(Public Domain/SOURCE)
(Written for the 2020 Sociology of Education Association Conference Theme)
What is America’s education promise?
Is it the reproduction of inequality
The fueling of wealth disparity
Fulfilling capitalists’ interests
In this economy
Written about in Gonzalez’s Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation
And Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America
What is America’s education promise?
Is it funneling youth into divergent classes
The curriculum tracking
Oakes calls “the tradition”
Sorting and dividing
Stemming from white supremacy
And modeled after factories
Is it privatization
Through vouchers and charters
Stealing from communities
Denying access
Maintaining Reagan’s legacy of a so-called nation at risk
And The Manufactured Crisis
What is America’s education promise?
Is it perpetuating prevailing ideologies
myths of meritocracy,
assumptions of deservingness
and fallacies of model minorities
Described by Lee in Up Against Whiteness
Reproducing hierarchies
Justifying inequalities
And camouflaging realities
Is it “whitemanization”
Retold in Lakota Woman
The stripping of identities
In boarding schools
Against Indigenous communities
Is it “cultural indoctrination” recounted by Woodson in 1933
So-called Americanization
Washing mouths out with soap for not English speaking
Punishment for simply being
Persisting in “humiliating ironies”
And Subtractive Schooling
Is it stolen lands that lie beneath schools
Where Indigenous communities have been pushed aside
Others gentrified
Or where toxins spew into water and fill the air from Unequal Protection
What is America’s education promise?
Is it policing Blacks and Latinxs in and out schools
Punished with zero tolerance policies
Criminalized in the “youth control complex”
Perpetuating López’s “race-gender outlooks”
Is it containing and constraining bodies
Through sexualized policing,
dress codes,
body shaming
Especially for gender nonconforming
Students tell me that’s another form of Academic Profiling
Is it reinforcing Lives in Limbo for Undoc and DACA students
And what Enriquez calls “multigenerational punishment”
for subsequent generations
This because of US imperialism
Militarily, economically, and politically
Devastating lives
And Sacrificing Families
Is it the banking system of education
Critiqued by Paulo Freire
Rows of students
Passively
Consuming
Competing
Rarely interacting
A process of dehumanizing
What is America’s education promise?
Is it rote memorization
Canned curriculum
No child left behind
A race to the top
High-stakes testing
Reflecting what some call a testocracy
Is it silence and erasure
Where fifty years ago students blew out of schools
In Third World strikes
Demanding relevant curriculum
Not eurocentrism
Today, nationally where is K-12 ethnic studies
Is it disrespecting families
immigrant, working class, of color
Erasing all they bring to learning
Undermining what the La Puente community has taught me about “transformational caring”
Is it blaming teachers
Scapegoating unions
Ignoring the human tolls of buffering the machine
And Guarding Culture
Is it disparities in higher ed
Extensions of tracking
Where students continue
Learning How to Be Latino
Unequally
Is it narrow constructions of knowledge
Deficiency theories
Valuing surveys over testimonies
Continuing Collins’ “Eurocentric masculinist knowledge validation processes”
Is it the smog of racism that Tatum tells consumes us
Contaminating everything
Including our everyday
What is America’s education promise?
Our schools must be for the greater good
Based in A Pedagogy Love and critical reflection
Not rabid competition and wealth accumulation
There’s much to be undone
Legacies of atrocities
Structural inequalities
Entrenched policies
And micro-processes
As some have shown
Many left unnamed
Collectively we too play disparate roles in re/making
This U.S. system of schooling
***
Gilda L. Ochoa is Professor of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies at Pomona College. Her most recent book is Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans and the Achievement Gap. Twitter: @GildaLOchoa1.
References
Abrego, Leisy J. 2014. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor and Love Across Borders. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Berliner, David C. and Bruce J. Biddle. 1995. The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books.
Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 1977. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.
Bullard, Robert D. 1994. Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Crow Dog, Mary with Richard Erodes. 1990. Lakota Woman. Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Darder, Antonia. 2002. Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
Enriquez, Laura E. 2015. “Multigenenerational Punishment: Shared Experiences of Undocumented Immigration Status with Mixed-Status Families.” Journal of Marriage and Family. 77 (4): 939-953.
Flores, Glenda M. 2017. Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Seabury Press.
Lee, Stacey J. 2003. Up against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth. New York:Teachers College.
Lopez, Nancy. 2003. Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education. New York: Routledge.
Gonzales, Roberto G. 2016. Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Gonzalez, Gilbert. G. Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation. Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press.
Oakes, Jennie. 1985. Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press.
Ochoa, Gilda. 2011. “Transformational Caring: Mexican American Women Redefining Mothering and Education.” Chicana Latina Mothering, edited by D. Smith Silva. Demeter Press, York University, 104-121.
Ochoa, Gilda L. 2013. Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans and the Achievement Gap. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.
Reyes, Daisy Verduzco. 2018. Learning How to Be Latino: How Colleges Shape Identity Politics. New Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Rios, Victor M. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Blacks and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press.
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. 1997. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations About Race. New York: Basic Books.
Tuck, Eve. 2011. “Humiliating Ironies and Dangerous Dignities: A Dialectic of School Pushout.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education24 (7): 817-827.
Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive Schooling: U.S-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Woodson, Carter G. 1933. The Mis-Education of the Negro.
