Designed & Powered by MediaTek_

Cooper's theory of education was expressed through both her actions at M Street early in her career, and her written and spoken words as an intellectual later in life. According to scholars Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, her theory was the "first systematic working out of the insistence that no one social category can capture the reality of the Black woman." American education and standardization, adherent to the strict, binary constructs of race and gender, also constructed the Washington-Du Bois binary. By blurring the lines of the Washington-Du Bois false dichotomy, Cooper was also successful in testing the limits of American race and gender constraints, expanding American identity and American concepts of integration.⁵⁶

In the 1850s, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun explicated the "official knowledge" of the antebellum South when he invoked the alleged intellectual inferiority of Blacks as justification for slavery. Fanny Jackson Coppin, born a slave in 1837 in Washington, D.C., was motivated to represent a standard diametrically opposed to this official doctrine. She gained an education, and spent the rest of her life as an educator and "racial uplifter," founding the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth in 1869 and heading it through the end of the 19th century. She modeled and conceptualized teaching for social justice, and throughout her career expanded the boundaries of American civilization to thousands of Black children, despite the mandates of a racist society that attempted to prohibit such an expansion.⁵⁷

At the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth, Coppin, anticipating Anna Julia Cooper, defied the constraints that would later be imposed by both White standards and the Washington-Du Bois false dichotomy. She implemented the teaching of a classical, liberal academic curriculum. But this curriculum was not reserved for the "talented tenth." Coppin, who understood the racist undertones of labels, worked to educate the so-called "slow learners." But recognizing the severe racial tension in Philadelphia (where one of her teachers was murdered in 1870 while attempting to vote), she saw the limitations of integration according to White standards, and thus also the risks of having a solely academic curriculum. She considered it unrealistic and irresponsible for Blacks to confine themselves to liberal studies while White society was hesitant to allow Blacks to utilize such education, sometimes even murdering educated Blacks. Altering her strategy of racial uplift, Coppin integrated industrial training at the Institute, hoping also to increase the likelihood of Black economic independence. Her philosophy was an unrelenting struggle for Black justice in White America.⁵⁸

Coppin's proven ability to develop the intellect of young Black students complicated the prevalent racist theories of intelligence, as (White) educational standards for her and her students became accessible. These standards could be liberating because she understood the official knowledge offered her by a White, racist society-embodied by John C. Calhoun-but did not accept this knowledge as the ultimate constraint. As a teacher for social justice, Coppin flipped this standard of naked racism on its head, and it motivated her and her students to achieve an education on their own terms, a small yet real victory.

Coppin's grand strategy, although it needs to be altered slightly to the particularities of time and place, should be emulated. The current system of standardized testing should be rejected, no doubt, just as Coppin rejected racism. The official knowledge the standardized tests represent should likewise be rejected, just as Coppin rejected Calhoun and scientific racism. But the standardized tests should also inform teachers interested in social justice. Just as Coppin turned the standard of her era upside down in liberating fashion, teachers should use the standardized tests to inform themselves and their students of the constraints of American knowledge deemed official. An understanding of this knowledge and how/why it came to be official should empower those who wish to test the limits of these constraints, expanding the boundaries of American identity. Many small victories, like those of Coppin and her students, could add up to a large victory for those seeking justice.

NOTES

1. The white teacher is quoted in Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 142, as cited by Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), p. 18. I owe the conception of the teachers being charged with civilizing the former slaves to Hale, pp. 18-19. The notion of an undifferentiated mass was garnered from Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), p. 7. Alexander successfully extracts a group of free Black women in the South from the "undifferentiated mass." For more on White northern teachers, see Linda Perkins, "The Black Female American Missionary Association Teacher in the South, 1861-1870," in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in United States History (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990). Despite previously conceived notions, many White women who traveled south as teachers were not motivated by altruistic zeal, but rather to seek an escape from lives constrained by the "cult of true womanhood." For more on the question of civilization, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).

2. Hale, Making Whiteness.

3. This method of unmasking that which is seemingly natural I borrow from Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx unmasked political economy¾the theories of capitalism that had previously been accepted as natural and eternal.

4. Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). My understanding of the framework of U.S. response to the Depression and WWII is based on: Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 240-244; Gary Gerstle & Steve Fraser, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Harry Magdoff, interviewed by Huck Gutman, "Creating a Just Society: Lessons from Planning in the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.," Monthly Review, Vol. 54, No. 5, October 2002, pp. 1-22.

