fully webbed to each other,

a consciousness that had previously eluded them

reading texts closely

This kind of work takes time

What story lines can inspire civic action when the narrative of the Dream does not resonate?

Our schools largely educate toward the Dream

culture of poverty myth

“Gorski states thathis lens is critical social theory. My theoretical lens is economic pragmatism. The two theoreticalframes are almost polar opposites” (¶1).Indeed.

reforming studentsfrom poverty

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ueee20Download by: [Auraria Library]Date: 19 October 2015, At: 15:58Equity & Excellence in Education

quity & Excellence in Education

Put differently, our society does not have time to perfect the turnaround reform movement, yet, for the sake of too many urban schools and students, we cannot allow the turnaround reform movement to fail.

the job is barely humanly possible, but it is spiritually possible.”

In the end, under current accountability metrics, students serve as the baseline laborers who will create the product—test scores—that determine the success or failure of a school turnaround

he report does acknowledge poverty as a factor, but adopts a defi-cit perspective, advocating that “schools directly address their students’ poverty-driven deficits” (p. 9)

In fragile, poverty-suffused areas of cities, the school closure process too often appears to alienate and effectively punish urban African American and Latino com-munity members by denigrating and eliminating what may be the sole func-tioning, stable, and trustworthy social service institution they can access reliably, even when academic results are low (Johnson, 2012; Kretchmar, 2011)

whether the billions of federal dollars being channeled into weak schools may be largely wasted, and whether the many would-be turn-around experts and consulting firms springing up around the land to help states and districts spend those dollars are little more than dream merchants. (p. 4)

To provide a final, essential component to our frame-work, we accessed the concept of democratic education. As articulated in the works of Dewey (1916), Apple and Beane (1995), and Goodman (1992), democratic education encompasses notions of voice, equity, and cultural responsiveness.

Reform ideas that have already emerged or been discarded in the business sector may be promoted as new and innovative in the edu-cation sector

. The case made by authors John Chubb and Terry Moe rests on the idea that poor academic performance is a product of schools being under the direct control of democratic institutions, and that the remedy lay in a mar-ket-based approach that offered parents choice between competing school options

The alleged “skills shortage” of American workers became an element of the received wisdom of U.S. policy making

A system that, to appropriate Hirschman’s terms, replaced the citizen’s dem-ocratic right to a “voice” in shaping their public schools with a consumer’s choice to “exit” schools.[12] Under the banner of “school choice,” public education would thus be removed from democratic control and reformulated as a commodity to be “chosen.”

As John D. Rockefeller’s propagandist Ivy Lee would have framed it, the neoliberal “story” needed to get “be-lieved.

Public education in the United States has from its earliest days been structured to embody and strengthen representative democracy by inculcating democratic values and by providing the knowl-edge necessary to secure economic wellbeing. As wave after wave of immigrants entered the U.S., public education was one of the principle mechanisms by which they were to be “Americanized.

Understanding this dynamic requires cutting through the ideological fog to locate privatization within the framework of beliefs, values, and assumptions that have made it appear rational, neces-sary, and inevitable.

all seek to remove public schools from the control of elect-ed bodies; to subject them to the “laws” of the “market”; and to put them at the service of the econo

school choice is "the new civil rights issue of our time

a property in whiteness. The law recognizes and protectsthis property right based on color like any other property

require whites to remain in the schools we had worked so hard todesegregate.

Success in those cases led to theadmission of black children to white schools, but seldom the reverse.Black schools were closed

First,

refers to the "class- room iconization of Brown," pointing out that this one Supreme Court case is listed in more state curriculum standards docu- ments than any other

jazz metaphor

VVhat must the educational system do to pro~ mote social justice for students of color and poor students? What is required to help these students develop self-determination' Where and how do race-conscious education policies fit into this?

Brown decision

Do students, teachers, and parents have regular opportunities to think about and discuss matters of educational import (Meier, 23)?

Certainly we stay at ourcubiclesfor the sake of survival.Without a paycheck wecannot secure the basic nutrition and shelter that keep us alive.But if we are like most worker bees in the economy, we controlneither the contents nor purposes of our work.In this sense our lives are not properlyour own.We spendthe best hours and energies of our years fulfilling the aims of a propertiedmaster, thereby enlarging capital and increasing its power over us.If we donot like this, a reserve army of the unemployed islined up waiting to replace us.Thus our job insecurity, which is also food and shelter insecurity, develops into general anxiety, perhaps manifested asaddiction to food, shopping, soft or hard drugs.

Schools “cool-out” the doomed by convincing them that, according to a fair and just system, they do not have what it takesto achieve a comfortable life and thusdeserve to remain mired in the dregs of wagedo

But the empirical fact is that there is plenty to go around; we only need a strategy for more intelligently, i.e., democratically, organizing our selves and efforts.Doing so will require us to purge the ideologies of scarcity and competitive individualism that infect both the school and larger society.

Students are urged to fulfill an achievement profile of themselves which is primarily derived from requirements and functions set by the colonizer’s needs...But even knowing that the records and papers ofa system tell us more about the system than the people who are stamped with them, the student seems unable to escape the image created for him—as him—through the hierarchic other...Children in [this] colonized world find themselves on the bed of Procrustes.They are expected to be tools of forces that they cannot see, understand, or control(Raskin, 24)

e adjustment of student attitudes to prevailing soci

Taylorism

Men and women accepted competing against each other within corporations rather than competing against the corporations themselves

p, schooling then offered the next best alternative: social mobility within the hierarchies of industry

change in relations of material producti

Culture, civics, and politics did not belong to them

social mobilitybegan to attach itself to public educationas early as the Common School period.

American public schools have become, above all, a vast, variegated system funneling this human capital into its final destination in the hierarchies of the undemocratic world of modern work.

What I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich.That’s the one thing we have and that must be preserved.