Category education

Progress on water (and two ways to celebrate)

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This next week I will be participating in two events that celebrate progress on water for all children in Jersey City’s schools: a book launch on Tuesday (the book is about populism, but from my perspective it’s about water), and our Jersey City Together water action on Friday, October 28.

Thanks to the advocacy of Jersey City Together as well as the work of public servants such as Superintendent Norma Fernandez, as school started this fall more kids have access to working drinking fountains than has been the case for more than a decade. Almost half of Jersey City Public School children are in schools where water remediation has already happened; one quarter of students are in schools where water remediation is in progress. For one quarter of the students, plans for remediation are not clear. For more details, see this summary. This wonderful graphic is by graphic designer Greg Nelson. Brigid D’Souza has also written an update over at Civic Parent.

To get to this point has taken several years of work by a strong team of families and community members, pushing public officials to work together to fix the water systems and install new water fountains. It was one of the first things we heard when we started listening to families: why don’t the water fountains have potable water? We first asked for this publicly at our action back in March of 2019, and then Superintendent Franklin Walker promised to, and did, start this work.

Thanks to my Rutgers colleagues Arlene Stein and Sarah Tobias, I had the opportunity to talk about my work with Jersey City Together on a panel with two amazing organizers: Heather Booth and Scot Nakagawa. This was in February 2020, and was one of the last public events I attended before the pandemic. It was also right after we had gotten the first tangible movement on water, with installation of water fountains at PS15.

The conversation was really amazing and fun, and it has now been published as a chapter in a volume edited Professors Stein and Tobias, The Perils of Populism, which will have an official virtual launch event on Tuesday October 25 at noon. Should be fun, so come if you can. I’m just an ordinary, local leader in an organization, so it was really fun to talk with these veteran organizers about the work.

Now, more than two years later, we have more progress on water, with still more to do. For me, this is why we need broad based power organizations that are in it for the long term. It is not glamorous work, learning all of the details of the process that is followed by various public agencies, finding the places where pressure can be exerted, while building and maintaining the organized people who can exert that pressure. But it is necessary.

Every fall I teach a class on community organizing, and for the past two years we have read Reveille for a New Generation, with many essays written by leaders and organizers of local IAF organizations. One piece some students have found puzzling is an essay by organizer Alisa Glassman titled “Don’t Win Too Quickly”. Her point is that the work of getting to victory is also the work of organizing, of building the network of organized people to not just win but keep on winning, because there is always more work to do. The progress on water is great; there is a little more work to do.

We’re in it for the long haul.

The work that “taxpayer” does

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This country has a “we” problem. There is so much talk of me and mine, of you and yours, of each of us as an individual and our individual interests, that we find it hard to talk about we and us, about who we are together, about being members of a society, let alone of a polity.

This is true at the national level but it is also very evident in local politics. It shows up a lot in discussions over education and schools. I see it in a focus on the “taxpayer” when we talk about public schools. The purposes of public schools are about “we”: schools exist to serve children and to fulfill our obligations as members of a society to each other and to the present and future well-being of young people. Too often, “taxpayer” is invoked to argue against public schools, and against the “we” of our community.

It matters how we talk about our collective life, and it also matters how we structure the institutions and policies that make up our public life. Part of the “we” problem with public schools is in how we pay for schools in the U.S. If you wanted to invent a way to pay for public schools that would ensure that the funding would be as unequal as possible, you couldn’t do better than to base it on local property taxes. This is especially true in a country with so much wealth inequality. The problem of this method of funding education is well known among those who study school funding: our system of funding schools is designed to produce and reproduce unequal funding.

One of the problems with trying to change policies, even ones that are irrational, is that change is difficult, and existing policies were created by, and in turn create, entrenched interests among those who benefit from the policy. So moving away from the system of local property taxes to fund local schools, a policy that originated in the mid-nineteenth century in the U.S., has been difficult. The state of Hawaii funds its local schools from state tax revenues; no other state has managed to move to state level funding without also using local funds, primarily property taxes. New Jersey did not even provide state funding for schools until the state was successfully sued, in the 1970s, for failing to provide the constitutionally required “thorough and efficient” education to students in Jersey City’s schools. (See Deborah Yaffe’s excellent book, Other People’s Children, for the details.)

