FEBRUARY DISCUSSION FORUM: Empowerment and the Failure of Progressive Education

[Note: this summarizes and extends on an argument made in this forthcoming article and in a book I am currently revising. Related discussions can be found at educationaction.org]

Perhaps to most, probably to many, the conclusions which have been stated as to the conditions upon which depends the emergence of the Public from its eclipse will seem close to the denial of realizing the idea of a democratic public.

--John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

Fights for decent housing, economic security, health programs, and for many of these other social issues for which liberals profess their sympathy and support, are to the liberals simply intellectual affinities. . . . [I]t is not their children who are sick; it is not they who are working with the specter of unemployment hanging over their heads.

--Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

The field of education is often a decade or more behind intellectual developments in other fields. It is perhaps for this reason that the full impact of revisionist histories of progressivism (e.g., Fink, McGerr, Rauchway, Sinyai, Southern, Stromquist) has yet to emerge in our writings. It is important to understand, however, that the cumulative impact of this new work represents a fundamental challenge to the proponents of progressive democratic education. What these books show is the extent to which the progressives were trapped within the horizon of their own privileged experience. Collectively, with more or less sophistication, they developed a vision of a democratic society that expressed the utopian hopes of middle-class professional work-sites, families, intellectual dialogues, and social gatherings. Few had any significant experience with the less privileged. And even those who did, like Jane Addams, held tight to a vision of a democratic society where everyone would be able to collaborate intelligently and caringly with each other, where stark facts of unequal POWER would cease to rule.

From the perspective of turn-of-the 20^th Century progressives, those with less privilege and education appeared much like children, to be taken care of until they grew into full citizenship by internalizing the advanced practices of democratic engagement that grounded the dreams of privileged reformers (so did the upper class, but they had less influence there). On this point, thinkers as divergent as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey were essentially in agreement, even if Dewey had much more hope and respect for the less educated. Everyone had much to learn, but the ignorance and practical limitations of the lower classes in terms of their capacity for true democratic participation was a if not the crucial impediment to true democracy.

The progressives did accomplish much that was significant for the impoverished in America. But the key word is FOR. It is difficult to point to any significant accomplishments in actually empowering people who looked and spoke and acted differently than them.

Progressive educators today are the inheritors of the progressivism of yesterday. The focus of progressive education research is on making our classrooms places for holistic learning and collaborative engagement. And these are quite wonderful goals. But they have little or nothing to do with empowerment. The fact is that skills for collaborating with equals are only useful when one is working with equals.

(The progressive dream of our society as a room full of people from different places and experiences that all learn to work together and benefit from their unique capacities is increasingly proving to be just that: a dream. To his own chagrin, Robert Putnam of “Bowling Alone” fame found that relational “social capital” is built most effectively in places where people are similar, not where they are different—he sat on this data for quite a while to see if he could figure out how to interpret it differently, and he couldn’t. Research on power inequalities in classrooms indicates that one achieves some equality of participation not when you treat the less powerful like unique individuals but instead when you “empower” them as representatives of particular groups.)

The heroes education scholars look to are people who think and act like we do. We have generally failed to be self-critical enough to ask why we find particular approaches to democracy and inequality compelling. We look to Dewey, but almost completely avoid what Gramsci would call the “organic intellectuals” of labor movement and the field of community organizing.

The Civil Rights Movement is a perfect example. The collaborative, non-hierarchical visions of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the similar vision of Myles Horton and the Highlander School are often held up as shining examples of democratic empowerment. Almost always obscured is the fact that the leaders of these groups represented the educated elite, mostly from the North. Further ignored is the fact that SNCC fell apart when indigenous working-class members began to assert themselves and their distinct cultural model of empowerment. It is at least arguable that many of the most effective actions of the Movement in the South emerged more out of these indigenous practices than from Baker and Robert Moses’s SNCC or Horton’s Highlander (see Hill).

Of course SNCC and Highlander were critically important. And Dewey was no ignoramus. Instead the key point is that these progressive visions are most useful as supplements to practices of collective empowerment that have been developed in contexts of inequality. Ironically, there is no real way to understand the real usefulness of these progressive visions until we can honestly bring them together with working-class and other models of empowerment on some level of equality. Each side, I believe (and there are more than two sides, here) has the potential to inform the other. But we can’t do this if we know little or nothing about the alternatives to progressivism that progressivism might inform.