5. On the global machinations of neoliberalism, a great text is Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). On the Reagan-Thatcher "revolution," see Daniel Yergin & Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace that is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998). On civil society, Michael Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society," Social Text, no. 45 (Winter 1995): 27-44.

6. For the role of standardized testing in the context of neoliberalism, I will examine: Michael Apple, Educating the Right Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001), and Kevin Vinson & Wayne Ross, "What We Can Know and How We Can Know It," Z Magazine, March 2000, pp. 34-38. For an excellent example of the romanticization of civil society, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Although Putnam argues that he does not seek a return to an invented American community, the way he frames his argument contradicts this claim. For a theoretical, anti-government, anti-civil societal order, see: Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960).

7. I partly owe this conception of a broader context to Bertell Ollman, "Why So Many Exams? A Marxist Response," Z Magazine, October 2002, pp. 47-50.

8. Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), pp. 8-50.

9. David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 1-32. Harris quote, Tyack, p. 29. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans., Talcott Parsons (London, Unwin Hyman, 1930).

10. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 1999), p. 91. Tyack, The One Best System, pp. 218-232. On the immigrants able to "become White," see: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).

11. The best examination of eugenics is Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); the Terman quote is from Gould, p. 209. On the connection of eugenics to standardized testing, see Alan Stroskopf, "The Forgotten History of Eugenics," in Kathy Swope & Barbara Miner, eds., Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Craze Won't Fix Our Schools (Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd, 2000), pp. 76-79. On intelligence testing and Terman, see Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform (New York: Touchstone Books, 2000), pp. 130-161.

12. Booker T. Washington, "The Atlanta Exposition Address," in The American Reader, Diane Ravitch, ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 185-186.

13. W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989 [1903]), pp. 518-522.

14. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 193.

15. Ibid.

16. Gloria Joseph, "Black Feminist Pedagogy and Capitalist White America," in Bowles and Gintis Revisited: Correspondence and Contradiction in Educational Theory (London: The Falmer Press, 1988), pp. 174-188. Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

17. For a nice economic analysis of unemployment in America, see Franck Ackerman, Hazardous to Our Wealth: Economic Policies in the 1980's (Boston: South End Press, 1984). On the Jim Crow South, there is a wealth of information, but see esp. Hale Making Whiteness (n. 1). The term "flexible workforce," long official capitalist policy, was uttered by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan as cited by Jim Hightower, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 228.

18. Tyack, The One Best System (n. 9), p. 218.

19. On America's response to economic crisis, see Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp. 240- 244. On the regulations of the New Deal, Gerstle & Fraser, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. On the role of planning in WWII, Magdoff (n. 4). For the Kennan analysis of U.S. global hegemony, see Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 318.

20. Slavoj Zizek, "Postface: Georg Lukács as the Philosopher of Lenin," in Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2000).

21. For the best account of the origination of the SAT, see Lemann, The Big Test, pp. 3-124. Cited text, p. 5.

22. James Oliver Horton & Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford university Press, 1997), pp. 55-76.

23. Lemann, The Big Test, pp. 155-165. Cited text, p. 155. For testing statistical evidence: "Sex and Race Differences on Standardized tests: Oversight Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, 100^th Congress, 1^st session, April 23, 1987 (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1989).

24. On socioeconomic determinants, see Vinson & Ross (n. 6); also, Julie Ancis & William Sedlacek, "Predicting the Academic Achievement of Female Students Using the SAT and Noncognitive Variables," Counseling Center, University of Maryland, Research Report #17-95, www.inform.umd.edu. Cited text: p. 2.

25. Joseph, "Black Feminist Pedagogy and Capitalist White America" (n. 14), p. 176.

26. Lemann, The Big Test.

27. Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society" (n. 5), p. 27; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 19-51. Cited text: p. 24.

28. On the Coleman report, see: Lemann, The Big Test, p. 161, and D. Hoff, "Made to Measure," Education Week, June 16, 1999, p. 8.

29. For an excellent journalistic account of the Prince Edward County policy of closing schools to ward off integration, see Donald P. Baker, "Closed," Washington Post Magazine, March 2, 2001, p. W8.

30. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," Graham Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87-104.

