Sustaining Black Captivity: A Critical Analysis of Corporate Philanthropic Discourse on

Education

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Allison Ragland

Graduate Program in Teaching and Learning

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Elaine Richardson, Advisor

Franco Barchiesi

Cynthia Tyson

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Copyrighted by

Allison Ragland

2019

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Abstract

Industrial and corporate philanthropy have historically played a role in shaping and supervising the education of African American students. This role includes promoting certain types of education for Black students and upholding certain ideologies within the

Black community, most of which are rooted in Black subservience and result in the circumvention of radical demands for Black liberation. This study examines the supervision of Black education as a form of surveillance through a critical analysis of corporate philanthropic discourse. In this dissertation, I use critical discourse analysis to explore the ways that the discourses of neoliberal education reformers from the corporate sector uphold the ideological surveillance of Black students and the role of those discourses in sustaining Black captivity. I identify three salient narratives in the discursive samples I analyzed, including A) the problem is simple; B) the solution is scientific; and C) education is a business. These narratives sustain Black captivity by acquiescing to inequitable structures and by bolstering forms of education that limit critical thinking in poor urban schools. In this study, I discuss the ideological and material implications of these narratives. I present recommendations for laying the groundwork for educational justice and Black liberation.

Keywords: Neoliberalism, critical discourse analysis, educational surveillance, corporate philanthropy, Black captivity, urban education

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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to everyone in the struggle for educational justice and Black liberation.

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank God for giving me the strength to complete my Ph.D. I also want to express infinite gratitude to my advisor Dr. E. for being extremely supportive throughout my doctoral studies; my committee members Dr. Barchiesi, Dr. Stout, and Dr.

Tyson for their encouragement; my husband Alexander for pushing me and inspiring me throughout this process; Binta for helping me so much and for being such a great friend;

Sage for keeping me focused; my family and friends Gayle, David, Lenell, James,

Ashley, Dominic, Cheryl, Valarie, Kat, and Erin for always believing in me; my ancestors for their struggle and determination; and my mentor Shemariah for introducing me to many of the opportunities that led me to where I am today.

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Vita

2014...... M.Ed. Cultural Studies in Education, Ohio University

2013...... B.S.S. Writing & Rhetoric, Ohio University

Publications

Richardson, E.B. and Ragland, A. (2018). #StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. Community Literacy Journal, 12 (2), 27-56

Fields of Study

Major Field: Teaching and Learning

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iii Acknowledgments ...... iv List of Tables ...... ix Chapter 1. Introduction: Education and Black Captivity ...... 1 Chapter Overview ...... 1 Statement of Problem and Purpose ...... 1 Repression of Black Education During Slavery ...... 5 Industrial Education ...... 10 Corporate Philanthropy ...... 16 Significance of the Problem ...... 19 Summary ...... 26 Chapter 2. Literature Review: Education and Surveillance ...... 27 Chapter Overview ...... 27 Industrial Philanthropy and Black Education ...... 27 Industrial Training ...... 28 Hampton and Tuskegee Model ...... 29 Corporate Philanthropy and Urban Education ...... 31 Venture Philanthropy ...... 32 Gates Foundation and Education Policy ...... 32 KIPP and “No excuses” education ...... 34 Gates Foundation’s Neoliberal Education Discourse ...... 36 Surveillance and Neoliberal Education Reform ...... 38 Curriculum and Ideology ...... 38 vi

Post-Civil Rights Movement Curricular Surveillance ...... 42 Accountability as Surveillance ...... 44 Curricular Narrowing and Standardization ...... 48 “Evidence-based” Programs ...... 49 Surveillance through Audit Culture ...... 52 Summary ...... 53 Chapter 3. Theoretical Framework and Methodology: The Afterlife of Slavery and Critical Discourse Analysis ...... 56 Chapter Overview ...... 56 Statement of Research and Purpose ...... 56 Theoretical Framework: The Afterlife of Slavery ...... 57 Black Captivity and Violence ...... 59 Under the White Gaze: Surveillance in the Afterlife of Slavery ...... 62 Methodological Framework: Critical Discourse Studies ...... 66 Methods of Data Generation ...... 68 Methods of Data Analysis: Critical Discourse Analysis ...... 69 Subjectivity Statement ...... 72 Trustworthiness and Methodological Considerations ...... 75 Summary ...... 76 Chapter 4. Findings and Implications: The Role of Corporate Philanthrophic Discourse in Sustaining Black Captivity ...... 77 Chapter Overview ...... 77 Implications: How does this narrative sustain Black captivity? ...... 99 Narrative #2: The solution is scientific (not structural)...... 102 Implications: How does this narrative sustain Black captivity? ...... 118 Narrative #3: Education is a Business...... 121 Implications: How does this narrative sustain Black captivity? ...... 134 Summary ...... 139 Chapter 5: Moving Toward an Education for Freedom ...... 141 Chapter Overview ...... 143 Limitations of the Study ...... 149 Recommendations for Research ...... 150 Recommendations for Practice ...... 151 vii

Concluding Thoughts ...... 158 Bibliography ...... 160 Appendix A. “What We Do” Page ...... 172 Appendix B. Full Text of Bill Gates’s Speech ...... 160

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List of Tables

Table 1. Narrative 1: Examples 1-3 ...... 80 Table 2. Narrative 1: Example 4 ...... 85 Table 3. Narrative 1: Examples 5-6 ...... 86 Table 4. Narrative 1: Examples 7-8 ...... 90 Table 5. Narrative 1: Example 9 ...... 93 Table 6. Narrative 1: Examples 10-11 ...... 94 Table 7. Narrative 1: Examples 12-13 ...... 97 Table 8. Narrative 2: Examples 1-4 ...... 104 Table 9. Narrative 2: Example 5 ...... 108 Table 10. Narrative 2: Example 6 ...... 109 Table 11. Narrative 2: Example 7 ...... 111 Table 12. Narrative 2: Example 8 ...... 112 Table 13. Narrative 2: Examples 9-12 ...... 113 Table 14. Narrative 2: Examples 13-14 ...... 116 Table 15. Narrative 3: Example 1 ...... 122 Table 16. Narrative 3: Examples 2-3 ...... 123 Table 17. Narrative 3: Example 5 ...... 127 Table 18. Narrative 3: Example 6 ...... 128 Table 19. Narrative 3: Examples 7-11 ...... 129

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Chapter 1. Introduction: Education and Black Captivity

Chapter Overview

This chapter provides the history and background of the research problems examined in this dissertation. After stating the research problem and the purpose of the research study, this chapter delves into the meaning and manifestations of Black surveillance through education and the history behind Black educational captivity. It then discusses the role that corporate philanthropists have historically played in shaping

Black education in a way that maintains the subordination of Black people.

Statement of Problem and Purpose

The purpose of this study is to critically analyze corporate philanthropic discourse in order to explore the ways that schooling operates to surveil and suppress Black students in the United States. This study questions the corporate-backed urban education reform initiatives that have functioned to curtail critical thinking amongst poor students of color. Furthermore, the purpose of this study is to provide nuance in the school-to- prison pipeline framework by theorizing the school as a repressive space in and of itself, to expand the discourse on neoliberal education reform by centering Blackness, and to investigate the implications of such reforms for Black students and communities.

Much of the current research on the repression of Black students in schools focuses on school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline. However, the curricular

1 practices that serve to mentally confine Black students need to be considered alongside the overt forms of discipline. Sojoyner (2013) problematizes the concept of the school- to-prison pipeline by arguing that schools function as a site of ideological enclosure for

Black students and that the state prison apparatus is codependent on and closely intertwined with schooling, not a separate entity that students are simply “pushed out” into. In light of Sojoyner’s argument, a major purpose of this project is to further the school-as-prison framework by explicating and exposing the various ways that Black students are kept under a strict regime of control and ideological surveillance through schooling. I draw connections between the repressive functions of schooling and the broader societal preoccupation with suppressing Blackness in order to prevent Black revolutionary thought and action.

The issue of schooling as a means to surveil and control Black students is examined through corporate philanthropic discourse and utilizes discursive samples from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a specific example. The Bill and Melinda

Gates Foundation’s donations influence urban education policy and practice in a manner similar to the ways that 20th century industrial philanthropists used their contributions to support a particular type of education for Black students in the South (Saltman, 2011).

This work necessarily considers the heightened surveillance targeting the Black community in response to Black freedom movements of the 1960s (Sojoyner, 2016).

Numerous mechanisms for controlling and surveilling the knowledge disseminated in schools emerged during the neoliberal education reform era, which followed the Black rebellions of the 1960s. This was also the time period when calls for “law and order”

2 began to permeate the political discourse, conveniently alongside de-segregation initiatives, which justified the policing, incarceration, and surveillance of African

Americans (Alexander, 2010). With this background in mind, my research questions are as follows: 1) What are the common narratives that appear in the corporate philanthropic discourse on education? 2) How does the corporate philanthropic discourse on education function to sustain Black captivity? These problems are examined through a critical discourse analysis specifically focusing on the discourse of the Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation. The Gates Foundation is used as the example because it is the most significant donor to U.S. education and plays a significant role in shaping urban education policy (Tompkins-Stange, 2016). Although the Gates Foundation was the example, their discourse reflects the broader realm of corporate philanthropic discourse.

Background: Black Educational Repression and Surveillance

Black people have long linked education with freedom (Anderson & Kharem,

2009; Sojoyner, 2016; Watkins, 2001; Williams, 2005). African Americans have historically had a strong desire for education; for us, education has been a necessary key to liberation (Anderson, 1988; Anderson & Kharem, 2009). It is because of this deep- seated connection between education and freedom that Black education has historically been considered a threat to the White supremacist social and economic structure of the

United States (Sojoyner, 2016; Watkins, 2001). Because Black freedom is not welcome in a society that was built upon and continues to depend on Black unfreedom, Whites have attempted to shape the direction of Black education throughout American history.

In the context of this study, I define unfreedom as the state of not having freedom, either

3 through coercion, laws, gratuitous violence, ideological hegemony, or other means. The

United States was born on the back of Black unfreedom through chattel slavery and continued to thrive on the captivity of Black bodies throughout its history. It is important to remember that for those who created, supported, and profited from American chattel slavery, the enslavement of Africans and their decedents was not supposed to end. Black freedom was something that was never supposed to be an issue, as slave labor was intended to be a permanent fixture American society. Thus, the notions of Black freedom and Black agency have been contested for centuries. As a result, Black people have been subjected to various forms of captivity throughout American history.

Wacquant (2001) traced the “four peculiar institutions” or major iterations of

Black unfreedom throughout U.S. history, including slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the hyperghetto/prison. These institutions have largely held Black people in a state of confinement and have been instrumental in shaping Black life in general, whether or not an individual Black person was enslaved or free, imprisoned, or physically residing in the ghetto. They have also had profound economic and social implications, including isolating Black people, strengthening White identity, and providing a steady stream of cheap or free labor.

The next section of this chapter offers historical context of attempts to thwart or control Black education by describing the prohibition of Black education during slavery, the role that industrial philanthropists played in shaping Black education in the

Postbellum period, and the role that foundations continue to play in influencing education for African American students.

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Repression of Black Education During Slavery

During American chattel slavery, slaves risked their lives in order to get some semblance of an education. Enslaved Africans and African Americans used literacy to assert the agency that their owners and the rest of White society denied them. Knowing that freedom of the mind through literacy was connected to freedom from bondage, slaves placed a high value on education and risked being sold away from their loved ones, being beaten, or facing other forms of torture for learning how to read and write

(Williams, 2005). Anderson and Kharem (2009) made this point clear in their study of

Black education as a practice of freedom during slavery:

becoming literate as a slave was not only criminal, it was revolutionary, in that it

enabled an enslaved person to reclaim a sense of humanity in face of inhumane

circumstances and develop skills of resistance and liberation. (p. xii)

The act of Black people learning disrupted the Black-White, slave-planter relationship in many ways, which is why White slave owners found it necessary to prohibit Black education. Educated slaves would have made it difficult to maintain myths of White intellectual superiority, Black inferiority and shiftlessness, and beliefs that Black people were not of the human race (Anderson & Kharem, 2009). These narratives were necessary in order for Whites to justify their actions of mass kidnapping and enslavement. Educated Blacks created cognitive dissonance in the minds of Whites who insisted that Black people were only fit to be slaves.

Sojoyner (2016) elaborated on the conflicts between Black education and Whites’ attempts to control Black people:

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With respect to Black people in the United States, the notion of education was in

direct opposition to the lustful greed of a predominantly White male landholding

base that saw Black bodies as a source of cheap labor and vast

exploitation. Contrarily, various manifestations of Black freedom movements

have envisioned education as a strategic standpoint to break from the chains of

dogged oppression . . . Black education in the United States is rooted within a

general historic tension between the liberatory desires of Black communities and

the attempted reinscription of Black subservience via the economic, political, and

gendered demands of a racial capitalist state apparatus. (pp. 148-149)

The education of slaves threatened the “peculiar institution” because slavery depended on the complete physical and mental domination of the enslaved (Hartman,

2007). Enslaved Africans could not easily be brainwashed into believing that they were an inferior race or species naturally predisposed to servitude if they knew how to read, write, and think critically. The fact that literacy provided slaves with a clear path toward critically thinking about their lives and the extreme injustices they faced made Whites fear that Black education would lead to revolts (Williams, 2005). Williams (2005) discussed other ways that the literacy of enslaved Africans disrupted the institution of slavery:

Access to the written word, whether scriptural or political, revealed a world

beyond bondage in which African Americans could imagine themselves to think

and behave as they chose. Literacy provided the means to write a pass to

freedom, to learn of abolitionist activities, or to read the Bible. Because it most

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often happened in secret, the very act of learning to read and write subverted the

master-slave relationship and created a private life for those who were owned by

others. Once literate, many used this hard-won skill to disturb the power relations

between master and slave, as they fused their desire for literacy with their desire

for freedom. (p. 7)

Both Whites and Blacks were aware that education was an important key to Black freedom. This is why enslaved Africans risked their lives learning how to read and why

Whites attempted to prevent Black education (Sojoyner, 2016). Walker (1830) made it clear that Whites were well aware that Black education posed a direct threat to their ability to enslave Black people:

For coloured people to acquire learning in this country, makes tyrants quake and

tremble on their sandy foundation. Why, what is the matter? Why, they know that

their infernal deeds of cruelty will be made known to the world. Do you suppose

one man of good sense and learning would submit himself, his father, mother,

wife and children, to be slaves to a wretched man like himself, who, instead of

compensating him for his labours, chains, hand-cuffs and beats him and family

almost to death, leaving life enough in them, however, to work for, and call him

master? No! no! he would cut his devilish throat from ear to ear, and well do

slave-holders know it. The bare name of educating the coloured people, scares

our cruel oppressors almost to death. (p. 37)

The threat that Black learning posed to White supremacy meant that during slavery, reading and writing were explicitly prohibited among the enslaved. Slave codes

7 detailed punishments for teaching enslaved people how to read or write, which included violent punishments for enslaved and free people of color:

AN ACT TO PREVENT ALL PERSONS FROM TEACHING SLAVES TO

READ OR WRITE, THE USE OF FIGURES EXCEPTED

Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excite dis-

satisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion, to the

manifest injury of the citizens of this State:

Therefore,

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, and

it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That any free person, who shall

hereafter teach, or attempt to teach, any slave within the State to read or write, the

use of figures excepted, or shall give or sell to such slave or slaves any books or

pamphlets, shall be liable to indictment in any court of record in this State having

jurisdiction thereof, and upon conviction, shall, at the discretion of the court, if a

White man or woman, be fined not less than one hundred dollars, nor more than

two hundred dollars, or imprisoned; and if a free person of color, shall be fined,

imprisoned, or whipped, at the discretion of the court, not exceeding thirty nine

lashes, nor less than twenty lashes.

II. Be it further enacted, That if any slave shall hereafter teach, or attempt

to teach, any other slave to read or write, the use of figures excepted, he or she

may be carried before any justice of the peace, and on conviction thereof, shall be

sentenced to receive thirty nine lashes on his or her bare back. (Act Passed by the

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General Assembly of the State of North Carolina at the Session of 1830—1831,

retrieved from http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/slaveprohibit.html)

Education was so dangerous to slavery that everyone involved with the education of a slave was subjected to punishment. The penalty of whipping for enslaved and free Black people was designed to further intimidate and dehumanize them so that they would stay in their place. Furthermore, laws and violent punishments that aimed to prevent Black literacy served as a form of surveillance for Black communities. What slaves legally could or could not learn was under the constant scrutiny of their White slave owners and other Whites who did not own slaves. The prohibition of Black gatherings was based on the fear that such meetings could be used to teach reading and writing to the enslaved.

This lack of freedom of assembly functioned to surveil Black activities and place slaves’ actions under a panoptic White gaze. Even when slaves’ efforts to learn how to read during Sabbath schools or in various hiding places escaped the eyes of Whites, there was the constant threat that they would be discovered and punished. This threat of discovery, the constant fear of being watched and monitored, was a system of surveillance that deterred many slaves from learning how to read and write.

The intersections of White violence and Black demands for freedom, in this case freedom through education, has been echoed throughout the various eras of U.S. history.

Even after the formal abolition of slavery, demands for a decent education for Black students have been met by violent resistance. The connection between education and

Black freedom did not disappear after the end of chattel slavery, and neither did attempts to keep Black people uneducated or undereducated and consequently unfree. The next

9 section addresses post-Civil War attempts to control Black education in order to circumvent Black demands for freedom through industrial ideologies.

Industrial Education

During the Reconstruction period, Black people, particularly the formerly enslaved, were at the forefront of the fight for public education in the South (Anderson,

1988; Anderson & Kharem, 2007; Watkins, 2001; Williams, 2005). After much resistance from elite White southerners, common schools were established for Black and

White students across the nation. However, these schools were not created in the interest of empowering oppressed students to think critically or educating them in a way that reflected their own experiences. Instead, schools functioned to disseminate a hegemonic ideology that was safe for the maintenance of White supremacist capitalism (Apple,

2004; Watkins, 2001). White, wealthy philanthropists from the North generally favored an education for Black students that was primarily vocational and avoided a classical, liberal arts curriculum that would have pushed African American students to think critically.

In the early days of African American common schools, northern industrialists rushed to use their philanthropic foundations to gain control of Black education because they wanted to establish a type of education that would allow them to continue exploiting

Black people for cheap labor (Sojoyner, 2016; Watkins, 2001). The Ford Foundation, the

Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation were active in shaping Black education during this era; they functioned to control and monitor the knowledge that

Black students were receiving in school (Watkins, 2001). Sojoyner (2016) contended

10 that “the establishment of education for Black people ensured their subjugation within a

White supremacist logic of social, political, and economic organization” (p. 164). This is not to say that the only interest that the White, wealthy philanthropists had was economic; some of them were also White supremacists who believed in the inferiority of

Black people (Watkins, 2001).

Industrial education for Black people was the northern industrial business community’s primary solution to the “problem” of Black education. Northern industrialists donated large sums of money to industrial training programs. Black students attended these industrial training schools to learn how to be domestic servants, manual laborers, and other positions on the most exploited rungs of the workforce

(Anderson, 1988, Watkins, 2001). These jobs did not require much of an education and were jobs that Black people did during slavery without going to school. Thus, the industrial education project was more of a social replication process than a true education, ensuring that Black people were only educated to fill those subservient roles.

Industrial philanthropists continued to push for industrial training for African

Americans even as the economy was becoming more mechanized. In the early 1900s, the

Hampton and Tuskegee models epitomized Black industrial education even as the need for manual labor subsided. These institutions emphasized vocational training for African

Americans while promoting White, middle class ideologies such as thrift, individualism, and personal responsibility. The Hampton model also emphasized teacher training so that its graduates could propagate the hegemonic ideologies that they learned to the masses of Black people (Watkins, 2001). These ideologies were safe for the maintenance

11 of White supremacist capitalism, as they focused on individual behavior and uplift through hard work instead of radical transformations of the oppressive society (Sojoyner,

2016).

Northern industrial philanthropists also supported vocational education because it indoctrinated Black students with a worldview that equated freedom with work

(Sojoyner, 2016). This posed several problems for Black demands for freedom, as

Sojoyner (2016) articulated:

First, students who matriculated from these industrial schools were taught to be

ideological managers of the masses of impoverished Blacks who knew that waged

labor was a far cry from freedom. In order to counter the radical demands of

Black freedom, it was important to indoctrinate a stratum of Black southerners to

the strivings of a capitalist enterprise. . . Second, the production of a class of

Black people who were married to the capitalist system created yet another

obstacle to dismantle the myriad of repressive processes that allowed for

capitalism to be so oppressive. Thus, already faced with a dogged work schedule

and the financial exploitation of a sharecropper’s existence, there was now a class

of Black southerners who believed that this very system was the key to Black

freedom. . . Third, the linkage of freedom with work as posited by an industrial

education, coercively silenced the one group, Black southerners who, through

firsthand experience, sought to undo the capitalist nightmare. (pp. 165-166)

The ideological orientation that equated Black freedom with work perverted the meaning of freedom and subdued more radical strivings for freedom. It did not question

12 the capitalist system; instead, it insisted that capitalism was the key to Black liberation. Black people also needed to remain obedient and complacent in order for them to unquestioningly accept their position in the bottom rungs of society and to perform the most physically demanding manual and service labor for meager wages and no protections (Sojoyner, 2016; Watkins, 2001). Furthermore, Watkins (2001) argued that

Industrial and vocational education taught manual skills at a time when machinery

and mass production were clearly the wave of the future. Mechanization would

clearly render manual labor obsolete in industrialized 20th century America.

Teaching manual labor. . . would condemn Black Americans to subservience and

backwardness and hardly would contribute to the leveling and equalizing of

society. (p. 134)

Thus, industrial education practically ensured Black subservience instead of fulfilling its promises that work would lead to freedom while educating African Americans for roles that were increasingly becoming outmoded.

Inherent within industrial education was the notion of racial uplift. Industrial education emphasized the adaption of White, middle class norms and values as a means for uplifting the Black race. This ideology was also embraced by many Black people who took on the “civilizing” mission of helping to assimilate their kinfolk migrating from the South (Wolcott, 2001). Racial uplift ideology suggested that if Black people just learned how to assimilate into White American culture through their behavior, morals, and values, the race would lift itself up. Thrift, hard work, individualism, personal

13 responsibility, temperance, and prudish standards for sexual behavior permeated racial uplift ideology (Wolcott, 2001). If Black people learned how to behave properly, they would eventually prove to Whites that they were ready for freedom and full participation in society. This ideology reflected gradualism instead of radical demands for freedom, promising that freedom would come slowly but surely. This view was articulated by

Booker T. Washington, who believed that

neither blacks nor Whites were ready for Afro-American equality. The freedmen

and their descendants required time and guidance to equip themselves for the

responsibilities of citizenship, while Whites needed evidence of blacks’

worthiness of inclusion in civil society. (Reed, 2008, p.1)

This ideology was problematic in relation to Black demands for freedom because it put all of the responsibility on Black people to become “acceptable enough” for equality while their rights and freedoms were continuously being denied. It pathologized

Black people and buttressed stereotypes of uncivilized, immoral African Americans who just needed to work harder and pull themselves up by their bootstraps in order to be accepted by White society. It also removed culpability from anti-Black social structures and placed it on Black people for not working hard enough or not acting White enough.

The narrative of gradualism buttressed by industrial education and racial uplift ideologies also quelled radical Black demands for freedom, because Black people were being told that things would eventually get better. They just needed to prove that they were ready for freedom and full citizenship. Hearing this, one might have been less

14 compelled to fight for immediate liberation because they were told that it will ultimately happen if they work hard, straighten their hair, and go to church.

The ideologies of racial uplift, gradualism, thrift, and other White, middle class values that were promoted through industrial education served as a form of surveilling

Black ideologies and communities. The aim was to convince enough Black people that hard work was the answer instead of a radical transformation of a White supremacist society. This acted as a means of thwarting radical Black organizing and keeping African

Americans away from the critical awakenings that would have caused large-scale revolts. That is not to say that all radical demands for freedom were effectively removed from the Black community, but these ideologies did create significant barriers to such demands.

Important to this background is that Black education has historically depended upon the demands of those with money, who happen to be in the capitalist class that favors Black subservience in order to maintain its own hegemony. Even though northern missionary societies and Black church and community groups have been a major player in establishing a well-rounded education for Black students, they have had a limited capacity to establish Black schools on a wide scale because of their struggles to secure adequate funding (Anderson, 1988). On the other hand, wealthy businessmen have had the financial means and the political power to build schools and shape educational policy on a large scale.

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Corporate Philanthropy

Philanthropists who made their fortunes through business and who currently donate to education are referred to as corporate philanthropists throughout this study.

