Obama's Betrayal of Public Education

[Makalakumu]

I hoped it would be different. I really did, but this is enough to shake my "faith" in that dream.

http://www.truthout.org/121708R

Barack Obama's selection of Arne Duncan for secretary of education does not bode well either for the political direction of his administration nor for the future of public education. Obama's call for change falls flat with this appointment, not only because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts of the corporation at best or the prison at worse. The first casualty in this scenario is a language of social and political responsibility capable of defending those vital institutions that expand the rights, public goods and services central to a meaningful democracy. This is especially true with respect to the issue of public schooling and the ensuing debate over the purpose of education, the role of teachers as critical intellectuals, the politics of the curriculum and the centrality of pedagogy as a moral and political practice.

In other words, the dumbing down of America continues. Schools will be converted into corporate training grounds and students will be nothing more then human resources. It's the 19th century Industrial Utopian dream come true.

Education is NOT about training workers. It's about awakening the intellect and providing the resources to be the person you want to be!

Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a "movement for social justice." He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments he said, "I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio." He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public education. "We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the private," he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform. He also insisted that the CTU opposes charter schools (and, hence, change itself), despite the fact that the CTU runs ten such schools under Renaissance 2010. Despite the representation in the popular press of Duncan as conciliatory to the unions, his statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under Ren2010 are deunionized).

Ending teacher's unions. Turning schools into businesses. For my conservative brother's this sounds like a dream, but, mark my word, this will put the final nail in the coffin of American Inventiveness. Here's why.

Employees didn't make this country great. Inventive, creative, imaginative minds did. Individual open source education that is flexible to student needs at specific times and places is the only way to for innovation to really prosper. This is the type of schooling that made our country great.

Corporate schools will make this impossible. Corporations are interested in innovation that they can control. Innovation they can dominate. A small fraction of people will be allowed to do this. The rest of the proles will get standardized tests and an even more watered down gruel of material that should have fed the imagination.

At the heart of Duncan's vision of school reform is a corporatized model of education that cancels out the democratic impulses and practices of civil society by either devaluing or absorbing them within the logic of the market or the prison. No longer a space for relating schools to the obligations of public life, social responsibility to the demands of critical and engaged citizenship, schools in this dystopian vision legitimate an all-encompassing horizon for producing market identities, values and those privatizing and penal pedagogies that both inflate the importance of individualized competition and punish those who do not fit into its logic of pedagogical Darwinism.[12]

Well said.

In spite of what Duncan argues, the greatest threat to our children does not come from lowered standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes or the lack of rigid testing measures that offer the aura of accountability. On the contrary, it comes from a society that refuses to view children as a social investment, consigns 13 million children to live in poverty, reduces critical learning to massive testing programs, promotes policies that eliminate most crucial health and public services and defines rugged individualism through the degrading celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports and the spectacles of violence that permeate corporate controlled media industries. Students are not at risk because of the absence of market incentives in the schools. Young people are under siege in American schools because, in the absence of funding, equal opportunity and real accountability, far too many of them have increasingly become institutional breeding grounds for racism, right-wing paramilitary cultures, social intolerance and sexism.[13] We live in a society in which a culture of testing, punishment and intolerance has replaced a culture of social responsibility and compassion. Within such a climate of harsh discipline and disdain for critical teaching and learning, it is easier to subject young people to a culture of faux accountability or put them in jail rather than to provide the education, services and care they need to face problems of a complex and demanding society.[14] What Duncan and other neoliberal economic advocates refuse to address is what it would mean for a viable educational policy to provide reasonable support services for all students and viable alternatives for the troubled ones. The notion that children should be viewed as a crucial social resource - one that represents, for any healthy society, important ethical and political considerations about the quality of public life, the allocation of social provisions and the role of the state as a guardian of public interests - appears to be lost in a society that refuses to invest in its youth as part of a broader commitment to a fully realized democracy. As the social order becomes more privatized and militarized, we increasingly face the problem of losing a generation of young people to a system of increasing intolerance, repression and moral indifference. It is difficult to understand why Obama would appoint as secretary of education someone who believes in a market-driven model that has not only failed young people, but given the current financial crisis has been thoroughly discredited. Unless Duncan is willing to reinvent himself, the national agenda he will develop for education embodies and exacerbates these problems and, as such, it will leave a lot more kids behind than it helps.

In his conclusion, the writer reveals himself to be a typical liberal. He doesn't understand that he really is on to something, but his bias against what he sees as conservative gets in the way of him seeing it fully. The bottom line is that both sides created this at the behest of the same masters. The writer is a tool, but he's got something to say. My hope is that people can take the nuggets of wisdom and throw out the partisan crap. We need to wake up from this left/right paradigm Hegelian Dialectic. There is a reason why both the "left" and the "right" are pushing the same kind of schooling.

"Real" schooling would put a stop to this in a decade.

 

[terryl965]

Yea after seeing this I would recken he will be trying to crush all teachers union, so much for education.

 

[crushing]

Yea after seeing this I would recken he will be trying to crush all teachers union, so much for education.

The union is more about collective bargaining and gaining tenure (sometimes despite performance), and not necessarily about improving education.

