Can communities of resistance and transformation be born from the social context of school?

Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2003 by Gibson, Rich

Jean Anyon says in her penetrating book, Ghetto Schooling, that attempting school reform without performing social and economic reform in the communities that surround the school is like washing the air on one side of a screen door. It will not work. Dr Anyon's comment is an axiom: true on the face of it, and tested by history (Anyon, 1997, p. xv).

This puts me at odds with leading lights like Tony Alvarado, a liberal, San Diego's current school guru who believes that social and economic conditions do not matter, that the right systems applied to teachers (who he insists are the main problem in schools) can reform capitalist schooling. Alvarado is growing wealthy as he parades that one-sided idea. The kids of San Diego are abused by a Blueprint that outlaws art, music, physical education, and the struggle for meaning in reading. Their teachers are deskilled using the most crude forms of Taylorist efforts at work place control. That runs parallel to the fact that those who are pushing hardest for the regulation of what students know and how they come to know it in school are not coincidentally the wealthy people who benefitted most from the destruction of the tax system over the last 25 years, and the subsequent designs to snare freedom in schools marketed in the name of social equality (Gibson, 2001 online at http:// www.rohan.sdsu.edu/-rgibson/alvarado.html).

I am going to address the social context of schooling with Anyon's thought as background. This is an examination of the air on both sides of the screen door: school, and the social, economic and political ecosystem that makes school, if not education, possible. I hope to demonstrate that what is taking place is part of a very clear series of phenomena. Once these examples reoccur in sufficiently frequency we can call them a tendency. We can name the tendency. Named, we can begin to act, with reason, in order to change, perhaps overcome it.

I list these as interrelated international and national social and economic tendencies, all existing before September 11 2001:

* Booming Inequality within the US, and between the US and the world. http://www.pipeline.com/-rgibson/inequality.html

* Segregation deepening within communities and schools. http://www.law.harvard.edu/groups/civilrights/publications/resegregation99 /resegregation99.html

* Irationalism-rising power of religious fundamentalism in school and out. http://www.nytimes. com/2002/10/15/education/ 150 HIO.html? pagewanted=print&position--top

* Regimentation of society via spectacles, surveillance, and the suspension of common civil liberties.

* Rising authoritarianism on the job and off, as the vertical discipline of society sharpened. This was especially easy to see in schools.

* Militarization of the schools and society (Goodman, 2002).

* Technology leading not to better lives for all but to massive unemployment and overproduction.

* A mystical economy built on Ponzi schemes like Enron, an economy that was unraveling with the NASDAQ collapse,

* A deepening divide of town and country, with masses of people being driven off the land and arriving in cities, homeless and hopeless.