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**Critical Surveillance- Affirmative



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**Critical Surveillance- Affirmative

1AC

Chicago Public Schools is committed to increasing surveillance in public schools at any cost- despite massive teacher layoffs and inadequate facilities, millions have been poured into surveillance technology


Chicago Defender 2010- “Chicago Public Schools focus on security” http://chicagodefender.com/2010/01/27/chicago-public-schools-focus-on-security/

Chicago Public Schools officials say they realize that unless their students are safe in school, they won’t learn.¶ That’s one reason why it increased its security budget to $8 million this school year from $6.5 million last school year. Upon hiring a new chief executive officer in 2009 it also hired a new security boss, Michael Shields.¶ Shields, a retired deputy superintendent from the Chicago Police Department, said students should be able to feel safe once on school grounds.¶ “My job is to make sure our students are safe and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to make that happen,” Shields, director of the Office of School Safety & Security for CPS, told the Defender. “We don’t want kids to be fearful while in school because it can take away from their productivity in class.”¶ During the 2008-09 school year there were 116,000 incidents recorded at CPS. Incidents range from a shouting match between students to a food fight in the cafeteria.¶ But the total number of “serious misconduct” incidents, which usually means an occurrence so bad, such as violence, that the student was either suspended or expelled, was 17,000, according to Shields.¶ There is a minimum of two Chicago police officers assigned to each high school. And like Shields, who spent 23 years with CPD, Ron Huberman, chief executive officer for CPS, is also a former Chicago cop.¶ But CPS does not rely solely on police assistance when it comes to security for its 408,000 students, said Shields. It relies more on the 2,000 security guards on CPS payroll – with a starting salary of $26,000 – and the 6,200 cameras installed throughout the school district. There are an average of seven security guards at each high school.¶ And while the bulk of its security budget is spent on personnel costs, Shields, who earns $150,000 a year, said long term plans include using more cameras.¶ “Video surveillance is a lot more useful because security guards can only be in one place at a time. Cameras are helping us immensely. Plus, cameras can capture activity in the community, which is where most school incidents occur,” he said. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. awarded CPS a $2.5 million grant, which will be used to purchase more cameras.¶ “J.P. Morgan is the first major corporation to step for security at CPS and we thank them,” Shields said. “We are also reaching out to other corporations for help.”¶ Huberman said its security efforts are paying off.¶ “There were 143 CPS students shot last school year and this school year there were only 102, so violence incidents are down,” he said. “And none of these shootings took place on school grounds.”¶ CPS received $30 million in federal stimulus money to combat violence and Huberman added that among the things he plans to do is to make traveling to and from school more safer for students.¶ “We plan to spend $2 million to develop a safe passage program to make sure students are safe when traveling to and from school,” he told the Defender.¶ Additionally, CPS will award a $10 million contract to a community organization to assist it with conflict resolutions strategies, which could include in-school suspensions rather than at-home suspensions. The final $18 million will be used to create a Culture of Calm program at designated schools identified to have high incidents of violence. There are 38 schools targeted for the new program, many of them are on the South Side.¶ Shields said a lot of incidents of violence occur at bus routes where students from different schools ride the same bus.¶ “We have met with private school principals, (Chicago Transit Authority) officials and Chicago police, because many times students from various schools ride the same bus and that’s when problems often occur. These meetings resulted in us getting bus times for routes that we will share with principals and to make sure police are at these bus routes.”¶ In September near Christian Fenger Academy High School on the Far South Side, Derrion Albert, a 16 year-old honor student who was waiting at the bus stop to go home, was beaten to death with a wooden railroad tie after a fight broke out between youth from different neighborhoods.¶ CPS uses cameras and metal detectors at many of its high schools. Metal detectors are not used at elementary schools although handheld detectors are sometimes used. The average elementary school has one security guard assigned to it.¶ One community organizer, Westow Miller, executive director of Neighborhood Watch, a parent patrol group, said more security guards and metal detectors are needed at elementary schools.¶ “There are more violent incidents occurring at elementary schools than people hear about,” he said.¶ Earlier this month a 12 year-old boy who attends Bethune Elementary School on the West Side was caught bringing an unloaded gun with ammunition to school.¶ But CPS officials said eventually it would like to reduce the number of metal detectors at schools. At Defender press time, CPS officials did not know the total number of metal detectors in use.¶ “Our goal is to have fewer metal detectors at schools,” said Monique Bond, director of communications for CPS. Some schools have more, depending on the number of students, building size and the school’s security needs, Shields added.

