A thoughtful article in Truthout today written by Henry Giroux, Locked Out and Locked Up: Youth Missing in Action From Obama’s Stimulus Plan, says, “Children have fewer rights than almost any other group, and fewer institutions protecting these rights.”
Giroux writes, “The notion that children should be treated as a crucial social resource … appears to be lost,” and asks, “What is one to make of a society marked by the following conditions:
- Almost 13 million children in America live in poverty – 5.5 million in extreme poverty.
- 4.2 million children under the age of five live in poverty.
- 35.3 percent of black children, 28.0 percent of Latino children and 10.8 percent of white, non-Latino children live in poverty.
- There are 9.4 million uninsured children in America.
- Latino children are three times as likely, and black children are 70 percent more likely, to be uninsured than white children.
- Only 11 percent of black, 15 percent of Latino and 41 percent of white eighth graders perform at grade level in math.
- Each year 800,000 children spend time in foster care.
- On any given night, 200,000 children are homeless – one out every four of the homeless population.
- Every 36 seconds a child is abused or neglected – almost 900,000 children each year.
- Black males ages 15-19 are about eight times as likely as white males to be gun homicide victims.
- Although they represent 39 percent of the US juvenile population, minority youth represent 60 percent of committed juveniles.
- A black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy has a 1 in 6 chance.
- Black juveniles are about four times as likely as their white peers to be incarcerated. Black youths are almost five times as likely and Latino youths about twice as likely to be incarcerated as white youths of drug offenses.
Giroux writes, “Obama’s message of hope and responsibility seems empty unless he addresses the plight of poor white youth and youth of color and the growing youth-control complex. The race to incarcerate – especially youth of color – is a holdover and reminder that the legacy of apartheid is still with us and can be found in a society that now puts almost as many police in its schools as it does teachers, views the juvenile justice system as a crucial element in shaping the future of young people, and supports a crime complex that models schools for poor kids after prisons.”
Other excerpts:
- Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of recognizing that many poor minority youth are badly served by failing schools, they are labeled as uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of providing minority youth with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless. Instead of addressing the very real dangers that young people face, the punishing society treats them as suspects and disposable populations, subjecting them to disciplinary practices that close down any hope they might have for a decent future.
- Children have fewer rights than almost any other group, and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs.
- As the protocols of governance become indistinguishable from military operations and crime-control missions, youth are more and more losing the protections, rights, security or compassion they deserve in a viable democracy.
- Rather than dreaming of a future bright with visions of possibility, young people, especially youth marginalized by race and color, face a coming-of-age crisis marked by mass incarceration and criminalization, one that is likely to be intensified in the midst of the global financial, housing and credit crisis spawned by neoliberal capitalism.
Either you agree with this social criticism or you don’t. If you do, you can see how we have gotten used to tolerating a lot of bad things that happen in the society, like the frog being slowly cooked in the pot.
There is enormous difference today between the lives of privileged young people and those of marginalized ones. Privilege is not always so great either, as the lives of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears show. But the life of promise is at the top, and there is little promise on the bottom.
This author ties together a number of social trends. One is the heavy enphasis on behavioral control, incarceration and military style problem solving that combines fear of crime with the post 9/11 reaction to all forms of rebellion, insecurity and disorder. Then there is the poverty, lack of resources and resulting destructive culture that are the remains of the welfare reform movement which saw childrens’ poverty become collateral damage to perceived behaviors of adults. These combine with a lack of compassion, at least for other peoples’ children.
This author links these to the commercial economy and the refusal to look outside “the moral sphere of the family” to analyze or explain the problems facing young people, who he sees as a politically powerless group.
“The response to [destructive youth behaviors], tellingly, is more ‘get tough on crime policy,’ never an analysis of the systemic failure to provide safety and security for children through improved social provisions. In public life, however, children seem absent from any discourse about the future and the responsibilities this implies for adult society. Rather, children appear as objects, defined through the debasing language of advertising and consumerism. If not being represented as a symbol of fashion or hailed as a hot niche, youth are often portrayed as a problem, a danger to adult society or, even worse, irrelevant to the future. . . . This merging of the neoliberal state in which kids appear as commodities or a source of profits and the punishing state . . . bears witness to – and indeed indicts – a model of market sovereignty and a mode of punitive governance that have failed both children and the promise of a substantive democracy.” The economic meltdown promises to make this worse.
All of the things he criticizes are the essence of the conservative political movement and what it has wrought. Conservatives will not be comfortable with this article.
Giroux is a prominent member of the social justice left. Their modus operandi is to show up at budget time with empty promises, spend all allocated funds, and then ask for more because the work can’t be done without fixing poverty.
Key to keeping this strategy viable are
1. Gullible leadership in minority communities
2. Uninformed voters
3. Undiscerning churches and service organizations
Kettering Foundation and NIF have materials to address these deficits, but the organizations which have the most to benefit often aren’t willing to acknowledge their roles as codependents.
According to Eric the “social justice left” gets all this education tax money because everyone else is gullible, uninformed or undiscerning. Sounds like the people who were selling mortgages.
As the link points out, most people like the idea of social justice. Is there a “social justice right” as well as a social justice left? Admittedly justice can mean a lot of things to different people, including perhaps a society where those who have get more and everyone else gets less, because that’s what they deserve.
