Chicago School Policy and the Regulation of Black and Latino Youth
Pauline Lipman
Chicago’s school accountability policies and centralized regulation of schools have become a model for urban school districts in the United States and a prototype of Bush’s national education policy. Chicago’s 1995 school reform law gave Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley control of the schools. Daley appointed his budget manager Paul Vallas to be CEO of Chicago public schools (CPS) and his chief of staff Gery Chico to head the CPS Board of Trustees. Promising efficiency, sound fiscal management, improved academic achievement, and equity, Vallas and Chico established a corporatist regime focused on accountability, high-stakes tests, standards, and centralized regulation of schools. As a result, thousands of primarily black and Latino youth have been retained in grade and sent to mandatory remedial programs and basic education transition high schools. Over one hundred elementary and high schools in black, Latino, and immigrant communities have been put on “probation” under strict central administration oversight.
CPS has also further stratified academic programs. New academically selective magnet schools and programs, mainly located in largely white upper-income and/or gentrifying neighborhoods, have been established alongside general high schools with limited offerings of advanced courses and new vocational academies, basic skills transitional high schools, the first two public military high schools in the United States, and an expansion of scripted direct instruction (DI)1 in elementary schools—all attended primarily by African Americans and Latinos. (Not to be confused with direct teaching of specific skills and concepts, the DI schools are rooted in behaviorism and a deficit model of “economically disadvantaged” students.) There is also increased policing of youth through zero tolerance school discipline policies.
In this chapter, I examine Chicago’s policies as a window on accountability and militarization of urban U.S. schools. I argue that, in the name of equity and school improvement, Chicago’s “reforms” concretely and symbolically “crack down” on African American and Latino youth who are seen as largely superfluous in Chicago’s restructured, informational economy and dangerous in the racialized social landscape of the city. The policies are clearly linked to broader neoliberal and neoconservative discourses of individual responsibility and centralized regulation,2 but my focus here is on ways in which the reforms are materially and symbolically linked to the regulation and control of black and Latino youth and their communities. While racial inequality, segregation, and injustice have been persistent realities throughout Chicago’s history, I argue that racialized school policies have dangerous new ramifications in the context of the city’s restructured economy, gentrification and displacement of low-income communities of color, and its global-city agenda. I briefly examine the new common sense around these policies and argue for an alternative agenda for urban schools.
Borrowing Grace’s notion of critical policy scholarship,3 my analysis of policy is theoretically and socioculturally situated and generative of social action. I link an empirical analysis of Chicago’s educational policies with a political analysis of their genesis and social meaning.4 I am interested in three aspects of policy: (1) regulations governing school organization, curriculum, and instruction, (2) policy as social practices of actors at all levels of the educational system,5 and (3) policy texts and discourses as symbolic politics6 or “political and cultural performance.”7 In this sense, educational polices are part of a dominant system of social relations, framing what can be said or thought8 and the social identities that are produced.9
Building on this framework, I examine education policy in the context of Chicago’s new urban economy drive to become a global city, and a new geography of centrality and marginality along lines of race, ethnicity, and class. Drawing on critical race theory, my analysis “foregrounds race as an explanatory tool for the persistence of inequality.”10 My focus is the relationship of school policies to the cultural politics of race in the city.11 Although official policy is contested at multiple levels, and school-level practices embody emergent and residual ideologies and past reforms, this complexity is beyond the scope of my discussion here.12
My analysis draws on interviews with school district administrators, a review of CPS quantitative data and policy documents as well as newspaper articles, studies of Chicago’s changing demographics and economy, and publications of real estate, elite civic organizations, and city officials. I also draw on interviews with teachers, school administrators, and students and observations of classes, school activities, and meetings at four CPS elementary schools between 1997 and 2001. I begin with the political-economic context of Chicago. Then I examine the role of accountability policies in the regulation of students, teachers, and communities. I go on to examine the ways in which these policies are a way of monitoring and controlling teachers, students, and communities of color. I focus on Chicago’s military schools, which I argue are linked to a wider set of social policies that police and criminalize youth of color. I conclude by examining why the policies resonate with some families and communities and link this “good sense” with an alternative agenda for transforming urban schools.
Chicago school policies are unfolding in an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse and economically polarized city driven by processes of economic restructuring, globalization, and the displacement and containment of people of color. Under the regime of capitalist accumulation, “global cities” are command centers of global finance and production, the places where the organization and management of transnational capital accumulation and global production processes are concentrated.13 With its concentration of sophisticated producer services, international markets, corporate headquarters, and its importance as a financial and tourist center, Chicago is vying for position as a “global city” alongside New York and Los Angeles in the United States.14 In alliance with Chicago’s business, financial, and real estate interests, Mayor Daley has consistently promoted the global city agenda. In his first mayoral campaign in 1989, Daley said, “I think you have to look at the financial markets—banking, service industry, the development of O’Hare field, tourism, trade. This is going to be an international city.”15
As is typical of other major international cities, in Chicago globalization is producing “a new geography of centrality and marginality”16 characterized by deepening inequality in salaries and wages, in housing, and in claims to public space. The face of Chicago has changed from a manufacturing city of “big shoulders” to a city of corporate headquarters, tourism, and gentrified neighborhoods alongside sweatshops, substandard housing, and isolated areas of de-industrialization and disinvestment. Established working-class and low-income communities are being supplanted by gentrified upscale housing, luxury shops, and hip leisure spots for high-paid professionals. Across the city, economic redevelopment in low-income areas has been sacrificed to renovation and development of the downtown area as a glamor zone of tourism, expensive restaurants and cultural venues, and luxury housing. This pattern is matched by the increasing social isolation of Latino and African American communities divested of city resources.17 Through tax increment financing zones (TIFs),18 the city has diverted millions in taxes earmarked for schools, libraries, and other public services to developers and real estate interests. Public housing, left to decay by decades of disinvestment and mismanagement, is rapidly being razed to clear the way for expensive new condominium and town-house developments. Meanwhile, the former residents are dispersed and/or forced out of the city to impoverished suburbs or other socially isolated low-income areas.
Globalization and economic restructuring are also producing a highly stratified, economically polarized labor force through simultaneous upgrading, downgrading, and exclusion of labor.19 In the Chicago metropolitan area, the shift from manufacturing to an informational and service economy has produced growth at both ends of the wage/salary scale, but the greatest job growth has come through the replacement of unionized manufacturing jobs with low-wage, low-skilled, primarily service jobs with less social protection than jobs in the recent past.20 A contingent workforce of multi-task, part-time and temporary jobs without benefits is made up primarily of women, people of color, and immigrants, many of whom work two, three, even four part-time or temporary jobs. Others, even less fortunate, have been driven into the informal economy in order to survive.