All of us are taxpayers. Anyone who has ever bought a basic commodity in New Jersey has paid taxes in New Jersey. Students who buy snacks at businesses near their schools are taxpayers. But of course this is not what people mean when they talk about taxpayers and public schools. They mean the school tax portion of local property taxes. So only people who own real estate in a local community are taxpayers. And there is a longstanding idea in the U.S. that property taxpayers are somehow more important than everyone else.

Many people are likely familiar with the way that white people who supported segregation, in the North and the South, engaged in massive resistance after the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, closing public schools–schools that all taxpayers in the community had paid for–rather than desegregating them. In her book Racial Taxation (2018), Camille Walsh tells a longer story about the role of what she calls ‘taxpayer citizenship’ in shaping educational policy, including school funding, segregation, and the continuing inequality of our education system. She traces litigation over taxation and the right to public education from the Reconstruction period (right after the Civil War) through the 1970s. Part of her argument is that the litigation on education and taxpayer citizenship in the 19th century laid some of the groundwork for white “taxpayer revolts” of the post-Brown period.

To trace the story of taxpayer citizenship, she studied the arguments made by litigants in cases involving taxation and education, including court documents and correspondence, as well as newspaper coverage of the cases. The cases include claimants who were seeking to maintain educational inequality, and claimants who were seeking to create greater equality in education. The identity of ‘taxpayer citizenship’ was used for both types of purposes (p. 8). For example, in pursuit of equal access to education, African American plaintiffs made claims as taxpayers over double taxation in the post-Reconstruction period and through the first half of the twentieth century. In some cases state law designated unequal expenditures for (then) legally segregated schools; in other cases actual systems of double taxation were in place, forcing African American property owners to pay for schools that their children could not attend. Among the cases Walsh traces are many brought by the NAACP in the first half of the twentieth century (see chapter three). As Walsh summarizes this era of double taxation litigation, “…black taxpayers spent decades consistently overpaying just for the opportunity for their children to attend poorly funded schools.” (p. 68)

Yet the myth in the post-Brown era was that white taxpayers were overpaying for schools that black children attended. The book traces these developments, and has an excellent discussion of the 1973 Rodriguez decision, a decision that found that there is no federal constitutional right to education while pointedly avoiding any discussion of structural racial inequalities in school funding. Here is how Walsh summarizes the role of the “taxpayer” identity that she is discussing:

“…I suggest that the deployment and popularity of the ‘taxpayer’ identity category has helped co-constitute whiteness through its symbolic exercise in defense of exclusionary ideas. This identity has been tightly linked to the racialized entitlements to educational access and resources from the late nineteenth century onward and has helped to entrench a school finance system with differential levels of citizenship and rights.” (Walsh, p. 3)

We need public schools. We need them to work well, to be effective both at their fundamental educational mission as well as in providing children a space to learn how to be together, to share space and create a “we”. In a multiracial place like Jersey City, public schools can be truly remarkable “public things”, providing a common space for those who are different to come together and build a common society and polity. Taxes are the way that we fund public things such as schools.

When I first got involved in advocating in support of public schools, I was really confused by this focus on “taxpayers” in public conversations about schools, because it was usually evoked in opposition to providing children an adequate education. At the time, our school system was underfunded by over $100 million per year according to the state funding formula. Children were not getting what the state said was the minimum amount of funding for the “thorough and efficient” education required by the New Jersey state constitution. So “taxpayer citizenship” was being invoked in opposition to equity and fairness for children.

Some of us who spoke publicly in support of increased local funding for our school system noted that in addition to being parents of public school students, we were also property owners and therefore “taxpayer citizens” in the sense that Walsh uses the term. We invoked this (reluctantly in some cases) to argue for equity and for fully funded schools. Perhaps it was an artifact of decades of antigovernment rhetoric, but the fact that we advocated for increased taxation to support our schools meant we were often dismissed as not really taxpayers, or certainly as not representative of taxpayers. It was hard to imagine that “taxpayers” were arguing for increased taxes to support the public good of public schools.

