The Structure of Inequity in Education
Enora R. Brown
Lockdown, surveillance, and exclusion constitute the pervasive reality for working-class youth in public high schools, which resemble prisons, military camps, and “dropout” factories, rather than sites of learning, critical thought, and human growth. In these schools, replete with metal detectors, armed guards and police, digital fingerprinting, video security systems, X-ray machines, texting-tip incentives, and bodily searches, poor youth, especially African American and Latino, are subjected to increasing levels of physical and psychological surveillance, confinement, and regimentation. Complementarily, stringent discipline policies, rising school expulsions, and narcotizing test-driven curricula, are inducing enraged hopelessness and forcing these youth out of schools at alarming rates. The physical restrictions, panoptic monitoring, and repressive measures imposed within the school walls are complemented by federal policies and nation-wide educational practices, such as school uniforms, zero tolerance policies, rote education, punitive sanctions and schools closing for low achievement on standardized tests, biometrics in schools, and proliferate JROTC programs, which signify the need for discipline, obedience, and conformity. This growing culture of militarism has been created within grossly underfunded, tax-based schools and in rapidly increasing numbers of corporate- and Pentagon-sponsored military academies for middle and high school youth in poor communities of color. Since youth identities in these communities are discursively constructed as under-achieving, behavior-problematic, violence-prone, unmotivated, education-aversive youth (i.e., the dregs of society, in need of regulatory control and restraint), who were born to aggress and fail, the imposition and presence of enforcement policies to “civilize their untamed spirits” seems merited and quite natural.
Conversely, public high schools for wealthy youth resemble palatial edifices, adorned with all the resources that constitute sites for learning, critical inquiry, and fluid social interchange. These schools are located on spacious grounds and are equipped with state-of-the-art facilities in comfortable, resource-rich environs that encourage the freedom of mobility and thought to discover, problem-solve, and create. In lieu of surveillance technology, armed guards, uniforms, scripted curricula, regimentation, and confinement, these schools have advanced technology for academic study, a plethora of available staff and academic resources to support learning, open dress codes, rich interdisciplinary curricula, varied experiences and open spaces for student creativity and social interaction. The physical breadth and expanse of these public schools serve predominantly upper-middle class white youth in affluent suburban communities, physically “buffered” from the urban poor and youth of color. Unthreatened by NCLB sanctions, elite schools provide students with challenging, enriching college preparatory experiences, while insuring de facto racial and class-polarized education. Through curricular, material, and human resources, students are prepared to excel on rigorously revised Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs), to graduate, and to attend “top tier” colleges and universities—signifying their inherited privilege and institutionalized entitlement. This culture of privilege is expanding within schools that are brimming over with tax-based funds and supplemental resources from wealthy resident families. Since youth identities in these communities are discursively constructed as smart achievers and as the thoughtful professionals and cultured leaders of the future, the plentiful resources and relaxed but rigorous learning environments seem to be the natural outgrowth of their penchant for learning, their value of education, their moral fiber, and their self-directed, responsible, inquisitive, and creative spirits.
While the overtly repressive, dehumanizing nature of schooling for youth in poor communities of color and the liberating, life-affirmative education provided for “academically advanced” youth and wealthy whites, are diametrically opposed, they are interdependent dimensions of public education. As poor schools on probation are being militarized, sanctioned, closed and privatized for non-achievement, select public schools are flourishing with engaged social interactions, with privilege, with advanced curricula in math, science, technology, the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, and with pedagogical practices that promote independent thought, analysis, and innovation. As PhDs are being hired to teach wealthy youth, Troops to Teachers is preparing retired military personnel, on a “fast track” certification in education administration, to be “leaders” in structuring “at-risk” schools. Conditions in poor and elite schools were promoted through the Bush Administration’s educational reform—No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) (2001) stratifying mandates for standardized testing and business-run schools— and their perverse effects will be institutionally reinforced during Obama’s Administration by the “new and revised,” competitive $4.3 billion Race to the Top Fund (RTTT) (2009), introduced by U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. The targeted achievement gap is attributed to “culture” and the personal deficits of poor youth and their families, rather than history of structural social inequality. The resegregation of schools is accomplished and secured through the gentrification of whole communities, school closings, dis/placement of youth; through the funded creation of “top tier” public schools, such as Selective Enrollment and Magnet Schools for “advanced students,” whose test score and neighborhood residence admission criteria preserve elite racialized education; and through legislative measures, e.g., the federal rescindment in 2009 of Consent Decrees mandating school desegregation, and Justice Roberts’ 2007 Supreme Court Decision, revoking the right to use race or ethnicity for voluntary school integration. The institutionalized existence of race–class stratified schools constitutes the systemic violence of apartheid schooling, which is justified by skyrocketing dropout rates in poor schools, achievement success in elite schools, and the construction of corresponding social identities, making inequality appear “functional, morally fair and just.”1
Polarized along social class and racial lines, public schools in poor, working-class and wealthy, upper-class communities are public places whose fusion of space and experience are imbued with differential meanings about the freedoms to which wealthy and “gifted” or poor “challenged” youth are “entitled” and the consequent breadth of future life options that are available to them.2 These places are the physical space where particular social, economic, political, and psychic relationships are forged, nurtured, and contested. Public schools are sources of identity, constituted within webs of power relations that frame the choices and aspirations of youth. While the dominant discourse portrays these schools as the “natural” product of the values, capacities, and rights of residents in each community, it will be argued here that these schools are structurally embedded in, and historically forged through, dynamic postindustrial, global economic, and political relationships. As such, the edifices stand for/represent a polarized and interdependent relationship between the upper class and the working class, the relative valuation of these classes in the dominant culture, and the “rightful” inherited identity positions of their youth in the existing social order. Shrouded in an ideology of individual choice, Social Darwinism, and national unity, these schools reflect the intersubjective meanings created through the different ways in which people live their lives in disparate communities.
This chapter begins with a Tale of Two Schools, an examination of the differences between two public schools—Mountainview Township and Groundview Technical High Schools—that manifest historical institutional inequalities in the public education system, which are exacerbated and codified by current national policies (i.e. corporate privatization and domestic militarization of schools) and are reified and justified by current ideological formulations about the “nature” or essentialized identities of the youth in these different contexts. Comparative portraits are presented of the current financial and material resources available, the curricular and pedagogical experiences provided, and the social relationships fostered within the divergent school cultures. The significance of the observed differences and the dynamic interplay of these dimensions of the educational experience within each school are discussed as they “validate” the meritocratic justification for inequality in education, and as they influence the futures that youth envision, the paths they “choose,” and the stations in life that are readily available.
In the second section, A History of Inequality, the historic roots of these school differences are examined through an analysis of the political struggles for public education for the ex-slaves that accompanied the ascendance of industrialization after the Civil War.3 This analysis is based on the overarching premise that the disparate quality of education in wealthy–poor racialized schools is organically linked to the economy. It provides insight into the structural reproduction and function of social class and racial inequalities in education.4 The third section of this chapter, Economic and Political Foundations, uses Althusser’s theory to consider the relationship between the economy and the State, to examine the relationship between the economic crises of capitalism, e.g., the recent catastrophic credit/financial meltdown of 2008,5 in accord with the seismic shift that a burgeoning information technology and robotics has introduced into the national economy,6 the wholesale movement of financial capital to cheaper global markets, and the extraction of natural resources through sustained imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.7 It addresses the rise of neoliberalism and education reform, including the significance of NCLB and RTTT as “old”/“new” twin pillars of a neoliberal agenda to restructure public education for corporate gain and to funnel youth into their divergent racialized class stations in society, and the concordant policy and newly honed ideological tools, e.g., color-blind ideology, anti-affirmative legislation, designed to obscure profound racial inequalities and justify the increasing polarization of wealth, manifest in Mountainview and Groundview High Schools, and rationalize militarization.8 The last section, Domestic Militarization, addresses the corresponding political repression and militarization of civil society and education exercised through legislative and judicial policies and practices, that are designed to “stabilize” the social order and quell rebellion of those displaced in postindustrial society, and to enforce the entrenchment of capital and requisite subject positions of sectors of the population into their respective race-class positions in society. This analysis posits that the introduction of robotics and gradual emergence of “laborless production” created a dramatic shift in the national/global economy, which requires drastic changes in the state apparatus,9 especially in public education, to accommodate the needs of financial capital in the existing social order at the expense of the broad population. The chapter concludes by addressing the crucial role of critical pedagogy in educators’ work to promote analytic understandings of the dynamics that undergird social inequality in education, and to guide our thinking and human agency in fostering social change.
Bourdieu posits that institutions’ monopolized appropriation of and methodical failure to transfer cultural capital and other instruments necessary for success in the dominant culture will instantiate their exclusive ownership and that of the culture as a whole in the hands of the ruling class.10 Concordantly, Spears states that the rigorous quality of education at elite institutions prepares those students for their inherited leadership roles in society with concordant ideological underpinnings, and that the absence of comparable educational experiences for students at non-elite institutions mitigates against creativity and poor students’ ideological investment in a critical examination of oppression that would challenge the existing social order and their position within it.11 Mountainview Township High School exemplifies wealthy/elite schools within an educational system that systematically transmits the instruments of appropriation to local affluent students, who are being prepared to inherit and fulfill leadership positions in society.
The sprawling public high school campus of Mountainview Township High School is located in an affluent Chicago suburb. It is blanketed with a lush landscaped lawn adorned with winding tree-lined paths that lead to seven strategically placed, spacious, modern glass and stone buildings. The picturesque, well-maintained campus has a large track field and other sport-specific courts and athletic fields. It has an adjoining faculty–student parking lot that is within walking distance of the shopping district, replete with quaint shops, restaurants, and businesses. Mountainview is nestled near a commercial thoroughfare that connects local shoreline communities whose $500,000 to $1,500,000–plus homes are comfortably adjoined by wooded areas and jogging paths. This school campus is the site for the academic, cultural, athletic, social, and civic pursuits of over 3,000 ninth- through twelfth-grade students in the adjacent wealthy communities. Upon entering Mountainview High School, one is struck by the expansive marble hallways, lined with window-seats beneath large windows that overlook the campus grounds and allow natural light to bathe the art-lined hallways. Students, casually dressed in nondescript jeans and designer clothes, freely and comfortably walk through the hall, perch on window ledges, to read or engage in conversation with friends. Running slightly late for class, students are gently encouraged by staff to “Hurry along.” They are unburdened by the threat of a detention slip and classroom doors are left ajar for their late arrival. Individual administrative offices are spacious, well-furnished, inviting spaces that support the ongoing work of the school and comfortably accommodate visitors. Classrooms are awash with natural light and equipped with advanced technology and AV equipment. Plentiful seating is available for students and teachers to engage in flexibly arranged discussions and a myriad of learning experiences to a background of quiet music. What a conducive environment for learning, thinking, and creating with others. On this open campus, students freely eat and drink in class and go home for lunch.
The various wings of each building reflect the range of academic and co-curricular experiences from which students may design “majors” and interdisciplinary courses of study. In addition to the wing devoted exclusively to fine arts, other academic spaces include: state-of-the-art computers, science, technology, and language labs, a theater and performing arts department, student-run radio and cable television stations, music facilities, news bureau, multiple gymnasiums, swimming pool and accessories, dance studio, Nautilus exercise room and equipment, an expansive library housing thousands of volumes, a cuisine-plentiful lunchroom, a student lounge, and an art gallery. National and international trips provide rich off-site learning experiences for student interests in marine biology, geology, and there is family support for social/intellectual inquiry.