The foundations that they run are referred to as corporate foundations. Corporate philanthropists have a similar capacity to shape educational policy as their industrialist predecessors because of several factors: 1) The massive endowments that their foundations have, which allows them to donate directly to particular educational programs that fit their ideologies; 2) their ability to shape the educational discourse through media; and 3) their close ties to politicians grants them immense political power in influencing educational policy. Corporate philanthrophic discourse is one aspect of neoliberal education discourse. In the context of this study, neoliberal education discourse is a discourse based in the neoliberal ideologies of market-based reform, deregulation of businesses, extreme individualism, and privatization of all public institutions. Corporate philanthropic discourse functions to blame problems within the

Black community on the victims of centuries of oppression instead of pointing the finger at the White supremacist system. Moreover, corporate philanthropy discourse reflects the continued supervision and surveillance of Black education by promoting certain ideologies while restricting others and by influencing the purposes and goals of education for African American students.

The Walton Family Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are only a few examples of foundations that have donated large sums of money to urban education reform. However, as will be discussed

16 later in this study, many of these dollars have gone into initiatives that have actually undermined the system of public education instead of strengthening it (Saltman, 2011).

The Gates Foundation is the focus of this study, as it is the single biggest corporate funder to education in the United States. Aside from the foundation’s work in global health and agriculture initiatives, its endowment is used to write grants for U.S. educational programs, research, and advocacy to shape education policy (Tompkins-

Stange, 2016). In the early 2000s, the Gates Foundation spent most of its energy and money in the realm of education on small-school initiatives, in which large comprehensive high schools were transformed to smaller learning environments.

However, this initiative did not achieve the results the foundation’s officials were seeking, so the foundation eventually abandoned the this project (Tompkins-Stange,

2016). Since 2006, the Gates Foundation has been pushing for

comprehensive systemic standards based school reform efforts that aligned with

federal and state policy measures under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, with

a focus on teacher quality-related reforms and standardized state curricular

standards and assessments. (Tompkins-Stange, 2016, p.22)

As this passage suggests, the Gates Foundation’s interventions in education have largely reflected the business-derived practices of standardization and quantitative measurement through assessment. These interventions view education as a business, in which teachers are incentivized and provided merit pay based on their students’ performance on standardized tests while students are seen as customers who are obtaining the commodity of knowledge.

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The Gates Foundation, as well as the other corporate foundations, view the purpose of education in economic terms, and this characterizes the broader neoliberal discourse on education. The focus on economic “outcomes” is the centerpiece of neoliberal education discourse. Students are supposed to go to school so that they can compete in the global economy, or in the words of the Gates Foundation, “obtain a credential with labor market value” (https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/US-

Program/K-12-Education). This language is absent of any discussion of education for the purpose of personal enrichment, mental liberation, or democratic engagement. This discourse also plays a role in surveilling poor Black and Brown students, who are the main targets of urban education reform initiatives, by naming the terms of what education should mean for these students. Under this logic, education should translate into jobs for the individual, not liberation for everyone.

Regardless of the Gates Foundation’s intentions, the policies, reforms, and research that it funds reflect top-down and neoliberal approaches to addressing educational issues. It also promotes certain ideologies within urban education, such as individual merit and hard work, while ignoring the underlying structural issues of economic exploitation and racism that have resulted in differences in academic achievement between different groups of students. Gates’s rhetoric insists that the biggest indicator of school performance is quality teachers while omitting structural, non- school factors that impact student performance.

The Gates Foundation’s discourses are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, but it is important to note that its interventions and the interventions of other corporate

18 foundations reflect the supervision and surveillance of Black education. The foundation’s hand in decision making, creating standards, and even funding community/parent advocacy groups means that urban educational change is still taking place under a White, capitalist gaze. The Gates Foundation and others have the power to determine the focus and goals of education reform and to drive the discourse about what the problems of education are, which disallows teachers, parents, and students from shaping the discourse. The Gates Foundation even plays a significant role in determining what knowledge is important for students to know. The Gates Foundation claims to know what will mitigate the problems within urban education, but its solutions do not include a critical analysis of power. Gates, a wealthy White man, purporting to have solutions to a problem that disproportionately impacts people of color reflects a colonizer relationship in and of itself.

Significance of the Problem

This research problem is significant in that it delves into oft-taken-for-granted dominant discourses and theorized schooling as a repressive space in and of itself for

Black students. That is not to say that education does not have emancipatory potential, but the current education system as it stands operates to suppress Black freedom. This problematizes the sector of education research that focuses on how to best “reach”

African American students by highlighting the impossibility of a decent education for

Black children under the current societal structure. This research brings forth the importance of academic and popular calls for establishing educational paradigms that work to dismantle anti-Black systems.

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Furthermore, this study offers a racial analysis within the research on neoliberal education reforms. It examines the implications that corporate-backed neoliberal reforms have for Black students specifically. Since most of the reform efforts have disproportionately had a negative impact on urban schools with majority students of color

(Lipman, 2009), an analysis of the consequences of neoliberal reforms carried out by corporate think-tanks and foundations that does not center race is insufficient. A race- neutral analysis ignores the historic efforts of the capitalist state and its corporate interests to prevent the awakening of Black consciousness. That is not to suggest that others have not been harmed by the overemphasis on standardization, testing, anti- intellectual and anti-critical approaches to knowledge that characterize neoliberal education reform. Much of U.S. population, regardless of race, is without a doubt educated in a way that reproduces blind patriotism and uncritical acceptance of capitalist consumption. Poor students of all races are victims of inadequate schooling. However, it must be acknowledged that urban schools that serve students of color are the primary focus of education reform. They are particularly vulnerable to sanctions, school restructuring, and restrictive curricula.

The mindless pedagogies imposed on Black and Brown students in poor, urban schools are an example of what Freire (1970) called the “banking model” of education. In banking education, students are treated as empty receptacles for the teacher to deposit information into. Students passively receive fragments of information instead of actively partaking in the learning process. Banking education prevents students from gaining the tools that they need to critically understand the world they live in. Freire

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(1970) argued that this type of education serves the interests of the oppressor by changing the consciousness of the oppressed and making them adapt to their oppression instead of gaining the critical consciousness necessary to transform the society they live in. Freire

(1970) explained:

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative

power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who

care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed . . . they react

almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the

critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality . . . the interests of

the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the

situation which oppresses them’; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to

that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.” (pp. 73-74)

Banking education, which is exemplified by the teach-to-the-test, scripted pedagogical methods that the education reform movement has forced upon Black students, sucks the life out of education for these students. Students are fed a distorted view of reality, which causes them to accept and become complicit in their oppression

(Freire, 1970). They are taught compliance and docility so that they will be less likely to challenge their oppressors. Woodson (1933) echoed this view in The Miseducation of the

Negro, arguing that

. . . the Negro’s mind has been brought under the control of the oppressor. The

problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved. When you

21

control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. . . He will

find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it” (p. xiii).

This is why Gilliom (2010) referred to the reforms under No Child Left Behind as a conservative victory. Standardization under NCLB defined and regulated what students needed to know for the tests, making sure that they did not have the time to learn about anything that challenged the dominant ideology. Even though No Child Left Behind was replaced by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, there is still an overemphasis on standardized tests. Students in poor, urban schools that focus entirely on testing are unlikely to learn about topics that would cause them to question the world they live in. When the vast majority of classroom time is spent on test prep, there is no need to worry about students gaining a critical consciousness in school.

In practice, the highly regimented practices and anti-intellectual methods that teachers use in urban classrooms in the name of test prep has detrimental effects on students’ minds. Sojoyner (2016) gave an example of these effects in the enrichment class that he taught. Students in the class were expected to fill out a number pattern chart, but participation started to decline when they got to the higher numbers in the sequence. In an attempt to increase participation, Sojoyner divided the class into teams and made the lesson into a competition. More students started participating at first, but when they got to the higher numbers in the pattern this time, students began copying one of their classmate’s answers and writing it down so that their team could win. It became clear that “students were rewarded for compliance, not critical thought. They received grades for turning in the correct answers; the process of reaching the answers was

22 irrelevant and therefore not valued by the students nor the teachers” (Sojoyner, 2016, p.

176). The impact on these students was that they were not actually attempting to grasp the concept. Their mental energies were spent trying to get the right answer even if they did not understand why this answer was correct.

Kozol (2005) wrote about a similar phenomenon of students just wanting to get the answer and not comprehending what they are learning. Every exercise in the Success for All program, which was used in the school he observed, had a specific name.

“Meaningful sentences” and “word mastery” are two examples of the official vocabulary posted all over the classroom walls as part of this program. When Kozol asked the students what these words meant, they were unable to explain it. When asked the meaning of the word “meaningful,” one student replied, “. . . you have to box the word you got . . . and underline it in your sentence” (p. 83). Another student responded, “You have to put a starred word in the sentence” (p. 83). When Kozol asked the students what was the meaning of “word mastery,” another phrase that they frequently see and use as part of this prepackaged program, a student responded, “if you’re told to memorize something and you memorize it right” (p. 83).

This echoes what I’ve seen in my previous experience as a fifth grade teacher in an urban school with a 100 percent African American student body. The school in which

I worked used a scripted Direct Instruction (DI) program for reading and math. The scripted reading curriculum did not teach the students to read or think critically; they only had to repeat the definitions of irrelevant, obsolete vocabulary words in unison. The math curriculum was a scripted recurrence of addition facts, subtraction facts,

23 multiplication facts, and division facts that students has to memorize and repeat. No multiple-step problems, higher order thinking practice, or even basic fifth grade math skills such as fractions or decimals were included in the lessons. When I abandoned the scripted curriculum and decided to do word problems with my class, a student said, “I can’t do this because there are more than two numbers.” When I asked the class to think about what they needed to do in order to solve the word problems, most of my students did not actually think about it. They would rush to give an answer, and when I asked how they came to that answer, most of them said that they didn’t know, they were just guessing. They were so used to mindless repetition and memorization that they were not accustomed to using their critical capacities to solve a problem. Many students’ abilities improved throughout the school year, but this is still a scary reality of what mindless instruction does to students’ minds. It is important to deconstruct these pedagogies, the ideologies and discourses behind them, and other interventions that some corporate foundations support that buttresses anti-intellectual educational practices.

It serves the interests of the White supremacist capitalist state and the corporate billionaires who control it to keep Black students comliant, accepting of their oppression, and unable to recognize their own oppression instead of empowered to change the conditions of structural injustice. The scripted, highly regimented lessons and classroom practices frequently utilized in poor, majority-Black schools teach students obedience by rewarding the right answers while devaluing the “why” behind the answers. Banking model instruction focuses on memorizing words and facts instead of gaining any in-depth knowledge or learning how to apply this information. The macro-level result is the

24 widespread mental incarceration of Black students and the neutralization of Black rebellion. If too many Black people had an empowering education that fomented conscientization and Black power, it would pose a threat to the White supremacist capitalist state as seen during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. These prescribed lessons that inhibit Black thought and capacity for critical consciousness are the neoliberal remedy for preventing widespread Black consciousness and resistance to structural injustice.

The chokehold that corporate philanthropists have over the current urban education scene is representative of a larger theme of Black captivity in that they act to surveil and suppress Black epistemologies, students, and communities. The surveillance of Black schools and Black students is achieved through standards, tests, sanctions, and funding schemes tied to the political interests of corporate billionaires and the White supremacist capitalist state. The discourses that corporate philanthropists use is cloaked in progressive rhetoric, touting slogans that consist of words like “opportunity” and

“empowerment.” However, these discourses are detrimental for demands of Black freedom, as they make the repressive and regressive programs and policies that they support seem as though they are helping the Black community when they are actually detrimental to it. The ideologies and policies that are supported by the discourse of the

Gates Foundation upholds a system that preserves Black captivity and the supervision of

Black communities as a whole.

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Summary

This chapter provided background information and historical context of the issue of Black captivity through education. The following chapter continues this discussion by reviewing the literature on the use of education as a form of surveillance and the role that philanthropy has played in shaping Black education toward subservience and containment. The literature review covers the themes of industrial education for Black students and the role that industrial philanthropists have played in crafting such an education. It also addresses corporate-backed education reforms under neoliberalism and the role that they play in the ideological policing of poor students. Furthermore, the literature review addresses the role that corporate philanthropy has played in upholding harmful educational practices and ideologies.

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Chapter 2. Literature Review: Education and Surveillance

Chapter Overview

This literature review examines the scholarly discourse regarding the role of education in surveilling students’ ideologies and actions. It pays specific attention to the literature that addresses the ways that education has been used to restrict Black freedom.

The topics included in this review are industrial education for Black students, surveillance via neoliberal education reform, and the role of corporate philanthropy is controlling urban education.

Industrial Philanthropy and Black Education

Industrial philanthropy has played a major role in the establishment and the direction of common schools for African Americans (Anderson, 1988; Finkenbine, 1994;

Watkins, 2001). Industrial philanthropy refers to the philanthropic foundations of industrialists who made their fortunes from industries such as steel and oil, such as the

Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. Saltman (2011) asserted that industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie gave money to social causes out of a sense of moral obligation, although their ideologies played a role in maintaining hegemony.

It is important to note that much of the research addressing background on the relationship between industrial philanthropy and Black education focused on the

South. This is largely because prior to the Great Migration, the overwhelming majority of African Americans in the United States lived in the southern states (Anderson, 1988).

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Because most African Americans lived in the South during the time common schools were being established, “Black education” in the South was essentially Black education in general. For Black students in the North, northern racism frequently resulted in segregated and unequal schools (Mohraz, 1979).

Industrial Training

Anderson (1988) argued that northern industrialists overwhelmingly supported industrial training for Black students instead of a classical liberal arts education. Foundations such as the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the

Rockefeller Foundation utilized their money in attempts to mitigate some of the social ills that were ironically created by capitalism (Watkins, 2001). Watkins (2001) argued that the industrial philanthropists’ solutions made the society safer for capitalism by slightly lessening the disastrous effects of poverty, exploitation, and racism instead of promoting any changes that would have fundamentally altered the unequal power relations behind those issues.

Northern foundations supported vocational education for Black students by building and funding industrial schools and colleges. In these vocational schools, Black students were trained to do tasks similar to those they had done during slavery, including domestic work, manual labor, and agricultural labor (Anderson, 1988; Finkenbine, 1994;

Watkins, 2001). They were also indoctrinated with ideologies emphasizing hard work, thrift, and gradualism instead of learning critical thinking skills that could have led to rebellion (Sojoyer, 2016). Northern philanthropists supported industrial education for

Black students even as Black students aimed for higher professions and as new

28 technologies were rendering many manual labor occupations obsolete (Anderson,

1988).

DuBois (1973) insisted that solely focusing on industrial education limited Black people’s ability to fully realize and assert their humanity. He foresaw that the Hampton idea and the jobs it was training African Americans for were becoming obsolete and rendering the Black community disenfranchised, denigrated, and excluded from the rest of society. For him, a liberal education (especially for the “talented tenth” of Black people, whose responsibility it would be to uplift the rest of the race) rather than industrial training was a major key to actualizing Black freedom. He argued,

. . . unless we develop our full capabilities, we cannot survive. If we are to be

trained grudgingly and suspiciously; trained not with reference to what we can be,

but with sole reference to what somebody wants us to be; if instead of following

the methods pointed out by the accumulated wisdom of the world for the

development of full human power, we simply are trying to follow the line of least

resistance and teach black men only such things and by such methods as are

momentarily popular, then my fellow teachers, we are going to fail and fail

ignominiously in our attempt to raise the black race to its full humanity and with

that failure falls the fairest and fullest dream of a great united humanity. (p. 10)

Hampton and Tuskegee Model

Although Hampton and Tuskegee were pioneering spaces for Black higher education, the Hampton and Tuskegee models of education trained Black college students in vocations that mirrored slavery. Hampton emphasized teacher training so that Black

29 leaders could disseminate socially conservative, gradualist views to the masses of Black people (Watkins, 2001). The Hampton and Tuskegee programs were widely supported by northern industrialists and played a major role in the establishment of a Black middle class that would not rock the boat. The overwhelming emphasis that industrial philanthropists placed on industrial education attempted to ensure that Black people would not adopt ideologies that ran counter to the capitalist system that wealthy industrialists depended on for their fortunes. The focus on labor education for Black students instead of a liberal or critical education functioned to keep Black students from exposure to ideas that would have caused them to question their oppression (Sojoyner,

2016).

As mentioned in the first chapter, African American schools were not established in the absence of Black agency. African American educators such as Booker T.

Washington and Mary McLeod Bethune founded their own schools. Black benevolent and religious societies also started their own educational efforts. However, due to limited funds, the scope of the schools started by Black church and community groups was often limited. On the other hand, northern industrialists had vast amounts of money at their disposal to influence education, and many of them spent millions in order to shape the direction of African American education (Anderson, 1988; Watkins, 2001). Industrial education efforts spearheaded by African Americans were more likely to receive financial support from northern industrialists, as opposed to liberal education models.

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Corporate Philanthropy and Urban Education

Even after the industrial model of vocational training was largely abandoned due to the demands of Black students who wanted more from their education, foundations continued to play a major role in shaping the direction of Black education (Anderson,

1988). The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 resulted in the de jure de- segregation of schools across the nation, but de facto segregation remained and even intensified in some areas. Large, urban districts that serve mostly students of color, like the communities in which they exist, are often underfunded and under resourced (Kozol,

2005; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Morris, 2014).

It is ironic that there was no “education crisis” until Black students started being allowed (legally, not always socially) into White schools. Suddenly, right in line with the

Black awakenings of the 1960s, urban education became a “crisis.” It was not a crisis in underfunding, racist housing laws, or disinvestment from Black communities; instead, it was a crisis in inept teachers and dysfunctional schools. The solution to this problem, according to the politicians and corporate players who shaped modern education reform, was more standards, tests, and accountability (Grey, 2011).

Corporations have played a major role in the current educational reform era by developing policy, influencing the discourse, and through philanthropy. A few examples of corporate foundations that are active in education reform in the United States include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Eli and

Edythe Broad Foundation (Klonsky, 2011).

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Venture Philanthropy

Saltman (2010, 2011) pointed out that the Gates Foundation and the Walton

Family Foundation have contributed vast sums of money to urban education reform. Instead of using their funds to strengthen the system of public education or to make it more equitable for historically marginalized students, these foundations have donated to privatization efforts such as charter schools and vouchers. Saltman (2010,

2011) referred to the philanthropy of modern foundations such as the Gates Foundation as “venture philanthropy,” meaning that the philanthropists see their contributions as part of a business plan and that they expect a return on their investment.

Gates Foundation and Education Policy

Speaking to the immense power that a few powerful players have in influencing public education, Hess (2005) contended that

It seems safe to estimate that the (Gates) foundation is providing well over two-

thirds of all philanthropic giving to high school reform, creating the possibility

that one donor will be largely responsible for the shape of modern day high

schools” (p. 300)

Because of their large endowments and ability to supplement (and sometimes dwarf) the federal government’s education spending, corporate foundations have an immense amount of power in molding education reform discourse and policy. Saltman

(2010) argued that corporate foundations have shaped educational policy and discourse in ways that favor competition, privatization, and “business language, values, and ways of

32 seeing” (p. 90) instead of in ways that challenge the systems of oppression and power imbalances that resulted in the “achievement gap” in the first place.

Klonsky (2011) also argued that the Gates Foundation plays a disproportionate role in influencing educational policy. “Although the foundation, which is personally run by Bill Gates, has at times provided badly needed resources where public funding can’t or won’t, that funding has often brought with it the disempowerment of local communities and an overreliance on the whims, predispositions, or simple misunderstandings of the world’s richest man” (Klonsky, 2011, p. 23).

Klonsky (2011) contended that the overreliance on private philanthropy to fund education results in the destruction of communities. Klonsky cited the example of the now defunct Manual High School, a majority-Black high school in Denver, Colorado, that received grants from the Gates Foundation to restructure their high school. With the assistance of a Gates Foundation grant, the school was restructured into various “small schools” without any input from teachers, parents, or students. In this case and many others, the top-down changes and the lack of democratic decision making caused teachers, parents, and students to feel disrespected and to resist the changes. The funding for the “small schools” initiative was eventually terminated by the Gates Foundation in favor of closing “underperforming” schools altogether and outsourcing the students who attended those schools (Hursh, 2011; Klonsky, 2011). The school in Denver was shut down, which meant the loss of a source of stability for that community. The students who attended the high school before it shut down fared poorly after the shutdown; many of them did not graduate because of the sudden and extreme changes to their schools,

33 communities, and lives. This is only one example of the adverse effects of undemocratic, top-down, corporate style reforms in urban communities.

Hursh (2011) argued that the Gates Foundation’s interventions in health, agriculture, and education focus solely on technology and the free market to solve the issues of disease, hunger, and unequal education. The Gates Foundation’s interventions and the ideologies behind them are harmful overall, in that they ignore larger structural issues and overlook the context of these issues in favor of coming up with technocratic

“solutions” to problems that are caused by the underlying problems of exploitation, economic inequality, and oppressive societal structures. Furthermore, the top-down nature of the foundation’s interventions undermines the knowledge of people who are active in the fields of education, agriculture, and medicine and by imposing solutions without much democratic interaction with those most impacted (Hursh, 2011).

KIPP and “No excuses” education

Many corporate foundations have focused their efforts on the establishment of charter schools (Fabricant & Fine, 2012). KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are a popular option that emerged as an answer to the problem of urban education (Horn,

2011, 2016). KIPP schools are characterized by draconian disciplinary codes, long school days, and extra in-school time during the summer. According to Horn (2011), The

Gates Foundation is a major supporter of KIPP schools. KIPP is one of the most prominent networks of charter schools in the United States, and it is based on the “no excuses” model of education.

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The premise of “no excuses” schools is that there is “no excuse” for the achievement gap between affluent White students and poor students of color. These programs operate on the assumption that Black and Brown students just need to work harder in order to achieve academically. Hard work, in addition to increased structure and discipline that they presumably lack, will help them do better in school and raise their standardized test scores. This premise relies on stereotypes of Black indolence and shiftlessness. It also lacks structural critique of the racialized poverty and anti-Blackness that results in achievement gaps by blaming Black communities and cultures for failing to get good test scores (Horn, 2011; Lack, 2009). Horn (2011) criticized KIPP for practicing a program of “cultural eugenics,” for blaming the achievement gap on the presumed cultural deficiencies of poor students, and for subjecting its students to an authoritarian regime of shame, terror, and control.

Horn (2011) pointed out that the disciplinary policies of KIPP schools are based on absolute obedience to authority, punishing students for slight demonstrations of resistance, and restricting students from socializing in school. If affluent, White students were subjected to such harsh discipline and lack of freedom at their school, there would be a public outcry. However, when it comes to Black students, this model of education is touted as innovative, successful, and what the students need in order to achieve. Horn

(2011) also argued that the mentality behind KIPP, a program that was founded by two

White Teach for America alumni, is akin to “colonialist missionaries on a crusade to save the souls of indigenous urban poor children by converting them to middle-class values and middle-class mindsets” (p. 89). KIPP schools are problematic, Horn (2011) argued,

35 in that they ignore structural critique of educational inequality by focusing solely on individual teachers and students “working harder.” Ironically, the attribution of academic success to the individual as seen in “no excuses” education serves as an excuse for racism, economic exploitation, poverty, structural oppression, and other factors that underlie the so-called achievement gap. The “no excuses” ideology behind KIPP schools

not only ignores the documented and substantive effects of poverty on the poor,

but it becomes the all-pervasive, blinding excuse for justifying dangerous,

damaging and morally repugnant acts that would not otherwise be entertained in a

society grounded by humane values and ethical rules of conduct. (Horn, 2011, p.

91).

Gates Foundation’s Neoliberal Education Discourse

Grey (2011) explained the ways that the neoliberal education initiatives supported by the Gates foundation and the discourses surrounding those initiatives act as a form of governance. Citing the Gates Foundation’s online materials, Grey (2011) argued that the foundation controls the discourse of what makes a teacher effective or ineffective, which subsequently governs the behavior of teachers and the attitudes of the public toward teachers. The Gates Foundation’s rhetoric also focuses on notions of equality and meritocracy in discourses of student achievement. These narratives blame students for their own individual failures if they do not succeed academically. They also ignore the social context and overlook any structural critique of differences in student achievement. Grey (2011) asserted that by disseminating discourses focusing on individual merit and behavior, the Gates Foundation bolsters ideological hegemony and

36 defines the standards of acceptable behavior and action. The discourses of the Gates

Foundation

constitute not only what is considered normal and desirable behavior, but also

what are considered reasonable choices, good citizenship, and rational and

responsible citizens. Because they are devised and implemented by so-called

experts, such educational initiatives embody structures that define and order what

counts as ‘normal.’ (Grey, 2011, p. 139)

Kovacs and Christie (2011) problematized the claims that are often made by four think tanks that the Gates Foundation supports, including claims that No Child Left

Behind was working, that international comparisons show that the United States is falling behind other nations economically because of low test scores, and that the majority of jobs require an advanced set of skills. They accuse the think tanks of engaging in propaganda distribution and “political science abuse” (p. 160) to further the neoliberal agenda by releasing research reports that are inaccurate. The research that the Gates

Foundation supports plays a role in misleading the public about what is truly going on in the education system and persuading people that the business-derived solutions of free markets, competition, standards, and accountability are the only solution to problems within the education system. Kovacs and Christie (2011) called on scholars to challenge the problematic “discourses and narratives that stand in opposition to democratic school alternatives” (p. 160) and to do so in a language that is accessible to the general public.

