Although I tend to concentrate these posts on K-12 education, I had the distinct privilege to spend yesterday involved in a meet-up with an exceptional group of college students in the state of Georgia who have organized to push back against the austerity budget cuts, fee hikes, and tuition increases being inflicted on public schools and universities by the Republican administration in that state.
The organization, Georgia Students for Public Higher Education or GSPHE, began as emerging grassroots campus efforts to resist egregious tuition increases formed a coalition more capable of mobilizing a statewide public campaign. Eventually, the organization allied with immigrant student groups, such as the Georgia DreamersGeorgia Dreamers who are pushing for an open pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth who were brought to this country and for fair access, tuition, and treatment of students who are undocumented.
I was there to explain "the bigger picture", but these young students were already up to speed. Unlike the out-of-touch leaders of the Democratic Party and the sycophant punditry "on the left" who follow them, these young adults had already made the situation analysis and had come to all the right conclusions:
* Access to quality education is a matter of human rights, and public schools are a cornerstone of our democracy - not just in the US but around the world.
* Current calls to cut education are not a necessary response to the housing crisis and ensuing financial collapse - on the contrary public education has been the constant target for attacks since the Reagan administration, if not longer.
* The efforts to transform public universities and K-12 schools are not about "reform," but are instead being driven by a concerted, broad, and well-organized coalition of forces bent on monetizing students, privatizing pubic schools, and transferring public assets into private hands (although the efforts to privatize universities differs from the efforts aimed at K-12, which I will come back to).
* Attempts to transfer the assets of our public schools into the hands of privateers and profit seekers is similar to how other public assets - in transportation, criminal justice, the military - are being sold off to "entrepreneurs" despite the fact that these contracts rarely lead to costs-savings to the public - indeed they often cost more and the service to the public declines.
* What's happening to public schools, teachers, and students in Georgia and across the US is part of a worldwide effort driven by a neoliberal ideology imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.
Even though these students hadn't heard of Diane Ravitch and were unaware of the ins-and-outs of ESEA they didn't need to. They already instinctively "got it" just from their experiences of organizing against something that curtails their right to an education and threatens their future wellbeing. And as the meeting progressed, we linked up - via Skype - with others around the world who got it too, and I began to wonder, "Is this where it begins?"
In much the same way that the end of apartheid in South Africa began when students staged protests against a law prohibiting instruction in schools to be in any language but Africkaans and English, and student sit-ins were a catalyst for advancing the Civil Rights movement in the US, were students around the world going to have to be the ones to lead the push-back against the advancing effort to transfer public assets around the world into the coffers of the very wealthy and powerful?
First, it is incumbent on progressives everywhere to recognize these privatization schemes in all their nefarious forms:
* In the military, the preferred model is to use contractors instead of soldiers to fight our wars - in Afghanistan for instance, contractors outnumber US troops even though they cost the taxpayers many times more per person in terms of salary than they do active military.
* In the criminal justice system, the privatization of prisons has emerged into a $billion + business even though these institutions "tend to cost more on a per-prisoner basis than do public institutions." * In K-12 public education, the ongoing attempt to privatize has taken many forms but the most recent preferred model is to convert traditional public schools into charter schools even though these schools do no better - and often worse - in educating children, frequently cost more to run (when the largesse of private foundations is included in the accounting), and frequently lead to graft and scandalsscandals.
However, the privatization schemes being worked in higher ed are of a particular odious nature. The primary privatization model being implemented in the US is to call for increased tuition, heightened fees, and stricter access on public institutions while allowing for-profit campuses to loot the treasury.
In the past decade, the for profit higher ed industry has tripled enrollment even though they charge as much as ten times as public institutions for a similar - or even less-prestigious - degree. How they do this is by recruiting heavily among minority and less-well-off students - even the homeless, according to one anecdote - and dangling the promise of a better life in front of them. In fact, one in seven minority students involved in higher education are enrolled in for profit institutions.
Because so many of the students enrolled in for profit higher ed are from minority and disadvantaged communities, many of them are eligible for federal tuition aid - more than one in four of minority students receive federal aid. Thus, 90 percent of the money flowing into for profits comes directly from taxpayers. But most students enrolled in for profits will not complete their degrees will end up deeply in debt. In fact, only 22 percent of students in for profits complete their degrees, compare to 55 percent at state schools, although only one in every eight students attend a for profit, they make up half of all students who default on their loans.
The results are that taxpayers end up getting stuck with all the default loans while for profit colleges laugh all the way to the bank.
These privatization schemes in our public school systems are nothing new to the teachers and students who are involved in education. And now they are starting to speak out and organize.
At the meet-up I attended in Athens, GA yesterday, I certainly heard from them:
* An organizer in Los Angeles, Julia Wallace, whose effort to battle back against education cuts has rallied students, parents, and teachers and led to student walkouts * Students in Puerto Rico who are in the midst of a prolonged strike to protest higher fees and restricted access imposed by the government's economic plan, known as Law 7 that "mimics the neoliberal playbook of many Latin American countries dealing with economic crises."
* Students in Germany who are organizing with students around the world for a "Spring of Resistance to "coordinate protests against fees and cuts and for free emancipatory education." Students from nearly every corner of the world - Italy, Ukraine, Ireland, Greece - are networking through the International Student Movement in a Global Wave of Action that, in part, drove the recent student unrest in the United Kingdom.
* A student activist in Connecticut, Wes Strong, who is involved in Defend Public Education to organize a National Month of Actions to Defend Public Education and begin to drive a media narrative in the US, already well understood among students elsewhere in the world, that market-based corporate education models are anti-progressive and a threat to basic human rights.
So what will it be fellow progressives? Will we listen to what these students are saying instead of continuing to look the other way? Will they have to shame us into action with their passion and determination, or will we speak out and begin to take action ourselves?
You tell me.
UPDATE: Based on reader recommendations, I have altered two links in this diary to provide more accurate and complete information.
