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Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform

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Jean Anyon's book, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform paints a harrowing portrait of the struggles of those who have a role in inner-city schools. It is written in three parts that address the present situation, reflect upon the past, and look to the future, respectively. The book took several years to write due to the level of research involved for the historical content, but the personal account was based on four years of the author's participation in the reform effort in Newark, New Jersey, beginning in 1992. The reform efforts targeted eight schools in the central section of the city. (On a broader note, the historical text of the book points out that the decline of the schools really began in the 1930s.) The book begins by showing the present state of education within the reform district, but then postulates the reasons for this status by looking at the historical foundations of the problems. In the first chapter of part two, Anyon begins the historical breakdown by looking at early situation with educating the children of the many immigrants who came to Newark beginning in the 1860s. Despite early attempts at reform, the seeds had already been planted for the disenfranchisement seen today. The historical context of Anyon's research design shows decade by decade the continual decay of the Newark schools. Reform efforts were suggested, but never truly implemented. After the period of organized crime and municipal scandals had arrived, Anyon notes that:
"Because there was no rescue of the Newark educational system in 1968, it would continue to limp along, and further generations of Newark children-the grandchildren, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of the southern rural immigrants-would
join their parents in the ranks of the uneducated and the undereducated. Many would therefore be unable to participate in the economic and political institutions of U.S. society" (p. 127).

This generational cycle of poverty and hopelessness is at the heart of Anyon's determination that changes can only be effective if they consider the sociocultural status and economic plight of those involved. I found the accounts in the book to be a revelation to say the least. I think people like myself who are born and raised outside urban areas live in blissful ignorance as to the true state of education for the thousands trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair. I like that Anyon takes such an honest approach to her research, realizing that to be effective she must be disclose everything she witnessed. The only change I would like to see is the statistical information presented in some type of graph form so that it would be easier to read and interpret. Otherwise, I found the book to be an invaluable read as a future educator. In fact, it has made me think beyond the world of education and to ponder my place among the human race and the responsibility I must take for needs of my fellow man and the generations to come.

Anyon wrote a provocative article a number of years ago which I still use in my teacher education classes. But this new book is troubling to me. She fails to look at the national systemic causes of institutional racism and seems to blame those in the local schools. I don't know New Jersey - maybe she is right about that city. But I do know other urban districts, and it is natioanl systems of testing, curriculum, funding, bureaucracy, and irrelevant teacher credentialing which oppress both those who attempt to educate and those who attempt to be educated. The African-American teachers in New Jersey tried to tell Anyon that, but she didn't listen.

Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Education Reform, is an interesting explanation of the case study done by the author, Jean Anyon. Anyon was a part of the attempted educational reform of the Newark, New Jersey schools in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Although most of her personal contact was with the faculty, staff, administration, parents, and children of the Marcy school, she gives the historical background for the Newark schools system starting in 1860. This history ventures all of the way to the present, which includes her personal experience in the reform process. Although the reform process in which she participated in failed, she did learn a great deal and shared a lot of insight about school reform. Her main point was that reform would not happen until the economic and political systems that surround the schools are transformed, neither would the schools be transformed. (Anyon 13) I found this book to be informative and insightful. Through this reading I have a better understanding of the inner city school setting, and how much help is needed there. Unfortunately, as Anyon point out, money is not the answer. The answer is reform on the larger scale. This book helped me to see this. Additionally, because of my current quest to become a teacher this booked helped me to prepare for some of the obstacles I may face. Although I will probably never teach at a school like those in the Newark district, it is very beneficial to my learning process to see the problem that plague the educational community. I am glad this book was part of my college curriculum.

It is easy in this day of age to forget about the troubling aspects that are still facing public schools in our large cities. With this book, Jean Anyon does not let us forget the problems that are still facing these schools today. This book provides a different and important perspective on public school reform in this nation. Anyon does not jump to blame the schools, teachers and students like is done so often when schools fail, but rather she portrays how cummulative effects of school and public officials decisions have tied the hands of the public education reformers in those cities. Anyon's ideas are more comprehensive, and she does not want to just change the schools, but the city itself. This book is very compelling and insightful and offers a great look inside the doors of the public school system in our urban environment.