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Surveillance and Neoliberal Education Reform

The policies supported by neoliberal education reform contribute to an atmosphere of surveillance for teachers and students (Lipman, 2009). Although the curriculum was originally intended to maintain ideological hegemony (Apple, 2004), the neoliberal era has mandated business-derived practices that have increased the scrutiny schools are under for what students are learning in the classroom. Educational surveillance under neoliberalism means that someone who is not in the school can control the curricula and the ideologies presented in schools through means such as standardized testing, scripted instruction, and accountability/audits. The following section elaborates on these issues.

Curriculum and Ideology

The aforementioned educational interventions supported by philanthropists from the business sector have played a major role in surveilling Black students. The most blatant forms of surveillance come in the form of metal detectors and school police officers, but this study is concerned with how the less-obvious forms of surveillance are designed to monitor and control the ideologies presented to students in school through the official and hidden curricula. It is important to note that curricular surveillance did not begin under neoliberalism, nor is it specific to students in urban schools who are the primary targets of education reform. As Apple (2004) explained in his historic analysis of the curriculum in the United States, the original purpose of the curriculum in common schools was to create a common consciousness among the disparate racial and ethnic groups that populated the nation during the early 20th century and beyond. Schooling

38 functioned to create a mentally homogenous society so that the populace could be easily controlled by the men in power. This reality remains intact as the official curriculum continues to reflect hegemonic ideologies and repel dissenting worldviews (Apple, 2004).

Writing about this underlying goal of schooling, Giddings (1932) insisted that

. . . the primary purpose of all social control, including all social education, is to

protect the community against all sorts of baleful influences, against all disorder

that might break up the community, and against economic burdens the community

is unable to bear.” (p. 305)

For Giddings (1932), the maintenance of order and suppression of dissent were primary goals of schooling from the inception of common schools in the United States. This is especially important when the discussion centers Black students, as the dominant culture demonizes their existence and automatically renders them deviant, “baleful influences.”

As revealed by the literature on industrial philanthropists attempting to control the ideologies disseminated in Black schools, African American education has historically been defined by efforts to prevent Black students from gaining critical or radical ideas that would potentially pose a threat to White supremacist capitalism. Sojoyner (2016) echoed this point: “Dating back to Reconstruction, the historic record indicates that schools were crucial in order to prevent Black dissent and key to this process was the ideological enclosure of the educative process of Black youth” (p. 35). Thus, instead of embracing diverse cultures and knowledges, the creators of the common school curriculum upheld a single ideology in order to suppress ideas that would made it difficult to maintain control over the masses.

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Sojoyner (2016) also argued that the curriculum socializes students to accept and embrace the systems of oppression (i.e. racism, sexism, economic exploitation) that the society was built upon. This ideological engineering still plays a role in suppressing

Black demands for freedom by causing students not to notice or question racial subjugation or other forms of injustice. Sojoyner (2016) noticed the effects of the hegemonic ideologies disseminated by the curriculum when one of his students responded to a question in a way that challenged inequality:

Much more savvy than outright attacking students who offered counter

viewpoints, the school merely presented perverse forms of history, literature,

economics, and politics that denigrated Blackness in order to legitimate the

superiority and normalcy of Western ideology. The result was that when students .

. . spoke out about issues of gender, race, and nationality, they did so to a student

body who by the very nature of their educative process, were equipped with

rhetorical devices (no matter how absurd) to quickly counter a liberatory analysis

of power. (p. 41)

In other words, the students that Sojoyner encountered had been indoctrinated with the dominant ideology for so long that they immediately rejected perspectives that contradicted what they had previously learned. Not only have the students in this poor, urban school (and thousands of schools across the nation) been socialized to rationalize oppression instead of questioning it, as this quotation shows, but they have been trained to not even notice their own oppression. This exemplifies the goal and the purpose of the hegemonic curriculum working as it was intended to work.

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Woodson (1933) insisted that Black students are indoctrinated with the dominant ideology when they go to school. Woodson argued that Black students learn that their people have made no contribution to society. They are also taught to idolize Whites and to reject their own blackness. As a result of this indoctrination, educated African

Americans tended to desert their communities and to strive for Whiteness instead of using their education for the benefit of uplifting the communities from where they came. Speaking to the primary purpose of this mis-education, Woodson (1933) said that

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action.

When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself

about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have

to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make

a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back

door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature

will demand one. (p. 71)

Anyon (1981) pointed out the differences in curriculum between lower socioeconomic class, middle class, affluent professional students, and executive elite students. For the working class students, the curriculum was focused on worksheets, rote memorization, copying, and other low-level tasks. Their textbooks reflected a wholly uncritical view of society that eliminated working class viewpoints and emphasized the worldview of the powerful, and they were punished for questioning authority. Anyon

(1981) mentioned that “during discussions of school knowledge, not a single child in either working-class school used words such as “think” or “thinking.” In short, these

41 students were being groomed at school to assume roles in the lowest rungs of the society and the economy. They were learning how to be absolutely obedient and to take orders instead of giving them. By contrast, each level of higher income schools focused on thinking instead of repeating, learning how to negotiate with authority instead of bowing down to it, and engaging with critical and creative thinking instead of doing mindless tasks. The students at each of the schools were being groomed to assume their respective roles in society. This is reflective of the role that the curriculum plays in social reproduction and in the surveillance of poor communities’ knowledge systems, which aligns with the present study’s focus: that schools are designed to keep certain people mentally oppressed.

Post-Civil Rights Movement Curricular Surveillance

The ideological policing mentioned in the previous section has been attempted throughout the history of common schooling in America; however, the United States government and its corporate puppeteers doubled down on the already deep-seated curricular repression and surveillance as a response to the various anti-racist, anti- capitalist, and anti-imperialist uprisings of the 1960s-1970s (Anijar & Gabbard,

2009). As social justice movements in numerous nations were bringing the world close to a global revolution in favor of the oppressed, calls to restoring “law-and-order” started ringing in from conservative politicians. As African American students were gaining a critical consciousness through the freedom movements that touched their communities, they demanded representation and an end to racism in their institutions by striking, protesting, and engaging in nonviolent direct actions (Allen, 1990, Rojas, 2010). Black

42 students from elementary school to college age were protesting for their human rights.

University students of color were fighting for a program of study that reflected them

(Rojas, 2010). This awakening was precisely what the White supremacist, capitalist state had sought to use schooling to prevent. The ideologies taught in schools needed to be more strictly regulated to prevent further uprisings for freedom.

The era of Black freedom struggles and other movements such as the feminist, anti-war, anti-imperialist, and environmental movements during the 1960s and 1970s ushered in an era of neoliberal social and economic policies. Gautreaux (2015) argued that neoliberal education reform policy began in response to the fabricated educational crisis documented in the Reagan commissioned A Nation at Risk report (United States:

1983). Hursh (2007) explained that the document blamed U.S. schools for the economic recession of the 1980s, “which was caused not by schools but by the policies of the

Federal Reserve Board and by multinational corporations exporting jobs to low-wage countries” (p. 498). The A Nation at Risk report argued that U.S. education had fallen behind that of other countries and that the poor state of the education system was placing the nation’s economic supremacy at risk. Hursh (2007) and Gautreaux (2015) contended that even though the report’s premise was deeply flawed, politicians began to call for increased standards and accountability through standardized testing in response to the report’s recommendations. The epitome of the standardization and neoliberal reform movement was the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which mandated accountability through testing and made it easier to privatize public schools (Ravitch,

2010).

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Anijar and Gabbard (2009) examined the role of neoliberalism in educational policy and argued that the creation of neoliberal policies was partly inspired by “fears of the elites that schools, especially college campuses, were breeding anti-capitalist sentiment and democratic ideals during the activism of the 1960s-early 1970s” (p. 41).

Anijar and Gabbard (2009) detailed how corporate-backed think tanks in the United

States emerged as a reactionary response to the perceived threats that an education that fostered democratic ideals posed to the American capitalist system. They argued that corporate-backed foundations were created to monitor public institutions, particularly schools, for ideas that ran contrary to business interests. They also explained the way that standards and testing were intended to monitor what students were learning by requiring teachers to teach to predetermined standards.

Accountability as Surveillance

The discourse of accountability became a rallying cry for corporate capitalists and politicians who argued that the problem with the education system, particularly urban schools, is that teachers are not being held accountable for their students’ performance, and that they need to be held accountable through the use of standardized tests (Lipman,

2009).

The No Child Left Behind legislation, signed by George W. Bush in 2001, became the policy manifestation of standards and accountability discourse by requiring schools to test students once a year in math and reading in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school (No Child Left Behind, 2001). In order to avoid facing sanctions such as school closure, privatization, or restructuring, schools were expected to make Adequate

44

Yearly Progress (AYP), the standard of proficiency required by the law. Describing the many intricacies of NCLB, Ravitch (2010) made it clear that this legislation required extensive standardized testing and placed sanctions on schools that did not get high enough test scores, which were mostly struggling urban schools. Ravitch (2010) also argues that NCLB resulted in the narrowing of curriculum, an emphasis on basic skills, and teaching-to-the-test. These changes hit Black and Latinx students in poor, urban districts the hardest, as they were at the highest risk for not passing the standardized tests.

The No Child Left Behind Act was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, but the law still requires extensive standardized testing.

Lipman (2009) argued that accountability policy and discourse has become a means of achieving conservative political ends and that accountability under neoliberal reform represents a system of “intensified regulation and monitoring” (Lipman, 2009, p.

160). This is evidenced by holding teachers

accountable to standardized tests, classroom inspections, scripted curricula, and

punishment—putting schools on probation, retaining students for failing

standardized tests, closing schools, and evaluating teachers based on their

students’ test scores. (p. 161)

In addition, Kohn (2000) argued that accountability policies under neoliberalism have virtually forced teachers, especially those in low-income schools, to teach exactly what is on the test because of the intense scrutiny, threat of public humiliation, and school sanctions based on low test scores. Gilliom (2009) also reported that teachers are increasingly pressured to teach what is on the test. He gave an example of a teacher who

45 used to use the War of 1812 to delve into an interdisciplinary examination of the topic over a period of several weeks. As a result of standards and accountability policies, the

War of 1812 virtually disappeared from the teacher’s curriculum and was merely glazed over as opposed to offering an in-depth study of it because standardized testing did not require students to know about it. Gilliom (2009) argued that standardized testing functions as a form of educational surveillance by regulating what students are taught and making it difficult for teachers to do in-depth, contextualized, historical investigations of topics. It also hinders teachers’ ability for creativity in the classroom, as creative skills are not tested. Many teachers are pressured to spend nearly all of their time and energy focusing on test preparation, drills, memorization, and scripted instruction in order to comply with the demands of the tests. Gilliom (2009) warned that test taking has completely defined the curriculum and academic calendars of low-income schools and that this is part of a long-term conservative attempt to regulate the knowledge that is disseminated in schools:

Anyone who lived through the educational politics of the 1990s knows that there

was a huge and not entirely new war going on, with religious and cultural

conservatives frequently advocating “the three R’s” or “back to basics” approach

coupled with teaching methods known as phonics or direct instruction. The latter

techniques focus on achieving knowledge acquisition through the repetition and

memorization of small parts of words or other pieces of information. Both have

been strongly embraced by the political and religious right in the United States

and resisted by progressives and the education unions. What NCLB was able to

46

achieve was a largely tacit, but nonetheless massive, victory for the conservative

movement. There is now strong evidence that as struggling districts attempt to

pass the tests mandated by NCLB, the pursuit of success on the testing metrics

pressures them to restrict the curriculum to the basic, tested materials at the

expense of the arts, physical education, and other untested areas. Further, this

pursuit pressures teachers to shift to educational techniques that better align with

the particularist, discrete knowledge style of standardized tests. Exploring works

of literature gives way to memorizing vocabulary and spelling lists; hands-on

experimentation gives way to memorizing formulae for calculations. (p. 197).

Lipman (2006, 2009) posited that standardized accountability results in the hindrance of critical thinking, especially for Black, Latinx, and poor students who could benefit the most from a critical understanding of the injustices that shape their lives. Lipman (2006) discussed how standardized testing has resulted in the elimination of classroom opportunities to discuss and analyze injustice, which is especially unfortunate for students from historically oppressed groups because “these are precisely the kinds of educational experiences students need to help them think critically and ethically about the inequalities that structure their life chances” (p. 46).

Lipman (2009) also argued that accountability reflects a culture of surveillance:

Learning inside accountability practices apprentices students to the compliant

dispositions, uncritical habits of thought, and a culture of blame and suspicion that

support tolerance for systematic government surveillance and political repression,

47

racial profiling, and jingoistic appeals to patriotism and war. In other words,

schools become part of the fabric of coercion as a social process. (p. 171)

Curricular Narrowing and Standardization

Kohn (2000) and Lipman (2006, 2009) argued that standardized testing too often becomes the main focus of schools, especially low income schools. This is known as curricular narrowing, when the curriculum squeezes out everything except for what is immediately needed for the tests. For example, Abrams et al. (2003) found that many teachers in poor schools do not teach anything that is not on the test because there is so much pressure for them to pass the tests. They also found that teachers in low-income schools emphasize test-prep earlier in the year and use materials that look like the standardized tests throughout the entire school year.

Instead of having a rich, holistic education, students in these schools are drilled and required to memorize a narrow body of decontextualized facts in order to pass the tests. Students are taught to answer test questions at the expense of fully understanding the content. Instead of covering topics in depth, “teachers often feel obliged to set aside other subjects for days, weeks, or (particularly in schools serving low income students) even months at a time in order to devote themselves to boosting students’ test scores. . . the test essentially becomes the curriculum” (Kohn, 2000, p. 29). Kohn (2000) continued, “the implications for the quality of teaching are not difficult to imagine, particularly if better scores on high-stakes exams are likely to result more from memorizing math facts and algorithms, for example, than from understanding concepts”

(p. 29).

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McNeil (2000) described the educational consequences of standardization and curricular narrowing in Texas, which mainly impacts low-income schools:

The clear picture that emerges is that the standardized reforms drastically

hurt the best teachers, forcing them to teach watered down content because it was

computer gradable. The standardization brought about by the state policies forced

them to teach artificially simplified curricula that had been designed by

bureaucrats seeking expedient (easily implemented, noncontroversial) curricular

formats. The quality of their teaching, their course content and their students’

learning all suffered. In addition, those relations within the school essential to

fostering a culture of both equity and authentic academics were undermined. (p.

192)

According to Hill (2006), standardization reproduces dominant, hegemonic ideologies and impedes critical thinking by not representing a range of ideas. Standardized content on tests and in curricula is also ahistorical and decontextualized, presenting information in small chunks instead of within a broader social context. In a stark contrast to actual learning, neoliberalism functions to

“commodify public education by reducing learning to bits of information and skill to be taught and tested.” (Ross & Gibson, 2006, p.4)

“Evidence-based” Programs

Neoliberal education policy also favors “evidence-based” interventions. This reflects a technocratic obsession with striving for objectives that can be measured with

49 numbers. Evidence-based programs are “practices or programs that have evidence to show that they are effective at producing results and improving outcomes when implemented” ( https://www.cde.ca.gov/re/es/evidence.asp). The evidence that this refers to is typically an increase in standardized test scores. This is problematic because as

Kohn (2000, 2015) maintained, standardized tests only test for shallow learning and memorization, not deep understanding.

Many evidence-based curricular programs prominent in poor urban schools reflect uncritical approaches to knowledge production for the sake of increasing numbers. For example, scripted programs such as Reading Mastery, Open Court, and Success for All are common evidence-based reading programs

(https://www.evidenceforessa.org/programs/reading/elementary). By requiring teachers to read directly from a script, these programs regulate what is taught and said in classrooms down to the word. This is an extreme form of educational surveillance that distorts the meaning of literacy and inhibits critical reading. Not only that, but students who use these programs are frequently unable to say in their own words what the stories they’ve read are about or articulate what they are doing beyond the script (Ayra et. al.,

2005; Kozol, 2005). Kozol (2005) argued that these programs target low-income students of color and emphasize memorization and repetition, but do not actually encourage deep reading or learning. They hinder students’ critical thinking capabilities and emphasize basic skills at the expense of more complex understandings.

Standardized programs, which focus on easily quantifiable reading scores, have resulted in critical or creative approaches to literacy being pushed out of the 50 curriculum. Goodman (2016) explained one example of this push-out in an analysis of the right wing and corporate attack on the whole language movement. Goodman argued that basal reading programs, which typically treat reading as a discrete set of skills, are part of the neoliberal assault on teachers and public education. Goodman describes the use of governmental funding in the form of Reading First Grants to promote the use of basal and scripted reading programs even though the idea of scripted readers contradicts most research on literacy learning. Scripted reading programs require teachers to read off of a script and students to memorize and regurgitate standardized responses. Basal readers are truncated reading anthologies that typically eliminate critical or controversial topics within the original works of literature, and their use in schools coincides with the conservative political agenda of corporate entities and the religious Right (Goodman,

2016). Ryan (2016) discussed the widespread use of basal readers in California:

A 2011 national survey found 84 percent of K-5 teachers using basal or “core”

readers, half of whom followed the program “very closely.” In LAUSD, Open

Court made its entre in 1999 as part of a ‘comprehensive district reading plan.’

All “low-performing” elementary schools were required to select one of three

scripted reading programs, and 92 percent picked Open Court. LAUSD also hired

Open Court coaches (some teachers called them Open Court police) and, by 2002,

had over four hundred coaches underwritten by the Packard Foundation, which

put up $45 million to promote the reading program across California. (Ryan,

2016, P. 188)

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Surveillance through Audit Culture

As the previous section suggested, scripted curricula, testing, and other forms of standardization operate as a form of surveillance. They are also reflective of the business-derived preoccupation with generating reports and documentation, which Apple

(2009) described as the “audit culture.” Standardized tests, evaluations, numerated measurements in all aspects of life, and other reports that teachers and other public employees must generate are manifestations of the audit culture. For Apple (2009), audits are the most proliferating form of surveillance:

Although it makes sense to locate the social control dimensions of educational

neoliberalism in security equipment, police presence, and unforgiving policies for

dealing with infractions, standardized tests and audits represent the most

widespread forms of surveillance and social control in public schools. (p. 5)

The audit culture, especially through its use of standardized testing, controls the learning that happens in schools. The effect is especially intense in poor schools that are more likely to focus specifically on the tested material. As Gilliom (2009) explained, the effects of testing on affluent schools mostly consists of a week of annoyance, while low- income students are drilled in test prep all year long. Poor students are also more likely to have their curriculum monitored and oriented toward scripted direct instruction, which surveils what they learn and discuss in class.

Furthermore, poor (particularly Black and Latinx) students and their teachers are immersed in the audit culture because they are under the constant gaze of tests, scripts, report cards, and managers from above monitoring their progress. Tying test

52 performance to punishments also reflects the audit culture. Hursh (2007) maintained that in many cases, teachers whose students do not perform well on standardized tests are punished or even fired, while those whose students perform well on standardized tests are awarded with bonuses (Hursh 2007). Similarly, schools with lower scores on standardized tests are sanctioned and placed under strict control (of the state), whereas schools that have higher test scores are allowed greater autonomy (Lipman, 2006; Hill,

2006). The reward and punish system of neoliberal education reform does not consider outside factors that affect test scores, such as poverty, despite studies that have shown that students’ socioeconomic status impacts test scores more than anything else (Kohn,

2000). Because of this, teachers and schools are held accountable for things over which they have no control (Kohn, 2000).

Echoing the argument made by Apple (2009), Torres and Monahan (2009, p. 5) argued that standardized testing is the most preeminent and widespread form of school surveillance. Using Foucault’s discussion on power, discipline, and coercion, they drew connections between the ideological surveillance that is performed through the use of standardized testing and accountability measures, physical repression such as cameras and metal detectors, and the prison-like design of school buildings that contributes to an atmosphere of lockdown.

Summary

This literature review suggested that corporate foundations have been central players in the dissemination of discourses and policies within education that promote the aforementioned forms of surveillance. Corporate foundations have demonstrated a

53 commitment to shaping the scene of urban education through business-minded privatization, accountability, and standardization policies that will not threaten the powers that be. Instead of advocating for a more equitable system of public education, corporate beneficiaries of neoliberalism insist that new technology, charter schools, teacher incentives, and standards-based accountability policies are the answer. In cases such as KIPP, the argument is that stricter discipline and longer school days are the answer to closing the achievement gap. These solutions ignore the structural issues of racialized oppression and economic exploitation that underlie the differences in academic achievement between different groups of students. They also distract the public from viewing capitalism and White supremacy as culprits, even though they have resulted in educational inequity, by blaming all of the problems in the education system on individual teachers, students, and schools.

Corporate foundations play a similar role in urban education that industrial philanthropy played in the establishment of African American common schools. In both situations, the people in power had strong opinions about what Black students should be learning. The approved curricula tended to be uncritical and reflective of Black subservience. Industrial training gave way to scripted instruction. These interventions have attempted to remove the historic connection that Black communities have made between education and freedom.

When students are taught in a way that reinforces blind acceptance of authority and student passivity inside and outside of the classroom, how can a democratic society achieve its goal of operating for and by the people? The educational system is laying the

54 groundwork for corporate tyranny at the expense of democracy. However, although neoliberal education policies pose a threat to democracy, this study concerns Black students, who were, and to a large extent still are, intentionally schooled for their exclusion from democracy. As Anderson (1988) argued, when common schools were being established in the United States, two separate systems of education were being created: the one for White students was for democracy, and the one for Black students was for subservience.

Noting that education reform has impacted poor, urban schools the most, I argue that corporate-backed education reform serves as a form of surveillance that targets Black students. That is not to say that these interventions do not result in all students being socialized to some extent to be passive, uncritical consumers, but I am specifically exploring this issue in relation to Black students, whose very existence is seen as a threat to the rest of the society. The role of corporate foundations in shaping urban education and perpetuating the surveillance of Black students will be addressed throughout the remainder of this study.

The next chapter delves deeper into the aforementioned surveillance of Black students and of Black people in general. It describes the Afterlife of Slavery theoretical framework that informs the data analysis, which argues that Black people are held in a perpetual state of captivity that began with enslavement. The chapter also details the critical discourse analysis methodology that this project utilized for analyzing the data.

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Chapter 3. Theoretical Framework and Methodology: The Afterlife of Slavery and

Critical Discourse Analysis

Chapter Overview

The denial of an education and the education system have functioned to surveil and contain Black life. This chapter goes into further detail about the containment of

Black people and denial of Black freedom through a discussion of the afterlife of slavery theoretical framework through which the data through which my study are analyzed. The chapter then discusses critical discourse studies perspectives that inform the methodology for my analysis of corporate philanthropic discourse. It concludes with a subjectivity statement and a statement of trustworthiness.

Statement of Research and Purpose

This dissertation utilizes corporate philanthropic discourse to examine the ways that schooling operates to surveil and suppress Black students. This study expands the school-to-prison-pipeline framework through a discussion of the ideological mechanisms that keep Black students in a state of captivity. It also provides nuance in the discourse on neoliberal education reform by analyzing the ways that such reform applies specifically to Black students. With full recognition that neoliberal education reform poses a threat to democracy in general, this study is specifically concerned with the implications for students who were never meant to be part of the democracy and who

56 continually face exclusion from it. These problems are examined through a critical discourse analysis specifically focusing on the discourse of the Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation, as they are the most significant donor to urban education reform (Tompkins-

Stange, 2016) and exemplify the broader realm of neoliberal education discourse.

With these ideas in mind, my research questions are as follows: 1) What are the common narratives that appear in the corporate philanthropic discourse on education? 2) How does the corporate philanthropic discourse on education function to sustain Black captivity?

These questions are examined through the afterlife of slavery theoretical framework, which examines the perpetuity of Black containment and captivity.

Theoretical Framework: The Afterlife of Slavery

This project utilizes the afterlife of slavery framework (Hartman, 1997). The afterlife of slavery framework theorizes the world and the existence of everyone within it as wholly shaped by the aftereffects of chattel slavery, namely the continued dehumanization, objectification, and captivity of Black people today and the White supremacy that continues to dominate. Hartman (1997) describes some of the effects of the afterlife of slavery as the “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, and impoverishment” (p.6) of Black people worldwide. The afterlife of slavery reflects the “ongoing racisms of unfinished emancipation” (Browne,

2015, p. 13), the lingering side effects of turning people into things. Echoing these concerns, Dillon (2012) describes the afterlife of slavery as

the emptiness left by slavery’s regimes of unimaginable violence and terror, the

nothingness left by the deaths of 60 million or more. Even as slavery’s afterlife

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is crushing, visible, and pervasive, it also looks like dust floating in the air. In

other words, slavery’s mark on the now manifests as the prison, as poverty, as

policing technologies; it emerges in insurance ledgers and in the organization

of urban space. (p. 121)

Central to the theoretical framework is the concept of Black captivity. Captivity is defined as “the state of being kept in a place (such as a prison or a cage) and not being able to leave or be free” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, retrieved from http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/captivity). Captivity in this study does not necessarily mean being trapped in a particular place, but it is being trapped in a world that reproduces Black unfreedom.

