[News] The Fall of Public Education

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Fall of Public Education

And the Rise of a New American Radicalism?

Thursday 7 April 2011
by: Matt Meyer

http://www.warresisters.org/node/1134

If “democracy” is understood to mean a process of 
inclusion, equalizing diverse peoples such that 
power and resources are distributed fairly, then 
democratic movements have a potentially positive 
role to play in furthering revolution, 
liberation, justice and peace. By any definition, 
though, the experiment known as democracy in the 
USA today is in dire trouble. Nowhere is that 
trouble more strikingly evident than in the 
national campaign to do away with public schools. 
After little more than 150 years of 
federally-mandated and coordinated 
schooling-for-all, the US commitment to publicly 
supported teachers and students is quickly coming 
to an abrupt end. The global corporate penchant 
for the privatization, commoditization, and 
enclosure of practically everything is having 
particularly chilling effects in policies that 
Henry Giroux suggests “seek nothing less than the 
total destruction of the democratic potential of American education.”

In order to fully grasp the current moment, it is 
useful to review the history of the US school 
system. With roots in the British class system, 
most schools in early American history were 
privately run and exclusively for the wealthy ­ 
supported by tuitions with the assistance of 
charitable and religious institutions. As the US 
expanded (in both territory and population), 
reform movements pressed for a widening of state, 
and occasionally federal, support for a shift 
from the few “pauper” schools which did exist to 
a more open and unifying model, where immigrant 
youth from Europe could be molded into “good 
citizens” and social discontent could be managed 
and contained. It was not until 1918 that all 
states had passed laws requiring children to 
attend at least elementary school. The radical 
upheavals of the 1920s and 30s had its 
counterpart in the pedagogical community; the 
“progressive” education movement forced a shift 
in schooling towards intellectual discipline.

The Great Depression and World War Two also 
created a positive climate for the advocates of 
education for social and economic advancement, 
with the federal government providing aid to 
local school districts. An aspect of this 
assistance was certainly due to a need to “hold 
back” portions of the population for whom there 
still were no jobs, and ­ in post-war society ­ 
the core of national support centered around 
“competing” with the Soviet Union in science and 
the arts. The pressures of the massive organizing 
for significant social change throughout the late 
1950s, 1960s, and much of the 1970s forced 
another dramatic shift towards educational equity 
and equal access across racial, ethnic, gender, 
and other lines. It is not insignificant that, 
whatever the motivations, the percentage of 
children who completed secondary education 
between the years 1900 and 1996 rose from six to eight-five percent.

Despite the apparent successes of mass schooling 
for the majority of its recipients, the 
objectives of the financiers, and a bipartisan 
collection of politicians, were not being met by 
the increase in equity or opportunity. Thus, the 
Cabinet-level Department of Education (DOE) which 
was created in 1980 and has a greatly expanded 
mandate from the one it started out with thirty 
years ago, now also has roughly half of the staff 
it had at that time to carry out these tasks! 
Under the Clinton administration, plans became 
solidified to “remold” the nation’s education 
system to suit the needs of an economic system 
which could just as easily utilize “labor market 
boards” as institutions of learning and 
empowerment. It is not, then, a far stretch to 
the politics and policies of 2010, when 
right-wing pundits call for a complete 
dissolution of the federal DOE, while businessmen 
pump funds into local and state education systems 
to all but insure that they become 
privately-controlled corporate training centers.

This global phenomenon, known internationally to 
be part of the neoliberal agenda whereby most 
workers do not need much formal education, sees 
highly-educated, life-long “professional” 
teachers as a central problem for smooth-running, 
globalized economies. By raising student 
expectations and civic involvement, and demanding 
higher wages and better working conditions, they 
cost much more than they are worth. Throughout 
Africa, Asia, and Latin America, The World Bank 
and other free market institutions have already 
implemented wide-scale privatization campaigns, 
with its necessary attack on unionism, 
disenfranchisement of parents and communities, 
and de-intellectualizing schools. Even in 
recently independent countries with liberation 
movement histories and ostensibly progressive 
governments, like Namibia in southern Africa, 
educational policy has become “driven and 
propelled by the insatiable demand for profit.”

Conditions in so-called developing countries, 
such as the still-colonized Puerto Rico, cause 
harsh battles between the elites and the 
have-nots; a one-day teacher’s strike at the 
start of the 2010 school year over austerity 
measures (following an immense student strike 
throughout Puerto Rico’s college population which 
marked most of the Spring 2010 semester) shut 
down close to ninety percent of the island’s 
public schools, with parents keeping their 
children home in record numbers. Yet in Finland, 
heralded by some of the new corporate-driven 
educational “specialists” for its consistently 
high ranking test scores, there is also a long 
and consistent history of strong unions, fewer 
standardized tests, and four times the level of 
social service spending on children than exists in the US.

It Has Happened Here: Education, the Military, and Prisons

The same political analysis which views school 
primarily as a space for marketplace training has 
also been crucial to the movement for zero 
tolerance discipline and high stakes testing. 
Imposing punitive, militarized solutions to 
crisis created by chaotic, community-based social 
ills (poverty, unemployment, the housing 
shortage, and traumatic home lives caused by all 
of the above), 21st Century middle and high 
schools have become, for many, an early 
introduction to the realities of prejudicial 
policing and the “positive” alternatives that a 
life in the US Armed Forces can offer. Beyond the 
obvious links between war spending in the midst 
of a failing economy which calls for teacher 
layoffs and cuts in services, there is the more 
pernicious problem of a national trend towards 
promotion of a curriculum based on military mythology.

Military recruitment in US secondary schools was 
on the rise throughout the 1980s and 90s, but the 
No Child Left Behind Act gave the military 
unprecedented access to young people in and out 
of school. Certain groups, like the New York 
Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE) and San 
Diego’s Project YANO, have worked hard to reverse 
this trend. But, more often than not, with an 
over-burdened peace movement which makes only 
occasional links to unions and parent groups, 
these initiatives largely remain camouflaged. The 
basic tenets of No Child Left Behind ­ a national 
curriculum, high stakes testing, and the 
militarization of schools in poor and working 
class communities ­ have only been invigorated by 
President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

Making the links between militarized education 
and war profiteering, however, are just two 
fingers of a tightly woven hand-in-glove 
experience. Horace Campbell, in a recent 
challenge to peace and justice activists 
following the memorials of former prisoner of 
conscience Bill Sutherland and former political 
prisoner Marilyn Buck, calls on us to understand 
that the US has undergone a new wave of 
militarization which includes the use of prisons. 
With intensified domestic psychological warfare 
and robotization, Campbell argues that 
institutionalization is pushing today’s youth 
towards trauma and craziness, when “the sanity of 
mind of our children is required for a peaceful 
world.” In addition, the fact that prisons have 
been the breeding grounds and holding centers for 
some of the most important progressive thinkers 
of the past American century may only be a small 
part of a growing new realpolitik.

For those of the lower classes who cannot conform 
to the new rules of a cookie cutter curriculum 
and who do not opt for the military “alternative” 
to factory-based education or burger-flipping 
underemployment, there is one ever-increasing 
opportunity which will still provide subsidized 
housing and gainful work: going to prison! The 
statistics about young men of African descent 
(jailed, for example, at a rate far above what 
was practiced in South Africa during apartheid 
days and the radical resistance to that racist 
regime), are just the tip of the prison iceberg. 
Never mind that mainstream, liberal civil rights 
groups like the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, 
and others have called the contemporary crisis 
for education of children of color a “state of 
emergency” in a system that one Boston Globe 
reporter termed “apartheid in our schools.” There 
has been relatively less attention paid, in these 
desperate fiscal times, to the 660 percent growth 
rate of the prison industry in the last decade of 
the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.

In this same period of time, the richest one 
percent of the US billionaires became the very 
happy (though still unsatisfied) recipients of 
almost one-fourth of the total income generated 
in the entire country. All policies ­ from 
education to prisons, from the military to 
housing, health care, and social security ­ have 
been molded to maintain this unprecedented 
inequity. The National Center for Fair and Open 
Testing, one of the most widely respected and 
research-based associations of progressive 
educators, has documented how the standardized 
testing craze has helped fuel the school-to-prison pipeline.