Public schools are public goods. They are public things that require our support, our advocacy, our attention. We need to fund them. And we need to work together to hold them accountable for doing the work that we need them to do for our children, for our community, and for our future. That’s all about “we”.

Building inequality

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“At the very least, public things press us into relations with others. They are sites of attachment and meaning that occasion the inaugurations, conflicts, and contestations that underwrite everyday citizenships and democratic sovereignties.” Bonnie Honig, Public Things, p. 6

Public schools are a crucial necessity for democratic life: the last few months have made that abundantly clear. School buildings are a central part of that equation; school buildings are public things per Bonnie Honig’s definition: they are one part of the physical infrastructure that makes public life possible.

In all the conversations about whether schools will be “open” in the fall, what we are talking about is NOT schools: schools will open on schedule, even if the instruction is done remotely. What we are talking about is school buildings.

But school buildings in the U.S. are not and have never been created equal. This is especially true in New Jersey, which has deep structural inequality in its schools, both in the delivery of education, and in the buildings where education usually takes place. In New Jersey, the poorest school districts also have many older buildings in need of repair or replacement. And funding those needs is the state’s responsibility.

One of the many decisions in the Abbott v. Burke litigation in New Jersey was a 1998 case that required the state of New Jersey, not the chronically historically underfunded districts commonly known as Abbott districts, to pay for school repair and for building new schools in those districts. The state established the School Development Authority (SDA) in 2002, and for a few years built new schools and repaired old buildings. And then about ten years ago, the state legislature just stopped funding the SDA.

To be fair, the SDA has been a site of a number of corruption scandals. Corruption stinks. But it can also serve as a distraction, or an excuse. Failing to fund the SDA is now having life and death consequences for kids, teachers, and families.

In a global pandemic, when the ventilation conditions inside buildings, and the facilities for keeping people and things clean are crucial, the children in the state of New Jersey who will be in the oldest and most poorly maintained buildings in the state are kids in the Abbott districts. These buildings are the least likely to be conducive to reducing transmission of the virus. As with so many circumstances of this pandemic, school buildings in New Jersey will make people who are already vulnerable, more vulnerable.

When and how will it be safe for school buildings to be the site once again for public education? As Danielle Allen points out, no country that has reopened school buildings after closing them because of the pandemic has done so “until after they had achieved near zero case incidence and low community transmission rates.”  Not to mention that they also have in place a solid infrastructure for testing, tracing, and supported isolation including for students and school staff.  And they have school buildings that can be made as safe as is possible. None of these circumstances are true of New Jersey right now.

Given those facts, reading the guidance from the New Jersey Department of Education, “The Road Back,” will make you want to weep. It will certainly make you want to turn to Alexandra Petri’s satire: “So will there be testing? Of course there will be! It’s a school! Probably there will also be essays and pop quizzes!”

Several provisions of the “Health and Safety” required minimum standards stood out to me as I read the report. First, “Schools and districts must ensure that their indoor facilities have adequate ventilation” (p. 19) and this includes, for example, the ability to open windows if there is no air conditioning. The majority of older buildings in Jersey City do not have air conditioning; indeed the district has had to shut down school on some sweltering summer days. In many of these buildings, the windows cannot be safely opened–this was true at PS 25 when my son attended there, until the SDA actually did fund window replacement, one of the only older buildings in Jersey City to have this funded. So this minimum standard is impossible to comply with in many Jersey City buildings, and this is directly due to the lack of state funding for these repairs. “The Road Back” makes no reference to this fact.

The other provisions that struck me were the next two, which designate the need for and locations of hand sanitizing stations, and provisions for frequent hand washing. In Jersey City, we have been fighting to get school facilities to have adequate provisions for potable drinking water, and as we have listened we have heard about non-functioning bathrooms, sinks falling off the wall, and never present soap. All because of the failure to provide funding to repair aging schools, making the underfunded district pay out of operating funds to address these problems.

