I traditionally don’t respond to extreme sources of media, but had to respond to the following quote: This high-profile experiment in privatization is being looked to by the powers-that-be as a potential model for a radical transformation of the public education system…” The reality is that you clearly did not read the mission statement found in the Green Dot Public Schools website. Prior to sitting in a chair, with a goal to slam a school model that has increased the graduation rates, A-G UC/CSU college requirements, and integrated the parent community in the Animo High Schools, take a minute to visit one of the Los Angeles campus, and the Green Dot Main Office.

1) Gree Dot is not PRIVATIZING EDUCATION! Green Dot is a Public High School CMO. If at any point Green Dot “PUBLIC” Schools are not meeting their objectives, LAUSD has the authority to end their charter.

2) Green Dot Public Schools serves the neediest communities in Los Angeles by fundraising and using per pupil funding for the needs of their students.

3) Green Dot Public Schools is an example of the type of successes and models that proves low income youth in urban communities can achieve is given the resources that the bureaucracy at LAUSD is unable to provide.

These schools are not private and as a master candidate in education policy, Green Dot Public Schools hold a model that educators in New York City are in the process of recreating. Please visit http://www.greendot.org and dont’ let a naive essay discredit the great PUBLIC work that urban education reform is providing for the youth in LA.

(The white supremacist view of) “multiculturalism” and immigration have nothing to do with why charter schools are in fact a nightmare. (I somehow doubt Bob read the article.)

Beverly asks a good question that brings the structural features of the problem (an imperialist system, in the Leninist sense of the word, where economic, political, and cultural life is subordinate to production for profit and the high-stakes scramble to generate favorable returns for CAPITAL on an integrated world scale):

“Even if charter schools turned out Phi Beta Techno Experts, where would all of them work when U.S corporations continue to outsource these type jobs from high end engineering work to low end xray tech and lab tech work?”

I totally agree with Brian Koontz’s anger, but his attempt to zero in on the problem makes an unfortunate and common retreat into good ole’ American Liberalism:

“Privatization is another word for the transformation of democracy into capitalism. The US is becoming a totalitarian capitalist state…”

Everyone throws around this term “democracy” like it’s some kind of holy grail that we’re expected to immediately grasp and identify with. Capitalism, i.e. the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the people and especially over those who come from the places like Watts where Green Dot just moved in, is perfectly compatible with democracy—bourgeois democracy. The evolution of the 2-party system is simply a particular (but by no means permanent!) form through which the ruling class of the U.S. have consented among themselves to exercise their rule.

There has never been a point in this country’s history that did NOT involve domination by the “monied classes” over the rest of society—certainly not in the vaunted early days of the “republic”, a period based on slavery and genocide which many democratic intellectuals still view as the “founding of a great democratic experiment” to be upheld philosophically and replicated/tinkered with today.

Very relevant to this is Bob Avakian’s “Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy” at http://www.revcom.us/Comm_JeffDem/Jeffersonian_Democracy.html.

Privatization is just privatization—the inherent drive of capital to commodify everything and re-mould institutions in its interest. Big changes taking place in the functioning of this country (no need to list them for this audience) point to how the U.S. is “becoming” something worse indeed, and privatization of services does seem to be a part of that, but it’s not predetermined WHAT it will become. What we understand and DO is a crucial element in what kind of future we might get. Fighting to get us off of this awful course requires ideas and ideology—the question is what kind.

“Democracy” in the sense that it’s normally thrown around by progressives is a) not achievable in a world marked by gaping class divisions and lopsided access to humanity’s means of production
and
b) not desirable.

Revolution, socialism and communism are.

I got a lot out of Reggie’s analysis. I hope both observers and those directly involved in fights for education reform (against charters) reflect on this passage:

“This is still a system with no future for the masses of poor and oppressed people in the urban cores of this country’s largest cities. Green Dot and this whole drive to radically transform the system of public education does not change that.”

So what will?

What a joke to hear these people saying we lack students prepared for today’s/tomorrow’s high tech economy. Every year, thousands graduate from 2 year, 4 year, and technical schools with degrees in high tech fields and far too many do not find jobs in said fields. Further, how many high tech workers have been laid off and watched their jobs shipped offshore to a low wage country? Even if charter schools turned out Phi Beta Techno Experts, where would all of them work when U.S corporations continue to outsource these type jobs from high end engineering work to low end xray tech and lab tech work?

These small schools then find themselves dealing with profoundly disfunctional young people whose lives have been shattered, first, by the lousy political economy and culture, and then, insertion into learning programs that lack adequate counseling or support for homeless students, substance abuse issues, and all the attendant juvenile mayhem that comes out of the childishness and hatred for life of mind that comes out of the wider infrastructure itself.

The idea is to deepen the myth that the only way effective schools can work is if the planning for such schools is part of a privatization arrangement. For example, one popular program springing from Seattle’s software padrone system is the Technology Access Foundation, which inserts itself into isolated learning programs long beset by crisis, and showers such schools with the resource and support they’ve needed all along. In exchange for such services, these “allies” of public education are allowed to override the concerns of building leadership teams made up of teachers, parents and community leaders, union contracts, etc. One might well ask why resource solves problems in some schools but not in others, but the standard response is bureaucratic stiff arming and media spin that hypes the “gifted” students who are allowed to attend such programs.

In effect, things are playing out pretty much as Jon Kozol said they would in a public talk he gave a few years ago. Kozol predicted we would witness the creation of privatized model schools that would receive all the support and media hype they wanted, and that such programs would be allowed to restrict their enrollments and deepen the two tier education system that the monied classes in this country have wanted for a long time.

Now, given the depth of the current banking crisis, I don’t believe this shit is going to go on indefinitely. But I do believe that we’re in for a long, protracted battle to defend what’s left of public schooling, and I think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

I think this is an astute observation. I don’t think the US elites ever had an affinity for its fellow citizens. Take a look at how the Japanese handled their banking and real estate bubble. Their solution was to use an economic stimulus that redirected resources to the downward. What’s the U.S. solution … more giveaways to the rich.

Most of US domestic policy, including “no nonsense” policies and of course incarceration rates, is aimed at terrorizing the population into submission. Incarceration is a form of torture, differing only in degree from the torture done by the US government in Guantanamo Bay.

The elite define “nonsense” as anything that departs from their agenda, and “sense” as anything that gels with their agenda. I find it good sense to put their heads on pikes.

Eli Broad writes in the third from last paragraph that they “run the risk of creating an even larger gap between the middle class and the poor. This gap threatens our democracy, our society and the economic future of America.”

Are we supposed to do anything other than tar and feather this clown after what’s happened in the last eight years? Perhaps he can head the line along with the Harvard and Yale and Stanford whiz kids that have brought us this mess. It’s amazing how much provincialism millions of dollars can buy.

Nice piece. Thanks.

The answer is that we, in fact, can, and it’s a nasty little secret that LAUSD bureaucrats do not want teacher to discover. It’s called ESBM — Expanded School-Based Management. Woodland Hills Academy managed to, after a long fight, adopt this model and it’s working for them very well. I believe that the model has the potential to transform public education by providing a vehicle of reform for LAUSD schools that would, essentially, use the best of the charter model yet remain public schools.

Aureliano Nava
Jordan High School –Watts
Teacher/UTLA Chair