The new economic inequalities are highly racialized. Disparity in wages between African Americans and Latinos, as compared with whites, is increasing;21 in 1999, Abu-Lughod reported that the Chicago metro area led all others in the economic disparity between whites and African Americans.22 At the same time, large sections of the potential labor force, mainly African American and Latino youth, are largely excluded from the formal economy.23 From the standpoint of capital and Chicago’s political elites, many youth of color are not only superfluous in the labor force but potentially dangerous in a city designed to attract tourism and high-paid managers, technical workers, and business services at the core of the global economy. Processes of globalization, economic restructuring, and spatial isolation and dispersal converge with white racist ideology and structures of racial power and privilege to foster a cultural politics that pathologizes and criminalizes communities of color. These communities, especially black and Latino youth, have become the targets of stepped-up police occupation, harassment, and terror. The stark reality is that the future of a generation of young African American and Latino men and women is more likely to be in the bowels of the prison industrial complex than in the offices of Chicago’s new informational and service economy.24 Chicago school policies cannot be fully understood apart from these economic, social, and cultural processes.
CPS’s accountability system gives central administrators the power to regulate many aspects of teaching and learning, professional development, school organization, and students’ educational futures. However, in practice, this power is exercised differentially with quite different consequences in low-scoring schools serving low-income students of color than in schools in more affluent, white, middle-class communities. I draw on my data from four elementary schools—Grover, Westlawn, Brewer, and Farley25—to illustrate what this selective regulation of schooling means for students and teachers.
Students at Grover and Westlawn are over 90 percent African American and low income. Grover is plagued by high teacher turnover and staffing by temporary and unqualified teachers. Westlawn has a more stable faculty and a reputation as one of the best schools serving a large cluster of housing projects. Brewer is over 90 percent Mexican–Mexican American and about 90 percent low income. It has a large bilingual, Spanish/English, program. Farley is a mixed-income, multi-race school with a significant segment of professional parents, both white and African American. About 50 percent of Farley’s students are African American and the remainder are white, Asian, and Latino. Farley has an established faculty, virtually all of whom have advanced degrees and are active professionally outside the school.
In 1996, Grover was one of the first schools to be placed on probation, and five years later less than 15 percent of students scored at or above national norms on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) in reading and less than 25 percent scored at or above national norms in math. Between 1997 and 2001, Westlawn raised its ITBS scores from below 25 percent of students at or above national norms to nearly 50 percent at or above national norms. In both Grover and Westlawn, the culture of the schools, although complex and contradictory, has become increasingly saturated with practices, language, and values shaped by performance on the ITBS, which is the basis for CPS accountability, and to a lesser extent on the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT). Concretely, this means teachers teach to specific test items/skills on which their students did poorly the previous year; teachers tend to reproduce the test content in the curriculum; and substitution of test preparation booklets (keyed to the ITBS and ISAT) for classroom texts is common. At key benchmark grades, one principal requires teachers to substitute test preparation materials for the standard curriculum for over one-quarter of the school year. At one school, teachers voted to use money earmarked for an arts program to purchase the test prep books. Teachers also focus on the mechanics of test-taking and strategies for selecting multiple choice answers. Even teachers who are highly critical of the emphasis on standardized tests feel obliged to do some test preparation given the serious repercussions for students and the pressures from their principals.26 This practice can pay off. The inordinate focus on test preparation is a major factor in Westlawn’s improving scores.
Acquiescence is partly the result of an accountability climate that is both coercive and normalized. Neoliberal, managerial discourse has so permeated public discussion about education in Chicago, and nationally, that other perspectives have been largely silenced. High-stakes testing and sanctions for failure are everywhere, necessary, normal, and inevitable. Despite some teachers’ (private) opposition, “test prep” has become a taken-for-granted part of the curriculum. Passing the tests has come to be a publicly sanctioned purpose of schooling regardless of what other intrinsic, educational goals educators may hold. By the third year of my inquiries, some teachers seemed almost surprised that I would ask about a practice that had become so routine. They described test-taking as “a lifelong learning skill,” and justified test practice in one grade as preparation for testing in the next grade, in high school, on the SAT, for a job at the post office, and for life in general. Also normalized (despite an undercurrent of moral outrage) is the widespread practice of educational triage. Students close to passing the ITBS are singled out for extra attention and tutoring, while those who are deemed to have little hope of passing and those certain to pass receive less attention.
Teachers, like the public in general, end up consenting to policies that deny agency to students and teachers alike and negate broader educational goals.
Although Brewer is less test-driven than Westlawn and Grover, efforts to encourage thoughtful, intellectually engaging instruction and bilingualism/biculturalism have been challenged by accountability policies. Although about 50 percent of Brewer students score at or above national norms on the ITBS, central authorities warned that Brewer might be forced to adopt district-mandated curricula if its scores dropped. This has narrowed the curriculum to some degree. For example, teachers dropped a conceptually grounded mathematics curriculum because it was not tightly linked to the ITBS. Some progressive teachers also struggle to maintain critical approaches to knowledge in the face of a test-driven culture that reinforces the authority of received information, memorization of facts, and simple right or wrong answers.
In contrast, at Farley, a school with a sizable proportion of middle-class and white students and an excellent academic reputation, most teachers, the principal, and, to some extent, parents, are openly opposed to the district’s accountability agenda. In general, the school has a rich culture of literacy and students have opportunities to discuss ideas, defend their own opinions, and produce meaningful work (e.g., short stories, thoughtful essays). Though 70 percent to 80 percent score at or above national norms on the ITBS, the school cannot afford to ignore high-stakes tests. Yet, teachers fiercely hold on to a curriculum that they believe constitutes a “good education.” For example, the third-grade teachers decided to reject CPS’s formulaic writing curriculum in favor of approaches they believed developed fluent writers with their own voices. At the same time, Farley teachers are keenly aware that a significant drop in the school’s test scores would have serious implications for the school and individual students, but they tend to clearly demarcate the regular curriculum from practice for the tests, and test practice is presented as an exercise, not a learning activity. Many teachers at Farley said they would leave and if necessary quit teaching altogether if Farley became dominated by the ITBS “like other schools.”