This year the resolution asks us to stand resolved that the United States Federal Government curtail its domestic surveillance. Rather than engage in a hypothetical debate about USFG policy, we have decided to use the debate sphere as a means to resist the surveillance infrastructure of our public school system. Urban youth are currently subject to over-policed and underfunded schools, with surveillance cameras and metal detectors deployed in hallways and classrooms. This should be viewed as a narrative aimed at exposing the ways youth of color are deemed “a security risk”.


Weiss 2007- Jen, Ph.D. candidate in Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York City, New York “Eyes on Me Regardless”: Youth Responses to High School Surveillance” http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ821604.pdf
In public schools across the country, students are encountering the effects of a variety of security measures designed to make schools safer. Students enter and exit their schools through metal detectors, scanning machines, and under the suspicious stares and booming shouts of security officials and police officers. On their way to classes, they move through hallways, stairwells, and sometimes classrooms mounted with surveillance cameras. From California to Florida, Washington to Maine, urban and suburban public school officials and government policymakers are choosing to respond to issues related to student violence and school safety by deploying an array of surveilling techniques and technologies. NewYorkCity, home of more surveillance cameras per square foot than any other city in the country, leads the pack in developing and implementing school-based surveillance initiatives (Ruck et al., 2005; Boal, 1998). In 2004,CityCouncilpasseda bill to install surveillance cameras and metal detectors in every public school by 2006 and allocated $120 million in the five year capital budget for new security cameras which cost “Eyes on Me Regardless”: Youth Responses to High School Surveillance By Jen Weiss 48 “Eyes on Me Regardless” approximately $75,000 per school to install (Bennett, 2004). In fact, the City’s Impact schools and nine other large high schools, with large African-American and Latino populations, were top priority to receive cameras, metal detectors, and heavy police presence. Ostensibly designed to improve school safety, the effects of the technologies and personnel required to implement surveillance are manifold—many of which are counterproductive to safety, and, in some cases, actually foment violence. Instead of a greater sense of safety in and around school, along with an active and civilly-minded sense of school community, students describe a feeling of danger and disillusion. More and more, public schools are becoming part of the network of post-9/11, state-sponsored surveillance—spaces in which students experience firsthand what it is to be monitored, feared, contained, and harassed all in the name of safety and protection. Even after security measures are installed, students refer to an increase in the number of violent incidents inside their schools, and attest to the harassment they experience at the hands of police and school safety agents(SSA)1 now located inside their schools.2 As one student put it: “If you would walk outside when the late bell rings, you would hear [the security staff yelling] ‘Get out. Go home. Go home’…They do not want us there. And even when we’re inside the building, they do not want us there. So it’s a constant ‘I don’t want you here’ typa thing.” These stories match up with current research noting that low-income youth of color are being pushed out of public spaces and are increasingly monitored by authority and placed under the threat of criminalization (see Fine et al., 2003; Ruck et al, 2005). Correspondent with research that contends that with greater police presence comes an elevation in arrests and incarceration rates for youth of color, especially African-Americans (Poe-Yagamata & Jones, 2000), the students with whom I worked are equally aware of heightened scrutiny in their school, as well as in surrounding neighborhoods and around their homes. These studies illuminate some of what gets forgotten in the search for greater school security and fewer incidents of school violence: that school-wide surveillance policies also produce indirect and counterproductive consequences on urban students, especially but not only those already marginalized by the school system. The very presence of urban youth, educational theorist Henry Giroux argues, prompts in the public imagination a “rhetoric of fear, control, and surveillance” (2003, p. 554). Loic Wacquant refers to this level of scrutiny as the phenomenon of “social panopticism” in which social service bureaucracies, like schools and other institutions, are called on to use the information and human means they possess to exercise close surveillance on ‘problem populations’ (2001, p. 84). Failing to address the larger economic, political, and social conditions faced by poor and working-class youth of color, urban school policies and reform agendas are generated in a context of heightened fear and moral panic. Poor urban high schools have largely become, or are becoming, sites of containment and control. They are spaces where school policies which involve surveillance technologies and techniques get tested on youth bodies already framed by suspicion (Ruck 49 Jen Weiss et al., 2005; Saltman & Gabbard, 2003; Garland, 2001; Males, 1996; Noguera 1995). Neoliberalism, or the retreat of social welfare programs matched by an increase of social control polices, is helping to foment a climate of fear and surveillance. Michelle Fine (2006) argues that privatization and what she names the “privileged public sphere” is not only a re-alignment of public dollars, but also public bodies. In this sense, surveillance