Mountainview resembles a small liberal arts college with over 300 multilevel, discipline-based academic courses, including advanced placement, from which students fashion their schedules. Courses include: mathematics, e.g., basic algebra, calculus, statistics; computer science; speech, drama, and debate; modern/classical languages; biological, automotive, and information technology; business education; social work; social studies; journalism; music; environmental science; international relations, e.g., post-9/11 and modern Middle Eastern studies; multicultural studies; architecture; gourmet cooking; and interior and graphic design. A math resource room, tutors, study groups, contests, and an entire Special Education Department support students in their study. Soccer, lacrosse, polo, fencing, and field hockey are a few of the sports that complement the usual array of athletic endeavors. There are eight choirs, four orchestras, a jazz band, and four wind ensembles, and a kinesthetic wellness program and health club. There are over 100 clubs and interest groups, from bridge to rugby and global exchange, from social service and AIDS coalition, to poetry, and cheerleading. The range of academic and co-curricular experiences, and the counselor assigned to every 22 students, undergirds the envisioned reality that 92 percent of students meet/exceed achievement standards and 99.5 percent are college-bound.
Who inhabits this space called Mountainview? Over 85 percent of the students are European American, about 8 percent are Asian American, less than 2 percent are Latino American, and less than 0.5 percent are African American. Almost 97 percent of the students graduate and about 2 percent are from low-income families. About 92 percent of the teachers are European American, less than 4 percent Asian American, about 2 percent Latino, and approximately 1 percent African American. Less than 1 percent of the teachers have emergency provisional credentials and all classes are taught by highly qualified teachers. Ninety percent of the teachers have masters degrees and salaries average close to $95,000. On the basis of local property taxes, over $18,200 was spent in 2009 for each student.12 For the youth in this community, Mountainview is their space, and hence their place. It is where they belong. The socialized choices, options, and freedoms that they experience and create in their school and community transmit and foster the creation of cultural capital that will prepare these youth to be the future CEOs, facile owners, and manipulators of emergent information technology, architects of public policy, and nimble consumers and promoters of “high culture.” These youth expect material wealth from the profits of today and will step into their place, their future, in the world.
The action of the school, whose effect is unequal among children from different classes, and whose success varies considerably among those upon whom it has an effect, tends to reinforce and to consecrate by its sanctions the initial inequalities.13
Educational institutions play a pivotal role in forging aspirations and structuring choice for youth through the daily actions and practices that sanction and normalize existent social and economic inequalities. Groundview Technical High School exemplifies schools that instantiate limited options for youth and validate their constricted vision of life options. The aspirations of youth, both wealthy and poor, reflect their “internalization of objective probabilities” and inform their life choices (i.e., material expressions of their efforts to reach what is attainable).14 Their “choices” are not those of “autonomous moral agents acting in an existential vacuum,” but are created and exercised through the dynamic interplay of social, psychic, political, and economic forces.15 As students at Groundview make sense of the school’s physical environs, public school policies and practices, and their own lived experiences, they insightfully deduce the prospects for their future, for their survival.
Groundview Technical High School is located in a poor urban Chicago community 25 miles from Mountainview. Its grounds consist of an imposing, self-contained faded red brick four-story building, in considerable disrepair, with an adjoining, uninhabitable, concrete court. The school consumes an entire square block and is bracketed by trash-strewn patches of wilted grass and a variegated concrete sidewalk in a working-class community. The smokestack structure is barely distinguishable from the worn vacant public housing buildings that stand nearby, and blends in with the rugged deteriorating landscape and the ceaseless traffic and fumes of the adjoining busy intersections. This 85-year-old building is the site for close to 3,000 ninth- through twelfth-grade students in the surrounding crowded urban community. Like other neighborhoods on “this side of town,” this community was intentionally cut off from the nearby commercial and residential areas by the strategic positioning of a racial barrier—one of the nation’s largest interstate highways.
One is welcomed into the physical structure of Groundview in a manner quite different from that of Mountainview. Upon entering the heavy steel doors of the school’s main entrance, one is immediately greeted by two armed policemen and metal detectors, whose presence is as imposing as the red brick, crumbling structure of the school. This reception typically generates considerable tension and wariness and does not have the “ring of freedom.” Students clad in black and white uniforms are herded/filed into the school with their picture IDs and class schedule, and must pass through the metal detectors to ensure that there are no weapons on school grounds. Students must wear their IDs and class schedules around their necks throughout the day, so that they may be policed/monitored upon entry into the lunchroom and other school checkpoints. The drably painted, relatively bare walls lead down dimly lit, dingy hallways, whose overhead buzzing fluorescent lighting is compromised by some boarded-up windows and noticeable fixtures in disrepair. The deteriorating physical structure reveals the lack of attention and funds devoted to the condition of the school and its inhabitants. Students are exhorted by guards not to linger in the hallways or exceed the four minutes allotted for them to move between classes. After the bell has rung, students are not permitted in the hallways without a written excuse, and tardiness is punishable by detention. The halls are for swift transitions to and from class or other destinations. Tarrying is not allowed. This social practice is enforced by the presence of guards in all of the corridors and by the absence of any space for students to comfortably congregate, to have a leisurely chat with friends, or to sit and read a book. The one place where students may congregate is in the lunchroom. The “closed campus policy” at Groundview prohibits students from leaving the school for lunch once they have entered in the morning. The policy is reinforced by the presence of metal detectors at all entrances and exits throughout the building and the pending threat of suspension if students fail to comply. Rules are made and strictly enforced, with the expectation that students will follow them to avoid sanction. After passing through this checkpoint, one arrives at the administrative office, a room of ample size with cramped, limited space for staff. Visitors who come to the school stand at a counter, sign in, and receive pleasant assistance from staff behind their desks.
The classrooms and connecting corridors built for 2,500 students barely accommodate the 3,000 students enrolled. There are no well-equipped academic spaces for students’ interests or choice in various disciplines of study, e.g., the humanities or social sciences. There is a metal shop, a wood shop, and a cosmetology room to prepare students for particular skilled trades. There is a locked room full of woodshop and carpentry equipment in the school, but it is inaccessible to students, since staff members are not available to operate the equipment. There is one gymnasium and one computer in the sparsely-volumed library, which is often locked, as are student bathrooms. There is no theater, music area, pool, or exercise equipment, no science equipment and few books to share during class. The State of Illinois’s required courses are available in the areas of English, history, mathematics, some sciences, and a few courses for elective credits to fulfill graduation requirements. The absence of current texts, equipment, or operative library for student learning is synchronous with their “skilled” preparation for work, if any, in marginal service industries. In the classrooms, students are seated at old desks and in some classes, as many as 25 students are crammed around four small tables. Adhering to Direct Instruction, few classes are fueled by engaging conversation between students and teacher. Most students are “busied” to the point of obvious boredom with ditto sheets or scripted lessons for recall and rote comprehension, and are often engaged by teachers with directives and discordant communications. Students’ frustration, disdain, contempt, and helplessness are apparent. Over 200 students are assigned to a school counselor and few students are college-bound. In contrast to Mountainview’s fine arts wing or technology lab, Groundview in recent years has created a separate and distinct wing that is devoted to the Junior Reserve Office Training Corp (JROTC). It is a privileged space, inhabitable only by those who are enrolled, and is becoming a major component of the school’s emergent curriculum and character as a site of military discipline. The JROTC hallways are adorned with military memorabilia, pictures of generals, scenes from past wars, and traditional patriotic images and symbols. This wing is equipped with many up-to-date computers and ample space for students to study. Students may move freely from place to place and to make choices about courses of study. Imbued with hopes for further education, these youth are being prepared to enter the disciplined ranks of the armed forces and to serve on the front lines of this nation’s global skirmishes.
Who inhabits this space called Groundview? One hundred percent of the students are African American; over 97.8 percent are from low-income families, and less than 50 percent of the students graduate from high school. Fifty percent of the teachers are European American, 30 percent African American, 15 percent Latino, almost 4 percent Asian American, and less than 1 percent Native American. Eight percent of teachers have emergency provisional credentials, and 13.5 percent of classes are taught by teachers who are not highly qualified. Forty-five percent of the teachers have masters degrees and salaries average $59,000, one-half and one-third less that those at Mountainview, respectively. Students at Groundview receive half of the financial investment per student that students at Mountainview receive. On the basis of the property taxes in this community, about $11,000 was spent in 2009 on each student to ensure his or her place and space in the social order and the continuation of a well-oiled tracking system of inequality.16 Groundview is on probation for failure to attain NCLB-mandated Average Yearly Progress (AYP) on the standardized tests. For the youth in this part of the city, one gets the sense that they are contained, confined, restricted, and monitored in a space that does not feel like their place. There is no sense of ownership. It is where they are, but not where they belong. The paltry curriculum, physical restrictions, closed options, structure, discipline, control, and order, imposed “for their own good”17 in prison-like schools, are preparing them for a place, at the lowest rung of the job market, in jail, or in chronic/permanent unemployment.
[T]he educational system does not add to or subtract from the overall degree of inequality and repressive personal development. Rather, it is best understood as an institution which serves to perpetuate the social relationships of economic life through which these patterns are set ….18
The differences between the two Chicago-area high schools are stark. The disparate financial and material resources, curricular and pedagogical experiences, and physical and social environs create divergent webs of meaning about the students’ social identities and future positions in society. Of particular interest are the new selective admissions programs and curricular offerings at each school. The JROTC School and basic vocational curricula at Groundview and the Global Studies Small School and expansive college/business-prep, academic curricula at Mountainview are preparing youth for their divergent, proscribed futures as adults. The words of Bowles and Gintis above, from Schooling in Capitalist America, still have relevance today.
At Mountainview, extensive new programs of study are in electronics, robotics, digital and laser technology, computer science and programming, globalization, culture and Eastern languages. These cutting-edge areas of inquiry complement long-standing curricula in business (e.g., the economy, stock market, politics), engineering, interdisciplinary studies, advanced math, and science, and are expansive disciplines that will thrive on new knowledge produced in the twenty-first century. These programs of study will support the profound and rapid economic shift from industrialization to robotics and electronic/information technology in a global market, reinforce the digital divide, and secure the social class position of these students as they are prepared for leadership in business and the political, economic, and cultural centers worldwide.19 Multiple venues exist for students to produce and appreciate the arts and popular culture (e.g., videos, film, literature, music, drama), and study varied cultural meanings being negotiated around the globe. Armed with “technical knowledge” and sociocultural understanding, students at this elite public institution are being socialized to be arbiters of corporate capital. Their cultural capital will “confirm … their monopoly of the instruments of appropriation of the dominant culture and thus their monopoly of the culture.”20 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) also structurally tracks students through the creation of Selective Enrollment Schools (9), Magnet Programs (11), Magnet Schools (4), and International Baccalaureate Diploma Programs (14), as an elite tier of education in the city for a small percentage of select students. This tier, however, is marked by glaring disparities in the building facilities, financial and material resources provided in upper- and lower-income, white versus African American and Latino communities.21 Aided by structural tracking, students at Mountainview and comparable elite schools have the most to gain from maintaining the current social order.
JROTC is the “privileged” field of study at Groundview. In poor communities of color, military enlistment is marketed heavily as the mode of education for students’ academic achievement, social advancement, and personal success. Chicago has the largest JROTC Program in the nation, at the behest of former CEO of CPS and current U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. There are 21 Middle School Cadet Corps Schools (MSCC) servicing 11- to 12-year-olds, and the number of military programs/schools within high schools organized by the Army (34), Marine Corp (3), Navy (5), and Air Force (2) has ballooned from 1 in 2001 to 44 in 2009, including 6 Pentagon-funded, corporate sponsored, military academies, enrolling over 10,500 of the 203,000 sixth- to twelfth graders.22 Under the guise of enhancing students’ educational opportunities, leadership skills, character development, physical fitness, and employability, JROTC promises a less than glorious, uplifting future for these youth headed for front-line combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Given the Pentagon’s military war function, the assertion that JROTC will reduce violence and drug abuse is an oxymoronic distortion of the proliferate drug use, suicide, racial disparities in combat casualties, PTSD, and other probable outcomes for enlistees.23 Though students’ academic achievement has been unremarkable (e.g., 8 to 33 percent met/exceeded standards in four schools) Arne Duncan is laudatory: “These are positive learning environments … I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline…. For the right child, these schools are a lifesaver.”24 JROTC takes $50,000 per year from each school budget, substitutes important academic subjects for JROTC courses, and hires teachers uncertified in the subjects they teach—a prime example of the militarized corporatization of education, as courses of study are tailored to business interests.25 Though JROTC is marketed with a “taking it to the streets” hip-hop campaign to provide “a way out” for poor youth of color, the Veterans Administration reports that veterans earn less than non-veterans, and that one-third are homeless and 20 percent are in prison.26 Though 54 percent of the nation’s JROTC participants and 50 percent of the front-line troops of the military are people of color, few are likely to receive technical training and are thus more likely to be unemployed when they get out.27 So much for the army motto: “Be all that you can be.”
