Revolution #146, October 26, 2008

Restructuring Inner-City Schools for the Global Marketplace:
Locke High School and the Green Dot “Solution”

PART 2

by Reggie Dylan

In many ways Locke High School in Watts concentrates the utterly failed education system in the urban cores of this country. The L.A. school district has now turned complete control of Locke over to Green Dot Public Schools, a private charter school organization. This experiment in privatization is being looked to by the powers-that-be as a potential model for a radical transformation of the inner-city public education system.  Part 1 described the apartheid conditions of the inner-city schools and two significant changes by the ruling class that have made the situation worse – vouchers, and No Child Left Behind.

*****

Since the early 1990s one major trend in “reforming” education has been the growth of for-profit and non-profit charter organizations around the country. In 2004 there were 3,000 charter schools serving three quarters of a million students in 37 states and D.C. New York City just raised the number of charter schools by 18 to a total of 78, serving 24,000 students. One in every 18 public schools in NYC is now a charter school.

There are for-profit public charters like the well-known “Edison Schools” founded by a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute. There’s a growing number of public military charter schools, which target poor, minority students, especially Black youth. The Department of Defense helps fund them, seeing them as a pipeline for new recruits to the all-volunteer army.1  And there are, scattered around the country, individual efforts to create politically progressive charter schools, often started by teachers who want to develop curriculum and an environment to meet special needs, in some cases the unique language needs of immigrant communities.  

But it is the major, top-down non-profit public charter school operations that are now garnering the most widespread promotion and support by the ruling class, including forces grouped around Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama.  A central selling point of these major charter operations is that they replace the education “bureaucracy” with a more streamlined, efficient management model based on business principles. Individual accountability is emphasized, with clear goals and results measured on a regular basis. That means school managers and teachers can be fired for poor performance, since charters do away with tenure. At a time when the government has been steadily taking funds away from education, their emphasis on accountability and cutting through red tape has the added appeal of promising that major transformations can be brought about without huge infusions of public funds.

The executive director of Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Bay Area Schools said recently: “Our focus on results is appealing to business leaders. So is our decentralized model that emphasizes autonomy, flexibility and innovation...” In return, the business community has been the biggest backer of charter schools: “The business community, both business leaders through their personal philanthropy and also corporate giving programs, have undoubtedly been a critical component of our fundraising success.”2

The Green Dot Model: Making a Bad Situation Worse

Green Dot Public Schools is among the many non-profit charters being championed and guided by some of the most influential and “far-sighted” of the business world, civic leaders and leaders of the education establishment, and people in the world of politics. Green Dot is headed by Steve Barr, an influential Democratic Party fundraiser and cofounder of Rock the Vote, which brought millions of young people into electoral politics and registered them to vote. Green Dot’s focus is on what they call “School Transformation” projects like the one at Locke. Their aim is to create a model, and with it broad public opinion, that will pressure school districts to adopt this model as their own.

Contributing an important element to this rush to privatization is Teach for America (TFA), a private, non-profit venture which for a number of years has been successfully recruiting graduates of Ivy League and other elite universities around the country for a two-year stint teaching in inner-city public and charter schools. A number of these graduates become inspired to pursue careers in teaching—but this is not TFA’s goal. Rather, TFA hopes after two years these young people will join the broadening base of experienced education managers, with the rest entering the professional world as informed supporters of these efforts. The KIPP Schools, based in San Francisco, were started by a pair of TFA graduates. And 250 TFA recruits are now in New Orleans, where—in the wake of the Katrina catastrophe—a massive experiment in charter school privatization is taking place.3

As a charter school that is completely replacing a public school, Green Dot is required to accept all the eligible students in the area that had been served by Locke. But that doesn’t mean they will have to keep them. There are many factors at work that are already driving students toward the door, with the repressive atmosphere being the main one.

School policies that push students out of school and into the criminal justice system have been called the “school to prison pipeline.” The ACLU opposes not only zero-tolerance policies that involve the police in minor school incidents, but also other school policies that do the same thing, “by excluding students from school through suspension, expulsion, discouragement and high stakes testing requirements.”4 Green Dot’s “School Transformation” project is already making it harder for struggling/borderline students at Locke to be able to stay there, while raising the stakes and consequences for those who can’t.

Green Dot requires all students to wear uniforms (as do most charters), a condition that has already sent some students to enroll at Jordan High, another high school in Watts. Those whose shirts are not properly tucked in are being sent to detention. Talking to any student in a different on-site academy is forbidden. The much stricter tardy and attendance policy is also part of the weeding process. In fact, Green Dot is setting up an on-site continuation school for students cut from their academies. Students report that there are more security guards inside the school now packing weapons. They say the street outside the school is lined with cops the moment school ends, so no one is allowed to hang out with friends even after school. The school days are longer, and the school year as well. And all students will have not just the opportunity, but will be required to take a college track curriculum, which—given the education they have (not) received to that point—many may find impossible to do.

This is a “model” for a “no-nonsense” school system that will even further constrain and define the terms of the kinds of critical thinking and working with ideas that are encouraged, and have no qualms about tossing far greater numbers of students down the school to prison pipeline.

The principal financial backers of Green Dot and many other charter operations are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, started by Eli Broad, a real estate tycoon who is #42 in Forbes’ 2007 list of richest people in America. These two foundations have pumped more than $2 billion into charter school organizations around the country. And last year the Gates and Broad foundations created a $60 million fund to get their education program onto the agenda of the 2008 elections. The extent of the active involvement of figures like Gates and Broad in revamping public education is an expression of the overall concerns within the ruling class about the urgency of making these changes.

