Abstract
After her extensive expose on the trauma and devastation of 9/11, Ms Day reminded students that there was much work to be done to protect the nation from future attacks. The Department of Homeland Security’s 24,000 employees, Ms Day asserted, diligently worked each day to prevent another September 11. According to Ms Day, those 240,000 employees ‘are the ones that need the intelligence to keep the bad guys out’. And that’s our mission: stronger team, safer nation. Keep the bad guys out.
Regina Day is a guest speaker addressing students in Milton High School’s Homeland Security programme, as witnessed by Nicole Nguyen, education researcher and assistant professor of social foundations of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Nguyen conducted an ethnographic study of Milton High School, the context of its adoption of its Homeland Security programme and the impact of the programme on its students.
Milton High is a struggling school, the sort that in England and Wales Ofsted would have placed in ‘special measures’ and compelled to become an academy, typically run as and by a corporate entity. It caters for predominantly working-class and poor black students in an area undergoing rapid change as middle-class families move in to take up jobs in an expanding national security industry consequent upon the 9/11 tragedy in 2001. Milton High determined that it would tailor its curriculum and pedagogy to the needs of the national security industry, thereby preparing its students for jobs in that industry. As such, Milton was seeking to improve the quality of education for its students while offering them comprehensive training in national security and keeping them motivated with the prospect of guaranteed jobs in the industry, if they conformed in their conduct, thinking and general orientation to the qualities and standards that would win them security clearance and a job. Since ‘the promise of a career in the security industry was dependent on a security clearance that requires a “clean” background’, the Homeland Security programme helped to deal with discipline problems and to eliminate behaviours which were associated with poor self-management and academic performance.
Nguyen’s research found that at least fifteen other high schools operated Homeland Security programmes, with most of them relying on ‘active partnerships with the US military and national security industry’. At Milton High, top-ranking officers from the National Security Agency (NSA) and from industry partners taught students either as guest speakers, workshop leaders or learning facilitators on field trips and simulation exercises.
But while all those programmes were designed to take the ‘war on terror’ to ‘the bad guys’, leaving nothing to chance, different categories of students were being prepared for different levels of jobs in the industry: ‘while all kinds of communities host high school Homeland Security programs, schools often slated poor and working class youth of colour for a military-style national security education while “more affluent” students enjoyed an engineering focused program’. Although Nguyen does not highlight the salient differences in these types of programme, the common curricular focus of which is on preparing students to contribute to the global war on terror, the research indicates that the more affluent students are also the ones with the foundation that renders them suitable for high-end jobs in engineering and IT, while the poor and working-class students are being prepared for lower-level jobs. One might add that they are also the ones who are more likely to return home in body bags.
Nguyen situates the rapid expansion of these Homeland Security programmes within the neoliberal trend in the US public school system towards privatisation, in other words, publicly funded schools run like businesses by private corporations for profit, a process that ‘transforms education from a public good to a capitalist enterprise’. Nguyen gives as an example Chicago, where forty-nine public schools serving ‘poor communities of colour’ were shut, but thirty-three publicly funded but privately operated charter schools were opened, charter schools which ‘often impose selective enrolment policies that “largely exclude neighbourhood children” from poor and working class communities of colour … Neoliberal policies serve the interests of wealthy entrepreneurs and white, middle-class children.’
Middle class or working class, however, students were treated to a pedagogy that enabled them to define ‘terror’ in a manner that made waging war on terror not just a patriotic duty, but something necessary for one’s own survival. Security and counter-terrorism exercises led by serving security personnel from the security industry and from the NSA made terror real and led students to sustain a heightened state of fear and of preparedness. The ‘bad guys’ were not just foreign terrorists and Muslims, but potentially the man next door and the student in the next room.
But, waging war demanded a certain mindset and one that glamorised weapons, militarism, violence and masculinity. Male students had a particular fascination with military hardware, guns especially. They were encouraged in that by staff who validated genderised roles and exhibitions of masculinity that objectified women and projected violence as a necessary component of counter-terrorism: the program encouraged Milton boys – most of whom were black – to perform hypersexual, virile, and aggressive masculinities. These masculinities map onto dominant, racist tropes of the Black male body as inherently violent and hypersexual, thus requiring constant surveillance and policing. These tropes feed the massive criminalisation of young Black men perceived to ‘constitute a threat’ ‘at home’. While the police pursue Black men and boys in city streets and schools, thus circuiting Black male bodies into prisons, the military re-valorizes these de-valorised racialized masculinities, inciting men of color to enlist. The military manages and uses these stereotyped masculinities. Placing bodies of color in military uniforms transforms their ‘dangerous’ status quo into ‘deserving citizens’.