JROTC’s increasing presence in schools is part of the unrelenting national “campaign” to enlist youth from urban and rural communities. The Department of Defense (DOD) funds school military programs nationwide, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2009 authorized the increase of JROTC programs from 3,400 to 3,700 for $170 million, and the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, 2009 (DREAM Act) would conditionally expedite citizenship for undocumented youth who completed two years of college or military service, in accord with the Pentagon’s goal to “boost the Latino numbers in the military from … 10% to 22%.” “Influencers,” i.e., school personnel/unofficial recruiters with access to youth and participants in the Educator Workshop Program (EWP) are expected to encouragingly guide students towards the military.28 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates requested budget increases in JROTC, partly funded by the DOD, from $76 to $103 million.29 Since NCLB’s Provision 9258 opened the floodgates for student data for military recruitment, unless parents “opt out,” the Pentagon quietly amassed 34 million names of 16- to 25-year-olds through the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies Program (JAMRS) run by Equifax, the credit bureau; circumvents parental permission by identifying 17,000 potential recruits monthly who register on its March2Success.com website for free standardized test-taking tips; secured almost 650,000 student names for JAMRS from classroom-administered Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery tests (ASVAB) in 2008; spends about $600,00 annually for information from commercial data brokers; produces numerous virtual war games to acclimate youth to combat; and sponsors military tables at career fairs, creates recruiter incentives, quotas, and performance standards, and conducts elaborate attitude, aptitude and aspiration surveys of youth.30 More is spent on recruitment advertising to enroll one young person, than is spent annually on his/her public education in low-income schools.31
This recruitment campaign in poor African American and Latino communities occurs in the context of dire economic conditions, joblessness, and a moribund education system, which incentivizes forced choices for students’ military enlistment. As unemployment rises, so do recruits from lower-middle-income homes ($40,000 median income). From 2005 to 2007, the number of Black and Latino recruits fell, but as the hardest hit by the 2008 economic crisis, Black recruits accounted for 95 percent of the increase over 2007.32 Though the ravages of two moribund wars and the current Administration’s plan to deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan has deterred some students and parents, the military has imposed mandatory second and third tours of duty for enlistees and extended active duty for reserve troops, jeopardizing their salaries and employment stability, has inflated troop strength figures since the 1990s, “relaxed” admission requirements, and increased advertising budgets for youth recruitment.33 As former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney stated, “The reason to have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars. That is our basic fundamental mission. The military is not a social welfare agency. It’s not a job program.”34 Retired Rear General Eugene J. Carroll, deputy director of the Center for Defense Information stated, “It is appalling that the Pentagon is selling a military training program as a remedy for intractable social and economic problems in inner cities. Surely, its real motive is to inculcate a positive attitude toward military service at a very early age, thus creating a storehouse of potential recruits.”35
Heightened marketing of JROTC programs coincided with a major overhaul of the nationally administered, standardized Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), including a writing exam, grammar questions, a critical reading exam in history, the humanities, science, and so forth, and a section based on advanced math covered in three years of high school. Ostensibly, these changes are better aligned with the 97 percent of college-bound students who take higher-level math.36 Structurally, these changes and additional costs for test registration exclude students at Groundview, whose scripted instruction, curricular paucity, probationary status, and graduation rate below 50 percent, fuel the adage: “College isn’t for everyone,” systemically constricting the already narrow band of high school students who will be prepared or can afford to take the SAT exam or attend college.37 There is little question about which students are being tracked to become CEOs in business and which are being tracked to serve and protect corporate capital’s interests in the military. The systematic implementation of such grossly unequal new programs of study adds new meaning to the idea of “choice” and reveals the powerful role of schools in reproducing and normalizing existent social class inequities. The divergent qualities of “freedom” and “constraint” at the two schools reflect interdependent, carefully maintained socialization processes necessary for students’ future positions in society.38 While dominant culture ideology champions the aspirations and accomplishments of youth as products of individual will, family values, and personal vision, it masks the powerful role of social, economic, and political forces in codifying and justifying the hierarchical positions occupied by youth across social class and racial lines.
The surge of militarism and proliferation of JROTC programs and military schools in African American and Latino schools constitute a dimension of what Žižek calls “systemic violence” against youth through “economic carrots” and deceptive promises, alongside the material violence of police brutality, school-to-prison pipeline, and other forms of societal oppression. Both “direct physical violence” and “more subtle forms of coercion” to maintain oppressive and exploitative relations.39 The valorization of “discipline” and “uniformity” in schools and the military for youth of color, belies the pervasive, unspoken “American fear of uncontrolled racial difference,” and the quest for enlistees in “uniform” to identify with the State/the nation, suppress their racial for national identification, and to cloud their recognition of racism and social inequality.40 Students at Groundview and other working-class schools are channeled into the military to protect the global interests of corporate capital and the future CEOs from Mountainview. While some from Groundview may “make it” in spite of the odds and are to be lauded for overcoming the obstacles, this portrait does not lend itself to a celebration of resilience and does not discount the many heroic and subtle forms of resistance exercised by marginalized youth to create new possibilities. Neither do these portraits suggest that social and economic relationships are unidirectional, deterministically creating mindless drones that blindly assume their stations in life. Rather, these portraits were designed to unequivocally render visible the pervasive and entrenched, structure of inequality, privilege, and discrimination in education that has unjustly benefited/damaged youth, to counter President Obama’s “No Excuses/Hard Work” speech, i.e., “bootstraps” discourse, to African American youth, and to critique an educational system that prohibits success for the many and enables success for very few.
The huge disparities between Mountainview and Groundview are not new to public education, but may be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century. In the past, as in the present, the inequalities were maintained by force and consent. In 1857, African American leaders fought against the gross difference between the $16 spent on each white student in schools, which were “splendid, almost palatial edifices, with manifold comforts, conveniences, and elegancies,” and the lone penny spent on African American students, whose school buildings were “dark and cheerless” in “environs full of vice and filth.”41 Similarly, Kozol’s poignant accounts in Savage Inequalities (1991) and in Shame of the Nation (2005) document the funding-based structural continuity of inequality in education for white, wealthy youth and working-class youth of color.42 Race and class disparities in public education historically have been linked to the oppression of the working poor and the economic interests of industrial and corporate capital. As the driving needs of the capital have changed and economic relations have shifted with technological innovation, there have been related changes in the state apparatus and political infrastructure that are manifested in public education. The following sections will examine some continuities and discontinuities in the fundamental relationship between major shifts in the economic social order and relations of production (i.e., rise of the industrial economy and the information-driven economy), that have been accompanied by repressive political measures and have ushered in requisite changes in public education.
The current inequalities and related injustices in public education are deeply rooted in the sociohistorical, economic, and political structures of this country and serve an indispensable social function in maintaining and perpetuating the social order. Industrialization created an economic necessity for universal public education, which in turn, has been both an instrument of oppression and the maintenance of a two-tiered system in this country and a tool of liberation for democracy. In The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935, Anderson examines the inextricable link between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization and mass schooling as a “means to produce efficient and contented labor and as a socialization process to instill in black and white children an acceptance of the southern racial hierarchy” and the pivotal role of racial division in maintaining the burgeoning Northern industrial capitalists’ control over white striking workers.43 For wealthy whites, universal public education would promote social stability, production efficiency, and economic prosperity.
Ex-slaves were the first native Southerners to struggle for universal, state-supported public education in the classical liberal tradition, in defense of emancipation and against the planters’ regime.44 However, “white architects of black education,” a contingent of Northern and Southern white entrepreneurs, social scientists, and philanthropists, crafted a special form of industrial education for blacks to substitute older, cruder methods of socialization, coercion, and control and to support the demand for an efficient, organized agricultural sector to supplement the emergent industrial nation’s trade with England.45 The advocacy and financial support of the “architects” for an industrial education for blacks and classical liberal education for whites afforded marginal material and psychological privilege to white workers (i.e., racial privilege would compensate for their social class disadvantage). This stratified public education would address the educational and ideological needs of a growing industrial society, while subjugating black and white laborers in relation to the owners of wealth. William Baldwin, Northern philanthropist and universal public education advocate, states:
The potential economic value of the Negro population properly educated is infinite and incalculable…. Time has proven that he is best fitted to perform the heavy labor …. This will permit the southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines, and the simpler trades for the Negro.
The union of white labor, well organized, will raise the wages beyond a reasonable point, and then the battle will be fought, and the Negro will be put in at a less wage, and the labor union will either have to come down in wages, or Negro labor will be employed.
Except in the rarest of instances, I am bitterly opposed to the so-called higher education of Negroes.46
Baldwin’s and other advocates’ financial support for public education was contingent on a brand of industrial education for blacks (i.e., Hampton-Tuskegee Idea), that was not equivalent to higher education for whites, and would divide the working poor in the interests of the burgeoning industrial capitalists.47 These conditions informed the structure, social practices, and justificatory ideology of emergent separate, unequal education, and reflect Bourdieu and Passeron’s analysis that the “neutral” face of public education, as social equalizer, conceals its dynamic contribution to the reproduction of class structure, with its attendant privileges and relations of power.48 W. E. B. DuBois, noted African American scholar and advocate, understood both the emancipatory possibilities of public education and enslaving function of race–class stratified education. Thus, he vigorously opposed the limited goal of industrial or classical education and argued for higher education that would promote blacks’ strident moves toward equality and not compromise the working poor.49
While support for universal public education was integral to the ongoing struggle for democracy, the architects’ economic motives were neither noble nor altruistic, and dovetailed with those of Southern white planters who opposed public education. Though the opponents relied on “illiterate, exploited agricultural laborers” and feared that education would fuel workers’ economic and political aspirations, both agreed on black disfranchisement, segregation, and economic subordination.50 During reconstruction, the architects “ignored” opponents’ funding of widespread vigilante violence by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups to force freedmen and freedwomen back to slave status, to secure a wedge between them and poor whites, and to reestablish the rule of white slave-owning oligarchy.51 The architects and opponents of public education strove to protect the economic interests of the wealthy through both legal and extralegal forms of coercion. In concert, the industrial education “for” and the reign of terror against blacks served to maintain the social and economic order.
This legacy of race–class inequality reveals structural and ideological continuities between past practices and the current relationship between Groundview Technical and Mountainview Township High Schools. First, Groundview’s curricula resembles the industrial education model designed for ex-slaves, which prepared poor African American youth to take on the “simpler trades.” The “higher education” is reserved for the white propertied class at Mountainview to prepare them with expertise for leadership. In addition, the bifurcated forms of public education and the divergent cultural capital afforded different race–class groupings mitigate against current fears that education will “inflate workers’ economic and political aspirations.” While the “non-elite” education at Groundview does not encourage poor African American youth to document or question their oppression, the transmission of power and privilege at Mountainview fosters students’ investment in the existing social order. Third, the ascendant culture of militarism in poor schools of color hearkens back to the legal and extralegal forms of coercion used by the early advocates and opponents of public education, imbued with the warning, “Stay in your place.” The surveillance, confinement, discipline, and systemic violence in poor schools is reminiscent of earlier efforts to deter freedmen’s and freedwomen’s resistance to forced labor and their struggle for the freedoms afforded whites. There is continuity. What prevails is a two-tiered educational system maintained by systemic efforts to quell the stirrings of poor youth of color. While today’s postindustrial economic and political configurations do not mirror those that existed during the post-Civil War days of the late nineteenth century, the fundamental disparity between the wealthy and the poor characterizes current relationships within global capitalism.52 There is discontinuity. The ascendance of an information-based, electronics-driven postindustrial economy has ushered in a new era that is reshaping the political and educational landscape, creating more pronounced forms of structural inequality and attendant forms of repression.
