Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education

PREFACE

I am the child and grandchild of educators on both sides of my family. My mother was born in Texarkana, Texas. Her great-aunt, a woman I grew up calling Grandma Isabelle, was raising my mother when she and her husband, Bill, decided to join the flow out of the South during the great migration. They settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s, my teenage mother along with them. My Grandma Isabelle did what she termed maid’s work, sometimes for white families, sometimes in hospitals, up until her death in the 1980s. Her husband, my Uncle Bill, worked a variety of odd jobs. However, more than what he did to earn a living, what I most recall about him was how he was able to impose his will on the hard, rocky ground in the back of their small, two-bedroom, one-bath home in the Hunters Point area of San Francisco. In defiance of the sky that was often gray and the chill of the fog-kissed wind, he made a garden grow tomatoes and okra and collard greens and cabbage.

Neither Grandma Isabelle nor Uncle Bill graduated from high school. They never even went. In the 1930s at the intersection of rural Texas and Arkansas—two heavily white-supremacist and segregated states—funding, access, and support for Black education took a back seat to doing backbreaking work as the means of survival. For their only child, Isabelle and Bill thought the public schools of San Francisco were a yellow brick road toward a more economically and socially secure place in America. I cannot fully imagine what they must have thought when my mother, the first in her family to attend college, jeopardized her scholarly pursuits by immersing herself in the Black student protest movement at San Francisco State in the early 1960s. This was a movement formed in part to demand that both the state and federal governments honor their commitments to financially supporting education for the poor, people of color, and all disenfranchised students. For the movement, education was a political weapon in the cause for freedom. Members began tutoring programs in the ghettos of the Bay Area with a curriculum that linked individual educational freedoms to a collective narrative about justice and the role of knowledge in wresting loose the promise of the so-called American Dream for those who needed it most. For my mother’s parents, educational access could lead to economic uplift and racial equity; for my mother and many others of her generation, the goal was to achieve more than equality—they were fighting for racial justice.

On the paternal side of my family tree, my grandfather was the principal at the segregated North Ward Elementary School in Clearwater, Florida, where my grandmother was a teacher. Though they met in Clearwater, they grew up in different parts of Florida where their families farmed. Because they had bettered themselves and their situation through education, they truly believed that it was a vehicle through which each subsequent generation could rise up through the ranks of a Black, middle-class, segregated society. Education had the potential to remake the future for their children.

At the time, the idea of fully integrating into white American society did not factor heavily into their thinking about the importance of upward mobility. While recognizing that they needed a certain amount of access to resources and opportunities guarded by white privilege and anti-Black Jim Crow–style racism, they did not imagine that such desires would necessitate leaving Black communities behind to live and work in white ones. They didn’t think whites would ever allow full integration. Like many Black folks, they were also unsure that they, themselves, would want it.

In addition to his role as a principal, in the late 1950s my grandfather helped to lead a ten-year—and ultimately successful—effort to integrate the teachers’ union in Florida. He wanted Black teachers to be eligible for benefits, to receive equal pay, and to have the opportunity for career advancement and job security. He paid a price for his organizing. He was shot at a number of times over the years. His home was firebombed. His life was repeatedly threatened, as were his job, the lives of his wife and son (my grandmother and father), and the lives of the teachers with whom he worked. He did not romanticize integration, but still saw education as being important for community self-reliance, uplift, and respect of Black Americans.

As for me, given my parents’ custody agreement following their divorce, my school years were divided almost equally between the newly integrated schools in Florida—where my classmates where overwhelmingly white—and schools in San Francisco, where my classrooms were for the most part of color, or all Black. In both places, I lived in Black communities. That experience, and my family history, led me to understand the tremendous influence of the segregated history of American education on our educational present. In our current moment, the type of education, the quality of the school buildings, the experience of the teachers, and the ability to graduate are vastly different depending on the racial and economic makeup of one’s community. It is apartheid—a system that is, at its core, organized by physically separating racial groups and then privileging one racial group over another (a construct that cannot be disentangled from social class). Educational apartheid has high social costs. As discussed in the pages that follow, we can right this wrong, but first we have to take full account of the ways in which race and profit-driven interests in education have negatively impacted the futures of so many of our nation’s youth. This book is a step in that direction.

