The Gospel of Tacking on of Student Fees that Often Have Nothing to Do With Academics

What I refer to as the “corporate climate” is the transition of the modern university from its academic mission to its financial mission. In large state universities that have cash cow athletic programs, almost none of the funds these athletic departments generate go to the general student body or academic programs, and often students are still saddled with fees that often have nothing to do with academic instruction. When I was in graduate school, my institution charged fees for recreation (use of its recreational facilities), transportation fees (parking permits and shuttle bus rides), and technology fees (computers and networks). While I was a student, I never used the fitness center, never used the bus system (I had a bicycle), and while I did use the university’s computers and networks, the technology fee was primarily in place to pay for software upgrades that were unnecessary. One of the aspects of the computer technology business is to always sell upgrades to the consumer when the consumer is already comfortable and efficient with the current version of a software program. The need to push what are essentially useless upgrades is what keeps the likes of Microsoft and Apple in business. Universities have jumped on this bandwagon by swearing allegiance to Blackboard which has a virtual monopoly on classroom management software and Microsoft, whose array of office products is required for nearly every computer terminal supported by the university computer system.

Falling Diverse Interaction Outside of the Classroom

Gone in today’s university experience is the nexus of rich student interaction where diverse students often congregate and exchange ideas over a burger: the campus dining hall. The campus dining hall has largely been replaced by high end dining chains that often cater to wealthy students. This has been a blessing for universities because they can lease out their academic buildings to the highest bidder. Independent local dining establishments or coffee houses often have to struggle to acquire a student clientele against corporate chains that have an inside track to a student customer base, thanks in large part to universities looking to cash in by leasing space to corporate dining establishments who can afford the high lease rates.

The University as the foundation of “moral values” such as “integrity” or “character”

This is largely an antiquated notion as the university has largely outgrown its monastic past. The number of arrests of college athletes and coaches, the number of students arrested for underage drinking year after year, the number of campus rapes all point to a systemic breakdown in values in the American university. It is laughable that universities are still in the business of promoting moral values, especially when they actively promote wage inequalities within their own ranks. As an institution of capital, the university sees no problem today in relying upon cheap labor, in the form of adjuncts and graduate assistants, for student instruction. I can recall as a graduate assistant making nearly a fourth of my salary as a full time worker in the private sector while having considerably more responsibilities: the primary of which was to shape the next generation of minds. This was while I was also completing my own course of studies and neglecting job prospects that I would have otherwise engaged. It is morally repugnant for universities to rely upon underpaying their adjunct and graduate instructors while also raising tuition and fees on the very employees who are charged with teaching undergraduates.

The moral outrage at Penn State is more than justified but I think the situation requires that the public look more closely, more intensely, at the inner lives of universities and the economic disparities they perpetuate. That administrators who profited while these abuses occurred should speak mightily about how as a corporatized entity, the university has sought the same status of corporations in trying to shield its questionable practices and abuses from the public eye.

At first glance there appears to be no inherent connection between a college education and social justice. Universities are organized around different areas of study, many of which have nothing to do with social movements. While sociology and political science departments might offer courses in gender inequities and/or transnational global movements, math and science do not. Other departments—like business and marketing—might actually resist or ignore such social/political issues. While some schools do cater to issues of justice, democracy, and political transformation, this is neither common nor obligatory. College is about education rather than radical social change.

This is not to ignore the rich history of campus activism: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and the whole anti-Vietnam war era; the Latin American solidarity work and the Campus Outreach Opportunity League of the 1980s; the United Students Against Sweatshops that began in 1997; the Campus Antiwar Network and the New SDS of the mid-2000s; California’s state-wide protests against cuts to education in 2009 and 2010; and the current call to Occupy College.

I wholeheartedly endorse these actions and believe that the college campus can and should be a site of political contestation. But there is also the issue of how individual students approach their education. Is college about earning a higher pay check (usually at the expense of someone else) or about making the world a better place for everyone? These two goals are not mutually exclusive, but the first is no doubt the status quo of contemporary America.¹ But it does not have to be like this; you do not have to reduce your college education to a future (and unguaranteed) paycheck. You are free to reappropriate—that is, occupy—your education in order to learn about, participate in, and organize movements for social justice. Just as the Occupy Movement is reclaiming and transforming the democratic nature of this country, so too can you reclaim and transform the nature of your education.

At the most basic level, a college education improves your ability to read, write, speak, research, and analyze. Once these skills of self-empowerment are learned, they are not forgotten and can be used whenever and however you wish. These skills are also necessary for creating more effective social movements. Reading complex social analyses, writing narratives and journalistic accounts, speaking in public and to the media, researching important political information, and analyzing everything from poverty rates to presidential discourse are necessary practices of every social movement. Approaching your college education in this way improves your ability to bring about fundamental social change.

At a more complex level, a college education can provide in-depth knowledge about specific topics pertinent to social change. Such topics might include but are not limited to: the history of American imperialism; systemic inequalities of capitalism; the racial disparities in the criminal justice system; the relationship between mental illness and homelessness; the different causes and challenges of urban and rural poverty; alternative healthcare practices; environmental science and issues of climate change; sustainability and globalization; nutrition, obesity, and the politics of the corporate food industry; the pros and cons of humanitarian aid; international diplomacy, conflict resolution, and the possibilities of peace; the social/political significance of literature, film, theater, and the arts; the biographies of Emma Goldman, Gandhi, and Dr. King; philosophies of government and theories of dissent; the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality; language and political consciousness; and even the communicative strategies of Greenpeace, ACT-UP, and the Zapatistas. The purpose is to develop a body of knowledge that resists and overturns rather than accepts and perpetuates modern day oppressions and inequalities. This may not be the formal mission statement of the average college, but there is nothing holding you back from constructing a program of study that helps you change the world.

The social life of college is also an opportunity for developing your capacity for social change. Most students are in their late-teens and early twenties and moving away from home for the first time. You are on your own with minimal supervision. This is a time of freedom, exploration, and experimentation. You have the chance to meet new friends of different backgrounds, persuasions, and orientations, which enriches your inner mind and worldly experience. You have opportunities to attend on-campus meetings, public talks, and film screenings, which increase your knowledge about political, intellectual, and artistic controversies. And you engage in late night dorm room discussions about numerous topics and issues, which expose you to new relationships and modes of interaction. The overall experience is nothing less than a laboratory for personal growth, social development, and political practice.

This approach to college is a far cry from the standard “college equals a future pay check.” Such a reductive and instrumental approach is understandable since everyone wants to live a financially comfortable life. But that reduction is neither inherent nor essential. Instead, it’s a product of neoliberalism, which is a “new laissez faire economic system” based on the deregulation of free markets and the privatization of wealth. Neoliberalism subordinates government control to the interests of private profit. The government—rather than regulating the market—becomes an extension of market activity with the sole purpose of increasing capitalist competition. Neoliberalism provides tax breaks for the rich, reduces spending on social programs and welfare, expands corporate control, and eradicates labor rights, environmental protections, drug and food regulations, and even national law. The basic purpose is to allow private interests to own and control every aspect of the human, social, and natural world. Things like food, water, farmland, forests, healthcare, prisons, militaries, political processes, mass media, and, in this case, education, are targets of neoliberal control.²

Neoliberalism helps explain many of America’s social ills. More than 46 million Americans live in poverty. Nearly 50 million have no healthcare insurance. Somewhere between 24 and 26 million are either unemployed or underemployed. More than one-million homes were foreclosed in 2010 while approximately 3.5 million people are homeless. And this country’s total student loan debt is over one-trillion dollars with the overall college tuition inflation increasing by more than 115% since the mid-1980s.³ But yet banks get billion dollar bailouts, CEOs get million dollar bonuses, multinational corporations pay lower tax rates than working class citizens, and Barack Obama, the president of hope and change, has already received more than $15 million in campaign contributions from the financial and banking industries.

We should also look at the strange correlation between America’s educational advancement and its increased economic inequality. The percentage of high school graduates attending college rose from 42 percent in 1970 to 70 percent in 2009.⁴ The economic worth of a college degree also increased during this time period. In 1980 the weekly salary of college graduates was 40 percent higher than that of high school graduates. By 1997 that gap had risen to 73 percent.⁵ These trends could be seen as a progressive shift toward a more educated and prosperous society. But economic inequality actually increased over these years. In 1979, the top 1 percent of Americans owned 20.5 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 99 percent owned 79.5 percent.⁶ By 2007, the top 1 percent increased its share to 34.6 percent while the bottom 99 percent declined to 65.4 percent. In 1980, the pay ratio between the average American CEO and the average American worker was 40 to 1. As of 2009, the ratio was 263 to 1, which is actually lower than recent years due to the economic recession.⁷ The ratio peaked in 2000 when it was 500 to 1. These statistics demonstrate that higher education helps the individual move upward at the expense of other individuals—i.e., college contributes to both upward mobility and wider social stratification. The smarter we get, the more unequal we become. Such private rather than collective gain is part and parcel of America’s current socio-economic juncture.

This situation no doubt affects one’s approach to college education. I have been teaching college students for almost fourteen years and it is obvious to me that students implicitly (and even explicitly) know that they are targets of private enterprise. They intuitively understand that they are seen as consumers rather than as students. Students then internalize this discourse and decide that they, too, want something in return: they want a degree and future pay check in exchange for their time and money. The logic of economic transaction thus trumps the experience and value of an education. Not everyone adheres to this logic. But it is increasingly common.

This scenario is upsetting, but not hopeless. You—the students—can reclaim your educational experience as an opportunity to change not just the problems of education, but the problems of society. Enroll in particular college programs, sign up for politically-minded courses, befriend willing and helpful professors, meet like-minded peers, join and/or start campus organizations, and coordinate campaigns for social justice. The point is to place social change rather than private profit at the center of your education. This is obviously a privileged position. Not everyone can afford to approach their education in this way. Many people cannot even afford to attend college, period. But this is the very problem that needs to be challenged. Occupying your education can help you change such problems and lay groundwork for creating a better world. Education should not be a privilege or even a right. It should be a way of life, and that life should be a political force for the common good. Occupy your education.

1. Here is a brief list of authors who have addressed similar issues over the years: Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, bell hooks, Peter McLaren, and Paulo Freire.
2. For further elaboration, see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. For sources on student debt and college tuition, see the following: Gordon H. Wadsworth, “Skyrocketing College Costs,” InflationData.com (October 19, 2011); Marcus Baram, “Not Just Wall Street: Protesters Should Target Colleges Over Student Debt, Tuition Increases,” Huffington Post (November 11, 2011); and Dennis Cauchon, “Student Loans Outstanding Will Exceed $1 Trillion this Year,” USA Today (October 25, 2011).
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “College Enrollment and Work Activity of 2009 High School Graduates.” April 27, 2010.
5. Author Levine. “The Remaking of the American University.” Innovative Higher Education, 25(4) (Summer, 2001): 253-267.
6. G. William Domhoff. “Wealth, Income, and Power.” September 2005 (updated July 2010).
7. Sarah Anderson, et al. “Executive Excess 2010: CEO Compensation and the Great Recession.” The Institute for Policy Studies.

