Segregated
Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America.
Paul Street. New York: Routledge,
2005. Pp. 222. $18.95, paper. ISBN: 0-415-95116-X. TEL: 212-216-7800 •
FAX: 212-643-1430
Street’s view of our schools in post-civil rights America gets new meaning
in post-Katrina America. With an eye to the historical development of segregated
education, he examines the current state of school funding, disparities in
teacher quality, student-teacher ratios, etc. Critical of “No Child
Left Behind” and school vouchers, he has no easy answers for creating
equal educational opportunities for every American child, saying there is
none.
In his final chapter, he says, “The main obstacles to the fulfillment
of Brown’s [Brown v. Board of Education] promise of educational equality
for the victims of contemporary educational apartheid are moral and ideological.
They are found in the widespread dissemination and acceptance of the notion
that racism is no longer a significant barrier for blacks [and, one might
add, Latinos] and that the only remaining obstacles to black success and equality
are found within the African American [and Latino] community itself.
“They are found also in the related, broadly hegemonic ideas that economic
inequality and social hierarchy are right, natural and/or inevitable facts
of life and that there is nothing that the populace and/or government can
or should do to establish control over the great tyrannical private-economic
institutions that impose savage social hierarchy life and regressive/repressive
policy in the U.S.
“They are traceable in part to the neo-liberal, corporate-imposed erosion
of the social-democratic public spaces that once served as forums in which
communities and peoples debated, analyzed, and participated in political life.
Indeed, we have witnessed in recent decades an unprecedented decline in popular
engagement, the process by which common people asserted their interests and
took responsibility for their common destiny.
“The result has been the privatization (consumerization) of American
life, with its concomitant sense that social action and responsibility are
futile propositions, stillborn by their very nature. There is a broad, deep,
skeptical, even cynical sense that nothing much can be done about existing
social problems … and that the only reasonable solutions to societal
difficulties are to be found in private realms, matters of purely personal
correction.
“The world has grown too complex—too ossified—to be subject
to meaningful collective agency. This sense masks despair as ‘realism’
and retreat from democracy and social responsibility as mature personal ‘adjustment.’”
And, finally, Street writes: “The vital task of countering these and
other powerful reactionary messages is, among other things, pedagogical work.
It involves telling students openly and honestly about the harsh facts of
social, including educational, hierarchy in modern America. It also calls
for educators to help students develop a critical framework in which to comprehend
and propose egalitarian and democratic alternatives to the ‘savage inequalities’
of American ‘life.’
“It requires a vision of a just and democratic future and a realistic
belief that desirable alternatives to the current dispensation can be constructed
and sustained. Diametrically opposed to the current craze for authoritarian
‘grill and drill’ instruction, it calls for something that is
very much within the sphere of schools’ capacity—the development
of a radical ‘pedagogy of hope’ (Paulo Friere’s phrase),
democracy, equality, and liberation and the abandonment of the current dominant
pedagogy of oppression, inequality, hierarchy, and fatalism.”
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