Part 3: Revanchism in the Neoliberal City: How the #NewDenver was Won, and Why Gentrification is the Wrong Battle
Betrayal: Shooting Ducks in a Barrel
Long gone are the days when Blacks lived in cities or towns where the tallest building was a church. In those days Blacks were called boy, negro or colored, at best, while in architecture and faith, God stood above all else. Since that time from postmodernity to neopostmodernity you will find a good majority of Blacks living where the tallest building is a corporate structure in a business park or in a center city. In these spaces from East to West you will find the sky is bloated with odes to capitalism, drums and chants of neoliberalism echoing from the passing cars and from the pulpit, a self-help guide of prosperity teachings piercing the mid-morning sanctity of Sunday air. A space where no one knocks the hustle or as theologian Obery Hendricks said, ‘many good church-going folk have been deluded into behaving like modern-day Pharisees and Sadducees when they think they’re really being good Christians.’
Perhaps this moment came to pass within the Black community, when Carl Stokes then mayoral-candidate for Cleveland asked Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King not to show up in Cleveland, because he would ruin his chances of being mayor. Dr. King did show up anyway and Stokes did win and become the first Black mayor of Cleveland. But that event horizon, marked when those who were reaching for more, were more than willing to throw the blankets of community off their shoulders to achieve an “I” over “we”. The line that Stokes used, would haunt and be repeated in the Black community more times than people would care.
Bradley in Los Angeles in 73′, Webb in Denver 91′ and through action with Hancock in Denver, “I am not the mayor of Black Cleveland, I am the mayor of all of Cleveland”. It was a sign of “thank you for your vote but I got it from here.”Whites and capital still fled cities and few will remember these men in time. But in it we learn the lesson of Black leadership for the sake of glory and hope of wealth, they are willing to sacrifice, you.
What the larger society has never understood about many Blacks from America is the self hate and the need to belong knaws and haunts many. “Because of its deep-seated inferiority complex, the black bourgeoisie hungers for any form of recognition by people or groups that have status or power in the world”, said sociologist,E. Franklin Frazier, in the “Black Bourgeoisie“. I would add to that and say for too long Blacks were looked as a monolith,especially those who have grown up in urban environments, so from this comes the constant need to be looked at as an individual and to be seen as different from the group.
This is not abnormal it is human. But how far would you go to be recognized? When reading Hegel, the “Lord-Bondsman” dialectic what one comes to realize is that the bondsman even when freed will regress to that which it was. At its best it will replicate the lord.
Democrats Eat Their Own
Denver lost the battle for its city when it began school reform, not a second before, not a second afterwards. When the city betrayed little Black boys and little Black and Latino girls in pigtails and ballerina dresses for the profit-sharing of white men, in distant counties and distant lands off the bodies and futures of Black and Brown kids. The aftermath was school closings, reverse mortgages, union busting, resegregation, less low-income housing and children rising to catch early morning buses with strangers. As it turns out, Denver was not alone in this endeavor, just a testing ground. Every community that partook in the school reform movement lost its city, because it was never about kids, it was always about land value and land appraisals. School reform has always been about capitalism, desire, government and racism converging, just as it had been in 1954. The difference was, the face of the perpetrator looked like someone who many thought they could trust.
“New Democrat” Black mayors in front and behind the scenes and sometimes the people close to them have led school reform. It has been Black mayors who have closed public schools to open up space for profit (charter) schools, whether in places like Denver, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Baltimore, or New Orleans with a major difference being Chicago (Rahm Emanuel though not Black, was connected to the Obama and Clinton administrations). It may have been a Black or Latino vote that put the Black mayor or his associates in office but it has been the money of the developers, real estate, banks, lawyers and construction companies that has paved the way and kept them there.It’s also been no secret that school choice often leads to a greater segregation of students. The difference from school segregation in the past, is the district and the state now have the luxury of saying they are not responsible. In this new West, resegregation becomes a product of individual choices, much in the manner that Kansas and Missouri were created, in the original West, and what is more American than choice.
If It Has a Tail and Barks It’s a Duck
It should come as no surprise that Black and Latino Americans are like many other Americans, they want the best for their children. In the 90’s the school reform movement was a Republican platform issue, then known as school vouchers. In the hands of Republicans, it was a way to have taxpayers pay for the private school educations of their constituents with remnants of the after effects of Brown vs. The Board of Education. By 1998 Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition had even gotten some Black businessmen and Black pastors to buy into school vouchers as the extension of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream, but still had not caught on.