If one believes in peace, then it seems the proper thing is to revere the warriors for peace. Yet those are the people who are disparaged by the media, whose movements are brutalized by state police. The warriors who head off to far-flung lands that pose no threat to Europe, the United States, or Canada — why should they be lauded? The warring soldiers of today are — by and large — indoctrinated killers, not protectors of peace or high principles.

People “volunteer” for the grist for the soldiery today. Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan … have nothing to do with defence; it is all about warring and killing. The multitude of killings, the war crimes, and the destruction of the aforementioned countries provides ample evidence of this.

Iraq, Haiti, Libya, and Afghanistan, Pakistan found (and find) themselves victimized by the military weaponry of the West. Fighting in close quarters is eschewed for fighting from a great distance via planes, ships at sea, bombs, and drones high in the sky. Such push-button soldiery has little to do with bravery.

Furthermore, if fighters should be remembered for their supposed “heroism” (and I do not deny that some acts of heroism occur), then they should also be remembered — and reviled — for commission of war crimes, massacres, and other wicked deeds; and they should incur whatever punishment is deserved.

Is there a day of remembrance for the Somali teenager — Shidane Arone — brutally murdered by members of Canada’s “elite” Canadian Airborne Regiment? (Graphic photo)

Whose freedom have all these soldiers for past wars really been fighting for? Is it the freedom of the 99% or the 1%? Whose cause does mind-numbing patriotism serve? The 99% or the 1%? Are the 1% putting their sons and daughters on the frontlines? All these wars have been fought over the years and what has the result been? A greater and greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthy few. Is such a societal outcome really worth fighting for?

When schools commemorate Remembrance Day, what are they really commemorating? Is it not an inculcation of warrior sentiment into the younger generation? I found myself having Chinese students being exposed to the Canadian tradition of commemorating their warriors.

Fine, that is what happens in Canada, but I have to be honest with students. I am opposed to the nonsense of celebrating warring and warriors. I made that known to my students.

I presented my Chinese students with the words of one of their own, Lin Yutang. The renowned writer Lin said, “[Chinese] hate war, and always will hate war. Good people never fight in China. For ‘good iron is not made into nails, and good men are not made soldiers.’”

I am adamantly opposed to indoctrination or inculcation of any sort. I always encourage my students to doubt what I say, especially when it runs counter to that told to them in wider society. I urge them to ask questions, research, and form their own conclusions. I encourage them to challenge whatever views I (or anyone else) may present. I inform them that if I wish to be a critical thinker, then I must yield to superior facts, logic, or morals.

If educators encourage critical thinking, then they must be open to the most divergent views, not just those that cluster around so-called conventional representations.

Who should society and its education system laud and commemorate: the gun-toting soldiers or the fighters for peace?

The economy would only be the better for it, as was shown by the G.I. Bill, which provided virtually-free higher education for returning veterans, along with low-interest loans for housing and business.  The G.I. Bill had a sevenfold return.  It was one of the best investments Congress ever made.

There are arguments against a complete student debt write-off, including that it would reward private universities that are already charging too much, and it would unfairly exclude other forms of debt from relief.  But the point here is that it could be done, and it (or some similar form of consumer “jubilee”) would represent a significant stimulus to the economy.

Toxic Student Debt: The Next “Black Swan”?

The Occupy Wall Street movement is heavily populated with students.  Many without jobs, they are groaning under the impossible load of student debts that have been excluded from the usual consumer protections.  A whole generation of young people has been seduced into debt peonage by the promise of better jobs if they invest in higher education, only to find that the jobs are not there when they graduate.  If they default on their loans, lenders can now jack up interest rates and fees, garnish wages, and destroy credit ratings; and the debts can no longer be discharged in bankruptcy.

Total U.S. student debt has risen to $1 trillion—more than U.S. credit card debt.  Defaults are rising as well.  According to Department of Education data, 8.8 percent of recipients of federal student loans defaulted in FY 2010, up from 7 percent the previous year.  With an anemic recovery from a severe recession and a difficult job market, the situation is expected to get worse.  The threat of massive student loan defaults requiring another taxpayer bailout has been called a systemic risk as serious as the bank failures that brought the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse in 2008.  To prevent another disaster like the one caused by the toxic debts on the books of Wall Street banks, we need to defuse the student debt bomb before it blows.  But how?

The Federal Reserve could do it in the same way it defused the credit crisis of 2008: by aiming its fire hose of very-low-interest credit in the direction of the struggling student population.  Since September 2008, the Fed has made trillions of dollars available to financial institutions at a fraction of 1% interest; and in audits since then, we’ve seen that the Fed is capable of coming up with any amount of money required or desired.  To the Fed it is all just accounting entries, available with the stroke of a computer key.

The Fed is not allowed to lend to individuals directly, but it can buy Treasury securities; and with the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) of March 2010, the Treasury is now formally in the business of student lending.  The Fed can also buy asset-backed securities, including securitized student debt; and there is talk of another round of quantitative easing aimed at just that sort of asset.

After QE3: The Market Wants More

When the Federal Reserve’s expected “QE3” turned into the tepid and ineffectual “Operation Twist,” the stock market reacted by plummeting.  To appease investors, Chairman Ben Bernanke then assured them that the Fed was “ready to do more.”  How much more and in what way wasn’t specified; but Alan Blinder, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, suggested some possibilities.  He wrote in the Wall Street Journal on September 28th:

To maintain the size of its balance sheet, the Fed has been reinvesting the proceeds in Treasurys. But starting “now” (the Fed’s word), and continuing indefinitely, those proceeds will be reinvested in agency bonds and MBS instead. . . . A future round of quantitative easing (QE4?) that concentrates on private-sector securities like MBS, rather than on Treasurys, is now imaginable. . . . Indeed, if we indulge ourselves in a bit of blue-sky thinking, we can even imagine the Fed doing QEs in corporate bonds, syndicated loans, consumer receivables and so forth.

Syndicated consumer loans include asset-backed securities (ABS) of the sort purchased by the Fed through its Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) created in November 2008.  According to the Fed’s website, “Eligible collateral initially included U.S. dollar-denominated ABS that . . . are backed by student loans, auto loans, credit card loans, and loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA) . . . .”

Buying securities backed by bundles of student loans thus falls within the Fed’s purview.  Quantitative easing is a tool reserved for economic crises, and toxic student debt appears to be the next “black swan” on the horizon.

Buying up a trillion dollars in student loans could be a nice stimulus package for the economy. The money supply is estimated to have shrunk by about $3 trillion since the 2008 collapse of the “shadow” banking system (an array of  non-bank financial institutions including investment banks, hedge funds, money market funds, SIVs, conduits, and monoline insurers).  In July 2010, the  New York Fed posted a staff report on its website titled “Shadow Banking,” showing that the shadow banking system had contracted by $4 trillion since its peak in March 2008, when it was valued at about $20 trillion—actually larger than the traditional banking system, which was then only about $12 trillion.  By July 2010, the shadow system was down to about $16 trillion and the traditional system was up to about $13 trillion, leaving a $3 trillion gap to be filled.  Adding back a trillion dollars in student aid could go a long way toward curing this shortfall.

Debt Relief as Economic Stimulus

What could such a stimulus do for the economy?  Consider the G.I. Bill, which provided free technical training and educational support, along with government-subsidized loans and unemployment benefits, for nearly 16 million returning servicemen.  Economists have determined that for every 1944 dollar invested, the country received approximately $7 in return, through increased economic productivity, consumer spending, and tax revenues. The G.I. Bill not only made higher education accessible to all, but it created a nation of homeowners, new technology, new products, and new companies, with the Veterans Administration guaranteeing an estimated 53,000 business loans.

Eliminating, reducing or deferring student loan debt would free up the budgets of millions of students, allowing them to spend more on goods and services, increasing demand and creating jobs.  More jobs would mean more taxes for the government, and a more educated and skilled work force would mean higher paying jobs in higher tax brackets.

What the economy sorely needs today is purchasing power.  Without customers to buy their products, businesses cannot expand and cannot hire.  And to get the needed purchasing power, consumers need more money in their pockets.  Getting it there by quantitative easing has been branded dangerously inflationary, but with a $3 trillion hole in the money supply, we need an injection of new money today.  As long as the money is spent on goods and services rather than on financial money-making-money schemes, the result will not be inflationary.  Retailers will just put in more orders for goods, causing producers to produce more and to hire more workers to do it.  Supply will rise along with demand, keeping prices stable.  Overall prices will not increase until the country hits full employment, which is far from where we are today.

Another Alternative: Interest-free Student Loans

Many countries offer free tuition for higher education, including Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, Scotland, and Sweden.  Another program that has proven to be very fair and workable is a program of interest-free student loans.  The government of New Zealand now offers 0% loans to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their income after they graduate.  For the past twenty years, the Australian government has also successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect interest-free loans.

The loans in the Australian Higher Education Loan Programme (or HELP) do not bear interest, but the government gets back more than it lends, because the principal is indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which goes up every year.  The indexation rate was 2.8% in 2006 and 3.4% in 2007.  To avoid this increase, borrowers can make voluntary repayments, for which they also get a 10% reduction in the principal.  Thus if a person voluntarily repays $1000, the debt is reduced by $1100.  The loans are “contingent loans,” repaid only if and when the borrower’s income reaches a certain level.  If the borrower dies, any compulsory repayment must be paid from his estate, but the remainder of the debt is canceled at death.

Following the Australian model, the Federal Reserve could buy up $1 trillion in U.S. student debt, waive the interest, and collect on the principal only when the borrowers’ incomes reach a certain level.  In the meantime, the loan money would circulate in the economy, stimulating economic activity.

Even assuming a 10% default rate, the Fed would get back $900 billion on its $1 trillion advance.  The $100 billion difference is only one-seventh the bailout money authorized by Congress to rescue Wall Street banks, and it would stimulate the economy more than the bailout money, which just shored up the balance sheets of insolvent Wall Street banks—banks that then declined to return the favor by lending to Main Street.  If the Fed’s investment generated anything close to the returns from the G.I. Bill, its $100 billion outlay could produce a several-hundred-billion dollar return.