Barack Obama’s speech on education in September gave voice to those concerns: “America faces few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy…. In this economy, companies can plant their jobs wherever there’s an Internet connection and someone willing to do the work, meaning that children here in Dayton are growing up competing with children not only in Detroit or Chicago or Los Angeles, but in Beijing and Delhi as well.” At stake, he said, is “whether we as a nation will remain in the 21st century the kind of global economic leader we were in the 20th century… It’s not just that a world-class education is essential for workers to compete and win, it’s that an educated workforce is essential for America to compete and win.” (emphasis added)

“Tough Choices or Tough Times”

“The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce” (NCSAW), a panel made up of former Cabinet secretaries and governors in addition to federal and state education officials and business and civic leaders, issued a report in December 2006 titled “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” The report “warned that unless improvements are made in the nation’s public schools and colleges by 2021, a large number of jobs would be lost to countries including India and China, where workers are better educated and paid much less than their U.S. counterparts.”5 Within the last decade 1.5 billion people have joined the global labor force from India, China, and the former Soviet bloc. And there are now twice as many young professionals in low-wage countries as in high-wage countries, who will be a lot cheaper to employ than American workers for decades to come. Projections are that as many as 40 million jobs could be at some risk of being “offshored,” including jobs requiring some college, in the next 15 years.

The impact on the economy and employment won’t be the same for all workers. A report by the National Center on Education and the Economy entitled “America in the Global Economy” predicts that families headed by college and graduate degree holders are much more likely to be moving up the income distribution, while families headed by high school graduates or dropouts are more likely to be moving down the ladder. And the report says: “The American class structure is very dynamic… Nevertheless, we can say that the middle class is dispersing into two equal and opposing streams of upwardly mobile college-haves and downwardly mobile college-have-nots.”

NCSAW recommends authorizing school districts to pay companies to run all their schools, organized along the lines of charter schools. They would be “highly entrepreneurial”—rewarding successfully run schools and firing those whose students don’t perform. The panel also called for all students to be required to take state board qualifying exams in the 10th grade that will be used to divide students into two groups. Those who do “well enough” could go directly to community colleges for a technical degree or a program leading to a four-year state college. Those who score even better would stay in secondary school two more years to prepare for four-year degree programs.

There is no mention of what would happen to those who don’t make it into one of these two groups. This is a formula for creating an apartheid system where the great majority of basic masses, particularly among the oppressed nationalities in the inner cities, would now be officially relegated to striving for vocational or community colleges at best, or discarded altogether. And it is perfectly consistent with the vision and direction of the public charter school movement, including Green Dot.

This is still a system with no future for the masses of poor and oppressed people in the urban cores of this country’s largest cities. Green Dot and this whole drive to radically transform the system of public education does not change that.

“They Made It, Why Couldn’t You?”

The rulers of this country believe they face a powerful compulsion, coming from the fundamental needs of this system, to raise the education level of the U.S. labor force as a whole. Not to enable everyone to become a “knowledge worker,” which is impossible in this system, but in order to maintain this country’s competitiveness in the world economy as much as possible.

The hype that everyone will have the opportunity for a college-level career covers up the reality that in today’s capitalist-imperialist economy, 50% of the new jobs being created are in the minimum wage service sector, with the possibility that an even greater percentage of the better paid technical jobs will be “offshored” in the future. Even more, without a concerted effort, backed up by state power, to actually overcome inequality and white supremacy throughout society, no amount of education will be able to overcome and eliminate it. Even if a small number of these youth make it through the meatgrinder and get a good education, the discrimination remains. Education alone is not sufficient; it will take a revolution where the rule of the exploiters is broken and state power is put in the hands of the masses to get rid of the capitalist obstacles and thoroughly uproot white supremacy.

So the rulers confront the challenge of heading off potential upheaval in the face of a widening polarization between the masses at the bottom of this society and the rest of the population, which these changes cannot overcome. Eli Broad, a major capitalist funding Green Dot and many other charters, wrote that if they don’t make these changes, they “run the risk of creating an even larger gap between the middle class and the poor. This gap threatens our democracy, our society and the economic future of America.”6

The changes in public education that are on the way cannot “level the playing field,” but they will be used to make the case that now if you fail, well, it’s your own fault. “We gave you a chance, but you didn’t take advantage of it.” So what these changes are really going to contribute to is fostering a climate of public opinion that shifts the blame even more fully away from the workings of the capitalist-imperialist system onto the masses for their own “failure.”

And the small section of students who DO make it through the education gauntlet and into a college career will play a crucial role as models, ideological buffers that supposedly prove the system works: “They made it, why couldn’t you?” This is going to create even sharper polarization within these oppressed communities, enabling politicians and police to marshal public opinion to justify writing off a whole section of youth. Green Dot and this whole top-down charter school movement is a “blueprint” for turning inner-city schools into fortified islands in the midst of an apartheid sea.

 

Endnotes:

1. One of the first such public military charter schools is the Oakland Military Institute, proposed by Oakland, California Mayor Jerry Brown in 1999. 90% of its 1200 students are Black or Latino. [back]

2. According to Don Fisher, who started the Gap stores and has given tens of millions of dollars to support KIPP Schools and other charter schools: “I’m a businessman, and I think education is a business, and I think each school is a separate entity—it’s not much different from a Gap store.”[back]

3. A recently-published book by former Newsweek correspondent Donna Foote, Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America, popularizes this trend by following four young teachers who spent a year teaching at Locke High. [back]

4. “Testimony of Donna Leiberman on behalf of the NYCLU Regarding the Impact of School Suspensions, On Students’ Education Rights.”[back]

5. Washington Post, 12/15/06 [back]

6. Eli Broad, on the Broad Foundation website. [back]

 

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.