CPS Policies and the New Urban Work Force

Education reform has been a consistent priority for Chicago’s corporate and financial elite. This is clear from the CCC’s brief overview of Chicago’s economic development proposals over the last fifteen years. In its 1984 long-term strategic plan, “Make No Little Plans: Jobs for Metropolitan Chicago,” the CCC called for making Chicago a leading financial services center, noting that although Chicago would have an abundance of workers, those workers needed constant upgrading of skills. Again, in a 1990 update (“Jobs for Metropolitan Chicago,” 1990), the CCC asserted, “The failures of Chicago’s public schools in previous years have left us with hundreds of thousands of people untrained and ill equipped to fill the jobs of the new economy” (p. 4). A survey of 68 top Chicago business leaders in 1988 also pointed to the poorly educated work force as a prime reason for business loss (Mirel, 1993).

What kind of education does business want for the new work force? I do not suggest a simple correspondence between schooling and the occupational structure, but there is a striking relationship between evolving educational differentiation in CPS and the segmented labor force in the restructured economy. Although a majority of growing occupations are projected to require education or training beyond high school, there is expected to be only a modest change in educational levels for all new jobs created in 1992–2005. Castells (1996, p. 224) projects that the proportion of college graduate workers will increase by 1.4 percent and the proportion of high school graduate workers will decrease by 1 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that between 1992 and 2005 there would be 6.2 million new professional workers and 6.5 million new low-wage service workers (Castells, 1996, p. 225; see also Apple, 1996).

While much has been made of the need to upgrade skills (National Center on Education and the Economy, 1990), many new jobs do not require sophisticated new knowledge but, rather, basic literacies, ability to follow directions, and accommodating dispositions toward work. In 1998, the CCC defined the “ever-more-skilled employees” required by the new economy as people “who can, at the minimum, read instruction manuals, do basic math and communicate well” (Johnson, 1998, p. 6). This definition is corroborated by Rosenbaum and Binder’s (1997) interviews with 51 urban and suburban Chicago employers, the majority of whom said they needed employees with “eighth-grade math skills and better than eighth-grade reading and writing skills.” The 1990 Commercial Club report also notes that “minorities” in low-performing schools will become a greater part of the work force and will need these new basic competencies.

Despite publicity about specialized schools, the overwhelming majority of Chicago high school students, most of whom are students of color, are enrolled in neighborhood high schools organized around these basic competencies. In the era of Fordist industrial production, workers needed very specific skills (such as welding). However, because of rapid technological advances, specific tasks are increasingly accomplished through informational technology (computers, robotics), and jobs are constantly being redefined. The new low-wage service and post-Fordist manufacturing jobs, as well as the large number of jobs filled by part-time and temporary labor, require the flexibility to adapt to changing job requirements, and basic literacies in reading and math are essential to this learning. As Carlson (1996) argues, “The ‘basic skills’ restructuring of urban schools around standardized testing and a skill-based curriculum has been a response to the changing character of work in post-industrial America, and it has participated in the construction of a new post-industrial working class … of clerical, data processing, janitorial, and service industry jobs” (pp. 282–283).

Differentiated high schools are related to other strata of the labor force. For example, coordinated with local business partners and vocational programs at community colleges, ETCs are explicitly linked to specific entry-level, skilled, and semiskilled manufacturing and service work, such as automotive technology, hospitality management, mechanical design, cosmetology, and secretarial science. Some ETCs prepare for entry-level jobs, for example, hospitality. Others, such as health services, require further training or education. The goal of ETCs is to prepare students with “a solid background of vocational training in their field” (personal communication, CPS official, April 12, 2000) or enable them to continue a vocational program in a postsecondary school. Unfortunately, in the new economy of simultaneously higher skilled and downgraded labor, many of these jobs do not offer the benefits, security, or relatively stable incomes of the unionized industrial jobs of the past. For example, whereas some clerical work requires greater information processing skills, it is often part-time and temporary. The same is true for robotized and high-tech manufacture, which requires many fewer workers than in the industrial era but workers with the education to program computers, trouble-shoot, and solve problems in digitalized production processes. Other ETC vocational courses, such as hospitality management, have a nonacademic curriculum core, and entry-level jobs are likely to be low-wage. At the same time, college preparatory magnets, IBs, and perhaps MSTAs will prepare a top tier of students for four-year colleges and universities and orient them toward technical and professional knowledge work. At the opposite end, the more than 40 percent of students who do not graduate may have little opportunity to participate in the formal economy. The regimentation of scripted instruction and test preparation, as well as retention and assignment to transition high schools, may serve to weed out youth deemed superfluous to the labor force.