The rise of industrial capitalism laid the foundation for structural inequalities in universal public education. In this postindustrial era, what economic and political conditions are structuring, altering, or dismantling public education? How do current inequalities in education and the cultures of militarism and privilege, in turn, serve certain economic interests? These questions flow from the premise of a fundamental, synergistic relationship between the economy and the state. The base (i.e., social relations and the tools, skills, technology that constitute the process of production to meet human needs), is both reflected in and protected, organized, and strengthened by a corresponding superstructure (i.e., political state apparatus or societal laws, institutions, and ideological formations).53 Though some have disavowed the validity of this structural relationship on the basis of economic determinism or the exclusion of human agency, this perspective, even in the postindustrial era, provides a lens through which complex, often contradictory processes of social life may be understood. While Engels did posit the economic necessity of societal development, he discussed the base and superstructure as a dynamic, bidirectional, and interdependent relationship between the economy and the state and emphasized the inherent, indispensable role of humans in shaping history.54 Complementarily, Althusser’s treatise on the state apparatus highlights the interdependent roles of ideology and repression within the superstructure.
The Repressive State Apparatus (i.e., the government, administration, army, police, courts, and prisons) and Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) (i.e., religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade union, communications, and cultural) function to maintain and support capitalist relations of production. While the RSA and ISA function primarily by repression and ideology, respectively, each contains elements of the other (i.e., the RSA can function ideologically, the ISA repressively).55 In mature capitalism, the educational ideological system is the dominant apparatus within the ISA. Represented as “neutral environment[s] purged of ideology,” schools ply youth “with the ruling ideology in its pure state,” and “function secondarily by repression … [in] very attenuated and concealed … symbolic [ways] … to reproduce capitalist relations of production.56 The theoretical constructs, base and superstructure, and repressive and ideological arms of the state apparatus are valuable analytical tools for examining the dynamic, nonlinear processes that constitute societal change. The next sections address the emergence of automation and corresponding rise of neoliberalism and domestic militarism as profound changes in base and superstructure, which provide the context for privatizing public education, militarizing schools, and bolstering structural inequality.
The introduction of new technologies under certain conditions precipitates qualitative leaps in the scale of production and gradual changes in the nature of social and political life.57 The invention of the steam engine and electric motor, innovations in iron and steel production, discovery of crude oil, and the creation of industrial tools and the assembly line, revolutionized manufacturing in textiles, iron founding, mining, and steel and auto industries. Complemented by technological advances, such as the telephone and telegraph, and the internal combustion machine, the Transcontinental Railroad provided the infrastructure to connect industrial, financial, and political centers in the country. These electromechanical developments of the mid-late 1800s launched the Industrial Revolution, gradually transforming society from an agricultural to a financial industrial economy.58 Electromechanics enabled the creation of labor-saving devices for efficient, routinized, mass production that far exceeded the limits imposed by the manual labor of the individual artisan, cottage industry, or chattel slavery. The mechanization of Southern agriculture and centralization of large-scale, assembly-line production precipitated severe social upheaval disrupting agrarian life, and forced farm laborers to migrate to the nation’s cities in search of wage labor in industry. The social nature of production in industry reconfigured the nation’s economy, transferring its hub from declining rural to thriving urban financial centers.59 Just as electromechanics forged the ascendance of industrial capitalist production, so has the emergence of microelectronic technology catalyzed the digital revolution, forging a postindustrial, information-driven economy. The invention of the microchip in 1971 heralded the incipient overthrow of the reign of electromechanics in industrial production, transforming an economy based on mechanical labor to an information-driven global economy based on automation and robotics.60 Microchips could record and play back human activity in small, affordable computers, eclipsing the labor-saving devices of industrialization, with the epochal introduction of labor-replacing devices.61 Replete with the cumulative knowledge, skills, and efforts of human activity, computers, robotics, digital telecommunications, and biotechnology can create, manage, and monitor goods and services for human consumption and survival.
The automation of production has precipitated an unprecedented reorganization of society, permanently altering the forms and nature of work, as robotics and the independent commodification of information and knowledge replace the sale of labor power and decenter human activity in production. Some project that the perpetual production of innovation (i.e., “new knowledge for making goods”)62 and cyber factories, consisting of a “web of intelligent machines,” will be the source of profit, and shift the role of humans to more autonomous, decentralized, supervisory functions.63 With further bifurcation of manual and intellectual work, hierarchies of knowledge production occupations are anticipated. High-/low-paid technical/professional workers may design, compose, and alter instructions for machines, as others’ intellectual work (e.g., engineers, architects), is deskilled through computer software.
Laborless production permeates every aspect of economic life, e.g., agriculture, medicine, law, construction, automobile, steel, and wood production, telecommunications, commodities trading, education, transportation, retail, clerical work, space travel, oceanography, government agencies, social services, insurance, libraries, computer programming.64 Manufacturers’ internet shopping for raw materials affects supply, demand, pricing, marketing, and inflation.65 Computerized systems allow U.S. technicians to control production in low-wage shops abroad. Tasks may be performed well beyond human capacity.
In mining, computer-operated systems command/monitor the excavation of over 100 tons of coal an hour with massive whirling drills, the production of an army of shovels, drills, and trucks, and the transport of 240 tons of rock by one truck and driver, with prospects for fully operated coal mines via satellite. These and other advancements in the steel and automotive industries increased profits and reduced the workforce by 21 percent by 1997.66
In agriculture, computerized controllers and navigation systems provide precision farming via satellites to pinpoint specific fertilizer, pesticide, and water needs of crops. Digitalized infrared photography identifies problem areas undetectable by the human eye, resulting in earlier, targeted diagnosis and treatment of produce. Large farmer owners use $160,000 robotic sanitized cow milking systems and anticipate major profits from 10–15 percent increases in production and decreases in the number of hired farm workers.67
Nanotechnology (the science of molecule-sized devices) is revolutionizing medicine, computing, and food supplies, through small machines that grab and rearrange individual atoms.68 Nanomedicine has produced a DNA computer, which can provide noninvasive surgery, detect and destroy disease-causing agents, and synthesize drug treatment, through the ingestion of nanobots.69 Nanofood supplies can synthesize food molecularly and, in the right hands, could prevent starvation and clean up toxic waste on an atomic level.70 IBM’s data-storage technology holds the equivalent of 200 CD-ROMs on a postage-stamp-sized surface, and nanocomputing projects supercomputers the size of a drop of water.71 The miniaturization of electronics has created far-reaching possibilities for humans to meet their needs. However, contention surrounds this domain (e.g., genetic engineering) as patents threaten to privatize knowledge for profit or egregious violations of human dignity, which retards progress in medical science that is vital to the improvement of the human condition.72
The military’s well-funded, aggressive pursuit of large, top-down automation has produced robots that are central to “DDD” work (i.e., “Duty, Dull, and Dangerous” tasks), including spy satellite surveillance and scout-search-destroy missions. Unmanned cars, planes, trucks, cruise missiles, and “smart bombs” perform many functions in robotic war via computer-operated systems. Roboticists have produced protein-based solar connected combat helmets, which mimic the surrounding environment and are difficult to detect electronically, and exoskeletons, which are prosthetic suits that carry soldiers’ weapons and supplies. Robotunas support efforts to create swift submarines and do research on the ocean deep. Prospects for robots that “think and walk” range from domestic service to law enforcement and military combat.73 The notion of Robocop is not far-fetched.
The technological development of microelectronics in the 1970s spurred sweeping urban de-industrialization throughout the country, with crucial consequences: 1) increasing permanent unemployment and a shrinking job market, 2) short-lived corporate “remedies” for the ensuing economic downturn and the massive accumulation and consolidation of wealth amongst the few, and 3) a deeper crisis borne on the backs of workers. These economic developments are pivotal in the unending cycle of global economic crises inherent to capitalism and are related to the rise of neoliberalism’s unleashing the market and restructuring education, and the rise of militarism in society-at-large and in poor public schools.
First, as global corporations introduced labor-replacing devices, “downsize,” and exported factories to cheaper labor markets to maximize profits, blue- and white-collar workers were expunged from the workplace. As unemployed and underemployed workers/consumers worldwide were less able to buy goods, as automation reduced the amount of labor needed to produce goods, as prices fell with goods glutting the market, and as profit margins shrunk from overproduction, corporations cut costs by further stagnating workers’ wages, increasing layoffs and technological innovations, and outsourcing production for cheap labor, thrusting the workers into poverty and the impoverished abroad further into slave-like subsistence. From 1960 to 1992, workers in the steel industry declined from 600,000 to less than 200,000; half of the jobs in the auto industry were lost; machine tools/electrical machinery decreased by 40 percent.74 In 1982, 1,287,000 jobs were lost to plant closings and layoffs, augmented in 1987 with merger-induced layoffs in banking.75 Average unemployment rose steadily, from 4.9 percent between 1956 and 1973, to 7.2 percent from 1974 until 1987, and poverty in 1994 had not been as high since 1961.76 De-industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the loss of 32 million jobs, and from 1995 to 2004, almost 17 million jobs were lost due to plant closings. Though manufacturing continued, employment shrank by 5 million jobs from January 2000 to April 2009.77 Increasingly, workers have been relegated to temporary, part-time, or contractual jobs without benefits, disguising the actual unemployment rate and swelling the ranks of the “working poor” and permanently unemployed.78 The drive for profits fuels this cyclical crisis of massive overproduction and “under-consumption” of commodities, propels the search for new competitive markets for capital expansion/consolidation, and undergirds the persistence of structural unemployment.
Second, in order to supplement workers’ declining wages, and enable them to buy their goods in an expanding marketplace, corporations have sought remedies to the crisis, e.g., credit, stock market investments, which ultimately deepen the crisis. In his new book, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown, Richard Wolff provides a clear analysis of the deepening cycle of crises.79 Corporations entered the lending business, as banks, e.g. GM and its subsidiary, GMAC, provided credit for cars and mortgages, etc. Credit temporarily sustained the flow and volume of profits to business through interest and the sale of goods, created the possibility for profitable goods in new markets to be consumed by workers, and maintained the illusion of a sound economy. As credit became synonymous with and requisite for participation in the economy and the maintenance of daily life, stocks became a prime area for corporate investment. With real, finite limits on the markets available for capital expansion and the purchase of goods, fewer corporate profits went into real production and were increasingly channeled into stock market speculation, causing an inflated investment, a bubble, in assets, e.g., the dot.com bubble.
During the bubble, stagnant wages, credit, and stock investments generated enormous profits for a few, temporarily allowed the majority to maintain a standard of living beyond their suppressed wages, and polarized the redistribution of the nation’s wealth. From 1967 to 1992, in Mountainview communities, the wealthiest white families’ incomes increased twenty-fold, and in Groundview communities, the poorest black families’ incomes decreased forty-fold. From 1979 to 2006, the income gap between the top 1 percent and the poor tripled, in 2006, the 23.9 percent income concentration at the top was the highest since 1929, and the wealthiest 300,000 individuals had as much income as the bottom 150 million people.80 In 2007, the top 1 percent owned 34.6 percent of the wealth (including home real estate), the top 20 percent owned 85 percent of the wealth, leaving 15 percent of the nation’s wealth to the remaining 80 percent of the population. In financial wealth ( including stocks, bonds, trust funds, business equity, and non-home real estate), the top 10 percent of the population owned 80 percent, the top 20 percent owned over 92 percent, and the bottom, that is, 80 percent of the population, owned a mere 7 percent of the nation’s financial wealth.81 Under these conditions of plenty for the few, the livelihood and survival of many are at stake. Some blame technology and unions for the unbridled propulsion toward the “end of work,” for distorted and unethical uses of technology, and for “the declining significance of humans.” These critics overlook the profound contribution that human innovation makes to humanity, if used as an instrument of human need, rather than private profit.
