Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Public Education

5. The Place of Urban High School in Central City Political Culture

Chapter 5 The Place of Urban High School in Central City Political Culture President Bush says that our kids must be taught to read. He says if his aides never learned to read, they’d never be able to tell him what’s in the newspapers every day. —Jay Leno You see somebody younger than you, don’t be afraid of him. That don’t cost you a dime; might cost you some heart. —Chuck D, response to what we can do to help our local schools In an article noting that Ohio has lost House seats after every census since 1960 and projections have the state losing two more seats in 2010, Director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, Dr. John Green, concluded, “That’s not in the least bit surprising. . . . Ohio has been unwilling to make the kind of investment in education and public infrastructure other states have made.” —Lake Erie Ledger, 2004 It is clear that while some see UHS as the city’s flagship school, others, including most of the city’s current public and private leaders, see it as a frightening school without a neighborhood, a building coveted by a rapidly expanding university neighbor, and a dumping ground for the school system’s behavior problems. Part of the explanation for this gap can be explained by the transition over the last one hundred years of the UHS residential neighborhood into a much less residential, largely university-occupied track of land that is no longer just next to downtown but part of it. While this chapter details local trends that mitigate somewhat against statewide forces hostile to educational funding, the previous history makes it clear that even leaders hostile to education line up behind school funding in the form of federal dollars for the renewal of “blighted” mixed-race, working-class, inner-city neighbor135 hoods as university recreational facilities. In our final chapter we argue that this prevailing perverse perspective on public education represents a particular approach to limited government, and in this chapter we argue that it has constructed UHS as expendable if not outright dangerous and the fears of UHS parents as unreasonable, punishing them for the challenges they face as a result of a history of malign neglect at the hands of state (and to a lesser extent city) leaders. The debates over educational funding, charter schools, and school construction detailed in chapter 4 illustrate the conflicts central to understanding both the rhetoric and the reality of UHS as a school without a neighborhood. At the same time, many other familiar conflicts consumed the time of the superintendent: overseeing the forcible transfers of principals, managing new state rules prohibiting students from changing schools for athletic reasons, negotiating the creation of dualuse schools as community centers,1 administering “new high-stakes” proficiency tests as required by state and now federal law (without the commensurate funding to pay for these mandates), finding a new football coach for UHS, and firing nearly two hundred teachers.2 But now it is time to focus directly on the competing stories about conflict and conflict management within UHS itself to illustrate how these larger political struggles are both reflected in and challenged by discursive struggles within this one educational environment. Many have argued that our recent fascination with all that is punitive is rewriting our present as a “culture of control,” displacing our democratic imaginations (Hanson 1985) with a culture of fear (Glassner 1999) that governs through crime control (Simon 1997) and transforming education—the foundation of strong democracies—into enforcement (Saltman and Gabbard 2003; Giroux 2003b) or, as Foucault noted, another site for “the integration of law into the state’s order” (1988, 162). In schools, we have already seen that the rhetoric and reality of “zero tolerance” provides one important analytical lens for understanding today’s emerging visions of social control (Ferguson 2000; Cohen 1985). Seen as a technology for exercising power, however, it is more apparent who the real winners and losers in zero tolerance are. At the heart of zero tolerance in schools is a fundamental reconfiguration of the expectations placed on power and its subjects. Zero tolerance creates two important forms of burden shifting. First, shifting the risks of adolescent life from the class as a whole, on to those marked as crim136 Punishing Schools inally oriented. This makes zero tolerance a kind of right held by conforming students...