Sharecropper Educational Policy and the New Colonial Project: Resistance, Strategy, and Self-Determination

• In Event: Seize the Time: Decolonizing Social Justice Education

Abstract

By targeting the educational hopes and aspirations of low-income families of color, a densely constructed veil of deceptive practices regarding new school development and educational policy have been utilized to further marginalize students of color in urban schools. This has resulted in an educational system of debt peonage where Central Office Bureaucrats, Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) and private philanthropy justify substandard education for students of color. The process, while simultaneously overt and subversive, allows the aforementioned groups to select students and schools to be emulated as models, while the bevy of urban public schools are drained of vital resources. Similar to antebellum plantation systems in the Southern U.S. where slave societies were separated by “house” and “field” slaves, the current wave of educational reform has reified the idea of creating a disposable group of students. Utilizing a high school social studies classroom as the site of analysis, the paper engages a theoretical exercise utilizing Critical Race Theory, critical urban theory, and critical theories of political economy to deconstruct the practices of said “reformers.”

In support of collective resistance from families, students, community members and activists in Chicago, the paper identifies strategies and resources mobilized in classroom space to interrupt the colonial project in urban education. Key to this process is the recognition that writing, talking and dreaming can be a luxury in relation to the contested spaces of schools. On the contrary, K-12 teaching can be messy, contradictory, conflicting and in light of recent developments in urban schools (e.g. high-stakes testing, privatization of pubic education, the gentrification of working-class communities of color for middle-class and affluent residents etc.). Still, because they are spaces where we interact with young people, they can be fulfilling and remain sites of hope in challenging times. By utilizing the primary tenets of CRT, the paper contends that schools often operate as spaces where the realities of race and racism go un-discussed, yet understood by students. We hear the stories of Black and Latino/a students being placed into remedial and special education programs, contracts given to parents by Charter schools that can call for dismissal for consecutive semesters of failing grades, or disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown students targeted by the military as potential new recruits. Despite our knowing, it is rare when these stories get an audience outside of the students. It is the hope that such an endeavor will allow readers and concerned stakeholders to take the lessons from Chicago and apply them in their respective communities.

Author

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago