This book offers a way past those feelings. It describes a long-term, radical solution to the problem of education in America, one that many teachers, students, and organizers are already working toward, though in ways that have not yet merged into a movement. But it also presents an immediate way to understand, picture, and talk about what we human beings are doing in these strange places, so that we can feel less trapped and work more positively and hopefully.
Although I use some abstract, theoretical, and often literary ideas to develop this understanding and picture, the descriptions below are in one way just a case study, highlighting the actual practices of a student-led organization called the Baltimore Algebra Project. We have found, using this way of understanding our work, that other feelings and actions have emerged to fight toe to toe with the feelings of being trapped: sometimes joy or comfort, sometimes political or organizing work, sometimes the thrill of intellectual exploration and discovery, sometimes the sense of being connected to the whole river of the freedom struggle, to its legacy of courage, endurance, and hope.
A how-to guide would be nice. But this book should be read more like program notes at a play. It gives some background and context, hints at the life stories of some of the actors, focuses the viewer’s attention on potentially important themes or images, and generally aims to make the experience of the play’s performance more intimate, significant, and enjoyable. The play is the students’ lives and our work in schools. The reader’s role, as audience or actor, is left for you to decide.
In the middle of the last century, public secondary schools were conceived to operate as factories, churning out workers adapted to the demands of assembly lines and industrial bureaucracies and to the consumption of products made in factories. Today, the dominant analogy is that schools should be like the laboratories of scientists, experimenting with initial conditions and inputs, controlling for specified variables, to induce brain-states adapted to the demands of an economy structured by scientists and the consumption of digitized products. In the public schools of relatively comfortable adolescents, these ways of thinking have worked well enough to produce the necessary workers and consumers for the bourgeoisie to go about their business.
But in schools for adolescents in poverty, and particularly for the descendants of slaves, both the factory and laboratory analogies are inadequate. Neither the young people themselves, nor their parents, nor their teachers have been able to look through these frames and make much sense of what they see. The factory schools couldn’t prepare students for factory jobs that no longer existed. And today’s “experimental design,” “data-driven,” “evidence-based” schools leave the great majority of African American and poor students unable to take math or science courses for credit in college, and so qualify them only for service jobs that robots will probably be doing a few years from now.
We need a way of describing and thinking about public schools of poverty that addresses what actually happens as opposed to what the dominant ideology says should happen. In general terms we are looking for a frame that accomplishes two related tasks: First, our mode of description and analysis must help us understand the bewildering experience of being a student, teacher, or parent trying to do something human in schools of poverty. These schools literally make many of us ill. We become so infuriated, depressed, impatient, confused, revolted, thwarted, humiliated, as we try to act on our own behalf or on behalf of others that both young people and adults often develop physical symptoms of disease. And while we are experiencing the physical and emotional symptoms of striving for life in a place that doesn’t fit our humanity, we hear the constant drumbeat of propaganda that there is something wrong with us, not with the place. The terms of the propaganda—“data,” “objectives,” “mandates,” “test scores,” “protocols,” “requirements,” “deadlines,” “evaluations”—flood our consciousness until it is hard to hear our own voices or to use our own names for things. It becomes difficult to make ourselves understood, as if we were babbling, because the distance between our experience and the official “reality” grows greater and greater. At this point, one of three things happens: we are labeled by the authorities as “defiant” or “insubordinate” and forced to leave; we decide on our own to leave to preserve our health and sanity; or we compromise and accept the ideology of schooling whenever we must, shutting off our humanity into smaller and smaller boxes alienated from any concept of the common good.
So one task that a better frame will accomplish is to give us words, images, and ways of thinking that are sturdy and agile enough to do battle with the propaganda of the dominant ideology as manifested in schools. It will let us survive in schools of poverty without being forced out or forced to compromise or made ill.
The second task is to prepare for an insurgency of young people. That is, we are looking for a description and analysis that is pragmatically constructive. If our frame doesn’t help us decide how to transform the world, in Paolo Freire’s terms, it is too weak.3 We postulate that the principal agents of the transformation will be the students and define our ultimate goal as an insurgency led by young people in poverty.
By “insurgency” we mean to emphasize the insufficiency of parliamentary, electoral, or technical procedures, and to describe instead a rising up of young people that massively interrupts the functioning of the country’s educational system and forces a rearrangement of roles, authority, and power well beyond the boundaries of “school.” The degree of disruption will need to be greater than during the insurgency that forced changes to the country’s electoral system, because the right to education is a more fundamental cultural function than the right to vote. As explained below, white middle-class parents (followed by middle-class parents of color) reacted to the changes brought on in the 1950s and 1960s by finding new ways to separate their children from children growing up in different castes. Jim Crow lost its grip on public accommodations and voting rights, but keeps education firmly segregated by race and caste; much more disruption, therefore, will be needed before this final breakthrough occurs.
The educational insurgency will certainly use parliamentary, electoral, or technical demands and procedures as organizing tools, but those demands and procedures are not the aims of the insurgency. For example, this book describes a demand for math literacy—but as an organizing tool, not as an end in itself. Often tactics such as this are confused for ends, but the possibility of confusion is one of the reasons math literacy, for example, was chosen as a demand. There is a consensus among nearly all elements of society that math literacy is good in itself; therefore organizing for math literacy among poor students of color is permitted by institutional authorities. We argue that the cover given by this consensus and the authority earned by doing math create opportunities for students in poverty to organize massive interruptions of the educational and social system. Similarly, voter registration was not radical in 1960; there was a wide consensus that voter registration was a good thing. But voter registration among sharecroppers in Mississippi was radical, and resulted in massive interruptions of the Southern, and eventually of the national, political and social systems.
The Marxist frame—that schools reproduce class structures—is certainly helpful to an extent. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis give a detailed explication of how educational reproduction works in America.4 The limitation of the Marxist frame, however, is that we will need to wait until the revolution for schooling’s role in the reproduction of class dynamics to change. There is an important body of work that understands working-class young people as resistant to the reproduction of class in schools. Part I of this book centers on a particular interpretation of this resistance in the context of the black freedom struggle in America. But understanding the students as resistant is not quite enough to help us understand how they will become educated in a pre-revolutionary era.
The problem is chicken and egg. To the extent that schooling simply reproduces existing class dynamics, no changes in how schooling works will matter till class dynamics change. But class dynamics are unlikely to change until a revolutionary or insurrectionary consciousness develops among the young—and their consciousness develops largely through schooling.
The obvious solution