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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.
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Privatizing Education: The Neoliberal Project
Black Education and Afro-Pessimism /
The Collapse of Urban Public
Schooling / The Myth of Charter
Schools
Hunger for a Black President / Biko
Speaks on Africans
/
Introduction I Write What I Like
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank
B. Wilderson III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student,
Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America. |
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Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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Afro- Pessimism By
Frank
B. Wilderson
“Afro-Pessimists are framed as such . . . because they theorize an
antagonism, rather than a conflict—i.e., they perform a kind of
‘work of understanding’ rather than that of liberation, refusing to
posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise.”
“[The Afro-Pessimists argue]
that violence toward the black person happens gratuitously, hence
without former transgression, and the even if the means of
repression change (plantation was replaced by prison, etc.), that
doesn’t change the structure of the repression itself. Finally (and
this is important in terms of the self-definition of the white
person), a lot of repression happens on the level of representation,
which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and the
white person . . . Since these structures are ontological, they
cannot be resolved (there is no way of changing this unless the
world as we know it comes an end. . . .); this is why the
[Afro-Pessimist relational-schema] would be seen as the only true
antagonism (while other repressive relations like class and gender
would take place on the level of conflict—they can be resolved,
hence they are not ontological).”
“[The Afro-Pessimists] work
toward delineating a relation rather than focus on a cultural
object.”
“Something that all the
Afro-Pessimists seem to agree upon regarding social death are
notions of kinship (or lack there of), the absence of time and space
to describe blackness. . . . There is no grammar of suffering to
describe their loss because the loss cannot be named.”
“[The Afro-Pessimists] theorize
the workings of civil society as contiguous with slavery, and
discuss the following as bearing witness to this contiguity: the
inability of the slave (or the being-for-the-captor) to translate
space into place and time into event; the fact that the slave
remains subject to gratuitous violence (rather than violence
contingent on transgression); the natal alienation and social death
of the slave.”
“[T]he Afro-Pessimists all seek
to . . . stage a metacritique of the current discourse identified as
“critical theory” by excavating an antagonism that exceeds it; to
recognize this antagonism forces a mode of death that expels
subjecthood and forces objecthood [upon Blacks].”
“For Fanon, the solution to the
black presence in the white world is not to retrieve and celebrate
our African heritage, as was one of the goals of the Negritude
project. For Fanon, a revolution that would destroy civil society,
as we know it would be a more adequate response. I think the
Afro-Pessimist such as Hartman, Spillers, and Marriott would argue
there is no place for the black, only prosthetics, techniques which
give the illusion of a relationality in the world.”
Like the work of
Jared Sexton,
Saidiya Hartman,
David Marriott,
Hortense Spillers,
Frantz Fanon,
Lewis Gordon,
Joy James, and others, Wilderson’s poetry, creative prose,
scholarly work, and film production are predicated on the notion
that slavery did not end in 1865; the United States simply made
adjustments to the force of Black resistance without diminishing the
centrality of Black captivity to the stability and coherence of
civil society.—Incognegro
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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