High Stakes Education

Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform

Pauline Lipman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135951528
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Noted scholar Pauline Lipman explores the implications of education accountability reforms, particularly in urban schools, in the current political, economic, and cultural context of intensifying globalization and increasing social inequality and marginalization along lines of race and class.

CHAPTER 1

Globalization, Economic Restructuring, and Urban Education

To me it just seems obvious that guiding kids in the process of becoming lifelong critical thinkers, learners, readers, leaders and participants for change is not related and cannot be “measured” on a standardized test bereft of context. My goals (and the goals of my colleagues, too, I think) are so entirely different from the “goals” of the Chicago Board of Education. My instinct is to extrapolate the issues here across the country. These tests are part of a process that produces/cultivates non-thinkers, rote learners, “cogs in wheels” If the ultimate goal of education in the U.S. is to maintain the status quo and create workers to fill needs in our economy then [these policies] are succeeding.

(Teacher testimony, Chicago Teachers for Social Justice, Policy Forum on High Stakes Testing, November 11, 2000)

African American students and Latino/a students are under-represented in the “college prep track” and over-represented in the “military prep track” and the “prison prep track”

(Generation Y, youth activist organization, “Tracking in Chicago Public Schools,” October 2002)

Where will they go, these poverty-level Chicagoans, mostly black, once invisible in the ghettos, but now inconvenient in the Global City? Probably farther out, into the fringe suburbs, beyond the reach of the global economy.

(Longworth, Chicago Tribune, August 25, 2002, p. 8)

These reflections represent the intersection of education policy, the economy, race, globalization, and the city. This book is an effort to examine this intersection. Chicago—the city and its schools, its politics, its economy, its history—is my point of reference. My analysis homes in on this city and its educational policies, but Chicago also epitomizes broad national and international educational trends. In an industrial age it was the city of big shoulders. In the era of big city political machines, the Chicago Democratic machine was canonical. So too are its current school policies. In an era of accountability, high stakes testing, and centralized regulation and militarization of schools, Chicago’s school policies are paradigmatic. Through an examination of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of Chicago school policy, I intend to open a window on the implications of policies that are reshaping education in the United States and in other countries as well.

In 1987, U.S. Secretary of Education, William Bennett visited Chicago and pronounced its schools “the worst in the nation.” Bennett chose Chicago public schools to level a charge against urban school districts nationally and to promote his own policy agenda, blaming public schools for the loss of U.S. economic dominance and lobbying for a return to basic skills and “rigor.” Just a year later, Chicago again captured national attention with its 1988 School Reform Law, a radical effort to shift some decisions from the school district bureaucracy to local communities and schools. In yet another twist, in 1995 the Illinois State Legislature turned over control of the city’s schools to Chicago’s mayor, Richard M. Daley. Daley promptly installed a corporatist regime focused on high stakes tests, standards, accountability, and centralized regulation of teachers and schools. These reforms were layered over the “democratic localism” (Bryk, Sebring, Kerbow, Rollow, & Easton, 1998) of the 1988 reform. In an ironic echo of Bennet’s earlier pronouncement, in 1998, President Clinton dramatically hailed Chicago’s 1995 school reform as “a model for the nation.”

Chicago has become a standard bearer for high stakes testing and school accountability, for centralized regulation of teachers and schools, and, less publicly, for increasingly stratified schooling experiences, including the militarization of schooling alongside new, highly selective college preparatory programs (Lipman, 2002). The policies driving the 1995 reform have become the hallmark of big city schools nationally and typify key features of neoliberal education policies in the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere (e.g., Apple, 2001; Ball, 1994; Coffey, 2001; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Whitty, Power, & Halpin 1998). Indeed, much of what Chicago’s mayor and school district heads have done since 1995 provided a model for George W.Bush’s No Child Left Behind (2001)—the policy shaping U.S. education at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In short, Chicago has been both a barometer of the state of urban education in the United States and a place to which reformers have turned for lessons on how to change urban schools. For this reason, it has also been a focus of research and changing perspectives on urban education in the United States (e.g., Bryk et al., 1998; Hess, 1991; Homel, 1984; Katz, 1992; Katz, Fine, & Simon, 1997; Peterson, 1976; Shipps, 1997; Wrigley, 1982).

