The Contradictions of the Legacy of Brown V. Board of Education, Topeka (1954)

A Special Issue of Educational Studies

Dianne Smith, Sandra Winn Tutwiler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135477615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that separate school facilities were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional and illegal. Today, 50 years after this landmark decision, much debate surrounds the efficacy of the ruling, particularly for its impact on the education of children of color in U.S. schools. In reality, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was never solely about education; neither did the case include only plaintiffs from Topeka. Both points are important to note as we reflect on the legacy of Brown a half century after the ruling. This journal offers articles, an interview, book reviews and a media review around this area.

Articles

Forces for Failure and Genocide: The Plantation Model of Urban Educational Policy Making in St. Louis

Bruce Anthony Jones

University of Missouri-Kansas City

This article is about policy decision making and racial politics in the St. Louis, Missouri, school district. From a research standpoint, traditional policy-making models are inadequate for explaining the evolution of school reform events in St. Louis over the past year. Teachers, principals, school staff, and parents perceive themselves to be under siege by an external corporate entity. Within a 4-week period, this corporate entity shut down 16 schools (14 were in the predominantly northside African American neighborhoods); laid off teachers and principals, terminated maintenance, security, and food service staff; and outsourced whole service divisions. One high-performing African American school was shut down and sold to St. Louis University so that the university could bulldoze the school to build a basketball stadium. According to one parent interviewee, “We did not know what hit us.”

Table top theory and the plantation model of policy design, development, and implementation are used as conceptual and practical guides to detail the corporate takeover reform experiment in the St. Louis school district. This study demonstrates that policy practices that are detrimental to the well-being of African American children continue to plague African American communities. New methods for understanding why these policy practices continue require extensive discussion and a critical need for changing the way the powers that be interface with African American interests.

In my many years as a school administrator no one has ever asked me my opinion about how to improve the schools.

—St. Louis African American school principal (2003)

In the 50-year aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, case, the United States is in many ways is more segregated racially, ideologically, and geographically than ever (Kozol 1991; Willis 1994; Jones 1997; Weiler 1998). As recently as 1999, research by Saprotio and Laureau clearly documented how European American families avoid schools that house populations that are more than 20 percent African American, despite the fact that these schools may be high performing, with excellent reputations and facilities. This research also revealed that European American parents prefer poor-performing White schools even if these schools have poorer children with lower test scores than African American schools.

Since the Brown decision, wholesale sections of the African American community have moved from poverty status to structural poverty status,¹ while as a collective, urban school systems have suffered from high teacher and administrator turnover; high student mobility; dilapidated building infrastructures; and woefully inadequate human, fiscal, and material resources to meet all of the needs of the diverse student populations. Additionally, urban school districts and children in these districts are common targets of curriculum and governance experimentation. Edison Schools, Education Alternatives, charter school proponents, and voucher school proponents, to name a few, constantly vie to secure lucrative contracts to operate individual urban schools or urban school districts. At the expense of children and their families, urban school systems are faced with an unending and vicious cycle of inadequate resources, misappropriation of resources, and experimentation.

The St. Louis, Missouri, school district is no exception, particularly with regard to these last problems. From the perception of many teachers and administrators, the district is under siege. In April 2003, the newly elected St. Louis school board conferred a $5 million contract to the New York-based turnaround corporation Alvarez and Marshall² to take over the curriculum, governance, and finances of the school district. The corporation immediately named a former Brooks Brothers executive as interim superintendent. Within a four-week period, the interim superintendent shut down sixteen schools and laid off more than 2,000 school personnel, including teachers, maintenance, security, and food service staff. He also outsourced whole service delivery departments. For example, in November 2003, with the sanction of the school board, the interim superintendent awarded a five-year, $55 million contract to Sodexho, Inc., to take over the district’s custodial and facilities division and awarded a four-month (March-June 2004), $7.2 million contract to Aramark Corporation to take over the district’s food operations. The latter contract was conferred despite knowledge that Aramark had been linked to food poisoning incidents at other educational facilities and correctional institutions across the country. In the first month of Aramark’s operation, cafeteria food service was suspended in thirteen schools in the St. Louis school district because of reported incidents of students becoming ill. Despite this, the school board has held on to the option of renewing the Aramark contract for the 2004–2005 school year at a disclosed amount of $16.3 million.

