Category politics

Building inequality

jyljosephson Leave a comment

“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

jyljosephson Leave a comment

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.

 

Discipline is action

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“Intelligent action, even public confrontation, is at bottom an attempt to engage and relate.” Michael Gecan, Going Public

I have been thinking over the past day about a story that Michael Gecan tells in his book Going Public about an action that East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) did in the early stages of their organizing. They were trying to get the city to repair a neighborhood pool that had been closed for several years. Funds for the repairs had been allocated, but the repairs were not happening, and children in the neighborhood–children of leaders in EBC–did not have a place to swim in the summer.

The action was a meeting with the public official whose department was supposed to be doing the repairs. EBC had done their research: they knew that most of the money allocated for the repairs had been spent, but very little repairing had occurred.

The plan for this action was simple: keep the focus on the agenda, to get an answer to the question, when will the pool be repaired? The leaders expected the public official and his staff to talk about everything except this. And so they had planned carefully, to keep their focus on their agenda, to be persistent and disciplined in asking for an answer.

After rounds the leaders presented the results of their research, and then persistently asked their key question: when will the repairs on the pool be completed? In response to every effort by the public official to distract from this question, EBC leaders returned to their question.

You should read the chapter–Gecan tells the story very effectively. By the end of the meeting the public official has begun screaming, and EBC leaders quietly gather their things and leave his office. And within a few days, work has begun on the repairs. Within a few months, the pool is renovated and EBC attends a grand opening celebration and thanks the public official.

Why was this so effective? They had done their research. They knew what they wanted, and it was very specific. They had prepared carefully for the meeting, including practicing how to respond to unexpected scenarios. As Gecan notes, “The discipline, as the director unraveled and became more and more volatile, was superb.” And they kept their focus on what they wanted. They kept asking for it. And when they didn’t get the commitment they sought in that meeting, they left. And within a few months, they got the reaction they were seeking, and the public resource that their children needed.

We don’t always win. Sometimes it takes time to win. And it certainly takes organizing. It takes building power. It takes doing your research, knowing what is possible and what is not. It takes making a clear request for something specific. You have to know the reaction that you want. And it takes focus and discipline.

As Emily Farris says, local politics is the best politics. You can often actually get things done–get a park renamed, get a public pool repaired. Maybe you can even get your children’s public schools to be fully funded. But to do that takes organizing, and it takes discipline. And sometimes, the discipline is the action.