Obama's Neo-Liberal Agenda for Education

By GILLIAN RUSSOM  WRITING IN March 2008, the editors of a Rethinking Schools book on charter schools held out hope that the end of the Bush administration would mean new possibilities for a progressive education agenda: This country is on the cusp of a new political dialogue. The conservative stranglehold on political debate is ending, opening up new opportunities for progressives to regain the initiative. How this opening will affect public education in general and charter schools in particular is not yet clear, but it ushers in new possibilities not imaginable a decade ago.1 Two years later, the direction of education policy under the Obama administration is indeed clear. The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has called into question whether our public schools will be funded at even the most basic level required for their functioning. Last year, budget cuts cost 40,000 teacher jobs. This year, 66 percent of school districts across the country have cut more jobs, while 83 percent of districts project cuts for the 2010–2011 academic year.2 Kansas City’s school board has voted to shut down twenty-eight of the city’s sixty-one schools. In California, more than 23,000 teachers received pink slips in March, and students hoping to attend college are facing tuition increases of 20 percent at the California State University and 32 percent at the University of California.These devastating cuts are being applied to a public school system that is already in horrible shape. Many schools are overcrowded and crumbling, lacking essential technology and materials; learning is often dull because teachers are exhausted or focused on preparing for standardized tests; and students rarely get experiences that connect what they are learning to the real world. These abysmal conditions have led to a high school dropout rate of nearly 30 percent nationwide, and more than 50 percent in many major cities.3 Education should be at the center of a national debate on social priorities, led by a president who promised “change.” Instead, the economic crisis is being used by the White House to dramatically accelerate a neoliberal agenda for education, going far beyond what George W. Bush’s administration was able to do with its No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy. With Arne Duncan, a political operative with no formal training in the field, as education secretary, the administration has aggressively promoted an education program with three principal elements: using test score data to evaluate teachers, shutting down and “reconstituting” schools deemed to be failing, and expanding privately-run, mostly non-union charter schools. Other elements include the standardization of curriculum and the lengthening of the school day. This agenda is supported by a nearly unified front of the powerful—Wall Street, Democrats and Republicans at all levels, and many non-profit organizations.Obama recently signaled the lengths to which he’s willing to go to implement this agenda. Speaking before an audience of business executives at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on March 1, the president supported a Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire all seventy-four teachers and nineteen other school employees at Central Falls High School. “If a school continues to fail year after year after year and doesn’t show sign of improvements then there has got to be a sense of accountability,” he remarked.4 As the only high school in the poorest community in Rhode Island, Central Falls has been chronically underfunded. Yet it seems that the only people being held accountable are the teachers who have dedicated their lives to working with Central Falls students.5

The Occupation of U.S. Public Schools: Kids as Cannon Fodder and Consumers

by Mary Beaudoin, Women Against Military Madness

In November of 2009, ninety retired U.S. military leaders, including former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark, two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and six other four-star generals and admirals, announced their plans to cultivate another demographic to fight future imperial wars—pre-schoolers. According to Rear Admiral Barnett, “Our national security in the year 2030 is absolutely dependent on what’s going on in pre-kindergarten today.”

Major press throughout the country printed the story, echoing the concern that so many 17-24 year olds are unfit for military service today and that in the future it could mean “a limited pool (of potential recruits) will hold back our military readiness and erode our national security in the long run.

Although it may be surprising that they are targeting tots, it’s probably not surprising that high-ranking retired military men have an interest in raising cannon fodder for the future and passing on the lethal legacy associated with their careers. But what may come as a surprise is that they are already well on their way with the aid of the Obama administration and U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as congress, in pursuing an aggressive agenda, spearheaded by the Pentagon and corporate business interests, to alter the entire U.S. public education system.

“Hey Dad, Why do we save Billionaires, but not Teachers?”

This week thousands of New Jersey public school students walked out of class to protest draconian school budget cuts. “Save my teacher,” their signs read. In a state that is home to a bevy of high finance billionaires, with the highest per capita income in the nation, teachers are being sacked left and right. In our town half the student body protested outside the high school. Perhaps the protesters should turn their eyes towards the twenty-five top hedge fund honchos who took in $25 billion in 2009. Their “earnings” alone could fund 658,000 entry level teachers.
It’s ironic that the battlefield in this war over resources is public education. Because the public remains entirely uneducated about the connection between those billionaires and school budget cuts. We are clueless about what the Wall Street billionaires do to earn their riches and whether it’s of any value. We might be able to understand “weapons of mass destruction,” but financial weapons of mass destruction are way beyond us.
The new earning reports are good, we read. The giant financial institutions are back to making billions through “trading.” So are these bankers grown-up versions of kids trading baseball cards–or are they robber barons? Are they enriching our society or siphoning off its wealth? Maybe the marching students of New Jersey could ask Governor Christie to explain.

Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid

JONATHAN KOZOL

The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell.
Collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Mass.

Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S. Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were white.In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.