Third, the wealth accumulation, born of inflated asset investments, the temporary “good life” for the masses, born of credit, and the illusory robust economy, born of the bubble, are eventually followed by a fall in asset values and collapse of the market. When the bubble bursts, the cycle of massive unemployment, endemic to the crisis of overproduction, recurs on a broader scale. Credit and stock investments as remedies for the crisis of capitalism are, by definition, short-lived, as evident in the current economic meltdown, in which real estate and urban restructuring became prime markets for investments and wealth accumulation.82 The housing market—riddled with sub-prime housing loans’ “hidden” variable interest rates “for the masses,” with the sale of lucrative homes, condos, and down-town real estate for property developers, with untold profits, mergers, acquisitions, and speculative and derivative markets for banks and investors—was a bubble waiting to burst. The pending disaster, facilitated by government deregulation, equivalent to an elaborate Ponzi scheme, erupted in 2008, as credit cascaded into a cataclysmic collapse, and the U.S./ global economy plummeted free-fall into a recession, to a level unprecedented since the Great Depression of 1929.
Again, the working class bore the brunt of the crisis, through what Slavoj Žižek calls, “systemic violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and politic systems … is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism.”83 Though the corporate sector’s unbridled pursuit of capital catalyzed the crisis, the State’s unconscionable solution was to “bail out” banks and corporations with public money to “stimulate” the economy, i.e., consolidate and rescue financial capital, as a “trickle down” catalyst for consumer spending. As banks’ debts and transgressions were forgiven, the general population was thrust into unemployment approaching 20 percent, daily home foreclosures, extinction of whole neighborhoods, swelling ranks of homelessness, numerous bankruptcies, and constricted spending.84 As banks used their “bail out” for more acquisitions, the main targets of sub-prime loans, African Americans and Latinos, were blamed for “irresponsibly living beyond their means.” This crisis, which was progressively deeper and more widespread than those in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, along with the history of faulty remedies, and the trail of chronic scapegoats are indicative of the constitutive fissures of capitalism. As a harbinger of future economic downturns, they fueled the enactment of political “remedies” for the crises: neoliberalism to aid the market and political repression to quell resistance from the populace.
Neoliberalism is characterized by government deregulation and unbridled market forces, the abdication of the social good and promotion of individual responsibility, accountability and choice, benevolent regimentation and institutional standardization, and the deracialization of social policy and civic life. Domestic militarization is characterized by the revocation of civil liberties and the erosion of democracy, increasing presence and sanctioned violence of military and police, the infusion of fear and suppression of information to justify uniformity and consent, the imposition of hidden and visible surveillance to monitor and control the population. As solutions to serve the ruling elite, neoliberalism removes constraints on financial capitalists’ pursuit of new untapped profit markets and domestic militarism imposes constraints on the population to forestall rebellion against people’s tracked position in society and the ravaging effects of profit accumulation on their capacity to meet basic needs.
The glaring reversal in government policy, i.e., divestiture in services, once considered entitlements and requisite supports for a decent quality of life, is a hallmark of neoliberalism. Social programs—e.g. education, health care, welfare, social security—that supported the maintenance of workers’ capacity to work are being supplanted, defunded, regimented, and privatized, while welfare-to-work, managed health care, and school vouchers are marketed as efforts to improve self-sufficiency, curtail insurance abuse, or enhance individual choice. Under new conditions of labor-replacing production, this responsive shift by the SA to economic crisis, supports the consolidation of corporate capital and pursuit of new markets.85 Plagued by declining profits and labor redundancy, privatization allows financiers to commodify public spheres of service, as workers who created the nation’s wealth are replaced and discarded. As such, the dismantling of public education became an “economic necessity” for the arbiters of power.
Neoliberalism and domestic militarism were imprinted in NCLB’s (2001) initial restructuring of public education, designed to fulfill two functions in the service of capital: to hand public education over to a new corporatized profit market through privatization, and to instantiate a two-tier system through high-stakes testing, which provides access to the best resources for the privileged, and funnels/manages/disposes of dispossessed, uneducated, and unskilled youth in a floundering, job-shrinking economy. Ostensibly, privatization promotes equity, accountability, flexibility, local control of failing schools through competition and efficient resource use, standardized testing evens the playing field, insures success, and regulates the market, “school choice” provides all parents with individual options for their children’s education, and zero tolerance and JROTC disciplines and prepares students for learning and productive citizenry. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, these policies redirect public funds for private accumulation, allow the government to abdicate its social responsibility to educate youth, and reduce educational content to the needs of corporations, turn students into consumers of their products, and exacerbate existing inequalities in public education. Standards and zero-tolerance policies reduce students to empty vessels in need of knowledge deposits and constraint. Promoting “choice,” as the property of autonomous moral agents, repositions private rights over the common good to justify corporate charter schools and school vouchers. With insufficient transfer schools and unmanageable travel distances for students from poor communities, preclusive standards for student admittance to middle-/upper-income schools, and options for wealthy private schools to be subsidized through school vouchers—school choice, disguised as entitlement for all, provides privileges for the few.86
Resistance to the effects of the current financial crisis have intensified public demand for the government to temper the neoliberal project—to intervene, to (re)regulate the market, to revise NCLB, to assume social responsibility for unemployment, home foreclosures, and health care, to address global warming, and other basic necessities of the populace. The arbiters of the neoliberal project may respond adaptively to the unrest, but adjustments will be designed, ultimately, to serve financial capital’s interests over the needs of the populace, as evidenced by the bank bailout, the absence of a single-payer/public health option, the failure to seriously forestall foreclosures and unemployment, the absence of a “bail out” for the masses, and the promotion of the RTTT to “correct” NCLB’s inadequate funding, poor design, and flawed implementation. Both the “old” No Child Left Behind (2001) from the Bush administration and the “new” Race to the Top Competition (2009) under the Obama Administration institutionalize standardization, the privatization of public education, and the militarization of schools in poor communities, to support corporations’ perennial search for new profit markets and to thwart the inevitable resistance and rebellion of those displaced within a postindustrial economy. Indicative is U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan’s missive pursuant of “huge investments” and “changes that are deep and foundational,” and his appointment of Joanne Weiss, investor and former CEO, to lead the RTTT initiative, “to push a strong reform agenda, that is entrepreneurial in spirit, producing carrots and sticks, to change the way we do business, and fundamentally turn around underperforming schools in ways that last for decades.”87
RTTT requirements and policy proponents obscure and naturalize the source of school differences, e.g., Groundview, Mountainview via essentialized race-class notions of youth and justify the use of public education as a profit market, by failing to acknowledge that educational reform has worsened the race–class divide, by not mandating the remediation of historical funding and curricular disparities between wealthy white and poor schools in African American, Latino, and Native American communities, by systematically tying students’ test scores to teacher/principal hiring, retention, and tenure, and by shifting the blame for the achievement gap to so-called unmotivated students, incompetent parents, and ineffective teachers. RTTT sustains the perverse effects of high stakes testing in poor communities of color—narrowed curriculum, emphasis on lower order thinking, limited bilingual education, school sanctions, schools’ hemorrhaging dropouts—and exacerbates the damage of NCLB by requiring states to expand alternate certification routes, by demoralizing and de-intellectualizing teachers with “scripted instruction,” by dehumanizing students with decontextualized “lessons” and educational tracks bound for a few low-wage jobs, military service, and jail.88 Though the methods of enforcement may change over time, the State Apparatus continues to discipline both students and teachers in schools, as Althusser warned 40 years ago, and to forge ideological, attitudinal, behavioral patterns and ordinate/subordinate relationships that are commensurate with students’ positions in the social hierarchy, as Bowles and Gintis asserted in Schooling in Capitalist America over 30 years ago.
In the context of cyclical economic crises and a “remediating” neoliberal project, the dominant culture’s ideological, discursive tools are honed to justify the increasing polarization of wealth, to divert the blame away from the banks and corporate sector for their unbridled extraction of profits in the housing and credit markets, to scapegoat certain racial and ethnic groups as sources of worsening economic and social conditions, and to redefine democracy as “individual, private choice.” The surge in anti-affirmative action legislation serves to strategically deracialize civil society under the guise of color-blind ideology and assertions of reverse racism, to obscure the confluence of racial and economic inequality in educational and other societal institutions, and gives credence to and justifies neoconservatism, the politics of resentment, and whites’ violent backlash against African Americans, undocumented Mexican immigrants, and others.89 Worsening conditions and increased attacks in African and Latino communities are dismissed as a function of the “culture of poverty” or deficits in socially responsible decision-making. These rationales are reinforced by the election of the first African American President of the United States, used as “proof” that society is “post-racial,” and that the racial equality legislated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been realized and that individual effort is the key to success. Despite assertions that society is “post-racial,” Barack Obama was the target of voluminous racial epithets, monkey dolls made “in his image,” and the New Yorker’s “spoof” of the First Couple as Muslim “terrorists.” This election’s “symbolic victory” obscures some continuity in policies that exist across the Bush and Obama Administrations and facilitates the alignment of unsuspecting parties with State policy that does not serve the interests of the broad population. Under these conditions, similar to those under the Weimar Republic, the financial arbiters of global capital scapegoat the disenfranchised around the world as the cause of the crisis. They seek new methods of control, new forms for the state apparatus to accommodate changing economic relations, and new ways to stem the rising tide of disillusionment and resistance to grotesque international inequalities that exist. Domestic militarism, armed with its ideological weapons, arises to sustain the social order.
As Žižek states,
Systemic violence, inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism … involves the “automatic” creation of excluded and dispensable individuals from the homeless to the unemployed, and the “ultra-subjective” violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious, in short racist, “fundamentalisms.”90
The state apparatus … i.e. the police, the courts, the prisons; but also the army … intervenes directly as a supplementary repressive force in the last instance. The Repressive State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology…. The Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately … this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic.91
Systemic violence [is] not only direct physical violence, but … the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.92
In Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, Parenti provides an insightful historical analysis of the successive wave of repressive legislative, political, and institutional measures, adopted from 1968 to the 1990s, that were coterminous with the wave of economic crises and reflect the dual function of the state through ideology and force. The mid-1960s were characterized by social activism in factories, schools, and communities, and urban rebellions following the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movement.93 Simultaneously, drugs were invidiously infused in the military in Vietnam and in urban communities, serving to narcotize emergent restlessness and disillusion. Similar patterns exist in current fallout from current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though the government instituted many ameliorative, short-lived social programs, the ideological shift to law and order was a pronounced, sustained preparation for ensuing repressive measures. The shift culminated in the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, initiating the erosion of civil liberties (e.g., wiretapping and dilution of Miranda Rights), and $3.55 billion for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in 1970 to bolster local and state police training and equipment.94 Omnibus was strengthened by its replacement, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which included the “three strikes mandatory life provision, ban on assault weapons, and excluded the “Racial Justice Act,” acknowledging the link between race and imposition of the death penalty. Through the twin arms of the State Apparatus—ideology and force—the law and order campaign and passage of repressive legislative measures reasserted social control over social reform.
The advent of microelectronics, de-industrialization, outsourcing, and massive unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s, put labor unions in jeopardy. In 1979, a frontal attack on unions was made with the aggressive, divisive firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, wage freeze, and deregulation of the industry. This chastening, repressive move within the ISA against organized labor and rhetorical blame for rising costs and fewer jobs on unions, along with Reagan’s incisive tax cuts for the wealthy, positioned the government solidly behind corporate interests. Between 1965 and 1992, a group of manufacturers moved 1,800 plants to Mexico, employing 500,000 workers, and from 1980 to 1985, close to 2.3 million jobs were lost forever.95 Thus, the bargaining position of labor and the right to strike were simultaneously compromised for workers, as the State reestablished the primacy of corporate control. Similarly, in 2009, school privatization is undermining teachers unions.
