Book Review / Sarah Outterson
Social Justice and the Inner City School
William Ayers et al. City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. New York: New Press, 2008. 384 pages.
Before his radical history became fodder for conservative sound-bites in the presidential election, William Ayers was a writer on education reform and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and three other professors of education have just published a new collection of perspectives on the problems and possibilities of urban education, entitled City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. The editors, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Michie, Pedro Noguera, and Ayers, have compiled a wide range of writings—from policy analysis to poetry—into a focused vision of the connectedness between education issues and the economic, social, and moral structure of our society.
Reading this book while rabble-rousing attempts to discredit Barack Obama’s candidacy by associating him with Ayers’ radicalism are still fresh in one’s mind is an amusing and disturbing experience. As a member of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers bombed government facilities in protest against the Vietnam War in which “thousands of people were being killed every week,” as he explained in a recent New Yorker interview. His memoir of his radical youth, “Fugitive Days,” was released in the early days of September 2001, leading to a renewed condemnation of his activities, though none of the Weather Underground’s attacks ever resulted in any deaths. Because of FBI misconduct in the investigation of the attacks, Ayers was convicted of no crimes. He continued his political activism in an academic form, eventually becoming a professor. Even before the Weather Underground, Ayers had been a radical educator at a Chicago “free school,” set up on principles of self-directed learning and freedom. The very scholarliness and American-dream idealism of that activism, as revealed in this book, is illuminating when considering the brief episode of Ayers’ appearance in the discourse about Obama’s candidacy.
While coverage of Obama’s connection to Ayers first appeared in February of this year, it was revived in October when Sarah Palin sought to condemn Obama for the lack of “truthfulness and judgment” shown in his “dishonest explanation” of his relationship with Ayers. Her concern ostensibly rested on the way that Obama called Ayers “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” when in fact they had worked together on Chicago community boards and political events in Obama’s early political career. However, the real emotional target for which Palin was aiming was not anger at Obama’s dishonesty or cowardice, but rather fear at the idea of a president tolerating terrorism. The reiterated idea that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” reinforced the idea of foreign danger already associated with Obama as the product of a Kenyan father and an Indonesian childhood. Needless to say, the association didn’t stick well enough to lose Obama the election.
Furthermore, while Ayers and the other editors of City Kids, City Schools have a clear progressive and activist agenda, their work is hardly militant or terrorist in outlook. Despite occasional detours into fiction and poetry, most of the essays are of the staidly footnoted education-policy persuasion, and they declare a firm commitment to—horrors!—community organizing and political involvement. Thus, as a specimen of Ayers’ current political goals and methodology, the book reminds us how ridiculous the political pressure put on Obama to disassociate himself was. But let’s pass over the personal demagoguery of politicians, inescapable but thankfully transitory, and return to the book itself, which presents a collection of meditations on the lasting issues surrounding urban education. The works included range in genre from journalistic anecdotes, to slam poetry, to research-based historical analysis, to fiction written in dialect, to theoretical essays arguing for critical pedagogy. Thus the title, City Kids, City Schools, serves more as a unifying thread than as a single topic for the book as it slowly broadens in scope from the personal experiences of city students to the effects of violence and immigration on urban education and society as a whole. Yet there is a perceptible clarity of theme even to this wide-ranging collection. The book presents education, and particularly urban education, as a battleground of social justice.
The book questions both the moral pessimism of the coded concept of the “urban” school—that is, as Ayers notes, violent, poor, overcrowded, decaying, hopeless—and the invisible segregation glossed over in the concept of “diverse” schools, most of which are, as Jonathan Kozol points out, populated solely by one or two demographics. The volume also addresses the varying effects of the cultural assimilation undergone by the children of immigrants, either contrasting the optimistic effort and cultural flexibility displayed by first generation immigrants, as Pedro Noguera does, with the pessimistic anger and futility felt by their descendants, or presenting the possibility of maintaining a bilingual identity despite assimilation, as in the chapter by Angela Valenzuela. The argument of the book is not limited to the specific problems of city students, but rather (as the editors write in their introduction) the book begins there because “cities are where the injustices and inequities of our society are brought into starkest relief.” The project of the book is twofold: to remind us of these injustices and inequities, and to present the possibilities available for changing them, in schools, in cities, and beyond.