Yet, through all the publicity about Chicago’s rising test scores and research on outcomes (e.g., Bryk et al., 1998; Roderick, Byrk, Jacob, Easton, & Allensworth, 1999), there is little critical examination of the genesis of these policies; whose interests they serve; their social implications, or their meanings for teachers, communities, and, most of all, the nearly one half million students in Chicago Public Schools, 90 percent of whom are students of color and 84 percent of whom are classified as low income. Front page headlines tell a story about “a vastly improving system,” about introduction of order and accountability to chaotic, failing schools. But there has been little attention to what the policies mean for the moral and intellectual life of teachers and students and the social implications of those meanings. There is another story, a story about discouragement and despair, about coercion and disempowerment, about individual blame and disciplined subjectivities, about race and class inequality, and about challenges to these realities. This story is embedded in a larger narrative of globalization and social and economic polarization, of urban displacement and exclusion. This book is an attempt to uncover these converging, and submerged, stories.

Chicago is a concentrated expression of the contradictions of wealth and poverty, centrality and marginality, that typify globalization and its implications in the economy and the cultural politics of race and space in the city. Using Chicago as a case study, in High Stakes Education I argue there is a strategic relationship between these economic and social processes and the regime of accountability and educational differentiation governing schools. Contrary to the discourse of equity and the common sense that have been constructed around these policies, I argue that they exacerbate existing educational and social inequalities and contribute to new ones. Drawing on case studies of schools and school district data, I contend that accountability and the centralized regulation of schools and teachers sharpen disparities in curriculum and teaching, widening the gap between schools serving lowincome students of color and schools serving mixed- and high-income populations. I also suggest that current policies undermine efforts to help students develop tools of social critique and culturally centered identities that can help them survive and challenge the new inequalities. As students’ opportunities to learn and the nature of school knowledge are further differentiated by race, ethnicity, and class, public schooling is contributing to the production of identities closely aligned with the highly stratified workforce of the restructured economy. I also contend that accountability and differentiated schooling concretely and symbolically support the spatial “repolarization” (Smith, 1996) of the city. This restructuring of urban space is linked to globalization and benefits downtown development and neighborhood gentrification at the expense of working-class communities and communities of color.

I argue that education policies are deeply implicated in a cultural politics directed to regulating and containing African American and some Latino/a youth and their communities. They support the policing and exclusion of youth who have been made superfluous in the new economy and undesirable in the public space of the city. Although the policies have led to certain improvements in some schools and have created additional opportunities for a small percentage of students, as a whole, they reproduce and intensify economic and social inequality and racial exclusion and containment. What is at stake are not only the educational experiences and life chances of students, but the kind of city and the kind of society we will have.

Chicago school “reform” is a sobering lens through which to view the implications of Bush’s national education agenda of accountability and high stakes tests and the ground it lays for the privatization of education when public schools fail. However, I also want to demonstrate through the Chicago case that any critique of accountability policies must address, in Gramsci’s (1971) terms, the “good sense” in the policies. Support for these policies needs to be examined, in part, in relation to the organic connections they make with people’s daily lives. Understanding this good sense, and the conditions in which it is rooted, is a crucial aspect of framing alternative educational policy and practice that respond to real problems and lived experiences. This reinforces the importance of public dialogue that includes the full participation of those who have been most affected by urban schools— families, students, and communities of color and committed teachers. Because the hegemony of current policies also represents the triumph of an agenda that has been constructed as the only alternative to “the failed policies of the past,” creating a viable alternative is all the more urgent.

In this book, I examine education policy in the context of a constellation of economic, political, and cultural processes linked to globalization as it unfolds in a major urban context. These include Chicago’s restructured, information economy; its drive to become a global city; its urban development and gentrification; and its new urban geography of centrality and marginality along lines of race, ethnicity, and social class. I am concerned with systemwide, or macrolevel, dimensions of official policies and microlevel meanings, how they are experienced by teachers, students, and principals in schools. Although I focus on the role of capital and the class interests embedded in Chicago school reforms, I “foreground race as an explanatory tool for the persistence of inequality” (Ladson-Billings, 1997, p. 132). I am interested in concrete consequences of policy and in its ideo logical force— the ways in which policy discourses shape consciousness about education, specific social groups, and the role of social policy in relation to the common good. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I lay out the political and economic situation underlying the dominant policy agenda, discuss my approach to policy, and briefly describe my research. I conclude with an overview of the book.

