Dyett High School and Decoloniality: The Chicago Context

• In Event: 41.061 - "There Can Never Really Be Justice on Stolen Land": A Discussion for Emerging Scholars

Abstract

In August 2015, twelve Chicago parents, educators and community activist underwent a 34 day hunger strike to demand community control of Walter H. Dyett High School. The hunger strike, -initially ignored by mainstream media and politicians, from Aldermen to the Mayor- highlighted the disparities of school closings in the city and throughout the country. This paper analyzes the Dyett school struggle to reopen a year after being closed by the Chicago Public School board in 2014. While this particular school can be solely placed in discourses of school closings, for which Chicago boasts and an unprecedented amount (Lipman et al, 2014), the struggle for Dyett High School should also be centered in discourses of decoloniality. I argue that the community’s decade-long fight for local school control, and self determination is rooted in the larger history of black resistance (James, 2012; Kelley, 1996); and that the community’s proposed curriculum aimed to decolonize the way black students learn and know the world (Thiong’o, 1986), is to fight against the assumptive, hegemonic production of knowledge (Smith, 1999). Since 2003 community leaders and local educators have inserted themselves into Dyett, to absorb the gaps left cuts, by providing services and culturally relevant programming to the school’s 100% black student population.
What is also little discussed in relation to the Dyett school fight is the connection between school closings in Chicago, a global north American city, and post-colonial schooling in the Latin America and the Caribbean. Paul Vallas, former CEO of CPS public schools (from 1995-2001), has built a career on crises. In Chicago he and Arne Duncan, then Chicago Superintendent of Schools, were key architects of sweeping school closings and school reform efforts (Brown et al, 2009; Lipman, 2013) and effectively destabalized hundreds of schools in poor and working class, black and brown neighborhoods. Vallas has since moved on to reform the public school district in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and was then contracted as an education reform specialist in Haiti and Chile following their earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 respectively (Dessof, 2012). This examination of Dyett aims to expand beyond the neoliberal critique of disaster capitalism, described as “the orchestrated raid on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disaster as exciting market opportunities” (Klein, 2007), or by pushing long-standing privatization schemes, taking advantage of long-disinvested public schools and, the seizer and transfer of public resources (Saltman, 2007); and to build upon post colonial theory that argues no end of the colonial relationship between the formerly colonized and empire (Young, 2001).

Author

• Prudence Browne, University of Illinois at Chicago