovery.
The source of the present collapse of
urban public education can be traced back to the late
1950s and 1960s, following the U. S. Supreme Court’s
momentous, but flawed, Brown school desegregation
ruling. Terminating state-sanctioned racial apartheid
in America’s public schools was correct; reasoning that
all black schools were inherently inferior was
incorrect. In a deliberate attempt to distort and evade
the Court’s decision, many urban school systems outside
of the South installed the pupil assignment policy of
tracking that effectively re-segregated many schools by
channeling the majority of black students into the
lowest track early in their educational careers.
Interpreting the Brown ruling as an
opportunity to improve their children’s education, black
residents in many big cities across America fought urban
public school regimes’ tracking policy. For example,
community activists in Washington, D. D., labeled the
policy “programmed retardation,” declaring that tracking
was more harmful than the conservative practice of
racist segregation in the Old South.
Reasoning that poor education
ultimately would hurt black and white working class
children in the Nation’s capitol, community leaders
called for neither racial integration nor segregation;
rather, they demanded quality education. Washington, D.
C. community activists defined this educational goal
unambiguously: (1) the distribution and mastery of the
fundamental tools of learning: reading, writing,
computational skills, and thinking; (2) academic
motivation; and (3) positive character-development.
Each of these elements was supposed to advance as
students matriculated from elementary through high
school.
Like residents of so many other urban
areas, Washington, D. C.’s black community lost the
political struggle for quality education. In 1967, the
celebrated Hobson v. Hansen case terminated the school
system’s tracking policy, but the court claimed that
racial integration automatically improved the
educational performance of black students. Liberal
civil rights leaders and educational managerial elites
won the day and began to implement various racial
integration policies—racial-balance using, magnet school
programs, and other education experiments. Because
integration is not an end in itself but only a means to
achieve an end, the contradictions and dilemmas quickly
became apparent.
Thus, educational managers and civil
rights elites put forward racial integration as the
singular goal of education and imposed it on public
schools at all costs. They overlooked the issue of
quality education. As a result, good classroom teaching
declined, the fundamental tools of knowledge were
abandoned, and positive character building was
perverted.
Moreover, as white and later
middle-class black flight from cities to suburbs
accelerated in the late 1960s and 1970s, America allowed
its urban areas and their schools to decay and
deteriorate. In the process, school regimes bused
African American and Latino children to an expanding
system of largely white and affluent suburban schools in
order to achieve “racial balance.” This tactic helped
to destroy the sense of community in urban areas, as
remaining inner-city life became increasingly
characterized by economic impoverishment, political
disenfranchisement, and cultural despair.
The consequences of this course of
events are now evident with the collapse of public
education in urban areas across this nation.
Ironically, school budgets have continued to rise along
with a growing ossification and inefficiency of urban
school bureaucracies.
Adding insult to injury, liberal
members of the educational managerial elite have
rationalized the denial of quality education to black
students by applying various theories of cultural
deprivation. Categorizing African-descended Americans
as “culturally deprived” or “culturally disadvantaged”
merely compounds and continues, into the contemporary
era, the legacy of cultural domination and the denial of
black human dignity originally articulated by whites
during the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in
colonial America.
To refer to black Americans as
“educationally handicapped” when there has been an
historic and systematic conspiracy to deny them quality
education is comparable to breaking a person’s leg and
then criticizing that person when she or he limps! This
is a strategy for keeping the oppressed in a condition
of oppression.
These unfortunate educational trends
and developments characterized urban and less affluent
public school systems in the 1960s and 1970s. Since
then, many suburban and more affluent public school
systems also have been experiencing an educational
crisis. They confront a growing rate of complex
problems: functional illiteracy, violence, drop/push
outs, discipline, drug use, teenage pregnancy, gang
activity, and teacher burn out.
What is to be expected of youngsters
from any racial, ethnic, or class background who never
were taught to read effectively, who never developed the
responsibility of carrying out an assignment, who never
learned to follow directions, who never acquired respect
for knowledge or its purveyors, and who never became
masters of their own souls with self-discipline? Under
these circumstances, generations of young people are
being educationally sabotaged in many public schools
across America.
In the current stage of American
postindustrial-managerial development, the collapse of
public schooling is frightening. In the emerging
society, knowledge and the management of people are
supplanting money and manufacturing as the only sources
of politico-economic power. Resisting the
professional-managerial class’s cultural domination and
intellectual imperialism requires that the people
themselves come to view knowledge and its utilization as
sources of power.
Learning, therefore, needs to be
increasingly understood as a life-long project and an
indispensable investment for social development.
Educational credentials more and more will be the key to
a person’s role in society. However, more than more
possession of certificates will be the requirement to
practice one’s knowledge. Knowledge-based performance
and decision-making will be the necessary attributes of
the educated person. Survival, development, and even
struggle will depend on knowledge-based action.
Indications are that educational
professional-managerial elites have betrayed a
generation or more of urban African American and Latino
students, whose educational underdevelopment is
undercutting their ability to survive and develop in a
postindustrial-managerial society grown cynically
indifferent to social suffering. Faced with the
possibility of an increasingly nihilistic future,
America has two options: educational renewal or societal
decadence.
1995
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posted 11 March 2006 / update 20 February
2008 |
