Amy Goodman's off this week, but co-host Juan Gonzales has written (and researched) a great deal about education policies, practices and deform, and he did excellent job today with guests Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, and Lois Weiner, professor of education at New Jersey City University, in a segment "Educators Push Back Against Obama's "Business Model" for School Reforms".
Lewis had hopeful news about growing local movements like the one she's part of in Chicago, where roll-over-and-play-dead union leaders have been ousted, and teachers have increasingly begun to organize with parents. But I want to focus on a couple of things that Weiner had to say. Not that they're new, really, to those of us here at Open Left, but it's good to hear them so powerfully validated.
First is that what we're seeing here with "Race to the Top" is part of an already-proven-to-fail global pattern of neo-liberalism ("Shock Doctrine" at school):
JUAN GONZALEZ: Lois Weiner, you've been, in your research, conducting what I would, I guess, call a macro analysis of the education reform-
LOIS WEINER: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ:-comparing not only what's happening here in the United States, but around the world, in terms of these so-called reform initiatives. Could you talk about that?
LOIS WEINER: Absolutely. And I think it's important to understand that Race to the Top is not unique to the United States, and what Arne Duncan did in Chicago is not unique to Chicago. And in fact, the contours of this program were carried out first under Pinochet in Chile. And this program was implemented by force of military dictatorships and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Latin America. And the results have been verified by researchers there. They produced increased stratification. So I think what we're seeing right now are the results of that increased stratification, a stratification, inequality of results, because if you think about it, No Child Left Behind is almost a decade old. And what are the results? The results are a growing gap between poor minority-achievement of poor minority kids and those kids who come from prosperous families who are-who live in affluent suburbs and in those suburban schools.
And I think it's also very important to understand that this focus on educational reform is replacing, is a substitute for, a jobs policy. We need to understand that. Education can democratize the competition for the existing jobs, but it cannot create new jobs. And when most jobs that are being created are by companies like Wal-Mart, education cannot do anything about that. So, we need to-we really need to look critically at Race to the Top and understand the way that it fits into this new economic order of a so-called jobless recovery and that what's really going on is a vocationalization of education, a watering down of curriculum for most kids, so that they're going to take jobs that require only a seventh or an eighth grade education, because those are the jobs that are being created in this economy.
And so, I think that while we--while it's important to look at the particulars of each state and each city, each school district, it's also important to see this large picture, because almost anything that you can point to me that's being done in Chicago or New York or San Francisco, we can find another place in the world that it was already done, and we can look at those results. And the results are not good.
This is not surprising. Neoliberalism has already failed, just as conservatism has. Education is just one policy realm among many where this is so. It's only a battle of ideology to the extent that we're fighting for facts to matter--as well as people.
And, of course, the main barrier to the neo-liberal wet dream is those damn teachers, who expect to make a living at their jobs:
JUAN GONZALEZ: You've also taken a look at the impact of No Child Left Behind on teachers. Could you talk about that?
LOIS WEINER: Well, I think it's important to understand that there are--No Child Left Behind is part of this global project to deprofessionalize teaching as an occupation. And the reason that it's important in this project to deprofessionalize teaching is that the thinking is that the biggest expenditure in education is teacher salaries. And they want to cut costs. They want to diminish the amount of money that's put into public education. And that means they have to lower teacher costs. And in order to do that, they have to deprofessionalize teaching. They have to make it a revolving door, in which we're not going to pay teachers very much. They're not going to stay very long. We're going to credential them really fast. They're going to go in. We're going to burn them up. They're going to leave in three, four, five years. And that's the model that they want.
So who is the biggest impediment to that occurring? Teachers' unions. And that is what explains this massive propaganda effort to say that teachers' unions are an impediment to reform. And in fact, they are an impediment to the deprofessionalization of teaching, which I think is a disaster. It's a disaster for public education.
Oh, and just one more little bit of clarification, in case there was any doubt: Teachers' salaries may be slated for cutting to the bone, but management, no way!
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you know, one of the-I've been, for several years now, looking deeply into these charter schools, and especially their tax forms. And one of the things that has struck me as I look at their various audited financial statements is that, generally speaking, the pay levels of the teachers in the charter schools are far lower than they are for normal public school teachers, but the pay of the executives-
KAREN LEWIS: Yeah.
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: --of the charter schools is far higher--
KAREN LEWIS: Higher, yeah.
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: --than it is for superintendents. So you're, in essence, creating a much bigger wage gap in the schools through the charters--
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: --between management and the employees who actually cover the work.
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I'm wondering what you found.
LOIS WEINER: Well, that's part of the-you know, that's part of the thinking here, that teaching really is not--does not have to be a skilled profession, because we're not going to teach--we're not going to educate kids to do anything more than work in Wal-Mart or the equivalent. They only need a seventh or an eighth grade education, at most a ninth grade education, and so we don't need teachers who are more than, as Grover Whitehurst, a former Undersecretary of Education, said, "good enough." That's all we need is teachers who are "good enough" to follow scripted curriculum and to teach to these standardized tests. And if you only need teachers who are good enough, you don't have to pay them very much. And that's the project. And regardless of the rhetoric, regardless of the intentions of some of the people who are supporting these reforms, people like the Education Trust, whose work I respect, I think it's important that we look at something beyond the intentions and the rhetoric, and we really look at this project as being a project that's global in its nature.
So, yes, education is not yet getting the sort of sustained progressive attention that it needs. But things are starting to change, and we here at Open Left are not quite as alone as we might sometimes think or feel.
More and more, the word is getting out. Help us continue to spread it as the new school year starts.
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