Conservatism is Fundamentally Weird

​It is being increasingly commented on how weird and creepy, whether it's pedophilia or sleeping with your fetus, or just a sense of emotional and social immaturity, so many conservatives seem to be. What is driving these bizarre or even taboo fixations?

But in my decade teaching low-SES, high-poverty, at-risk school kids (as well as some experience with high SES schools) at both the elementary and secondary levels, the problem is obviously family income. Most of the problems faced by low SES kids could be resolved by paying workers fairly so you didn't have the category of 'low-SES' in the first place. Yet the author provides an illustration of how this analysis always seems absent from an assessment of the dependent variables:

In New York, a combination of housing segregation and "academic" sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students - even middle-class ones are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more.

In my time in education, poverty was this weird thing that was only to be discussed as something to be rectified through education. While many were simply pragmatic and focused on what they could control, others seems to tie the logic in a pretzel. It became to be a popular belief that education was the way to solve poverty. Everyone is going to college! was the mantra. And worse, others actually believed that a bad education was responsible for poverty itself.

What are we doing here, people, I'd ask myself in my graduate seminars. What we are doing is conservatism.

We are purposefully avoiding serious criticism of a system we all benefit from that is designed around a hierarchy of domination and control. That is, the millions of low-skill jobs traditionally done for low pay by marginalized classes.

Because something I noticed was that while nearly everyone agreed - except the maybe the absolute psychos at Teach For America - that poverty was underlying all of this but all that could be currently done was pragmatic intervention, not an overhaul of our economy, no one was even talking about it!
Endless ink was spilled over what interventions were needed and where, which were effective or not, it was rare to hear anyone address the elephant in the room. I'd prefer not to say that the fact this article is published in the NYTimes is representative of a certain political and ideological orientation but let's face it.

The paper is not exactly interested in dealing with class. For reasons. And let's not get confused here on the race vs. class discourse. It's obviously both and the two work off each other, just as any positionality does, each with their own historical and current systemic tendrils.

Its horrific, but very difficult to find a high-SES majority black school as a sort of control for race. But they exist. As far as I can tell, their scores compare roughly with those of their white counterparts. This would make sense, because while forces of racism, both individual and systemic,
have an impact, so too do a multitude of other factors.

Disentangling them is hard because they entwine further upstream (e.g. loving, peaceful home disrupted by both low wages as well as workplace racism causing stress or worse). But a wealthy black family is simply going to have much more of a 'buffer' against racist harm.

As long as there is poverty there are going to be 'poor schools', by definition. These kids will come from families facing a multitude of disadvantages directly resulting from an illiberal compensation for their labor. Historically, it is these disadvantages that create the bed for poverty by roping in all the ways one has been marginalized and disenfranchised to cut them off from opportunities to access greater freedom in the world, and shape them into an underclass.

While the author has been covering race and education, she seems unaware of this fact. That all of the trauma of poverty is brought with them into school. She writes this:

It was not the children that horrified me - kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults. Students respond to the high or low expectations of institutions and the grown-ups who operate them, and it was clear that these children were getting the message.

This is wrong in many ways. First, kids from different SES backgrounds behave differently in school. It's sometimes reported that minority students are disciplined more often, and this is certainly partly due to racism - which I have certainly seen explicit and implicitly from other teachers.

And some of it is no doubt due to a lack of resources. (There's so much going on here!)
But most of it - I can tell you anecdotally, but from 10 years' experience both in my own classroom but also substituting across a wide range of SES schools, comes down to the kids.

What?!!!
You're blaming the kids!

No, I'm blaming the parents. No, I'm blaming society. But not in some stupid RW framing. In a socialist functionalist framing of 'we need to take care of our kids, our parents and our teachers'.
To ignore these kids' home life and pretend they're the same as their white counterparts (although the same is true of any poor neighborhood), feels almost disrespectful to their experience. But then the author has this whole trip about warrioring with her high status ideals (and money) to fix everything on an individual level. Very conservative*!

I'll completely caveat this by saying going and giving back to her school, especially when she felt she was in a way sacrificing her daughter to the system, was totally honorable and of course we need to keep funding and finding interventions. But overall the approach is not functionalist, in terms of really looking at what the social sciences tell us about poverty and the various impacts it has on behavior and development of children. It tells us race is a systemic hierarchical social construct that binds these various elements together (just as they do all the privileges of wealth).

In truth, we felt utterly stuck. Our child was suffering, but all these children were — they were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach."

