Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools by Karen Lewis

Author:Karen Lewis [Sanders, Raynard; Stovall, David; White, Terrenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807076071
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

DEEP POCKETS AND WHITE SAVIORS WITH BLACK AND BROWN ENFORCERS

UCSN and the Noble Network of Charter Schools (NNCS) are the two largest charter networks in the city of Chicago. While each network depends heavily on corporate giving to cover operating costs, NNCS has the boldest strategy for securing corporate dollars. NNCS partners with local corporate and nonprofit entities to “name” its schools. Currently, the Chicago Bulls basketball organization, DRW Trading, and current governor Bruce Rauner have schools with their names (a school was named after Rauner when he was a billionaire hedge fund manager). In full disclosure, my employer, the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a Noble-branded school connected to its medical campus.

More than 95 percent of the NNCS’s student body is either African American or Latinx, residing on either the South or West Sides of the city. The network is headed by CEO Michael Milkie, and twelve members of the twenty-two-member board of directors are employed by multimillion-dollar corporations, including DRW, Northern Trust, LSV Asset Management, and the Exelon Corporation. With eighteen schools in the district, NNCS plays a major role in Chicago’s public/charter debate.

Families are deeply drawn to its “college-going culture,” but topics absent from discussions of its empire are the makeup of its teaching staff and its deeply punitive discipline policies. Like many charters throughout the country that serve students of color in urban centers, the vast majority of its teachers are white and hail from alternative certification programs, such as Teach for America and the New Teacher Project. Meanwhile, many of those responsible for discipline on its campuses are people of color. It has made a push to hire more people of color and NNCS alumni as teachers in recent years, but its discipline policies remain more reflective of prison culture than transformative practice.

When students are “out of compliance” with an extensive set of rules, they are given detention and fined. Parents United for Responsible Education, a community organization that calls for transparency and accountability within CPS, reported the NNCS collected $386,745 in fines from students between 2009 and 2012 for disciplinary infractions.17 While the NNCS touts its role serving African American and Latinx students from low-income and working-class communities, students there are encumbered and kept from advancing to the next grade if fines are not collected.

Despite the exposé on the collection of student fines, the robber baron mentality of Milkie and the NNCS has a parallel in the sharecropping narrative, in the form of a deep-seated belief that black and brown youth need to be saved from themselves and that white saviors are the ones to show them the way. In this instance, parents are excluded from governance and leadership, and have little say in school curriculum and the hiring of teachers and principals. In 2014, when Illinois charters were seeking to change the law so charters received full funding from public sources, they gave students a day out of school and required teachers to ride buses to the capital and lobby legislators for the change in the charter funding equation.

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