“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gazan street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces, “it couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”

His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced, “the day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my time in school.”

By 1991 the first Intifada (Palestinian Uprising) was coming to an end. The streets of Gaza slowly emptied of the Israeli soldiers and tanks. The bodies of martyred Palestinians were less often carried to neighborhood graveyards. And in Beit Hanoun, a northern town of Gaza, six-year-old Ahmad began his first day of school.

He enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. Life, one could say, was becoming rather normal in Gaza. And upon finishing middle school in 2000, as a reward for his scholastic achievement, Ahmad received the gift of a lifetime. He, along with 19 other students from Gaza, was selected by the Ministry of Education to join a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the US.

He had a wonderful time in America. What an adventure for the 14-year-old boy! He improved his English. He made new friends. He experienced a whole knew world in that beautiful state of Maine. A world that told him life was open and free and full of opportunity. So he returned to Gaza, after this month-long excursion, full of hope.

But Ahmad was branded a Palestinian at birth. He would now learn to pay that price. The second Intifada irrupted only two months after he returned home from America, at the start of his first year of high school.

“The week before the Intifada started we were in Jerusalem, in Al-Aqsa Mosque. We were praying,” he said, recalling how close he was to being caught amid the initial Jerusalem massacre. The Israeli onslaught quickly spread throughout all the West Bank and Gaza, leaving no Palestinian in peace.

“There was no space,” he told me, trying to explain how the Israeli offensive effected every aspect of personal life for the Palestinian individual. Student life was only one such casualty.

It became dangerous to go to school. It became impossible to have a normal education. In his three years of high school, Ahmad‘s school was shelled by Israeli tanks six times, twice while students were inside.

“Each day we would have demonstrations against the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank because we had so many martyrs… No school. Just demonstrations… You had to go and demonstrate against the horrible attacks against these children and kids everywhere.”

Still, despite all the madness, or perhaps in spite of it all, the students clung as much as they could to their vocation. They would loyally go to school, as much as circumstance allowed. But even this effort was frequently quashed. Too often the students would trek to school only to find it closed. They would ask the reasons for the closures. The answers became the soul-grating refrain of their lives.

Why?
Because Israeli tanks are getting close to the school and there is no school today.
Why?
Because people in our city have been martyred and there are demonstrations so there will be no school today.
Why?
Because the tanks have closed off Beit Hanoun and the teachers cannot come from outside. So we’ll have no school today.

It was in this environment that Ahmad and his classmates (the ones that were not killed) came to their 3rd and final year of high school in 2003. Called Tawjihi, the entire future educational and career life of the student hinges on these end-of-the-year cumulative exams.

“Tawjihi,” Ahmad aptly described, “is like a stage between life.”

Tawjihi year began normal enough. Normal in the Palestinian sense of the word. Normal attacks. Normal shootings. Normal curfews. But the last two months before the exams began the Israeli army laid siege on Beit Hanoun. No one could enter. No one could leave. Everyday there were attacks and explosions. Everyday there were injuries and martyrs.

“We didn’t study, actually,” said Ahmad, “nothing. You cannot study and people are dying,” he explained, as if that needed explaining to me, a girl who had never once even seen a dead body.

And all the while their exams were approaching. The first day of examination was the 9th of June 2003. And the Israeli army was still in Beit Hanoun.

“What do we do?” said Ahmad, “we need to take our exams. So we decided to go to school even though the Israeli tanks were at the doors outside the school.”

So they went. Despite the fact that they hadn’t prepared at all due to the siege and the killings. Examinations went on for a month. Everyday the students went. And everyday the Israeli tanks were at the doors of the school.

It was the worst month, Ahmad told me. All your time in high school you wait to prepare and do well on these final examinations, only, in the last moments, to be prevented from studying because your city is under attack.

The soldiers left after 67 days of siege. And then their exam results came in.

“I passed,” said Ahmad, “my average was 83.5. So very good.”

So that was his high school story. I asked how he felt during those years, as I was unable to comprehend how one could live through such a horror and move on.

“It’s mixed feelings,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t know what you are doing or what’s going on around you. Sometimes it’s fear because you are afraid to lose more friends and more people. And because you are afraid about your family. And you are afraid about your future.

“You don’t know what is going on. You just go and study for a life you’ve been dreaming about. But then you find you can’t have it because of obstacles put up by enemies. And these are horrible obstacles. They’re not just any kind of obstacles that anyone could pass.

“It’s war everywhere. And people are dying everywhere. And you just don’t know. Maybe it’s your turn. I mean, we believe in God, and we know everyone is going to die. But when it goes on so continuously, everyday there is attacks, you just keep worrying about it. So the feeling was, what should I be doing? Should I go fight and resist? Should I go study as a way to resist, as a better way of resistance? Should I just stay afraid, doing nothing, with my family?”

“I started to believe that maybe the power of this education that I will have in the future will be more than the power of a stone against a tank. I asked myself a million times, if I should do the same [and take up throwing stones at the Israeli tanks like some of the Palestinian youth]. Even if it was a little thing.

“Some people say it’s stupid, a stone against a tank. But it’s their will and determination [that counts]. It comes from deep inside. That you are not afraid from anything, whatever it may be. You just want to fight, resist, for your rights. Even if it takes your life, takes everything: [None of that matters because] I believe that its my right and I have to do it.”

That is one way to resist. But Ahmad decided to resist through his education.

“I had to take care of my family. Reach what my parents wanted of me. They wanted us to be educated, get a good life, good jobs, have a good place in the community. They wanted us to help them and help people. So that was the final, or not the final, but a decision that I made.

“You are feeling many things, but you have to go on, to keep going. The only way is to just keep fighting, through your education, and your dreams, and your beliefs. That was the feeling.

“But I never felt like I have to give up. I didn’t find a way that told me ‘you just need to give up now.’ And every time a bad thing happened, or a disaster happened, it gave me more power to continue.

“Because this became the normal life for us. The abnormal life for other people became the normal life for us. So we had to figure out another way of life for us. It’s our reality. We had to face reality, however it was. So it helped us to figure out that life, in spite of all this.

“And all the challenges that we are facing, and all the power that is fighting and destroying everything here in Gaza, we still need to keep going. It’s not going to stop us. Because if we stop, it wont help us. [The Israelis] will keep going. Whether or not we stop, they will try to get what they want. So why give them more chance to get what they want? We need also to continue.”

He paused at the end of this grand soliloquy, “How difficult it was,” he said softly.

But the difficulty continued as he moved on to get his BA in information technology at a university in Gaza.

“I faced troubles when I was in high school because of the Intifada but the troubles increased in university,” Ahmad explained, “Beit Hanoun is the most violent area in Gaza Strip because it is very close to the [Israeli] border so there were usual attacks. Every day we had events. People killed. People injured. Homes destroyed. Lands demolished. My father’s farm was bulldozed 4 or 5 times. Most of my relatives’ homes were targeted.

“Most of the semesters I couldn’t attend many lectures because of the usual attacks on my city. There were weekly attacks, sometimes daily attacks so I could not leave home, it was not safe to leave. And I’d also have to stay home when there were other attacks around the city, or around the university.”

Many times he was even able to attend final exams.

“I’d just keep studying throughout the semester and when time for exams come, attacks happen in Beit Hanoun and friends and relatives are killed, [so I‘d miss the exams]. I was supposed graduate in 2008, but I graduated in 2009, one year late because of these attacks. Attacks which have never stopped. Even now. Especially in my city.”

Ahmad was finally set to graduate in December 2008. But he was reminded once again that a Palestinian who dared pursue a good life had heavy taxes to pay.

“The end of December turned out to be the beginning of a war, not the beginning of final exams. It was a big, I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, searching for words to describe the deep personal affront he felt, “it was like, ‘here is a gift for graduation: You wont graduate. Just keep waiting for death.’ ”

His month of exams was exchanged for a month of terror.

“It was 23 days,” he said, “but you can say 23 weeks. 23 months. 23 years. 23 centuries. It never ends. You keep waiting, moment by moment. And you know nothing. You can only feel the darkness. There is no light, for any kind of hope, or safety, or human rights, or whatever. Just 23 days full of darkness. Full of horror. Full of victims. Massacres. Everything bad. I cannot remember words to describe it.”

But those days did pass. And he found enough strength to pick himself up out of the rubble and finish the mission he began. He graduated, at last, this past spring. But not, I cannot help but acknowledge, not without sacrifice and loss that no one should ever have to endure.

“These five years in university, I said and will keep saying forever,” Ahmad concluded, “these five years were the most horrible years of my life. Even though they’re supposed to be the best years, the nice years. The time to go out and discover life. But it wasn’t discovering life. It was discovering disasters, actually, here in Gaza.”

Re: Ms Berlanty Azzam (I.D. 801158791)

Ms Azzam is a Gaza resident who is staying in the West Bank illegally. Ms Azzam held a permit to stay in the West Bank for 4 days in 2005 and since the permit has expired has been residing in the West Bank illegally.

As you probably know, every Gaza resident who stays in the West Bank requires a permit, failing to do so is a breach of the law. As Ms Azzam has failed to provide a valid permit she was deported back to Gaza. If Ms Azzam wishes to complete her studies in Bethlehem University, she will need to submit her application to the relevant authorities (COGAT) in Gaza where they will be processed.

Sincerely yours,

Ms Ma’ayan, Israeli Public Affairs Department
Embassy of Israel
2 Palace Green
London W8 4QB
Tel: +44-(0)207-957-9541
Fax: +44-(0)207-957-9555
Email: Public@london.mfa.gov.il

Berlanty was resident in the West Bank since 2005 and all that time resisted the temptation to return home to Gaza to see her folks. If her permit expired in 2005 why did the Israelis wait to ‘discover’ this fact just 2 months before she was due to graduate?

What the embassy tells me does not tally with what the University has been told. In an update issued today Bethlehem University management reports:

• On Tuesday, 3 November 2009 the lawyers at Gisha were informed that the state of Israel claims that Berlanty has no right to be at Bethlehem University – to be in the West Bank. However, Berlanty did not need a permit to remain in the West Bank after entering, and no such kind of permit existed in 2005, so she couldn’t have requested one. Berlanty only needed the Israeli permit to cross through Israel from Gaza to the West Bank, which she received.
• The Israeli High Court of Justice will hold another court hearing on Berlanty’s case next Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 9:00am to have the Israeli military to further explain why Berlanty was removed from Bethlehem to Gaza.
• In their response to the court, the Israeli state admits that a “mistake” was made in removing Berlanty on the night of Wednesday, 28 October 2009. Orders were given by the legal adviser’s office not to do it. It was done anyway and still they refuse to return her to her studies at Bethlehem University.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are internationally recognized as one integral territory. The embassy’s explanation is at odds with the contention by Birzeit (another West Bank university) that similar action by Israel against a number of Birzeit students from Gaza was “in clear violation of the fundamental human right to education, the right to freedom of movement and the right to choose one’s place of residence within a single territory, in accordance with internationally accepted standards of human rights law”.

I’m not a lawyer, but it would be nice to hear a legal expert explain what authority Israel has for its bloody-minded and cruel conduct towards hard-working students.

Consider the way Jewish and Palestinian children are educated. Segregation in the classroom is the rule so that Jewish and Palestinian children only rarely mix. This strict segregation exists despite the fact that the Palestinians are citizens of Israel, comprising 19.5 percent of Israel’s population–around 1.37 million people–and 25 percent of all school children. Unlike the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, these Palestinians vote and pay taxes like Jewish citizens.

Notwithstanding their incorporation into the citizen body, Palestinian citizens do not enjoy full equality. In comparison to their Jewish counterparts, Arab schools receive half the per capita budget. It is therefore not very surprising that Palestinian students have the highest dropout rates and lowest achievement levels in the country.

Equality in education is reserved to the uniformity of the school curriculum, particularly the texts dedicated to teaching the history of the Israeli state. The existing history textbooks adopt the Zionist historical narrative, erasing all trace of the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”, referring to the events of 1948, when approximately 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 900,000 either fled or were expelled from their homes). Furthermore, these textbooks emphasise the significance of the Land of Israel for Jews and attempt to prove that the State of Israel could only have been created in historical Palestine, while simultaneously portraying the connection between the Arabs and Palestine as purely incidental. Along similar lines, the study of literature in the Arab schools is oriented toward Zionist portrayals and is conspicuously lacking in any patriotic or nationalistic Palestinian sentiments.

It is, no doubt, a truism that public schools in modern liberal democracies inculcate their students with the dominant national worldview. In the US, for example, children still recite the pledge of allegiance and in France children sing La Marseillaise. But while the public schools in these democracies are today more willing to provide students with a multicultural curriculum that includes the historical narratives of those who have been oppressed and marginalised over the centuries, Israel is arguably becoming less tolerant to any pedagogy that challenges the dominant Zionist national narrative.

This increasing intolerance does not bode well for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. It has therefore become more urgent than ever to consider alternative educational models.

Since educating for tolerant thinking within a conflict zone is no easy task, there are very few such projects in Israel. The bilingual Arab-Jewish Hagar School in Beer-Sheba is the only one of its kind in Israel’s southern region–a region that is home to over half a million people, 25 percent of whom are Palestinian citizens. While Hagar is a public school supported by the Ministry of Education, it is also the exception that proves the rule.

Hagar’s uniqueness stems from the fact that it has created a venue in which Jewish and Arab children not only mix (each ethnic group makes up 50 percent of the student body) but learn together in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Currently 67 children, nursery through first grade, attend this bi-lingual school, whose commitment to equality informs every aspect of its educational agenda.

To ensure that Hebrew and Arabic are awarded equal status, for example, two teachers, one Jewish and the other Arab, are present in every classroom. By creating a bilingual space that encourages direct contact with the heritage and customs of the different cultures, Hagar promotes tolerance, while being sensitive to nurture the personal identity of each child and each tradition. Thus, by the time the children are old enough to learn that there are two conflicting national narratives, both of which will be taught, they already have the necessary emotional and intellectual tools to deal with conflict through dialogue.

Hagar is an educational island that is expanding against all odds. Indeed, the school’s achievements within the current political context–especially following the assault on Gaza and the sporadic missile attacks on Beer-Sheba–are astonishing. But ongoing local support and international financial assistance are necessary to guarantee the future success of this educational space–a space that is actively translating a pedagogy of mutual respect into practice within a conflict zone.

There’s nothing the matter with teachers that a little less unionization and more COMPETITION couldn’t cure.
– Ann Coulter (racist reactionary right wing pundit)

It would force the district to learn how to run great schools by forcing them to COMPETE.
– Ben Austin (Executive Director LAPU/PR)

Several Emerson Middle School parents, activists, and teachers recently contacted me. They informed me LAPU/Parent (counter)Revolution has an “organizer” going door-to-door gathering signatures to privatize their school, this despite the fact Emerson isn’t on LAUSD Superintendent Cortines’ current privatization list. I asked them to describe the “organizer,” expecting LAPU/PR to have committed one of their most experienced employees, Shirley Ford or Mary Najara, to a project so ideologically important to chief privatizer Ben Austin.

The person gathering signatures they described, while initially unexpected, made complete sense in the context of the class character and demographics of where the canvassing is occurring. We’ll get back to this shortly.

Anyone over the age of 30 should recall phrases including “school choice” were the clarion call of segregationists and southern dixiecrats. It’s no small irony that one of Ben Austin’s Georgetown University Law School predecessors, Milton Korman, argued on the Jim Crow side of Brown vs. Board of Education. While the context of modern white flight isn’t directly comparable to that of the segregationists, its character and motivations are the same. Let’s look at the subtle, insidious racism that fuels the charter/voucher movement.

It’s one thing to discuss the racism charter schools and voucher advocates like Alliance, Bright Star, and Green Dot represent in the abstract. It’s quite another to demonstrate it in practice. For help with this, let’s turn to an Emerson parent who is an ardent Green Dot/LAPU/PR supporter. This parent, posting anonymously as helpemerson on the LAPU/PR Emerson privatization message board, forgets they’re posting in a public forum and lets the code words fly:

I think the Green Dot priorities would be great at Emerson. The kids need more work on their character and decorum and what it means to be a good citizen.¹

Character? Decorum? No, that wasn’t a Sarah Palin speech. It is however, very representative of the language employed by affluent white parents at Los Angeles schools where children of color have been or are currently bused in. In the wealthy white world of Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Franklin Canyon, phrases like “those people,” and questions like “when will they stop bussing?” top the list of code words overheard by social justice minded parents and teachers at schools like Emerson and Mark Twain.² These racist code words employed by westside parents like helpemerson including “character” and “decorum” fit right in with the bigoted westside phrases like “culture of failure” exposed in Carolyn Jacobson’s brilliant article “The Revolution of Separate, but Equal.”

This brings us back to the beginning of our essay, in which we were discussing LAPU/PR’s choice of organizers for their westside offensive. The description people provided of the LAPU/PR petition bearer went as follows: young, thin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and female. They were describing one of LAPU/PR’s newer employees, Nayla Wren. Is it pure coincidence Green Dot would prefer their blonde, blue eyed employee to canvas the affluent, predominantly white westside neighborhoods over their most experienced and seasoned “organizers,” who just happen to be women of color? Probably no more coincidence than the fact that all of Green Dot’s top executives are wealthy white males. Probably no more coincidence than Ben Austin calling 77% white Warner Avenue Elementary wonderful, and 11% white Emerson Middle School failing.³ Green Dot’s pandering to white flight and westside elitism is part and parcel the type of racism and segregation discussed in Jonathan Kozol’s seminal works “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools” and “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.” One of the reasons Green Dot/LAPU/PR protested, but couldn’t refute⁴ Carolyn Jacobson’s article exposing westside racism, is that when the covers are pulled off the country club elitism of Steve Barr, Marshall Tuck, Antony Ressler, Ben Austin, and Marco Petruzzi, things get ugly.

Let’s be clear, the so called academic apologists for the racism and segregation inherent in charter schools and voucher programs include The Heritage Foundation, The Hoover Institution, The Cato Institute, and other far right think tanks.⁵ While these extreme right organizations are completely unconcerned with racial egalitarianism or class equality, they try to make a case that markets magically fix society’s systemic problems. These racist Milton Friedman cum Ayn Rand fantasies are adopted wholesale (with slight rewording) by the DLC/DFER crowd and presented as “innovation” and “reform.” No wonder Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter are on the same side as Ben Austin and Arne Duncan. Let’s also bear in mind the critics of charter schools and vouchers include left luminaries like Donaldo Macedo, Jonathan Kozol, and Henry Giroux. This is why Ben Austin and Gabe Rose’s specious comparisons of those opposing school privatization and vouchers to right wing health care town hall disrupters⁶ are absurd on their face! Privatization and neoliberalism is the right wing position in the education reform debate, and the charter/voucher crowd represent reactionary ideas like segregation, competition, and union busting with great adeptness.

To those who would claim the motley assortment of business types, lawyers, and political hacks that comprise the pro-privatization camp have good intentions, but just misguided ways of executing them; and claim the reason extreme right forces happen to agree with the DLC/DFER on charters/vouchers is it’s just a manifestation of bipartisan concern for children, it’s reckoning time. Even if the wealthy white males on the leading edge of school privatization were really in it for their concern about society instead the money (exposed in Kozol’s “The Big Enchilada“), then they’d still be exhibiting precisely what Paulo Freire describes as “the false generosity of paternalism.”⁷

What’s more, it isn’t mere coincidence that LAUSD’s sole African American board member, Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, vehemently opposed the corporate charter choice resolution. It’s been long recognized in communities of color that the underfunding of inner city schools combined with privatization represented by charter/voucher advocates is another way to perpetuate the grip of the white supremacist overclass. Let’s look at how progressive African American writers view the charter/voucher onslaught. Los Angeles Sentinel’s Larry Aubry said of LAUSD VP Yolie Flores Aguilar’s corporate charter choice resolution:

The Public School Choice Resolution continues pattern of indifference to the plight of Black students-that is not acceptable. Parents, teachers, school boards and concerned others must work hard, and together, to guarantee a quality education for these much maligned but immeasurably deserving children.⁸

Black Agenda Radio’s Glen Ford said of charter/voucher privatization:

“Outsourcing of public education only occurs in overwhelmingly Black and brown school districts, places where, like in Los Angeles, public property and public responsibility to students is put on the private auction block.⁹

Black Agenda Report’s managing editor Bruce A. Dixon’s recent article should be read in its entirety, but this quote is especially cogent and to the point:

Improving education is not the goal. Privatization is the goal. The targets of school privatization are not supposedly underperforming students and teachers. The target is democracy itself. Private interests are just that – private. Turning public schools over to private interests frustrates even the possibility of democracy. Charter school apologists often claim that greater parental involvement is a hallmark of their model. But to the extent that it is true at all, it’s involvement of a select group of parents, and not open to those of the entire community. Charter schools undermine what is left of community.¹⁰

There’s much more to explore on this topic, but for now this will have to suffice. Lest the poverty pimps and privatization pushers try and play the oldest card of colonialism, divide and conquer, check out the latest progressive statement from the Association of Raza Educators regarding charters/vouchers.

