In Black America; Cutting School, with Dr. Noliwe Rooks, Part I

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. I often notice that if you would see pictures or hear people from, say, teach for America or various high-level charter schools, everybody sitting around the table would be white, which is not necessarily bad, except they were white, and then talking about how little contact history, understanding, or knowledge they had about the poor, black, and Latino people that they were responsible for educating, and I started really trying to figure out how to bring what I knew about black communities that I've never, ever known of black communities at large, where you don't have people very interested in getting their children at education. But you would hear all these stories about now children think they're just acting white

to get an education, or, you know, the parents don't know enough to participate. We have to force them to sign contracts, to even show up, to interact with their kids, and I'm not saying that's never true. I'm not saying that there are not, you know, complex people. Dr. Noli Wei-Rooks, Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of African Studies at Cornell University, an author of cutting school, privatization, segregation, and the end of public education, published by The New Press. In the book, Rooks to spoil the question many are asking, why are public schools more segregated now than in years past, and why are public schools failing? To answer these and other questions regarding public education, Rooks followed the money, tracing the financing of segregation in this country, beginning with the Civil War Reconstruction to the current discussion regarding school vouchers. Having experienced two different education systems growing up, she found the interesting that those in support of quality education were more interested in the business of education.

I'm Johnny Owens in junior and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, cutting school with author Dr. Noli Wei-Rooks, Director of American Studies at Cornell University, in Black America. They said, not only can we educate them, we can make sure that they are going to be college graduates and beyond, and the stories that you hear from the hundreds and hundreds of kids in each of those institutions are also similar. It's really, you know, they loved us into success. It was not, they were strict, they believed in discipline, they were not really like having people, you know, talk to them any kind of way or at crazy, but it wasn't the same kind of punitive, no excuses, how can we get you into the carceral state in the prison? How can we just suspend you and send you into detention? It wasn't that kind of discipline, and as these people say, you know, we noticed they loved us enough that we wanted to do well.

And it seems such a simple thing in a way, but it's not, right, because you got to have the right teachers in the room, in the right environment, with the right expectations for that to be true. It is not impossible. In recent years, students and parent organizations have taken to protest, walkouts, and demonstrations of what they perceive that the taking of authority over the education they believe belongs at the local level. In a Newer's book entitled Cutting School Dr. Nulliway Rooks, crowns of making and unmaking of public education in this country, Rooks provides an analysis of our separate and unequal schools and states that profiting from our nation's failure to provide a high quality education to all students have become very big business. In fact, private investment and education increased from $2.5 million in 1990 to $4 billion just a decade later. And between charter and virtual schools, the investment and achievement gaps only grows. It should also be noted that African-American families are one of the fastest-going segments

in the homeschooling world. William Black America's Smoke of Dr. Rooks, regarding her research, I did, I did a Spelman night, proud of it. I grew up splitting my time, but to my parents divorced when I was five. And so I went, their custody arrangement, I went back and forth each year between them. So that was between Clearwater, Florida where my father and grandmother lived. And then in San Francisco, which is where my mother and her people were. So I had the, in terms of schools, when I was in Florida, I happened to be there right when the schools were integrating. So most of the schools I went to were predominantly white when I was in, or I was, I was the, you know, people will say euphemistically the fly in the buttermilk. It's not that they were all white, it was like all white and me. And then in California for the most part, I went to schools that were either black or heavily of color. Was it your grandfather that was an educator?

Yes. So my grandfather was, you know, it's funny, when you don't do oral history. So all I know is when he got to Clearwater, Florida, he was the principal of one of the schools. And I know that of a, you know, segregated at the time, we talk about the 30s, 40s, and 50s in the South. And I know that his people, though, were sharecroppers, and he came from Lake County, which is a more agricultural district, but how he got, went from Lake County to rise to be the principal of a school, I don't actually know. What initially sparked your interest in education? You know, the thing that I was talking to some people earlier today, and I was saying that I find as an academic, I'm always finding ways to what I call bring my people into the room. So the thing about being at, going to college into grad school is very often the ways that people talk about black communities, the scholarship that we have, the kind of lens that people use.

I don't always recognize people who raised me, who loved me first and best, right? I don't, I don't always see us represent it. And so in a lot of these conversations about educational reform that have been taking place since at least the 90s, really public conversations about we need to save these communities, we need to save schools, we, you know, it's a shame for a child zip code to determine their education, which is, which is, in arguably true. But the ways that they will talk about black communities and poor communities and the ways that those communities were excluded from the tables where the decisions were being made, I often notice that if you would see pictures or hear people from, say, teach for America or various high, high level charter schools, everybody sitting around the table would be white, which is not necessarily bad, except they were white. And then talking about how little contact history, understanding or knowledge they had about the poor, black and Latino people that they were responsible for educating.