Yet the responsibility for this change does not rest entirely on teachers themselves. Many of the works in the book address the idea of the teacher as hero in order to question the assumptions and problematic power issues that concept suggests. The editors’ general introduction to the book situates the cultural cliché for us by describing a MADtv sketch parodying the magical power of the hero teacher. Presented with an exaggeratedly menacing bunch of high school students, sharpening their knives on the barrels of their handguns, we are told in voiceover that “there’s only one thing that can make these kids learn... a nice white lady!” Doubting colleagues and hardened students are overcome with the simple invocation: “When it comes to teaching inner-city minorities, you don’t need books and you don’t need rules. All you need is a nice white lady.” The editors argue that the dangerously stereotypical “resounding chorus of negatives” we hear about urban youth infects our concept of their capabilities and “scapegoats urban youth for larger failings in American society.” Further, by suggesting that the “only chance of salvation” for these students lies with the “missionary teacher,” we free ourselves from our complicity in the problems they face and from taking on responsibility for these problems ourselves.
This idea of cultural responsibility for social change, an essential tenet of critical pedagogy, is in the tradition of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator whose classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that to overcome oppression, education and activism must both arise out of the needs and experiences of the people. City Kids, City Schools presents again and again the concept that improving education requires changing society too, while at the same time education can itself be a means of social change. The dual nature of this argument gives the book its apparent universality of audience. Grace Lee Boggs argues in her essay, “Education in Our Dying Cities,” that “rethinking the purposes and methods of education in a post-industrial society” is the responsibility of everyone interested in living in “durable economies and healthy communities.” The book presents its message as equally necessary for anyone who contributes to and depends on the current unsustainable and inequitable system as for the obvious audience of teachers or policy-makers. The goals of critical pedagogy should be the goals of all thinking citizens.
In this project, the format of the book exemplifies some of the very ideas that it is trying to teach. The book is structured into four sections, proceeding from “City Kids,” to “City Teachers,” to “City Classrooms, City Schools,” to the final category, “City Issues: Beyond the School’s Walls.” Each, introduced by one of the four editors, contains a range of contributions in different styles and from different perspectives. The multivocal, multidirectional approach that the book takes is itself the critical, ethical method that the book suggests is necessary for multicultural education. Even in the midst of its most painful depictions of social problems in education, into which category much of the poetic and fictional work in the volume falls, the book extends a sense of responsibility and moral purpose beyond teachers alone. It asks us to acknowledge the ways in which we are all complicit in the misery of the poor; to force us to consider our ethical responsibilities; to ask us whether our society is formed for democracy; to ask why and not just how to do things; to shape our economic and technological systems around our universal human needs for meaningful work and community, not the other way around. The book implicitly presents itself as a pedagogical tool, meant not just for teachers, but for our entire society.
The specific vision here ostensibly focuses on K-12 education, the compulsory battleground that requires so much more daily persuasion and motivation than do college classes like the sections of Introductory Literature I teach, where at least students have in some sense “made it” and are choosing when and what to learn. Yet the way the book presents a vision of life-long and communal learning (as in the essay on parents as writers, by Janise Hurtig) reinforces the idea of education as a space for students to consider their own experiences and actions as “disciplines” from which to spark learning. The goal of teachers and of educational structures in general then becomes to provide that kind of supportive space for success. Sue Books and Lisa Delpit discuss the particular effects of poverty on children, whose higher-order reasoning, self-reliance, and imaginative skills of poverty go unacknowledged or punished while the lower-order basic skills already absorbed by middle-class children place these invisibly privileged students ahead of the remedial track right from the start. Acknowledging the different cultural preparations of poor and middle-class children then becomes a way to fill in the gaps in the education of both, to the benefit of all.