Illegal drug use and sale escalated in declining cities, as class polarization, white flight, and the concentration of urban poverty among people of color grew. Increased violence, local rivalries for profits from the drug economy, and thousands of arrests were symptomatic of rampant unemployment and desperation. Parenti argues that the growing “surplus population” had to be contained or subjugated through brute force to destabilize a potentially rebellious, cast-off population of displaced workers and to mask the illusory health of the national economy.96 Conditions were ripe to scapegoat the “racial other,” one of the State’s indispensable ideological weapons of deflection, as “inner cities” became discursively synonymous with violence, drugs, and African American and Latino youth, proof of the inefficacy of social programs. This view presaged the rollback of the social programs of the 1970s and “a new wave of criminal justice crackdown.”97 “Crime control” was presented as a means to contain the “dangerous classes” and accompanied the simultaneous resurgence of vigilante organizations, extra-legal terror.98 As part of the war on drugs, the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act sanctioned the denial of bail and federal parole and increased the fines.99 The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and 1998 imposed higher sentences on the use of crack cocaine (cheaper and more prevalent in communities of color) than on cocaine power (more expensive and prevalent in white upscale communities), and sanctioned the death penalty for tag-alongs in drug-related felonies and (un)intentional killings.100 These “legal” measures institutionalized inequality in the judicial system’s sentencing and imprisonment processes and the disproportionate incarceration of poor people of color. They masked the prevalence of drug use and sale in affluent, white communities, contributed to the demonization of African Americans and Latinos, and provided ideological justification for increased state repression, violence, and containment in these communities, e.g., police brutality, racial profiling. From 1980 to 2003, federal inmates imprisoned for violent crimes decreased from 34 percent to 11 percent and increased for drugs from 25 percent to 55 percent. Despite heightened abuses, violated civil rights, and violence, the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) inhibited inmates’ filing federal lawsuits by requiring exhaustion of administrative remedies, filing fees, three strikes provision, and physical injury.101 As the legislative arm of the Ideological State Apparatus legalized inequality, the Repressive State Apparatus’s court system forced incarceration based on race and class, and in turn, reaffirmed demonizing, scapegoating discourses as communicative and cultural dimensions of the ISA.
The ideological and repressive aspects of domestic militarism have surfaced primarily through the legal, judicial, and law enforcement apparatuses of the State. The militarization of public housing in Chicago, designed and serving as massive intern/containment centers in impoverished African American communities, was new terrain for the State, and brought surveillance and law enforcement to the homes of the poor. Though allocated funds for building upkeep were diverted for years, resources for containment and surveillance were abundant (i.e., security, ID cards, metal detectors, police, electronic surveillance, and “Clean Sweeps”).102 The history of fiscal mismanagement contributed to the rapid deterioration of the buildings, but was ascribed to residents’ criminality, uncleanliness, and disregard for property. This justified the need for residential imprisonment and paved the way for the demolition of public high-rises, gentrification for capital investment, the return of upper-class whites to the lakefront and downtown business, and brought massive displacement of successive generations of permanently unemployed people of color. The successive array of legislative and law enforcement measures were designed to deter resistance by the “surplus populations” to the devastating social ills resulting from inadequate means to live, and paved the way for State reliance on more stringent repressive apparatuses—the prison system and the military.
The massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex, a lucrative entity, is at the center of domestic militarism and corporate privatization of public services. As the criminalization of the poor escalates, i.e., the inmate population increased 650 percent from 1980 to 2005, the prison industry is housing the cast-offs, employing the unemployed in devastated de-industrialized cities, and creating profits for private corporations. Based on third-grade reading scores and severe overcrowding at 37 percent in 2009, the projected need for prison construction continues to soar.103 Since 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) budget increased $3 billion for 50,000 police, and their FY 2010 Budget Request for $386 million enhancements for prisons and detention signals the Bureau of Prisons as one of the fastest-growing arms of federal government.104 In 2007, though crime rates had declined, the U.S. prison population of 2.3 million was the highest in the world. Over 80 percent are non-white. Black males were imprisoned 6.5 times more than white males, 2.5 times more than Latino males, and had a 38 percent higher chance of getting the death penalty.105 Increasingly, undocumented workers are being imprisoned. The current annual budget exceeds that of welfare at 1 percent of the GNP. Consistent with the pattern of structural inequality, of the 6.6 million people in prisons, 63 percent are African American, 25 percent are Latino.106 Arrests increase “for illegal drug use and ‘driving under the influence,’” signaling the shrinking life options and demoralizing efforts to “ease the pain.”
The prison system plays a clear role in the physical discipline and forced containment of inmates, exercised through cell life, prison guards, SWAT commandos, and violence. Its ideological function is manifest in the prison system’s provision of captive labor, the “new slavery,” via the Federal Prison Industries Enhancement Act (PIE) of 1979 and 2002, “to maximize productivity, economic contributions, income … for government and open markets.”107 In this faltering economy, captive prisoners are a prime source of cheap labor, legitimated by their idleness, “need for rehabilitation,” opportunity to learn “workplace habits, accountability, and … dependability,” and the “shared gains by stakeholders and society.” UNICOR, the federal trade name for Federal Prison Industries, Inc. (FPI), employs offenders in clothing and textiles, electronics, office furniture, fleet and vehicular components, recycling activities, industrial products, and data entry, and partners with private corporations, e.g., Dell Computers, Allstate, Eddie Bauer, Nike, Honda, Target, and McDonald’s.108 Unless exempt, federal agencies must buy products, not services, from FPI. All physically-able inmates must work and are paid from $.23 to a maximum of $1.15 per hour and must use 50 percent of their income for court costs. Employing 18 percent of the inmate population, UNICOR generated $765 million in sales, and has incurred opposition from the private sector for its competitive edge.109 Prison privatization, i.e., the takeover of existing facilities or building and operating new for-profit prison companies, e.g., Corrections Corporation of America, Pricor, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, GEO Group, Cornell Companies, has risen steeply, as earlier threats to corporate profits from prison labor, e.g., limited space, lawsuit threats, public relations issues, and prisoners’ resistant poor work quality, have abated, and as corporations successfully lobbied for high sentences in “three strikes” and “truth in sentencing” laws, to provide long-term cheap labor.110 The repressive function that prisons serve is complemented by their ideological function of reassuring the public that the “wayward and morally depraved” are being rehabilitated, that their tax dollars are being efficiently used, and that they are safe from the “dangerous classes.” The removal of libraries, educational programs, and exercise rooms from prisons signals a return of the view that prisons are for retribution and punishment, not for rehabilitation of society’s cast-offs. The domestic militarism escalates with the unprecedented extension of surveillance and the military into civilian life.
The tragic events of September 11 forever changed life in the United States and its economic and political relationship to the global community. Endemic faultlines in the economy were stretched at that time, and have been strained to the point of near rupture with the recent credit collapse, as American confidence in the market has waned with layoffs and foreclosures. The personal and national vulnerability created on that day has forged national unity and an underlying current of fear, and undergirds the U.S. DOJ’s FY 2010 budget request for over $721 million for enhancements, including surveillance and a Biometrics Technology Center.111 The threat of terrorism in the midst of a deepening recession contributed to the invocation of Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) to establish networks of public workers, “worker corps,” to report “any suspicious activities” observed. Now neighbors and civilian workers will serve as an auxiliary arm of the state.112 In an effort to further stem the tide of terrorism, plans are under way to revamp the Posse Comitatus Act of 1898, which severely restricted the military’s right to participate in domestic defense.113 The overhaul of this act will allow the military to act as a law enforcement body within the nation’s borders. Visions of tanks and armed troops policing the nation’s streets are not far-fetched, and the erosion of civil liberties embodied in the sweeping terms of the legislation has evoked outcries from the American population to preserve democracy in order to defend it.
This state of affairs is both a source and consequent of the precarious economic and political position of the U.S. in the global arena: post-911, post-economic collapse of 2008, and amidst two sustained wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate Committee’s reauthorization of the Patriot Act in October 2009 and concomitant retraction of civil liberties, i.e. access to personal records, increased wiretapping and secret surveillance, new death penalties and seven year sunset provision, and the flagrant sanctioning of police brutality across the country, increased suppression of information, and erosion of the public newspaper, are indicative of the sustained national project of domestic militarism and surveillance.
[Though] Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, [they] also function secondarily by repression…. Thus Schools … use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection … to “discipline” not only their shepherds, but also their flocks.114
The rise in domestic militarism provides the context for a commensurate surge of militarism in low-income schools, which mirrors the national system of increased repression and surveillance, and targets youth of color. The School-to-Prison Pipeline systematically pushes African American and Latino youth out of school and into the criminal justice system, through “disciplinary” school suspensions and expulsions, high-stakes testing precipitating school dropouts, police practices, and the growing prison-industrial complex. Zero-tolerance policies, directed towards serious misconduct, emerged after the passage of the Gun-Free Schools Act (1994), escalating crimes against and by youth.115 Expendable in the workforce, poor youth of color are targeted, and are incarcerated at alarming rates due to these harsh policies in schools, increased police presence and disciplinary authority in the hallways, police use of tasers and canine units, and institutionalized racial profiling. Research on Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) documents that youth of color are more likely targeted for out-of-school suspensions and expulsions than their white counterparts for the same offense, and that school discourses and practices adultify, demonize, and severely sanction African American boys.116 In 1999, though white high school seniors used seven and eight times more cocaine and heroin, respectively, than did African Americans, opposite commonsense assumptions prevail.117 Racial disparities are glaring as African American youth are severely disciplined for minor infractions, e.g., bringing cell phones or iPods to school, smoking, cutting class, insignificant fights, and are subjected to incarceration “alternatives,” e.g., boot camps, electronic monitoring, and intense probation supervision. In Chicago, over 40 percent of the 8,539 student arrests in CPS in 2003, were for minor misconduct, 77 percent were African American youth, and 10 percent were children aged 12 and below. Despite the Juvenile System’s dismissal of most cases, CPS aggressively pursued harsh discipline and arrest. Black youth constituted 51 percent of school enrollment, but were 76 percent of suspensions and almost 78 percent of expulsions. Over 29,700 students were suspended in 2002–2003 and 3,000 expelled in 2003–2004. African American and Latino youth are overrepresented in special education, and 70 percent of students sent to the State’s Attorney’s Office are behaviorally or learning disabled.118
Funneled onto the “schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,” these students are targeted at school, arrested by the police, sent to juvenile court, and subsequently expelled from schools. Former CEO of Philadelphia Public Schools, Paul Vallas, smoothed the path from school to jail in 2002, by contracting $7 million with private firms to create alternative disciplinary schools for “violent” youth, and to set up widespread Saturday detention, in-school suspension, and community service for non-violent disruptive youth.119 Designed to end bad behavior after one infraction, these programs demonize urban youth as guilty offenders and serve as institutional “halfway” houses to jail, contributing to the fivefold (500 percent) increase in African American men’s incarceration since 1980, versus a mere 23 percent increase in their college enrollment.120 Unfairly marked by criminal records and securely placed on the pipeline, these students are pathologized, damaged emotionally, and denied educational, employment, and other life opportunities. What awaits them in detention? In addition to rampant reports of abuse, sexual assault, violence, and suicide for boys and girls, the Texas Youth Commission piloted a partnership between Gulf Coast Trades Center, Inc. and Gainesville State School, to “provide work” for youth through the Prison Industries Enhancement Program (PIE) in 1998. Just in time to be used as cheap child labor for the housing market bubble and collapse, youth were trained in residential construction, i.e., framing, trim, masonry, electrical wiring and plumbing for homes in Texas.121 Of those incarcerated in the juvenile justice system, African American, Latino, and white youth constitute 77 percent, 15 percent, and 7 percent, respectively. In 2008, 1 in 10 Black males ages 25–29 were in prison or jail, 1 in 26 Latino males were in prison, and 1 in 63 white men were in jail; future projections for youth born in 2001 are that, 1 in 3 Black boys will be imprisoned in their lifetime, 1 in 6 Latino boys will be incarcerated; and 1 in 17 white boys will be in jail. Similar, lower patterns emerged for girls, who are more likely to be abused, sexually assaulted, and to experience PTSD.122 From 1990 to 2004, there was a 208 percent increase in youth under 18 in adult jails for serious crimes. Tried as adults in six states, Black youth are housed with adult inmates 12 to 25 times more often than are white youth, Latino youth in four states are 7 to 17 times more likely to be tried accordingly, and thus have limited eligibility for education, jobs, financial aid, and housing.123 Not only are gross racial disparities apparent, but the pipeline is expanding as the probability of youth incarceration grows exponentially, which the State is aggressively maintaining. Towards that end in Chicago, in May 2009, Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez, subpoenaed students of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, who work on the Innocence Project at the Center for Wrongful Convictions, for their records, and has made allegations of impropriety in an intimidating effort to attack the Project, and to delegitimize, thwart, and discourage students’ work in exposing the wrongly accused and convicted youth and adults in prison and on death row.124 These efforts by the State complement the funds are channeled into prisons and the military at the expense of our youth.