In the early 2000’s developers realized what a tool school reform and the American dream could be with the right voice and face, it could be black gold. A term indicating the boom and wealth that could be had off the Black bodies and minds of children being moved for better schooling. With arrival of Bill Clinton in 1992 a different Democrat was about. Gone were the Dixiecrats but in were Clintonian Democrats governors and mayors now known as New Democrats and they were more receptive to big business, while listening and influencing the unions, they kept them at arm’s length. The New Democrats wanted to be defined for creating a new future not the ties of a distant past that projected legends and former greats while anchoring them down. If there was compassionate conservatism there could be business-minded liberalism.
Developers and New Democrats repackaged school vouchers as standardized testing and school reform, with privatized schools which they promised would be more efficient and produce the products that business and America needed for the future. They hinted to Black and Latino parents your children won’t have a future unless we let the business community run schools. In came companies and schools led by Ivy League businessmen with MBAs. The irony was the people leading these pseudo-public schools for the public, many had never attended a public school.
New Deal Education
In this model, government directed by capitalism creates the disastrous market, that it says will need saving by no other than capitalism. After years of under funding schools (Colorado spends more than Alabama but less that Arkansas), in particular urban environments, the government offered standardized testing, guidelines and concomitants for a failure in the two previous benchmarks. Standardized test scores, start off first as beacons of hope then quickly move to mandates to give the State (State and Municipal) permission to privatize a public good, and then sat up outcomes for what happens next with students and teachers. What happens next, is market destabilization under the guise of stabilization, union teachers are let go after students fail to achieve, there by creating teacher shortages. Students are told that they no longer have to attend the neighborhood school, they can now attend any of the new charter schools that have been set up or one of the tradition public schools (TPS) of greater a distance. This now creates student shortages at TPS, and school funding shortages, since schools are greatly funded by enrollment and property taxes, once again the private sector is asked to step in for market it and the State have purposely created (please see Part 1: Revanchism in the Neoliberal City).
In this New Deal, White businessmen come into neighborhoods with school standardized test scores and rent gap models using them as stock tip sheets on schools, districts, neighborhoods and land value projections and speculations. For the 1st time in U.S. history they were using them to project what schools would be closing, what land around those former schools would be opening up and what land in distant places could companies set up new schools. In this new deal, the State (State and Municipal) gave up the responsibility to educate the citizen, correction the State gave up the right to educate children. It paid private businessmen and hedge fund managers to create the resources (students), while the State saved money. Many will recognize this as a play from Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman into the deregulation of government creating the politics of neoliberalism.
Businessmen, the State argued as it shirked it responsibilities could not only prepare Black and Brown children for the frontier of the future they would run the schools more efficient. The State behaved neglectful at the expense of Black and Latino children, to believe business would care about kids, because businessmen go into business to make money not to do good. Before this new version of businessmen in education walked into an urban school building they began talking about cutting the excess fat and the glut in their minds was experienced Black and Latino teachers. There was a gap of opportunity between firing the experienced union teacher and hiring the inexperienced non-union teachers, while/or plugging in online schools with online classroom programs like the company Republican Neil Bush had been running since being caught in the Colorado Savings and Loan scandal.
How to Win Friends and Influence People in a New Economy
The businessmen took the gap and Black and Brown teachers were fired, while children suffered. The teachers union once a pathway to the middle class, in America, like the AFL-CIO, Police and Firefighters, except blacker, browner and more feminine, in this moment were powerless, teachers were let go like dead leaves in the wind. An act no politician or businessman would ever have thought or the courage to do to two of the former unions and like that government had helped business make money and a pathway was created for a new teacher, younger and suburban.
Politicians and businessmen could not have ever achieved this though without the help of Teach For America, thanks to subsidized salaries created by donations from liberal do-gooder foundations, doing wrong, with names like Gates, Broad, conservatives like Anschutz and the anti-union Walton foundation. From the side of the public good, no one asked in the middle of this asked why billionaires suddenly cared about the education of little Black and Brown children, why did Black education matter? After all, many Whites had fled the cities when legions of Black children who had been under educated for generations were going to attend school with White children the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Now billion dollar companies like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and JPMorgan distressed from the housing market crash of 2007–2011, after previously licking their wounds from the late 90’s, early 2000’s dot.com market disaster wanted in on the education business, the minds and bodies of Black and Brown children. These firms and their partners not only began to back reform minded Democrat governors and mayors they began to fund school board races, which were/are unpaid positions, suddenly like derivatives market in housing they were creating a new economy, in education.