To prevent abuse of the system, colleges should be required to stay within certain well-defined parameters for providing affordable, high quality education; and students should meet well-defined standards as well.

Properly monitored, a federal investment in higher education can be a win-win-win, good for the economy, good for the government, and good for the people.  A generous student loan program will create jobs, increase tax revenues, and give young people a fair shot at the American dream, a dream that has become a mirage for 99% of the population.

Though schools are meant to promote learning, they are, in fact, one of the most effective tools in destroying the love of the learning. A long and dreary compulsory curriculum, the constant evaluation and the utter loss of freedom do just that. As children enter kindergarten they are anxious to learn and understand the world about them. These same students, a few years later, almost without exception, regard learning and reading as being boring and of no interest to them. The end result is citizens who are not interested in learning the facts that are relevant to important issues. Such people are not capable of taking on an active, meaningful role in a democracy and are inclined to leave issues to the “experts” – the voices presented to them by mainstream media – the very people who serve society’s established interests.

One thing that students do learn from their school experience is that people get what they deserve. Their report cards come with a statement of the class average or the prescribed standard. One half of the students in every class learn that they are below average. This further discourages learning and leads to further poor marks. As the message is repeated year after year, these students fully understand that they are among life’s losers, the underachievers and the undeserving. Upon leaving school, they have been prepared to accept the miserable, low-wage jobs that our society creates. They accept their lowly status in society as their own fault and do not become voices demanding change. The world of business relies on school to produce such workers and to produce them in large numbers.

School also works its magic on those who are successful at school. These students come to understand that schooling is about marks, not learning. They have succeeded in attaining higher marks and earning more advanced degrees. They have heard educators and parents state that without an education they will suffer in life, and that attaining an advanced education is the key to worldly success. The successful students come to believe that they are deserving of a disproportionately large share of society’s goods. School don’t just help create an unjust society composed of the overly rich and the overly poor, school also creates students who see these divisions as natural and just.

Schoolchildren’s lives are dominated by assessment and marking. Everything they produced is graded, and determined to have a certain value in the eyes of the teacher. Students very quickly learn that their own value, and the value of the work they produce, is rooted in the opinion of an external authority. Self-exploration and self-expression are less important than the approval of those with power over them. The graduates of this system have been trained to accept the common wisdom of the day and the values of the powerful. They no longer critically evaluate things on the basis of their inherent goodness or justice.

A fundamental docility is the key to success in school. Students can play pranks and even organize a small protest – perhaps about the quality of the lunches in the cafeteria -  and earn some applause from their elders. But all students know that to succeed they must comply with the many hours of work and the detailed instructions handed down by the teacher. Any student who proclaims that he or she is unwilling to follow the long compulsory program is labeled a problem, and a troublemaker, and will ultimately earn our most crushing label, that of school dropout. Every student knows that a fundamental challenge to the values and procedures of school is futile. And so we have a society populated with adults who know that fundamental challenge to entrenched authority is futile. We have a society in which the majority of people are prepared to accept injustices as something about which they can do nothing, The forces of injustice could not ask for a more pleasing situation.

At school, abstract knowledge and learning is glorified. The world that we can see with our eyes, and touch with our hands, is never regarded as important as the abstract ideas that can be used to manipulate that world. The natural world is understood only insofar as we can exploit it. A study of the world forests, for example, falls under the topic of “natural resources.”  Forests are to be understood insofar as they contribute to the material benefits that humans want to extract from them. So children grow alienated from the natural world and comfortable with the profound ecological damage worked by our industrial society.

The defenders of the public system suggest that school will be changed for the better when progressive forces are in charge of society. Such a development is rationally logical, yet practically impossible. Progressive forces will not come to power so long as regressive schools are turning out the overwhelming majority of citizens. Given our present school system, the forces of injustice can quite happily sit back and relax, knowing that their opposition has been cut off at the knees.

We need an education revolution, and we need it in order for any progressive transformation in our governments to take place. As progressives, we need to establish a broad network of schools with a radically new mode of operation that will turn out a new kind of adult citizen. It will require tremendous commitment and sacrifice and work. The great irony is that it is conservative forces that are championing charter schools when it should be progressive voices that are establishing independent, community-based schools as agents of transformation.

You may say that this cannot be done, that such a project is beyond our resources, that we are powerless to change the fundamentals of the education system. I would just ask you: where did you get that idea?

The school was going to make the Presidential speech available to students, but allow the partisan and/or bigoted parental crowd to shield their probably already-sheltered offspring from anything threatening the pale (as in white, conservative and “good”) worldview that they themselves espouse and do everything in their power to instill in their children.

The image of former President George W. Bush (looking dazed and meek) sitting in a classroom full of kids while the terrorists attacked on 9/11, came to mind. Had that school contacted all their pupils’ parents to make sure it was okay to let Bush into their school for a press op? How would those children and or parents have been treated if they had refused to give their Commander-in-Chief audience?

Do they have a Gitmo for children?

When I first got the notice that children’s middle school was taking precautions regarding President Obama’s speech, I wasn’t surprised. I simply viewed it as another step in the baneful ossification of the Republican electorate. Fox News doesn’t encourage an informed American worldview. Dissenting voices confuse things. Contradictory viewpoints are anathema.

It’s much easier to despise President Obama if you ignore him. It’s much easier say he’s not an American or a Christian if you don’t listen to him speak. It’s much easier to claim he’s a Muslim and a terrorist if you’ve never watched him try to communicate his thoughts.

As long as all you expose yourself or your kids to is the opinions and views expressed by Fox News (or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck), it’s easy to maintain a conservative worldview because the indoctrination settles over you in layers, day after day, week after week. Eventually the sediment of close-mindedness ossifies and neither you nor your sheltered children have much of a chance of viewing President Obama as anything other than a dangerous interloper who must the enemy.

This kind of rigidity is not conducive to cognitive, much less intellectual development. Intelligence needs to be well-rounded, tested and, if possible, demonstrable. Single, slanted sources (as we now know from the lead up to the Iraq War) are not reliable or trustworthy.

If you don’t like President Obama, that’s your prerogative. I’m not a huge fan myself of late. If you don’t want to watch the address he makes to our children, fine. Ignore it. But don’t demand that your kids go to school or be at school with their eyes half-closed and their minds half open. They should be trusted to decide these things for themselves. We should love them enough to give them a chance.

My kids are too young to have sedimentary worldviews and I don’t want their minds or spirits fossilized before they’ve had a chance to be properly formed—by them—not me.

The problem with the “American conversation” these days is that we are not conversing. Too many people on both sides are simply talking to themselves or talking only amongst themselves.

This is the kind of atmosphere that usually makes it easier to lynch folks. This is the form of tunnel vision that created McCarthyism. This is the stunted thought process Nazi Germany was born of.

Closed minds and hearts may be more American than open minds and hearts these days. But they shouldn’t be. Especially when it comes to our children.

It reminds me of the old Eastern contemplation that asked “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is Fox News.

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is either side of any issue only listening to what it has to say.

If real reform is going to happen, it has to put in place a viable, critical, formative culture that supports notions of social and engaged citizenship, civic courage, public values, dissent, democratic modes of governing and a genuine belief in freedom, equality, and justice.

— Henry Giroux, Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students, and Public Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. xi.

While I believe that public education should equip students with skills to enter the workplace, it should also educate them to contest workplace inequalities, imagine democratically organized forms of work, and identify and challenge those injustices that contradict and undercut the most fundamental principles of freedom, equality, and respect for all people who constitute the global public sphere.

— Ibid., p. 9.

Public education in this society has hardly ever attracted the enthusiasm of the powerful—any medium through which the disempowered can gain ground on the privileged has always had the tag of “Communism” or “Anti-Americanism” hung around its neck. And for this reason, the public school system has been the piñata of Right-wing politicians and their bosses, whacked to death and drained of all resources that give it life and sustenance. So starved of precious funding are many schools that music, health, and even history classes have been shaved off, narrowing the scope to Math, English, and Science courses, to better prepare a generation for leadership in a hostile and competitive world—or so the apologists bay.

Public education has always had the eyes of society’s owners trained on it, and in our age those of the ruling class see it as but a bygone nuisance, one mere hour away from total oblivion. Education, for this slim minority, should always keep one element esteemed above all else: value. The narrative goes: students cannot simply be educated to be educated; they have to be to take over companies, build pyramid schemes, crunch numbers, sell mortgages, grab land, win lawsuits, and run government. Public education, then, always represented a great threat to the fantasies of those who want back the culture Roosevelt chased off.

To see this dream come true, the anti-public culture warriors went to work, stripping off what they could by the piece, guffing lies into the living rooms of millions, setting presidential agenda when they could; and before long, it became common sense to see underpaid, overworked, unsupported teachers who endure 9-10 hour shifts as the great wall standing between an abandoned generation and a renewed gilded age.

Looking back, the plan seems executed without flaw: to render the very concept of a society obsolete, to demolish critical sites that create and sustain the values of such society; to reframe the function of schools, to collapse media ownership into the hands of a few, to run a profit-making pipeline from low-income public schools into juvenile halls and thereafter prisons—assigning a function and role to students who might better spend their time trying to make society a model of justice and parity. In the grand finale, public school teachers were dragged out into the town square for public stoning. Having deskilled these teachers for decades, switching their roles to technicians and test machines, the demonization began, which helped later on in absolving them off all power to challenge oppressive workplace practices like militarization and privatization.

The Texas Board of Education’s decision last year to delete all history of working-class organizing and resistance would prove merely the latest round in a long battle to do away with any education that doesn’t assign students consumer identities—giving to teachers that of salesclerks.

Acclaimed education theorist Henry Giroux traces this history in his latest text, Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students, and Public Education, a slim, fiery volume drenched as much in hope as in despair for what has become of a culture which tells kids CEOs know more about education than do certified educators. “Despite the trust we impart to them in educating our children,” he writes, “we ignore and devalue the firewall they provide between a culture saturated in violence and idiocy and the radical imaginative possibilities of an educated mind and critical agent capable of transforming the economic, political, and racial injustices that surround us and bear down so heavily on public schools.”

Teachers, devalued and demonized, are increasingly being written out completely. Giroux notes: “As many as one million students are now finding themselves in classrooms where the only adult is a computer technician.” And the loudest champions of this new wave wouldn’t be our insane friends on the Right but the philanthropic minds of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Sam Walton, and many other wealthy executives—captains of the education ship in the Obama era. They have the ears of the illiterate education secretary, Arne Duncan, whose mind is forever sold on a corporate education system, controlled by Wall Street financiers and Education Management Organizations (EMOs), run by market rules, and inevitably pumped up with so much greed and avarice into a bubble so vast it bursts—and millions of struggling citizens lose everything while the rich beam off scot-free:

Underneath this discourse lie the same old and discredited neoliberal policies that cheerfully serve corporate interests: privatization; union busting; competition as the only mode of motivation; an obsession with measurement; a relentless attack on teacher autonomy; the weakening of tenure; educational goals stripped of public values; teacher quality defined in purely instrumental terms; an emphasis on authoritarian modes of management; and a mindless obsession with notions of pedagogy that celebrate memorization and teaching to the test.

