"Respect MLK: Shut Up and Dress Up!" Undermining Democratic Education in U.S. Public High School

• In Event: 61.067 - Leveraging Anthropology of Education Policy in a World Turned Upside Down

Abstract

This presentation is part of a larger ethnographic, multi-year project that documents how various stakeholders in one urban, high poverty school district enact policy at the school level (Ball, Maguire, Braun, 2012; Robert, 2017). The project focuses on how teachers, administrators, parents, community groups, elected officials, and the media learn about, create meaning for, and practice policies inside and outside schools across the district. The policies range from Federal to school-based policies. All policies are meant to address multi-generational violations of students of color’s and poor children’s right to public education and not doled out in an unequal, segregated system; the school district and particular schools are under not one, but multiple, court orders, to fix policy processes that continue to undermine democratic public education. This is a Northeastern school district in a majority minority city with leaders of color at the helm of government and school district. The presentation’s significance for the panel and for the civil rights movement it serves lies in the unadulterated data collected with an anthropology of education policy analytical approach. With the data, the researchers have been able to actively participate in struggles to hold policy makers accountable. Also, the researchers have been able to put into practice the pedagogical turn that the anthropological discipline as a whole has experienced. Prior to the study, we were members of multiple affinity groups (Gee, 2004). We continue to learn from various stakeholders who have for generations struggled for children’s right to a public education and we act as educators, when asked, about policy processes and power.
For presentation purposes, we share a one-year view of disciplinary actions against students and teachers at one high school. We examine authoritarian and illegal practices of policy against Dahl’s model for pluralist, democratic governance in institutions (1972). We show how colorfully and publicly accessible disciplinary procedures meant to stop disproportionality in the punishment of young men of color are employed to squash students and their teachers’ engagement in decision making about topics ranging from senior privileges to the removal of teachers in the middle of the school year to stop the gun violence. The quote in the presentation title is drawn from the principal’s in-school announcement and later email to parents threatening students, teachers, and parents to not stage any form of protest before, during, or after an annual Martin Luther King, Jr. assembly. The alleged protests were in response to the transfer of teachers midyear, leaving hundreds of children without required classes for high school graduation. In the communique the principal stated that any protest would disrespect the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and instead students were instructed to dress up just like Martin Luther King, Jr. liked to do. We use the undermining of the civil rights leader’s legacy as crystal clear example of the undemocratic governance of public schools, the manipulation of policy processes, but also the catalyst from which to struggle for democracy and equity.

Authors

• Sarah A. Robert, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Kate Haq, Independent Scholar