vilify the fry

The nascent movement to ‘vilify the fry’ may have begun with Cultural Politics and Education (Apple, 1996). Recently, French fries have been an enemy to both our health and waistlines due to their preparation in trans fat. A few short years ago, we changed their anti-American image by renaming them “Freedom Fries.” But a decade ago, cheap French fries began wreaking havoc on education with far more serious effects.

This didn’t happen in the United States—it happened in Asia—but with W.T.O. trade policies like NAFTA, a similar educational crisis is currently affecting California: how do we educate the ever-growing immigrant population? This has had national, political ramifications. Immigration and national defense are arguably the two most important issues to both democrat and republican voters in this upcoming election year. So what do French fries have to do with immigration? I’ll get to that. Suffice to say, the immigration problem we face in 2007 is analogous to the problem of cheap French fries in the Asian country where those potatoes were grown.

When a multi-national, fast-food giant was offered huge tax breaks to move their potato farming and French fry production to rural areas of this Asian country, thousands of indigenous people were forced from their homes—land on which generations of their kin had lived, long before banks and mortgages and deeds existed. Naturally, the people migrated from their rural environment into and around the cities.

The influx of families created a burden on the city’s schools, and they began to over-crowd. Unfortunately, the government would not build new schools without a “legitimate” need based on “official” statistics. The displaced families were considered “illegitimate”—and therefore weren’t counted in “official” statistics—because of their “immigrant” status. Moreover, babies born to these families weren’t counted as new births unless they were born in a hospital—facilities that weren’t readily available in the slums and “shanty towns” where many moved.

While the “Value Meal” was heralded in America for its abundance of cheap food options—including fries—unbeknownst to most Americans, it was causing an educational crisis in Asia. Since the fast-food company was offered sweeping tax-breaks on the land, no new revenue was coming into government coffers. This–and the unfair counting of its citizens—accounted for the dearth of new schools. Even if there were a “legitimate” need for new schools, there was no money to fund their construction.

We have a similar educational problem in California. After Clinton signed NAFTA in 1994, huge companies (like the auto and textile industries) moved their domestic production facilities south of the border. Many of these factories were built in rural areas, and indigenous people were forced to relocate. Some moved into the surrounding cities, but many moved to the Border States like Texas, Arizona, and California. They moved into urban areas where local school systems—already over-crowded and under-funded—have struggled to address their needs ever since.

The English Language Learner—or ELL—student generally requires more resources to educate; resources many inner-city schools lack. Since Proposition 13, school funding has been tied to property tax. Downtown schools, surrounded by apartments and low-income housing, don’t have the local tax base that more affluent, suburban districts have. Therefore, ELL’s and inner-city children get a “separate but unequal” education.

Standardized (English only) testing only exacerbates this problem. And with federal educational funds tied to these tests, our education system stands at a crossroads. Do we professionals let top-down policies such as NCLB destroy what we know are best teaching practices? We know high-stakes testing doesn’t lead to more effective teaching or a better education—if anything it leads to higher dropout rates. But maybe that’s the point: as long as we stay enamored with cheap French fries, we’ll always need someone to run the drive-through window.