A note about writing, process, and activism

NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram

This week I talk about writing, how I approached it, and the way I’ve come to name whatever form of activism NSFS is and how Post-PhD influenced my decision to become a high school teacher in Harlem.

Dear friends and fam,

As you read this, I’m currently on a solo writing-retreat at an airbnb in upstate NY to bang out my book proposal (thx papa Biden for that stimulus check, holla), which I’ve been procrastinating and avoiding and dragging out unnecessarily for about two months. How bad was my procrastination you ask? Well, so bad I wrote this newsletter exactly a week ago. I know this is a break from my usual content, but for this NSFS, I’m going to be talking about my own process, writing, and what my form of educational activism looks like.

So, hopefully you won’t mind me breaking the Brechtian 4th wall as they say (though to be fair, that has never been a wall so much as a hazy boundary in my writing). I knew I had to write this book exactly this time last year. Not because of the pandemic. Because of what I saw and participated in at a corrupt and deeply troubled urban charter school slated for closure. While this isn’t a book about the evils of charter schools, it nonetheless takes place in one. In fact, there are so many other books that exhaustively detail the inherent corruption and exploitation in the charter school industry, the only question I’m left with is: with all of this abundant literature on this topic, why has nothing been done? I knew I would not be as effective as writing about charter schools than the plethora of already great education writers on the topic. And it also felt besides the point: I am a humanities person. I’m more interested in the cultural conditions of modernity, which is to say, the cultural conditions from which the rise of charter schools, school privatization, and the further marginalization of the teaching force in both secondary and higher education.

This book began as a question: Why? Why had outright theft, over a million dollars in the first few years of the charter school’s operation, reported to the school board, and inflated and nepotism-steeped hiring practices been allowed to happen with no criminal charges brought? The answer to this still eludes me. And I think that’s the point: we’ll never know how bad it really is, how vast this in-plain-sight criminal network of school boards, superintendents, and charter school founders really is simply because it is everywhere.

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So, very quickly, this book I thought would be a whistle-blower account of charter schools and school board corruption, became about something bigger than that. When my whistle-blower account of “Why I Left Academia” first went viral, and hundreds of “me too” emails poured into my inbox, I realized then that this was not about my individual advisor trouble, but rather what happened to me was like a small tiny wound on a dying system. Small peanuts. Which is why it took me by surprise that I didn’t see this sooner. The perils of over-research, I suppose. It took me about six months of intenseive research to realize that this issue, too, was again not about one particular school, county, or even state education system.

The only possible explanation that what I saw was allowed to happen to minors, to children, has always been the case when BIPOC communities are involved. Exploitation and corruption are particularly rife in “urban” schools which are overwhelmingly Black and brown. That is not a conicidence. It is a symptom of white supremacy.

So, I wrote a book about the pernicious effects of culturally instituted and systemically ingrained white supremacy. I talk about the Black joy and Black excellence I found in the ubran classroom. The pedagogy of empowerment that I build by hand. All the wins I begin to make in the classroom. But, it is also a book about how, despite how hard I tried, I knew I was never long for this world, not because of other teachers, or even principals, but because of the structure of education. It’s a cancer spread to your lymph nodes, it’s everywhere from outdated and racist common core curriculum to the obsession with test scores; there is no room in public education to teach a pedagogy of empowerment. Soon, I suspect, this will also be the case for higher education, if it isn’t already too late.

Because Black lives don’t matter in the U.S.

At this time, the cries came from inside the house as to how expensive and wasteful public education was, and how it would best be handled by handing it over to the business guys, the tough guys who knew how to run a corporation. Surely they would do a better job than those who had been in their classrooms and schools for decades. They could trim the bloat, scale efficiently and turn it into a profit making entity, what more could we want from our nation’s public education system??

Teaching English at both public and charter schools taught me about the joys of Dominican culture, African-American culture, and the weird strictness kids of immigrant parents adeptly navigate all while staying cool for their friends. They are a joy. They are nothing like their representations in pop culture or mass media. They are goofy minors who fall in love at the drop of a hat and are d e v a s t a t e d when that love doesn’t work out. In short, they’re kids. And they’re hilarious. They deserve so much more.

Charter schools began populating like a herpes outbreak in 2011, and that growth has continued unabated. To the point where it’s absurd to even wish that our nation’s education system could possibly get rid of them. They’re too imbricated. They’re on state school boards. They’re state superintendents. They’re all white, rich men. A token minority scattered in tastefully and discreetly. School privatization is now deeply enmeshed, perhaps inextricably from so, from public secondary education in the U.Ss. The disgusting and short-sighted privatization of public education began, as all the best neoliberal hellscapes do, in the 1970s. Right as the largest number of women and BIPOC people were enrolling in colleges. What a coincidence.

I’m not being hyperbolic. That actually happened. Many, many times. Across the United States since 2011. And that’s how we can trace the downfall of both higher education and secondary education in the United States: it all began when minorities and women began enrolling in universities in higher numbers than white me. If you’re reading this, I know I don’t have to explain the insanely terrifying impacts of a general populace that is grossly undereducated and thus challenged at the crucial skills of critical analysis. We already lived that particular hellscape, and none of us will ever be the same again.

For some context, the total percentage of Black students in the U.S. is 15% and the percentage of Hispanic students 29% of the total student body. Despite this, over half of charter schools are in BIPOC majority neighborhoods. That is intentional. And no, it is not out of a desire for restorative justice or whatever current brand of white saviorism is popular at the moment. It’s because of money. Duh. It’s just justified with a misbelief that white people “help” minority communities.

