School Choice: It’s Common Sense? Installment 3.5 Wormhole

Before returning to the accountability history of Johnston and Eastside Memorial, I would like to take a moment to share some remarks from a recent school board meeting where I critiqued the proposal to move the Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA) to the former site of Anderson High School (the school for African Americans under segregation) in East Austin.  (LASA’s influence at Eastside Memorial is discussed in last weeks post)

(LASA) is a selective public magnet high-school. The demographics of the school ethnicities are 23% Hispanic, 3% Black/African-American, 51% White, 20% Asian, 2% American Indian, and 1% Hawaiian/Native Pacific Islander for a total enrollment of 796 students (Lamb, 2014). LASA is collocated within LBJ High School (LBJ), LBJ is an Early College High School with different ethnicity/race demographics: 30% Hispanic, 39% Black/African-American, 15% White, 1% Asian, 14% American Indian, 1% Hawaiian/Native Pacific and a total enrollment of 648 (Lamb, 2014). Counted as one school, on paper LBJ and LASA are a model for racial diversity and their closely related socioeconomic status indicators, but in reality the two schools are worlds apart.

LBJ may have college in its name but on average sixty-six percent of the students agree with the statement, “I will go to college after high school,” thirty-four percent say “maybe” (AISD, 2014). At LASA ninety-three percent of students say “yes” and six percent say “maybe” (AISD, 2014). Even the response rates to the survey of both schools is telling. LBJ was sixty percent, LASA was eighty-eight percent, and the district average was seventy-three percent on the Student Climate Survey. Not only are students from the neighborhood being served by LBJ less likely to participate in sharing their voice, but students are also less sure that college is in their future. On the other hand LASA students not only show greater participation but also have generally more optimistic perceptions of their school climate.

It is with the above passage in mind that I drafted the subsequent citizen’s communication last week at the Austin ISD board meeting:

“Janelle Scott points out that historically the imposition of middle-class values and pronouncement of the liberal creed of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps,” is heralded by white men claiming to know what the best course of action should be.

The choice the Austin school district made to house its most prestigious academic track at LBJ did not occur in a vacuum but was influenced by a historical context white consultants from Washington DC are likely ignorant to. A desire to both recapture students leaving due to white flight as well as to increase enrollment in an economically and racially stratified part of Austin drove the district’s initial placement of the magnet schools at Johnston and LBJ, subsequent consolidation, and is driving the proposal to relocate the campus.  I argue that one of the major reasons the school choice movements has come to flourish is because rather than confront the glaring inequalities of a society stratified by race and class by standing up to the underfunded mandates of TEA and teaching critical pedagogy and Praxis, public schools allow the same disparate outcomes as separate but equal under the guise of equal opportunity in a post racial society. Researchers describe schools like LBJ as characteristically displaying “higher-than-average suspension rates and lower-than-average graduation rates” (Fabricant & Fine, 2010 p.121).  Therefore the STAAR test serves to discipline LBJ while simultaneously ennobling LASA to participate in social reproduction and white supremacy. In 2014 26% of LASA students were nonasian minorities, that number is nearly three times as much, 69% of students at LBJ are nonasian minorities.

Magnet schools, like LASA, take on air of democratic equality, but from the brief example above there is little equity in a system where some parents can choose and participate in the best public education has to offer, a choice often accompanied by the social capital to be informed about the program, and the ability to afford the supplemental supports- academic, social, and communal- to make their child a viable candidate.  On the other hand, parents at LBJ have a reduced ability to choose based on broader historical, racial, and economic contexts.  Contexts which are tertiary concerns at best when consultants are hired to evaluate facilities and efficiency in an ahistorical fashion.

Therefore I ask that Black Anderson (now the Alternative Learning Center) not be repurposed to house LASA, Representing the erasure of culture, perpetuating the burden of desegregation disproportionately placed on our African American community, and representing the final gentrifying nail in the east Austin cultural coffin”.