Racial tensions in the city have been severely heightened by the actions of the school board in contracting with Alvarez and Marshall, because the lay community was not involved in the decision to hire the turnaround firm, and the firm, as well as the interim superintendent, has ignored pleas from the lay community for more community deliberation in its policy decisions. Furthermore, fourteen of the sixteen schools that were shut down were located in the predominately African American north side of St. Louis. One high-performing, predominantly African American school (Waring Elementary) was shut down and sold to St. Louis University so that the university could bulldoze the school to build a basketball stadium. According to one interview account, the interim superintendent, with the backing of near-unlimited resources from Alvarez and Marshall, operated so quickly and swiftly that school teachers, administrators, and local parents did not know what hit them.

This article is about power, politics, and control in the St. Louis educational policy arena: who has it and who does not. How did the St. Louis school district become the first school district in the United States to experience governance by a corporate-turnaround firm? What political conditions precipitated the takeover? What can we learn about politics and educational policy from this kind of urban school reform strategy, and what are the implications of these lessons for future studies on school desegregation and urban school systems in America? With these key questions, in this article I explore how racism, class disparity, conflicting educational policy cultures, and financial self-interests intersect to provide the basis for what I refer to as a siege and conflict political and policy study. The plantation model of policy design, development, and implementation is used as the primary conceptual guide for this study (Jones 2003).

Researchers for the study conducted 14 one- to three-day site visits to St. Louis between June 2003 and February 2004 to engage in data collection for the siege and conflict study. One-on-one interviews (averaging one hour) were conducted with a purposeful sample³ of sixteen St. Louis school district teachers and school administrators.⁴ In addition, a survey was administered to twelve of the sixteen teacher and administrators who were interviewed. Observational and archival data were collected as researchers attended and documented two school board meetings; three central office meetings; and three community gatherings of parents, politicians, representatives of community-based organizations, religious institutions, the media, and political activists. Researchers also collected local newspaper and electronic mail accounts of the activities of the school board, corporate-takeover firm, and community activists. Pertinent internal central office memos, which were circulated within and outside the school district, were also collected from interview participants. Prior to the site visitations, the researchers developed interview, survey, and observation protocols to ensure that data were collected in a systematic and consistent fashion. Both interview and survey administrations occurred during the regular school day. Generally, survey instruments were left with the sample of teachers and administrators and retrieved on subsequent site visits.

Research Conceptual Guides and Results

Three conceptual guides were used in this study. As Dye (2002, 12) pointed out, political phenomena in the policy arena more often than not are explainable through the overlay of multiple theories, as opposed to a single theory. The first concept, siege and conflict, provides the reader with a descriptive understanding of the emotive context of the St. Louis educational policy arena with particular regard to the perceptions of the Alvarez and Marshall firm by school teachers and administrators in the study. The second concept, table top theory, serves as a guide for mapping policy structures (or institutions), multiple constituencies (or key players), and the sociopolitical context (i.e., race, class, gender, culture, finance) of the corporate-turnaround school reform strategy. With this conceptual guide, a heavy emphasis is placed on understanding the impact of both formal forces—that is, what is readily visible and on top of the policy table—as well as informal or covert forces from underneath the policy table that may help explain policy development in complex organizations such as the St. Louis school system. Once data from participants in the study were applied in accordance to table top theory, patterns emerged that seemed to show what I refers to as a plantation style of decision making in the St. Louis school community, which is the third concept for this study. Unlike most policy models, the plantation model of policy design, development, and implementation places high significance on understanding how history and issues of race affect the policy process. As Cooper, Fusarelli, and Randall (2004) reported:

The failure to consider adequately the (forces of) history and context leads to a poor conceptualization of the policy process .... (for example) How could one even consider school reform for inner-city African American students without knowing the history of slavery, Jim Crow, Reconstruction, civil rights and the culture of the black family? Yet repeatedly, policy “solutions” are offered that ignore the history and context of education problems, presenting them as if new and discovered. (6)

Siege and Conflict

Bal-Tal (2000) discussed something known as the Masada complex with regard to societies and institutions that perceive themselves to be under hegemonic attack. From ancient Jewish history, the word masada refers to the defense of the Masada from Roman attack and invasion. The Jewish defenders of Masada collectively decided to commit suicide rather than allow themselves to fall into the hands of the Roman enemy. Over time, this episode in history has come to symbolize Jewish heroism and unity in the face of the outside enemy. Today, the Masada complex is used more broadly to apply to a collective of individuals and institutions that perceives or actually is under siege by some outside force. Three elements are characteristic of groups or individuals with a Masada complex: (a) a perception element, the tendency to view the outside world as hostile or threatening to the institution; (b) an action element, occurs when the external entity engages in some form of real action that is viewed as threatening; and (c) a historical element, which centers on the tendency of the institution under siege to cite longstanding historical “proof that the external or threatening entity cannot be trusted.

In St. Louis, all three elements of the Masada complex are evident. The interim superintendent, Alvarez and Marshall, and the mayoral-driven school board are viewed by school personnel as threatening; this is the perception element. The interim superintendent and school board have adopted policies (i.e., shutdowns of schools, terminations, layoffs, and outsourcing) that are viewed as threatening; this is the action element. Last, African American school personnel have provided example after example whereby African Americans have been unjustly treated in St. Louis, and the actions of the interim superintendent, Alvarez and Marshall, and school board are viewed as a part of a long chain of negative events that have had a devastating impact on the community; this is the historical element. The revelations by interviewees that there is a tradition of assault on the African American community is well supported throughout the literature on the history of St. Louis (Lipsitz 1991; Stuart-Wells and Crain, 1997; Early 1998; Clamorgan 1999; Kim-brough and Dagen 2000).

Although St. Louis has a remarkable history of education innovation, African Americans, as a collective, have not been beneficiaries of this remarkable history. For example, St. Louis was the first locality in the United States to design, develop, and implement kindergarten. During the mid-1800s, the city was the first to systematically develop alternative educational programs for German immigrants as a method to assimilate the immigrants successfully into the St. Louis political economy. In contrast, the St. Louis school board (as with most school boards and state legislatures across the country) made it illegal to educate African American children. According to Lipsitz (1991), “No person shall keep or teach any school for the instruction of Negroes or mulattoes.” (103)

A more recent and contentious policy action felt by African Americans occurred approximately 20 years ago. The action concerned a current school board member who is a former St. Louis mayor. During his mayoral campaign he promised that he would reopen a medical hospital (Homer G. Phillips Hospital) that had a long-standing and significant history of serving the African American community.⁵ Once in office, he betrayed the African American community by refusing to reopen the hospital, which had been unjustly shut down by his predecessor.⁶

A most recent school example of siege and betrayal that is consistent with the Homer G. Phillips history is the closure of Waring Elementary School during fall 2003. According to an interviewee, “[Waring] was a high-performing school that served a predominantly African American student population and it was shut down and demolished to build a basketball arena for a predominantly white university (St. Louis University).” Interestingly enough, the former mayor and current school board member who reneged on his promise to reopen the Homer G. Phillips Hospital was reportedly deeply involved in the perceived unjust closing of Waring Elementary School.

Given the policy history just described, many teachers and administrators view the interim superintendent, Alvarez and Marshall, and the school board as comprising the outside force or hostile enemy. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Copyright Page
• Editor’s Corner
• Special Issue: The Contradiction of the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka (1954)
• Articles
• Interview
• Book Reviews
• Media Review
• Time Exposure
• Books Available List
• Call For Papers