The readings and video this week made me think a lot about the fundamental purpose of schools, and who gets to determine and measure that purpose.  In particular, they made me think about the concept of standards and standardized structures in schools – who designs them, who enforces them, and who determines how they are evaluated.  Ultimately, it brought me back to our discussion last week of the danger of false “neutrality”.  Standards aren’t neutral and conceptions of care aren’t neutral, and so no single school structure, standard, or evaluative tool can be used alone or uncritically. 

This was most clear in the readings in terms of the concept of care.  It is clear that concepts of care are always filtered through the lens of the individual enacting the care – their positionality, relationship, race, and position of power.  As Antrop-Gonzalez and De Jesus (2006) explain, the “colorblind assumptions” of a White feminism define caring as “emotion-laden practice characterized by low expectations motivated by taking pity on students’ social circumstances,” (p. 411).  This is the kind of caring that Rivera-McCutchen (2012) describes as prevalent in her study of Highbridge High School.  As she notes – “without a fundamental belief that students are capable, the other qualities the literature identifies as part of a caring framework…are ultimately secondary” (p. 677).  Indeed, the White savior definition of caring is steeped in the racist ideologies of who is intelligent or capable. 

However, it is not possible to simply establish a set of policies or structures to address this fundamental difference in defining caring, because policies and structures are not neutral.  For example – in Rivera-McCutchen’s (2012) study of Highbridge school, teachers continual extending of deadlines was an example of this problematic form of caring – not in and of itself, but rather because “there was little evidence to suggest that teachers believed students would ultimately be capable of meeting standards without the additional leniency” (p. 675).  In contrast, a student in Antrop-Gonzalez and De Jesus’ (2006) study shares that a teacher’s flexibility was framed in the knowledge and belief in the students’ capacity – “I remember when I got a ‘C’ on a test. The teacher told me that I could’ve done better so he let me take the test again. I thought that was cool because it showed me that the teacher cared about me.” (p. 426).  As they explain, high expectations and academic press are not necessarily “extreme academic pressure, high-stakes testing or other humiliating practices aimed at raising test scores” but rather are “communicated through the patient investment of time and the creation of reciprocal obligations between students and facilitators as an important and active form of social capital.” (p. 426).

Further, if teachers demonstrate care by holding students to high standards, but those standards are problematic, how can that be considered critical care?  In the practices that Curry (2016) describes a powerful ritual implemented by the school as part of its “critical carino”.  However, some of the standards established for that experience – the “professionalism” of dress and language – upheld problematic and white-washed ideologies presented as neutral. As Curry writes, “firewalks through their symbolic endorsement of dominant, meritocratic paradigms as evidenced in ‘‘dressing for success,’’ the reification of a college education as the ticket to becoming valued, and bootstrap remarks like ‘‘You can do whatever you want to do!’’ or ‘‘The power is in your hands!’’ may be viewed as mechanisms propping up the status quo and co-opting students into false consciousness” (p. 909).  

This came up also in the powerful video about parent organizing in the Bronx, and work of CC9 and the CEJ coalition. The Lead Teacher program worked precisely because it was guided by the knowledge, care, and expertise of parents coupled with the support of other institutions taking their cues from them.  The parents established the standards – the goals of the program and the method of evaluating it – the parents conducted the interviews, devised the questions, and developed the “rating system, what we were looking for.”  Just like the description at the start of the video – “They [the parents] knew best. They were their children.”  The parents set the tone for what was most valuable and important, and then worked with educators they identified as having the qualities that were most important to design the measures of “good teaching” that would ensure the best for their children. However, when this program was taken and replicated by the DOE – the same institution that created and implemented the systems that the CC9 were fighting against – it lost the fundamental and central feature that made it successful – the specific and explicit input and structural power and decision making by the parents whose children were in that school.

As both the Antrop-Gonzalez and DeJesus article, and the parent video, make very clear – you cannot simply take a structure or a program and replicate it out of context.  Small schools alone are not the solution for authentic caring (p. 410) – indeed the size of the schools were not the defining feature, but rather the fact that they “were established by Puerto Rican/Latino community activists, revolutionaries and educators to address educational crises in their communities created precisely by urban school districts” and that “the relevance and quality of instruction and the interpersonal relations that form inside these schools is far more significant than their size” (p. 410).  A Lead-Teacher program alone is not the solution – instead, the allocations of power to parents, the alignment of goals for their children out of the most authentic kind of caring, and the contextualized and specific knowledge and expertise were what made it successful.

I am left wondering – is it possible to design universal standards and structures for schools that don’t replicate or reify oppressive and violent ideologies?  What would it mean for standards to always be designed, informed, or measured by coalitions of young people and adults – to have horizontal relationships (Tichnor-Wagner and Allen) set the goals and standards – for students and teachers and administrators? To include young people in both of those processes?