U.S. Racism 9

US Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy Through Structural Violence

Sunday, 02 August 2015 00:00 By Tim Scott and Deborah Keisch, Landscapes of Violence | News Analysis 

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(Image: School bus via Shutterstock)

U.S public schools are more segregated today than they have been since before the desegregation efforts that followed the 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. Coinciding with this segregation are vast racial inequities and stratification, which are being intensified through the policies known as corporate education reform. In this article, we share the voices and stories of scholars and education activists who have documented the racism and segregation of U.S. public schooling over the rise of corporate education reform. We start with the current state of our segregated schools, before stepping back and looking at the historical and ideological context of U.S. schooling under industrial capitalism, white supremacy and neoliberalism, all creating the perfect storm for the punitive and dehumanizing conditions within 21st century public education. We will then explore the formula of corporate education reform through an examination of specific instruments used to enact these policies: school choice and charters, high-stakes testing, and the disciplining and criminalizing of black and brown bodies. We also examine the delivery of these policies via the discourse used to justify them and the intentions behind them. Finally, we call the question of whether public schools are our best hope for achieving social and economic equity and how those working in this struggle might keep that vision in mind.

“We have, in the country, a history of not just the police, but the state, the law enforcement agencies, disrespecting black life. And it’s disrespected in hundreds of ways. And then the police are just one expression of that. And again, we can measure that now. It’s not simply a question of asking. And it’s not the same as saying, “Is the country racist?” or even, “Are the police racist?” We live in a system in which black life is devalued. And it’s reflected in our schools.”

john a. powell, August 19th, 2014, in an interview with Amy Goodman about the events in Ferguson, MO.

Introduction 

In the midst of the writing of this article, white police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed, 18-year old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The events that quickly followed—Brown’s bloody body left lying for hours in the street for all to see; the violent militarized police response to community expressions of pain and anger; the perpetuation of a blaming narrative about racial violence by framing Brown as a wilding “demon” who attacked Wilson which provided the subterfuge to exonerate Wilson of the crime; and establishment leaders pathologizing the ensuing social unrest—are emblematic of a deeply rooted violent design in U.S. society.

Michael Brown’s murder is just one of countless reminders that we live in a society that deems the lives of Black and Brown people disposable. This disposability is never so evident than in the vast racial inequities that have always existed within the U.S. public school system, and now being intensified through policies known as corporate education reform as exemplified by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times that “Brown’s mother told a local television station after he was killed just weeks after his high school graduation: “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. ‘They’re going to try to take me out anyway’” (Blow, 2014, para. 22).

Poignantly, two months prior to his killing, education historian Diane Ravitch wrote about Brown’s school district, citing it as an egregious example of the neglect of the nation’s promise to end racial segregation in schools. She wrote:

That district had been a high-achieving all-white district in the 1950s. After years of white flight, the district became all-African-American. As its test scores fell, the state of Missouri put the district on provisional accreditation. Help was definitely not on the way. After 18 years of provisional accreditation, the state merged the struggling Normandy district with another struggling, all-black district that had been under state supervision for five years. After the merger, the new district was stripped of accreditation (Ravitch, 2014, para. 1).

Michael Brown’s school district, like many other poor and under resourced districts in the country, is one of numerous examples of the ongoing legacy of institutionalized racism in U.S. society and in U.S. schools. If current policymakers were truly working toward justice in public schooling, it would follow that we would see all children enjoying the privileges of schooling environments that the children of the elite experience. Civil rights activist and the first female African American judge in Alabama, Faya Rouse Touré, critically poses this question, exposing the contradictions between policymakers’ rhetoric and their practices. She contemplates why anyone wouldn’t want an education system that is humane for all children, where every child has the opportunity and the preparation to achieve his or her potential.

Education systems in all societies are designed to serve as the primary institutions that reproduce dominant social and economic orders, customs and beliefs systems. In U.S. public education, this makes schooling a function of capitalism, white supremacy and their intrinsic restraints on democracy and social equality. Current efforts to reform primary and secondary public education are based within the violence of white supremacy aligned with the broader brutality of neoliberalism. Elite, Eurocentric education policymakers continue to espouse a language of equity while simultaneously maintaining private elite schools for their own children, spaces that look nothing like the ones they are designing for the masses. This results in a hyper intensification of the sorting of students based on their “value” as defined by a neoliberal worldview steeped in white supremacy. In this system, those identified to have the least amount of value are ultimately deemed disposable.

This article is composed of several components that seem on the surface distinct but are actually quite connected, and will illustrate the relationship between education reform policies and the lives of children and communities of color in the United States. Essential to this project are selected audio interviews with some of the most powerful U.S. critical education scholars and activists of our time. Alongside our own narrative, we share their voices and stories, collected by Education Radio[1] from July 2011 through June 2012. The two authors of this article were producers for Education Radio, which documented testimony and analysis of the impact of U.S. education reform policies on schools and communities. We have selected pieces of that audio from the Education Radio collection as a way to weave together a narrative of a public education system that is structured—both historically and contemporarily—within the violence of white supremacy. Our hope is that the voices we share will both enhance the story we are telling as well as connect readers more deeply to the issues we discuss.

We begin with the current state of our segregated schools, what Jonathan Kozol refers to as a state of “apartheid education” (Kozol, 2005). Then, we step back and look at the historical and ideological context of U.S. schooling under industrial capitalism, white supremacy and neoliberalism—all creating the perfect storm for the punitive and dehumanizing conditions within 21st century public education. We explore the formula of corporate education reform through an examination of specific instruments used to enact these policies: school choice and charter schools, high-stakes testing, and the disciplining and criminalizing of Black and Brown bodies. We also examine the delivery of these policies via the discourse used to justify them and the intentions behind them. Finally, we call the question of whether public schools are our best hope for achieving social and economic equity, and how those working in this struggle might keep that vision in mind.

Current Context: Separate and Unequal

Further Reading: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32171-us-education-reform-and-the-maintenance-of-white-supremacy-through-structural-violence