schoolracetalk.org

By Mica Pollock

Our election keeps pivoting on a basic debate: are some Americans freeloading and “dependent” when “they” use subsidized “public” services? Or are public services a basic public investment in a collective future—in “us”?

In a now infamous private conversation taped by an unknown guest, Mitt Romney complained to wealthy donors that 47% of the country freeloads off the government and clarified that he “didn’t care” about “them” – the half of the country he was describing. Then Paul Ryan was heard accusing one third of the country of the stance of government dependence. But long before these famous percentage claims surfaced, we were seeing a divide in our two conventions and platforms between an economic philosophy arguing explicitly for public investment in a diverse American “we” -- and specifically, in children --- and one arguing explicitly for limiting such investment.

The literal language of “investment” in a diverse and specifically young American “we” pervaded the Democratic convention. Elizabeth Warren said bluntly that “I grew up in an America that invested in its kids.” Julian Castro argued explicitly that opportunity provision for all in America is not charity, but an investment in future prosperity; Deval Patrick said children are by definition our future innovators, so abandoning the fiscal responsibility to care for them is dumping our future down the tubes. And President Obama made the explicit case for opportunity in education and other public services as investment in an American collective “we,” with posters afterwards trumpeting “we leave no one behind, we pull each other up.” Even as Obama’s education work has often called far too reductively for more investment essentially only in schools with higher test scores, the Democratic platform discusses education in a section focused on economic investment, called “rebuilding Middle-Class Security” (http://www.democrats.org/democratic-national-platform), and in the debates, Obama repeated the logic of education investment.

In contrast, the Republican platform includes explicit statements of a position that public investment in education in today’s America equals overspending, like, “enormous amounts of money are being spent for K-12 public education with overall results that do not justify that spending” and the notably anti-“universal” “We support keeping federal funds from being used in mandatory or universal mental health, psychiatric, or socio- emotional screening programs.” (http://whitehouse12.com/republican-party-platform/) According to many analysts, Ryan’s and Romney’s economic program would gut programs that invest in the “public’s” children (http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/race/report/2012/08/16/1196...): Head Start, community health centers, Pell grants, youth training programs, Medicaid (http://tinyurl.com/8ecm6wn), and, as Bill Clinton pointed out in the convention, even services for kids with disabilities. Romney has said that investing in teachers won’t grow the economy (http://tinyurl.com/927exvm).

Is investing, via public services, in the nation’s children and families (and in those children’s teachers) a down payment on prosperity or an unwarranted drain on national profit? I was struck long ago by a logic put forth by Elizabeth Warren: pretty much everything we use in American life has had some sort of public subsidization (http://tinyurl.com/3ewtzut). Romney’s own private ventures actually have benefited from public money – Bain-owned companies received taxpayer money, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-06/romney-critical-of-government-a..., and so did Romney’s Olympics (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/15/1110178/-Romney-s-Olympics), and even Romney’s dad benefited from welfare for a bit (http://tinyurl.com/d3hhjfh). Private companies benefit from public roads and public-schooled workers. So are my own kids dependent freeloaders for going to a public school, reading at a public library, eating food bought by a mom teaching at a public university, driving to that school on publicly paved roads, and dropping recycling in our public garbage? Or are they simply utilizing services designed for a collective “us”?

The wealthier you are, the more you might feel isolated from human interaction with the public, and the public’s children; after the “47%” line, conservative columnist David Brooks wrote in the New York Times (http://tinyurl.com/9neg6kd) that Romney seemed out of touch with the reality of pervasive public subsidy, almost as if from a castle protected by barbed wire by lower-class marauders. But for the diverse actual America, public roads move our cars, and public services take away our garbage – and public schools care for our children. In its origin, such public effort is actually about caring for children pragmatically and selfishly: the future health of the country, reformers started to realize, relied on the education of more of its youth. Still today, like the health of the person next to me on the bus or the prices of others’ homes, the success of my children’s classmates affects me. So, public investment actually is collective self-interest: public investment literally gets our cars from A to Z and makes our shared streets cleaner. “Public health” means stopping diseases before they infect us all. And by extension, public schools educate our children because our collective future depends on young people deploying their talents. And if “we” are the nation, publicly funded education isn’t charity, right? It’s an investment in the future of “us.”

But here’s the point: this logic only works if you consider the young “we” getting public investment, “us.”