For the purposes of this study, I define Black captivity as the notion that after chattel slavery ended, the Black body continued to be in a state of enslavement. The continuation of Black captivity after slavery was and has been maintained by anti-Black violence, enforced poverty, denial of rights, policing, surveillance, incarceration, and various other forms of social control.

Black captivity in the afterlife of slavery is also maintained through the education system. The literature does not use the term Black educational captivity, but it discusses at length the policies and conditions that keep Black students imprisoned within their own schools. I define Black educational captivity as the ways in which Black students are held in a state of theoretical captivity (which often turns into physical captivity when students are conditioned for a future of incarceration) through the education system by

58 punitive disciplinary policies, restrictive curricula, under-resourced schools, and other forms of control.

In the afterlife of slavery, Black captivity means keeping Black bodies and minds under a strict regime of control through violence and ideological domination so that they will not threaten the power of the White supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society. Akin to slave owners banning slaves from learning how to read and think critically, schooling for Black students has consisted of curricular and pedagogical practices (particularly in poor urban schools) that restrict critical literacy. Also akin to slavery, the parameters of

Black existence are too often set and surveilled by powerful White capitalists. I argue that the supervision and surveillance of Black education demonstrated by corporate philanthropy reflects the supervision and surveillance of Black life in general, a supervision that has been a reality since slavery.

Black Captivity and Violence

American chattel slavery was marked by extreme violence against the enslaved in order to keep them in a permanent state of mental and physical captivity. As Wilderson

(2010) described,

This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and

imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black

in an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object

made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject.” (Wilderson, 2010, p.

51)

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As Wilderson (2010) suggested, slavery was about more than free labor on plantations; it entailed the absolute, violent domination of Black minds and bodies by Whites and the complete objectification and dehumanization of all Blacks, whether or not they were slaves. Africans were shipped to the Americas to begin their nightmarish existence as non-human property used for the whims and pleasures of “any subject;” any semblance of Black subjectivity was destroyed the moment their bodies were marked “slave.” When the forced labor portion of slavery was abolished, the non-human position of the Black stayed the same. Wilderson (2010) expounded on this point: “…the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-human, a position against which humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity…” (p. 11). Constructing Blackness as inhuman was the only way for Whites to justify the unfathomable violence that they perpetrated against

Black bodies.

During American chattel slavery, violence came to be an ontological reality of

Blackness, and it continues to be the basis of Black captivity. The violence of policing, surveillance, incarceration, forced poverty, and other manifestations of the open vulnerability of Blackness serve to keep the Black body captive in order to maintain the

“corporal integrity” of Whites. Captivity via violent domination is a principal aspect of the afterlife of slavery, a constant reminder that Blackness and Slaveness remain inseparable and that the captive object status of Black bodies transcends place and history. In the afterlife of slavery, Black captivity means keeping Black bodies under control, punished for asserting agency, openly vulnerable, and existing at the whim of

White desire.

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The concept of Black captivity is theorized within an Afro-pessimist framework, which examines Blackness as the embodiment of disposability, objectification, and gratuitous violence (Wilderson, 2010). Put another way, when Africans were forcefully removed from their homelands and forced onto slave ships, they and their descendants became disposable objects. This object status has not changed; Black people continue to be treated as expendable commodities, as “things” rather than human beings. Because of this continued “thingification” (Wilderson, 2010), Black people continue to be subjected to the violence and captivity initiated by chattel slavery.

It is important to discuss Black existence within the context of captivity in order to understand historical and current manifestations of anti-Black racism. When discussing politics and Black disenfranchisement, racist public policies in education, housing, healthcare, and virtually all other institutions, the “migrant crisis,” environmental disaster, the criminal justice system, police brutality, and any other issue that impacts Black people, the starting point must be the assumption that the injustice in question exists to maintain the captive object status of Black bodies. As Wilderson

(2010) suggests, any analysis that assumes the possibility of Black subjectivity is a mistaken analysis from the start. Black existence lies outside of the realm of subjectivity and can only realistically be examined within the context of non-being, of captivity, of existing to be used and violated by the subjects of the world. Captivity penetrates all aspects of Black life, and this study specifically focuses on its manifestations within education.

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Under the White Gaze: Surveillance in the Afterlife of Slavery

Another defining element of Black captivity in the afterlife of slavery is being watched, having every action monitored and scrutinized. It is constantly living under “a gaze that is always unmarked, and therefore already markedly White and male” (Browne,

2015, p. 49). Surveillance techniques have been used since the inception of slavery, including on the ships that transported Africans to the Americas, in order to maintain domination over Black bodies. Anti-Black surveillance comes in the form of regulating and criminalizing Black behavior, attire, movements, family life, and all other aspects of

Black existence.

In her historical analysis of anti-Black surveillance practices, Browne (2015) made comparisons between today’s Anti-Black dress codes and historic laws used to keep Black people under control during American chattel slavery:

Bans of sagging pants form part of the ongoing fashion policing that criminalizes

black styling and expression, including acts such as the South Carolina Negro Act

of 1735 that legislated what sundry, or dress, could be worn by black people,

down to the type of cloth. (p. 66)

Perhaps the most important element of legislation such as the South Carolina

Negro Act of 1785 is that such laws regulated the behavior of all Black people, whether they were enslaved or not. These types of laws blurred the lines between slave and free by subjecting all black people to the same expectations and treatment. Laws that controlled Black bodies, both enslaved and nominally free, served to relegate all Black

62 people into the category of slave regardless of whether or not they had documentation proving their free status.

American Chattel slavery was entrenched with surveillance strategies, which were necessary to quell slave rebellion. Although slaves still frequently rebelled on plantations, their defiance was made more difficult by fugitive slave laws, as well as laws that prohibited them from assembling, being outside at night, reading or educating themselves, leaving the plantation without a pass, and worshipping and mourning without strict stipulations (Hartman, 2007, Sojoyner, 2016). Violating the endless list of banned activities resulted in violent punishment, including death, beatings and other methods of torture.

In an effort to keep Blacks under the complete dominance of Whites after emancipation, fugitive slave laws were rewritten into oppressive legislation such as Black

Codes. Black Codes were laws that made it illegal for newly freed black people to gain any power over their own lives. The codes included vagrancy laws, which prohibited the free movement of black people from one place to another. In many southern cities, the codes forced formerly enslaved African Americans to work for their old masters or for another White person. They were not allowed to change employers or even to temporarily move from one employer to another without written permission from their primary White boss. Employers were allowed to whip their employees at their will, and

Blacks could not break their contracts with employers even when their employer beat them. If any black person was caught breaking these laws, they would be sentenced to labor in slave-like conditions under the convict leasing system, in which a White person

63 would profit even more from their labor (Taylor, 2016). Lantern laws, which prohibited

Black people from travelling at night without a lantern, were also used to ensure that

Black people’s actions would constantly be visible to White society (Browne, 2015).

Further, it was the duty of all Whites to police the actions of all African Americans during and after slavery.

Today, Black bodies are still monitored and punished when unable to prove that their existence is not a threat to White society. Black neighborhoods are occupied by police forces that patrol, stop, frisk, injure, and sometimes kill any Black person who does not satisfy the officer’s expectation of proving they are not a threat, even when the

Black person in question is running away or holding their hands up. The policing of

Black bodies is not limited to police officers with badges. The historic position of Whites in general to return slaves to their owners as well as the compensation that they received for doing so created a situation in which all whites became the police. Against the backdrop of this history, Black children such as Trayvon Martin are murdered for appearing to be out of place by vigilantes who are not badge-and-uniform officers. This reality is akin to slaves tortured and killed by Whites for being outside of their designated location at any point in time. The rhetoric surrounding Trayvon Martin’s hoodie (a hoodie that many people blamed for his death) mirrors the aforementioned anti-Black dress codes, which required that Black people wear clothing not perceived as a threat to

White society. Surveilling Black attire, movement, and communities in order to maintain

Black captivity is a major function of the modern policing apparatus, both within the

64 context of the badge-and-uniform police force and within the context of the broader

White society functioning as a policing force for Black people.

Sojoyner (2016) brought the issue of anti-Black surveillance and social control into an educational context. His analysis illuminated the ways in which surveillance technologies (metal detectors, school resource officers, arrests, ID cards, school sweeps, etc.), as well as impotent curricula that restrict Black students’ critical thought, are intentionally used to keep Black students in a permanent state of captivity, a state that he terms enclosure. Walking through the hallways of many majority Black schools across the nation brings to mind images of prison-regimented practices, restrictions on students’ movements and bodies, enough “school security” officials to ensure a complacent student body. Young Black people walk from the prisons of their communities to the prisons of their schools in a revolving door of inescapable surveillance and captivity. As Browne

(2015) asserted, “surveillance is nothing new to black folks. It is the fact of antiblackness” (p. 10).

Black captivity and surveillance would not be able to exist without discourses that uphold Black oppression. Anti-Black discourses come from the media, from politicians, and from a plethora of other sources, and they justify the containment of Black life. A critical lens is needed to dismantle the taken-for-granted narratives within the mainstream discourse that rationalize the policing and containment of Black life. The following section addresses the critical discourse studies methodological framework that this project used in order to bring these problematic discourses to light.

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Methodological Framework: Critical Discourse Studies

This study utilizes critical discourse studies perspectives for its methodological framework. Critical discourse studies are concerned with the power and dominance inherent in discursive practices, both written and oral. Traditional discourse analysis pays particular attention to the specifics of the language and syntax of discursive samples, without power or context playing a central role in the analysis. What makes critical discourse studies critical is that it places discourse into a broader social and historical context in order to center the power imbalances present. For this study, discourse refers to the big D- Discourse, which Gee (2011) described as the broader social practices that interact with language (text) in order to create meaning and signify identity:

When we enact an identity in the world, we do not just use language all by itself

to do this. We use language, but we also use distinctive ways of acting, interacting

with others. . . A Discourse with a capital “D” is composed of distinctive ways of

speaking/listening and often, too, writing/reading coupled with distinctive ways of

acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, believing, with other

people and with various objects, tools, and technologies, so as to enact specific

socially recognizable identities. (Gee, 2011, pp. 36-37)

For this study, I focus on the big “D” discourse to highlight the ways that education philanthropy functions to surveil and mentally incarcerate Black students. The macro- level discursive practices that Gee highlighted in the paragraph above are central to my study, as I examine the implications of the discourses that support anti-critical and anti- intellectual approaches to knowledge such as standardized tests, content alignment to

66 standards, and overemphasis on numerical data for generating instructional practices.

The other big “D” discourses that I examine deal with the ways that the Gates Foundation frames and discusses education as a whole, including issues within the education system and the purposes of education. These discourses function to shape the discourse of education, to influence public opinion about the issues that exist within the education system, and to police the parameters of acceptable discourse on education. I conducted a close ideological analysis of the rhetoric that the Gates Foundation uses to shape educational discourse and public opinion, which reflect deflection from underlying issues, oversimplification of the problem, and overemphasis on individual behavior as opposed to macro-level structures.

Critical discourse analysis is the most appropriate means of analyzing the data, as it is a means of questioning the taken-for-granted dominant discourses that uphold hegemonic ideologies. In addition to the insights that Gee’s approach to critical discourse analysis provides, my approach is also informed by Pini ‘s (2011) critical discourse study of Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) and their role in supporting neoliberal education reform that actually harms schools and democracies while making promises of improvement. I use Pini’s study as a model for my own research, as that study used the websites of EMOs to question the language that they use and the ideologies behind them. Without analyzing these discourses and the ideologies they reflect, powerful entities in society will continue to thrive in their disproportionate power and control without resistance. Harmful education discourses need to be critically

67 analyzed and exposed in order to build resistance to neoliberal, anti-Black ideas and practices.

Critical discourse perspectives are particularly useful in my research because they focus on the social, cultural, and historical contexts of text and language in meaning making. Discourse does not exist on its own in the absence of power. Questions of who is speaking, who is claiming authority, whose voices are represented, and whose are left out are central to gaining a true understanding of the discourse, the ideologies represented, and the social implications. Critical discourse studies view discourse as a social practice (not merely as words on the surface level) and theorizes language as determined by many different social elements such as race and gender (Fairclough,

2011). As Fairclough (2011) explains, “Texts are not just effects of linguistic structures and orders of discourse, but are also effects of other social structures and of social practices in all their aspects, so it becomes difficult to separate out the factors shaping texts” (p. 121). This project takes a critical discourse perspective in analyzing the power imbalances, marginalization, dominance, and subordination inherent within the discursive practices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and relating these discursive practices to broader social patterns, meaning making, and identity making of students, Black communities, White philanthropists, teachers, and other stakeholders.

Methods of Data Generation

The data for this study comes primarily from the Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation’s k-12 education website (http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org) and Bill

Gates’s blog (https://www.gatesnotes.com). Although many other foundations are active

68 and influential in k-12 education reform, I specifically focus on the Gates Foundation, as the foundation’s “endowment of 41.3 billion renders it the largest actor in the field of US education philanthropy” (Tompkins-Stange, 2016, p. 20). Reflective of Pini’s (2011) study, I focused on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s k-12 education website and

Bill Gates’s blog, which offers personal insights on his philanthropic work, because an organization’s websites “are the principal vehicles through which the companies advertise. The online information is detailed, extended, and continuously updated” (p.

270).

I highlight the Gates Foundation’s discourse as an example of the larger neoliberal discourse regarding education reform. This foundation is by no means the only actor in shaping the discourse on education reform; rather, its discourse is representative of the way that corporate philanthropists generally frame educational issues. The Gates Foundation is also not solely culpable for discourses that maintain

Black captivity, but their discourses reflect a larger pattern of such discourses used among wealthy corporations and their foundations that fund schools. This study emphasizes corporate philanthropy in general, with the Gates Foundation as an example representative of a larger issue. Critical discourse analysis is used to challenge the taken- for-granted narratives promoted by corporate philanthropists, which uphold the continued control of Black education.

Methods of Data Analysis: Critical Discourse Analysis

For this study, I examine the implications of urban education reform through a critical discourse analysis of two discursive artifacts promoted by the Bill and Melinda 69

Gates Foundation. The two discursive samples exemplify narratives and rhetorical practices that reinforce Black captivity in education. Van Dijk (1993) describes CDA as

“a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (p. 351). CDA provides an important analytical perspective for pointing out the role of power and ideology in discourse. Critical discourse analysis allows me to center the unequal power relations, neoliberalism, and anti-Black ideologies inherent within the discourse of education reform and in the practices implemented by the

Gates foundation. I use CDA to deconstruct the ways that the Gates Foundation’s discourse, the ideologies behind it, and the resultant practices serve as a colonizing, neutralizing, and supervising force in Black schools and communities.

Fairclough (2011) argues that discourses have both ideological impacts and material consequences. Discourses reflect particular ideologies and play a role in shaping public ideologies and attitudes about issues. In an educational context, the discourses presented by the neoliberal education reform movement that has been dominant for the past 30 years have impacted the public’s perception of educational issues (e.g. that the public education system is failing and threatening the nation’s economy) and solutions

(e.g. more testing and accountability is necessary). These ideologies lead to concrete policies (e.g. No Child Left Behind). “Texts as elements of social events. . . have causal effects – i.e. they bring about changes. Most immediately, texts can bring about changes in our knowledge (we can learn things from them), our beliefs, our attitudes, values and

70 so forth” (Fairclough, 2003, p.8). The ideological and material impacts of discourses are why it is so important to analyze them critically.

The purpose of analyzing the discourse of the Gates Foundation in this way is threefold: 1) To provide a critical perspective of corporate philanthropy discourse within a larger discussion of neoliberal education reform, as critical views of major educational funders is necessary in order to dismantle the misinformation these organizations and individuals disseminate to the public (Kovacs & Christie, 2011). 2) To represent how the

Gates Foundation’s discourse, as part of a larger discourse on urban education reform, serves as a form of Black surveillance and the supervision of Black students and communities, similar to the ways that industrial philanthropists controlled Black education during the 20th century. 3) To theorize the implications of the Gates

Foundation’s discourse (within the larger context of corporate philanthropic discourse) for present and future demands for Black liberation.

The data for this analysis is from Bill Gates’s 2017 Council of Great City Schools keynote speech and the What We Do page on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s k-

12 education website. I selected these two examples because they represent the current objectives, initiatives, and ideologies of the Gates Foundation. They are broad, yet concise overviews of the foundation’s goals, purposes, and methods. They also reflect common discourses found in the broader corporate philanthropic discourse. With the

Gates Foundation playing such an instrumental role in upholding the dominant education discourse, as well as setting and funding education policy, I found it necessary to employ discursive samples that reflect its work.

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I first read through these texts several times and made a list of the common narratives that came up. After generating an initial list of narratives, I narrowed down the narratives with each subsequent reading. I listed specific phrases and paragraphs that fit each narrative, and then I made a chart of the assumptions, ideologies, and material consequences that each statement reflected. I then conducted a critical analysis of the examples in each category. After analyzing the examples, I examined the ways that each narrative contributes to the continuation of Black captivity. My interpretation of the data may be impacted by my positionality, and the subjectivity statement below helps to provide context for the lens through which I interpreted the discourses.

Subjectivity Statement

The purpose of this subjectivity statement is to situate myself within this research and create transparency with regard to my worldview. I am a Black woman who attended struggling public schools. I have also taught in an overwhelmingly Black school charter school environment that was under-resourced, authoritarian, and utilized scripted curricula. I experienced firsthand the detrimental effects of neoliberal urban educational reform as a student and as an educator before becoming an educational researcher. The experiences I share in this subjectivity statement sparked my interest in this topic and my deep commitment to eliminating all structures of oppression and anti-Blackness in society. This is not intended to damage the credibility of the study; instead, it intends to show how my experiences line up with what the research says about Black surveillance and captivity.

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When I was growing up, I attended majority Black schools in an area of

Cleveland that was over-policed and under-funded. A reflection of the 80 percent White teaching force in the United States, the vast majority of the teachers and administrators at my elementary, middle, and high schools were White. Most of them did not understand the cultural differences between them and their students outside of a deficit perspective; they often attributed various behavioral and social issues to a fabricated culture of poverty, laziness, or dysfunction within the Black community. The employees who worked in the schools that I attended reproduced White, middle-class standards of existence while castigating and criminalizing African American forms of communication, knowledge, and dress. They also reflected a culture of absolute obedience to authority.

Students were severely punished for minor infractions, and it often felt like the teachers and administrators were more concerned with producing docile bodies than with fostering a critically thinking student body prepared for democratic participation in society.

Once I started learning about the history of oppression of Black communities while I was in college, I quickly realized that what I experienced in school was social control, not education. I began to make connections between those oppressive school practices, the disinvestment in and criminalization of Black communities, and the destruction of Black life upon which this society was built. Though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, what I was experiencing in my adolescence was state violence, White supremacy, and anti-Black racism. My reflections about the anti-Black violence and systemic oppression that I witnessed and experienced in my youth culminated when I had just finished my third and final year of my undergraduate studies, when vigilante George

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Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Black teenager Trayvon Martin. I was an activist long before the George Zimmerman case, but never before had I realized the extent of the devaluation of Black life until I heard that “not guilty” verdict. Never before had I realized how harmful the commonly accepted notions of colorblindness and post- racialism are in a land built on slavery, genocide, and White supremacy. The killing of

Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman solidified my goal of teaching others about the realities and intersectionalities of racial injustice, specifically from an educational perspective.

I have protested and organized for the lives of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Aiyana

Stanley-Jones, Timothy Russell, Tanisha Anderson, John Crawford, and the innumerable other Black people killed by state violence that derives from the irrational fear of the

Black body and the annihilation of Black life. State violence might seem like a far stretch from discussions about the education system and the corporate billionaires that influence it. But they are only different byproducts of the same system of White supremacy and anti-Black terrorism.

For me, the interventions of the Gates Foundation, as well as the interventions of other neoliberal education reformers, promotes cultures of passivity and compliance.

These cultures of passivity and compliance have the potential to produce anti-critical and anti-intellectual citizens. For Black people, the creation of compliance and passivity through the educational system can act to nullify radical Black demands for freedom. For everyone else, compliance and passivity can result in an uncritical acceptance of social

74 structures that result in the destruction of Black bodies and communities. My research is a form of protest against this violent and oppressive system.

Trustworthiness and Methodological Considerations

In light of my subjectivity statement, it must be stated that this research includes my interpretation of the data in light of the literature on this topic. I am not purporting that my analysis is the only possible analysis. I viewed this data through a specific lens and theoretical framework based on my own positionality, and I placed it within as much context as possible. Trustworthiness in this study is established on the basis of my inclusion of the scholars who have engaged with these topics in the literature. The interpretive nature of the data analysis is a potential methodological limitation of critical discourse analysis; however, my research is reflective of Van Dijk’s (1993) statement on

CDA:

Unlike other discourse analysts, critical discourse analysts (should) take an

explicit sociopolitical stance: they spell out their point of view, perspective,

principles and aims, both within their discipline and within society at large.

Although not in each stage of theory formation and analysis, their work is

admittedly and ultimately political. Their hope, if occasionally illusory, is change

through critical understanding. Their perspective, if possible, that of those who

suffer most from dominance and inequality. Their critical targets are the power

elites that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality and

injustice. That is, one of the criteria of their work is solidarity with those who

need it most (252).

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Summary

This chapter detailed the afterlife of slavery theoretical framework and the critical discourse studies methodological framework through which the data in chapter 4 is interpreted. It also provided details of the methodology and considerations regarding subjectivity and trustworthiness. The following chapter delves into the analysis of the discursive samples and examines the implications of corporate philanthropic discourses in sustaining Black captivity.

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Chapter 4. Findings and Implications: The Role of Corporate Philanthropic Discourse in

Sustaining Black Captivity

Chapter Overview

This study examines the common discourses utilized by corporate philanthropists and the ways that those discourses contribute to the continuation of Black captivity. The two research questions are as follows: 1) What are the common narratives that appear in the corporate philanthropic discourse on education? 2) How does the corporate philanthropic discourse on education function to sustain Black captivity?

In order to explore these issues, I have provided a critical analysis of two discursive samples representative of the discourse used by the Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation, the nation’s leading donor to urban education reform (Tompkins-Stange,

2016). The first piece of data is the transcript of a speech that Bill Gates made on

October 19, 2017 on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the Council for

Great City Schools in Cleveland, Ohio. The speech transcript was retrieved from Bill

Gates’s blog Gates Notes (https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/Council-of-Great-City-

Schools). This speech was selected because it provided a comprehensive overview of the foundation’s intentions, approaches, and strategies, which reflect the common narratives and ideologies that the Gates Foundation and other corporate foundations embrace. Also, as a keynote address at a major public education conference, it cannot be underestimated

77 the potential that this speech has to shape the audience’s ideology about education issues and how to solve them. In addition to the possibility of the audience members’ opinions to be impacted by this speech made by a man of high influence, the speech was posted on

Bill Gates’s blog and was shared almost 12,000 times on social media

(https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/Council-of-Great-City-Schools). This illustrates the ability that Gates has to have his ideas disseminated widely to the public.

The second discursive sample was from the What We Do page of the Gates

Foundation’s k-12 education website (http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org/what-we- do/), which explains in a nutshell what the foundation does and how they do it. This webpage was selected because it provides a broad overview of the foundation’s intentions, mission, and actions, which are illustrative of the common approaches of corporate philanthropic education reformers.

In order to generate my analysis, I conducted an initial reading of Bill Gates’s speech for the 2018 Council of Great City Schools Conference and the What We Do page of the Gates Foundation’s k-12 website. I then re-read the readings several times and made a list of the common narratives that I noticed. After generating a preliminary list of narratives, I then read through the data several more times and narrowed down the narratives. After narrowing down the narratives with each subsequent reading, I ended up with the three most salient narratives. I critically analyzed the statements within each discursive sample. After dissecting the examples, I explicated how each of those narratives sustain Black captivity.

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The organization of this chapter revolves around three salient narratives that I identified in the discursive samples. I went through the two discursive samples line-by- line and positioned the statements that fit each narrative. I placed each example statement that I examined into a table with my interpretation of its underlying assumptions, ideological consequences, and material consequences. The ideological consequences are the potential results that the narrative has on the public’s perceptions and ideas about education. The material consequences are current or potential money expenditures, policy initiatives, or pedagogical results of those narratives. I analyzed some of the statements alone, while I analyzed other statements with other similar statements. After the analysis of all of the statements within each narrative, I examined the implications for the narrative in sustaining Black captivity. The three narratives that I identified were 1) The problem is simple, 2) The solution is scientific (not structural), and

3) Education is a business. Each of those narratives justifies the continued surveillance of Black education, and they are critically analyzed throughout the rest of this chapter.

