April 25, 2003: Privatization and folklore
Why is the privatization of the Philadelphia public schools an issue of concern to the Philadelphia Folklore Project? As parents of Philadelphia public school students, as artists who work in the streets and schools of this city, and as city taxpayers, PFP board and staff members have a stake in this issue.
Why education?
We are engaged in work around public education because we believe that cultural equity and educational equity issues are closely linked.
The move to privatize our schools is just one more in a series of actions that have in the past 20 years or so altered public education in disturbing ways. Reliance on standardization and high stakes tests have helped to create a system of education that is alienating and mind-numbing for many of our students. Chronic underfunding of our schools, lack of commitment to proven and needed reforms, and lack of political will have all contributed effectively to the theft of the futures of hundreds of thousands of students in our city. As a folk arts agency, we see this disinvestment in local communities and the homogenization and disparaging of what counts as local, critical and community-based knowledge as parallel processes to those which have stripped our communities of skilled craftspeople and practitioners of meaningful collective art forms, replacing them with chain stores and shoddy mass-produced generica.
What counts?
Current approaches to measurement in the worlds of education and arts are constant reminders of how we all become tools in accomplishing this disinvestment. Standards, rules and procedures adopted in both worlds shift us away from locally-based, high-context, situation- (and person-) specific measures of significance. Etymology also traces the drift from the discourse of raising standards to that of increasing standardization. Benchmarks, now seen as a set of marks for measuring student achievement, were originally a craftsman's tool: practical marks on a landscape, measuring differences across the face of the land. Currently, ideally, when we speak of benchmarks in education, we hope to incorporate the attention to specific place that was part of the original craft and care of the surveyor. The best of constructivist education theory recognizes this in considering the variables that constitute a specific learning landscape: the students, the teachers, the classroom, the past experiences of all involved, the knowledge which is brought into the process of learning, and the subsequent knowledge gained. These different dimensions, as varied as the levels and shapes of land encountered by a surveyor, all should contribute to the establishment of benchmarks. Yet, too often, a "one size fits all" mentality creeps into our ideas and visions of school reform. Benchmarks become standardized in a way that poorly serves both measurement of land and measurement of the craft of teaching and knowledge-making.
The question of who is measuring what, and to what ends, becomes central because which schools become privatized in Pennsylvania is determined by a single test, the PSSA (Pennsylvania State School Assessment). This test determines which schools receive more money and which receive less, which districts are subject to empowerment takeover, which schools within those districts are subject to privatization, which students have access to magnet schools, which languish in underfunded neighborhood schools, and even which students graduate from high school.
The PSSA is based on a single set of criteria, measuring a single style of learning, a single set of knowledge, and a single way in which students demonstrate that knowledge. With their futures depending on these test outcomes, even teachers critical of the tests are forced to "teach to the test." The test shapes the curriculum. Teachers no longer teach constructively, engaging students around questions that derive from their worlds and experiences. The test becomes an end and not a means. (We will leave aside for the moment all of the reasons why PSSA test-driven education fails our students and deadens our teachers, classrooms, and schools. At the moment, our point is simply that a single much-criticized test becomes a tool for doling out already scarce resources, for punishment, success, and loss of independence/privatization.)
Why not privatization?
As a folklife organization, we are long-time witnesses to the costs of privatization. We work with artists and individuals representing (or descended from) pre-industrial rural, village or community traditions that, one or two or three generations ago, were early casualties of privatization of the public domain. Students of folklore history become witnesses to the tragedies of industrialism, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. We have learned about traditional folksongs, dance, and crafts both from artists who were heirs to long histories of community-made and shared arts, and by scholars who have tracked how people had been pushed off the land, made into wage slaves, by forces larger than they. Agents of "progress" have been disinclined to notice the hidden costs of the industrialization, "improvements," and "modernization" that they have pushed.
For anyone who is paying attention, there are countless examples, many well-known, and even more untold tragedies.
