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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
We're continuing our discussion about public education in the city. And now joining us
again to discuss all of this, first of all, is Lester Spence. He's a contributor to the
book We Are Many. He's an associate professor of political science and Africana studies
at Johns Hopkins and author of the book Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip Hop and
Black Politics.
Also joining us is Marc Steiner. He hosts the widely acclaimed (see? "widely acclaimed"--it
actually is) public radio news and interview program The Marc Steiner Show, which you can
hear on WEAA 88.9 FM here in Baltimore. Thank you both for joining us.
LESTER SPENCE: Thanks for having me.
MARC STEINER: It's good to be here.
JAY: So, Lester, let's kick it off with you. So let's say tomorrow you get appointed head
of--you're now in control of education, public education in Baltimore, and you've got a majority
of support on city council, and the mayor says, Lester, I'll back you. What would you
do?
SPENCE: Well, there are a few things I would do. Right? So one thing I would do is Baltimore
City schools are undercapacity--If I'm right, it's something like 60 percent stands out
as far as either 60 percent of them have--people don't really have a full house, or in general
the system is 60 percent undercapacity, which means they have to shut down certain schools.
So it becomes a zero-sum competition.
What I would actually do is--if you think about these schools as neighborhood public
spaces, one of the first things I would do is I would open them outside the school hours.
Right? So a certain amount of time, it would be open for school, but then, after that,
whether it's quote-unquote "training" or whether it's public meetings, whether it's gym space
for folks to work out in, etc., meeting space, you have to transform these schools to institutions
that actually meet the needs of those neighborhoods. Right? So that's the kind of infrastructure
thing I would do.
What I would do as far as curriculum is I would transform the curriculum to build--and
I don't like that word build, but it's shorthand--to kind of build citizens, like, citizens, you
know, to--. If we think about these folks, like, these kids are in school from five to
18, five days a week, you know, nine months out of the year. Imagine what we could--what
they could do as citizens if we taught them how to engage in the world politically, right,
actually how to be citizens.
And the thing is is there are a number of ways to teach core concepts of math, of science,
and literacy through that project, right? Along those same lines, every school would
have, like, a community garden, and kids would learn from kindergarten how to grow and tend
their own gardens and how to grow and tend their own food and to create a certain type
of relationship with the environment.
So just the--if you just think about just those two things, if I only could do two things,
right, the one is you make those schools public institutions and make them open them up to
the community, like, year-round, 24/7, and then the second thing is reframe the curriculum
and gear the curriculum towards making them citizens, like, local global citizens.
JAY: I guess you could add to that community center cheap, affordable daycare.
SPENCE: Yes.
JAY: I just don't understand how anyone's supposed to hold a job and get home and deal
with a kid at three or four o'clock.
SPENCE: Yeah, real talk.
JAY: Yeah. So, okay, Marc, you're now in charge of education. What would you do?
STEINER: Well, [crosstalk] let me--first let me just say that the mayor in Baltimore has
no control over the schools. It's out of the mayor's control. It's an independent body.
The school board's appointed by the governor with mayoral input, but the mayor has no control
over the schools of Baltimore.
JAY: So is the school board accountable to the state?
STEINER: Yes, it's accountable to the state.
SPENCE: And that's a new thing. That's [crosstalk]
STEINER: It's been like that for a while. You know. So they took it out of the hands
of the city. And so [crosstalk]
JAY: And why did they take it out of the hands of the city?
STEINER: The schools were falling apart. And, you know, there was a whole big move for the
state to take over complete control, which they didn't do. That was a big battle that
took place in Baltimore.
SPENCE: Now, real quick, but when you say "a while," what does that mean?
JAY: Yeah, how long ago?
SPENCE: 'Cause I know that happens in Detroit, but it happens in Detroit in--like, between
'95 and 2000.
STEINER: The exact year when it stopped being under mayoral control I don't remember, but
it was, like, under the Schaefer years. I don't have the exact year in my head.
SPENCE: So, like, in the '90s.
STEINER: Yeah.
SPENCE: Yeah. So that's what--it was around the same time, yeah.
STEINER: But having said that--and what Lester was talking about I completely agree with,
is a concept called community schools. And that concept is to keep schools open all day
long. So in the evening it becomes evening classes, it becomes facilities for the community.
And the whole notion of community schools was something people pushed in Baltimore.