The private has been at war with the public for as long as slaves were resisting the demands of the market, but never before has public society fallen under such compelling attacks as to inspire the sense of desperation sweeping through public schools: entire staffs cleaned out by the hundreds, districts hijacked by corporations and the military, schools shut down by omnipotent emergency financial managers, students taught curriculum written by McDonald’s, British Petroleum, and Walt Disney. This sequence has a simple motivation, Giroux insists: “Public schools are under attack not because they are failing or are inefficient, but because they are public.”

The new culture cannot be complete without striking to death this one last giant, which still hangs upon a tight rope the hopes of millions of parents, unable to afford private education or home schooling. This, then, puts upon education a great responsibility, to prove to the naysayers that it can “function” with “efficiency” in our complex world, that it can crank out students with good GPAs who’ll sit in cubicles for the next 50 years after graduating college. But this notion fails the test, as Giroux notes: “The repeated emphasis on education manufacturing a product, as if it were designed simply to produce durable goods, does nothing more than justify its treatment as a machine to be repaired rather than a complex social institution made up of living, breathing human beings.”

It is the shameless construction of uneducated clods who couldn’t tell John Dewey apart from the decimal system: the fantastical aspiration of Wall Street racket runners and half-wit entertainers who swear charter schools are merely public entities shielded from the bureaucratic red tapes clogging up all access to meaningful reforms. And any hour these days they are found plastered on cable news screens, reciting jingle-like platitudes only gratifying to like-minded simpletons, frothing at low standardized test scores, high teacher salaries, tenure, unions, and the short hours kids spend in school these days. What they want, of course, is a generation trained to the “Gordon Gekko ethos of ruthless competition.”

They want kids to see education as a business, as primarily the means to a financial end, which would explain why “when young people were surveyed in 2009, 73 percent responded that their top goal was being financially wealthy as opposed to only 37 percent who supported that position in 1971.” They want kids thinking—but uncritically. They want kids seeing the world through the ideas and values that crashed the global economy two years back. They want kids enmeshed in a casino capitalism doctrine that creates the sort of culture where Ponzi schemes and redlining and subprime bundles keep the engine running.

In New York, as in many cities countrywide, the billionaire mayor can put his trust only in CEOs to run the education system. Success in the hard-nose private sector is now paralleled with experience required to deal with matters of segregation, curriculum, pedagogy, dropouts, special needs, and school meals. This signals a turn in the screw, calling to question a crisis of values, a reshaping of principles, beliefs, and traditions. “In this instance,” Giroux writes, “Bloomberg and the market-driven billionaires who support his view of education are now asking the American people to be proud of what we in fact should be ashamed of—the rise of a market-driven business culture that hates democracy and the forms of education that make it possible.”

Reading Education and the Crisis of Public Values, Giroux often comes across inhabiting multiple bodies: in one sense, a latter-day prophet announcing doom to a half-empty lecture room; in another, a veteran intellectual supplying ammo to a younger generation woefully unprepared for the most important public education fight in the nation’s history; a matador striding alone, trying to hold onto what remains of a flailing, collapsing tradition; a public advocate resting one final count of persuasion upon a society slipping into the abyss of neoliberalism, from which no return might be possible. “Surely, under such circumstances, we have joined Alice in falling into the rabbit hole.”

But this teacher of hope wouldn’t want to depart without a sense of what true education brings: not a model or method or structure frozen and microwaved for use like packaged patties, but a “political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills, and social relations that enable students to explore for themselves the possibility of what it means to be engaged citizens while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.”

Students, if they at all care for their futures, would have to forge alone at times, returning to history for inspiration, refusing to be swept away by this whirlwind of neoliberalism racing through everything yet to be privatized. Students would have to be vigilant against facile alternatives to the paradigms and traditions handed down through generations, fought brutally, and often bloodily, for by men and women who simply dreamed of a world free from the fangs of corporate dominance. Students would need to be at the forefront of this movement, like the children of Chile, refusing to sell out their futures and those of generations to come. “They must also learn to confront directly the threat from fundamentalisms of all varieties that seek to turn democracy into a mall, a sectarian church, or an adjunct of the emerging punishing state.”

With this document, we can truly hope for the best.

With the nation’s unemployment rate hovering about 10 percent, recent high school graduates are escaping reality by going to college, and college grads are avoiding reality by entering grad school. The result is that it now takes a M.A. to become a shift manager at a fast food restaurant.

Colleges have stayed ahead of the Recession by becoming business models, where students are “inventory units,” and success is based upon escalating profit. Increasing the number of incoming units, class size, and tuition, while not increasing teaching and support staff, leads some colleges to believe they are solvent in a leaking economy. Budgets for academics are decreasing; budgets for dorms are increasing. Enrollment in degree-granting institutions is expected to be about 19.1 million in 2012, an increase of about 25 percent from 2000, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.

Desperate to destroy their image as places of scholarship, colleges are using the 98.6 admissions criteria—admit almost anyone with a body temperature. Colleges may claim they admit only students with at least a 3.0 grade point average, which at some high schools is about half the student body, but it’s likely that students with lower averages aren’t recruited because they’re already working as lab specimens.

Across the nation, Developmental Education classes are increasing, with some departments now within the Top 5 in the college. For those who don’t speak “academicese,” that means more students are in college who have basic readin’, ’riting, and ’rithmetic problems.

Nevertheless, there are still a few hold-outs among colleges where students actually go to study, develop their minds, and hope to make great contributions to society. This, of course, in a declining economy, is not acceptable.

At Neargreat Tech, when the Admissions department failed to increase enrollment because most high school grads didn’t want to be associated with geeks, the President convened a Judiciary Review Board to reduce the college’s academic reputation. First in was the class valedictorian.

“Bennish, this is the fifth time this semester you’ve been caught sneaking into the library. This administration just doesn’t know what to do with you.”

“Sir, maybe I could increase my community service and read books to the ill and illiterate.”

“Why can’t you just go to our football games Saturday afternoons, then party and get drunk like a normal college student?”

“Because, sir, we don’t have a football team.”

“Then start one! If it’s as bad as it could be, you’ll have an excuse to drink. Next!”

Next in was a student accused of disturbing the peace.

“Rachmaninoff, your advisor says you’re a pretty good musician, but you only want to play the classical stuff. We’re assigning you to the marching band.”

“But, Dean, I play the piano.”

“Great! The band needs a pianist.”

“Sir, it might be difficult to carry a piano along Broadway. Besides, there are only 20 members in the band anyhow.”

“Even better! Pick an instrument. Banjo. Double bass. Electric guitar. They need everything! Dismissed!”

Next to be called to face a disciplinary hearing was Schopenhauer. “You were seen lying on the grass beneath a tree in the quad,” said the president. “The campus police claim you were thinking. We should give you an opportunity to defend yourself against this egregious accusation. What exactly were you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“That’s outrageous! You know we don’t like our students to think. What’s your major?”

“Philosophy, sir.”

“That’s the problem,” the president declared. “Since you’re only a freshman, and probably don’t know better, I’ll be lenient. You are sentenced to a day of writing graffiti on the university’s bathroom walls.” He paused a moment, then snapped, “And don’t let me catch you writing anything intelligent on those walls!”

Later that afternoon, the president met with his staff.

“This isn’t going to work,” said the dejected president. “We can’t catch every practicing scholar on campus. They’re just snickering at our rules. If we can’t stop education, then we won’t be able to raise our enrollment and get performance bonuses.”

That’s when Winslow, a newly-appointed deputy assistant dean spoke up. “Perhaps we need to look elsewhere for our inspiration. What is it that almost every college but ours has?” He didn’t wait for a response when he declared the college needed fraternities and sororities.

“How do we know the students will even want to participate?” asked the president. “Most of our students have no desire to participate in a system that humiliates them, strips them of their individuality, and causes them to walk six abreast down a narrow street while singing off-key.”

Perhaps,” suggested the deputy assistant dean, “we can tap our reserve fund and build a couple of fraternity houses, maybe a sorority house or two.”

“Will that guarantee we’ll get more common students to raise the enrollment?”

“If you build it, they will party,” said the deputy assistant dean.

“Winslow may have a bright idea here,” said the president, who immediately promoted him to vice-president of academics and parties.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), a charter school is “a primary or secondary school that receives public money but is not subject to some of the rules, regulations and statutes that apply to public schools, in exchange for some type of accountability for producing certain results, which are set forth in each school’s charter.”

Parents of color are encouraged to believe that charter schools are the panacea to the obstacles their children face due to institutional racism and underfunding in the public schools. But are charter schools truly the answer to inequality in schools? No! The truth must be exposed to stop these for-profit organizations.

Two-tier Education, Union-busting, Lower Living Standards

Charter schools actually hinder the development of students of color in several ways, while at the same time eroding the quality of public education.

First, they increase classroom segregation by race. In 2010, the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a study showing that 7 of ten Black charter school students attend schools with extremely low numbers of white students. It also found that 32 percent of charter school students are Black — twice the percentage as in public schools.

These schools aggravate other kinds of segregation as well. They gain access to lists of high-achieving students and poach them from public schools. They cherry-pick their students with a restrictive enrollment application and are legally allowed to reject students with special needs: those with physical or cognitive disabilities, for example, or English language learners. What’s even more appalling is that this exclusion is done with taxpayers’ money! Publicly funded schools should be required to serve the needs of all children — not just the ones with the best chance of success.

Charters are also the trigger for union-busting. Teachers’ unions, longtime defenders of quality schools, have to be silenced in order for public schools to be closed and replaced with charters. Most charter school teachers have no union representation and can be terminated for any reason as long as the decision is not based illegally on a characteristic like age, race or sex.

Imagine working under that kind of pressure with 40 students or more in a classroom! This helps to explain why the average teacher in a charter school works there for less than five years.

Public school teachers are required to have earned a bachelor’s degree and gone through a student teaching program. Charter school teachers are not. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the NEA are two unions that were created to ensure that educators would have rights as professionals, health benefits, and wages above the minimum.

Children will suffer and the living standards of U.S. workers will drop if the teachers’ unions are broken and a two-tier educational system takes hold.

Education for the masses!

Originally, freed slaves — defying threats to their lives — established the public education system in the South as a tool to empower disenfranchised African Americans and to create equal educational opportunities for all people. I vehemently defend public education because I, myself, am a successful product of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest public school system in the nation!

With encouragement from my family and some very hard-working, dedicated teachers, I beat the odds in spite of my humble beginnings.

Had charter schools been around when I was growing up, I would not have been able to attend due to their selective rules. Many require a minimum of two hours per week of on-site parent volunteer service. That would have eliminated me because my dad worked two jobs to support the family. Charters also often require that parents provide lunch daily for their children. Once again I would have been excluded. And the uniform requirement?! I again would have been left out; my mom sewed my clothes because there was no money to buy them.

Would I have been missing out on a stellar education? Probably not.

In 2009, the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (Stanford University) presented a study comparing charter schools and public schools. Charter schools outperformed public schools only about 17 percent of the time. Nearly 46 percent of charter schools are on par with public schools. However, about 37 percent of charters are rated academically lower. Other factors being fairly equal, how is it possible to start with the “cream of the crop” and yet produce sour milk more than a third of the time?!

Charter schools have sprung up rapidly in New Orleans, New York, Georgia, California, and elsewhere. We need to fight against this destructive wave of ineptitude that charter schools have initiated.

Antidote: United Defense of Public Education

Quality public schools can be an effective road out of a cycle of poverty. They can reduce social inequality, help youngsters achieve their potential, and provide good union jobs for people who care about children. So, how do we fight for them?

Our unions must once again strive to build solidarity with the community — where parents of color are often in the lead. We can also take a giant step in fighting back by participating in ongoing campaigns.

As I write, one immediately upcoming opportunity will present itself July 28-31 in Washington, D.C., where Save Our Schools (SOS) is holding a several-day conference and organizing a march. SOS demands include equitable funding for all public school communities; an end to high stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation; teacher, family, and community leadership in forming public education policies; and curriculum developed for, and by, local school communities.

As the famous and deservedly popular anti-war slogan has it, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber!”

•  This article first appeared at Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 32, No. 4, August-September, 2011

The first order of business after the passage of the CEA will be to close all of the existing “liberal arts” colleges in the country. As Senator Boner pointed out, the whole concept of “liberal” is passé, and “art” has nothing to do with good job performance. Instead, the CEA will ensure that all education is geared towards employment with America’s leading corporations, and graduates will have been properly trained and groomed to serve these corporate interests. He chuckled at the thought that “liberal arts” ever had the backing of any patriotic citizens.

The government is determined to set priorities for corporate involvement in educating America’s students: Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop and other major military contractors will, of course, have the first shot at the top students, teaching courses that will assist them in weapons development and military research. There will be a strong emphasis on science and mathematics, and courses of questionable utility, such as English, literature, history, philosophy and education, will be placed on a back burner.

The next range of businesses to receive students, after the military contractors, and their assistants at the Pentagon, will be the Wall Street financiers. Their particular expertise, at teaching students how to squeeze the maximum profits out of American citizens without actually producing anything of value, is seen as a specialized form of economics, and one necessitating Wall Street’s leadership. Of course, hedge fund brokers, mortgage speculators and other financial advisors will work closely with corporations such as Goldman Sachs to ensure that every aspect of U.S. business will receive their quota of graduating students.

After the corporations mentioned above, the next in line will be the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, and other institutions that have made a profit during the last 6 years in the face of America’s failing economy. It was felt that anyone who could make a profit in the current political environment deserved unlimited support.

The CEA was drafted so as to provide public funding for the education that students will receive in order to work for the corporations that will run the academic senates of the universities. After all, private corporations should not be burdened with the need to pay for the education of students who will work for them in later life. Since an educated work force is a prerequisite to the success of any corporation, it is obvious that the public should bear the burden of making sure the CEA functions efficiently.

Democratic leaders explained that several concerns will be met through passage of the CEA: It will get rid of those students who cannot compete in the corporate environment, and will therefore likely become a financial burden on the society. Scholarships will also be unnecessary, since students will be assured jobs at the corporations that sponsored and educated them, and the initial costs of their education will be borne by the public. Finally, by making sure that all future graduates will be assured employment with one of the corporations that run the system, the public will save billions of dollars by not having to educate worthless, stupid youth, who can’t compete in the corporate world.

Because most children don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, and certainly, under the older system, had no idea where they would find employment, the Congress determined that it was a waste of time and money to teach such children until they were older, and had a better sense of direction. By obviating the need for special education, scholarship programs, or “affirmative action,” the Congress was able to drastically lower the amount of funds and resources needed for what used to constitute widespread, wasteful education.

The teaching workforce will also be affected positively. Since the corporations and businesses who will train and educate the students are in the best position to know what courses and curriculum will best suit their needs, the kind of wasted efforts on language skills, history, philosophy and other abstract, impractical classes that characterized the old university systems, can be modified to delete such unwarranted “luxuries.”

Another positive impact that the CEA will have is to end those pesky teacher’s unions, and support systems that existed under the old educational system. Since the targeted corporations will determine teachers and curriculum, most teachers will already be covered by corporate employment contracts, and therefore no other superfluous union-type of structure will be necessary, or desirable.

When Hillary Clinton heard of the CEA, she was extremely pleased, and promised to bring the same formula to the State Department, as a means of streamlining the educational system, and getting rid of the “dead weight” that existed pre-Obama.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, they explained how Stand for Children, a nonprofit ostensibly dedicated to helping “all children get the excellent public education…they need to thrive,” helped push through legislation in Illinois aimed at severely restricting teacher union rights.

Their panel discussion, titled “If It Can Happen There, It Can Happen Anywhere: Transformational Education Legislation in Illinois,” began with Crown painting a picture of an all-powerful teachers union that consistently blocks education reform and has a stranglehold on Illinois politics:

[W]e had a mayor who talked importantly about reforming the schools, Mayor Daley, and we had a CEO of public schools, Arne Duncan, who did everything he could in that environment. But this was not a fair fight. Because of the political strength and the organized strength of the unions, who, each time they came up to a contract session, would not concede on length of day, would not concede on teacher metrics and would insist on additional compensation. And that’s the way things have gone for an entire generation in terms of negotiated outcome.

Crown was particularly angry that teachers in Illinois had maintained their right to strike. “In forty-five of the fifty states there is no right to strike by teachers,” he protested. “So this was an incredibly strike permissive environment with these other efforts by the unions, and so forth, that created an unsustainable structure in our school system.”

But for Crown, whose family has long been a pillar of the Chicago financial elite, this environment changed when Jonah Edelman and Stand for Children got involved.

Stand for Children (SFC) is a Portland, Ore.-based non-profit that emerged out of a 1996 march of over a quarter-million people in Washington, D.C. The aim of the march was to highlight child poverty at a time when Congress and the Clinton administration were preparing to “end welfare as we know it.” According to Susan Barrett, a parent volunteer who recently stepped down from her position in Portland’s SFC chapter, Jonah Edelman:

and a co-founder set up a home base in Oregon, and worked on smaller issues with positive impact, such as after-school program funding and emergency dental care for uninsured kids. Many parents like me who joined SFC a while back still remember how it was an organization fighting for the Portland Children’s Levy, which provided funds for early childhood education, foster care, child abuse prevention programs and a variety of other programs centered on children.

But in the last couple years, Stand for Children has seen an influx of corporate cash that drastically changed the organization’s priorities.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of SFC’s earlier big donors, began by offering a two-year grant of $80,000 in 2005. In the last few years, however, possibly because it realized that SFC could be an effective ally in pushing the corporate model for education reform, the Gates Foundation drastically enlarged its contributions. In 2007, Stand for Children received a $682,565 grant. In 2009, it got a $971,280 grant, and in 2010, it received a $3,476,300 grant—all from the Gates Foundation.

Though the Gates Foundation remains the biggest donor to Stand for Children, other players in the world of corporate education reform have also begun to see SFC as an effective vehicle to push their agenda.

New Profit Inc. is the other major player that has funded SFC since 2008—to the tune of $1,458,500. According to its website, New Profit is a “national venture philanthropy fund that seeks to harness America’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to help solve the country’s biggest social problems.” New Profit’s “strategic partner” is Monitor Group, a consulting firm that was recently criticized for signing a $3 million contract with Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi for a PR campaign aimed at rehabilitating the regime’s image.

The Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the extremely wealthy owners of Wal-Mart, made a 2010 grant of $1,378,527. Several other major funders are tied to Bain Capital, a private equity and venture capital firm founded by Mitt Romney—currently the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

To think that bedfellows like these are just handing over millions in cash and expecting nothing in return would be naïve. As Susan Barrett wrote in an eye-opening article about the changing atmosphere inside Stand for Children:

Parents and community members most likely do not know that SFC now has private equity investors and venture philanthropists on the board, making decisions for the organization as it grows new chapters…

My fear is that unwitting parents and community members will join SFC because they want to rectify the problems they see every day in their children’s public schools, such as underfunding, lack of arts programs, large class sizes and cuts to the school year, only to find that they get roped into very different goals. With SFC inspiring many of its members to run for school board seats, and the funding it gives through its PAC, I worry we will lose a truly democratic discussion and action on education weighted in favor of corporate reforms.

Barrett goes on to explain how the priorities of the Portland chapter have changed:

About three years ago, some team leaders at my school became uncomfortable when they were asked to engage in what they considered to be tacky conversations with teachers around hiring practices. When a fellow parent and I were asked to take over as the new team leaders for this school year, we were cautioned about this, but otherwise, we all assumed SFC was working to enhance public education, and this was just a minor mistake along the way…That was a red flag, but now, as I look back and connect the dots, I see so many more.

I think about the visits from the Policy Director of the New Teacher Project, and the former aide to New York City charter operator Eva Moskowitz, who said she was moving to Portland and trying to set up a chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, the pro-charter, hedge-fund driven organization. I think about their push for Oregon to submit a Race to the Top application, (which the state did initially, but it failed); and how the organization acted as the “social justice partner “of Waiting for “Superman” and urged parents to attend the film. Only recently did I come to realize that the SFC Portland director, Tyler Whitmire, is the daughter of Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater, a book lavishing praise on Michelle Rhee.

This past year, Oregon SFC staff wanted us to press our legislators to pass a “bipartisan education package,” which basically tied the release of much-needed school funding to the expansion of charter schools, online learning, and other so-called “reforms.” SFC also pushed to lower the capital gains tax….

This stance is a great departure from what people would normally expect of SFC, and only makes sense when you see the wealthy investors on SFC’s National Board of Directors, and how billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation are now funding and driving the organization’s agenda.

As SFC begins to expand across the country, new chapters will likely be controlled from the top with the corporate-driven agenda as their first priority.