And I started really trying to figure out how to, how to, how to bring what I knew about black communities, they've never, I've never ever known of black communities at large where you don't have people very interested in getting their children at education. But you would hear all these stories about now children think these acting white to get an education or, you know, the parents don't know enough to participate. We have to force them to sign contracts to even show up to interact with their kids. And I'm not saying that's never true, I'm not saying that there are not, you know, complex people in black communities. But I did know that there was troubling to me that I was never hearing about the black communities that I did know existed, that I was never hearing about people like my grandfather. And all the people who came, came after him. You can't go into a black community and not have some depth, generational depth around

activism and thinking about and fighting for, fighting against often the public school system to try to include and educate black kids. And so that was a part of the story that it seemed to me was missing. And so in addition to my family background, it was that, you know, wanting to see those folks in that conversation. Dr. Rooks, in relation to your educational upbringing, being educated in two different school system as it relates to your book, did you know there was a difference back then? Well, I think the thing was, one of the things that I noticed as I had to think about it while writing this was the fact that I don't recall in Florida, where I was mostly with white people, I had no friendships that I have any recall about. I was never going to people's homes, I was never having sleepovers. The stuff that happens in elementary school, you know, after school, play dates, phone

calls, that kind of thing, I have zero memory of any of that ever happening. But I didn't have it. I learned how to square dance. I know that. Like I remember that. I can dose you dough with the best of them because of Florida. You know, that's what you did during gym. And I learned how to recite all 52 prepositions from memory. Like those are the two things that I kind of remember from that period. I had no trauma, I was perfectly tolerated, but I was not, you know, I wasn't a part of the community. You know, I wasn't run out on a rail, but I just wasn't a part of the things that were going on. And in terms of the community feel in San Francisco, that was a whole different thing. You know, just, I had more of a social life. In terms of education, at the time, the San Francisco public schools were really high performing. So even though they were majority of color, where I lived in the neighborhoods that I lived, they were really high quality.

They were a model for the nation. They were like number one in education until some of these tax cut fanatics during Reagan came along and slash the funding for schools. So they started to go downhill after that. You talk about in the book, these individuals were all intended, but their focus was somewhat limited. And as they look at the advancement of people of color, educational-wise, more so than actually having them obtain a level of success educationally, other than just coming in and just say, if we're there, we're going to automatically, they're going to be able to do better, but that was not so the case. Yeah. One of the things I talk about are black independent schools, black schools, black educators. I mean, I think that she is revolutionary in an icon, Marvel Collins, which I was somewhere and I actually mentioned Marvel Collins and nobody in the room knew who she was, but you

had schools and educators who were, the Black Panther Party, their community school. As fought by all the standard tests and measures, the children who were going to these schools and they were always from the lowest performing strata of the community, you know, public housing folks, unemployed parents, homeless sometimes, coming to school without food, like they were not high-by-high, there was a lot of social disruption in and around their lives. And those are the children that these educators would target in the 1970s. This is when most of the schools started, started really popping up and they started popping up. There's over 450 by the mid 1970s all over the country because for the most part, black parents, Latino parents, Native American parents, they're just totally and absolutely given up on the ability of public school systems to educate their children in a relevant kind

of fashion. But the thing that always, you know, the more I found out about them and doing this research when they went from just names and schools and dates to really looking at what they were doing in terms of curriculum, looking at what was happening with their graduates, I mean, it is truly astounding. The percentages, these schools, all of these educators, there's the Ivy Leaf School in Philadelphia, all of these educators, the way that they marked success was by college graduation. So, it wasn't, you know, your score on a test, it wasn't graduation from high school, they claimed success, they felt they had done their job at the point at which each of those children, who this public school systems often said, we can't educate them, give them drugs, put them in some special education class, maybe they need to go into juvenile detention, those same children, they said, not only can we educate them, we can make sure that they are going to be college graduates and beyond.

And the stories that you hear from the hundreds and hundreds of kids in each of those institutions are also similar, it's really, you know, they loved us into success. It was not, they were strict, they believed in discipline, they were not really like having people, you know, talk to them any kind of way or at crazy, but it wasn't the same kind of punitive, no excuses, how can we get you into the, the carceral state in the prison, how can we just suspend you and send you into detention, it wasn't that kind of discipline, and as these people say, you know, we noticed they loved us enough that we wanted to do well, and it seems such a simple thing in a way, but it's not, right, because you got to have the right teachers in the room, in the right environment, with the right expectations for that to be true, but it's not impossible. Dr. Rook, how did John D. Rockefeller and Julius Rosenwald affect our educational system as we know it today?

