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Chapter 4 Punitive Politics and Punishing Schools Indeed, in Ohio, education is seldom mentioned in the same breath with investment. Rather, the state’s appropriation for higher education is called an “instructional subsidy”—a gross misnomer suggesting an obligatory gesture no different than the many entitlements in the state budget. This subsidy syndrome about education appears to have deep roots. Back in 1960, for example, a widely circulated study by Dr. George Thatcher, the former chairman of economics at Miami University of Ohio, turned up some disturbing facts about Ohio’s dismissive attitude toward education. Although the state’s personal income ranked 5th in the nation, its per capita support of higher education ranked near the bottom. Today, the figures are hardly more encouraging: Ohio is still near the bottom in per capita support for higher education, and, predictably, it has dropped to 22nd in personal income! Clearly, Ohio’s subsidy mentality has had time to work its course during the last 40 years, and apparently for the worse. Thus, there should be little doubt that this idea of subsidy in educational spending is one that must change dramatically , and quickly, if our campuses are to serve as Ohio’s most powerful engine for economic development. —President of Central City University1 I. Introduction This statement from the president of a local state university represents the politically anemic progressive flank in the education debates taking place in Ohio. The prevailing position in these education debates at least since the end of World War II, and as the state has dropped from fifth to twenty-second in highest income in the nation, has been dismissive in three ways that have been harmful to the state. First, state public and private leaders dismissing the value of public education have failed to invest in communities resilient enough to adapt to changes in employment opportunities. Second, leaders dismissing the importance of intellectual inquiry have encouraged an anti-intellectual culture 93 based on a blue-collar job base that exists only as nostalgia. And third, leaders dismissing investment in the public sphere have left Ohioans today with a legacy of public impoverishment through a uniquely right-utopian combination of tax breaks for companies that still left the area and a public school system so seriously neglected that the only viable response to unsafe buildings was for the state legislature to exempt schools from building code requirements.2 State-level support for education has ranged from scarce to stingy. But the battle has been waged at many different levels, from neighborhood struggles to reverse a district decision to close a nearby elementary school, to electoral contests where local judges battle to be the toughest on youth violence, to extralegal enactment of vouchers and charter school reforms, to urban renewal efforts that fracture inner-city communities and leave their high school with the pejorative title of a school without a neighborhood, to a decadelong series of state supreme court decisions ruling that the state’s system for funding public education was unconstitutional. And these ongoing struggles—political and economic, statewide and neighborhood—provide the context for our examination of efforts to better manage conflict at one inner-city high school located in the downtown section of one of the largest cities in the state: Urban High School. We will call this city Central City. A History of the Present in Central City Central City was first settled in the early nineteenth century at the intersection of critical commercial waterways that provided the foundation for the manufacturing facilities that settled in and around this city from its founding until the 1960s, when the capital flight associated with deindustrialization turned Central City, and the entire region, into part of the Rust Belt. One of the first two New England families to come to the area settled in the section of downtown where UHS was built in the late nineteenth century, the first high school in the city. This neighborhood was powerful enough at that time to remain independent when Central City was incorporated as a village, but it was annexed when Central City became a city thirty years later. The area was home to blue-collar working families, some of the city’s most prominent families , a college established by a local church and named after a prominent local industrialist, manufacturing facilities, and UHS. And these connections were not simply a geographic coincidence. One of the early 94 Punishing Schools [18.216.32.116] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16...

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