Urban Education, Political Economy, and Cultural Politics of Race

The persistent failure of urban schools and repeated efforts to change them have shaped much of the debate about education policy in the United States over the past forty years. The issues have remained stubbornly constant: inadequate funding and resources, unequal educational opportunities, high dropout rates and low academic achievement, student alienation, racial segregation, and race and class inequality within and among urban schools. These failures have, in part, been a product of the evolving crises of cities themselves. Poverty and race have been at the center of these crises, beginning with white, middle-class flight and urban disinvestment in the 1950s. Poverty, urban neglect, and racial isolation were compounded by deindustrialization and further disinvestment in central cities in the 1970s and 1980s and by reduction in federal funding for social programs for the poor beginning in the 1980s (Rury & Mirel, 1997). In the 1990s, the revitalization and gentrification of some urban areas and neglect of others and the highly stratified informational economy widened the gap between rich and poor. This has occurred in ways that are racialized (i.e., white vs. Black and Latino/ a), intraracial (i.e., African-American and Latino/a professionals vs. lowincome African Americans and Latinos/as) and differentially experienced by various ethnicities and immigrant groups (Bettancur & Gills, 2000). At the same time, intersections of racial oppression and social class and inequities between urban and suburban schools and among city schools have demonstrated the continuing importance of social class in U.S. education. Urban schools remain deeply embedded in these multiple and intersecting inequalities. My analysis of these inequalities begins with the broad social situation—the ensemble of social relations that are shaped by global, national, and local political-economic structures and ideological forces (see Gill, 2003).

Globalization, Global Cities, and Education Policy

It is impossible to examine education reform in the United States without taking into account continuing forces of globalization and the progressive diversion of capital into financial and speculative channels. (McLaren, 1999, p. 20)

Globalization, a much discussed and contested concept, is at the center of my analysis.¹ My focus is on economic globalization—the global con nection of markets, production sites, capital investment, and related processes of labor migration. The world economy over the past thirty years has been defined by mobility of capital nationally and transnationally (Sassen, 1994) and the dramatic contrast between wealth and poverty within nations and on a global scale. “It is this hypermobility of capital that distinguishes the current phase of globalization from that of earlier eras. Against this backdrop, the divide between the global rich and the regional and local poor has never been so great” (Rizvi & Lingard, 2000, p. 420).

At the heart of globalization are the technological capacity to generate knowledge and process information at increasing speeds and efficiencies, a highly integrated and flexible system of production of goods and services built on the global reorganization of the labor process and transnational circuits of labor, and the worldwide primacy of finance and speculative capital (Castells, 1989, 1998; Sassen, 1994). These forces have generated massive transnational movements of money, commodities, and cultures, and a new global division of labor. They are destabilizing populations on a national as well as an international level, setting in motion transnational migrations and circuits of labor, and literally changing the face of national populations. They have also created greater economic integration of national economies and increasing concentrations of power in supranational political bodies such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (Burbules & Torres, 2000). Contrary to official applause for the “benefits” of the market and its web of global economic connections, under the global regime of capitalist accumulation, the economic processes and policies associated with globalization are magnifying existing inequalities and creating new ones. They are accelerating the devastation of the environment and the liquidation of languages, cultures, and peoples. The results are a widening global chasm between rich and poor countries, rich and poor regions, and rich and poor people and a steady degradation of life for the vast majority of the world’s people (Korten, 1995; Mander & Goldsmith, 1996).

The economic, political, and cultural dimensions of cities are increasingly shaped by these processes. As Feagin (1998) points out, the development of cities is partly shaped by their transnational economic linkages, particularly their connections with the global capitalist economy, dominant transnational companies, and processes of economic restructuring. The new international division of labor, characterized by the shift in the world market for labor and for production sites, is having a profound effect on cities across the globe. The exodus of displaced popu lations of workers and peasants in some countries is producing increased immigration and cultural diversity in cities like Chicago thousands of miles away. Closing of plants in and around cities in core industrial nations is linked with export of production to Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa. Disinvestment and unemployment in one urban area are linked with increased investment in another. While some cities or urban sectors have become rusty hulks, reminders of past industrial might, others have emerged as high-tech centers and regions of postindustrial growth. As capitalism is restructured globally, some cities are driven to the margins of the global economy while others fight for position as command centers of that economy (Sassen, 1994). These new inequalities among and within cities, coupled with dramatic demographic changes, have important implications for urban schools and for school policy.

Saskia Sassen (1994) has argued that simultaneous processes of global dispersal of economic activities and global economic integration, under conditions of increasingly concentrated ownership and control, have given cities renewed importance. She argues in this context that “global cities” take on a strategic role as command centers of the global economy (p. 4). Global cities are central marketplaces of global finance, major sites for the production of innovations central to the informational economy, and places where global systems of production are organized and managed. These metropolitan centers require large numbers of highly paid professionals (e.g., corporate lawyers, advertising heads, financial analysts, corporate directors) and concentrations of low-wage workers—immigrants, women, people of color—to service the corporate and financial centers and the leisure and personal needs of highly paid professionals. Paradigmatic global cities include New York, London, Tokyo, São Paulo, Paris, Hong Kong, and Mexico City. In the United States, Los Angeles and Chicago have also been described as global cities (Abu-Lughod, 1999).

