Julian Vasquez Heilig posted a narrative by the dean of students at a Néw Orleans charter school, describing the harsh treatment meted out to students–especially black males–at the school.
The author writes that the best way to understand the tightly structured culture at the charter school was through post-colonial studies.
The dean writes:
“Are some charters’ practices new forms of colonial hegemony? When examining current discipline policies and aligned behavioral norms within charter school spaces, postcolonial theory is useful because of the striking similarities between problematic socialization practices and the educational regimes of the uncivilized masses in colonized nations. A number of postcolonial theorists focus on multiple ways that oppressors dominate their subjects and maintain power over them. For example, while working as the Dean of Students for a charter school in New Orleans, it took me some time to realize that I had been enforcing rules and policies that stymied creativity, culture and student voice. Though some of my main duties involved ensuring the safety and security of all students and adults at the school, investigating student behavioral incidents and establishing a calm and positive school culture, I felt as if I was doing the opposite.”
The dean explained the routines and demands that enforced conformity, punished black children for wearing their hair natural, and sent children to detention for trivial offenses.
“Lastly, everything at the school was done in a militaristic/prison fashion. Students had to walk in lines everywhere they went, including to class and the cafeteria. The behavioral norms and expectations called for all students to stand in unison with their hands to their sides, facing forward, silent until given further instruction. The seemingly tightly coupled structure proved to be inefficient as students and teachers constantly bucked the system in search of breathing room. The systems and procedures seemingly did not care about the Black children and families they served. They were suffocating and meant to socialize students to think and act a certain way. In the beginning, we were teaching “structure,” but it evolved to resemble post-colonialism. Vasquez Heilig, Khalifa, and Tillman (2013) stated that “education was and still is used as a hegemonic form to monitor, sanction, and control civilized people.” Thus, postcolonial theory (Fanon, 1952, 1961; Memmi, 1965; Said, 1978) offers a critical framework through which urban educational policies and practices can be understood and critiqued (DeLeon, 2012; Shahjahan, 2011). They continue their analysis by stating that “at base, post-colonial theorists interrogate the relationship between the legitimized, conquering power and the vanquished subaltern, and ask questions about who defines subjectivities, such as knowledge, resistance, space, voice, or even thought.” Fanon (1961 ) argued, “Colonialism wants everything to come from it.” Essentially, colonizers delegitimize the knowledge, experience, and cultures of the colonized, and establish policy and practice that will always confirm the colonial status quo. In other words, it is important to note that postcolonial studies, though often thought of as relegated to a particular period, are actually also a reference to thoughts, practices, policies, and laws that impact marginalized Black bodies enrolled in charters during the current educational policy era.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s also keep in the front of our minds that the same people and policies abusing children are also rapidly gentrifying the neighborhoods where these families live and displacing them.
Teacher’s Village in Newark is the poster child for this kind of school privatization/real estate play: TFA scabs/temps are to brought in to replace career teachers fired by a ex-TFA staffer who has been given dictatorial control of the schools. They will live in apartments that are built with subsidies and tax credits given to companies that also fund TFA and the charter schools that employ TFAers, thus completing the circle of colonization in communities deemed ripe for privateering.
It’s all completely “legal,” and it’s all totally corrupt.
An excellent description. It has been clear to me for over a year that the common push, whether through “no excuses” charters or common core curriculum was to lower self esteem and regulate social and intellectual behavior. I had not thought about describing it as colonialism, however. It seems a perfect point of comparison.
But, beware. Although the early system is being forced primarily on children of color, the aim is for the economic elite to use post-colonial methods on the vast majority of our population.
The requirement for walking in line and quietly is or was standard operating procedure in most Parochial schools. Strict dress code was also part of the Parochial regime. Colonialism had nothing to do with it. It reflected a view of children dramatically illustrated in Goldings’ Lord of the Flies.
Parochial schools are all about colonialism. They perfected their methods as “missionaries” in “developing” countries where all indigenous children were forced to go to their schools, wear their uniforms, speak their language and learn their lessons. Even in this country parochial, especially Catholic, schools, tend to serve the poor, minority and immigrant children, using mostly the same methods used abroad. It’s all about “civilizing” the unwashed masses.