Tracking, differentiated curricula, and magnet schools are nothing new (Oakes, 1985). However, educational differentiation takes on new meaning in a society in which knowledge is far more decisive than in the past, when a high school diploma was sufficient to gain entry to a well-paid, stable job and sense of future. In the informational economy, education is a key determinant of whether one will be a high-paid knowledge worker or part of the downgraded labor sector. The differentiation of schools and academic programs results in differential access to specific courses of study that have significant implications for students’ preparation for college: for example, the high school math and science classes taken by students at the college preparatory magnets as compared with those offered in general high schools. Ramon Flecha (1999) notes: “As a consequence of the dual model of society, education … is becoming an increasingly important criterion for determining who joins which group. The educational curriculum, therefore, has become a factor in the process of social dualization, the selection of the efittest” (p. 66).

Producing Differentiated Identities

Equally important, differentiated schools and programs provide students with different resources from which to construct their identities. This has serious implications in a segmented labor market and a dualized society. Students assimilate identities by apprenticing to a particular discourse. In this sense, a discourse “is composed of talking, listening, reading, writing, interacting, believing, valuing … so as to display or to recognize a particular social identity”(Gee et al., 1996, p. 10). Discourses produce certain kinds of people:

Immersion inside the practices — learning inside the procedures, rather than overtly about [emphases in original] them — ensures that a learner takes on the perspectives, adopts a world view, accepts a set of core values, and masters an identity without a great deal of critical and reflective awareness about these matters, or indeed about the Discourse itself. (p. 13)

Thus scripted direct instruction programs, IBs, ETCs, military academies, college preparatory magnet high schools, and so on, constitute social practices that apprentice students to particular identities with profound implications in a layered society of a “relatively well-paid core of knowledge leaders and workers and a bevy of people servicing them for the least possible price” (Gee et al., 1996, p. 47). I want to emphasize that this social reproduction is not necessarily purposeful. Teachers and administrators I have talked with who champion DI, military schools, and ETCs are generally dedicated to improving the academic performance and futures of their students. It is the material and ideological effect of this differentiated learning that is the point here.

Differentiated schools and programs also construct public meanings about the students who attend them. The prestigious IB program, with its stringent admission requirements and diploma “recognized worldwide,” has a cachet quite different from the Military Academy’s concentration on military discipline. The audiences for these programs include students and parents who select specific programs, the general public, and employers. In addition to basic mathematical and print literacy, employers are particularly concerned with future workers’ attitudes and “work ethic” (Ray & Mickelson,1993), their reliability, trustworthiness, ability to take directions, and in the case of in-person service workers, a pleasant manner (Gee et al., 1996).Eighty percent of the business leaders sampled by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce said that they were seeking a stronger work ethic, appropriate social behavior, and a good attitude from their new workers(Ray & Mickelson, 1993). Moberg (1997) notes that Chicago is at a disadvantage in attracting new firms because there is a widespread perception that Chicago’s work force is “ill-educated, untrained, and difficult to manage”; this perception “especially affects the hiring of black men” (p. 79). It is interesting that the description of the new ETCs, including “job-readiness” and “employability skills,” addresses this “problem,” as does CPS’s focus on discipline and individual responsibility.

Public perception and the actual socialization of youth and of a disciplined work force are constructed through a set of policies and a rhetoric that emphasize hard work and personal responsibility, individual achievement, and regulation and control (see Lipman, 2002). This is the pedagogy of scripted instruction and basic skills, through which students are trained to follow directions and learn according to a strict protocol. And the ideology of individual responsibility is reinforced by the system of high-stakes tests that places failure on the shoulders of individual students and that drives home the message that they pass or fail through their own efforts.

