var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_content_id = '1086049'; Click here for reuse options! nowadays's Silicon Valley hustlers belong to a long tradition of making money off a segregated education system.
Noliwe Rooks is the director of American studies at Cornell University and the author of Cutting School: Privatization,Segregation, and the End of Public Education. This is an edited transcript.
Jennifer Berkshire: In your original book, and Cutting School,you introduce a concept you call 'segrenomics.' It’s the combination of the segregation that continues to define education in the US, and economics—whole industries that gain money off of our unequal system. Like the Silicon Valley hustlers who own their sights set on the Baltimore Public Schools.
Noliwe Rooks: Baltimore would be a perfect example of segrenomics. You own a school district that’s predominantly poor students of color. And here comes Silicon Valley saying ‘we'll teach you approximately computers and coding and you’ll be prepared for the jobs of the next century.’ But it’s within the context of a fundamentally unequal form of education.
There’s this deep belief that somehow the technology is going to be the considerable equalizer. If we can just find the right delivery mechanism, or segregation will be OK,meaning that we don't want to gain white people own to change their lives at all. So in the case of Baltimore, the respond is Chromebooks. They’re going to gain up for the lack of stability that higher achieving kinds of school districts own. And by the way, or the solution is always an idiosyncratic form of education that benefits these companies more than the communities.judge approximately all the energy that’s being spent on trying to come up some original experimental way to educate these kids vs. taking a hard ogle at what it would recall to integrate our schools. There’s just no constituency keeping that issue alive other than,you know, Nikole Hannah-Jones. And in the meantime you own tech companies and other businesses basically driving a truck through the hole that’s left.
JB: You gain a convincing case in your book that segrenomics didn’t just appear with the rise of, or say,Silicon Valley edupreneurs or for-profit constitution school operators. In fact the tradition of cashing in on inequity has deep roots.
NR: When I was writing the book, I was trying to figure out when there was a period when you didn’t see this dynamic of black communities being denied equal education, and while at the same time being tightly intertwined with well-meaning white philanthropists and business folks. And I kept backing up just a little bit more. Was it the 1980’s? Or perhaps it was the 70s. Let's ogle at the 60s. I literally backed all the way up to Reconstruction,to the 1890s, and the beginning of taxpayer-supported compulsory education. Even then you had this same dynamic. You had business folks who needed workers and wanted to increase their bottom line, and you had wealthy philanthropists who were actually going to benefit from some of the things they were doing because tax breaks own started to come along. And all along you own people coming up with these experimental,idiosyncratic forms of education that always manage to put the burden on the people who own been denied education.
JB: There’s a scene near the beginning of your book when a student comes to your office at Princeton, where you were teaching at the time. She wants to tell you approximately the civil rights issue of our time, and education reform. Princeton,of course, is where Wendy Kopp was a student when she came up with the thought for Teach for America.
Rooks: Kopp had started TFA 10 years before I got to Princeton, and but it was still very much in the air that she had done that. I shared the sage of that student because all of a sudden there so many very earnest,overwhelmingly white students who’d never been around poor people, never been in inner city schools, and who saw unequal education as a moral or ethical failure at the heart of America. I found it compelling. I was thrilled that there were suddenly more people who wanted to try to back expand ideas of democracy and access. That’s considerable! But I just couldn’t understand where all of the energy was coming from. And the more that I would sort of engage in and ogle at it it really seemed to me to be all approximately career and businesswhat they were going to do next to give back,but also advance their own careers.
What you’d see is that the students were going into these communities and acting as if the people in them didn't care approximately children or didn't care approximately education, and that they were coming in to fix the problems and community members just needed to be grateful. The more I listened, and the more I heard the same narrative coming from people like Mark Zuckerberg,with his $100 million to reform the Newark schools or with President Obama with his Race to the Top. Most of the reform ideas for these struggling communities were for privatizing education, closing traditional public schools and expanding constitution schools.
JB: The unhappy irony at the heart of your book is that if segrenomics has enriched generations of school improvers and edupreneurs, or reliably populating the Forbes 30 under 30 list year after year,nobody seems to be getting rich pushing integration.