TRUE.
How else would you have kids walk through narrow hallways, say a class of 38? Just have them walk as a mob, making loud noises and disturbing the other classes that are in session? How would fire drills be conducted? Most schools (and for generations) require that the children walk single file or in two lines while passing through the halls so as not to have “traffic jams” and total chaos. Of course if you have smaller class sizes, then possibly things could be more relaxed. However, all that being said, the no excuses discipline hell of some of these charter schools are an abomination.
It’s becoming obvious that the white billionaire oligarchs are dividing up America and colonizing it to fit their political and religious beliefs. That includes racism. Have you read about what happened in Wisconsin?
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/04/125876-5-huge-problems-publicly-funded-teachers-conference-claims-whites-racist/
BIll Gates seems to own New York and has already marked California as part of his fiefdom as he spreads his money and influence there.
The Koch brothers may own Wisconsin and a few other states.
The Walton family probably owns North Carolina, Texas and a few other Southern States.
What state does Rupert Murdock own? Maybe Florida with the Bush family.
I think Gates and the Koch brothers may be battling over New Jersey.
That is one vile article, and the comments are worse. I wish I could pretend such ugliness went out with the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
IMHO, it is not just that the leading edge of the charterite/privatizer movement often employs worst management and educational practices—they disdain and ignore best management and educational practices.
For example, it is too easy to describe certain common charter practices as treating children as if they were dogs whose spirits need to be broken in order to make them obedient and docile. Carry the thought forward a little: even for dogs, those are worst practices, not best ones.
And to rub salt in the wound: those worst practices are not in evidence at the schools the self-styled “education reformers” send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to.
“Have they no shame?????” [Dee Dee]
None. Absolutely, positively, none at all.
😎
I don’t see this as “post colonialist”. I see it as the works of narcissistic, egomaniacal and avaricious SOBs, Bastards and Wenches,
AMEN.
I much prefer your analysis.
If we want to talk like humanities professors and get technical about it, *all* education is an exercise in social control. Mass schooling does it on a mass scale. And compulsory education laws, backed by the power of the state, make it overtly coercive and violent. None of this is news.
All true, but within that coercive environment, teachers have tried, often successfully, to carve out small realms of compassion, individuality and joy for students to experience.
What sets this era apart is the relentless effort to extirpate every expression – indeed, eliminate the very possibility – of resistance and basic humanity.
FLERP, I don’t agree. Mass schooling is not “overtly coercive and violent.” As a graduate of K-12 education, I do not believe I was ever subjected to state-sponsored violence. Come on!
FLERP:
The only violence I saw during my thirty years in the classroom was usually against teachers—both physical and verbal. Mostly verbal. Are there exceptions? Of course. But there are always exceptions but they are not the average or norm. This is not the way most public schools operate and if they do, there are plenty of watchdogs who are more than willing to speak out and expose abuses of the system. That’s why the public schools are transparent and part of the democratic process.
And your claim that public education is mass schooling is only state sponsored if Obama, Bill Gates and the rest of that gang achieve their goals with Common Core and the do-or-die testing regime they are attempting to put in place that will be controlled from Washington DC instead of the state level.
Where do people get this idea that the public schools in the US are similar to a giant corporation like Microsoft? The answer must be from those corporations themselves.
There are more than 13,600 public school districts mostly run by democratically elected school boards who have the responsibility of making sure the teachers and administrators are doing their jobs—teaching kids what they need to know.
In addition, a third of 4 million+ teachers are registered Republicans, about half belong to the Democratic Party and the rest are registered as independent voters. This by itself is a safeguard. And with active PTAs in each district, there will always be some parents involved to watch over what’s going on too.
In addition, only 17% of registered Republicans are considered far right and 14% of Democrats far left. The rest are somewhere in the middle and considered moderate—this is the element willing to reach across the aisle and work together through compromise.