There is a potent racial subtext here as well. The ideological force of racially coded “basic skills,” scripted instruction, and social control in the classroom is to discursively construct African-American and Latino youth as in need of regulation and control. The epitome of this is the establishment by CPS of the first two public military high schools in the United States — both in African-American communities. The military academies are run in partnership with the U.S. Army. The principal of the Chicago Military Academy is a retiredArmy Brigadier General; teachers wear military uniforms and are referred to as “Captain.” In addition to the CPS disciplinary code, the schools follow the military code of discipline; for every misstep (e.g., failure to turn in homework, tardiness), there is a penalty (e.g., doing push-ups, cleaning walls). The schools are known for strict discipline and military drill — by implication bringing in line dangerous and unruly African-American and Latino youth. As Gery Chico said when the first academy opened, “It’s a school based on rules and conduct. This is a very good thing” (Quintanilla, 1999, p. 16).

This is quite different from the open and relaxed environment of majority-White Northside Prep, where students lounge in spacious hallways and participate in Wednesday afternoon colloquia. But in the absence of good high schools, resources to attend college, or prospects for good jobs, and given the threat of gangs in high schools, military academies, like military service itself, are a viable choice in a world of few options. Furthermore, the academies promise “leadership development” (within a hierarchical system of command) in a public school system that largely disregards the leadership potential of many youth. Thus parental support for military academies, as for ETCs, may in part reflect the restricted opportunities available to low-income students of color. Nonetheless, programs and policies that focus on discipline, regulation, and control teach students their “place” in a race and class hierarchy (cf. Bartlett & Lutz, 1998), bringing into line those who comply and pushing those who do not outside the bounds of formal work and legitimated social intercourse.

Of course, students are not simply shaped by schools and by the forces of the new urban economy. They form their identities through experiences in a variety of spaces—families, community centers, peer groups, churches, and so forth. Still, Chicago’s differentiated educational experiences provide different resources for students to draw upon to construct their identities.

School Policy, Gentrification, and the Cultural Politics of Race

To attract producer and financial services, global cities must satisfy the lifestyle demands of high-paid, high-skilled workers (Sassen, 1994). “Challenging,” “state of the art” schools are a key component. New York, for example, has an established upper tier of elite public schools as well as private schools. A series of articles in the Chicago Tribune on Chicago’s bid to become a global city notes that key business spokespeople consistently identify the need to “fix” the schools, “both to provide a pool of good workers and to persuade middle-class and upper-class families to settle in the city” (Longworth &Burns,1999, p. A14). CPS leaders have been quite explicit about this strategy. Gery Chico, in a CPS press release announcing three new magnet high schools, said, “Students who are ready for a challenging academic program will be able to find it at a school in their area” (Three More Schools, 1999). And a 1998 Chicago Tribune article on the “hottest” real estate markets in the city noted that “Chicago’s improving public school system is making young families less leery of rearing their children in the city” (Pitt, 1998, August 31). This argument is presented in public partly because CPS is openly appealing to middle-class families and partly because it is taken for granted that middle-class children are essential to a good school system. Like the argument for mixed-income housing, the assumption is that there cannot be good working-class schools (or good working-class neighborhoods).

“Good” schools are real estate anchors in gentrifying neighborhoods. The intersection of CPS policies and the interests of developers and real estate companies is apparent in the geographical location of four of the new college-preparatory magnet high schools. The future of the new Region 3 magnet, opened in fall 1998, replacing Jones Commercial High School, is with the massive new upscale South Loop development where it is located. This was clear to the Jones parents, students, and the local school council, who protested the school’s conversion from a business high school. Jones was widely supported by working-class families, whose children were, for the most part, destined to be excluded from the new school. “It’s real obvious that it’s tied to the gentrification of the neighborhood,” one teacher said. “They want a school that they can point to and say, ‘Here’s a school for your kids’ ” (Phuong Le & Malone, 1998, p. 2). The displacement of the previous students was itself a process of gentrification, removing the working-class high school students who fought to keep it open much as working-class families have fought developers in the neighborhood.