Over a hundred years, between 1750 and 1850, the British Parliament "enclosed" or privatized more than six million acres of open field land, fully one-quarter of the country's cultivated acres. In seizing common land formerly shared by all, Parliament widened an enormous gap between haves and have-nots, forcing people who had been self-sufficient through their share of the commons, into wage slaves. (You can read British social historians on this - for example, Eric Hobsbawn and George Rudé, in Captain Swing.) Similarly, arts that were once collective and community traditions have become commodities to be bought, owned and traded: we have witnessed how these critical and alternative arts, experiences, and histories have often been lost to people, and even more, how the erosion of the commons undercuts community life, literally diminishing the common wealth.
In this context, it is shocking to hear bureaucrats blithely proposing the privatization of our schools. With a stroke of a pen, they are turning our children into commodities, to be bought and sold, price tags on their heads: sources of income for private companies and well-connected Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). At the Folklore Project, given our involvement in public schools and once-public arts, we feel that we have a responsibility to bear witness: to encourage public discussion about the costs (and values) behind privatization, to challenge the culture of the market.
Here at the PFP, we are engaged in work around public education because of our mission. Folklore makes us believe in the importance of preserving public ownership of common and public domains. Folklore makes us believe in sustaining the capacity of communities to own and critique their own histories and experiences. And folklore stands as a trace element, modeling for us how valuing collective experience, common good, and community responsibility can remain important models for healthy societies. We view folklore not as texts or items that have lived, decontextualized, over millennia and across continents, but as continually relevant contemporary expressions, powerfully marking past struggles, and past social arrangements. (This is not a new notion, of course. Most of us don't realize the subversive and progressive readings in the most familiar folklore forms. Jack Zipes describes just such struggles in the famous Grimm's Tales, in his introduction to the Bantam edition of the Complete Tales).
The current crisis in the Philadelphia schools is about whether we believe that education is a public right of all people, or a private privilege reserved for a few. As deals are cut, with one agency taking over this school, another taking over that school, who will watch out for those left out and left behind? Who will ensure that ALL have equal access? A public system has that responsibility, although it does not always live up to it. We, as citizens have the responsibility and right to make our public systems live up to such a vision. The last few months have made it clear that privatized structures, based on business models and accountable only to shareholders, have no interest in hearing from or responding to those impacted.
The struggle against privatization of our schools resonates with local, state and international struggles about who has a right to (and control over) culture. Fundamentally, these fights are about how we preserve not only the public domain and the commons, but also multiple and diverse voices, histories, perspectives, and possibilities.
Why PFP?
To this struggle (and whenever addressing important public issues), the PFP can contribute folklore method: habits of enabling authentic voices to emerge, of engaging all interested parties, of listening for collective (and unspoken) perspectives about what is in the public interest, and of contextualizing and hearing where different voices are coming from. Our practice tells us that it is critical to ask "What is in the public interest?" with a wide sense of who counts as public, of who is (or is not) represented. Our practice also teaches us to consider how the public interest is not simply an aggregate of private interests, how the collective is different from the sum of the parts. And here, as in much of our work, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other parents and citizens, sharing responsibility for learning what is happening, for encouraging conversation and questions, for working together to preserve what is public.
This struggle also makes us wonder what will be next. In attending to the relative health of communities, we have often likened folk arts to the canary in the mine shaft, whose ability to sing is a sign of decent air, and whose silence is a sign of peril. Public education may be the next casualty as the air of equity and public responsibility is increasingly cut off in the relentless need to create markets. In advocating folk arts, we often find ourselves fighting for (and with) "the least of those," for artists and art forms marginalized by race, class, gender, immigration status. In the fight for public education, our constituency is the same. The "least of those" are the ones among us who first face the spectre of privatization and erasure.
In the face of this, we join with others to ask: What is the purpose of education? How do we, now, invest in education for liberation? How do we build movements to reclaim the right to "the commons" of 21st century urban America? How do we honor the cultural integrity of our neighborhoods and how to do we sustain these cultures meaningfully in the schools where our children learn, in the curriculum they are taught, and in the values which inform the curriculum? How can we fight for high standards without standardization, and force accountability from the adults charged with the most precious of our legacies – our children? We have no other choice than to ask these questions and to contribute what we can to this critical struggle.
Debora Kodish
Deborah Wei
Philadelphia, April 25, 2002