*Photo Credit for this installment goes to Rodolfo Gonzales retrieved from: http://preps.blog.statesman.com/2015/06/11/prepped-and-ready-reviewing-the-2014-15-school-year/

 

 

 

 

School Choice: It’s Common Sense? Installment 3- Nomenclature

Johnston High School, in Austin, Texas was the first school in the state to be closed (rather than reconstituted) by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).  The high-stakes accountability defined by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was after all incubated in Texas under then Governor Bush.  Senate Bill 618, passed in 2003, which codified school reconstitution for schools failing to meet the mark two years in a row.  The bill aligned with NCLB, the 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and signaled an end to local control; 135 schools in Texas were reconstituted in the ensuing decade (Cumpton, 2015).  The closure of Johnston in 2008 and subsequent repurposing as Eastside Memorial High School at the Johnston Campus is an opportunity to witness the intersection of market-based reforms, racial identity, community history, gentrification, community organizing, and educational decision making.  The confluence of macro political and economic forces cannot be ignored when examining the intersection of public school policy and private interests due to their impact in shaping individual and organizational perspectives (Kamat, 2004 p. 156).

History:

In 1959 Riverside High School opened to serve the graduates of East Austin’s predominately Hispanic Alan Junior High.  A year later the school would be renamed after Albert Sydney Johnston, a soldier in the Republic of Texas, United States, and Confederate armies (Bearden, 2011).  Austin, like many urban centers, began to experience white flight following Brown v. Board in 1954.  Despite the Justice Department’s approval of a desegregation plan for Austin in 1955, it was not until after a 1971 U.S. District Court Judge’s ruling that Austin ISD was forced to implement bussing (Cuban, 2010).

Neighborhood schools’ attendance boundaries were redrawn to allow for two-way bussing. Previously the closure of the historically African American Anderson High School placed the burden of bussing and integration on the East Austin community (Cuban, 2010, Interview 5, 6, 9, 11, & 13).  Following District Court Judge Jack Roberts ruling to implement a three tiered approach to desegregation which included two-way bussing, affirmative-action hiring processes, and bilingual education, the federal government provided 3.4 million dollars in emergency aid for the district (Reinhold, 1983).

The 1980’s were a time of significant change for Johnston High School due in large part to judicial and state bolstered financial intervention.  Johnston became a nationally recognized model of school desegregation as its demographics shifted from 99% Hispanic and African American to 50% White, 30% Hispanic, and 20% African American, a population more reflective of Austin’s overall racial composition, and reduced the number of students below grade level in math from 90% to 52% (Garcia, Yang, & Agorin, 1983 p. 95).  President Ronald Reagan even cited a Time Magazine article featuring Johnston, as a model of community investment without the interference of the federal government in transforming the community, apparently not recognizing the federal judicial and financial interventions which were instrumental in bringing about the change (Reinhold, 1983).

Increased funding for the school allowed for investment in renovations, technology, and expanded course offerings.   This change in trajectory though was short lived.  Austin was absolved from its federally mandated desegregation in 1983 and formally ended bussing in 1987 returning to neighborhood schools and the de facto segregation and lasting impact of restrictive covenant, residential housing patterns, and the bisection of the city by Interstate 35 (Cuban, 2010).[1]

In Austin, magnet schools of “choice” were an attempt to attract white, middle-class families to the Eastside schools through tracked prestigious academic and arts academies insulated from the comprehensive neighborhood schools within which they were collocated (Cuban, 2010).  The LBJ Science Academy opened in 1985 and Johnston would be home to the Liberal Arts Academy starting in 1987 when two way bussing was discontinued to prevent another round of white flight.

Johnston did maintain its vocational programs and magnet status which built on a community tradition in providing vocational education for a predominately Mexican-American and Chicano community (Interview 7, 15, 19).  However with ever increasing emphasis on achievement scores, enrollment and graduation rates continued to decline, and by the late 1990’s Johnston saw a thirty percent spike in already inflated teacher turnover (Reeves, 2007).  The subsequent decision by the district to relocate the magnet arts academy to LBJ high school in 2002 only served to exacerbate already tenuous circumstances.  The parallel histories of school choice, at the local and national levels, indicate the interconnectedness of education policy from the top down.  Therefore, interruption or resistance to these types of reforms indicate that there is also a potential to influence policy from the bottom up, setting the stage for Pride of the Eastside.

-To be continued.

 

[1] For more information on Austin’s mixed history of progressivism and discrimination see Eliot Tretter’s work: Austin Restricted http://projects.statesman.com/documents/?doc=1499065-austin-restricted-draft-final

School Choice, It’s Common Sense?