Jean Anyon is currently a Professor of Urban Education in the graduate program, City University of New York. She wrote Ghetto Schooling after participating in an unsuccessful four-year attempt to restructure eight schools in inner city Newark, NJ. She says, "To discover why inner city schools have not improved, it is not enough to only examine present reform or educational practice. We need, in addition, to understand how inner city schools have come to be what they are" (xv). The book traces the historical political economy of old industrial cities in the U.S., with Newark as the focus. She shows how the factors that mitigated against reform in the 1990's developed, and how they represent the "concentration effects of the gradual ghettoization and stigmatization over time of the city's minority poor" (xv).

The assertions Anyon makes are diligently researched and extensively documented. Unfortunately, the way the findings are reported makes it extremely difficult to follow the argument. Anyon herself contributes to this difficulty with a tangled and complex prose style. The demographic trends, comparisons of funding levels, changes in racial composition of students, faculty and administrators, trends in qualifications of teachers and in student/teacher ratio, number of substitute teachers, proportions of the budgets spent on classroom instruction vs. non-instructional personnel, and so on, should have been put into charts, graphs, maps and tables. Burying them in paragraph after paragraph of narrative studded with numbers, percentages, and in-text citations makes them nearly useless. For example, it is unclear to me whether Newark is considered a "large city" or not, and I couldn't figure out which county it is in. That made it impossible to evaluate some of the things she said about other cities and counties.

The book shows that the Newark public school system, which was once considered a model, never did a good job with working class, poor, and immigrant children. Their graduation rates were abysmal, their schools and teachers were always substandard, and they were always marginalized, despised and abused. As long as there were plenty of jobs in the city that did not require an education, the second class status of the poor children in the system was hidden from view. Anyon also shows how federal and state policies regarding mortgage lending, urban renewal, highway construction, and tax incentives for investment led to the destruction of inner city neighborhoods and isolation and impoverishment of the people. It shows how the political isolation of both the city government and the school board in Newark contributed to the ascendancy of organized crime and machine politics, which diverted enormous amounts of revenue intended for schools into the pockets of criminals and their accomplices. Then it shows how the schools went into a freefall caused by loss of tax base, unjust education funding policies, and grossly incompetent and unsuitable teachers and administrators. Anyon traces the history of attempts at reform, including numerous lawsuits aimed at enforcing the requirement of the New Jersey Constitution that all school children in the state be provided a "thorough and efficient" free public education. This social, political and economic analysis makes it clear that it was not primarily teachers' unions, or liberals, or starry-eyed idealists who "ruined" the system, but business interests, organized crime and wealthy conservatives.

Anyon concludes that it will not be possible to fix urban education without addressing poverty and racism. Urban school systems comprise parents, administrators, teachers and students who are, themselves, products of a socially, culturally, linguistically, and economically isolated, marginalized and powerless society that has no viable connection with the centers of power, money and influence in the city of Newark, the state of New Jersey or the federal government. The low expectations, dysfunctional organization, and culture of resignation, abuse, incompetence and failure that Anyon observed in the schools, and that have been rightly cited as contributory factors in school failure, are symptoms, not causes. Although Anyon goes acknowledges that many individuals and groups work diligently to make things better in the Newark schools, the book shows that no program, no restructuring, no analysis of the education system that fails to address the cultural, political, and economic structures of the inner city itself can succeed. Unless the ghettos are transformed into economically viable, functional communities, it will be impossible to make any meaningful improvement in ghetto schooling.

I agree wholeheartedly with that conclusion, but the book is short on policy prescriptions. One of the most useful suggestions is that all grassroots efforts to transform inner city environments include programs to improve education. That is about as specific as Anyon's proposed solutions get. She says, for example, that it ought to be possible to raise the money to fix the system, pointing out that the U.S. has one of the lowest tax rates in the world. Yes, but fiscal policy in this country is controlled by people who are determined to keep it that way, and who are getting more and more successful at doing just that.