I trend toward optimism, but watching the Republican convention, I had been depressed by its vast whiteness – almost like the photos of Jim Crow America I grew up looking at in the encyclopedia. Delegates aren’t just window dressing; they represent the constituency a president will represent after the election. Romney has the highest percentage of white supporters of a GOP presidential candidate in recent history (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/10/18/mitt-romney-is...). Before, during and after the convention, I was ashamed by explicit comments about taking back “our country,” by public snickers on Romney’s trustworthy birth certificate, and by active voter regulations attempting to make it harder for poor people and people of color to vote (http://www.jackandjillpolitics.com/2012/09/voting-going-gone/). My jaw dropped during the Tampa convention when I heard Romney supporters foaming anonymous, old-school racism on Fox Nation comment strings calling Michelle Obama a “fried chicken”-eating “baboon” and a “whore” who should stop talking so the audience could get back to “the lettuce fields” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/05/1127817/-Fox-Nation-reacts-to-M...); when I read of convention-goers pelting a black CNN camerawoman with peanuts, calling her an “animal” (http://tinyurl.com/cyrbf52); and later, when I heard of Romney supporters hanging empty chairs and nooses in their yards (http://www.thenation.com/blog/170439/romney-backer-displays-chair-waterm...), wearing t-shirts saying “put the white back in the White House” (http://tinyurl.com/9r9ovxh), or saying blithely that they couldn’t “stand to look at” the President and his wife, who just didn’t act or “look” like a first Lady” (http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160293862/romney-courts-veterans-at-americ...). Why would such perspectives not extend to the children of those being hated, post election?

In comparison, the Charlotte convention didn’t just “include” everyone visually; people actively argued for three straight days that all Americans were worthy of inclusion in the “American dream” and in economic programs supporting kids and households. Throughout the Democratic convention, I was struck by the consistent explicit inclusiveness – the explicit anti-bigotry and the explicit statements of equal human value – displayed both visually and rhetorically in Charlotte. A recent article in the New York Times indicated that the word spoken most often by Obama and his inner circle to describe his philosophy is just that – “inclusive” (http://tinyurl.com/8uvu6rh). Obama said again in the last debate that investing in public education and in youth development supports the economy, period.

The word “inclusive” strikes my deepest instincts as well. Whenever I’ve written a book or article on race and education, editors have always circled the many occurrences of an American “we” in my writing and asked, “who’s ‘we’?” I’ve always felt that at heart, “we” were a national “we,” divided by all sorts of internal rifts but basically reliant in the future upon one another’s children. But if you live in a private road, private plane, private school, all-white sort of bubble, I guess, investing in the public, including in public schools, can feel like a gift to freeloaders – to “them.”

At stake here might be a basic definition of equal opportunity’s shelf life: remarks critiquing half the country for dependence imply that “the public” has used up its allowance and future generations simply don’t deserve any more. In their book The American Dream and the Public Schools, my former Harvard colleague Jennifer Hochschild and her coauthor Nathan Scovronick report that when asked to express their opinion on surveys today, Americans overwhelmingly agree abstractly on equal opportunity principles – “ninety percent” “agree that ‘our society should do what is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed’” (2003, 10) -- but disagree fundamentally on concrete ways of applying them. To those who can afford private education or, who don’t want their children schooled in public demographics, public schools may not still themselves be part of “what is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.” But the rest of us need public schools, and the argument for spending even less on schools, teachers, and children suggests simply that today’s kids aren’t a “we” worthy of further public investment – that they can and should somehow be educated on a gnawed bone.

When I went to elementary school in mostly-white Iowa in the 1970s and 1980s, we had an orchestra with publicly available instruments, and taking science wasn’t some sort of extra perk but a public good normalized in every classroom. Today, my kids’ school has to fundraise hard for art and science specialists, and that’s only possible because middle-class parents have the ability to scrape extra dollars from their own pockets; as a supporter of even more strapped public schools primarily serving low-income kids of color, I have to beg charitable donors for basic dollars simply to keep teachers around to support the next generation’s development. In California’s public schools, we now have to argue that kids deserve even the basic school year or afterschool programs -- or, public universities, period (http://www.salon.com/2012/10/02/california_educations_painful_decline/).

Is this because the children in today’s public schools are increasingly kids of color? I think in part, yes. But as Ta-Nehesi Coates noted recently (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/we-are-all-welfare-q...), a weird marker of improvement in race relations today is that white people too are getting dragged down in racism-fueled refusals to fund and support public services – including public education.

So in this election, we’re debating the borders of “us” and what “we” and our children deserve. When Romney argued against half the country (“them”) as “freeloaders” and in justifying his comments reiterated his desire to slash government programs, he also really raised the question of whether public investment in America’s multicolored children via publicly supported schools, libraries, hospitals, mental and physical health programs, and preschool is simply investment in the United States or, an unwarranted investment in “them.”

