Class War

The Privatization of Childhood

Megan Erickson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781781689486
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781689394
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

In an age of austerity, elite corporate education reformers have found new ways to transfer the costs of raising children from the state to individual families. Public schools, tasked with providing education, childcare, job training, meals, and social services to low-income children, struggle with cutbacks. Meanwhile, private schools promise to nurture the minds and personalities of future professionals to the tune of $40,000 a year. As Class War reveals, this situation didn't happen by chance.

In the media, educational success is framed as a consequence of parental choices and natural abilities. In truth the wealthy are ever more able to secure advantages for their children, deepening the rifts between rich and poor. The longer these divisions persist, the worse the consequences.

Drawing on Erickson's own experience as a teacher in the New York City school system, Class War reveals how modern education has become the real "hunger games," stealing opportunity and hope from disadvantaged children for the benefit of the well-to-do.

1

PUBLIC SCHOOLING:
WHO LISTENS? WHO SPEAKS?

Every time I see a young person who has come through the system to a stage where he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who identifies more with the struggle of Black people who have not had his chance, every time I find such a person I take new hope. I feel new life as a result.

–Ella Baker

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for oneself, to make one’s own decisions, to say to oneself this is black or white, to decide for oneself whether there is a God in heaven, or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then to learn to live with those questions, is the way one achieves one’s own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really ideally want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.

–James Baldwin, 1988

When the odds are against you, how can you prosper?

When during childhood you become a man

And after that derange into a monster

This is for all my misunderstood brothers

Who won’t settle for minimum wages

Who are a danger to themselves and others

For all the carnales confined up in cages.

–Alejandro G. Vera, from Push and Pull: Poetry by
Residents of the Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile
Correctional Treatment Center in
San Antonio, Texas

Students are admitted to Stuyvesant, an elite public high school in New York City where I worked as a student teacher of ninth-grade English, based solely on their performance on a single entrance exam. To receive a spot at the school, they must score in the ninety-ninth percentile on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Stuyvesant is one of nine Selective High Schools overseen by the New York City Department of Education (along with Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, “the Fame school,” which is alone among the other eight in requiring a portfolio rather that exam results for entrance). A quarter of Stuy graduates go on to Ivy League colleges, in a city where less than half of students go on to college.¹ At least four alumni are Nobel laureates.

When I walked into the building on my first day, I heard a piano playing classical music. I wasn’t sure where the sound was coming from, but I could tell I was hearing it distinctly from several rooms away. The acoustics were that good. By spending a few days wandering the hallways like a Brontë heroine in a country house, stunned and exhilarated, I discovered that the resources available to this academic elite included two lecture halls; a skylit cafeteria overlooking the Hudson River; swimming pools; labs for ceramics, photograph, wood, plastics, and robotics. During school hours, students were expected to conduct themselves like little adults, ready to get down to the business of being educated. After school, they participated in a symphony orchestra, elaborate theater productions, or a film appreciation club. The oddest thing I saw was the Museum room, which housed a replica of an old classroom—a memorial to the institution’s scrappy origins: The Old Stuyvesant Campus in Gramercy was (in fitting with the meritocratic origin story) a notoriously dingy and uncomfortable old building and is as romanticized a place as any in New York City.

Founded in the early twentieth century with the intention of providing the most academically talented students with an exceptional education regardless of class background, selective-enrollment schools are the original American “choice” schools—Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, is a Stuyvesant alum.² Today, gifted and talented programs and magnet schools are still valued by urban planners and politicians for their ability to keep upper-middle-class people who would otherwise send their kids to private school or move to the suburbs in the city, and ensure their participation in the city’s school system.³ They are public schools, but like other “choice” schools with an admissions process, including charters, Specialized High Schools enroll far fewer children from low-income backgrounds, children with special needs, and English-language learners than traditional public schools.

The syllabus for the freshman composition course I taught at Stuyvesant included Brave New World, Things Fall Apart, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelve Angry Men, 1984, Julius Caesar, a short fiction unit, and a poetry unit including poets ranging from Federico García Lorca to Nikki Giovanni, with an essay required in a different genre (argumentative, persuasive, etc.) for each text. Classroom conflicts took the form of intense verbal debates related to the text we happened to be reading at the time: the uproar from the female students when one boy argued, during a discussion about The Taming of the Shrew, that “women should listen to their husbands,” for instance. Students acted out, but it was usually through passive aggression. Once, I found a Pepsi bottle full of urine placed precariously on a handrail over an immaculately clean stairwell. Another teacher told me she’d seen kids throw bottles of pee down the stairwells before as a form of quiet rebellion. The greatest challenge for a teacher was, as one colleague of mine put it, “pulling them out of their shells” during class.

Only a tiny fraction of American kids attend specialized public schools, and New York City stands alone in using a single standardized test as admissions criteria. Students admitted to any one of the Specialized High Schools in the city represent just 6 percent of its pool of eighth-graders applying for high schools.⁴ The significance of these schools is not how many students they enroll. It’s what they symbolize. Stuyvesant is free and consistently ranked among the top American high schools in U.S. News & World Report. It’s something to aspire to. There are no dropouts, and the football team has a 91 percent grade average.⁵ Strikingly for New York City, there are no metal detectors to pass through daily on your way to class. The only thing barring entry is invisible: the SHSAT exam.

As a beginning teacher, my job at Stuyvesant was first to observe, then become a coteacher of the class, then take over teaching the class myself.