By 2010 it was more than clear the new economy would be built off the dreams and hopes of people who theses firms had exploited in the housing market, but this time the shock and results would be in something far more lasting. The new model put inexperienced, TFA teachers in schools after a five-week pedagogy program, and summer schools to experiment and explore teaching on Black and Latino students versus the model where teachers majored in education for four years, learning history, methods and ideas. What were parents and taxpayers getting for their children? Studies show after their two-year commitments, 40% of TFA teachers leave the profession, by the beginning of year five all but 27% had chosen new professions or have used the opportunity as a resume filler for a graduate school applications. It’s too late for traditional public schools (TPS) and middle-class Black and Latino union teachers, who trained to be teachers as a first profession and who traditionally stay longer, they’d already been fired.
After all, a district of union teachers cost the State more, and union teachers have more rights and connections within their communities they live and teach in. The TFA teacher usually had no connection within the communities they taught in, making them a movable commodity for a businessman or corporation. In Denver, like the rest of the nation, no one cared about the lost of the teachers, because they were old, Black and Brown and usually in urban environments, they had been dehumanized. The weak teachers unions did not battle hard enough for, they missed the war in their case was about preserving the union and having experienced teachers. Only in Chicago did the union see the bigger picture. What parents did not realize in this battle was school choice is not a choice if the more experienced and dedicated teachers, teach in the suburbs, while districts fire, experienced teachers in urban environments to hire neophytes to experiment again and again on Black and Brown children.
Denver a Hotbed and Testing Ground for School Reform
On a local level this happened to TPS like Manual, Montbello and South, where administrators and communities were told the schools would be closing after poor scoring on standardized testing, which led to lack of enrollment. No one dared to think the lack of enrollment was happening because instead of building stronger neighborhood schools (TPS) the district had opened up the education of Black and Brown kids to the private sector, all three were for sale. The district then sectioned and rented off the buildings to corporate charter schools (except Manual).
Simultaneously in the district, the school board and began to close feeder schools (middle and elementary) off test scores. These parents were more than likely to be transient and travel to have their child enrolled in another school, dissipating the number of students likely to attend TPS at the high school level. As this happened once again districts around the country like DPS began to signal they will be re-purposing or closing high schools due to the lack of future enrollment. Disaster capitalism performed on Black and Brown kids in America, this time in black-face.
But why? Because shutting down large urban schools with 1500–3000 Black and Brown children, let out every day at 2:30 p.m. makes the real estate surrounding those schools more attractive. These kids were part of the donut that new Denverites did not want to live around. These tracts of land did not generate revenue in a city, and make it more attractive the way rezoning for businesses such as bars, nightclubs, and dispensaries. They just had to put a face on it that people felt they could trust and that face was Michael Bennet,a scion of breeding and Washington Democrat insider politics and who would later become a U.S. Senator.
Bennet would serve as Denver Public Schools Superintendent doing this transition, an MBA trained lawyer who had no formal experience with managing schools, education, students or public schools. In fact he, himself had attended private schools from kindergarten to law school but he had the backing of his politically conservative, billionaire investor and real estate mogul, boss Philip Anschutz. Who had financed the pro-charter documentary “Waiting For Superman“. Bennet would rely on Denver political insider, former council aide to Bill Roberts, (who many thought would be the first Black mayor) and councilwoman Happy “Allegra” Haynes for direction. Bennet looked nice enough but Haynes a Barnard graduate, had attended DPS’s East High School as the daughter of Denver Preschool founder, a program making preschool affordable for all, in Anna Jo Haynes. Haynes bought Bennet generations of credibility within the African-American community and Latino communities.
They together would lead Denver down the dark path of school reform and the destruction of the Black middle class. Bennet for his work would be considered for President Obama’s Secretary of Education. He later would be appointed as a U.S. Senator of Colorado as his private school mate from St. Albans in Washington D.C., Tom Boasberg would be appointed to replace him as superintendent. For her part, Ms. Haynes became a member of the Denver School Board, while practicing as a political consultant, later she became deputy Mayor under Michael Hancock, in a city cleared for development.
Originally published at theneopostmodernist.wordpress.com on February 26, 2018.