Empowerment for those on the bottom is a collective and not an individual accomplishment. The problem is not a lack of knowledge. Even the most profound critical examination of oppressive social forces is not of much use if you don’t know what to do about what you have learned. (In fact, knowledge of this kind, by itself, is often quite disempowering.)

There is a paradox, here, of course. On the one hand we need to be more respectful to indigenous practices and ways of seeing. We need to seek out and value “organic intellectuals” who reflect the best and most effective practices of these communities. On the other hand, there is much too little happening to contest oppression and inequality in America. There are, in fact, skills that people in oppressed contexts need to learn if they are even going to begin to resist.

The problem with progressives was not that they wanted to teach people who needed to learn. The problem was that they tried to make “others” into mini-versions of themselves.

In the end, I think one useful criteria would be: what is the minimum that people need to learn for them to become empowered? What is the smallest intervention in someone else’s culture that we can make that will actually be effective? I am not under the illusion that these are easy questions to answer.

We know this, at least:

Many of our children grow up in cages; lie in bathtubs at night in fear of stray bullets; curl themselves into fetal balls from the gut-wrenching terror of post traumatic stress disorder; steel themselves from the pain of rotting teeth, wake coughing at night from treatable asthma; and tolerate school as long as they can with the full knowledge that it won’t do much for them just as it didn’t for their parents and neighbors.

These kids are not hopeless victims. They are often quite sophisticated in their analyses of their own conditions. But in most cases they also don’t really know what to do to change the futures they can see so clearly ahead of them.

So, a call to action:

1) Middle-class, professional education scholars should take some time to consider the possibility that we find progressive visions of education compelling because of who we culturally are as much as because of some inherent relevance in these theories and practices themselves. (Note: I include most scholars from working-class backgrounds in this broad call—success in any cultural milieu requires people to take on the characteristics valued there. Counter-intuitively, it may in fact be true that resisting middle-class ways of thinking is easier, in a pragmatic sense, for those of us who are the most thoroughly initiated into this culture in the first place. No one will ever accuse people like myself of not being able to play the academic game.)

2) Every once in a while, all of us should reflect on the fact that, regardless of how pissed off we are that we didn’t get much of a raise this year, we are some of the most privileged people ever to walk on this planet. In what ways does this privilege affect our work on a daily basis?

3) We should acknowledge that schools are usually places where less privileged parents feel unsafe and judged. Schools are not likely places for scholars, teachers, and working-class people to meet on any level of equality.

4) Education scholars whose work is not relevant to student and community empowerment should stop for a moment and justify to themselves why they have chosen the topics and focus they have. (You don’t need to justify this to someone else, just to yourself). Repeat as necessary.

5) Courses on the history and philosophy and sociology of education, at the least, should include works from the world of community and union organizing that reflect visions of education linked directly to collective empowerment from the perspective of impoverished and working-class people.

6) Graduate students should be encouraged to look beyond traditional visions of “learning” and “democratic education” to explore practices of empowerment focused on collective action. Ask them: “Who will this help and how?” “Maybe this will help kids do math better, but will that fact really help them much in their lives?” “Is education about ‘learning’ or about life success? And if it isn’t about life success, then why bother?” (Of course, it is possible to use mathematics education in empowering ways (see Moses). Again, in the end they need to justify it to themselves, not to established scholars, although established scholars may need to choose who they have the time to work with).

7) Scholars at top universities should explore innovative ways to find people who may not have great GRE scores but may have the experience and inner fortitude to produce unique and powerful work that can shift the field.

8) We should ditch the term “social justice.” Social justice is a goal, not a practice. You don’t teach social justice, you teach practices that will help you achieve social justice. Focusing on social justice often allows scholars to spin wonderful utopian visions of a beautiful world without thinking concretely about how it will be achieved.

9) The field of education as a whole should support a range of creative efforts that explore how more effective practices of student empowerment might be initiated in traditional public schools given the severe limitations such efforts will inevitably face. These efforts might include ways of concealing the teaching of practices of leadership and collective action within efforts that at least seem non-threatening to the powerful.

10) Scholars working in alternative education settings that can allow more radical efforts should explore ways for engaging students more directly in social action projects in ways that might educate them about how to resist power and oppression. (The fact is, students should be required in every school to master practices of community empowerment just as they are required to master mathematics).