This was certainly the case in Illinois, where Stand for Children played a part in crafting what they are touting as their biggest victory yet: Senate Bill 7.

SB 7, which passed the Illinois Senate in a unanimous vote and the General Assembly with a single dissenter, undermines seniority as the basis of teacher job security and specifically singles out the Chicago Teachers Union by severely restricting its right to strike.

Which brings us back to Jonah Edelman and his unrestrained arrogance. At the Aspen Ideas Festival—sponsored by the Aspen Institute, another Gates Foundation recipient that works on corporate education schemes such as the Teachers as Human Capital Project—Edelman caused an uproar for his comments about SB 7.

In a speech caught on video, Edelman gives a step-by-step account of how Stand For Children worked to undermine teacher union rights in Illinois. After explaining how SFC essentially bought a handful of Illinois legislators with campaign contributions—most crucially, Assembly Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat who had been shunned by the unions after pushing to cut teachers’ pensions a year earlier—Edelman explains SFCs strategy:

After the election, Advance Illinois and Stand had drafted a very bold proposal we called Performance Counts. It tied tenure and layoffs to performance. It let principals hire who they choose. It streamlined dismissal of ineffective tenured teachers substantially—from two-plus years and $200,000 in legal fees, on average, to three to four months, with very little likelihood of legal recourse.

And most importantly, we called for the reform of collective bargaining throughout the state—essentially, proposing that school boards would be able to decide any disputed issue at impasse. So a very, very bold proposal for Illinois, and one that six months earlier would have been unthinkable, undiscussable.

And after the election, I went back to Madigan…I reviewed the proposal, and I confirmed his support…The next day he created an education reform committee, and his political director called to ask for our suggestions for who should be on it. And so in Aurora, Ill., in December, out of nowhere, there were hearings on our proposal…

In addition we hired 11 lobbyists, including the four best insiders and seven of the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them. We enlisted a statewide public affairs firm…We raised $3 million for our political action committee between the election and the end of the year. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.

And so essentially, what we did in a very short period of time was shift the balance of power. I can tell you there was a palpable sense of concern, if not shock, on the part of the teachers unions in Illinois that Speaker Madigan had changed allegiance, and that we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down their throats, the same way the pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier.

Stand’s “Performance Counts” was used as a battering ram to get the less harsh Senate Bill 7. As Edelman explained, “[B]ecause we started extreme, we gave ourselves room to come back….And so, in the course of three months…[the unions] essentially gave away every single provision related to teacher effectiveness that we had proposed…Not irrationally, not idealistically. It wasn’t a change of heart. It’s because they feared that we were able to potentially execute our collective bargaining proposal.”

Edelman’s anti-union comments rightly produced outrage among union and education activists and Edelman, realizing he had blown Stand for Children’s progressive cover, issued an extended apology. Edelman said he regretted that he “left children mostly out of the equation,” and that the speech “could cause viewers to wrongly conclude that I’m against unions.” The lengthy apology was obviously nothing more than an attempt to rehabilitate the image of SFC and Edelman.

For their part, the leaders of Illinois’ three main education unions blasted Edelman in a joint statement:

We heard a lot from Jonah Edelman about power in politics, power over unions and management power over teachers. Sadly, we didn’t hear anything in that hour-long session about improving education…What’s worse is that these false claims clearly show an organizational agenda that has nothing to do with helping kids learn.

What should be clear after reading Edelman’s remarks is that Stand for Children, rather than standing for the rights of poor children, has become an organization that stands for Corporate America. In order to push its agenda, groups like SFC try to get parents and other community members who care about education to buy into the myth that teachers have bloated pensions and are impossible to fire.

But any real account of the current atmosphere for teachers flies in the face of this fairy tale.

Chicago, in particular, has seen its school system devastated by a slew of corporate reformers: Paul Vallas (1995-2001), who later became the architect behind the union-busting and charterization plan in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Arne Duncan (2001-2008), who privatized Chicago public schools at a rate of about 10 per year before becoming Barack Obama’s Education Secretary; Ron Huberman (2009-2010), who weakened protections for probationary teachers and cut sports programs, while paying exorbitant salaries to central office officials; and now Jean-Claude Brizard (2010-present), the former superintendent of Rochester, N.Y., where 95 percent of teachers voted “no confidence” in his administration.

Chicago has become a testing ground for corporate education policy, which has created a terrible atmosphere for teachers.

For example, a week before the Edelman scandal broke, the Chicago Reader printed an insightful story by Ben Joravsky about a Chicago Public Schools teacher that debunks the teachers-are-impossible-to-fire myth. According to Joravsky, Allison Bates, a third-year science teacher at a high school called Austin Polytechnical Academy, “was fired and banned from working anywhere in CPS for the unforgivable sin of—hold on to your hats, folks—not putting her lesson plans in the red folder, as her principal told her.”

Bates’ first principal had given her an “excellent” rating, but within a year, he was promoted to the central office and replaced by a new principal from North Carolina, and Bates was given an “unsatisfactory” rating. This rating had nothing to do with her ability to manage a classroom or teach science to her students, but was due to her forgetting to follow the principal’s instructions to put printed-out copies of her lesson plans in a red folder.

As Joravsky points out:

[P]robationary teachers—that is, those with less than four years in the classroom—have no tenure rights. They have their jobs on a year-to-year basis and can be fired without much of an explanation. Moreover, probationary teachers who are given unsatisfactory evaluations and who are not rehired at their schools are slapped with a do-not-hire designation. Principals can hire back teachers evaluated as unsatisfactory, but if they don’t, the teachers are essentially banned from ever teaching anywhere in the CPS system.

This story reveals that the complaints of Edelman and James Crown about the difficulties in firing teachers are nothing more than a pretext for attacking what few rights teachers have left.

For the first several years, when teachers are in their probationary period, they can be fired for almost any reason. When teachers receive “tenure,” they can still be fired—the difference is that now they have access to due process, a basic right written into most union contracts, and they can file a grievance if they feel they were unjustly terminated.

Though cloaked in language about helping children, the purpose of further restricting teachers’ rights to due process and to strike is to take control of the classroom out of the hands of teachers and the communities they serve—and putting it under the authority of corporate boardrooms.

Breaking the teachers’ unions—now the largest sector of organized labor in the U.S.—is about smashing any organized resistance to the bipartisan drive for austerity. Edelman’s comments may be unique in their candor, but the ideas he espouses are commonplace among corporate education reformers—whether they come in Republican or Democratic clothing.

As the Edelman scandal makes clear, the ruling class is preparing to export the strategy it adopted in Illinois to the rest of the country. It will be up to teachers, parents and students to expose organizations like Stand for Children—and organize the fight to defend public education.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Our morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education.

– Albert Einstein¹

While at university, I was once required to write an essay on personal ethics to guide an educator. Of course ethics entailed respect for the rights of all humans, but mere respect for rights is insufficient.

Each person must decide on which principles they hold and abide by them as much as possible.

I propose the following as a simple basis for making decisions that have ethical consequences.

1) Respect that others abide by different principles. Therefore, before rendering any decision, the reasons held by others for or against any action must be heard and considered.

2) Principles must be open to scrutiny. If a superior conception of a principle exists, then an inferior principle must be abandoned.

3) Given that a principle is morally and logically sound, decisions should be rendered upon this principled basis.

4) Since mass participatory democracy is preferable to dictatorship, decision-making should be achieved, as much as possible, through a consensus.

As for my personal ethics, I hold that all humans must be not only regarded as endowed with equal rights but provided with equal conditions. The United States Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” This is factually inaccurate. We are all created unique, each person with his own strengths and weaknesses. From this mindset, how “we” value certain attributes determines how “we” view equality among humans. Society² values certain attributes more than others; consequently, individuals proficient in certain skills or possessing other attributes valued by society will be treated differently than individuals who do not possess society’s valued skills or attributes.

The phrase “all men are created equal” is obviously a platitude. It would have been much more honest to simply state that we are all different; nevertheless, we are all entitled to equal rights – and importantly, because it is not stated in the Declaration of Independence – equal conditions. (The Declaration of Independence undermines itself by referring to the Indigenous peoples of “America” as “merciless Indian Savages.” This is pertinent because it is a document held sacred by most Americans; and Americans and Canadians hold a similar — not identical — colonial origin and culture.)

That everyone is entitled to equal conditions is seldom stated as a principle in society. This is not surprising because it does not exist, and this is unsurprising because it thoroughly undermines all notions of equality in society. Canadian society is capitalist (with socialist elements). Theoretically, capitalist society is predicated on competition in the market, and current capitalist mythology holds that anyone with skills who works hard enough can make it to the top of society. There is a top and there is a bottom. That fact that there is a top of society, itself, refutes the notion of equality.

Yet, it is simple to demonstrate that equality of conditions is a sine qua non of a society where equality of rights exists. For example, very few people would argue that a 100-meter race where some runners start from positions far behind the start line is fair. It is axiomatic. Very few people would argue that a professional boxing match between a heavyweight and flyweight is fair.

Yet, many people — and most educators!! — think it is fair to grade children using identical parameters, despite the inequality of their conditions. In the education system, a child from a poor, single-parent family who is poorly fed, often going to school in the mornings with an empty stomach, and who must help out his parent will be assessed the same as a child from a wealthy, loving family where both parents are professionals and the shelves are filled with books and educational DVDs. Is this fair? I submit it is not, but the system requires educators grade regardless of conditions outside the classroom.

The obvious solution seems to recognize the inequality of conditions and reflect this in the assessment of students. Better would be to provide for equality of conditions.

Not only is a system of testing and grading unfair but it is inefficient, as study after study shows that cooperation is superior to competition in promoting achievement.

Cooperation is something that should be fostered in society. Therefore, the imposition of competitive grading should be eliminated and cooperative learning encouraged. It seems sufficient that students can decide upon their own goals and plan (with facilitation from a teacher/parent) their paths to their goals.

Yet education is fraught with authoritarianism, and one consequence of this authoritarianism is that learners are taught that it is normal in society to wield power over others, often without accountability to those the power is being wielded over.

Hence, a discussion of ethics in education is rendered moot because education (in the mainstream of the capitalist system) is flawed by an unethical foundation.

1. Albert Einstein: The Human Side, Helen Dukas and Barnesh Hoffman (Eds.), Princeton University Press, 1979: 83. The quotation continues: “The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.”
2. Here I am not referring to the masses in society because society is not governed by the masses; society is a function of agendas set by owners of corporations and their political faces.

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four and nothing over. Thomas Gradgrind, Sir- peremptorily Thomas- Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket. Sir, ready to weight and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, case of simple arithmetic.

