No Citizen Left Behind

Meira Levinson

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674069589
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

While teaching at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Meira Levinson realized that students' individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their profound marginalization within American society. This is because of a civic empowerment gap that is as shameful and antidemocratic as the academic achievement gap targeted by No Child Left Behind. No Citizen Left Behind argues that students must be taught how to upend and reshape power relationships directly, through political and civic action. Drawing on political theory, empirical research, and her own on-the-ground experience, Levinson shows how de facto segregated urban schools can and must be at the center of this struggle.Recovering the civic purposes of public schools will take more than tweaking the curriculum. Levinson calls on schools to remake civic education. Schools should teach collective action, openly discuss the racialized dimensions of citizenship, and provoke students by engaging their passions against contemporary injustices. Students must also have frequent opportunities to take civic and political action, including within the school itself. To build a truly egalitarian society, we must reject myths of civic sameness and empower all young people to raise their diverse voices. Levinson's account challenges not just educators but all who care about justice, diversity, or democracy.

1

THE CIVIC EMPOWERMENT GAP

“So why did the Articles of Confederation make it so hard for the states to work together and get anything done? Adam, what do you think?”

“Ummm—oh, Dr. Levinson, there’s someone knocking at the door. Can I let them in?”

“No, I’ll get it!”

“No, me, no, me!”

“I’m the closest!”

Josephine triumphantly makes it to the door first, and opens it to reveal my colleague Ms. Sanchez, who is visibly shaken. She teaches just two doors down from me, but we usually see each other in the teacher room, not in our classrooms. “Dr. Levinson, have you heard?”

“No, heard what?”

“The World Trade Center has been hit by two planes. There are rumors that the Pentagon has also been bombed, and maybe the Capitol Building. Do you have a TV in your classroom? No? Why don’t you bring your students into my room; you all can watch the news with us.”

Stunned, I line up my homeroom, nineteen eighth-grade students whom I first met only a week ago, and file them down the hall to Ms. Sanchez’s room. We fill in the extra desks and perch on the radiators in the back of her Spanish bilingual classroom. A thirteen-inch television is propped on a chair at the front of the room showing a wavy, often static-obscured image of Tom Brokaw and the World Trade Center towers pouring smoke and flames from gashes in their sides. Ms. Sanchez stands next to the TV, adjusting the rabbit ears on top every minute or two, trying to get a better picture. Some students call out recommendations to her in Spanish and English; most of us sit or stand silently, trying to assimilate the obscure images on the screen.

We watch for about forty-five minutes, long enough to see the first tower collapse, to learn that the Pentagon was indeed hit, and to hear more rumors about other missing, possibly hijacked planes. It’s still unclear if other targets in Washington have been hit. My students start to get restless, and the news is admittedly repetitive: continued massive confusion with no new information. Also, we’re due in the library in half an hour to check out textbooks for the year, and I want to have an opportunity first to discuss with them what we have seen. Quietly, I motion to my homeroom students to follow me back to our classroom.

After my students slip into their seats, I ask them if they have any questions or thoughts. I’m surprised to find myself hit with a barrage.

“I don’t understand what’s happening. Can you explain it, Dr. Levinson?”

“Are the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan or Washington?”

“Where’s the Pentagon?”

“I couldn’t see anything. Why were those buildings collapsing?”

I realize that I’m going to have to explain everything that we just saw on television. Whether it’s because of the fuzzy picture or the difficulty my thirteen-and fourteen-year-old charges have interpreting the raw, undigested nature of breaking news, many of my students are totally confused about what’s going on. I pull a student desk to the front of the classroom and sit on its top, resting my feet on the seat of the attached chair. “Well,” I begin, “I don’t know more than you do, but it seems that some planes were hijacked and flown into buildings. Two were flown into the two towers of the World Trade Center, which is in Manhattan, and one was flown into the Pentagon, which is in Washington. We don’t know yet if there are other places that have been attacked, and it seems that there are still some planes missing, which may also have been hijacked.”

“Why would somebody attack the Pentagon?” Da-Quin interrupts.

“Because it’s the center of the American military. It’s the symbol of America’s military power,” I answer.

“Oh.” Upon some questioning, I find out that many of my students have never heard of the Pentagon, and most are confused about why it’s named after a shape they learned about in math class. I go to the board and draw the building for them and explain its purpose; I can see understanding start to dawn.

“I saw the World Trade Center when I was in Manhattan last year,” Anna volunteers.

“Yes, you can see it from many places in New York City,” I answer.

“Wait,” Yasmine asks. “Are Manhattan and New York City the same?”

I realize that I have to back up some more. As I will learn over the next few months, fewer than half of my students are native-born citizens. Although most have lived in the United States for many years, some since birth, few have traveled outside of Massachusetts within the continental United States; if they travel in the summer or over school holidays, it’s to go “home” to Cape Verde, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, or Vietnam. Travel such as this is rare, too, as almost all of my students are poor, as measured by their qualification for free or occasionally reduced-price lunch. Except for the few students who have visited relatives in New York, none has heard of the World Trade Center before today, so I draw a crude map of southern Manhattan on the board. I fill in the twin towers, the Stock Ex-change, and Wall Street, and show my students why the area symbolizes America’s economic power.