The fact that some states have even planned 
future budget allocations for the building of new 
prisons, based upon the number of failing math 
and English language test scores amongst third 
graders, is just one grotesque example of this 
trend. Michelle Alexander, calling the current 
process of imprisonment in America “the new Jim 
Crow,” reminds us that the connections between 
race, class, education, militarization, and 
repression are alive and well and deepening. We 
have already arrived at a USA where Orwellian 
double-speak is the norm, and repressive, 
militarized structures pervade every facet of the 
lives of all but an elite few.

The Capitalist Manifesto

It should therefore have been of little surprise 
when, in October 2010, a collection of sixteen 
superintendents from some of the largest school 
districts in the country came together to write a 
“Manifesto” titled How to Fix Our Schools. Coming 
out in conjunction with the quasi-documentary 
Waiting for Superman (much of the footage was 
staged), this manifesto, also unsurprisingly, 
laid the failure of US education mainly at the 
doorstep of tired and incompetent teachers, who 
apparently make up much of the educational 
workforce. Their evil benefactors and backers, 
the local and national teacher unions, are the 
main target of the campaign to “fix” problems 
which actual social science research suggests are 
entrenched throughout the whole of our 
socioeconomic system. Economic Policy Institute 
associate Richard Rothstein reminds us that 
decades of studies have corroborated that all 
in-school factors (of which the quality of 
teachers is just one component) make up just 
one-third of the reasons why some students 
succeed while others fail. The other two-thirds 
of the causes of the achievement gap, it has been 
shown over and over again, have little or nothing 
to do with anything that goes on inside schools.

It should be of little solace that a good number 
of the sixteen superintendents associated with 
the Manifesto have, in a few short months, been 
“made redundant” in regards to their own jobs. 
Michelle Rhee of Washington DC famously lost her 
position when the Mayor who backed her was 
unceremoniously voted out of office by an angry 
citizenry who saw their schools disrupted in a 
thinly veiled attempt to further disenfranchise 
the African American population while catering to 
a minority of white gentrifiers. Some have said 
that, in places like DC and New Orleans, the 
process has meant nothing short of ethnic 
cleansing. Superintendent Ron Huberman of Chicago 
has resigned his position, and Philadelphia’s 
Arlene Ackerman claimed to have been falsely 
listed as a signer, now noting that getting rid 
of teachers’ unions or rights, including tenure, 
would not end school failure ­ especially at a 
time when schools are being looked at to solve 
“many of the ills [of] the larger society.” And 
when the news of New York’s Chancellor Joel 
Klein’s mid-semester resignation shocked the news 
media, the apparently-more-shocking news came out 
that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would 
dare to select a flunky who had no experience in 
education, barely even having ever set foot in a public school building.

The point is that the funders of this Capitalist 
Manifesto, like the promoters of standardized 
tests, the scapegoaters of teachers, the 
developers of charter schools unencumbered by 
parental control or input, are still very much in 
place. Like billionaire Bloomberg himself (whose 
civics lesson to the people of New York was to 
buy himself a third term of office despite 
popular outcry against it and two referenda that 
showed widespread electoral support for term 
limits), these funders ­ from Bill Gates to the 
more reactionary Eli Broad or Jeb Bush ­ have 
never had a problem with making daring moves 
which they can well afford to back up. They can 
shield themselves from bad press, since they are 
well-connected to the publishing industry and 
have the money to buy their own press if 
something they don’t like gets written up. They 
can distance themselves from politicians when 
policies go sour, for they have nothing to lose 
but their claims. But they will still have the 
attention and the allegiance of the President and his Secretary of Education.

When former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich 
suggests that “a perfect storm” of economic and 
social factors are gutting democracy and creating 
a “plutocratic” capitalism, one might wonder what 
it will take for the bottom 120 million 
Americans, who make less money than the top 
one-tenth of one percent of the richest amongst 
us, to rise up and do something. When the Fall 
2010 cover of the National Education 
Association’s news magazine reports that a New 
Jersey Teacher of the Year was just one of the 
victims of layoffs which affected no less than 
eighty percent of the nation’s school districts, 
one wonders how far folks will be pushed before 
militant trade union tactics return. When 
respected former New York City Deputy Chancellor 
Carmen Farina, who served for years under 
recently-replaced Klein, notes that the policies 
of the new manifesto reformers feel like they’re 
aimed not at the goal of strengthening learning, 
but to “eliminate public schools,” one again 
wonders what that final straw will be, riding on 
the back of a very shaky camel.