Let me be clear: we have dedicated leaders in our district administration, we have great teachers, paraprofessionals, and security and cleaning staff in our district. What we don’t have is enough money. And this is made worse by the state failure to fund our school facilities, as it is obligated to do.

The effect of the lack of funding for SDA in Jersey City, chronicled in this document, is that the majority of school buildings in the district are not equipped to provide the bare minimum of what “The Road Back” expects. Jersey City is not alone in this circumstance, but you would not know this from reading “The Road Back”. There is some discussion of funding for additional costs due to the pandemic, but there is no discussion of the background conditions for those decisions of school buildings that are already inadequate.

Public things are deeply contested, sites of inequality, sites with different meanings to people situated differently in relation to social and political power. Bonnie Honig notes just briefly in the first chapter of Public Things that public schools in America were part of the regime of white supremacy, and thus are part of the hierarchy of citizenship. Public things act to exclude as well as to include. “Thus, when public things are democratized, the response of the powerful is often to abandon them. White flight is not just from the urban to the suburban; it is from the public to the private thing.” (24-25) This is precisely what the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has written about extensively, on white flight from public schools and how even in multi-racial school districts white parents often work to maintain racial inequality. In a state like New Jersey, where the state refuses to provide adequate school buildings in its poorest districts, a global pandemic means that this building inequality is deadly.

Public school buildings are public things. That means we need to fund them, fairly, equitably, fully.

Public universities and democracy

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In my recent article in New Political Science, “Higher Education and Democratic Public Life,” I argue that the common way of thinking about colleges and universities in the contemporary U.S., as a kind of consumer good, is wrong. And not just wrong, but damaging to democracy. I argue that when we think about higher education and especially about public colleges and universities and community colleges, we should think first of democratic public life and of the role of public institutions in serving the whole public. And we need to push and redesign public institutions to do a better job of being part of and of serving the whole public, as well as serving their local communities. This thinking comes in part out of the work that Rutgers University-Newark, led by Chancellor Cantor, has done in the past few years, to build a university that is “in Newark and of Newark”.

This economics-first way of thinking has been especially evident in the flawed public conversation about how universities will fulfill their mission of education and research this fall. Contrary to the idea that universities have “closed”, staff and faculty at my institution have worked harder than ever in the past four months, to convert classes to online instruction, to set up systems to ensure that we touched base with all students once we moved to remote instruction, to ensure that students scheduled to graduate in May were able to do so albeit without an in person ceremony, to continue to provide on campus housing and services for students who had no place else to go, and the list could continue just regarding the teaching aspect of our mission. This list does not even include all of the planning that took place to manage the university’s research mission, including shutting down labs where necessary, pivoting to COVID related research as appropriate, shifting research projects to virtual where possible.

So when we think about what universities should do, this fall and in the future, we need to think of public good not in the economic sense, but in the political sense. We need to place educational institutions at the center of democratic public life, and provide both public support and demands for accountability that our public institutions of higher education serve democratic public purposes.

 

Money does matter

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We invest public resources into the education of the public for the benefit of the public. (Bruce Baker, Educational Inequality and School Finance, 2018, p. 18).

Two key points: in public school funding, money matters, and cuts cause harm.

How much money a school system has available, as well as how that money is spent, make a big difference in the experiences kids have in school, whether their educational needs are met, and whether they go on to flourish in their adult lives. This seems like a common sense statement regarding U.S. public schools.

Yet for decades there has been an active campaign to claim the opposite. While the main point of Bruce Baker’s book is to argue how to think about and analyze school finance systems, Baker devotes his third chapter to discussing and debunking this misleading literature. If you are inclined to believe that money doesn’t matter, I urge you to read at least that chapter, or this report, which discusses some of the same sets of arguments.

Baker is careful in the language he uses to critique these studies, but honestly, how seriously can one take a study (for example) that assumes that all state court orders on education funding led directly to appropriations by state legislatures fulfilling those orders? Researchers just made this assumption, and did not bother to collect any information about actual appropriations and implementation, and claimed that court orders didn’t matter. This assumption flies in the face of American history. The history of New Jersey is a history of court orders ignored and resisted, and only slowly and grudgingly implemented, with ample backsliding in economic downturns. Nationwide this is more the rule than the exception.

Indeed, the New Jersey state aid formula that the legislature itself adopted in 2008 has been underfunded by the state legislature basically since it was adopted; see this coverage from 2015. Yes, that shortage from four years ago is more than one billion dollars. This year’s state budget proposes to increase school funding by about $200 million dollars, which is an improvement, but still means that the state is not fulfilling its own promises. (To see more details for Jersey City, check out Civic Parent’s analysis and visualizations.)

I don’t study education policy, but the arc of the argument that money doesn’t matter is very familiar to me from the literature on gender, race, and social policy in the U.S. Baker talks about the persistent but false narrative that U.S. public schools have bloated costs and have shown no progress on student achievement. Just like the false, racist, and intentionally misleading story of the “welfare queen”, this education policy narrative persists despite clear evidence to the contrary. The narrative serves the same purpose: discrediting public goods, in this case public schools, and indeed the very idea of a common public life. And it hurts our kids.

But it is more pernicious and counter-intuitive than that, because schools in the United States have always been unequal in their access to resources, and until Brown v. Board this was official, legal and legally and violently enforced public policy. This argument that money doesn’t matter is based on an ideology that some kids don’t matter, or at least that some kids in some schools matter more than other kids in other schools. In case it wasn’t clear, this is an anti-democratic ideology.

In Other People’s Children, Deborah Yaffe mentions an encounter between two New Jersey school board members, one a white man from Westfield, one an African-American man from Paterson, brought together in a meeting not long after the first Robinson v. Cahill ruling in 1972. Yaffe reports that the white school board member had this question for his counterpart in Paterson: “‘Why are you people making such a big deal out of money? After all, your kids don’t need what my kids need.'” (Yaffe p. 33). Again, in case it wasn’t clear, this is not just racist, it is factually incorrect and also anti-democratic.

Reading this made me think of this point, made years ago by leaders in WTOS, the west Texas IAF affiliate organization. These leaders described the first time they tried to get the city of Lubbock to do something for their majority Latino neighborhood–this was before WTOS was organized–and went to a city council meeting to testify, only to be told “there’s no money”. As they left the meeting, a city employee followed them out, to tell them, “Don’t give up, keep asking. What they are saying is that there is no money for you. Keep coming back. There is money.”

Money matters. It matters for kids whether their schools have adequate funding. And while the New Jersey state funding mechanisms after the Abbott v. Burke decisions began to actually be implemented is actually one of the better state school finance systems according to Baker, he notes that the actual appropriations from the state started to decline around 2005, even before the recession, and the adoption of SFRA in 2008 (pp. 112-113 and see this report).

A second point: cuts matter. Social scientists often look for “natural experiments”, and the recession of 2008 and subsequent cuts to education funding throughout the U.S., unfortunately for kids, provide such a phenomenon. Did cuts to state and local spending on education as a result of the recession cause changes in student outcomes? Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg have analyzed the effects of the recession on a variety of education finance and equity outcomes, including student achievement. The recession had a negative effect on student achievement, and had the largest effect in districts with the largest cuts to school personnel. Cuts have negative effects on kids. Again, this seems like a common sense conclusion, one that we could see just by talking to middle school students in Jersey City, who had their sports budget completely eliminated last fall. But in case you trust social scientists more than kids, there is your evidence.

Kids need schools that have enough funding to meet their educational needs. Money matters. Our promises to our kids matter. Our democratic public life matters. School funding cuts in districts where school funding is already inadequate hurt kids.

Let’s try to keep at least some of our promises to our kids. All of us will benefit.