But nobody was able to do it. And they really wanted that to happen. There was a movement
in the city to do that, and it didn't happen. And it should happen.
The other thing is Baltimore has the largest, one of the most complex private school systems
in the country. And one of the things I've always maintained is that what public school
students deserve is what private schools get. And that means that parents and students pick
the kind of school they want their kid to go to, so that if you wanted your child to
be in a Montessori school or a Waldorf school or a more progressive school, those schools
exist for your kid to go to. If you want your child to be in an all-male school, all-female
school, you have that choice.
JAY: But all within the public system.
SPENCE: But that should be our public system. And each facility, you have to fight for billions
of dollars to redo our schools so that the facilities match the kids' needs, so that
every school has a swimming pool, every school has outdoor facilities, every school has a
lab, every school has things they need to be a full school. And arts are infused into
the curriculum of every school in Baltimore City. So every child has a chance to kind
of--to be in the arts at whatever level they want to be in the arts, that you have the
opportunities for kids to really learn.
I would get rid of standardized testing completely. I would dump it in the trash. That there's
no--there are no private or parochial schools in Baltimore where kids have to take a standardized
test to prove they're learning. That's not how you deal with it. I would get rid of all
those tests and be done with them. That, and I would cut down class size. I would say,
we are going to pay our teachers more money, and we're going to have teachers who want
to be in the system be there, and to radically reform all of that.
JAY: So the--I mean, obviously, people watching and listening to all this are saying, okay,
fine, so where's the money going to come from.
STEINER: Well, you know, I mean, we spend a lot of money on our schools, and part of
it is how we want to spend the money on our schools. Part of it has to do with building
an infrastructure. America should be spending money on infrastructure
JAY: Now, didn't the mayor just recently announce something like $1 billion to go into public
schools? I'm not sure where she's getting the money from.
STEINER: She did. I don't know--this will be a coming battle in the upcoming legislative
session. That's going to be a--that's one of the pivotal issues.
JAY: The money has to come from the state. The city doesn't have this $1 billion. Is
that right?
STEINER: Correct. Correct. I mean, when we have what we call [incompr.] Annapolis Summit
that I host with the--on the first day of the session with the governor, the president
of the Senate, and the speaker of the House, we have a two-hour session that we'll get
The Real News to play that--that's one of the questions that they have to answer, how
are they going to pay for our school system.
JAY: One of the things--we've done a lot of stories about public education on The Real
News, and, you know, you start to wonder whether, you know, the powers that be, the elites,
whether they're in Baltimore or nationally, actually want an educated ordinary population.
There has to be some political intent. I mean, you know, maybe, you know, the fact that the
schools to some extent or some schools to a large extent are kind of, you know, babysitting
services and/or jails of sorts, and kids in Baltimore talk about, you know, this prison--school-to-prison
pipeline, and that this is all part of the way especially the urban poor areas are visualized,
that it is a question of just keep that area under control, we don't really care whether
they're educated.
SPENCE: Well, I'm going to complicate that a bit. I would say--I would work on the assumption
that people want good schools, right? But they're too--.
JAY: People meaning parents? Or--.
SPENCE: I'm going to assume everybody. There's only an extreme group that doesn't want good
schools, right? Only an extreme group, right?
But this is--I'm going to complicate that in a few ways. One is that when you come to
the definition of what a good school is, you've got very different perspectives, and people
with power tend to win out to the extent those differences, those different perspectives
clash. Right? That's the first thing.
But the second thing is that there's this assumption that we're talking about a zero-sum
game and there are very, very limited resources. So even though we all want good schools, the
reality is that only--that we can only have a certain number of schools in the pot. And
to the extent we individualize learning, that is, to the extent that we talk about individual
parents making choices about individual kids, that dynamic naturally leads to a dynamic
where we're saying, okay, well, since we only can have so many good schools, we're going
to put that responsibility on the parents to choose, and then the parents themselves,
you know, who are now competing with other parents for those slots, they're now kind
of responsibilized, so to speak, and they're made to do all the heavy lifting, and then
you end up having start cuts, where some parents know what to do and have the hookups, know
how to get their kids into schools, and then everybody else has to kind of fend for themselves.
JAY: Yeah. I mean, it seems completely structurally built in that way now, where you have this
kind of lottery system, but merits, so you can say, yes, a selection of the smartest
kids will get a decent education, and we'll kind of write off everybody else.