A Curriculum of Fear provides a very graphic account of how a body of students could be groomed, if not brainwashed, to adopt a siege mentality and be preoccupied with external threats from ‘bad guys’ intent on causing injury to innocents, to the nation and to its infrastructure. That malevolent ‘other’ could be your neighbour, but they could also present as other referents: Through the social construction of danger, people interpret certain visual cues, like brown skin, low-flying planes, people read as Muslim, and unattended bags in airports, as risky and thus fearsome. Cultural, political, and social ideas about what is, and is not, dangerous structure these fears. Fear, subsequently, is not an individual or interior state of mind but rather a socially constructed, historically contingent, and culturally embedded emotion.
Nguyen observed that teachers and guest speakers used military or security imagery and artefacts to teach maths, geography and other subjects. What her ethnographic account does not present is any reference to a curriculum that was not directly related to Homeland Security and that gives students an alternative view of the world. Where did ‘terrorists’ who were not home-grown come from? Why do they make the United States their target? What is US foreign policy? Which countries are its allies? Does its association with them put America under threat? Where is the Pentagon? Why is there a preoccupation with Muslims and not with Jews?
One can surmise that those poor and working-class black students being trained for jobs in the national security industry would be even more ignorant about their place in America and America’s place in the world at the end of the programme than before they joined it, albeit they would have been more mentally prepared to go and ‘kick arse’, even if they might not have the slightest clue as to where in the world they are going and why.
Nguyen concludes: this book critiques how we, as a nation, continue to funnel non-dominant youth into the global war on terror, prioritizing national security over human security. Accordingly, this ethnography troubles the securitized educational pathways we continue to carve out for poor and working-class youth of color.
Milton High saw the Homeland Security programme as a good way of imposing military discipline upon ‘poor and working-class youth of color’ who were otherwise not engaged with learning and could not readily be motivated. The programme was clearly unyielding in telling students what to learn and the mental attitude they should develop to threats, imaginary or real, facing the United States, rather than how to be critical learners and thinkers. Conformity to a terror narrative and to the notion of the dangerous ‘other’ required conformity to dress codes, codes of behaviour and discipline and to national security norms. That conformity was secured not just by staff on the Homeland Security programme, but by police who were part of the staff team at Milton High.
Kathleen Nolan, a lecturer in the teacher preparation programme at Princeton, conducted a study of a school which she called Urban Public High School (UPHS) in an area characterised by poverty and violence. The school operated ‘zero tolerance’ policies that were imposed through the deployment of a highly visible and engaged police presence.
Nolan set out to explore what the impact of that style of school management and discipline maintenance was on students who came from challenging circumstances and who were seeking to engage with learning and with education as a route to better life chances. She found a regime that was excessively punitive and that compounded the disadvantages and oppressions students faced.
Those students were used to a heavy and intrusive police presence in their communities outside school. They were often the target of police attention, leading to interactions that resulted in summonses and court appearances. Outside school, therefore, there were few opportunities for them to receive non-judgmental guidance and informal social education that would have enabled them to develop effective self-management skills and be better at navigating the challenging environments that were part of their daily living. In school, many were poor performers and not highly motivated learners. The school, however, was responding to a policy decreed by the city mayor Rudy Giuliani and retained by Michael Bloomberg that required schools to deal firmly with minor infractions so that they did not lead to greater and lesser manageable ones. ‘Zero tolerance’, even of those routine misdemeanours that are generally acknowledged as adolescent boisterousness and boundary testing.
There appeared to be no clear boundaries, however, between the police use of power and authority and that of teachers. Effectively, the police dealt with discipline matters as law and order issues, handcuffing students and issuing court summonses for even minor infractions. Many teachers were unhappy with the fact that their authority was being usurped by the police and were uneasy about the thought that, although they were putatively working in partnership with parents in support of students’ learning and self-development, the school was as much a site of student criminalisation as the streets.
What Nolan calls the ‘culture of control’ led to student appearances in court, often resulting in criminal records for behaviours which, in other schools, would be dealt with routinely by teachers. She cites as the most significant finding of her study the number of occasions on which students would be called out for minor infractions, e.g. being late for class, or wearing a hat, and that would lead to them being given a summons to appear in court. In the introduction to Chapter 3, Nolan writes: Although a variety of policies and practices were part of the culture of control inside UPHS, the most central was the systematic use of order-maintenance-style policing. This included law-enforcement officials’ patrolling of the hallways, the use of criminal-procedural-level strategies, and the pervasive threats of summonses and arrest, which together led to three essential consequences. First, the heavy policing of students on a daily basis and an official policy of police intervention for minor school infractions led to the criminalization of misbehavior. In fact, frequently the police intervention itself triggered the behavior that was ultimately considered criminal. Second, disciplinary incidents that could have been considered violations of the law but had once been handled internally by educators, such as fighting, came to be defined as serious crimes and were often handled through police intervention, summonses, and the arrests of students. Third, as school discipline merged with an ideology of street policing, the boundaries between once-separate domains – the school, the street, and institutions of the criminal-justice system – became blurred. As David Garland suggests, as crime-control responsibilities move beyond the boundaries of the criminal-justice system, institutions of civil society, such as the urban public school, assume explicit roles in the larger societal project of the penal management of marginalized, low-income youth of color.