INTRODUCTION

The Segrenomics of American Education

Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes, or results in … discrimination.

—John F. Kennedy, 1963

The road necessarily traveled to achieve freedom and equality in the United States leads directly through public education. For American citizens who are neither white nor wealthy, the journey has often twisted and turned before leading back to the beginning, exposing the stark tensions between racial and economic integration as an educational strategy and the strategy that champions separate but equal schools as America’s educational ideology of choice. Since the earliest days when tax-supported public education was conceived and implemented, there have been intractable tensions between how economics, or race—or both—determine the funding, form, and purpose of education in America. Schools that educate the wealthy have generally had decent buildings, money for materials, a coherent curriculum, and well-trained teachers. Schools that educate poorer students and those of color too often have decrepit buildings, no funds for quality instructional materials, little input in the structure or purpose of the curriculum, and they make do with the best teachers they can find. These differences based on color and class are an undeniable constant throughout the history of education in America, and still are today.

It is then not surprising that students educated in wealthy schools perform well as measured by standard educational benchmarks. Students educated in poor schools do not. While there have been times in our nation’s history when we have acknowledged the damage inflicted by separate educational systems on our constitutionally enshrined rights of citizenship, with few exceptions we have found little incentive to commit ourselves to integrating both halves of this literal and figurative schoolhouse. Racial and economic integration is the one systemic solution that we know ensures the tide will lift all educational boats equally. However, instead of committing to educating poor children in the same way as we do the wealthy, or actually with the wealthy, we have offered separate educational content (such as a reoccur-ring focus on vocational education for the poor) and idiosyncratic forms of educational funding and delivery (such as virtual charter schools and cyber education) as substitutes for what we know consistently works. While not ensuring educational equality, such separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education have provided the opportunity for businesses to make a profit selling schooling. I am calling this specific form of economic profit segrenomics. Segrenomics, or the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation, is on the rise. Educational practices based on segrenomic practices trickle downward from the wealthy and well connected to poor communities and those of color.

This book explores the social and economic forces, past and present, that have worked together to propose and maintain separate school systems that are organized very differently depending on the race and class of the children in the classroom. This separation is profitable. The dynamics that intertwine to make it so—segregation, poverty, race—are one area of exploration in this book. At the same time, while the educational prescriptions for the most disadvantaged in our society are often imposed from outside, their success or failure often depends on their active acceptance or rejection by parents and other members in the community. Groups seeking the assurances of American citizenship, advancement, and employment have always believed that education is one sure path to get there. They are then willing to achieve it by any means necessary. The desire that some have to profit from racial and economic segregation in education, coupled with the active desire members of segregated communities of color have for quality education, has led to our current moment where quality education is for some a distant mirage, and the promise to provide it is profitable for others.

A close look at highly racially and economically segregated neighborhoods, communities, and indeed regions of the country illustrates how high levels of segregation, combined with economic vulnerability, can lead to corporate profit for those who promise to provide children in these circumstances an education. We have long known that there is an undeniable link between a child being undereducated and her future life chances. Children who live in segregated communities and are Native American, Black, or Latino are more likely to have severely limited educational options that consign them to the lower rungs of a racial and economic caste system from which the likelihood of escape becomes ever more dim. Given that racial and economic segregation almost always guarantees a lesser form of educational attainment, we as a nation need more, not fewer, plans or policies to aggressively integrate our classrooms as a means of equalizing education. In the absence of such a widespread commitment and effort, integration as a cure for the disease of educational racism is, in the twenty-first century, tantamount to a prescription that can’t be filled.