SPENCE: Yes.
STEINER: Like, and the kids are written off. I mean, part of it is the battle going on
about not wanting to invest in the public sector in America. And the public educational
system is part of the foundation of that public sector.
And, you know, we--this is a very different world we're facing. I mean, this is a thing
that I've--a conversation I've had many times with people in Baltimore. Friends of mine
who came out of the old black middle class in Baltimore who I grew up with and their
parents were in the public school system at a time when the only school in Baltimore for
black folks was Douglass Senior High School.
JAY: Yeah, that's right.
STEINER: Later they started Carver Vocational-Tech and Dunbar, but for a long time Douglass was
the only place that black folks could go to high school. And there were no black schools
like that in Harford County or any other county, so this was the place. So I said to them [incompr.]
my friends, you know, when you were in school, I mean, so how many kids were in school? Four
hundred? A thousand? So what did that mean? That meant that thousands of black children
never went to high school. Then they went into the steel mills and they became porters
and they had jobs in the box factory or they drove a hack or they did whatever, became
plumbers, electricians, carpenters.
And so when I--you know, when earlier, like, I wasn't laying the onus on--in the last segment,
I wasn't laying the onus on the people for having a bad school system, but what I'm saying
is the history of our schools are such that we're still in the mold of training and putting
kids in schools that were back in the '40s and '50s [incompr.] at all.
And so you've got to realize you've got these incredibly smart kids in the poorest neighborhoods
who are not being given an educational shot at growing their minds. That's the--they're
not growing their minds. They're putting them in these classes, they teach them how to read
and write, they have direct instruction, which is a big debate [incompr.] but they have--they
teach by rote, you learn how to read, you learn how to write, you learn how to add one
and one, but nobody's taught how to think critically and no one's given creative projects
to do. They're not being able--they're not given that spirit.
What they're afraid of: they don't want a population of creative, analytical minds that
will say, how come I don't have a job, why is my society looking like this. And that's
the fear.
JAY: Yeah. I think one of the most remarkable pieces of that (and it's happening all across
North America) is the lack of teaching of history. I mean, I talk to kids here, and,
I mean, most of them don't even know that Baltimore was an occupied city by the military
in the late 1960--.
STEINER: In the Civil War.
JAY: No, here during 1968-69. There were National Guard tanks on the streets in Baltimore. They
have no idea about that history of their own city, never mind--I mean, I was also--.
STEINER: Or the civil rights history of Baltimore.
JAY: Yeah, or the slave--in Fell's Point, they used to have shops along Fell's Point
buying slaves to--domestic slaves, to bring them down to the South to work in the cotton
fields. And as you were saying, there were so many free African Americans here, they
were kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery to go work because of the invention
of [crosstalk]
STEINER: Frederick Douglass owned his own dock company in Fell's Point. I mean, you
know, he was a--that this was--you know, that this was--.
JAY: But this whole idea, this lack of teaching history--.
SPENCE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so one argument is that--so there's this argument about this
larger job argument. It's like, well, these kids have a choice between working at McDonald's
or working in a drug gang. Right? The thing is--and this is--it's funny, but it's tragic--is
the kids that are being produced or the type of education kids are getting--. You need
to know math to be a good drug dealer. You know what I mean? I mean you need to have--you
need to know all types of things to be a good drug dealer. Right? And some of those things
you really can't learn. So you can't really--so you either are kind of built in to kind of
really beat somebody down, you know, or you're kind of not. I mean, you can--. But things
like math, I mean, so if you're graduating, if you're coming out of the high schools and
you're not able to do math, you can't even be a good drug dealer. You know. So what is
there for you? What is there for you? So the challenge that Baltimore--.
JAY: Prison.
SPENCE: Yeah, that's it. And so we talk about the school-to-prison pipeline. It's like it's
built--it's a natural consequence. But then the prisons are costing so much that you're
even now seeing pushback from conservatives in some cases against the prisons. So we're
going to--this is the issue that we're going to have to come to some type of resolution
on fairly soon, because we're close to the breaking point.
JAY: Okay. So this is just the beginning of a discussion about what's going on in Baltimore,
and we're going to keep doing this every few weeks. And as I said, we're going to do more
investigative stories. We're going to be doing, in a few months, town hall debates. So please
join us for our ongoing discussion about what to do about Baltimore.