The black body, poor and working class, is historically an objectified phenomenon to be controlled, subordinated and subdued, whether through brutality or coercive compliance, or both. What Nguyen and Nolan depict through their respective studies is that the ‘war on terror’ mirrors the ‘war on youth’. It is a war in which black youths are targeted as the ever present threat to law and order and to consensual values which they are presumed not to share. What is more, there is an assumption on the part of those in authority, in schools no less than in the police and in the courtroom, that no decent citizen would consider any method of controlling and containing that ‘threat’ to be excessive, draconian jail sentences or, worse even, the phenomenon of ‘strange fruit’ littering southern streets.
So, in the case of Milton High, a criterion of acceptance into the security industry is that young people provide concrete evidence over a sustained period that they have divested themselves of the traits, characteristics, beliefs and attitudes to oppressive authority that are deemed to define black youth as ‘threat’, as ‘other’, and are therefore stable and sanitised enough to be considered capable of joining the club. Their suitability is measured by the extent to which they display a mindset which enables them to identify with the NSA’s sweeping definition of ‘the bad guys’, including members of their own family and peer group. Driven by that mindset, they become as capable as their white counterparts of spraying black youths like themselves with bullets as potential ‘bad guys’, in a classic case of the oppressed becoming host to the oppressor and taking on his mantle.
In the case of Nolan’s UPHS, the school is effectively a business and uses the police to control any body and any activity that runs against the interests of the business. It operates to ensure that what is seen as the culture of the street and what pass as normal interactions in the communities from which students come do not manifest on the business premises. ‘Customers’ are therefore expected to come in well attuned to the expectations of the business place, or face the consequences. Those who do not are not just asked to leave, or thrown out, they attract police intervention and invariably court summonses.
The idea that school is a place where children’s learning and development into adulthood is facilitated, where they are assisted in acquiring the values that make us fit for living in civil society, in demanding and safeguarding their own rights and having due regard for the rights of others, in unlearning inappropriate behaviours and taking personal responsibility for creating and sustaining a safe and supportive environment where they and others could learn and teachers could teach … that idea is not one that fits with the business model of UPHS, or of any of the schools created and managed on the neoliberal, input and output model. So, rather than schooling and education being a vehicle for social mobility and a route out of social exclusion, especially for the poor, marginalised and dispossessed, it compounds social exclusion and the oppression that is already part of students’ existential reality, thus more likely leading to the abandonment of hope and the death of aspiration. In concrete terms, the school becomes the mouth of the school-to-prison pipeline.
So, what are the implications of all that for schooling in England and Wales?
That ‘pipeline’ which is now a well-established conduit in the US used to take the form in the UK of student infraction>>> school exclusion>>> criminal justice system. For example, in 2001, when he was chair of the Youth Justice Board, Lord Warner of Brockley said this: 80 per cent of young offenders of school age are out of school, either through exclusion or refusal to attend … mainstream schooling is not willing and not able to deal with children with challenging behaviour.
Successive governments in Britain have been enamoured of the US charter and magnet schools and have tailored the Academy and Free School programme to mirror them. In the last decade, police in the British school system have been performing, routinely, roles not unlike those in the US public school system. For example, a report in the Southend Evening Echo (18 June 2008) said of the police presence in Shoeburyness High School: Headteachers decide on suspensions and expulsions but the officers can look to make arrests should an incident warrant their intervention. Headteacher Sue Murphy said she would recommend every school have an officer based on site to deal with issues, help educate pupils and make everyone feel safer.
One suspects that it is just a matter of time before police are assigned to ‘troubled families’ or to parents with children with ‘challenging behaviour’ in much the same way that social workers used to be. Until then, however, many academies are operating ‘zero tolerance’ regimes not unlike UPHS.
In England and Wales, academies and free schools are excluding at a much higher rate in proportion to the total number of schools. In 2012–2013, for example, a total of 18,763 maintained schools excluded 2,700 pupils. Yet, only 2,390 academies excluded 1,930 pupils (a mere 770 less than all maintained schools). When one considers the link that exists between school exclusion and involvement with the criminal justice system which the government itself acknowledges, the role of academies in feeding that school-to-prison pipeline should be the subject of much needed research.
If, as government statistics suggest, Britain is incarcerating more black people relative to our numbers in the overall population than does the US, the purpose of schooling as judged by the practices of academies and other schools operating in the neoliberal education marketplace is surely worthy of the most intense scrutiny.