Unless Obama, Bill Gates and the flock of billionaire oligarchs are successful, there is no way that the public schools will become an indoctrination tool for any element of the political spectrum because there are too many people involved in the teaching process—as long as public education stays democratic and transparent—that will not happen.
Were you ever beaten by a teacher or school security officer? It’s a lot less common today than it was 50, 75, or 100 years ago, but corporal punishment is still used in classrooms around the country, including in your native Texas, I believe. Same with truancy laws, which even today are used to actually incarcerate students and parents.
That’s just using the everyday, ordinary usage of the terms “violence” and “state-sponsored.” Some (including humanities professors who study post-colonialism) would argue that things like standards and ideology are expressions of hegemony and are inherently coercive and, yes, violent.
As a NYC public school student in the 1960’s, my classmates and I were physically assaulted by teachers. I recall one 7th grade shop teacher in particular who would throw students against the sheet metal brakes during class.
In many NYC public schools today, students pass through metal detectors, as if in an airport being checked as possible terrorists.
In many parts of the country, the public school hallways are patrolled by armed police officers, with dogs.
I have been warning people, most of whom thought I was out of my mind, about the threat posed by school privatization for almost twenty years, but that doesn’t mean that I will close my eyes to the actual injustices and degradation, often racially motivated, experienced by students in the public schools. We don’t help our cause by denying unpleasant realities, one of which is that many public school students are subjected to authoritarian environments, in which coercion is constant and official violence present or implied.
Education is many things, and one of them includes the replication of the social order, an observation that is not new. Obviously, so-called education reform seeks to entrench equality and repression as deeply as possible, but let’s not pretend it was never there.
Michael, this was an “epic” post, as the kids say. Thanks for it.
Michael Fiorillo says: “In the 1960′s, my classmates and I were physically assaulted by teachers.”
I also was in the public schools in the early 1960s and graduated from high school then and this never happened in the public schools I attended. In addition, over the years, new laws were passed that made physical punishment and even mental punishment illegal putting a stop to anything like this. Today, if this were to happen in most public schools in most states, the school district could be taken to court and the teacher fired or tossed in jail. In fact, while I was teaching, laws were passed in California that made teachers responsible for reporting even suspected child abuse to the authorities and if a teacher didn’t do that, they could be fired and lose their credential and even end up in prison.
But not with the new double standard that is appearing where private sector schools supported by the same tax dollars are being allowed to be opaque and are not held accountable by the laws that govern the transparent, democratically run public schools that protect children from this type of abuse.
What this means is that in the new private sector tax supported education system, children may be physically and verbally assaulted by teachers and administrators and the parents have no say and the laws do not protect those children in those schools.
In addition, Fiorillo’s experience in the early 1960s is just that, his and his classmates at one school in one district in a country that today has more than 13,600 democratically run public school districts spread through 50 states and territories with almost 100,000 schools; with 4+ million teachers teaching more than 50 million children.
To claim your own, unique and individual experience that happened more than fifty years ago might be the norm today is foolish. It would also be foolish if this happened to someone today who stepped up and pointed a finger at those 100,000 public schools and condemned them all for what happened in one school.
If this it the logic that Fiorillo is thinking, then all Americans are guilty of anything any American does to another person anywhere in the world at any time.
That means anyone alive when the Mai Lai massacre took place in Vietnam in 1968, is guilty too.
That means all Americans who were alive when the atrocities and torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison too place in Iraq during the 2nd Bush war iare also guilty.
This same logic says that if we have ancestors who once lived in a slave owning state before the Civil War, we are all guilty of the crimes against humanity during that period of slavery in the US.
I won’t speak for Michael, but I don’t think that was his logic. On a more general level, I don’t understand how anyone can engage in a meaningful discussion about how the dress code or conduct code or disciplinary code at a given charter school is an example of “colonialism” or “postcolonialism” without understanding that modern, mass, compulsory education is an expression of the state’s power; is designed to create and replicate a certain social order; is inherently coercive; and is reliant upon the threat or actual expression of state-authorized violence. If you don’t believe all those things, then the talk about “postcolonialism” in charter schools is just a rhetorical game, an exercise in analogies.
