By Matthew Dunn
In 2010,
American Express released a commercial featuring Harlem Children’s Zone CEO
Geoffrey Canada. In this commercial
Canada explained some of his efforts at using his charter school to transform
the uptown Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem.
The commercial presents Canada as kind of a savior for a neighborhood
which was desperate for someone to take action to combat poverty, crime, and
squalor. He then states that the Harlem
Children’s Zone will help students graduate from college, and block by block
they will improve their neighborhood.
This commercial truly presents a charter school that could be a stepping
stone for real social transformation.[i]
This
commercial truly aimed to tug at people’s heart strings. However, one must remember that this was a
commercial designed to get people to sign up for American Express Cards. Perhaps Canada should have started this
commercial with a disclaimer that this was a commercial for a credit card which
allows people to accumulate debt. High
levels of debt and punishment for not paying debts have consistently been one
of the major problems that African Americans have faced. It’s an advertisement though, so one should
not expect any criticism of the company.
There is no doubt though, that one watching this commercial would feel
that charter schools definitely offer a promising alternative for poor African
American youth. So let’s travel south to
a region even more influenced by African American culture, New Orleans, to see
how an experiment with charter schools has done.
As New
Orleans was and is a major port city, it was the one of the capitals of the
slave trade before the Civil War.
African Americans today compose a large majority of the population of
the city. The public schools of New
Orleans had been said to be an almost total failure in the early 21st
Century. In addition to this, New
Orleans was constantly ravaged by crime and violence. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the
city of New Orleans, the managers of the city tried an ambitious new experiment. After the hurricane, the city government
approved a plan to turn all of the existing public schools into charter
schools. This was done without any
approval from the residents and done in a time of huge suffering when people
were concerned with just surviving day by day.
While residents had left the city in large numbers, the teacher’s union
contracts were cancelled, public schools were closed, and privately run charters
were put in their place.[ii] This move was overseen by Paul Vallas, who
had previously served as CEO of Chicago and Philadelphia’s public schools. Vallas in his time at those positions also
had promoted rapid development of charter schools. Eventually under his tenure only four public
schools remained in New Orleans.
So, New
Orleans has had almost ten years of charter schools at this point. They must have completely transformed the city,
lowering crime and making the city a much better place to live right? I mean if American Express advertises for it,
it must be true? In fact, New Orleans
was and continues to be probably one of the worst places in the nation to
live. New Orleans has one of the 50th
highest murder rates in the world, currently placing 28th, right behind
Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Ciudad Juarez
is one of the notorious border cities near the United States, where drug wars
have murdered thousands in recent years, and the military was brought in to deal
with the high levels of violence.[iii]
It’s not exactly somewhere you would like to have any comparable statistics to.
Now
this is not to blame charter schools for the high levels of violence in the
city. It is just to point out that
charter schools are not the miracle cure all that they have been said to
be. There are no easy fixes to longstanding
poverty and violence that has been in certain areas of the United States since
its founding. To advertise easy
solutions to this through charter schools is arrogant and deceiving. The fact that schools in New Orleans were
failing is no surprise. They were
concentrated in an area which has been dominated by poverty and racism since
the first European settlement. In
addition to this, giving public property to private managers in a time of
crisis hardly seems to be a democratic idea.
We fight wars supposedly to bring democracy to people of other nations,
so they can make decisions for themselves.
Maybe we need to start bringing more democracy to our own cities, rather
than promoting quick fixes.
[i] American
Express Members Project TV Spot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZxS-rnjOGQ.
Retrived 3/2/2015. This and other Harlem
Children’s Zone ads can be seen as well, documenting their efforts to transform
education in Harlem.
[ii]
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York;
Picador, 2007.
[iii]
List of Countries by Murder Rate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate.
Retrived 3/7/2015.
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