and security policies in schools are strategies for moving these public bodies around; not only to and from classrooms, but also from school to prison. Surveillance trends in schools are not merely more cops and more cameras, but are also symptoms that emerge in the context of neoliberalism—represented by a range of educational reform agendas and policies. Expecting surveillance and security measure to address the consequences of excessive over-crowding, financial inequity, and lack of educational services such as counseling and peer mediation signals an unwillingness to deal with underlying macroeconomic issues faced by schools and educators. In the context of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we witness the retreat of public funding and a demand for state or federal (and private) control and accountability. Although it gave students in failing schools a chance to enroll in successful district schools and required schools and districts to be held responsible for its under-prepared students and teachers, it failed to allocate resources and funding to meet these needs and held them accountable for outcomes they were ill-prepared to meet. It is a good example of an accountability system that is punitive—forcing schools and educators to impose NCLB’s standards without compromise or questions. Such an accountability system fails to address the myriad structural factors that contribute to struggling schools. Ultimately, the law serves to penalize schools and educators—measuring compliance solely by the increase in standardized test scores of its students. Despite an important intent, NCLB has done little to close the ‘achievement’ gap of Black and Latino students—with only 38% of NewYork City’s public high schools tudents graduating in four years. At the same time, NCLB represents a financial windfall for standardized testing and textbook companies and has awarded millions of dollars to security companies. Homeland security-related business is said to be the economy’s “fastest-growing sector—jumping from $28 billion in 2003 to a projected $170 billion by 2015” (Homeland Security Research Corporation, 2005 as quoted by Editors, 2005). Students learn to avoid security at all costs; and they learn that the rules they are expected to follow are not consistently imposed. Interactions with security become moments in which students note the failure of surveillance—on some days they’ll “get caught for going to the bathroom without a hall pass” and on other days they do not. Following the school’s rules, then, means being subjected to ‘the presence of an absence’ of authority and experience the material and psychological impact of these policy trends. What they are responding to, my research contends, is not merely the violence of feeling so heavily watched, but the violence that accompanies unjust school policies directed at low-income, urban youth of color students 50 “Eyes on Me Regardless” in these schools, student who are deeply aware that the persistent advancement of surveillance measures inside their schools has ill-intended consequences on them and their education. Given the context urban youth find themselves in—appropriately described by one student as “eyes on me regardless”3 —what then becomes of student resistance to the oppressive and often punitive conditions they face inside their schools? Although my larger study addresses the political economy informing school-based surveillance policies for youth of color in urban areas, my central research focus has been to trace student resistance to these policies. Students narrate stories of fear and frustration. But they also narrate stories of resistance. Foucault (1980) reminds us that where the forces of domination reside, so too do the forces of resistance. In school spaces there is a multitude of both; however when power masquerades or is concealed through mechanisms of surveillance, it re-defines what “counts” as resistance. Theorists generally disagree about what constitutes resistance: some argue that it must be collective struggle with specific goals and intentions(Hermans, 2001; Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985); others note that while efforts at resistance are always active under domination, they are harder to detect and may appear complicitous with power (Kelley, 1990; Scott, 1985). Ashforth and Mael (1998) outline a basic framework for understanding the overlapping nature of the concept. They argue that resistance may be directed at a threat or that it may be indirectly targeted at a threat (diffuse); that it may be collective or individual; that it may be authorized by an institution, or remain unauthorized; and, finally, that it may be facilitative of an institution’s goals or oppositional to them. Keeping this basic framework in mind as a guide, this article does not take up what constitutes resistance, but rather what we might learn about resistance and surveillance by looking at how students at a Bronx, New York, high school have responded to security initiatives recently imposed on them. It discusses three responses: theprotest; tactical avoidance; and what I am calling emergent participation. I will address each of these strategies in depth and follow with a brief consideration of what they teach us about resistance. Taken together, these responses offer us a chance to consider the multiple forms that resistance takes and those that emerge over time, in this case, over the course of a school year. I will begin by considering what is perhaps the most promising and definitely the most visible response to school-wide surveillance measures: a student-organized walkout of 1,500 students that took place at a large comprehensive high school in the Bronx, New York, in late September 2005. But before attending to the protest, I will give a brief history of New York City school security policy.