As for your other points, I take those to be very interesting questions. What choices do I make? What systems do my choices rely upon and reinforce? What have I done to deserve what I own or even who I am? And what do I mean when I say that I’m “not guilty” of, for example, “the atrocities and torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib”?
I don’t think you are seeing the issue clearly. The public schools are not an assembly line factory producing bricks for some cultural wall as some think.
Through elected representatives from Washington DC, the state levels, and from democratically elected school boards comes the ed codes and laws of each state that are formulated to reflect and support the culture and moral values of the majority of the people of the United States.
Those laws came about through debate, court cases, state legislators, Congress, presidents, and/or voters going to the booth to select what they thought was right, etc.
If they make a mistake like they did with Prohibition, then later, after more court cases and debate, those laws may be repelled or changed.
This works best when someone with a huge fortune isn’t flooding the public ear with cherry-picked propaganda that supports their own agendas and political/religious beliefs.
Without that democratic system in place, then what would we have?
!, No schools
2. Schools funded by and controlled by individuals where there is no democratic debate about how our schools should be operated.
3. A country ruled by anarchy and you could be dead the next day just because a local mob decided you have no right to think or live as you do
4. A CEO or president makes all the decisions without any input from the people
With the democratic public schools funded by taxpayers, if something isn’t working, then there is a system in place that allows for that to be corrected at the local level, state level and/or national level.
Before you condemn the democratic public schools, do not forget that—on average—they are the engine that makes America what it is. Without the safeguards that democratic public schools offer, anyone could do whatever they want and that’s exactly what’s happening in the private sector Charter schools that are now being funded by taxpayers. These schools are opaque. They may teach whatever they want. They are not held accountable for anything they do. They may hire and fire anyone they want at anytime without criminal background checks. Their employees have no rights. Parents are often cut out of the process. Voters do not have any say about what some distant CEO dictates.
In fact, we now have some of these opaque, private sector, outside of the ed code and law, tax payer supported Charter schools run by Islamic Turks who could end up doing exactly what Mao did that led to China’s devastating and insane Cultural Revolution.
Without the over-site and transparency that comes with the democratic process, Mao turned China’s schools into brainwashing factories. Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations became the only acceptable textbook of the youth from K – 12. The teachers even jumped on board and supported this movement and used Mao’s Little Red Book as their only textbook.
A decade later the youth rebelled. Most of them were not members of the Chinese Communist Party. They were teenagers who ended up terrorizing and ruling China through mob control. They were called the Red Guard. They brutalized, denounced and beat teachers, college graduates and school administrators. They turned on their own parents. Everyone was suspected. Anyone could denounce anyone else at any time. It was insanity.
Believe me when I say we are better off with the democratically operated public schools than with any other system that might replace them.
If you don’t believe me, then I suggest you read “Red Azalea”, the memoir my wife wrote in 1992, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the winner of the Carl Sandburg Award. Read that memoir and find out what it’s like to live in country gone mad. It’s still in print. It has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Asian studies departments at universities in the US even use that book in their curriculum.
There’s an old saying that holds much truth. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”
If you don’t approve of how the public schools are operated in your state and local area, you still have a voice but remember, in the end, the courts and/or the majority will decide how to allow those schools to operate.
What happens when the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Hedge Fund billionaires, etc. don’t have to answer to democratically elected school boards, the courts, or the people (including parents) and they can do anything they want with and to our children.
Do you really believe you will have a voice in the tax payer funded private sector Charter schools they own?
So, go ahead and shout your slogans. You will fit in well with China’s teenage Red Guard and they aren’t gone. Today they are a minority in China who wants to return to the insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They are called Maoists and if you look close enough, you sound very similar to them.
I think we’re talking past each other, Lloyd.
Then let me ask you this: What does choice offer?
How many different ways can we teach literature, history, science, math, physical education, drama, chorus, band—that is if the private sector charter schools even offer all of those choices?