Four years ago, on November 5, 2008, I coincidentally gave a talk on my work about racial inequality in education on the morning after Barack Obama was elected President. In education, I argued then, “we” share a generic logic of opportunity but still often act as if some “types” of American children are simply smarter, more capable, or worthier of investment than others. I suggested that in education, the task of “everyday antiracism” today is to act proactively as if every child is “us” -- as if each child’s future contributions are as possible and necessary as one’s own child’s, and so, equally requiring investment.

Core to such equity work in education is activating a proactive logic of “we” and taking acts that invest in all young people’s talent development, actively treating boys/girls, locally born children/ immigrant children, well-off children/poor children, white children/children of color, and straight kids/gay kids as equally necessary investments. On each of these pairings, the Republican party stance treats the second group as less worthy of public dollars.

If you are a teacher in a diverse public school today, the only way to support children’s success is to act as if you believe in each child’s capacity to contribute to current and future prosperity, and to invest accordingly in each child’s talent development and human capacity-building. In supporting investment in each young person, we invest in our own future as well. More explicitly than in my own memory, it seems we are now being asked as a nation to choose who “we” is – to choose or reject a program of public investment in the diverse, young human beings who are actually the American public.

Mica Pollock is a professor of education, and the author of Everyday Antiracism (edited with 70 colleagues), Colormute, and Because of Race. This is her personal opinion, written on her own time.

Check out a very collective project's work at http://wiki.oneville.org!

You'll see ¡Aha! written throughout the website. It means a moment when we figured out something useful about improving communications in diverse educational communities.

All of us will continue to write and speak about what we each learned. I've written one article on some initial ideas, ¡Ahas! , and prior research that I've personally been thinking about in conversation with literally hundreds of people featured or mentioned on the website. It's coming out this fall in the journal Teachers College Record. It's attached by permission from the editor.

In spring 2011, my Everyday Antiracism class from Harvard's GSE went over to the Boston Science Museum to see the Race exhibit put on by the American Anthropological Association (to which I belong).

I spent half my time learning details about the history of the U.S. Census and the rest of my time at the section on health and race, because I've always found that discussions of disease stymie discussions about how race categories are biologically bogus (but structurally/historically, very real). What about sickle cell? people say. Tay-Sachs?

A good quote: "There is no genetic basis for race. The vast genetic diversity within each so-called race makes race unsuitable as a marker for genetics. A better substitute for genetics is ancestry or family history."

Stated otherwise: race categories aren't useful as containers for our genetic, biological diversity. They are too blobby, too big, and, too human-made.

"Ancestry" (where in the world your ancestors lived) is a much more precise, and valid, way of talking about your background and genetic propensity for diseases.

A good quote: "should race be used in medical research?" "Certain diseases are more common among people with a particular ancestry than among the general population. But racial categories are just too big and imprecise to indicate anything medically meaningful about a person's ancestry. In order to be truly pertinent, the data gathered in medical studies must track ancestry at the level of specific country or region."

E.g.s from the cards I read, of how race categories are too "big and imprecise" and country/region of origin works better to think about disease:

*Sickle cell is more prevalent in West Africa and Southern Europe, and the Middle East and South Asia, but not Southern Africa or Northern Europe.

*Northern Europeans are more at risk for cystic fibrosis than Southern Europeans, even while both are considered "white" on the US Census.

*Eastern Europeans are more at risk for Tay-Sachs than Western Europeans.

*"Asian" lumping overlooks more precise facts: e.g., Filipinos, Koreans, and Southeast Asians have higher risks of lung cancer than do other "Asians."

But, here's an example of lived structural inequality that plays out along "race" group lines: which groups are more likely to work for a type of employer who offers no health insurance. (e.g., Latinos).

Students in my last Everyday Antiracism class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Spring 2011) just created this collective "action plan" for schoolwide antiracist effort. It's a set of suggestions from educators, for educators.

By antiracist effort, we mean everyday acts by educators that counteract:

a. Inequality of opportunity, access, and outcome along lines of race/class/ethnicity/national origin/language;

b. False, harmful, and stereotypical ideas about “types of people.”
See what you think.

The phrase "school to prison pipeline" has surged in recent years, to describe how school discipline policies, law enforcement policies, and a context of mass incarceration intersect to "track" disproportionate numbers of young people -- young people of color, in particular -- into prisons.

But repeating the phrase doesn't accomplish much: we need concrete information about how this cycle works. When I worked at the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, I saw various concrete examples: in one school, Latino students wandering the halls were disproportionately referred to the local police department as likely gang members. That meant that a school discipline experience turned into an actual police record.