This blog series, “School Choice, It’s Common Sense?” serves as a counterstory to the current dominant narrative of school choice and neoliberal privatization. Each installment will introduce critical concepts currently being debated in education policy. The series is taken from personal field research conducted over the past two years. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to stimulate a more inclusive dialogue and depict the significance of a democratically run public school board’s expulsion of a privately owned in-district charter school following public pressure and community organizing.
Making the Case:
Overall student achievement is stagnant over the past four years in states like Texas (Weiss, 2015). Urban school districts are increasingly partnering with charter school networks to build their portfolio of schools in the name of meeting accountability measures and improving public education (Levin, 2011). This is observable in urban settings in Texas; therefore understanding how funds are actually being spent is important. In particular, this series will examine one site in Austin ISD, Eastside Memorial High School and the efforts by IDEA Public Charter School and East Austin College Prep to occupy the campus through in-district charters.

Charter schools often adopt similar curriculum and pedagogical practices as traditional public schools thus garnering institutional legitimacy which can act to limit differentiation (Huerta, & Zuckerman, 2009). Wholstetter et al. (2013) cite Christensen and Rainey in asserting charters, through focusing on differentiating themselves, were not innovating new programs as much as repackaging what already existed. Analyzing public school responses to new practices such as marketing demonstrates how public schools are simultaneously adopting business strategies in response to increased market pressures. The diversion of public funds from instruction to private media companies and marketing consultants is an overlooked topic, often overshadowed by discussions on efficiency and achievement. Critically examining the isomorphic tendencies of both public and private governance structures, we begin to tease out substantive from inessential changes (Lubienski, & Lee, 2016).

The current political climate begs the question, why are charter schools able to increase enrollment, further legitimizing the policies promoting their expansion without demonstrating a significant improvement in student outcomes? I argue, one way charter schools are growing is through marketing, advertising, and public relations. Also, charter schools often appeal to notions of good sense including equity, efficiency, and innovation. Finally, their advocacy by way of presidential authority, extends from George H. W. Bush to Barrack Obama and the new policy networks shaping legislation (Frankenberg, & Siegel-Hawley, 2013; Anderson, & Donchik 2014). One question, relevant to the scope of this research, posed by Kahlenberg and Potter (2014) is whether or not charter schools cooperate or compete with regular public schools? Marketing and advertising are one overt way schools compete for students.

The debate in this country about whether the public school, or common school as it was known back in its day, should be treated as a public or private good, spans over a quarter century (Mann, 1848). Scholars provide several frameworks to evaluate the intent and efficacy of education policy (Labaree, 1997; Jencks, 1988). In research conducted for my MA Thesis I coded twenty-four interviews which asked how participants felt about spending public dollars on advertising, and the results were mixed. Some saw it as common sense considering the return on their investment in terms of increasing enrollment, while others perceived this type of spending to be a waste of finite resources in a climate of scarcity and austerity. Another group endorsed their use enthusiastically.
The availability of the information regarding marketing expenditures for the Austin Independent School District (AISD), IDEA Public Charter School (IDEA), and East Austin College Prep (EACP) can all be found on the Texas Education Agency (TEA) website. However, there is a lack of uniformity in their filings which is one barrier to accurately measure expenditures which should be addressed in policy with the intent of more easily disseminating the information. Before perceptions can be analyzed we need an accurate picture of actual expenditures in order to improve our understanding of context (Cucchiara, 2016). Figure 1 contains the three most recent years of available data for each school.

Figure 2 depicts these expenditures in terms of per pupil expenses.

The figures above indicate that marketing expenditures are increasing over time. Examining enrollment patterns demonstrate growth for IDEA during this time frame and declining enrollment for AISD and EACP. The decision by AISD to begin formal marketing in 2015 indicates that democratically run public schools are in this case adopting the strategies of the competition in order to recapture students. Increasing competition for students and their accompanying average daily attendance funding play a marked role in shaping school behavior during an age of austerity.
The next installment will trace the history of Johnston High School culminating in the Austin ISD School Boards Decision to partner with IDEA Public School in 2012.
(References are available upon request)