Once my students assimilate the basic information, talk quickly turns to whether there will be more attacks, and if so, where they will be. My students are understandably scared. Our school is at most a couple of miles from Logan Airport. Adam looks out the window and points to the Prudential Building and John Hancock Tower, downtown Boston skyscrapers clearly visible from our classroom. “Maybe they’ll hit those next,” he offers. “Maybe that’s where the next hijacked airplane is headed.”

“Or what about our school?” Josephine asks. “We’re so close to everything. They could kill 700 students at once.”

“Look, I can’t guarantee that we’re safe, or that the Pru and Hancock Tower won’t be hit,” I respond, “but I’m pretty confident that nothing is going to happen here. First of all, whatever message the terrorists are trying to get across, they would lose the world’s sympathy immediately if they attacked a bunch of innocent children. They’re just not going to attack a school. And second, truthfully, we’re just not important enough.” Nineteen shocked faces look at me. Of course they’re important!

“Think about it,” I continue. “The terrorists, whoever they are, are attacking symbols of America’s power: our military power, our economic power. What else symbolizes America’s world domination? Our culture—in which case they’ll attack Hollywood, or somewhere else in Los Angeles. Our politics—so maybe Washington, D.C. again. But Boston doesn’t have anything that’s a symbol to the world of America’s might. We’re a great city, sure, but we’re not a great symbol of anything. The Freedom Trail? Yeah, but what would you attack—the Old North Church? Not exactly worth it. If you go to a foreign country and ask people to name great American cities, they’ll mention New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, maybe Chicago. Boston would be at best fifth or sixth on the list. We just don’t matter enough.”

I glance at the clock and realize that we’re due to check out textbooks. We troop down the hall and spread out in the library, waiting for Mr. Bill to call out students’ names and scan the bar codes on their textbooks into the computer. This is a new technology for the school, and some of my students gather around him, watching and complaining that now if they lose a book, they can’t take somebody else’s and write in their own names instead. “Dog, you ain’t got nowhere to hide now,” I hear Da-Quin comment to a friend.

There’s a TV on in the back of the library; I tell students that I plan to watch the news and invite them to watch with me. Four or five join me as I stand, glued to the set, occasionally looking around to make sure that my kids aren’t getting out of hand. By this time, both towers have collapsed, and all of the television stations are playing the footage of the collapse, along with the videos of the planes flying into the towers, over and over again. Despite the drama, most of my homeroom is content hanging out in the front of the library, gossiping about classmates, comparing teachers, speculating about whom the assistant principal is out to get this year. As students pass by with their books in hand, I try to corral them into watching with me, explaining that this is history in the making. “You see these images?” I ask. “These are going to be pictures in the back of the American history textbook next year. See these pictures of Clinton here in Why We Remember? After that, in the next edition, you’re going to see these pictures of the planes and the towers.” Some students are impressed and stay to watch, commenting to each other that they’re watching history happen. Others talk about how it looks like a movie or a video game; it doesn’t seem real to them yet, and they wander back to the front of the library to gossip some more.

I send my homeroom class off to science and then to lunch. When they return to me for the last period of the day, our conversation turns to who would have done this and why. “I bet George Bush is behind this,” Laquita declares. “I bet he did this so he could have an excuse to go to war with Iraq.”

“What?!?!” I respond. “We don’t know who’s done this, but I can promise you it’s not George Bush.”

“No, Dr. Levinson, I think you’re wrong,” says Travis. “Bush doesn’t care about anybody except rich people, and he wants to go to war with Iraq to take revenge for what Saddam Hussein did to his dad. President Bush probably got somebody to do this for him, like Laquita said.”

More voices chime in to back up Laquita. Bush has the power to do something like this because he’s the president. You know that he doesn’t care about the law because he stole the whole election. All he wants to do is go to war with Iraq, and this is the perfect excuse. People in power can do anything and get away with it; look how his brother managed to keep Black people from voting in Florida, and you don’t see anything happening to him, do you? Bush is a horrible man—why wouldn’t he do something like this?

I’m completely taken aback. Up until now, I’ve taken my students’ questions in stride: their naiveté about the Pentagon, their confusion about the relationship between Manhattan and New York, their concern that terrorists might choose McCormack Middle School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to attack next. But this vitriol against Bush, and their almost sanguine assumption that the president of the United States might choose to and be capable of killing 5,000, maybe 10,000, American citizens simply on a whim—I find it breathtaking in its combination of utter ignorance and absolute cynicism.