Youth incarceration is connected to school dropout and unemployment. One in 10 male dropouts and 1 in 4 African American dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention, versus 1 in 35 male graduate detainees. Aptly stated by Marc H. Morial, President of the Urban League, “The dropout rate is driving the nation’s increasing prison population,” in poor communities of color.125 Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters’s disturbing study at Johns Hopkins University (2004) found that 15 percent of the nation’s schools produce almost half its dropouts, and are attended primarily by African American and Latino youth. These high-poverty “dropout factories,” with low promoting power, lost 40 percent or more of their freshmen by the senior year from 2001 to 2004, and over 50 percent of African American males drop out. Many disengaged, bored, and frustrated students are “pushed out” through high-stakes testing and school failure, as evidenced by the fact that there are 35,000 to 70,000 extra dropouts each year per state, due to high school exit exams.126 In 2008, over 54 percent of dropouts aged 16 to 24 were jobless, 32 percent of graduates were unemployed, and the rate for African American youth was 69 percent, and is worsening in the 2009 recession.127
There is little question that these assaults on youth contribute to the heightened incidences of violence, like the tragic beating to death of Derrion Albert at Fenger High School in Chicago—enraged hopelessness of students at a “dropout factory,” school closings across divergent communities, joblessness and constricted life options, all occurring in the context of and mirroring U.S. culture’s sanctioned televised violence of “collateral damage” in Iraq, and its frenetic video-game and “Avataresque” preparation of these youth for military service and domination abroad. These economic, political, social and educational dimensions of the dominant culture heighten humans’ disregard for and ability to discard and dispose of human life—both their own and others.128 Žižek insightfully notes that “this [subjective] violence, which seems to arise out of nowhere” in schools and communities is a product of the normalized systemic [objective] violence that subtly maintains societal “relations of domination and exploitation.”129 Left unexamined, these “unexplained eruptions” are used to justify the State’s increased repression and the citizenry’s backlash against them, and naturalize the increasing “adiaphorization,” societal desensitization to the pain, humiliation, and violence against others.130 This ostensible reign of racial terror, by law enforcement and the prison system on Black and Latino youth, is epitomized by the public police assassinations of Oscar Grant on the elevated train platform in Oakland, California, the killing of Sean Bell in his car hours before his wedding in Queens, New York, and the absurd charging of two African American boys, ages seven and eight (the youngest murder suspects in the nation), in the murder and rape of 11-year-old Ryan Harris, in Chicago, Illinois. This systemic violence is eerily reminiscent of and/or a current version of the paddy patrols and lynch mobs that rounded up thousands of African Americans to sustain the economic system of slavery after Reconstruction, of the vigilante settlers and armed forces that massacred millions of Native Americans to take their land, and of the border patrols and troops that slaughtered Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to secure the acquisition of Mexico and Puerto Rico and establish colonial rule.131
The rise of domestic militarism, embodied in legislation, the criminal justice system, the military, and institutional policies, functions through ideology and force, as it complements the economic restructuring and deepening crisis of the world economy and provides the template for comparable policies and practices in education for low-income African American and Latino youth. At Groundview, the presence of force—via metal detectors, suspension, expulsion, harsh discipline, and police authority, not only contains the “dangerous classes,” but prepares them for their prescribed place in the new economy—prison or the military. Simultaneously, the defunct curricula and inadequate resources deprive youth of their human desire to think and explore. They convey a powerful ideological message to the students and broader culture, “This is your worth,” which naturalizes inequality and renders the absence of resources a “good fit” for these youth. The culture of militarism and force in the schools supports Althusser’s idea that both repression and ideology are operative within the ISA’s educational institutions. Each arm of the State, ISA and RSA, contain elements of the other to push forward the existing social order. Conversely, at Mountainview, the ideological aspects of the culture of privilege are not supplemented by force, but are complemented by proscriptive practices and policies that socialize students “to be free” to fulfill their complementary role in the emergent economy, as the privileged.132 Both are a testament to the powerful forces of social reproduction that operate within and across schools, and to the ways in which the policies and practices in the educational system play a vital role in the maintenance and in the restructuring of society.
Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception…. The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.133
The restructuring of a postindustrial economy and public education is well under way, aided by neoliberal policy and domestic militarism. On the one hand, the present examination paints a bleak picture of increased polarization between the poor and wealthy, declining schools, and efforts by the State to protect corporate capital’s interests through multiple venues and “remedies.” On the other hand, it addresses the dual historical role of education as a site of struggle, in both maintaining structural inequalities in society and in promoting and fostering change in our economic, social, and political lives. Education has both enslaving and emancipatory possibilities, especially during this period of economic restructuring and rapid change in civic life, and may forge new ways of thinking and understanding school and society. Youth across the nation in urban areas and other communities have already responded to social inequalities in education and society, including school closings, unfair testing practices, military recruitment and presence in schools, ravages of NCLB, rising dropout rates, drugs and gun control, immigrants’ rights, police brutality and youth violence, the War in Iraq, bank bailout, and global warming. These forms of resistance guided by a discerning understanding of the dynamic economic, social, political, and historical processes that forge current policies and practices in schools, civil society, and the global arena are pivotal in the struggle to defend and maintain democracy.
Thus, educators have a crucial role to play in countering the domestic militarism and privatization in schools and society at large, both ideologically and practically. It is incumbent upon educators to examine, wrestle with, and strive to understand the historically embedded, social, economic, ideological, and political realities that exist, so that our efforts to promote change will be well-guided. By examining the motive forces of the economy, the state, and social life in all of its forms, we may arrive at critical analyses to guide our strivings for an educational system and quality of life across race and class that disrupt structural inequality and affirm our basic humanity. In this sense, education across multiple contexts is a key—a vehicle in the informed process of change. Most important, we must challenge the corrosive ideologies and institutional practices that constrain the possibilities for youth, by changing the objective probabilities before them. Central to this work is our role in providing a forum for students to critically examine their immediate realities and the broader questions that have bearing on their lives through multiple texts. Our struggle against inequality requires thoughtful examination in educational contexts that will contribute to the preparation of successive educators’ participation in the struggle for humanity.
1 Jonathan Kozol, Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005); Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008); R. Ropers and D. Pence, American Prejudice: With Liberty and Justice for Some (New York: Plenum Press, 1995).
2 Robert Friedland, “Space, Place, and Modernity,” A Journal of Reviews: Contemporary Sociology 21, 1 (1992): 8–36.
3 James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
4 Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture,” in Power and Ideology in Education, edited by J. Karabel and H. Halsey (London: Sage, 1977).
5 Michael Apple and Christopher Jenks, “American Realities: Poverty, Economy, and Education,” in Cultural Politics and Education, edited by M. Apple (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996); Christian Parenti, Lockdown America (New York: Verso, 1999); Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl, and Michael Stack, eds., Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution (New York: Verso, 1997).
6 Davis, Hirschl, and Stack, The Cutting Edge.
7 Richard Appelbaum, “Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, edited by Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
8 Parenti, Lockdown America.
9 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
10 Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction,” 494.
11 Arthur Spears, “Race and Ideology: An Introduction,” in Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism and Popular Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 42.
12 Illinois State Board of Education Report Card, 2009 (isbe.net).
13 Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction,” 493.
14 Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations in a Low-income Neighborhood (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), 19.
15 Michael Dyson, “Growing Up Under Fire: Boyz N the Hood and the Agony of the Black Man in America,” Tikkun 6, 5 (November–December 1991): 74–78.
16 Illinois State Board of Education Report Card, 2009.
17 Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
18 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 41.
19 Guglielmo Carchedi, “High-Tech Hype: Promises and Realities of Technology in the Twenty-first Century,” in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution, edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack (New York: Verso, 1997), 73–86.
20 Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction,” 494.
21 Chicago Public Schools, Office of Academic Enhancement, High Schools; Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (New York: Routledge, 2004).
22 Chicago Public Schools, Department of JROTC, “About JROTC: Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force,” available at www.chicagojrotc.com (accessed May 1, 2010).
23 Marvin Berlowitz, “Racism and Conscription in the JROTC,” Peace Review 12, 3 (2000): 393–398. Rosa Furumoto, “No Poor Child Left Unrecruited: How NCLB Codifies and Perpetuates Urban School Militarism,” Equity and Excellence in Education 38 (2005): 200–210.
24 Andy Kroll, “Fast Times at Recruitment High,” Mother Jones (August 30, 2009), available at http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/08/fast-times-recruitment-high (accessed May 1, 2010).
25 “Military Industrial: JROTC Is a Recruiting Program for Dead-End Military Jobs,” available at www.schoolsnotjails.com (last accessed March 29, 2001): 1; Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), x.
26 “Military Industrial,” 2.
27 Ibid., 2.
28 Andy Kroll, “Fast Times at Recruitment High”; Jorge Mariscal, “Immigration and Military Enlistment: The Pentagon’s Push for the Dream Act Heats Up,” Latino Studies 5 (2007): 358–363; www.dreamact2009.org; Jorge Mariscal, “Nowhere Else to Go: Latino Youth and the Poverty Draft,” Political Affairs Magazine (November 2004), available at www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/295/1/36 (accessed May 1, 2010).
29 Furumoto, “No Poor Child Left Unrecruited,” 203.
30 David Goodman, “A Few Good Kids?” Mother Jones (September/October 2009), available at http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/few-good-kids (accessed May 1, 2010); Allison Fass, “Advertising: The Army Is Helping to Pay for a ‘Stay in School’ Campaign,” New York Times (June 25, 2002): C6; Paul R. Sackett and Anne S. Mavor, eds., Evaluating Military Advertising and Recruiting: Theory and Methodology (National Research Council, Committee on the Youth Population and Military Recruitment – Phase II, 2004) and Sackett and Mavor, eds., Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth: Implications for Military Recruitment (Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences and Education, 2003).
31 Ed Morales, “Military Luring Black and Latino Youth with Hip-hop” (April 7, 2004), available at http://www.progressive.org/media_826 (accessed May 1, 2010).
32 Anisha Desai and Maryam Roberts, “Youth of Color Resist Military Recruiting,” Toward Freedom Today (August 31, 2009), available at http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1659/1/ (accessed May 1, 2010).
33 Richard Perez-Pena, “Report Says Enrollment in Guard Was Inflated,” New York Times (June 29, 2002): A13; Dave Moniz, “15,000 Reserves to Serve 2nd Year: Longest Call-Ups Since Vietnam,” USA Today (August 26, 2002): 2.
