By Paul Horton. Part three of three. 

Perhaps even more alarming than the Obama administration is the recent campaign headed up by former CNN and CNBC talk show host Campbell Brown and former Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs against teacher tenure. Energized by the apparent success of the Vergara decision, the Partnership for Education Justice was recently launched to disparage teachers, teacher unions, and teacher tenure as scapegoats of the failure of an education reform movement that defunds public schools and reduces all learning to what can be measured by multiple choice tests and algorithms created by standardized testing companies. Bad teachers are those who cannot close the “achievement gap” as measured by standardized tests scores for tests given throughout the country. Teachers across the country will be evaluated in part (the percentage varies with local contracts and decisions) on student standardized tests scores using a mathematical formula, or Value Added Measures (VAM), that has been thoroughly discredited by an authoritative study conducted the American Statistical Association. But peer reviewed studies do not cool the missionary impulse of sworn enemies of teacher unions and due process who seek all teachers to be hired and fired at will.

Playing the “bad cop” and perhaps auditioning for a policy making position in a state or Federal Republican administration, Ms. Brown calls her campaign to end teacher tenure “a war, not a fight.” Gibbs, who leads a PR firm, Incite with another former Obama aide, Ben LaBolt, is projecting himself as the good cop,

From the first day of kindergarten to my last day of college, I was educated in a public school by great teachers. One of the most important responsibilities we have as a nation is to ensure that every child, regardless of their economic background, learns in a classroom with only the very best teachers. And all too often this simply doesn’t happen.

Both Brown and Gibbs are from the Deep South, Brown from the town of Ferriday, Louisiana, a Mississippi bottom, former plantation area across the river from Natchez that also produced Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggert. Gibbs hails from Lee County and Auburn, Alabama an area on the western edge of Alabama’s Black Belt. Tuskegee is the next large town to the east, and Tallapoosa County, featured in Douglas A Blackmon’s, Slavery by Another Name book and the PBS documentary of the same name about racial violence, convict labor, and the denial of any due process rights to African Americans held in bondage by local whites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the county to the west northwest.

Both Ferriday, Louisiana and Lee County, Alabama were hotbeds of Klan violence in the wake of the Civil War and black majorities in both areas created a rigidly enforced Jim Crow caste regime until the mid sixties. In the early twentieth century racial conditions in and around the western black belt of Alabama are described in two remarkable books: All God’s Dangers, the story of the life of Ned Cobb a Tallapoosa County tenant farmer who joined the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union and the first few chapters of John Lewis’s remarkable autobiography, Walk With the Wind. Both of these books describe the realities of life for African Americans who grew up in the Alabama Black belt. For African American and poor white farmers (see Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, for a depiction of white croppers three counties northwest of Tallapoosa), education was an afterthought. Cotton farming and grinding poverty dictated the lives of poor whites and blacks in former plantation areas. Underfunded schools did little to increase the effective literacy of black and white croppers. Malnutrition stunted the ability of many children to learn if they were lucky enough to attend public schools.

Conditions in the Louisiana bottom in and around Ferriday from emancipation until the mid sixties were nothing short of feudal. African American cotton pickers had to be “spoken for” by a planter to receive any civil protections at all. Punishment was often meted out indiscriminately and without warning for “talking back,” or looking at a white person in the “wrong way.” Punishments were decided by nightriders and Klan dens that had the power of torture, life, and death without consequences, or any due process of law. Due process was reserved for respectable whites, “n-lovers” were also denied due process.

All attempts to organize farmer and labor unions that brought whites and blacks together to educate cotton pickers in their basic civil rights were met by open hostility by Klan groups, the Democratic Party, county and local sheriffs, and state police and militia throughout the South, but especially in the Delta, black prairie, and river bottom regions of the South.

But it is crucially important to see the narrative of twenty-first century school reform within this broader historical context. Because conditions in the South created brutal repression, many African Americans and poor whites moved from places like Ferriday, Louisiana, and Lee and Tallapoosa Counties in Alabama to places like Chicago, Gary, Milwaukee, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, and New York to acquire jobs, education, union membership, and at least equally important, due process and equal protection rights.