Instead, in the last thirty years, government, philanthropy, business, and financial sectors have heavily invested in efforts to privatize certain segments of public education; stock schools with inexperienced, less highly paid teachers whose hiring often provides companies with a finder’s fee; outsource the running of schools to management organizations; and propose virtual schools as a literal replacement for—not just a supplement to—the brick and mortar educational experience. The attraction, of course, is the large pot of education dollars that’s been increasingly available to private corporate financial interests. The public education budget funded by taxpayers is roughly $500–$600 billion per year. Each successful effort that shifts those funds from public to private hands—and there has been a growing number of such efforts since the 1980s—escalates corporate earnings.

The bulk of the privatization efforts aimed at America’s public school system are generally described by businessmen, civil rights leaders, and government officials alike as the most successful means by which poor and working-class parents of color can exercise choice in their children’s education, and as a powerful means by which to address the deficiencies of the traditional public education system. Parents are told by these influential voices, often perceived as experts, that such alternative educational strategies are the best way to close the achievement and opportunity gaps between Black, Latino, Native American, and poor children and their wealthier white and Asian counterparts. Charter schools, charter management organizations, vouchers, virtual schools, and an alternatively certified, non-unionized teaching force represent the bulk of the contemporary solutions offered as cures for what ails communities that are upward of 80 percent Black or Latino and overwhelmingly likely to fall below federally set poverty levels. Yet the practices and approaches that mark these so-called solutions are rarely if ever prescribed as an educational panacea for white students, or for those with wealth, or for communities with high levels of either. Wealthy communities would exact a high political cost on any who tried to similarly experiment with the educational futures of their children.

While consistently and successfully educating children who are poor and of color has eluded the nation as a whole, the public funds earmarked for their education have been a prize of staggering economic value and social importance. This has been the case since the nineteenth century, when tax-supported and -financed education was first implemented in the former slaveholding South. The post-Reconstruction period birthed the basic structures of both the racial and economic relationships and the power struggles that play out in education today. It was a time that gave rise to the earliest union between America’s wealthy elite—philanthropists—and a business interest in the education of poor children, or those of color. As a result, when looking at the recurring history of educational segrenomics from the nineteenth century through to today, I assert that the only way to end this particular manifestation of the educational caste system in this country is to penalize those who seek to—or happen to—profit from educational inequality if that inequality is linked to racial and economic segregation. In the absence of safeguards, the most pernicious forms of segrenomics will continue. There is simply too much money to be made for them not to.

There are myriad myths about the intersection of race, class, and education in America that taxpayer-funded profit streams rely upon. The first in need of revision is that Black people do not care about education. Another is that, in relation to quality education, poverty does not make a difference. What I learned writing this book is that parents in poor communities care so deeply about education that they are willing to go to almost any lengths, both tested and experimental, to find the silver bullet that might possibly provide their children with the educational access that has been so long denied. I also learned that the systemic undereducation of some communities is lucrative. There are educational entrepreneurs who see and seek profit from segregated communities precisely because they are poor, of color, or both. Segrenomics is as much a business strategy as it is an educational ideology.

That reality helps to explain in part how it was that, in 2009, a Black middle school student from a failing and decrepit school in the town of Dillon, South Carolina, found herself in Washington, D.C., as the guest of the new president, Barack Obama. She was there as justification for why Congress should support the president in his request to authorize billions of dollars in funding for low-performing public schools—the largest sum ever dedicated to addressing the undereducation of poor students in failing schools. Much of it was in the form of construction and infrastructure spending wrapped in a bill to stimulate the economy. None of it was earmarked to support or enhance educational integration. Ultimately, that student would become the face of one of the most expensive educational funding failures in the United States.