1. Emerson Middle School. I also created a screen capture, since Green Dot/LAPU/PR is famous for redacting reality. The image captures the Emerson LAPU supporter’s racist code words for posterity. For some excellent articles on racist “code words” in general see:
   Is the racist smear campaign working? by Brian Jones
   Deciphering their racist code words by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
2. In the case of Mark Twain, the wealthy white elite of Venice (particularly the exclusive canal neighborhood from which Green Dot’s ruthless CEO Marco Petruzzi hails). It’s worth mentioning Mr. 90210, Ben Austin, lives near Emerson. Cynical much?
3. First exposed by journalist Caroline Grannan we also discuss this in a blog. Could you imagine Eli Broad and Steve Barr sycophants Jason Song and Howard Blume actually doing real reporting like Grannan? Now that the Los Angeles Times is basically a PR department for Broad’s DFER privatization project, we will never see an honest piece out of them again.
4. Note they state the piece is full of “disgusting and divisive lies,” but provide no evidence to the contrary. In other words, since everything in Ms. Jacobson’s article is true, all the country club klan at LAPU/PR can do is smear the messenger.
5. The racist reactionary right wing loves charters, vouchers, and neoliberal phrases like school choice. They have devoted tons of ink to trying to explain how the free market doesn’t perpetuate racism. Their arguments, with minor modification, have been adopted wholesale by the DLC/DFER. Here are a few of their disgusting works:

   The Heritage Foundation
   The Hoover Institution
   The Cato Institute

6. For feeble prose and an example of these ridiculous comparisons by the right wing privatizers trying to paint the left as right wing on this issue.
7. Paulo Freire “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” p. 54. If you claim to be on the left and haven’t read Freire, you’re fooling yourself.
8. Blacks Not Part of Public School Choice Plan.
9. Outsource It! Privatize It! LA School Reform in the Age of Obama. An astute comment following Ford’s cogent article asks ‘Isn’t this just institutionalization of the “Bell Curve?”‘ Seems like a lot of folks see right through the racism of the charter/voucher “movement.”
10. Obama’s Public Education Policy: Privatization, Charters, Mass Firings, Neighborhood Destabilization. Bruce A. Dixon is a real revolutionary. Unlike those right wingers living in the 90210 zip code claiming and using the word without knowing what it really means.

Interviewed on NBC’s Today show Friday the 14th of August, Gingrich and Sharpton spoke of bi-partisanship and “putting everyone’s hands on the table.” It might be a good idea to require that they be placed palms up, just to be safe. Gingrich even went so far as to call education a “civil rights issue” and echoed the familiar themes often heard about the need to prepare students for competition in a global capitalist world. Gingrich on civil rights? Education Secretary Arne Duncan is also joining forces with the dynamic duo to bankroll the new charters (he’s got ten billion to play with from various and sundry federal programs) and encourage and push cities to fix failing schools, or so he says. As if the cities had the money to even fix sidewalks, let alone schools. After almost thirty years of neglect, the cities, not to mention their mostly urban schools, centers of obedience training and tethered as they are to the carpet loom of rigid standardized testing, are literally falling apart. But don’t tell that to the Rat Pack. According to NewsMax:

The trio will visit Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore later this year. They plan to add more stops as their tour progresses.

“These are cities that have real challenges but also tremendous hope and opportunity,” Duncan told reporters on a conference call Thursday.

Maybe Duncan will get the opportunity to meet with the FBI when he’s in Philly, where at least five Philadelphia-area charter schools are under investigation, their control of public funds, handling of financial accounting and managerial oversight have been criminally called into question. Federal authorities are right now adding investigative and legal resources to the criminal probe as this is being written. School Matters notes that:

People familiar with the matter say the list includes New Media Technology Charter School, with campuses in Germantown and Stenton; Germantown Settlement Charter School in Germantown; Northwood Academy in the Northeast; and Agora Cyber Charter School in Devon, which provides online instruction to 4,400 students statewide (School Matters, August 27, 2009).

The trio will eventually burrow its way into New Orleans, another pit stop on the whistle tour. There, disaster capitalism is boosting charter school CEO pay after decimating the teachers union, the way the ‘reform’ was designed. In New Orleans, disaster capitalism’s first educational reform experiment, corporate school mercenaries under the direction of autocrats Paul Pastorak and Paul Vallas (Arne’s old boss in Chicago), operate with little or no oversight and little community participation. CEO Principals hire and fire at will without any protections for teachers. Similar pay boosts for administrative personnel were just announced in Los Angeles where the school board handed over 250 charter schools to the “new providers”, in face of opposition from teachers and parents.

While the kids are uniformed and uninformed and the teacher’s shackled and harnessed to the inauthentic tests, according to the Times-Picayune CEO pay is rising:

At the top of the pay range sits veteran Kathy Riedlinger, head of Lusher Charter School, who earns $203,556, including a $5,000 yearly car allowance. Lafayette Charter School’s Mickey Landry, recruited from a prep school in a national search, is No.A2 at $186,000

At Ben Franklin High School, Principal Timothy Rusnak, also recruited nationally, earns $150,000 annually. And Jay Altman, chief executive of FirstLine Schools, earns $132,000 to oversee both S.J. Green and Arthur Ashe charter schools (Times Picayune, May 17, 2009).

This is the Wal Mart model of education, where teachers become ‘associates’ student become ‘consumers’, unions are despised and any effort to organize them immediately thwarted, and it unfortunately this reform seems to be spreading to almost every major city in the country and at incredible speed. Thanks to Arne Duncan.

There is little doubt that the gang will be chauffeured to various charter schools and then scattered amongst rehearsed classrooms. Images of the three patting eight year old student heads while a smiling administrator and grinning teacher stand in the background will be cast to the public and perhaps one or all of the three ‘reformers’ can inquire of little Johnny or Maria or Shareka how they feel about the need to get an education in the rush to compete with China and India. The group might also take the opportunity to meet with some of the ‘strong players’ in the business of turning around schools, like Green Dot Public Schools in LA or Alliance Schools. We also mustn’t forget about the meetings with unions and their members in an effort to convince them they are drafting a future that includes the beleaguered teachers while the true intent of the Sicarios remains hidden under their garments.

Overshadowed by two wars, a corporate financed health care debate, economic crisis and swelling unemployment, social unrest and reality TV, a discussion of educational policy is virtually impossible under the current corporate media command. Unacceptable to most American citizens the current educational system is being radically disassembled like Legos in a pre-school play room. In its stead is being built a new corporate educational model. The water bag has burst, the EMO’s are like kids scrambling for candy under a broken piñata. It is truly astounding.

Duncan, of course, is spearheading the campaign to sell the charter school snake oil to the public. It’s like an old traveling medicine show equipped with elixirs and potions for every ailment but Duncan’s the guy with the bankroll, the go to guy. He has close ties to billionaires: Eli Broad, Gates, the Walton family and other philanthropic interests who have for years looked forward to this moment to step in and control the design and organizational structure of American education. Maybe while he’s in Los Angeles, where 250 schools were simply given over to “outside operators” he’ll find a little time away from his soap box tour to spend a few minutes at the Eli Broad Superintendents Academy that prepares non-educators like Duncan for Superintendent positions in urban schools while the Broad Foundation trains works side by side with ‘associates’ of skilled executives in various fields for leading urban school systems (School Administrator, August 2007). There, he can listen to the voices of experienced, proven leaders from business, military, civic and government sectors sharing ideas with their non-educator counterparts on how to privatize and reform education. Even Newt and Sharpton might enjoy the challenge.

The hyperbole and hypocrisy of Arne Duncan

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is asking America to hand over its public school system to outside providers and non profit and for profit educational maintenance organizations (EMO’s) in an attempt to regiment education, clean up management and tie the whole mess to performance outcomes on NCLB under the euphemism Race to the Top. What about Duncan’s education successes in Chicago where he was CEO of schools. Shouldn’t we critically examine them to see if Arne is on the right track? It sure doesn’t seem like it; in Chicago Arne created more like a race to the bottom and the statistics are dismal.

In a report released in July of this year Titled “Still Left Behind,” and put out by Duncan’s former bosses, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, in Chicago public schools:

Half of the students drop out by high school, and of those who remain until 11th grade, 70% fail to meet state standards, the report says. In fact, “In the regular (non-magnet) neighborhood high schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are prepared to succeed in college.” The report directly challenges widespread claims by current and former CPS officials that local students have shown substantial progress over the last decade on standardized tests. For instance, it notes a 2006 letter from then schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. secretary of education, stating that the share of CPS students meeting or exceeding state standards had leapt 15 points in one year (”Still Left Behind: Student Learning in Chicago Public Schools”).

Purporting to be gloomy and indeed it was, the Chicago Civic Committee actually seemed to relish the poor test results. It seems that even though Arne’s seven year tenure as CEO of Chicago schools did nothing for students even if you accept NCLB and the state mandated tests, the committee spokesman, Mr. Martin, did not hesitate to say he would not call the entire school-reform process a failure. Why? Largely because the ‘reform’ also sparked the formation of more charter and ‘innovative schools’, schools that according to the report perform better than CPS schools. Ah, and there we have it, the report is evidence of Arne’s success; Arne did do his job and he did it well, traditional schools fail in Chicago and charter schools gain fame. The public schools become secondary providers that struggle to compete with philanthropic and taxpayer subsidized charter schools, now the primary providers. The game isn’t even fair, the schools are being set up for failure by NCLB and its absurd assessment; they have no chance to compete with the new EMO’s anxious to kick down the barn door and register as many ‘subprime’ kids as they can for the monies they get. Take a look at the set-up and how it is supposed to work according to the conservative Hudson Institute.

In their Winter 2008 issue of Education Next, the publication laid out in no uncertain terms the ‘game plan’ charter advocates are employing to takeover public education nationwide:

Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering’s way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75%. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, non-district authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political climate (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition)… The solution is not an improved traditional district; it’s an entirely different delivery system… Charter advocates should strive to have every urban public school be a charter (Smarick, 2008).

Sure, and there are all kinds of players and gamers just giddy with glee for the chance to burst into the burgeoning privatization of a $750 billion dollar educational industry as many call it. Take Entertainment Properties Inc., for example; this is a company known mostly for sinking its money into movie theaters and wineries. Guess what? They recently bought 22 locations from charter school operator Imagine Schools for about $170 million. The real estate investment trust acts as landlord, while Imagine operates the schools and is using the investment to expand its chain of 74 locations. As School Matters recently noted, Barry Sharp, chief financial officer for Arlington, Va.-based Imagine was quoted as saying:

They really are an effective source of long-term financing that we can rely on and enables us to do what we’re best at, which is running schools, and do what they’re best at, which is long-term real estate ownership. It’s a good fit. Focusing on large players who know how to operate schools, hire teachers and develop a curriculum provides the company a more dependable return (School Matters, September 12, 2009).

That’s what Arne, Sharpton and Gingrich will be really trying to accomplish as odd-bedfellows. When scrutinized under the financial lens of profits to be made and power to be had they aren’t really that odd at all. What these three men represent are public relation warriors in the final march to completely revolutionize public education by creating a new class of primary for-profit and non-profit providers beholden largely to mayoral control of cities and corporate control by Wall Street.

When you think about charter schools you are supposed to assume they are community based ‘small schools’ designed by committed parents and teachers. For the most part they are not. They are large institutional players with briefcases full of cash and a rolodex that would make a Hollywood agent blush with envy. The mom and pop charter schools that come to the public mind will never be able to compete with the large non-profit and for-profit driven EMOs. The focus is on large players, remember, the ‘made guys’?

Yet when the rubber hits the road and the trio finally makes their way across the expansive nation of ‘American exceptionalism’ and you tune into the rancid rhetoric of the trolips and strumpets, that’s not what you’ll hear. They’ll be in rare form to be sure, utilizing towering and lofty rhetoric clothed in the need to boost inauthentic test scores and how education is failing America in the 21st century. The language will resonate with themes about how “competition being good for raising all boats” is the answer to drop-out rates and underachievement and you’ll be treated to the hostile rhetoric that “teacher unions are greedy and their pay and performance must be tied to the NCLB state-based testing regime” — all in the name of the kids.

This was all confirmed when NPR had Gingrich and Sharpton on the air on September 12th and the puppeteering was as palpable as the reporting was pitiful. It’s the word ‘reform’; nobody bothers to ask what it means and what it would look like so sophists like Gingrich, Duncan and Sharpton don’t have to get into the muck of providing any details.

Never mind the facts, according to NewsMax the idea for the dog and pony show came from a meeting the three musketeers had with President Barack Obama in May 2009, while at the White House. How nice! If you think bipartisanship is working with the national health debate just wait until you see this new level of courtesanship in the name of our nation’s kids. And this ‘debate’ hasn’t really even started, if one was to watch the national news. Lost in the headlines of ‘deathers’, ‘tenthers’, ‘tea-baggers’ and ‘birthers’ are our nation’s urban children, usually Black and Latino whom are forced to attend dilapidated schools in ghettos dimmed by poverty and drop-out rates that call the whole notion of ‘schooling’ into question.

But don’t worry, Arnie, Al and Newt will provide the needed answers and the suckling private sector will count the body bags of kids and do the math and accounting and set up an entire new non-profit, quasi profitized educational system – a national retail chain of charter schools started by noble entrepreneurs, free market fundamentalists, philanthro-capitalists and valiant non-profiteers who wish to assure the ‘kids’ are prepared for the challenges of global capitalism and the need to compete with India and China, as new economic engines of competition. Ask Bill Gates, he’s got his billions in play to “reform” education (see Tough Choices or Tough Times); so does the Walton Family and the Eli Broad Foundation, among other philanthropists looking to leverage their pirated loot to destroy teacher unions, impose merit pay on teachers and administrators, contract out good paying public jobs, lengthen the working day and entice starry eyed Teach for America recruits to be the new ‘associates’ in the whole new business arrangement where the average teacher lasts three years before leaving the profession.

Who pays for it all? You as the taxpayer will pay for the new retail educational chains with your tax monies that will be transferred from traditional public schools to the new EMO’s and the charters they will manage, many of the schools gussied up and going by such blue-blooded names as Academies or Preparatory Schools. This, we are told will help the traditional schools ‘compete’ – sound familiar? Only the words are false, the real idea as the Hudson Institute stated is to make the traditional public schools the secondary providers of education reducing the public sphere and turning over the primary provider role to the new ‘turnaround artists’, the business school grads like Arnie who never taught in a classroom or designed a lesson plan. Neo-liberalism is the economic theory and privatization is one of the first orders of the day, that and deregulation, concentration of power, surveillance and authoritarianism.

Sharpton the Sharpee

So what do the three stooges bring to the debate over education? Nothing, really. Sharpton commented on NBC:

The parents need to be challenged with the message of `no excuses (NewsMax, August 14, 2009).

No excuses for what, Al? As if poverty, Wall Street theft, deregulation of the ‘free market’, the privatization of almost every sphere of life, a lack of affordable and reliable health care, decimated public transportation, lack of a living wages, infant mortality rates creeping close to third world countries, devastated urban areas with increased incarceration rates, gentrification, foreclosures and jobs shipped overseas for cheap labor are working people’s fault? Kevin Phillips writes in his book Bad Money that after tax income per year for the lowest 20% of the population at the end of the 1970’s was $9,300, adjusted for inflation. At the end of the 1990’s it fell to $8,700 in inflation adjusted dollars. The middle class did no better, during the same period of time and using the same criteria they saw their income rise from $31,800 at the end of the 1970’s to $33,200 at the end of the 1990’s. Meanwhile during the same period and using the same after tax, inflation driven number, the highest 1% of the population saw their earnings rise from $256,000 to a whopping $644,000 during the same period (Bad Money). It is this top one percent that now wants to control, manage and design education for all the other Americans.

Foaming at the mouth about individualism and personal responsibility as the system grinds slowly to a halt and new tent cities are constructed weekly seems to sit well with the Reverend who reportedly earns $750,000 a year hosting a syndicated radio talk show and collects anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 per lecture and $2,000 per church sermon. On top of that, Sharpton does “consulting” work for corporations. Business is good, very good and now, bound to get even better with his new-found courtship and oath of Omerta.

Yet it’s important to remember that Sharpton recently had his own little “teachable moment” when it comes to ‘excuses’ and personal responsibility; last July the feds went after him for not paying his taxes. No-excuses, pull em’ up by your boot straps, Sharpton cut a deal with federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to end a longstanding criminal probe of his finances that reportedly encompassed his personal fortune, his opportunistic and self-aggrandizing 2004 presidential campaign spending and the National Action Network, his so-called ‘advocacy’ group. Sharpton quickly cut the deal whining that he’d personally pay back $1 million, including $500,000 upfront, as part of the settlement. However that didn’t get him out of all the hot water. In March of this year, according to the New York Post, Sharpton also owed $884,669 to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which was not part of the July settlement; this according to two liens covering years 2002 through 2006. $500,000 up front is a lot of money for a guy under criminal investigation for tax fraud; where would he get that kind of cash?

Sharpton Gets the Cash!

As I reported in a three part series in Counterpunch and as was also reported in the New York Daily News by award winning investigative journalist, Juan Gonzalez in an article, entitled “Rev. Al Sharpton’s 500G link to education reform” Sharpton’s involvement in the new bipartisan march to charterized our nation’s schools could have been a script from a Hollywood movie – with its attention to financial wheeling and dealing, skilled manipulation, personal gain, payoffs through third party intermediaries, front groups, cronyism and rigged public relations campaigns and events designed to influence and manipulate public sentiment on matters of educational policy.

What Gonzalez was able to uncover is that Sharpton’s own organization, The National Action Network, was immediately paid $500,000 for Sharpton’s consent to endorse, involve and partner himself with Joel Klein to launch the new Education Equality Project, a group favoring New York charterization. The cash no doubt was timely as Sharpton had promised the government $500,000 down in the tax settlement deal, quite handy and timely to cut the deal with the prosecutors pursing the good Reverend. However, the story gets even more bizarre.

It appears that to avoid any publicity over the ‘pay for play’ payment that Sharpton received for his alliance with Joel Klein in erecting the new Education Equality Project (EEP), the $500,000 intended for Sharpton’s group was covertly funneled to Sharpton’s National Action Network by Plainfield Asset Management, LLC, a Connecticut hedge fund. As the story progressed, I asked myself: ‘Why was an asset management company chosen to make a payoff to Al Sharpton’s group?’ Perhaps the best motivation could be found in the fact that the former Chancellor of New York Schools, Harold Levy, is currently the managing director of Plainfield Asset Management and a registered lobbyist for the firm. If there are any students reading, “Have you learned anything yet?” The whole sordid affair is malodorous, but it is not surprising. It is all about public relations now, sophistry and propaganda of the first order and who best to convince the poor, Black and Latino working families that the new charter schools will be good for their kids?

Gingrich the predator

What’s the role of Gingrich in all this, you might ask? Besides his character as a throne sniffer and his proclivity for self-aggrandizement and self-promotion, Gingrich has a significant role in the whole scenario. To begin with he represents the Wall Street business interests and the entrepreneurs and philanthropists who pay him. William Gates Sr., for example, worked for Preston Gates, a big law firm and lobbying group that hired Jack Abramoff as a lobbyist. Abramoff is known to have had strong ties to Gingrich. At this point we do not have any idea if Gates Sr. or Bill Gates for that matter has any ties to Newt. But Gingrich brings more than just political and financial ties from his disgraceful see-saw days in Washington where he oversaw the gutting of educational funds. He also brings the managerial doublespeak that so charms the business community. He’ll invoke Peter Drucker rhetoric and speak to organizational inefficiencies and he’ll talk about cutting costs in education, managerial efficiencies, cost containment, outsourcing, measured outcomes, and the need for No Child Left Behind to assess the future of our nation’s children and of course, he’ll highlight the theory of failing teachers and their unions. Gingrich will be posing for the FOX news listeners, Ruppert Murdoch’s little curmudgeons and he’ll do a fine job of convincing them that the road is being paved with gold and the future of our children is bright with new competitive spirit.

Newt calls public schools a “monopoly of failure,” pinning the blame for the decline of public education at “departments of education, schools of education, and unionized bureaucracy.” He argues that people from any of his three culpable camps are inherently corrupted by their stake in the failed system, and that they will blindly defend that system to protect themselves at the expense of our nation’s children (”Newt Gingrich and Me: A Charged Moment at an Education Blogger Summit Dan Brown,” May 16, 2008 Huffington Post).

But wait, there are more concerns swelling in the neo-cortex of Gingrich. Newt has always been concerned about the liberalism inherent in teaching and the ‘liberal’ curriculum in general. He’s not alone for the Texas State Education Board is set to vote on the first draft of the proposed standards in “United States History Studies Since Reconstruction,” which removes any and all references to liberal politics, according to Chron.com an online news service. The new standards require students “to identify significant conservative organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.” The standards are expected to be adopted along party lines with all 10 Republicans voting in favor of the curriculum. But there’s more: One expert, David Barton, president of Wall Builders, recommended that “…the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be “republican” rather than “democratic,” in the state’s textbooks (Chron.com “History’s first draft: Newt Gingrich but no liberals: Textbooks being written for Texas students appear to lean to the right,” Gary Scharrer, August 20, 2009). Newt will be on hand to rail against the brainwashing of our kids and their ‘civil rights’ to an ‘objective’ education as all part of the big reform.

The Skilled Manipulators and the Hyperbole of Hypocrisy

When thinking about propaganda and its perpetrators, like Gingrich, Sharpton and Arne Duncan, it is important to understand that it is a specific type of message presentation aimed at serving a particular agenda; even if the message conveys true information it still may be partisan and fail to paint a complete picture of an issue or controversy. In their book Propaganda and Persuasion, Dr. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell define propaganda as:

The deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

It is clear that people skilled in the art of Machiavellianism, manipulation and propaganda want to influence the beliefs and behavior of others and they will resort to all kinds of mechanisms to do so. Understanding psychology people like Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan have insight into what makes people vulnerable to manipulation and they use language and images to manage perceptions. As a result, they strive to appear before others in a way that associates themselves with power, authority, expertise and conventional morality. That’s why they’ll parade into communities and grab media headlines.

Key actors in the march towards educational privatization are well aware of this need to control information so when advocating sweeping educational changes such as charter schools or for-profit EMOs, they use ‘rational’ means only when such means can be used to create the appearance of objectivity and reasonability. The key, here, is to understand that the skilled manipulators are always trying to keep some information and some points of view from being given a fair hearing while at the same time promoting their own storyline for dissemination through the corporate dominated press. It is the same tired, shameless behavior we’ve seen when we focus on health care.

