Ed school dean: Urban school reform is really about land development (not kids)

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/28/ed-school-dean-urban-school-reform-is-really-about-land-development-not-kids/

Good piece by Dean Leslie Fenwick of Howard.

<snip>

In most urban centers like Washington D.C. and Prince George’s County, black political leadership does not have independent access to the capital that drives land development. These resources are still controlled by white male economic elites. Additionally, black elected local officials by necessity must interact with state and national officials. The overwhelming majority of these officials are white males who often enact policies and create funding streams benefiting their interests and not the local black community’s interests.

<snip>

In the most recent cases of Washington D.C. and Chicago, black parents and other community members point to school closings as verification of their distrust of school “reform” efforts. Indeed, mayoral control has been linked to an emerging pattern of closing and disinvesting in schools that serve black poor students and reopening them as charters operated by education management organizations and backed by venture capitalists. While mayoral control proposes to expand educational opportunities for black and poor students, more-often-than-not new schools are placed in upper-income, gentrifying white areas of town, while more schools are closed and fewer new schools are opened in lower-income, black areas thus increasing the level of educational inequity. Black inner-city residents are suspicious of school reform (particularly when it is attached to neighborhood revitalization) which they view as an imposition from external white elites who are exclusively committed to using schools to recalculate urban land values at the expense of black children, parents and communities.

So, what is the answer to improving schools for black children? Elected officials must advocate for equalizing state funding formula so that urban school districts garner more financial resources to hire credentialed and committed teachers and stabilize principal and superintendent leadership. Funding makes a difference. Black students who attend schools where 50 percent of more of the children are on free/reduced lunch are 70 percent more likely to have an uncertified teacher (or one without a college major or minor in the subject area) teaching them four subjects: math, science, social studies and English. How can the nation continue to raise the bar on what we expect students to know and demonstrate on standardized tests and lower the bar on who teaches them?

As the nation’s inner cities are dotted with coffee shop chains, boutique furniture stores, and the skyline changes from public housing to high-rise condominium buildings, listen to the refrain about school reform sung by some intimidated elected officials and submissive superintendents. That refrain is really about exporting the urban poor, reclaiming inner city land, and using schools to recalculate urban land value. This kind of school reform is not about children, it’s about the business elite gaining access to the nearly $600 billion that supports the nation’s public schools. It’s about money.

[MichiganVote]

1. True in Chicago and Detroit too.

[Starry Messenger]

2. Absolutely.

Thank you for the reply, I was feeling lonely in here.

[MichiganVote]

3. Well I appreciate the article. Been saying this for awhile.

I can't wait to see what the wealthy eventually do with all the property once privately owned by GM/Ford executives along the St. Lawrence and other water ways. They are already buying property along the great lakes at a fast clip.

Trouble ahead.

[xchrom]

4. Du rec. Nt

[Egalitarian Thug]

5. Very slowly the light begins to glow. As our social bifurcation accelerates and people begin to

realize that being isolated by miles of crumbling roads and the complete lack of resources and assistance that define suburbs might not be a great idea, those once forgotten large plots of land currently occupied by schools are being recognized for the potential value they represent.

The parasite class couldn't care less about education, except insofar as they can get their hands on that money that flows into the system. Their kids will receive a fine education in the schools they will attend, but acres of land close in to the centers of commerce are both really hard to come by and prohibitively expensive.

[Starry Messenger]

6. True and correct.

All the lying about this is getting to me. It's screamingly obvious what is going on.

[Egalitarian Thug]

7. Only to people that are both paying attention and understand how things really work.

Hang in there, you can only do what you can do and at some point the people you care about will need your insight and sanity.

I'm wrestling with whether there is any point in staying in this country or bailing out altogether. I've spent my life helping people to understand what is and helping them deal with it. I've also been passionately in love with the idea and potential of this nation for my whole life, but we're only going to live another 20 - 40 years (if we remain lucky) and the idea of being old and at the mercy of the morons and truly evil people that dominate America today is damned frightening.

(I have no idea why I wrote that except that it is foremost in my thoughts for the last decade or so. So I'm going to leave it. Please feel free to ignore it, but do take care of yourself.)

[Starry Messenger]

9. Good advice, thank you.

I do try to pace myself, there's only so much you can think about and do.