For that first address to Congress in 2009, newly elected president Barack Obama invited fourteen-year-old eighth-grade student Ty’Sheoma Bethea to sit in a place of honor next to First Lady Michelle Obama. When the president acknowledged her, the entire gallery rose as one to applaud. As the clapping intensified and then crested, the First Lady gathered the teenager close in a hug and smiled at Ty’Sheoma’s mother, holding her palm up for a five on the Black hand side moment of solidarity with her fellow parent. Years later, Ty’Sheoma would reflect on the evening with wonder, saying, The president knew who I was.¹

These magical moments happened because Ty’Sheoma had written to the president when he was a candidate, urging him to provide money to repair her aging and dilapidated middle school. In her letter, she said she wanted him to know that though the students there were poor, they weren’t quitters, and she and her classmates wanted to be doctors and lawyers and presidents too. They wanted to make a difference not just in South Carolina, but in the world beyond. She told him that the sorry state of the school building, with its peeling paint, nonexistent AC system, overcrowded classrooms, and dilapidated bathrooms, made realizing those dreams difficult to imagine. She described the hardship created by the fact that the school sat close to the railroad tracks, and, as a result, at least six times each day academic instruction had to cease throughout the whole building while the students waited for the trains to pass.²

Not only did Ty’Sheoma’s letter lead to her trip to Washington, where she and her mother met the first family, but also, two years later, she attended the ribbon cutting to commemorate the opening of a newly built school that replaced the one about which she had written. The Obama administration had allocated economic stimulus funding to pay for the cost. In fact, the president proposed rebuilding as many as 1,200 schools nationwide, many in communities that had suffered declining access to employment as manufacturing jobs disappeared. Called the School Improvement Grants program, between 2010 and 2013 the Obama administration awarded billions of dollars to struggling schools, most of it stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Stimulus funding linked to educational infrastructure seemed like a win-win situation. Communities got new schools and enough money to provide short-term jobs to help pull the country out of a deep recession. The resultant new buildings were sorely needed and showcased the administration’s commitment to bettering the lives of poor children by providing equal educational facilities regardless of race. It was good politics and good business, if not necessarily a sound or transformational educational solution.

The School Improvement Grants program wasn’t new. President George W. Bush had started it, but under the Obama administration, the funding was greatly increased from less than $1 billion per year to $7 billion spent between 2010 and 2015. Former secretary of education Arne Duncan said the grants unleashed innovation across the country. The money went directly to states to distribute to their poorest-performing schools, defined as those with exceedingly low graduation rates, or poor math and reading test scores, or both. Individual schools could receive up to $2 million per year for three years, on the condition that they adopt one of the administration’s four preferred measures, which included replacing the principal and at least half the teachers, converting into a charter school, closing altogether, or undergoing a transformation, including hiring a new principal and adopting new instructional strategies, new teacher evaluations, and a longer school day. None were measures proven to boost achievement for struggling students. At the end of 2016 a federal analysis showed that test scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program than in schools that did not. What that means is while the money did help to stimulate the overall economy, it didn’t actually do much to help Ty’Sheoma and the other students at the school realize their academic dreams.³

When Dillon, South Carolina’s new school was completed, there were no more crumbling walls, broken windows, mold-infested bathrooms, or backed-up sewage streams bubbling up into school hallways. However, the shiny new structure was not a harbinger of higher academic performance for children in the state who were both Black and poor. For that group, academic achievement continued to lag far behind standard expectations. This was and is true in the state overall. According to the National Urban League’s 2015 Report on the State of Black America, in 2013 only 13.8 percent of Black fourth graders in South Carolina scored proficiently or above in math, compared to 48 percent of white fourth graders. By eighth grade, the Black math-proficiency rate dropped to 10.5 percent compared to 44.6 percent for whites. According to the state’s superintendent of education, Mick Zais, in 2014 about 38 percent of all the state’s fourth graders were functionally illiterate. Three-quarters were able to read, but they did so well below grade level. Scores in Ty’Sheoma’s hometown of Dillon were no exception to these trends. For poor students in America, solving the riddle of startlingly low achievement continues to defy both infrastructure and good intentions. We will never know what would have happened if those funds had been invested in providing proven educational strategies.⁴

