Bruce Dixon: When Reforming Education Means Destroying Communities

On April 10, representatives of communities around the country will converge in D.C. to demand the firing of Arne Duncan and the reversal of the Obama administration's policies on public education. There is an unbroken line of bipartisan continuity, grassroots activists for public education say, between the education policies of Republican George Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. Even before Bush Secretary of Education Rod Paige declared teachers unions to be "terrorists," organized educators were targets in the crusade for corporate-friendly school reform.

Activists claim that the Obama administration's current "Race To The Top" awards federal education dollars to states based largely on how many public schools they disband and privatize, and how many public school teachers they fire. This wholesale dismantlement of public education and the scattering of public school workforces will have profound consequences well beyond education for inner city communities.

Most urban public school teachers actually live in and near the communities where they teach.  The majority are women, often minority women, who have struggled for years to attain advanced degrees and additional certifications.  They take part in frequent high-level instruction to hone and enhance their skills.  Even when they are not the heads of their households, they are pillars of their own families and communities, the most active members in local churches and neighborhood civic organizations of all kinds. They are well-paid enough to make mortgage payments and send their own children to college.

What happens to inner-city communities when hundreds of thousands of highly educated, superbly qualified community residents, mostly women, lose their retirement and medical benefits, find their pay cut in half, or lose their jobs altogether?  Many, in their forties and fifties won't find new employment easily or at all, and those that do will be paid less, often much less.  

Some won't be able to pay those mortgages any more. Those that find new jobs will have to travel far afield, where their distant employment won't contribute to the building of social capital that enriched the lives of their communities as their former work as public school teachers once did.  Commuting to distant jobs will mean less free time to take part in the activities of churches and local organizations that constitute the social fabric and civic life of neighborhoods.  "Every ten minutes of commuting," according to sociologist Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, "reduces all forms of social capital by 10 percent."

The current wave of what's called "school reform" is replacing these well-paid and experienced teachers, again overwhelmingly women and minorities, with a younger, whiter, less well-paid workforce with few ties to the communities where schools are located.  In Chicago hundreds of former teachers have short notice, firing all their teachers and handing their facilities over to favored private operators.  It was a policy that went national with the election of Chicagoan Barack Obama to the White House.

Why Target Teachers and Their Communities?

From the viewpoint of school privatizers, targeting teachers makes good sense.  Public payrolls, along with medical and retirement benefits are a big part of public school budgets.  If those wages can't be cut, and those benefits avoided, there will be no profit for private charter school operators and contractors.  And let's face it, no private employer wants a large force of well-paid workers in possession of the institutional knowledge to run the place without him, and intimately connected with the local citizenry who have some claim of authority over the enterprise because it operates with public funds.  

For inner-city communities with child poverty and unemployment already at levels not seen since the Great Depression, this is the worst possible news.  There have always been poor neighborhoods.
But economically disadvantaged communities in relatively egalitarian societies, recent scholarship indicates, don't suffer from the rates of child abuse and abandonment, crime, mental illness, drug abuse, and large scale imprisonment as communities of poor people in societies like the U.S., where the gulf between rich and poor is the largest in the industrialized world.  Lower wages, more unemployment, more poverty in unequal societies means more crime, more drug abuse, more mental illness -- more of every imaginable negative social indicator.

Firing tens or hundreds of thousands of inner-city teachers is bound to have dire long term consequences for the stability and viability of the communities where they used to work.

via huffingtonpost.com

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