None for all and all for none: Ginning up the anti teacher anti public parent base

For those witnessing the health care or health insurance reform issue as it is playing out on the national landscape, they will not be surprised when they begin to see the ‘astro turf’ groups assembled around charter schools emerge, if they haven’t already. This is another reason Arne and the gang are riveted on visiting major cities for they want to be on hand to applaud and cheer on the ‘grass root’ efforts aimed at charterizing a way forward. They need to work on the talking points developed by think tanks and right wing pundits for dissemination to the hoi polloi.

In the case of educational policy analysis, one way to begin to think critically on issues such as charter schools is to rightly focus on the highly vocal educational think tanks that purport to be non-partisan and objective, but in reality are supported by huge economic interests. Within the corridors of these think tanks walk the researchers, scholars and intellectuals that produce research to justify neo-liberal public policies that support charter schools, vouchers and other privatization schemes. Thus, one critical task in the debate over charter schools today is undoubtedly to help people recognize how the wealthy and powerful often prey on the credulity, gullibility, and vulnerability of the poor or poorly schooled in advocating public policies that favor their interests while at the same time avoiding critical public scrutiny. This of course is disconcerting for advocates of public disclosure, public transparency and political democracy in general and surely unacceptable for informed decision making and democratic oversight and governance. Yet this ghastly governance goes on seemingly unabated each and every day; non-disclosure and non-transparency are now more norm than aberration, the media more stenographers than journalists. One of the most insidious and popular efforts in arranging consent generating activities is to start ‘grassroots front groups’, as we’ve seen in the health car town hall fiascos.

Take the group ‘Parent Union’. Steve Barr, the originator of Green Dot Public Schools, a non-profit EMO out of LA, started Parent Union in Los Angeles a few years ago and it’s now spread its reach to Oregon. Although it’s still too premature to conclude, The Parent Union, from what I can understand is not entirely separate from the Parent Revolution, another ‘reform education’ group. In fact, plausible inferences suggest that the Parent Revolution is just the Parent Union’s driving force. Ben Austin, who brought EMO Green Dot Public Schools in for the Locke High School “turnaround,” started the Parent Revolution (Austin, conveniently, is also a city attorney for Los Angeles). The organization seeks to dismantle traditional Los Angeles public schools by getting parents to organize petition drives to have the schools ‘decertified’. The organization boasts at its website:

watch our video and find out how you can transform your child’s school. If 51% of the parents at your school sign the petition demanding a better school, we will guarantee your child a great school, in your neighborhood within three years (Parent Revolution)

This is how Green Dot managed to pull off a hostile takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles, where Duncan and the crew can view the dismal test scores that came out last week, one year after the takeover by Green Dot. Chapters of Parent Revolution are popping up all over the state of California and in the Northwest. Some parents are concerned about what happens after getting the 51%, but what to worry, with the plethora of EMO’s like Barr’s and the candied promises of the managerial elite the gullible have found their answers. The Revolution is funded at least in part by billionaire Eli Broad, but Service Employee International Uunion (SEIU) is also chipping in, making for another set of interesting bedfellows and a discouraging platform for the future. Los Angeles is a mess and doesn’t promise to get better any time soon.

Marco Petruzzi, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Green Dot, is also the head of the Venice chapter of the Parent Union and although there is nothing to indicate he’s getting paid for his work with the parent organization, he’s certainly getting paid by Green Dot. How much? Hard to say for he became CEO in 2008 and the IRS 990 forms for Green Dot only run through 2007. Prior to joining Green Dot, according to their website, Marco founded ‘r3 school solutions’, an organization that provided management and administrative services to charter management organizations, another burgeoning business. Prior to founding r3 school solutions, he was a Partner at Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm. Marco has fifteen years of consulting experience working with top management of major international groups in corporate and product-market strategy, channel management, pricing strategy, commercial organization, operations, R&D management and supply chain management assignments, in the USA, South America, and Europe. Marco also worked at McKinsey & Co. and for Enichem Americas, a petrochemical trading company based in New York (Green Dot Website).

When the LA takeover of 250 schools was passed by a 6-1 vote on the resolution on August 25, 2009, Austin told the Parent Revolution afterwards:

We made history today. All of us are living together in a revolutionary moment. Big, scary, good, revolutionary change is happening right now, and we get to be part of it. We have parents standing together alongside the President of the United States calling for a revolution. That’s exciting. But there are two reasons for us to temper our joy, just a little bit.

First, because we haven’t done anything yet. This resolution — and all the great Parent Revolution organizing in East Los Angeles, Venice, and elsewhere — won’t mean a thing until we transform our first school, and begin the process of giving our children the education they need and the future they deserve. Until we transform that first school and help that first student, we have done nothing. The defenders of the status quo didn’t expect us to move so quickly. Maybe they underestimated us and were caught a little flat-footed. But they aren’t anymore. They now know what we can do, so we must do more. We have to work even harder to actually implement this resolution with parents all across Los Angeles.

Second, we need to be gracious winners. Because our opponents aren’t bad people. They care about kids too. I’ve consumed a tremendous amount of wine with A.J. Duffy and know him to be a smart, funny, nice person. The problem isn’t the people, it’s the system itself. More often than not, if we can change the system, we can work with the people. Even though major elements of organized labor opposed us today, there isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t ultimately be on the same side (Parent Revolution, September 9, 2009 http://www.parentrevolution.org/).

The Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan show is certainly aimed at influencing and providing gravitas to the new parent insurgents intent on turning their children’s futures over to Wall Street CEO’s and concerned philanthropists and entrepreneurs. They’ll be egged on by the grey-haired and grotesque Gingrich, the lithe and goofy Arne Duncan and the ‘people’s champion and advocate, the Reverend Al Sharpton. Expect to see the three stage managers thronged by eager and justly frustrated parents talking about the platform for education as a ‘civil rights issue’ while fist bumping with the disillusioned and those devastated by more than thirty years of extinction economics.

Detecting the disinformation and dissembling the diatribe

Those of us interested in a democratic debate regarding charter schools, educational reform, privatization, teacher unions, authentic assessment, creative and relevant curriculum and the host of concerns that are currently considered ‘hot bed’ issues within the arena of education want and deserve a public discussion that includes equal coverage of dissenting as well as dominant points of view as they pertain to these controversies. We also do not wish to be seen as feckless fools who can be dominated by verbal rhetoric and propagandists. However, in our current hyper-media environment, controlled as it is by powerful corporate interests bundled up into think tanks, people now need to learn how to detect when some one is trying to manipulate them into believing or doing what they would not believe or do had they access to more information or further reasoning from dissenting points of view. Therefore, in order to assure a healthy debate on issues such as charter schools and educational policy, it is necessary to publicly disclose situations wherein people of wealth and power are manipulating people with little wealth and power, and specifically how the use of language and imagery is used to accomplish these ends. But don’t tell that to Duncan and his conspiratorial counterparts.

In the case of educational policy, one way to begin to think critically on issues such as charter schools is to focus on the highly vocal educational think tanks that purport to be non-partisan and objective, but in reality are supported by huge economic interests. Within the corridors of these think tanks walk the researchers, scholars and intellectuals that produce research to justify neo-liberal public policies that support charter schools, vouchers and other privatization schemes. Thus, one critical task in the debate over charter schools today is undoubtedly to help people recognize how the wealthy and powerful often prey on the credulity, gullibility, and vulnerability of the poor or poorly schooled in advocating public policies that favor their interests while at the same time avoiding critical public scrutiny. This of course is disconcerting for advocates of public disclosure, public transparency and political democracy in general and surely unacceptable for informed decision making and democratic oversight and governance. Yet it goes on seemingly unabated each and every day; non-disclosure and non-transparency are now more norm than aberration.

The Duncan, Gingrich and Sharpton alliance is only the latest in what can only be called disinformation and therefore really a callous disregard for democracy, working people, their communities and the disasters they face. For it is the economic disasters of the last thirty years of neoliberal economic theory and practice that has allowed the Chicago Boys to seize the national debate on everything from health care to education. And although President Obama has stated his opposition to dummied down standardized testing, his advisors and oafs like Duncan, Sharpton and Gingrich continue to forge policy and occupy the geographical debate over education. They have something very different in mind. They need No Child Left Behind not just for the fact that more and more schools are scheduled to fail under the rubric of its testing gallows, but because no NCLB will be one of the chief standards used to measure the performance of the new charter schools, and after all, isn’t that the point?

‘Duncan donuts’ with Arne will prove to be a memorable experience for all concerned with education, from the carpeted cubicles of Wall Street to the disastrous reality of main-street. The only real issue is whether the national media coverage will give a fair hearing to those who have other ideas for preserving and reforming America’s troubled educational systems, ideas that embrace education, participatory democracy and schooling as a moral value, not simply as factories for the manufacture of human products to compete with China. But if the health care debacle is any indication of what may lie in store for the public, look for the skilled manipulators like Duncan, Sharpton and Gingrich to weave tall tales even Paul Bunyan couldn’t hold a candle to and look for the corporate sock puppet press to be the willing stenographers for power they were hired to speak for.

In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: they are the risk.

– Henry Giroux, p. x.

If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized… p. 29.

As the politics of the social state gives way to the biopolitics of disposability, the prison becomes a preeminently valued institution whose disciplinary practices become a model for dealing with the increasing number of young people who are considered to be the waste products of a market-mediated society. p. 82.

Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?
By Henry A. Giroux
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-230-61329-4
ISBN10: 0-230-61329-2

It need not be said, though I find it necessary to restate, that Henry Giroux is one of the most important public servants the last 100 years have produced. In his expansive three decade plus academic career, Giroux has written over 35 books, contributed to countless scholarly journals, and received numerous educational honors.

But perhaps what most makes this former high school basketball star distinct is his tireless advocacy on behalf of the frail, the vulnerable, the disposable.

Giroux has focused much of his writing over the fragile existence disenfranchised populations are largely relegated to. Giroux’s “critical sympathy” to the often forgotten, as Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson once mentioned, is what pushes him time after time to engage issues many of his peers would rather stay far away from — for fear of sanction, resentment, or job loss.

In that spirit of deep moral determination and fervent conviction, comes his latest work: Youth in a Suspect Society, which, above all else, is an attempt to interrogate the increasingly hostile future our society is preparing, with no sense of shame or irony, for its next tenants — young people.

Giroux wastes no time condemning the “assault against youth” being waged by all those blind to the radical realities of reproof youth, and especially those of color, are being confined to by way of policy and legislation. An example of this is provided in the case of Deamonte Driver, a seventh grader from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who “died because his mother did not have the health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extraction.”

Under the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, Giroux writes, there was at least a “willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens.” But all advancements made in that era were rolled over as one neo-conservative administration after the other found its way into the White House. And the most devastating of them, in theory and practice, Giroux insists, was the 43rd one.

But government alone isn’t responsible, he notes, because anti-Youth legislations couldn’t be established as law without a media complex that has “habitually” reinforced representations, however false, of young people as “variously lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, volatile, dangerous, and manipulative.” It’s important to note that these suggestions “do more than degrade young people and resonate with their underlying marginality and disposability”; they also “legitimate the passage of draconian measures, policies, and laws at the highest levels of government.”

So, it then makes sense when schools become transformed into secondary stations for police officers, military personnel, and other agents of the State.

The message: Kids and, especially, Youth are a threat to society — a threat which must be watched with close scrutiny, dealt with diabolically, and, when necessary, punished with the power of the law.

Students are, as a result, targeted and treated as potential criminals, paving way for a society in which “children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell.”

In Youth in a Suspect Society, Giroux also takes special time out to dive deeper into the challenges confronting children, as they try to navigate a world where giant corporations see them as nothing but disposable commodities – to be bought and sold.

Children, Dr. Giroux writes, “constitute the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision, and politics.” And today’s children are having to become more accustomed to a speed-driven society; a society that treasures punctuality over poignancy, and impatience over incandescence. Thus, kids are being encouraged to revel in “the suspension of judgment, the inability to think critically, [and] the avoidance of responsibility.” (Never mind that these very kids are still ultimately barraged with blame for low test scores or poor performance on state standardized tests.)

Kids would also have to get used to “a society that measures its success and failure solely through the economic lens of the Gross National Product (GNP)”; a society unable to “define youth outside of market principles determined largely by … market growth and the accumulation of capital.”

This society, children should be aware, sees them not only as an “expansive and profitable market but as the primary source of redemption for the future of capitalism.”

Examples of such thinking abound in Youth in a Suspect Society. Giroux’s meticulous research unearths numerous reports of kids being selected by toy companies to act as representatives (unpaid employees), such as a GIA-sponsored event, Slumber Party in a Box, which enlists “agents” to “invite their friends to an overnight party, hand out free products to them, and then provide ‘feedback through quizzes’ to GIA headquarters.” Corporations have found kids and pre-teens great resources – peer pressure power — to use in expanding their brand — even if it commodifies the non-market value of friendship.

Giroux also turns a sharp gaze on pro athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who, he says, appear more interested in inflating their bank account figures than “using their celebrity status for educating young people about character, hard work, the value of sportsmanship, and the sheer joy of athleticism.”

But there’s another angle to this, which hasn’t gotten as much press among progressive circles. As Giroux writes:

More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct.

The war on terror and drugs, Giroux asserts, has added a new target: Youth.

This war, unlike the more glamorous cross-national disputes, doesn’t necessarily involve two sides in contentious combat. This war is characterized by “4th grade reading scores and graduation rates [being] used to determine how many prison cells will be built.” This war is against the growing population of “pint-size nihilists” amongst us. Extinguish them!

And so,

Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of being recognized as badly served by failing schools, they are labeled uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of being provided with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless.

These enemies of our peace are then rightfully placed in schools where the squeaking sound of metal detectors is omnipresent, where police forces are dominant, where arrests, suspensions, and expulsions are as commonplace as being frisked, cussed-out, or strip-searched by security officers on your way to class. These enemies of our peace might be too young to legally “marry, drive a car, get a tattoo, or go to scary movies, but not too young to be put in prisons for the rest of their lives.”

And while we’re at it, let’s make sure they’re excluded from “various forms of student aid,” post-conviction, including but not limited to “welfare payments, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, and… public housing.”

Isn’t it so heartwarming to know that young people growing up have such a splendid future awaiting them?

Giroux calls on “intellectuals” of great courage to “take a stand” against these “collective problems” putting at risk “not only young people and adults… but the very possibility of deepening and expanding democracy itself.” But how many of these intellectuals wouldn’t have to be summoned from the dead?

As he rightly notes, the university has witnessed a radical shift in vision this past decade. Through hysteria whipped up by right-wingers following 9/11, many liberal or left-leaning professors have been silenced or fired to quell the paranoia expressed by some students that they’re being brainwashed. Their professors tried to force upon them “Marxist” and “Socialist” values – values that go by such scary prospects as critical thinking, intellectual freedom, and independent reasoning.

These young people, Giroux writes, have been bamboozled by the likes of David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of popular culture, who’ve “hijacked political power and waged a focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing the quality of education made available to youth in the name of patriotic correctness.”

Cheated out of an enlightening educational experience, Giroux contends, are young people, who, in exchange for being provided the tools to “critically engage what they know and to recognize the limits of their own knowledge,” are infantilized by appeasing academics. They are denied “opportunities to engage knowledge critically… [and] assume responsibility for what it means to know something.”

Giroux’s hopes are for a “larger public dialogue about how to imagine a democratic future,” in the context of a Youth-centered pedagogy. Unfortunately, “We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance.” Nonetheless, this ambassador of hope reassures: “… [P]ower as a form of domination is never absolute, and oppression always produces some form of resistance.”

And though the laborious work of resistance must engage all sectors of society, Giroux’s call to young people is direct: “[G]o out into the world and actively try to change it.”

Youth in a Suspect Society is an unnerving prophetic call to action. Through tedious research and meditation, Giroux has provided a blueprint that all concerned can use in restoring the faith Youth once had in society — faith planted in the soils of non-privatized, non-corporatized values.

This faith, however, has been uprooted by years of indifference and antipathy, callousness and bellicosity.

Children are now much too aware of the degree of disregard society disses them with. And they respond to it in ways that anger some and amuse others.

But the concrete work of restoring this faith has hardly been addressed, let alone acted upon, before the publication of Youth in a Suspect Society.

I recommend it with inestimable gratitude to Dr. Giroux for his moral vigor and matchless vitality.

The one-day stoppage is due to take place on October 1, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second intifada, when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police.

The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called “racist” government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state.

“In recent months, there has been a parallel situation of racist policies in the parliament and greater condoning of violence towards Arab citizens by the police and courts,” said Jafar Farah, the head of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy group in Israel. “This attitude is feeding down to the streets.”

Confrontations between the country’s Arab minority and Mr Netanyahu’s coalition, formed in the spring, surfaced almost immediately over a set of controversial legal measures.

The proposed bills outlawed the commemoration of the “nakba”, or catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians for their dispossession in 1948; required citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Zionist state; and banned political demands for ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Following widespread outcries, the bills were either watered down or dropped.

But simmering tensions came to a boil again late last month when the education minister, Gideon Saar, presented educational reforms to mark the start of the new school year.

He confirmed plans to drop the word “nakba” from Arabic textbooks and announced his intention to launch classes on Jewish heritage and Zionism. He also said he would tie future budgets for schools to their success in persuading pupils to perform military or national service.

Arab citizens are generally exempted from military service, although officials have recently been trying to push civilian national service in its place.

Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the parliament, denounced the linking of budgets to national service, saying that Mr Saar “must understand that he is the education minister, not the defence minister”.

The separate Arab education system is in need of thousands of more classrooms and is massively underfunded – up to nine times more is spent on a Jewish pupil than an Arab one, according to surveys. Research published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem last month showed that Jewish schools received five times more than Arab schools for special education classes.

Mr Netanyau, who accompanied Mr Saar on a tour of schools last week, appeared to give his approval to the proposed reforms: “We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land.”

Mr Barakeh also accused government ministers of competing to promote measures hostile to the Arab minority. “Anyone seeking fame finds it in racist whims against Arabs – the ministers of infrastructure, education, transportation, whoever.”

Mr Barakeh was referring to a raft of recent proposals.

Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced last month that training for the diplomatic service would be open only to candidates who had completed national service.

Of the foreign ministry’s 980 employees only 15 are Arab, a pattern reflected across the civil service sector according to Sikkuy, a rights and coexistence organisation.

The housing minister, Ariel Atias, has demanded communal segregation between Jewish and Arab citizens and instituted a drive to make the Galilee, where most Arab citizens live, “more Jewish”.

The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has approved a wave of house demolitions, most controversially in the Arab town of Umm al Fahm in Wadi Ara, where a commercial district has been twice bulldozed in recent weeks.

The transport minister, Israel Katz, has insisted that road signs include placenames only as they are spelt in Hebrew, thereby erasing the Arabic names of communities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth.

Arab legislators have come under repeated verbal attack from members of the government. Last month, the infrastructures minister, Uzi Landau, refused to meet Taleb al Sana, the head of the United Arab List party, on parliamentary business, justifying the decision on the grounds that Arab MPs were “working constantly here and abroad to delegitimise Israel as a Jewish state”.

Shortly afterwards, Mr al Sana and his colleague Ahmed Tibi, the deputy speaker of parliament, attended Fatah’s congress in Bethlehem, prompting Mr Lieberman to declare: “Our central problem is not the Palestinians, but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk – they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined.”

Mr Tibi responded: “When Lieberman, the foreign minister, says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist. It is the most dangerous incitement.”

Israel’s annual Democracy Index poll, published last month, showed that 53 per cent of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave.

Mr Farah said the strike date had been selected to coincide with the anniversary of the deaths of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000 to highlight both the failure to prosecute any of the policemen involved and the continuing official condoning of violence against Arab citizens by police and Jewish citizens.

Some 27 Arab citizens have been killed by the police in unexplained circumstances since the October deaths, Mr Farah said, with only one conviction. Last week, Shahar Mizrahi, an undercover officer, was given a 15-month sentence for shooting Mahmoud Ghanaim in the head from point-blank range. The judge called Mizrahi’s actions “reckless”.

This week, in another controversial case, Shai Dromi, a Negev rancher, received six months community service after shooting dead a Bedouin intruder, Khaled al Atrash, as the latter fled.

Mr Farah said the regard in which Arab citizens were held by the government was illustrated by a comment from the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, in June. During an inspection of police officers working undercover as drug addicts, the minister praised one for looking like a “real dirty Arab”.

As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.

Michigan is home to the nation’s third-largest number of charter schools, many of which rely on private, for-profit companies for administration and management. The companies, commonly known as education management organizations (EMOs), manage approximately 70% of the state’s 144 charters. But some EMOs are not content to simply manage charter schools for others in some cases they are starting up their own schools, creating greater educational choice and competition for Michigan families. One such company is National Heritage Academies (NHA), a Grand Rapids-based EMO. Founded by J. C. Huizenga in 1995, NHA is rapidly achieving its goal, which is to create and manage a strong network of K-8 charter school academies. Huizenga operated just one charter school in NHA’s first year. Three years later, the company is managing 13 schools in western Michigan and plans to open nine more schools this fall. Like other EMOs, NHA has sought private, outside investors. To date, it has raised $100 million in investor capital in addition to millions of dollars provided by Huizenga from his own personal finances. Yet, even with this level of funding, the risk is great, and there are no guarantees of success. Charter schools cannot sell bonds for buildings and equipment like traditional public schools. First-year charters must be fully staffed and teaching students long before any money comes from Lansing. The high up-front costs for starting charter schools cause a negative cash flow for many months and also keep many “mom and pop” charter schools from entering the market. On the plus side, the high up-front costs may also lead charters to use more cost-saving measures such as contracting out school support services. NHA, for example, contracts out 100% of its food and custodial services to other private firms.

The Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University has been reporting extensively on for-profit management of public schools, including charter schools, for more than ten years. Each year they issue a Profiles of For-Profit Education Management Organizations in which they look at data that documents the number of for-profit firms (EMOs) involved in the management of publicly funded schools. They include data that identifies the schools these firms manage, the number of schools they manage, and the number of students they serve and other sundry disclosure data. In 2008 they released their first study of non-profit educational management of schools, which we will look at later in the chapter.

First, turning our attention to the 2007-2008 Profiles of For Profit Education Management Organizations Tenth annual report, authors of the report, Alex Molnar, Gary Miron and Jessica Urschel, sum up the argument conservatives use to garner public support for the for-profit EMOs this way:

While faith in market competition as an effective engine of reform provides a general theoretical basis for both EMO-run district and charter public schools, the specifics of the competition are somewhat different in each instance. Adherents of market-based school reform favor charter schools in the belief that they provide competition that will force existing public schools to improve their outcomes or be put out of operation. Support for for-profit management of district schools, meanwhile, arises essentially from a belief that private business models are more efficient and effective than nonprofit, government operated institutions. A for-profit company contracted to manage district public schools, it is reasoned, will have incentives (making a profit in the short term and retaining a profitable contract in the long term) to seek efficiencies and improve student outcomes and achievement. The competition, in this context, takes place not among schools or districts themselves, but among current or potential managers of schools (Molnar, Miron and Urschel, 2008).

So the assumptions, at least by some, behind the educational and economic theory supporting the for-profit EMO is clear, according to Molnar, EMO advocates believe: competition in the management of public schools will raise all boats; this is important for the argument is not simply that competition in the types of schools students may go to (though that too is part of the educational privatization agenda) is essential to improve public schools; free market ideologues go even further, arguing that if schools compete effectively in how they manage a school, be it a charter or district school, student performance will rise and efficiency will increase. But is this really true and is it really the true underlying ideology of conservative forces that support charter schools and EMOs? In other words, is the real goal of these companies to improve traditional public school performance across the national educational line through competition, as they claim, which would include both charter schools and traditional public schools? Or is the real unstated purpose and rarely spoken of objective to actually replace traditional public schools with a business form of ‘privately run educational retail franchises’, in the form of charter schools?

For profit EMO’s are now big players in the rocketing charter school movement that has swept the country and their relationships, agendas, and claims must be critically examined and thoroughly scrutinized. We will attempt to do this in this chapter. First, however, it is important to understand what a for-profit educational management organization (EMO) is and what they propose to do, have done or haven’t done in the name of improving public schools.

Defining Terms: What is a for-profit EMO?

Just what is a for-profit educational management organization (EMO)? The answer must initially be ascertained by first defining the notion of the ‘privatization’ of ‘public services’, in general. As we noted in chapter five, the transfer of public duties traditionally performed by government actors and/or agencies to privately held or publicly traded companies for profit who assume complete responsibility for the public assets and answer only to their shareholders or owners, can be called ‘privatization’ (also referred to abstractly as neo-liberal economic policy). When public educational duties are ‘privatized’, thereby transferred from the public to the private sector (in this case comprising the ‘management’ of schools with all the myriad of responsibilities this entails), and subsequently this private management is contracted for with a public school entity, be it a public educational district or simply a public school (charter or otherwise), we can say that this private company is or will be a ‘for-profit management’ company or what is now called in contemporary educational jargon, an Educational Management Organization (EMO). The Education Policy Studies Laboratory, at the College of Education at Arizona State University is more thorough and specific in their definition of an EMO:

We define an education management organization, or EMO, as an organization or firm that manages schools that receive public funds, including district and charter public schools. A contract details the terms under which executive authority to run one or more schools is given to an EMO in return for a commitment to produce measurable outcomes within a given time frame. The EMOs profiled in this report operate under the same admissions rules as regular public schools and are operated for profit. The term “education management organization” and the acronym “EMO” are most commonly used to describe these private organizations that manage public schools under contract. However, other names or labels such as “education service providers” are sometimes used to describe these companies. An important distinction should be made between EMOs that have executive authority over a school and service contractors that are often referred to as “vendors.” Vendors provide specific services for fee, such as accounting, payroll and benefits, transportation, financial and legal advice, personnel recruitment, professional development, and special education. EMOs vary on a number of dimensions, such as whether they have for-profit or nonprofit status, whether they work with charter schools or district schools or both, or whether they are a large regional or national franchise or a single-site operator. Historically, only a small portion of EMOs have been nonprofits. In recent years, however, nonprofit EMOs (sometimes referred to as CMOs charter management organizations) have expanded rapidly (ibid).

Gary Miron, Alex Molnar and Jessica Urschel, authors of the report, note that EMOs vary on a number of legal standards, such as whether they have for-profit or non-profit status or whether they contract with charter schools or district schools or both. They even differentiate EMOs as to whether they are large regional businesses with ‘national educational retail franchises’, or simply single-site operators.

A Public-Private Partnership? What is the economic relationship between EMOs and traditional public schools and/or charter schools?

Getting back to the economics and legalities of the EMOs and their operations, to reiterate, the transfer of public duties traditionally performed by government actors to private companies who assume complete responsibility for the public assets and answer only to their shareholders is ‘privatization’; yet the argument often made by both the private and public sectors who support the EMO idea is that state takeovers of school districts or other forced transfers of school management to for-profit school management corporations (EMOs) are not strictly speaking, privatizations, but rather represent a ‘private-public partnership’. How, you might ask could this be called a private-public partnership when public taxpayer monies are transferred directly into the coffers of for-profit management companies for the services they are contracted to render? The reasoning set forth for the public-private partnership claim rests on the assumption that because the private EMOs (under a contractual relationship with individual charter schools, the districts or the state) remain accountable to governmental entities, the conclusion is that this relationship is therefore really a form of a ‘private-public partnership’, not an outright privatization. But as the Profiles report noted, “A contract details the terms under which executive authority to run one or more schools is given to an EMO in return for a commitment to produce measurable outcomes within a given time frame” (ibid). Thus the relationship is not a ‘partnership, but a contractual relationship subject to legal terms and outcomes.

Adherents to the ‘public-private partnership’ argument claim that schools remain open to the public while taxpayers continue to finance education by subsidizing the private management of schools, therefore forming the ‘partnership’. Furthermore, they argue, the public school administration or the state bureaucracy can always terminate the for-profit management company’s contract if they are dissatisfied with their performance and resume school operations as they had in the past or in the alternative produce new institutional arrangements that they deem more favorable. But what makes this any different than a mere contractual relationship for services entered into for profit between a public entity (in this case say a charter school or school districts) and a private for-profit firm like an EMO? How can this contractual arrangement and the institutional, economic and legal consequences that follow from the agreement between the two parties be categorized as a ‘public-private partnership’ when profits and returns not only drive the EMO business model but are expropriated by the EMO as a result of the fiduciary responsibilities an EMO has to their shareholders or partners? In fact, the use of the term ‘partnership’ is the real key to understanding the way EMOs have framed the issue for the public, insofar as the term implies a mutual playing ground between parties in the contract. According to Jonathan Kozol, educational writer and best selling author:

One of the early strategies employed by private corporations to soften resistance to their presence in our public schools was the creation of so-called business partnerships between the poorest inner-city schools and large companies. The financial side of the partnership usually turned out to be inconsequential. Kerr-McGee, the multinational petrochemical giant, gave one impoverished public school in Oklahoma City the trivial annual sum of $36 for each pupil. In return, one of the company’s executives was appointed to direct a “governance committee” to oversee the school operations, and the school consented to be known not simply as a public elementary school but as an “Enterprise School”. Throughout the 1990s, many inner-city schools underwent the same accommodation to the goals and even to the lexicon of their benefactors in the private sector. “Academy of Enterprise” became a common term adopted by such schools in genuflection to their corporate patrons. Principals I met in schools like these would tell me they wished no longer to be known as “principals” but preferred to be known as “Building CEOs” or “Building Managers”, in which cases their teachers frequently would be described as “classroom managers”. Mission statements heralding the need for children to be trained to serve our nation’s interests in “the global marketplace” were posted on the walls of many schools I visited. In practice, however, students were more often being trained for careers at supermarket checkout counters or for the bottom level “service jobs” at nursing homes (Kozol 2007).

From the point of view of author and attorney Kathleen Conn, she agrees with the implications we can draw from Kozol’s observation: there simply are no private-public partnerships with EMOs nor can there ever be; the whole notion is woven out of uncritically accepted ideological cloth. And this might go a long way to explain the eagerness to embrace the language of corporations when referring to principals as ‘CEOs’ and teachers as ‘managers’.

According to an article written by Conn in the Journal of Law and Education that specifically looks at the legal and economic responsibilities of EMOs and concludes the idea behind the EMO economic model is simple legality:

In the euphoria of “solving” America’s educational woes, a basic inconsistency in the notion of private, for-profit corporations controlling public education escaped serious consideration. Private corporations are legal entities established within a paradigm of maximization of profits for those who provide the working capital of the organization, the shareholders. The directors of such corporations owe fiduciary duties of care and loyalty to the shareholders. They owe, under the law, no concomitant duties to other constituencies (Conn 2002).

It is clear to any beginning business student that any director or directors of corporations have a fiduciary duty of loyalty that requires that all profits of the corporation accrue to shareholders; this is the simple logic of the economics of corporations and the fundamentals of the capitalist system. As Conn noted, the Michigan Supreme Court, addressing the demands of shareholders in the early twentieth century, stated the principle succinctly:

A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes (ibid).

So in the case of corporate EMOs, just like any other business, the corporate EMO is organized and day to day practices of the organization carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders, or in the case of single operators the private venture capitalists looking for a return on their investment; and this means the powers and actions of the directors of these corporation are to be employed exclusively to that end. The directors of these companies really have no other legal choice, for they have accepted the fundamental economic and legal fiduciary duties in the corporate context that comprise the twin sisters of loyalty and care in the running of their organizations with the sole intent of maximizing profits for shareholders. The only discretion that directors have in assuring profit maximization is in the choice of means they choose to attain this end, nothing more. Non-shareholders, or what are often referred to as ‘constituencies’, simply have no property interest in the corporation and thus few rights in terms of power, decision-making and control. Due to the lack of constituency property interests in an EMO, the issue of public private partnership is not only moot but in fact a complete misrepresentation of real legal relationships due to the reality that the public at large, the district or charter school, the students and parents being served by the EMO corporation within the public arena would be considered ‘constituencies’ under the law and constituencies do not have the power, authority and control over the fiduciary duties necessary for shareholder wealth maximization. In corporate terms they are ‘second class citizens’.

So what does all this mean? The answer is simple: when a for-profit EMO takes over the functions of traditional public education or the day to day operations of a charter school the companies’ non-shareholding ‘constituencies’, in this case the students, parents teachers, and workers at the school, have little or no bargaining power with the corporate directors due to the directors’ fiduciary duties to shareholders; they in fact may arguably be at the mercy of the companies in the absence of adequate regulatory safeguards or union contracts and collective bargaining agreements, all of which are of course an absolute anathema to the ideological interests of privatization supporters. And because dollars spent on education are not available as dollars for shareholder dividends, in order to realize profits for investors in these for-profit educational management organizations, the bottom line is that EMOs must seek to increase their share of the educational pie through the ‘volume’ business of attracting increasing numbers of students, as well as spend less than they collect; the scramble to keep costs down becomes part and parcel of the profit seeking as they seek simultaneously to expand market share. And these entities do this in myriad ways.

According to Conn, companies like EdisonLearning and other EMO corporations actually accomplish cost cutting in two ways.

First, and perhaps least importantly, school management companies contract with vendors of non-educational supplies and services, trying to get volume discounts on everything from tissues to floor strippers. These strategies, while they may save money, have limited, if any, real educational significance (ibid).

This of course resembles the Wal-Mart business model of bargaining and contracting with suppliers. But as Conn astutely realizes, the second way companies and private operators or EMOs keep costs down is through corporate bottom line choices that can have immediate and outright devastating effects on practical issues of educational significance, such as choices related to cutting or increasing class sizes, the type, pay and quality of the teachers, and the quality and quantity of educational resources and instructional materials provided to students. So it seems the real ‘choice’ is buried within a particular EMOs plans for profit maximization.

Take the notion of charter schools: here, for-profit school management companies (EMOs) are free to hire non-certified teachers who then legally become employees for the EMOs, not the public schools they manage. This is an important distinction for EMO hired teachers do not work for the districts or charter schools they may labor in; they have virtually been ‘contracted out’ to EMOs. The EMOs often hire non-certified teachers in an effort to keep labor costs and the cost of any benefits accrued to labor significantly low. This also allows their management to control the daily routines of work. They also employ certified teachers who cannot obtain jobs in the public sector, but at salaries far lower than those in comparable publicly run schools, again for the same reason. This is all part and parcel of an effort to reduce labor costs and to assure non-unionization and thereby avoid the need to collectively bargain for the distribution of shareholder or privately held profits. But if this is good for the bottom line, for capital and its owners, is it really good for teachers, educational workers, parents, students or even education in general as the public has been continually told over the years by the companies and their media counterparts and think tanks? It would help to take a look at some facts.

EMO run charter schools, for example, have higher rates of teacher turnover than other entities. Edison Schools, Inc, admitted in 2005 to a teacher turnover rate of 23%, twice the national average for urban public schools (Molnar, Miron and Urschel, 2008). Is this cost effective and is it educationally wise to have such high turnovers in the teaching profession? Or does it mean that valuable resources are wasted continually training new teachers as the attrition rate rises? How can this be seen as fiscally and educationally responsible to the public it proclaims to serve, especially when public funds are deployed?

EMOs also experience significant cost savings in the area of the educational resources they choose to utilize. Most EMOs come equipped with their own ‘model curriculum’ as part of their contract with charter schools and/or districts; this is usually part of their management ‘packet’ to be employed and used at each school, or franchise, the EMO manages. This of course leads to cost saving reductions by offering up easily produced ‘cookie cutter’ or ‘one size fits all’ curriculum, thus realizing a savings far more extensive than what public schools spend for creative, non-standardized diversified curricula. Let’s face it, teacher conceived curriculum takes time, patience and a commitment on behalf of the school management and staff for more allocated preparation time for the construction of meaningful curriculum and educational activities for students. It involves working with other teachers in mentoring relationships in order to formulate ideas and best practices; this is a collaborative activity done by teachers with and for students. Creative and innovative curriculum construction is often individually geared to specific students and themes and rebels against pre-packaging or standardization.

Yet from the point of view of the for-profit EMO this is a problem for at least two reasons: one, collaboration among teachers is problematic for the EMO business plan which seeks only profits, for it often leads to teacher organized off-site meetings to talk about the conditions of work, the possibilities for unionization and a discussion of collective interests. Secondly, what these companies wish to do is create large ready-made curriculum that can be used with a high volume of students with a onetime up-front financial investment in both the curriculum and the teacher ‘training’ necessary to implement the curriculum. As author and educational researcher David Plank noted back in 2000, a way for EMOs to profit is to scale down their economies and they do this by reducing pupil costs. He goes on to explain:

Scale economies rely on the possibility of lowering per-pupil costs by spreading them over larger numbers of students. For example, a national firm offering a standardized curriculum for hundreds or even thousands of schools may significantly reduce the per-pupil cost of curriculum development and instructional materials in the schools they manage. Similarly, it may be possible to standardize financial and other administrative services for large numbers of schools, reducing the per-pupil cost of providing these services. When economies of scale are present, firms can profit by increasing the number of students they serve (Plank et al. 2000).

So, for example, teachers are often given a pre-conceived and ready-made curriculum and then are trained as ‘managers’ to implement it throughout the educational retail chains owned and operated by the EMOs. In sum, it’s obviously cheaper for the EMOs as well as private charter school operators to encourage the adoption of one-size fits all curriculum than it is to provide paid time for teachers to collectively conceive of their own curriculum which could then also lead to the teachers identifying their class interests with each other, not management.

Once again, we are left with the question of how any of this can possibly serve to create ‘innovation’ in instruction and ‘empowerment’ for teachers and students, two of repeated arguments we find in the soaring rhetoric supporting the idea of the charter school movement. If the lesson plans come equipped with the ‘school management package’, then once again, as we saw in the last chapter in the historical development of education, teachers are divorced from curriculum conception and reduced to mere ‘managers’ of packaged student ‘delivery systems’, not the chief architectures of cooperative educational excellence and curriculum development. Nor can educational innovation be highlighted, shared and modeled for the benefit of introducing creativity at either traditional public schools or charter schools. Instead, teachers in many EMO run schools are ‘tethered to the carpet loom’, required to teach to the pre-packaged curriculum which is largely wedded to arguably inauthentic standardized testing and an environment of competition. This ‘commodification’ of educational curriculum and teaching runs not only counter to the arguments historically made by charter school advocates regarding innovation and best practices, but is problematic for teaching and learning. It can also open the door to unscrupulous business entities who seek to introduce their ‘educational products’ into charter schools without any regard to innovation, best practices or educational values.

EMOs and the educational products industry

The truth of the matter is that many private companies do work hand in hand with EMOs to provide ‘educational products’ to them as part of their ‘school management package’ which they can then take ‘on the road’ for display to districts and charter schools.

Take the Curriculum on Wheels (COWS) ‘product’ sold by Ignite!Learning. Ignite!Learning is owned and operated by former President George W. Bush’s brother, Neil Bush and was founded in 1999, just one year before the passage of No Child Left Behind. At the company’s website their is plenty of talk about Ignite!Learning’s “educational products” but noticeably teaching is never mentioned. Instead “easy to use delivery” are the words used to describe the pre-packaged curriculum promoted by the company (Ignite!Learning Website). While former president, George W. Bush, formulated and successfully passed the No Child Left Behind to promote ‘teaching to the tests’, brother Neil is busy ‘selling to the tests’. His curriculum promises higher test scores.

What Ignite!Learning does is sell a ‘computerized learning center’ with the apt acronym of COW, for Curriculum On Wheels, to school districts, charter schools and any EMO company or school wishing curriculum to add to their ‘management package’ or curriculum. Made up to look like a purple cow, the assemblage is a self contained software projector that is actually wheeled into classrooms where it uses electronically made jingles and cartoon videos to ‘deliver instruction’ to students. The teacher, or ‘classroom manager’, is reduced to running the COW. Each COW costs $3,800 and at least 13 school districts in 22 states have used No Child Left Behind monies to purchase them. The money allocated is said to be primarily intended to help disadvantaged kids learn reading and math – yet surprisingly, Neil’s COWs don’t teach either of these subjects (Hightower 2006).

Business Week noted in 2006:

Now, after five years of development and backing by investors like Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and onetime junk-bond king Michael R. Milken, Neil Bush aims to roll his high-tech teacher’s helpers into classrooms nationwide. He calls them “curriculum on wheels,” or COWs. The $3,800 purple plug-and-play computer/projectors display lively videos and cartoons: the XYZ Affair of the late 1790s as operetta, the 1828 Tariff of Abominations as horror flick. The device plays songs that are supposed to aid the memorization of the 22 rivers of Texas or other facts that might crop up in state tests of “essential knowledge (Epstein, 2006).

According to an article in the New York Times in 2007 that reviewed the company, there were problems:

The inspector general of the Department of Education, John P. Higgins Jr, said he would review the matter after a group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, detailed at least $1 million in spending from the No Child Left Behind program by school districts in Texas, Florida and Nevada to buy products made by Mr. Bush’s company, Ignite!Learning of Austin, Texas. Members of the group and other critics in Texas contend that school districts are buying Ignite’s signature product, the Curriculum on Wheels, because of political considerations. The product, they said, does not meet standards for financing under the No Child Left Behind Act, which allocates federal money to help students raise their achievement levels, particularly in elementary school reading.

Much of the product’s success in Texas dates from a March 2006 donation by Barbara Bush, who gave eight units to schools attended by large numbers of hurricane evacuees.

And so, as we saw when we looked at the No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001 by the then George W. Bush administration, in addition to emphasizing ‘public’ choice as an alternative to students in “failing” Title 1 schools, the federal budget for fiscal year 2002 allocated $200 million in grants for “expanding the number of high-quality charter schools available to students across the Nation” (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 § 5201(3)). This provided the opportunity for ‘market penetration’ on behalf of many of the privatized companies offering ‘teach to the test’ curriculums like those of Ignite!Learning. Now, with education reduced more and more to a business model, ‘delivery systems’ replaced teaching, ‘delivery platforms’ replaced classroom instruction, ‘pre-packaged curriculum’ replaced ‘teacher led conception and innovation’ and ‘students’ came to be looked at as ‘products’ to be produced. With classrooms, many of them charter schools, thanks to No Child Left Behind, now full of COWs and similar ‘educational products’, teachers no longer have to know how, let alone what to teach. They become mere instrumentalities in the commodification of education for profit. This, claim opponents, is hardly curriculum innovation and excellence, but instead resembles more of a well-coordinated division of labor that is designed to further a business model, not the education of children. More discouraging is the fact that it is being marketed in ‘low income communities’. This should be of no surprise, for as we will see, it is this burgeoning ‘sub prime’ market of children that seems to appeal to the new EMO entrepreneurs and many charter school advocates looking to make hefty profits.

So, in summary, if the fiduciary duty of a director of a corporate EMO is to maximize shareholder profit and do so by putting profits first, then how are non-shareholder ‘constituencies’, otherwise known as ‘our nation’s children and their parents’, not to mention the general public at large, to be protected under an EMO agreement? Conn answers only by noting that this protection could be afforded by explicit side contracts or regulatory schemes:

Some commentators argue that, if non-shareholder constituencies need protection, explicit contracts and regulatory statutes, rather than fiduciary duties, should determine management’s obligations (Conn 2002).