The schools’ different responses to district accountability are closely linked to past and present race and class advantages and the relative political power of their communities. They demonstrate that school policies that regulate and control compound the disempowerment of oppressed communities and that schools also reflect power differentials in the city. Farley’s high test scores, a product of its middle-class and white advantages, and its location in a politically powerful professional community allow the school to avoid surveillance by district officials. The school, with a pro-active parent organization, partly composed of influential professionals, has a history of ignoring CPS mandates that preceded the 1995 reforms. Farley’s middle-class core constituency and its affluent community have attracted a stable group of qualified teachers who typically see themselves as intellectuals and knowledgeable professionals. They make confident judgments about the Chicago academic standards, the merits of various tests, and research-based curricula and are supported by a principal who defends their professional competence and shields them from district mandates as much as possible.
The school also benefits from its close relationships with universities and involvement in university-sponsored curriculum development.
These advantages set Farley apart from Grover and Westlawn, both of which are in communities decimated by decades of disinvestment and now the demolition of public housing. Grover, in particular, exemplifies the inequity that plagues urban schools serving students of color. Until 1999, Grover had no playground, no all-day kindergarten, no science labs, no library. It had a long-term ineffectual principal, a teaching staff with little professional development beyond their original degrees, and no reading specialist. Although some of these deficiencies have been corrected by juggling funds, the school continues to have extremely high teacher turnover and a high proportion of noncertified teachers. Brewer, although also under threat of more direct control if its scores drop, has an energetic principal and an activist parent organization that has mobilized to challenge the board’s retention policies. The community also has a history of fighting for bilingual education and for the rights of undocumented immigrants, and community organizations have been fighting against gentrification. This political activism and the school’s strong community reputation provide some insurance against greater intervention by the district.
The four schools illustrate how current policies compound historical injustices. The histories and academic profiles of Grover and Westlawn are intricately connected with multiple forms of structurally and culturally rooted race and class subjugation and decades of educational inequity. Despite struggles by Latino and African American communities to improve their children’s education, structural changes in the economy over the past thirty years have compounded race and class inequities. As de-industrialization and disinvestment have produced economic destitution, African American and Latino communities have been further undermined by demonization in the media and in public discourse. As a result, schools like Grover and Westlawn, located in very low-income African American communities in particular, are the schools with the fewest resources and least opportunity to make comprehensive, transformative changes, and their communities have the least political power. These are also the schools most subject to a narrow, test-driven curriculum at a time when the students in these schools urgently need an education that arms them with tools to analyze and critique the social inequalities enveloping their lives.
There is evidence that the pattern of narrowed curricula and test-driven instruction at Grover and Westlawn prevails across the system in schools serving low-income African American, and to some extent, Latino students. This is revealed by the demographics of schools emphasizing basic skills and those most pressed to improve test scores (probation schools, scripted direct instruction schools, transition high schools, and other remedial programs). Probation schools are overwhelmingly African American; a few are Latino or mixed African American and Latino, and very few white students are in schools on probation.27 When CPS placed 109 schools on probation in 1996, the average poverty level of the 71 elementary probation schools was about 94 percent.28 The 59 schools employing scripted direct instruction (personal communication, CPS Office of Accountability staff) follow the same demographic pattern as probation schools. The program is described by its staff as following a special education model. According to the information provided to teachers in scripted direct instruction schools,29 the goal is to improve the “basic education of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.”30 Transition high schools, for over-age eighth graders who fail the ITBS, have a stripped down curriculum of reading, math, and world studies (no science, foreign language, or arts) geared to passing the ITBS in extremely sparse facilities.31 A transition center teacher explained, “We try to boil the concepts down to the point where if they just pay attention, they will succeed.”32 Former Brewer students reported that their transition center English class had no discussion of literature but a steady stream of worksheets aligned with the standardized tests. The students facing this impoverished curriculum are mainly black and Latino. In 2000, an activist parent organization won a civil rights complaint against CPS for adverse discriminatory impact of the retention policy that placed black and Latino students disproportionately in transition high schools.33 The same can be said for remedial after-school programs, which are part of the accountability system’s “support” for failing students. These programs are aligned with ITBS preparation and target primarily low-income students of color.
To the extent that programs and schools follow a basic skills model, students in these contexts have fewer opportunities for critical thought, sustained intellectual engagement, or personally and socially meaningful work. As a Grover teacher said, “Suddenly the classroom is a place where you get better test scores, you learn to get better test scores instead of learning.” In a reduplication of the racism that has pervaded CPS, these students are now bearing the brunt of a system that has historically failed to educate them. Clearly, a basic education for students who have historically been denied—and are thus most in need of—an enriched and intellectually rigorous program is hardly a solution to entrenched inequities. As Murrell argues, in relation to African American students, an emancipatory education is one that teaches children to think critically and act morally.34 Schooling that is driven by standardized tests subverts critical thought and the sense of personal and social efficacy that is particularly important for African American and Latino students under conditions of intensifying race and class inequality. As Ladson-Billings notes: “If students are to be equipped to struggle against racism, they need excellent skills from the basics of reading, writing, and math, to understanding history, thinking critically, solving problems, and making decisions.”35
Intended or not, a basic skills curriculum for African American and some Latino students coincides with the basic education requirements of low-wage service work in Chicago’s new economy. Despite public perception that the new economy demands significantly upgraded skills for everyone,36 in fact, many of the new, low-wage service jobs require basic literacies, the ability to follow directions, and accommodating dispositions toward work.37 In 1998 the Commercial Club of Chicago (an organization of the city’s financial, business, and civic elite) called for “ever-more-skilled employees” defined as people “who can, at the minimum, read instruction manuals, do basic math and communicate well.”38 Tough accountability measures certify that students who graduate from CPS will, at minimum, possess these skills. Good-quality schools are also central to Chicago’s drive to be a world-class city, and accountability, standards, and numerical measures of achievement are the language of quality. A 1998 Commercial Club report endorsed the mayor’s school reforms and identified education for a skilled workforce as one of three top priorities to realize its vision of the Chicago area as a region of “knowledge, expertise, and economic opportunity.”39
In addition to basic mathematical and print literacy, employers are particularly concerned with future workers’ attitudes and “work ethic”—their reliability, trustworthiness, ability to take directions, and in the case of in-person service workers, a pleasant manner.40 These concerns are highly racialized. A 1990 Commercial Club report noted that “minorities” in low-performing schools will become a greater part of the workforce and will need the new basic competencies. And, in the competition to become a global city, Moberg found that Chicago is at a disadvantage in attracting new firms because there is a widespread perception that Chicago’s workforce is “ill-educated, untrained, and difficult to manage” and that this perception “especially affects the hiring of black men.”41 CPS’s rigid accountability also signifies that schools are producing the disciplined identities business is demanding for the lower tiers of a highly racialized workforce.