This interview by author Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is a useful resource for those exploring the "school to prison pipeline." One quote below:

http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michelle-alexander...

"The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they’re in silos. But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces." -Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Originally published in spring 2012

I am always seeking "gold nugget" quotes.

Here's one I found in John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed (1897)(http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm).

“To prepare [a student] for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities. . .”

It reminded me of a post-Civil War quote I often read to begin courses or workshops, as it's the most stirring definition I’ve ever heard of what education is supposed to be about.

In 1865, black delegates in Charleston, South Carolina petitioned the legislature for basic rights in the post-Emancipation South. In defiance of increasingly common "Black Codes" restricting black people's pursuit of opportunity, the delegates presented a list of human rights demands. For example, they demanded the right to assemble to discuss politics, to amass wealth, to farm and conduct trade, and so forth. And as Vincent Harding writes in his book There is a River (1981, p. 326), “To this, they added a summary human right not normally found in the public documents of the nation:

'the right to develop our whole being, by all the appliances that belong to a civilized society.' "

I find these quotes unusually inspiring descriptions of the purpose of education.

Originally published circa April 2012

When it comes to discussing issues of race and education, sometimes comedy raises issues more effectively than scholarship.

As a qualitative researcher, I also note how the Daily Show interviewer prompted the Tuscon board member to speak his own logic out loud:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/04/04/the-daily-show-ridicules-ban-on-me...

The actual situation in Tuscon is a painful one for many involved: Raza Studies have subsequently been banned from the Tuscon public schools, with youth and teachers in the courses disallowed even from having certain books:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/18/arizona-b...

Is the erasure of facts and narratives from the written record available to young people, education?

Deep educational questions are at stake here: who can add historical facts to the record young people are taught? And, when can educators safely create voluntary spaces where youth from a racialized/ethnic group can engage potentially shared experiences? Patricia Gandara has a useful piece on the latter issue in our book Everyday Antiracism.

Originally posted March 30, 2012

I just glimpsed the picture of Trayvon Martin that made me saddest, on a neighbor’s magazine page on a plane. It was the picture of him as a child in a white “graduation from elementary school” cap and gown. A child, anticipating a future of contribution.

A few years after this picture was taken, Trayvon was profiled – and then, killed -- by a neighborhood “watchman” as if he were a dangerous criminal – as if he were a neighborhood intruder, based on what he was wearing and what he looked like.

As an educator and scholar of race in schools, the parallel in my mind is how security guards, administrators, or even teachers too often approach black boys the same way in American schools – as trouble, and as people requiring eviction. Disproportionate discipline of students of color is currently in the news: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/education/black-students-face-more-har...

When I worked at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, I saw cases where security guards sent Latino youth’s names and photos, too, to the local police department because the students were wandering in the halls.

In OCR work, it was often hard to “prove” that such disproportionate discipline of students of color was “because of race,” often because educators didn’t keep comparative records on white kids who misbehaved and were not suspended. And often, it was true that students disciplined repeatedly and excessively for minor things then did become resistant out of frustration, prompting even more harsh discipline. In my work with teachers, I often call this "the snowball." Talking through any teachers' participation in "the snowball" is crucial: when educators evict students from school via suspension and expulsion, for example, the act often "snowballs" even to disproportionate placement in the justice system.

But Trayvon wasn’t resisting a thing; he was just walking with Skittles and ice tea. And now, no more graduation outfits.

Today, even unconscious racial bias has a majority of viewers labeling young men of color “suspicious”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phillip-atiba-goff/trayvon-martin-race_b_1...). And the ‘pipeline’ in K-12 education (indeed, K-20 education) is notoriously leaky for such boys. A disproportionate number of young people never make it to the graduation stage, falling through gaps of support in schools. Typically we call these leaks youths’ own fault. But too often, youth grow the feeling that schools don’t want them much.

Robin Kelley has said that “race isn’t about how you look; it’s about how people assign meaning to how you look.” http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-05.htm

That in 2012 we still take a sweatshirt and dark skin as “evidence” of a likely troublemaker means that old ways of thinking about “how we look” loom large. These ways of thinking affect how our children are treated – and often, whether they wear caps and gowns.

We often insinuate in educational debates that people are educationally and professionally successful due to their own individual hard work alone.

This recent quote from Elizabeth Warren succinctly adds an important logic to such debates: in fact, every successful person has benefited in some way from public money. And so, paying it back "for the next kid" (e.g., funding public education) is part of the deal.

http://front.moveon.org/the-elizabeth-warren-quote-every-american-needs-...

These sorts of everyday arguments (and facts) are very useful to have at hand in conversations about inequality in education. Otherwise, we really just rehash opposing opinions.