But that is the last thing free market advocates who zealously advocate deregulation and charter schools want —- more regulation or more contractual side agreements that would legally hold them responsible to government agencies. They are looking for unbridled territory free from any regulations or government constraints, and this say opponents of the idea, is the problem.

Who protects educational ‘constituencies?

The answer as to who protects educational ‘constituencies’ can be found in legal cases and constituency laws that support the notion that the nature of the corporation itself can impose upon its directors fiduciary duties of loyalty that flow to the public, for the public good, not just to the shareholders.

Let’s look first at a decision by the courts in this matter, discussed by Conn in her article in the law journal. The case involved the responsibilities of the directors and owners of a professional baseball club to their ‘constituencies’, in this case the fans. The court held that the directors of the corporation, in deciding whether to install lights for night baseball games, had a duty to consider the safety of the patrons attending night games in a deteriorating neighborhood. The court also asserted that the directors had an interest in the long-term health of the neighborhood in which their stadium was located. However, the court explicitly stated that deciding the correctness of the directors’ decision whether or not to consider these non-shareholder interests was “beyond [the court's] jurisdiction and ability.” (ibid)

In light of the court’s seeming unwillingness to grant fiduciary responsibilities to directors of corporations which would protect the public, some cities and states have passed ‘constituency statues’ that expressly spell out the fiduciary duties corporations owe to the public. The legislatures of approximately thirty states have enacted “other constituency” statutes allowing corporate directors to consider non-shareholder interests in corporate decision-making. Yet unfortunately, these statutes are merely permissive, they carry no real legal weight. Again, Conn is salient here:

Pennsylvania, one of the first states to enact an “other constituency” statute, has experienced several challenges to the statute’s constitutionality. The first occurred in a derivative action to enjoin Strawbridge and Clothier, the department store giant, from presenting to shareholders a stock reclassification plan that would have defeated a raider’s tender offer.” The court refused to grant the injunction, holding that Strawbridge directors rightly considered the potential effect a successful tender offer would have had on the company’s employees, customers, and community. More recently, application of the Pennsylvania statute was upheld in a 1996 court decision in which Conrail sought a friendly merger with CSX Corporation, rejecting a more lucrative Norfolk Southern bid that cost shareholders $1.5 billion. Conrail argued, and the court accepted, that, under the Pennsylvania statute, corporations have the right to consider constituencies other than shareholders and shareholders’ financial interests in making business decisions (ibid).

Another state, Connecticut, enacted what can be called a mandatory ‘other-constituency statute’ that attempts to compel directors to consider stakeholder or ‘constituency’ interests in decision-making but this statute has also has failed to make an impact precisely because it lacks any enforcement mechanism (ibid). So can charter schools that contract with EMOs pass constituency statutes? The answer, legally, is ‘no’ and this then begs the question of both how the schools will be run as well as who will control the decision-making in the interest of students, teachers and their parents.

In sum, case law and statutes, even other-constituency statutes make it clear that a director’s duties of loyalty, in regards to a corporate entity, flows exclusively to shareholders for the express purpose of maximization of profits. In the context of public education, the primacy of shareholder wealth maximization legally means the directors of a for-profit school-management corporation (EMO) owe fiduciary duties of loyalty to one constituency only: their shareholders. And if this is the case, which the courts have ruled it is, then students’ educational needs can simply never be legally on a par with shareholder needs and this means that EMO’s really seek to replace public governance with corporate governance, public decision-making with corporate decision-making. The corporate or independently owned business model must, by the very nature of the laws governing it as an economic and legal entity, put profits before kids. At the present time, the only response a traditional public school, charter school or a state can make in response to a non-performing for-profit EMO or single operator is to cancel its contract for malfeasance or close its charter school completely. The former requires time, hefty legal fees and devotion of staff. The latter remedy, besides leaving students in the lurch and potentially resulting in unplanned-for overcrowding in the traditional public school districts that must accept the displaced students, is simply insufficient to recover the public costs of the educational losses experienced by the students and the state and the management nightmares that entail when contracts are vitiated or cancelled. Nor does it seem to be fair.

But even assuming that advocates of corporate EMOs are right and the concept of a ‘public-private partnership’ position with EMOs is really what it is painted to be: a boon for both ‘partners’, then it begs a number of questions regarding governance, accountability, student performance, financial transfer of public funds, transparency and ultimately decision-making.

Then why EMOs?

In a later article we will look at the many of the questions and the claims made by EMOs and their supporters that the for-profit management of schools, notably charter schools, leads to higher performance by students, more efficient operations of schools and the various and sundry counterarguments to the entire notion of for-profit management of schools. However, it is suffice to say that part of the reason EMOs have gained in popularity is that school boards and superintendents often see the idea of for-profit management of schools as a an economic ‘boon’ in times of economic turbulence and amid a shortage of public funds. It is tempting for school boards and superintendents to see for-profit management firms as a quick, painless panacea for educational ills. But many educators argue that there is no such corporate driven panacea – that good schools, well designed curriculum, and excellent teaching practices have to be painstakingly built on the local level by staff and students with the support of parents and school administrators. In the end, these educators argue that the improvement of schools is the result of the hard work of school staff with administrative and parental support. Everything, these EMOs say they can do, claim opponents of the idea, has already been done in publicly run public schools; every curriculum and program these EMOs use, the argument goes, is also available for every public school in America to implement on its own without adding corporate managers and subsidizing for-profit EMOs

Couple this fact with vivacious and often heated corporate and think tank rhetoric eschewing the public management of schools and pushing for the wholesale privatization of every aspect of education, it is not hard to see how a perfect storm was created for the EMOs creation and growth in the last few decades. The media carry a great deal of blame in not critically and thoroughly covering the issue of EMOs and charter schools while promoting, uncritically, the notion of ‘public choice’. However the notion of ‘choice’ means many things to many different constituencies, but this was hardly covered by an eager media seeking to promote privatization. The public was greeted, as they have been in the private health care industry, with the idea that the more ‘choices’ they have within an unregulated, market driven economic system the better off they’ll be. Market driven organizations function far better than ‘government monopolies’, was and is the message delivered by pundits in the press and the Washington think tanks devoted to neo-liberal economics. However this is problematic for as one philosopher once said, “We all make choices but we do not all choose the circumstances under which we make them” (Marx, 2007).

There are many definitions of ‘public choice’, and the voices for the idea are diverse, as noted in chapter five. As researchers and authors, Ron Corwin and Joseph Schneider recently wrote in their book, The Charter School Hoax:

When we see the implausible claims and boasts asserted by rabid choice proponents, we always wonder who is speaking, and who is listening. We know there is more than one voice, more than one audience. Some of the fans of choice are idealistic educational reformers who honestly believe that choice will improve public education and are eagerly searching for ways to prove it. Others are cunning disciples of free markets who, under the guise of bogus pledges and unfounded allegations, have succeeded in creating publicly funded safe havens. Their rants against bureaucracy and their impossible promises were from the start devious plots to justify what amounts to a special status for select groups (Corwin and Schneider 2007, 13).

Take a recent report entitled, NCLB’s Ultimate Restructuring Alternatives: Do they Improve the Quality of Education? Author of the report, William J. Mathis Associate Professor at the University of Vermont, found that:

EMOs appeal to politicians and to some parents for many of the same reasons as state takeovers. Center city urban blight, poor building maintenance, disruption, poorly qualified teachers, safety, high dropouts and poor test scores sound a siren call. When EMO managers say they will come in and sort out corruption, throw out bad teachers, impose curricular reforms, break the union strangle-hold, dismiss the bureaucrats and save money in the process, the promise makes for a potent political message (Mathis, 2009).

And although EMOs would like to present themselves as ‘turnaround artists’ or ‘takeover artists’ whose mission is to boost test standardized scores and revolutionize the delivery of instruction by running schools for profit, many critics would shake their heads in disagreement arguing that too many public servants are being beguiled by these same corporations or privately owned for-profit businesses into believing the neo-liberal argument of market efficiency through deregulated educational competition masquerading as ‘public choice’. This is true, they say, when it comes to everything from raising test scores, organizing the workplace, hiring and firing teachers and reforming the day to day operations of education in general. In our next article we will look more critically at EMO’s and the rise of charter schools.

Maysa and Shua’a Zuabi, from the village of Sulam in northern Israel, launched the court action last week saying they had been “shocked and humiliated” when the centre’s owner told them that six Jewish parents had demanded their daughter’s removal because she is an Arab.

In the first legal action of its kind in Israel, the Zuabis are claiming $80,000 from Neta Kadshai, whom they accuse of being the ringleader.

The girl, Dana, is reported to be the first Arab child ever to attend the day-care centre in the rural Jewish community of Merhavia, less than 1km from Sulam.

However, human rights lawyers say that, given the narrow range of anti-racism legislation in Israel, the chance of success for the Zuabis is low.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has operated an education system almost entirely segregated between Jews and Arabs.

However, chronic underfunding of Arab schools means that in recent years a small but growing number of Arab parents have sought to move their children into the Jewish system.

Dana was admitted to the day-care centre last December, according to the case, after its owner, Ivon Grinwald, told the couple she had a vacant place. However, on Dana’s first day six parents threatened to withdraw their own children if she was not removed.

Ms Kadshai, in particular, is said to have waged a campaign of “slurs and efforts aimed at having [Dana] removed from the day-care centre, making it clear that [her] children would not be in the same centre as an Arab girl”. Mrs Zuabi was summoned to a meeting the same evening at which Ms Grinwald said she could not afford to lose the six children. She returned the contract Mrs Zuabi had signed and repaid her advance fees.

Mrs Zuabi said that while she was in the office Ms Grinwald received a call from Ms Kadshai again slandering Dana and demanding her removal.

Ms Grinwald refused to speak to the media last week. However, last December, when the Zuabis first complained, she told Army Radio: “The [Jewish] parents called her a girl from ‘the [Arab] sector’, they said this is a day-care centre for Jewish children and that it should stay that way … I can’t change the world, I have to look out for my livelihood.”

Although Israel lacks a constitution, the Zuabis’ lawyer, Dori Kaspi, is suing Ms Kadshai under the terms of the 1992 Basic Law on Human Freedom and Dignity, the nearest legislation Israel has to a bill of rights.

In previous cases when Arab children have been excluded from schools, the parents have launched a legal action for discrimination against the education authorities or the school itself.

Lawyers are doubtful that the couple can win given the law’s lack of reference to the principles of equality or equal opportunities.

One lawyer, who wished not to be named, said: “Instances like this are not covered by laws against discrimination. Anti-discrimination legislation in Israel is very specific, covering mainly examples of discrimination in employment and access to public places like pubs and clubs.”

Even then, the lawyer added, enforcement was extremely lax.

Instances of Arab children being denied places at Jewish kindergartens and junior schools have become more common in recent years, especially in the country’s handful of mixed cities.

Yousef Jabareen, head of Dirasat, a Nazareth-based organisation monitoring education issues, said when parents tried to switch their children to Jewish schools it was because of the poor conditions in Arab education institutions.

“Although it’s an understandable reaction, it’s a cause for concern,” he said. “In Jewish schools Arab children are not taught their language, culture or history. Their Arab identity has to be sacrificed for them to receive a decent education.”

A report published in March revealed that the government invested $1,100 in each Jewish pupil’s education compared to $190 for each Arab pupil. The gap is even wider when compared to the popular state-run religious schools, where Jewish pupils receive nine times more funding than Arab pupils.

There is also an official shortfall of more than 1,000 classrooms for Arab children, said Mr Jabareen, though Arab organisations believe the problem is in reality much worse. In addition, a significant proportion of existing Arab school buildings have been judged unsafe or dangerous to children’s health.

In some parts of the country where private religious schools are available, particularly in Nazareth and Haifa, Arab parents are turning their back on the state-run system, said Mr Jabareen.

Two-thirds of the 7,500 Arab pupils in the northern mixed city of Haifa, for example, are reported to be attending private schools, despite high levels of poverty among the population.

Last September, the Adalah legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority forced the municipality of the mixed city of Ramle, near Tel Aviv, to register an Arab boy in a Jewish kindergarten close to his home.

The mayor, Yoel Lavi, had earlier told the boy’s parents that he could not be admitted because he was an Arab and that the kindergarten served only Jewish children.

Mr Jabareen said he favoured binational and bilingual schools in which Jewish and Arab children could meet and study as equals. However, the state did not offer such schools to parents.

Four bilingual elementary schools admitting both Arab and Jewish children have been established privately. Israel has no mixed secondary schools.

Mike Prashker, director of Merchavim, an organisation advocating shared citizenship in Israel, recently told the Haaretz newspaper: “The Israeli reality of segregated education systems creates ignorance and fear of the ‘other’.”

A poll published by Haifa University in January found that three-quarters of Jewish pupils regarded Arabs as “uneducated, uncivilised and dirty”.

A recent survey by Merchavim found that the segregation among pupils was mirrored by segregation among teachers. Despite some 8,000 Arab teachers being recorded as unemployed by the education ministry, only a few dozen work in Jewish schools, mainly teaching Arabic, even though the Jewish system is suffering from staff shortages.

The previous dovish education minister Yuli Tamir established a public committee last year to develop for the first time a “shared life” policy for Jewish and Arab schools.

The committee issued its report earlier this year recommending more meetings between Jewish and Arab children, that Arabic should be taught to Jewish pupils, and that schools should employ both Arab and Jewish teachers.

The new rightwing government of Benjamin Netanyahu announced it was freezing the report in April.

For followers of the Obama administration’s troublingly business-centric education policies, the AGI follows a theme Obama has reiterated in interviews and speeches on the campaign trail and since his election. As he wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed, “Our community colleges can serve as 21st-century job training centers, working with local businesses to help workers learn the skills they need to fill the jobs of the future.”²

This theme—that community colleges should serve as job-training centers to help revitalize the economy—is a popular talking point among members of his administration. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan explained to a group of Ohio college presidents that community colleges are “an extremely important part of restoring our economy and ensuring our students can compete.”³ Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel described the community college as “literally a conveyor belt to allow people to upgrade their skills when they are going from X job to Y profession.”⁴ In addition, Jill Biden, who teaches English at Northern Virginia Community College, and serves as an administration spokeswoman promoting community colleges, told The New York Times that “’Community colleges are the way of the future ‘ […]. ‘Now with people losing their jobs, they’re a great place to go for new training.’”⁵ Even Obama’s pick of Martha Kanter, a former administrator for one of the nation’s largest community college systems, as an Education Department undersecretary was cast as a move underscoring the administration’s focus on job training: The Chronicle of Higher Education’s report on her selection was titled “Obama Pick Shows Focus on Training Work Force.”³

And this vision has ample support beyond the Beltway—from politicians, national community college organizations, community college presidents, and at least one private philanthropic organization.⁶ The Association of Community College Trustees President and CEO J. Noah Brown says, “Community colleges serve as economic engines, strengthening the fabric that binds our communities together—jobs”; the American Association of Community Colleges adds that the President’s policies will provide a “big win for [community college] job-training programs.”⁷ A recently released College Board report, “Winning the Skills Race and Strengthening America’s Middle Class: An Action Agenda for Community Colleges,” from The National Commission on Community Colleges, a group made up of ten current or former community college presidents, places job-training and workforce development at the core of the community college’s mission. The commission’s chair, Augustine P. Gallego stated, “We have to win the skills race, and we have to reply on the nation’s 1,200 community colleges to do that.”⁸

The tragic flaw in the administration’s focus on job training is that it is not a panacea for political and economic policies that have created an unfair, unequal, and unresponsive economic environment, one that has seen the wages, benefits, and standard of living of working Americans plummet.⁹ The community college should not be seen as a place to hide workers during the downturn or warehouse people who need to be able to depend on their own political agency to forge a more stable and sustainable future. The American Graduation Initiative, then, is little more than a harbinger signaling the end of the academic function and democratic ideal that the community college was designed to uphold: to provide a liberal arts education that affords all students the chance to transfer to four-year colleges and universities to earn a bachelor’s degree.¹⁰

For the Obama administration and those who support their education policies and discourse, “education” has become narrowly defined as “job training” and “workforce development.”¹¹ As a result, those attending community colleges are no longer viewed as citizens or learners (or even at times as students) but rather as economic entities, as “workers” or a “workforce.” No longer is the talk about teaching and the intellectual and social development of students, but rather about “high demand jobs,” “economic stimulus,” “training,” and “skill development.” The message repeated over and over again from politicians, community college leaders, and the media is that, with respect to the community college, what matters is job training and how quickly one completes it—and that what’s good for business and its bottom line is paramount.

Yet there is strong evidence that job training (and re-training) does not provide the economic stimulus or promote the economic equality that its proponents argue. A recent study from the Labor Department found that the benefits of the nation’s largest federal job training program were “small or nonexistent” for laid-off workers.”¹² A Detroit Free Press editorial noted on the day of the President’s visit to Macomb Community College that focusing on job training is “not a bad idea on its face. But Michigan has emphasized job retraining for months, if not years now—and yet people keep losing their jobs, even in supposedly hot fields such as health care.”¹³ Bruce Fuller took this argument even further, writing in the New York Times that “Politicians’ obsessions with making schools and college more vocational in character are unlikely to lift the economy,” citing research from the University of Chicago showing that “today’s workers don’t need vocational skills, they need better ‘non-cognitive’ skills—like the capacity to communicate effectively or to cooperatively solve problems.”¹⁴

What’s absent in the Obama administration’s education policies and discourse is acknowledgment of the community college’s academic and collegiate mission—that is, the role of the community college in providing a liberal arts education that teaches and encourages students to become informed and engaged citizens in a democratic society.¹⁵ By definition a liberal arts education requires courses in a broad number of subjects in the arts and sciences as opposed to the very narrow subject matter of training.¹⁶ In the community college, these would be the general education courses traditionally offered in the first and second years of college, courses in American government, U.S. and World History, psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, art history, and English courses involving writing and English and American literature. A liberal arts education teaches students that learning and knowledge itself is inherently valuable rather than simply a set of skills to be mastered for a particular job. Clearly a liberal arts education is not a cure-all for the country’s societal ills. But as Robert Reich told Bill Moyers, “There is no substitute for an active, informed citizenry.”¹⁷ In fact, it is an informed and engaged citizenry, and not jobs, that binds a community together.

The AGI also ignores the fact that a vast majority of students entering the community college directly from high school have the stated intention of transferring to a four-year institution to earn a bachelor’s degree. For them, attending a community college isn’t about getting a certificate or training for a job. That so few community college students, particularly low-income or minority students, actually ever transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree should be the focus of administration education policies.¹⁸

The very idea of getting an education is not to serve someone else or their interests but to identify and serve our own. John Dewey made this a cornerstone of what makes education socially viable as opposed to the views of those such as Charles Prosser, or his modern day equivalent, Charles Murray, who advocate for the separation of vocational training and education. It would be objectionable in any set of economic and political circumstances to limit the educational opportunities of students, particularly students who don’t have access to the country’s most elite four-year colleges and universities, but it is most objectionable in a time where training leads nowhere. What jobs, exactly, are these students supposed to train for? Who can say with any degree of certainty what jobs will be in demand in five years, let alone ten? Or as an economist recently told Michael Luo of the New York Times in the story “Job Training May Fall Short of High Hopes,” “I can’t tell you with any degree of certainty, and I have been doing it for 20 years, what the hot jobs are going to be.”¹²

Instead of being educated to make informed choices of their own, community college students are being thrown back into dependent and subservient positions in an economic moment of unequaled peril. Instead of being educated to insert themselves into the political process of restructuring a society of fair values and green energy, they are being trained to stay out of the way and hope that their wages, which haven’t kept pace with corporate profits, will be enough to feed their children.¹⁹

Simply put, job training and workforce development is indoctrination. It is not education. It has no socially constructive or just outcome, particularly at a time of upheaval and uncertainty. It is a failure of everything that a liberal arts education contributes to a just and democratic society.

Job training will not change the corrupt values of Wall Street or bridge the gap in wealth that has grown from unseemly to grotesque.²⁰ The argument currently being made that people need jobs, any jobs, first and that justice and political enfranchisement can wait is backward. The way forward for those just entering higher education and for the millions of displaced workers is not another dead end or soon-to-be outsourced under-paid job with few or no benefits. The way forward is an educational system grounded in ideas of social justice and democracy.

Community colleges are perhaps the last bastion of democratic higher education in this country. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 95 percent of community colleges are open admission, and when compared to four-year institutions, they enroll larger percentages of nontraditional, low-income and minority students.¹⁸ Depending how students are counted, community colleges enroll anywhere from 35 percent to nearly 50 percent of all undergraduates and in the current economic crisis their enrollments are soaring despite cuts in state and local funding.²¹ With four-year institutions becoming more and more expensive to attend and out of reach for even middle class families,²² the community college continues to offer an affordable, realistic alternative.

President Obama is right: Community colleges matter; they are vital in any economy. But not as an economic refuge. They’re vital as institutions and spaces whose mission must be to foster the democratic ideal of providing an education that offers students from all backgrounds the chance to realize their full potential as human beings.