Vinson and Ross observe that accountability policies are a particularly insidious mode of social control that merges Foucault’s notion of discipline as “spectacle” (the observation of the few by the many) and discipline as “surveillance” (the observation of the many by the few).42 School probation, automatic retention, the publication and discussion of test scores in schools, and the constant media monitoring of test results constitute a public spectacle of failure. Students who fail are identified by assignment to remedial programs and grade retention. They are publicly humiliated by exclusion from eighth-grade graduation ceremonies and by assignment to transition high schools. Teachers and administrators, as well as students and their communities (overwhelmingly black and Latino), are publicly chastised by being placed on probation and under the authority of central administrators and outside agents contracted by the board to supervise and “help” them. At the same time, the policies promote a panoptic order of intense monitoring and surveillance. Central office administrators monitor principals, principals monitor teachers, teachers and staff monitor students and parents. It is important to be clear that this is not a policy that promotes engaged public attention to inequity in the system, nor is it a policy that encourages collective examination of the problems in schools. This is a process of powerful city and school officials holding up certain schools (and by extension, their communities) and students as public exemplars of failure without the democratic participation of communities to debate and act together with educators to improve their children’s education. Despite the appearance of unilateral application of these policies, concretely, the schools under close scrutiny are in low-income communities of color. This is social discipline primarily directed to black and Latino students, schools, and communities.
Disparities among the four elementary schools discussed here are reflective of Chicago’s increasingly differentiated education. Despite the rhetoric of holding all students to high standards, high-stakes testing, grade retention, mandatory remedial summer school programs, and transition high schools are part of a two-tiered education system. On the one hand, a minority has access to new college prep magnet high schools and international baccalaureate programs alongside preexisting gifted and accelerated programs. The highly selective nature of these new programs and schools (at three of the six new magnets, only 3–5 percent of all students who applied and tested for admission were admitted, according to the Chicago Sun Times43 and their disproportionate whiteness (Northside College Prep, for example, is majority white in a district with 89 percent students of color) means that only a small number of black and Latino students are admitted. On the other hand, the vast majority of students attend remedial programs and neighborhood schools with limited course offerings, uncertified and unprepared teachers, and high dropout rates.44 The geographic location of academically advanced programs neatly corresponds to patterns of gentrification as school policy supports the drive to attract professionals and managers for the city’s globalized economy.
While a minority of students are prepared with the cultural capital and educational experiences to become professionals and knowledge workers, actors in the informational economy, the majority, overwhelmingly students of color, are being prepared for skilled and unskilled low-wage sectors. Although academic tracking has a long history, as Ramon Flecha notes, “the prioritization of intellectual resources in the information society means that … education … is becoming an increasingly important criterion for determining who joins which [social] group.”45 This social selection is highly racialized. Moreover, students learn inside the social practices that constitute stratified educational experiences to take on a particular world view and master a particular identity with little opportunity for critical and reflective awareness.46 The discourse of high-stakes tests teaches African American students at Grover and Westlawn that their own thinking has little value in the face of the authority of the “right answers” in the Test Best answer book. A discourse that eschews critical thought and demands acquiescence to received knowledge also teaches powerlessness.47 Students in these schools are being immersed in very different dispositions toward knowledge and have fewer opportunities to practice independent thought and action than students at Farley. Although schools are only one site for young people to develop critical consciousness and agency, disparate school experiences provide them with quite different resources from which to do this. This is particularly significant in the face of increasing inequality and oppression.
The consequences of failing tests based on mastery of English and dominant discourses also demonstrate the high cost of assimilating the dominant language, knowledge, and dispositions. Students are being taught that their own experience, the language and culturally embedded meanings embraced by their families and communities, count for little in a school system governed by one-size-fits-all standards and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Brewer illustrates this point. New policies require students to take the ITBS in English after three years or less in bilingual education or English as Second Language (ESL) programs. Even teachers who grew up in Brewer’s Mexican American community and are committed to bilingual/bicultural education are under great pressure to privilege the teaching of English. One of them explained, “We’re not doing it [Spanish] justice. So it’s sort of like, you know, again, let’s put our beliefs aside, let’s not think about ‘it’s great to be bilingual.’ We can’t practice what we believe.” The severe consequences of failing the ITBS potently reinforce the supremacy of English and teach students to see their reality from the standpoint of the dominant group and its ideology. CPS standards for bilingual education also require that English language learners master behaviors characterized as “American.” An administrator summarized the debilitating effects of this “cultural invasion”:48 “I can imagine feeling inadequate and thinking, ‘God, if I want to be recognized or be anything, I’d better get rid of the Spanish and start getting on with the English. I mean that’s what counts’ … a feeling of inadequacy and what you have is not good enough.”
Accountability policies also undermine the agency of students, teachers, and communities. They shift the blame for school failure from the state to students who are in fact recipients of decades of substandard education and miseducation. As grade retention, summer school, transition high school, and low test scores are public markers of deficiency; they remind young people they are personally responsible. At Grover, some teachers post students’ test scores from the previous year outside their door to shame them. And implications of deviance and individual responsibility reverberate in school leaders’ warnings that, after all CPS has done, it is now “up to the students to work hard” if they want to pass. This lesson was echoed by eighth graders at Brewer who blamed themselves for failing the ITBS.49 Of course students also resist these messages. Some Brewer students opted to drop out rather than face the demeaning prospect of attending the transition high school. However, in the schools I studied, there was an absence of critical analysis of high-stakes tests that might allow students to examine them from the perspective of race and class oppression and educational inequality.
Probation also demonstrates to the whole school community that it is powerless. It formalizes the subordination of teachers, principals, and local school councils to powerful superiors who scrutinize their actions and have the authority to regulate nearly every facet of the school (curricula, instructional approaches, school organization, professional development, educational programs, and plans for improvement). A teacher at Grover articulated the impotence she and her colleagues feel: “I don’t think we have too much [control over what we can do in the classroom] because when you’re on probation, it seems everybody wants to help you, everybody wants to tell you how to do things. You really don’t have too much power or say-so in what goes on.”
