Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education

2. “I Hate It When People Treat Me Like a Fxxx-up”: Phony Theories, Segregated Schools, and the Culture of Aspiration among African American and Latino Teenagers

69 2 “I Hate It When People Treat Me Like a Fxxx-up” Phony Theories, Segregated Schools, and the Culture of Aspiration among African American and Latino Teenagers Jeanne Theoharis A hailstorm hit South Central today, the national news reported. Hail in November in South L.A., a place that exists in the popular imagination as the stifling hot setting for two riots, gang violence, drive-by shootings, and West Coast hip-hop. Broadcast across the country, there was little mention that the weather anomaly had left tens of thousands of African American and Latino Angelenos without power for days. John C. Fremont High School, at Seventy-seventh and San Pedro, was one of those places that still had no power. But the principal lacked the authority to close the school herself, and the superintendent ordered that the school must be open the next day. Teachers were flabbergasted, some reporting rumors that the LAPD had pressured the district to keep the school open. Basically, each teacher was required to hold her first-period class for the entire day. There was not enough light in the school to do any effective work or to make it particularly safe for students to be changing classes. So students were essentially held in the school, neither educated nor sent home for their own safety. It is difficult to imagine that, in the tonier suburbs of Beverly Hills or Santa Monica across town, high schools would be open during a power outage and the district would think it appropriate to hold students for an entire day in a building without electricity. —Fieldnote (November 2003) 70 Phony Theories, Segregated Schools It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop out. . . . What the hell good is Brown v. the Board of Education if nobody wants it? —Bill Cosby, speech at NAACP commemorative Brown gala (2004) What’s most interesting about the recent spate of studies [on Black males’ underachievement] is that analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power. . . . [These young men’s] candid answer was that what sociologists call the “cool-pose” culture of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. —Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, “A Poverty of the Mind” (2006) It is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. . . . Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. —NPR/Fox journalist Juan Williams, “Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education” (2007) Public discourse on urban education has been overtaken by a discussion of values. As chapter 1 elaborated, it has become common sense to bemoan the declining value of education within urban Black and Latino communities, to assume a priori that students who value education succeed in school and that those with poor values drop out. This misinformed discussion about values not only takes the responsibility for schools away from the society that creates them and places it solely on students and their parents but distorts the regard for education held in the African American and Latino communities. Moreover, it caricatures criticism of the unequal structures of schooling as devaluing education itself. Many commentators like those above, while purporting to speak authoritatively on urban teenagers, do not spend much time listening to how young people actually think about and frame issues of schooling. This chapter foregrounds the perspectives of a group of African American and Phony Theories, Segregated Schools 71 Latino high school students who attend a deeply segregated public high school in Los Angeles on the value and nature of their own educations. Using a set of journal writings students did for me over the course of the 2004 spring semester, I look at how young people write about their goals and aspirations, about good teaching and the use of testing, and about the structures of schooling today. Their writings demonstrate how profoundly students value education, how deeply they wish to be successful academically , and how much they hope to make their families proud. Interweaving their beliefs and values with an analysis of the schooling they receive, I show how these young people are expected to be responsible (about attending school, doing their homework, making plans for college) while the school district does not have to demonstrate an equal level of responsibility in...