On Education, Barack Obama is the President of Privatization

[MissBarbara]

On Education, Barack Obama is the President of Privatization. Can We Stop Him? Will We?

By the time his term is over, President Obama and his Race To The Top program will have forced the closure and privatization of thousands of inner-city schools, a feat no white Republican or Democrat could have accomplished. But he'll only be president 4 more years. If we can stop this now, his successors won't be able to do this again. Can we? Will we?

Last year we asked why the announcement that the city of Philadelphia planned to close 40 more public schools over the next few months wasn't national news. This year, we could ask the same about Chicago, where officials have announced plans to close more than a hundred schools, or about Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, Atlanta and dozens of other cities.

The national wave of school closings not national news because our nation's elite, from Wall Street and the hedge fund guys to the chambers of commerce and the business establishment, from corporate media and all the elite politicians of both parties from the president down to local mayors and state legislators are working diligently to privatize public education as quickly as possible. They're not stupid. They've done the polling and the focus groups. They know with dead certainty that the p-word is massively unpopular, and that parents, teachers, students and communities aren't clamoring to hand schools over to greedy profiteers.

On every level, the advocates of educational privatization strive to avoid using the p-word. They deliberately mislabel charter schools, just as unaccountable as every other private business in the land as “public charter schools,” because after all, they use public money. So do Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, but nobody calls these “public aerospace companies,” “public military contractors,” or “public banks.” For the same reason, corporate media refuse to cover the extent of the school closing epidemic, or local opposition to it, for fear of feeding the development of a popular movement against privatization, and Race To The Top, the Obama administration's signature public education initiative, and the sharp edge of the privatizers, literally driving the wave of school closings, teacher firings, and the adoption of “run-the-school-like-a-business” methods everywhere.

The privatizers know the clock is ticking. They know that no white Republican or Democrat could have successfully closed thousands of schools, mainly in the inner city and low-income neighborhoods without a tidal wave of noisy opposition. No white Republican or Democrat could have fired or replaced tens of thousands of experienced, mostly black qualified, experienced classroom teachers with younger, whiter, cheaper “graduates” of 5 week “teacher training” programs like Teach For America.

President Obama's black face, and the connivance of the black political class of which he is the reigning exemplar enables the implementation of right wing policies in the areas of war and peace, in growing the police and prison states, in shrinking the parts of the state that protect economic and civil rights, in guaranteeing Big Oil, Wall Street and other corporate malefactors continued immunity and impunity, in privatizing the Postal Service and of course public education. That's the bad news.

The good news is that Barack Obama will only be president less than four more years. If a noisy, contentious, civilly disobedient popular movement to protect public education can be brought into existence in the next year this president and our turncoat black political class can be stopped. The clock is ticking for us too.

The privatizers know that this is their chance to succeed. We must this is our best chance to stop them.

What can we do? What can you do?

If you live in one of the hundreds of jurisdictions that elect school board members in November 2013, now is the time to call your neighbors together and choose which one of you will be a candidate. School board elections are low impact, low budget, low attention and low turnout affairs, the most favorable electoral terrain for amateur and grassroots activists. In Georgia the Green Party will be calling together search and support committees to seek and support school board candidates who oppose privatization. So if you live in Georgia you can email me. My email is at the end of this article.

Join or start an organization of parents, teachers, students or all three in your neighborhood to halt the privatizations. Next week Black Agenda Report will have a resource page for school activists, from which you can read and download materials that will help you educate and inform your neighbors and co-workers on the issue of school privatization.

You can join the parents, students and teachers who are coming to DC the first week of April to Occupy the Department of Education. We'll have more information here at Black Agenda Report on that too.

The clock is ticking. Once we lose the public schools we won't get them back. And if we can stop the black President of Privatization from doing this to us, it should be easy to prevent the next white one from continuing this evil and destructive policy.


http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/education-barack-obama-president-privatization-can-we-stop-him-will-we

[snowm]

How many times do we repeat the same thing only to expect a different outcome? It is insanity to keep a system that has exhibited failure. While total privatization may not be the answer, the status quo isnt either.

[MissBarbara]

How many times do we repeat the same thing only to expect a different outcome? It is insanity to keep a system that has exhibited failure. While total privatization may not be the answer, the status quo isnt either.

Many countries have very successful public systems, my own included. The problem with privatisation is that it takes away equal opportunity within schools. When a standard rate of pay for teachers is taken away, the best teachers will naturally go where the best pay is. The schools that pay the highest in wages will charge the most to students and the result is that the poorest families send their kids to the worst schools and the poverty trap is even harder to escape. If the public system is broken, it should be fixed, not scrapped.

The discussion here isn't public vs. private schools as much as public vs. charter schools. Charter schools are either the best or worst of both worlds, depending on your point of view.

