Challenging Neoliberal Education at the Grass Roots: Students Who Lead, Not Students Who Leave

Abstract

The Students at the Center (SAC) learning community in New Orleans challenges the premises of neoliberal education reform through an alternative social vision and an oppositional social praxis. It encourages students to be people who lead their communities rather than people who leave. SAC presents a model of democratic and egalitarian education that exposes, challenges, resists, and counters the enormous harm perpetrated by the neoliberal reorganization of public institutions. The young people who participate in the classes run by SAC view their own fate as individuals as linked to the survival, dignity and democratic potential of all people.

Keywords::

• disposability
• exceptionality
• neoliberal education
• New Orleans
• story circles

About the Author

George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. His books include Midnight At The Barrelhouse (2010), Footsteps In The Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (2007), The Possessive Investment In Whiteness (2006), Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (2001), and A Life In The Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (1995). Lipsitz serves as chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and is a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin.

Notes

Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 1998). The plantation bloc supported the “southern strategy” that enabled Republican presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to win elections and implement policies that made national policies based on the plantation bloc’s views of civil rights laws, welfare policies, criminal justice and taxation. In the 1990s, the majority leader in the Senate was Republican Senator Trent Lott from Mississippi and the chair of the Republican National Committee was former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. The bloc also promoted the electoral success of Democratic presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and William Clinton and their policies of “ending welfare as we know it,” mass incarceration, and deregulation.

Clyde Woods, “Concluding Remarks,” Reimagining the Global South Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, January 21, 2011; author’s notes.

Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, “After neoliberalism: Analyzing the present,” Soundings 53 April (2013): 9; Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 14 no. 3–4 (2012): 140.

Chandan Reddy, “Plenary Discussion,” Anti-racism Inc./Works Anti-conference, Santa Barbara, CA, May 16, 2014; author’s notes.

All student names used in this article are authors in books available to the public published or in press by Students at the Center.

Christopher Burton, “Raising a Ruling Class,” in The Long Ride by Students at the Center, 2nd ed. (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 301.

Sadiq Watson, “Public Means for Everyone,” in The Long Ride, 2nd. ed., by Students at the Center (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 261.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Crystal Carr, “Separate But Equal,” in The Long Ride, 2nd ed., by Students at the Center (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 258.

Tricia Rose, “Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and the ‘Illegible’ Politics of (Inter)Personal Justice,” Kalfou 1 no. 1 (2014).

Author’s notes, March 24, 2014. New Orleans, Louisiana.

Ibid.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 68.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

All quotes from this correspondence are from the as yet uncontracted manuscript by Students at the Center “Go to Jail” in the author’s possession. Quoted with permission from Students at the Center.

It is of course possible that the Orleans Parish School Board, which has allowed ninety percent of the public schools in New Orleans to be charter schools, will claim credit for the success of King and Alexander, and identify them as exceptional. They do have strong role models, however, in Ashley Jones and Mosi Makori, once students in the system who are now SAC teachers.

The phrase “to be more rather than to have more” comes from the martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 86.

Quote from Students at the Center, Go to Jail, manuscript in author’s possession.

All quotes in this section are from the author’s notes, March 24, 2014. New Orleans, Louisiana.

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171.

Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has Dignity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 171.

Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 140.

Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African-American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Freedom on My Mind, directed by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford (Clarity Educational Productions, 1994).

Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, “After Neoliberalism: Analyzing the Present,” Soundings 53 April (2013): 20.

Catherine Michna, “’We Are Black Mind Jockeys’: Tom Dent, The Free Southern Theater, and the Search for a Second-line Literary Aesthetic in New Orleans,” Journal of American Ethnic Literature 1 (2011): 56.

Gilbert Moses, Thomas C. Dent, and Richard Schechner, “Preface,” in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, ed. Thomas C. Dent and Richard Schechner (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1969), xi.

Thomas C. Dent and Richard Schechner, editors, The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1969), 115–16.

Dent and Schechner, The Free Southern Theater, 24.

John O’Neal, “Some Political Dimensions of the Free Southern Theatre,” The Drama Review 12 no. 2 Summer (1968): 76.

Catherine Michna, “Stories at the Center: Story Circles, Educational Organizing, and Fate of Neighborhood Public Schools in New Orleans,” American Quarterly 61 no. 3 (2009): 539.

Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford, 1987).

Michna, “’We Are Black Mind Jockeys,‘” 56.

Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 14 no. 3–4 (2012): 153.

Reddy, “Plenary Discussion”; James Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2004.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “While we may have one Black man in the White House, we have one million Black men in the big house,” quoted in Leewana Thomas, “American Studies Keynote Advocates Student Activism,” Mac Weekly, February 18, 2011.

Kimberly Gedeon, “Challenges Black Women Face in Wealth-Building,” Madame Noire April 9, 2015, http://madamenoire.com/524915/the-challenges-the-black-women-face-in-wealth-building/ (accessed May 27, 2015).

Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” 153.

John O’Neal, “Guidelines for Story Circles” in Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict, ed. Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutierrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker, Building Just and Inclusive Communities, vol. II (Oakland: New Village Press, 2011), 214.

Adrinda Kelly, “Resistance,” in The Long Ride by Students at the Center, 2nd ed. (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 50.

Kalamu ya Salaam, “Poetic Visions” (presentation, American Studies Association annual meeting, November 5, 2009; University of California Center for Black Studies Research), DVD.

Ian Haney Lopez, “Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama,” California Law Review 98 no. 3 June (2010).

Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton, editors, Policing the Planet (New York: Routledge, 2016); George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 149–66.