31. Ibid. As a discourse, standardized testing is both language and material.

32. Cited text, Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society," p. 30; Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 15-28.

33. On Foucault's interpretation of civil society, ibid., p. 29-31. On Foucault's discipline model, see his definitive work on the notion of discipline as a mode of social production: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), pp. 138-176.

34. Hardt & Negri analyze America as Foucault's factory-society in Empire, pp. 240-244. On the NDEA and the SAT, see J. Pulliam & J. Van Patten, History of Education in America (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), p. 165.

35. Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society," pp. 34-37. On dwindling education funding, see: Jay Taylor, "Desperate for Dollars," American School Board Journal 178, no. 9, September 1992, pp. 19-35. Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 282-306.

36. Ibid.

37. For a comprehensive and withering critique of neoliberalism, see Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People (including McChesney's introduction, citation
p. 11). For an uncritical but informative narrative, see Yergin & Stanislaw (n. 5).

38. U.S. Census Bureau, "Money Income in the United States: 2000." Also, Paul Ryscavage, Income Inequality in America: An Analysis of Trends (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.)

39. For an excellent account of education inequalities, see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). On globalization and the role of government, see Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), introduction.

40. Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society," p. 37.

41. Mary Hatwood Futrell & Walter A. Brown, "Should African Americans Support the Current Education Reform Standards Movement?" Journal of Negro Education 69 (Fall 2000): 288-304. Cited text: p. 288. Linda Darling-Hammond, "New Standards and Old Inequalities: School Reform and the Education of African American Students," Journal of Negro Education 69 (Fall 2000): 263-87.

42. On standardized testing as a market-based reform, see Apple, Educating the 'Right' Way (n. 6), pp. 84-93. Cited text, p. 86. For an analysis of the axiomatic logic of neoliberal capitalism, see Hardt & Negri, Empire, p. 330-331.

43. Marx quote: Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 344. Apple, Educating the 'Right' Way, p. 21. William Bennett, Our Children, Our Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 10.

44. Bill Bigelow, "Standards and Multiculturalism," in Swope & Miner, eds., Failing Our Kids (n. 11), pp. 87-92. Both the Gates and Bigelow quotes are from p. 87. Harold Berlack, "Standards and the Control of Knowledge," in Swope & Miner, pp. 93-94.

45. Donald E. Collins, "Fear of a Multicultural (Read 'Black' America): The Public Policy Debate Over Multiculturalism and Race in the 1990's" (unpublished manuscript). On the experience of the Virginia student (a letter written by his mother): Makani Themba-Nixon, "Testing Slights Multiculturalism," in Swope & Miner, p. 20. On the Massachusetts exam, see: Derrick Z. Jackson, "At Best Silly, At Worst Racist," in Swope & Miner, pp. 18-19. Teacher quoted: p. 19.

46. Futrell & Brown (n. 38). On the Harvard Civil Rights Project, see Gary Orfield & Johanna Wald, "Testing, Testing," The Nation, June 5, 2000. Darling-Hammond (n. 38); Asa Hilliard, "Standards: Decoy of Quality Control?" in Swope & Miner, pp. 64-70; National Council on Education Standards and Testing, Raising Standards for American Education (Washington, 1992). Hilliard quote: p. 66.

47. National Council on Education Standards and Testing (n. 43).

48. For more on the Rochester teachers, see Gerald Grant & Christine Murray, Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 141-181.

49. For an introduction to critical pedagogy, there is none better than Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

50. The Washington Bee, February 28, 1891, as cited by Sharon Harley, "Beyond the Classroom: The Organizational Lives of Black Female Educators in the District of Columbia, 1890-1930," Journal of Negro Education, vol. 51, no. 3 (1982). The term "racial uplifter" appears time and again in the literature on Black female educators.

51. Anna Julia Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, Eds. Charles Lemert & Esme Bhan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Cited text, p. 54.

52. Ibid., pp. 1-13.

53. Ibid. Also, on the power of the Tuskegee Machine, see Robinson, Black Marxism, pp. 192-194.

54. Cooper, pp. 14-21.

55. Ibid., pp. 248-250.

56. For the Lemert and Bhan assessment: ibid., p. 14.

57. Linda Perkins, "Heed Life's Demands: The Educational Philosophy of Fanny Jackson Coppin," in Black Women in United States History (n. 1), pp. 1039-1048.

58. Ibid.