Yeah, this was a story that I, you know, I learned much more about. So as you can imagine, following reconstruction, following the period after the Civil War, and when the federal government was sending massive amounts of money in to try to reconstruct the South, right, put it back together, support the newly freed slaves, support the poor whites, you know, like just help the whole, the whole region heal, and they sent federal troops, you know, to keep the peace, because you still, just because we won the war, there's still a lot of black, a lot of white people who were not easily accepting of the idea of black freedom, you know, like going right from, we used to have slaves, and now you're supposed to be a citizen, and you're supposed to be voting and, you know, going to school and walking the streets with me was not a, it just didn't happen when you said, okay, now we, we're, you lost the war. So there's this 12 year period where you had black folks who were just doing amazing stuff, being elected governors and senators, because you know, once you give us the vote in a region of the country where the majority, you know, you started to see some things

equaling out a bit, well, time came where they had to decide a election for president and it was deadlocked, and so they said, well, let's make a compromise, you know, we'll let this guy win if we pull the, the troops out of the South. So that was the, what followed post reconstruction was really a mad race to rebuild those structures of white supremacy, like they couldn't re-inslave black people, because the 13th Amendment had said they were free, and that they couldn't be slaves, and the 14th said that they were citizens, but so they couldn't just wholesale, go back to, to where they had been, but they started to chip away at all of the gains that had been made, including education. So massive amounts of money were sent to start building schools, to educate poor whites as well as, as well as the formerly, formerly enslaved. And at that point, as people were sort of going, now why would we be educating black folks when all we need from them is to be service workers?

Why would we put that money into that? Let's take that money. These are state governments in the 13th former slaveholding states, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, all of them, all 13, Kentucky, you know, one after the other, start to institute laws where they say, it's illegal for black people to go to school if there are any white people around. It's illegal to spend white tax dollars as they put it, to educate black people. We need the black people to educate white people, like we need the tax dollars for one pot that will go into educating whites, and if they want more than that, they're going to have to pay an additional tax. They put everything in place to keep black folks from being educated, so you had some folks in the north who were rightly concerned, in part, though, because there was an economic issue. The South during slavery had been, you know, for the entire founding of the country up until 1865.

The South had been the economic engine for the entire nation. The reason that America was healthy economically, we were not into manufacturing railroads or, you know, a kind of new-ish kind of phenomena. It's still agriculture of various types that's fueling the expansion of the U.S. period. And so folks, business interests started to say, well, can we really just let this region of the country, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, folks who had deep business interests and ties. So, you know, we really are going to have to get in here and help these folks figure out this education of black folks, or they're going to drag us all down. The whole country will end up, you know, economically falling apart, because the white people don't want to educate any of the black people, but we need workers, and now we no longer have free labor. So we got to have them at some kind of literacy if they're going to participate in any kind of industry.

So they came along, and really, they're writing to each other saying, this is not me making up or inferring. The reason that they got involved in black education is literally they were concerned about the economic health of the nation. So they decided that what they would do, so as to not upset the folks in the South, you know, who are busy reinstituting white supremacy, like they're busy taking away black rights, left and right, and making it clear that white people are superior in every way, is let's come up with a scheme where this is Rosenwald School's, Rosenwald scheme. We know they need education, they're all in the rural areas, it's far from everything. How are we going to do this? And we can't get white legislatures to give us any money for it, so Julius Rosenwald comes along and says, okay, and working with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. And says, okay, this is what we're going to do. We are going to teach them self-help. We are going to make it possible for them to learn about hard work and self-help, and then they can educate themselves at the same time. These are formerly enslaved people who somehow need to be taught about hard work, you know,

and self-help. So what they said is each community had to collect some of money starting at $500 if you wanted a one-room schoolhouse. In today's terms, I believe if you go to the most disenfranchised area and said, okay, now y'all got to come up with $6,000. So then you first had to raise the $500. If you wanted to participate in Rosenwald's grant matching program. And then after you raised the $500, you could apply, and then they could say, yes, sure, you know, we'll take you on. But then you had to find someone to deed the land to county officials. So if you wanted a school, black communities all over the South and the rural areas had to find some land where someone would give it to the state. Because they wouldn't let you rent land, and they wouldn't let you build on state or county own land. For black people, you had somebody had to own it, and they had to turn it over.

