Norm posted a great article Monday on how the public is being pried out of public education in a massive kind of way. It's a summary of Steven Miller and Jack Gerson's report on "The Corporate Surge against Public Schools."
Miller and Gerson refer back to a response they had written a year ago to a report funded by the Gates Foundation et al., which had called for some pretty nasty things when you come right down to it, like replacing public schools with charter schools, eliminating the power of school boards and teacher pensions, slashing health benefits, and forcing poorly functioning kids out of education altogether.
That these people can sleep at night is beyond me.
Once you start breaking down local systems of education and turning ideology, management, and finances over to corporations and pseudo-philanthropists with national influence, you get ed-oligopolism. The super-rich supply the theories, and everyone else buys into them.
From Miller and Gerson:
They would leave education policy in the hands of a network of entrepreneurial think tanks, corporate entrepreneurs, and armies of lobbyists whose priorities are profiting from the already huge education market while cutting back on public funding for schools and students. . .
Essentially, this is a fight of and for the common man. The authors put it this way:The struggles of the Civil Rights Era made people realize that quality education was a right that everyone deserves. Education today, whether public or private, is a social policy. We make choices about how far it is extended, what the purpose is, what quality is offered, and to whom. Now that wealth is polarizing in this country, corporate forces are determined to create a social system that benefits the “Haves” while excluding the “Have-Nots”.
Privatizing public schools inevitable leads to massive increase in social inequality. . . If the corporate privatizers succeed in taking over our schools, there will be neither quality education nor civil rights.
The system of public education in the United States is deeply flawed. . . .The solution is not to fight backwards to maintain the old system. Rather it is to fight forward to a new system that will truly guarantee quality education as a civil right for everyone.
Central to this is to challenge [emphasis mine] the idea that everything in human society should be run by corporations, that only corporations and their political hacks have the right or the power to discuss what public policy should be. As Naomi Klein stated so well in The Shock Doctrine, privatization “will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged”. (p 14)
The real direction is to increase the role and power of the public in every way, not eliminate it. If we can spend $2.5 billion a week for war in Iraq, we can certainly build quality schools. It’s not a matter of money. The issue is who will benefit and who will control. Should schools be organized to benefit the super-rich, or should they be organized to benefit everyone?
Read Eduwonkette and all the comments in "It's a small world after all" on the
interconnectedness of some of the players in this big ballfield. Listen to Chomsky's lecture "Class War: the Attack on Working People." 
Read The Shock Doctrine, Gerson and Miller's "Education and Commodity," William Cook's Unencorporating Education, and anything else that makes connections for you, so you can get a handle on this intellectual, political and class war. Just because you don't necessarily feel it yet doesn't mean it's not already all around you.
It's the struggle of our lifetime, really, because the outcome will define the way we think, the way we interact with (and maltreat) certain sociological groups, and the way we educate schoolchildren for years to come.
When the public purse is not being spent for the public good, it becomes the task of each of us to do a fair amount of homework and become familiar with the terminology and ideology of capitalist fundamentalism. We really owe it to our children and grandchildren to smoke the vultures out.
There’s an interesting email written by George Schmidt, editor of Substance ("the newspaper of public education in Chicago"), in response to a question posed by Mike Fiorillo about Obama and his connections to the ed world. I was going to post this interchange here, but Ednotes has actually saved me the trouble. Read it in full over there, because it’s good stuff.
It is worth quoting the self-stated mission of Substance, because the paper sets admirable goals:
Substance is a monthly investigative newspaper devoted to in-depth reporting on the major issues facing public education. Our mission is to report facts and provide interpretations of the news about public schools unhindered by the biases against public education that currently infest both the "liberal" left and the "conservative" right. We are also pro-union, pro-child, and pro-democracy. Because of this, the news stories in Substance provide accurate information but never maintain the pretense of "objectivity." "Objectivity" as it is practiced by the major media in this case means slanting the news to reflect the biases of the millionaire and billionaire individuals and corporations that control the public's access to news and information.
We need newspapers like Substance as much as we need books like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I wrote something about earlier this month.
With creeping privatization, unchecked corporatization, a diminished press and a sullied judicial system, it is no longer possible in times like these to form superficial opinions – party chatter, if you like – on the games they're playing with our schools.
Mike Fiorillo essentially asked Schmidt to elaborate on Obama's connections with Renaissance 2010 in Chicago. The description of this project on its website shows the shift that's taking place over there from public to corporate-sponsored education. You can see it in the in the governance structures mentioned in the last line of the Overview:
Renaissance 2010 seeks to create 100 high-performing schools in designated communities of need by 2010. These schools will be held accountable for performance through 5-year contracts while being given autonomy to create innovative learning environments using one of the following governance structures: charter, contract, or performance.
and also in the jargon used in Background paragraph just below it:
This bold plan closes chronically under-performing schools and sets up a competitive, community-based selection process to determine the best operator for each site.
Obama's relationship with Renaissance 2010 is important, as much as Hillary Clinton's is with the AFT and UFT in general, and with BloomKleinGarten in particular.
Parenthetically, but salient in evaluating Clinton's affinities with the corporate world, is that while she's not only (according to Ari Berman in the Nation) "more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists," an analysis of her senatorial voting record prepared by Progressive Punch, the AFL-CIO and others gave her an overall progressive score of 93%. Based on its analyses, the LeftCoaster, pt.1, did not find Clinton merits being labeled a "Corporate Democrat." They've put out pts. two, three, and four as well.