Thus, global cities are the strategic terrain on which the contradictions of wealth and poverty, power and marginalization that typify globalization are played out (Sassen, 1998). “We see here an interesting correspondence between great concentrations of corporate power and large concentrations of ‘others’” (Sassen, 1994, p. 123). The new immigrants are products of U.S. military interventions as well as global capital’s worldwide disruption of local economies and traditional agricultural production. “This global dislocation comes to roost in the ‘Third Worlding’ of the U.S. city” (Smith, 1996). Terrible economic disparities are paralleled by new forms of social segregation and dislocation and glaring contrasts in the use of, and access to, urban space (Castells, 1989). One striking manifestation is the built environment of global cities which has been, and continues to be, reshaped by massive investment in gentrification and downtown development. These developments both are produced by and contribute to processes of globalization. As global capital floods the real estate market it fuels development. And the influx of high-paid workers at the nerve centers of the global economy creates a massive market for upscale residential and leisure spaces built out of, and over, the homes and factories and neighborhoods of former industrial workforces. The new luxury living and recreation spaces become gated security zones, policed and controlled to ensure the “safety” of their new occupants and global tourists against the presence of menacing “others,” particularly disenfranchised youth of color who increasingly have no place in the new economy and refashioned city. “Evicted from the public as well as the private spaces of what is fast becoming a downtown bourgeois playground, minorities, the unemployed and the poorest of the working class are destined for large-scale displacement” (Smith, 1996, p. 28). But new immigrations, coupled with economic and social polarization, also give rise to new contests over culture, language, representation, and place. Sassen (1998) argues that at the same time that immigrants and people of color are politically and economically marginalized, the city becomes a “strategic site for disempowered actors because it enables them to gain presence, emerge as subjects even when they do not attain power” (p. xxi). In Chicago and elsewhere, the drive to become a first-rate global city—with all its contradictions—shapes the social landscape on which the trends and tensions of education policy are played out.

Indeed, education policy has been explicitly tied to global economic competitiveness as the fluidity of investment capital and the global competition for investments and markets have dominated more and more aspects of social life in cities and nations. “Education policy is now often conceptualized as a central plank of national economic planning—the skills of a nation’s people being an important factor in attracting peripatetic capital to a specific place” (Rizvi & Lingard, 2000, pp. 423–24). On a world scale, this trend is reflected in the setting of educational standards for developing countries by global capitalist bodies, such as the World Bank, in order to promote an integrated world economy along market lines (Jones, 2000). In the United States, education is being linked directly to the economy through school-to-work programs, the “new” basic skills (working collaboratively, solving problems, improving reading and math skills), and the revitalization of vocational education (Murnane & Levy, 1996; Olson, 1997). Ideologically it is linked through “human capital development” and discourses that define education as workforce preparation (Morrow & Torres, 2000; National Center on Education and the Economy, 1990; Reich, 1991). This “economizing education” (Ozga, 2000) and the emphasis on standards and testing are eroding the concept of education for participation in democracy (McNeil, 2002). Morrow and Torres (2000) summarize this danger: “The overall effect is to shift education toward competence-based skills at the expense of the more fundamental forms of critical competence required for autonomous learning and active citizenship” (p. 47).

Global economic integration and transnational flows of information and culture have also led to more rapid “policy borrowing” (Blackmore, 2000). This is apparent in the convergence of neoliberal² policy frameworks in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, and elsewhere (see, for example, Burbules & Torres, 2000; Gabbard, 2000; Lingard & Rizvi, 2000; Mickelson, 2000; Stromquist & Monkman, 2000; Taylor & Henry, 2000; Walters, 1997). Chicago’s education policies reflect two complementary, though seemingly contradictory, aspects of these frameworks. One is decentralized management (through devolution, schoolbased management, decentralized governance, Ball, 1994) and opening up of schooling to the market (through school choice, privatization, and direct corporate involvement, Saltman, 2000; Whitty et al., 1998). The other is strong state regulation through centralized regimes of testing, monitoring, and accountability. This trend is reflected in standards, national testing, accountability, and centralized regulation of teachers and curriculum. Framed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• References