Separate, Contained, Compliant, and Equal

[James Horn <ontogenyx@gmail.com>]

The Audacity of Arne Duncan
Jim Horn

Arne Duncan stood before the NAACP convention last week to repeat his  
claim that “education is the civil rights issue of our generation.”   
He also declared “the only way to equality in society is to achieve  
equality in the classroom.”  Since Mr. Duncan did not spell out what  
he meant by equality or civil rights, let’s see if we can extrapolate  
his meaning from the policies he is pushing hard to be adopted across  
America, even if his heavy-handed forcing means ignoring the lawful  
Congressional role in making federal education policy.

Apparently, Mr. Duncan does not believe that the equality shortage in  
classrooms that we have known about ever since poor children started  
going to school can be helped by fair housing policies, better  
transportation policies, improved health policies, or new jobs  
policies, any of which we know could affect the poverty levels of  
urban and rural America, where rates are now the highest, after taxes,  
of any industrialized nation.   According to Mr. Duncan, it would seem  
that policy shifts or new efforts in these areas are unimportant, for  
it is “only” in the classroom that we may hope to achieve equality.

Well, what kind of equality in the classroom would that be?   
Apparently, it is first and foremost a segregated kind of equality, a  
segregation that is aided by the spread of charter schools, which  
remains a top priority of the Administration.  Two studies last year,  
in fact, showed incontrovertible evidence for the segregative effects  
of charter schools, whether run by non-profit or for-profit  
corporations.

So by ignoring segregation within charters, we must assume that the  
kind of equality that Mr. Duncan is talking about does not depend upon  
the sharing of social and cultural capital that occurswhen  
socioeconomic classes are educated together, and it is the kind of  
equality that apparently pays no attention to the facility and funding  
advantages accrued when middle class parents lend their voices to  
decisions within the schooling community.

Secondly, it has become a harsh, punishing kind of equality centered  
on remediation, ever since the “let a thousand flowers bloom approach  
to charters” has been replaced by an urgency to ramp up and bring to  
scale the “no excuses” KIPP schools and the KIPP behave-alikes.  In  
these "no excuses" schools, equality demands total compliance by  
children who go to school nine or more hours a day and then have 2 to  
3 hours of homework each night.  Plus Saturdays and part of the  
summer.  In order to be equal in these school and, thus, make up for  
the poverty that puts these students behind, they must be willing to  
give up their childhoods, family, and friends for a chance at passing  
the necessary tests that may or may not prepare them for college some  
day.  For even though the “no excuses” chain gangs remain the dominant  
model for corporate education reform, we know very little about how  
these children will fare in independent learning environments after  
years of total compliance and behavioral/psychological modification.

Thirdly, it is the kind of equality that denies the importance of the  
other massive inequalities within the communities where these poor  
children live.   It is the kind of equality that does nothing to aid  
the child who must dodge bullets on the way home from a 9-hour school  
day, or who must return home to find nothing to eat.  It is the kind  
of equality that refuses to enroll a child whose parents are not  
willing to sacrifice their child to a schooling regimen that parents  
of the leafy suburbs would consider abusive to children if it were  
their own being subjected to it.

Fourthly, it is the kind of equality that depends upon assessments  
that put poor children at a great disadvantage all along the line, for  
there is no standardized test used in schools today, whether in third  
or thirteenth grade, that does not demonstrate, on average, a direct  
correlation between family income and testing outcomes.

In short, it is the kind of equality that depends upon a race that has  
many starting lines but only one finish line, a race wherein the  
hordes of losers claim their place among those who deserve to be the  
“unequal,” children who will be dropped out, pushed out, and  
eventually forgotten behind the walls of the workhouses and  
correctional facilities that mark the destination in the school to  
prison pipeline.

If Arne Duncan’s views on equality are evidenced in his actions, it  
leaves us with a troubling realization.  For to understand that for  
Mr. Duncan to be right in saying that “education is the civil rights  
issue of this generation,” we must stand shamefaced in admitting that  
civil rights now demands from equality what we previously could expect  
only from oppression.