11) Schools of education should find a way to integrate efforts to foster community empowerment into their offerings. Most important would be the development of new or adapted programs that ensure long-term student enrollment in these areas. Only when there is student enrollment that requires the hiring of professors with expertise in community organizing and engagement can we hope to escape the limitations of “faddism,” especially given the increasing economic pressures faced by most universities. This would require a fundamental rethinking of the “charge” of schools of education. It would involve a willingness to embrace challenges of “education” that emerge in the community and not just in schools. And it would necessarily include the acknowledgement that significant and durable school reform is unlikely to happen in impoverished areas unless these communities are empowered to demand, supervise, evaluate, and maintain these innovations.

12) Scholars interested in these issues in schools of education should join together with scholars in other fields with similar interests to form collaborative teams to share knowledge and develop multidisciplinary projects. (Other key areas would include: social work, public health, sociology, urban studies, communications, etc. I’m currently part of a team developing a Ph.D. in Public Health at my university, and the group has agreed—so far—to focus on knowledge of community empowerment as a key goal.)

Read more →

Online Community Organizing Course: Publicly Available (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

This semester I have been teaching an online course: “Organizing for Social Action in Urban Communities.” I have posted the draft lectures for the entire course here, under a Creative Commons license, so that readers are free to use them they wish.

As I note in the “Overview”:

The course is NOT intended to teach students how to be a community organizer. They don't learn how to work with the media, or run a house meeting, nor other practical skills like that. Instead the course is designed to help students learn how to THINK like an organizer.

The actual lectures represent a first draft effort to figure out how to teach "community organizing" to students for whom this is really an alien perspective. The overall structure of the course has evolved in more than five years of teaching in a face-to-face format.

My only request is that if people do read and use this material they send me comments about their impressions and experiences. You are free to post comments to this announcement post. The course is a work in progress, and I will be updating it periodically with newer drafts.

Read more →

4 Million Dollars and 24 New School Nurses: Beyond Pedagogy to Collective Power (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

To read the entire series, go here.

WINNING CONCESSIONS

Last week, in the just-passed Wisconsin State budget, a couple of lines give four million dollars (in new state and federal money) to the Milwaukee Public Schools for 24 school nurses.

Sometimes it’s hard to trace the influences behind policy changes. But in this case, I know for certain that these lines in the budget are a direct result of the work done by myself and a small number of leaders in Milwaukee’s MOVE congregational organizing group. It is because of MOVE and our work that thousands of the poorest students in Milwaukee will have health services that they did not have before.

BE LIKE ME?

Most of us spend a lot of time working with teachers, or writing articles. Few of us spend any time working to generate power to contest the forces that prevent our ideas and pedagogical advice from leading to significant change.

Some have misread or misheard me as arguing that everyone should do what “I” do, and that anything else is worthless. This isn’t my argument at all. Many of us do very important work, and I’m working, myself, on a book about Dewey and democratic theory. So I’d be a hypocrite if I said everyone should put their pens down and get out of schools and join organizing groups.

The problem is not that everyone needs to change. People have different skills and gifts. Teachers need to learn to teach, and we still need to think about how to teach better.

THE NEED TO CHANGE DIRECTION

The problem is that work on schools is almost ALL we do, and it is NOT ENOUGH. Our focus has remained so narrowly on teacher education that we constantly ignore the fact that pedagogical and administrative skills aren’t really the core problems facing inner-city children.

What have we really done to change the reality of inner-city public schools and, more importantly, the success of students coming out of these schools in the last four decades or so? Maybe we’ve kept things from getting worse. Have we made things better on any broad scale? The honest answer would have to be: NO.

For the vast majority of children in inner-city schools, WE HAVE FAILED. I’m not sure how anyone could honestly argue anything else.

Furthermore, in an article I published a couple of years ago, I showed that the field has developed NO effective models for bringing inner-city schools into any significant authentic interaction with impoverished communities. Except in relatively rare (and always tenuous) circumstances, the institution of schooling in America lacks any significant capacity for healthy community engagement. In other words, a focus on schooling as our only task inherently rules out any real collaboration with communities.

Baldly stated, however, without empowered communities, we will not be able to change schools.

Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

ORGANIZING AS ONE OPTION

Community organizing is one of a number of different strategies for generating community power and consensus in impoverished areas that are increasingly oppressed in America. Elsewhere I have discussed some of these other approaches, but organizing is the one I am most familiar with. So when I talk incessantly about organizing it’s not because it’s the only answer, but because it’s an effective answer that I know something about.

Community organizing is not about winning on individual issues. It is about generating durable POWER for communities that currently lack power.