Another case is a new Region 1 magnet, Northside College Prep (opened in fall 1999), which draws from 6 of the 15 “hottest” neighborhoods (those with the greatest increases in real estate values) (Pitt, August 31, 1998) and 3 more areas that realtors predict will be “future hot spots” in the next ten years (Pitt, September 1, 1998). Payton, the Region 2 magnet, is in the upper-income Gold Coast area, with median house prices at $271,000 (Williams, 2000), just north of the gentrifying North Loop and east of the redeveloped Cabrini Green public housing project, now the site of $1.3 million townhouses. Payton also draws from upscale Lincoln Park, as well as from newly gentrifying neighborhoods to the northwest. King, the Region 4 magnet, is in the Kenwood neighborhood, where “distinguished new residences” are advertised just blocks from boarded-up housing projects. King is also near Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago. From 1995 to 1998, median prices for detached, single-family houses went up 50 percent in Kenwood and 67 percent in Hyde Park (Pitt, August 31, 1998, p. 9).

As a whole, the CPS policy agenda and the discourses that surround it are part of a larger cultural politics of race that both serves development interests and has a life of its own rooted in Chicago’s racialized history. Magnet high schools, IB programs, and publicity about rising test scores are complemented by policies that emphasize regulation and centralized control, primarily of students of color. Policies that symbolically discipline African-American and Latino youth signify “taking back” the city as a space of middle-class social stability and Whiteness from African Americans and Latinos, whose neighborhoods, “place-making practices,” and identities are a threat to “stability” (Haymes, 1995). Like the vocabulary of the “urban frontier,” which rationalizes gentrification and displacement as the taming of urban neighborhoods (Smith, 1996), racially coded “basic skills,” scripted instruction, probation and reconstitution of schools, and military schools for African-Americans and Latinos legitimate both the segregation and the dispersal of low-income communities of color in need of discipline and control. These policies (the “flip side” of those applied to elite high schools) help make the city “safe” for new upscale enclaves, much as “the new urban pioneers seek to scrub the city clean of its working-class geography and history, ... its class and race contours rubbed smooth” (Smith, 1996, pp. 26–27). The discourse of control and authority can also be interpreted as a preemptive response on the part of city officials to an urban context simmering with potentially explosive contradictions of wealth and poverty, development and abandonment, and blatant economic and social power alongside disempowerment.

Conclusion

Chicago is demonstrating that education is another front in the struggle for the direction of globalization. The stakes are high. As Gee, Hull, and Lankshear (1996, p. 44) aptly warn, “We are heading towards a world in which a small number of countries and a small number of people within them will benefit substantively from the new capitalism, while a large number of others will be progressively worse off and exploited.” My analysis suggests that Chicago’s school reforms support this social dualization. The policies concretely and symbolically produce a highly segmented and polarized labor force. They support the spatial reorganization of the city along lines of race, ethnicity, and class; and they instantiate a racialized discourse of regulation and control. Yet this outcome is not inevitable, despite the reigning logic of capitalist accumulation in the age of globalization. Nor does economic restructuring inherently dictate policies that intensify inequality. Economic restructuring is itself shaped by the specific alignment of social forces in cities and their relative power. In short, there is space for human agency to reshape economic and social relations and social policy, in cities and globally (see Preteceille, 1990).

Current CPS policies represent a convergence of interests of financial elites and the city’s political regime, but they are supported and accomplished by well-meaning educators at all levels of the school system, as well as many Chicagoans, operating out of a shared common sense that the policies will improve schools. This common sense is constructed out of real hopes and frustrations. It is bolstered by CPS’s rhetoric of equity and resoluteness and the pragmatic logic of a quick fix through the blunt force of sanctions and punishment. Unequal educational experiences are rendered less visible by establishing standards and tests that promise equal treatment and rigor. Although new advanced academic programs involve a very small percentage ofstudents, their well-advertised initiation serves to legitimate the current policy regime even as it helps to develop the city as a concentrated expression of new global inequalities.