Narrative #1: The Problem is Simple

I labeled the first overarching narrative in the discursive samples as the problem is simple, also referred to as the oversimplification narrative. This narrative presents issues within the education system in an oversimplified way, removes the connection between education and other societal problems, and fails to acknowledge underlying structural issues or to provide any social or historical context to why the education system is not working for so many students. This narrative only brings forth surface-level problems in order to present solutions that seem reasonable and achievable. This narrative also

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suggests that the problems faced within the education system are only school-related and

can be solved with some adjustments to teaching, curricula, and other in-school factors. I

identified 14 statements that exemplified this narrative.

Table 1. Narrative 1: Examples 1-3

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

1. Our #1 priority All students Supports public Money and policy was – and still is – currently do not perception of initiatives go ensuring that all have access to a education as an toward funding students get a great great public equalizer initiatives to public education education, and the improve individual and graduate with Gates Foundation Upholds public schools, to help the skills to succeed can help perception that students graduate in the workplace. education is with skills to (Gates, 2017) Education should workforce training succeed in the prepare students for workplace instead 2. Our role is to the workforce Focus is placed on of structural serve as a catalyst individual schools changes or an of good ideas, It is possible for all and not on the equitable driven by the same students to get a system redistribution of guiding principle great public resources we started with: all education under the Contributes to the students – but current societal neoliberal ideology especially low- structure that public income students institutions are and students of It is possible for all failing and need color – must have people to live a help from private equal access to a healthy and sector great public productive life education that under the current People believe that prepares them for societal structure it is currently adulthood. (Gates, possible for all 2017) students to have equal access a great Continued

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Table 1 Continued

3.We believe that public education all lives have equal under the current value and that every societal structure person should have the chance to live a Blame is placed on healthy and schools and not on productive life. the system (http://k12educatio n.gatesfoundation.o “All lives matter” rg/what-we-do/) ideology

Emphasis is placed on equal “access”- access to an unjust institution, not necessarily equity on a broader scale

Example #1 is the opening statement of Bill Gates’s 2017 Council of Great City

Schools keynote speech: “Our #1 priority was – and still is – ensuring that all students get a great public education and graduate with the skills to succeed in the workplace” (Gates,

2017). In example #1, Gates implied that all students currently do not have a great public education or graduate with the skills they need to succeed in the workforce, yet he did so without mentioning any underlying reasons why all students do not get a great public education, including the histories of segregation and other forms of social and economic exclusion, generational poverty buttressed by slavery and racist economic systems, and inequitable distribution of resources (Davis, 1989). This began the surface-level rhetoric that is characteristic of the oversimplification narrative. The statement also oversimplified the concept of a “great public education” and did not mention what 81 criteria are used to determine what that means. Without saying it, Gates assumed that his definition of a “great public education” and “skills needed to succeed in the workforce” was neutral and universal, and this has important ideological consequences for how others define what makes a good education. Later in the speech, he implied that the

(presumably neutral and universal) metrics of a quality education include test scores and college completion rates.

Gates’s speech opened up on a hopeful note by stating that it is his foundation’s top priority to ensure that all students have access to a great public education. Even though this is a noble goal and it is difficult to refute that all students should have a great public education, the statement ignored that the economic system of the United States necessitates inequality and requires that some students have an inadequate education.

The capitalist system requires that a lot of people stay at the bottom of the social and economic ladder in other for a few to remain at the top (Marx, 1976). Gates suggested that it is possible for all students to get a great public education within the current system, but this is structurally impossible in a system that necessitates inequality.

In example #2, the Gates Foundation’s stated goal that students should “graduate with the skills to succeed in the workplace” oversimplified the concepts of the workplace, work readiness skills, and their relationship to the education system. This reflects an uncritical acceptance of the current labor system, ignores its underlying inequalities, and omits the social reproductive nature of schooling from the conversation. According to

Anyon (1981), working class students attend schools that reduce their capacity for critical thinking and push them toward absolute obedience to authority, whereas more affluent

82 students attend schools in which they are pushed to negotiate with people in power and to think at higher levels. This intentional social reproduction process trains poorer students to assume their roles in the bottom rungs of the workforce and trains wealthier students to assume powerful positions in society. When Gates said that his foundation believes that all students should have access to a great education and that their education should prepare them for the workforce, it seems as though he did not consider that schooling does prepare students for disparate positions within a highly stratified workforce and that this is a structural necessity under capitalism. In order for there to be a continuous supply of inexpensive labor and a steady pool of surplus workers, it is necessary for some students to have a destitute education in which they will be trained to be docile laborers

(or even prisoners) instead of critical, independent, or creative thinkers.

Furthermore, the A Nation at Risk report (U.S. Commission on Excellence in

Education, 1983) played a major role in solidifying in the national ideology that education serves a primarily economic function, including that it should be a form of workforce training (Gautreaux, 2015). However, this uncritical acceptance of the workforce ignores the underlying, often racialized economic exploitation that is a normal and necessary part of the capitalist labor system (Goldberg, 1970). Gates’s statement implied that students should graduate prepared to enter the workforce, not to question the fact that many jobs entail the mistreatment of employees and the lack of a living wage, healthcare, and other necessities. This statement also did not challenge workplace discrimination, safety issues, and the overall devaluation of racialized and feminized jobs

(Goldberg, 1970). Gates’s oversimplified statement reflects a failure to problematize an

83 economic system that is built on slavery and continues to thrive on the exploitation of largely Black and Brown workers for cheap labor in order for a few at the top of the economic ladder to accumulate extraordinary amounts of wealth.

Gates ended his speech on a similar note, as seen in example #2: “Our role is to serve as a catalyst of good ideas, driven by the same guiding principle we started with: all students – but especially low-income students and students of color – must have equal access to a great public education that prepares them for adulthood” (Gates, 2017). The issue here is that there was no mention of why students of color currently do not have

“equal access to a great public education.” Gates’s oversimplified statement lacked historical and social context; it made no mention of the institutionalized racism, racialized poverty, legacies of slavery and discrimination, and variety of other inequalities that underlie educational inequality (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Example #3 is from the What We Do page of the Gates Foundation’s k-12 education website: “We believe that all lives have equal value and that every person should have the chance to live a healthy and productive life”

(http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/). This echoes “All Lives Matter” rhetoric, which renders invisible the fact that all lives are not treated as though they have equal value. This oversimplified statement did not address any of the underlying reasons why all lives are not treated as though they have equal value and why everyone presently does not have an equal chance at a healthy, productive life. No matter how noble the

Gates Foundation’s rhetoric is, the capitalist White supremacist system necessitates the devaluation and dehumanization of racialized bodies.

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Example #4 illustrates Gates’s ostensibly neutral and universal interpretation of the current problems within the education system:

...I’d like to say a few words about the state of public education in the U.S. By

and large, schools are still falling short on the key metrics of a quality education -

math scores, English scores, international comparisons, and college completion.

(Gates, 2017)

Table 2. Narrative 1: Example 4

Example (s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

4. ...I’d like to say a Schools are failing Public sees good Money and policy few words about the (public education is scores as good go toward funding state of public failing) education initiatives to education in the Scores and numbers improve the “key U.S. By and large, are the “key metrics Public belief in the metrics” schools are still of a quality ineffectiveness and falling short on the education” inevitable failure of key metrics of a public systems, quality education - “Quality education” which serves as math scores, is neutral and justification for English scores, universal privatization international comparisons, and The problem with There is no college completion. U.S. education is questioning of (Gates, 2017) structural issues, because the focus is placed on these “key metrics”

Gates’s statement suggested that the education system is failing because U.S. test scores and other metrics are falling short. This statement oversimplified and misdiagnosed the problems of the education system by focusing solely on these quantitative measures.

Gates’s assessment did not include the lack of resources and underfunding of poor 85 schools, the historic social and educational inequities that Ladson-Billings (2006) refers to as the education debt, the biases of standardized tests, or the plethora of other school- related issues. It also did not mention any broader societal factors that contribute to low academic performance. By stating a problem without context, this statement upholds problematic ideologies that do not question unjust systems. The next examples demonstrate the same issue:

Table 3. Narrative 1: Examples 5-6

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

5. When There is an Buttresses notions disaggregated by achievement gap, of White Money and policy race, we see two with Whites intellectual initiatives focus on Americas. One performing better supremacy improving student where White than students of achievement and students perform color Public not toward along the lines of consciousness about changing the best in the Achievement gap the achievement inequitable systems world—with does not have gap does not that impact achievement underlying factors include underlying achievement comparable to factors disparities countries like Finland and Korea. And another America, where Black and Latino students perform comparatively to the lowest performing OECD countries, such as Chile and Greece. (Gates, 2017) Continued

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Table 3 Continued

6. Melinda and I made public education our top priority in the U.S. because we wanted to do something about the disparity in achievement and postsecondary success for students of color and low-income students (Gates, 2017).

Gates oversimplified the disparities between students of color and White students by omitting the reasons behind them - racism, historic oppression of people of color, separate and unequal schools, and the myriad other inequities that account for differences in academic performance (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Ladson-Billings (2006) argues that the historic deprivation of education, political rights, economic stability, and moral reprieve for people of color all contribute to what we now know as the achievement gap, and thus the achievement gap should be reframed as the education debt. Yet Gates did not mention any of these deeper issues, nor did he acknowledge that these inequities impact student academic performance.

Gates’s myopic focus on differences in academic performance and postsecondary success between White students and students of color did not seem to consider that the education system is a racist structure designed to benefit White people (Leonardo &

Grubb III, 2013). White supremacy undergirds all other U.S. institutions as well, and this

87 also contributes to the achievement gaps mentioned in the speech. In addition, Gates said that we see two Americas as pertains to test scores but did not consider that there are two

Americas when it comes to disparities in jobs, health, incarceration, wealth, or other systemic issues as a result of structural racism (Morris, 2014). By focusing solely on academic achievement, Gates made these other issues invisible as though they are unrelated to education and achievement gaps.

Example #6 also reflects the decontextualized focus on student achievement gaps:

“Melinda and I made public education our top priority in the U.S. because we wanted to do something about the disparity in achievement and postsecondary success for students of color and low-income students” (Gates, 2017). Again, the academic success disparity was the only disparity mentioned here. This suggests that the foundation wants to change the gaps in achievement without changing the conditions that account for these gaps. The gaps in educational resources and funding, employment, housing, wealth, food security, healthcare, and other areas that disproportionately impact Black people due to racialized poverty are underlying factors that cause poorer outcomes for African Americans across the board (Morris, 2014). The absence of these disparities from this narrative implies that the Gates Foundation is not interested in changing these underlying gaps, which impact student learning.

The racism within the education system was also missing from this narrow, decontextualized focus on student achievement. The racism inherent within school discipline, curricula, and employees plays a major role in the achievement gap between

White students and students of color (Leonardo & Grub III, 2013). Students of color are

88 likely not to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, and the disconnect created by many culturally incompetent school environments causes many students to feel as though school is not for them (Emdin, 2016; Leonardo & Grub III, 2013). These unmentioned factors play a role in how students perform academically.

Another aspect of racism that was left out of Gates’s narrative is the disparity in school resources between students of color and White students. Due to centuries of slavery, segregation, employment discrimination, disinvestment from Black communities, and unconstitutional property tax-based school funding systems, Black students are likely to attend underfunded, under-resourced schools. Instead of addressing the inequalities of school funding and resources, Gates placed exclusive focus on the differences in student achievement that result from these inequities. This omission implies that as long as students of color are able to learn at the same rate and get the same test scores as White students, none of the other inequalities matter.

This restricted focus on individual student achievement stops any conversation on societal inequity before it even starts. It also frames Gates’s assessment of what makes a successful school, as seen in the next examples:

Over time, we realized that what made the most successful schools successful –

large or small – was their teachers, their relationships with students, and their high

expectations of student achievement. . .Understanding this, we saw an opportunity

to move our work closer to the classroom – to systemically support schools across

the country to improve the quality of teaching and raise academic standards.

(Gates, 2017)

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Table 4. Narrative 1: Examples 7-8

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

7. Over time, we The public sees Money goes realized that what made Teachers are the solutions only in toward funding the most successful most in-school terms of teacher prep schools successful – important factor in individuals and large or small – was student not in systemic The foundation’s their teachers, their achievement and changes to influence in relationships with school success; education teacher prep and students, and their high outside-of-school creation of expectations of student factors are a non- Justification for standards achievement. (Gates, issue for student “higher increases 2017) achievement standards” without Scripted lesson 8. Understanding this, Teaching needs to questioning what plans and other we saw an opportunity be improved and those standards forms of to move our work closer academic standards are or where they panoptic to the classroom – to need to be raised came from classroom systemically support surveillance schools across the Belief that country to improve the teachers are quality of teaching and ineffective and raise academic need to be standards. (Gates, 2017) surveilled

No mention of cultural competency in discussion of teacher effectiveness

Examples #7 and #8 exemplify teacher-centric rhetoric, which plays a major role in the oversimplified narrative. This narrative places the blame and the responsibility for improving the education system on individual teachers. As Kohn (2000) warns, placing all of the emphasis on teachers for the problems in the education system takes the focus

90 off of the unjust system and unduly holds individual teachers accountable for problems that are out of their control. It also justifies the surveillance of teachers that in the most extreme sense takes the form of scripted lesson plans and programs that map out every minute of the school day (Kozol, 2005).

A major research study that the Gates Foundation spearheaded, the Intensive

Partnerships for Effective Teaching Study of Teacher Evaluation,1 is an example of a teacher-centric initiative that illustrated how focusing entirely on teachers does not yield palpable results for students. The purpose of this study was to test teacher evaluation and feedback systems and see how much they impacted student achievement. Reflective of the assumption that teachers are the most important school-based factor in student success, the Gates Foundation’s expectation was that focusing on teacher improvement through evaluation and feedback would help student achievement. This study lasted several years and cost $575 million, but it ended up falling short on its goals for improving student achievement (Will, 2018)2.

This study exemplified the Gates Foundation’s individualistic approach and misdiagnosis of the problem of student achievement. An assumption behind the study was that a lack of effective feedback for teachers caused student academic problems. But when the conditions of the school system are the same and students are in the same

1 For more on the research study, visit https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2242.html 2For the full article on this topic: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/06/21/an- expensive-experiment-gates-teacher-effectiveness-program-show.html-74B1-11E8-9753- 7F0EB4743667&cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2&M=58524703&U=1332932 91 situations of racialized poverty, a teacher evaluation system is not enough to change these underlying issues that impact student academic success. This is not to say that teachers are unimportant or that their relationships with students and high expectations of them do not make a difference in student learning. They are an important school-related factor in student academic success.3 But the narrow focus on in-school factors leaves out out-of- school realities. It cannot be ignored that students will be less able to thrive academically if their basic needs are not being met and if they feel completely disconnected from a school system that is not designed to serve them.

Furthermore, Gates’s teacher-centric rhetoric in the above examples left out important factors that may also impact teaching that go deeper than simply improving their instruction through the use of evaluations. Fair pay, tolerable working conditions, and education in cultural competence are three examples. It is well known that teachers in the United States are underpaid and overworked4, and that they are often not respected as professionals in increasingly authoritarian school systems. Many teachers are also unable to connect with their students due to their misunderstanding of students’ cultures and their deficit framework of their students (Emdin, 2016). So even within a focus on teachers, many of the deeper issues that impact teaching and learning were still missing from Gates’s oversimplified narrative.

3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/08/16/think-teachers- arent-paid-enough-its-worse-than-you-think/?utm_term=.5d6122410c3c 4 https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/8/1793799/-Two-new-studies-show-just-how- underpaid-teachers-are 92

Example #9 acknowledges other school-related factors that impact student academic achievement:

In addition, it became clear that teacher evaluation is one important piece of

several critical elements to drive student achievement. School leadership, teacher

professional development, climate, and curriculum also play critical roles in

improving student achievement. (Gates, 2017)

Table 5. Narrative 1: Example 9

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

9. …teacher Student Individualistic view Money and policy evaluation is one achievement is only of student initiatives go important piece of connected to achievement toward surface several critical school; outside-of- level, school-based elements to drive school factors don’t No underlying solutions such as student matter. critique of school teacher evaluations, achievement. inequality in the curriculum, PD, etc. School leadership, public ideology and not toward teacher professional structural solutions. development, climate, and curriculum also play critical roles in improving student achievement. (Gates, 2017)

Gates continued the oversimplified narrative by mentioning other factors that “play critical roles in improving student achievement,” but he never moved past the level of the individual school. He mentioned “school leadership, teacher professional development, climate, and curriculum,” but no structural factors that account for student achievement.

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The concrete policy initiatives that result from this rhetoric never move past Band-Aid solutions.

Later in his speech, Gates discussed the importance of a curriculum centered on the Common Core State Standards.

Table 6. Narrative 1: Examples 10-11

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

10. …We also Common core is Curricular backed the important for Public opinion may surveillance (via Common Core student begin to see common core or because…all achievement. Common Core other means), students…should neutral, non- graduate with the “costlier solutions” ideological, and Standards aligned skills and are not an option essential curriculum knowledge to becoming law succeed after high Standards-aligned school. . . Teachers curricula are what Money and policy need better teachers need the go toward curricula curricula…aligned most instead of equity with the Common efforts Core. (Gates 2017)

11. …curricula can improve student learning more than many costlier solutions. (Gates, 2017)

These statements gave undue credit to the usefulness of the Common Core State

Standards, which have been heavily criticized for lacking substance, for not helping

94 student learning, for being written largely by non-educators,5 and for posing major concerns for student equity (California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education,

2016). However problematic and ineffective the standards are, the overemphasis on a

Common Core-aligned curriculum poses another problem: it functions in the same way as the overemphasis on “teacher quality” by ignoring structural issues. It insists that a curriculum aligned with the Common Core State Standards is the solution to low student achievement at the expense of taking a more complex look into the issue. The narrative also suppresses any conversation about the efficacy of the Common Core State Standards that Gates advocates for.

Even within a narrow focus on the curriculum, there are deeper curricular issues left out of Gates’s assessment. The racism and Eurocentric bias in the curriculum play a role in whether students do or do not see themselves and others reflected in the curriculum (Leonardo & Grubb III, 2013), which impacts whether or not they feel connected to what they are learning in school. When students do not feel connected to what they are learning, they are more likely to see schooling as separate from their intellectual development and subsequently may have a higher chance of not succeeding in school (Emdin, 2016).

When Gates said that “we also know that high-quality curricula can improve student learning more than many costlier solutions” (Gates, 2017), he assumed an authoritative voice about what is known about curriculum and student learning without

5 For details on the authors of the CCSS, visit https://seattleducation.com/common-core- standards/who-wrote-the-common-core-standards-the-common-core-24/ 95 mentioning where he got this information from. By asserting that the curriculum is the factor that can improve student learning more than costlier solutions, the focus again was placed on a surface-level solution and the discussion of costlier solutions was stopped before it even had a chance to start. Any mention of out-of-school factors that could have a positive impact on students’ in-school performance, such as community stability and a living wage for families, are not part of the discussion. The policy consequences of the emphasis on Common-Core aligned curriculum also keeps the door open for corporations who make “standards aligned” materials and standardized tests to profit from students.

Furthermore, example #10 shows Gates speaking for teachers by saying that they need a standards-aligned curriculum. He spoke as the authoritative voice on behalf of teachers by listing their needs while omitting any discussion about their other concerns, including a fair salary, a school that is well-funded enough to provide them with the proper supports, and respect as professionals. The act of a businessman speaking on behalf of teachers contributes to the devaluation of educators’ voices and the dismissal of the professional capability of teachers.

Gates then moved on to state his perceptions of the common features of successful schools without backing up the statements with any evidence: “Schools that track indicators of student progress — like test scores, attendance, suspensions, and grades and credit accumulation – improved high school graduation and college success rates” (Gates, 2017).

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Table 7. Narrative 1: Examples 12-13

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences 12. Schools that Tracking these Still no underlying Money/policy track indicators of metrics will causes or discussion initiatives go student progress — improve student of underfunding/ toward these like test scores, achievement unequal distribution surface level attendance, of resources interventions suspensions, and Simple problem, grades and credit simple solution: accumulation – Schools just need to improved high track these school graduation indicators to and college success improve graduation rates. (Gates, 2017) rates

13. And last, The problem is schools are the unit only at the school of change in the level effort to increase student Schools have achievement and inadequate they face common resources and challenges – like need better supports inadequate (non-financial) and curricular systems strategies and insufficient support for students as they move between middle school, high school and college. And they need better strategies to develop students’ social and emotional skills. (Gates, 2017)

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In example #12, Gates made the assumption that there is a connection between tracking the measures of student attendance, test scores, suspensions, and grades/credits and increasing graduation and college success rates. This statement overlooked the reality that many struggling schools already do track these measures, and it did not include any underlying reasons of why a student might have an issue with truancy, suspensions, or low grades. Gates’s assessment left out that child poverty is associated with high truancy rates (Zhang, 2003) and that racism in school disciplinary practices leads to Black students being suspended at much higher rates than their White counterparts (Kim et al.,

2010). Grades and credit accumulation are related to a variety of underlying factors, as well. By not attempting to steer the conversation toward solutions to child poverty and racist school discipline, Gates missed the point that simply tracking these measures is not enough to improve student success.

In example #13, Gates stated that “schools are the unit of change in the effort to increase student achievement” (Gates, 2017). This eliminates any discussion about out- of-school factors or inequities impacting student achievement. Gates made a similar statement in example #14: “Our work is also driven by a direct focus on schools, because that’s where the action of teaching and learning happens” (Gates, 2017) Again, there was no mention of out-of-school or structural factors that impact teaching and learning.

These examples also demonstrated the Gates Foundation’s assumption that it knows what schools need and the challenges they face. According to this rhetoric, schools need strategies for developing student’s socioemotional skills, better curricula, and student supports during grade transitions. Asserting that these are the things that 98 schools need covers up the deeper needs of school funding, resources, infrastructure, adequate staff, and a plethora of other essentials. This surface-level rhetoric overlooks the school needs that would have required a deeper discussion about the inequitable structure of the education system. That is not to say that curricula and student support during transitions are unimportant. But they are not the only needs that schools have, as the example implied through omission.

On the same note, students do need to develop their social and emotional skills.

But when considering their socioemotional development, it is important to understand underlying causes of social, behavioral, and emotional issues in students. Are they coming from histories of abuse, poverty, and other traumas that can take a psychological toll? Are they suffering from the side effects of toxic racism, patriarchy, and other systems of violence? Do they have access to the needed mental healthcare? By remaining at the surface level, Gates asserted that these underlying conditions are non- issues in the discussion of the problems or in the creation of solutions.

Implications: How does this narrative sustain Black captivity?

The “problem is simple” narrative sustains Black captivity by distracting the public from seeing or questioning underlying issues and anti-Black societal structures.

This in turn functions to nullify demands for Black liberation because discussions about the inequitable systems that keep Black people oppressed never gets a chance to enter this discussion. Gates presented his perceptions of the problems of schools and of the state of

American education as the dominant, neutral, and universal voice, which omits critical perspectives completely. This narrative presents the perceived problems within the

99 education system in an ahistorical, decontextualized way that removes the culpability from systems of White supremacy, economic exploitation, and other systems of injustice.

By presenting an oversimplified viewpoint of educational problems and solutions, any discussion about underlying anti-Black structures is stopped before it even starts. Gates’s rhetoric reflected the dominant discourse on educational issues, and this surface-level narrative seeps its way into the public consciousness through the popular media.

The Gates Foundation has had tremendous influence in shaping the current education discourse and policy by funding research and programs, lobbying lawmakers, and posting news articles that promote their ideologies in various media outlets. The

Gates Foundation’s former chief financial officer and current U.S. program president

Allan Golston was a contributor the now-defunct Huffpost Contributor Platform.

According to the Huffington Post website, “Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site” (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/whats-working- engaging-families-as-education-partners_us_58ac4d82e4b03250fc905f1d). Golston contributed 22 articles to the Huffington Post, all of which promoted the Gates

Foundations’ initiatives and touted the same narratives that do not go beyond the surface level. Golston also wrote promotional articles for the Gates Foundation’s initiatives that exemplify oversimplified assessments in the education news website The 74, which is “a non-profit, non-partisan news site covering education in America”

(https://www.the74million.org/about/). Each article that Golston wrote for The 74 includes a disclaimer that the Gates Foundation provides financial support to the website.

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The articles promoted by the Gates Foundation, as well as Bill Gates’s speeches, interviews, and the news articles on the Gates Foundation’s k-12 website, espouse an uncritical understanding of educational problems. They propose solutions and suggestions without challenging the unjust social structures that need to change in order for school equity to become a reality. Again, this blunt omission of underlying issues halts any conversation of oppression or anti-Blackness before it starts. It disallows questions of power, privilege, and oppression from entering the popular discourse or ideology of education. And if the public conversation about oppression and anti-

Blackness inside and outside of education is blatantly ignored like it is in this oversimplified narrative, it is unlikely to be addressed by a significant number of people outside of a handful of radical and critical education advocates.

The oversimplified narrative assumes that the problems within the education system can be fixed within the existing social structure, which is inherently anti-Black.

Anti-Black structures cannot exist without perpetuating anti-Blackness. When the dominant narrative sidesteps the deeper societal issues that lead to educational inequity, the problems within the education system are likely to be examined outside of the other factors that impact student performance, including poverty, lack of healthcare, housing, and childcare, health problems, violence, institutionalized racism, and other factors.

Subsequently, the proposed solutions, funding, and policy initiatives will continue to only involve surface-level interventions such as teacher evaluation, curriculum, and classroom technology, none of which are enough to make a significant change in the disparities between students in terms of academic performance. The proposed solutions that this

101 narrative leads to do not address what actually needs to happen in order to foster educational equity.

How can we begin to challenge and dismantle anti-black systems when anti-

Blackness, its historical roots in society, or its implications in education never reaches the conversation? How can we bring in deeper discussions of capitalism and the environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and inequality that it necessitates if the discourse remains at the surface level? Perhaps the “problem is simple” narrative is necessary to maintain current power imbalances, because a critical perspective would result in the questioning of the same unjust structures that earned Gates and other billionaire philanthropists their fortunes. The capitalist structure is the reason why Bill

Gates is able to live in a multi-million-dollar home while others are laboring for wages too low to pay for adequate housing.

This narrative does the ideological work of leading the public to believe that the problems and solutions are simple and unrelated to deeper societal issues. It never questions or challenges anti-Black systems of violence. This helps to sustain Black captivity because we can’t be free if we can’t even have an honest conversation about the roots of our unfreedom, and this narrative keeps too many individuals away from discussing those roots.

Narrative #2: The solution is scientific (not structural).

The second salient narrative that I identified was the narrative that scientific solutions such as data and technology will solve the problems within the education system as opposed to structural solutions. I refer to this as the scientific solutions

102 narrative. This narrative assumes that data-driven, technological solutions are necessary in order to lead to improvements in student achievement. This narrative often calls for technical/scientific solutions “grounded in data and evidence” (Gates, 2017) while overlooking structural issues such as racism and the inequitable distribution of resources.

It also shows an uncritical acceptance of data and evidence without going into detail about where the data and evidence are coming from, how credible the sources are, how they will be used, or the other important considerations. Similarly, it shows a blind acceptance of technology as a solution without detailing the possible implications that those technologies might have in schools. It ignores the fact that despite the advent of technologies such as the personal computer, educational inequality still remains strong.

The scientific solutions narrative also favors easily quantifiable information such as math and reading test scores to the detriment of subjective measures such as critical thinking or creativity. This has resulted in interventions that focus on improving numbers without necessarily improving the education students are getting or the conditions of schools (Kohn, 2000; Hursh, 2007). I identified 14 examples of the scientific solutions narrative within the two discursive samples that I analyzed.

The first four examples highlight Gates’s focus on data and evidence in educational interventions and connects technology to notions of increased school success and student achievement.

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Table 8. Narrative 2: Examples 1-4

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material Consequences Consequences

1. …excellent The important Public perception of Money and policy schools— led by characteristic of a educational initiatives go leaders who focus school leader is that solutions with no toward data, on continuous they are focused on understanding of evidence, and improvement data & evidence underlying causes technology instead grounded in data or discussion of of fixing the root of and evidence— Success is only underfunding/ the problem are what help school-based, no unequal distribution students succeed external factors of resources most. (Gates, 2017) Data/evidence Public perception of 2.We do this by based interventions solutions based on investing in will help improve scientific solutions networks of schools student instead of structural to solve common achievement. changes problems schools face by using data- driven continuous improvement to identify evidence- based interventions that best fit their needs. (Gates, 2017)

3. …we will focus on locally-driven solutions identified by networks of schools, and support their efforts to use data-driven continuous learning and evidence-based interventions to improve student achievement. (Gates, 2017) Continued 104

Table 8 Continued

4. We anticipate that about 60 percent of this will eventually support the development of new curricula and networks of schools that work together to identify local problems and solutions . . . and use data to drive continuous improvement. (Gates, 2017)

In example #1, Gates suggested that excellent schools are “led by leaders who focus on continuous improvement grounded in data and evidence” (Gates, 2017), and that this is an important factor in student success. This statement dismissed other factors that may be important for school leaders to focus on besides data and evidence, including cultural competence, relationships with students, and connection with the community.

This statement also implied that great schools that are led by data and evidence-focused leaders are what will help students succeed without questioning the extreme inequalities between wealthy and poor schools or the societal inequalities that hurt students’ capacity to thrive in school. It kept the discussion of solutions at the school level and advocated for technical, not structural, solutions.

An overemphasis on data and evidence in solving education issues was also apparent in Examples #2-4, which came from the “What We Do” page of the Gates 105

Foundation’s k-12 website and Gates’s 2017 Council of Great City Schools speech respectively. These statements emphasized “data driven” continuous improvement and

“evidence based” interventions as solutions to the problems schools face, without detailing the data and evidence that it referred to, how it was generated, or any other information about it. This reflects an uncritical acceptance of data and evidence as a good thing without mentioning that some data and evidence are relevant to the problem, while others are not. The data could be anything- enrollment and attendance records, student surveys, teacher evaluations, or any other form of quantitative information, but we cannot know what it is or how it is useful in coming up with solutions because it was not stated.

The same was true for Gates’s statement on “evidence-based interventions.” The evidence could be student test scores, school report cards, or any other quantifiable measure. When data and evidence are overemphasized in creating interventions, there is a risk of using policy and pedagogical methods to satisfy the numbers, as can be seen with the overuse of standardized testing as data for developing educational policy and programs (Ravitch, 2010). Energy is then spent on influencing easily quantifiable data, such as student test scores, to the detriment of harder-to-quantify aspects of education, such as critical and creative thinking. Standardized test scores still play a major role in evaluating student performance, and this runs the risk of shaping policy and pedagogy around improving test scores despite the problematic nature of the tests or the reality that they are not accurate measures of learning (Kohn, 2015). An overemphasis on testing has also resulted in the development of authoritative programs such as KIPP, which target 106 low-income students of color and justify their draconian methods by citing student test scores as evidence. Furthermore, the overemphasis on quantifiable data has led to a variety of cheating scandals and a general trend of teaching-to-the-test in schools that struggle to produce high test scores (Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Kohn, 2015).

Perhaps the lack of detail about what Gates specifically means when he discusses data and evidence- based solutions is due to an assumption that many people might accept these ideas simply because he is advocating for them. How many people would argue about the importance of data and technology in solving education issues with a multi-billionaire who made his fortune from data and technology? Gates’s presumed expertise in the area of data and technology, even when it is being utilized outside of his field, exemplifies a level of wealthy White male privilege which allows him to shape policy solutions to an issue that he is not an expert on.

The next example also reflects the Gates Foundation’s advocacy for technology- based solutions:

And we’ll keep our eyes on the horizon, advancing long-term innovation, research

and development focused on ideas and practices with the potential to significantly

change the trajectory of student learning outcomes over the next 10 to 15 years.

(http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/)

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Table 9. Narrative 2: Example 5

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material Consequences Consequences

5. And we’ll keep Innovation, Public perception of Money and policy our eyes on the research and solutions is kept at go toward horizon, advancing development has the scientific level, data/evidence/techn long-term the potential to not the structural ology instead innovation, research significantly change level addressing the root and development learning outcomes of the problem focused on ideas Overemphasis on and practices with student learning the potential to outcomes instead of significantly change equitable social the trajectory of systems student learning outcomes over the Equity is next 10 to 15 years. constructed as the (http://k12education ability become a .gatesfoundation.or wage earner, join g/what-we-do/) the workforce and to fit into the existing social stratification

This shows a myopic focus on using data to change individual student learning outcomes,

(which is likely measured by their performance on tests) and not on fostering educational equity, reducing student poverty, or improving the public education system overall.

Innovations, research and development are not enough to significantly change student learning outcomes as long as the structures that perpetuate educational inequality remain intact. However, the Gates Foundation’s website insisted that innovations and research can potentially make a significant impact on student outcomes. If this were true, with the

108 influx of technology and research that has reached many classrooms over the past several decades, the problems within the education system would already be solved.

In example #6, Gates referred to his foundation’s initiative that tested the effectiveness of teacher evaluation systems:

Table 10. Narrative 2: Example 6

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material Consequences Consequences

6. This work has Teacher evaluation Uncritical Money and policy helped states across systems improve acceptance of data go toward data the country build teaching as necessary and systems comprehensive helpful evaluation systems Quantitative data is based on multiple needed to identify measures. We’ve good/bad teachers seen promising results…where research shows these systems can help identify teachers who need to improve and those who are underperforming... and in places like Tennessee, where three out of four teachers say the evaluation process improves their teaching. (Gates, 2017)

Despite its overall lack of success, Gates praised his foundation’s recent long-term research project, the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching Study of Teacher

Evaluation, also known as the Measures of Effective Teaching initiative. This was 109 previously the foundation’s major policy initiative, and it operated on the premise that giving teachers better feedback through the use of teacher evaluation systems would improve student achievement.6 However, the results of this study showed no improvement in student achievement.7 This was one example of an overemphasis on quantifiable data leading to an unnecessary expenditure of money and energy on matters that could have been figured out without expensive research studies. Students could have simply been asked whether or not their teacher is effective and what their teacher can do to improve without the use of a multi-million-dollar evaluation system.

In example #6, Gates named several cities in which teacher evaluation systems have yielded “promising results.” But according to the foundation’s own research, simply having this information did not produce the positive results for students that the

Gates Foundation expected. The expectation behind the study was that data- in the form of teacher evaluation systems- would change student learning outcomes. In this case, the data provided by teacher feedback did not significantly help students. Perhaps the lack of impact on students is due to the reality that teacher evaluation systems do not change the issues of school underfunding, institutionalized racism, poverty, and economic inequality that contribute to differences in student performance (Berliner, 2013; Ladson-Billings,

2006; Emdin, 2016). The teacher evaluation system did nothing to solve the problem that many students still do not have their basic needs met and the education system is still

6 For more on the initiative, visit https://medium.com/@AllanGolston/what-weve- learned-about-teacher-evaluation-1334e350b901 7 For more on the study results, visit https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/06/21/an- expensive-experiment-gates-teacher-effectiveness-program-show.html 110 inequitable. Data can only produce limited (if any) results when the underlying conditions of inequality remain the same.

In example # 7, Gates stated that his foundation will continue encouraging the use of teacher data systems:

First, although we will no longer invest directly in new initiatives based on

teacher evaluations and ratings, we will continue to gather data on the impact of

these systems and encourage the use of these systems to improve instruction at the

local level. (Gates, 2017).

Table 11. Narrative 2: Example 7

Example(s) Narrative(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

7. “…although Data (of These systems Focus is on Money/time/en we will no teacher will improve teacher ergy goes longer invest feedback/evalu education at the evaluations and toward directly in new ation systems) local level not the broader feedback initiatives will improve system systems//teache based on education r evaluations teacher instead of other evaluations and things. ratings, we will Meanwhile, continue to things such as gather data on cultural the impact of competence or these systems anti-racist and encourage teacher the use of these education is out systems to of the equation. improve instruction at the local level. (Gates, 2017)

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Despite the evidence that these systems did not produce significant results for students, Gates asserted that teacher evaluation systems will “improve instruction at the local level.” This statement suggests that Gates still thinks that data systems will improve teaching, without acknowledging the dismal results of the study and without considering any structural factors that impact teaching and learning. This statement illustrates the teacher-centric narrative that better instruction alone will have a significant impact on student achievement and the technocratic narrative that data will improve teaching. It also overlooks deeper issues related to teacher effectiveness, such as cultural competence and relationships with students (Emdin, 2016).

In the next example, Gates continued the scientific solutions narrative: “Finally, we will expand investments in innovative research to accelerate progress for underserved students” (Gates, 2017).

Table 12. Narrative 2: Example 8

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

8. “Finally, we will The problem is that Upholds ideology Research, policy expand investments underserved of individual and money go in innovative students aren’t achievement and of toward accelerating research to progressing fast deficiencies of progress for accelerate progress enough “underserved” underserved for underserved students by students instead of students. (Gates, Research will focusing on creating equitable 2017) accelerate the students who aren’t systems progress of progressing fast underserved enough students

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In example #8, Gates stated his intention to invest in research aimed at accelerating the progress of underserved students. He placed the focus on individual students not progressing fast enough instead of focusing on the systems that are failing underserved students or questioning why so many students are underserved in the first place. This statement implied that the intended outcome of the research would be to get underserved students to catch up to their well-resourced counterparts, and it did not include any discussion of equity or structural solutions. This rhetoric is dangerous in that it could result in the continuation of stereotypes of lower intelligence in poor students and students of color by assuming that their progress is slow and needs to be accelerated.

In examples 9-12, Gates attempted to strengthen his case on the importance of data in improving education.

Table 13. Narrative 2: Examples 9-12

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences 9. Many states, Data helped the Upholds data- Money and policy districts, and problems centric ideology go toward surface- schools now have mentioned instead of level interventions the data they need ideologies that to track student Data was the main would lead to the progress and contributing factor proposal of achievement… to the improvement structural solutions (Gates, 2017) of these situations, no other factors 10. …a new data were at play system revealed that students weren’t aware of their college options…” (Gates, 2017)

Continued

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Table 13 Continued

(Gates, 2017)

11. Summit Public Schools, which operates 11 charter schools in California and Washington, analyzed data and determined that English Learners entered school significantly behind and never caught up. So, it identified the teachers whose EL students were doing the best, talked to them and curated their materials, and applied those best practices across all Summit schools. In less than a year, the performance gap between English Learners and others decreased by 25 percent. (Gates, 2017)

12. In Chicago, researchers also found powerful insights in their data that are predictive

Continued

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Table 13 Continued of student progress and success. They determined, for example, that 9th graders who succeed on four key indicators – high attendance, course completion rates, credit accumulation, and grades – are more than four times as likely to graduate. And if their grades are a B+ or higher, they are much more likely to succeed in their first year of college. (Gates, 2017)

All of these data-centered success stories overlooked the underlying reasons why students might be getting low grades, why they might have attendance problems, and why performance gaps exist. Gates’s examples also showed an assumption that the data caused the improvements without including other factors that might have contributed to these results. These statements presumed that simply tracking student achievement and placing a laser focus on solving that particular problem (with no examination of social context) can help the problem significantly.

These statements ignored underlying issues and did not delve deeper into why student attendance is poor in the first place, which logically would result in lower grades, credit accumulation, and graduation rates. Gates’s references did not take into account 115 whether students feel safe, valued, or connected to their school, which may play a role in their attendance. This is not to say that students should take no responsibility for their grades or attendance, but it is important to acknowledge that grades and attendance may be linked to other issues that need to be considered even though they might not be visible in the data that Gates cited. It is also significant that there were no footnotes or citations associated with this speech and that Gates was touting data and evidence without giving any real data or evidence to support his claims.

The next examples called for the development of technology-enabled approaches to education.

Table 14. Narrative 2: Examples 13-14

Assumptions Ideological Material Example(s) consequences Consequences

13. The conditions Technology is People look to Research, policy for developing and helping and it is the technology as the and money go spreading new right time for solution toward technology approaches in developing and instead of equity education, spreading new particularly technology-enabled technology-enabled approaches in ones, are better education than ever. Broadband access in schools is reaching 90 percent. Students and teachers have access to more affordable and more powerful tools for learning. Educators are Continued 116

Table 14 Continued seeking each other out and sharing ideas in digital communities. And there are promising developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics.

14. Math is one area where we want to generate stronger evidence about what works. What would it take, for example, to get all kids to mastery of Algebra I? What kinds of intelligent tools do teachers and students need to get there? And how might we design these in partnership with the best math teachers in the country? (Gates, 2017)

Technology-enabled approaches to education are not be enough to “change the trajectory of public education over the next 10 to 15 years” (Gates, 2017), because a lack of technology in schools is not the root of the problem. Just because more students might have access to “more affordable and more powerful tools for learning,” (Gates, 2017), those technologies will not drastically improve the conditions of schools as long as the 117 structural issues of institutionalized racism and poverty inside and outside of the school are unchanged. If technology were the solution, then the myriad issues within the education system would have been solved long ago with the advent of the personal computer and other technologies.

Additionally, Gates suggested in example #14 that “intelligent tools” might help students gain mastery of Algebra 1 and that his foundation wants to generate more evidence about what works for learning math. However, there are already technology- enabled math programs, such as Kahn Academy and Aleks. Even with these innovations, the education system has not significantly changed and the conditions for poor students have not drastically improved.

Also, despite Gates’s tone signifying that educational innovations are new, many teachers have been sharing ideas online and many students have had new learning tools for decades. New technologies are not the solution to a deeply flawed system. Perhaps

Gates Foundation representatives should seek advice on how to improve student outcomes from Berliner (2013), who suggests that students’ achievement rates will not significantly change unless their families are able to earn a living wage.

Implications: How does this narrative sustain Black captivity?

The “scientific solutions” narrative sustains Black captivity by presenting a set of solutions that does not address the root causes of racialized poverty, anti-Black violence, and other aspects of the afterlife of slavery that keep Black people in a perpetual state of confinement. Data-and-evidence backed interventions at the school level are presented as the answer to the various problems within the education system without looking at

118 structural solutions that would improve the living conditions of Black, Brown, and poor students and subsequently impact in-school success. This discourse insists that the answer to student achievement disparity is evidence-based, data-driven interventions, not societal equity, and this stops the conversation on solutions that would tackle the root causes of education problems before it even starts. The problems of structural anti-

Blackness and injustice are never brought up when the rhetoric is focused on scientific solutions. Addressing the manifestations of anti-Blackness and its implications inside and outside the realm of education never enters the debate. Interventions such as investing in Black communities, paying reparations for slavery, fostering Black self- determination, transforming education into a culturally sustaining system, ending racialized poverty, and stamping out all forms of oppression are not widely discussed in outside of a number of radical educators, scholars, and activists.

When the dominant discourse, which is broadcasted on television, in policy speeches, and in popular education news sources, is focused on technical fixes to a structural issue, the structural solutions are largely left out of the conversation. The ideological consequence of this is that many people will not think beyond scientific solutions to problems within the education system. As a result, there may be public and political support for data-driven proposals at the expense of expanding the debate to include solutions that address economic inequality, racism, and other forms of oppression, which contribute to disparate academic outcomes and to the continuation of

Black captivity. Gates’s rhetoric is representative of the way that corporate philanthropic discourse determines the parameters of acceptable solutions to education issues. The

119 solutions proposed for improving student outcomes, as evidenced throughout this section, do not address larger societal issues such as poverty, which impacts student performance more than in-school factors (Berliner, 2013).

Much like the industrial philanthropists who dictated the direction of Black education throughout the 20th century, there is still a propensity for White men such as

Bill Gates to set policy agendas and come up with solutions that will not threaten their own social standing. Corporate philanthropists, many of whom are wealthy White men8, have benefitted from White supremacy, exploitation of people of color, and inequality.

These systems have contributed to their fortunes, their privilege, and their power to influence policy. Thus, corporate philanthropists will not usually propose solutions that will alter the very foundations of their success. Instead, they propose solutions that function to point the finger at individuals, flawed public schools, and cultural deficiencies instead of the anti-Black systems that they have historically benefitted from. They propose solutions that contribute to the replication of a submissive, easily exploitable labor force (and surplus/incarcerated labor force) consisting largely of Black and Brown people. Their proposed solutions will uphold the structures of anti-Black violence that the society was founded upon and continues to depend on.

Furthermore, these scientific, data-driven solutions, from an increase in high- stakes standardized testing and accountability policies to the prepackaged curricula common in poor urban schools, have contributed to the maintenance of a mentally

8 For a list of the top philanthropists in the U.S., visit https://www.forbes.com/top- givers/#5337ae866ffb 120 incarcerated class of people (Sojoyner, 2016). These solutions have defined the neoliberal education reform era, have resulted in a tremendous amount of educational surveillance in urban schools (Hursh, 2007), and have largely squeezed opportunities for critical or emancipatory pedagogy out of the realm of possibility in poor schools that have mostly students of color (Lipman, 2009). In short, this narrative sustains Black captivity by excluding possibilities of radical change from the discourse and leaving

White men in control of policies that impact Black students and communities.

Narrative #3: Education is a Business.

The third salient narrative that I identified was under the broad category of education is a business, also referred to as the neoliberal narrative. This narrative discusses education in business terms and suggests that the primary purposes and goals of education are economic. This narrative also bolsters the ideologies and practices of the neoliberal education reform movement, including framing education as a form of job training and advocating for the privatization of public education (Lipman, 2011; Anijar &

Gabbard, 2009; Gautreaux, 2015). Gautreaux (2015) reminds us that the key tenants of the neoliberal education reform movement include “the promotion of school choice, the marketization of educational ‘services,’ accountability through standardized exams, and standards-based assessment, all of which are pillars of the global education reform movement” (p. 3).

In the neoliberal narrative, students are often framed as customers or future workers who need to achieve in school in order for them to be prepared for the workplace, to gain access to upward social mobility, and to compete in the global 121 economy. This narrative emphasizes quantitative outputs (e.g. standardized test scores) to measure student achievement, teacher effectiveness, and school success. The neoliberal narrative also implies that business leaders know what is best for the education system and that what is good for business will also be good for education. This narrative has had tremendous ideological implications for the public perception of the purposes of education, as well as practical implications for how education policy is set, what is taught, and how schools are run. I identified 11 statements that exemplify this narrative.

The first example emphasized the importance of education in terms of graduating with work skills: “Our #1 priority was – and still is – ensuring that all students get a great public education and graduate with the skills to succeed in the workplace” (Gates, 2017).

Table 15. Narrative 3: Example 1

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

1.Our #1 priority Education is Public perception of Schools are focused was – and still is – important so why education is preparing students ensuring that all students will be important becomes for jobs (industrial students get a great able to succeed in all about getting a education public education the workplace good job mentality) instead and graduate with Industrial education of other things that the skills to succeed mentality might be important in the workplace. about education (Gates, 2017)

This statement connected education to job readiness. Although job readiness is important so that students will be able to make a living as adults, the fact that this is the only skill set that Gates mentioned here implied that for him, job readiness is the most important element of education. This statement reflected the industrial education 122 ideology that the purpose of schooling is to prepare students to become workers. When the emphasis is placed on job training, the other purposes of education, such as fulfilling intellectual curiosity, gaining the knowledge needed to contribute to a democratic society, building tolerance for others, and engaging in self-discovery, are sidelined. It is also important to note that these other purposes of education are pillars of progressive, democratic, and emancipatory philosophies of education, yet they were absent from the

“education is a business” narrative.

Examples #2 and #3 were also representative of the neoliberal narrative.

Table 16. Narrative 3: Examples 2-3

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

2. We are also Education is Public perception of How Gates defines interested in what important for the purpose of the skills needed to role we can play to economic education as linked enter the workforce prepare students for competitiveness, to the goals of the and to succeed in the dramatic global economic economy college or careers changes underway dominance of U.S. becomes what is in the workforce. and social mobility Industrial education practiced within We have to make mentality, education. work-related The goals of emancipatory Policy and experiences a education are purposes of pedagogy become consistent part of primarily economic education are geared toward these high schools… that outside of the public perceptions of what put young people on ideology is good for job a path to credentials readiness. with labor market value in our future economy. (Gates, 2017) Continued

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Table 16 Continued

3. Without success in college or career preparation programs, students will have limited economic mobility and fewer opportunities throughout their lives. This threatens not only their economic future but the economic future and competitiveness of the United States. (Gates, 2017)

In Example #2, Gates emphasized preparing students from the “dramatic changes” happening in the workforce, but said nothing about preparing students for being engaged citizens, preparing them to exercise their rights and defend the rights of others, or preparing them to think and read critically. The sole focus was to “put young people on a path to credentials with labor market value in our future economy,” (Gates, 2017).

This implied that students are not supposed to question or challenge the economy or the inequality that it necessitates; they are simply supposed to get their credentials so that they can succeed in “our future economy.” Even the word “our” in this context (“our” future economy) merits a close examination. Who was the Gates Foundation referring to when it says “our” future economy? Was it referring to the minuscule class of billionaires who have disproportionate power in the economy and in the society at large?

It makes sense for this group of people to advocate for an education centered on job 124 training as opposed to an education with emancipatory potential. I am not implying that job training and critical, liberatory forms of education are incompatible or mutually exclusive. However, when job training is stated as the purpose of education, the emancipatory potential of a critical education is dismissed.

Example #3 reflected the neoliberal narrative that education is important to uphold the economic dominance of the United States. As Gautreaux (2015) pointed out, the A Nation at Risk report claimed that the failing U.S. education system was causing the nation to fall behind on economic competitiveness. This did the ideological work of

“linking the goals of education to the global economy” (Gautreaux, 2015, p.3). As a result, “these conceptualizations of education. . . are now seen as ‘common sense’ and have been naturalized and accepted as ‘non-ideological’ by the American public”

(Gautreaux, 2015, p.p. 3-4).

Gates’s suggested in example #3 is that if individuals succeed in college and career programs, the nation will maintain its standing in (as #1) in the global economy.

However, the education system is not the reason why the United States is a global economic superpower, and it is not to blame for any threats to the nation’s economic standing in the world or problems within the U.S. economy. Hursh (2007) argued that blame was placed on the education system for economic downturns that were actually a result of neoliberal policies.

Even when non-wealthy Americans experience economic downturns, the U.S. remains an economic superpower due to the legacies of slavery, colonization,

125 imperialism, and countless military interventions abroad to secure its economic supremacy. These violent interventions account for much of the nation’s economic success. To point the finger solely at education for maintaining economic dominance is to erase these bloody histories of domination for the sake of profit accumulation that has defined the history of the United States (Kwinty, 1984; Zinn, 1980).

In example #4, Gates’s comment on social mobility showed an uncritical acceptance of the idea of social mobility. The concept of social mobility is problematic in that “moving up” the economic ladder does nothing to transform the reality that under the capitalist system, it is necessary for much of the global population to be poor in order to subsidize the luxuries of a small wealthy class (Marx, 1976). Gates’s focus on social mobility also reflected a meritocratic ideology by leaving out the many barriers to social mobility that many people face, most of which are due to structural factors such as poverty, racism, and sexism. This rhetoric makes an unstated assumption that no matter your background, you can move up the economic ladder to live the American Dream, which shows a blindness to societal injustices and causes people not to acknowledge the underlying roadblocks to economic success that many people face.

The next examples embodied the pillars of the neoliberal Global Education

Reform Movement, including the push toward standardized accountability, advocacy for charter schools and other privatization schemes, and the marketization of educational services (Gautreaux, 2015). Example #5 showed the use of test scores as an indicator of success: “Fourth-grade reading and math scores in large city schools increased at almost

126 double the rate of public schools nationally. And the 8th grade scores are even better”

(Gates, 2017).

Table 17. Narrative 3: Example 5

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences

5. Fourth-grade Test scores mean Public belief that Money, policy and reading and math success, test scores good test scores pedagogy go scores in large city mean good mean good toward increasing schools increased at education education test scores almost double the rate of public schools nationally. And the 8th grade scores are even better. (Gates, 2017)

Although Gates mentioned elsewhere in this speech that there is more to education than test scores, he defaulted back to test score success stories when he spoke of positive progress happening in schools. Example #5 exemplified the bias toward using test scores as a predictor of student success and school efficacy. The overemphasis on test scores has resulted in detrimental impacts for students, particularly poor students of color who attend struggling urban schools. It has resulted in a narrowing of the curriculum in these schools and an overemphasis on memorization, regurgitation, and teaching-to-the-test as opposed to developing deep levels of understanding (Gautreaux,

2015; Hursh, 2007; Kohn, 2000; Lipman, 2009). Yet Gates did not mention any of these adverse impacts of using test scores as an indicator of student success, nor did he consider the bias of the tests themselves or the racism within the education system that

127 must be considered when discussing test scores. Instead, Gates uncritically accepted the idea that higher test scores means a better education. This upholds a dangerous ideology that equates quantitative gains with academic success, even as students’ critical thinking capacities are stunted by the inefficacious pedagogical practices that the test-prep regime has ushered into the classroom.

Example #6 showed Gates’s support for another aspect of the Global Education

Reform Movement: charter schools.

Table 18. Narrative 3: Example 6

Assumptions Ideological Material Example(s) consequences Consequences

6. …the final 15 Charter schools can Lack of trust in the Money & policy percent of our solve problems that efficacy of public aim to help charters funding…will go to public schools schools instead of the charter sector. cannot improving public We will continue to schools help high- performing charters expand to serve more students. But our emphasis will be on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students … we believe that charters have the flexibility to help the field solve this problem. (Gates, 2017)

Example #6 demonstrated the Gates Foundation’s intention to continue funding and supporting “high-quality charter schools,” as charters have “the flexibility to help the 128 field solve this problem” (Gates, 2017). This statement of support for charter schools implied that public schools do not have the ability to properly serve special needs students. Instead of pledging millions of dollars to public schools to make sure that they have the staff and support that they need to best serve special needs students, this statement framed the problem as though only charters can help.

In addition, Gates overlooked the negative impacts that charters have had for the public education system, including taking money, resources, and students away from the public education system and aiding in the privatization of public education. These impacts have been especially detrimental for communities of color (Buras, 2015).

Despite these issues, a key facet of neoliberal education rhetoric is an acceptance of charter schools and the privatization of public education as a desirable path.

The examples in Table 19 utilized business terms to discuss the Gates

Foundation’s educational funding and exemplify the tenants of neoliberal education reform within the framework of teacher professional development initiatives.

Table 19. Narrative 3: Examples 7-11

Example(s) Assumptions Ideological Material consequences Consequences 7. In 2007, we What is most People may see Policy, pedagogy, began investing in important to business-like and professional the Measures of teaching is performance review development are Effective Teaching performance for teachers as established in project…it has assessments, necessary neoliberal terms contributed standards aligned important curriculum in

Continued

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Table 19 Continued knowledge to the Tactics that have Public perception of Privatization of field about how to worked in business education as a public education gather feedback will also work in business and from students on education business solutions Standards-based their engagement as appropriate for curricula and and classroom Business education professional learning language/practices development experiences . . . and are applicable to Public perception enforced in schools about observing and appropriate for that neoliberal teachers at their education interventions are Funding and policy craft, assessing their working, support initiatives go performance fairly, for neoliberal toward business- and providing reform centered solutions actionable instead of fixing feedback. (Gates, Public perception of structural issues 2017) education/ knowledge as a 8. In a few places, commodity we also will support pilots of scalable professional development supports anchored in high quality curriculum. (Gates, 2017)

9. …the state has created a marketplace of preferred professional development service providers… (Gates, 2017)

10. We expect that about 25 percent

Continued

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Table 19 Continued of our funding in the next five years will focus on big bets – innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of public education over the next 10 to 15 years. (Gates, 2017)

11. We also invest in ensuring that teachers have what they need to be successful—high- quality preparation and standards- aligned instructional materials, accompanied by professional learning opportunities. (http://k12educatio n.gatesfoundation.o rg/what-we-do/)

I put some of words and phrases in the examples above in boldface to show business terms being used in the context of education. For example, Gates referred to programs that are scalable in example #8. Entrepreneur.com defined scalability as follows:

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Scalability is one of the most important factors for entrepreneurs considering

starting a new business or hoping to take a current business to the next level.

Successful business growth depends on a scalable business model that will

increase profits over time, by growing revenue while avoiding cost increases.

(https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243237)

Scalability usually refers to a business model that is able to yield high profit with minimal cost. In the context of professional development, Gates’s use of the word scalable implied that his foundation is interested in professional development programs that will yield a high result (likely measured by quantitative values such as student test scores) while keeping the bottom line down. In example #9, Gates boasted of a marketplace of professional development providers, and he said that a quarter of the

Gates Foundation’s funding will go toward big bets in example #10. It is important to note that Gates slipped these words into his speech as though they naturally belong in an educational context. However, education is not a place for making big bets. The lives of millions of students are at stake; thus it is problematic when what happens in the education system is discussed as though someone is calculating whether or not they should make a bet on the stock market or at a casino. Also, the phrase “marketplace of preferred professional development service providers” seemed to assume that it is appropriate to include the language of the market in education. The words variety or selection could have been used in place of the word marketplace, but inserting business- related words into the educational discourse is necessary to uphold the “education is a business” ideology. 132

It is important for Gates and other corporate philanthropists to implant business terms into the education discourse in order to blur the lines between education and business and to subsequently attune the public to seeing no difference between the realm of education and the realm of business. The use of business language and ideas in education has become so common over the past 40 years that neoliberal approaches to education are now seen as natural and non-ideological (Gautreaux, 2015). Inserting business words into the education discourse bolters this taken-for-granted notion of education as big business.

Examples 8-11 also highlighted the business-derived practices of performance reviews for teachers, standards-based curricula, and other low-risk, low-cost solutions to improve student outcomes. In these examples, Gates advocated for teacher evaluation systems, “high quality” curricula aligned with the Common Core State Standards, professional development, and teacher preparation to help teachers implement the standards. All of these solutions reflected a business-minded, “quality control” solution to an issue that is too deep for surface level interventions to make a big impact. These interventions are relatively low-cost (e.g. curricular materials are likely less expensive than raising teachers’ salaries across the board), are easy to replicate and standardize, and allow businesses to profit from the education system through the creation of curricula, professional development services, evaluation systems, and standardized tests that will likely be used to measure the outcomes of these initiatives. Instead of proposing ideas that would address inequities such as poverty, Gates insisted on business-friendly

133 solutions to a problem that is largely the result of the unrestrained business practices that have reproduced and exacerbated such inequities.

Implications: How does this narrative sustain Black captivity?

The “education as a business” narrative sustains Black captivity by removing the emancipatory potential of education in favor of a form of education that only serves economic ends in a White supremacist capitalist society, and this functions to surveil

Black education and to buttress inherently anti-Black social structures. This narrative conflates the purposes and goals of education to that of business, and this has major ideological implications for the public perception of education and material consequences for the way that the education system is run. It insists that the main purpose of education is to get a job, move up the social ladder, and help the nation compete in the global economy. For Black people in particular, as Woodson (1933) noted, this adds to an

“educated negro” mentality in which educated Black people never use their education to contribute to the betterment of their people. Instead, they use their education and economic success to partake in the spoils of capitalism and Whiteness, even though they will never have full access. Obsessed only with the maintenance of their own social standing and eager to separate themselves from “lower-class” Blacks, the educated Black middle thus class serves as a neutralizing and policing force for Black Americans as a whole.

In other words, when economic gain is emphasized as the purpose of education,

Black liberation is missing from the discussion. This narrative says that if you work hard

134 in school, you can get a good job and move up the social ladder. After consistently hearing this story, the consciousness of Black people as a whole is not on dismantling structural anti-Blackness but on reaching the carrots dangling in front of us. Success stories of a Black president, Black doctors and CEOs become motivation for entering the ranks of capitalist success. Perhaps this is one reason why Gates and other corporate philanthropists, as well as their industrial philanthropist predecessors, have felt a strong need to control the discourse on education and the knowledge disseminated within the education system, particularly for those at the bottom of the social ladder (including and especially poor Black people).

Furthermore, viewing education only in economic terms lessons or removes the possibility for using education as a practice of freedom on a broad scale. Instead of seeing education as a key element to personal and collective liberation, the neoliberal narrative frames education only as a tool for individual gain and economic dominance.

The ideological consequence of this is that opportunities such as using education to learn more about the injustices of society or to develop political clarity are not part of the mainstream conversation on education. Even if these opportunities present themselves, there is a decent chance that the focus on education for individual gain would result in this knowledge not being put to action, as students may still be spending most of their energy solidifying their personal profit instead of acting to fight for justice for themselves and other marginalized groups. The popular discourse on education, and subsequently many individuals’ ideas of education, revolve around test scores, job readiness, and upward mobility at the expense of critical social justice frameworks. 135

The neoliberal narrative also endorses uncritical approaches to knowledge production, as evidenced by Gates’s continual advocacy for the use of standards-aligned materials. The business-derived policies of standardization and accountability have resulted in easily quantifiable gains being seen as the most important, and the negative impacts of the overuse of drilling and teaching-to-the-test in order to “improve outcomes” have ensued as a result. Standardized tests do not measure students’ ability to think creatively, independently, or critically (Kohn, 2000). Many of the students subjected to scripted and prepackaged curricula supported by these reforms aren’t being taught how to think for themselves; instead they are learning how to answer questions and follow orders

(Kozol, 2005). This ensures a smooth transition into their positions at the bottom rungs of society once they reach adulthood. Standardization and accountability policies have been particularly detrimental for Black students in poor urban schools, keeping too many of them mentally incarcerated (Sojoyner, 2016).

The conundrum of neoliberal standards and accountability policies also sustains

Black captivity because it means that opportunities for critical pedagogy, which would help people gain a realistic image of the world and the injustices within it and subsequently challenge oppressive, anti-Black structures, are increasingly squeezed out of the curriculum (Lipman, 2009). Poor Black schools are especially susceptible to be pressured to focus on the useless knowledge that will appear on standardized tests at the expense of gaining critical or liberating knowledge. Teachers are compelled to increase their students’ test scores instead of learning to practice culturally sustaining, critical pedagogy. This has the potential to push progressive and radical educators out of the 136 field because they may quickly become fatigued by the oppressive nature of standardized accountability.

The neoliberal discourse and its material consequence of standardized accountability has also resulted in a form of surveillance that is especially potent in urban schools. This surveillance is achieved through standardized tests and the audit culture

(Apple, 2009), which determines what students are learning in poor urban schools, which teachers can stay and which are forced out, and sometimes what the school day entails down to the minute. These schools are placed on academic emergency and given Fs on state report cards based on their students’ test scores, which justify their continued scrutiny and surveillance. This says to the public that these schools cannot function on their own, thus they need to be closely watched. Instead of placing any accountability measures on the systems that perpetuate educational inequality and racism in education, schools are held accountable for many issues that are out of their control. This contributes to the surveillance of knowledge within Black schools, communities, and students.

Furthermore, this narrative sustains Black captivity because it emboldens wealthy

White business leaders to make decisions that shape education for Black students. As mentioned before, these same people have benefitted from slavery, anti-Blackness, and

White supremacy, and they will not do anything that threatens these systems or own social standing. Just like the White philanthropists who influenced Black education during the 20th century, the new class of corporate philanthropists are supporting

137 initiatives to ensure that Black students are getting their daily dose of docility through their schooling. The 20th century industrial philanthropists wanted to guarantee that the

Black population would be easy to control (Watkins, 2001), and this is largely still the case. The seemingly dystopian reality is that a small group of wealthy White men are coming up with business-minded “solutions” to issues that impact millions of Black students, and their proposed solutions do not address the roots of anti-Blackness. This is further evidence of the supervision of Black education and its role in sustaining Black captivity.

Finally, this narrative sustains Black captivity by upholding neoliberal ideologies and policies, which have aggravated the decimation of Black communities (Wacquant,

2009). Neoliberal policies have contributed to the continued captivity of Black communities in the form of increased policing and imprisonment, which have had disastrous implications within the education system (Wacquant, 2001). The disinvestment from social programs that have characterized neoliberal reforms have contributed to an explosion in the incarceration, exploitation, and further alienation of

Black people (Davis, 1989; Wacquant, 2009). Charter schools and the broader trend of school restructuring and privatization have resulted in the dismantlement of public schools and subsequently the upheaval of communities of color (Buras, 2015). Also, the expansion of charter schools has intensified racialized segregation and has contributed to the overuse of authoritarian educational approaches as seen in the no-excuses schools

(Buras, 2015; Horn, 2011). In light of these detrimental impacts of neoliberal policies inside and outside of education, it is ironic for corporate philanthropists to claim that the 138 very same policies will help students of color. In short, neoliberal policies are the current manifestation of the legacy of slavery in that profit is considered more important than people and Black people bear the brunt of dehumanization, violence, and captivity based on these policies.

Summary

This chapter explored the common narratives apparent in corporate philanthropic discourse by using two discursive samples from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It then examined the implications for each narrative in upholding Black captivity. Even though the Gates Foundation was the main focus, the foundation’s rhetoric reflects narratives that are common within the broader corporate philanthropic discourse. In order to see how these narratives are commonly utilized by other foundations, I looked into the mission and vision statements of three other foundations that donate large sums of money to education.

The Eli and Edith Broad Foundation:

Every student in America deserves a chance for a great life. But too many

students and families—especially those who live in large cities, who are Black or

Latino, or who struggle with poverty—need better public schools and school

systems. In our home city of Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the

country, the need is particularly significant.

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Our grantees and the leaders we support are relentless in their pursuit of providing

an excellent education for every child. With teachers, school leaders, parents and

community members, we are committed to improving our public schools and

making sure every family has access to a great school. Our students deserve no

less. (https://broadfoundation.org/education/)

The Walton Family Foundation:

Supporting access to high-quality education for a lifetime of opportunity

The most important thing we can do to give young people the opportunity to

succeed is to make sure they have a high-quality education that works for them.

This means supporting the growth of schools that transform the lives of children,

especially those from low-income communities. It means believing in the

uniqueness of each child, school and community and understanding that there’s

no one-size-fits-all solution. And it means supporting excellence in teaching by

helping educators do their best for their students. That’s why the foundation

collaborates with schools of all kinds – public charter schools, traditional district

schools and private schools – on bold ideas that will prepare students for a

lifetime of success in school, career and life.

We support new ideas that have a measurable impact on student success. And we

tailor and scale what works to meet the urgent needs of today’s students and

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create lasting change for future generations.

(https://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/our-work/k-12-education)

The William T. Grant Foundation:

Supporting Research to Improve the Lives of Young People

The William T. Grant Foundation invests in high-quality research focused on

reducing inequality in youth outcomes and improving the use of research

evidence in decisions that affect young people in the United States.

(http://wtgrantfoundation.org)

These narratives sound righteous on the surface, but they do not address the underlying causes of educational inequity. The focus seems to be on improving education for marginalized students and/or improving their life outcomes without ever addressing the “why” behind those disparate outcomes. The emphasis is placed on improving the “inequality in youth outcomes” as stated in the Grant Foundation’s statement above, without reducing the inequality of the society in which they live. When the focus of philanthropic dollars is solely on schools or research, structural issues remain untouched. As Berliner (2013) makes clear, focusing on in-school factors will only go so far when students are still struggling to have their basic needs met due to their families not having a living wage. In order to solve the issue of educational inequity, the underlying unjust societal structures need to be corrected. Also, as stated many times throughout this chapter, these narratives omit more radical solutions from the

141 conversation and remove the problem of anti-Blackness from the discussion, which functions to sustain Black captivity by doing nothing to address anti-Black systems.

The next chapter takes the aforementioned issues into consideration to inform its discussion of the findings, recommendations for research, recommendations for practice, and concluding thoughts.

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Chapter 5. Conclusion: Moving Toward an Education for Freedom

Chapter Overview

This study used critical discourse analysis to explore the common narratives that appear in corporate philanthropic discourse and to examine the ways that schooling functions to suppress and surveil Black students. The research questions that were addressed are as follows: 1) What are the common narratives that appear in the corporate philanthropic discourse on education? 2) How does the corporate philanthropic discourse on education function to sustain Black captivity? In order to address these questions, I analyzed two discursive samples from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to find the most salient narratives and discussed the ways in which each of those narratives contributes to the continuation of Black captivity. The narratives that appeared were 1) the problem is simple, 2) the solution is scientific (not structural), and 3) education is a business. The results of this study aligned with the literature about the role of neoliberal discourse in upholding educational structures and practices that suppress critical thought and keep the present power structure intact (Hursh, 2007; Lipman, 2009). This chapter includes a brief discussion of the findings. It then provides recommendations for research, recommendations for practice, limitations of the study, and concluding thoughts.

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Discussion of the Findings

I identified three salient narratives in the discourse. The first salient narrative was

“the problem is simple.” This oversimplification narrative portrayed the problems within the education system in a way that lacked historical and social context. It ignored the deeper social issues that contribute to educational inequality and did not look into out-of- school factors that impact student achievement. This narrative functions to sustain Black captivity because it does not name or acknowledge structural anti-Blackness or institutionalized systems of oppression that undergird the problems within the education system. By ignoring the larger structural issues and only focusing on surface-level rhetoric, this narrative omits discussions about underlying injustices and subsequently lessens the potential for major challenges to oppressive structures.

The second salient narrative was “the solution is scientific (not structural).” This narrative presented the solutions to the problems within the education system as rooted in data, evidence, and technology. It also overlooked structural problems and solutions in favor of surface-level interventions. This narrative functioned to sustain Black captivity by eliminating radical solutions that would address the root causes of anti-Blackness and educational inequity from the discourse. Without considering solutions that could play a role in cultivating Black freedom, ending anti-Black violence and racism, and improving the underlying conditions that result in the continuation of Black captivity, this narrative only functions to uphold the anti-Black system.

The third salient narrative was “education is a business.” This narrative presented the goals and purposes of education as primarily economic. It connected education to job

144 training, upward social mobility, and the maintenance of the dominant position of the

United States in the global economy. This narrative featured business-centric rhetoric and terminology to blur the lines between education and big business. This neoliberal narrative functions to sustain Black captivity because it results in pedagogies and policies that limit critical thinking, conflates education with job training to remove the potential for widespread emancipatory forms of education, and upholds neoliberal policies inside and outside of education that exacerbate the problems that Black people face.

These findings are consistent with the research on the policy implications of neoliberal education discourse and its role in exacerbating inequality between marginalized students and their affluent peers through curricula that stunt the critical thinking activities that happen in poor schools (Sojoyner, 2016; Lipman, 2009.)

Lipman’s (2009) study found that the type of education brought about by neoliberal education reform has had the impact of uncritical rote instruction and teaching-to-the-test, which disproportionately disadvantages Black and Latinx students. Echoing Lipman’s concerns, these are the students who would potentially benefit the most from learning more about the power imbalances that influence their lives. Within the framework of

Black captivity, this serves to keep the Black student and community mentally captive in that the time that could be spent with critical engagement and political awakening is abandoned in favor of test prep. Courses outside of basic math and reading are increasingly cut out of poor majority-Black schools, as tested subjects and scripted instruction take precedence. As Kohn (2000) warned, the test essentially becomes the curriculum in these schools. The discourses that corporate philanthropists continuously

145 disseminate promote uncritical classroom interactions, in which teachers are surveilled through the use of scripted curricula, standardized tests, and punishment and/or shaming if their students do not score well. In this type of education, students are expected to memorize and regurgitate decontextualized facts. These discourses have exacerbated the inequality of course offerings and curricula, which was already unequal prior to NCLB.

Furthermore, based on Kozol’s (2005) and Sojoyner’s (2016) findings, the results echo the concern that poor Black students are not learning how to think critically and are only learning at a generic level, not for deep understanding. Only being able to learn from rote instruction hinders students’ critical thinking capacities and makes it even more unlikely that they will engage with ideas that would lead to revolutionary thought and action through their education. Sojoyner (2016) noticed this phenomenon when he was substitute teaching and realized that students were only trying to get the answers, not really caring about whether or not they understood the concepts. The same was true in

Kozol’s (2005) findings; students were just trying to answer the questions correctly and were not deeply engaging with or truly understanding the material. The discourses that corporate philanthropists promote, along with the material policies that these discourses lead to, emphasize standardized testing, standardized curricula, and surface level approaches to knowledge (Kohn, 2000). This in turn repeats the cycle of Black captivity by disallowing Black students from engaging with potentially liberating forms of knowledge.

These findings are also consistent with the research on social reproduction.

Although corporate philanthropists such as Gates claim to want underserved students to

146 have access to social mobility through their education, their discourses and the policies that result lead to a situation in which students in poor urban schools are only engaging with shallow test-prep activities and learning how to follow procedures (Kohn, 2000).

Meanwhile, their affluent counterparts are able to keep their electives, learn how to negotiate with authority, and not spend the whole year focusing on test prep because they do not have to worry so much about passing the test. Reflective of Anyon’s (1981) study, poor students are being trained to be docile workers in the service sector (and perhaps even being conditioned for incarceration). Meanwhile, students in affluent schools have more flexibility to engage in critical discussion and learning processes that prepare them to assume positions of power as adults.

These findings are also consistent with the literature on wealthy White men making decisions for the education of Black people and controlling the discourse around

Black education, as did the ideological engineers who shaped Black education toward industrial models (Watkins, 2001). Wealthy philanthropists of the past and the present have shaped Black education in a way that does not promote critical thinking, contribute to their knowledge about the power imbalances that shape their lives, or move them closer toward emancipatory epistemologies. Instead, they promoted and continue to promote models of education that were closely linked to getting a job (although the current pedagogical tactics are questionable when it comes to students actually gaining the skills they claim to want students to have). This uncritical, industrial education was designed to keep Black people at the bottom of society, and this is still what is happening today as much as Gates and other corporate philanthropists claim to want these students

147 to be upwardly mobile. These discourses contribute to the continuation of anti-Black narratives that do not challenge inherently unjust social structures. In the afterlife of slavery, Black people are surveilled through schooling, denied an education that would lead to a critical awakening, and told to focus on upward mobility instead of challenging their oppression.

These findings are also consistent with the research on discourse playing a major role in ideologies and subsequently material realities (Fairclough, 2011). The political discourse on education has been heavily influenced by corporate philanthropists such as

Gates. Neoliberal discourses on education have resulted in concrete policy consequences such as No Child Left Behind, which have opened the door for the privatization of education and the overuse of standardized testing. The business-centric discourse oversimplifies issues and poses scientific solutions to improve student outcomes without improving the conditions that lead to unequal student outcomes, but neoliberal discourses and policies are often seen as neutral, non-ideological, and “the only way.” Any discussion of improving the underlying conditions of poverty, inequality, etc., is a non- factor in the mainstream education discourse. The material consequence is that policies will continue to reflect the logic of this dominant discourse, meaning that the reforms will continue to focus on standardized testing and standardized curricula, authoritarian disciplinary schooling for Black and Latinx students, and quantitative methods of teacher evaluation. All of these consequences buttress systems of Black captivity.