The book predates "gentrification," but that, of course, is not the kind of transformation that Anyon had in mind. Razing slums to build gated upper class communities, and demolishing old schools to create charter schools that rich people want for their kids, further displacing and marginalizing the poor, is merely a new chapter in the old story of "urban renewal" as disaster capitalism. The most striking thing about "new urbanism" and the shiny new "mixed use" communities that are being built is their whiteness. Except for servants, you won't see any people of color in these theme parks, where the social classes of the residents and customers run the gamut from A to B.

We need a different paradigm for thinking about education itself, one that liberates the victims of oppression instead of blaming them. At first I was frustrated by Anyon's failure to propose a different paradigm in this book, but then I realized that she didn't promise that. She succeeded in her goal of showing what must be done. She did not undertake to describe how to do it.

Anyon has used ethnographic and historical material to make a case that's been made before, though I don't think it's been made this well: Schooling is a contextually determined institution. If the context -- in this case the urban U.S. -- is declining economically and socially, schooling will decline as well. If the cities in which schools are located are impoverished, crime-ridden, and devoid of opportunity, schools and their students will be faced with the same vastly diminished prospects. Anyone who has read Bowles and Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America, Willis' Learning got Labor, or Devine's Maximum Security already knows that schools can't be fixed from the inside out.

It's convenient to blame teachers and administrators for the damaging conditions which prevail in places like Newark's Marcy school, but what are teachers to do? Imagine a teacher who has just spent four or five years in a college or university acquiring the behavioral repertoires and theoretical perspectives which qualify them to be called education professionals. They get their first job at Marcy school. None of what they learned seems applicable -- the students are too poor and routinely brutalized, their colleagues are too demoralized, the principal is too cynical, parents are victimized by an unforgiving set of circumstances which constitutes their daily lives. Putative experts who bring the most recent reforms presented in the guise of staff development are clueless. It's easy to see that teachers would become alienated from and hostile to an environment that prevents them from doing the professional job that they were trained to do.

Anyon's claim that there's nothing special about Newark, that the same destructive processes are destroying education throughout the urban U.S., is indisputable. Furthermore, much the same applies to schooling in rural America. I've seen it in the West Virginia Coal Fields and in the poorest, most rural parts of central Kentucky.

It's a cruel oddity that in all these places, whether urban and poor or rural and poor, the same sort of educational reforms were being sold to the same sort of disaffected teachers and administrators by state officials who haven't set foot in a classroom for 30 years.

Until the context of education is massively reformed, bad educational jokes like No Child Left Behind will continue to be an intrusive nuisance for teachers and an embarrassment for the rest of us.

Anyon writes a provocative study of the school system in Newark and how the children of the area have been affected by local and state trends in funding, politics and economics. Her conclusions are specific to the Newark situation, but they lend themselves to a large study. Namely, that the problems that exist in our urban schools are not to be fixed with overnight reform.

Instead, the years of systematic abandonment and neglect by political officials and businesses have left the inner city, and those that reside in it, struggling to survive. Anyon paints this picture painfully well, and the book is a good read for those looking to understand why we can't educate poor and minority children.