Militarization is often thought of as something that happens “over there” in far off, war-torn nations. Yet, for the average Chicago Public School student, being subject to weapons searches, random stops by security guards and surveillance cameras, is a normal school day. The current discourse on the “failure” of inner-city schools fails to interrogate the ways inner-city students are considered harbingers of violence. At stake is the notion of “schooling” itself


Devine 1996- John, director, School Partnership Program, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools
The response of this New York City high school student summarizes the¶ discourse I try to problematize in the pages that follow.‘ When most people—Americans or foreigners, even those who live in economically im-poverished lands—think about schools, they ordinarily do not think of uniformed security guards, high-tech devices for weapons searches, or the use of police tactics for corridor surveillance. Students attending New York¶ City‘: most troubled high schools do so automatically.¶ The central thesis of this book based on my ten years of working in New¶ York's inner-city high schools can be described as an attempt to outline the process by which violence becomes normalized in everyday school life, to examine the inner logic of its accompanying ethos of fear, and to suggest that this phenomenon may be proving more widespread throughout American education, even in suburban and rural schools—wherever, in fact. a techno-security apparatus is relied on as the primary mechanism for achieveing schoolwide discipline. My basic claim is that the collective imagination of the New York City high school system, fed over the past several decades on an amalgam of real and invented student crime, treacheries. and rampages, has reacted with intensive paramilitary practices that have engen- dered an antagonistic terrain where traditional public schooling and urban street culture mingle—the latter conceptualized as both transforming and transformed by the educational institution. l will contend that state, school,¶ and street languages are merging into a koine of corporeal experiences (the¶ attendant options of this koine are suspicion. loneliness, anger, terror,¶ fear. and grief. although it also allows for the negation of those feelings).¶ This emerging etiquette has so radically shattered the standard concept of the school and affected the historical teacher-student bond that a novel duality has arisen, assigning to teachers an exclusively cognitive role while delegating to security forces the responsibility for supervising the body, con- trolling student behavior, and managing school discipline. When l ask¶ teachers in these schools how they maintain classroom control, their re-¶ sponse is, “I can always call security if the kids get too rough.” The chapters¶ that follow question these kinds of responses, now taken for granted,¶ through an anthropology of the body that takes as its starting point Feld-¶ man’s (1994, 407) observation that “relations of domination are spatially¶ marked by the increase of perceptual (and thus social) distance from the¶ body of the Other.”¶ But the hallways of urban schools are not spaces in which educational researchers and theoreticians have been comfortable. Their preference for the classroom as the locus of investigation reflects their interest in the cogni- tive aspects of teacher training, their fascination with the “hidden curricu-¶ lum,” their rush to create “effective” schools before adequately diagnosing why schools have become ineffective, and their desire to recount success stories about “transferable” experiments “that work." This study will focus¶ on that most contested of spaces, the high school corridor, understood here--in opposition to the increasingly privatized universe of the class- room—as emblematic of the whole public dimension of the institution. The¶ corridor calls into question that vast body of literature that centers on the¶ enclosed realm of the classroom and its curriculum, those twin preoccupa-¶ tions of most educational research journals. The social topography of the urban corridor implies infinitely deferred presence (Derrida's dfiérance), multiplicity, a dispersion of temporality, constant distraction. and the ran dom occurrence of events; the classroom still holds out the promise of dia logue, unity, a coherent configuration of time, concentration. and the possibility of narrative By refusing to consider the processes whereby the student's body be- comes transformed into a proactive instrument of violence, by disdaining to theorize about the politically incorrect topic of discipline, research has bolstered those tendencies of the “system” that pretend there are some fac- ile answers to the overwhelmingly complex problems associated with urban school reform. Such sweeping assertions will rightfully elicit a host of objec-¶ tions from informed readers. I will address some of these objections at the¶ outset.¶ Since l start by attempting to establish that violence does exist in the schools that are the subject of this study and that its discovery is not simply¶ the result of racist interpretation, nostalgic exaggeration about the “good¶ old days." or general adult squeamishness about adolescent culture, perhaps¶ the first question that might arise is precisely why it is necessary to begin in¶ this way—merely confirming the existence of a conspicuous phenomenon.¶ ls it not obvious. one might object. to anyone who watches the news or¶ reads the papers that the schools, especially the public schools, are, like the¶ streets surrounding them saturated with stabbings, muggings, and nurse?¶ The problem is that in attempting to interpret the phenomenon of violence, one immediately encounters a discourse of denial coexisting along- side this discourse 0|’ frank admission. The same high school principal who confides to a visitor that all‘ of the students in his school routinely carry weapons is also able to maintain almost in the same breath that “things have been getting much better lately“ It is therefore necessary to situate the problem of violence, as I attempt to do in chapter l. to confirm its existence. isolate its components, and circumscribe it, even though it stays one step ahead and forces researchers to realize their own complicity in constructing the very object to be studied.¶ l shall maintain that this discourse of denial manifests itself on two levels—the practical as well as the theoretical. Since my project aims at ad-¶ dressing both levels, my audience perforce includes scholars interested in¶ analyzing the American educational scene as well as parents, teachers, and¶ the general public, for whom school violence has become an authentic con cern. These reflections are primarily meant to start practical and useful¶ conversations with anyone interested in shaping urban educational policies,¶ in discussing how highly troubled schools can be converted into safer, more¶ respectful places of learning. But l am also arguing that the culture of school violence—whose exact demarcations l shall at this point leave unde fined—is undertheorized. In reacting to right-wing views many academi cians have, for some time that portrayed the inner-city adolescent as pure¶ Without denying the validity of their insights. I will be claiming that¶ the realities of inner-city schooling are far more convoluted.