It’s hard to fathom that the banal philosophy of such a universally mocked caricature from Victorian times would make a strong resurgence over a century later. Yet just like neoliberalism, another Victorian leftover, this ideological brand has achieved bi-partisan support, near pundit consensus, and billionaire backing. Substitute test scores for ‘facts’ and Bill Gates or Joel Klein for Gradgrind and we have an almost perfect match for what passes for educational philosophy and reform these days.

It was Joel Klein, former schools chancellor of New York City credited with implementing major changes such as opening over 100 charter schools and pushing for teacher merit pay, writing in the June issue of  The Atlantic regarding criticism that reformers like himself ought to be more collaborative with existing education structures, who said “Collaboration is the elixir of the em>status-quo crowd.” The essay was the expected paean to the usual buzzwords like accountability, choice, union obstructionism, and test scores.

Test scores are sacrosanct, particularly in the aftermath of Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB),  enthusiastically passed by both parties in 2001. The bill mandated schools improve test scores in reading and math in grammar schools (third grade through eighth grade) or risk closure in five years. It left it up to individual states to create their own tests and determine relevant curriculums.

However, an editorial on the normally reactionary NY Daily News op-ed page on June 14th succinctly explained the obvious pitfall of NCLB. It turns out that after eight years of Klein’s stewardship (along with billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg) 80% of the graduates of New York City’s public high schools are not ready for college or successful careers. This according to the state’s Education Department. The News puts it:

After steadily climbing over the past nine years, the proportion of city students graduating in four years hit 61%, or 65% counting August completions. That used to reason to cheer. No more. Now additional statistics are cause for alarm…In other words, standards were so dumbed down that vast swaths of the school system were offering only a pretense of a quality education…The rising graduation rate of city high schools is of little consolation when most of the diplomas are barely worth the paper they’re printed on

Things don’t seem to be much better nationally on that front. On the same day as the Daily News op-ed, the New York Times and other news organizations reported that only 20 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors who took the latest National Assessment Exam demonstrated proficiency in history (for example, only two percent of high school seniors correctly answered a question about Brown v Board of Education); the study of history, while perhaps being valuable in itself and critically important for an educated citizenry, not being reading or math and therefore overlooked by NCLB test cramming.

Then, of course, there is Michelle Rhee, the glamour girl for free-market education whose picture has glazed the cover of just about every weekly news magazine during her three year tenor as chancellor of DC public schools. Rhee became a hero to conservatives and libertarians for closing schools, firing dozens of principals, over 200 teachers, and managing a teachers’ contract that leans towards merit pay. Worship of Rhee went so far that during the 2008 election Obama and McCain pathetically duked it out over who was closer to Rhee’s opinion about vouchers.

However, she was all but forced to resign after incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid in a contest that was billed as a referendum on Rhee’s running of the city’s school system. Not long after revelations emerged that recent state tests in several DC schools contained an exorbitant amount of erasures that changed wrong answers to correct ones. For example, the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, touted by Rhee as a prime example of getting results since the percentage of students who achieved proficiency on DC tests jumped from 10 percent to 58 percent in just two years. The principal and teachers were showered with bonuses while computer analysis of erasures in one 7th grade class showed that students averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures in a reading test, compared to less than 1 average for the whole district; a very likely case of teachers under pressure from an unreasonably demanding boss and with economic incentive to take matters in their own hands, a trend that would figure to show up again elsewhere.

It is an easy truism that when simplistic numbers become the end-all corruption is an inevitable result. Thus, this is what the education revolutionaries have sowed: dumbed-down standards, narrow curriculums, meaningless test drilling, and union busting. Yet this shallow revolution is backed by deep pockets, mainly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by far the largest foundation in the U.S., six times wealthier than the next largest, and the Walton Family Foundation (according to the foundation’s website it’s ‘more focused than ever on sustaining the Walton’s timeless small-town values’). Through large grants to cash strapped states, dependent on such stipulations as not granting teacher tenure in less than three years and ‘ensuring successful conditions for high performing charter schools and other innovative schools’, large donations to both political parties, and hundreds of millions of dollars in media advocacy (including Gates sponsoring the documentary Waiting for Superman), big money philanthropists have been able to shape the education debate and be fawned upon by the national media. Indeed one study cited by Frederick Hess in “With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy is Reshaping K-12 Education“ revealed that from 1995-2005 there were thirteen positive articles about education initiatives of major foundations for every single negative one in national news outlets.

Still all is not yet lost. For all the hyped despair about U.S. students falling behind their international counterparts this claim can be put into context. Joann Barkan, writing in Dissent Magazine (“Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools”), cites the results of two of the three major international tests- the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study. Both are given every five years. She explains the results:

The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent rankedfirst in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty ratewas 10 to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose higher still, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.

It is the poverty rate, along with the incarceration rate, that has long separated the U.S. from other industrial countries. Mechanized test prepping, schools closing, and cheapened diplomas won’t make a dent in either, that self-reinforcing loop, in the absence of real reform and commitment to communities as a whole, figures only keep on churning.

This resolution comes at a very important time for education policy-making in Maryland. Gov. Martin O’Malley must appoint a new state schools superintendent, now that Nancy Grasmick is retiring. Perhaps the governor will take the hint from Baltimore City that we need to reverse course immediately.

Ms. Grasmick was a strong proponent of Race to the Top, which has been more appropriately labeled “Race to the Bottom” and even “Rat Race to the Top.” The entire focus of President Barack Obama’s educational policy is to replace public schools with charter and non-union schools; bust the teachers unions by stripping teachers of collective bargaining rights; rely on extremely nebulous, faulty and often fraudulent data to assess school and student performances; tie teacher salaries to standardized test scores; and ignore economic reality in order to shift blame for apparent failures.

The politics around blaming teachers is simple. If you’re not going to go after the legitimate targets for educational “failures,” then look for scapegoats. This approach is clearly bipartisan, as President Obama, the Democrat, chants a similar mantra to the likes of Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin — that all should share the sacrifices. In education, shifting the responsibility almost entirely onto the professional teaching class is their way of sharing sacrifices.

Our national focus on education is to turn it into a business with no input from its workers. Teachers are laborers, and students are the commodities. But consider this: The state with the highest state test scores, Massachusetts, is the most unionized state for teachers.

Conversely, South Carolina, the most anti-union state in the country, shows the worst performance among its students but nary a peep from the “reformers.” Yet it is somehow the unions’ fault that students aren’t performing well? Who is manufacturing failed “products?”

The data that back up the notion that students’ failures are the fault of teachers are easily debunked. Diane Ravitch, the lightning rod for exposing the fraudulence of No Child Left Behind and its permutation, Race to the Top, posits that the success of Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the D.C. public schools, may be based on widespread fraud. Unfortunately, Ms. Rhee, one of the heroes of the Superman syndrome and one of Mr. Obama’s educational champions, is not alone.

Who is favored? Race to the Top certainly does not favor the student. It favors test makers and new assessment tools and their enormously expensive software, professional development gurus, young Teach for America recruits who quickly see greener pastures after toughing it out for two years, and six-figure principals of non-union chartered schools.

Merit pay — tying test scores to teacher salaries, a major part of the new Baltimore City teachers contract — is one of its “selling factors” that guarantees those with the most needs will be those who are least served. Hey, who wants to teach students who will likely bring down a school’s scores and have a direct impact on one’s paycheck?

Governor O’Malley, your former colleagues from the Baltimore City Council have sent you a message. Look for a state superintendent who does not see teachers as the problem, or pit teacher against teacher with wild schemes of merit pay for only a select group, or endlessly test students only to prove how well they can do on taking multiple choice tests. This is not education. The business model does not work — and replacing the superintendent with one who recognizes this will turn Maryland into the educational powerhouse it used to be.

When we march in Washington this summer for our schools, let Marylanders know that we are in the business of teaching and that pedagogy should not be based on the corporate bottom line.

•  This article was first published by the Baltimore Sun.

The true nature of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians prompted Jewish-American folk legend Pete Seeger to speak out. Seeger, 92, used to participate in the Israeli Arava Institute’s virtual rally “With Earth and Each Other”, but Arava’s behind-the-scenes partner is the Jewish National Fund, responsible for destroying Palestinian lands and building forests on them to hide their crimes. Seeger now realises Arava is in fact a subtle tool of “Rebrand Israel”: “Now that I know more, I support the BDS movement as much as I can.” Seeger has long given royalties from his famous Bible-based song from the 1960s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions for their work in rebuilding demolished homes and exposing Israel’s practice of forcing Palestinians off their land to build Jewish villages and cities.

In the build-up to IAW, the Ramallah-based “Stop the Wall Campaign” and “It’s Apartheid” media collective announced the winners of the first International Israeli Apartheid Short Film contest in February. The winners “Apartheid Road”, “Ali Wall” and “Confronting the Wall” can be viewed at itisapartheid.info. Ali Al-Jadar’s story is especially touching; as a callow 16-year-old, he built a ladder and planted a Palestinian flag at the top of the wall near his home. The IDF came in the night, arrested, tortured and sentenced him to eight years in prison, though mercifully he was released in a prisoner exchange after two years. He is one of the thousands of modest heroes that inspire IAW activists around the world.

In Beirut, South African anti-apartheid activist Salim Vally provided insights from the earlier South African struggle. Lebanese activist Rania Masri described the boycott movement as a vehicle against global and local neoliberalism. Iconic Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled linked IAW goals with current anti-government revolts in the broader Arab world, which are dominated by social movements for justice and self-determination.

Ontario universities joined together to draw up a petition signed by 140 academics to divest from BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Hewlett Packard and Lockheed, all of which provide military and/or information technologies that help Israel violate international law.

A dramatic IAW event was staged by students from the Arizona chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace at the University of Arizona (UA) and UA migrant rights group No Más Muertes/No More Deaths (NMM), who erected a mock apartheid wall dividing the UA campus in Tucson for a week, drawing a parallel between the wall being built dividing Mexico and the US and the Israeli apartheid wall. “People are dying and suffering from abominable policies being funded with US tax dollars,” remarked JVP coordinator Chicano-Jewish student Gabriel Matthew Schivone.

More than 6000 human remains of Mexicans seeking a better life have been recovered from the US/Mexico borderlands in the past two decades. “We will not stand idly by nor stay silent regarding the enormous suffering being inflicted either in our local deserts and cities, or 10,000 miles away in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Our wall symbolised our collective will to end global apartheid and work toward a world that truly offers justice for all.”