Winning these 24 new school nurses for MPS schools represents the most significant effect my work has ever had on actual students in schools. Yet this specific win, by itself, is not the goal. The point is that we were able to get the State and the district to pay attention to MOVE. Success in one arena, in the ideal, builds a reputation for effectiveness that can support other efforts in the future. For example, we are moving forward to look at dental services in impoverished urban schools in Wisconsin. I am able to sit at tables with other stakeholders and work together on a campaign to improve dental services not because I am a professor or because I know much about teeth (I don’t) but because I am a representative of MOVE.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

Schools of education as institutions should start making community empowerment a part of their core charge, institutionally. It’s not enough for a few individual professors to do this on their own time.

There are all kinds of worries about what can happen when academics get involved in community activities. But the fact is that there is desperate need for more resources of all kinds in impoverished communities if they are going to gain any significant power at all to resist and act. At the least, scholars bring with them the capacity to read scholarship. As Oakes and Rogers and others have shown, this can be an extremely important contribution to community efforts. And there are other ways to participate.

But in the long term, to be helpful without being harmful, we need to bring real expertise about community engagement and action into our faculties—either by gaining that experience ourselves, or hiring people who have it.

And we need to get beyond our focus—our obsession—with teacher and administrator education as sufficient, in itself, as a path towards long-term improvement in the future life success of inner-city kids.

To be honest, I don’t think any of this will really happen on any significant scale.

It is possible, however, that the field of foundations—because of its interdisciplinary nature, its amorphous focus, and its concern with equity more broadly—may be one of the most promising places for change. In fact, as Dan Butin and I argued at AESA, community engagement as a scholarly arena and as a source of enrollment might actually provide one avenue for saving foundations in American education. But that’s for another post.

[P.S.: If we don’t learn more about how POWER works, and about how to influence the powerful, we can’t hope for much impact in the policy arena (NCLB?) either.]

Read more →

One On One Interviews: Intentional Relationship Building for Organizing (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

Here is another of my introductory lectures to organizing. I just wrote this one this week, so it is very much a first draft (more, even, than most of the lectures). Click here for the text of the complete lecture and here or the complete series.

Community organizing groups are made up of relationships between individuals. Of course, this is not all that holds them together. Long-term groups depend on a loyalty to the organization and its historical relationship to the community. And, as we will discuss later on, the specific issues that a group works on can draw in commitment. But at the base level, at its best, a community organizing group is made up of relationships between individuals.

[I want to emphasize that I’m speaking of the ideal of this model of organizing, here. The fact is that the one-on-one process described below is very time intensive, and in my experience not enough leaders (like myself) really take the time to do them in the numbers recommended by the model. This, of course, raises questions about how effective this model is, since if people don’t actually “do” the one-on-ones, then they aren’t working. But the argument is that stronger organizing groups do. So let’s assume people do complete them, for now.]

“Community” is not something that is given in particular neighborhoods or cities. In the inner-city today, for example, people often do not know their neighbors and may actually fear some of the people who live or congregate on their blocks. Mobility in these neighborhoods is high, often for financial reasons, so it is harder for a coherent sense of geographic identity. And even when people do know each other, studies indicate that in poor communities relational ties generally don’t cross social class lines. In other words, poor people know other poor people, and more well-off people know those with economic situations more like their own.

Angela Davis argues that:

it is extremely important not to assume that there are “communities of color” out there fully formed, conscious of themselves, just waiting for vanguard organizers to mobilize them into action. . . . [W]e have to think about organizing as producing the communities, as generating community, as building communities of struggle. (cited in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, p. 161)

As we have noted, in Alinsky’s day there were many local formal and informal organizations that might be seen as reflecting aspects of a local community. Today, this is less true, not only in poor areas but in suburbs full of relatively isolated families as well. As Robert Putnam, among other scholars, has pointed out, the problem is not that people today don’t belong to any organizations at all, or that they don’t volunteer to help others. Instead, what have been lost are collections of people who see themselves as an ongoing, relatively permanent “we” that can act as collectives. Volunteering with Habitat for Humanity or at a local school, participating in a 12-step group for some addiction, etc., don’t necessarily produce the kinds of collectives that organizers are looking for. Again, churches represent one of the few exceptions to this trend.

However, as our reading on gender and organizing pointed out, these older organizations often functioned in a fairly hierarchical and patriarchal manner. While Alinsky might have found what he felt were authentic “native leaders,” the groups these leaders led were often less than participatory in their internal functioning. And even when they were more participatory, members may not have really known each other that well outside of their common participation.