A History Teacher’s Peacemakers Quiz

Now for a short test. No pens or paper are 
required, only the use of your mind. Think back 
just a little over a decade ago, say to the point 
just before January 1, 2000, when so many were so 
certain that all our computers would just stop. 
How many of us, at that point in time, would have 
predicted with confidence that a military attack 
would level the World Trade Center, while a plane 
apparently flew into the side of the Pentagon? 
How many of us, at that same moment, would have 
thought ahead to the time when torture would be 
seen as an officially accepted strategy of the US 
military abroad, while substantial protections 
under the Constitution would be systemically and 
openly done away with? How many would have spoken 
out in a clear and definitive manner, about the 
fact that, within one decade, the US would surely 
have a President of African descent, with a 
father actually hailing from Africa?

Now, let us look at the next ten years. Eminent 
peace researcher Johan Galtung suggests that the 
US empire will come to an end at this time. This 
shrewd Scandinavian observer, who predicted 
within months the date of the fall of the Soviet 
Union (also ten years before the fact), says that 
US empire days are surely numbered, but the 
empire may be replaced by a US republic that will 
blossom, or turn to fascism. How much can we, as 
a movement, truly imagine ­ assuming that our 
imaginations have been limited by our over-work, 
our stresses, our emergencies, and the growing 
repression we face? How much can we plan for, 
given that ten years ago some of the major 
historical markers of this first decade seemed unthinkable to most of us.

At the 2010 US Social Forum People’s Movement 
Assembly focusing upon education, a panel of Bill 
Ayers, Grace Lee Boggs, and others opened the 
discussion. Theologian and Dr. King advisor 
Vincent Harding, in presenting on the educational 
requirements of a multiracial, democratic 
society, noted that ­ for those who look to a 
future of peace ­ “We are citizens of a society 
which does not exist yet.” Will the conditions 
that have always made for revolution everywhere 
ripen to such a degree that the US itself is 
finally faced with fast-paced radical change? 
South African poet Dennis Brutus, whose passing 
we also mark this year, used to say that after 
apartheid had ended, he couldn’t find one single 
white South African who admitted to supporting 
the racist regime! “Revolution,” he suggested, 
“always seems impossible for a long, long time . 
. . until things speed up all at once, and then 
it seems inevitable.” Are we ready to play a role 
in the revolution to come? Or must we plan to pack our bags?

For those of us working for a broadening of 
democracy through transformative education for 
all, it seems like an uphill battle. We would do 
well to remember that public schooling is not 
worth fighting for if it is a minor reform aiding 
the maintenance of an unjust status quo. But if 
the classrooms we create are centers for critical 
change, for empowerment and liberation, for peace 
with justice, then the fight we’ll be part of is 
for nothing less than a livable future. The 
targeting of students, parents, and teachers’ 
lives in Wisconsin was truly a test case. If we 
are to pass the test, we must study well ­ and 
make the national movement against public 
education (and equality, democracy, and fairness) 
be the beginning of a new American radicalism.

Matt Meyer is an educator-activist, based in New 
York City, and serves as convener of the War 
Resisters International Africa Working Group. His 
recent books include 
<http://www.akpress.org/2005/items/gunsandgandhiinafrica>Guns 
and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on 
Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation(Africa 
World Press, 2000), the two-volume collection 
<http://www.africaworldpressbooks.com/servlet/Detail?no=444>Seeds 
of New Hope: Pan African Peace Studies for the 
21st Century (Africa World Press, 2008, 2010), 
and 
<https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=60>Let 
Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the 
Movements to Free U. S. Political Prisoners (PM 
Press, 2008). Meyer is a contributing member of 
the Editorial Advisory Board for 
<http://www.truth-out.org/2011/03/28/>New Clear 
Vision. This article was adapted by the author 
from a piece that 
<http://www.warresisters.org/node/1134>originally 
appeared in the War Resisters League magazine.




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