1. “Remarks by the President on “The American Graduation Initiative,” Macomb Community College, Warren, MI, July 14, 2009.
2. Barack Obama, “Rebuilding Something Better,” Washington Post, July 12, 2009.
3. Kelly Field, “Obama Pick Shows Focus on Training Work Force,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 10, 2009.
4. David Moltz, “Building Up Job Training,” Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2009.
5. Matthew Saltmarsh, “Jill Biden Says Community Colleges Are a Key U.S. Export,” New York Times, July 8, 2009.
6. Scott Jaschik, “Gates Foundation to Spend Big on Community Colleges,” Inside Higher Ed, November 12, 2008.
7. “In Tough Times, Colleges to Spotlight Economic Ties,” Community College Times, November 24, 2008; Megan Eckstein, “Community Colleges See Stimulus Bill as Bonanza for Their Students,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2009.
8. Elyse Ashburn, “Community colleges are Key to Shoring Up the U.S. Economy, Report Says,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2008.
9. David Walsh, “A Rising Tide of Social Misery,” World Socialist Web Site, July 16, 2009.
10. See Arthur M. Cohen and Florence B. Brawer, The Collegiate Function of Community Colleges, Jossey-Bass, 1987; Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream, Oxford University Press, 1989; Kevin J. Dougherty, The Contradictory College, State University of New York Press, 1994; and John S. Levin et al., Community College Faculty at Work, Palgrave, 2006.
11. Washington’s emphasis on job training and its seeming disregard for the liberal arts did not start with the Obama Administration. In citing her reasons for resigning from the Margaret Spellings-led Department of Education, Diane Auer Jones noted that the department was involved in a “misguided attempt to really narrow the focus of higher education and to almost vocationalize all of higher education.” In Paul Basken, “Liberal Arts Undervalued by Education Department, Official Says After Quitting,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2008. Proof? “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” a report of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education makes no mention of the liberal arts.
12. Michael Luo, “Job Retraining May Fall Short of High Hopes,” New York Times, July 6, 2009.
13. “Above all, Mr. President, Michigan needs promise of jobs,” Editorial, Detroit Free Press, July 14, 2009.
14. Bruce Fuller, “Why We Educate Our Children,” New York Times, October 22, 2008.
15. Unfortunately, few voices within the community college have publicly questioned Obama administration education policies and the social implications of the community college essentially assuming the role of a trade school with little, if any regard, for the liberal arts and critical literacy. Two such voices are Sean A. Fanelli, the president of Nassau Community College in New York and David Berry, executive director of the Community College Humanities Association. For Fanelli, “The situation for the humanities at two-year colleges may only worsen [... ] as politicians and business leaders turn to community colleges to help revive the economy without regard for the important role the liberal arts play in educating students.” See Jeffrey J. Selingo, “2-Year Colleges Worry That Job Training May Displace the Humanities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, 2009. Berry has expressed concern “that the traditional function of teaching core subjects and the humanities can be overshadowed” by the emphasis on workforce development. See Andy Guess, “A Humanities Push for Community Colleges,” Inside Higher Ed, January 14, 2008.
16. The role of a liberal arts education in four-year institutions, including at the traditional liberal arts college, is also under attack with more and more four-year institutions feeling pressured to offer job training. See “Victor E. Ferrall Jr., “Can Liberal Arts Colleges Be Saved,” Inside Higher Ed, Februrary 11, 2008; Patricia Cohen, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” New York Times, February 25, 2009; Peter Schmidt, “Number of Colleges That Fit the ‘Liberal Arts’ Mold is Falling Study Finds,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 2009.
17. Interview with Robert Reich, Bill Moyers Journal, PBS, June 12, 2009.
18. Stephen Provasnik and Michael Planty, “Community Colleges: Special Supplement to The Condition of Education 2008,” U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, August 2008.
19. Jeanne Sahadi, “Workers Lose Traction Over Past 10 Years,” CNNMoney.com, September 2, 2006.
20. Sahadi, “Wealth Gap Widens,” CNNMoney.com, August 29, 2006.
21. Valerie Strauss, “Community Colleges See Demand Spike, Funding Slip,” Washington Post, July 1, 2009.
22. Andy Kroll, “Shut Out: How the Cost of Higher Education Is Dividing Our Country,” TomDispatch.com, April 2, 2009.

Officials announced last week that they were sending out special “national anthem kits” to 8,000 schools, including those in the separate Arab education system, in time for the start of the new academic year in September.

The kits have been designed to be suitable for all age groups and for use across the curriculum, from civics and history classes to music and literature lessons.

The anthem, known as Ha-Tikva, or The Hope, has long been unpopular with Israel’s Arab minority because its lyrics refer only to a Jewish historical connection to the land.

Mr Saar’s initiative is widely seen among Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens as a further indication of the rising nationalistic tide sweeping policymakers.

Last week the ministry also announced that textbooks recently issued to Arab schoolchildren would have expunged the word “nakba”, or catastrophe, to describe the Palestinians’ dispossession at Israel’s founding in 1948.

Hala Espanioly, who chairs the education committee of the Arab minority’s supreme political body, the Higher Follow-Up Committee, told the Israeli news website Ynet: “If there is an attempt to force the Ha-Tikva anthem on Arab schools and Arab pupils, it will be akin to a kind of attempted rape of their identity.”

The issue of the national anthem, based on a 120-year-old poem by Naftali Hertz Imber and an ancient folk melody, has been a running sore between Israel’s Jewish and Arab populations for decades.

Arab citizens are unhappy with its heavily Zionist lyrics, which speak of how the “soul of a Jew yearns” to return to Zion, as well as referring to “The hope of two thousand years, To be a free nation in our land”.

In 2005 some legislators were outraged when an Israeli parliamentary committee considered, among possible constitution changes, revising the anthem’s lyrics from “the soul of a Jew’” to “the soul of an Israeli”. The change was not approved.

Mr Saar, then an ordinary politician, led the opposition to changing the lyrics: “In two words: definitely not. I wouldn’t make any changes to Ha-Tikva. It would be a compromise on the state’s identity.”

The refusal of prominent Arabs to sing the anthem in public has provoked several notable controversies.

The most high-profile concerned Raleb Majadele, of the Labor party, who was appointed Israel’s first Arab cabinet minister in 2007. In an interview he said that, though he always stood during Ha-Tikva, he drew the line at singing it.

He later defended his position to Israeli radio: “Where is it written that a person appointed to be a cabinet minister in Israel must stop being an Arab, and turn into a member of a different religion and ethnicity?”

Arab players in Israel’s national football squad have also admitted being uncomfortable during the playing of the anthem before games. TV broadcasts often zoom in to show that their lips are not moving.

Abir Kupty, today an elected official with the Nazareth municipality, produced one of Israeli TV’s most talked-about moments four years ago when she was filmed sitting down when the anthem was played. She was the only Arab contestant in a show to find Israel’s future leaders.

Ms Kupty said: “This decision by the education ministry is part of the current hysterical right-wing mood in Israel. They hope they can erase our Palestinian identity by making us love the anthem.”

She added that Arab pupils were already deprived of the chance to learn about their own history, culture and identity. “The curriculum in Arab schools is heavily controlled by Jewish officials and by the security services.”

Sofia Yoad, the education ministry’s director of curriculum development, said the anthem kits included a book and two CDs containing 40 historic recordings of Hatikva, including it being sung in a concentration camp and at the Declaration of Independence.

“It is very important to learn about the national anthem even if pupils are not Jewish,” she said. “After all, this is the story of a country’s independence.”

Astrith Baltsan, a pianist who researched and wrote the book over three years, said she had originally been commissioned to produce it for Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations last year.

But when Mr Saar saw it, she said, he had been keen to use it in all schools. She added that, when she played the anthem at a ministry launch party last week, even the Arab schools inspectors stood. “When you know the story of the anthem, you show it respect,” she said.

The Higher Follow-Up Committee, a national political body representing Israel’s Arab minority, has staunchly opposed the use of the kits. It wrote last week to Mr Saar, warning that the initiative would “only deepen the alienation of Arab students and teachers”.

Figures released by the education ministry this month show that only 32 per cent of Arab students passed their matriculation exam last year, compared to 60 per cent of Jewish students. The pass rate was a dramatic drop from the 50.7 per cent of Arab pupils who matriculated in 2006.

Yousef Jabareen, head of Dirasat, a Nazareth-based organisation monitoring education issues, blamed the poor results on growing cultural bias in the Israeli education system as well as severe budgetary discrimination.

He said the increasing weight placed on Jewish heritage and Judaism lessons put Arab pupils at a severe disadvantage, and that further alienation was caused by the state’s refusal to allow the Arab education system any autonomy in selecting its own curriculum.

A report published in March, he added, showed that the government invested $1,100 in each Jewish pupil’s education compared to $190 for each Arab pupil. There was also a shortfall of more than 1,000 classrooms for Arab students.

Mr Jabareen pointed out that a committee appointed last year by the dovish previous education minister, Yuli Tamir, had recommended curriculum reforms to encourage a “shared life” and common values among pupils, including more frequent encounters between Jewish and Arab students.

In April Mr Saar quashed the committee’s report.

Opposition to the study of Ha-Tikva is shared by ultra-religious Jews known as the Haredim. They believe the anthem should include a reference to God in the lyrics, and have proposed an alternative entitled HaEmunah.

In lectures about the United States’ system of white supremacy and the privileges that white people have in that system, I have sometimes told a story about being stopped by police in Austin, TX.

I was driving home in a dilapidated old Volkswagen Beetle on a busy street, late at night after a long day at work. I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, feeling rather cranky and looking rather raggedy. Eager to get home, I saw the yellow light and gunned it. Next I saw the flashing red lights of a police car.

I turned off onto a dark side street and dug in my wallet for my license. Just as the officer got to my car, I was opening the glove compartment to get the vehicle registration when out popped a small knife I keep for emergencies. I looked at the knife, looked at the white officer, and wondered what he would say.

“Sir, would you mind if I held that knife while we talked?” he asked politely. I handed him the knife and my documents, and he walked back to his car. When he returned he handed me those documents, along with a ticket, and my knife, without comment. “Please drive safely,” he said. And safely I drove home.

When I told that story to illustrate white privilege, I asked people of color in the room what they imagined might have happened to them in such a situation. The black and Latino men, especially, laughed. “Do you mean before or after I’m on the ground with a gun at my head?” one of them said.

My point was not that every cop is out to harass or brutalize every person of color, but that people of color could never be sure a routine traffic stop would play out routinely. I could be reasonably sure that, barring unusual circumstances, such a stop would be uneventful. Even when the knife popped out, I didn’t feel at risk.

I was feeling proud of myself for making this point to the mainly white audience, when I saw a hand go up. I called on the young black man, assuming he would endorse my analysis.

“You really don’t get it, do you?” he said. “You think your privilege started when the cop came up to the car and saw you were white. Has it ever occurred to you that when you turned onto a dark side street you were taking your privilege for granted?”

My first response was to explain: I had been on a busy street and turned to avoid blocking traffic. I was trying to be considerate of other drivers, I said.

“I know why you did it. My point is that I would never turn onto an unlit street with a cop behind me,” the young man said. “I would have pulled over and blocked traffic. I’m not going to take myself out of public view with a cop.”

My next response was to feel appropriately foolish for my unwarranted self-righteousness, and then to be grateful to the man for using that teachable moment.

He wasn’t suggesting that I be ashamed of myself, only that I recognize the burden he carries in the world that I don’t. The story was one more example of the privilege that comes with being a member of the dominant group in an unjust hierarchical system. It’s the same lesson men should learn about the sexual violence women face. Heterosexuals should learn it about the condemnation that lesbians and gays endure. The wealthy should learn it about the insecurity that poor and working people cope with. U.S. citizens should learn it about the fear of arbitrary authority that haunts immigrants no matter what their status.

I still tell that story when I lecture, now emphasizing that the man’s comments had reminded me no one with privilege ever fully “gets it.” It doesn’t mean we whites — or men, or heterosexuals, or the well off, or citizens — are consigned to perpetual stupidity, but rather that we should never think we have it all figured out.

In this allegedly “post-racial” era, these teachable moments are an important reminder that white supremacy is woven deeply into the fabric of this country. A system as perverse and pervasive as white racism — in all its forms, conscious and unconscious, brutal and subtle, personal and institutional — will not end simply because we appoint black professors or elect a black president.

In this moment, we white folks should ask ourselves, after so many teachable moments, why we still have so much to learn.

Education is touted as field where the hardest working and most talented students will rise to the top. Examining this, Robbins with Joe Bishop wrote “Accountability Legerdemain and the Intensification of Inequality.” The writers questioned the supposed meritocracy within education by noting the inequality of conditions among students.

Robbins explores the inequality of conditions further in his book Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling (SUNY: 2008).¹ Robbins raises consciousness over the direction neoliberals and neoconservatives are steering education – a direction that further marginalizes and excludes the poor and people of color.

At the end of George Bush’s term, the economic devastation wrought by the Bush administration’s neoliberal policies grabbed headlines. The 2008 election saw a shift from George Bush, a president of expelling hope, to Barack Obama, a president who audaciously encourages hope. I interviewed Robbins by email about what this means for the policy of zero tolerance within education.

Kim Petersen: In your article “Accountability Legerdemain and the Intensification of Inequality,” you wrote of the illusion of a meritocracy and the unfairness of standardized tests. One solution you looked at was an educational handicapping index. Within this index was a proposed teacher quality index. I wonder how this could be objective? Do not teachers have different conditions under which they became teachers and under which they operate as teachers? So shouldn’t there also be a handicapping index in the determination of a teacher’s quality?

Christopher Robbins: My co-author and I provided the idea of a handicapping index as only a slight attempt at showing one type of mechanism by which the standardization process and the push for national outcomes could be made moderately fairer, given the wildly different community contexts in which schools operate, teachers (attempt to) teach, and students (attempt to) learn. Notice I said “fairer,” not “objective.” At some level, none of the processes and practices associated with “accountability” can be objective because the proposed or intended outcomes, and the motivations driving the definition of certain outcomes, that “accountability” processes are to meet are patently non-objective. These outcomes are defined largely by players outside of public schools, and these players–for instance, groups like the Business Roundtable, National School Boards Association, and the National Governors’ Association and other hardly social justice-minded groups that have come out in early support of national standards –have vested and more often than not concentrated interests in defining, solidifying, and legitimating outcomes that narrowly serve their interests in producing numerate and minimally literate workers who will be compliant, or in Foucault’s terms “docile,” having basic skills and dispositions amenable to being shaped and sharpened by employers. It is quite possible that teachers, students, parents, and their wider communities might have some interests in the definition and achievement of some outcomes that overlap with those preferred by the corporate or government communities. Yet, this is something we cannot really know since teachers, students, parents, or even researchers, who work with teachers, students, and parents, haven’t typically been prominent contributors to National Governors’ Association or Business Roundtable meetings. The increased emphases on technical, as opposed to critical, literacy and math, and the woefully inadequate, if not non-existent, emphasis put on civic education and the social sciences that have been attendant to No Child Left Behind (the current avatar of the accountability movement) were not incidental or “unintended” consequences of recent accountability efforts. Further, since these groups often operate on crass cost-efficiency models, outcomes and the processes involved in meeting them must be both easily manipulated and measurable in “objective” or “scientific” ways that rely on the least amount of labor as possible. It is costly and difficult to measure students’ interpretations of and engagement with political events or their ability to use “traditional” academic skills to address pressing community problems of interest to them. But beyond being costly and difficult to measure, these sorts of possible educational outcomes are simply anathema to the interests of the various groups that are behind the “accountability” movement. What’s more, as scholars as varied as Paul Street, Alex Molnar, Kenneth Saltman, and David Berliner and Bruce Biddle have pointed out in various ways, the accountability movement and the processes associated with it are really not about achieving objectivity and transparency in formal education; they are about controlling formal education for arbitrary ends, when they are not about undermining the public school system.

I realize that I have talked around your question. The simple answer is that producing a handicapping index for teacher quality and teacher training, much like the handicapping index for measuring student “achievement,” would not be objective. It could give the illusion of objectivity. Because of having apprehensions about the value of such a positivist understanding of objectivity and the potential mis/uses to which it could be put, we would be wary of applying this handicapping index to teacher quality. And, really, the larger points we were making in that short paper concerned two things: the civic purposes of public schools and the longstanding existence of social inequality. How can, and how does, “accountability” account for these things?

Yet, there is another issue involved here. My co-author and I also used the handicapping index example as a way to point to the absurdity and waste of these standardization attempts. To do standardization in even a remotely fair way would cost incredible amounts of money and take considerable amounts of intellectual and social energy, and this would achieve what? One of the effects of these processes would be the further delimiting or closing of educational and social possibilities. Paulo Freire, Roger Simon, and Henry Giroux have written eloquently and prolifically about education being about possibility. If education is not about the opening of self- and social possibilities and alternative ways of being in the world, then what is it about? In a different vein, John Dewey talked about democracy as being creative democracy, one that is continually unfinished, open to new questions, capable of responding to adversity and rapid change in ways that are fair and allow for people to have as much control as possible over the basic affairs that govern their everyday lives. He was also steadfast in his beliefs about pedagogical practices being produced and elaborated in ways that would allow for such a democracy to come into being by providing agents, or citizens, with opportunities to practice and develop the skills and produce relationships capable of supporting such a democracy. Such a view puts a high premium on capacious educational practices—inside and outside of schools. If most, if not all, of the outcomes of and questions about formal education are given, heteronomously, in advance, possibility is significantly reduced. If our energies and relationships are diverted to controlling, rather than opening, educational practices and getting lost in the euphoria of statistical orgies that will allegedly represent our efforts in “objective” ways, then defining, articulating, and working toward other possibilities will become extremely difficult.

KP: You wrote Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling while George Bush was president. In this book you wrote that a culture of punishment attendant to zero tolerance society was denying a section of American youth the right to an education, especially poor youth and youth of color. Now that Barack Obama, a president of color, sits in the Whitehouse, do you see any indications of change in the zero tolerance policy?

CR: Yes, I see the policy and its attendant practices possibly becoming further normalized. What with all the subterfuge about both his candidacy and presidency being evidence about the existence of colorblindness in the U.S., a racial state from top to bottom, people might have more reason to say, “Black kids are disproportionately kicked out of school because they are dangerous or disruptive. This is not about racism. We have a Black president after all, don’t we?” and then tautologically point to the exclusion rates as proof rather than have impetus to point to a racial logic built into the policy of zero tolerance, the culture of schooling, and the structure of U.S. society. When zero tolerance was passed as part of the Gun Free Schools Act (1994), government officials (and their constituents) readily supported it because it was seen as a response to an “urban” (read: Black) problem that was threatening suburban whites. We would do well to remember that more than 1 in 2 whites who voted casted their votes for someone other than Obama. Many of these people work in or for schools, or they have children in schools, or they sit on school boards. Why or how would Obama being president immediately or automatically change the ways these people interpret the behaviors of certain children and youth?

We would also do well to look at his appointment to the position of Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at a time when racial disproportionality in both school exclusions and the criminalization and militarization of schools in CPS did not decrease, but stayed the same or increased. As I pointed out in a footnote in my book, “zero tolerance” could be seen as the logic that underpinned Bush’s unprecedented foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes; under the current administration, warfare has increased, not decreased, in places that are coded as racially other, perpetuating a war that A. Sivanandan has defined as a “xeno-racist” war, a war that is framed and conducted in ways that vacillate between xenophobic and racist motivations and appeals. If we see evidence of “zero tolerance” at play in the highest reaches of foreign policy and obviously costly military affairs, why would we see a waning of zero tolerance at lower levels of society? What’s more, if we look at the issue of zero tolerance in wider terms, we might see connections between ongoing militarization and zero tolerance in public schools. Study after study shows that zero tolerance is most frequently applied to non-violent social behaviors in schools and districts that are, in policyspeak, “economically distressed.” Many authors point to larger class sizes, lack of curricular resources, and under-qualified teachers as factors involved in the disproportionate use of zero tolerance in schools serving communities marginalized by class and color. As we continue to allocate roughly ten times more to defense spending than we do to education spending, it becomes increasingly difficult to undo the underlying conditions that either inform disruptive behavior or encourage teachers and school officials to almost automatically resort to zero tolerance as the solution to the symptoms of deep social and economic problems in their schools and communities. Combine these factors with the renewal of NCLB and its hyper-focus on testing and “annual yearly progress,” something on which certain groups or types of students have been perceived as a drag, and we will continue to see the corrosive effects of zero tolerance in the disproportionate exclusion of poor students and students of color from public schools.

At the same time, there is much more to the picture. GFSA (1994) was/is defined in relatively inane ways. This, the federal version of zero tolerance, was/is defined in fairly straightforward terms that merely inscribed in law policies that most, if not all, schools had had in place for years: students cannot possess firearms, weapons (or drugs) in school or on school transports, without being met with exclusion. The problem is that because public schooling is defined as a states’ rights issue, states crafted policies that not only maintained, by legal fiat, the language of the federal policy, but they also expanded on the language. The process then occurred again at the district/school level, which was then only propounded by educational officials’ mis/comprehension of the local/state/federal policy and their varying interpretations of student behaviors. Zero tolerance is applied with almost as much zeal to weapons possession as it is to asthma inhalers, midriff shirts, and do-rags in many districts. So, on this level, Obama is really ancillary at best to efforts at reducing the power and pervasiveness of zero tolerance in public schools. Zero tolerance has become routinized in particular ways at the level of culture and everyday school politics. This is where work on zero tolerance needs to take place.

KP: Do you see any change in the policy of color blindness?

CR: Unfortunately, my hopes in this regard are tempered. On the one hand, the image of a president of color in a racial state is promising. If anything, it is potential evidence of possible subterranean shifting at work in culture and politics. On the other hand, a president of color in a racial state is faced with practical political challenges. How does such a president advance progressive policy, which ostensibly would help communities of color, without being tagged for advancing the interests of his “race?” Just because the U.S. has a president of color, does that mean, despite the whiff of transformative interests found in his rhetoric, he or his administration is actually progressive? Did voters and do citizens have concrete, substantive evidence that this is the case, that this administration is explicitly concerned with addressing very significant problems that have been exacerbated by color blind discourse, problems like wildly disproportionate incarceration rates, drastically different infant mortality rates across racial lines, divergent employment rates, segregated schooling…?

