Soil of Misfortune: Education, Poverty, and Race In a Rural South Florida Community
by
Juan Carlos Gonzalez
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August2005 ©Copyright by Juan Carlos Gonzalez 2005
11 Soil of Misfortune: Education, Poverty, and Race In a Rural South Florida Community
by
Juan Carlos Gonzalez
This dissertation was prepared under the direction of the candidate's dissertation advisor, Dr. Max H. Kirsch, Department of Comparative Studies, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letter and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:
Chair, Dissertation Advisor
iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The success and completion of this paper would not have been possible without the support of my family, Liz, Adrian, and Anna; without the teaching, assistance, and dedication of Max Kirsch; without the valuable input of Andy Furman and
Farshad Araghi; and without the cooperation of the people of Belle Glade and Pahokee.
iv PREFACE
I can vividly remember my first drive to Belle
Glade as an adult. August in South Florida is one of the hottest and most humid months of the year and that day in 1994 was no different. Dressed in a suit and tie in an air-conditioned car, I was nonetheless sweating as the mid-day sun beat down on the road. I had completed a successful interview in a small private school in Delray Beach and was headed to the
Glades for a 1:00pm interview at Glade View
Elementary, a Palm Beach County public school ironically dedicated on the year of my birth, 1966.
It was located one block off of Martin Luther King
Boulevard in the heart of Belle Glade.
As I drove through the dilapidated store fronts and apartment housing, I had no recollection of this place, although as a child I had been there many times as part of my father's tours. He would often take visiting family members to the Glades to show them the cane fields and the ingenios or sugar processing plants. Having cut cane since the age of
v ten in Cuba for his uncle's, my father was a true
Islenior a Cuban whose ancestry is from the Canary
Islands. Darker skinned and more robust than their more Southern European based counterparts, the
Islenios have always been known as men of the land - hombres de la agricultura.
The interview that afternoon went well and I was told that the position was mine if I was truly interested. This was my first full-time position.
It offered me insurance benefits, the highest salary
I had ever earned ($31,200 a year with a Masters
Degree), and job security. I accepted on the spot. I found it odd when the school administrators, both white, non-Hispanic, advised me to think about it and talk it over with my wife during our upcoming holiday in Canada. But I assured them that my decision was final and that my wife would be fine with whatever I decided. I did not know then that my three years spent teaching in the Glades would be full of such unhappiness, depression, and despair - felt for myself and for the children who lived their life in this unique rural community.
vi Glade View Elementary in 1994, looked to me like
a cliche of the poor, segregated schools of the
South. The classrooms were poorly maintained,
materials were outdated, and many of the teachers
seemed to me either inexperienced or substandard.
The school was overcrowded, so portable classrooms
lined one side of the school site. Ninety-nine
percent of the students were either black or Hispanic
and eighty one percent of these students qualified
for free or reduced lunch- the Federal Government's
lunch subsidy program. Indeed, just two months
before my arrival, the NAACP and four other civil
rights groups filed a suit against the state of
Florida alleging that schools with poor students had
inadequate buildings, classrooms, and materials. One
of the students named in the suit was 8-year-old
Marcello Wilbon of Glade View Elementary (Kaplow
12A).
Within two weeks of working at Glade View, I
went into what I can only describe as cultural shock.
Though part of my own elementary education experience was in the ethnically mixed community of South West
vii Delray, Florida in the early 1970s (Pine Grove
Elementary), I had never experienced this level of poverty and anger among the student body. Classroom management took up 80% of my class periods with 20% left for shallow, near meaningless instruction.
There were constant classroom disruptions ranging from lack of focus and concentration to aggressive physical fighting. As one of two music teachers, I taught kindergarten, third grade and fifth grade
(about 600 students a week) including ESE students
(exceptional student education) and a 5th grade DOP class (dropout prevention).
As the school year continued, I learned more about the community and the background of the students I was serving. Many of the native born
Afro-American students lived in such poverty that the best meal of their day would be the school lunch, which was not, I can attest, very appealing. The recently arrived Haitian students struggled in the impoverished ESOL (English for Speakers of Other
Languages) programs along with the Hispanic Spanish speakers. And when September hit, the school braced
viii itself for the arrival of the migrant children whose parents harvested the sweet gold for the companies
Dixie Crystals and U.S Sugar.
Many students would come to school filthy, hungry or tired from nights of little sleep. Many were abused or at least witnessed forms of domestic violence. These were the children of young drug using parents or single parent households. These students were the children that made Belle Glade their home, a community which at that time had the largest per capita population of HIV cases in the
United States.
Former Education Commissioner and Lt. Governor
Frank Brogan in an ideological proclamation reminiscent of the Reagan Era remarked in 2002 at a state meeting: "There are families so dysfunctional it's a blessing those kids can get to school"
(Flannery lA). He was backed by obtuse educational consultants such as Robert Evans, a psychologist from
Boston, who announced that the crisis is not in education, but in families. The problem, said Evans, are not the schools. The schools are victims of
ix problems that start in the home (Flannery lA). This is an infectious rhetoric. Its ethos speaks to our
Euro based Christian sensibilities. Indeed, during my year at Glade View and subsequent two years at
Pioneer Park Elementary, located adjacent to the low income project-housing complex - Glades Glenn, I was sympathetic to this belief. There was nothing, I thought, that society, schools, or teachers could do.
My ignorance and naivete then are an embarrassment to me now.
I returned to Belle Glade in the summer of 2003 for the first time since my transfer out of the
Glades in 1998. It was the result of participating in my first critical study of the Glades communities in a course titled Environmentr Industry and
Community in the Florida Everglades taught by Dr. Max
Kirsch. That summer marked the beginning of my first attempts at formal anthropological fieldwork that would eventually become this study. Old relationships with the community were rekindled and new ones were begun. This time, however, I was the student, searching for the questions that needed to
X be asked, questions only the people of this community would know to ask. Relph states that "people are their place and a place its peopleH (34). No truer statement can be made of Belle Glade. It is indeed the place of a public that has created and known it
"through common experiences and involvement in common symbols and meaningsH (34).
xi ABSTRACT
Author: Juan Carlos Gonzalez
Title: Soil of Misfortune: Education, Poverty, and Race in a Rural South Florid Community
Institution: Florida Atlantic University
Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Max H. Kirsch
Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Year: 2005
This dissertation addresses the structural components of education in the United States and how they have hindered the ability of a community's black and brown children to obtain the knowledge and resources needed to succeed and adapt to the changing circumstances of their region and beyond. It will do so through a case study of a small community in the American South, where the failure of education to provide access to the American dream has been clearly demonstrated in persistent poverty and lack of opportunity available to its residents. Belle Glade, Florida is a rural community centrally located within the Everglades
Agricultural Area. Fifty years after the historic
1954 Brown vs. Board decision, which outlawed school
xii segregation and the separate but equal claims of
Plessy vs. Ferguson, little has changed in this poor rural community. This study shows that this community, rather than representing an isolated case, is reflective of many small non-metro communities of the American South. Though integration initially intended to balance the great disparity that existed between the schools for black children and schools for white children in regards to facilities, materials, and curriculum, in Belle Glade and throughout the
South those same disparities still exist today. This study argues that current state education policies, modeled after the federal government's "No Child Left
Behind Plan," are a veneer for a separate and unequal educational policy and practice in the state of
Florida. It seeks to explore and document why this has occurred, and place this case study within the larger context of structural inequalities on the local, national and global levels. How is it that the "freest nation in the world" with the largest gross national product has yet to fulfill its most fundamental promise to this community - equal opportunity and access to quality education? Thus,
xiii this dissertation asks why regardless of the policies, plans, curricula and tests the district and state adopt, at times with the best of intentions, nothing seems to improve the conditions of these black citizens? More importantly, when these issues are addressed, who speaks, under what conditions and for whom?
xiv Contants
Introduction ...... l
Chapter
1. Black Education in the South: Florida And the Ideology of Compliance ...... 21
The Hampton Project and the Ideology of Compliance ...... 28
Washington and Tuskegee ...... 30
W. E. B. Dubois and the Black Intelligencia...... 34
Plessy vs. Ferguson and the Ideology of Separation...... 38
The Death and Reincarnation of Jim Crow...... 42
Florida...... 4 6
Palm Beach County...... 54
2. Left Behind: Education in a Forgotten Community...... 63
The People and Their Schools ...... 66
The Politics and Manipulation of the FCAT Scores ...... 79
Countering the Gathering Storm...... 88
Back to the Future ...... 94
The Plight Unchanged...... l08
3. Condemning the Other: Culture of Poverty, the Moynihan Report, and the Ideology of Family Values ...... ll3
Losing the Class/Race...... 130
XV The Transmodern Disposable Family...... l38
4. Free Markets, Heavy Cost: Globalization and the Demise Of Public Education ...... l45
A History Entwined...... 148
The Globalization Race ...... 150
The Locality of Globalization...... 153
The Demise of Public Education ...... 167
5. Education, Poverty and Race: Belle Glade and Beyond...... 178
Hiding in the Bushes: Resistance to Educational Reform/ation ...... 182
Undoing Racism...... 18 7
The Inadequacy of a Theory...... 192
Belle Glade and Beyond...... 197
Conclusion ...... 2 07
Works Cited...... 231
xvi DEDICATION
To the children of Belle Glade and Pahokee. Introduction
There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin ... The more I feel like an American, the more this situation pains me.
Albert Einstein - May 3, 1946.
The Problem
It is written in the Brown v. Board decision of Topeka,
Kansas that "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments" (qtd. in Fishel and Quarles
1967, 500). The presumption of Brown vs. Board was that doing away with racial isolation would begin to heal the social wounds inflicted by a former slave society. But after a generation of increasing desegregation, the United States education system is once again moving towards increasing segregation - a trend started in the 1980s (Orfield and Sanni
1999, 1). According to a Harvard Graduate School of Education study, white isolation is on the rise; segregation is increasing in the South; there is increasing resegregation in states with large Black enrollment; and there is a "substantial link between segregation by race and poverty" (Orfield and
1 Sanni 1999, 1,2). As a consequence, America's public schools are failing to realize their primary mission in a democracy - saving children from the restrictions of class and race, giving them access to a "world of longer memory, broader imagination and stronger ambition" (West 1999, 321).
This dissertation will address the structural components of education in the United States and how they have hindered the ability of a community's black and brown children to obtain the knowledge and resources needed to succeed and adapt to the changing circumstances of their region and beyond. It will do so through a case study of a small community in the American
South, where the failure of education to provide access to the
American dream has been clearly demonstrated in persistent poverty and lack of opportunity available to its residents.
Belle Glade, Florida is a rural community centrally located within the Everglades Agricultural Area. Fifty years after the historic 1954 Brown vs. Board decision, which outlawed school segregation and the separate but equal claims of Plessy vs.
Ferguson, little has changed in this poor rural community. As a result of wealthy white-flight to newly established private schools objecting to the desegregation efforts of Palm Beach
County in the mid-60s to 1970s, Brown vs. Board was never fully implemented in Belle Glade. The historic court decision and its attempts at desegregation are nothing more than a forgotten
2 experiment of the Civil Rights Movement (Miller 2004, 14A). I
hope to show that this community, rather than representing an
isolated case, is reflective of many small non-metro
communities of the American South. Though integration
initially intended to balance the great disparity that existed between the schools for black children and schools for white
children in regards to facilities, materials, and curriculum,
in Belle Glade and throughout the South those same disparities still exist today. The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People recently filed a complaint with the federal Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, claiming Florida has intentionally discriminated against black students (Shah 2004, lA, 14A). At present, integration policies are only relevant to Belle Glade in regards to 1994 federal mandates requiring a racially balanced staff that mirrors the state population, a decision that caused a great deal of contention within Belle Glade's black community.
This thesis will argue that current state education policies, modeled after the federal government's "No Child Left
Behind Plan," are a veneer for a separate and unequal educational policy and practice in the state of Florida. It seeks to explore and document why this has occurred, and to place this case study within the larger context of structural inequalities on the local, national and global levels. How is
3 it that the "freest nation in the world" with the largest gross
national product has yet to fulfill its most fundamental
promise to this community equal opportunity and access to
quality education? Thus, this dissertation asks why regardless
of the policies, plans, curricula and tests the district and
state adopt, at times with the best of intentions, nothing
seems to improve the conditions of these black citizens? Even more critical is the question of voice. When these lssues are addressed who speaks, under what conditions and for whom?
Background
Belle Glade Florida is one of Palm Beach County's, and one of America's, poorest and most uneducated municipalities.
Incorporated in 1928, its median household income of $22,715.00
(year 2000) is well below the state average, while the unemployment percentage of 12% is well above the state average.
The population of this small, rural Palm Beach County municipality, 14,906 (year 2000) has an ethnic make-up that is
50.7% black, 27.6% Hispanic, 13.8% white, and 9.7% from other races (City-data.com n.d.). Thirty percent of the residents are foreign born, originating in Haiti, Cuba, Mexico and other
Caribbean and Central American countries. Many come to join
4 their relatives in hope of finding work, only to remain unemployed years later.
Many of these immigrants arrive with little or no formal education (van Sickler and Stapleton 2002, lC). The percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree or higher is 9.9% compared to 22% for the state. Of the black non-Hispanic population 53.7 percent have not graduated from high school.
This statistic rises to 66.4 percent in the Hispanic population
- compared to the overall state average of 83%. According to the 2003 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test results published by the Florida Department of Education, only 26% of black tenth graders in Palm Beach County are reading at grade level compared to 73% of white students. These statistics are representative of the educational history of black and brown children in South Florida. The inability of these students to succeed within Palm Beach County's school system has been well documented and chronicled over the last 10 years, as the following pages will highlight.
Before Frank Brogan was president of Florida Atlantic
University, he was the Education Commissioner of Florida, a position that brought him a great deal of political notoriety throughout the state. The primary reason for his fame was his authorship of what would eventually be referred to by school communities as "the Critical Schools List." The Critical
5 Schools List noted which schools had less than one-third of their student population score the state average on the
California Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) and the Florida Writing
Assessment Program. According to this plan, the state would look at a two-year frame of test scores from grades fourth, eighth, and tenth and then organize schools into tiers according to the scores over that period. If a school had two consecutive years of scores below the 33 percentile - less than a third of the students scoring at grade level - then it would be labeled critically low and placed in Tier one (Elsken 1998,
11) . According to this policy of accountability, schools would be forced to improve or suffer the continued stigma of being on the list. In the three year period between 1995 and 1997, the majority of the Glades area schools were designated "critically low" performing schools with the remainder listed as Tier 2 or low-performing. The effects of the policy on Glade's schools was well chronicled in Katrina Elsken's series published in the local Sun in April of 1998, the embarrassment and stigma of being on the "the list" caused an immense amount of anxiety among the staff and student body, but little change in the scores.
With the election of Jeb Bush to Governor of the State of
Florida, the infamous "list" evolved into a far more powerfully stigmatizing tool. In 1999, the mostly Republican legislature
6 approved Governor Jeb Bush's and Lt. Governor Frank Brogan's A
Plus Plan. The plan grades schools from A to F primarily on the students' performance on the newly adopted Florida
Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) and, to a lesser extent, on the attendance and discipline of the students. A school receiving an A grade by the Florida Department of Education receives a monetary bonus that the school community, through faculty and school advisory council vote, uses in any way they see fit including teacher bonuses. It is a policy reminiscent of the meritocratic business model - monies will go to those who are most productive.
If state assessment tools are culturally biased, as has been asserted by many Belle Glade school district officials and community activists, then students who have not been exposed to white, middle class culture will not score as well. Schools perpetuate the cultural capital of the dominant group by adopting certain class interests and ideologies that devalue the cultural, linguistic and behavioral characteristics of the subordinate group. State standardized tests, such as the
Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, simultaneously model and assess the linguistic and cultural competency of the default culture. The present study will therefore question the states policy of rewarding schools whose students already have the
7 minimal linguistic and cultural skills required to succeed on the standardized test.
When the FY99 numbers came out 43% of Palm Beach County's elementary schools had failed to meet the academic standards set by the Florida Cabinet. Belle Glade had two schools on this list: Glade View Elementary and Glade Central High School
(Flannery and Stapleton 2000, lA). In 2000 Glade View was up to a D graded school, but dropped again the following year.
Lake Shore Middle School was given a grade of D both years in a row and the elementary schools did not fare much better. Belle
Glade Elementary received a grade of D both years; Glade View, previously cited, rose to a D grade in 2000; Gove Elementary, a
D grade both years; and Pioneer Park Elementary a grade of D both in 1999 and 2000 (Flannery and Stapleton 2000, lA).
By 2002 only Gove Elementary had shown a significant grade change. It accomplished this by undergoing a radical restructuring of curricula - half the school day would be taught in Spanish to its predominantly Hispanic population.
The other schools have remained below a C grade through 2003 though some minor improvements have been noted (Flannery and
Miller 2003, lA) . In August of 2003, 88% of Palm Beach
County's schools, including those with grades of A from the state, failed to meet the federal standards under President
Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (Miller 2003, lA, 20A). In
8 June of 2004, 40 of the district's 81 A schools did not meet
the federal standard (Nirvi Shah 2004, 1A). None of the Belle
Glade schools, six in all, met the standards, which required that at least 31% of any subgroup (i.e. black, Hispanic, poor) pass the reading FCAT and 38% pass the math portion of the test. Glade View Elementary only had 26% of blacks pass the reading while only 23% passed the math portion. Pioneer Park
Elementary, another Belle Glade elementary school located adjacent to the housing project of Glades Glenn, faired even worse with only 21% of blacks passing the reading and 12% passing the math (Florida Department of Education qtd. in Shah
2004, 14A).
Yet another local ramification of this national policy has been the busing of these black and brown poor students away from their community schools to better performing schools. If adequate yearly progress is not made two years in a row by a low performing school according to NCLB standards, parents have the option of busing their children to the closest A school
(Miller 14A) . In the fall of 2003, approximately 350 Belle
Glade and Pahokee students, a community twenty minutes north of
Belle Glade, were bused 60 miles voluntarily to Polo Park
Middle School and Palm Beach Central High School - two A schools located in a majority white, upper-middle class community. The result was racial tension manifested through
9 disorderly conduct and violent incidents reminiscent of the
early 70s. It resulted in the removal of the new principal by
the district in order to placate the local community. A former
teacher and local Belle Glade historian elaborated on her perception of this issue and the overall policy of No Child
Left Behind during a recent interview:
They were expecting a hundred or so students ... they were prepared to receive a hundred or so students at the new Palm Beach Central from Glades Central. They had nearly three hundred. So the population of that school exceeded their planning for the school and they had problems at the school... they had fights ... and so there were days that, as a hedge against racial conflict, they sent our kids home early. And so there is an understanding now that they will not be allowed to return there next year. And I don't think that they should have ever gone there. I think that whatever is wrong with our schools out here should have been fixed out here. So a child can go to a school in their community. But see beyond that ... I don't think. .. I think that children and teachers need to come from the community because that is the only way you have a mix of people that have a vested interest in the welfare of the community... so No Child Left Behind is a joke. It's a joke. It's just something that has nothing to do with us at all. It sounds good, but it ain't workin' out here. It's not working out here. Our children are being left behind.
Belle Glade is reflective of many non-metro high-poverty areas, especially in the American South. "Of the rural poor,
44% are African American" (Miller, http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg- fact/5000/5709.html). According to the United States
Department of Agriculture's Rural Development Report 98 of
November 2003, rural education continues to lag behind urban
10 levels, "and regional and racial differences persist"
(http://www.ers.usda.gov). The South, where a third of the nations rural population resides, is also home to half of all non-metro adults who have not earned their high school diploma.
Rural Blacks and Hispanics in the United States are at least twice as likely to not complete high school and half as likely as non-Hispanic Whites to receive a four year college degree
(http://www.ers.usda.gov).
These low educational levels are highly correlated with continual poverty. Continual or persistent poverty are terms used to describe areas, such as the "Black Belt" in
Southeastern United States, that have been plagued with high levels of poverty for many years. The USDA's Rural Development
Research Report 98 of November 2003 shows that the quartile of counties with the lowest rate of high school completion include
75% of all persistent poverty counties. Approximately 30% of adults in these counties, on average, have no high school diplomas. As is well understood, lower education levels correlate with low-wage economy and an unstable workforce.
Poor counties have insufficient tax base revenues with lower social and community capital than their white, mainstream middle class neighbors. As public funding for education diminishes, private monies become imperative for better public schools. Poor communities lack local capital, further
11 reinforcing long-term economic distress
(http://www.ers.usda.gov.).
Belle Glade: A Case Study
This case study of rural Belle Glade, Florida is structured
as an ethnography and uses anthropological fieldwork as a
methodology. Ethnography is the research approach most closely
associated with cultural anthropology. Its main practice is
close and prolonged observation of a specific social group.
Ethnographic studies are most concerned with understanding the
culture of a specific group from within (Edgar and Sedgwick
1999, 133). For three years, employed by the School District of
Palm Beach County, I worked as a music teacher at Glade View
(1994-95) Elementary and Pioneer Park Elementary (1995-98)
Though I was not of the community, long-term personal
relationships were established during those years that now serve
as the foundation for formal research. Much of the insight
gathered in this study comes from dialogues with former
colleagues, school officials and administrators, parents, and
community activists who I have had primary and secondary
relationships with during my years as a commuter within the
teaching community. A formal academic return to the field was
12 begun in the summer of 2003 as a requirement for the second half of Environment, Industry and Community in the Florida Everglades taught by Dr. Max Kirsch.
History
Chapter one is an historical overview of black education in the American South from the Reconstruction Era to the integration efforts of the mid-60s and early 1970s.
Reconstruction ignited a rage of 19th century northern-based corporate philanthropy, and after 1865, the focus of assimilationism, geared towards newly arrived Europeans, would turn to accommodationism geared towards freed blacks. What
Watkins calls the "new corporate hegemonists" played a key role in the education of black citizens in this country. It was lead by such distinguished white families as the Phelps Stokes,
Ogdens and Rockefellers. Their primary interest was "the political economy of southern development and Negro education within that process" (Watkins 2001, 143). The objective was to stabilize and restructure the South providing a livelihood for
Black Americans as sharecroppers or debt farmers - a subservient wage labor force (Watkins 2001, 23). In essence, Emancipation simply gave blacks the freedom to sell their labor power back to those who once owned it - lease as opposed to ownership, civil
13 society as opposed to slave society. Race relations within this economic structure, it was believed and proclaimed, would eventually improve because accommodationist education, made possible by such institutions as the Hampton Institute in
Virginia and Tuskegee in Alabama, helped deliver this ideology of acceptance, which blacks needed to live by within the newly formed society (Watkins 2001 23).
Education and the Community
Chapter 2 chronicles the ramifications of national, state and local educational policies in Palm Beach County since 1994 as perceived by the citizens of Belle Glade. It proposes that beginning in the mid-60s with the establishment of private schools in Belle Glade and Pahokee by white agri-industry owners and white community leaders, which foresaw the inevitable integration of white and black students; the foundation of structural racism was laid. In the wake of desegregation, local schools throughout the South experienced abandonment by white families who could afford to establish and patronize private all white schools. In Belle Glade, as in other Southern communities, these business and community leaders were often affiliated with the same local churches (Walters 2001, 43).
Often the rationale for the exodus from the integrated public
14 schools was to provide their white children a good Christian education. Black families, however, as a result of their social and economic position did not have the resources to even consider this alternative. This was a local manifestation of racism that was well woven into the tapestry of state policies - policies that would continue to be put in place throughout the
1980s and 1990s.
State policies have always provided opportunities for threatened elites. Today, with the federal government cutting already meager subsidies for state run programs such as education, local school districts are in trouble. Many states are now running huge deficits as a result and are making further cuts into social services. Once again funding becomes the main obstacle to reducing racial inequality in education (Walters
2001, 35). Local communities are left to make up the huge shortfalls in funding. But the local resources of a community like Belle Glade cannot compete with the resources of an affluent community like, as example, the Village of Wellington.
The possibility must be considered, as Pamela Walters proposes:
... that the same social and political processes that result in racial segregation in living arrangements and racial discrimination in the labor market also produces racially segregated schools and racial inequality in school resources(2001, 37).
15 It is in this chapter that the voice of the Belle Glade
community will be most prevalent. The testimonial of community activists, community leaders, school board officials, teachers, parents and private citizens from both sides of the color line expound on the problem. Also included will be the view from the periphery - professionals who are not of the community, but who made the long trek daily for many years. What is there view, and how does it compare to the view from the core?
The Culture of Poverty: Lewis, Moynihan, and the Ideology of Family Values
Chapter 3 reviews the literature of education, poverty and
the development of a dominant ideology of cultural practices.
Many damaging theories rooted in nineteenth-century arguments
that the poor are poor through their own inabilities and lack
of initiative attempt to explain the dilemma faced by rural and
urban black and brown community schools. As Eleanor Leacock
points out, concepts such as lower-class culture, cultural
deprivation and the infamous culture of poverty theory all have
contributed to the "distorted characterizations of the poor,
and especially the black poor" (1971, 10). Because of its
importance in the formulation of national and local policies on
education and its rationalization of continuing poverty, I
will, in this chapter critically analyze the culture of poverty
16 theory. Proposed by Oscar Lewis in his 1959 work - Five
Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, it
became a central argument for prevalent late 20th century
rhetoric of neo-liberal ideology from the 1965 Moynihan Report
to George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. The works of
Eleanor Leacock and Carol Stack, which critically deconstruct
Lewis' trans-generational theory of poverty and Moynihan's
pathological conjectures of poverty, will be explored and used
as an alternative analysis of the generation of poverty - an
analysis that will allow us a clear view of Belle Glade's
depressed black community and the structural racism of its
educational system.
Educational Policy and the Free Market Economy
Chapter 4 questions local, state, and national educational policy and the role it plays in late capitalism. It will
address the fact that though poverty in Belle Glade is not
solely an issue of color, a disproportionate number of Afro
Americans throughout Palm Beach County are impoverished.
Indeed, this is true nationally with black incomes just short of
60% of white incomes in the United States (West 1999, 255).
Even in the so-called boom years, from the late 1980s to 1997,
17 which was marked by increases in nonwhite incomes, "the wealth gap between whites and nonwhites widened" (Phillips 2002, 135)
In this chapter, Belle Glade's strategic location within the EAA or Everglades Agricultural Area, one of the most productive agri-industrial zones in the United States, will be addressed. The dominant cash crop of the EAA is sugarcane - a crop that has played a significant role in the development of global capitalism (Mintz 1985, xxix). Surprisingly, there have been few studies documenting and chronicling the effects of Big
Sugar on the population of Belle Glade and the other rural communities whose marginalized domestic and migrant populations maintain the dominance of this agri-industry. It is in the context of this immensely powerful local and national industry that public education, via its policies, becomes a player in the statecraft and repression that imposes the logic of the market and its associated risks on the subordinate citizenry of Belle
Glade. Belle Glade will be approached in this study as a micro narrative of what Karl Polanyi would assert is the attempt by market forces to run society as an adjunct to the economic system - a pure commodification of the natural system and human beings. Within capitalism, the market becomes a structural institution displacing community, religion and kinship "which assures the destruction of both society and the natural environment" (Block in Polanyi 2001, xxv).
18 Education, Economy, and Racism
The concluding chapter will address the possibilities of local coalitions and organic organizations bringing about systemic trans-historical change. Ronald Chisom's Peoples
Institute for Survival and Beyond, which offers an alternative to established, institutional understandings of race and racism is analyzed. The "Undoing Racism" workshops currently sponsored by the School District of Palm Beach County are intensive two and a half day sessions designed to "educate, challenge, and empower people to "undo" the racist structures that hinder effective social change" (Chisom and Washington 84)
These conceivably radical options are guided by the realization that any local decision-making must ultimately bring about a complete ideological shift in the Kuhnian sense, a complete ideological shift in the approach to educating children of color within and outside this rural, South Florida community. But the limitations of "Undoing Racism" philosophy in bringing about such a shift are confronted in this chapter. It argues that by deconstructing institutionalized political structures without deconstructing the unregulated market economic system that maintains such a structure, "Undoing Racism" does not allow the full view of the forest passed the tree. Racism, as it
19 manifested itself in the West, is viewed as a phenomenon birthed by a system of slave labor that was integral to colonial capital accumulation - internal and external.
The primary purpose of this dissertation is to understand the experience of a community that has been structurally denied the opportunity to fulfill their needs and desires. After emancipation, freed blacks, old and young, knew the importance of education, a right they had been legally denied for centuries. They attempted to improve their position within the newly united nation through literacy, only to experience institutional barriers that would keep them from acquiring full membership in society. The black and brown citizens of Belle
Glade are still experiencing those institutional barriers. They include segregated schools, disproportionate levels of poverty, and disproportionate levels of incarceration. To place all emphasis on the immediate family unit, attempting to identify either a pathology or culture of poverty as the mitigating factor responsible for their position, is to ignore the inherent contradictions of a late capitalist, neo-liberal state.
20 Chapter 1
Black Education in the South: Florida and the Ideology of Compliance
There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he is become their equal; and the real inequality which is produced by fortune or by law, is always succeeded by an imaginary inequality which is implanted in the manners of the people.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1838)
We are trapped in history; and history is trapped in us.
James Baldwin
The foundation of the argument put forth in this dissertation is based on the historical understanding that the racist policies and procedures of the United States in regards to black education was part of the concentrated and determined undertaking of colonialism and economic expansion, both domestic and international, that occurred on the backs of people of color throughout modernity (Dyson in Olsen and
Worsham 1999, 116). Before 1861 the education of the black man in the United States was extremely diminished by the economic, political and social life of the country. The first half of the 19th century saw resurgence in slave power and along with it
21 the suppression of black education by white churchmen and statesmen. The question of exactly what knowledge a slave needed in order to be the most efficient and effective laborer was not a difficult one for slave owners. It was agreed that good slaves needed to communicate effectively in the language of the master and, to a lesser extent, understand the conception of modern civilization, but no more. Ante-bellum slave owners maintained the belief that slaves "could not be enlightened without developing in them a longing for liberty"
(Woodson 1968, 1). The more uneducated the slave, the more malleable he would be for purposes of exploitation (Woodson
1968, 1-2). For the southern industrialist of the early 19th century, the institution of slavery was first and foremost an economic institution. Though structurally this political economy would end after 1865, ideologically, little would change in the post-bellum period - a time in the South that is marked by the establishment of public education and the education of freedmen.
After the fall of the Confederacy and the emancipation of black slaves, it was understood that a public educational system would have to be established in the southern states.
The freedmen's school system, established during the Civil War, was not a permanent fixture, nor was the Union government.
Even the financial support of benevolent societies like the
22 American Missionary Association, The Baptist Church North, and the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church could not financially cover the education of four million people.
Permanent support for the education of the Southern blacks, and indeed Southern whites, would have to come from public funds - a realization that would not sit well with the South's agri industrialists.
As a result of the leniency allotted the South during
Reconstruction by Lincoln and Johnson in dealing with the
"Negro problem," traditional prejudice would prevail and barriers were quickly erected prohibiting blacks from realizing two of their main objectives: achieving full-fledged citizenship and acquiring education for their children.
Through constitutional conventions and legislation, a set of
Black Codes was established throughout the South that would
"freeze the Negro's status just short of slavery" (Bullock
1967, 38). Southern conservatives began to view the Civil War as an historical moment that could be undermined, restoring the antebellum status of the black man (Bond 1966, 15). These
Black Codes would essentially replace the Slave Codes of the ante-bellum South.
The Presidential Reconstruction, along with the individual state government acts that ensued, negatively affected the freedmen schools. In 1862, for example, Edward Stanley,
23 governor of North Carolina, closed the freedmen schools in the state (Bullock 1967, 39-40) In 1865 the Florida Legislature would pass a special $1.00 tax on all black males. This tax would be used to maintain and establish schools for blacks. In addition, tuition would be collected from pupils attending the schools. The most damaging part of the law, however, was the immense power given to local school superintendents who would become completely responsible for the certification of teachers. Many critics of the law would view this as an attempt by the Southern states to oust Northern teachers who would plant in the freed slaves doctrines of social equality.
In Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville, for example, a
Pennsylvania teacher was denied admission. These legislative acts would become a huge burden on the black communities because they set precedents for other states (Bullock 1967,
49). Employers in Alabama denied work to blacks who attended schools; and overt acts of violence against black schools occurred in South Carolina and Tennessee. Throughout the South the freedmen schools were denied public support.
Even with these barriers and unstable attitude towards public education legislation, the attempt at establishing public schools in the South continued, and indeed, had been attempted before. Although never acted upon and solely kept on paper, Tennessee in 1806 and Virginia in 1810 established
24 public school funds and processes for application through legislative acts. Ultimately, South Carolina in 1868 would constitutionally establish formal public education - opening the schools to all children of all races - a controversial decision. Similar actions would follow by other state constitutional conventions including Florida, but the question of mixed schools was either left unmentioned or definitively answered with a negative response (Bullock 1967, 49).
By 1870, the pattern of thought in regards to the relationship between blacks and whites that would last for the next hundred years was becoming clear. The South was coming to terms with the 14th Amendment - accepting emancipation, but not equality; permitting the education of freed slaves, but not in an integrated schoolhouse; accepting the education of poor white children, but rejecting the idea that it should be done at the public's expense (Bullock 1967, 52). In these matters the Southern states would experience the same basic problems - no tax base for the support of public education, lack of adequately trained individuals, complaints against the expenses for running the schools, and the continuous equating of public schools with mixed schools.
In the mid-1800s private schools throughout the South far outnumbered public institutions. The Southern industrialists and business leaders, able to take care of their own, were not
25 interested in the needs of black labor; and black labor, fearful of repercussions, also resisted and accepted its subordinate role. Labor itself saw no need for education, viewing it as a luxury only enjoyed by the upper class (Bullock
1967, 77). Regardless of these views, however, articles for public education were written into the constitutions of each state and by 1871, after the conventions, each passed some form of law establishing a public school system.
Fortunately, addressing the economic shortfalls, the
Freedmen's Bureau provided each state with at least some form of school system. By the time government aide was withdrawn,
2677 Freedmen schools were spread throughout the South with
3300 trained teachers and almost 150,000 students. Most of the
Southern states took advantage of these ready-made establishments and began to build upon them. A school for 100 black children in Ocala, Florida, for example, occupied a fine building that was erected by the Freedmen's Bureau (Bond 1966,
68). What was not inherited from the Freedmen's Bureau was equal education.
Blacks new, as Bond writes, "that separate schools meant inferior schools" (1966). They desired mixed schools and saw them as a means of achieving equality in efficiency, although they were accepting of any system that would improve their lot.
It is true that as a result of the South's desire to maintain
26 control over the newly freed blacks and the Congress' intervention in the matter, Southern black citizens accumulated enough representation in the conventions to make at the least one of their collective goals a reality - the establishment of a public school system (Bullock 1968, 59-60). Educational expenditures for white and black children were equalized. Even blacks in rural areas, during Reconstruction and for several years after, saw a fair proportion of public school funds going to their cause - although the poverty and turmoil of the time kept those funds to a minimum.
An implied agreement, however, between the North and the
South at the end of the period would end the Afro-American's short-lived social movement. The Northern citizenry, tired of the political turmoil of the Reconstruction, was inclined to let the South deal with the "Negro problem" as it wished. If the South did not believe that the black man was ready for full citizenship, then so be it, as long as "conditions would not be allowed totally to revert to antebellum strictures upon the mobility or education of the Negro" (Bond 1966). It was implied that the South would therefore prepare him for the slow assumption of the role, aided by industrial education and subsidized by Northern philanthropy represented by John D.
Rockefeller, George Peabody, John F. Slater, and Anson Phelps
Stokes.
27 The Hampton Project and the Ideology of Compliance
In 1868, the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, opened its doors. Its founder was the Hawaiian born, Williams
College graduate, Samuel Chapman Armstrong. After commanding several regiments of black troops during the Civil War,
Armstrong offered his services to the Freedmen's Bureau. It was his work for the Freedmen's Bureau that convinced him that the only hope for the future of freed Black men and women lay in industrial education (Fishel and Quarles 1967, 319).
Armstrong believed that the majority of blacks had little use for the classical education of the day. The students attending
Hampton would be put to work acquiring practical work skills and occupations. The freedman, argued Armstrong, "should be taught to earn his living, to acquire manual skill, to prepare himself for the life he would most probably face in the still predominantly agricultural economy of a fundamentally agrarian region" (Hayes 1959, xxvii-xxviii). In 1867, he began to solicit funds for the purchase of a 159-acre estate in Hampton and the construction of a vocational school. By 1869, at a cost of $33,000, the first permanent building opened its doors, followed by the impressive Virginia Hall in 1872 (Fishel and
Quarles 1967, 319). Armstrong's dream became a reality and his
28 labors succeeded in propagating the idea of industrial education for blacks throughout the South. Southern businessmen and school reformers began to view "Negro industrial training" as the most effective "form of education to assist in bringing racial order, political stability, and material prosperity to the American South" (Franklin and
Anderson 1978, 61). More importantly, he successfully purged the pocketbooks of key Northern philanthropists like Josiah
King, a Pittsburgh philanthropist who donated $10,000 towards the purchase of the original property known as Little Scotland
(Watkins 2001, 47).
Armstrong came to be highly regarded and respected as a pioneer in black education by the missionary and corporate philanthropic community. The Hampton experiment was paramount in dealing with the dilemma of what to do with the freed blacks in the conquered South. Not only would it provide the manual skills needed to create a viable labor force, it would train much needed teachers for an alienated, displaced and illiterate black population. Armstrong's main objective for Hampton was to create a training ground for thousands who would go out and train thousands more. Anderson describes Armstrong's vision as a "unique industrial normal school designed especially to produce 'an army of black educators' who were expected to model particular social values and transmit them to the Afro-American
29 South" (Franklin and Anderson 1978, 62). This educational ideology, based on his beliefs on politics, religion, morality and race, was the foundation of the Hampton culture. Watkins contends that it was more than a school, but a concept that
"created and fostered a culture and spirit to which both its students and the larger community could relate" (2001, 49).
Armstrong's goal was to show the South, and North, that former slaves could be "cleaned up and made polite and useful" - looking and acting respectable by white standards (Watkins
2001, 50). The students of Hampton would have to conform and not threaten the social order or their lower position in the
South. By solving the "Negro problem," situating the black man, the delicate new balance between the agricultural South and industrial North would be insured, allowing for economic prosperity (Watkins 2001, 54-55).
Washington and Tuskegee
Many significant segments of the black community, including alumni of the institute, came to resent and suspect the Hampton model. National attention to the work done at the institute was noted through prominent black publications from the black Virginia Star to the People's Advocate, which was edited in Alexandria. They characterized the programs at
30 Hampton as "an educational experience that sought to affirm the legitimacy of black subordination" (Franklin and Anderson 2001,
81-82). But Armstrong and Hampton also created faithful disciples. The most prominent and successful of these would be
Booker Taliaferro Washington. Booker T. Washington, who attended Hampton from 1872 to 1875, would for decades be the most prominent Black spokesman in the view of White America.
In 1881, he was chosen by Armstrong to start in Tuskegee,
Alabama a Negro normal school that had recently been granted a charter by the Alabama legislature. The school would be modeled after Hampton and would mark the beginning of one of the most prominent careers in American education (Bullock 1967,
7 9) .
Washington was born on a slave plantation in 1857 or 1858.
After Emancipation, he and his mother moved to West Virginia where he began working in a coal mine. It was there that he heard of General Washington's school in Hampton, Virginia.
Within a short period, with little saved, he set out for
Hampton, finally arriving there after working at a Richmond dock for a short period in order to acquire the funds needed to complete the trip. The following is an extract from an account by Washington written in 1899 entitled "Early Life and Struggle for an Education." It describes what he found at Hampton upon his arrival:
31 At Hampton I found buildings, instructors, industries provided by the generous; in other words, the chance to work for my education. While at Hampton I resolved, if God permitted me to finish the course of study, I would enter the far South, the Black Belt of the Gulf states, and give my life in providing as best I could the same kind of chance for self-help for the youth of my race that I found ready for me when I went to Hampton: And so in 1881 I left Hampton and started the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in a small Church and shanty, with one teacher and thirty students.
As with Hampton, Tuskegee's curriculum included basic farming, carpentry, brick making and brick laying, print shop, home economics, as well as secondary school subjects.
Washington stated that "as a slave the Negro was worked, and that as a freeman he must learn to work" (qtd. in Fishel and
Quarles 1967, 364-66). The black man was now free to sell his labor. The training courses at Tuskegee would become models for industrial education in the United States as well as the rest of the world.
Washington did not believe in confining the black race to industrial life, but he did believe that upon a foundation laid in industry could be built the future of a people: "the very best service which anyone can render to what is called the higher education is to teach the present generation to provide a material or industrial foundation" (Washington in Fishel and
Quarles 1967). He believed that the future of African
Americans was in the South, in the country districts. It was in the South and through industry that Washington believed the
32 black man could acquire what the white man had always held the love of work, economy, property, habits of thrift, and a bank account. With this acquired position of wealth, public responsibility and professional education could be acquired.
Only through this wealth, acquired through skillful work and practical industry, could leisure and the enjoyment of literature and the arts be one day experienced (Washington in
Fishel and Quarles 1967, 364-66). His program took the nation by surprise. It was incomprehensible to hear a black man advocating such a plan. Du Bois would write: "it startled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North ... i t silenced if it did not convert the
Negroes themselves"(Du Bois 1973).
As with Hampton, which the John F. Slater Fund subsidized with other Northern philanthropists, Tuskegee became a center for the major philanthropic figures of the day. The more familiar they became with Washington, the more they realized that he could oversee their interest in the development of
Southern education. Influential northerners like William Henry
Baldwin believed in education that served the economic and social order. He and other Northern industrialists considered freed African Americans a subservient labor force. They found the Hampton/Tuskegee model of accomodationism the ideal solution to the "Negro question." As a result, Washington
33 influenced the establishment of such organizations as the
General Education Board, the Anna T. Jeanes Fund, the Phelps
Stokes Fund, and the Rosenwald rural school program (Bullock
1967, 84). But as with Hampton, African American academics and radicals condemned Tuskegee for teaching nothing more than compliance with the white social order. Among the most vocal and radical of these "classical" education leaders was W.E.B.
Du Bois who championed the cause for Negro liberal arts colleges like Fisk and Atlanta.
W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Intelligencia
From the Reconstruction era until well into the twentieth century, educational elites maintained differing conceptions of black America's place in the larger society. These ideological rifts would naturally lead to disparate educational policies.
The Hampton-Tuskegee elite, as demonstrated, believed in training an accommmodationist black leadership that would program the masses to willingly observe the Southern system of racial hierarchy and separatism. Although, as Wintz points out, Washington did warn white southerners of the possible northern migration of southern blacks if they were not allowed to be a part of and benefit from the economic progress of the south in the new industrial age. Moreover, while Washington
34 pushed for a self-help approach that included industrial education and the economic stability of the black community, he did not believe in "any political or social system that would place restrictions on black suffrage that whites did not face, or prevent blacks from acquiring access to equal public accommodations for their money" (Wintz 1996). He spoke out against lynchings and mob violence and was well aware of white southern attacks on the black community's right to vote. He realized barriers existed that prevented blacks access to public services including public education. His nonconfrontational delivery, however, was often misinterpreted, and therefore satisfied the white community and attracted severe attacks from the more militant wing of the black leadership (Wintz 1996). In reality, the primary work of both these factions, the Bookerites and non-Bookerites, would be the persistent struggle that would bring about civil and political equality for the black citizenry. They differed only methodology. The black educational elite desired a more radical intelligencia, one that would articulate the economic and political interests of the black masses and keep them aware of issues where their interests were at odds with that of the dominant white culture (Franklin and Anderson 2001). The central figure and proponent of this movement was William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois.
35 By the turn of the century, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the best-known African Americans in the nation. The striking and unique aspect of Du Bois' emergence as a prominent political figure is that he achieved the position through the written word. With the publication of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903,
Du Bois would become the public voice of the Negro American
Intellectual and the nemesis of Booker T. Washington. His background and training could not have been more different and ideologically distant from that of Washington's. Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in 1888 with an A.B.; Harvard in
1890 with a B.A., cum laude, in philosophy; an M.A. in history from Harvard in 1891; and a PhD from Harvard in 1895, the first man of African American descent to do so. In 1892, he left for the University of Berlin where he would study with Gustav
Scmoller, Adolf Wagner, and Heinrich von Treitscke. He would also hear lectures and befriend the great sociologist, Max
Weber (Gates in Du Bois 1989, viii) . As a consequence, Du Bois would become America's first sociologist.
In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois presented the "Negro problem" in a clear and unprecedented form. He explained an alternate, and to many Blacks and Northern abolitionists, truer meaning of emancipation and what it meant for blacks and the
South. In the essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,"
Du Bois hurls a devastating blow at the philosophy and
36 leadership of Washington. He accurately predicted that segregation, left unchallenged, would perpetuate itself
(Bullock 1967). In 1900, at the first Pan-African conference in London, Du Bois declared: "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" (Gates in Du Bois
1989). By 1906, Du Bois was well aware that the United States was obsessed with what he called the Hampton-Tuskegee idea of
Negro education, and though he believed in parts of it, he did not consider it a complete idea. In "The Hampton Idea" written in 1906, he writes of his thoughts at the turn of the century:
We should seek to educate a mass of ignorant sons of slaves in the three R's and the technique of work in a sense of the necessity and duty of good work. but beyond this, I also believed that such schools must have thinkers and leaders, and for the education of these folk we needed good and thorough Negro colleges (Du Bois 1973, 5) .
Diametrically opposed to Washington, Du Bois believed in the preservation of the black colleges as a source of educated black men who could control and steer their own destiny. The black man as a full citizen, and as a result of his historical experience, "is capable of improvement and the acquisition of culture at any degree" (DuBois in Bullock 1967, 210). Du Bois was as emotionally and intellectually committed to this endeavor as Washington was to his ideology of compliance. As a result, in 1896, he was appointed to the department of sociology at Atlanta University and given the responsibility of
37 conducting a series of conferences on the "Negro problem."
From 1896 to 1920, the conferences would cover such topics as mortality, urbanization, blacks in business, the black church, black crime, and college-bred blacks. DuBois would become the champion of the protest movement against racial discrimination
(Bullock 1967, 210).
Plessy vs. Ferguson and the Ideology of Separatism
Once the Reconstruction governments collapsed, Southern white political and economic leaders began to legalize the informal practices of separatism common in the ante-bellum
South. The most popular of these was a law passed by the
Louisiana legislature in 1890. It provided that "all railway companies carrying passengers ... shall provide separate but equal accommodations for the white and colored races" (Fishel and
Quarles 1967, 339). Plessy v. Ferguson would contest the constitutionality of this wave of Southern legislation. On
June 7, 1892, Plessy, a mulatto, bought a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway. He requested that on the trip from
New Orleans to Covington, he be seated in a white coach. After a conviction based on the 1890 law and subsequent appeals, the law was upheld and found constitutional by the Supreme Court on
May 18, 1896. In his dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan
38 wrote: "the judgment rendered this day will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case" (Fishel and Quartes 1967, 339). The Dred
Scott decision of 1857 denied the Negro citizenship status even after freedom was bestowed. Harlan saw the Plessy decision as conflicting with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which rendered the controversial Dred Scott decision powerless.
Regardless of its destructive and limiting effect on the struggle by freedmen, however, the Plessy decision and its ideology of separatism had been affirmed five years prior by
Booker T. Washington himself in the infamous "Atlanta
Compromise." He stated: "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress" (Du Bois 1973). It was a moderate position that would make Washington favorable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In Washington, the leaders of
America's political and economic machine found a "Negro spokesman" who realized the "limits of the race question"
(Fishel and Quarles 1967, 342). His rhetoric was non- inflammatory and exactly what white industrialists wanted to hear. In a speech presented at the Atlanta Cotton States and
International Exposition of 1895, Washington stated:
It is important and right all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The
39 opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house (Fishel and Quarles 1967, 342-345).
Booker T. Washington, as Louis Harlan points, had become by the white man's indirect rule, "the king of a captive people" (qtd. in Fairclough 1978) In the 1890s Southern states began to legislate and represent within state constitutional provisions the subordinate positions that
African Americans would take within American society. The majority of the laws would separate the races in public spaces such as schools and use Plessy as a precedent. The first to do so was the 1899 decision in Cummings v. Richmond County Board of Education. The Court decided that separate schools in
Georgia were allowed to stay open and function even if equally functional schools for blacks were not available. It was the first application of the separate-but-equal doctrine to education. The Court ruled that because Richmond County only had enough funds to support a white high school, it did not have to shut down that white high school in the interests of separate-but- equal. After this case it became nearly impossible for black schools to assert financial hardships. By
1910, the legal structure of segregation was fully in place and it was evident that the Court was far more interested in enforcing the "separate" over the "equal" in Plessy. By 1915,
40 the year of Washington's death, it was clear that his
"appeasement of Southern whites had done little to soften racial discrimination" (Fairclough 2001, 13). The purse strings of Northern Philanthropy had been loosened, but these organizations acquiesced in racial segregation and often attempted to strengthen white supremacy (Fairclough 2001, 13-
14)
The 1920s witnessed a renaissance in Harlem and an end to the South's era of black thinkers whose education was received by Freedmen's schools and church-related or church supported schools. The new black scholars included a small group of graduates from Harvard and Princeton and a much larger group of teachers, preachers, and vocational artisans in the tradition of Tuskegee; it was not until the 1930s that black institutions began to replace industrial courses with academic ones. For black men and women, it was the end of being educated in secret, in small churches and plantation cabins by the wives and daughters of the plantation owners. But it was the beginning of a divided public schooling system that would remain in place by law until the Brown v. Board decision of
1954 (Morgan 1995, 127-28). For the first half of the twentieth century, black students attended public schools that received less state and local funding than the schools attended by white students. Black educational scholars such as Margo
41 have demonstrated that "racial inequality in school resources led to racial differences in educational outcomes: school attendance, literacy rates, and standardized test scores"
(1990) . If the "equal" clause of the separate-but-equal doctrine had been adhered to, the racial disparity in educational outcomes would have been diminished, although not completely dissolved. Equal but separate schooling was all but impossible.
The Death and Reincarnation of Jim Crow
Contrary to popular belief, the Civil Rights movement, as
Alice Jardine argues, was really a product of the 1950s rather than the 1960s. The Emmet Till murder in Mississippi in 1955 and Martin Luther King's ten-year journey from Montgomery to
Memphis that began in 1958 sparked the movement that would culminate in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1950s would also mark the apparent end of Jim Crow. In the early part of 1951, at the height of the McCarthy era, under the counseling of the
NAACP's legal department, many African Americans entered various legal suits in order to get the court to rule on the legality of segregation (Bullock 1967, 231-33). The most famous and effective case was named after Oliver Brown. Brown et. all v. Board of Education of Topeka et all covered several
42 cases encompassing several states: Kansas, South Carolina,
Virginia, and Delaware. Arguments for the case were heard in
1952; and in 1954 the court made its first of two rulings stating: "in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place" (qtd. in Fishel and Quarles
1967, 501). The second ruling, the 1955 decision made popular by the phrase "with all deliberate speed," established the premise for the transition to integrated schooling. Legally,
Jim Crow was dead.
After the ruling many school districts in the states of
Arkansas, Delaware, Missouri, and Texas began to comply immediately. Some were border-states, neither Northern nor
Southern making their compliance less revolutionary - not a real disturbance to the traditions of the social order. Other states, however, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama to name a few, adopted various methods of stalling the process under the label of "all deliberate speed." Atlanta set up committees and study groups to study the problem of integrating. Professional research people were hired to bring in a report. Greensboro also began a study, and Knoxville turned down black requests to integrate while they studied methods of complying. Legal suits were brought against local school boards to stall the process of integration. Ultimately, violence and protest by Whites erupted in Northern as well as Southern cities (Franklin and
43 Anderson 1978, 201). The era can be described as one of resistance and compliance, though the scale was not balanced.
Popular sentiment supported the ideology of the old tradition
(Bullock 1967, 250). The end of 1966 showed little progress in the desegregation of the South. As Bullock writes: "In the
South most public school children were attending schools that were white or Negro" (1967, 262). Brown v. Board was a legal win for proponents of educational equality and access, but a social loss in regards to the reality of structural racism. In practice, the Brown decisions did little to end separate schools. As Walters points out: "the federal government lacked an effective policy tool to enforce compliance with the Brown decision" (2001).
It was not until the early 1970s that Southern states and their local school systems began to fully comply with the Brown decision, aided, one must add, by the passing of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act. But it was a paradoxical era that must be critically viewed. The decade of the 1970s would experience the largest push for full educational integration, while simultaneously experiencing Court rulings, as in Milikin v.
Bradley, which undermined Brown. Metropolitan wide, desegregation plans as a way of integrating urban schools with high minority populations would be blocked by the Court in the
44 Milikin decision. As a result Brown would never definitively impact racially isolated urban districts.
Even during the Reagan/Bush era of the 1980s and early
90s, desegregation efforts continued to progress even as educational policies implemented by the administration weakened the movement. The thinking behind these policies was to once again leave integration issues to the individual state legislatures and courts. An example would be the Riddick v.
School Board of the City of Norfolk, Virginia ruling made by a federal court in 1986 which found that once a district meets all factors, it can be released from any further desegregation plans and returned to local control (School District of Palm
Beach County, Office of African and African American Studies
2004). The federal role became the funding and development of specialized educational programs such as magnet schools that would "naturally" integrate school populations by luring high socio-economic students out of affluent neighborhood schools and into poverty stricken, low achieving, minority schools.
They would do this by providing unique curricula and faculty only found in those inner city schools. But these programs actually created further inequality and reinforced existing social barriers. A deeper analysis of magnet schools and the ideology behind them will be included in Chapter 3.
45 The mid to late 1990s truly saw the dismantling of successful desegregation programs around the country - a product of judicial decisions made by a more conservative supreme court. Today, America's schools are in the midst of a twelve-year slide toward further re-segregation. According to
Harvard Professor Gary Orfield, the 2000-2001 numbers show levels of segregation not seen since 1970. In 2000 close to
40% of black students attended schools that were 90 to 100 percent black. This is up from the peak 32 percent in 1988.
What is apparent is a major push towards re-segregating public schools and returning to a separate but equal structure - a system which has been historically proven to fail (Orfield and
Gordan 2001). Jim Crow has been reincarnated.
Florida
As a Southern state, the history of black education in
Florida parallels and reflects the structural and ideological restrictions of race and racism common throughout the post bellum South. Before 1869, no schools had been established for the education of black children in the state. Laws had been passed in 1832 and 1846 prohibiting the assembly and congregation of colored persons except for the purpose of worship. That made it extremely difficult for black schools to
46 open. The Southern white citizenry was fearful that coeducation of the races would be demanded by a reconstruction legislature. This and other obstacles rendered public education nearly impossible at that time (Cochran 1921), but the situation would change quickly after the end of the Civil
War.
In 1865, shortly after Emancipation, Northern missions and the American Freedmen's Union Commission began to establish schools throughout the state of Florida, opening thirty by years end (Scott 1974). The following year witnessed the first legal provision for the education of the "Negro child" but simply read that: "the Governor shall appoint an officer by and with advice and consent of the Senate who shall be styled
Superintendent of the Common Schools for Freedmen ... " (qtd. in
Scott 1990). However dismal, black schools expanded under this law to sixty-five and enrollment grew from 1900 to 2726 students. Cochran wrote that the schools "resulted in the improvement of the pupils both in knowledge and in general conduct of life" (1921).
In 1868, mandated by Congress in "the reconstruction act" of 1867, the Florida Constitution of 1865 was ignored and
Florida wrote a new constitution establishing a public educational system. Section one reads:
47 It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provisions for the education of all the children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference (in Cochran 1921, 31)
The Florida Constitution of 1868, like that of many other
Southern states, went into extensive detail regarding the organization and support of the public educational system. Not surprising considering the political environment, part of the organizational structure dealt with the education of the black child. Provision number one "authorized the legislature to organize a system of schools for all the children of the State
- for the black as well as for the White" (qtd. in Cochran
1921, 35). By 1870, the Peabody Fund found Florida to have a very effective public school system established by law, although the funds were insufficient to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites (Bond 1966, 67). The Cochran assessment was correct in describing these first movements towards the education of the black child as being an improvement on the ante-bellum experience, but he was mistaken in his assumption that these early black schools "paved the way for the establishment of a system of education in which the
Negroes received school privileges on equal terms with the whites" (1921) The restrictions of Jim Crow would become too constricting.
48 In 1885, the new Florida Constitution would establish separate schools, not allowing the education of white and black children to occur in the same school but guaranteeing that balanced arrangements would be made to meet the needs of both races (Scott 1974). Section 12 read: ~white and colored children shall not be taught in the same school, but impartial provision shall be made for both" (in Cochran 1921, 81). The constitution also forbade whites from teaching blacks in the public and private schools of the state. This white dominated political and ideological oppression of separate and unequal education trickled down from the highest court in the land. In
1899, the Supreme Court allowed Georgia to levy a tax on black and white citizens alike while providing a public school for white children only (School District of Palm Beach County,
Office of African and African American Studies 2004). What would follow was a level of neglect and disparity that would span the first half of the 20th century.
Always an issue in the Southern states, the question of funding for public education would also become a point of contention in Florida. The editor of the Daily Herald, a
Jacksonville newspaper, stated in regards to the 1885 constitution, that the convention was attempting "to confiscate the property of the state to educate Negroes with" (qtd. in
Cochran 1921, 83). Again, it would be a position supported by
49 the Supreme Court. In 1899, the court upheld a decision by a local school board to close a free public black school due to fiscal constraints, ignoring the fact that the district continued to run two free public white schools (School District of Palm Beach County, Office of African and African American
Studies 2004).
Scott contends that in Florida, philanthropic support
"came to the rescue when state and local support was almost completely indifferent" (1974). But Scott's view is historically myopic and does not see the reality of colonial education and colonialism. Many Northern philanthropic groups, as was previously cited, were established after Emancipation for the sole purpose of educating the Southern black child. In
Florida, the Rosenwald Fund, a primary source of funds for
Tuskegee, assisted in the building of 128 Negro schools. The
General Education Board, founded by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., created the State Supervisor of Negro Education in 1920 and helped Florida by providing monies for equipping black training schools. Teacher training guaranteed that the ideology would be spread. The Slater Fund, discussed earlier as a primary source of funding for industrial education and a proponent of
Hampton's accommodationist ideology, established the first industrial classes for blacks in the state of Florida (Scott
1974). The education of the black child in Florida, as it was
50 throughout the South, was hence based on the overwhelming conclusion arrived at by the ruling Northern class. "Blacks would remain in America and become a subservient labor force"
(Watkins 2001, 181). The southern planter class would give up its power to the Northern industrialists, but they would keep their wealth. More importantly, they would preserve their cultural and social dominance (Watkins 2001, 181).
In the 1916 bulletin on Negro education, number 38, the
Department of the Interior published a series of statistical tables and lists. The numbers clearly expose the power structure behind the educational system of Florida at the height of Jim Crow. Of the 27 total private and higher schools for colored people, only 1 was a public or land grant school.
There were 3 independent schools and 23 religious denominational schools. What is significant is that of the 23 denominational schools, 17 were under the decision making power of white denominational boards.
During the Jim Crow era, Florida's counties placed little importance on the education of the black child. Professional supervision of the black schools was limited and when practiced, was usually ignored. Scott cites the Florida
Educational Survey of 1929:
In general, one finds little if any real interest in the Negro schools on the part of the white people,
51 whether officials or others. The majority are wholly indifferent, some are mildly interested, while quite a large number are hostile to any substantial efforts to provide adequate educational facilities for Negroes (1974).
This mind-set even filtered into mainstream academia and can be well illustrated in the writings of White scholars of the earlier part of the century. Thomas Everette Cochran, for example, in his 1921 work, History of Public Education in
Florida, his doctoral dissertation at the University of
Pennsylvania, highlights the immense expansion and improvement of Florida's public educational system from 1892 to 1921. He mentions the more refined textbooks, the impressive school structures, and the new emphasis on hygiene. But no part of the study is dedicated to the condition of black schools and the oppression of the black child during the Jim Crow era.
In contrast, Scott points out in his work, The Education of Black People in Florida, that during the 1940s while working on his dissertation, he noticed a general apathy toward the educational needs of the black child. There was no consideration of the fact that if Florida were to excel and become a leading educational state, the educational needs of black children would have to be considered. The clear disregard, however, for this endeavor was obvious. Every area showed neglect and disparity. The construction of black
52 schools was rare and, when they did exist, sessions ran for three to six months while white school sessions ran for eight to nine months. In 1916, the Department of the Interior's bureau of education published a study of "Negro education" stating that Florida, along with other Southern states, had colored school terms averaging less than five months. This was the result of meeting the needs of the white farmers. In sections of Palm Beach County, for example, the schools would close during the harvesting of tomatoes and beans. These black schools would open for three months, close for three months during the harvest, and open again for three months after the season. The practice would not end in Palm Beach County until
1943 (Scott 1974).
It is clear that for the first fifty years of Florida's public schools, the effort to educate black children moved at a snails pace and though opportunities for change arose, non were acted upon. Between 1937 and 1939 many conflicts woven into school laws were removed allowing the school programs to run smoother and on a firmer legal ground. It was a prime opportunity to eliminate school segregation and discrimination laws, but it was not done. Not until 1947, after World War II and the crisis it ignited in public education systems throughout the United States, did Florida's legislature approve of an educational program referred to as the Minimum Foundation
53 Program. The law assumed that every child in Florida regardless of the wealth of the county in which he or she lived was entitled to "equal minimum opportunity for an adequate education" (Scott 1974). Moreover, the responsibility was cast unto the state and county to provide the educational opportunity. There was no mention of race in the legislation.
But it came at a time when there was pressure building to eliminate discrimination practices. "Every child" began to include the "black child" (Scott 1974), but what would be the extent of that inclusion? Would African Americans in Florida and across the United States be finally allowed access to the full benefits of modernity via the institution of public schooling?
Palm Beach County
Since this dissertation is a case study of Belle Glade, a small township within Palm Beach County, it is important to give a brief historical overview of black education and the establishment of black schools within the county before hearing the voices of the community on the specific cultural, economic, and political structures acting within and upon their existence. Primarily, it is important to understand that the foundation of Palm Beach County's school district in regards to
54 policies and facilities for the education of blacks during the
Jim Crow era reflects the larger state and regional ideology of the South.
In September of 1885, District Five of Dade County Florida was created. The district encompassed that section of Dade
County lying between the northern boundary of the county and a point between Jupiter and Lake Worth - the present location of
West Palm Beach and Riviera. Nine years later, according to the school board minutes of September 19, 1894, the trustees of the colored church, the present Tabernacle Baptist Church located on what is now Clematis Street in West Palm Beach, offered the use of their building for school purposes.
According to school district records this was the first "Negro school." It opened with 74 students and one teacher, J.E.
Jones. Since it was overcrowded, the school year was divided into two terms equaling eight months. Half of the students would attend the first four months and the other half, the second four months. In the year 1900, the school was renamed
Lake Academy for grades 1-10 and appointed James Mickens principal. Between 1894 and 1909, while the Palm Beach County geographical area was still part of Dade County, eleven more schools for black children would be established (School
District of Palm Beach County, Office of African and African
American Studies 2004). The following is a selected timeline
55 of Palm Beach County illustrating the evolution of black education and the establishment of black schools up to the famous Brown vs. Board decision. The timeline purposefully concentrates on the Glades area, the focal community of this case study.
1894 In October, School Number Four, Delray Colored is opened in Linton, Florida. In later years the school would become Spady Elementary and Carver High School. 1895 The Linton School is renamed the Delray Colored School. 1896 The Tabernacle Baptist Church school is named Clear Lake. It is renamed Lake Academy for grades 1- 10. 1906 Lake Academy is renamed the West Palm Beach Colored School. 1909 Boynton Colored School is renamed Boynton Negro Elementary 1914 On 11th Street and Division Avenue in West Palm Beach, the Industrial High School opens for grades 1-12. Beulah Land School in the Glades area is renamed Azucar (Sugar) in 1914. In 1946 it is renamed Bryant (Grades 1-8). The Linton School becomes the site for the establishment of the Delray Training School. In 1939 it is renamed Carver High School. 1916 Hillsboro Elementary School opens its doors. In 1922 it is renamed Belle Glade Elementary. 1917 In Canal Point, the Bacon Point Road School Opens for the school year. In 1948, it is renamed Sand Cut - the place where the sand cuts into the muck. 1920 The South Bay School opens. In 1931 it renamed Lake Harbor School 1924 The Pahokee School opens. In 1954 it is Renamed East Lake School 1925 In a church, the Kelsey City Elementary School opens. It is renamed Rosenwald in 1926 and merges with Washington Grammar School in
56 1931. 1930 The one teacher Loxahatchee Colored School lS renamed Loxahatchee Elementary. The school was also used as a church. 1938 Glades area schools only educate to the gth grade. Students desiring a high school diploma must travel to West Palm Beach, Ft. Lauderdale,or Miami. The Federal Government is petitioned by Glades residents. Their desire is to have a high school in the Glades area. 1939 Everglades Elementary opens in Belle Glade for grades 1-6. 1940 The Everglades Vocational High School opens in Belle Glade. In 1955 it is renamed Okeechobee Elementary. 1941 The Everglades Camp School opens in 1957. It is renamed Everglades Elementary in 1957. 1947 Olivia H. Baldwin is named Supervisor of Negro Schools. The title is later changed to Supervisor of School. She retires in 1967. 1949 Lake Shore Elementary in Belle Glade opens. 1950 Roosevelt High School in West Palm Beach opens for grades 7-12. 1951 The Canal Point Migratory Camp School, previously known as Sand Cut, opens. In 1959 it becomes the North Ridge Elementary 1954 United States Supreme Court renders the first of two Brown vs. Board decisions. The decision establishes the principle that segregated schools are a denial of equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. (www.palmbeach.k12.fl.us/AfricanAmerican)
As was the case throughout the South, the implementation of Brown was immensely difficult for Palm Beach County and not without incident. These incidents included threats to the life and employment of those who showed any interest in the integration process (Scott 1974). In 1958, the Florida
Legislature actually passed a bill that allowed districts to
57 close schools rather than desegregate. Governor Leroy Collins vetoed the bill (School District ~f Palm Beach County, Office of African and African American Studies 2004).
Five years after the first Supreme Court ruling on Brown,
Dade County, Florida voluntarily became the first county in the state to desegregate its public schools. Twenty-five black children in September of 1959 were admitted to two schools in
Miami that were previously all white. The total enrollment of both schools upon opening was 777. The 1967-68 numbers indicated that of the 1,296,949 children in the state schools at that time, 301,254 were black. Of these students, 69,399 or
23 percent were attending integrated schools (Scott 1974)
Palm Beach County first began token integration on
September 11, 1961. A court ruling permitted secondary school students to attend the schools closest to their homes if they so desired. Of the 87 black students that applied, however, only five were allowed to attend the white schools. Their names were Theresa Jakes Kanu and John Green of Lake Worth High
School, Iris Hunter Porter of Jupiter High School, Yvonne Lee of Seacrest High School, and Mary L. Warren of Palm Beach
Community College. It was not until a decade after Brown that
Palm Beach County permitted black student volunteers to transfer to white schools. The delays for full desegregation, however, began to try the patience of the African American
58 community and, ln 1969, 2500 black students boycotted the Palm
Beach County schools. The public outcry came at a strategic time for in the same year the Supreme Court ruled that schools must desegregate. In 1970, the district finally achieved what the Brown decision had set out to do fifteen years before.
Only one of 13 all black schools were left with a population that was 90 percent African American (School District of Palm
Beach County, Office of African and African American Studies
2004).
The Emancipation movement and Presidential Reconstruction project allowed for Northern Industrial Philanthropy to subsidize the education of Freedmen through compliant industrial institutions such as Hampton and Tuskegee that would create first, a viable labor force, and second, an aspiring black middle class. This was an ideal project for race philanthropy because it provided not only funds for educating the black man, but also a political and ideological platform indicative of classic colonialism - in this case applied to the
American South (Watkins 2001, 20). The black intelligencia, educated in the North and headed by W.E.B Dubois, fought diligently against industrial education and its accomodationist theory, but the inequalities inherent then in the vocational tracking of black students, still exists today in Florida - in the form of magnet programs and charter schools. Schooling,
59 initially private then public, would entice the black community to dream and to imagine the promise of America, all "in the absence of immediate material prosperity" (Watkins 2001, 181)
It must be considered that in the maintenance of consensual hegemony within a capitalist expansionist society, especially when dealing with democratically contradictory social structures such as apartheid, education has been an indispensable tool. This historical survey has chronicled the ebb and flow of inclusiveness and exclusiveness of blacks within the social structure of public education. From their inception, the educational institutions of blacks in the United
States served the political and ideological core of a white, industrial, usually protestant bourgeois. One hundred and twenty years later, little has changed.
Unfortunately, the immense accomplishment of Brown would not stand longer than thirty years. In 2002 Palm Beach County eliminated the last remnants of the 1970s desegregation efforts, the busing of black students from Delray Beach and
Boynton Beach into the suburbs. Chapter two will address the re-segregation of Palm Beach County's schools through a case study of the rural Belle Glade community - a community whose black citizens have never had full representation in our
American democracy. Theirs is a micro-narrative of the much
60 larger colonial reality affecting all people of color entangled in the American political project.
61 The sign on the west side of Hwy. 80. as you drive into town.
62 Chapter 2
Left Behind: Public Education in a Forgotten Community
0, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free."
Langston Hughes
It is difficult to believe that the film images of downtown Belle Glade, captured in Edward R. Murrows' now famous
1960 documentary Harvest of Shame, offer an accurate depiction of the community today. But yet, in many respects, it does.
For those driving west on Southern Boulevard, away from the unprecedented sub/urban sprawl of West Palm Beach, Belle Glade offers a glimpse at the rural communities that once spanned the pre-World War II American south. It is also a portrait of the grim reality of a new postmodern south. Incorporated in 1928, the Belle of the Glade is historically known for its agri- industry, producing an abundance of green beans, celery, lettuce, sweet corn and sugar cane. Today, we must add to its characterization disproportionately high incidents of HIV,
63 proliferating correctional facilities, and a history of educational failures.
Its Fordist history, as Holt refers to the post emancipation period of mass-production/mass-consumption (2000,
62-63), began with the building of the massive thirty-four foot high levee that runs sixty-six miles around Lake Okeechobee's southern shore. As a result of two deadly hurricanes, one ln
1926 and the other in 1928, which leveled the local agri industry, the levee was begun in 1930 at the insistence of
President Herbert Hoover. The thirty-four foot high man-made hill would protect the 400 square miles of agricultural lands known today as the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). With the economic expansion of the Second World War and the engineering marvels of the Hoover Dike and Army Corps of
Engineer's canal system, the once trackless swamp region was made potentially capable of providing jobs for millions of
Floridians (McCally 1991, 30-43) Governor Broward's dream, however, would not materialize.
Sugar would become the prominent crop, and sugar corporations such as U.S. Sugar, based in Clewiston, would resort to the "natural" order of the American south - forced labor practices in the form of peonage, and paternalism as a way of making racially-based forced labor practices acceptable
(McCally 1991, 33-37). With the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and
64 the establishment of Dixie Sugar in the region, the sugar crop continued to expand. But sugar is a treacherous crop to cultivate and does not attract willing labor. Native Americans and native Blacks new the hardship of the daily toil. Migrant and foreign unskilled workers holding an H2 visa from the U.S. government would be sought after to fill the domestic labor shortages (McCally 1991, 64-73). In the interest of maintaining the industry's complete and utter control over its labor force, little changed in the community over time.
The late 20th century development and urbanization of South
Florida during the post-Fordist era has yet to make an economic impact in Belle Glade. It has no gated communities, no sprawling retail mall, no movie theater or skating rink, and no public recreational pool that could give its children a reprieve from the relentless Florida heat. As a result of agri-industry, urbanization, and the cattle industry north of
Lake Okeechobee, Belle Glade and its surrounding communities have some of the worst water quality in the nation, so swimming in lake Okeechobee or the plethora of man made canals is physically perilous and therefore, not an option. In regards to development, aside from the four new school facilities built by the School District of Palm Beach County over the last ten years, there are few new buildings or businesses in the town.
65 The last franchise to enter the community is the Wendy's on
Main Street built in the mid-90s.
According to the 2000 census only 290 of the 5157 employed civilian population 16 years and older in Belle Glade are self- employed workers in sole-proprietorship, not corporate businesses. When one considers that 1051 of its 4902 households earns less than $10,000 a year, it is not surprising that its largest number of workers, 1091, is in education, health, and social services. The most salient point, however, is that 44.3% of its population 16 years and over are not in the labor force - 4660 out of 10,521 (City-data.com 2004) In a nation where education's primary function is economic efficiency, these numbers exhibit a catastrophic disparity between this community and white mainstream America.
The People and Their Schools
To the Black citizens of this non-metro community, the realities depicted in Harvest of Shame resonate today with the failures of public education. A local Belle Glade community activist who I will name Claire, elaborated during an interview:
I think the problem is not a "problem;" it's an over - lay of a lot of different things. One of those is economics. There has never really been a
66 reason to educate people in this area because the expectation has been, and still is to a large part, that people would find some kind of work in agriculture. So there has really been no real reason to provide education to students so that they can compete because it was the feeling of a lot that as long as we have enough, then we'll have enough to work. The Harvest of Shame that Edward R. Murrow did a very long time ago ... I was sitting down and looking at parts of that program, and I can't remember what farmer it was, and I didn't understand then, but what he said was, in essence, he equated black people with cows and said what's better for a child than to learn by its mothers side just like a little calf. You know, when it's in the field right by its mother. So I think that is the then-spoken but now unspoken kind of basis for there not being education proper education - in this area.
In the 21st century the accepted standard for proper education in Belle Glade among parents, community leaders, and educational professionals is based on the Florida Comprehensive
Assessment Test, a tool that is part of Florida's attempt to
"improve the teaching and learning of higher educational standards" (Florida Department of Education 2004). The main focus of the FCAT is to test the individual student's grasp of the cognitive skills listed in the Sunshine State Standards.
The standards were determined by groups of teachers chosen by districts throughout the state. In 1996, the State Board of
Education approved the following subject areas to be included in the SSS: language arts, math, science, social studies, health, physical education, dance, music, theater, visual arts, and foreign languages (Florida Department of Education 2004).
67 These conferences of teachers determined which skills children should learn at each grade level. The core areas of the SSS - reading, writing, mathematics, and science - all list a series of "high order" thinking skills assessed through a criterion referenced test. All children enrolled in the state of
Florida's public schools, grades 3-10, must take the FCAT reading and mathematics portion of the test each spring.
Students in grades 4, 8, and 10 must take the FCAT Writing portion, while students in grades 5, 8, and 10 take the Science portion.
There are two types of questions in the SSS part of the
FCAT reading section: multiple-choice, which is machine scored; and performance task, which is holistically scored by two trained readers. Two trained readers also holistically score the essay required for the FCAT Writing portion (Florida
Department of Education 2005). The students score according to achievement levels classified from 1 to 5. If a third grade student fails to meet the established score of 3, they are not promoted to the fourth grade. Tenth grade students not meeting the established score in any area must successfully pass the test before graduation or the diploma will be withheld.
The FCAT scores from individual schools is the primary criterion used in Florida's A+, School Grades plan. Each
Florida public school is graded from A to F based on how well
68 the students have mastered the SSS standards. The State Board of Education allocates points to the schools based on three criteria: how well students are doing, the progress they are making or learning gains, and the progress students struggling with reading are making.
Since the implementation of the A+ Plan, communities on the shores of Lake Okeechobee have had the largest number of lowest graded schools of any area in Palm Beach County. From
1999 to 2004 Glade Central High School in Belle Glade has been graded F, D, D, F, D, D, respectively. Pioneer Park
Elementary, where I was employed for two years has received state grades of D, D, D, D, C, C. Belle Glade Elementary, during the same six-year span has been graded D, D, D, C, D, C.
Glade View Elementary, my first teaching assignment for the district received F, D, D, D, C, C; and Lake Shore Middle: D,
D, D, D, C, C. Two schools, Pahokee Elementary and Pahokee
Middle/High School located in the town of Pahokee, a disintegrating community that was once an agri-industry Mecca just north of Belle Glade along the lake's east coast, earned similar grades from the state during the same six years. The state grades for Pahokee Elementary from 1999-2004 show minimal improvement from the Belle Glade schools: D, D, D, C, C, C, respectively. Pahokee Middle/High's are even more abysmal- D,
D, F, F, D, C. (Florida Department of Education 2005).
69 Only one Belle Glade school, Gove Elementary, received a grade of A for the last three years: 2002-2004. Gove, like the other Belle Glade schools, is a Title 1 school - the federal law designation that provides funds for low-income students.
If 50% or more of students are eligible for free and reduced lunch based on their families income, it is designated a Title
1 school and receives additional federal funds. What sets Gove apart from the other Belle Schools is that it is a bi-lingual magnet school, modeled after the extremely successful Coral Way
Elementary in Dade County. The academic day at Gove is split between instruction in Spanish and English. Because of its predominantly Hispanic population, 60% of the total student population, the program was a natural fit for the community and has been extremely successful, but also very controversial.
Historically, the black community has perceived Gove as the "white" elementary school. It was built in 1965, approximately at the same time Glade View Elementary was constructed, but it sits on the east side of Main Street, an area of town that was predominantly white in the 1960s and
1970s. Today, it is a predominantly Hispanic enclave housing permanent residents and migrant families, but the perception of it being a "white" school remains. During a discussion with
Maggie, a black Belle Glade Elementary teacher and city
70 Glade Central High School, Belle Glade, Florida (2005)
Glade View Elementary, Belle Glade, Florida (2005)
71 Pioneer Park Elementary, Belle Glade, Florida (2005)
Gave Elementary, Belle Glade, Florida (2005). Gave is a bi-lingual magnet school with a Spanish/English curriculum.
72 official of Belle Glade, the issue of Gove arose and became the center of a critical assault by her on district policies and politics dealing with the building of Pioneer Park Elementary in 1995 and the manipulation of boundary lines and school demographics. According to her, prior to the completion of the new Belle Glade Elementary on Avenue M, a local PAC committee sent a proposal to the school board for approval. The PAC proposed making Belle Glade Elementary a trilingual magnet in
English, French, and Spanish. But the board never responded until the surprise announcement of Pioneer Park Elementary.
Maggie:
Nobody new Pioneer Park was being built while Glade Central was being built because nobody asked questions. Why do you have to put a building up that far from the high school? The engineers would just casually say, ~we're just building the school." So they had people thinking that Glade Central had all of that stuff coming up; and then when it was done, that's when they announced that Pioneer Park had been built so that they could get the students out of Gave Elementary that lived in Glades Glen, Okeechobee Center, and the 715 Trailer Park. They could put them in Pioneer Park so that they could open Gove as the dual-language magnet. So we had a superintendent of the area school called Chuck Schall. .. at the time that this was planned, and he quietly and deviously put these plans in place while representing the interests of all of the schools in this area so that Gove bubbled up to the top as being the better school that would draw people from Glades Day rather than Belle Glade Elementary.
Pioneer Park and Glade Central were built adjacent to
Glades Glen and the 715 Trailer Park. Students from Glades
73 Glen, a low-income government subsidized housing project,
Okeechobee Center, and the 715 Trailer Park are the most stigmatized in regards to socio-economics, dysfunctional family experience, and low achievement. An administrator who I worked with at Pioneer Park from 1995 to 1998 did not feel comfortable being recorded, but commented on the anger and baggage the students brought to school; the minimal parent involvement; and the anger of the staff and teachers. For her it was a stressful situation that seemed never ending. The level the students came in with was so low that they would never reach the desired county level by the time they left the school.
In the last two years, some of these Glades schools have shown improved Department of Education grades, but the question of whether or not these grades have been justified by real improvement in the schooling of these children of color is suspect. What is implied when a school in the state of Florida receives a grade of A with less than 50% of their students reading on grade level - the same grade a school with 93% reading at grade level receives? A June 20, 2004 editorial in the Palm Beach Post alluded to the state educational grading system's "political curve." Two hundred A rated schools in
2004 would have received grades of B if the DOE had maintained
74 The entrance to Okeechobee Center from Hwy. 80. This community was also known teachers as "the projects."
A view of the homes in Okeechobee Center from Hwy. 80.
75 The 71 5 Trailer Park.
The 71 5 Trailer Park.
76 The entrance to Glades Glen apartment complex.
77 2003 criteria. Indeed, the state's grading system has been changed practically yearly, an accommodation that resulted from political demand (Opinion 2004, 2E). In May of 2003, 43,000 third graders were in danger of being retained as a result of their failure to pass the FCAT. Thirteen thousandhigh school seniors were faced with graduating without a standard diploma.
But black community leaders and parents rallied at Florida
International University in Miami and across the state protesting the state exam and threatening a boycott of such state industries as citrus, sugar, and tourism (Malernee 2003,
1-2). By November, the state altered the grading formula, guaranteeing a more agreeable result in the election year of
2004.
The Glades schools, because of their socio-economic make- up, are benefactors of the political manipulation used by the
DOE to placate voting communities. Maggie alluded to the importance of Belle Glade within Palm Beach County as an important minority enclave:
... this is a hotbed. Palm Beach County is for the politicians. Everybody knows about the anger of 2000, and people are becoming more and more incensed. And we have people who have decided they will have anybody but Bush, and I am one of those people. Palm Beach County has neglected us, but we do have a sizable amount of votes out here if they can be pulled together in a block.
78 The Politics and Manipulation of the FCAT Scores
In regards to education, political manipulation takes the form of assessment and accountability using state mandated standardized tests as the tool for acknowledging and supporting progress, as well as failure. But serious questions and concerns regarding the Department of Education's testing and grading arise when critically analyzing the discrepancies between individual Belle Glade school scores on the SSS core areas of reading and writing.
According to the 2002/2003 School Accountability Report, published by the DOE, Glade Central High School had only 9% of their school population meet state standards in reading, yet
77% met state standards in writing. There was no change in the reading scores in 2004, but the writing scores soared to 90% of the students meeting state standards. Lake Shore Middle School showed a similar discrepancy in 2002/2003 - 27% met reading standards, while 86% met the writing standard. The reading scores stayed the same in 2004, but the writing score only droppedto77%. The elementary schools showed similar discrepancies except for Gove Elementary, the bilingual magnet.
In 2004, sixty-six percent of its students were reading at or above grade level with 80% meeting the state standards in
79 writing, a drop of 15% from the 2003 writing percentage of 95%.
Pioneer Park Elementary, however, had 2002/2003 reading percentages of 26%, while the writing percentage was 87%. Both scores improved in 2004, but the discrepancy was still apparent: 34% in reading with 88% in writing (Florida
Department of Education 2004).
It is well documented that reading and writing are cognitive skills functioning with the same cognitive resources.
This case study does not intend to argue for any single theory identified by linguists and learning theorists connecting reading and writing. Whether one is a proponent of directional, non-directional, or bi-directional theory is of no consequence, for all three assume an inherent connection between reading and writing that cannot be ignored. While directional theory proposes that the resources of the two skills are transferable with training, non-directional assumes that training and sophistication in one skill will automatically result in the refinement of the other because of the single cognitive proficiency underlying both skills. In the training of young readers and writers, those not yet advanced at either, the bi-directional hypothesis is of value.
It claims "reading and writing are interactive as well as interdependent" (Vanniarajan 2000, 1-2). The main premise of bi-directional theory is that there are multiple relations
80 between the two processes and those relationships change as one becomes more proficient in either skill. In bi-directional theory, the less experienced writer depends far more heavily on reading (Vanniarajan 2000, 2).
The discrepancies between the reading and writing scores of the students in Belle Glade must be critically examined according to linguistic theory, while keeping the political and ideological climate of the state's educational system in mind.
First and foremost must be considered the holistic, subjective grading of the FCAT Writing assessment. Two trained teachers use a grading rubric that is divided into four categories: focus, organization, support, and conventions. Each category is graded from level one to six. The rubric contains the
"scoring guidelines or criteria used to evaluate" FCAT writing essays (Florida Department of Education 2003. The requirements for each possible score point is explained in it. The focus category listed on the far left of the rubric or on top (if viewed online), scores a writing sample on its purposefulness and insight into the writing situation. Whether or not the writing sample's idea is complete and whole, with an argument that is well put together, is answered according to the organizational section. The support section deals mostly with syntax and the clear presentation of ideas - how the language supports the subject. Lastly, on the far right of the rubric
81 or on the bottom (if viewed online), the conventions category is listed. It is the grammatical section, dealing with sentence structure, mechanics, usage, and punctuation.
According to the Florida DOE website, holistic grading, evaluating a students writing sample for its total effect, is the most effective format for assessing a student's written draft because it does not place emphasis on any one factor.
The overall quality of the writing is considered. This explanation, however, does not support the realities of in service training given to English and Language Arts teachers throughout the county. As a former Lake Shore Middle School
English teacher, Susan, explained to me during an interview she preferred not be recorded, emphasis is never placed on the mechanics or grammar of language when training the student to write in the prescribed FCAT format. Far more emphasis is placed on training the students to understand the prompt and organize their essay in the prescribed FCAT format of focus, organization and support.
Holistic grading, as used by Florida and other states, raises the political question of subjectivity, perspective, and position. Where does the power come from; who is wielding it; and who benefits? If improvements must be shown publicly by the districts and state to placate incensed communities of poor ethnic and racial minorities, and to a lesser extent, affluent
82 White communities, the FCAT writing section and its holistic format of evaluation allows for the unquestioned, and perhaps unqualified, improvement in scores. Consider the hierarchical position of focus over conventions on the rubrics. The conventions section, the category dealing specifically with grammatical ability, is diminished in importance by its position on the rubric - the section which would most be affected by the reading proficiency of the inexperienced or beginning writer according to the bi-directional theory. By de-emphasizing the importance of writing mechanics, the evaluation process of the FCAT writing exam compensates for the high level of illiteracy represented by the reading scores of the Belle Glade students. The remarks of a high ranking district employee, who I will name Roberta, supports this argument:
The two tests assess very different things. The reading is at a high level whereas the FCAT writing is graded on a 6 point rubric. Students are not required to use correct spelling or even correct grammar on the writing test. The main point is that they can form paragraphs. The standard is much lower.
The process, however, is not uniquely practiced on at-risk schools alone, and so the question becomes far more complex. The black community of Belle Glade is not the only victim of the political play used by the DOE in assessment and evaluation. When comparing Glade Central High School's reading and writing scores to
83 those of three predominantly white, affluent, A rated Palm Beach
County schools, one finds, though not as drastic, similar discrepancies between the scores as those shown by the Glades schools. According to the Annual Report Card: 2004, issued by the
Florida DOE, Wellington High School had 95% of their students meetin• state standards in writing, while only 57% were reading at or above grade level. Spanish River High School in Boca Raton had 97% of their students meeting state standards in writing, with only 52% reading at grade level. The only school of the three that met
Federal No Child Left Behind Standards, Dreyfoos School of the Arts, had 100% of their students meet state writing standards, with 77% reading at grade level (Florida Department of Education 2004)
The inconsistencies are also not unique to Palm Beach
County. Dade and Broward show a similar anomaly. According to the 2004 DOE reports, only 26% of Dade County's lOth graders scored the state required 3 or above on the FCAT reading section - 3 being considered grade level while 4 and 5 are considered proficient and advanced. Eighty-nine percent of these 10th graders, however, met the minimally accepted state level in the writing portion. Broward's 10th graders achieved similar scores: 34% met 2004 reading standards with 92% achieving or surpassing the minimal writing requirement. It is obvious that the analysis must be widened from the county level
84 to the state level and beyond. A critical analysis of these inconsistencies must not be enfeebled.
Discrepancies between reading and writing scores of this nature are not ubiquitous across the American South. Indeed, it is more common to find writing scores level with or trailing reading levels. In North Carolina, a state that uses a similar assessment format to Florida's, 2001 scores showed 77.1% of 3rd through 8th graders at or above achievement level 3 (grade level) in reading. In the same year, 73.3% of 4th and 7th graders scored at or above the state minimum required 2.5 in the writing assessment out of a scale of 1 to 4. It is important to note that North Carolina also uses two trained, independent readers to holistically grade each student essay, the same format of evaluation as Florida (North Carolina
Department of Public Instruction, Accountability 2002).
Kentucky's Commonwealth Accountability Testing System also exhibits consistency between the reading and writing achievement levels of their students. As with North Carolina, writing scores trail reading scores and have become the primary area of emphasis for the state's DOE. According to the 2004
CATS scores, 86.8% of the elementary school students tested met state standards in reading with 72.2% writing at established levels. High school student percentages were lower at 73.8% in reading and 65.1% in writing, only an 8% differential. The
85 widest gap was exhibited by middle school students: 81.5% met reading standards, while only 54.9% met state writing levels
(Rodriguez 2004).
While I won't attempt an intricate analysis of the tests administered by North Carolina and Kentucky and how they compare to Florida's FCAT, the mere fact that the exams demonstrate the cognitive connection between reading and writing as determined by student scores, calls into question the disparities of the Florida scores. Again, Susan offered her insight as a veteran English teacher. In her many observations of practice tests and actual FCAT materials viewed, she noticed that the level of language used in the writing prompts is inferior to that of the reading comprehension sections. As long as a student has a firm grasp of the prompt, they can successfully implement the FCAT format for writing that they have been trained in since their primary years. Roberta supports this assertion:
The reading is at a high level. The writing also comes from their own experience and the reading is based on long, boring scientific passages that the students do not relate to. Finally, the writing is definitely more coachable. If a student is a poor reader it is harder to catch them up than it is to teach them to write four paragraphs.
For example, students are taught to write their opening sentence as the topic sentence. Yet, the reading samples used for comprehension evaluation in the FCAT test often do not open
86 with the main or topic sentence; it is deeper within the body of the reading sample. In essence, Susan believes there are two main reasons for the discrepancy between the reading and writing scores: the FCAT writing training students in Palm
Beach County are participating in actually hinders their reading comprehension success; and the county curriculum does not allow for reading education at the appropriate level to succeed on such a sophisticated exam. Both of these factors offered are reasonable and supported by the findings of this study, but there is a third factor with much broader and deeper ramifications that must be considered.
According to a survey of literary reading in America conducted by the Census Bureau at the request of the National
Endowment for the Arts, "the percentage of adult Americans reading literature has dropped dramatically over the past 20 years" (National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division
2004, ix). This decrease in literary reading- the reading of novels, short stories, poetry, and plays - coincides with a regression in general book reading. It has far reaching implications, for the rate of decline is accelerating. The phenomenon is affecting all groups within society - old, young, educated, uneducated, women, blacks, Hispanics, and whites.
All are experiencing slides in the number of literary works
87 read yearly (National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division
2004, x-xiii).
The steepest declines are observable in the youngest age groups - a 28% decline from 1982 - 2002 in the 18-24 year old group (National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division 2004, xi) . The survey eludes to the dominance electronic media now holds in the everyday lives of children and young adults. As would be expected, however, the most important factor in literary reading rates is the educational level achieved.
Respondents to the survey with college degrees were "75% more likely to read literature" (National Endowment for the Arts,
Research Division 2004). Also compelling are the data that show the lowest literary reading rates belonging to Hispanic males (18%), black males (30%), and Hispanic Females (34%)
(Reading at Risk 2004, 11). As a slightly altered African
American folk saying states it best, "When America sneezes, people of color catch pneumonia."
Countering the Gathering Storm
By viewing the discrepancies between the FCAT reading and writing scores of black, brown, and white students of Palm
Beach County in the context of the findings put forth by the
Reading at Risk survey, the subtle manifestations of an unequal
88 educational structure become clearer and more pronounced. To
Claire and the black community of Belle Glade, the problem is
very clear: "you can talk about Glade Central and Pahokee High
as much as you want to, but the problem is that the Palm Beach
County School System does not educate black and brown
children." In 2000, though black student scores began to
improve on the FCAT, the achievement gap widened between white
and black students at about two-thirds of the county schools,
those schools that maintained a significant black and white
population. In 1998, a critical study done by the National
Coalition for the Advocacy of Students entitled The Gathering
Storm: How Palm Beach County Schools fail poor and minority
students, found that black students did not have equal access
to the districts best programs. As of May of 2004, less than
25% of black sophomores in Palm Beach County were reading on
grade level. In contrast, 75% of their white counterparts were
achieving grade level reading. In the last four years, white
high school students eligible for graduation have shown a
significant 33% improvement in reading scores - from 40% to
73%. Black students are yet to achieve the 40% level (Shah
2004 lA, 14A) .
To counter the findings of The Gathering Storm, the
district co-authored Achievement for All with the Coalition for
Black Student Achievement. The creed of this five-year Palm
89 Beach County School District Plan reads: "We believe that all children can learn and achieve high standards" (qtd. in Shah
2004, 14A). In the plan the district promised to augment the number of Black students in upper-level and advanced classes in math and science as well as gifted courses. To aid the district in raising test scores for black students, the
Washington based consulting firm, Education Trust, was retained. The firm would offer teachers and administrators new techniques for reaching lower-achieving students (Flannery
2000, lB).
In addition, under the leadership of Art Johnson, the Palm
Beach County School District has implemented the Accelerated
Academic Achievement Plan (AAA) to "address the individual needs of the students within each school and align resources to provide equal opportunities for all children to learn" (School
District of Palm Beach County 2004). The main premise of the plan is to identify at-risk schools and then provide "intensive interventions." At-risk schools are defined within the plan as those schools that have high poverty populations, low student performance, and high teacher turnover. By using research as its basis, research that is never cited within the body of the
AAA plan, the District developed a "best practices approach from around the country. One of the components of the intervention is to "develop a cadre of strong and supportive
90 teachers and administrators" (School District of Palm Beach
County 2004). Considering the shortage of teachers around the country, however, and the fact that the Glades suffer from the stigma of a marginalized community, even the added financial incentives of a $500.00 signing bonus and a $2000.00 a year travel expense package have done little to attract teachers
(Solomon 2003) . In 2003, they bused applicants from the
District's job-fair out to the Glades with little success.
Even less successful has been the attempt to assign quality veteran teachers to the highest needs schools.
The issue is not whether or not the intervention has been successful, but how the community has reacted to teachers educating their children, teachers who do not understand the culture of the community or its history. This is not a new issue for the Glades. Since the desegregation movement of the
1970s, the influx of white teachers to the Glades has always been a point of deep contention with black parents, teachers and administrators from the community. During a conversation with Beatrice, a Black teacher I worked with at Glade View
Elementary and Pioneer Park, she explained to me that the view of black teachers on white students has always been that of
"just children." She felt that black teachers in the Glades never viewed white students as white, but just students. She could not say the same for her white counterparts. She always
91 felt that white teachers looked upon black students differently
(the other) . She also mentioned that in her experience, white teachers always tried to make her think that they understood the black situation. "But they do not," she said. "They do not know what it means to be black, live black, teach and learn black... what it means to speak our language." What Beatrice is referring to is what bell hooks calls a "social framework of sameness - a homogeneity of experience." Bell hook's interpretation of James Cone resonates with Beatrice's position, "the politics of racial domination have necessarily created a black reality that is distinctly different from that of whites" (hooks 1992, 11-14).
Another District strategy of significant conflict with the community is the plan to align individual school curricula with the Sunshine State Standards and then translating the standards into instructional practice - other wise known as teaching the test. It demands that all at-risk schools "adopt and support
District wide curricula and instructional approaches rather than allowing at-risk schools to devise their own strategies and programs" (School District of Palm Beach County 2004). But this thinking is at odds with black teachers and administrators who live in the community. Maggie argued her point:
... we have a very bad curriculum in Palm Beach County. In fact, our superintendent has said he wants to see all children on the same page at the same time, and
92 that's not reality. It's not reality. If everybody is on the same page at the same time, then those who are capable of doing more are going to be brought down, and those that are capable of doing less are going to become frustrated and they are not going to do what they need to do.
It is a poignant point for regardless of the District's efforts, in the five-year span between 1999 and 2003, barely
50% of Black students graduated from high school each year: 45% in 1999; 48% in 2000; 49% in 2001; 51% in 2002; and 49% in 2003
(Shah 2004, 1A,14A). Indeed, not one of the 39 schools designated by the district's superintendent, Art Johnson, as in dire need of improvement has a majority white population (Shah
2004, lA, 14A). The question then becomes, to what extent has the attempt to end segregation, unify the curriculum, and establish mechanisms for accountability impacted this community? Why has this community not moved beyond the structural legacy of Plessy? These are questions that puzzle the people even now as Claire attests:
For a long time when I would travel, and I don't know if this is now, when I would come back in, start flying back into West Palm Beach and I could feel this thing coming over me. You know, this heaviness, this blanket. Now I don't know if it's just that I'm accustomed to it now, but there's this, if you look at the Bible, these principalities, this ruling evilness that is just so present in this community that it's just automatic. That thing that I said with the elephant - you know, if you got a chain and you let it go, and it'll pull out from the chain and then if you put a thread on it, after a while it won't bust out. I think that
93 for a lot of reasons that's probably where we are. Things have changed since the 70's, but I don't know if they have necessarily changed for the good or the bad, and I don't know that we weren't much better off educationally before the FCAT."
Back to the Future
As I stand here and look out upon the thousand of Negro faces, and the thousands of white faces, intermingled like the waters of a river, I see only one face- the face of the future.
Martin Luther King (1959) (Speech before the youth march for integrated schools)
The implementation of FCAT and its use as the primary measuring tool for accountability coincides with a return to the Plessy structure of separatism and a complete snub of the
Brown decision. Up until 1999 integration efforts were still in full force in Palm Beach County. Black students were bused away from their neighborhood community schools, and white students were lured to low-socio economic minority schools by developing specialized magnet programs. Neutral sites were often chosen for new schools, neither in predominantly white nor black neighborhoods; and boundaries would be a subject of great analysis - insuring that school populations would have at least a 10% black student population and no more than 50%. An oversight committee insured all of these efforts, put in place by the United States Department of Education's Office of Civil
94 Rights in 1987 (Miller 2004, 14A). The twelve years of oversight, however, ended in 1999.
The movement swept the nation. Districts throughout the country immediately halted all efforts to desegregate and Palm
Beach County was no different. Without direct monitoring, districts began to focus on sending students to the closest schools near their homes. To many, however, the neighborhood school concept is synonymous with segregation - separate and unequal. A retired veteran of the Palm Beach County School
District, Joe Orr, made these comments: "All these people seem to think that if you build the same school in a black community that you do in a white community that it' s equal... it' s not equal" (Miller 2004, 14A). Orr's argument resonates with the arguments that justified the Brown decision in the 1950s.
There is a haunting, as Alice Jardine of Harvard University argues, of our present moment in time by ideological, economic, and social movements of the 1950s. In many respects Florida schools of today exhibit similar characteristics to schools of the 1950s. A recent editorial in the Palm Beach Post compared the closing of a rural Virginia public school system in 1959 and the subsequent amendment to its state constitution allowing public monies to be used for a free public academy for White students, to Florida's state funded voucher program which promotes private education and devalues public schooling.
95 Elisa Cramer argues that Prince Edward County in Virginia resisted Brown by informing its white citizenry that public schools were not worth attending because of black students, and that Florida's message today, although much more subtle, is no different (2004, lOA). The majority of the students in
Florida's public schools are ethnic and racial minorities. By
Florida using state vouchers, it diminishes the value of public education, espousing private education as superior (Cramer
2004, lOA) The voucher plan was packaged and sold in Florida as a way for low-income black and brown children to move out of low performing public schools. In Cramer's view, a view that this study supports, state vouchers have become subsidies for families that can already afford private school education.
Moreover, the Florida state legislature has lacked any initiative in clarifying requirements for voucher use.
The structural racism of the Plessy era did not collapse with the Brown v. Board decision. It morphed into a much more subtle, much more dangerous form of consensual hegemony. Belle
Glade represents an internal colonial periphery, a non-metro community left behind to struggle in the residue of modernity.
Tom, a veteran Black band director and teacher who worked in
Pahokee and Belle Glade for thirty years put it this way:
All of the Southern schools converge into that mindset and that syndrome of why black schools don't measure educationally. And it's a mindset. It has
96 just been strategically - I almost want to say scientifically, but psychologically dealt with as a mindset. Even to this day in the sense of minorities, if you look at FCAT scores, the low schools are minority schools. Now, Belle Glade is the worst of the worst because Belle Glade has been the stepchild of Palm Beach County. Everything they didn't want over here (the east part of the county), they sent it over there (the rural western communities). Even the white students got the hand me-downs from the white schools over here. So Belle Glade has always been the doormat to the county as far as turning their nose up at the farmers like that. And us, not being the farmers, we were the farm workers, so we were even less. If they treated the boss that way, now the servants and the workers were going to get treated even worse.
The major difference between the experience of the White farmers and the black farm labor population, however, deals with the disproportionate allocation of social capital along racial lines. The white Southern landowners of Lake
Okeechobee's south coast had the means by which to improve the substandard educational experience of their children as a result of their non-metro classification in the Palm Beach
County area. When Brown v. Board was passed and the end of segregation seemed inevitable, the centers of white leadership in Belle Glade, notably the white Baptist church, began an alternative private school designed for their children, very similar to those of Prince Edward County, Virginia in 1959.
Glades Christian Day started as a correspondence school through the Baptist church in Belle Glade in the late 1960s. Julie, a
97 former White Belle Glade resident and school district employee, commented that its congregation included all the "movers and shakers of Belle Glade ... all the politically minded people." Tom elaborated:
That was a Baptist school, but almost everything in Belle Glade was agri-industry. It was the agriculture center almost for the state for many, many years, so it was backed by the farmers. That's why they snatched their kids out of the public school and sent them to the private school. At that point in time, the state government couldn't really put the money into the school, the tuition and all, so these were the kids who could afford it.
A similar situation occurred in Pahokee. In 1965, Glades
Day, a private agri-industry backed school opened its doors for the white students whose parents foresaw the inevitable attempt at integration. Major farmers of the area such as A. Duda and
Son, Inc. backed the school financially. In 1981, the school moved from Pahokee to Belle Glade. By the mid-1990s the two schools merged keeping the name of Glades Day. The opening of both of these schools significantly impacted these lake communities. As Julie commented:
"I think it sort of put up that wall. Both of them, not only Cristian Day, but Glades Day also. They just created that vehicle by which to segregate the masses again. We stayed on our side of town, and they stayed on theirs. It was a long time before the housing began to intermingle."
98 Tom concurs: "There were none of us initially in those schools, no Blacks in either of those schools. The schools were opened to remain segregated."
As Pamela Barnhouse Walters of Indiana University points out, this practice is not unique to the Glades. It has been a common historical practice throughout the South after the desegregation movement initiated by the Brown decision (2001,
43). When wealthy powerful whites could no longer maintain control of their educational interests by controlling state and local governments, new means were sought. Their private resources would be pooled and used to found and patronize private, usually Christian, segregated academies. Many of these schools were connected to a local church. Once the public sector was out of reach, the private sector became the only viable option in the maintenance of structural racism
(Walters 2001, 43).
Prior to the forced attempt at integration in 1970, Belle
Glade was a model of the separate and unequal practices associated with Plessy, the "apex" of Jim Crow in South Florida as Tom, the retired band teacher put it. This is a result of the centralized geographic position of Belle Glade in the rural agri-industrial area in South Florida prior to the urbanization of Dade, Broward and Palm Beach that started in the 1970s and is still occurring today. He elaborated during a session at
99 his home, on how Belle Glade's locale positioned it as a center for black education:
You see, when you started talking about schools in Belle Glade - high schools - once upon a time the only high school for blacks was in Belle Glade. In fact, the only high school, so we can't just say Belle Glade anymore because when we talk about the Everglades Vocational High School, which was a black school up until 1955 when Lake Shore opened, that school was serving kids from the Martin County line to the Glades County line. They were coming from Moorehaven and Clewiston and all around. That's where the Black kids were coming from. They were coming from the Martin County line, Pahokee, Bryant,
and that area. All of those kids were coming to school in Belle Glade.
In regards to education, and indeed many other institutions of the state, it is imperative to understand the political position of Belle Glade as the center of a periphery. This community was, and is, at once controlled and controlling.
Looking at it within a larger context, county, state, and national politics; economic and racial dynamics; and demographics play out in this township. Interwoven within these movements, is the class stratification that defines all late capitalist societies. Education is a primary mechanism in the maintenance of this stratification. Neither the Hampton model nor the Dubois model is immune to the constraints of class. Public schooling has not proven to be the vehicle of upward mobility for the masses of people of color who, in one form or another throughout the United States' history, have
100 been the primary source of menial labor. As Cornel West points out: "The majority of public schools become both a source and a mirror of social apartheid in America" (1999, 321). Claire, the local community activist put it this way:
... school systems generally and education just never was intended for people who were not of privilege. I think in some parts there is discussion and debate about what DuBois meant about the talented ten, which kind of sets up the same structure in a lot of peoples minds that you are only going to have these few people that will go anywhere. So in some instances, the crux of education and the philosophy of education at its foundation and roots and early development when it was expanding has always been exclusionary for people who were not thought to be the right people or necessary to learn anything except to read a recipe so that they can cook and know what the crossbones were so that they wouldn't poison themselves or others.
The exclusionary practice of segregation and how it manifested itself structurally in Belle Glade is a micro- narrative of American modernity. It is a narrative that reminds us, as Homi Bhabha points out, "that some people's modernity was somebody else's colonialism (Olson and Worsham
1999, 32) . When Lake Shore Middle/High was built, it became the black school - black faculty and students. Belle Glade
High had always been the white school - white faculty and students with powerful backing by the local Baptist church.
The separate and unequal facilities and practices are well remembered by the local residents and teachers that grew up, lived, and later worked in the area during the 1950s and 1960s.
101 Julie along with Jonathon, a former teacher in the Glades, now a district employee, highlighted the inequalities:
Jonathon: The old Belle Glade High was air Conditioned; the old Lake Shore was not.
Julie: They got the hand me down books. The Glades got the hand me down; the Black area got the hand me, hand-me downs. They were way behind.
Jonathon: Their book situation and desks and supplies and classrooms and buildings and all of that stuff were just not taken care of.
Julie: That's the way it was.
Tom collaborates Jonathon and Julie's description and adds substandard basic facilities and a classroom environment that was often not conducive to learning:
They had that hardwood floor, and they had to put creosote. You know what that's like? Oil, right ... so on the days when the oil was fresh, that's it. You couldn't sit up in the room and not get sick from smelling the fumes, and that happened every quarter. You'd come to class, and they'd put that stuff on the floor, and it smelled so bad, and the bathrooms were on the outside of the building. So if it was raining, couldn't get out of there. There were no cafeterias. All of the structural things that lend itself that we have now, we didn't have then. I've got a book that I refuse to get rid of so when I'm talking to kids and trying to motivate them, I show it to them. I bought brand new, but now I've used it so long, there's no back on it but the pages are all in it. This is the way we used to get books in the colored schools. When the colored schools would get them, they would have the name Palm Beach High or Palm Beach Elementary.
The Brown decision in Palm Beach County during the eighteen-year period between 1970 and 1988 did improve some of
102 the conditions experienced by blacks within the school district, but its primary purpose was never fully achieved.
The tragedies and inequities of the Plessy era are well documented. Unfortunately, in reference to the minimal improvements brought about by the Brown decision, it is viewed today by mainstream white America as nothing more than a primitive practice of an unenlightened era. A veteran white male teacher who is employed at the same middle school where I now work, Polo Park Middle School in Wellington, expressed to me how the black community no longer has the excuses of the past. To the extent that the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s succeeded in diminishing the full force of racial discrimination, he is not completely incorrect. The political and legal strides made by people of color in and outside government cannot be discounted (West 1999) .
Facilities and access to up-to-date information have improved throughout the South and in Belle Glade. Tom:
For many, many, many years as a matter of fact I would say until 1995, the worst schools in Palm Beach County facility wise were in the Glades. In 1995, we opened up the new Glades Central which finally became an adequate school, and as a matter of fact I want to think a whole lot of it was a mistake. It's a pretty nice campus ...
In the mid-nineties the old Belle Glade Elementary was replaced with a new building. Pioneer Park Elementary, a brand new school was built on the same campus as the new Glade
103 Central High School, which replaced the old Glade Central.
This particular elementary school, where I was employed as a music teacher from 1995-1998, relieved the vastly overcrowded
Glade View elementary. Glade View was built in 1965 and though it had received a media center addition in the past, was still a mouse and roach infested site during my year there from 1994-
95. The old Lake Shore Middle School has also just been recently replaced with a new school site. So, under the vestiges of a unified curriculum, standard texts, and the recent push by the School District of Palm Beach County to maintain and build functional, if not aesthetically pleasing school facilities, black students in the Glades are no longer deficient in those regards. Indeed, as Tom elaborates: "Today, the worst facility in Belle Glade for education is Glades Day."
This is a salient point. With such complete facilities and the racial divide fused, one would assume that the white population, agri-industry and farm-owners, would enroll their children in the public schools. But this has not been the case. Tom:
... that just shows you how adamant White folks are about segregation even to this day because Glades Day has no real reason to exist right now but to maintain segregation because it's not a good school. The facility sucks. Everything sucks except the football field. If you'd look at it, why would you send your kids? Some parents have taken the kids out of Glades Day and brought them over to Wellington. So a lot of Belle Glade kids are at
104 Wellington High School or somewhere over here, but a lot of people have moved out of Belle Glade.
Those that have stayed behind because of necessity or choice, predominantly people of color, are being left behind - regardless of the improvements made to educational facilities, consumables, and technology as a result of Brown, deep structural change has not occurred.
The question of Brown haunts any study that attempts to deconstruct American democracy and its inherent hypocrisy. On its 50th anniversary, it is a symbolic testament of the struggle put forth by a marginalized people. But its benefits are no longer apparent to black communities across the country, and to the people of this community. The question in the field always arose, is education better today in Belle Glade as a result of the Brown decision? It is a question that produced surprising responses of great consensus among white and black citizens of the community. A prominent white university scientist, a long- time resident of the community, and a man who raised both of his sons during the zenith of desegregation, admits to its shortcomings:
Desegregation - the process by which it was carried out ... i t was carried out by edict. I think as a policy, it wasn't very effective because it generated the day schools. It wasn't effective as far as I'm concerned.
105 A very active black church leader who came of age in Belle
Glade gave a similar response. He was completely educated in the segregated public school system of the 1960s. He not only felt that integration was handled poorly, he described the results as being worse for the education of the black man:
Actually, it was better when it was segregated. I hate to say this. It was much better. First of all, we had teachers that lived in the community. We had teachers who you didn't have to worry about ... if a teacher was hard on you or pressed you, you knew it was because they wanted you to succeed. It wasn't about a paycheck. They also found ... we found that if you did something wrong in school, by the time you got home, your parents knew. So you were on your best behavior a lot. And then, too, they were real role models, too - real role models for us, the principal in particular. We didn't understand it then, but looking back in hindsight, it's like amazing what we were able to accomplish in a second handed system like that. I mean, used textbooks, used lab equipment, and all of that stuff. I mean, quite a few of us came out of that school and went on to college to have a successful life.
A former Glade Central High School teacher and local historian who I will name Aida agreed:
Education used to be good here when schools were segregated, and I think it's because every community had a vested interest in the development of their kids. So teachers in Black schools with insufficient budgets, secondhand materials, but knowing that their future depended on knowing that these children, being educated to the point that they could take care of themselves realizing that there are obstacles as Black children, they just taught them. There were teachers who taught in school, lived in the community, taught Sunday school. You saw them. The people who came in the community to teach, came here to live. So they had a vested interest in the community, as well as the school, as
106 well as the people. They taught that. In the 50s and the 40s and the 60s, we had kids who left, young people who left this community and became doctors and historians and ... in fact, who have come back to this community briefly and then gone on to do other feats in other parts of the county. So the schools were doing a much better job as segregated schools in my opinion than they are doing now.
Even Claire, who believes the initial wave of integration opened up opportunities for many individuals, agrees that the long-term ramifications of Brown on a rural community like
Belle Glade have been minimal:
I believe that because of that first wave of trying to comply with Brown v. Board, a lot of people were given the opportunity to go to school that would not have had otherwise. You had Pell Grants, you had different things that came into play that made it possible for people to go to school that maybe otherwise wouldn't have. But when they'd go back, there was still a ceiling. The only thing they could do basically was teach - education. You know the opportunities or whatever it was, whether it was preparational, to be things other than educators weren't as vast as they are now, not even in the 80's. The pickings are slim out there to get a foothold and a start. A lot of things have changed for individuals but not for the community. If you take a snapshot of Belle now and Belle Glade 15 years ago, I think you would see a regression, not progress. Minimally, you would see a maintaining of what existed 15 years ago. But just the visual landscape, when it comes to the masses of the majority of the people, I don't think very much has changed. Economically, socially- we're having more political change and maybe that'll lead to other things, but except for the political dynamics that have occurred within the last couple of years, everything would be the same. There wouldn't be any marked improvement or advancement I think you could say as a whole or as a collective. There are places that we've gone to that have changed. I don't see that here.
107 If one argues that those at the bottom of the social class ladder achieve upward mobility by becoming exposed to the life experiences, culture and values of those at the top of the ladder, then Brown was never relevant to the black and brown people of Belle Glade. Claire's view of the Glades resonates with Peter Gilbert's 2005 film All Deliberate Speed, which documents the current disparities and inequalities experienced by black students today in the community of Summerton, South
Carolina, an epicenter of one of the five primary cases of the
Brown decision -Briggs vs. Elliot.
The Plight Unchanged
Americans, as Michael Eric Dyson points out, "have rarely been able to sustain debate about pressing social problems over long periods of time" (Olsen and Worsham 1999) . As a society, the United States is incapable of seeing structural components that connect complex social issues. Much needed multi disciplined organizations and broad coalitions with extended histories could be sustained if a deep and continuous public analysis and debate could be sustained. Unfortunately, problems like race and poverty are not always in vogue. Dyson refers to this as the "Calvin Klein" character of social debate
- a designer social consciousness (Olsen and Worsham 1999). As
108 a result, in the United States today, issues of race and equality are not a priority of social legislation. To many
Americans, such issues were resolved in the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1960s. For mainstream white America and an elite black America, it is time to move on. Any remnants of discriminatory practices must be swept aside in the wake of new global dilemmas. At this point in our nations history, a new international threat, at times real, at times perceived, has been identified, calling for the unification of all factions of the country. This social solidarity, formed to combat the targeted international enemy, must set aside the countries internal strife. Children and education, especially black and brown children and their education, becomes a forgotten issue in the much more pressing crisis of hegemony. To disintegrating communities like Belle Glade, the imminent crisis lies within, not beyond our borders. It is a social crisis and an economic crisis of 'staggering proportions.
The American public school system, and by extension the
Palm Beach County School District, have failed to save children of color from the socially constructed limitations of class and race. In Belle Glade, as in all parts of this country, bourgeois business owners and professionals maneuver around such failures by leaving the communities and moving to gated communities, maintaining better than average public schools
109 with social capital, or having their children attend private schools. Government answers to date, weak and not well thought out policies such as affirmative action that attempt to address discriminatory race practices by allowing for a form of educational and economic access, at best only benefit the few elites within the black community (professionals and business class); and at worst encourages resentment among White citizens further exacerbating the racial divide (West 1999, 322-23)
While the Brown decision, then, eventually ended the
Plessy era of unequal facilities in Belle Glade, it did not end the era of minimum schooling for most children of color; and it did not end the era of social exclusion. The Brown decision failed to demolish structural racism in Belle Glade. Moreover, initial attempts at integration spawned new forms of racial and economic divides with Glades Day and Christian Day - private, all white, religious schools. Today, the racial divide has become geographically wider and the promise of true educational equality misleading. The black citizens of Belle Glade may reasonably ask for whom and to what extent have things changed?
Jessica, a school board employee and Pahokee resident answers without hesitation:
Nothing has changed - a bunch of crap. And the way I see it, we're regressing. It's total regression. After raising two sons of my own, I have a stepson, and other boys that have come into my life, you
110 know, and I talk to them all the time because ... I don't know why the fear, but there lS so much fear of an intelligent young black man.
Communities across the nation like Belle Glade and Pahokee are being left behind, left to struggle with the residue of modernity's internal colonialism: social inequality, economic inequality, and third-rate citizenship status. To the Florida
Department of Education and the federal government, the primary answer to the limited achievement experienced by the students dwelling in these communities is standardized testing. But, as has been shown, the assessment mentality and the pedagogical techniques that accompany it have had little impact on the levels of literacy achieved by the students of these at-risk schools. The manipulation of the test scores has made them nothing more than political fodder used to enhance the perception of the electorate, what a Palm Beach Post editorial referred to as "election-year grading" (Opinion 2004). The promise of higher achievement and higher standards through standardized testing has done little for the black students of
Belle Glade who continue to struggle; and limited education within a capitalist society is the key to the production of social stratification. In her paper delivered at the 46th
Session of the International Conference on Education, S. Tawil quoting Majumdar makes it clear:
111 Exclusion from minimum schooling leads to a lifetime of exclusion from other basic entitlements, from employment, from social acceptance and dignity and above all from the right of citizenship (2001).
112 Chapter 3
Condemning the Other: Culture of Poverty, the Moynihan Report, and the Ideology of Family Values
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.
James Baldwin
In President Bush's education reform plan, No Child Left
Behind, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 (20
U.S.C. 6301 et seq.) is amended. The original version designed by Education Commissioner Francis Keppel was passed on April 9,
1965 and read as follows:
In recognition of the special educational needs of low-income families and the impact that concentrations of low-income families have on the ability of local educational agencies to support adequate educational programs, the Congress hereby declares it to be the policy of the United States to provide financial assistance ... to local educational agencies serving areas with programs by various means (including preschool programs) which contribute to meeting the special educational needs of educationally deprived
113 children" (Section 201, Elementary and Secondary Act, 1965) .
The opening statement of purpose now reads:
The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments (U.S. Department of Education 2002).
It proposes that by unifying and standardizing the curriculum, training and preparing teachers, and implementing standardized academic assessments, Title 1 will succeed. The achievement gaps that exist between minority and "nonminority" students will begin to diminish and by "meeting the needs" of high- poverty schools, education will balance the inequalities inherent in the United Statesian experiment. Yet, this has not proven to be the case for the children of Belle Glade, or the majority of poor children of color across the American South.
It was not the case in the Plessy era, or the Brown era, and it is not the case in the plutocratic era of today. As Margaret
Sutton points out in "Culture, Modernization and Formal
Education," educators have finally noticed, "the institution of schooling does not appear to be leveling the playing field between the haves and the have-nots" (qtd. in Levinson 2000,
81) .
As was demonstrated in the previous chapter, Jeb Bush's A-
Plus Plan for Florida schools bears a striking resemblance to
114 his brother's No Child Left Behind initiative. But not one
Belle Glade school, including the bi-lingual magnet, Gove
Elementary, has even achieved NCLB standards. But what do these standards really mean? Educational experts across the political spectrum can be seen, read, and heard on CSPAN and other media, supporting the merits and design of NCLB, but those people in and of the Belle Glade community - teachers, parents, and community leaders, have a contrasting perspective.
To them, NCLB is yet another hypocritical attempt to present public education as the most powerful agent in providing equal opportunity for its citizens. The proponents of the educational reform act argue that through unified curricula and assessments, NCLB attempts to provide an identical educational experience for all students regardless of race, ethnicity, wealth, or disability, therefore insuring equal opportunity - a tenet of American democratic theory. According to this theory, as Graham argues, "economic and social inequalities are acceptable because every man has an equal opportunity to receive the rewards of superior achievement" (1963, 68-80)
What this study proposes is that in a capitalist democracy like the United States, economic and social inequality guarantees unequal opportunity. An interview with Bob, a white male teacher I worked with at Glade View Elementary and a veteran of
Glades education, illustrates the point. He had seen and
115 experienced poverty before in the inner cities of New York,
Baltimore, and Philadelphia, but not to the extent of Belle
Glade. And though his optimism of market forces is naive, it illustrates the important role socio-economics play in the
American consciousness.
Ghetto and inner city was a lot different than migrant labor camps I visited in Belle Glade - the shacks, the hard packed dirt floors. I came to appreciate real quick what the kids brought to school. The schools are not going to be the major change agents in the Glades. Take the old road - develop each side of the old road into some kind of commercial enterprise and get some jobs for these people. They still want to live there. They have their families and the churches ... I don't think the schools are so much failing out in Belle Glade in terms of staff and what they are attempting to do. But there is so much more that has to be done to make the people's lives more livable. So they can sit in a classroom and not be frozen in fear. These kids have fears. I am not talking about EH (emotionally handicapped) kids. Everyone of those little kids have fears. When I went in and I looked around - I looked at what was on the stove, what was on the shelves. And when I looked at what was on the stove man, it was beans and beans, not a hell of a lot of anything else.
The extreme levels of poverty in Belle Glade and Pahokee have been well documented over the last forty-five years, from
Harvest of Shame to the present study. Indeed, poverty and race are inseparable issues in dialogues of state, economy, and society in America. But it is in our present era, from 1945 to the present - what Cornel West refers to as the American Era - that poverty is defined as culture and rhetorically spun as an oppressive force against its own victims. From its first
116 appearance in Oscar Lewis' 1959 book Five Families: Mexican
Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, to Senator Patrick
Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, to
Ronald Reagan's family values ideology, the assumption that poverty culture "explains the low level of school achievement among children of the poor, and especially the black poor" has become widespread (Leacock in Rubinstein ed. 1970, 192). As educational policies like the federal government's No Child
Left Behind, Florida's A-Plus Plan, FCAT, and Palm Beach
Counties AAA Plan fail at bringing about deep structural change, culture of poverty theory offers, as Leacock put it: "a neat explanation for the school's failure to educate the children of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and it is far more polite than straight racist theories of inherited inferiority" (Leacock in Rubinstein ed. 1970, 192).
What Oscar Lewis formulated in his original 1959 study and the subsequent "Culture of Poverty" essay first published in La
Vida, is a theory that explains poverty as a culture, or more specifically, as a subculture. Theorized in this form, poverty has its own structure and rationale - "a way of life which is passed down from generation to generation along family lines"
(Lewis 1970, 69). Poverty perpetuates itself. According to
Lewis, the culture of poverty within the nation state must be viewed in respect to what is missing - economic means and
117 organization - and what is gained, for if not for some form of reward, the poor could not survive. It is therefore "an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalist society" (Lewis 1970, 69). The culture of poverty becomes a way of dealing with the hopelessness and despair that haunts the daily lives of those who come to the realization that the
American dream, the goal and aspiration of mainstream society, is highly improbable. These local solutions to problems that are not being addressed by institutions, either because the poor cannot afford the solutions or because they are simply ignorant or suspicious of the institutions, are passed on to children creating a cycle of poverty. Lewis contends that by age seven, at-risk children "have absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime"
(1970, 69).
Sociologists, under the umbrella of this lower-class culture theory, accumulated vast quantities of data proving the assumed differences between the poor and the middle class in
America - values, sexual behavior, child rearing practices, and life goals or aspirations. The present study proposes that indeed these differences do exist, but contends that culture of
118 poverty theory enters the dubious distinction of ideology when it proposes that these presumed lifestyle differences are the actual cause of continued poverty. Moreover, as Ryan argues in his classic work, Blaming the Victim, there is the question of whether or not the differences are significant enough to label them cultural or even sub-cultural (Ryan 1976).
Though critically viewed by many sociologists and anthropologists, the idea of a culture of poverty became well established in all halls of government and state institutions in the mid-60s aided by experts, pundits and academics. Ryan offers the government generated pamphlet Growing Up Poor by
Catherine Chilman as a primary example of the "adulterated, but reasonably accurate distillate of the culture of poverty ideology... the idea that poverty is a resultant of the characteristics of the poor themselves" (1976, 120-22) But the most controversial of these government generated, sociologically backed emetic documents was a confidential report first brought to the public's attention at a Howard
University speech given by President Lyndon Johnson on June 4,
1965 (Rainwater and Yancy 1967).
Resonating with the blame-the-victim theory generated by the writings of Lewis and Chilman was Daniel Patrick Moynihan's
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action that was completed in March of 1965. The Office of Policy Planning and
119 Research of the Department of Labor generated the controversial report, prepared by Moynihan and two members of his staff -
Paul Barton and Ellen Broderick (Rainwater and Yancy 1967).
The main premise of the Moynihan report parallels the main thesis of the Lewis studies - the family is the primary source of weakness within the Negro community. The report argued: "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family" (U.S. Department of
Labor, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy 2004). The report would become a powerful ideological tool for both sides of the American political spectrum.
The Moynihan report may well have been the first government document that offered a glimpse at the family values ideology that would become so prevalent in the neo-conservative decades of the 1980s, 90s, and today. In Chapter II, titled the "Negro Family," Moynihan wrote:
The role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked. The family is the basic social unity in American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.
Moynihan proclaimed the production by Americans of a recognizable family unit, although small ethnic differences in the production were acknowledged. The greatest discontinuity, he explained, exists between the white, mainstream family culture and that of the African American. White families,
120 according to the report, are stable and can maintain stability, but the "family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable ... " (U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Assistant
Secretary for Policy 2004). The Moynihan report went so far as to label this deterioration of black families within black communities a "social pathology."
Using psychoanalytic theory, the Moynihan report asserts that a black child learns to view life through a certain lens that will be used throughout her life to view experiences that will shape her conduct. Children of stable middle-class black families, unlike poor African Americans, are part of a community that is growing stronger and more successful because they are "in tune" with American society in general. But the children of the lower class, disadvantaged, disorganized black community live in family units where marriages are dissolving, a high percentage of births are illegitimate, and females head the family. This "tangle of pathology," as the report referred to it, was brought on by three centuries of mistreatment - slavery, reconstruction, urbanization, poverty, and unemployment. Poor blacks are therefore a disturbed group
(U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy 2004).
In regards to education, the Moynihan report alluded to the consistently low mental test scores of children as a
121 symptom of the social pathology associated with matriarchal broken homes. Using the Deutch and Brown study, it found that children from homes with fathers had higher IQ scores than children from homes without fathers. Furthermore, the report stated that boys from broken homes do not do as well in school
- that the posting of lower grades is more common among children with only one parent at home. This, the study asserts, has led to truancy and juvenile delinquency and adult crimes among the black community. In essence, the Moynihan report stated that these "deep seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American ... is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world" (U.S.
Department of Labor, Office of the Assistant for the Secretary
2004). This is a very similar assertion to the Lewis declaration that the strong sense of resignation and fatalism of people within the culture of poverty explains the low level of student achievement among the children of the poor.
It is apparent that middle class ideology on poverty and race is deeply entrenched within the consciousness of American society. The Oscar Lewis explanation of a culture of poverty and the strict definition of an accepted family unit that explains the supposed psychological dilemma within black communities proposed by the Moynihan report are prevalent ideas that can be heard within the Belle Glade community itself.
122 Often, these voices are confused and are contradicted by their own rhetoric. Consider the following answer by a prominent white scientist and long time resident of Belle Glade:
Do I feel it's a problem with families or a culture of poverty? No, I don't think it's a culture of poverty necessarily except that poverty begets poverty. The lower strata of the society places value on education, yes, but not as much ... this kind of thing here, I don't believe, I'd be surprised if we got much parental involvement or parental direction in the black community, maybe more in the Hispanic. Another thing about the black community is that there are fewer families in the traditional sense. Hispanic families are more traditional. Family units in the white community are different than in the black community, and that's not disparaging anybody; it's a fact of life, and I know it's a fact of life. My sister is a retired social worker in New York. She worked mostly in New York City. She went to places I wouldn't dare to go. Yeah, I know. No family there. The mother is the family. The mother is the family and there is a lot of that here. You can't live in a community like this without seeing it, without knowing it. I think that is a salient reason why ... well, you know, the other thing is discipline. Where does discipline start? It starts in the family.
This message resonates throughout every public and private institution of American society. Former Education Commissioner and Lt. Governor of Florida, Frank Brogan, in an ideological proclamation reminiscent of the Reagan era's family values ideology, once remarked at a state meeting: "There are families so dysfunctional it's a blessing those kids can get to school"
(Flannery 2002, lA) . He was backed by obtuse educational consultants such as Robert Evans, a psychologist from Boston, who announced that the crisis is not in education, but in
123 families. The problem, said Evans, are not the schools. The schools are victims of problems that start in the home
(Flannery 2002, 1A) .
These ideological statements are a product of the current conservative wave that has its origins in the post World War II era. Perhaps in the totality of the American century, the most recognizable public proponent of family values ideology and its link to education and poverty has been the former actor made president, Ronald Reagan. In his infamous 1988 State of the
Union Address, Reagan declared that the best way for the federal government to improve the deplorable state of education in the United States "is to reaffirm that control of our schools belongs to the States, local communities and, most of all, to the parents and teachers" (Presidential Address: State of the Union 1988). Reagan argued in this speech that lack of funding is not the root of a poor educational system. Money, he espoused, cannot take the place of basic, traditional values like discipline and hard work. From a short, two paragraph segment on education, he segued neatly into issues of poverty and welfare reform declaring that Johnson's war on poverty was lost as a result of welfare programs that made "poverty harder to escape." Yet, the following extract of the speech could have easily been ripped from the pages of democratic Senator
Moynihan's 1965 report:
124 With the best of intentions, Government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty - the family. Dependency has become the one enduring heirloom, passed from one generation to the next, of too many fragmented families (Presidential Address: State of the Union 1988).
This is purely an ideological statement. It is true that
Western sociologists have historically defined the basic socio- economic unit as consisting of a husband, wife, and child.
That particular social construct has for many centuries been regarded in Western cultures as the "universal family grouping that provided sexual, reproductive, economic, and educational functions" (Stack 1974, 30-31). But it is imperative to understand that ideology, in the case of family values, does not function in binary opposition to truth. Timeless truths are historically specific "arising in response to the conditions of a particular time and place" (Berlin 1992, 23).
It is never a choice between ideology and truth, but different ideologies. What is not being considered by culture of poverty theory, the Moynihan report, and the ideology of family values that weaves through both, is a non-traditional view of low- socio economic black communities, whether rural or urban - a redefinition of the traditional definition of the core family unit.
125 William Ryan, in his famous essay "Savage Discovery - The
Moynihan Report," points to the difficulty at arriving at one defining structure for the institution of family. "It's structure and function vary in subtle ways, over time, and from one culture to another" (Staples 1971, 62). His critic of the
Moynihan report is valid in that it correctly alludes to its unscientific and half hazard approach, connecting unclear concepts such as "family stability" with inaccurate census data numbers dealing with family composition. The Moynhian Report, following the new ideology established by Lewis' work, condemns the black man's position because of his pathology- "his values, the way he lives, the kind of family life he leads"
(Ryan in Staples 1971, 63). The study considers no in depth analysis of what is really happening within the families of poor black communities and therefore maintains an established structural paradigm.
At question is the view of a socioeconomic condition as cultural or subcultural. The behavior of the poor, their values and attitudes, must be viewed as "adaptations to conditions which are indigenous to our American culture"
(Weinberg 1971, 27). The organizing structure of the American economy creates disparities between the economic positions of individuals. Similarly, racial differences result in conditions connected to the United States' history of race
126 relations (Weinberg 1971, 2 7) . The black poor of Belle Glade and across the American South adapt according to alternatives and possibilities available to them. Since traditional avenues of acquiring middle-class cultural roles and goals are not readily accessible, deviant adaptation, delinquent modes, or non-traditional modes of achievement are practiced (Weinberg
1971, 40-44). For many poor black families, it is simply a matter of survival.
Carol Stack's classic work of cultural anthropology, All
Our Kin, offers a paradigmatic shift in the Kuhnian sense to the Lewis/Moynihan definition of family and culture. She realized early on in her study that the traditional definition of family depicted by mainstream white culture was not adequate for analyzing her particular field - a network of families within a poor, urban black enclave. Her ultimate definition of family became "the smallest, organized, durable network of kin and non-kin who interact daily, providing domestic needs of children and assuring their survival" (Stack 1974, 31) The accepted definition by middle-class culture of family, nuclear family, or the matrifocal family hindered any clear understanding of how the people in the community described, defined, and organized their world (Stack 1974, 30-31).
What Stack discovered was a complex system of exchange, co-residence, and malleable household boundaries between kin
127 and non-kin that spanned three generations. The social structure of these urban black families showed an efficient and durable response to the conditions of poverty. The idea that poor black families are defined by fatherless, unstable, and disorganized structures is nothing more than a generalized depiction. As Stack found, it is possible to find cooperative domestic exchange networks that are organized and resilient.
In her Flats community of Jackson Harbor, Stacks found a cooperative, communal lifestyle that was multi-valued (1974,
124-29).
What she also observed was the inevitable influence of mainstream culture on the Flats community. They are poor and black, but they are also "locked into an intimate, ongoing bond with white culture and white values. The intense influence of social service agencies, mass communication, television, advertising, and of course, the institutions of schooling all push traditional white mainstream values. Within the current stage of American capitalism, poor blacks desire the same commodities that white middle-Americans desire - a single- family home, a nice car, and good schools. Poor African
Americans are therefore bicultural. They hold on to both black culture and mainstream white culture, which are not, as often believed, mutually exclusive (Stack 1974, 124-29).
128 The structural coping mechanisms of poverty, which have been mistakenly defined as a "culture," do not "lock people into a cycle of poverty" (Stack 1974, 22-27, 125). Failing mainstream values and difficult conditions produced by poverty require that the poor return to proven methods of survival. It is not a cycle of poverty that they are trapped in, but a socio-economic condition that is being maintained by a late capitalist, free market economy.
Let us consider the poverty experienced by poor blacks in the rural Belle Glade community, the coping mechanisms they must implement in order to survive, and the impact low-socio- economic conditions have on the education of its poor black children. Julie, the white school district worker and former resident of the Glades offered a valuable description:
The problem with the Glades blacks, they're street blacks. They come from families that work sun up to sundown, literally. They get on the buses to go to the fields at 5:00 in the morning, and they don't get back until dark, which at this time of year could be 8:00 or 9:00. They don't see their children. When I lived out there in the camp, those poor kids would get up and get themselves to school, and they're not going to see their mommies and daddies until Saturday because those poor people got up, got on that bus, worked hard in the fields ... because they have been migrant workers all of their life or field workers, so they can't even help their children. So the incentive for the kids to do better is not there. Now as we've gotten older, we're not so much into the field and migrant working stuff.
[I offered that this was a result of the mechanization of the agri-industry at which point she continued.]
129 I don't know what to tell you, but I do know that's my feeling on a lot of it. It's because these poor parents have to work their butts off just to survive, and they didn't have time to do homework like our parents did. "What have you got tonight? Let me see what you have. Where is the test you took today? Give it to me." That's not there for them. So from this high they don't have any incentive. Nobody's going to say to them, "Did you do it?" So why do it?
Her statement is not a condemnation of the family; it is "the logical outcome of the operation of the widely ramified and interconnecting caste system" (Rainwater in Shinn 1972, 144)
Losing the Class/Race
Issues of class and race are so intertwined in American social consciousness that few academics have offered a critical analysis of the congruencies. This study will certainly not try to do so, except to allude to the fact that they are inseparable. The idea that the United States is an open class society and therefore not class-conscious in the Marxian sense is so entrenched that any research to the contrary causes pure outrage among many individuals within differing publics. The concept of Equalitarianism, the idea that a person of humble beginnings can achieve upward mobility for himself or for his children is at the heart of the "American way of life" (Graham
1963, 39). Indeed, it is at heart of classical liberalism,
130 diametrically opposed to any form of socialism. Unfortunately, we live in a partitioned society.
The permeability of our so-called open-class system, we came to believe during the industrial era, has been maintained by the seemingly free and open access to education for all of our citizens. This belief was accepted and considered true by people of color, as has been shown throughout their struggle for civil rights, a struggle that has been all but synonymous with equal schooling. Whites and blacks have viewed education throughout the tumultuous 20th Century as the best means by which one can rise in status. It is, therefore, a cause for great cognitive dissonance among those who now hold this to be a part of their core belief system to hear that those in the lower classes do not "find equality of opportunity in American schools" (Graham 1963, 55-57). It is not an unsubstantiated argument. As Samuel Bowles wrote: "unequal education has its roots in the very class structure which it serves to legitimize and reproduce" (Carnoy 1975, 39).
There is little argument against the description of public schools in the United States as middle-class institutions.
Considering that middle-class values are the primary values in society, that the lower classes expect upward mobility, and that most educators and school administrators are middle-class regardless of their origins, it is not surprising that the
131 value-system of the school culture in the United States is that of the middle-class. For a lower-class child, the reality of the situation is one of disadvantage - add issues of race to the mix, and the experience is intensified. The American school culture maintains patterns of behavior and values that may conflict with what a low socio-economic child has learned in their habitus - "the attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of those inhabiting one's social world" (Macleod 1995, 14-15)
The lower-class child is, therefore, handicapped by his economic hardships and lack of cultural capital (Graham 1963,
327-28). It has been historically shown, for example, that the
IQ of lower-class children cannot be accurately measured by mental ability tests because they are culturally skewed toward middle-class students (Graham 1963). "Success or failure in school is determined largely by social class" but masked by meritocracy (Macleod 1995, 16).
It is not, as Lewis, Moynihan, or Reagan believed, a question of poverty as culture or family values. The cycle of poverty is not maintained by familial or communal structures, but by much broader institutionalized socio-economic structures of which schools are a part. Pierre Bourdieu's "Cultural
Reproduction and Social Reproduction", proposes that there is no better answer to the question of the historical distribution of privilege and power within the social class structure than
132 the institutions of education (Bourdieu in Karabel and Halsey
1977, 487-507).
Jay Macleod's classic work, Ain't No Makin It, uses
Bourdieu's theory to explain the generational continuance of lower-class status by two groups of urban boys he followed over a period of eight years. Macleod's interpretation of Bourdieu reads that schools perpetuate the cultural capital of the dominant group by adopting certain class interests and ideologies that devalue the lower classes. The subordinate group, usually of color, positioned, as they are within their school habitus, able to view the attitudes and experiences of teachers and administrators, lose interest in school and accept their lower position (Macleod 1995, 15). This process, which has been viewed as the essence of Bourdieu's reproduction theory, considers the "linguistic and cultural competence" that was inherited by middle-class family experiences as being essential for success in school. This theory must be viewed in context to our present American educational environment, where the final proof that learning has taken place is measured by how well students perform on standardized tests such as FCAT that are written with the linguistic and cultural sphere of the dominant group in mind - a very specific interpretive community. Maggie's experiences as a teacher in Belle Glade
133 Elementary is a testament to the realities of Reproduction
Theory:
I think the problem is it goes back to the oppression and the depression. I worked in kindergarten for two years prior to becoming a sixth-grade teacher. In 1978 ... ' 79, there was this unwritten mandate that said if you want your minority students to do better, then you've got to show them the modeling that's needed. The only way they can get good modeling is to have white kindergarten teachers. I was pulled out of kindergarten back to third and fourth grade math, science and reading so that a white teacher could come into the spot that I was in and teach kindergarten. Four years ago, when I was in kindergarten, this lady says, "I just don't understand what's wrong with you guys. I asked you to sit down. Don't you know normal people sit down and do what grown up people ask them to do?" And the kindergartner stood up in his chair and said, "I just don't understand you people. Don't you know you are supposed to sit down?" And she looked at him and buzzed the office, "You absolutely have got to get this child out of my class if I'm going to teach today." There was only one teacher at Belle Glade Elementary in kindergarten who commanded the respect of the students because she went in there showing that she loved them and that she was not there to show them the right way they were supposed to live. And because of her remarks and her disagreements, she had to leave, and then she was filled with another person who said, "I am here to teach you to not talk like that," and the children just absolutely rejected and revolted against it. At Belle Glade Elementary, there is a first grade teacher who selects one African-American boy a year to retain. She starts with the third week in August, pulling him outside of her door, standing with her arms like this [crosses arms in front], and she's almost six feet tall, while she looks down at the gentleman, as she calls him... the "gentleman," in such a way to tell him his behavior is unacceptable and that if he doesn't get in line, she's going to call his parents. That's the only kind of attention he gets from her. So she pulls him outside of class about twice a day, and by the end of the year he is
134 retained, one a year from this first grade teacher.
What Maggie argues is what Macleod, using Bourdieu, argues, by the structure of schooling placing emphasis and importance on the cultural capital of the dominant middle class, the belief is promoted that lower-class students are not likely to succeed academically. The aspirations of a poor student or a wealthy student are acquired in the habitus of the individual a child growing up in an environment where economic and social success is not the norm is less likely to become overly ambitious or, the middle-class child whose social reality is filled with professional success stories is more likely to aspire for similar position. The habitus of individuals promotes behavior and attitudes that allow objective social structures to reproduce. The institutions of educational and economic opportunity are not structured to improve the chances of poor students' securing professional, white-collar employment. "Thus there is a correlation between objective probabilities and subjective aspirations, between institutional structures and cultural practices" (Macleod
1995) . As a reaction to the objective structure, the school within a late capitalist society maintained by classic liberal ideology and meritocracy, the poor student gives up thereby perpetuating the structure of class inequality.
135 Though Bourdieu was dealing with France's class stratification and the Macleod study was done in an urban field, the theory has practical applications in understanding the educational disparities of the rural lake communities of
Belle Glade and Pahokee. In an interview with Anthony, a retired black teacher that returned to Pahokee to run a charter school that is focused on training students to pass the FCAT, the question of cultural capital was discussed:
The problem is that the kids we are trying to teach don't have the exposure that the kids on that side have [alluding to the eastern Palm Beach County communities]. That's number one. They don't have the background from the establishment to compete. Now some of them will get out. Some of these kids will get out because I know we've got kids at Stanford University, some coming out Florida. I've got kids that went to Michigan State and graduated. One kid went to Ohio State; we've got kids at Ohio State. So some of them will make it. Some of them will be the cream of the crop wherever. But when you are trying to move a mass of people, and when they go home there's no newspaper, there's no books, there's always something ... that kids got a long hard road to get out.
A long hard road is indeed ahead of the black child from
Belle Glade, but it is not simply because there are no reading materials in the house, lap time from the mother, or a lack of a professional father. Cultural capital and habitus - "the attitudes, beliefs and experiences of those inhabiting one's social world" - are important arguments that must be made if one is to understand the miseducation of the black child, but
136 it is only one aspect of the much larger structural, political, and economic divide that continues to plaque the American social landscape (Macleod 1995, 15). The liberal ideology that now accepts the responsibility for the generational oppression and depression that caused the African American his inferior position within the American experiment still proclaims him as inferior, pathological. It no longer needs a substantiated theory on the inherently low "Negro IQ," although those theories still survive. Consider the infinite influence of
Herrnstein and Murray's 1971 phenomenon, The Bell Curve, a confirmation for neoliberalism that the "ills of welfare, poverty, and an underclass are less matters of justice than biology (Jacoby and Glauberman et. al. 1995, x). By allowing the past crimes of the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow, and
Plessy to be at fault for the inherent inability of the black man to get his house in order, the dominant culture cops a plea. It will not allow itself to be held responsible for the inequalities of the present as it only accepts responsibility for the past (Ryan in Staples 1971, 63). The victim is condemned and the structures are kept intact.
137 The Transmodern Disposable Family
In our late capitalist global economic system, the family has become a socially disposable unit. Political, religious, and intellectual leaders that prescribe to family values ideology, allude to the traditional family as the heart of a great success story, simultaneously condemning alternative family structures as a recipe for a tragic existence. In reality, unregulated global markets hungry for temporary low wage peripheral labor that can maintain massive core consumption has made the family all but irrelevant. Indeed,
Wallerstein and Smith have purposefully made a distinction between the modern family and the modern household alluding to the fact that household members may or may not be biologically related or share the same domicile (1992). This distinction fits nicely with Stack's study of urban black kinship systems.
Wallerstien and Smith discover, as Stacks did, that households become relationships that pool income and share resources when necessary in order to survive (1992) .
Ironically, it is in so-called primitive societies, those where production is underdeveloped socially, that family importance is most visible. Unique to the modern, postmodern, and current transmodern capitalist society, is the separation
138 of family from the economy. All critical deconstructions of the capitalist economic structure and its impact on the family social unit, Marx, Polanyi, and Zaretsky, have established their argument on primitive, pre-capitalist feudal and peasant societies. In pre-capitalist societies the family was responsible for the administration and reproduction of community, shelter, care of the elderly and ill, personal property maintenance, regulation of sexuality, and most importantly, "the basic forms of material production necessary to sustain life" (Zaretsky 1986, 11) . The family in these societies was the primary form of social organization. As in peasant agriculture, labor was based on familial forms - the village, for example, was a kinship system. It is in capitalist societies that the economic role of the family is diminished. By organizing material production as wage labor, capitalism segregates the family from its forms of production
(Zaretsky 1986, 14).
The rise of unregulated, free market, global economies in the 19th century separated labor from daily life activities and their social context, allowing the laws of the market to disintegrate all "organic forms of existence" (Polanyi 2001)
These communal, familial ways of life and thought were replaced by individualistic, liberal structures. Economic functions were no longer embedded in social relations - social relations
139 were embedded in the economic system (Polanyi 2001). What
Polanyi refers to as "noncontractual organizations" like kinship, family, village, neighborhood, community, profession, and creed, had to be eliminated in market societies for they required participation and allegiance of the individual, restricting his freedom. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi cites the example of colonial regions where the colonized are forced to sell their labor, destroying all traditional institutions of family, kinship, and village. By not allowing these indigenous organizations to reform, a reliance on wages, the market, and capital are developed. This is imperative to the system, for individual existence in primitive society is rarely threatened by starvation unless the whole community is in similar peril. This was also true of pre-sixteenth century
European social organizations (Polanyi 2001, 59-70).
E.P. Thompson in The Making of the Working Class writes about the resentment felt by weavers in 18th century English mills in regards to the effect the factory system had on family relationships. Weaving, before it was taken out of the familial home, offered employment for the whole family - "young children winding bobbins, older children watching for faults, picking over the cloth, or helping to throw the shuttle in the brood loom" (Thompson 1963, 306) . The family was united. Even though the meals may have been lacking in quality, the whole
140 family could sit down at a chosen time. Patterns of community and family life evolved around loom-shops. It was a life categorized by conversation or singing (Thompson 1963, 306-7)
These structures of family economy would not survive the forces of self-regulated markets and liberal ideology perpetuated by newly founded institutions, such as those of schooling.
It is important to note, as Philippe Aries chronicles in
Centuries of Childhood, that attitudes towards children and their education changed in the 16th and 17th centuries, changing the family. The education of children prior to this period was solely and completely a process of apprenticeship, usually not within the child's household. Children learned by practice, by domestic service under the tutelage of a master who gave him the "knowledge, practical experience, and human worth he was supposed to possess" (Aries 1962, 369). The transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next was guaranteed by the child's participation in adult life. But this would end during the 16th century, as the school became the primary source for education. It was no longer an institute specific for clerics.
Instead it would become the primary mechanism of "social initiation" (Aries 1962, 369-371).
The historical view argued in this study is that the evolution of schools in the United States has not been based on the pursuit of equality for all, but rather to meet the demands
141 of unregulated market employers for a "disciplined and skilled labor force" as well as providing the social control needed for political stability (Carnoy 1975, 38). In all discussions dealing with communities like Belle Glade, lying as it does on the periphery of an historical internal colonialism, lies the link between the world's unregulated market structure, globalization and neoliberalism. It has been widely accepted by social scientists that the last fifteen years, what Alice
Jardine refers to as a transmodern period, have shown a continued diminishment in the size and scope of families. In reality, the last fifteen years have been nothing more than a continuation of the last one hundred and fifty years. In purely capitalist, open market structures, family has become a nuclear unit compared to peasant society's extended version.
Labor once defined by simple subsistence production, is now sold by adults for wages - its main source of income. The family becomes detached from economic activity, an autonomous institution separate from the means of production. The destruction and disintegration of the family, and the black family in particular, is not caused by a culture of poverty, but by the devastating impact of corporate capitalism, uncontrollable materialism, consumerism, and the political policies that support these values and are integral to the harm brought on the "vulnerable and the poor" (Dyson 2004, 415-416).
142 To many, family values depicts a singular "view of how families work, who gets to count as a legitimate domestic unit, and, consequently, what values are crucial to their livelihood"
(Dyson 2004, 415). But modernity's institutions, such as public education, have aided the movement away from non-market values. It is paradoxical that those same dominant groups that espouse family values promote the same unregulated markets that undermine the most poignant of these values (West 1999, 559)
Moreover, in this market-run-amok system where family is disposable, also lies the roots of communal poverty - the disposable workforce. Claire's lucid explanation in reference to Belle Glade's predicament as a depressed and oppressed community explains the phenomenon:
... I think our depression lies within the structures that have been overt in making sure that the potential and possibilities that we have as individuals in a community were not accomplished or serve the purposes that were deemed to be appropriate for the oppressor. I mean if you look at the community as depressed, there is no economic growth. How can you think that ... but if you just look at it, it's a dampening of the spirit. I think we most definitely are an oppressed community, and I think you can really trace that by looking at how we ... how its been maintained. I don't think we have to dig to find that. So I believe that we are an oppressed people. We are an oppressed community above and beyond all the other shuns. I just think systems have been prevented and obstructed.
Her thoughts resonate with the writings of black intellectuals who place the blame of massive attacks on the American family and their values on the political centers of the United States
143 and their slow but persistent deconstruction of the Great
Society. Constant and relentless cuts on social programs that aid the poorest families; constant redistribution of wealth upward towards the richest; and "an unprincipled political campaign to demonize poor black mothers and their children ... "
(Dyson 2004), impedes the acquisition of needed funds by the black and brown families that need it most. Public education, which at its best is an institution of delivery - promoting the supportive ideologies of these practices, is of little use to marginalized communities. As the next chapter will argue, in a global capitalist structure - with its unsatisfied hunger for lower wage-labor - American public schooling has also become a socially disposable unit. Considering the majority of public school students are now minorities, the hope that education will be the great equalizer may have to be relinquished.
144 Chapter 4
Free Markets, Heavy Cost: Globalization and the Demise of Public Education
Late capitalism is justified by calculation and statistical means. Welfare roles must be cut, trade simplified and enhanced, environmental programs eased, and social programs eliminated to remain "competitive." While the destruction of education, health programs, and other social services are lamented, these actions become rationalized as necessary evils to further our goal of success. In reality, of course, the object is the goal of increased profit.
(Max Kirsch 2000, 71)
We are not free. We live in a partitioned late capitalist society. To answer for the inherent inequalities and contradictions within our free-market state, many histories have cited education as the "great equalizer," a vessel of upward mobility and a primary rationalization of liberal ideology. This premise is based on the idea that the educational system itself is egalitarian. This has historically not been the case for the United States' system of schooling, a fact admitted and condemned by both extremes of the political spectrum. Both dominant parties in American politics spend a great deal of effort, time, and money
145 communicating the inherent importance of education in the
American experiment. Both parties take seemingly different ethical, moral, and ideological positions on the condition of public education every election cycle. And both parties fall into a struggle of semantics for rarely are they truly opposed in their views. The question of improving public schooling becomes nothing more than political fodder, for whether it is consciously known or unknown to America's decision makers, in a globalized, unregulated market economy, the question of supporting, innovating, and funding public schooling for the masses is no longer relevant. Public education has become disposable.
Mass education in American modernity, from the late 18th century to the mid-twentieth century, has been by far the most important socializing mechanism, replacing the family as the primary unit in life preparation. As the previous chapter documents, the social relations of the public school served as the perfect training ground for needed industrial factory labor. Its focus on "discipline, punctuality, acceptance of authority outside the family, and individual accountability for one's work" facilitated the adaptation to newly formed social divisions of labor (Bowles in Carnoy 1975, 42). The perceived access to the schooling system perpetuated the individualistic and meritocratic ideology that would shield those divisions of
146 labor from any critical assaults. One's class position socially and economically was therefore of one's own making.
In reality, public schooling has been a primary mechanism in the maintenance of white hegemony, the continued oppression and depression of people of color.
This critical view of education's role in what Polanyi
(2001) would call the market's "great transformation" can be found in the writing of many poignant 20th century social thinkers, from Henry A. Giroux and Pierre Bourdieu to Martin
Carnoy and Ronald Strickland. Paulo Freire, for example in the
1960s, referring to the education of the Brazilian peasantry in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, offered his "banking concept of education as an instrument of oppression" (Freire 1970) . By poor students becoming nothing more than containers that teachers deposit information into they accept their lower position and become "good students" modeling their future role as "good workers." Freire argued that the seemingly natural structural hierarchy of mass education itself projects "an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression" - negating education "and knowledge as processes of inquiry (Freire 1970) . As students accept their passive role year after year, they gradually accept their world
"as it is" and "the fragmented view of reality deposited in them" (Freire 1970). In America, mass education has served an
147 even larger purpose - the maintenance of class stratification and racial demarcation.
A History Entwined
Publicly financed education in the United States originated in the 19th century industrial centers of the North
East and spread quickly throughout the country except the predominantly agricultural South. One possible view of this publicly funded educational movement is based on a thea political theory. Katz, for example, proposes that in
Massachusetts, primary education served the industrial needs of the Protestant capitalists who required the social control of the Irish and other non-Yankee immigrants recruited to work in the mills. Katz argues in his Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools that the history of public education in the United States is founded in a movement to maintain Protestantism over
Catholicism, not only as the dominant religion in this country, but also as the dominant religion within the rapidly evolving industrial economy. Immigrant masses were viewed as a future workforce, but they were lacking the skills needed for the new post-agrarian age. Skills could be acquired through work experience, but complacent contentment could not. An attitude and set of values conducive to working in industry had to be
148 taught. Mass education was viewed by Protestant industrialists, according to Katz, as the best way of inculcating these particular Western Europeans (Katz 1971)
Alternately, the historical attempt to educate the masses in the United States can hence be viewed as a movement that emphasized assimilation into the political economy over intellectual progression (Noblit 1999). As was established in
Chapter One, however, this focus of assimilationism, geared towards newly arrived Europeans, would ultimately turn to accommodationism geared towards freed blacks after
Emancipation. As the 19th century economy industrialized, the role of the black worker was altered from one of "agricultural sharecropper and household servant to one of urban industrial operative and service worker, but it did not result in substantial relative improvement for blacks" (Reich in Carnoy
1975, 80) . As Cornel West points out, when African Americans were finally allowed to enter industrial modernity after 1945, it was over. At the end of World War II, the United States was well positioned as the global center for unregulated trade and a new era of imperialism was beginning opening up cheaper and less resistant labor markets. Fragmented, decentralized, and technologically driven postmodernity was standing on modernity's back and this next, and perhaps penultimate stage
149 of capitalism, would only allow a privileged few a view from above.
The Globalization Race
Dubois proclaimed that the African slave trade of the
Middle Passage established the first global markets of exchange. Holt supportively points out that the economic transformations that affected the way people lived, spanned the whole period of modernity, from the 15th century to the present
- and race was linked to all of it (2000, 59). Racism was, and continues to be, imbedded in the economic system and its market colonial ideology (Reich in Carnoy 1975, 81). It is simultaneously a product and facilitator of the system.
Africans and Americans of African descent played an integral part in European capitalist expansion. "Racialized labor forces became crucial to the mobilization of productive forces on a world scale" (Holt 2000, 32). The slave trade facilitated a complete change in the conditions of production and consumption, labor mobilization, revolutions, and personal and political identities. The agricultural products of this early global trade period that would forever change the lifestyles of
Europeans were cotton, tobacco, and most relevant to this study, slave grown sugar (Holt 2000, 31).
150 Du Bois would also proclaim in 1903 that the dilemma of the 20th century would be one of race relations. Again his prophecy would not be incorrect, but the late 20th century form of his realization would be far different than it had been in his own century of birth. Race and racism in the 20th century would become "profoundly linked to the relative subordination of productive relations to consumptions" (Holt 2000, 29). One hundred years ago, blacks held a subordinate, but imperative position within the southern agricultural labor force. They then began a hopeful, but fruitless movement into northern industrial centers, and ended the century with a greater opportunity for unemployment or never achieving employment than ever before. Little changed then; little has changed since.
The percentage of the nations wealth held by blacks at the time of Emancipation was .5%. It is now 1%. In many ways the situation has worsened. The nation's economy is still controlled by multinationals - a neo-plutocracy. Consumption has reached unprecedented levels supported by a global virtual crediting system. In our present Post-Fordist existence, the economic well being of everyone relies on the continued acquisition of things - "part of the circulation of capital that sustains production and the surplus value that creates accumulation and wealth" (Kirsch 2000, 73). For the black citizenry, the part played in production via consumption is
151 even more obvious. From the 1893 caricature of Aunt Jemima, to the Michael Jordan Nike commercials of the 1990s, to the Tiger
Woods Accenture commercials of today, black images, icons, and culture sell us everything (Holt 2000). The appropriation of blackness in the last thirty years has reached new and astounding levels (hooks 1992). As the Reverend Luis Farakhan alluded to in a 2005 CSPAN broadcast of a black leadership conference, the black man may finally be allowed to sit at the table, but he is yet to partake of any food.
With the global economic crisis of the early 1970s, that was marked by a 2.5 drop in world economic expansion; the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates by the United States in 1973; and the decline by Reagan at a
1981 economic summit to update the system of national and global regulations insuring the development of poorer countries, northern "corporations began experimenting with strategies to increase their profits by reducing their labor and other costs" (Brecher and Costello 1998, 22-23).
Minimizing production costs by moving capital around the world would be the first order of business. This would create decentralized production controlled by a concentrated core consisting of government agencies, world banks, and multinationals. A corporate culture was born supported by interpretive communities made up of think tanks and business-
152 backed universities. The language of deregulation, neo- liberalism, and supply side economics categorized their ideology. The result was a downward leveling - cuts in wages, social and public services, and environmental protection.
With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a new
"Corporate Agenda," was conceived within the Republican Party by uniting seemingly irreconcilable groups that resisted and resented the racial, religious, and gender based social movements of the previous two decades (Brecher and Costello
1998, 50). The United States would once again play a key role in defining the philosophy of the World Bank and the policies of the International Monetary Fund in this post-Bretton Woods era, but it would not be to the benefit of debtor countries - countries disproportionately of color. It would also not benefit communities of color within the United States, communities in the wake of the new imperialism of the postcolonial era.
The Locality of Globalization
The affects of an unregulated global economy on a poor community of color like Belle Glade are profound and multifaceted. As the country, state, and municipality reduce their environmental restrictions, wages, and public and social
153 services in order to stay competitive within the global economic structure, what Brecher and Costello refer to as "the race to the bottom," Belle Glade and its neighboring communities are the first to suffer from inflated prices, inadequate water quality, poor social services and unemployment. The impact and depth of free trade agreements, globally unregulated markets, and currency manipulation becomes clear by looking at this rural locality and how the phenomena manifests itself through the dominant agri-industry that has benefited greatly from these policies.
The sugar industry has provided the economic structure, to the detriment of the communities along the southern rim of Lake
Okeechobee, for most of this century. The several hundred thousand acres around the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee is the largest single sugar producing area in the United States.
Though early in Florida's history skeptical voices questioned the possibility of cultivating sugar in south Florida's
Everglades, science and technology prevailed in convincing men of capital that sugar "represented the most profitable commercial agricultural venture for south Florida's muck lands"
(McCally 1991). But science and technology is rarely the most important ingredient in capital accumulation. It is true that controlling the drainage of excess water was a necessity if expansive production was to be achieved in the swamp conditions
154 found south of the lake. And the system of dikes and canals built from the Kissimmee River south to the Florida Bay can certainly be viewed as an engineering feat - an example of how internal and international trade are aided by the intervention of the state (Polanyi 2001, 66). But it was the blood, sweat, and toil of the black man that allowed capital to create riches out of muck. Black muscle, like centuries before, became the ultimate machine needed to reap the immense profits. From Bror
G. Dahiberg's 1925 incorporation of the Southern Sugar Company to its successor, United States Sugar, black bodies would suffer under differing levels of post emancipation slavery - from paternalistic hard labor to pure peonage (McCally 1991,
31-32). And when Americans of African descent refused to do the work, foreign labor from the Caribbean basin took its place, mostly Haitian and Jamaican. It is clear that sugar's position as the dominant crop in the American era, is based on its parallel history with Jim Crow practices, the common occurrence of lynchings, and the general disenfranchisement of the black man in the South. It is important to note that all of these manifestations of racism occurred in the context of the accomodationist acceptance of the "Atlanta Compromise" by
Booker T. Washington (McCally 1991, 32).
The once globally unique ecological area south of the great Lake Okeechobee produces 25% of the sugar in the United
155 States - 600,000 acres of cane producing 1.8 million tons of raw sugar every year (Center for Responsive Politics n.d.). As a result of this massive production and the labor it controls, the sugar industry is today one of the most subsidized, 1.9 billion a year according to the Government Accounting Office's
2000 report, and politically connected agri-industries in the country. Its immense power can best be fathomed by looking at one of the wealthiest and most controversial families in Palm
Beach County, the Fanjuls. The Fanjul family sugar operations spread out over many large farms in the EAA - the Everglades
Agricultural Area. Okeelanta Corporation, Osceola Farms, the
Atlantic Sugar Association, King Sugar Corporation, New Hope
Sugar Company, and Closter Farms are all controlled by the Flo
Sun Corporation, which is headquartered in Palm Beach.
Alfonso, Jose, Alexander, and Andres Funjul, four brothers, are the primary owner/ managers with a total estimated wealth of
$500 million dollars (Center for Responsive Politics).
The brothers descend from the Gomez-Mena family of Cuba and the New York based Fanjul family. Prior to the revolution of 1959 and the fall of Batista, the Gomez-Mena family controlled a great deal of the American dominated sugar industry in Cuba (Center for Responsive Politics). In 1960, the family escaped to Palm Beach County and began their ascent once again as powerful sugar moguls. Upon the death of the
156 elder Fanjul in 1980, the older brother, Alfonso, began acquiring Florida as well as Dominican sugar holdings such as
Tate and Lyle and Gulf and Western (www.whitehouseforsale.org)
Aside from their product name, Florida Crystals, which is perhaps the most identifiable bag of sugar at the local Publix or Winn-Dixie, Flo-Sun also grows rice and corn. Recently they began construction on a "$200 million cogeneration plant that will burn waste products of sugar cane and sell electricity to
Florida Power and Light (Center for Responsive Politics) .
With their vast wealth, it is not surprising to find that the Fanjuls donate a great deal of "hard" and "soft" money to political parties. Since 1979, family members, corporate executives, the corporations, and the Florida Sugar Cane League
PAC have contributed $2.6 million to different political candidates - the Fanjuls make it a point of being very bipartisan in their contributions. Democrats and Republicans both benefit. Alfonso Fanjul, for example, served as co chairman for Bill Clinton's political campaign. After
Clinton's victory Fanjul attended the president-elect's economic summit in Little Rock; sat next to the future Treasury
Secretary Lloyd Bentsen; and would later announce an Everglades cleanup plan with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit. His brother, Jose, balances the family by being a Republican activist who was once the vice chair for the Bush senior and
157 Dan Quayle finance committee during the 88' campaign. He was a guest at the Whitehouse during the first Bush presidency; contributed $186,500 of "soft" money to the Republican national committees; and in 1994, joined the finance committee of Dole's presidential campaign (Center for Responsive Politics) .
The political connections and army of lobbyists guarantee the sugar industry an estimated $64 million dollar a year subsidy that insulates it from the global market price. This subsidy of five cents a pound costs American consumers $1.4 billion a year in increased prices (Roberts 1999, 3) .
Meanwhile foreign sugar importation into the United States is blocked by various means including the sugar industry's exemption from the North American Free Trade Agreement's
(NAFTA) deregulation of industry until 2008. This is an arrangement that makes little sense in an unregulated market paradigm (Barboza 2002, 2-3). But the sugar industry's corporate welfare is not a recent historical phenomenon. Since the Jones-Costigan Act of 1934, the U.S. government has restricted sugar imports, charged prohibitive taxes on imports above the tariff rate, and paid to store surplus sugar (Rural
Migration News 2005). The very origin of Florida's sugar industry is based on corporate welfare - extended by the federal government's Army Core of Engineers at the turn of the last century. It was they who designed, paid for, and built a
158 system of canals and locks that would drain the excess water from the Everglades out into the Atlantic and create viable farmland (www.whitehouseforsale.org). With new strains of sugar developed that could withstand the nutrient poor soil, and the embargo on Cuban sugar as a result of the 1959 Cuban
Revolution, the 1960s saw the sugar industry become the major player it is today in local and national politics, water regulations, and environmental concerns (Roberts 1999, 8-9)
In 2000, the congress of the United States passed the
Everglades Restoration Plan. As is well documented, the elaborate system of dikes, canals, and pumps paid for by taxpayers so that the EAA does not become a flooded swamp, combined with the heavy fertilizer use of the sugar industry, has had devastating effects on what little is left of the
Everglades downstream. Years of litigation over the matter yielded the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project, a nearly 16 billion-dollar project mostly flipped by the taxpayer. By 2003, 1 billion dollars had been granted to the project that gave the primary charge of regulating the water to the Army Core of Engineers - an agency that destroys more wetlands than any private developer or contractor (Grunwald
2002) .
With Washington heavyweights like Vice President Al Gore,
Florida Senator Bob Graham, and House Representative Clay Shaw,
159 the Everglades Restoration Plan was easily sold in the halls of congress. With Bruce Babbitt at the helm, aware of the important role Florida would play in the 1996 and 2000 elections, the implications of the plan for agri-business and developers were made promising (Kirsch 2005). The house version's first section establishes that " ... the plan is approved as a framework for modifications and operational changes to the
Central and Southern Florida Project that are needed to restore, preserve, and protect the South Florida ecosystem while providing for other water related need of the region,
including water supply and flood protection N (September 7,
2000, H.R. 5121; 106 H.R. 5121). The approximate $2 million that Florida Crystals and U.S. Sugar funnels into national elections bought them a voice in the document. Consider the rhetoric in Appendix J of CERP (Comprehensive Everglades
Restoration Project):
Evidence suggests that efforts to provide flood control to agriculture have resulted in over-drying the eastern portions of Everglades National Park adversely affecting Park ecology. Agricultural land does, however, provide a buffer between urbanization and Everglades National Park. Farmland is recognized as the preferred neighbor to natural areas because of its minimal impervious areas, open green space, and low population density.
Appendix J is an extremely well detailed, researched and referenced analysis of the current conditions of the restoration project areas: Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee,
160 Upper East Coast/Indian River Lagoon, Everglades Agricultural
Area, Water Conservation Areas, Lower East Coast and Biscayne
Bay, Everglades National Park/Florida Bay, Florida Keys, Big
Cypress Region, and the Caloosahatchee River Region. The specific and detailed analysis includes, for each region: soil classifications, wildlife, vegetation, water quality and management, socio-economic, and aesthetic. The work is an uncomplicated, facile read for a public that is not necessarily knowledgeable in the ecological and environmental conditions of the Florida Everglades and its estuarine and aquifer system.
The science-based analysis of each region are, however, far more comprehensive and detailed than the sections focusing on the human social factors such as the historical, political and economic dynamics of each region.
Though the piece initially reads as an objective, apolitical report on the current conditions of this vast environmental resource area, discursive patterns are recognizable, especially within the central portions of the piece - pages 100 to 200. This section is political and characterized by a rhetoric that is sympathetic to the agricultural industry and especially the large sugar producing companies. The fact that "agriculture is critical to the local and regional" economies of the Lake Okeechobee Service Area, which includes the EAA, is argued throughout the piece in
161 various ways (CERP 1999, J-125). It also magnifies the improved conditions of certain areas made possible by the presence of agri-business: "Although this sub-basin (North St.
Lucie Sub-basin) naturally discharged into the Indian River
Lagoon, agricultural canals have greatly improved drainage"
(CERP 1999, J-139). This is, at one level, true, but who benefits from this improved drainage? The document makes a key point of illuminating the reader with the important role the canal system plays in the EAA:
"The Everglades Agricultural Area is highly dependent upon the system of canals running through the region to provide necessary drainage of excess water during the wet season as well as supplemental water supplies for irrigation during the dry season" (J-156)).
The following section taken from page J-156, reads as a marketing tool or press release for the sugarcane industry.
The mere fact that this particular industry has such a strong voice in the document is suspect.
Sugarcane requires less phosphorus fertilizer than other crops grown in the Everglades Agricultural Area (Sanchez, 1990), and sugarcane has been found to remove 1.79 times more phosphorus than was applied as fertilizer (Coale et al., 1993). Florida sugarcane only requires small amounts of pesticide due to disease resistant and tolerant cultivars, and cultivation instead of herbicides for weed control. Sugarcane also tolerates greater variability in water table levels, allowing for more flexible water management strategies (Glaz, 1995).
162 The sugar industry has an immediate and clear voice in this document not shared by other industries and it subtly points a finger of possible blame for the conditions on those other industries:
A strong agricultural economy in the Everglades Agricultural Area based on profitable crop production is the best defense against conversion of agricultural land to urban land (J-156) .
Urban development becomes the sole enemy of the Everglades
Restoration movement, ignoring agriculture and limestone mining. It is not to say that urbanization does not play a role in the current conditions, but the immense affect of the
EAA on the hydrology of the region is far more complex than just the question of phosphorus or pesticides.
The CERP document minimally deals with the affects of agri-industry on the Lake Okeechobee communities. It does not address the actual ramifications of CERP restoration, such as it is designed and implemented by the South Florida Water
Management District and Army Core of Engineers, on the existing social, cultural, and economic conditions of communities like
Belle Glade and Pahokee. Throughout appendix J, titled
"Existing Conditions, as through the whole CERP document, the discursive pattern is clear, and unsurprising since the document was generated by the sugar industry. Urban development, limestone mining, and natural processes are given
163 heavier weight and always listed first when allocating fault for the abysmal condition of the Glades.
The community, however, does not view the situation in this way. Nor do many environmental organizations. Local cases of phosphorous related skin rashes and asthma are common, but arthritis and even cancer have been associated with the chemical (Kirsch 2005). Indeed, citizens of Belle Glade continue to feel the impact and control of this mega agri- industry in a plethora of ways. A local historian describes the situation:
There is a stronghold on this community by agriculture. So everybody's afraid to offend them because they'll shut down and people won't have jobs, and they have shown us that. They sent a message in 1996. That election there was a ... they were being asked to clean up the environment they had polluted, and they managed to configure the message so that it looked like they were being forced to downsize rather than to clean up the environment. So then people voted "yes" to Proposition IV, which allowed them to get away with back-pumping there waste into our ... that's one of the reasons we're in the situation we're in now with water. People didn't understand that. So there is a threat of losing employment, losing jobs. After people approved Proposition IV, they closed South Bay growers anyway so that many people in South Bay were out of work. So, what they've done is they've shut down operations to allow prisoners to come in. This is a penal colony now, you know. It's kind of facilitated by whatever agri-business does to downsize that leaves people needing jobs. People don't really have the ability to leave the area to get jobs, or the skill. Do you know what I mean? Or the exposure to leave the area for jobs. So what do they do? They go to work for a prison. Over here is a new prison, and then there is a juvenile facility, and now there is the Eagle Academy.
164 The feelings of this community activist are justified. As
Kirsch points out, "the largest threat to a community is changes in the way individuals and families are able to secure the daily necessities of living" (2005). In a late capitalist, globalized America, the needs of communities are no longer considered. There is a massive wealth and power imbalance between labor and industry, and it is rarely blamed on the unequal distribution of resources. Instead, it is blamed on a community's culture- family, lifestyles, and attitude. Here are the thoughts of the local historian, who is also a member of the NAACP, on the condition of the community in the context of agri-business hegemony:
It's decaying (the community) and we're fighting it, but it's a hard fight and that's one of the reasons why I am running for the State House of Representatives. It's because the issues of the community are not being addressed by people outside of the community. It's hard to understand what the issues of this community are without being here and growing up here. It's really difficult to understand because America ... it' s like we are in a time warp, and the rest of America is not functioning like Belle Glade is functioning at this point. The industry here has such a strong hold; they even stop fast-food places from coming. They monitor and thwart almost every avenue of development that is outside of their industry. And then people don't complain about it because they are afraid to lose their jobs, and they're dying here because of what the sugar industry is putting into the environment. I think of places all over the nation where they have filed suit - Love Canal, those kinds, you know - same thing. So you wonder, why don't people file suit, class action suits? Fear. The first person to step up ... probably will be killed. I don't mean it figuratively. They have such a vested interest to
165 maintain their wealth that our lives are unimportant to them.
There is an inherent, "conceptual near-synonymy of certain kinds of capitalist social relations and structural violence"
( 1999) . Indicative to race inequalities supported by modern capitalist production are the physical crimes instilled upon workers and communities, especially those in labor intensive industries such as agriculture, factories, and mines.
Demographically, particular groups, those identified by race, ethnicity, and gender as subordinate, are more susceptible to suffering and premature death due to job related injuries, underemployment, unemployment, malnutrition, and adequate medical care. Nonini and Lutz argue that it is nothing less than structural violence (1999) . The seasonal agricultural workers of the Belle Glade and Pahokee communities, live no different an experience than that endured by the cane cutters of Born Jesus in Brazil - chronic fatigue, illness, and undernourishment (Nonini and Lutz 1999). And the 21st century reality is, not only do they not benefit from agri- industrialization, they will not benefit from trans-modern technologicalization. They are perpetually caught within the walls of a periphery maintained by globalized economic cores that educate along caste lines for economic efficiency.
166 The Demise of Public Education
Brecher and Costello write that as "corporations transcend
national boundaries they can force workers, communities, and
countries to compete to lower labor, social, and environmental
costs - force them into a 'race to the bottom'" (1998). In
Spartanburg, South Carolina BMW was given a $300 million dollar
subsidy for the land to build the plant, water, road, sewer,
office, housing and training. The state of South Carolina is
well known for its weak environmental laws, low wages, and
suppression of labor unions, so the average labor costs in the
state were as much as 50% lower than what they would have been
in Germany (Brecher and Costello 1998, 16). Tax based social
services such as education do not benefit from such corporate
subsidies which include immense tax exemptions. The monies
that would normally filter into Boiling Springs High School in
Spartanburg from the BMW generated profits never reach the
school - the same schools that would ideally train the
engineers that would work in the plant one day. Instead the
recruited local labor fills the low paying, menial jobs or, at best, skilled manufacturing - what little is left in an
automated world. The upper level positions of engineering and design are recruited from other countries or outsourced - a
result of "the race to the bottom." As a local Pratt Whitney
167 quality control manager recently told me, his company is now running 24 hour engineering out of India for all the domestic airline engine designs at a fraction of what it would cost to pay an American engineer. This is supported by Phillips who estimates software engineers earning $75,000 a year in the U.S.
"could be hired for one-fifth as much in Hyderabad or
Bangalore" (2002, 270-1). A point has been reached in
America's industrial educational relationship where it is cheaper to recruit educated labor or outsource than it is to school the public school children of this country. Public education in a globalized market economy is no longer a necessity. Simultaneously, those that are socially and financially privileged, continue to be well educated and are indeed further benefiting from middle-class subsidies under the guise of choice programs and voucher schemes. The monies offered poor families by the government are never enough to cover full tuition for a private or parochial school. The results are further under-funded public schools for the poor
(Strickland 2002, 3).
Ironically, those that are proponents of globalized unregulated markets argue that contemporary world societies are becoming societies of knowledge. The implications of such an assertion are, as Stromquist writes:
(l)"high knowledge will be needed at all levels of
168 economic activity, (2) individuals and countries can 'make it' by relying solely on the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and (3) no impediments exist for the acquisition of such knowledge"(2002, xxi).
In reality, at least 50% of jobs created for the developing
economy will not require university study, but job-based
technical training or trade experience. In many localities,
globalization has actually created a retrograde movement in
regards to wages. Using 2000 data, Stromquist cites California
as an economic center of globalization that had more workers at
poverty-level wages in 2002 than it did a decade before - over
75% of job growth shifting to lower paying jobs over a ten yea
period (2002, xxi). The vaunted job growths of the 1990s
Clinton era were mostly in lower paying jobs. What becomes
apparent is that the globalized economy does need highly
trained, highly educated workers, but it also requires large
numbers of workers in labor-intensive positions. Stronquist
points out:
An important dynamic that globalization will create will be the demand for a relatively small number of university- trained graduates while ensuring that there will continue to be persons with lower levels of education and that they understand their situation as part of a fair process that allows the success of only those who are most meritorious (2002, xxi) .
Carnoy, in agreement, observes that government policies, enacted by nation states to better compete in the global arena, often hurt the lower educated and benefit the higher educated.
169 Globalization is encased in an ideological packaging that promotes bias against raising wages and social wages. It favors policies that maintain higher levels of unemployment for the benefit of controlling variable capital. Welfare state policies are abandoned, unions are weakened, and lower minimum wages are maintained as an argument for increased employment.
Unite this ideology of high profits, low wages with the increased need for higher skilled workers as a result of technological advances, and one realizes that higher education equals higher returns raising the need for more advanced education. The question is, who has access to quality higher education? Lower income students, like those in the Belle
Glade and Pahokee communities whose parents are less educated and therefore reaping little from the global package, are not likely to have equal access to higher learning (Carnoy in
Stromquist and Monkman 2002, 43-58).
Using this reality, unregulated market advocates have responded by blaming the phenomena on inefficient public schools, institutions that have failed "to respond to their interests in developing a well-trained, efficient labor force that will increase economic productivity... " (Stromquist 2002,
38) . This is the rhetoric behind globalization and education, primarily espoused by the World Bank and organizations like the
International Association for Evaluation of Educational
170 Achievement. The World Bank has historically supported increasing quality education, but always in the context of reducing the cost of public service. It has recommended concentrating funding to lower educational levels, increasing privatization to higher educational levels, decreasing public per pupil costs in areas with established high student/teacher ratios, and decentralizing - removing the control on the institutions of schooling by centralized governments and giving that control back to the local communities. Their theory is that by decentralizing education increased productivity will emerge, measured by systems of assessment such as FCAT. But the ideology of free markets as it pertains to education is not just about economic efficiency. It is also about opposing government participation when it represents marginalized publics, for there is, in reality, a great deal of government participation advocated by business when private and corporate needs are being met - those organizations that Araghi refers to as nknowledge expropriators." Carnoy writes:
In a nutshell, globalization enters the education sector on an ideological horse, and its effect on education are largely a product of that financially driven, free-market ideology, not of a clear conception for improving education (in Stromquist and Monk man et. al. 2000, 50).
There is no disputing that the educational reforms of the last twenty years have been market driven. These financial
171 reforms have a tendency to reorganize and redistribute access to quality education away from low socio-economic communities, showing clearly the unequal distribution of salaries and highly sought after knowledge. By implementing the most damaging of these finance reforms, the measurement and comparison of school outcomes nationally and internationally, organizations like the
World Bank and the IEA can quickly assess the nation states possibilities for higher economic and social productivity. The comparative data accumulated from national and international assessment tools are not, however, used by these organizations in ways that are best suited for improving schooling. Instead, the data is used to maintain system efficiency "mainly in financial terms" (Carnoy in Stromquist and Monkman 2000, 57)
In an April issue of Expansion Management, a business journal exclusively dedicated to growth strategies for companies operating within the global economic structure, the
Palm Beach County School District ranked third in the nation among school districts within the 65 largest metropolitan areas. Among school districts within all 331 metropolitan centers in the United States, the School District of Palm Beach
County was ranked 46. The study compared school districts throughout the country using college-board scores, graduation rates, beginning and average teacher salaries, student teacher ratios, and per pupil expenditures. Categories weighted
172 heavier in the study are college-board scores and graduation rates, while "community and state spending are less important to the overall final score" (King 2004, 23). The study makes notoriously poor districts like Washington D.C. and Kansas City among the best in the nation by including the surrounding high- achieving suburban public schools to the mix, balancing the high dropout rate and low test scores of the metro inner schools - schools that are populated by low-socio economic minority students. Bill King, Chief Editor of Expansion
Magazine and author of the article closed it with this sentence:
The important point is that a metro area is really one big labor market and, in order to get an overall picture of the quality of public education, you have to include the suburban and ring city school districts in your evaluation (2004, 24).
The current conservative American political culture of
"business runs everything" has had an immense influence on U.S. schools. This current education climate can be traced to the senior George Bush, our first "education president" who pledged that America would surpass the world in math, science, reading, writing, and other skills related to business-processes by the year 2000. Business, he espoused, would reinvent the American school, ignoring all traditional systems of schooling and breaking through the historical restraints that conventional
173 schools work under. Heavy emphasis would be placed on a national curriculum, choice programs, and nationwide testing.
All of this, of course, would and should occur without any increase in federal funds (Farnen in Farnen and Sunker 1997,
15-19).
Of the main areas appropriated by the new plutocracy, testing proved to be the most powerful rhetorical tool for the next batch of political leaders, on the right and left, and the most devastating for low socio-economic student populations.
Though there are possibilities for the use of testing as a true improvement to schools and schooling - locally conceived assessment tools that specifically address school improvement regardless of cost - the main application in the current educational environment is for the development of "national policies for resource use with the intention of decreasing per student public resources ... " (Carnoy in Stromquist and Monkman 2000) . This is a mantra among conservative groups across the country.
As Peter McLaren points out, in the late capitalist America of today "test scores based on information filtered from the
Western canon and bourgeois cultural capital and developed in the business salons of the Prozac generation are used to justify school district and state funding initiatives" (in
Farnen and Sunker 1997).
174 The Glade Central High School marquis, April 2005, showing the Expansion Magazine rating. In May the 2005 FCAT scores were released showing that only 7% of the high school's students had achieved level 3 in reading.
175 The neo-liberal democracy of the 21st century United States insures differently empowered publics. What few successful mainstream public schools are left, cater to the needs of power and privilege in society, ensuring the natural transmission of advantage from one generation to the next. Intergenerational continuity is maintained - working-class students will most likely end up with working class jobs (McLaren in Farnen and
Sunker 1997). Add the question of race to the construct and the outcome looks even bleaker.
In the context of a globalized transnational economy, the hopes and dreams of the children of Belle Glade are doused via the current educational system. In a conversation with a retired, thirty-year veteran teacher from Belle Glade, he responded to the possibility of having a musical group or extracurricular club from one of the public schools sponsored by the local sugar industry:
... or the grain sugar company or any of those sugar mills would have financed that for Glades Day but they would not have done it for Glades Central. They would have gi ven ... U. S. Sugar would have probably given Glades Day $20,000 and $1000 to Glades Central. The racial thing always enters the picture. And what has happened to the FCAT and "No Child Left Behind,n they're ain't no white kids at Glades Central. If we're talking about everybody, I don't think there are ten white kids at Glades Central High School. We're very multi cultured and probably one of the most multi-cultured schools in the county, but U.S. sugar ... I couldn't put my hand on this as the Gospel, but I understand that Glades Sugar gives Glades Day $125,000 a year for their budget. I don't know how true that is, but it
176 came from whites. That's how they became a trustee; they gave them $125,000 a year.
The social capital of the Belle Glade community, concentrated exclusively in the local white agri-industry dominated by Big
Sugar, subsidizes the school that they themselves developed for the maintenance of segregation - a structural racism that continues to oppress and depress the black community in the 21st century. The public schools in the community, unfortunately offer a poor alternative - starved for monetary and human resources. In the new global economy, the business centers of
Palm Beach County receive mass quantities of investment capital in the form of real estate (i.e. the Scripps Research Project) raising the wages of the highly educated, but the forgotten
Lake Communities of Belle Glade and Pahokee continue to experience the impact of unregulated market policies, but not the rewards. Even the possibility of meager income generated by working in the bean fields has diminished. NAFTA, GAT, and the newly conceived CAFTA policies have created a new expendable workforce arriving from Central and South America, insuring cheap labor for agri-business. Today, Belle Glade, and to a more immediate extent, Pahokee are nothing more than expendable communities, no longer worth the cost of educating.
177 Chapter 5
Education, Poverty, and Race: Belle Glade and Beyond
Slavery was not born of racism. Rather, racism was the consequence of slavery... it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but with the cheapness of the labor.
Eric Williams
Race is merely the manifestation of the class conflict arising from inherent inequalities in the economic mode of production.
Karl Marx
Coinciding with the writing of this final chapter is the release of the 2005 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores. The Governors Office and the Florida Department of
Education have released positive assessments on the improvement and achievement of Florida's schools, but there is no hiding the disparities between white and black student scores or the discrepancies between reading and writing scores. Overall, twelve hundred Palm Beach County seniors are not graduating because of their inability to pass either the reading or the math section of the lOth_grade FCAT (Shah and Kopkowski 2005, lA) . What is also apparent is that even though improvements have been made in the reading and math scores of the Belle
178 Glade and Pahokee elementary school students, they still lag
significantly behind their more affluent counterparts on the
Palm Beach coast. Thirty-one percent of Pahokee Elementary 3rd grade students achieved level three or above in the mathematics portion of the test - 51% at Pioneer Park and 44% at Belle
Glade Elementary. Level 3 on the FCAT being the target quintile needed to progress to 4th grade. Compared to Jerry
Thomas Elementary at 96% and Del Prado Elementary at 94%, the lake community's scores are significantly lower (Florida
Department of Education, Office of Assessment and School
Performance 2005). Historically, schools in Palm Beach County with larger populations of higher socio-economic students score in the higher quintiles (Florida Department of Education,
Office of assessment and School Performance 2005). Both Del
Prado and Jerry Thomas are located in predominantly white, affluent communities of Palm Beach County- Del Prado in Boca
Raton, and Jerry Thomas in Jupiter.
The reading scores show similar disparities. Thirty-one percent of Pahokee's students scored at level 3 or above, with
Gove at 52% and Glade View at 56%. Pioneer Park and Belle
Glade Elementary both stayed below 50% - 49% and 46% respectively. Compared to middle and upper-middle class communities like the Village of Wellington, the disparity is significant. Binks Forest Elementary in Wellington had 94% of
179 their students score level 3 or above. Indeed, half of their
3rd graders scored at level 4. Del Prado had 93% score at level
3 or above with a staggering 55% scoring at level 4. These
disparities become even more significant when consideration is
given to the fact that 46% of Pahokee's 3rd graders scored at
level 1, while only 4% of Del Prado's students scored in the
first quintile (Florida Department of Education, Office of
Assessment and School Performance, 2005). Perhaps, 67% of
third graders reading at grade level throughout the state, up
from 57% in 2001, are a cause for celebration by the Department
of Education and the Governor's office, but specifically for
whom?
Glade Central High School and Pahokee Middle/Senior High
School's 2005 scores show further diminishment. Only 7% of
Glade Central students are reading at level 3 or above, a drop
of 2 percentage points from 2004. Lake Shore Middle School in
Belle Glade has 24% achieving the reading requirement, with 50% of the students unable to score above level 1. Pahokee
Middle/Senior has 13% of their students meeting the state requirement of level 3 or above with a staggering 71% unable to score above level 1 (Florida Department of Education, Office of
Assessment and School Performance 2005).
The writing scores, however, continue to be unexplainably high. With only 7% of its students meeting state standards in
180 reading, Glade Central managed to get 88% of its students writing at level 3 or above. With 13% reading at state mandated levels, Pahokee Middle/Senior had a combined writing score of 91% - that is 91% of its students achieved level 3 or above averaging the expository and persuasive writing scores
(Florida Department of Education, Office of Assessment and
School Performance 2005) . These discrepancies continue to fly in the face of established linguistic hypothesis on the cognitive connection between reading and writing. As
Vanniarajan points out, "both are cognitive skills working with the same cognitive resources and both are learnable ... one cannot teach writing without teaching reading ... and one cannot teach reading without highlighting how it has been written" (2000)
If it is true that the reading exam is far more demanding than the writing prompts as school officials and English teachers insist, then the discrepancy between the Florida Writes examination and CTB/McGraw Hill and Harcourt Educational
Measurement's FCAT Reading exam is purposeful. They are meant to promote an improved public perception of the state and county curricula, programs, and practices masking extreme levels of illiteracy among marginalized groups.
181 Hiding in the Bushes: Resistance to Educational Refor.m/ation
It is clear that there is an immediate crisis ln American public schooling, and nowhere is it more evident than in minority education. To address this trans-historical American problem our political leaders organize exports, form committees, and formulate plans that will cure the social ills, but these plans are grounded in a market ideology that often turns them into a Trojan horse of systemic oppression for black and brown communities. President Bush's No Child Left Behind
Education Reform Plan is the current means by which the federal government plans to bridge the disparities between children of color and their more successful white counterparts - perhaps the most notable plan since Lyndon B. Johnson's own War on
Poverty. But educational reform plans like unified and core curricula, accountability, standardized testing, and national standards that are guided by unregulated market ideology via organizations like the World Bank and economic blocs like the
EU and NAFTA have at their core the unrelenting desire to maximize achievement while minimizing funding (Stromquist
2002) . Paradoxically, these are regulated attempts at controlling curricula so as to better meet the needs of the private sector. This is a formula destined for failure and surrounded by resistance as is being proven by the current
182 litigation brought against the Federal Government's Department of Education and the NCLB law. In April of 2005, the NEA along with 8 school districts from the states of Michigan, Vermont, and interestingly enough, Texas filed lawsuits declaring that the states cannot be forced to spend their own money to meet the NCLB mandates (Dillon 2005, 1). This action was taken after Utah's Republican dominated legislature passed a bill rebuking the unfounded provisions of the law (Dillon 2005, 14)
On the state level, Florida Governor Jeb Bush's A-plus
Plan, which is a reflection of his older brother's NCLB Plan, has been under critical attack since its inception. Community activists, marginalized publics, and teachers - like those from
Northboro Elementary in West Palm Beach who collected signatures in 2000 to do away with the FCAT, have shown resistance to the current Department of Education's policies.
In 2000 a West Palm Beach parent, Marcie Yansura, wrote a county and state resolution that would "abolish school grades and find a better way to measure how much students learn"
(Flannery 2000, lB). She argued that the school grades were negative labels; that one test should not decide promotion; that it was too much pressure on children; that curricula was geared towards the test; and that "teachers in affluent schools were getting bonuses while those in poor schools were unfairly punished" (Flannery 2000, lB). This is a position that
183 resonates with Belle Glade parents who view the A-Plus Plan as a source of further funding for middle-class and affluent white schools who consistently receive a grade of A from the state, while schools struggling for funds, those with low-socio economic minority populations, are stigmatized with a D or F grade and therefore receive no funding. They disagree with the premise of the A-Plus Plan that is based on the primary tenets of big business - meritocracy and competition. They disagree with the Governor, who believes that teachers, administrators, and parents of the low performing schools will improve the achievement of students on standardized tests so that they do not continue to lose students and by extension, funds to other schools. The A-Plus Plan to the Belle Glade community resonates with Strickland's description: "a corporate-sector demand for a curriculum of narrowly defined skills training in public schools ... undermining public education's role as a democratic social institution" (Strickland 2002, 2).
On the local level, to placate the black and brown community's position that there is an inherent inequality built into the A-Plus Plan, the current Palm Beach County School
District Superintendent, Arthur Johnson, has in recent years gone through great lengths to deal with the disparities that continue to plague schools of color. In 2003 he vowed to the
Belle Glade parents that all teachers in the Lake communities
184 would be certified, even if he had to forcibly transfer them there. He admitted that Glades' schools often ran programs with uncertified teachers, but by implementing funding efforts such as signing bonuses and cash incentives to veteran teachers, he could insure that all instructional personal in the Glades would be certified and meet NCLB requirements
(Flannery 2003, lB) .
The Triple A Plan is another example of a funding effort implemented Dr. Johnson to improve the academic achievement of minority schools vis-a-vis teacher units. This is not, however, the perspective of some community leaders. As a local
Belle Glade activist stated: " ... the superintendent is just trying to advance out No Child Left Behind and trying to put in place things he thinks will work .... " In reality, a school having a Triple-A designation today, is stigmatized in a similar fashion to schools placed on Frank Brogan's "List" in the mid-
90s. It is not to say that lowering the class size of at risk communities is ineffective, but teacher units alone cannot address the larger historical trap that these children find themselves in. As a high school student in a predominantly black Triple-A school commented to an arts teacher after the student found out she did not pass the 10th grade FCAT as a senior, what does she have to look forward to? What does she
185 do now, without a high school diploma? What future does she have?
The fact remains that even with the extra Triple A monies allocated by the county to poor minority schools, "the wealthiest 10% of school districts in the United States spend nearly ten times more than the poorest 10%" (Hammond qtd. in
Dyson 2005, 64). These funding disparities mirror the great inequalities among families - the most resources go to the wealthiest children, the least to the poorest. What is disheartening is that even the most organized and organic attempts at rectifying the inherent inequalities of America's social structures have fallen short of critically deconstructing entrenched power structures to their deepest economic core. One example, analyzed in the next section, is a radical organic race-based organization whose workshops are now being sponsored by the Palm Beach County School District. This coalition building, undoing racism organization proposes the deconstruction of racist based political structures within institutions that maintain educational, social, and economic stratification. But the deficiency of its undoing racism philosophy in fully encapsulating the economic source of continuous oppression upon people of color, limits its effectiveness in bringing about deep social change.
186 Undoing Racism
In 2004, Dr. Arthur Johnson approved a series of radical race workshops open to all Palm Beach school district employees. Some black teachers from the Glades community felt he no longer had a choice and had to respond to black community pressure on issues of inequality and discrimination within the school district. Others felt he always had a choice and was simply making a concerted effort to bring about meaningful change. The workshops would deal with the question of structural racism and the allocation of power within the district. They were run by a Louisiana based organization known as the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. Each two and a half day workshop began with a very effective historical and structural analysis of, not just the victims of racism, but the "systems that keep racism in place ... why people are poor, how institutions and organizations perpetuate the imbalance of power, and who is responsible for maintaining the status quo" (Chisom and Washington 1996, 86) .
It is uncertain what the ramification of promoting such a workshop meant politically for Dr. Johnson. White attendants of the sessions at times perceived the arguments put forth by the presenters as unfounded and incomplete - no more than racist attacks on their identity as white citizens of the
187 state. Indeed, it is impossible to gauge the extent to which the sessions succeeded in bringing about any level of self imposed ideological investigation among its participants, a primary goal of the organization. The presenters were, however, effective in communicating the importance of coalition building as a vessel for social change - a valuable lesson.
"Coalitions are one important way that practitioners and concerned citizens can achieve greater power and influence"
(Mizrahi and Morrison 1993, 5). Grass roots organizing in the form of community organizations are perhaps the most effective form of coalition building in practice today. They are, as
Delgado points out, " ... not what they used to be" (1986, xv)
They no longer simply organize ordinary people for power.
Today they run "sophisticated networks replete with replicable organizational models, codified strategies and tactics, and complex staff-constituency relationships" (Delgado 1986, xv)
The People's Institute is one such organization.
The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond founds itself on five basic assumptions. The first is argued on the premise that American society is founded on the basis of race.
Conformity to the norms of the designated racial group is desired and expected if one is to be considered normal:
Whites, for instance, are expected to conform to having more privileges than non-whites and would be considered deviant from white societal norms if they
188 would risk their privileges or their lives to dedicate themselves to the struggle for Black equality (or for that matter, the equality of any non-white race) (Chisom and Washington 1996, 16) .
The ramifications of such conformity, however, are unhealthy to the individual and society. According to the Institute, denial of equitable treatment to others leads to a hegemonic crisis in the Gramscian sense - violence, crime, and racial hostility.
Concurrently, non-white conformity to the norms of their
"inferior race," norms that are dictated by the dominant white culture, are also unhealthy to the community for they lead to
"self-inflicted violations of humanity in the way of sexual abuse, assaults and homicides" (Chisom and Washington 1996,
17) . Therefore, according to this assumption "racial roles maintain both inequitable treatment and pathological relations"
(Chisom and Washington 1996, 17).
Based on this first tenet, community organizers can begin the work of coalition building and activism dedicated to training community leaders - a process that must be constant and guided by integrity, humanistic values, and vision.
Assuming the organizer has such an ethical character, the process of disempowerment begins. This is the means by which the oppressed people gain a sense of their own power. Leaders from the community, not from the periphery, must be recruited in order to maintain the struggle. The Institute proposes that
189 an effective organizer must "understand the structural forces
which function to disempower the people" (Chisom and Washington
1996, 20). In this way he or she eliminates the possibility of
blaming the victim. It is a process of educating the
constituency on how to analyze institutional power and how it
manifests itself on people of poverty stricken communities.
Institutional gatekeepers, as the Institute refers to
them, are the key to the maintenance of oppression, but also
the major sources for community empowerment. They maintain the
societal status quo by perpetuating racial inequality. In an
educational institution, according to the People's Institute,
teachers, counselors, and administrators serve as gatekeepers
in regards to providing a quality, equitable learning
experience. Their allegiance, however, is to the institutional
structure that produced them and not to the public(s). They
therefore serve as a buffer between racially subordinate groups and access to privileged positions of power. Chisom and
Washington point out that at times activists and community organizers can fall into the role of buffers, often with the best of intentions. If the organizer takes the position of the
"charismatic leader," for example, the constituents may place all of their confidence in that person's ability to "articulate the issues" (Chisom and Washington 1996, 23-24). The dilemma occurs when the organizer becomes the center of her activity,
190 negotiating and facilitating deals with the power structure under the auspices of caring for the subordinate group, but in reality benefiting her own position - in essence a sell out.
The constituents being untrained are therefore unable to maintain the struggle on their own - unable to achieve institutional access.
Finally, Undoing Racism Philosophy requires that a "viable working definition of racism" be established. "The process of undoing racism means being as humanistic as possible when addressing other issues" (Chisom and Washington 1996, 27). If addressing feminist issues, for example, the oppression of black women is not confronted until a "viable definition of racism... permits the movement to be inclusive of the concerns of all women" (Chisom and Washington 199627). By defining racism in this way, the organization becomes a tight organized effort towards achieving noticeable results. The People's Institute uses an effective rhetorical tool in helping attendees of their workshops absorb this definition, an equation they display in all sessions reads as follows: RACE PREJUDICE + POWER= RACISM.
The following section will offer a critique of such a formulation for it is the position of this study that this methodology is deficient. In its fervor to deconstruct the political framework of white hegemony, The People's Institute
191 ignores the deeper historical economic foundations that support
the political structure of America's society.
The Inadequacy of a Theory
In Black Looks: Race and Representation bell hooks points
out that "many unlearning racism workshops focus on helping
white individuals to see that they too are wounded by racism
and as a consequence have something to gain from participating
in anti-racist struggle" (1992, 13). The Undoing Racism
workshops offered by The Peoples Institute promote such an
approach. Hooks argues that the premise of this approach,
though true in some ways, obscures the fact that many people
"benefit greatly from dominating others and are not suffering a
wound that is in any way similar to the condition of the
exploited and oppressed (hooks 1992, 13). Racism may harm
whites, "a culture of domination does seek to fundamentally
distort and pervert the psyches of all citizens," but white
domination affords white mainstream culture a great deal of
economic capital through the exploitation of the black bodies, minds, and souls it subjugates (hooks 1992, 13-14).
This dissertation views Undoing Racism Philosophy the
result of a well meaning but flawed methodology, an incomplete
analysis that rightly emphasizes the political foundation of
192 racism while wrongly ignoring the economic system that is the cornerstone of the ideology. There is little argument against the assertion that race is deeply embedded in the American consciousness, but the United States' democratic experiment was not solely based on race and not ultimately driven by racism.
If a full understanding of the forces at work in Belle Glade and other rural, non-white communities across the South is to be achieved, the basis of racism must be viewed as an ideological justification for colonialism. Racism can most clearly be understood as a relation of production (Allahar in
Cashmore and Jennings, ed. 1989, 337)
Racism has been, and continues to be, "an indispensable aspect of the process of primitive accumulation of colonial capital, internally and externally, which was vital to the consolidation and development of capitalism at the global level" (Allahar in Cashmore and Jennings, ed. 1989, 337)
Many, as Mintz points out, may place the development of capitalism as a late eighteenth century phenomena, but capitalism in the West has a far more extended history that includes the destruction of economic systems that preceded it
(i.e. feudalism), the establishment of global trade, and the creation of peripheries that fed a core hunger for wealth.
Slave based production was an integral part of the development of "experimental economic enterprises in various world areas"
193 (Mintz 1985, 55). Early sugar plantations in the Western
Antilles, for example, relied on forced labor and became an important part of this process, maintaining both a constant flow of commodities for Europe and markets for its products
(Mintz 1985, 55). In reality, the African slave and the
European proletarian of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century were linked by the position they held in regards to production and consumption within the global market.
Both groups offered nothing more to production than labor; consumed little of what they produced; and were separated from the means of production. As Mintz points out, they really formed one group, "differing only in how they fit into the worldwide division of labor others created for them" (1986,
58) . Indeed, the designation of commodity, albeit a "false commodity" in the form of slavery, is inseparable from the mechanism and ideology of capitalism.
Before 1861 the South lagged behind the North in many significant ways - manufacturing, schools, railroads, and urban populations, but they did not trail in wealth. The four million slaves that were part of the agri-industrial property of the South had an estimated worth of 2-4 billion dollars.
Including them as part of the South's wealth evens the region with its Northern neighbors in this decisive category. The
United States Government and Northern industry did not have the
194 accumulated wealth to free 4 million slaves. The alternative
was war and the result would be the South's loss of wealth and
"the relentless political transfer of a critical portion of
that wealth into the expansion of Northern industry" (Phillips
2002, 32).
Certainly, there are problems with a adopting a complete
view of racism as nothing more than a systemic rationalization
that does not hold its own against the nuance of class
relations. As San Juan points out, racial antagonism today is
more than just political class struggle (in Cashmore and
Jennings, ed. 1989). Holt writes that it manifests itself
throughout modernity, but differently each time (2000). Cox,
nonetheless cannot be completely ignored. A case can be made
that racial categorization arose with capitalism for the
purpose of facilitating "the differential commercialization and
exploitation of the labor of certain racially marked groups"
(San Juan in Cashmore and Jennings, ed. 1989, 226). Racism did
not cause people of color to be oppressed and enslaved -
capital accumulation in the form of colonialism and imperialism
accomplished that. Whether one argues, as Allahar does along
scientific or theological lines for the basis of racial
categorization, is in our present trans-modern, late capitalist, neo-imperialist moment not as imperative as coming
195 to terms with global monopolistic capitalism and its effects on communities of color, internally and externally.
Starting in the 1980s and running into the late 1990s,
"the wealth gap between whites and non-whites widened" in the
United States (Phillips 2002, 135). In general, few median income families participated in those boom years. When the question of race is posed, one finds that even fewer blacks and
Hispanics were able to participate at all in the financial swoop of the market. Even though the Federal Reserve Boards
1998 Survey of Consumer Finances showed an improvement of net worth for non-white groups, the crash of 2000 and 2001 erased any gains (Phillip 2002, 136). According to the Pew Hispanic
Center, the net worth of African Americans fell 32% between
1999 and 2002 - from $8774.00 to $5988.00. In contrast, the net worth of white households rose 2.6%, from $86,370.00 to
$88,651.00 (Jordan 2004). Ultimately, it is important to revisit Braverman's point, made in the 1970s but extremely relevant today: "Within capitalist nations, poverty and insecurity have become more or less permanent features of social life, and have grown beyond the ability of private philanthropies to cope with them" (Braverman 1974, 286).
196 Belle Glade and Beyond
The premise of this study has been based on a history of
Northern corporate philanthropy and the role it played in designing black education in the South as a self-benefiting economic investment in a future workforce. It explains how initially, white bankrolls funneled into black industrial school complexes prepared waves of freedmen for their new lives as free labor. As Frazier shows, however, the industrial schools failed to train blacks for the new mechanized skills of the mills. The industrial work of the 19th and early 20th century mills was saved for the white workers that would be returning from the war to find their previous source of income destroyed. Washington's proposal for Tuskegee was a misconception. Black training would be in the domestic skills of the home and the agricultural skills of the field. It was only after the huge northern migration of blacks following WWI, and their limited access to "white" education, that black colleges and universities began receiving adequate amounts of money ultimately creating what would be referred to as the
"black bourgeoisie" (Frazier 1957, 78).
The communities of Belle Glade and Pahokee are trapped in this history, for they are the victims of a post-bellum
Southern ideology that was not interested in the making of
197 educated black men, but in the making of labor. Today, globalization has made that labor irrelevant and by extension the maintenance of a reasonable quality of life difficult. A former Pahokee resident spoke on the situation facing the community's workers today:
One of the reasons why it's getting tough for them now is because when you have a different influx of migrant workers that are going to work for less, then you're pushing the ones that say, "No we're not going to work for that anymore," well, Big Sugar and all the co-op don't care about it. They want the worker that's going to work for the least amount of money, and they use the new labor that's coming into town and cause the old labor to have problems because now their way of life went down ever further.
To counter the decline of jobs ln Belle Glade and across
America that is the inevitable result of global economic policies including NAFTA, GAT, and now CAFTA, the Democratic and Republican administrations of the last 25 years have proposed that education is once again the answer to the inherent inequalities of our neo-liberal democracy. Along with our presidents - teachers unions, parent coalitions, the
National Governors Association, The Business Roundtable, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all supported standards-based education - a buzz phrase that really means the teaching of selected content. Of these groups, it has been the business community that has been the dominant force behind the high stakes measurement and assessment of student knowledge that has
198 become such an integral part of standards-based education.
What may not be so apparent is that a vast amount of research shows test-based accountability systems to be flawed and in reality may produce dropout behaviors, especially among minority students (Stromquist 2002, 96) . This is an argument that runs counter to the prevalent mainstream middle-class belief on standardized testing.
The belief among many groups across the nation as to why students of color fail in our public schools has simply been espoused as the manifestation of a culture of poverty and the tragedy of its dysfunctional families - an ideology supported by government produced social science (The Moynihan Report) and political leaders (Johnson, Reagan, Bush). But Lewis' theory, as critiqued by Leacock, Stack, Ryan, and Valentine, incorrectly interprets the lack of participation by the black poor in the broader social order as a part of poverty culture - a design for living which helps them deal with human problems.
The deeper analysis, argued in this paper, considers the differing levels of participation by poor people of color in varied institutions of society as being structurally imposed.
As Valentine points out: "one would expect high participation by the poor in the police-courts-prison complex, the armed services, the welfare system, and primary public education" (in
Leacock ed. 1971, 205-6). In contrast, the poor are less
199 likely to acquire desirable employment, property, political party affiliation, labor unions, and higher education
(Valentine in Leacock ed. 1971, 206) Indeed there are differences between the structure and processes of poor families, especially black poor families as Stack points out, and their affluent counterparts, but these so-called dysfunctional family patterns can be directly traced to
"externally imposed conditions impinging on the poor from the society at large" (Valentine in Leacock ed. 1971, 207). It is an old and comfortable belief within capitalist societies to blame poverty on the poor because it offers a simple answer for social dilemmas while posing no danger to the collapse of the established societal mechanism that maintains the lifestyles of middle and upper class America (Valentine in Leacock ed. 1971,
215) . It is imperative to note that this is a belief that transcends the color line.
On May 17, 2004, at a gala commemorating the soth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Bill Cosby, a well known black philanthropist and entertainer, publicly attacked the poor black community for "not holding up their end in this deal" (qtd. in Dyson 2005, xi). He condemned the lower economic people of the race for not parenting, attacked black youth for their hip-hop culture, and criticized what he considered minimal efforts in acquiring an education (Dyson
200 2005, xi-xiii). As Dyson points out, this is not "the isolated ranting of a solo rhetorical gun slinger" (Dyson 2005, xiii).
Cosby represents an Afristocracy, the black bourgeoisie elite that resonates with white middle-class beliefs on "black pathology and the failure of lower-class blacks to see that their miserable lot is all their doing" (Dyson 2005, 182). He ignores the neoapartheid wave in public education that has been gradually swelling for the last twenty-five years and instead blames the black poor for their failures in school. He ignores the fact that "there is a direct link between the social and economic status of the most vulnerable and the quality of education they receive" (Dyson 2005, 64). He ignores these issues because he has become a part of the "century-old class war in black America" that now resonates with white mainstream neoliberal thinking on both sides of America's political spectrum (Dyson 2005, xiii) .
It has long been assumed that school cultures mirror home cultures. Pioneer Park, Lake Shore Middle, and Glade Central
High School in Belle Glade are well known throughout Palm Beach
County for their disciplinary problems and low academic achievement. These problems are perceived as symptoms of
"cultural deprivation, reinforced by the distance between the middle class goals and orientation of the schools and the lower class values of the children" (Leacock ed. 1971, 27). Indeed,
201 many of the teachers that travel Hwy 80 from the coast to teach in the Glades, both black and white, have latched on to the culture of poverty rationale, frustrated by their lack of success in raising the educational level of the black and brown children they work with everyday. Ironically, they are both victims and villains. Their responsibility is to teach the children, but their actions and practices must be viewed in the context of the larger machinery of district, state, national, and now international political economies where ideologies of class and race intersect. Teachers are nothing more than "cogs in a machine so structured that teaching is well nigh impossible in low-income schools" (Leacock 1971, 28). David
Rogers, in 1968, labeled the New York City School System as a
"sick bureaucracy." This same label works well when describing its early 21st century South Florida equivalent:
Indeed, this is a system that is strangled in red tape; mired in inertia, incompetence, and corruption; inefficient; insulated from its clients ... ; and fragmented into power blocs (teachers, principals, district superintendents, divisions, bureaus ... ) (in Rubinstein ed. 1970, 130).
The Palm Beach County School District, like many across the nation, is an inbred unit constantly reproducing power structures that protect their vested interests and at best placate its minority clientele when they demand change (Rogers
202 in Rubinstein ed. 1970, 130). Yet the people that work within this mechanism are also victimized.
President Bush's No Child Left Behind Educational Reform
Plan and, by extension, Governor Jeb Bush's Triple A Plan read like policies that reach out to marginalized communities like
Belle Glade and Pahokee, a metaphorical rope that will take the place of the ladder pulled up during modernity. But there are no views from nowhere. State, national, and international curricula are "never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge, somehow appearing in a nation's texts and classrooms" (Apple in
Farnen and Sunker ed. 1997, 45). Standardized tests like
Florida's FCAT assess a specific groups tradition and vision of legitimate knowledge. This selected knowledge is generated from cultural, political, and most relevant to this study,
"economic conflicts, tensions, and compromises that organize and disorganize a people" (Apple in Farnen and Sunker ed. 1997,
4 5) . It is an ideological decision made to legitimize one group's knowledge, making it official, while diminishing and belittling another group's. Today in Belle Glade, as in the post-bellum South, the goals of the schools are to meet the needs of industry and business. Unfortunately, the current push to nationalize curricula and testing, as substantiated by
Apple, will hurt most those in our society that have the most to lose (in Farnen and Sunker ed. 1997, 46).
203 This dissertation's main objective is to continue to shift the paradigm away from the blaming the victim ideology of the last 40 years and argue that the lack of achievement and miseducation of poor black and brown children in the rural Palm
Beach County community of Belle Glade and the American South must be addressed in the context of the current neo-liberal push to expand so-called free markets, eliminate government responsibility for social needs, strengthen competitive
"structures of mobility," caution against any illusions of economic security, and spread a kind of Social Darwinism (Apple in Furnen and Sunker ed. 1997, 50). The argument has not been posed, as a question of right or left, Democrat or Republican, for the existence of a viable left in the United States of the
21st century is questionable. Indeed, the ideology, doctrines, and policies of neoliberalism are now ubiquitous across the political spectrum. Educational choice programs and voucher programs proposed by President Bush and Governor Jeb Bush, impacts of market mentality on education, are strongly supported by both Democrats and Republicans, right and so- called left. The issue is truly about a further appropriation of the public commons, a privatization of public schooling that forces one to the realization that it may no longer be relevant in the current world system to educate the marginalized.
Racism theories based solely on structures of power such as the
204 Undoing Racism Philosophy of the People's Institute and Beyond fail to make this analysis, sparing the grandest narrative of all - the market. It has evolved over 400 years into its late form, destroying communities, environment, and hope.
This is not a denial of the inherent, imbedded racist ideology of our nation's consciousness. It is simply a sharper critic of the origins and maintenance of this structure, exposing the base and allowing a transparent observation of hegemony's true desire- maintenance of dominance insuring continued capital accumulation. Control over people of color in the United States via the institution of public schooling has always been "directly tied to profits and wealth" (Allahar in Cashmore and Jennings ed. 1989, 336). Even as this study closes with a voice from the Belle Glade community who was asked what her final assessment would be, the race-based analysis is disembedded from its economic origins.
Nonetheless, hers is a voice that must heard:
I think you pick your battles one at a time, but you don't waste your time on insignificant battles; and because this country is based on race and inequity, you'd have to deal with it up front. You'd have to place it on the table continually because otherwise all of those smaller skirmishes become more focused. So you just build something else around it that's just a higher level or a different level of what the core problem is, but structurally nothing has changed. When we started doing the "Undoing Racism" workshops, Palm Beach County was the nation's 14th largest school district and it was the nation's third wealthiest county. It is now the nation's wealthiest and it is
205 the nation's 11th largest county. A race battle can be fought anywhere in the United States, anywhere, but where would it be more significant to occur? I think Palm Beach County is the place. We're looking at it, looking at education and the problems with education. It's a good place to start addressing something that could fundamentally change the way that a significant part of the people in the county... I think the other part of it is to say that it's also something that can't be ignored and it can't be colored or covered with anything. It can't be colored and covered in diversity. There are a lot of things that may mimic or seem similar or keep you away from it or make you think that you're addressing the issue, but you can't have any substitutions. You have to look at and understand what the real problem is. You'll have ulcers if you have some cancer, but I don't want to say ... who knows? Cut it out? Burn it up? Do something, but treating the ulcer isn't going to help us begin to look at how to cure cancer. Those are things that I think... I think the Bush's might not have known what they were doing, not even believed in what they were doing. It just sounded like something good to say "No Child Left Behind" and "We want everybody to learn," but that is providing a really good opportunity to start looking at ways to equalize and make the system of education better for the children. It takes us to a place that we've not been before. You know, we've just done a lot of globalization about - that school's okay, that school's okay and ignored the schools who look okay, but when you come to start, the black and brown population is no better off. So let's provide a place for us to start doing the work that will get us to relieve the causes and hopefully solutions about how we're going to ... to make sure as a country and as a city and everything else, we start looking at being inclusive and prosperous and everybody has that ability to move forward because all of us can move forward.
206 Conclusion
Direct violence, in whatever form it takes, is brutal and horrifying. The lynchings of the Jim Crow era, the Rwandan genocide, the images of September 11, the car bombings of
Palestinian terrorists, and combative American and Israeli military action unnerve us, but we become attentive. We become aware and hence, responsive. Structural violence, in contrast, is unseen - "embedded in social structures, normalized by stable institutions and experience" (Winter and Leighton 1999,
1). It occurs when people, usually of color, are oppressed by economic, political, and cultural traditions. Because these social inequities are transhistorical, they become everyday, ordinary, expected. Yet, local and global structural inequities cause as much suffering and death as direct violence does. Indeed, the devastation may be more subtle, slower, more common, and more difficult to counteract. Poverty, infectious disease, and environmental devastation, phenomena that occur when people are denied access to resources are signs that physical and psychological violence exists (Winter and Leighton
1999, 1). The black citizens of Belle Glade, Florida are victims of this most elusive manifestation of violence.
207 The exposition of this study established an historical foundation on which the argument for structural violence in
Belle Glade and the surrounding lake communities has been laid.
It is premised on the idea that the racist educational policies and actions of the United States were necessary for economic expansion and colonialism, internally and externally. This relentless expansion and acquisition of wealth could not have occurred without the blood, sweat, and toil of black bodies.
Though the economic institution of slavery ended in the 19th century, the ideological institution of slavery did not. The
South may have at one level accepted emancipation, but it did not accept equality. It may have permitted the black man's education, but it did not permit integration. It may have established public schooling, but it did not desire to fund it.
These were the economic and political constraints on human potential that according to Johann Galtung, who coined the term in his 1969 article ~violence, Peace and Peace Research," can only be referred to as structural violence.
The "white architects" of black education, as Watkins refers to them, Northern industrialists such as Rockefeller,
Peabody, Slater and Phelps-Stokes, would hence play a key role in the funding and establishment of compliant industrial schools for the Freedmen. But these vocational institutions specializing in domestic duties and basic farming skills were
208 inadequate in providing the immediate material prosperity that freed blacks were seeking. These racial philanthropic endeavors were more about providing a political and ideological platform indicative of classic colonialism than they were about achieving racial equality. The Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes became the most prominent of these black industrial schools from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. They were headed by Samuel C. Armstrong and Booker T. Washington, respectively, and taught a compliant and accomodationist ideology that would create a viable labor force out of the newly freed slaves, a vocational tracking system for black students that was inherently unequal. The trustees of the
Peabody fund, for example, stipulated "that Negro schools should receive only two-thirds the allotment made to white schools," and opposed the Civil Rights Bill of 1873 (Frazier
1997, 65). By the end of the 19th century, black public education in the South had become a mockery and a part of the much larger systemic oppression that has, under a new guise, survived into the 21st century.
When well meaning educational experts analyze the continued failure to educate the children of Belle Glade and
Pahokee, the economic and psychological structures that impair these at-risk students are never deconstructed. It is rarely considered that "children living in poverty experience
209 diminished intellectual development because their parents are too overwhelmed to be able to provide crucial linguistic experiences" (Winter and Leighton 1999, 2). In the late 1800s violence against black citizens took on clear and direct forms represented by white sheets and burning crosses. Today, this violence may come dressed in a Brookes Brothers suit. It comes disguised as benevolent ideology - individualism, neoliberalism, and capitalism. In regards to public schooling in the state of Florida and across the United States, these ideologies manifest themselves through meritocratic policies - those schools that score best on the Florida Comprehensive
Assessment Test, for example, receive monetary bonuses for their achievement. A clear act of structural violence considering there is a direct correlation in Palm Beach County between A schools, those scoring best on the FCAT, and the high socio-economic characteristics of their student body - predominantly white, affluent, and residing in distinct geographic locations (Florida Department of Education, 2005
FCAT scores). In Palm Beach County the "best schools" are located in the towns of Boca Raton, Wellington, and Jupiter.
For those schools in Belle Glade, Pahokee, and Riviera Beach, schools that are populated with low-socio economic children of color, schools that truly need the extra funding, the monetary bonuses are nonexistent.
210 When social inequities are noticed, however, attempts at explaining them lead to rationalizations and simplistic conjectures. More often than not, assumptions are made that condemn the victims for their poverty. It is a popular 19th century theory of poverty, but it took on an air of legitimacy during the mid to late twentieth century with the anthropological work of Oscar Lewis, the devastating repercussions of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan report, and the family values ideology of Ronald Reagan. The blame lies not in the institutional structures, proponents argue, but in the nuclear family structures. Neoliberal policy makers therefore implement plans that seemingly allow the poor to make choices that will help their children break the familial cycle of poverty. Under educational business models like No Child Left
Behind and Florida's A Plus Plan, parents of children who are attending schools that consistently perform poorly can choose to receive vouchers to help pay for private school tuition or send their child, at the governments expense, to the closest high performing public school. Since these options are legally available to all, the dominant neoliberal establishment believes concessions have been made, policies have been put in place, and programs have been implemented to help the poor achieve the higher standards needed to compete in the global market structure. To these social Darwinist, there are no more
211 excuses except the failings of the individual as a result of his or her habitus. Poverty is conceived, as a culture, rhetorically spun as an oppressive force against its own victims eliminating the possibility of a much deeper, much needed structural analysis.
The truth is school vouchers offered by the state never cover the full cost of private education leaving the poor to make up the remainder of the tuition. This is not an option for most Belle Glade households, 20% of which make less than
10,000 a year according to the 2000 Census
(http://belleglade.hometownlocator.com/Resources/CityCensus
Data.cfm). Even the choice program which has been widely used by the citizens of Pahokee and Belle Glade, creates inequalities for the black and brown commuting students in the form of limited access to extra curricular programs such as sports, arts, or even academic tutoring. When the students of
Pahokee are bused to Polo Park Middle School and Palm Beach
Central High School in Wellington, the one-and-a-half hour commute eliminates any possibility for afternoon practices, programs, and tutoring sessions. It becomes unequal education in the guise of equal access. Moreover, once again students of color are bused away from their communities as a solution to the inability of the county and state to fund and operate successful schools in impoverished areas. The children of
212 Belle Glade, as is often the case with children in similar circumstances around the world, are the "invisible and innocent victims of societies structural violence (Winter and Leighton
1999, 3). It is a post World War II phenomena that has diminished the "demand for a social welfare state," historically perceived as a system whose sole purpose was to fit the needs of blacks, women and children (Lutz and Nonini
1999) . The children of Belle Glade are systemically unprepared to succeed and adapt to the changing circumstances of their region and beyond.
According to the 1999-2000 Readiness for College Report published by the Florida Department of Education, Glade Central
High School had only 31 black male students and 36 black female students enrolled as degree seeking in a college or university.
These numbers are out of an average total school enrollment of
1300 with the average senior class size around 300. Of the 31 male students tested in the areas of math, reading, and writing, only 29% were ready for college level work. The percentage rose slightly for the females, 58.3% of the 36 tested, but are alarming for Hispanic students - just two male students were enrolled as degree seeking from Glade Central with neither ready in the three subject areas. Of the three
Hispanic females, only one did not have to do remedial prep
213 work (Florida Department of Education 1999-2000 Readiness for
College Report) .
Like many rural communities in West Virginia, Alabama, and
South Carolina, Belle Glade is scarred by history, from the national terrorism of the Plessy era to the exclusion and oppression of postmodernity. It is a community whose story is no different than Duncan's Dahlia in the Mississipi Delta
"almost all the whites in Dahlia have economic power and security, almost all the blacks are poor and powerless" (Duncan
1999, 96) Like Dahlia, Belle Glade's class structure, which reflects racial stratification, was founded long ago for the sole purpose of meeting the needs of a plantation economy.
That structure has been maintained till today, preserving white power and affluence in a predominantly black community (Duncan
1999, 96). In Belle Glade, White flight to the private
Christian schools of Glades Day and Glades Christian Day and away from integrated public schools insured that the Brown decision would not change the status quo. The black and brown poor inhabit the bottom rungs of the social and economic ladder of these Southern communities. At the top are the big farm owners and their families, followed by white small business owners and politicians whose little power and interest are best served by maintaining close ties to the wealthy agri-industry and by not challenging the hand that feeds. The needs of the
214 poor are not their main concern. The black poor might have their needs addressed by a small middle-class black leadership group, in Belle Glade usually made up of church leaders, activists, teachers, and small black business owners (Duncan
1999 96), but their social capital is minimal making their political might limited.
Belle Glade is a community in crisis. It is a micronarrative that reflects a global macronarrative as market forces purposefully distribute resources unequally. As Saskia
Sassen writes: "One of the most disturbing trends today is the vast expansion in the numbers of unemployed and never-employed people in all the highly developed countries" (Sassen 1996,
37). And the correlations between poverty and illiteracy, environmental deprivation, lack of healthcare, and infectious diseases cannot be ignored. Indeed, one cannot begin to solve the problems of quality educational access in Belle Glade without understanding the systemic oppression of the community.
In 1985, Belle Glade's rate of AIDS cases, one for every 541 people was 51 times the national average. It was known as the
AIDS capital of the United States. And though it has not maintained the highest per capita rate of AIDS in the country, it remains among the most afflicted and AIDS continues to flourish in the community. In 2003, 31 people were newly diagnosed with HIV (Barton 2004, 14A). An additional 45
215 learned they had full blown AIDS. Many health care workers
blame the high number of cases on late HIV diagnoses and
limited access to healthcare - many citizens of Belle Glade are
unfamiliar with preventative healthcare. One reason is the
powerful stigma AIDS carries in these communities. Residents
with the disease are reluctant to frequent public health
clinics where staff members may be neighbors. The fact
remains, however, that beyond AIDS testing and counseling, the
afflicted must still travel constantly to West Palm Beach for
follow up care, a commute that is unrealistic for many poor
Belle Glade citizens. With Belle Glade's unemployment numbers
currently running at 18%, many of its citizens live without
insurance and employment, usually seeking treatment in the
emergency room of the areas only hospital. Pahokee's hospital
closed in 1998 (Barton 2004, 14A). Undoubtedly, with agri-
industry becoming an unreliable source for employment as a
result of the mechanization agriculture and other factors, life
has become even more difficult for many in recent years.
Indeed, hundreds of farm workers, as a result of their H2 or migrant status, are ineligible for Medicaid and unlikely to
navigate through the bureaucracy necessary to obtain healthcare
(Barton 2004, 14A).
The government budget and program cuts of the last several
years have made access to healthcare for those most at risk for
216 HIV in Belle Glade and across the country even more difficult if not impossible. The comprehensive attacks by the Bush administration on locally tailored HIV prevention programs has been relentless according to Mark Mclaurin, director of the Gay
Men's Health Care, the nation's largest provider of AIDS care.
A coalition of AIDS organizations nationwide graded the administration D-minus "for its performance on the Minority HIV
AIDS Initiative, a congressional measure targeting deficiencies in services offered to minority communities" (Barton 2004,
14A). As a result of the position taken by the administration, a clear diminishment of federal dollars reaching community based organizations for prevention has occurred.
It is difficult at times, however, for the victims of structural violence to realize the extent to which systemically, their situation is established, maintained, and exacerbated. Communities of black and brown citizens suffering from HIV/AIDS may feel immediate exemption from quality healthcare, but other forms of structural violence are more difficult to identify. It is common, for example, to find communities predominantly of people of color consistently exposed to environmental toxins or denied quality basic necessities. Belle Glade and the surrounding communities of
Clewiston, Pahokee, and South Bay are no exceptions. These communities have, for example, some of the worst water quality
217 in the nation and yet pay the most expensive charges for water
in Palm Beach County. Their primary source, Lake Okeechobee,
has over the last several decades become polluted by
agriculture and dairy runoff among other sources. As a result,
the lake now has a two-foot layer of muck lining its bed. "The
cumulative discharge of phosphorous from surrounding dairy
farms north of the lake from ten waterways" has threatened it
to the point of extinction (Earthjustice: Newsroom 2005, 2)
Phosphorous is a nutrient that causes low dissolved oxygen,
clouded waters, and algae growth. Uncontrolled phosphorous
levels and delayed cleanup will inevitably result in the lake
becoming a cesspool of algae, killing fish and other natural
wildlife.
Moreover, because of the lakes geographic position at the
headwaters of the Everglades, it is a central component of
south Florida's ecosystem. Whatever flows through the lake
will eventually flow through the Everglades. Before a 2003
lawsuit brought against the Department of Environmental
Protection Agency by Earthjustice attorneys, the Clean Water
Act held the load standard to 25 tons of phosphorous annually.
This was a level clearly too high to bring about the necessary
recovery for the lake, which is already deeply polluted and
damaged (Earthjustice: Newsroom 2005). Indeed the March 23,
2005 court ruling that required the DEP to alter and revamp its
218 pollution reduction plan was viewed as a milestone in the lake's restoration and the future of the Everglades, not to mention the quality of the drinking water for the surrounding communities. But the success may be short lived, for the future may hold an even grimmer reality for the Everglades and the whole of South Florida.
Urbanization is quickly replacing agri-industry as the major contributor to Florida's dwindling natural resources, specifically water. The soil of the half-million acres of drained Everglades south of Lake Okeechobee is disappearing.
Scientific speculations go as far as to assert that some time early in this century, unless the Everglades are reflooded, there will be nothing left but bare rock. Subsidence has been a known fact by not only the people in the Glades but also by government and private experts for decades. Yet, there are no plans to put water back on the land while soil is still existent. More pressing is the issue of the Everglades
Agricultural Area (EAA) and the inevitable urban development that will occur once the soil is too thin to farm. For the last fifty years, when the first drainage and restructuring of the Everglades occurred, the EAA has acted as a damn, "blocking the shallow sheet flow of water that once began north of Lake
Okeechobee and ended at the tip of the Florida Peninsula"
(Greene 2001). Aside from the purchase of 30,000 acres of
219 sugar farmland located at the south end of the EAA that will now be used as a water reservoir, current plans devote little attention to the EAA and none at all to the idea of restoring it to its natural state where it will once again play the role of headwaters to the River of Grass (Greene 2001). But the real danger lies in continuous urban sprawl that is quickly approaching the small EAA community of Belle Glade. If a city rises in the heart of the Everglades, it will imperil the whole natural system that sustains South Florida. It is an urgent crisis when one considers a University of Florida study done in
1997 found that the deepest parts of the EAA go out of production in 70 years (Greene 2001).
The Future
According to the 2000 Census, the top employment industry in Belle Glade includes three areas of public service: education, health, and social services - 1091 employees out of a total of 5157 in the employed labor force. The second largest employment industry, at 977, includes agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting, and mining. Since 1845, however, when Florida was granted statehood, agriculture has held a position of political and economic hegemony. In Belle Glade it created and sustained a closed political system that, like many
220 rural Southern towns throughout the United States, has been a huge barrier in educating its young people of color. Rural white power brokers always deemed education as a progression towards industrialization and technologicalization, a sure way of losing the needed black labor force (Duncan 1999, 139).
Today, ironically, automation and mechanization aid agri industry in lowering variable capital by reducing the need for a large labor force, leaving the community without jobs.
Beyond this local historical systemic oppression are the new dynamics of globalization as macroinstitutions like the
International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the
World Bank expedite the process of capital accumulation, "while impacting negatively on the process of redistribution and reallocation of the social product" (Stromquist and Monkman
2000, 6). These organizations now regulate education globally under the ideology of deregulation. But as Farshad Araghi has noted, deregulation is the strongest form of regulation that exists. Education has become a key factor in transnational business serving the private sector instead of the public good
- the state has slowly relinquished its responsibility to schooling. As a result "issues of equality and equity concerning women and ethnic minorities are losing ground to the consideration of such issues as efficiency (often reduced to performance in math and reading tests)" (Stromquist and Monkman
221 2000, 13). As white middle class and affluent students of Palm
Beach County master the skills most connected to the market, menial service jobs and labor-intensive jobs must be transferred to the "other." A globalized "knowledge society" must rely on a plethora of individuals whose knowledge and skills are low enough that they will accept service oriented, menial tasks. Moreover, the social condition of these "other" individuals will not allow them to accept "the more dignified, higher paying tasks for themselves" (Stromquist and Monkman
2000, 13).
Political leaders, experts and neoliberal pundits state that standards driven public education will create individuals who will compete in the global economy therefore making up for the loss of jobs to oversea markets, but in reality the schooling system is being used to differentiate students early
- those wealthy in cultural capital will find their place in the technologically driven market society, while those lacking in cultural capital will make up a pool of local workers for food preparation, domestic duties, and agri-industry. Belle
Glade's black and brown children, with their current low achievement levels on standardized tests, are falling into the latter category. If they are unwilling to accept their position, then global labor migration from second and third
222 world countries will take care of the rest leaving them little options.
As a result of the structural exclusion, desperate desire for economic and social independency leads to various forms of direct violence. Groups that have been continuously oppressed economically, educationally, and socially will eventually resort to direct violence as a means to survival. Studies across 40 nations have shown positive correlation between economic inequality and homicide rates (Hansmann and Quigley,
1982; Unnithan and Whitt, 1992). This is also true of the
United States where disproportionate levels of wealth along racial lines is correlated to murder rates (Blau and Golden,
1986). Moreover, when educational correlations are analyzed, the future is even bleaker. According to the Justice Policy
Institute, the 1980s and 1990s saw a rate increase in correctional facilities at six times the rate of state spending on higher education. At the end of the 20th century there were nearly 33% percent more black men in prison than in higher education. These statistics resonate with the Belle Glade and
Pahokee communities, which are quickly becoming penal colonies.
The Belle Glade Correctional Institute is located off of
Hwy. 80 and can be seen entering the community from West Palm
Beach. It is also the location for the Palm Beach County
Sheriff's Office Youth Eagle Academy- a military school for
223 at-risk boys. Pahokee, a community that has been described by many locally as 2nd World at best, is actually in the forefront of what Wall Street would coin the "at-risk youth industry."
It is home to the Pahokee Youth Development Center, a for profit correctional institute for children run by Correctional
Services Corporation. As child poverty rose to 13 million in the year 2000, according to the National Center for Children in
Poverty, so did rates of child violence and crime. Typically these children would be placed in nonprofit or public agencies, but by the mid-90s, multistate for-profit companies began to emerge. The incentive was compelling - an estimated annual public spending on youth services amounted to $50 billion a year. The corporate movement was aided by the 1996 Welfare
Reform Act, which "included a provision allowing for-profit companies to tap into child-welfare funds that had previously been reserved largely for nonprofit agencies (Press and
Washburn 2002, 1-2). When it comes to systemic oppression, the separation between state, economy and society is a dubious one.
There are no current state educational reform plans designed to deal with the problems of poverty, social injustice, and racial exclusion in the Belle Glade community.
It has become apparent through the present research that the current public schooling system is both a victim and villain in the maintenance of structural violence endured by this rural
224 South Florida community. The No Child Left Behind Educational
Reform Plan mandates according to the global business models of curricula, but does not subsidies. The governor's A-Plus Plan subsidizes, but only to the benefit of those who are already in the economic, social, and cultural position to achieve according to the needs of the globalized market system - predominantly white children who live in affluent areas like
Wellington, Boca Raton, and Jupiter, Florida. The Palm Beach
County School District's Accelerated Achievement Plan for at risk schools attempts to make up for the loss of state and federal funding by expanding the budgets of schools in trouble so they can add teacher units, usually in the area of reading, but one extra reading teacher cannot begin to balance the structural scale of inequity. The poor who are disproportionately people of color in Belle Glade and the surrounding towns, rely on public education to develop their children's competency in the English language, "facility in handling quantitative relationships; understanding the physical and social world of which they are a part; and attitudes toward self and society which contribute to effective living"
(Wilkerson in Rubinstein 1970, 93) . But the schools are failing. They are failing as Thomas Jefferson said, "to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in
225 poverty... for want of means of development" (Rubinstein 197 0,
94) .
With the intensification of the real estate market in
South Florida and the continued subsidence in the Everglades causing sugar and possibly other agri-industries to eventually leave the community, the urbanization of the western lake towns may begin as early as within a decade, making the prospects for the low socio-economic minority citizens minimal. Many black citizens of Belle Glade believe they will have little to say in the future urban and regional planning of the community, while the black citizens of Pahokee believe the white roots in the community are too deep and the release to the pressures of urban sprawl will not come without a fight from generations of white agri-business owners. A teacher residing in the town told me of how the city commissioners voted to close a recently opened Burger King on a Tuesday night and on Wednesday morning it was done.
It is apparent that the sugar industry, headed by the
Fanjul's, will not remain in the area perpetually. Its exclusion from NAFTA will end in 2008, Asian markets are opening, subsidence is inevitable, and the United States government will not continue to subsidize the industries already formidable bottom line. The near future of these lake communities is riddled with change, and there is a sense of
226 urgency among Belle Glades black community and native black
Pahokeeans that something must change. But there fear lies in the question of what will replace an industry that has dominated the area for a century. The closing of Bryant Sugar in Pahokee has all but caused the town to disappear.
The future of these rural communities remains to be seen.
Their history of structural violence is long and deep. The communities hope for a shift from agri-business to tourism, but the natural environment that once attracted fisherman and naturalists to Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades has been decimated by decades of abuse by a water management design that benefited farming, cattle, mining and coastal development industries. The water is now running out. For tourism to flourish in the area the current state of Lake Okeechobee would have to be reversed and the majority of the EAA would have to be flooded, two actions that are unlikely to happen in the current political environment.
Agriculture in the form of vegetable crops has a solidified future in the area, but there are no other industrial options. The more likely scenario is the continued urban sprawl into Loxahatchee and across Hwy. 80 creating a megalopolis that will truly mark the end of the Everglades. As has occurred in the towns of Delray and West Palm Beach, urban and regional planning under the guise of community
227 beautification and development has taken historically low-socio
economic communities and turned them into trendy commercial
zones or expensive residential areas. Atlantic Avenue in
Delray Beach and the City Place retail complex in West Palm
Beach are prime examples. These developments pushed out the
lower income citizens, as city ordinances required property
improvements to meet knew codes. The result is higher property
tax at unaffordable levels for the poor or even middle-class
families. In this scenario the poor black and brown citizens
of Belle Glade and Pahokee would likely be displaced. Many would lose their generational homes and roots. But even this possibility must have solutions to the urgent crisis facing
South Florida in regards to water, Lake Okeechobee, and the
Everglades.
The most hopeful scenario for the future of these rural communities and its citizens lies in the possibility of community activism and a consolidated movement towards self preservation. With public action, the possibility exists for a shift in local environmental policy and a development of microfinance institutions, organizations that have globally aided the poor in savings, credit, and insurance services from
Asia to Latin America. Historically, market-driven financial services to the poor have been marked by widespread imperfections due to the belief that the poor are not credit-
228 worthy, unable to save, and unable to insure. But in the last fifteen years, with the help of public action by the state, private donors, and altruistic leaders microfinance institutions have made "considerable progress and outreach to the poor through a number of different types of MFis" (Zeller
2001, 6). The cooperative model of micro-banking, for example, a geographically limited profit sharing model could offer the citizens of Belle Glade and Pahokee the financial services they need to create surplus capital that could be used for micro entrepreneurial investment, health insurance, or education.
The members are the owners of these institutions, participating in major decisions and democratically electing officers from there own ranks to guide and oversee the administration of the cooperative (Zeller 2001, 3). Organized individual human agency can bring this community to the realization that
"structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systemic ways to mitigate its effects"
(Winter and Leighton 1999, 4). As Lutz and Nonini write:
"alternative modes of organized daily life have existed in the past, and may exist once again in the future" (1999, 103).
This dissertation may have begun as the simple narrative of yet another oppressed rural community in the American south, but it has become an elucidating document proving that education must not be added to the list of appropriated commons
229 by market driven privatization. It must be reclaimed along
with neighborhoods, and part of the demand for social justice
along with living wages, healthcare, and a clean environment.
Currently, public schooling in the United States is part and
parcel of the systemic global communication and normal social
cognition that feeds structural violence. I believe, as
Leacock did, that hope lies in weakening the complicity of the
schools in the maintenance of such a structure (in Rubinstein
1970, 209-210) . By returning control of the schools back to the community of Belle Glade, perhaps a more meaningful curriculum can be developed that will help students better identify themselves and their place within the institution. If any thing else it will shake up the status quo and the layers of bureaucracy that hinder the identification of individual student or family problems. The mono-cultural values of globalization that define America's public schools "must be changed before inequality can be effectively challenged"
(Leacock in Rubinstein 1970, 209-10).
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