In the end, this agenda has prevailed because the city’s political regime, including top school administrators, have shaped the public conversation about education. By framing current policies in the language of equity and labeling any criticism an endorsement of “the failed policies of the past,” they have effectively muffled opposition. In the absence of a cogent counter discourse, the policies have imposed a definition of education, specified processes of human and institutional change, and limited the terms of the discussion. Powerfully disseminated through the media, these policies are part of a dominant system of social relations (Ozga, 2000). As Preteceille (1990) explains,

Policy discourse becomes part of a discourse policy [emphasis added], turned through the media, toward society as a whole, whether at the national or local level, as part of the work of hegemony. … Politicians and state institutions, central and local, state their capacity to recognize social problems, impose their legitimate definition and solutions, which will in turn contribute to structuring the way people, as well as other economic and political actors, think of those problems and define their actions. (p. 45)

Nevertheless, several Chicago school reform organizations, as well as activist parent, student, and teacher organizations, have proposed alternative policies. For example, an established citywide parents’ group, in collaboration with other school reformers, has developed a proposal for multiple assessments of student progress, elimination of retention based on test scores, and community participation in school reform. This plan and others are constructive contributions to a public discussion about educational change. However, I would argue that they are limited, not only by their influence but by their frameworks.
What is missing is a program that clearly challenges the injustice of CPS policies — past and present — and offers an alternative that goes beyond high stakes testing to address the transformation of teaching and learning and the democratic mission of public education. All too often, criticism of high-stakes testing and accountability fails to address comprehensively the persistent failure of schools to educate African-American, Latino, Native American, and many Asian children. And much reform talk takes for granted the limits of current budgets and government priorities. Changing this public conversation is one important step toward more just and liberatory policies. There is a need for policy language, as well as concrete proposals, that link the urgency to improve urban schools with goals of rich literacy, cultural and social relevance, and critical approaches to knowledge. Such an alternative can only grow out of a rich public dialogue between educators and students, families, and communities about what is in the best interest of children. In particular, the dialogue must be informed by those who have been most failed by the public schools, especially students, communities, and committed educators of color (Delpit, 1988).

In the spirit of dialogue, I suggest four premises of an alternative agenda. First, all students need an education that is intellectually rich and rigorous and that instills a sense of personal, cultural, and social agency — an education that helps them to think critically and ethically about the inequalities enveloping our lives while it prepares them for a wide range of academic and vocational choices. Although the realization of such an education is obviously complex, documented successes in urban schools attest to its possibility (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1994; Rethinking Schools, 1994, 2001). Second, a commitment to educate all students requires the deployment of significant material and intellectual resources. As in most urban public school systems, there is a crying need in Chicago to substantially reduce class size; 27 to provide consistent high-quality professional development and time for teachers to plan and reflect in order to transform the nature of teaching, learning, and assessment; to recruit and retain expert, committed teachers in schools in the poorest communities; to provide up-to-date science labs, current and well-stocked school libraries, arts and foreign language programs, state-of-the-art and well-run computer labs, and so forth. Third, reversing the historical inequities and current failures of urban schools requires reciprocal responsibility by educators, students, parents, school leaders, and policymakers. In particular, political officials and school leaders should be held accountable to advocate for and ensure necessary resources and to overcome present and past discrimination. Fourth, transforming urban schools entails a protracted campaign to challenge deficit notions about children of color and their families and to question the appropriateness of impoverished curricula for these students (Lipman, 1998).

To some, a broad and nuanced educational vision is unrealistic. How-ever, like the city’s development agenda, educational policy embodies political and economic interests. The pragmatic common sense of CPS “reforms” meshes with social and economic policies that generate despair, dislocation, and marginalization alongside unparalleled wealth and opportunity. If Chicago and other urban systems are to create a purposeful education for all students, then they will need to turn away from policies rooted in economic and social priorities that produce inequality. An equitable education is not limited to high test scores or basic skills or even college preparation. It provides the intellectual and ethical tools that students need to survive and critique these segmented identities and unequal futures being created in the schools, in the city, globally. Pursuit of this educational direction is part of a larger democratic project to reshape urban policy in this era of globalization.