Between 1919 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated to northern cities and west coast cities. But those who migrated experienced a series of unanticipated challenges. Though they were welcomed in churches and communities by relatives and friends who preceded them, they were often ruthlessly exploited, forced into overcrowded and segregated tenements, and segmented dense urban enclaves; black migrants welcomed the faceless autonomy of black urban as a liberation from the stultifying repression of the rural Jim Crow South.

But the benefits of migration included better educational opportunity. According to historian Spencer R. Crew,

…up until the time of the migration, African American children rarely advanced past the sixth grade in the South. “Black” schools received very little money from southern legislatures, especially at the secondary level, and landlords place pressure on parents to put their children to work rather than have them further their education. Under these circumstances only a relatively few children were able to receive a high school education. In contrast, northern states allocated more resources, and compulsory attendance requirements forced students to stay in school longer. Moving north gave migrants and their children access to better opportunities and a chance for a brighter future.

Access to good jobs proved a tougher nut to crack for most African American migrants to the north, until WWII temporarily opened the door to skilled work and union membership. Trade and building unions would not admit blacks and still don’t to a large extent. Most migrants got by with domestic work and non-skilled shop floor work.

African Americans typically wound up in dirty, backbreaking, unskilled, and low-paying occupations. These were the least desirable jobs in most industries, but the ones employers felt best suited to their black workers. On average, more than eight out of every ten Afro-American men worked as unskilled laborers in foundries, in the building trades, in meatpacking companies, or on the railroad, or as servants, porters, janitors, cooks, and cleaners. Only a relatively few, obtained work in semiskilled and skilled occupations,

according to Crew. (Monthly Labor Review, March 1987, 34-37)

Despite job segregation, a thriving black middle class grew in northern cities from the sixties to the present. Sociologist Mary Pattillo has argued that black middle class neighborhoods exist within and on the margins of segregated neighborhoods where poor blacks live. Black middle class aspirations, in other words, separate the poor and the middle class in many inner city neighborhoods, but many lower tier middle class black families can not afford to move to more affluent suburbs that are safer are perceived to have good public schools. Moreover, because many middle class urban blacks work for city government, they are often required to remain in the city as a condition of their employment. The story of Michelle Obama’s father, an employee of the Chicago Water Department is illustrative of a solid middle class family living in a solidly black middle class urban community. These areas within neighborhoods and neighborhoods remain largely invisible to whites because media attention is so focused on violence and poverty. The recent images of Ferguson-Florissant, Missouri that have saturated the mainstream media serve as a case in point.(Pattillio, “Black Middle Class Neighborhoods,” Annual Review of Sociology (August 2005), passim)

The black upper middle and upper classes, in contrast, grew very rapidly in the eighties and nineties, acquiring Ivy League graduate degrees and moved into the corporate world in banking, finance, and upper management. Members of this group have been integrated into the power structures of major cities and reside in high rent condos and inner circle suburbs that are integrated. Jennifer L. Hochschild, who has analyzed class divisions within the African American community, found that “roughly 80 percent of blacks of all classes agreed that well-off blacks should do more to help the poor, and why 90 percent of the Black Enterprise respondents accept such a moral obligation.” (Hochschild, Facing up to the American Dream, 124-5).

But as this globalized black upper class has prospered, the black middle class is threatened by job loss. “Many of today’s middle class [black] women have deep fears about sliding back into poverty—fears that [keep the] ‘haves ‘ running fast from the ‘have nots’.” Deindustrialization wreaked havoc on working class jobs from the sixties to the eighties. From 1967-1987, according to sociologist William Julius Wilson, “Philadelphia lost 64 percent of its manufacturing jobs; Chicago lost 60 percent; New York, 58 percent; and Detroit 51, percent. (Wilson, When Work Disappears. 29-31)

Deindustrialization devastated the urban black middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, destroying the economic foundation of many working families, and stunting the aspirations of tens of millions in bitter frustration.

The biggest lifeline that middle class blacks could grasp was public sector employment. The last thirty years have seen an increase in the employment of blacks in city, county, and state government. Teachers, firemen, police, water and sanitation workers make up the backbone of the black middle class today. It is not surprising, given the history cited above that blacks are very active in seeking the job protections offered by union membership.

In fact, in a report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last year (“Union Members Summary”), “black workers were more likely to be union members than white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.” The average weekly earnings for union members was $950 and $750 for non union members.

Not surprisingly, the two states with the largest union membership are the first two states targeted by Campbell Brown’s group anti-tenure group: California (2.4 million) and New York (2 million).

