W.E.B. Du Bois’ speech some 50 years ago addressing the impending damage of integration on black educational institutions begs the question: What is the current status of black education in the 21st century?

Amazingly, Du Bois’ predictions concerning high dropout rates, the dearth of black teachers, and a deficit in teaching and knowing black history were quite accurate. As we look to address these salient problems, in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area and the country more broadly, Du Bois’ words continue to be instructive and insightful.

However, these problems have not been properly addressed, and now we have a new set of problems that equally deserve our attention. I submit that three issues -- corporatization of schools, militarization of schools and the lack of culturally related curriculum in predominately black schools -- have assisted in the withering of black education locally and nationally in the black community.

We are living in what is known as the “Great Recession,” where corporate greed, thievery, and bottom-line values brought the U.S. economic system to near collapse. This same capitalistic framework is being used in our own education system (and if you look hard enough, the black church) where schools are being run as businesses as opposed to places of learning.

Henry Grioux, critical educational theorist and activist, defines the corporate model of schooling as “testing being used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by reducing them to mere technicians, that students be similarly reduced to customers in the marketplace rather than as engaged, critical learners.”

Likewise, professor Giroux also speaks to the militarization of schools by defining its disciplinary policies as a “crime complex” with three distinct offenses:

First, students are increasingly subjected to zero-tolerance policies that are used primarily to punish, repress and exclude them. Second, they are increasingly absorbed into a “crime complex” in which security staff, using harsh disciplinary practices, now displace the normative functions teachers once provided both in and outside the classrooms. Third, more and more schools are breaking down the space between education and juvenile delinquency, substituting penal pedagogies for critical learning and replacing a school culture that fosters a discourse of possibility with a culture of fear and social control.

Most often black children are victims of this system, which ultimately feeds into the prison industrial complex (also a market-driven mechanism) where there is little to no chance of rehabilitation.

Therefore, American education can best be described as academic capitalism where teachers are laborers and students are the commodity and states are the corporations seeking to find ways to improve their bottom line. This is done by either outsourcing their labor (charter schools) or consolidating industries (school closing) in order to become more marketable for federal funds and eventually be taken over by a mega corporation (private philanthropy) whose interest is not about the quality of education but outcomes.

In this kind of system no true learning can take place, and if we are serious about developing programs and schools systems that speak directly at educating black children we have to understand the limitations of this educational model.

Finally, the presence of a culturally specific curriculum is truly needed today. Earlier this year, the Texas Education Association passed measures to make major curriculum revisions in social studies books by celebrating Confederate generals and playing down the significance of the Civil Rights Movement. This should be a wakeup call to all black educators. Not only will our children not be exposed to a curriculum that reflects their experience, they will soon be using textbooks that, for all intents and purposes, will write them out of history.

These new developments involving black education reflect the same concerns Du Bois raised to black social studies teachers 50 years ago in Biddle Auditorium -- a serious discussion on some fundamental epistemological questions regarding black education: What type of education do we ultimately want for our children? What should the curriculum be in this type of system? Should we concede to the ideal of a post racial society and reject the notion that the education system harbors vestiges of racism? Should we embrace segregation again in order to reclaim/revamp our schools systems through community oversight and local control? If there is a correlation between literacy and incarceration rates, how do we begin to shift resources toward educational programs and school districts? Finally, what role can/must alternative institutions (family, church, civic groups) play in revamping black education?

Starting in late October the Political Science Program at Johnson C. Smith University, in conjunction with several nonprofit organizations, will be hosting a series of forums focusing on addressing these questions and more on the campus of JCSU. The date, time, and venue will be posted on QCitymetro.com, and we strongly invite the Charlotte community to attend these crucial forums as we attempt to address these complicated and critical problems facing our community.
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Joseph L. Jones, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science at Johnson C. Smith University. Click here to read Part I of his commentary.

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