It is relevant that “probation” is also the language of the prison system, signaling the delinquency of schools in African American and some Latino communities, and by implication, the delinquency of students and families as well. It is this implied delinquency that justifies control and rectification. A Grover primary grade teacher summed up the implications, even for very young children, of the discursive connection between probation and the criminal justice system: “several of the kids know through the jail system what probation means. So you are connecting the jail system with the school and them hearing this word ‘probation’ and it becomes like a hammer just knocking them down, knocking them down.”
While teachers and administrators at Grover and Westlawn (and to some extent Brewer) are closely monitored by probation managers, central office authorities, and district monitors, Farley’s educators are relatively more free to pursue their own educational goals and processes precisely because they are under less surveillance for low test scores. Students at Farley also have more opportunities to practice making decisions about their own actions. In contrast, over the past four years teachers at Brewer have noticed a steady deterioration of opportunities for democratic participation in decision making. Farley’s school culture clearly teaches students they have a degree of intellectual and personal agency that is quite different from that learned in the other three schools. I do not claim that more affluent and white schools necessarily promote critical approaches to knowledge. Nor do I want to negate powerful teaching against the grain at Grover, Westlawn, and Brewer, nor minimize problems at schools like Farley, particularly its racial disparities in the upper grades.50 Despite these caveats, in general, students at Farley do have opportunities for critical thought and judgment that diverge from the overall narrowed curriculum and regimentation in the more test-driven schools, and Farley teachers certainly have more control over their own work.
In sum, accountability measures, basic skills curricula, retention, and probation are both an explicit means of regulating students and teachers and a pedagogy that teaches people to adopt subordinated identities. Policies that control African American and Latino students and their schools also undermine the agency of their communities. Chicago’s 1988 School Reform Act established the governance of local school councils (LSCs), made up of a majority of parents and community residents. Despite variation among schools, in its first years, the 1988 reform precipitated broad grassroots participation in school reform.51 Recentralization, through the 1995 reform, has diluted the power of local communities across the city, but LSCs in probation schools have generally lost the most power as central office-appointed “probation managers” have superseded their authority. In some cases LSCs were dissolved altogether. High-stakes tests also determine much of the agenda of LSCs in schools in danger of probation. Thus, accountability has worked to negate the democratic participation of low-income communities of color in particular and has conveyed a public message that these communities are incompetent to govern their children’s schools.
Racially coded “basic skills,” scripted instruction, probation, and reconstitution of schools are part of a larger ensemble of social policies that control and police low-income communities of color. These policies are concretely and symbolically linked with interests of real estate developers and financial and political elites determined to make Chicago a center of tourism, upscale living, and a command center of global capital. Accountability standards discipline black and Latino youth who are “dangerous” in a city which brings together new gentrifiers and those disenfranchised, displaced, and pushed to the bottom of the new economy. As public housing is torn down and its residents dispersed to make way for new high-end townhouses, these racially coded policies justify the segregation and/or removal of blacks and Latinos much as the vocabulary of the “urban frontier” justifies gentrification and displacement in the name of “civilizing” urban neighborhoods.52 School policies that discipline and regulate signify that those running the city are “taking it back” as a space of middle-class social stability and whiteness from dangerous “others,” especially black youth.53
Chicago’s military schools are part of an ensemble of policies that criminalize and police youth of color and mark them as dangerous and deviant. These include CPS’s zero tolerance discipline policy, which mandates automatic suspension and expulsion for specific offenses, Safe Schools, which segregate youth who have been involved in the criminal justice system, and Chicago’s Anti-Gang Loitering Ordinance, which authorizes police to disperse groups in public places if police believe they are gang affiliated. Taken as a whole, these policies are part of a new process of racialized social control that is characterized by simultaneous inclusion and exclusion.
CPS has established two public military high schools and expanded military programs in middle schools and neighborhood high schools. Touting the regimentation of these schools, when the Chicago Military Academy opened, CPS Board of Trustees head Gery Chico said “It’s a school based on rules and conduct. This is a very good thing.”54 Both the Chicago Military Academy and Carver Military High School are in black communities, and their enrollments are over 80 percent African American with the rest Latino. A partnership between CPS and the U.S. army, the Chicago Military Academy is led by military officers; teachers wear military uniforms and are called Captain. In addition to the CPS Uniform Discipline Code, parents and students must sign a contract agreeing to obey the military discipline code with its own set of punishments for infractions of school rules and failure to complete school work (e.g., students must do push-ups, run laps, scrub walls). Although administrators at one of the schools maintained that its purpose is not army recruitment, recruiters meet with all juniors and offer them the army admission test, which is administered in the school. Some students join the army and go through basic training before graduating high school. In fact, the selection process for admission to the school is a first screening to identify youth who will abide by military discipline. As evidence of this screening, administrators noted that few youth from a nearby housing project attend the school because they didn’t seem to like “the military model” (personal communication, school administrator).
The schools teach competitive individualism and unquestioning obedience to a hierarchy of command embodied in the cadet system, which promotes those who exhibit the strongest military-oriented values and behaviors and show the greatest enthusiasm for military activities. Youth who advance to “colonel” lead daily military drills of students, inspect the “recruits” (new students), and exact obedience from those beneath them. Carver administrators extol the virtues of a system that requires youth to refuse to compromise military discipline for solidarity with other youth. A military officer at one of the schools explained, “You have to be kind of conceited, show off your skills …. There is no time for friends because if you have too many friends you can’t lead. You can have friends but you have to do your job … if you are too close to people then you can’t go against them if you have to as a commander.” The schools respond to youth’s desire for respect, responsibility, and leadership development, but shape these experiences as the exercise of authority over others. There is no place here for learning self-determination, collectivity, critical analysis of the world and one’s place in it, or self-control for ethical ends. Rooted in the ideology of competitive individualism, the schools “help the kids who help themselves,” as one school administrator put it.
Like probation and test drills, the ideological thrust of military schools is to publicly define African American and Latino youth as undisciplined. Despite Daley’s claim that the military schools simply offer students “another option,” the schools were established with much public fanfare in low-income African American communities—not white or middle-class communities. The media coverage of the schools’ boot camp discipline commends them for bringing under control “dangerous” and “ unruly” youth55 and “at-risk” students, by exposing them to “order and discipline.” Media accounts are filled with stories of failing and undisciplined youth who do not speak “proper English” and come from “dysfunctional” homes who have been transformed as a result of the military academies into young men and women who work hard in school, help out at home, respect adults, and even learn to speak “proper English.” The schools are exemplars of a new “truth”—if schooling is going to work for urban youth of color, it will need to be highly regimented.