What are different ways to teach, literature, for example? I’ve seen all the following approaches used: You could
a. have students read a chapter and answer questions on a worksheet
b.read a chapter of a book out loud in class and discuss 3 or 4 key questions that the teacher asks students to discuss
c. Select a piece of literature and have students debate key issues. For example, in the Scarlet Letter – resolved, that this character is more ethical than that character
d. You could spent part of class reading books about, for example, hunger (ie Grapes of Wrath, and others) and spend part of the time with students working with local food shelves, city council members or state legislators to help reduce hunger in their community
Lots of different ways to teach. Those are a few of many, many examples available.
And, for sure, all of these methods are already being used in the public schools that haven’t been taken over by the Common Core combat troops with their do or die methods.
Lloyd, as note elsewhere, the problems that Mr. F described are not just from 40 years ago. I appreciate his willingness to acknowledge problems while recognizing that we disagree about some of the things that could/should be done to help solve them.
A school discipline study, released earlier in 2014, found
* Disproportionally higher suspension rates for students for color
* Students with disabilities were twice as likely to be suspended “out of school” as those without disabilities.
Click to access CRDC-School-Discipline-Snapshot.pdf
Joe Nathan said: A school discipline study, released earlier in 2014, found
* Disproportionally higher suspension rates for students for color
* Students with disabilities were twice as likely to be suspended “out of school” as those without disabilities.”
I’m sure the results of the study are true and it will probably continue as resources are cut to the public schools and the high stakes testing that fires teachers and closes schools continues, because this segment of the student population, on average, offers the most challenges to teachers. Push these kids too hard and they rebel in class and this leads to suspensions.
The only way to bring the ratio of suspensions down would be to follow Diane’s suggestions in “Reign of Error”, and attack the causes of poverty at a much earlier age through early child education and literacy programs designed to foster a love of books and reading in children who live in poverty.
I think poverty is the foundation of the student behavior that caused this increase in suspensions. As the schools put more pressure on these at-risk kids to perform, the result is usually frustration and defiance and a disruption of the classroom’s learning environment. To be able to work with the kids who are not rebelling against the pressure, the teacher has no choice but to suspend students and get them out of the room or the test scores of the remaining students would probably drop too.
The biggest mistake anyone could do would be to pass laws that do not let teachers suspend these children. Until the root problem, poverty, is dealt with, this situation isn’t going to change. And even if we had programs for early childhood literacy programs, it would still take several generations to bring about change. This isn’t something that can be changed with a magic bullet or a wave of a witches wand.
A teacher with 30+ students in a 60 minute or less block of time doesn’t have the luxury of counseling a few students who won’t let them teach or other kids learn. Keeping those kids in the room would be worse than suspending them from class.
Years of working with and learning from terrific teachers and schools has demonstrated how different kinds of schools help youngsters from challenging families achieve far more than they thought possible. Moreover, behavior generally is better at smaller schools. Schools can’t over come all the problems associated with poverty, racism, not enough good jobs, lack of strong pre-school programs. But schools can have a huge positive impact.
You’re right. Smaller class sizes do make a difference. One year, the high school where I taught, had a grant to lower class size from 34 to 25 in 9th grade English and I taught four sections. Compared to teaching and managing 34 kids, teaching 25 was a great experience. That year was the best out of thirty. With fewer students, there were fewer behavior problems to deal with and more time to work with kids who were there to learn.
Lloyd, the highest suspension rates are in charters.
Is that conclusion on the basis of national research? No such assertion appears in the recent national report.
In every state report I have seen, charters have far higher suspension rates than public schools. I recall in DC it was 72x the number in public schools. http://m.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-charter-schools-expel-students-at-far-higher-rates-than-traditional-public-schools/2013/01/05/e155e4bc-44a9-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html
3 brief points:
1. The report that you referred to says district schools use long term suspensions at a higher rate than charters:
“The city’s traditional public schools use long-term suspensions more often than charter schools, imposing nearly twice as many in the past academic year, according to school data. That year, 2011-12, 601 students were suspended from traditional schools for more than 10 days as punishment for a single incident; 327 charter school students received similarly long suspensions.”
But unlike expulsion, suspension does not allow a school to give up responsibility for a difficult child, Greenfield said.