Yet, we must be clear about how color blindness operates. Color blindness is a slippery and, in many ways now, a strong discourse. It is slippery, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has pointed out, because it operates in a “now you see it, now you don’t” way. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Dissident Voice on the racial politics that ensued after Michael Richards’s (aka “Kramer’s”) racist outburst at the Laugh Factory, where he unleashed a tirade of racist vitriol reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. While such behavior is obviously reprehensible, it is not entirely unpredictable, even if it is currently infrequently seen in public spaces. However, the media’s response to this incident ignored all of the social, cultural, political, and economic evidence of a very color-conscious society and government. Somehow, the Katrina tragedy, only a year before Richards’s outburst, produced questions about whether race actually still mattered in the U.S. but, if one had taken the media’s response to Richards at face value, one would have been encouraged to think that racism was merely the aberration of a minority of deranged individuals rather than a deeply-rooted system of advantage and disadvantage built into the state, the market, and civil society. We continued to see this sort of slipperiness at play in the nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and in the confirmation hearing s that followed. After how many years of having predominantly white men sit on the court, who presumably were chosen because of their political and philosophical orientations which, in part, are the products of their cultural (and racial) capital, mainstream and reactionary media suddenly had concerns about racial ideology seeping into law because of Sotomayor’s ethnicity! So, strangely enough, this response was seen as “color blind” when pundits were obviously seeing “race” as a possible determining variable in Sotomayor’s potential deliberations. Many seemed so concerned with maintaining (the illusion of) color blindness that they felt it was necessary to focus debate about Sotomayor’s nomination on race. See, there is race, and we are concerned with it, but we’re really talking about law, not race. “Now you see it, now you don’t.”

Color blindness can be seen as a strong discourse because of the predominance it holds over public discourse on race. What’s the alternative to color blindness? Color consciousness? After almost a solid 30 years of being browbeaten with the idea that we are color blind, how fashionable or politically viable is it to be color conscious, even if some of the most pressing social, political, and economic problems in the U.S. are underpinned by racial politics? Just think, given contemporary discourse and politics surrounding race, how surreal it would seem if a candidate of any race were to run on a racial justice platform. And, when we refer back to the “concerns” about race involved in the nomination of Sotomayor, this is really a peculiar and disturbing discourse. The Supreme Court is seen as the penultimate symbol of justice in the U.S. The strength of color blind discourse in this case is its ability to frame color consciousness, one element of many involved in producing more justice in a racialized society, as something that is unfair, unjust or, seemingly in this case, worse—“un-American.”

KP: If the educational opportunities of some individuals or groups continue to be denied, what are the future ramifications for those denied and society?

CR: I recently had a conversation with a military official where this concern emerged in reference to the (disproportionate) militarization of poor and urban public schools through things like the JROTC. My concerns with exclusion, criminalization, and militarization in public schools are all informed by similar assumptions. Given the inordinate commercialization of society and the corporate stranglehold over information at this point in time, public schools, more than ever, need to be struggled over, as Ken Saltman and Henry Giroux argue, as “sites and stakes” in democracy and democratic public life. The vitality and future of democratic public life and political culture in the U.S. are seriously threatened when children and youth are denied opportunities to develop the skills, languages, and relationships central to democracy. This threat is only propounded when the skills, languages, relationships, and conditions for developing civic agency are so unevenly distributed among groups in society. I am not solipsistic about these ideas or ideals. Public schools never effectively or concertedly operated in the interests of a strong, creative, or radical democracy. However, they nonetheless always had a weak charge given to them to provide the basic skills required for participation in political processes. This was a charge given to public schools by Horace Mann, considered the founding architect of U.S. mass public schooling and hardly a radical. We can say with some certainty that Disney, TimeWarner/Aol, Viacom, NewsCorps, and GE/NBC won’t provide the ingredients fundamental to democracy. So, given the current institutional arrangements in society, where else beside in schools, operating in coordination with grassroots and advocacy groups, can concerned educators begin to develop the relationships, and struggle over the wider conditions, that make democracy possible?

We are already seeing the evidence of the disproportionate provision of educational opportunity. We can look to statistics on military enlistment rates and from what social classes enlistees came, how much education they had upon when enlisting, and their motivations for enlisting. We can also look at our massive prison-industrial complex, the indisputable world leader of such complexes. Our prison population nearly tripled between 1990 and 2002, largely as a consequence to the then newly crafted drug laws and sentencing policies, petty, non-violent crime, and laws surrounding social behaviors. A large percentage of people sentenced for crimes during this time period were un- or under-employed in the year before they were arrested for their alleged crimes. Many, too, had comparatively lower amounts of education. Clearly, all of the education in the world will not get people jobs if the jobs do not exist, but education is certainly helpful in allowing one to compete for existing jobs.

Further, various studies have pointed out that schooling plays at least an indirect role in various life chances, choices, and outcomes: where/if one will go to college, what fields one will pursue, one’s political orientation, and even people’s marriage choices or choices of life partners. Education also plays an indirect role in where one might live, which other recent studies have shown to be correlated with life expectancy. Unevenly allocating educational opportunity can only create uneven outcomes in these and various other areas. Such unevenness on these socio-economic indicators threatens democracy in a couple of ways. It reduces the range of choices and resources available to people, and it does so, as Pierre Bourdieu argued in the 1970s, through “objective” means and, being “objective,” make it very difficult for people to legitimately contest unequal outcomes, if they were to be so audacious to contest “objective” processes and practices in the first place. It also creates the conditions in which different groups of people are educated in fundamentally different ways, if at all, about civic life. It’s interesting to read Horace Mann’s “Report No. 12 to the Massachusetts School Board” from 1848 and see the consequences he predicted would result from failing to produce a coherent schooling system that focused on political education: the rich and poor inhabiting distinctly different social, political, and even moral universes; the installation of feudalism under a different name; seething, if not mass, social tension and possible unrest; inclination to resort to violence as opposed to politics; and a dysfunctional government, among many other things. Sadly, these imagined consequences hardly seem like rhetorical excess 160 years later.

KP: You see “a critical, educated hope” as a necessary “guiding force” toward “reconstituting the democratic legacy of public schooling and the promise of a democratic future.” Obama took the mantle of the presidential candidate of hope. Do you see a “critical, educated hope” present?

CR: Given the available evidence to date, I see a narrowly, that is, ideologically-driven, pragmatic hope, which is a contradiction of terms. Pragmatism alleges to be non-ideological. Its currently vogue version goes kind of like the following: Let’s take some of the evidence we can put our fingertips on (e.g., in the healthcare hearings in the Senate finance committee, no supporters of the single-payer option were invited to the table), look at the very immediate situation, see what tools we have at our disposal, apply those tools in the least “partisan” (which seems to translate into the most market-friendly) way, and hope they will get us through this or that situation, and we will come happily out on the other side as post-partisan and post-political drones. But, how is this not ideological, or how can it avoid becoming ideological? Isn’t it ideological to say we are moving beyond politics to being “practical” and “pragmatic?” Isn’t democratic politics a vehicle that can allow us to address “practical” but albeit sometimes complex and messy social and economic questions? More importantly, how is such a pusillanimously pragmatic hope not short-sighted? Doesn’t hope require social and political vision, something that allows us to imagine and practice into being a future that does not repeat the present, one that Ernst Bloch said would always be not-yet?

It also seems that questions and questioning would play central roles in a critical, educated hope. Questions, especially needling ones about things that we would prefer not to talk about or ones that others unremittingly try to convince us are “just the ways things are,” perform critical work in bringing a more humane future into being by drawing attention to strategic silences in political discourse and denaturalizing the socially produced phenomena that the powerful would wish to be seen as the consequences of the mere unfolding of the natural order. Questioning, as Cornelius Castoriadis and Zygmunt Bauman have argued, is central to not only hope but also justice: A democratic society is one that is able to continually question not only its existing institutions, but also the assumptions involved in the construction and maintenance of those institutions. A democratic society is one that never asks enough questions about justice, justice already produced, and justice that could be produced. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, a democratic society is never “just enough.” A society that can no longer or that does not any longer question itself stops being a democratic society. Justice and hope seem to be connected, in this regard, by a culture of critical questioning. Our ability to produce more justice and hope for more justice relies, in part, on our capacities to question the basic values informing, and institutions legitimating, our social relationships.

In my estimation, I don’t see enough questioning, or at least appropriate questioning, by people properly situated, about the basic assumptions and relationships organizing our society, for there to be a critical, educated hope. Just think about the questions that have animated government responses to the financial meltdown. Politicians have made exhaustive attempts to repeatedly assure us (and their constituents in the business community) that government interventions are aimed to recuperate the “free market “ and the “enterprising spirit” that “so marks America,” as if these were the assurances many of us wanted to hear. See, these responses are the result of an inability to ask questions about given institutional arrangements; the only questions that could be publicly asked so far are of the following sort, “Given the existing crisis, how can we recuperate a free market order, or at least one that is favorable to concentrated corporate interest?” The assumption is that the “free market” philosophy and its attendant institutions were not the problem; it was the excesses of a few bad apples. We have heard this rationale before, haven’t we? Or, we can look at the limited public conversations and debates about contemporary education policy. These debates typically operate on the assumption that all that we have is all that can be achieved; we just need to do some tweaking or twittering here and there on accountability issues. When Duncan first announced interests in national standards, for instance, he obviously assumed that NCLB and the philosophy and sociology that drove it are generally sound; in his words, “There are some problems in the policy…”, not that the policy itself was/is a problem.

All of this, however, is not a rallying cry for hopelessness. I retain hope that people are more complex and complicated than politicians assume them to be. I also retain hope that people, being human, are unfinished, much like the circumstances in which they find themselves and, in part, help produce. The pedagogical question here, one that Paulo Freire asked a long time ago and others have asked since, is, how do we create conditions in which people can recognize their unfinished-ness and how can such a recognition be used to mobilize efforts to create and support social relationships and institutions that open us to a more democratic future rather than foreclose it from us, reduce social suffering rather than exacerbate it, expand justice rather than unevenly apply it.

1. See review

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

– Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816

When Thomas Jefferson refers to a state of civilization, one assumes he has his own in mind; that is western civilization, of course. Why, then, should an ignorant nation never expect to know freedom? Perhaps, as he penned this letter to Charles Yancey, Jefferson had in the back of his head the approximately 6,000 years of scorched earth policies that, within this state, were perpetrated by and for the vector of western progress. The institutions comprising western civilization, he concluded, predisposed agents of history to depravity and conquest. Therefore, it must be so, that the people enjoy the fruits of access to the voluminous amount of data available during any given epoch. Abraham Lincoln, while in office, echoed his forbearer, saying “let the people know the truth and the country is safe.” Like never before do the masses have access to a wealth of information. Many key players in the political and corporate arenas, recognizing this, are positioning themselves and events so as to make a case for further restriction of the internet, while increased supervision in the classroom is on the agenda under Obama.

As the world enters the dog days of summer, families have by now taken their annual financial vacations. The kids have been home from school, work and sports fill up the calendar and finances have been put on the backburner. In the fall, without having sifted through financial statements for three months, parents return to the monetary details of their lives, oftentimes aghast at the holes they had dug for themselves in so short a time. Aside from money shambles on the second leg down of the economic crisis, what can parents, and children, expect this coming fall at their public schools?

Close analysis of Obama’s education policies divulge that, like many other policy areas, no new course will be pursued. Rather, just as the administrations financial policies expound the amount of clout his main financial supporters flex over a woefully command and control economy—Goldman Sachs, for example, controls somewhere in the ballpark of 35 percent of all program trading, which makes up around 50 percent of all activity on NYSE—so too will Washington exacerbate totalitarian trends in the classroom. Basically, the plan for education will lead to more state intervention in school life, continued marketisation, managerialism, standardization and testing, external accountability, intervention in family life, and a modeling of education in such a way as to further the goals of the state-enterprise apparatus—among which stands, first and foremost, centralization of goods, governance and services—as opposed to the consciousness raising and therefore general welfare of the public.¹

First, the continuing budget crisis will precipitate more cuts in school funding. Due to budget cuts limiting the amount of pay allocated to faculty, legislation in California already permits schools meeting certain requirements to reduce the school week to four days. This in a state, of all places, where currently only 43 percent of six million students are considered proficient in reading and 41 percent in math. Furthermore, a recent National Science Foundation report foresees that California’s elementary schools will fall short of reaching their Adequate Year Progression targets by 2014.² The California education outlook, while dire due to the state’s advanced stage in the financial crisis compared with smaller economies in the union, is hardly a black sheep: in the coming months, similar developments will be played out across the country.

The Obama Regime maintains that teachers “should not be forced to spend their academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests.” Their plan, however, reflects the overall Orwellian nature of the contradictory propaganda/measures taken dichotomy thus far employed by the regime in Washington, and increases the amount of standardized testing and externalized accountability by introducing “a broader range of assessments that can evaluate higher-order skills, including student’s ability to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.” This portends the implementation of tests not only for basic literary and math skills, but also vocational and analytical skills.³

The trend of externalized accountability—a euphemism for externalization of authority, away from the teachers and students, and into a vertically executed federal system—will be further extended to the job of teaching. More and more, instead of being certified through a process based on one’s proclivity to creativity in the classroom, measured by one’s ability to inspire a healthy learning environment, teachers will become accredited by way of a checklist of designated competencies. Currently, accreditation is optional for teacher education institutions; under the Obama plan, however, all teacher education programs will be required to endure the accreditation process. The premise of such measures, naturally, is that the interlocked art of teaching and learning is no art at all, but rather a uniform process with no variation across personalities and geography. Historically, the universal application of religions, which have their origin in unique times and places, has meant the debasement and consequential uselessness of those religions. The same logic applies to education, an outcome of its socio-historic roots, as well as a cultures cognitive orientation.

Funding for early learning allows parents more time to work or take part in other activities, especially in the inner city, at which many of these programs are targeted. Most of the programs are offered to children in the cities, and not their suburban counterparts. Obama and Biden argue “the failure to address early learning needs is most apparent with disadvantaged children.” Early learning, they continue, is an economically sound policy, for it leads to a “decreased need for special education services, higher graduation and employment rates, less crime, less use of public welfare systems and better health.”³

The line of reasoning will indeed be furthered, that the purpose of education is the service of the economy. The Obama Regime has outlined a “rewarding and training” system, whereby 40,000 “service scholarships for “high-need” (for the economy) subjects are to be allocated, with main emphasis put on science and math, upon which “over 80 percent of the quickest growing occupations are dependent.”³ The intermixing of private and public education, one must deduce, will create a feedback loop promoting the increase of overlapping interests between the economy and the socialization process. This is demonstrated by the fact that Obama and Biden support charter schools under the guise of parent freedom to choose one school over another. Charter schools are independent and oftentimes focused on religion or owned by a private entity. In the name of diversity and choice, Obama and Biden champion these available options, and though it is true many private schools have been a relative success, leading to innovative initiatives etc., the furthered privatization of the socialization process would mark a fraudulent overlap in interests. The privatization of education in the United States, as many analysts have pointed out, seems inevitable considering that nation’s bankrupt debt-equity ratios.

What might turn up increasingly throughout the country has already in some places. For instance, at Jefferson high school in Portland, Oregon, the basketball team the Portland Trailblazers, in a partnership with the NBA and Toyota funded the building of a new Community Resource Center at the school. The project is one of 15 community service initiatives spearheaded by funding from Toyota Project Rebound. While it is great that the school is receiving a new venue for meetings, etc., Toyota advertisements now adorn the inside of an Oregon public school.⁴

This agenda, aimed primarily at working-class or lower-income families, allows the state a more far reaching hand in the upbringing of its subjects, especially those who, otherwise, would be in the hands of the historically more discontented elements. This logic extends to absurd lengths, even encroaching on the turf of ancient documents, such as the Magna Carta, wherein it states that a man’s home is his castle. Obama and Biden would like to “expand evidence-based home visiting programs to all low-income, first-time mothers.” This is gateway legislation: Creeping intervention on behalf of the state which further erodes the family and the bedrock of openness on which the Republic was founded.⁵

In other school-related news, school-age children, it has been reported by the Washington Times, “will be a key target population for a pandemic flu vaccine in the fall.” The students would be vaccinated in a mass campaign paralleling that of efforts in the 1950’s against polio. Pregnant women, adults with chronic illnesses and health-workers would join children as the first in line. The federal government expects to receive approximately 100 million doses of vaccine by mid-October, assuming the current production, by only five companies, continues as planned. However vaccine for wide use, by about 120 million “especially vulnerable” people, will not be available until later in the fall.⁶

Schools and teacher training institutions do fall flat of expectations. While these systems are in desperate need of overhaul, the policies on which Obama and Biden plan to embark will limit the range of critical topics discussed in the classroom. What they offer are tested insights in regards to education, many of which are proven failures and work towards social engineering goals at the expense of learning and enlightenment. Representative of the failing US public education system, is a recent study calculating that one-third of American college students must enroll in remedial classes. These efforts cost colleges and taxpayers between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually. Tuition at US universities and colleges, moreover, is reaching levels which threaten the ability of the middle class to afford higher education. Many institutions maintain they are embarking on cost-shifting programs, whereby the more moneyed students—able to pay or take out loans—will subsidized through their tuition a poorer colleague. Some colleges and universities, nevertheless, are experiencing financial difficulties which severely limit their ability to offer quality educations.⁷

In early may the Obama administration proposed its first full education budget, funding a plethora of new programs, despite a net decrease for minority-serving colleges and universities; that is, for typically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions. The administration plans to terminate 12 small federal programs costing $550 million, among others. This new budget should also save $4 billion by way of reducing bank subsidies for federal student loan programs.

1. Standish, Alex. Under Obama: No Child Left Unmonitored. Spiked Online.
2. All Students Proficient on State Tests by 2014? National Science Foundation, 25 September 2008.
3. Barack Obama and Joe Biden Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education
4. Press Release: Trailblazers, Toyota Unveil Community Resource Center at Jefferson High School. Submitted by Sentinel news Service, 3/30/2009.
5. Barack Obama and Joe Biden Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education
6. Brown, David and Hsu, Spencer. Students first in Line for Flu Vaccine. Washington Post, July 10, 2009.
7. Pope, Justin. High School Failing Colleges Now Spend Billions on Remedial Classes for Freshmen. Huffington Post, September 15, 2008.

Bullfighting is a wonderful and very apt metaphor for society. If we think of the greater body of people as the bull and the tiny handful of elites who rule us as the matador, what might be the red cape that so successfully ensures the timeless survival of our tormentor?

It comprises three main components. Part of it is our education, where we are conditioned to thinking the matador is the best friend we have; part of it is the media upon which we rely to keep informed about the world around us and which endlessly confirms that the matador really is our best friend; and part of it is the multitude of leisure activities that are available to us, the device that convinces us the matador’s helping us to have too much fun to spend any time thinking for ourselves, and wondering if we really should trust someone who wears tight sparkly pants all the time.

Education

As soon as we are old enough to learn, we start to learn about our ‘place’. For the overwhelming majority of us, our ‘place’ is that of subservient followers. For a very tiny handful of us, ‘place’ is that of leadership. Just as the majority are conditioned to accept the leadership of others, so too are a tiny minority conditioned to accept their superior status and their right to determine the lives of others.

It used to be obvious to all that ‘place’ was decided by birth. Those born in poverty were conditioned to accept they would never leave it, and those born to privilege were conditioned to accept that lives of pampered indolence were theirs by divine right. The social revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries put an end to all that. A far more subtle device had to be devised to perpetuate ‘place’. So the illusion of democracy was invented.

Founded on the fine ideological dreams of early revolutionaries, modern democracy was supposed to eliminate the gross excesses of ancient aristocratic elites and provide meaningful opportunities to the downtrodden mass of humanity. The masses were taught to believe that if they worked hard enough they too could rise to the top, to lives of unimagined wealth and privilege. The faith was regularly reinforced with true enough rags-to-riches stories, of children born in poverty rising to become famous football stars, businessmen and politicians. If those people could do it, so too could anyone else; all thanks to democracy and the wonderful free society it created. Young people were taught to aspire to be tycoons and university graduates. Producers of food, goods and services were obviously drop-outs and rejects: what happened to you if you failed to become a tycoon or graduate. Thus the new elites became valued and consequently rewarded, fully deserving of ever-rising pay-deals, because ‘you can never pay too much for good people’; as new peasants faced ever-worsening conditions because they were unfortunate ‘overheads’ which always needed trimming. The red cape fluttered and the millions of untold stories of misfortune, injustices and oppressions for every widely trumpeted fairytale of ‘success’, were conveniently ignored.

The Media

Our knowledge of the current events in the world beyond our limited personal experience is supplied by the news media. If we look back at the early war reporting of newspapers and newsreels it’s quite difficult to imagine how the readers and viewers of the time could have been so gullible. The blatant propaganda is so clunky and obvious that we find it impossible to believe that it fooled so many people. Yet we instinctively accept anything we read in today’s papers and watch on today’s TV screens — even though everyone appears to know that ‘you can’t trust what you read in the papers’.

Modern propaganda is as different to its predecessor as modern man to the ape, maybe more so. The subtleties used by the modern propagandist have achieved an art form. From the careful appointments of ‘objective’ editors to the skilfully crafted half-truth, the stories that comprise today’s news are a seismic shift away from those of just one generation ago. Yet with a cynical flick of the red cape our attention is nevertheless simply and skilfully diverted away from the very real and needless suffering of millions, to the non-news of imagined ‘pandemics’, trifling political ‘scandals’ and ejectees from unimaginably banal TV game shows.

Playtime

It has often been observed that one of the most essential aides to the success of the Roman Empire was the Coliseum; for it was the circus that provided the cheap entertainments to distract the attention of the mass of citizens away from the grotesque excesses of their leaders. So too today. In order to ensure that the part of our lives not taken up with trying to survive is not taken up with examining how we are ruled, we are supplied with countless forms of ‘leisure activities’. Whilst it cannot be denied that many of these activities are indeed hugely beneficial, it also cannot be denied that a far greater number are hugely destructive — for they comprise the saddest part of the red cape: that part of the distraction which we choose for ourselves.