While these youth are being assimilated to a system of rules and authority, thousands of other youth like them are kicked out of school through zero tolerance discipline policies. Data collected by the Chicago youth activist organization, Generation Y, demonstrate that under Zero Tolerance students are being suspended primarily for minor, nonviolent infractions and attendance-related issues, and that targeting African Americans, in particular, has intensified under zero tolerance. In 1994, the year before zero tolerance began, African Americans made up 55 percent of CPS enrollment, but got 66 percent of suspensions and expulsions. In 1999–2000, African Americans were less than 53 percent of all CPS students, but received more than 73 percent of all suspensions and expulsions. While enrollment increased by only 665 students between 1999 and 2000, suspensions increased from 21,000 to nearly 37,000. “The biggest increases were among students of color, especially African American students—where the suspension rate increased from less than 7 percent up to 12 percent.”56 Expulsions have also surged, with African Americans the main target. According to The Chicago Reporter magazine, in 1995–1996 there were 80 expulsions; in 1998–1999 there were 737 expulsions; African American students represented 73 percent of these although they were 53 percent of CPS enrollment.57 This pattern of racial exclusion is reflected in the quarantining of youth involved in the criminal justice system in Safe Schools isolated from the general school population.
School policies parallel the containment and policing of African American and Latino youth in their neighborhoods. Chicago’s 1992 Anti-Gang Loitering Ordinance, championed by Mayor Daley, allows police to round-up youth congregating in public places who are suspected of being in gangs. Between 1993 and 1995, the police arrested 43,000 people under the law58 (a form of legalized police terror). Despite the determination that the law is unconstitutional, ongoing attempts to legalize harassment and street sweeps of youth continue to make it a powerful signifier that youth of color are dangerous and need to be locked up or removed from public space.
Military schools that single out some youth for their successful accommodation to a system of race and class discipline are simply the flip side of zero tolerance policies, Safe Schools, and the Anti-Gang Ordinance. Those newly disciplined by the army are explicitly defined by their difference from others like them who are, by implication, out of control and menacing. As a military officer at one of the academies put it, “Our gang colors are green, our gang is the army [emphases original].” The fact that military programs can turn these youth into models signifies that it is the youth (and their families and communities), not racism, not economic policies of disinvestment, not real estate developers, not demonization in the media that are responsible for their lack of a productive future. Molding these youth into obedient citizens justifies the demonization of others: “The partial nature of the process of racialization as criminalization may simultaneously allow the evolution of a symbolically more successful racialized fraction which serves publicly to rebuke the immiserated majority and divest white society of any responsibility for such immiseration.”59
A critique of CPS policies should be juxtaposed with their resonance with some families, teachers, and administrators. This requires that we look not only at neoliberal ideology but also, in Gramsci’s terms,60 the “good sense” in the policies—their response to real problems and lived experience.61 Support for CPS policies should be understood as a response to decades of educational failure, mismanagement, racial segregation, and perceptions of school violence. Like other big city school systems, Chicago has persistently failed to provide a decent education for low-income children of color. In 1990, Orfield summed up a situation that still prevails: “The great majority of black and Hispanic youths in metropolitan Chicago today attend schools that prepare them for neither college nor a decent job. Many are forced to live under circumstances unimaginable to middle-class suburban families.”62
The good sense in CPS policies lies in the fact that, finally, school district leaders are taking decisive action. They are setting standards and holding schools, teachers, and students responsible for meeting them. They are refusing to simply promote kids to the next grade without teaching them. They are insisting that schools should be safe spaces. A number of teachers at Grover and Westlawn commented that teachers who had been little more than caretakers in the classroom were now, at least, forced to “teach something.” My observations coincide with this assessment. There is more focus on instruction, more planning of lessons, more coherence in the curriculum than four years ago when I began studying the schools. Probation has also led to the replacement of a number of ineffectual principals, as at Grover. (Of course, this must be qualified by the critique of teaching and learning and educational discourse I have outlined.) CPS has narrowly defined education by standardized tests, but support for raising test scores is also rooted in the understanding that the pitifully low scores of many schools in African American and Latino communities are a marker of inequitable education. (Moreover, these tests are used as gatekeepers to academic high schools and college, especially for children of color.) Having created social dislocation, impoverishment, and family stress through decades of disinvestment, de-industrialization, and racial oppression, capital and powerful political interests in Chicago now step in and offer centralized regulation and boot-camp-style solutions. These solutions intersect with the urgency to improve urban schools and with racial profiling of African American and Latino youth, feeding the public perception that they require special forms of discipline, regulation, and control. Yet, military schools (billed as college prep) may be students’ only alternative in a context in which there are very few opportunities for the vast majority to attend good, well-run high schools.
Indeed, the absence of a viable alternative liberatory educational discourse that concretely embraces the urgency to transform urban schools is at the heart of the current crisis in education policy. CPS leaders and the mayor have defined their policies as the only alternative to “the failed policies of the past.” This argument holds sway because the failure of liberal education policies to address underlying issues of race, gender, and class inequality and oppression is not part of a national or local debate about education policy. Instead, neoliberalism is justified by the discourse of inevitability. As Bourdieu argues, “Everywhere we hear it said, all day long—and this is what gives the dominant discourse its strength—that there is nothing to put forward in opposition to the neoliberal view, that it has succeeded in presenting itself as self-evident, that there is no alternative.”63 Moreover, political and economic elites have skillfully re-articulated the struggle for equity to their neoliberal agenda. Accountability is framed in the language of equity and justice: all students and schools are evaluated by “the same test” and “held to the same standards”; the retention of thousands of students is “ending the injustice of social promotion.” “Value legitimation” (giving people what has been promised) is replaced by “sense legitimation” as “… states, and/or dominant groups attempt to change the very meaning [emphasis original] of the sense of social needs into something that is very different.”64 Despite some school improvements (the value strategy), the thrust has been to shift discussions of equity to standards, accountability, and individual responsibility, negating historical and present race and class oppression.65
However, as Carlson argues, “because [recent basic skills and centralization] reforms have not addressed the roots of crisis in urban schools or countered the inequalities that generate conflict and resistance among various groups, ‘basic skills’ reforms are undermined by their own set of contradiction and crisis tendencies.”66 In the short run, they may raise test scores and legitimate the containment or exclusion of some youth, but these policies do not resolve underlying problems of equity, quality, and meaning in urban schools. They are hegemonic in the absence of an alternative discourse. Such a discourse will need to link the urgency to transform urban schools with goals of critical literacy and personal and social agency and pedagogies rooted in students’ sociopolitical realities and cultural identities. And clearly, the struggle for an alternative educational agenda must be understood as part of the larger project to reshape urban policy in the context of globalization.