Charter schools are free to the students, just like public schools. In general, they lie outside the aegis of the respective Board of Education, and they are not compelled to comply with the rules and regulations that guide public schools. They are financed through a combination of public and private funding -- including corporate management.

Here in New York City, they're growing by leaps and bounds. In many cases -- and this is the point of the article I posted -- an existing public school is shut down as an "underperforming" school, and a charter school is established in the same facility, usually within a few months. To snowm's point (and it seems like he didn't read the article), the problem with this system is that the new charter school usually does not adequately serve the students in the district in which it is erected. The kids there simply will not have an equal chance to attend the school, and for a number of reasons. And, as you suggest, "the poorest families send their kids to the worst schools."

To your point, establishing charter schools is a way of ignoring the problems that plague our public education system -- and the problems are very many. And it's a typically Conservative approach. No sane person believes that we should continue to throw good money after bad, and the two major programs over the past decade to improve public education in this country -- Bush's "No Child Left Behind" and Obama's "Race to the Top" are both doomed to failure, as has already been shown.

 

[MissBarbara]

Excuse me. I hadn't read much of the article either. Having now read it though I will say that your post is far more explanatory. The article's author depended far too much on sensationalism. Regardless, it sounds like the overall effect of replacing public schools with charter schools is very similar to replacing them with private schools.

You're right. As much as I love that site, their views are aggressively slanted and one-sided, and it's primarily devoted to hardcore and rather blinkered advocacy. But they never pretend otherwise. They're fully aware of all of that, and they admit it straight out. After all, their very name indicates they're persuing an Agenda.

I've read very widely on this topic, yet I'll admit that I don't have many suggestions toward a solution. (And there's already a very long thread here devoted to this topic.)

But I do know that charter schools and privitization are not the answer. And, as tragically flawed as they are, both "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" are at least steps in the right direction.

[snowm]

Consider that charter schools and private schools in NY may not be indicative of the growing trend nationwide. I have never heard of a charter school opening in a closed down public school locally.

I have seen the differences in private vs public education, and they are quite significant.

The problem that politicians have with education is that they try to quantify success with hard data and metrics much like you do in the private sector. The translation does not apply. How do you judge a teacher's efficacy? Their students' grades? Who assigns those grades again?

Additionally I think the push to 'mainstream' every child is a problem. Kids that may benefit from more one on one time become disruptive to a class that does not need the added supervision or distraction.

[MissBarbara]

Consider that charter schools and private schools in NY may not be indicative of the growing trend nationwide. I have never heard of a charter school opening in a closed down public school locally.

You're right: charter schools in New York City might not "be indicative of the growing trend nationwide."

But this follow-up article indiates that they might, in fact, be indicative:


Why Isn't Closing 129 Chicago Public Schools National News?

by Bruce A. Dixon


If you don't live in Chicago you might not know that the CEO and the dozens of other six figure a year mayoral cronies who run the Chicago Public Schools want to close 129 public schools this year, more than a third of the city's total. It's not national news for the same reason that closing 40 public schools in Philadelphia last year wasn't national news, and massive school closings in the poorer neighborhoods of cities across the country is not news either.
 
It's not news because school closings and school privatization, the end game of the bipartisan policies the Obama administration, Wall Street, the US Chamber of Commerce, a host of right wing foundations and deep pockets and hordes of politicians in both parties from the president down are pushing down the throats of communities across the country, are deeply unpopular. The American people, and especially the parents, teachers, grandparents, and other residents of poorer neighborhoods where closings and privatization are happening emphatically don't want these things.
 
Even the word describing their policy, “privatization” is so vastly unpopular that they've taken it out of circulation altogether. The best way, our leaders imagine, to contain and curtail resistance to their deeply unpopular policies is to avoid naming them for what they are, to keep them on the down low, to not report on their implementation, and certainly to not cover any civic resistance to them.

Local elites in each city and school district concoct real or imaginary “crises” to which the solution is always firing more experienced teachers, hiring more temps in their place, instituting more high-stakes testing, closing more public schools and substituting more unaccountable (and often profitable) charter schools, frequently in the same buildings that once housed public schools. In Chicago the “crisis” is precipitated every year when the CPS (that's Chicago Public Schools – Chicago's never had an elected school board, they're all mayoral appointees) honchos announce the schools are in a billion dollar hole. The Chicago Teachers Union of course, took a look over the same books and revealed that despite the host of top $100,000 a year officials whose jobs never seem to be cut, the system was nine figures in the black, not ten in the red. Naturally, local and national media didn't report that either.
 
Chicago's teachers have done what those in New York, Houston, Dallas, L.A. and others have not, and spent their union dues funding outreach and collaboration with parents across the city, so neighborhood hearings on the school closings are packed to overflowing with outraged parents, indignant local business people, angry teachers and concerned students. If CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News gave the school closings and privatization story a fraction of the coverage they gave deceptive and dishonest pro-privatization movies like Waiting For Superman and Won't Back Down, the outrage against the move to privatize education would be unstoppable. The most coverage the wave of school closings have received lately was a misleading segment on Melissa Harris-Perry's weekly TV show on whether school closings were “racist” or not, with no examination of the how or why they happen or the growing resistance to them.
 