(I wrestle with staying too, but I test very low on the desirability tests they have you do about emigration. I guess the rest of the world has enough aging ceramics teachers, lol.)

[HiPointDem]

17. take heart. there seems to be a growing public awareness & some acknowledgment by the media.

when conditions on the ground belie the party line, people start looking for better explanations.

[Starry Messenger]

18. Thank you, I'm trying to.

I just have visions of all this coming to pass and people scratching their heads 10 years from now and saying "Man, did we let corporations take all this great real estate?" It's taken several decades here in CA for some to realize why Prop 13 was bad. I know these things take time, but hell...

[elehhhhna]

16. charters get the buildings

and they're doing this "to help the poors get a good education". LOL. With no oversight. This is JUST LIKE privatizing the prisons, and we all know how that turned out.

[Egalitarian Thug]

19. Yep. Short-term profit taking. The education-for-profit scam is still at its heart, just a scam.

It's a high-profit, short-term means to steal large piles of capital from the suckers through the "reformers" they foolishly put their faith in. The current cycle of destruction will not go on forever, and after it fails the owners will need a few fall guys to take the heat, but in the end they will still own the property and that goes on forever.

[HiPointDem]

8. exactly. 'ethnic cleansing'. KR

[Starry Messenger]

10. I hope she says this in more venues and gets other people to talk about this.

So far people who point this out are from the grassroots, it would be great to have a bigger megaphone.

[HiPointDem]

11. +1 and the corollary is the 'ghettoization' of suburbia, as the poor are pushed out of the cities

and jobs disappear from the suburbs.

big capital has insider knowledge of both processes and can 'invest' accordingly.

speaking of which, i saw a documentary on detroit last night (detroitopia). kind of stream of consciousness but the interesting point to me was that it said there'd been a recent & fairly substantial increase in the movement of young people into detroit. they profiled a couple who'd done so -- white, artists, and able to buy a house in detroit (looked fairly decent for $25K) while maintaining an apartment in some unspecified other city and having no apparent means of support beyond their art.

what they showed of their in the video was them standing on a road in gold-plated gas masks with signs saying 'give us your money'. didn't look too lucrative, so i guess they're trust-funders or something similar...

[Starry Messenger]

14. I'll look for the documentary.

When I was researching a couple of years ago on Robert Bobb and the privatization of Detroit, I found that several of the foundations involved in all that also had ties to basically "urban renewal" organizations. There are a lot of glossy publications with videos advertising the different neighborhoods and they were definitely geared towards hipsters, sponsored by coalitions with those orgs.

This guy has a blog on the hipster influx to Detroit. http://notadetroithipster.blogspot.com/

[HiPointDem]

15. hey thanks! looks very interesting.

[HiPointDem]

22. kicking this again

[LWolf]

12. K&R

[marmar]

13. k/r

[starroute]

20. Even Harlem could soon be a mostly-white, upper class neighborhood

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2012/12/10/west-harlem-identity-crisis

The numbers certainly show demographic and income changes in West Harlem. “I think it’s going to be less than 50 percent black by 2020,” Stacey Sutton, an urban planning professor at Columbia, said. “If all of that changes, what remains is this historical memory of the place that was black, but is something very different.” . . .

Between 2000 and 2010, the number of non-Hispanic white residents in West Harlem—the area stretching from approximately 110th to 145th Street and from Morningside Avenue to Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard—increased precipitously. According to census data compiled by the city, it jumped up by 405.1 percent, from 1,483 to 7,491.

Meanwhile, the number of non-Hispanic black residents decreased by 13.1 percent, from 43,319 to 37,630—still making up 61.9 percent of the neighborhood, but down from highs near 100 percent in the ’50s and ’60s. . . .

The change in ethnic makeup is just one aspect of the neighborhood’s transformation that some say threatens to erode Harlem’s identity as the capital of black America. Median household income levels have also increased nearly across the board. One census tract—between Morningside Avenue and Frederick Douglass and 122nd and 126th streets—made an average of $33,500 in 2010, a 124 percent increase over the last decade. The fear, of course, is that rising incomes drive up prices—and drive out lifelong residents.

[Starry Messenger]

21. It's happening so fast.

It's insane.