Chicago exemplifies the law and order trend in Europe as well as the United States aimed at controlling the “enemy within” in the racially coded “inner city.”67 This is a response by the state to the new geography of centrality and marginality in cities defined by economic restructuring and globalization. On the one hand, these cities concentrate immense corporate and financial power, which has a commanding presence in the city landscape, extracts major financial concessions from city governments, and assembles a disproportionate population of highly privileged managers and professionals to run capitalist globalization functions. On the other hand, they also concentrate a growing population of immigrants along with other people of color whose low-paid labor is essential to the work of globalization but whose presence is devalorized and demonized and whose conditions of life produce growing despair. Although marginalized, Latino, African American, and immigrant “others” also exert a growing presence in the city through the politics of culture and identity and through their essential functions in the economy. They are poised to make their own claims on the city. Recent rebellions in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and in Britain coupled with police-state conditions manifest this contention. This social dynamic is central to understanding educational policies and processes that discipline, criminalize, militarize, and exclude low-income urban youth of color and their communities.
In a post-September 11 world, racial profiling has gained new legitimacy and the police repression that has been standard practice in urban communities of color is now legitimated for the society at large. Democratic participation has become expendable and critique treasonous as the “war on terrorism” justifies authoritarianism and the suspension of democratic rights.
Fighting to win the battle of common sense over how our schools should be run, in whose interests, with whose participation, and to what ends has taken on new dimensions and new urgency. Liberatory educational discourse is part of a larger challenge to neoliberalism. It is also a refusal to accept a society in which the solution to perceived enemies (our children within or “demons” without) is cracking down.
* A substantially different version of this chapter appears in the journal Race, Ethnicity and Education.
1 The curriculum employs scripted lessons focused on discrete skills and one-right-answer responses. See Wesley Becker, “The Direct Instruction Model,” Journal of Direct Instruction 33, 36 (Winter 1977).
2 See Michael W. Apple, Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001); Nicholas C. Burbules and Carlos Torres, “Globalization and Education: An Introduction,” in Globalization and Education: Critical Perspectives, edited by Nicholas C. Burbules and Carlos A. Torres (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–26; David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell, Rationing Education: Policy, Practice, Reform, and Equity (Buckingham, Eng.: Open University Press, 2000); Pauline Lipman, “Bush’s Education Plan, Globalization, and the Politics of Race,” Cultural Logic 4, 1 (December 12, 2001), available at http://www.clogic/4-1/4-1.html (accessed April 19, 2010), and Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—a Threat to Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
3 Gerald Grace, “Urban Education: Policy Science or Critical Scholarship,” in Education and the City: Theory, History and Contemporary Practice, edited by Gerald Grace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 3–59.
4 See Michael W. Apple, Review of “Devolution and Choice in Education,” Educational Researcher 27, 6 (1998).
5 See Margaret Sutton and Bradley A. U. Levinson, eds., Policy as Practice (Westport, Conn.: Ablex, 2001).
6 See Joseph R. Gusfield, The Symbolic Crusade, 2nd ed. (Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
7 Mary L. Smith, Walter Heinecke, and Audrey Noble, “Assessment Policy and Political Spectacle,” Teachers College Record 101 (2000): 157–91.
8 See Jenny Ozga, Policy Research in Educational Settings (Buckingham, Eng.: Open University Press, 2000).
9 See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1977]).
10 Gloria Ladson-Billings, “I Know Why This Doesn’t Feel Empowering: A Critical Race Analysis of Critical Pedagogy,” in Mentoring the Mentor: A Critical Dialogue with Paulo Freire, edited by P. Freire (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997), 132.
11 See Stephen N. Haymes, Race, Culture and the City (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
12 See Pauline Lipman, “The Politics of Chicago School Policy and Emerging Resistance,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, Seattle (April 2001); and Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
13 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 1994).
14 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
15 Kim Phillips-Fein, “The Still-Industrial City: Why Cities Shouldn’t Just Let Manufacturing Go,” American Prospect (September–October, 1998): 28.
16 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), xxvi.
17 See John J. Betancur and Douglas C. Gills, “The Restructuring of Urban Relations,” in The Collaborative City: Opportunities and Struggles for Blacks and Latinos in U.S. Cities, edited by J. J. Betancur and D. C. Gills (New York: Garland, 2000), 17–40.
18 A central tool of city government to facilitate this development strategy is tax increment financing zones or TIFs. Once an area is declared by the city to be “blighted,” tax increments are diverted from schools, libraries, and other publicly funded services to subsidize infrastructure that facilitates development. For example, the North Loop TIF district is expected to produce $33 million annually for individual development projects and infrastructure to support development (Podmolik, Mary Ellen [1998]. Downtown Spreading Out as Residents Pour In. Chicago Sun Times, p. A20–21). Once declared a TIF zone, the city can also force owners to sell homes and businesses under the right of eminent domain, clearing the way for development.
19 Manuel Castells, The Informational City (London: Blackwell, 1989).
20 See Betancur and Gills, “The Restructuring of Urban Relations.”
21 Ibid.
22 Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.
23 See Sassen, Cities in a World Economy.
24 Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 1999).
25 To protect the anonymity of schools I have chosen not to disclose specific data that might identify them.
26 For similar findings, see Linda McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (New York: Routledge, 2000).
27 There are 81 schools on probation (52 elementary and 29 high schools). Of these 81 schools, 61 have a student population that is at least 98 percent black. Five schools have at least 84 percent “Hispanic” students, and most of the other students are identified as black. The remaining fifteen schools are mixed black and Hispanic. Seven of these fifteen schools with mixed populations have a student body that is at least 75 percent black. Only two schools on probation have 1 percent or over white students—one has 9.2 percent white students, the other 7 percent white students (CPS Office of Accountability, 2002).
