Mark NAISON writes on the damage done to communities by closing neighborhood schools.
The one-two punch of No Child Left Behind and its ugly twin Race to theTop have led to the closure of thousands of neighborhood school, typically in black and brown communities.
He writes:
“Thousands of schools which have served neighborhoods for generations have been closed in cities all over the US, leading to mass firings of teachers and staff who grew up in or lived in those communities and disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of families. In some cities, the result has been exposing young people to greater risk of violence; in others, the process has promoted gentrification. But the disruptive consequences of this policy have been enormous and totally ignored by policy makers who have ironically claimed this strategy is promoting education equity.
“I will say this. Destroying neighborhood institutions and the historic memory invested in them is a form of psychic violence that should not be underestimated. School closings, and displacement of the people who worked in them are wreaking havoc with the lives of people who need stability, continuity and support more than continuous upheaval.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The disruptive, displacing, psychically violent neighborhood upheaval is EXACTLY the point. Policy Makers INTEND this as a strategy for clearing out the community, gentrifying it and selling it off to the highest bidder.
We need to deal with the malevolent intention driving all of this because none of the movers and shakers give a damn about the instability. It is their End Goal.
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kathyirwin1: it goes by various names among the business-minded “education reform” crowd including “innovative destruction” and “creative disruption.”
When it comes to the ed biz, it’s all about that most important metric of all: ROI/MC [ReturnOnInvestment/MonetizingChildren] aka $tudent $ucce$$.
And it fits in nicely [from their POV] with ROI in every other area.
And why the frenetic mad dog pursuit to gobble up everything and everybody?
Sometimes an old dead Roman will do just as nicely as an old dead Greek guy:
“For greed all nature is too little.” [Lucius Annaeus Seneca]
The only thing they didn’t count on was our pushback.
😎
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Short term ROI always makes poor decisions based on too few data points. I used to be the go to guy for CRM ROI. Then I went back to Philadelphia to teach physics. Many of my students were killed or incarcerated now because of violence, drugs and poor life choices. Without counselors, what is the lifetime value of the college education they were capable of achieving. How many dollars are spent on incarceration, drug rehab, and social services because of the cascading effects of hunger, poor education and poverty. Doing it right and positively was the best ROI in CRM and is now the best ROI in service education. I left education because I was told to do it wrong.
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My message to President Obama: Please replace the Secretary of Education
Dear President Obama,
Under your administration, public education is being ruined. Please reverse this situation. I know you have a tremendous amount of issues to deal with each day and it seems now that education is a low priority for you to deal with. You allocate these education decisions to others and then just give your stamp of approval without knowing how devastating these new initiatives are for public education.
Please remove Arne Duncan from his powerful role as Secretary of Education. We need a person with more insight and not someone that is blindly implementing policies because they appear good on paper. If your own daughters were experiencing what is taking place in public education you would see how these changes are wasting precious time and money. America needs a new Secretary of Education. Please consider Diane Ravitch. She is the best answer to our American public education system. She is an intellectual with wisdom and pragmatic insights for real solutions. What is taking place now is defeating our teachers, students, and families in America. We need to use education money to help students learn through small class sizes and improving infrastructure in decaying buildings. Also, introducing Latin will improve students’ abilities for writing and to comprehend science.
Please remove Arne Duncan, he is not the right person to make these enormous decisions that impact education in our country. You seem to go along with everything that comes out of his mouth and maybe this is because you have no time to recognize that Arne Duncan is wrong. To implement Common Core and extreme standardized testing is damaging students and these initiatives were not even field tested before going full speed ahead with programs that are now destined to ruin our public schools. The students are test weary and the desire for learning gets zapped away in these conditions. Students need small class sizes so they are recognized as individuals and learn interpersonal communication skills and develop enthusiasm for learning. These inhumane, impersonal and ineffective educational programs that are being forced into the schools are not acceptable to the average American tax payer, especially as we are seeing and feeling the real impacts of what is going on in the classrooms across America.
Sincerely,
Brandi Browskowski-Durow
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Well said Brandi, I am an educationalist in New Zealand and it is very disheartening to watch our own government following and implementing changes to our once renowned education system, which appear to be following US.
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Closing minority schools was always one of the purposes of NCLB, other purposes are enriching the testing industry and privatizing public schools through charter conversion. If the public had actually read the law and understood its logical conclusions this scheme never would have passed. NCLB Is a train wreck. RTT is a burning train wreck.