Both of these issues can be as true today of the churches that many organizers work with. Organizers often find that churches fail to recognize the vital functions played by people who are not central leaders. And even though people may recognize each other at church, the fact is that most members probably don’t really know much about the people who sit around them in the pews (or on cushions, or whatever their tradition is).

As our last reading on more recent approaches to congregational organizing noted, today’s organizers don’t simply draw from churches as sources of “people.” They actually try to intervene in them. They try to get pastors, who seem sometimes to treat their parishioners like children, to think more about how they might play a more “empowering” role. They even make theological arguments, trying to convince those who think religion shouldn’t get involved in “dirty” reality that Jesus and Mohammed and others wanted their followers to care for this world, that they should care about their “works” as much as their praying. They try to help religious people understand that many of the key figures of their scriptures (like John, Abraham, etc.) acted very much like organizers. I remember, for example, a tense moment at an organizing training I attended where the facilitator directly challenged a Catholic priest about whether he was really willing to let go of some of his control over his “flock.”

We are not here to argue about whether they are right or wrong about religion. The important thing is to understand how organizers generally think, although I am, of course, open to any questions you might have. There are many religious traditions and cultures that find it difficult or impossible to embody this kind of attitude. In the end, you will need to decide what you will take away with you from our course, what you find convincing and what you don’t, what fits with whatever religious tradition you might hold dear. But even if you don’t “buy” key aspects of this argument, there may be aspects that you find illuminating or that you can appropriate in creative ways to serve your own beliefs and needs. Again, I won’t judge your responses by whether they are “right” or “wrong” in their opinions, although I will be examining whether you understand the perspective we are studying in this class.

One of the key ways organizers try to intervene in and “improve” the associations they recruit into their organizing groups is through the process of one-on-ones.

What Are One-One-Ones?

A one-on one interview is a “public” but “personal” interview with another individual.

The interview is personal in the sense that it often gets into quite intimate stories about someone’s life. Of course, it is always up to the person being interviewed what they are willing to share. But the fact is that people in our society are rarely asked such personal questions by someone who is actually interested in the answers. We seldom are asked to share our stories, and people are often quite willing to do so.

The interview is “public” according to the definition we discussed a few weeks ago in that your goal is not to generate an intimate friendship (although this may also be an eventual result). Instead, your aim is quite pragmatic and instrumental. You are trying to link this person in to a larger group, giving them and the organization more power to make the kinds of changes they would very much like to see in society. You want a “public” not a “private” relationship with this person.

Partly in order to help the people you interview to understand the “public” rather than “private” nature of these interviews, that you are not approaching them to become their “friend,” one-on-one’s are generally set up in a relatively formal manner. You don’t usually just start chatting with someone without warning. Instead, you ask someone to meet you in a particular place at a particular time so that you can talk with them, get to know them, and help them understand your organization. This formality is important because it sets the stage for what is going on. From the beginning the person knows that you are approaching them in the role of a leader or organizer and not as a private individual who just wants to chat. You approach a person in your role as organization member and are trying to recruit them as well

One-on-one interviews have three key goals:

1. To develop a “relationship” with an individual that you can draw upon later.
2. To discover a person’s “passion,” which will help you hook this person into particular issues they may be “self-interested” in working on.
3. To ask this person to do something specific for your organization or group.

This is traditionally the list of aims, but there is actually a fourth goal:

(4.) You want to evaluate whether this person is worth the “trouble” of recruiting and drawing in to your organization. Is this someone who seems reliable? (Is this someone who is likely to be disruptive in meetings or can they disagree and engage without throwing a wrench into the entire process?) Are they passionate about anything enough to keep them engaged over the long-term? Remember that “public” relationships are, in the ideal, driven by self-interest, the need for “respect,” and a willingness to hold others accountable and to be held accountable oneself. A person may be perfectly useful as a participant to call into a mass action, but not someone you want as a leader.

Be careful about making such decisions too quickly, however. It is really impossible to know for certain how someone will act in an organization unless one has worked with this person. Further, characteristics like race and gender can bias our perspectives without us even knowing this. And we have already noted how our society tends to disparage the “leadership” activities of people who work more in the background instead of out front like a familiar patriarchal leader. Sometimes the people who look great turn out to be “terrible,” and the people who look terrible turn out to be great (although often in ways you may not have predicted before).