The media coverage of how Dillon, South Carolina, got one new middle school was in many ways uplifting, if not fully heartwarming. On the one hand, we saw a moment when the highest reaches of the federal government indicated that it was their role and responsibility to both push for and fund buildings and infrastructure as a means of demonstrating their commitment to ensuring that all children, regardless of race and income, received an equal education. On the other hand, given the educational results, it is clear that more than a building was necessary to uplift the educational futures of children like Ty’sheoma. The reasons this was true were as much because of the district’s past as its present.

Ty’Sheoma’s school, J.V. Martin Junior High, lay in a generationally impoverished region of rural South Carolina with historically poor public school achievement. The whole area was referred to as the Corridor of Shame in a 2005 documentary about a lawsuit brought against the state of South Carolina on behalf of thirty-six similarly run-down rural school districts. Much like the historic Brown v. Board of Education case, the South Carolina case charged that the students in these districts were receiving a substandard education and attempted to argue that a massive investment of time, resources, and creativity was necessary to stem this tide that so disproportionately impacted the state’s children who were Black and poor. Taken together, the districts that made up the plaintiffs represented districts where 88.4 percent of students were of color in a state where only 48 percent of the residents were non-white; where 86 percent were poor enough to qualify for free lunch when overall only 55 percent of state residents did; and where 75 percent of schools ranked as unsatisfactory and below average in a state where only 18 percent of all public schools were so ranked.⁵

The suit, first filed in 1993, argued that the children in those communities were not receiving an adequate education and were in need of more than advice about boot strapping, grit, and hard work or a new building to fix what ailed them. Those schools needed funding for experienced teachers, buses, social workers, books, new curricula, health care, and, perhaps most important, a commitment to quality education. The case, Abbeville County School District v. The State of South Carolina, was older than Ty’Sheoma when she wrote to President Obama in 2009. It was the longest-running case in the history of the state, appeared before the State Supreme Court twice, amassed over twenty thousand pages of documents, and included a hundred witnesses. The proceedings took place in Clarendon County—the very same county where in the 1940s a case, Briggs v. Elliott, was brought that would eventually contribute to the landmark Brown decision on segregation. While some things changed between the mid-twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first, it is still the case that in the United States it is just not possible to fully understand the role, success, and proposed function of education without weaving a tale inclusive of how segregation, race, and economics have combined to become the story of public education in America.

A discussion of the meaning of, accomplishments in, and fight for an equal education by Black children and their parents in contemporary as well as in historically Black communities is one of the contributions this book makes to conversations about educational strategy and equity in the United States. In 1933, Carter G. Woodson wrote about Black Americans’ chief difficulty with education in his classic text The Mis-Education of the Negro:

Somebody outside of the race has desired to try out on Negroes some experiment which interested him and his coworkers; and Negroes, being objects of charity, have received them cordially and have done what they required. In fact, the keynote in the education of the Negro has been to do what he is told to do. Any Negro who has learned to do this is well prepared to function in the American social order as others would have him.

By 1980, another legendary Black educator, Marva Collins, would continue that line of reasoning, saying, Our people have been guinea pigged. No one experiments on other children the way our children are guinea pigged. I want for our children what the best get. Educational experimentation is part and parcel of the educational history for the poor and children of color.⁶

Among other things, this book shows the connections between past and present business and philanthropic interests in the education sector and the necessity of having the high levels of racial and economic segregation consistently required for their often experimental educational strategies to be tested. There have been few periods in American history when the success of business and philanthropic interests in education did not rely on high levels of racial and economic segregation. A pattern of cyclical regularity has emerged wherein powerful interests plunder public education dollars earmarked for poor students of color in order to enrich certain powerful individuals and their business interests. That is then