– – – – –
2. The report says as a group, charters expel students at a higher rate than district schools. But the report also notes that DC district schools can and do transfer students from one school to another – which does not count as an expulsion – but most charters do not have a larger group to which they can transfer a student, like districts do.
3. A number of people have complained here and elsewhere about generalizations about district schools. They vary widely .Fair enough. The same can be said for charters. The article makes clear that some charters don’t expel any students. The same is true for district schools.
Joe, it isn’t easy for a public school (at least in California) to expel a kid. The district has to take the case in front of a review board of some kind. I don’t recall the name, but the district has to ask for permission (providing adequate evidence) and then if the board rules yes, the child’s parents must enroll their child in another school that will accept them within a certain number of days. Being expelled doesn’t mean the child stops going to school.
I suspect that since the private sector charter schools are exempt from all the rules and laws the public schools have to follow, they can just throw a kid out without proving anything or going in front of any board that has to sanction expelling a kid making it much easier for the charters to get rid of kids that might make the school look bad when academics improvement was measured.
And long term suspensions usually mean the incident was pretty bad or was the culmination of many incidents. The only five day suspension I was aware of was when the student knocked out a teacher who tried to break up a rather vicious fight in her classroom between two gang girls. The school did transfer the girl who knocked the other English teacher out to my classroom where five days later after returning from suspension the girl arrived tardy to my third period class 20 minutes and then refused to go get a tardy slip. Instead, she lifted her leg high and farted in my face. It was a loud fart and disrupted the lesson until I could get her out of the room. She then sat down and refused to leave the room. I had to call security to come and pick her up and escort her to see the counselor or principal.
However, there are two infractions that lead to an automatic request to expel a kid. One is if a kid is caught with a weapon. For instance a knife or fire arm or caught with illegal drugs.
The high school where I taught had the local sheriffs office conduct unannounced inspections with a drug sniffing dog. They’d go up and down the halls and the dog would alert them to lockers that might have drugs in them. They also brought those dogs in our classrooms and just walked up and down the rows. Never found anyone with drugs in my classes but that had nothing to do with me and it didn’t slow up teaching. It’s amazing how well gang kids behave when a uniformed police officer is in the room.
Most of the kids who use or sell drugs aren’t that stupid. If they sold drugs, they kept the stuff off campus and made their sales off campus after school.
I’ve read that. I forgot the stats. The comparisons. I wonder if they suspend a kid for not doing their homework. We never did that.
Have to agree with ya, FLERP! on your take of how humanities professors would view this.
Corporal punishment (hitting students) is still used in some parts of the US. According to the Center for Effective Discipline in Columbus, Ohio, 19 states have rules permitting corporal punishment, and educators struck more than 223,000 students in 2006, the most recent year for which data is available:
http://www.stophitting.com/index.php?page=statesbanning
They cited data from the common core of data published by the US Dept of Education
A school discipline study, released earlier this year, found
Disproportionally hired suspension rates for students for color
Students with disabilities were twice as likely to be suspended “out of school” as those without disabilities.
Click to access CRDC-School-Discipline-Snapshot.pdf
Again, it’s up to each state to change the laws of the ed code through the democratic process, and in some states corporal punishment is supported by laws.
Here’s some info on that:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0934191.html
According to the information from the previous web site, 0.46% of total students in the states listed received corporal punishment. That means 99.54% of the students didn’t.
Are we making an Everest out of an ounce of sand?
For instance, at the high school where I worked, the teacher/administrator in charge of the room where we sent kids for in-house, period suspensions said that 5% of our students at that high school earned more than 90% of the 20,000 (on average) annual referrals and suspensions.
Do we allow a climate of rebellion and defiance—-anarchy—into our classrooms where learning is supposed to take place?
It’s a fact, that far too many kids who live in poverty have no interest in cooperation or learning. They have other issues and problems that are more important to them.
This puts public education in a closing vise. These kids need education to break out of poverty but poverty is the cause of their defiance of classroom teachers and refusal to cooperate, study and read.
In most cases, those suspensions are not happening because the teacher is prejudiced.