Even if the union stands in the way of improving education, I highly doubt President Obama will be busting or crushing them.

 

[Hand Sword]

Get used to it all.

Then..."I'll bring the troops home immediately" and "I'll end the war"

Now.. "We have to show some flexibility on that issue"

Then.. "I'll tax the rich, etc....."

Now... "That might have to be put off for at least another year"

I don't vote and don't really trust either side, but when you just retread with past regime people and philosophies instead of really being about change, I'm not surprised. Expect more!

 

[kidswarrior]

In other words, the dumbing down of America continues. Schools will be converted into corporate training grounds and students will be nothing more then human resources. It's the 19th century Industrial Utopian dream come true.

From my tiny perch, we're already there, brother. Been there for almost a decade now...

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Education in the US has been broken for 60 years.

 

[Makalakumu]

There are a lot of other, better qualified, people out there. People who better suit the needs of the country. Write your senators and tell them not to confirm Duncan.

 

[arnisador]

Education is still principally locally controlled.

The teachers' unions are a problem...they have to be reconsidered.

 

[Makalakumu]

Education is still principally locally controlled.

If schools are predominantly under local control, then why do all schools look and act the same? There are some exceptions, but mostly, schools have the kind of format and curriculum regardless of where you go.

One would expect to see more differentiation in terms of schooling under a system that really was controlled at the local level.

In my experience, the only thing that is really under local control is the money. Local people pay for schools, but they have very little say in how they are run.

 

[crushing]

If schools are predominantly under local control, then why do all schools look and act the same? There are some exceptions, but mostly, schools have the kind of format and curriculum regardless of where you go.

One would expect to see more differentiation in terms of schooling under a system that really was controlled at the local level.

In my experience, the only thing that is really under local control is the money. Local people pay for schools, but they have very little say in how they are run.

http://www.nea.org/newsreleases/2008/nr081216.html

 

[Nolerama]

As frightening as this appointment may be, I still think there are two sides to every coin.

There's argument that corporately restructuring schools pose a threat to creativity and individualism. In some ways, I agree, but then again creativity and individualism are coveted on a corporate level as well.

And what about competition? The corporate world is cutthroat and heartless at times. Why not expose children to that sort of reality early on?

There are some families out there who look at education as a tool to elevate their children from their position, and not a sanctuary for individualism, creativity, and innovation. Nothing more.

IMHO, American public schools are horrible and an embarrassment to the rest of the world. If the status quo isn't working, why not radical change? I would rather see the effort for a restructuring occur, and immediately learn/fix the problems that are encountered than endless deliberation over the quality of schools, and have nothing done about it.

But who am I to talk? In the event that I ever procreate, I'm sending the kid to a private school.

Because that's the culture we live in now: public schools are a lacking backup to a lack of money.

 

[arnisador]

If schools are predominantly under local control, then why do all schools look and act the same?

Here in IN at least we have a fair number of magnet/charter schools that really are different, up to and including one that is two days a week in-school and three days a week online from home.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Maybe the Big O and his new Ed Czar can pass more great stuff like LBJ's "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" (1965), or great things like "Title 1" and "Head Start". What's the score on those? $10 Trillion, and the US drops from #1 to #27? Maybe they can call it "No Child Left Behind". Oh wait. That one already was tried, and like a concrete glider, it didn't fly.

Maybe dropping all the BS, returning to what was working in 1950 would be a good starting point?

 

[Kreth]

The teachers' unions are a problem...they have to be reconsidered.

Unions, IME, largely benefit the union officials, rather than the members.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Unions should be outlawed. Subject for another thread though.

 

[celtic_crippler]

It's an excellent strategy of maintaining control and power; keep them dumb and docile.

 

[Makalakumu]

Here in IN at least we have a fair number of magnet/charter schools that really are different, up to and including one that is two days a week in-school and three days a week online from home.

That's good. I'm glad to read that more options are appearing. My guess is, however, that the vast majority of IN kids still go to a "traditional" school.

 

[Makalakumu]

Unions should be outlawed. Subject for another thread though.

Sounds like a good thread. I'd like to hear your argument on why you think someone's freedom to organize and associate should be taken away from them.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Short version: Because I hate Socialism. Long Version, I'll try and wrap that article up this week.

 

[Makalakumu]

Maybe dropping all the BS, returning to what was working in 1950 would be a good starting point?

I agree with dropping all of the BS, but I think 1950 isn't far enough. I think you need to go back before WWI in order to find an education system that was directly linked to families, responded to their needs, and really was child centered.

That is what we need now. We don't need standards, we don't need conformity, we don't need to groom people to be managed like sheep. Look at where that's led us?

We don't have a real economy any more. Real people don't invent things that radically change our lives (unless they are poorly schooled). People don't produce things. They just consume. In this sense, all of our prosperity in the last thirty years, has been nothing but sleight of hand. People get rich by moving money around, not by actually building or producing things of value.

It's all coming to an end, IMO. This recession, this nightmare of fiat fractional money, is just the beginning.

In order to reclaim our place, we need to radically rethink school. IMO, it shouldn't be a playground for corporate elite to train employees. It should be a place to awaken the individual, a place that actualizes dreams. School should be "open source" so that there is freedom to draw form everywhere to be what you want to be.