“In almost all major American cities, most Black and Latino students attend public schools where a majority of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income. Such neighborhoods and students are the engines of growth for both charter schools and other educational businesses. Segregation pays.”
–Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education
Last winter, Abram and I attended a book presentation by Dr. Noliwe Rooks at Word Up Community Bookstore in Washington Heights. As advocates for school integration, we were interested in what she had to say about “segrenomics,” the term she had coined to describe the educational industry that profits from ensuring that our schools remain separate and unequal. We were impressed by both her analysis and charism in her conversation with Dr. Carla Shedd, and afterwards we asked her if she’d be willing to join us at a later date on the podcast. She graciously said yes.
Her analysis has particular resonance for me, as a 1999 Teach for America alum. TFA figures prominently in her book as one of the educational endeavors that today is worth nearly $400 million and has an enormous impact on shaping what for the past ten years has been commonly referred to as “the education reform movement.”
The truth is that I could write a much longer essay about my complicated feelings about TFA, but suffice to say in this brief message that I found great resonance in her description and critique of how its teachers are prepared for the classroom. “Instead of committing to educating poor children in the same way as we do the wealthy, or actually with the wealthy,” she writes, “we have offered separate educational content and idiosyncratic forms of educational funding and delivery for what we know consistently works.” She goes on to argue that one fundamental problem is that in poor schools we do not actually ask parents and community members how we can best support them. We (the affluent, the TFAers, the reformers) think we know what is best for other peoples’ children. This had always been my fear, and Dr. Rooks put it in stark relief both in her book and during our interview.
So please give the episode a listen, and if you are interested in education reform pick up a copy of her book. As a bureaucrat, her message of community engagement is no less relevant. We’ll be tweeting all week from @radbureau with the hashtags #CommunityEngagement and #Segrenomics.
Before You Go: Fundraising!
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