Jean Anyon studies school reform in the failing Newark School system, focusing on her case study of Marcy School. It is an insightful case stdy that educators can apply to help us understand and ssist other failing urban school systems in our country. This took place during a four year refom effort by the Newark district from 1989 through 1993. As a dedicated researcher, she continued her study for another year in other district schools after the reforms ended. Anyon spent time with both students and teachers to get to know them and their opinions, diving her great insight into their educational plight. She held workshops for the teachers and faculty, as a staff developer for cooperative teaching. She combined this with spending one day per week, for ten months in the classrooms, assisting the teachers in implementing her programs. She combines municipal and educational, historical research of Newark, using archived materials to help support her theories and findings. She used archieved materials dating back 100 hundred years. I feel she incorporated her extensive use of historical documents and background articles to prevent criticism or disregard of her conclusions for the current status of the Newark school systems. This research provides realistic insight into the cause of their situation, resulting in meaningful solutions. Newark is identified as a "ghetto," wtih few businesses, dilapidated housing, and schools. She explains how their segregation and "ghetto" formation evolved wtih her research presented in chapter four. Anyon also makes us aware of the political problems that have been a critical part in the circle of poverty. The black areas have less political power to get their situation changed. She gives a historical account of how organized crime rule during the sixties, kept their unqulified friends employed, while letting the schools deteriorate under their rule. She also reveals mismangement of educational funds they received, by having to return the money when not spent in a timely fashion. Anyon reveals a circle of poverty and poor health in this community. It has been created over time and has become accepted as the norm by the residents of the community. The book does present a few weak pionts in Anyon's theories. One being that the only way to help change the city's educational dilemma is by changing the city's economic and political status. I think she misses suggesting methods to incorporate the city's students into the suburban schools. In summation fo her fingdings of this failing school system, she leads us to hypothesize as to what effects historical politics and economics have on modern day education systems. She presents us with research to suport her finding that society, over decades, has produced their current failing state of education, poverty, and racial isolation of this community. Her method to change this community's circle of poverty in these aspects is through a "grassroots movement between educators and those that can ssist them to create better social conditions" (p.168). She suggests that it is up to all of us, educators, healthcare workers, politicians, administrators, and parents; functioning as community members and concerned citizens; to become enraged enough to change this dire situation. "Through a concerted social action-to work together to provide cities, city families, children, and their schools with a modicum of hope and a chance to excel" (p.xvi). A vicious circle of poverty has crippled this community. Most likely, until suburban and urban residents pull their efforts together, the circle will continue to grow and spread their political, economic, and educational inequities.

The book, Ghetto Schooling A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform, written by Jean Anyon, is an informative book concerning the issues surrounding urban education, funding, and racism among many groups. Ghetto School is divided into three sections, with 8 chapters, providing background of the Newark, New Jersey school system and plight of inner-city schools beginning in 1860 and following through to present day. The results of Anyon's research should be a wake up call for all involved in education, from educators to politicians, and parents. In my opinion, the question is now more relevant than ever. Which factors led to the inadequacy of educational opportunities for urban school districts? Anyon defines her research by "describing the social milieu of isolation and poverty, then illustrate how these conditions affect urban schools. (Anyon 3) When looking back, Anyon has shown the implications for the future, central cities now hold only 29% of the nations population and comprise less than 12% of the national electorate (Judd and Swanstrom 1994, Anyon 1997). As mentioned through her research, the majority of the middle class tax base and industry in which supports both the middle class and school system have relocated to the suburbs. Within these events a deeper problem was created; inequalities within the school system of Newark itself. According to the Council of Great City Schools, large city districts (79%) are funded at a lower rate than are suburban schools; nationally advantaged suburban schools spend as much as ten times that spent by urban poor schools. (Anyon 7) With inner cities holding less than one-third of the total population, convincing voters that change is necessary and needed is a daunting task. To change the past, present, and future, reform of the inner city school is needed. According to Anyon, reform of the Newark inner city school districts will not happen until the economic and political systems in which the cities are enmeshed are themselves transformed so they may be more democratic and productive for urban residents. (Anyon 13) I found "Ghetto Schooling" to be a provocative and educational source of historical information. As a teacher, and future administrator, the need for understanding the vast array of social, political and legal mandates truly dictates not only education, but also the city and state in which they reside. Anyon creates a very realistic in description of past events, many of which are still seen today. The material presented not only punctuates, but makes a very colorful statement of the current economic situation facing many states, including Illinois. After reading this text, I have a better appreciation for the sheer complexity of school funding. Illinois uses three very complicated formulas for determining funding of public schools alone. Anyon's explanation of public education is complete, complicated, and enjoyable.

I stumbled across this book while working on my thesis. This book really didn't relate to my area of inquiry but I felt compelled to pull it off the shelf. Four days later, and very little done on my thesis, I was shocked by the amount of graft and corruption within the historical account of New Jersey's Public School system. This book is very insightful and compeling.