Anyway it is easier to be for social justice than to be for “critical pedagogues” which is what the link calls the author Giroux, or maybe “Constructivists” which it calls some other people. So you know whose side you should be on, William Ayers and Karl Marx are apparently on the other side. The link does jump them all together with the popular author Jonathan Kozol, whose books on the horribly underresourced schools of the poor are best sellers.
The link also prefers a “prescriptive approach to education -whereby middle class mores are reinforced and all aspects of street culture are suppressed.” This may seem like a way to prepare people for middle class jobs, assuming that there are some such jobs for them. However it is also reminiscent of English schools in Ireland or the aborigine schools in the Australian film “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” schools that reflect occupation as much as education. The Bridges Out of Poverty movement makes a major issue out of the fact that escaping poverty often means breaking emotional ties with significant others such as family members, as well as burning bridges with the survival model which is important in surviving poverty but may be harmful in advancing to the middle class. But at least it has some sympathy for people in that predicament.
The most interesting fact about this is that critical and independent thinking about society is what people of privilege want their education system to do, which is why they are concerned with the emphasis on standardized tests at least as applied to their kids. It seems to become a problem when other people start doing it.
Eric, regardless if, “Giroux is a prominent member of the social justice left,” as you say, his concern for poor children is real. Classifying him into some political corner doesn’t change the truth of his message.
I read the article you referred to “Obama, Education, and the ‘Social Justice Left’,” written by someone named Antonio Chaves. I googled Chaves, but could find no information about him. It would not surprise me if he turned out to be a paid writer for some conservative foundation that has tons of money to spend promoting a very specific conservative agenda.
Chaves writes, “Clearly, Darling-Hammond is more ideologue than scholar.” This is an interesting accusation from someone who has no discernable track record of scholarship himself, but rather, at least in this particular article, seems completely intent on making an ideological point. This is what Wikipedia says about Darling-Hammond: “Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Education at Stanford University, where she launched the School Redesign Network, the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute, and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Darling-Hammond is author or editor of more than a dozen books and more than 300 articles on education policy and practice. Her work focuses on school restructuring, teacher education, and educational equity. She was education advisor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.”
Chaves, I don’t believe, has made much of a case that Darling-Hammond is simply an ideologue. He seems outraged that Darling-Hammond “ignores the success of charter schools like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools.” I’m wondering if Chaves directly, or indirectly, works for one of these outfits.
Chaves says that the notion of reinforcing middle class mores and the goal of suppressing negative aspects of street culture “contradicts everything she (Darling Hammond) supports.” Wow. Chaves has not given me enough evidence to convince me to believe that such an accusation is true.
Stan, I’m in agreement with your comment, “The most interesting fact about this is that critical and independent thinking about society is what people of privilege want their education system to do, which is why they are concerned with the emphasis on standardized tests at least as applied to their kids. It seems to become a problem when other people start doing it.”
I believe our local NAACP is hoping for competence–and accountability for results.
Theodore Hesburgh: “… compassion, of itself doesn’t get you anywhere. … it doesn’t really get anything done. … it’s okay to be compassionate, and you better darn well be competent. All the poor people don’t need is a bunch of incompetent hacks running around acting busy.”
Hard to argue with the Hesburgh quote. First thing that comes to mind is the Bush Katrina effort. I don’t know that that describes schoolteachers on the front lines in urban districts.
I never heard of this KIPP chain of schools that the link mentions. A quick look at Google found a recent article on resistance to unionizing the teachers. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/education/07kipp.html
“the standoff should not be a surprise. Charter schools, which are publicly financed but operate independently, were founded in opposition to teachers’ unions; many of the movement’s supporters view union contracts as a fundamental flaw in public education that keeps ineffective teachers on the job. And KIPP, like many charters, has hired teachers without traditional training and requires long hours and weekend work, usually for extra pay.
Teachers’ unions initially ignored charter schools or viewed them as the enemy, but as the charters grew in size and influence, the unions’ feelings warmed somewhat. Green Dot, a Los Angeles-based charter network, has unions at each of its schools, including one that opened with the teachers’ union’s cooperation last fall in the Bronx.
In New York, 18 of the state’s 115 charter schools are unionized, including two in Brooklyn operated by the teachers’ union. What happens to the unionization effort at KIPP AMP is being closely watched nationally as a test of whether two powerful forces in education will cooperate, coexist or devolve into protracted battles.
KIPP’s administration seemed to be caught off guard Jan. 13, when seven teachers wrote to the principals at the school and in the nonprofit network to inform them of their decision to organize. Ky Adderley, KIPP AMP’s founding principal, met with the seven and told them that he was disappointed, according to several teachers who were there.
“He said he had founded the school as a nonunion school and he had done so for a reason and that he was not pleased,” Ms. Chakravarty said. Forming a union, the teachers recalled Mr. Adderley saying, would mean staffing decisions would be out of his control, suggesting that state officials who approved the charter would be able to fire people at any time.
I wonder what the schools operated by the teacher’s union are like.
Hard to argue with the Hesburgh quote.
The social justice left will argue that they–not Hesburgh–are the true benefactors of the poor. They will contest Hesburgh’s awards and accolades.
Another example: Teach Deming’s quality concepts (like fishbone diagrams) to schoolchildren with resources from the American Society for Quality using their program named for its mascot, Fred the Koala. I’ve seen a panelist at a conference contend this leads to the objectification of fish and Koalas.
One more thing. Where are those Obama volunteers now that its time to serve America? What role for them in our Governor’s ed reforms?