To read the rest, click here for an MS Word document.

Read more →

Buying Off the Fighters (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

[To read the entire series, go here.]

After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

--New York Times, September 17, 2007

An interesting article in today’s New York Times reports on an effort in Tuscaloosa to resegregate their public schools. As is regularly the case in America, today, this resegregation is being framed as an effort to create “neighborhood” schools. The same thing has been happening here in Milwaukee, for example. Of course, it just happens that “neighborhoods” in American cities are extremely segregated. So “neighborhood schools” are really a code-phrase for resegregation.

I don’t have any more information about this case than is provided in the Times article. But the article seems (probably unintentionally) to tell a fairly classic story about the catch-22s involved in empowering individuals instead of entire communities.

The article notes that black parents have been “battling the rezoning for weeks.” However, one of the key tools concerned parents are using is the provision in the NCLB law that allows students to transfer out of poor performing schools. As the article notes:

Parents looking for recourse turned to the No Child Left Behind law. Its testing requirements have enabled parents to distinguish good schools from bad. And other provisions give students stuck in troubled schools the right to transfer. In a protest at an elementary school after school opened last month, about 60 black relatives and supporters of rezoned children repeatedly cited the law. Much of the raucous meeting was broadcast live by a black-run radio station.

While “some black parents wrote to the Alabama superintendent of education” to argue “that the rezoning violated the federal law,” the superintendent noted “that Tuscaloosa was offering students who were moved to low-performing schools the right to transfer into better schools. That, he said, had kept it within the law.” Let’s assume that the superintendent is accurate in his understanding of the law for the moment (commenters are free to correct me).

In essence, what the whites in charge of Tuscaloosa schools may have done is turn some public schools into “open” schools for white children and inso “magnet” schools for children of color—especially poor children of color who, as usual, seem to have been especially targeted for exclusion. (In Milwaukee school leaders were more explicit about their intentions, seeking to create “neighborhood” specialty schools in white areas that students outside the neighborhood had to apply to get into.) As Kozol, among many others has noted, magnet schools are generally created in poor districts to keep middle-class professionals, often white, parents from leaving the district or sending their kids to private schools. By creating bureaucratic hurdles for admission, regardless of whether there are any real academic or other evidentiary requirements for admission, they keep parents with less savvy and social capital out.

In the Tuscaloosa case, even if the district simply allows every student whose parent jumps the hurdles they place in their way back in, the plan is likely to accomplish the resegregation (that they, of course, deny seeking) in the first place. In general, the students transferring back will be those with parents with the self-assurance to engage with the system and demand a transfer, parents likely to be less-poor than their neighbors, and more likely to be able to effectively support their children’s education. From a social class standpoint, in general these are probably not the families that white parents, administrators, and politicians most wanted to get out of their schools in the first place. Regardless of their skin color, or how contentious these parents may be, likely “they” are probably more like “us” than those “other” blacks and latinos.

In any case, the number of returning students is certain to be much smaller than the number excluded in the first place. The district reports in the article that they have “only” moved 880 students. Even if this is the truth, which I doubt (in my experience, there are many ways to play with these numbers), only 170 students apparently have requested transfers back in. So, at “worst,” only about 20% of those they wanted to get rid of are coming back. And in the future these numbers will probably fall as the controversy inevitably dies down. (I think NCLB also allows schools to refuse transfer if they are “full”, further ensuring that “too many” students can’t come back).

Finally, and most importantly from my perspective, those requesting transfers are likely to be students with the “squeaky wheel” parents. This is important because if you exclude a large number of poor students of color from particular schools and then let back in those students whose parents have the gumption to fight, you are essentially “buying off” those who are most likely to lead rebellion against the resegregation plan. This approach may allow you to resegregate while eliminating from the opposition those with the most leadership capacity, while probably also splitting the opposing black community along class lines.

While some parents with transferred kids will probably still fight against the problem of resegregation more generally, this approach may successfully prevent the emergence of the critical mass of strong leaders necessary to fight the plan over the long term.

Assuming the article is giving the correct impression about what is going on in Tuscaloosa, it would be interesting to see if what I am surmising actually takes place. It’s important to stress that I am not saying that we should necessarily eliminate escape hatches like this. Choices like these are often tragic. I’m only noting the potential consequences that they may produce.

Do some of the few apparently positive provisions of NCLB, actually end up making it easier for them to segregate the schools than if these provisions didn’t exist in the first place?

Read more →