My cooperating teacher, the experienced teacher who would guide me through the process, believed in a “sink or swim” mentality and gave me three days to observe, a week and a half to coteach, and the rest of the semester on my own. He warned me about the pressure put on his students by parents and faculty. In my observation notes from the time, I wrote earnestly: “He tries to assign only 45 minutes of homework each day, because when he asks his kids how many hours of sleep they got the previous night, many of them answer ‘five.’ Too many of them are depressed because they are overworked” from homework in other classes. One boy of fifteen showed up every day that first week of the semester without saying a word during our forty-minute period, except “Here” when his name was called during attendance. The next week, he was not there. The cooperating teacher shrugged and told me that he’d had a nervous breakdown and refused to do anything but sit at home and play video games. He did not return. In fact, it’s not abnormal for a few students a semester to take weeks or months off from school because of stress. In “Confronting Mental Health Issues at Stuyvesant,” health journalist Rong Xiaoqing reports that the deputy director of a nonprofit community organization in the Lower East Side, Hamilton-Madison House, told her he sees more students from Stuy than any other school.⁶

Throughout the semester we taught together, the cooperating teacher I worked with encouraged me to ensure that every single voice in the classroom was heard. His own method of doing so was to scream “Louder!” or “Speak up!” over a student who spoke too quietly. This went against everything I’d been taught in the school of education where I was taking classes at night—and which, like many schools of education, emphasized student-centered, progressive pedagogy—but the teacher also worked hard to create an environment of mutual respect and trust, especially through humor, and was popular among many students and had been teaching at the school since the 1970s. He was referred to affectionately as “old school” by other faculty. I saw him use this approach equally to boys and girls; at the end of one class, a male student said, “That’s why I love this class!” and tried to hug his teacher.

Participation was high—we kept a record on a yellow legal pad, putting a check next to the student’s name whenever a hand was raised—but three kids out of our thirty-one students never volunteered and, when called upon, looked as if they were in pain. At one point during the first few weeks of class, one of the girls mentioned to me after class that she felt afraid to volunteer. Attributing this reluctance to a student’s personality as some teachers do (“She’s just shy!”) is inadequate, since like all human beings, children act like “different people” in different circumstances, adapting and responding based on their background and perceptions. When I asked the cooperating teacher what we could do to try to involve the students who never participated in discussion or homework assignments, he responded, “They’ll probably fail this semester.” It wasn’t a glib response; it came from experience, for this was the way the school was structured, and though the teacher repeatedly expressed concern with the organizational philosophy of the school, it was ingrained in school culture and policies. Instruction was for the gifted and talented, the thinking went, and took place at a rapid pace—if you couldn’t keep up, what were you doing there?

After my teaching day ended, I spent time tutoring students individually and in groups at the Writing Center in the library. During one-on-one sessions of about twenty to thirty minutes each, students (some of whom were “regulars,” signing up to attend once a week, others stopping by with looks of desperation on their faces the day before a major paper was due) were surprised to find support. At the Writing Center, I worked with a tenth-grader on a literary essay about how the competitive values of American society influenced Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby; the student connected the wealth disparities and competition of 1920s America to the school environment, writing that the obsession with grades and getting into an Ivy League college had impeded his ability to make meaningful relationships with his peers.

In an article published in the school newspaper in 2010, a graduating senior wrote about the way his perspective on the school culture evolved from his first day to his last: “Community is not a word to describe [our school]. Competition is a better synonym.” The anxieties of students, parents, teachers, and administration about college entrance and future performance was a vicious cycle assuring that the school environment would be a competitive pressure cooker. He noted that nothing had really changed since the principal had addressed students’ concerns about communication and the problem of competition in 1984. To get a “good” education, he wrote, students needed to be able to see the school in a different light, “not as a brewing hot pot for college, but as a place where … teachers, parents, and students, can learn from and with each other.”⁷

In the same issue, a student defended his choice to drop out of the school as a response to the school’s policy for dealing with “delinquents”: “The first weapon is punishment,” writes Wes Schierenbeck, and the next is isolation.⁸ He wrote about how caring for a disabled parent led him to seek confidence and encouragement from after-school programs, from which he was paradoxically removed as his grades began to slip. When he explained his situation to an assistant principal—“I remember once telling her, near tears over being pulled from a show, that what I really cared about was theater, and that academics was second priority for me.” Her response, according to the student: “You should’ve gone to LaGuardia.”

The fact is, the school is explicitly not for everyone. It’s an example of the best the traditional model of education has to offer. For the most part, students succeed based on the metrics typically used to evaluate high schools: how many students gain acceptance to a prestigious college. An English teacher at the school told me, “Competition and community are not two mutually exclusive things. Just because we have one doesn’t mean we can’t have the other.” But the assumptions that underlie this arrangement are the same ones that underlie our entire system of education: that “high-achieving” individuals benefit most from seclusion from the rest of us; that what benefits high-achieving individuals is more important than what benefits the community as a whole; that a student’s understanding is best evaluated based on her individual performance and best expressed on a one-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Public Schooling: Who Listens? Who Speaks?
• 2. A Nation at Risk? The Policy Landscape of Public Education
• 3. Edutopia: Against Technical Fixes to Political Problems
• 4. Every Child Should Have 100 Parents: Against Personal Fixes to Political Problems
• Conclusion: A Caring Society