We need a counter-discourse, one that questions the existence of surveillance infrastructure in public schools, and exposes the ways students are turned into docile, unquestioning and apolitical subjects. Current post-modern literature on biopower and disciplinary power fails to explain the nexus between pedagogy, violence, and surveillance in the urban school setting.


Devine 1996- John, director, School Partnership Program, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools
At this point, we might turn from the ethnography of the corridors and¶ ask ourselves what messages these public spaces contain for pedagogical¶ theory. It would be easy to conclude that the presence of the SSOs, the police, and the hall deans, with their panoply of electronic surveillance ma- chines, represents a higher-order expansion of the old panopticism, but dressed up and greatly intensified in hi-tech clothing. Does it not appear¶ self-evident that we are witnessing a heightened kind of surveillance—one infinitely more detailed and pervasive than even the “fussy” seventeenth- century military inspections Michel Foucault refers to in Discipline and Punish (1979, 140)? At first blush, this would seem so, but before answering¶ definitively we should review Foucault’s decipherment of panopticism as¶ the constitutive code of modernity. Most fundamentally, Foucault viewed the Panopticon, Jeremy Ben-¶ tham’s ideal prison, as one of the many new modes of social control that¶ were developing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that pro-¶ fessed to be more emancipatory than their predecessors but in reality were¶ not. The progression from the confessional box to the psychiatric couch¶ and the evolution from public executions, torture, and dungeons to modern¶ prisons were, for Foucault, steps toward far more efficient and pervasive¶ techniques of social domination. Whereas previously the mutilated body of¶ a regicide who had been hanged, drawn, and quartered could be paraded¶ to instill a lasting message in the minds of onlookers, now—in the classical¶ age—-the body was being converted into a “useful machine" through the¶ mediation of a whole set of methods and rules for controlling and correcting¶ its operations. A “docile body” (Foucault 1979, 138) was being created, one that could be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (136), espe- cially in the context of the boarding school or the military camp. Within¶ the space of the barracks or the dormitory, “no detail was unimportant”¶ (140), and the body was subjected to uninterrupted surveillance—the¶ “gaze” (l7l)—eventuating in human subjects mastering, managing, re-¶ pressing, and ultimately supervising themselves. But for Foucault, the effects of this “supervision of the smallest frag-¶ ment of life and of the body” went far beyond seventeenth-century secondary education and prisons: concentration on the “meticulous observation of detail” spilled out of these particular institutions and into modern soci- ety as a whole. Panopticism and surveillance were “destined to spread throughout the social body” (207), to penetrate it “through and through with disciplinary mechanisms” (209), resulting in the formation of “what might be called in general the disciplinary society” (209). As a result of¶ this successful dissemination of panopticism, societal surveillance became permanent and complete-precisely because modem society was in a per- manent state of fragmentation. Under the regime of modernity, we incorpo-¶ rate into ourselves the role of both supervisor and supervised—we become “the principle of our own subjection” (203), and pedagogy rests on the basic assumption of an unremitting concern for “character assessment.” In the¶ hands of Foucault, the Panopticon thus becomes a metaphor for all of mo- dernity. “The man [sic] of modem humanism was born” (141).¶ But the school was not the only instrument of domination: it took its¶ place alongside the prison and, most especially, the industrial factory. Re-¶ call the I913 glass-ceilinged school auditorium reminiscent of the “arcades”¶ and the Benjaminian reading of the same (see the introduction). When all¶ of these large schools were designed at the beginning of this century—(and¶ not just the “vocational” ones)—they were seen as correlates to, and as¶ prep schools for, an industrialized working class that could sit there, look¶ through the glass ceiling at the heavens, and dream the dreams of an ex-¶ panding commercial economy—an economy that no longer exists New York City school discipline of the early days of this century—whose resto- ration will occur, it is now almost unanimously agreed," only through a “strengthening” of the security ggrd apparatus-must be understood as having been, even then, when it seemed to work so well, a response to an already-fractured school system functioning within a constantly fissuring factory economy, which is precisely why the discipline had to be applied in¶ the first place.“¶ What, then, are we to make of the whole Foucauldian thesis in the light of corridor life today? Can we really say that “docile bodies,” capable of responding to the exigencies of the world of work, are being produced?"¶ Can anyone seriously contend that meticulous attention to detail occurs¶ when the guards’ chief concern is to check for large weapons at the front¶ door? How can the model of “continuous surveillance” continue to function when the “network of gazes” has totally collapsed‘?