The kind of unchecked privatization the country has experienced at the hands of the neocon ideologues over the past decade has meant that it is harder to distinguish the boundaries between governments and corporations. The players have a foot in each camp to varying degrees, and they are frequently all too willing to profit immensely from the public purse. The revolving door, as mentioned in the Shock Doctrine, has become a lofty arch.
How far each of the presidential candidates are willing to embrace the most manipulative and anti-social practices of corporate America is something that should be pretty much at the forefront of our thinking.
To this end, put Schmidt's comments about Obama up against an editorial he published a couple of months ago in the Substance about the Chicago school system and see if you get more perspective.Picture Paul Bremer, the erstwhile "viceroy" of Baghdad, only without the boots. You now have Arne Duncan and his troupe of zealots privatizing everything in sight at the Chicago Board of Education and in the "Office of New Schools." Of course, just as Bremer would have been nothing without George W. Bush and the crazies in the Washington think tanks that write the privatization scripts for the world, so Duncan would just be another washed up former professional ball player if Mayor Daley and his corporate buddies weren't backing his massive privatization plans.
For the past six years, we've watched while Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan lied repeatedly to the public about how and why he was closing dozens of public schools. Duncan was not trying to improve public schools in Chicago for all children, but was in command of a ruthless privatization plan that is designed to undermine traditional notions of public education for urban children and replace them with a crackpot version of "market choice" that exists only for the wealthy and the powerful.
The key to Duncan's ability to get away with the Big Lie, however, is not Duncan's own eloquence, but the face that he has the backing of Chicago's ruling class. From the CEOs of the city's largest corporations (organized into the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club) to the editorial boards of the two power daily newspapers, Duncan's lies are amplified every day, and except for the pages of this newspaper and a few other places, unchallenged in the public arena where democratic debate is supposed to take place.
After we reviewed the school closings in Chicago since 2001, when Mayor Daley appointed Duncan the second "Chief Executive Officer" in CPS history, the shocking details began to become clear. Not only were poor black children being forced out of their homes (public housing reform, it was called), but they were also being deprived over and over of access to public schools.
Comparing Duncan's other work with massive privatizers like Paul Bremer (who headed up the Provisional Coalition Authority in Baghdad from 2003 to 2004), any clear-eyed reader can see the same pattern. These guys are not in the business of improving public school, but of stripping the assets from public services and turning unionized public servants into non-union public slaves.
For five years, we have watched thousands of people appear before the corporate stooges who constitute the Chicago Board of Education, trying to talk about what would be best for public schools. Every argument has been eloquent.
But the arguments don't really matter, because Arne Duncan and the seven members of the Chicago Board of Education are not in the education business, they are in the privatization and charter school business. Once the public understands that, at least people can stop wasting their time talking about what's best for the education of Chicago's poorest children. Duncan couldn't care less about that as long as his crimes — and they are crimes that flow from these lies — don't make the TV news or interfere with the agenda of his mentor Richard M. Daley.
You can't read everything to bone up on this election, but it seems like you have to do more than you ever had to before.
If we could all take the time to read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), we’d be in a much better position to assess what’s happened to our profession this past decade and begin the task of reclaiming our once viable position in this society – alongside many other professionals, of course, whose jobs have also been diminished by the far right.
I don’t know if Ms Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” herself, but she certainly presents a comprehensive world-view picture of it in the introduction to this book.
As so many know by now, what she suggests is that a country traumatized by a shocking event, like a natural disaster or a man-made one such as 911, will be “softened-up” and ripe for the picking by capitalist profiteers.That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster ... puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. ... Shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect. (p.17)
Klein attributes the “shock” strategy of what she calls "fundamentalist" capitalism to the economist Milton Friedman, who died a little over a year ago. She reminds us that it was this lauded intellectual, a Nobel prizewinner no less, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "[Hurricane Katrina] is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”
According to Ms Klein, By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans ... it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering. (p.8)
[Ex-CIA operative] Mike Battles puts it best: “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.” (p.9)
For the word "country" in her analysis, we can easily substitute the entire system of public education in the city of New York — not only the many thousands of its employees, but the millions of parents and children who need to use it. (And we all know that doesn't mean every parent and child in this newly polarized society.)
Joel Klein’s multiple and devastating reorganizations of the school system have softened all of us up: administrators, educators, parents and students alike. Without any familiar systems, rules, administrative personnel, or contracts to get us through the chaos of these successive remodelings, we flounder, fall, slink off, and fail.
And this is exactly what BloomKlein and their conspirators have planned for the city all along: less presence and political clout from the rank-and-file and the users of the system, and a virtual partnership with the corporations, private contractors, and hired technocrats with whom they will be doing business from now til kingdom come.
In the wake of this destablizing transition, even the new hires are counted upon to be “temps” — not to be nurtured all that much now and not to be thanked later on down the road, but to remain forever expendable in a system that doesn’t deliver what it’s supposed to and supports nothing that any of us can value.
interconnectedness of some of the players in this big ballfield. Listen to Chomsky's lecture "Class War: the Attack on Working People." 
Read The Shock Doctrine, Gerson and Miller's "Education and Commodity," William Cook's Unencorporating Education, and anything else that makes connections for you, so you can get a handle on this intellectual, political and class war. Just because you don't necessarily feel it yet doesn't mean it's not already all around you.