A few days after the September 11 attacks, when I started telling my mostly White, middle-class friends and family about my students’ response, they generally shared my shocked reaction.¹ How could my students believe an American president could do this? And how could they never have heard of the Pentagon? After all, even though some of my students were recent immigrants, many had been born here or had lived here for years. A number of people asked me if my students had confused the current President Bush with his father, and I answered no; they clearly distinguished between the two, and knew that Hussein had been attacked by, and was alleged to have tried to assassinate, George H. W. Bush rather than George W. Bush. But nonetheless, I too felt as if my students had gotten confused somewhere along the way—and as if their mistrust of “the system” was almost pathetic in its casualness.

Nowadays when I tell this story, people comment on my students’ prescience. Instead of questioning my students’ understanding of the distinction between the two presidents, they question whether my students really could have made the claims I ascribe to them. Could they really have seen so far into the future, when none of the pundits in late 2001 and early 2002 had done so? How could they have known, on September 11, 2001, that President Bush would use these attacks to justify going to war in 2003 against Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein? My students were brilliant! Also, people point out that although it is too bad that my students hadn’t heard of the Pentagon and didn’t know that Manhattan was a borough of New York City, there’s little reason to think that the average White, middle-class, native-born eighth grader would have known this information either. Maybe the teachers in Arlington or Medford (two White, working- and middle-class suburbs of Boston) had to explain these things to their students as well.

The latter point is well taken. I am not yet convinced, however, of the former point, that my students were so brilliant. Despite President George W. Bush’s use of the September 11 attacks to justify a profoundly misguided war in Iraq, his assault on due process, embrace of torture, cavalier dismissal of the Geneva Convention, shameless malingering, and patent war crimes,² I still disagree with my students’ assessment. I don’t believe that President George W. Bush planned and executed the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

Why not? As far as I’m concerned, it’s because I’m right—the facts don’t bear out an alternative interpretation. But it’s certainly plausible that I read the facts as I do in part because of my personal experience growing up and living as a White, middle-class, native-born American citizen. I have been well served by the United States: by its institutions, opportunities, freedoms, civil and public servants, class structure, and racial hierarchies. Thanks, too, to my social class and my educational experiences at Ivy League schools (these are heavily intertwined, of course), I know and am even related to a number of people who have been or are currently serving at high levels in various branches of federal government. I like and trust many of these people, and I find it hard to imagine how a conspiracy like September 11 would or could have originated and been carried out by their equivalents in the White House.

True, as an American history teacher I also taught for years about the horrors perpetrated by presidents of the United States: the eight men who owned slaves while president; Andrew Jackson’s systematic slaughter of Native Americans before, during, and after his presidency; Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to sending thousands of American men to die in a war he knew could not be won—to say nothing of the Vietnamese men, women, and children who also perished. But I don’t interpret these events as revealing an essential injustice or inhumanity in the character of the American presidency, or of the United States more generally. I don’t mean to say that I think these horrors are outliers in American history or culture. To the contrary, they both implicate and are implicated by some of the deepest strands within the American character, ones that we are still grappling with today.³ Even so, I generally trust that public servants are well-intentioned, even if sometimes horribly misguided in their interpretation of the public good. At the very least, I trust that vast, murderous conspiracies against the American people are not circulating among top officials in the White House.

By contrast, why did so many of my students immediately assume that Bush could have planned and executed the attacks? Again, as far as they were concerned, it’s because they were right. Facts such as the stolen 2000 election, presidents’ slaveholding and other depredations, and White, wealthy politicians’ history of holding ruthlessly onto power easily bore out their interpretation. It is also certainly plausible that my students read the facts as they did because of their experiences growing up as non-White, poor, first-and second-generation immigrants in de facto segregated neighborhoods and schools. When I taught at Mc-Cormack, close to 90 percent of the eighth graders qualified for free lunch; 90 percent were racial and ethnic minorities; and well over half were first or second-generation immigrants. The vast majority of my students lived in poverty, in apartment buildings or housing projects rife with violence and drugs. Many lived within blocks of the seven “hot spots” identified by the Boston Police Department as the most violent areas of town. They were used to having only negative interactions with representatives of governmental power such as the police, social workers, probation officers, and teachers. These interactions were often tinged with racism and mutual mistrust. They also attended school almost entirely with others living in the same situation. As I discuss in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3, these daily aggressions may have been further contextualized by family members and other adults in the community as being part of a lengthy history of mistreatment and oppression by the government. Small wonder they interpreted breaking news in such a way that implicated the president for complicity in the tragedy.

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue: Kurt Cobain versus Master P
• 1. The Civic Empowerment Gap
• 2. “At School I Talk Straight”: Race Talk and Civic Empowerment
• 3. “You Have the Right to Struggle”: Constructing Historical Counternarrative
• 4. Rethinking Heroes and Role Models
• 5. How to Soar in a World You’ve Never Seen: Making Citizenship Visible in Schools
• 6. The Case for Action Civics
• 7. Democracy, Accountability, and Education
• Epilogue: Standing Up, Talking Back
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright