Maya Angelou Public Charter School • See Forever Foundation
There is a very good article by James Forman, Jr. in Boston Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opinion/08brooks.htmlBR34.3/forman.php">"No Ordinary Success: The Boundaries of School Reform" (May/June 2009). Forman is the founder of Maya Angelou Public Charter School, a school for those kids that schools usually don't want as students, often the ones that, unfortuantely, the criminal justice system in the U.S. collects as symbols of "fighting crime." Forman is a product of SNCC parents of the '60s. His father, James Sr., died in 2005 was SNCC's executive secretary and his mother was an activist and nurse.
"No Ordinary Success" raises tough and important questions regarding programs like Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone Project (HCZ) and former Teach for America fellows Michael Feinberg's and David Levin's KIPP (Knowledge is Power) schools.
Forman provides us with details and scenes from Canada's efforts and the KIPP schools which I did not in my post of 10 May. Scenes and details that are significant to create a more full story of what Marv Hoffman and I call in our forthcoming book, the "new schools of the neoliberal era." The rigidity of these programs still disturbs me. After reading of Forman's brief experience inside a KIPP school I still feel that these schools and programs are training poor and working class African American kids to embrace their subjectivity. The schools strongly believe in the power of social perception to determine one's life chances--and KIPP and HCZ demand that kids socially construct themselves accordingly.
But, what Forman shows us is that these schools and programs also teach the kids to look critically at text, self, and social perception. In addition, as I did mention in my post) and that which David Brooks in "The Harlem Miracle" neglected, programs like HCZ and in part MAPCS provide the social safety net (e.g., health, parenting, early childhood education services) necessary for kids to grow, subsist, and prevail. As I also argued in my previous post, the problem with this is that what we see with HCZ and KIPP type organizations are valiant attempts that ultimately reinforce and legitimate the ideology that says that each person is an autonomous, self-governing individual--a virtual human corporation with private interests to share and to be sought out.
This mindset keeps poor and working class people of color believing that they alone are responsible for the conditions in which they live and that they alone should take care of those conditions without state intervention and resources. I want HCZ, KIPP, and particularly Forman's MAPCS (which does not engage as much of the rigid rigor fever of the others) to continue to do their important and necessary work in the communities that the state has abandoned. I just wish their work didn't help to reproduce the social and economic fount that neoliberalism has created in poor and working class Black bodies.
What I want is for kids to participate in learning that provides them with opportunities to look critically at who and what constructs them as subjects. I want them to critique the place they're in, the spaces that have been designed to hold, trap, and/or produce them. And then I want the kids to go out and create new knowledges that change how we see each other and that shift mental and economic paradigms. I want them to put up roadblocks on the traffic-free highway neoliberalism opened up in their neighborhoods, their homes, and in their dreams. That same one-way highway on which HCZ, KIPP, and MAPCS audaciosuly and gallantly drive their trucks of hope and action.
I want the kids to do all of this but only if they don't have to exchange who they might already be or who they might want to be for values and norms that are inherently prejudiced against them.
Leave a comment