By engaging in a discussion of surveillance in our own schools we are no longer the docile, apolitical subjects of surveillance practices


Devine 1996- John, director, School Partnership Program, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools
The lobbies and hallways of inner-city schools, epitomized most concretely in the icon of the student's concealed weapon meeting the guards hand-held metal detector, reveal that none of these educational theories is any longer particularly germane for the task of mapping the school culture.¶ The question that arises, then, is whether any narrative can replace these formulations and adequately interpret these agitated and fragmented social texts of mimetic violence that masquerade as contemporary schools¶ I will argue that none of the discourses of present currency is relevant for the job of reflecting this cutting edge of postmodern experience, the inner-city public school space. If this claim is even partially correct, what¶ line of commentary is left for us to make? As an exercise in cultural decipherment, postmodernism by its very nature eschews any kind of theory building, social activism, or participation in the political process Some¶ postmodernists dismiss the very possibility of making policy recommendations (Rosenau 1992, 3). But the ruined edifice of the metropolitan school bears a postmodern message that differs radically from that of the collages of advertising or of boutique windows At issue is the task of finding effective and democratic, if limited, responses to the ritualized violence—even if these responses run the risk of being labeled neo-humanistic.

Roleplaying as the USFG is not an effective solution to pressing issues in our communities- as urban debaters we must use our knowledge to address social realities

Giroux 2006- Henry, Waterbury Chair of Secondary education at Pennsylvania State University, America on the Edge: Henry Giroux on Politics, Culture, and Education Google books


Educators at all levels need to challenge the assumption that politics is dead, or the nature of politics will be determined exclusively by government leaders and experts in the heat of moral frenzy. Educators need to take a more critical position, arguing that knowledge, debate, and dialogue about pressing social problems offer individuals and groups some hope in shaping the conditions that bear down on their lives. Public civic engagement is essential if the concepts of social life and the public sphere are to be used to revitalize the language of civic education anddemocratization as part of a broader discourse of political agency and critical citizenship in a global world. Linking the social to democratic public values represents an attempt, however incomplete, to link democracy to public action, as part of a comprehensive attempt to revitalize civic activism and citizen access with decision-making while simultaneouslyaddressing basic problems of social justice and global democracy. Educators within public schools need to find ways to engage political issues by making social problems visible and by debating them in the political sphere. They also need to be at the forefront of the defense of the most progressive historical advances and gains of the state. French sociologistPierre Bourdieu is right when he calls for collective work by educators to prevent those who are mobilized against the welfare state from destroying the most precious democratic conquests in labor legislation, health, social protcction and education.’ At the very least, this would suggest that educators should defend schools as democratic public spheres, struggle against the de-skilling of teachers and students that has accompanied the emphasis on teach ing for test-taking. and argue for pedagogy grounded in democratic values rather than testing schemes that severely limit the creative, ethical, and laboratory potential of education. Urban Debate Leagues represent one reason for hope. Hope is more than roman tic idealism; it is the condition that highlights images of an alternative politics and pedagogy. Hope is not simply wishful thinking; it ¡S Written into those various struggles waged by brave men and women for civil rights, racial justice, decent working conditions, and a society cleansed of war. Hope is the refusal to stand still in the face of human suffering and it is learned by example, inflamed by the passion for a better life, and undertaken as an act of civic courage. The work of Urban Debate Leagues provides a tangible reason to be hopeful. Urban debaters, as they devour newspapers and periodicals, confront information detailing certain realities about our world including the use of war, the severity of environmental degradation, and the increasing gap between the rich and working poor.


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