So black churches were one of the main sources of land at the time. I believe the reason there's so many schools is because black churches did have land, and we're willing to turn it over. So then you had to find the land and get it donated. You still not getting a matching grant. Then you had to identify all of the materials and figure out how to pay for them. You could go chop down trees if that worked for you. You could go to the lumber yard and work out something however it was. You had to, after raising this money and getting some money to donate land, you had to get all the necessary materials for building it. And then you had to find some people to build it on your dime, your little community, had to find the people to actually put it up. Once all of that happened, Rosenwald would give you $500 in matching funds. And all across the South, the primary form of education for black people up into the 1930s or so, late 1930s, post-reconstruction to like 30s or so, were these Rosenwald schools,

which did amazing things. Like the raised literacy rates, and it did in fact educate rural black people, and nobody else was going to educate them. But it really was that the under toll story, it's not untold, but under toll is how desperate those communities were for education that they gave everything they had to build these school things. And the multi-millionaire, you know, gave $500. That was a long answer. But I had to like you, but you got to set the whole thing up, so. I had to say it. If you're just joining us, I'm Johnny O'Hanston Jr., and you're listening to In Black America from KUT Radio, and we're speaking with Dr. Noli Wai Rooks, Director of American Studies at Cornell University, and also Professor of Africana Studies and Author of Cutting School. Dr. Rooks, every administration back to Ronald Reagan, had some kind of initiative towards education.

Well intended, the good on paper, but by and large, none of them actually worked. What happened? But generally, any of the schemes that people came up with, one that involved integration, you know, the one thing that has worked systemically, integration has all kinds of problems, however, it's the only thing that has worked at a systemic level to close achievement gaps over time. Or increasingly, and initially, white communities were in the North or South were not overjoyed at the idea of integrating. So as all of these initiatives are coming up, you know, some of them are things like Joe Biden in the 1970s, you know, during Nixon's presidency, decides that all of his constituents are saying, well, we don't want our children bust, and we don't want black children bust us.

So I need you to figure out, you know, how to abide by the law, but not actually bust any white or black children anywhere. Which they couldn't quite figure out, you know, like is it legal and people are pressing back? So Joe Biden, our former vice president, one of the things that he did, he just won of many who did stuff like this, introduced a bill saying, well, if you want to put gasoline in buses for the express purpose of fostering integration, if you're going to move either black or white students from black schools to white schools with buses, it is illegal for you to use federal funds to put gas in the buses. So while they didn't, he did not, you know, directly say, we're going to bring back in a segregation, you know, we're going to make it illegal for black and white students to be together, if you can't get them back and forth, if you have denied people the means of traveling at the federal level, then you're interfering, you know, in a way, with the idea of integration.

Nixon, really, what he ended up just going ahead and deciding was, let's make of this sort of devil's bargain, this like fund segregated inner city schools to a much, much higher level and let white suburbs at the time, you know, now a lot of white people are moving back into the inner city, but at the time, it was, you know, the suburbs were the places they were white. And there's this saying between North and South, people in the civil rights movement and demarcating the difference would say, you know, in the South, white people don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too high. In the North, they don't care how high you get as long as you don't get too close. So that idea of, you could, you could, you know, in the North, you know, people were sort of like, yeah, sure, go be doctors, have your whole own communities run for stuff, you know, in Chicago, they had whole aldermen and then you could have a whole black infrastructure. Just don't try to get too close to us.

You can get high, but, you know, in the South, because the way communities were, a lot of communities were right on top of each other, you're talking one street over, you know, hopscotching. So they were like, yeah, you can get close, you can live on the next block, but don't try to rise, you know, that's our line in the sand. And that really plays out when you see education policy going from Nixon who was like, okay, you know, like you, y'all just stay over there in the suburbs and the black people y'all just stay in the urban areas and I'll give you money, just stay away. And then by Reagan, what people decided, one report after another, got together and said, you know, really all this social issues and this integration, it's really, it's harming American education as a whole. If we look at how all of American education is performing, we're going down the tubes and the Reagan administration decided that we were going down the tubes based on a lot of a number of different reports that they commissioned, in part because we weren't training

people to be workers for business and we have been focusing too much on social issues. So they said, okay, let's take all of this integration and rising people up from the bottom and education as a lever or change out and let's just talk about how American education can benefit American businesses solely. And so we did that for a while. Dr. Noloway Rooks, Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, an author of Cutting School, Priavization, Segregation and the End of Public Education. We will include our conversation on next week's program. Have you have questions, comments, or suggestions asked your future in black America programs, email us at inblackamerica at kut.org. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. Remember to like us on Facebook and the follow us on Twitter. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station

or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can get previous programs online at kut.org. Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez, I'm Johnny O Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week. CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in black America CDs, KUT Radio, 300 West Dean Keaton Boulevard, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in black America CDs, KUT Radio, 300 West Dean Keaton Boulevard, Austin, Texas, 78712. This has been a production of KUT Radio.