34 Moniz, “15,000 Reserves to Serve 2nd Year,” 3; “Military Industrial,” 1.
35 Moniz, “15,000 Reserves to Serve 2nd Year,” 3.
36 Tamar Lewin, “College Board Announces an Overhaul for the SAT,” New York Times (June 28, 2002): A1; Sean Cavanagh, “Overhauled SAT Could Shake Up School Curricula,” Education Week (July 10, 2002).
37 Moniz, “15,000 Reserves to Serve 2nd Year,” 3.
38 Noam Chomsky, “Intellectuals and Social Change,” in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, edited by Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel (New York: New Press, 2002), 236.
39 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 9
40 Lesley Bartlett and Catherine Lutz, “Disciplining Social Difference: Some Cultural Politics of Military Training in Public High Schools,” The Urban Review 30, 2 (1998): 119–136, esp. 133.
41 Linda Darling-Hammond, “Inequality and Access to Knowledge,” in Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, edited by James A. Banks and Cherry A. Banks (New York: Macmillan), 466 (citing D. Tyack, The One Best System).
42 Kozol, Shame of the Nation.
43 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 27.
44 Ibid., 4–8.
45 Ibid., 89.
46 Baldwin quoted in Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 247.
47 Ibid., 33–78. Anderson examines the origins of this particular form of industrial education and the controversy that surfaced between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and Northern philanthropists and Southern planters.
48 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, second ed. (London: Sage, 1970).
49 W. E. B. DuBois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Journal of Negro Education 4 (July 1935): 328–35.
50 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 81.
51 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 1980), 198.
52 Apple and Zenk, “American Realities: Poverty, Economy, and Education,” 71.
53 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 137–42.
54 Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Joseph Bloch” (September 21, 1890): 12–14.
55 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 142–143.
56 Ibid., 156, 155, 145.
57 Thomas Hirschl, “Structural Unemployment and the Qualitative Transformation of Capitalism,” in The Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution, edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl, and Michael Stack (New York: Verso, 1997), 157–74.
58 Ibid., 158. Ruth Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
59 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
60 Hirschl, “Structural Unemployment,” 159.
61 Jim Davis and Michael Stack, “The Digital Advantage,” in The Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution, edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl, and Michael Stack (New York: Verso, 1997), 121–44.
62 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Robots and Capitalism,” in The Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution, edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl, and Michael Stack (New York: Verso, 1997), 13–28.
63 “The Cyber Factory: A Web of Intelligent Machines,” previously available at www.globaltechnoscan.com, 1–5.
64 Ibid.
65 Michael Casey, “Internet Changes the Face of Supply and Demand,” Wall Street Journal (October 18, 1999): A4, 3Q.
66 Michael M. Phillips, “Business of Mining Gets a Lot Less Basic,” New York Times (March 18, 1997): B13.
67 Marc Levy, “Robots Do the Milking On Some Farms,” Associated Press (March 1, 2002).
68 Jesse Berst, “What’s Next: Nanotechnology Promises Big Changes by Getting Small” (August 2, 2000), previously available at www.zdnet.com/anchordesk.
69 Patricia Reaney, “Scientists Build Tiny Computer from DNA,” India News: World (November 22, 2001).
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Jonathan King, “The Biotechnology Revolution: Self-Replicating Factories and the Ownership of Life Forms,” in The Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution, edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl, and Michael Stack (New York: Verso, 1997), 145–56.
73 The Science Channel, “Technology Circuit: The Digital Domain” (June 25, 2002).
74 Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 48.
75 Ibid., 2.
76 Hirschl, “Structural Unemployment,” 161; Davis and Stack, “The Digital Advantage,” 137.
77 John Russo and Sherry Linkon, “The Social Costs of Deindustrialization,” in Manufacturing for a Better Future America, edited by R. McCormack, C. Prestowitz, and K. Heidinger (New York: Alliance for American Manfacturing, 2009).
78 Hirschl, “Structural Unemployment,” 2.
79 Richard Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2009).
80 Apple and Zenk, “American Realities,” 72–73. In 1992, 80 percent of people were earning less than half the national income, and 20 percent of the wealthiest had almost 50 percent. Hope Yen, “Recession Pushes Income Gap between Rich, Poor to Record,” USA Today (Washington, DC, 2008). Arloc Sherman, Income Gaps Hit Record Levels in 2006 (April 17, 2009) (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2009). David Johnston, “Income Gap is Widening, Data Shows,” Truthout (March 29, 2007), available at www.truthout.org/article/income-gap-is-widening-data-shows?print) (accessed May 1, 2010).
81 William Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power,” Who Rules America?, available at http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html (accessed May 1, 2010).
82 David Harvey, “The Crisis and Consolidation of Class Power,” Counterpunch (March 13, 2009). Richard Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan.
83 Žižek, Violence, 2, 14.
84 Žižek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (New York: Verso, 2009).
85 Hirschl, “Structural Unemployment,” 168.
86 Michael Apple, Educating the Right Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2001), 75; Stephanie Banchero and Michael Martinez, “Federal School Reform Stumbles:Confusion Reigns Over Choice Plan,” Chicago Tribune (August 28, 2002): 1; Diana Jean Schemo, “Few Exercise New Right to Leave Failing Schools,” New York Times (August 28, 2002): 1.
87 “U.S. Department of Education, Secretary Duncan Sets Tone for ‘Race to the Top’ by Naming Innovative New Leader” (May 19, 2009), available at www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2009/05/05192009c.html (accessed May 1, 2010).
88 James Crawford, Letter to The Honorable Arne Duncan on “Race to the Top” (August 19, 2009), available at http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/08/race-to-top.html (accessed May 1, 2010); George Wood and Sam Chaltain, Letter to Secretary Duncan, Forum for Education and Democracy on “Race to the Top” (September 10, 2009), available at http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2009/09/forum-for-education-and-democracy-on.html (accessed May 1, 2010); Linda McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (New York: Routledge, 2000).
89 Enora Brown, “The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind: Standardization and Deracialization Breed Inequality,” in Schooling and the Politics of Disaster, edited by Kenneth Saltman (New York: Routledge, 2007).
90 Žižek, Violence, 14.
91 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 137, 145.
92 Žižek, Violence, 9.
93 Parenti, Lockdown America, 4.
94 Ibid., 8–11.
95 Ibid., 42.
96 Ibid., 45.
97 Ibid., 44.
98 Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (Cambridge, Mass.: Southend Press, 2000), 153.
99 Parenti, Lockdown America, 50.
100 Ibid., 57–61.
101 ACLU, The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) (2002), available at www.aclu.org/images/asset_upload_file79_25805.pdf (accessed May 1, 2010).
102 Parenti, Lockdown America, 59.
103 Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, “FY 2008 Performance and Accountability Report, Top Management and Performance Challenges in the Department of Justice, Memorandum for the Attorney General” (November 13, 2009), available at http://www.justice.gov/ag/annualreports/pr2008/sect4/p200-219.pdf (accessed May 1, 2010).
104 Rady Ananda, “Obama Increases Number of Prisons, Cops” (May 12, 2009), available at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-Increases-Number-of-by-Rady-Ananda-090512-19.html (accessed May 1, 2010); U.S. Department of Justice FY 2010 Budget Request, Prisons and Detention, available at www.justice.gov/jmd/2010factsheets/pdf/prisons-detention.pdf (accessed May 1, 2010).
105 Sandra Williams, “Racial Bias for Black Prisoners,” Race Issues (March 9, 2007), available at http://racism-politics.suite101.com/article.cfm/racial_bias_for_black_prisoners (accessed May 1, 2010); Human Rights Watch Press Backgrounder, “Race and Incarceration in the United States” (February 27, 2002), available at www.hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/race (accessed May 1, 2010).
106 Fox Butterfield, “Study Finds Big Increase in Black Men as Inmates since 1980,” New York Times (August 28, 2002): 1; Jonathan D. Salant, “6.6 Million Under Nation’s Correctional System,” Florida Times-Union (August 26, 2002): 1.
107 Parenti, Lockdown America, 230. Nathan James, CRS Report for Congress: Federal Prison Industries (Washington, DC., Congressional Research Service, July 13, 2007): 14; Inmate Employment and Federal Prison Industries Act of 2002; Charlene Muhammad, “America’s New Slavery: Black Men in Prison,” National Newspapers Publishers Assn. (December 14, 2009).
108 Nathan James, CRS Report for Congress; The Mandala Projects, U.S. Prison Labor at Home and Abroad, available at http://www1.american.edu/TED/jail.htm (accessed May 1, 2010).
109 Nathan James, CRS Report for Congress, 3.
110 Parenti, Lockdown America, 233–35; Stephen McFarland, Chris McGowan, and Tom O’Toole, “Prisons, Privatization, and Public Values” (December 2002), available at http://government.cce.cornell.edu/doc/html/PrisonsPrivatization.htm (accessed May 1, 2010).
111 U.S. Department of Justice FY 2010 Budget Request: National Security, available at www.justice.gov/jmd/2010factsheets/pdf/national-security.pdf (accessed May 1, 2010).
112 Adam Clymer, “Security and Liberty: Worker Corps to be Formed to Report Odd Activity,” New York Times (July 25, 2002).
113 Elizabeth Becker, “Bush Seeks to Review Military’s Home Role,” Chicago Tribune (July 16, 2002): 1; Tribune News Services, “Ridge Calls for Study of Military’s Home Role,” Chicago Tribune (22 July 2002).
114 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 145.
115 William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Rick Ayers, eds., Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools (New York: The New Press, 2001).
116 Sean Nicholson-Crotty, Zachary Birchmeier, and David Valentine, “Exploring the Impact of School Discipline on Racial Disproportion in the Juvenile Justice System,” Social Science Quarterly 90, 4 (December 2009): 1003–18; Anne Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
117 1999 National Household Study on Drug Abuse.
118 Advancement Project, “Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track” (March 2005); Drug Policy Alliance Network, “Education vs. Incarceration,” available at www.drugpolicy.org/communities/race/educationvsi/index.cfm (accessed May 1, 2010).
119 Susan Snyder, “Vallas: No Shuffling of Violent Students,” Philadelphia Inquirer (August 22, 2002): 1.
120 Butterfield, “Study Finds Big Increase,” 1.
121 Physicians for Human Rights, Unique Needs of Girls in the Juvenile Justice System (Cambridge, Mass.: Health and Justice for Youth Campaign, 2007).
122 Physicians for Human Rights, Youth of Color in the Justice System: Racial Disparity in Health and Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Health and Justice for Youth Campaign, 2006).
123 Butterfield, “Study Finds Big Increase,” 1; Physicians for Human Rights, Youth in the Adult Criminal Justice System: Health and Human Rights Risks (Cambridge, Mass.: Health and Justice for Youth Campaign, 2007).
124 “Prosecutors Target Northwestern Journalism Students Working on Exonerating Wrongfully Convicted Prisoners,” on Democracy Now (January 12, 2010), available at http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/12/prosecutors_target_northwestern_journalism_students_working (accessed May 1, 2010).
125 Sam Dillon, “Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts,” New York Times (October 9, 2009).
126 Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters, Locating the Dropout Crisis: Which High Schools Produce the Nation’s Dropouts? Where Are They Located? Who Attends Them? (Baltimore, Md.: CRESPAR, Johns Hopkins University, 2004); Ian Urbina, “States Loosen Rules on Test for Diploma,” New York Times (January 12, 2010): 1.
127 Dillon, “Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts,” 2.
128 Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
129 Žižek, Violence, 9.
130 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997); H. Svi Shapiro, Education and Hope in Troubled Times: Visions of Change for Our Children’s World (New York: Routledge, 2009)
131 Christian Parenti, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Enora Brown, “Education and the Law: Towards Conquest or Social Justice,” in The Handbook of Social Justice in Education, edited by W. Ayers, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall (New York: Routledge, 2008).
132 Chomsky, “Intellectuals and Social Change,” 236–37.
133 James Baldwin, “The Discovery of What it Means to be an American,” More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage, 1961/1993), 11.