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Building Smart Education Systems: VUE Number 26, Winter 2010
NOTE: This article was originally published in Rethinking Accountability: VUE 1, Spring 2003.
Drawing on the voices of youth in New York and California, the authors find that the promises for improvement in current education policy represent a cruel hoax. Young people want a better education, but they are denied even the most basic conditions for learning.
Three days after taking office in January 2001, as the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush announced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), his framework for bipartisan education reform that he described as “the cornerstone of my administration.” President Bush emphasized his deep belief in our public schools, but an even greater concern that “too many of our neediest children are being left behind…. The NCLB Act… incorporates principles and strategies includ[ing] increased accountability for states, school districts and schools; greater choice for parents and students, particularly those attending low-performing schools; more flexibility…” (U.S. Department of Education 2002, p. 1)
A re the President and the nation in a position to reach the stated goals of No Child Left Behind? This essay addresses this question through an accountability exercise. The authors join those who challenge the high-stakes standardized-testing implications of NCLB (Elmore 2002; Meier 2002), but in this essay we focus our concern on the NCLB promise of “choice” and “flexibility” to “our neediest children.”
Drawing on data from poor and working-class youth of color from California and New York City, we analyze accountability from the “bottom.” As you will read, these students yearn for a high-quality education. They believe deeply that they are entitled to a slice of the American dream. Yet they have been startled awake by their investigations into the quality of their education, as they recognize how public education in the United States has been redlined, with race, ethnicity, and class determining young people’s access to high-quality schooling.
With the youth in these two contexts, we find the stated intent of NCLB – to support parents and students in ow-performing schools – to be stunning and timely. Two of the Act’s provisions, however, high-stakes testing and choice (specifically, the opportunity for students in low-performing schools to transfer to better-performing schools), reveal the cruel betrayal of NCLB for poor and working-class youth. For these students and their families, the language of “choice” rings brutally hollow. Systematic policies of inequitable urban school financing, maldistribution of quality teachers, and lack of access to rigorous curriculum ensure that the privileged remain privileged, while poor and working class students lag behind, all too predictably “failing” tests that seal their fates, with no choices in sight. “Choice” in this context sounds like an ideological diversion – a crumb held out to desperate students and parents whose real problem is underfunded schools (Kozol 1991).
Economist Albert Hirschman (1990) theorizes that members of declining social organizations may engage in any of three psychological relations with their organizations: exit, voice, or loyalty. In school systems plagued by structural inequities, most poor and workingclass youth sadly, if understandably, exit prior to graduation (see Fine 1991). This was true before the introduction of high-stakes testing, and drop-out ates have dramatically spiked, especially in low-income communities of color (Fine & Powell 2001), since the tests have been put in place. Exit reigns in hese schools, and those exiting have migrated into prisons, where 70 percent to 80 percent of young inmates have neither General Educational Development (GED) certificates nor high school diplomas (Fine et al. 2001). Some teens we’ve spoken with capture this trend as they see it: “There are two tracks now in high school – the college track and the prison track.”
But the voices you will encounter in this essay are not voices of despair spoken by dropouts (another critical voice of accountability). Instead you will hear from students who have remained in underfunded schools, narrating a blend of yearning and betrayal, outrage and loyalty, the desire to believe and the pain of persistent inequities. Remaining loyal, in Hirschman’s terms, these youth did not walk from their schools. It has not escaped their attention, however, that America has walked away from them, refusing the obligation to provide poor and working-class youth of color quality public education (Anyon 1997; Darling-Hammond 2001; Fine & Powell 2001; Kozol 1991; Mizell 2002; U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey 2000; U.S. Department of Labor 2001).
In such an America, any discussion of accountability requires a view from the bottom, told through the eyes of poor and working-class youth of color who want simply to be educated. We provide this view by bringing together college faculty, graduate students, teachers, and high school students, who work collectively to chronicle the uncomfortable truths of the accountability question (see Wells & Serna 1996 for parallel sets of issues concerning accountability and school integration).
You will hear, in this short essay, from high school students in two distinct settings. Across both settings, these young women and men are eloquent about the absence of distributive justice, that is, the unfair distribution of educational resources throughout America; and about the absence of procedural justice, that is, being refused a fair hearing from educators and the courts (Deutsch 2002). They ask: Will adults stand with them for educational justice? Theirs are necessary voices in the accountability debates.
The Hollowing of the Public Sphere: A Violation of Distributive and Procedural Justice
In the early 1990s, one of us (Michelle) wrote Framing Dropouts (Fine 1991), which analyzed the ways that public urban high schools systematically exile youths of poverty and color, scarring souls and minds in the process. This essay may sound redundant – an echo produced a decade later or an echo of W.E.B. DuBois’s (1935) question “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” almost seventy years later. But we believe, with concern, that the stakes for undereducated youth and for dropouts are far more severe today than they were in the past. For students of color and poor students, resources are woefully inadequate, access to higher education is increasingly low, and stakes for exclusion are rising. The economy remains hostile to young people without high school degrees (Poe-Yamagata & Jones 2000). Young women and men of color, even with high school degrees or some college, fare far worse than their white peers; those without a high school degree have little chance of entering the legitimate economy (Hochschild 1995, forthcoming).
We situate this work in California and New York because these states perversely represent “cutting edge” states in which historic commitments to affirmative action (in California) and remediation (in New York) in higher education have been retrenched, wrenching generations of African Americans and Latinos out of even dreams of college and university (Hurtado, Haney & Garcia 1998). The public sphere of K–12 education has been hollowed; the academy has been bleached; the prison populations have swelled. California and New York, then, offer us an pportunity to ask how youth of color and poverty, now denied equal opportunity, assess the policies and practices of public education. These are perfect – if distressing – sites for reconceptualizing accountability from the bottom.
