Schools as Discriminatory Artifacts

2011

Urban Education, 2010

The last two decades have seen dramatic change in U.S. schooling as a response to high-stakes accountability and market-based reform movements. Critics cite a number of unfortunate consequences of these movements, especially for students in urban schools. This article explores the troubling ironies related to one strategy for survival in this environment: constructing an image of a “good school.” Drawing from an ethnographic study of an urban middle school, the author argues that the administration developed and promoted an image of a good school in the public sphere but this image did not reflect the experiences of students and teachers. The author develops this argument by drawing out four ironies that resulted from image-building in a climate of high-stakes accountability and marketdriven reform.

Postdigital Science and Education , 2021

Within the space of this collective image/text article, 18 photographic imagemakers and 4 respondents consider deeply and dialogically a quote from William Ayers' 2016 book Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation. The resulting constellation of images and words (1) realizes a space within which works of art, specifically photographs, operate as centers of meaning to generate educational implications, and (2) theorizes a pedagogy that resists unilateral prescriptions and is instead anchored around openness, expansion, and individualization. The paper begins with a few short pieces from Sarah Pfohl, including an overview of Ayers' book and ideas from writings on progressive education, object-based teaching and learning, and close/slow looking to position works of art as sites of rich meaning. While contemporary schooling often drives toward monolithic, numerical representations of the learners in its care, the article employs postdigital gestures to argue that learners have more in common with works of art than numbers, and thus, attention to artworks can open valuable implications for teaching and learning. The diverse group of images that follow offer an emerging portrait of teaching practice as a set of constantly shifting constellations moving across deep time and space from the intensely specific to the wide. Four texts think more about schools, education, and art. Finally, there is a postscript from Bill Ayers himself.

Advancing technology that includes digitized images, search and retrieval databases, and the Internet has made it possible for major historical photograph collections to go on-line thus creating searchable data bases of millions of historic images. This paper examines a selection of photographs of urban schools culled from on-line photograph archives. The goal is to see how the image of the urban school has changed over time. Analysis of photographs requires obtaining as much information as possible about the images so as to build a logical context for understanding, I employ a three-fold structure examining Evidence objective, factual, documentary information provided by the photograph or its context; Interpretation deductions built on circumstantial evidence and context that can be clearly verified to and by others; and Speculation subjective attributions that extend the interpretation based on less concrete evidence, or emotional reaction to the image. Historical periods examined include: 19 century turn-of-the-century, the depression and war years, and the 1960's. Issues related to school discipline, pedagogical authority, overt and hidden curricula, gender, race and ethnicity are discussed

American Educational Research Journal, 2004

Citywide constructs such as "West Side" or "South Side" are spatial codes that result from more than the informal conversations of city residents. This article shows how elementary school educators in one U.S. metropolitan school district participated in the production of a local knowledge of the East Side and West Side space and individual. It demonstrates how educators used these codes to name race and class, as well as to obscure the codes' meanings. The article maps the convergence of institutional technologies and local educational knowledge whereby this knowledge resisted change and buttressed the citywide East Side-West Side relations and knowledge. The disjunctures in this knowledge base are also identified, as educators attempted to produce a knowledge of a third space that they termed "Central City."

History of Education Quarterly, 2016

From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, a new idea drew the interest of local leaders and national networks of educators seeking to further desegregation but concerned about how to do so within the bounds of white resistance. Huge single- or multischool campuses, called education parks, would draw students from broad geographical areas and facilitate desegregation. But in the design and location choices for these imagined (but often not realized) education parks, desegregation advocates revealed a spatial ideology of schooling that reflected both a rejection of racialized black spaces and an antiurban, modernist aesthetic. Beyond recognizing the place of spatial ideology in desegregation advocacy, this article suggests that historians of education listen for ideas about space and their impact in other areas of educational history.

2017

White Canadian teacher candidates are brought into direct dialogue with urban high school students through a yearlong immersion in a high school with a “demonized” image in the broader community. Interviews with students reveal experiences of school as “my safe space” and the predominance of a student culture not characterized by resistance, but by a positive experience of school as an autonomous relational space. We argue that attention to student voices through extended immersion in urban high schools enables teacher candidates to experience schools as uniquely situated spaces and disrupts the tendency to essentialize urban students and their schools.

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

Background/Context Historians of education have chronicled the essential link between schools and communities from a variety of perspectives, exploring how ideology, material conditions, and political struggles have shaped public education. Viewing school reform historically allows us to see how schools are tied to their particular contexts, breathing in and out the values, beliefs, and conditions of local communities. This link is especially important to acknowledge in the high-poverty urban communities targeted by school reformers in the current policy landscape, which pits privatization against local democratic control of schools. This paper contributes to scholarship on school reform by portraying a local struggle to reimagine a longstanding neighborhood urban school in the context of an expanding marketplace of school choices. Purpose Our study uses an asset-based community school development framework to analyze the rich 90-year history of a particular school in the greater Lo...

Buildings & Landscapes, 2015

This photo-essay takes as its central concern the architecture and geography of America’s educational apartheid, in the form of a system of “colored schools” in southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Photographs depict the buildings and landscapes associated with the system of racially segregated schools established in these southern regions of the northern United States. The digital-imaging technique of obscuring the landscape surrounding the schools is a visual representation of W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of the veil. Schools for the Colored is the representation of the duality of racial distinction within American culture.

We report on a field trip we took to a ‘highly successful’ urban middle school and a number of disturbing events that occurred there. Afterwards, we filed formal complaints about the violence, and racial and sexual harassment we observed. These complaints led to both a formal investigation and a series of newspaper articles that resulted in a public discussion of urban schools and how best to work with young urban students of color. We present our analysis of this public discussion in terms of what we identify as the master narrative of the ‘tough, urban principal’ and how children of color in urban schools are ‘othered’ in ways that allow members of the public to consider abusive behavior an appropriate way to improve students’ learning. Four themes emerge in the public discussion of these events: (a) Minimization of startling behaviors – calling them ‘unconventional’, for example, to regularly scream racial epithets at students; (b) ‘Isn’t that what those kids need?’ in which outrageous and possibly criminal levels of assault on students, teachers, parents, and community members are perceived as ‘what is needed’ to reach ‘those kids’; (c) Desperation on the part of parents and community members to find and identify ‘good’ urban schools; and (d) Dismissal of those who would complain about such actions as ‘politically correct’, ‘soft’, and ‘foolishly naïve’ about what ‘urban’ children need to succeed. These themes are discussed in terms of the implicit and explicit dehumanization of students of color, the racial separation between the community and the local schools (i.e., the community is more white and middle class than the student population of the schools), conversations about what constitutes a ‘good’ school, and the role of standardized test scores in protecting against criticism.