 

 

Public schools are public goods

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Parent leaders in Jersey City Together are consistently saying this in our public conversations: public schools are a public good. This essay is inspired both by their consistent leadership in making this point, and our shared frustration that we must keep making this point; that is, that it is not already a common public understanding that public schools are a public good in democratic public life:

Almost never is there an expressed concern about the public realm; there is silence about renewing the common world and about what that common world should be. What is it that lies in between, that holds us together, that we can cherish and try to keep alive? Where, when we ponder it, are we to turn? Questions like these move me to explore the role that might be played by public education in bringing into being an authentic public space, one that might give rise to a significant common world. Maxine Greene, 1982.

I recently came across the address given by the late Maxine Greene in 1982 when she served as president of the American Educational Research Association. The title is “Public Education and the Public Space,” and she speaks of the possibilities that are part of the purpose of education: “…we are educators, and education has to do with new beginnings and with reaching toward what is not yet.”

Greene speaks of what is missing in the conversation about public education in the 1980s, and it is equally true today. Discussions of funding formulas and graduation rates are important, but frequently these conversations divert our attention from any focus on the public purposes of public schools. Greene is speaking to educators, but she is also speaking at a time when the movement for our current regime of testing as accountability was on the rise. Just before the passage quoted above, she says, “literacy is talked about as though it were part of the gross national product.” What about the intrinsic joy of reading? What about the democratic civic purposes of an educated public?

We have become accustomed to speaking of schools in terms of achievements on tests, graduation and drop out rates, per pupil spending. Even Dennis Shirley, in his (very useful) discussion of the Alliance Schools program in Texas, speaks of test scores as one measure of the success of this community school program. All of these are important. But they are not all of what public schools are or can be.

Public schools serve public purposes for democracies. This is a simple, straightforward, necessary idea. This is not a new or original idea. But it is crucial.

 

 

In an article on the growing number of teacher strikes last year, Sarah Jones argued that one of the reasons for these strikes and for the conflicts over public schools more generally is that public schools “are some of the last public squares in this country”. Discussing the requirements in U.S. state constitutions for public education, she notes that three common words that describe public education are “Free, common, and efficient. These words tell us that public schools should be accessible and ubiquitous, and that they should function. ”

Yes. Public schools should function. They should help children to develop their human potential. They should provide appropriate, supportive environments for all students to learn. They should have space to play, to create, to imagine. These things are happening every day in Jersey City Public Schools. But there are many, many challenges as well.

In order for public schools to function, school facilities need to function. Public schools should not have classrooms that are dangerously hot or cold, that are infested with cockroaches, that are falling apart. They should have potable drinking water. They should have functioning bathrooms. That we are fighting for these very basic, functional facilities in Jersey City is shameful.

The story of why this is so is long and complicated, of course, implicating state as well as local officials and the failure to fully fund the School Development Authority despite the Abbott court’s order. Some beautiful schools have been built in Jersey  City.  But funds for repairing our ageing schools have not been appropriated. And the lesson of who is valued, and who is not, is starkly clear to young people in Jersey City. We have beautiful, new high rises, and crumbling high school facilities.

Greene goes on to cite Dewey, and his notion of the “eclipse of the public” articulated in The Public and its Problems (originally published in 1927). The persistence of this concern tells us that we should resist the temptation to refer to some nonexistent golden age; attention to the public realm and to public things is one of the key ongoing problems of democratic public life. Civic life requires us to be engaged in the ongoing project of renewing the democratic public realm. We have to organize.

At the end of Deborah Yaffe’s book Other People’s Children, about the long effort by the state of New Jersey to refuse to provide a thorough and efficient education to all of the children in the state, despite decades of court orders to do so, she notes that she is often asked “did it work”? People mean different things by that question, and one of the problems with answering it is that in some arenas, the state never did really comply with the court orders. But at the very end of the book, she makes reference to the public purposes of public schools, quoting one of the named litigants in the Abbott cases, Hector Figueroa. “‘You’re not guaranteed a home life, but you should be guaranteed a school life.'” And Yaffe says, “Public institutions matter, even if they are not the only things that do.”

Public schools matter. We must create more possibilities for schools to be the kinds of public spaces that are so vital to democracy. We have to dare to try.