In 2016, 62% of college graduates were white. Up from 2011’s 57%. Black students dropped a percentage point between 2011 and 2016 from 15% to 14%. The college graduate rate of Hispanic students also dropped– from 19% to 13%. [Source: https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf]

I think we can all grasp how large even a percentage point is in terms of scale here, especially just a 5 year time period, since that is what we’ve all been inundated with since the pandemic began. I personally believe, based on a 47 page long bibliography I have read and catalogued in the past year, in addition to countless interviews with experts on every single facet of education, that charter schools are directly to blame for this. But don’t get me wrong: urban public schools are just barely better options. School privatization did not solve any problems, rather, it widened the inequality gap and let loose more disgusting forms of exploitation and corruption. Truly stomach churning stuff. It’s been difficult to research this.

How our schools got this point: Neoliberalism = Racism 4 Profit

Remember ‘desegregation’? Yeah. That never really happened, except for in the South, but don’t worry, they all opened Christian private schools and voted consistently for hundreds of years to divest in public education. So, you see, both sides of the Civil War are responsible for this.

But let me be clear: the racism in the South, just as the sheer hatred for LGBTQ+ peoples and the outrageous violence against BIPOC communities that occur are worse. One more time for the cheap seats in the back: the south is still more racist. Don’t @ me. I got receipts. As a fallen debutante, I back that assertion with about a decade of research on critical race and gender theory, modern history, and all of the major cultural movements marked by colonization and white supremacy.

Up in the north, desegregation was altogether avoided through rezoning– where of course real estate investors prayed on African Americans, sucking many of them from a middle class stability back into poverty by the 1980s. With “desegregation” in the North, Black and brown kids were bussed into previously all-white schools. Imagine how welcoming that must have been. What a wonderful, welcoming and safe environment for learning to take place.

And then, they fired all the Black teachers.

Yes. When desegregation happened, tens of thousands of Black teachers lost their jobs. This came right as predatory real estate lending and redistricting all but assured if you were Black and middle class, your kids would be at the very bottom of the economic scale. What a country.

It’s all a scam. The system’s rigged. My book is not about wasting critical time discussing whether or not it’s a scam. The abundant literature on the commodification and corporatization of the university as well as of secondary education is shocking. But it’s also a boring read, that for me, erases the humanity of all of this. Reduces actual students to mere statistics, which only work as a new way of further dehumanizing them.

This summer, I spent the early months in the streets protesting the grotesque death of George Floyd, Breonna Tayler and the millions of unnamed Black people this nation has murdered across history, as I researched the history of public education, and in particular, so-called desegregation. My inner academic was obsessed with facts. Finding proof. But the proof was so abundant, that my book took an entirely different, but perhaps more profound direction.

For three years, I taught in a diverse array of urban educational contexts, thanks to the itinerant reality of adjunct professors. When I left to write this book, I was obsessed with researching exactly how what I experienced at a corrupt, flailing charter school was allowed to happen. I taught there for merely six months, and over half of them were warped into further trauma and pain by the pandemic. I saw visibly drunk white teachers, I saw overtly racist white teachers and principals, and did not find a single white person willing to collaborate and invest in new ways of educating urban youth. All of them considered themselves part of the solution. As I did for myself.

White Saviors & Me

The “White savior” mentality is at the heart of this, and at the heart of the book I’m writing as you read this. I don’t have a thoroughly articulated position on this meaty topic, but hopefully some magic is going to happen this week. Between bell hooks and James Baldwin, I think I’ll be cooking with fire. Hopefully at least.

I know what I’m writing will expose me to the wrath of white supremacist trolls, and I’m not going to lie: I’m a little scared. I know what I have to say is not going to be popular. But, as you read this, I’ll be on a complete communication black out– no twitter, no email, no newsletters. Because I need to freaking finish this book proposal, regardless of how nervous I am about how what I have to say will be perceived. But nevertheless, for the cheap seats in the back: whiteness, and any allegiance toward it as ideology or identity, is terrorism. Period.

And I’m not going to lie, once I found enough dirt on charter schools, and realized just how deep charter lobbyists’ pockets were, thanks to the fact that urban charter schools in particular generate a lot of profit for hedge funds down to individual teachers sticking their hands in the cookie jar. It’s too lucrative to be able to stop. Far too many people, far far removed from the consequences of their investments and actions, are profitting off the tax breaks, extra federal funding designated for ‘urban schools,’ real estate ventures and hedge funders all love, and will arendtly fight for their right to exploit BIPOC minors.

Those of you who’ve been with me since the early days know I’ve already paid a pretty high price to be a whistle blower. And that was at the helm of an individual, not an intensely lucrative industry that is urban charter school proliferation. Those ain’t my dogs to fight, because I gotta live, I gotta make a living, and most of all, I want my writing to be read. I know all too well how easy it would be to cut me off at the knees in terms of a writing career because that’s already happened to me. And I’m still trying to rebuild my life from the rubble of that from four years ago.

Well anyway, wish me luck on this endeavor. I’m working on a subscription-based “additional content” feature which will allow you to pitch in to support this project. I’ll be coming up with extra content, resources, and workshops for subscribers, but of course, I am committed to Open Access in every sense of the word, so NSFS itself will always be free.

And as always, if you enjoyed reading this, share it! That’s the best way to support my writing. And if you haven’t already, subscribe.

Thanks for reading.

Until next week,

Allison

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