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Limitations of the Study

One limitation of this study is that it focused exclusively on corporate philanthropic discourse and did not go in depth about how this aligns with the political discourse on education. The two go hand in hand; corporate billionaires have as much political influence if not more than politicians do in shaping policy. The policy is signed by the legislators, but often it is shaped by corporate CEOs and the Business Roundtable

(Emery, 2002). Presidents’ speeches on education since the 1980s echo the corporate mentality that emphasizes competition, the global economy, and standardization. Future research should analyze dominant political discourses on education and explore the parallels between those discourses and corporate philanthropic discourses. Both contribute to conceptualizations of education that reinforce Black captivity.

Another limitation of this study is that it focuses specifically on the U.S. context.

Anti-Blackness and Black captivity are global phenomena. The entire world as we know it was built upon anti-Blackness and the captive Black body. It was built on the genocides of Indigenous peoples across the world and the exclusion of the Black from the human race. What would the West be were it not for the violence and brutality that it perpetrated upon Black bodies globally? What would Africa be were it not for the plunder of the continent by vulturous colonizing forces? How would the lives of Black people throughout the diaspora be different if this history was different? What about the lives of Whites and other people of color? The world as we know it would not exist were it not for the captive Black body, and the world as we know it will have to change so drastically that the concept of humanity will have to be redefined in order for this reality 149 to shift. The education system contributes to the global denial of Black humanity. Future research should study global education initiatives that corporate foundations and political institutions support, as well as the discourses that surround them, in order to address the issue of Black captivity on a global scale.

Recommendations for Research

In light of the findings of this study, more research needs to be done on how the political discourse is connected to the corporate philanthropic discourse and how they both contribute to anti-Black systems of captivity. Again, the political discourse and the corporate philanthropic discourse both reflect and contribute to neoliberal ideologies within education. Research is needed to critically analyze all of these harmful discourses, because if we do not challenge them, the voices of powerful billionaires and the politicians who are influenced by them will continue to dominate the conversation.

Also, more research is needed to address the qualitative consequences of anti- intellectual instruction that is mainly targeted at poor Black students. The qualitative results of scripted instruction and other repressive pedagogies are necessary to examine and challenge their harmful effects. Further study is needed to examine the results of rote instruction and teaching-to-the-test on students’ intellects, their engagements with knowledge production, and their critical capacities. Along these same lines, research needs to be done to address the impacts of students attending repressive schools such as

KIPP (and other no-excuses schools that have been popularized during the neoliberal education reform movement). Future studies should further the research done by Horn

(2016) by addressing what is being lost at the expense of doing whatever it takes to raise 150 test scores without improving the underlying conditions that led to the inequality in outcomes between poor students of color and their affluent peers. Charter school success stories of students raising their test scores and getting into college need to be challenged by research that focuses on the other results of these processes.

Finally, more research on the impacts of anti-Black racism in education is needed in the research on neoliberalism. I noticed that many of the studies on neoliberal education reform seemed relatively colorblind. Many of the studies that did mention race did not examine the unique structure of anti-Blackness. Research that is critical of neoliberalism should look to Wun (2015) and Dumas (2016) for ideas on how to incorporate the centrality of anti-Blackness into the analysis.

Recommendations for Practice

These recommendations are based on my interpretation of what needs to happen in order to move closer toward educational equity and to lay the foundation for the potential transformation of anti-Black structures, in light of the findings of this study.

My first recommendation for practice is a widespread program of anti-racist, critical, and culturally sustaining pedagogy at every school in the United States starting from Pre-k and continuing through college, instead of White supremacist mis-education. McGregor

(1993) said that

Antiracist teaching confronts prejudice through discussions of past and present

racism, prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination in society. That approach

differs from a cultural information program because it is not the understanding of 151

cultural differences that is important, but the awareness of the economic,

structural, and historic roots of inequality, for which racism is a justification. (p.

216)

Anti-racist education needs to be practiced alongside critical pedagogy, which is

fundamentally committed to the development and enactment of a culture of

schooling that supports the empowerment of culturally marginalized and

economically disenfranchised students. By so doing, this pedagogical perspective

seeks to help transform those classroom structures and practices that perpetuate

undemocratic life. (Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2009, p. 9)

All students need a factual representation of history and society that centers the role of power in the creation of all modern institutions. They need opportunities in school to learn about racism, sexism, economic exploitation, heteropatriarchy, and other forms of oppression so that they can recognize and challenge these systems instead of passively accepting or reproducing them. Both the content and the pedagogy need to be culturally sustaining, meaning that students’ cultures are centered, affirmed, and sustained through the educative process with the aim of fostering a truly pluralistic society instead of only valuing the dominant culture (Paris & Alim, 2014). Culturally sustaining pedagogy is based on Gloria Ladson Billings’s theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. Culturally relevant teaching must have “an ability to develop students academically, a willingness to nurture and support cultural competence, and the development of a social or critical consciousness” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 483). This 152 would necessarily require an end to standardized tests, prepackaged and scripted curricula, and anything else that limits the capacity for students to engage critically with knowledge production (Kohn, 2000; Lipman, 2006). Both the curriculum and the teaching and learning processes have to shift away from the authoritarian banking model and toward the direction of democratic school models that empower the students. Critical education has the goal of transforming unjust structures, thus it has to exist within models of school that reflect the type of society that critical educators would like to help create.

In order to achieve this, teachers must be prepared to engage students in anti- racist and critical pedagogy with a democratic school structure. This would mean a radical change to field of teacher education. Instead of blindly perpetuating the dominant ideology, educators need to be prepared to enter the classroom with political clarity, which Bartolome (2004) defines as “the ongoing process by which individuals achieve ever-deepening consciousness of the sociopolitical and economic realities that shape their lives and their capacity to transform such material and symbolic conditions” (p. 98).

Bartolome (2004) states the “importance of infusing teacher education curricula with critical pedagogical principles in order to prepare educators to aggressively name and interrogate potentially harmful ideologies and practices in the school and classroom where they work” (p. 98). Not only will this help all students succeed as Bartolome

(2004) argues, but it will lay the ideological groundwork for a populace that is ready to transform the unjust conditions of society because they are able to better understand it.

153

Anti-racist, critical, culturally sustaining pedagogy needs to be at the center of all teacher education programs. A potential starting point would be for education programs to start off with a full year of immersion in unlearning all of the things that future teachers have been mis-educated about and undoing their problematic views on race, gender, and history. The second year could immerse future educators in theoretical perspectives of anti-racism, critical, and culturally sustaining pedagogies while continuing a deeper study of systems of oppression. Years three and four could be specifically designed to train future educators to implement radical, critical, and culturally sustaining pedagogy in their content areas and practicing doing this with students. It might take a generation of new teachers to fully see the effects of this, since there are already so many teachers currently in the field who have not gone through this process. For those who are already teaching, there has to be options on re-orienting their teaching toward critical, anti-racist, culturally sustaining pedagogy and undoing their harmful ideologies. And of course, teacher education programs need to actively recruit, train, and place more teachers of color in schools so that the teaching force will be reflective of the diverse students they serve.

It is also important for Black people to create and sustain their own educational programs that reflect the goals of Black freedom. Educators and organizers should follow in the footsteps of activists such as Septima Clark, who used grassroots education to build political and critical consciousness among African Americans throughout the 20th century. Creating new programs and supporting existing programs with the goal of raising the critical consciousness of Black people is key to establishing Black self-

154 determination and power. While testing and standardization still dominate school reform,

Black students have to partake in their own consciousness raising activities outside of the classroom to combat the mental incarceration imposed upon them by the state. A critical mass of conscious, organized Black youth is necessary to defeat the testing bloc and the neoliberal regime that upholds it. A liberatory education for Black students is a vital step in fomenting a movement that ends educational injustice and all forms of oppression.

I said many times throughout this study that we cannot solely rely on teaching and schools to help resolve educational inequities. Teaching and schools are only part of the equation. In addition to these suggestions, students need to have their basic needs met in order for school to make a difference. As Berliner (2013) suggested, students’ families need to have living wages; out-of-school factors such as poverty have more of an impact than in-school factors when it comes to student academic outcomes. A living wage, affordable housing, free healthcare and childcare would make a major difference in the lives of students and subsequently have the potential to improve their performance in school. The U.S. governmental funding needs to go toward social services that would help to take care of its inhabitants’ basic needs, including education and healthcare, rather than the majority of the GDP going toward its massive military expenditures. Multi- million and multi-billion dollar corporations and the individuals who own them need to be required to pay their fair share of taxes so that their profits, which are made on the backs of working people, can subsidize these changes. Along with this, these funds need to be used to pay Black communities reparations for slavery. These are only the

155 preliminary things that need to happen in order to for teaching and school to make a difference on a broad scale.

Furthermore, schools need to be funded on an equitable basis instead of on the current unconstitutional income-tax based funding models. These models have harmed poor students of color the most because centuries of racialized poverty and economic oppression have left these students attending bare-bones schools. A radical redistribution of resources is needed to even come close to educational equity.

The aforementioned recommendations do not purport to end Black captivity, but they are what I see as necessary to lay the ideological groundwork for the creation of an entirely new society that is not based on anti-Blackness and the exploitation of land, people, and resources. The potential for education to be used as a tool for anti-oppression is a possible reason why people in power strive to keep their stronghold on what happens in educational spaces, particularly for the masses of poor students of color. Changing this situation will not be an easy battle; people in power are doing and will continue to do everything they can to prevent such a radical awakening from happening. In my view, scholar-activists have a responsibility to lay the ideological groundwork for the radical transformation of the world as we know it- a world that is inseparable from the anti-

Blackness and dehumanizing greed that undergirds it. Laying the groundwork for a new society requires a widespread program of radical pedagogy. Those are my recommendations for using education as a tool for liberation.

156

My next recommendation for practice is to radically change the education discourse and remove the stronghold that the anti-Black corporatist state has in controlling this discourse. Education needs to stop being viewed as job training and valued only in economic terms. Education needs to start being discussed less in terms of social mobility and the global economy and more in terms of emancipation. The freedom potential of education needs to be restored to the discourse, and critical educators need to be vocal in doing this. Scholars, students, and educators need to reject the notion that business should have a hand in making decisions in education policy.

My recommendation for corporate philanthropists is to spend their money to address the root causes of inequality; however, I realize that this may be contradictory to the means by which they earned their fortunes and to the continuation of their extreme wealth. In her book Dark Money: The Hidden History Behind the Rise of the Radical

Right, Jane Mayer quotes Peter Buffett, who speaks to this issue:

“Giving back,” as Peter Buffett, the son of the legendary billionaire financier

Warren Buffett, observed, “sounds heroic.” But he noted, “As more lives and

communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for

the few,” philanthropists were frequently left “searching for answers with their

right hands” to problems that they had “created with their left.” (p. 463)

In other words, the process of accumulating tremendous amounts of wealth for a few individuals has been a major cause of many of the social issues that corporate philanthropists have attempted to solve, including educational disparities. Mayer (2016) 157 also notes that in order to avoid paying taxes, corporate philanthropists donate their money to their foundations, which support political and educational initiatives that align with their own values. When they donate large sums of money to foundations, it appears as though they are generous heroes despite their tax avoidance and the fact that their own business practices are the cause of many social issues. So while I suggest that corporate philanthropists spend their money addressing root causes of poverty and inequality, I realize that their own social standing depends on such inequalities. I also recognize how diligently the billionaire class has worked to preserve its own social standing and to maintain the current societal structure, which allows for and depends on extreme inequality. However, without addressing the root causes of disparities in education, corporate philanthropists will continue to spend money and energy on Band-Aid solution after Band-Aid solution.

Concluding Thoughts

This study did not claim to save the world from Black captivity or to save the education system. It simply intended to show that the discourses surrounding education reform contribute to the reproduction of unjust systems such as Black captivity. Any discourse that does not challenge this system plays a role in upholding it.

This study also did not mean to discount or dismiss some of the important work that foundations have done to help individual schools and students. Since the United

States government does not adequately fund education or other social services, foundation money plays a role in filling in some of the gaps. For example, some of the students who end up attending college partly because of foundation money likely live a 158 better life than they would have lived if they were not able to go to college. Some students may have more economic stability than they would have had in the absence of these supports. But it needs to be acknowledged that the underlying conditions of inequality, which result from greed and the unrestricted accumulation of capital, are why it is so difficult for some students to “make it” in the first place.

In the absence of a radical change to the structures of anti-Blackness and inequality, a significant change in student outcomes is an unrealistic expectation. Within this existing framework of inequitable systems, let us hypothetically consider a situation in which the interventions of corporate foundations did result in the elimination of achievement gaps between poor students of color and their affluent peers. What would happen next? Would Black and Brown students then be “better prepared” to begin their adult lives in a White supremacist system that denies their right to exist? Let’s hypothetically consider a situation in which poor urban students were taught by only the best of the best teachers. What would change about their schools and communities? The would likely still be under-resourced, underfunded, and inadequate because the underlying conditions would still be the same.

Corporate philanthropic discourses need to be challenged in order to move closer toward structural solutions to structural issues. Historically situated, oppressive systems underlie educational inequity, anti-Blackness, and Black captivity. The end of Black captivity and the beginning of Black freedom, and subsequently all freedom, requires a re-imagining of the world as we know it and a radical transformation of society.

159

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Appendix A. “What We Do” Page

Retrieved from http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/.

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Appendix B. Full Text of Bill Gates’s Speech

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Our education efforts are evolving By Bill Gates October 19, 2017

Melinda and I got involved in U.S. education in 2000. A lot has changed since then, but our goal has not: We still want all children in America to get a great education. It’s key to realizing the vision of America as a country where all people have a chance to make the most of their talents.

Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy. I explained what’s changing in a speech today at the Council of the Great City Schools. Here’s the text of my speech:

Remarks as prepared The Council of Great City Schools Cleveland, October 19, 2017

When our foundation began working in education in 2000, we started with a few guiding principles.

Our #1 priority was – and still is – ensuring that all students get a great public education and graduate with the skills to succeed in the workplace.

We wanted to work with educators to better understand their needs and the needs of their students and communities.

And, taking their best ideas, we wanted to pilot potentially transformative solutions and understand what worked well and what didn’t.

Today, I’d like to share what we have learned over the last 17 years and how those insights will change what we focus on over the next five years.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about the state of public education in the U.S. By and large, schools are still falling short on the key metrics of a quality education – math scores, English scores, international comparisons, and college completion.

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While much has rightly been made of the OECD data that shows lagging performance of American students overall, the national averages mask a bigger story.

When disaggregated by race, we see two Americas. One where white students perform along the lines of the best in the world—with achievement comparable to countries like Finland and Korea. And another America, where Black and Latino students perform comparably to the students in the lowest performing OECD countries, such as Chile and Greece.

And for all students in U.S. public schools, the percentage of high school graduates who enroll in postsecondary institutions has remained essentially flat.

Without success in college or career preparation programs, students will have limited economic mobility and fewer opportunities throughout their lives. This threatens not only their economic future but the economic future and competitiveness of the United States.

There are some signs of progress. Over the past decade, in cities like Charlotte, Austin, and Fresno, high school graduation rates have gone up rapidly.

Fourth-grade reading and math scores in large city schools increased at almost double the rate of public schools nationally. And the 8th grade scores are even better.

But like many of you, we want to see faster and lasting change in student achievement – and our commitment to that goal is steadfast. In fact, given the constraints and other demands on state and local budgets, it’s more important than ever that we continue to explore the best ideas for improving student achievement.

Melinda and I made public education our top priority in the U.S. because we wanted to do something about the disparity in achievement and postsecondary success for students of color and low-income students. That inequity persists today, and we are just as determined now to eliminate it as we were when we started.

When we first got involved in U.S. education, we thought smaller schools were the way to increase high school graduation and college-readiness rates. In some places and in some ways, small schools worked.

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In New York City, graduation rates of students attending small schools was more than 30 percentage points higher than the schools they replaced. And almost half of the students attending small schools enrolled in postsecondary education – a more than 20 percent difference from schools with similar demographics.

Results in other places – like Los Angeles and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas –were also encouraging. Yet, over time, we saw that the overall impact of this strategy was limited— the financial and political costs of closing existing schools and replacing them with new schools was too high.

Over time, we realized that what made the most successful schools successful – large or small – was their teachers, their relationships with students, and their high expectations of student achievement.

Understanding this, we saw an opportunity to move our work closer to the classroom – to systemically support schools across the country to improve the quality of teaching and raise academic standards.

In 2007, we began investing in the Measures of Effective Teaching project. Over the last decade, it has contributed important knowledge to the field about how to gather feedback from students on their engagement and classroom learning experiences . . . and about observing teachers at their craft, assessing their performance fairly, and providing actionable feedback.

This work has helped states across the country build comprehensive evaluation systems based on multiple measures. We’ve seen promising results in places like Cincinnati, Chicago, New York City, and Washington DC, where research shows these systems can help identify teachers who need to improve and those who are underperforming . . . and in places like Tennessee, where three out of four teachers say the evaluation process improves their teaching.

But districts and states have varied in how they have implemented these systems because they each operate in their local context.

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In addition, it became clear that teacher evaluation is one important piece of several critical elements to drive student achievement. School leadership, teacher professional development, climate, and curriculum also play critical roles in improving student achievement.

As you know, we also backed the Common Core because we believed, and still believe, that all students – no matter where they go to school – should graduate with the skills and knowledge to succeed after high school. It’s exciting to see how the standards are being brought to life in schools and classrooms. But more needs to be done to fully realize their potential.

As we have reflected on our work and spoken with educators over the last few years, we have identified a few key insights that will shape our work and investments going forward.

Teachers need better curricula and professional development aligned with the Common Core. And we see that they benefit the most from professional development when they are working with colleagues to tackle the real problems confronting their students.

Schools that track indicators of student progress — like test scores, attendance, suspensions, and grades and credit accumulation – improved high school graduation and college success rates.

And last, schools are the unit of change in the effort to increase student achievement and they face common challenges – like inadequate curricular systems and insufficient support for students as they move between middle school, high school and college. And they need better strategies to develop students’ social and emotional skills. But solutions to these problems will only endure if they are aligned with the unique needs of each student and the district’s broader strategy for change.

So, what does this mean for our work with you and others?

First, although we will no longer invest directly in new initiatives based on teacher evaluations and ratings, we will continue to gather data on the impact of these systems and encourage the use of these systems to improve instruction at the local level. 176

Second, we will focus on locally-driven solutions identified by networks of schools, and support their efforts to use data-driven continuous learning and evidence-based interventions to improve student achievement.

Third, we are increasing our commitment to develop curricula and professional development aligned to state standards.

Fourth, we will continue to support the development of high-quality charter schools.

There is some great learning coming from charters, but because there is other philanthropic money going to them, we will focus more of our work with charters on developing new tools and strategies for students with special needs.

Finally, we will expand investments in innovative research to accelerate progress for underserved students.

Overall, we expect to invest close to $1.7 billion in U.S. public education over the next five years.

We anticipate that about 60 percent of this will eventually support the development of new curricula and networks of schools that work together to identify local problems and solutions . . . and use data to drive continuous improvement.

Many states, districts, and schools now have the data they need to track student progress and achievement, and some are using it to great effect.

In Fresno, a new data system revealed that students weren’t aware of their college options. So, the district created individualized college information packets for every senior who met the state’s college requirements. The result was a 50 percent increase in the number of students applying to California public universities.

Summit Public Schools, which operates 11 charter schools in California and Washington, analyzed data and determined that English Learners entered school significantly behind and never caught up.

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So, it identified the teachers whose EL students were doing the best, talked to them and curated their materials, and applied those best practices across all Summit schools. In less than a year, the performance gap between English Learners and others decreased by 25 percent.

In Chicago, researchers also found powerful insights in their data that are predictive of student progress and success. They determined, for example, that 9th graders who succeed on four key indicators – high attendance, course completion rates, credit accumulation, and grades – are more than four times as likely to graduate. And if their grades are a B+ or higher, they are much more likely to succeed in their first year of college.

Excited by insights like these, school leaders in Chicago partnered with the University of Chicago to create the Network for College Success.

This network of schools is using data to identify strategies that educators can use to solve specific problems. From 2007 to 2015, the percentage of students on track to graduate from Chicago high schools rose from 61 to 85 percent. And four-year college enrollment rates in Chicago went from 36 to 44 percent.

We believe this kind of approach – where groups of schools have the flexibility to propose the set of approaches they want – will lead to more impactful and durable systemic change that is attractive enough to be widely adopted by other schools.

We are seeing more examples of this popping up all the time. Like the CORE Districts in California – comprised of eight of the largest school districts in the state. And the LIFT Network in Tennessee, which includes educators from 12 rural and urban districts across the state.

Over the next several years, we will support about 30 of these networks, and will start initially with high needs schools and districts in 6 to 8 states. Each network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching, and data collection and analysis.

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There are two things these networks will share in common. A commitment to continuous improvement. And a focus on addressing common problems that are identified by using proven indicators predictive of students’ learning, progress, and postsecondary success.

But we will leave it up to each network to decide what approaches they believe will work best to address their biggest challenges. They might decide, for example, to focus on student interventions in middle school . . . or adapting new and more rigorous curricula . . . or improving support for certain groups of students in the transition from high school to college.

We will work with partners to document these change efforts in schools and networks and ask them to share the lessons learned with others.

We’ll also work with teacher and leader prep providers to ensure that these lessons and best practices are incorporated into local programs to further enrich and sustain this work.

We also know that high-quality curricula can improve student learning more than many costlier solutions, and it has the greatest impact with students of novice and lower performing teachers. We also know it has the greatest impact when accompanied by professional learning and coaching.

Our goal is to work with the field to ensure that five years from now, teachers at every grade level in secondary schools have access to high-quality, aligned curriculum choices in English and math, as well as science curricula based on the Next Generation Science Standards. In a few places, we also will support pilots of scalable professional development supports anchored in high quality curriculum.

Louisiana is a great example of where aligned curricula and professional development is helping teachers. 80 percent of districts have adopted fully aligned curricula in grades 3 through 8. And the state has created a marketplace of preferred professional development service providers to help schools implement these curricula effectively. Teachers report that they feel more equipped to help students meet the standards—for example, by closely reading texts for meaning.

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In Washington DC, the school district has developed an innovative professional development program that is discipline-specific, curricula-aligned, and focused on improving teachers’ instructional skills at the school level. Teachers meet weekly with a coach who is an expert in the subjects they teach. They also meet in small groups with colleagues who teach the same subject to talk through lesson plans, what’s working, and how to adjust their instruction accordingly. While still early, 87 percent of teachers say the collaboration and feedback is improving their practice and knowledge.

We expect that about 25 percent of our funding in the next five years will focus on big bets – innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of public education over the next 10 to 15 years.

The conditions for developing and spreading new approaches in education, particularly technology-enabled ones, are better than ever. Broadband access in schools is reaching 90 percent. Students and teachers have access to more affordable and more powerful tools for learning. Educators are seeking each other out and sharing ideas in digital communities. And there are promising developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics.

But the PreK-12 research, development and translation ecosystem is underfunded and fragmented, with less than 1 percent of total government spending in public education focused on R&D.

Math is one area where we want to generate stronger evidence about what works. What would it take, for example, to get all kids to mastery of Algebra I? What kinds of intelligent tools do teachers and students need to get there? And how might we design these in partnership with the best math teachers in the country?

We are also interested in what role we can play to prepare students for the dramatic changes underway in the workforce. We have to make work-related experiences a consistent part of high schools in ways that build student engagement and relevant skills, and that put young people on a path to credentials with labor market value in our future economy.

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We anticipate that the final 15 percent of our funding in the next five years will go to the charter sector.

We will continue to help high-performing charters expand to serve more students. But our emphasis will be on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students – especially kids with mild-to-moderate learning and behavioral disabilities. This is a critical problem across the education sector, and we believe that charters have the flexibility to help the field solve this problem.

Over the last 17 years, we have invested $1 billion in the cities represented in the room in support of school improvement and redesign efforts. We are proud of that work and have seen some good things come out of it that make me optimistic about the future.

Education is, without a doubt, one of the most challenging areas we invest in as a foundation. But I’m excited about the shift in our work and the focus on partnering with networks of schools.

Giving schools and districts more flexibility is more likely to lead to solutions that fit the needs of local communities and are potentially replicable elsewhere.

I’m also hopeful this will attract other funders focused on particular approaches or who work in one state or community.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.

Our role is to serve as a catalyst of good ideas, driven by the same guiding principle we started with: all students – but especially low-income students and students of color – must have equal access to a great public education that prepares them for adulthood. We will not stop until this has been achieved, and we look forward to continued partnership with you in this work in the years to come.

Thank you.

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