That urban schools suffer while suburban schools thrive is a time-worn generalization about American education. The U.S. Constitution may guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – yet the explicit guarantee of an education for the nation’s citizens is entirely absent. The mandate to educate is left to individual states, which make and interpret education law, with results as varied as the nation’s contours.
More than 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, the debate over equal access to public schooling persists. Gaps between the affluent and the impoverished, students of color and their white and Asian peers, and among urban and suburban districts – what sociologist Michael Eric Dyson characterized as “educational neoapartheid” – challenge the ideal of a free public education for all, espoused in Brown, and continue to undermine the lives of the students most at risk of academic failure.
Beginning even with its title, “Our Schools Suck” aims to give voice to some of the youth caught up in the maelstrom of 21st century urban education, within a critical framework of the cultural values and larger socioeconomic forces that shape the debate. It also asks, most critically, whether Brown’s focus was integration or educational equity. Does the outcome of that U.S. Supreme Court case ensuring “opportunity of an education…on equal terms” imply “general and uniform,” “thorough and efficient,” “sound and basic,” and “adequate” schooling – as many state constitutions mandate? Or does it promise the universal civic right of all students to “an equal and excellent education” – a far higher bar?
The authors, all political science professors at Brooklyn College, force readers to challenge ingrained presumptions, especially regarding the American proto-myth of personal initiative and self-realization, and focus sharply on the disconnect between what academics and journalists write about young people and what those young people say for and about themselves. Yet they are less successful in critically viewing their young subjects, who are often idealized to represent a kind of innocent, too-simple urban youth, and in providing practical strategies to address the abyss they, and their young subjects, articulate in the pages of this book.
In some respects, “Our Schools Suck” suffers from President Barack Obama’s success. The authors argue against overweighting the value of personal initiative (which, they assert, permits society to blame individuals for the shortcomings of the schools, and sidestep broader civic and moral responsibility). Yet their message is overwhelmed by the obvious ascent of the Bootstrapper-in-Chief, a mixed-race individual who, with the help and support of family, teachers and mentors – and a whopping personal drive – scaled heights far beyond the reach of other, more privileged Americans. Obama’s narrative is fueled by his personal initiative; his example is a powerful model for young people of color today, whether in or out of school. But the authors reflect little on the Obama phenom. The oversight, perhaps due to publishing timelines, dates the book profoundly, and frames it more as a response to the 50th anniversary of Brown than a challenge, going forward, or a blueprint to guide concrete, positive change in the schools.