Conversely, Gloria Ladson-Billing’s essay “Yes, but how do we do it?: Practicing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” suggests one specific way in which narrowness of social vision hurts us all. The essay describes the practices of teachers successful at “teaching for social justice.” One of the problems Ladson-Billings identifies in producing this kind of teacher goes along with the idea of “hero teachers” of disadvantaged students critiqued in the introduction to the book. While teacher education has generally gotten the message that multicultural education is important, the typical program simply “ghettoizes issues of diversity.” Information about social inequity and injustice is included in a separate course or workshop and not integrated into the pedagogy itself. The result is a mixed message provided to teachers “in ways that destabilize their sense of themselves and make them feel responsible for the condition of poor children of color in our schools.”
This critique is devastating not only for its accuracy, but in the context of the book for the way in which it links the issues of the isolation and invisibility of poor students to the problematic isolation of responsibility to the heroic teacher. As Michael Eric Dyson reminds us in “Unnatural Disasters: Race and Poverty,” his essay on the social conditions contributing to the effects of Hurricane Katrina, the point is not just to reveal injustices but to fulfill our social contract with each other, and to do so by responding to injustice systemically, radically, and collectively—not simply by appointing heroically empathetic saviors to take care of it for us.
How radical, exactly, is the vision of social responsibility presented by this book, then? The specter of Ayers’ “radical” youth notwithstanding, the word “radical” resonates through the book. Indeed, we must go back to the “radix,” or root, of our ethical concepts of purpose in education. City Kids, City Schools begins with a prologue containing James Baldwin’s memorable 1963 speech, “A Talk to Teachers,” which presents education as inherently and internally “revolutionary,” a civil war within each person. Society is structured to attempt to create citizens that simply obey its rules, but “if a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.” “Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience,” he says, “you must find yourself at war with your society.” The book is resolutely committed to the concept of education as a site of social change, as Jean Anyon’s final essay proclaims. Within that concept, there is also plenty of room for radical questioning of the exact form necessary for that education. Many of the works here imply the necessity of radical changes in educational structure and method.
For example, in his introduction, Ayers asks whether the authoritarian structure of our schools can possibly lead to the kind of democratic society we want to create. Boggs suggests that one of the results of an industrial educational system driving students into the dead end jobs of a post-industrial world is that dropping out becomes a worryingly rational and self-protective response. Luis Rodriguez addresses the destructive effect that “get-tough” legislation on immigration and drugs has on the tenuous but nurturing community structures that urban kids build for themselves. Noguera, Kozol, and Bakari Kitwana further explore how authoritarian systems of immigration control, education, and policing, respectively, act to suppress efforts at self-determination. Yet Ayers and Sapphire also present the power of education functioning within and in spite of destructively authoritarian systems. The ambivalent relationship between education and authority is reflected in the way Kozol and others admit that strict demands of students can be effective, or even necessary. Culturally-relevant pedagogy is all very well, but what about the necessity of learning despite student resistance? How to resolve the paradox? What can teachers do, and what should they do?
The result of the book’s engagement with questions of authoritarian structure is a new and revised concept of the authoritative role of the teacher. Instead of regulating and controlling “violent,” “uncontrolled” youth with military-style authoritarian structures, which is an efficient but ultimately inhuman method of education, authority can be deployed within an intimate and relational environment to “demand” success of students, Lisa Delpit writes, as when students ask teachers to “make me learn.” In her essay “Lessons from Teachers,” Delpit describes one teacher who symbolically named each of her students with her own last name on the first day of class, making them all her own children who were “going to learn more in one year than anyone ever learned in one year.”
Thus, she seems to suggest, the paradox of authority in education can be resolved into a new model of student self-confidence and success based not in control, ideals of technical efficiency, demands, and punishment, but rather in mutual respect. The military authority structure can be replaced with familial authority and love. The analogy of the former model with, among other things, Stan Karp’s discussion of the specific failings of the No Child Left Behind Act is unmistakable. City Kids, City Schools argues that the health of the community and the health of its educational system are irrevocably bound together. By attempting to remove the burden of “reforming the educational system” from teachers alone, and to destroy the twin stereotypes of violent youth and hero teacher, the theoretical project of this collection results in a decentralized and radicalized vision of communal education, in which all are potentially teacher-activists, particularly students themselves.
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