The pattern that I am trying to describe is that the attack on teacher tenure is, in part, an attack on the black middle class. In Chicago, for example, several rounds of school reform between 2000 and 2010 decimated black teachers employed by CPS (Chicago Public Schools: 40% 2000, 30% 2010). When I attended an activist parents meeting and gave a talk, the parent on the panel to my left expressed outrage that another public school was being closed and that “the community was losing more black teachers.” (Huffington Post, “CPS Racial Discrimination Lawsuit: Three Teachers, Union Sue District Over Losing Their Jobs”) In a recent Ebony expose’, Rod McCullom reported that 43% of those laid off in the wake of the 2013 school closings were black. (Ebony, September 2013) According to CTU (Chicago Teacher Union) President Karen Lewis, “Entire faculties are fired and must reapply for positions in turnarounds. These situations have been extremely challenging on Black middle-age faculty members who often have advanced degrees or seniority.”

As cities are strapped with austerity budgeting as a result of less federal funding in cities and as tax bases decline, public schools are targeted for cuts by state and local government. Public sector layoffs are a result of budgets cuts. But these cuts have had a huge impact on black middle class job prospects. According to a May 2012 report conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, blacks lost more than 177,000 jobs from 2007-2012. Valerie Rawlston Wilson, an economist with the National Urban League Policy Institute told the Chicago Tribune that, this is a very dire situation. Even for blacks who have college degrees, we have seen a doubling of their unemployment rate between 2007 and 2010.”

While there is much evidence to support the targeting of black teachers by anti-tenure lawsuits supported by Ms. Brown, Ms. Gibbs, and now, superstar lawyers David Boies and Lawrence Tribe, the impact of the loss of tenure will demoralize teacher’s unions and allow school administrators to hire and fire at will. The immediate objective for education reformers is that a victory in the tenure fight will allow big city school districts to rif out senior teachers who are expensive and replace them with young, less costly teachers recruited from such organizations as Teach for America. TFA teachers are typically just graduated college students who undergo a five-week intensive training course that does not adequately prepare them for the classroom, especially the inner city classroom. Although increasing numbers of TFA teachers are staying on for a third year, they rarely stay in the classroom longer.

The irony of Ms. Campbell’s anti-tenure campaign is that by making the teacher workplace a less secure place to be, fewer of our brightest young people will want to work in schools where administrators “are forced by their district level bosses “to take the kid gloves off.” An absence of tenure will drive salaries even lower, making the teaching profession even less attractive to most bright young people who might want to buy a house or start a family. Teachers who live in cities where salaries are comparably high often cannot afford to live in neighborhoods that are considered “safe.” Yet another irony is that those states that are the most heavily unionized are, almost without exception, those that have the highest standardized test scores.

One can certainly understand why Campbell Brown, who is married to a Republican bundler, would support an end to tenure for teachers, but it is more difficult to understand the motivations of Gibb, Bois, and Tribe who claim to be Democrats.

The weakening of teacher tenure will create legal precedents for the elimination of due process for all remaining public sector jobs. This would allow cities to hire and fire all of its employees at will and easily jettison expensive pension and health care packages, ala’ the Chicago School of Economics privatization schemes applied to Chile and Argentina by the “Chicago Boys.”

Apparently, the corporate money that controls both parties wants less taxes and less government. No surprise. This sector wants to end public service unions to make government go away. No surprise. This sector wants to privatize schools to open markets and make money. No surprise.

What is surprising is that people who call themselves Democrats, including the President and his closest advisors, and much of the congressional Progressive Caucus are willing to sit back and watch this happen.

The long story is the story of the horsewhip, the story of the bullwhip. If you go back two generations, most cotton pickers who moved north have memories of the whip used by the man, the driver and later the sheriff’s deputy or the Klan. The cotton pickers tried to form unions in each generation going back to 1867. When they moved north they were locked out of most unions, but eventually found a home in public service unions. Now the man is going after public service unions and due process rights.

Another fight is brewing. My son and I do not need to take another road trip to the Delta to bear witness to the fight to preserve human dignity and the American Dream north of the cotton line, across the river Jordan.

Previously in this series:

Part One: Past as Prelude in the Still Troubled South.

Part Two: Why is the Obama Administration Waging War on Teachers?