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Dear Diane— love your blog
have you seen this issue of Truthout re public education—esp item 3 re charter schools—a very clear explanation spotlighting what’s wrong—a surreptitious non-profit ruse to suck big profits from the public edu budget. link attached. Garth Bishop
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/1491f62410fd30f5
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The troubled Normandy School District…or whatever name the Missouri department of education has invented for it currently…….is a sad and extreme example of this psychic violence. The local public tv show “donnybrook” had kmox radio host Charles Brennan, a regular member of a holier than thou panel, say some of the most absurd, uninformed things I have ever heard—–an all too common thing with St. Louis media. He did manage reassure viewers that money is not the problem with the bankrupt, state managed district. He did not mention that the state commissioner fired 45 percent of the staff so they could hire more dynamic teachers. Presumably, firing veteran teachers in favor of younger “more dynamic” teachers had nothing to do with cutting the budget.
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Why Johnny Can’t Stay in School analyses
https://barrylane.bandcamp.com/track/why-johnny-cant-stay-in-school
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I appreciate the perspective of Mark Naison, but his discussion is too brief to recognize that there is more than one version of history. Consider this from a great humanist and one of the founders of “the new urbanism” movement. She was known in NYC for preventing an interstate highway from going right through Washington Park.
“Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, ‘neighborhood’ is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.” Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
There are brief and credible summaries of the history and pros/cons of neighborhood schools at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighbourhood_unit and insights about Jane Jacob’s life and work here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
Some time ago, I taught in a neighborhood junior high school with a factory-like design surrounded by low-income housing and nothing but asphalt surrounding it for the whole block. Six blocks away, a school dating from the first decade of the 20th century, was being studied for a possible rehab. It was an architectural wonder with golden glazed brick outside, including fancy trims around windows, and drinking fountains fashioned by artisans from the local Rookwood Pottery.
Within a few years the junior high was demolished, the surrounding low income housing was either leveled or revamped and gentrified for young professionals. The junior high merged with an newer elementary school for a K-8 school. The moderately renovated school with a fascinating facade still functions as a neighborhood icon. It is now a charter “academy” in the middle of street with one fast-food drive-through and mostly vacant strip malls that were envisioned as sites for locally owned businesses.Many of the teachers and administrators who had, in fact, provided leadership in the communityhave moved away.
The neighborhood still has one of the highest crime rates in the city and one of the highest concentrations of social service agencies trying to shore up the lives of individuals and repair holes in the social fabric.
This neighborhood, warts and all, is still the most historically significant in Cincinnati.
It was shaped by the courageous workers in the underground railroad. For decades the neighborhood was well-served by African Americans who taught themselves to live in freedom and taught others to do the same. My school was named to honor the memory of Jenny Porter, the first woman and African American to serve as a school principal.
The forces that killed the neighborhood included the interstate system that cut the neighborhood in half–Jane Jacobs or a surrogate was not here. Another was a decline of the railroad where steady employment with union-negotiated pay was once available and within walking distance. Our once splendid Union Terminal, an historic monument and architectural wonder is need of a multimillion dollar restoration.
In another neighborhood, a vinatge early 2oth century elementary school has been rehabbed, aided by one citizen who stood firm and gathered others to realize his vision—of a roof-top garden for hands-on teaching of “everything in the curriculum” in addition to the benefits of rooftop viewing the city. Parents and students are being drawn into the orbit of this community school as never before, perhaps because they had a say in planning it and people in high places were listening….for a change.
The civic leader spearheading this effort, a contemporary of Jane Jacobs, once hired a landscape poet to teach city council why our streets needed trees and how to make that happen. We have an full time urban forester to look after the well-being of our trees, We have one elementary school with a fresh and hope-filled start. Never doubt what one one person can accomlish.
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I was involved with a research study on parent perspectives of school closings in Chicago. The stories were heartbreaking. Please take a look: http://ceje.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Root-Shock-Report-Compressed.pdf School closings=destruction of communities.
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I agree with all that has been said about neighborhood schools being closed and sold to Charter Schools in Ohio. It’s interesting to see that public schools are closing so they can’t compete with the Charter Schools that are being built in the same community. Parents voiced their concerns to the Cols. Bd. of Education to no avail. The Public was not fooled by the last levy that was supposed to help fund private & Public Schools in Cols. Ohio. It was soundly defeated!
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