Oceans of ink and hot air have been expended claiming that “social media” would somehow take up the slack created by the disappearance of local news gathering organizations, and how these things can somehow fuel and sustain a wave of public outrage that can topple unjust authority and make the will of the people felt. But when it comes to the war of our elite waged to privatize public education, we haven't seen it yet.



http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/why-isnt-closing-129-chicago-public-schools-national-news

[snowm]

I am not sure I can agree with the premise that anything occurring in Chicago is indicative of a nationwide trend.

CEO of a school district? Mayoral appointed school board? wtf...no wonder there are issues...

[Athos131]

It seems that article is playing a little loose with the facts.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-final-report-recommends-80-cps-schools-could-face-changes-20130306,0,5786397.story

The district is working off a preliminary list of 129 schools that could be closed. Clark declined to give a specific number of how many might be closed, but the report indicates that CPS has the capacity to shutter 60 to 70 schools, and that others could have their staff completely replaced, a process known as turnaround, or share space with other schools including privately run charters.

The commission settled on the number 80 not by looking at how many schools could be closed safely and efficiently, but rather by how many higher-performing schools were available to receive students from the shuttered ones. The panel recommended that all students displaced be moved only to better-performing schools.

I am not sure I can agree with the premise that anything occurring in Chicago is indicative of a nationwide trend.

CEO of a school district? Mayoral appointed school board? wtf...no wonder there are issues...

Appointing school board members isn't a bad idea.  Too many elected school board members have no background in education, and you end up with doctors, lawyers, businessmen, etc. telling the actual educators how to do their job.

[MissBarbara]

I am not sure I can agree with the premise that anything occurring in Chicago is indicative of a nationwide trend.

On the one hand, dis Chicago again and I'll smack you upside the head so quickly you won't know what hit you.

On the other hand, read the articles: New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles represent, to my mind, enough of a representative sample of major U.S. cities that one could at least begin to make generalizations.

[snowm]

I am not sure I can agree with the premise that anything occurring in Chicago is indicative of a nationwide trend.

On the one hand, dis Chicago again and I'll smack you upside the head so quickly you won't know what hit you.

On the other hand, read the articles: New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles represent, to my mind, enough of a representative sample of major U.S. cities that one could at least begin to make generalizations.

Don't care how you think or feel about Chicago. Simple matter is it is a city with too many stats on the low ends (note ends, as in both ends) of the bell curve to be indicative of the country. Not a diss.

Only thing I could find on Dallas is an article on 11 school closings from 2011 for budgetary reasons, some schools that were highly rated. Dallas has a lot of good private schools already though. Compound that with Athos noticing iffy facts...

[MissBarbara]

Don't care how you think or feel about Chicago. Simple matter is it is a city with too many stats on the low ends (note ends, as in both ends) of the bell curve to be indicative of the country. Not a diss.

Only thing I could find on Dallas is an article on 11 school closings from 2011 for budgetary reasons, some schools that were highly rated. Dallas has a lot of good private schools already though. Compound that with Athos noticing iffy facts...

Nor should you care what I feel about Chicago, since what I said was intended as a joke, and I assumed -- falsely it appears -- that the manner in which I expressed myself made it clear that it was intended as a joke.

As I noted above, the objection is not to public vs. private schools, but public vs. charter schools. And, especially, the manner in which public schools are being replaced by charter schools which do not serve the given constituency. And, as both the article and my comments above make clear, they are not being closed for "budgetary reasons." It has nothing to do with civic finances, and it has everything to do with politics.

[snowm]

Don't care how you think or feel about Chicago. Simple matter is it is a city with too many stats on the low ends (note ends, as in both ends) of the bell curve to be indicative of the country. Not a diss.

Only thing I could find on Dallas is an article on 11 school closings from 2011 for budgetary reasons, some schools that were highly rated. Dallas has a lot of good private schools already though. Compound that with Athos noticing iffy facts...

Nor should you care what I feel about Chicago, since what I said was intended as a joke, and I assumed -- falsely it appears -- that the manner in which I expressed myself made it clear that it was intended as a joke.

As I noted above, the objection is not to public vs. private schools, but public vs. charter schools. And, especially, the manner in which public schools are being replaced by charter schools which do not serve the given constituency. And, as both the article and my comments above make clear, they are not being closed for "budgetary reasons." It has nothing to do with civic finances, and it has everything to do with politics.

In Chicago perhaps, in Dallas no. That is my only point. With that said and Athos finding dubious facts used in the OP, I question the validity of the entire commentary and certainly do not believe it is a national trend.