What is happening. This is so right wing.

The whole narrative is about how the teachers are failing the children. When I taught, I nearly had a nervous breakdown once. Has she not met with and observed in classrooms where teachers are lifting Heaven and Earth to just keep kids safe and learn a little bit before they leave? I had a kindergartner who was shot by his cousin (accidently) the first day of class. He survived. Attendance was always spotty. Many of my kids came in never having even tried to read - or really been read to, at 5 years of age.

Jobs at poor schools are much harder because the kids have so many more needs and are dealing with so much more. Many teachers will avoid these schools. So they tend to get a mixture of amazing, veteran teachers and new hires who are just starting out.
This is an important paragraph because it will no doubt be a critique of my position. There is a long tradition of laundering biological racism through cultural racism, a trick gentile conservatives love because it allows them to justify hierarchies of racist domination and control by claiming the problem is "black culture".

I knew the consequences of this educational neglect would follow them throughout their lives, as the failures here would be passed on to the next grade and the next. And then our society would blame their academic limitations on the dysfunctional culture and poor choices of their marginalized families, because blaming poor families is more convenient than calling for the dismantling of segregation.
 
This is categorically not what I am doing. There are no norms in black culture regarding bad behavior than any other culture doesn't basically have. Nor is this a 'culture of poverty', which is a ridiculous concept with a ring of truth. Poor people tend to do things as a class just like any other, but that is not a "culture". Buying scratchers is not a "culture". It's what you do more of if you're desperate.

As for blaming families, yes, I am. But I'm also not, because they had no say in the matter. I'm blaming the system. I'm blaming those of us who continue to vote for a neoliberal economy that prefers poverty to socialism. I'm also blaming those of us too racist - or more realistically, too bought in to assumptions about poverty that are inherently racist.

But to be honest, I'd kind of like to blame the chattering classes for basically never discussing this with regard to education. I mean never. Sure here and there, but in the news, amongst pundits and journalists, almost never. Always more interventions, bad teachers, hand-wringing over test scores and pedagogy, etc. (if you pay people well all schools become 'good schools' because all families become 'good families' e.g. they can pay their bills, sit on the couch and read a book to their daughter or help them with homework and snuggle with them).

Speak of the devil.
This is a really weird sleight of hand she pulls here. 'Caring families are more important than teachers' is true! Is her daughter doing OK? - I think so! It's the other kids from 'uncaring families' (that's dumb, we're talking about families able to provide support to their children given numerous hardships) we are referring to. Not this author's ability to transform her one school because of her 'care'.

But our experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers. Here we were, this upper- middle-class, educated, highly involved family with a house brimming with books. Najya's principal and her teachers knew that I worked for The New York Times reporting on school inequality and that Faraji served on the P.T.A. and the school leadership team. And yet with all the power and resources at our disposal, we left Najya's elementary school at the end of fifth grade feeling wholly defeated by a system of inequality that may begin outside the school walls but is magnified within them. We're not going to transform our high-poverty schools into non-segregated, low performing* schools through direct parent action.
This is a systemic social problem that we all need to come to grips with, as part of a broader civil rights functionalist socialist agenda.

A final note as she wraps up, I found this paragraph maybe telling us something about the author as well:

We decided to set up a meeting with Paige so Najya could express her concerns. She told Paige that her teachers often rewarded, in her words, the "problem" students for doing the littlest things right; meanwhile, the students who always did what they were supposed to went unrecognized.

Oh, full-disclosure, more cards on the table (and maybe for someone a see I knew his true motivations!): I do not live in a poor part of town, but we did send our kids to the local charter elementary because we were in its catchment and it is a very well-run and resourced school. Interestingly, there was a very high proportion of students whose parents were immigrants from all over, not just Latin America - eastern Europe, China, India, etc. Of course, these are higher-SES families and as such are used to maneuvering the system. But yes - all very high-SES. Not wealthy, this wasn't private, but lots of different forms of valuable capital. (btw, both my kids went to public, non-charter HS and are now in quite 'good' colleges. Mostly due to their learning history of growing up in the environment they did with access to financial, emotional and cognitive resources that other students simply did not).
So she ends with her daughter testing into a top HS. Again, completely a product of her parent's resources.
OK. Except maybe this?
"Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study"
Wtf? You want the school to teach this to your kid?
"But I also understood that a school like Unison is tasked with working miracles to overcome the years of educational morass they have inherited from schools like P.S. 307"
Again, blaming the schools and teachers. What's new?