For although we can rightly criticise others for the way we are educated and informed about the wider world, we have no-one else to question about how we choose to spend our leisure time.

Watching television probably occupies more leisure time for most first world people than any other single activity. Yet even though there are a multitude of channels to choose from, as numerous as the number of pastimes themselves, none deviate from their main purpose: waving the red cape in front of us, diverting our attention away from our real tormentor and mortal enemy.

Is it any wonder, with so many powerful influences deliberately intended to misinform and distract us, that we, the powerful beast that is ‘the general public’ continually fail, generation after generation, to realise who our most deadly enemy really is? Exactly as fighting bulls are never given the chance to learn how the game works and are thus never capable of winning it (apart from the occasional accidental victory — too rare an event to cause any concern) so too are the general public carefully shielded from anything that might teach them the real rules of the game, and thus how to defeat their most mortal enemy.

Patriotism as Love of Fellow Citizens

Patriotism implies expressing love for one’s fellow citizens. Loving other people makes sense, and is surely beneficial for society as a whole. Such love arises naturally for individuals one comes in contact with and works and plays with. A neighborhood, a workplace, a county, a prefecture, a nation and all of humanity benefit from loving, cooperative and altruistic behavior. Patriotism, however, extols the virtues of targeting a particular group of individuals to love. With what logic—and to whose benefit—is it to focus almost exclusively on national unity as opposed to community, state, or global unity?

Citizens of a nation are largely strangers. Nations contain a huge number of individuals with diverse ideas and ways of thinking. Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, writes, “Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.”¹ Thus, a nation is not homogenous.

Patriots of some nations, like Japan, might point to kinship, claiming Japan is a “racially pure” and hence family in one sense of the word. However, tracing ancestry back just a few more generations, Japanese can find their supposed family is merely part of a larger family, of Koreans, Chinese, Portuguese, and innumerable other races. Keep tracing ancestry and we arrive in Africa and the birth of the human species. There is no logical or biological reason to limit the notion of family to those within national borders. The broader and profounder concept of family embraces all of humanity, if not all living creatures.

If a person can love hundreds of millions of strangers as patriotism implies, surely it would be better advised to spread that affection and commitment to all of humanity. With patriotism, the feelings of love and unity are always narrowly focused on those within national borders.

Patriotism and Identity

One rationale for patriotism is that humans need to identify with greater entities and ideals, and internationalism doesn’t satisfy that need. Michael W. McConnell is an academic, author, and defender of patriotism. In his essay “Don’t Neglect the Little Platoons,” he writes, “Humanity at large—what we share with other humans as rational beings—is too abstract to be a strong focus for the affections.² Since “the world” has never been the locus of citizenship, a child who is taught to be a “citizen of the world” is taught to be a citizen of an abstraction.”

McConnell, however, fails to acknowledge that to be a citizen of a nation is likewise to be a citizen of an abstraction, with the only concrete evidence of national membership being man-made papers such as passports. Citizens of a nation are artificial constructs; looking at a person, there is no way to know her citizenship. In the case of a “world citizen,” however, individuals are members of a natural entity, the earth, and humanity always absolutely identifiable.

Patriotism as Loyalty to National Government

Wikipedia notes that patriots should be willing to sacrifice even their own lives for the state. Loyalty means to remain faithful despite circumstances. It is oxymoronic at best, and Orwellian doublespeak to cynics, to suggest that autonomous independent-thinking citizens of a so-called free, democratic society should maintain “unswerving allegiance” to its national government. “Unswerving allegiance” is amounts to a certain amount of bias and blindness, for the sake of unity narrowly focused within national borders, especially in times of war. In fact, wars rely on the loyalty of its citizens. Without this loyalty, it’s hard to imagine soldiers killing and risking their lives when their governments demand the bombs start falling.

The Education Connection

John Taylor Gatto is an educator and two-time winner of the New York state Teacher of the Year award. He traces the history of compulsory schooling to Prussia.

“After Napoleon’s army defeated Prussia (Germany) at the battle of Jena in 1806, Fichte (the Prussian philosopher) declared, ‘Education should provide the means to destroy free will.’ Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that “work makes free,” and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds…”

Thus, Prussia laid the foundations for the illusion that the state as a powerful father figure, necessarily worthy of the loyalty of its citizens. From its inception, public school education was not envisioned as a way to cultivate the human spirit, but as a way to make the individual loyal to his or her nation. Gatto describes the ways public schools are designed to break an individual’s independence, by making the pupil obey the dictates of bells and follow a fragmented curriculum, as well as having his or her worth defined—judged—externally via grades. Youth who don’t conform to the dictates of the system get branded rebellious, receive poor grades, or simply flunk out. Beyond these systematic means of bending the student’s will to the demands of the state, there are overt expressions of love which most schoolchildren the world over are expected to express. In the United States, a supposed champion of freedom and critical thinking, children routinely recite, “”I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Now, few even question whether having school age children promise their loyalty to the national government has a place in public schools. In Examining the Pledge of Allegiance, Leisa Martin discusses the history of the pledge, provides suggestions for activities, and briefly mentions a couple of controversies regarding it, but never raises the point of whether this sort of indoctrination belongs in schools at all, even in her paragraph about “different perspectives” (which contains a mere half-sentence criticism about the phrase “liberty and justice for all followed by lengthy praise for the pledge, including a Bellamy quote).³ In appendix C she mentions that in 1925 thirty-five Mennonite children refused to salute the flag because “they felt taking up arms and taking other peoples’ lives to defend the U.S. was against their religious beliefs,” but Martin’s phrasing “to defend the U.S.” is obfuscation and should be phrased “to fight in wars,” especially since American soldiers have fought only on foreign soil for well over 100 years. Martin also notes, but doesn’t expand upon, the fact that originally the pledge was said with a stiff arm militaristic salute, not unlike the Nazi salute. Schools dropped the salute during the second World War.

Martin does, however, offer some facts, troubling to critics of the Pledge. Since 911, seventeen U.S. states have enacted new pledge laws, and 35 states mandated that the Pledge be recited daily during school. Unfortunately, this clinging to old ways of patriotism and indoctrination are not limited to the United States. Japan has recently made similar moves for its own patriotic expressions.

In Japan, where patriotism had been discouraged in the years following World War II, pressure is building to make school children more patriotic. In August 1999, a law instituted the Hinomaru rising sun flag as the official flag of Japan and the “Kimigayo”, (”His Majesty’s Reign”) as the official national anthem. Both were and are potent symbols of Japan’s militarization and invasions of neighboring countries prior to World War II. Moreover, Japan’s Fundamental Law of Education, which had called for the “nurturing of truth, peace, and justice” was revised. Then prime minister Shinzo Abe and his allies passed a bill that demanded schools instill “a love of one’s country” in children. Some critics of the new law saw shades of an 1890 edict that decreed children must recite stanzas of patriotic praise before the portrait of the Emperor. That very year a Hiroshima principle who was caught in a controversy involving teachers who refused to stand for the Kimigayo during school ceremonies, and pressure from the school board who demanded they stand, committed suicide.

In particular, Tokyo teachers have suffered the brunt of punishments against teachers who refuse to stand. Tokyo Governor Ishihara, who has suggested Japan should bomb North Korea and calls Japan’s peace constitution “nonsense”, has pressed school boards to force teachers to stand. Those who refuse to stand have been suspended without pay, frequently transferred to schools far away from their homes, not allowed home-room duties, and even abused physically and verbally by students. One teacher in particular, Kimiko Nezu, has taken the school board to court over the suspensions, and won. Undaunted, the board has appealed to the Japanese supreme court. A verdict is expected in 2010.

Few educators would deny the value of autonomy and independent thinking, yet few question why students and teachers should be expected or forced to recite their allegiance to the state. Of course, the problem is much deeper than any single act of indoctrination. More important are the ways people carve up the world into “us” and “them”; the ways people learn to view international problems through the lens of their cultural and national identities; the extent young adults feel compelled to conform to the dominant culture of their society; and the tendency for young men and women to agree to become soldiers who follow orders and may have to kill strangers on the order of their commander. Educators have a responsibility to deeply consider these issues and consider deeply the meaning and implications of patriotism.

1. Zinn, H. 1980. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial.
2. McConnell, M. 1996. “Don’t Neglect the Little Platoons” in For Love of Country. Boston: Beacon Press.
3. Martin, L. 2008. Examining the Pledge of Allegiance. Social Studies. Washington DC: Heldref Publications.

The children of Gaza draw that way too. But their paintings hold what no child’s artwork should ever show.

We sat, I and a group from the Code Pink delegation come to Gaza, in a conference room of the Al-Qattan Center in Gaza. The center focuses on literacy and culture specifically for children under the age of 15. It has a beautiful public library and over 13,000 members.

In that room we were shown a truly shocking set (what ought to become an exhibit at every art museum in America) of children’s paintings after the most recent Israeli massacre of Palestinian people in Gaza.

The paintings tell an honest story of the absolute savagery of the Israeli occupation, siege and continual destruction of Gaza. Their oh-so-child-like brushstrokes of bombed out buildings. A red and all too disproportionate stick figure lies in front of a house. He lies in a pool of blood. A black outlined cloud on another painting has red strokes of fire issuing from it–a far too accurate depiction of white phosphorous. Tanks. Blood. Chaos. Dead people scattered. Madness. Bombs. Broken buildings. Terror.

It is disturbing enough to see paintings of such violence from anyone. But that one can tell with a moments glance these are indeed the creations of children makes the viewer jolt with horror and revulsion. No child should ever even know such images, let alone paint them with such intimacy and deliberate, eye-witness conviction.

Those paintings were, somehow, worse for me to digest than even seeing first hand the rubble of far too many buildings to keep count of. It hit me far harder than feeling my feet crunch over the shattered glass of a newly built hospital building never given a chance to be used.

The graphic paintings show the world (if the world ever sees them) with a child’s simplicity that what is happening in Gaza is not just a political problem. It is not about getting bad guys or terrorists or defending Israel–or any other media-driven propaganda.

The paintings tell us that we are destroying the human identity of individuals. Ripping violently from them all that makes people “normal” and decent. What kind of universe do these children see? Their entire psychology has been tortured into an unrecognizable nightmare. Our American taxpayer money did not just destroy the homes, schools, and mosques of these people. The Israeli armed forces did not just scare them with our weapons. Nor did they merely kill and maim them. The Unites States and Israel, and the world in its tacit complicity, has collectively ravaged the consciousness of an entire population. And I wonder, after seeing those paintings, how it can ever be healed.

Good art is supposed to be provocative. Yesterday afternoon I saw what Picasso could never create. Guernica painted with the hands and hearts of children. The bright, unmixed colors a shinning testament to their innocence.

The official Web site for the week of gratitude recommends “choosing such a memorable and unique teacher gift that your effort shines through and your teacher has no choice but to realize how much you think of them.”

Doing her best to follow this advice, Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson gave us teachers a clear picture of what she thinks of us when she sent two personal gifts for the week, beginning with a hand-delivered letter sent certified mail at a cost of $5 per teacher — totaling some $20,000. The letter read in part:

The purpose of this letter is to advise you of my determination that there is probable cause to non-renew your contract that was for 180 basic contract days plus two LID (Learning Improvement Day) days, and offer to you an employment contract for the 2009-2010 school year for 180 basic days plus one LID day.

I checked with the foreign language department, and they translated the above passage as, “I used the contract you previously signed as tissue paper; your union and legal right to collectively bargain don’t impress me; and should you not agree to these terms, good luck.”

Remember when your mom gave you that handmade pair of boxer shorts with the Looney Tunes fabric at your 13th birthday party? Okay, maybe that was just me, but I can attest the feeling is analogous to receiving this letter from the District. It wasn’t that losing a day’s wages and the extra day of training to make us better teachers was so bad. It was the skirting of our union and the rigid ultimatum that left the taste of day-old school lunch in teachers’ mouths.

Just like when my mom wished she had saved the gifting of the Daffy Duck undershorts for a more discreet time after seeing the look of alarm on my face, District Spokeswoman Patti Spencer realized the inopportune timing of their petit cadeau, saying, “It’s very, very regrettable.”

The district’s hunger for generosity not yet satiated, Teacher Appreciation Week was capped off for me and some 172 other teachers in the Seattle School District with a second gift: messages to our principals that we were to be “RIFed.”

I checked again with the foreign language department, and RIF is roughly interpreted as “Reduction In Force” — or more precisely: “apply for unemployment; good luck raising your four-month-old son; oh, and your three-and-a-half years of service to the children of Seattle are irrelevant.”

Okay, so maybe it was a little tacky to deliver these gifts during Teacher Appreciation Week, but after all, the district is facing a budget shortfall that was exacerbated by Washington state legislators’ reckless slashing of $800 million from the K-12 budget, right?

I sympathized briefly with the District when I remembered the summer after college that I wanted to get my dad a really nice pocketknife for his birthday, but I was broke, so I got him a shirt with a picture of a Swiss Army knife instead.

However, the District’s claim of lack of funds is inexplicable given that they are hoarding more than $30 million in a reserve “rainy day” fund they say must be saved in case of a financial storm. It should be clear by now that we are in the middle of an economic monsoon that will wash the education of our children into the gutter if we don’t tap that fund.

Moreover, the District has another important source of revenue. Washington state law RCW 28A.320.320 allows school districts to transfer the interest earned on capital funds over to the operations budget, specifically to pay for “instructional supplies and equipment.”

In 2008-09, the district budgeted $22.7 million for “instructional supplies and equipment,” which, if transferred from the capital side would free up $22.7 million from operations. That money could then be used to offset the Reduction In Force of teachers and ballooning class sizes.

Advice columnist Linda Ann Nickerson has council for just such situations: “Gag gifts are one thing, but what if you get a gift that makes you gag? Resist the temptation to state that you hate the flavor, color or style of the gift . . . [But if] the item is the wrong size, or broken, then it may be acceptable to request the giver’s permission to return or exchange the item.”

Ever polite, Seattle’s teachers are now asking if we can exchange these broken gifts for ones that improve the quality of education in our city. Should we be ignored, we will take the discourteousness to mean that students, parents, and teachers should unite to build a civil rights struggle for the funding education deserves.

Those are the words of Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), in an interview last fall with Time magazine. Besides the flippant attitude and narrow, robotic conception of what teaching and learning look like, Rhee’s comments reflect her zealous mission to lay the blame for the crisis in D.C.’s schools at teachers’ feet.

Rhee was installed as DCPS “chancellor” in 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty succeeded in abolishing the elected school board and taking over the city’s schools. Since then, Rhee has embarked on nothing short of a “scorched earth” campaign, in the words of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

Rhee’s first act was to work in conjunction with the city council to have all central office staff legally reclassified as “at will” employees. This effectively abolished union representation. Rhee marked the moment by firing around 1,000 employees.

As a teacher in D.C. public schools from 1997 to 2004, I know firsthand the chaos that reigned at the central office — payday was a crapshoot, papers and certificates got lost, making changes to your benefits was a nightmare, superintendents and their coteries came and went faster than we could learn their names.

Rhee’s calculation was that years of frustration with the bloated central office would lead to support for the firings. But the further intention was clear: start with the easy target, then move on to the main event.

And that main event has been a “relentless” (one of Rhee’s favorite words) campaign to convince the world that bad teachers are the only thing standing between D.C. schoolchildren — who experience poverty at some of the highest rates in the country — and academic success.

Since the first round of firings, Rhee has fired some three dozen principals and assistant principals, more than 250 teachers, and 500 teacher aides. She has closed 23 schools and promises to restructure another 26. Media accounts vary with respect to the exact numbers, but in an urban school system with just 4,000 teachers and 130 schools, the impact of these attacks is enormous.

Rhee’s primary goal is to get rid of tenure and seniority rights in the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) contract. And her strategy includes a pretty hefty carrot — increasing compensation for teachers who show success (i.e., raise test scores) to $100,000 a year and higher. In exchange for this dramatic increase in pay, teachers must agree to a high-stakes annual evaluation, which can lead to their termination if they don’t show student success.

As of this writing, contract talks were in their 18th month and still in arbitration. But the plan has garnered an immense amount of attention.

The lucrative pay sounds like a good deal for teachers. In reality, it exposes not only the bankruptcy of the explanation of “reformers” for why schools fail our students, but also a backward and ineffective vision of what education could be like.

For example, many media reports about Rhee’s ambitious plan make reference to the “research” and think tanks that “prove” the central factor affecting student achievement is an effective teacher.

The problem is that these references, when they are specific at all, are to the likes of Erik Hanushek and the conservative Hoover Institution, affiliated with Stanford University. Such think tanks are well known for generating “research” and reports with the conscious aim of backing up conservative explanations for what’s wrong with schools.

Even if we accept the idea that effective teachers make a huge difference, Huffington Post contributor Dan Brown is right to point out the “myth that there is a shadow population of GREAT teachers, touched with something like fairy dust.”

Rhee does believe that such a shadow population exists — and that they can be found among the ranks of programs like Teach for America (TFA).

TFA is a program run by a nonprofit foundation that is often (and rightfully) mocked as “Teach for Awhile.” It recruits what it calls “outstanding” recent college graduates, usually from the top universities in the country, and after a summer crash course in how to teach, places them in struggling school districts on a short-term basis.

The entire logic behind TFA is based not only on the mythic teacher-hero, but smacks of the worst kind of snobbery. If that claim isn’t clear at first, Rhee — herself a TFA alum — makes sure we get the point in an interview with Charlie Rose last fall. One of her defenses of the attack on the WTU contract is that huge pay increase will “attract a different caliber of person.” This is a slap in the face of every teacher in D.C. schools.

In addition to the myth of the miracle-working teacher, Rhee’s vision of what counts as student achievement is dangerously narrow.

First, and most obvious, is that the primary measure of “achievement” is standardized testing, which has been shown over and over to narrow the curriculum and, in fact, dumb down the instruction students receive.

In addition, a profile of Rhee in Newsweek points out another frightening aspect:

Rhee doesn’t quite come out and say it, but she and her fellow reformers are trying to change the teaching profession, at least in the inner city . . . to something that bears more resemblance to joining the Green Berets. . . . There are teachers who can maintain this pace [of twelve-hour days, six-day weeks] for decades (just as there are some older Special Forces operatives in the military), but in Rhee’s world many teachers may find themselves working hard, burning out, and moving on.

This notion — especially when applied to DCPS, whose student body, workforce and community are overwhelmingly African American — is racist and insulting. The insinuation is that inner-city schools and the people in them are simply out of control — and require something akin to military occupation to solve the problem.

Finally, Rhee’s plan to “fix” D.C. schools is profoundly un-democratic. This is true in the obvious sense that Rhee operates by pushing through her attacks by ignoring community and parent input.

She may have glowing words to say about WTU President George Parker, but Parker has come under increasing criticism for the lack of rank-and-file input into contract talks. His vice president sued him last year over freedom of speech claims, and a union activist was assaulted by a Parker supporter at a recent building representative meeting. Parker has turned to AFT President Weingarten to quash dissent and push through Rhee’s contract, but this has only fueled rank-and-file criticism.

But the violation of democracy also takes place at a deeper level. Rhee has stated repeatedly that the only reason she took the position as DCPS chancellor is because the city council had abolished the school board. In fact, she regularly argues that school boards — democratically elected community members who oversee local schools–are another major source of the problem with public schools, not least because of union monies that she claims “buy” board members.

In D.C., however, this argument is especially outrageous. One of the major gains of the civil rights movement in Washington, D.C., was the formation of a democratically elected school board to oversee D.C. schools. To this day, D.C. does not enjoy rights as a state or any formal representation in Congress, and national lawmakers have veto power over city policies. Abolishing the school board was a major step backwards in terms of D.C. residents having a say in how their city is run.

Much of the media attention on Rhee’s attack on tenure and union rights rests its case on listing the dismal educational figures about for D.C. schools: eighth-grade reading and test scores rank last in the nation, only 27 percent of 9th graders graduate within five years, families are abandoning DCPS in droves for charter schools.

In addition, claims about per-pupil spending in D.C. being high relative to other school districts are never too far behind. The figures cited vary wildly — after all, facts matter little when you’re waging an assault on D.C. schools and the people in them. But the point to these arguments is always the same — you can’t throw any more money at the problem.

Apparently, however, the two powerful foundations run by billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad believe you can throw money at the problem — at least when the solution on offer is union-busting and shuttering schools. These two foundations have donated millions of dollars to DCPS since Rhee took over.

Rhee is known for backing up her argument about what’s wrong with D.C. schools by stating that the education experience students get in the poverty-stricken Anacostia neighborhood and wealthy Georgetown are radically different. She calls this a fundamental issue of social justice.

She’s right–but she refuses to acknowledge that the fundamental part of that difference is money. The PTAs for schools in upper Northwest DC schools have a long tradition of throwing money at the problem: they regularly raise tens of thousands of dollars to keep a teacher who otherwise would have been cut, or to maintain school libraries or arts programs.

For every statistic detailing the problems in DCPS, we have to respond by laying out the real crisis in Washington, D.C. — the crushing reality of poverty.

In 2005, in the capital of the richest nation on earth:

* nearly one in five D.C. residents lived at or below the federal poverty level, making D.C. the third-poorest jurisdiction in the U.S.

* 32 percent of children lived at or below the poverty, meaning D.C. had the highest child poverty rate in the country.

* over half of D.C. children live in low-income families, meaning families making less than 200 percent of the poverty line. For a family of four in 2005, that 200 percent threshold was $39,942–in a city where the median rent in 2008 for a two-bedroom apartment amounted to $22,800 per year, the highest in the nation.

Any strategy to improve D.C. schools and the education students receive has to look beyond classroom walls and include a fight against this crushing poverty — a fight for health care and social services, and for democratic control over D.C. schools and the city itself.