Fighting Back Against The War On Public Education
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
The March 4th demonstrations to defend public education-centered here in California, but extending across at least 30 states and several other countries-were long overdue in the eyes of some leading education activists and critics. "These protest movements are really healthy. I hope that political leadership listens to them," said Gary Orfield, head of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA . The Civil Rights Project has been tracking the re-segregation of American schools since the late 1980s.
Due to deep funding cuts, sharply increased fees, reduced class offerings and increased class sized, Orfield sees their prospects dwindling, absent a struggle.
"We project that here in California, which educates one-ninth of the students in the country that we're going to be on a path to lower average education levels for the first time in the history of the state within a very few years," Orfield told Random Lengths. "That's going to devastate our future development."
Education scholar David Berliner-co-author of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America's Public Schools, published in 1995-is a leading voice among critics who have been battling the tide of hysterical attacks on public education for several decades now. "I'm wondering where they were all along," Berliner said about the widespread involvement of teachers. Referring to the Williams v. California lawsuit over systemic second-class educational conditions for poor and minority communities, settled in 2004, Berliner said, "Every teacher in the state should have walked out."
Better late than never, perhaps. And better that students themselves have taken center stage. But when it comes to the war on public education, it's much, much later than most people realize. In the future, it could mean "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States" in 2014, according to a new book by Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch had been a long-time advocate of conservative education "reforms," including GW Bush's "No Child Left Behind" [NCLB] Act. But in 2006, she came to realize that none of the promised gains were materializing, and that NCLB's provisions meant that the result of this failure could and would be used to dismantle public education as a whole, unless changes were made to existing law. |
