During the last stretch of his life, Bob Moses made time to meet with small groups of strangers who talked through the issue of caste in America—“what it means to you; and how you see it manifest itself in American classrooms.” He wasn’t just musing around. These Zoom raps—informed, no doubt, by the practice of Moses’ mentor Ella Baker who believed major social insurgencies must be rooted in humane face-to-face interplay—were part of campaign to build a national consensus. Moses knew he wouldn’t be around to see the future he envisioned, but he hoped Americans of all kinds and conditions would suss that the country’s school system must be remade in order to break down our caste structure.
I joined one of his last caste calls in May. The famously recessive Moses didn’t take up much air in the Zoom. He gave us space to tell our stories and pick up on echoes as we listened to the rest of the respondents. Together we brought home to each other how caste manifested itself in classrooms all over the country. I was struck by the testimony of a fervent (though perfectly composed) black elder from the Midwest, with decades of teaching experience, who told how the caste structure was calcifying in the heartland. Iowa was once known for having good public schools and better test scores than almost any other state. Lately, though, it has been inching down state educational rankings as the gap between scores of black and white students grows ever more salient. That, in turn, has led to a vogue for charter schools—the bogus solution that’s been the rage on the coasts for years.
Moses wanted us to grasp what had become clear to him during his forty years of work with the Algebra Project: we cannot beat America’s caste/class system if public education remains a matter for “states and local communities.” It’s past time for a national solution.
Over the past generation, the Federal government has responded to gross inequities in our educational system by mandating standards for teachers and tests based on a “common core” curriculum, but the Feds never close the loop on these interventions since they won’t address the mechanisms of funding public schools in America. They slip around the cold hard truth that schools in inner cities or poor rural districts have much less money than schools in suburbs or high-end urban neighborhoods. Everybody knows a broad-scale transformation of schooling in America is not a revenue neutral proposition. Discourse on educational reform is unserious unless it addresses bottom lines and gets real about what’s wrong with our country’s current approach to funding public schools. Americans must rethink our Constitutional inclination to leave education—both its content and the means of its provision—to states. Just as the Federal government played a key role in the struggle against slavery and Jim Crow, it must work in tandem with a mass democratic constituency to overcome the ongoing effects of our caste system in the classroom.
Clarity about this urgent task drives Moses et al.’s National Consensus Project. That project (along with moves toward real reparations rather than feints favored by the “diversity” nexus) provides something like a 21st Century agenda for the Civil Rights Movement’s true vine. It melds now’s-the-time imperatives with long views and a clear-eyed sense of what’s politically feasible. The popular upsurge Moses envisioned wouldn’t be delimited by race. At our Zoom meeting, he invoked the scads of white kids locked into lousy, under-resourced schools. It was apparent he understood white Americans won’t be shamed out of their fantasy that education in this country is a realm of freedom and equality; they will have to be reasoned into abandoning it.
Moses realized that getting Feds on the side of everyone beneath America’s imperial middle castes will require Constitutional mandates. He collaborated with other colleagues to draft a short “Outline of a White Paper” that surveyed the legal history behind his logical conclusion that Americans must establish a Constitutional right to education and then press Feds to enforce it. The “Outline’s” sketch of the past was meant in part to counter culture-wide libertarian biases. Post-modern states’ rights stances, coupled with deep skepticism about the way national power has been used in the past, tend to make it harder for the party of hope to amp up democratic governance. Not that Moses was ever beamish about the American political tradition or the scope of the original Constitution.[1] “Outline for a White Paper,” though, suggests that prosecutors of a 21st Century case against America’s caste structure could learn from the role played by feds in the struggle against Jim Crow in the South.[2]
When I read the “Outline” (which his amanuensis, Joan Wynne, sent to participants in those Zoom meetings) in May, it left me hanging. No doubt the open-ended ending was a sign of Moses’ aversion to top-down prescriptions. He liked to take in messages from the grassroots not deliver them. While the “Outline” could use a little more snap to its punch, another crisp two-pager produced by the National Consensus Project, “Eliminating Caste in America’s Classrooms,” is a knock-out. (You can it read here.)
That paper is both lucid and urgent. Its radicalism shames the tokenism that twists America’s elite precincts:
We are not trying to help only some students escape to a higher caste. We are trying to ensure that everyone stands on a solid floor of educational, material, civic, and political well-being.
The ECiAC document limns a sweet spot that’s a deep far from where any country has ever been.
To rouse our humanity, actualize our dreams, and revitalize our democracy, we need to reclaim education. Every school should be a joy and a glory, where we are proud to be. Every college and university, community college, park and playground, rural by-way, and urban street corner should be understood as a place of cultural production, including as a place to teach, learn, and do mathematics.
While I’m all in with Moses’s democratic vision, I’ll allow that last phrase backed me up since the prospect of algebra on every block seems like a nightmare to yours truly! Kidding aside, though, Moses’ focus on math was not just a matter of his own mental temper. (When I’m on the corner I try to remember he loved Camus too!) Moses zeroed in on algebra because math skills enable entrance into the 21 C. information economy. His materialist angles made sense. It’s important to tie educational reform to the job market. (“Culture don’t butter no bread.”) Still, I’d argue we need public education to prep students for citizenship not slots in the occupational shitstym. Democracy rests, after all, on an educated polity. I may not long to see math problems being solved on “every rural by-way and urban street corner,” but it would be dreamy if citizens there were thinking seriously about politics. To say it plain, one aim of public education should be to improve the vote.
I had the temerity to ask Moses about all that in the Zoom Session and (I’m tempted to say of course) his response showed he’d been mulling this question over for years. He cited the New York State case decided back when Pataki was governor, where a three judge panel determined citizens need an eighth grade education to serve on juries and do other civic duties.
Moses always linked the Algebra Project to democracy and he and his collaborators underscored that aspect of the proposed National Consensus Project in the ECiAC working paper…
Math is an organizing tool, not the goal in itself. The goal is for young people to think for themselves and then to decide to act as a group, demanding access for everyone. Essentially this is “self-determination.” The Algebra Project classrooms and Young People’s Project learning spaces are places where young people can experience thinking for themselves and then acting as a group as they learn successfully to challenge the injustices in their society.
Bob Moses’ longtime comrades at the AP have reaffirmed their commitment to take their new project to the next, federal level. In the wake of his death, it may be harder for them to get traction. OTOH, Moses was averse to leader-worship and one of his abiding lessons was that the future of caste-free democracy is on us.
Notes
1 Historian Taylor Branch wasn’t wrong when he responded to news of Moses’ death by focusing on the “gentle brave genius’s” Constitutionalism but Branch probably underplayed Moses’ disdain for the Founders’ racist compromises.
2 Moses wasn’t out to burnish the rep of government figures, though I note he always seemed to imply respect was due when he brought up John Doar—the “Lincoln Republican” who became the face of the Justice Department in the South during the early 60s. Founded on stone truths about rocky relations between the Southern Freedom Movement’s local civil rights organizers and agents of the national government—Moses’ instincts on this front were way better than those of contemporary moralizers stuck on a dim antimonies between “protest” and “politics,” grassroots and feds).