What’s Wrong with Urban Education?—or—Notes on the Masthead

I purposefully avoided the term “urban education” in the description of The Brooklyn Educrat, though it would have been the simplest way to refer to the titular locale. There is something about describing a form of education as “urban” that smacks of the same euphemistic obscurantism employed by record stores when they arrange their Hip-Hop/R&B/Soul/Jazz/Reggae/Blues section under the same label. In fact, the term is such pliable code that it can be found standing in for everything from “inner-city” to “ghetto” to—I’m sure some would argue—the N word itself.

Of course, they do offer graduate degrees in urban education, as well they should. I’m not so naïve as to think that the code doesn’t work both ways. For a professor of urban education, the discipline of “urban education” allows her to say: “We need to specialize in the techniques necessary to advance the academic achievement of precisely those Americans who have the greatest need. They are highly concentrated in poor, urban areas.” And, yes, it turns out that they are predominantly black and brown students.

I sympathize whole-heartedly with such professors. The discourse of identity must be elusive in an age that considers the Civil Rights Movement to be over and done with. In exchange for certain civil rights, certain people took the right to be done with black and white, as well. Hence, the government can no longer do anything for black people that isn’t classified as an entitlement, having already given them equal rights (please imagine your own scare quotes). Professors, whose disciplines are ensconced in the university, find themselves close enough to government that they must learn to watch their mouths. Hence, degrees in “urban education.” In this context, I can accept a strategic deployment of the euphemism.

For my part, however, I want to avoid the term. I am concerned about the education of our black and brown children—both urban and rural and in between. I am concerned that some of us are willing to work so hard to convert poverty into the currency of all misery. Poverty is certainly an index of misery, but we strain when we try to consume the world of color with this medium of exchange.

That being said, I will be guilty of confusing all of these terms many times before I’m done with them. And yes, I am particularly concerned with the education in this particular urban area. I just thought I would leave the word off the masthead.