Ellen Schrecker - The Fading Dream of Higher Education in the US

It seems fitting that some of the activity inaugurated by the Occupy Wall Street movement migrated from city squares to college campuses, where students, from Berkeley to the City University of New York (CUNY), are protesting against the rising cost of their educations. Undeterred by pepper spray or police batons, they struggle to preserve the evanescent American dream of a top-flight affordable college education available to all. But, unless there are major transformations within academe and the rest of society, they may be fighting a losing battle.

Just as the frontier once allowed an enterprising individual to get ahead (or so the story went), by the middle of the 20th century, higher education had become the main engine of social mobility in the United States. A college degree, it was believed, would boost its holders into the middle class and then keep them and their children there. Recently, however, as the US economy turned sour, that promise no longer holds. Not only have rising tuitions and unmanageable student debt threatened to put a first-rate higher education out of reach for many of the 99 per cent, but it has also become harder for graduates to enter the well-paying careers they went to college for.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012113131643983539.html

Sarah Jaffe - Standardized Tests Hurt Kids and Public Schools: Teachers, Parents Take a Stand Against Corporate-Backed Test Regime

Early January is back-to-school time—students preparing for a new semester, a year half over. For many students, that means getting ready for a seemingly endless stream of standardized tests – tests meant to measure their progress, their teacher's competence, their school's quality, and their own readiness to take the next step in their education.

This January, though, a group of teachers, parents and activists are organizing against the tests. They have called the first national Opt Out Day for January 7, a day of actions across the country loudly withdrawing consent from a testing regime they say is hurting kids.

Peggy Robertson, a Colorado-based former teacher who is one of the founders of United Opt Out and a Save Our Schools March steering committee member, told AlterNet, “In our opinion, an act of civil disobedience is paramount to stop this.”

“It's very clear that this testing is being used to dismantle the public school system,” she added.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/153654/standardized_tests_hurt_kids_and_public_schools%3A_teachers%2C_parents_take_a_stand_against_corporate-backed_test_regime

Marian Wright Edelman - Education Cuts Aren't Smart

Once upon a time, America professed to believe in a strong public education system. While we still talk about public education as the great equalizer that can offer a pathway out of poverty, the nation is falling far short in assuring millions of poor children, especially those of color, upward mobility.

As if children and families were not suffering enough during this economic downturn, too many states are choosing to balance budgets on the backs of children. They're shifting more costs away from government onto children and families who have fewer means to bear them. It's shameful.

Of the 46 states that publish data in a manner allowing historical comparisons, 37 are providing less funding per student to local school districts this school year than they provided last year, and 30 are providing less funding than they did four years ago. Seventeen states have cut per-student funding more than 10 percent from pre-recession levels, and four — South Carolina, Arizona, California, and Hawaii — have reduced per-student funding for K-12 schools by more than 20 percent, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported.

Read More:

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/education_cuts_arent_smart

Kenneth Saltman - The Failure of Corporate School Reform -- Toward a New Common School Movement

Monday 5 December 2011

by: Kenneth J. Saltman, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/failure-corporate-school-reform-toward-new-common-school-movement/1322671494

In the United States, a corporate model of schooling has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum and nearly all aspects of educational reform.

While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). EMOs extract profit by cutting teacher pay and educational resources while relying on high teacher turnover and labor precarity.(i) Corporate school reform seeks solutions to public problems in private-sector ways, from contracting out schools and services, to union-busting, a wholesale embrace of numerical benchmarking and database tracking and the modeling of schooling and administration on multiple aspects of corporate culture. Policy hawks make demands, for example, for teacher entrepreneurialism, or insist that students dress like retail chain workers and call school heads "CEO"; or install corporate models of numerical "accountability," paying students for grades and teachers for test scores; or leaders play intricate Wall Street-style shell games with test performance to show rising "return on investment"; or teachers assign students the task of crafting a resume for Benjamin Franklin; BP was involved in creating California's new science curriculum: the examples are endless.

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"William Astore"- Education, Our True Homeland Security

 

http://www.truth-out.org/education-our-true-homeland-security/1315582316

 Today's students see education as a means to an end, the end being a respectable job with decent pay and benefits. 

And who can blame them?  With the national unemployment rate at 9.1 percent (a percentage that doesn't include part-timers seeking full-time employment and those unemployed who have simply given up looking for jobs), students are understandably worried about career prospects. 

Many college students are also worried about paying back their student loans; operating under such financial pressure, a focus on salary and the possibility of pay raises and promotions is hardly surprising.

Combine these personal pressures with a stalled economy and a political realm that increasingly sees public service as wasteful and unnecessary, and it's no wonder that education is being reduced to another for-profit venture: another fungible commodity in a world driven by money and the bottom line.

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"David Sirota"- The "Shock Doctrine" Comes to Your Neighborhood Classroom

Published on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 by Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/feature/2011/09/06/shockreform/index.html

Corporate reformers use the fiscal crisis and campaign contributions to hype an unproven school agenda

by David Sirota

"Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism.

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"Dana Goldstein" - Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So

Steven Brill, the journalist and media entrepreneur, has come a long way since he helicoptered onto the education beat in 2009.
 
That’s when The New Yorker published Brill’s exposé of the New York City “rubber rooms,” where the Department of Education parked the one-twentieth of 1 percent of the city’s 80,000 public school teachers—about forty people—who had been accused of gross negligence and removed from the classroom. As they awaited the due process hearings guaranteed in their union contracts, rubber room teachers received full pay and benefits, sometimes for up to three years.

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Noam Chomsky: Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault — What's Next?

By Noam Chomsky, AlterNet
Posted on August 5, 2011, Printed on August 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151921/chomsky%3A_public_education_under_massive_corporate_assault_%E2%80%94_what%27s_next

The following is a partial transcript of a recent speech delivered by Noam Chomsky at the University of Toronto at Scarborough on the rapid privatization process of public higher education in the United States.

A couple of months ago, I went to Mexico to give talks at the National University in Mexico, UNAM. It's quite an impressive university — hundreds of thousands of students, high-quality and engaged students, excellent faculty. It's free. And the city — Mexico City — actually, the government ten years ago did try to add a little tuition, but there was a national student strike, and the government backed off. And, in fact, there's still an administrative building on campus that is still occupied by students and used as a center for activism throughout the city. There's also, in the city itself, another university, which is not only free but has open admissions. It has compensatory options for those who need them. I was there, too; it's also quite an impressive level, students, faculty, and so on. That's Mexico, a poor country.

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The War On Science is Now a War on Education

When the news broke last week of the request for Professor William Cronon's email after his NY Times op-ed piece suggested that Wisconsin's Republican governor Scott Walker's behavior was contrary to the state's history of "neighborliness, decency and mutual respect," I was reminded of the old line from WWII survivors that begins with the words "first they came for ...." It is a phrase, an analogy, which has been perhaps too often used to decry unjust political conduct by raising the specter of fear of imminent harm, but this time, in Professor Cronon's case, I think it is appropriate. Here's why:

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School Woes Rooted in Boardrooms, Not Classrooms

Champions of public education often claim that student achievement drives the economy. Economic innovation and competitiveness supposedly depend on how much students learn in school. Investing in public education is thus wise policy because it ensures our collective prosperity.

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