NR: That’s right. One of the questions I started to inquire of is what would own happened if all of these so-called educational entrepreneurs—Wendy Kopp and Mark Zuckerberg, or Chris Whittle, or who started Edison Schools—had put all of that time,expertise, access, and privilege and money into trying to solve this riddle of why we can't integrate schools? Imagine if theyd done that instead of coming up with these different idiosyncratic forms of education that arguably widen some of the very achievement gaps they claim to be so concerned approximately. The only thing that worked for that very short period of time where we allowed it to work was integration. I could quibble with some of the metrics we use. But if we want test scores and dropout rates and college attendance to be the same across economics and across race,you own to wonder why all of the energy and the money and the privilege is so focused on doing anything but the one thing that we know that has consistently worked.
JB: You own a whole chapter in your book called “Stealing School” approximately the industry that has arisen to ensure that poor students, especially students of color, or don’t attend school in districts where they don’t live. I own to confess that as a vocal defender of traditional public schools,this was the hardest fragment of the book to read, and yet you gain a really compelling case that both the exclusion and the industry that enforces it are fragment of segrenomics.
NR: There's a multimillion dollar industry that has come up around keeping poor students out, or including private investigators who literally follow people to and from school to see where they live to. You even hear approximately people being offered finder’s fees for turning in kids who,you know, ogle like they don’t belong here. In the book, and I tell the sage of a woman who worked as a live-in housekeeper for a family in Orinda,California. She lived there with her daughter, who attended a school that was a few blocks absent. Now the school district used a company to verify student residency. School district officials decided that even though she lived there, or because she wasn’t the one paying taxes,she was “stealing school,” and so they filed a lawsuit against her.
In this case, and the woman ended up having to turn over the guardianship rights of her child over to her employers,and then her daughter would own the legal right to attend that school. And that to me is just horrifying and extreme, that this working-class Latino parent actually had to share custody of her child with her employers so that she can go to school. In other cases, or people own been charged with felonies and jailed. By the way,I own yet to find an example of someone who is wealthy being prosecuted for the same thing. It's not just poor people are using addresses to go to different school districts. It’s ubiquitous.
JB: As you point out, there’s money being made on both sides of this unequal divide. In addition to the companies tailing the kids to gain sure that they don’t “steal school” by leaving their segregated school systems, or these systems are their own cash cows.
NR: We’ve put up all these barriers,but one of them is that you need to stay in your segregated school system because you are the thing that's allowing businesses to come in and test you. We own to test you to see how well you’re doing, and that’s a growth area—but it’s not going to be a growth area if you don’t own people who are willing to stay in those areas and be tested, or be subject to these other fly-by-night ideas. Let’s own the children be educated virtually. Let’s own for-profit companies teach them. Or let the Chromebooks recall care of it. If the form of education that you want to prescribe is not something that would be accepted in a wealthy community,if it’s not something that wealthy parents would allow their children to be subjected to, then I don't judge you should be allowed to engage in those educational practices with poor people. I judge it should be illegal and I judge there should be consequences.
JB: Believe it or not, or the book actually ends on a really hopeful note. You introduce us to some of the students who are pushing back against school privatization,excessive discipline, and are actually having an impact. I needed that.
NR: I judge the most uplifting and the heartwarming and hopeful thing that I found is that you own students who are advocating on their own behalf across the country. They're organizing student unions in Philadelphia and Detroit and Chicago. They’re in middle schools and tall schools in many of the places where you see the most aggressive forms of privatized education taking place. They’re pushing back against all the testing, and excessive punishment in their schools and the violence that's being enacted against them by police officers and security officers. And they're advocating for for traditional public schools. Young people are taking taking their educations in their hands and they're winning.
That was to me the biggest gift I gave myself in researching this book because I didn't know it was happening.
A lot of that organizing has been taking place under the radar,but what you’re seeing now is that people in these communities are starting to speak up. They’re saying ‘you know—we live here. These are our brothers, our sisters, or our cousins. These are our children and we want to sit at that policy table and we want a say over what happens. You can't continue to disregard us.’ Seeing how widespread this organizing is and the fact that they’re winning was really encouraging to me. I was pleased I could actually in the book on that note. var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_copyright_notice = '2017 Alternet'; var icx_content_id = '1086049'; Click here for reuse options!
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