28 PURE, “Correlation of CPS Probation with Poverty Levels,” available at http://www.pureparents.org/data/files/PovertyandEducation.pdf (accessed May 1, 2010).
29 The curriculum employs a strict hierarchy of skills and concepts (levels of lessons), and it employs scripted questions and scripted student responses that “leave(s) nothing to chance” (Martin A. Kozloff, Louis LaNunziata, and James Cowardin, “Direct Instruction in Education” (Wilmington, N.C., University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 1999), available at http://beteronderwijsnederland.net/files/active/0/Kozloff%20e.a.%20DI.pdf (accessed April 30, 2010). Lessons are “quick paced” with a single right answer which the whole group must master before the group can move on. The curriculum is based on a behaviorist model of learning, and there does not appear to be room for student interpretation of text, culturally specific content, or connections with students’ experiences.
30 Wesley Becker, “The Direct Instruction Model.”
31 See Elizabeth Duffrin, “Classes Revolve Around Test Prep,” in Catalyst 10, 6 (1999): 9–11; and Elizabeth Duffrin, “Transition Centers: Services Praised, Instruction Questioned, Results Withheld,” in Catalyst 10, 6 (1999): 4–8.
32 Duffrin, “Transition Centers,” 6.
33 In 1998, the district ratio of African Americans to whites was 5:1, and the ratio of Latinos to whites was 3:1. However, in transition high schools for over-age eighth graders who failed the ITBS, the ratio of African Americans to whites was 27:1 and the ratio of Latinos to whites was 10:1.
34 Peter C. Murrell, “Digging Again the Family Wells: A Literacy Framework as Emancipatory Pedagogy for African American Children,” in Mentoring the Mentor: A Critical Dialogue with Paulo Freire, edited by Paulo Freire (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 19–58.
35 Gloria Ladson-Billings, Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Students (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 139.
36 National Center on Education and the Economy, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages (Rochester, NY: Author, 1990).
37 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (London: Blackwell, 1996).
38 Elmer W. Johnson, Chicago Metropolis 2020: Preparing Metropolitan Chicago for the 21st Century: Executive Summary (Chicago: Commercial Club of Chicago, November 1995).
39 Ibid., 3.
40 James P. Gee, Glenda Hull, and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996).
41 David Moberg, “Chicago: To Be or Not to Be a Global City,” World Policy Journal 14 (1997): 71–86.
42 Kevin D. Vinson, and E. Wayne Ross, “Education and the New Disciplinarity: Surveillance, Spectacle, and the Case of SBER,” Cultural Logic 41 (2001), available at http://clogic.eserver.org/4-1/4-1.html (accessed April 19, 2010).
43 Rosalind Rossi, “City’s Toughest Prep Schools,” Chicago Sun Times (April 2, 2001): A1–2.
44 The Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research calculated the cohort dropout rate of CPS students followed from age 13 to 19 at 41.8 percent in 2000.
45 Ramon Flecha, “New Educational Inequalities,” in Critical Education in the New Information Age, edited by M. Castells et al. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Little-field, 1999), 46.
46 Gee, Hull, and Lankshear, The New Work Order.
47 See also Pauline Lipman, “The Politics of Chicago School Policy and Emerging Resistance,” and Pauline Lipman and Eric Gutstein, “Undermining the Struggle for Equity: A Case Study of Chicago School Policy In a Latino/a School,” in Race, Gender, and Class 8, 2 (2001): 57–80.
48 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1992).
49 See Lipman and Gutstein, “Undermining the Struggle for Equity.”
50 For a further discussion of these issues, see Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education.
51 See Michael Katz, Michelle Fine, and Elaine Simon, “Poking Around: Outsiders View Chicago School Reform,” Teachers College Record 99, 1 (1997): 117–57.
52 See Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996).
53 See Stephen N. Haymes, Race, Culture and the City (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
54 Ray Quintanilla, “It’s Not Just School It’s an Adventure,” Chicago Tribune (12 August 1999): Sec. 1, pp. 1, 26.
55 Dirk Johnson, “High School at Attention,” Newsweek (21 January 2002), available at http://www.gangwar.com/items/items2.htm (accessed April 30, 2010).
56 Generation Y, “Right to Learn Campaign,” PURE (12 January 2002), previously available at www.pureparents.org/pencil.html.
57 Brian J. Rogal, “Alternative Education: Segregation or Solution?” Chicago Reporter 304, 6–8 (2001): 10.
58 Chicago Reporter (September 1998). Danielle Gordon, “High Court is the Final Chapter in Gang Ordinance Controversy,” Chicago Reporter (May 5, 2002), available at http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Sidebars/d/High_Court_Is_the_Final_Chapter_in_Gang_Ordinance_Controversy (accessed April 30, 2010).
59 Michael Keith, “From Punishment to Discipline? Racism, Racialization, and the Policing of Social Control,” in Racism, the City and the State, edited by M. Cross and M. Keith (London: Routledge, 1993), 207.
60 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
61 See Apple, Review of “Devolution and Choice in Education.”
62 Gary Orfield, “Wasted Talent, Threatened Future: Metropolitan Chicago’s Human Capital and Illinois Public Policy,” in Creating Jobs, Creating Workers: Economic Development and Employment in Metropolitan Chicago, edited by L. B. Joseph (Chicago: University of Chicago Center for Urban Research and Policy Studies, 1990), 131; see also ERASE Initiative, Facing the Consequences: An Examination of Racial Discrimination in U.S. Public Schools (Oakland, Calif.: Applied Research Center, 2000); and Tammy Johnson, Jennifer E. Boyden, and William Pitz, Racial Profiling and Punishment in U.S. Public Schools (Oakland, Calif.: Applied Research Center, 2001).
63 Quoted in David Hursh, “Neoliberalism and the Control of Teachers, Students, and Learning,” Cultural Logic 4, 1 (December 12, 2001), available at http://www.clogic.eserver.org/4-1/4-1.html (accessed April 19, 2010).
64 Roger Dale quoted in Michael W. Apple, Educating the “Right” Way, 46.
65 William F. Tate, “Critical Race Theory and Education: History, Theory, and Implications,” in Review of Research in Education, edited by Michael W. Apple (Washington D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1997), 195–247.
66 Dennis Carlson, “Education as a Political Issue: What’s Missing in the Public Conversation about Education?” in Thirteen Questions: Reframing Education’s Conversation, 2nd edition, edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 281.
67 Keith, “From Punishment to Discipline?”