Last year Hampshire College in Massachusetts, the first US college to divest from South Africa in 1979, became the first to divest from the Israeli occupation, following its anti-racism Action Awareness Week 2008. As in Arizona, students constructed a mock wall, distributed Palestinian and Israeli passports randomly to students, and when they tried to pass through, the activists showed them how they would be treated in Israel. As in Toronto they launched a petition drive to divest from firms supporting Israeli apartheid.

As a result student Will Delphia made his debut as documentary film producer last year with the 30-minute film To Know is Not Enough, using Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine archival footage, clips from media coverage, and interviews with the personalities involved. Though the administration never admitted it divested because of Israeli apartheid, as one student says in the film, “The administration divested. But the administration is not the college. The staff, students and community are. We made the decision and we are making the statement.”

University of Johannesburg went a step further to become the first South African university to implement an academic boycott of an Israeli university, Ben-Gurion University. The UJ Senate concluded that “there is significant evidence that BGU has research and other engagements that support the military and armed forces of Israel, in particular in its occupation of Gaza.” Bishop Desmond Tutu argued: “Palestinians have chosen, like we did, the nonviolent tools of boycott, divestment and sanctions. South African universities with their own long and complex histories of both support for apartheid and resistance to it should know something about the value of this nonviolent option.”

EuroPalestine is engaged in spectacular and frequent BDS actions that the European Israel lobby and the French government try relentlessly to block through legal actions. They recently made a 15-city tour of France with 200 activists and posted their documentary about it. They plan to bring thousands to East Jerusalem and the West Bank 8-16 July for the Gaza Freedom March, with Palestinians hosting their foreign supporters.

The most important BDS-inspired event of 2011, marking the first anniversary of the tragic Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara last May, will be the Free Gaza Movement flotilla expected in late May, when 12 ships carrying a thousand peace activists with humanitarian supplies will head for Gaza. Israel’s Ambassador to Turkey Gaby Levy asked the Turkish government to help stop the activists, but was told the flotilla was “an initiative by civil society”. Israel’s UN Ambassador Meron Reuben called the activists “terrorists” who are “willing to become martyrs”. One of the “terrorists” is retired US Colonel Ann Wright, who vowed, “Despite these threats, we are definitely sailing.”

The courage that Palestinians have shown under six decades of brutal occupation is now infecting people with a conscience around the world. It looks like the siege will finally be broken in June, with the flotilla and with Egypt’s promise to open the Gaza crossings, to be followed by the arrival at Ben-Gurion airport in July of thousands more activists determined to embrace their Palestinian brothers and sisters.

When the circumstances change, when it’s a high school senior or college student who exhibits the same lack of discipline, we know instantly whom to blame. Clearly, it’s the student’s fault. But because 10-year olds are still at the mercy of their parents—depending on them to feed and clothe them and establish a household work ethic—laying even part of the blame on the kids seems not only unrealistic but counterproductive.

Yet, bizarre as it seems, in the public school system, when kids miss class or fail to turn in their work, it’s neither the child nor the parent who gets the blame. It’s the teacher.

In contrast to private schools, where entrance exams are required, tardiness and excessive absenteeism are not permitted, and recalcitrant students are routinely booted out of class, public schools are all-inclusive, warm body institutions. Attendance is not only free, it’s compulsory. It’s mandatory. Which means that many of the less motivated, poorly prepared students are going to come to regard it as one cut above prison.

Because public school teachers have to play the hand they’re dealt, what are they supposed to do with a classroom full of uninspired, truant, tardy, undisciplined kids who are there only because the law requires it, and whose parents offer little or no support or encouragement? What are teachers expected to do with students as unprepared and unreceptive as these?

Answer: They’re supposed to play dumb. They’re supposed to pretend that these students’ home life doesn’t matter, that the universe begins and ends in the classroom. They’re supposed to shut up, stop whining, and go about the task of getting these kids ready to achieve high test scores. Get them to behave like “serious” students so that the American taxpayer won’t feel cheated by underwriting teachers’ salaries.

Ask any public school teacher, and they’ll tell you that their “dream class” would consist of students who had gotten sufficient sleep the night before, eaten a nutritious breakfast, completed their homework assignments, and are sitting at their desks, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready and relatively eager to learn their lessons. The students don’t need to be budding geniuses or Junior Einsteins. They don’t even need to be above average. All they need to be is relatively prepared.

One way of achieving this “dream class” might be to appeal directly to the parents. Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on consultants, experimental techniques, teacher bonuses, outreach programs, etc., that money could be spent directly on the parents. Offer them money for their child’s performance—for perfect (or near perfect) attendance, for their child completing his or her homework each day, for improved test scores.

Naturally, people will argue that such an expenditure is unAmerican, that it is not only wasteful and reckless but that it sends the wrong message, encouraging materialistic remuneration for something—a good, solid education—that should be its own reward. They’re absolutely right. A good education should be its own reward. But, clearly, in many families, in many neighborhoods, and under way too many circumstances, it ain’t.

And instead of painting ourselves into a self-righteous corner—refusing to budge because of adherence to some abstract principle relating to virtue being its own reward—we should come to grips with sociological realities and proceed accordingly.

High school jocks and academic whizzes are given scholarships for performance on the athletic field and in the classroom. Correspondingly, because fourth-graders are still at the mercy of their home environments, such “scholarships” should be given to their parents. Give a family $100 if the kid misses one day a year or less; give them $100 if the kid turns in all (or almost all) of his homework; give them $200 if the kid improves his annual test scores.

These underachieving, undermotivated 10-year olds are going to require some sort of impetus, something to keep them focused academically. It can’t simply be their teachers. It has to be the people who play the most important and decisive role in their lives. It has to be their parents.

And if it takes money to achieve that goal, then so be it. Since when did the notion of paying for stuff become alien to us? We bailed out Wall Street. We bailed out General Motors. Is it so farfetched to begin investing in the American family by offering cash incentives? Clearly, we need to do something.

The epicenter of the struggle for the public university in Latin America is Puerto Rico.

– José Carlos Luque Brazán, professor and researcher of political science and urban planning at the Autonomous University, Mexico City¹

Puerto Rico has historically been a laboratory for social, economic, political and scientific experiments. After the 1898 Spanish American War, the U.S. extended to Puerto Rico a newly crafted colonial system which had never been implemented in the mainland, eugenic programs were tested in the island, sterilization of women and the use of the contraceptive pill also used the island as a laboratory. Later, an export-based developmental model was crafted, euphemistically called “Manos A la Obra” translated as “Operation Bootstrap” (in Mexico called Maquiladora Program), which was later touted as a developmental model for the “Third World.” The use of emigration as an escape valve led 500,000 to migrate to the United States and other parts of the Americas.

After the Spanish-American War, the United States was confronted with a dilemma: what to do with the newly acquired territories, especially, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Territories that were annexed earlier, whether the Louisiana Purchase, Alaska, Hawaii, or the incorporation of the Southwest after the Mexican American War, had relatively small populations which did not have a fully developed national identity. The colonization process consisted of moving white settlers into these regions and placing them into the path toward statehood. The United States was not building a classic empire; it saw itself as engaging in nation-building. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 basely guided a process to transform these territories into full fledged members of the union.

In Puerto Rico’s case, the experience was quite dissimilar. Puerto Rico had a clearly developed national identity, close to a million inhabitants, in U.S. racial terms mostly non-white, a literature, and a history of anti-colonial struggle. The white settler model would not work in the island. Elihu Root used the knowledge engendered by British anthropologists who had provided the ethnography used to structure the British colonial system. This was adapted to Puerto Rico and a series of cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, the “Insular Cases,” carved a legal space for legitimating something that was anathema to the U.S. experience: having colonies. The United States became an empire in the classical sense. Puerto Ricans are today second class U.S. citizens, who can be drafted into the military in case of war (like they were in World War II, the Korean intervention, and the war on Vietnam). However, they are unable vote for the president of the United States, the Commander in General of the U.S. armed forces. They have a delegate which sits in congress with voice but does not vote. Every federal law applies in Puerto Rico even when it might contradict the island’s constitution.

This is in an abbreviated form the historical context for the collapse of the U.S. colonial project in Puerto Rico. The most evident symptom today is the social movement to preserve public higher education which has, still hidden from the U.S. public, shaken the foundations of the colony. Today, the crisis is not only political, but it is also social and economic. It’s most recent reiteration is that for the first time since 1898, the population of the island has declined, according to the latest Census 2010 data. One of the causes of this collapse is another experiment that has used the colonial subjects of Puerto Rico as guinea pigs. The radical implementation of a program of neo-liberal measures that surpasses anything attempted before in Puerto Rico. While previous administrations tried a patchwork of privatizations and budget reduction measures, this is the first time a systematic effort to apply neo-liberal measures to “starve the beast” is being attempted on the island. The most obvious victim is the system of public education which had, until very recently, been a fairly good model of access to higher education and of its contribution to the development of the most educated labor force in Latin America. That all has changed.

Crisis in Public Higher Education in Puerto Rico

While some universities across the nation have increased tuition fees to address budget deficits, few universities have faced the persistent social and political turmoil that has gripped the University of Puerto Rico. With the exception of the 2010 student protests at the University of California at Berkeley, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, most in the academic community have not organized a broad social movement to challenge the underlying ideology that appears to be leading this restructuring of the financing of public higher education. In some sense, as Laurel Weldon argues, a social movement for public education in Puerto Rico has provided a voice to a segment of society which felt powerless as an ideologically led government dismantles public higher education and creates the basis for the continuation of a seemingly permanent crisis.²

Since the founding of the University of Puerto Rico in 1903, the university, which has grown into eleven campuses, has had to face the political intervention of the state. The university was organized during a period after the United States military government ended; it was burdened with a centralized administration and a colonizing objective.³ The model for its structure came from the educational system created in the United States for the education of African Americans and Native Americans. This was a period when social Darwinism permeated American culture and some of the political and educational leaders felt that the natives of the newly acquired territories where inferior. This produced a system of higher education that had a paternalistic relationship with the colonial government. Unfortunately, the legacy of the past is still woven through the institutional norms and practice of the university.

In fact, it was the intense political intervention by the government in the university which led the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools to refuse accreditation to the university in 1937. This colonial origin, the government’s intrusion of partisan politics and centralized power are at the source of most of the recurring social conflicts that have pervaded the history of this institution. In 1942 and 1948, protests from the university community because of political encroachment led to two major strikes that closed down the university. Later throughout the 1960s and 1980s, the university life was punctuated by protests, calls for educational reform and debates about fiscal autonomy as a way to ensure a central role to the academic community in governance. However, while strikes and protests are relatively common throughout the history of the university, this is the first time when the protests have had the real possibility of challenging government policies. The coming together of a number of factors has created a potentially critical situation that could either crush the hope of a progressive educational reform or create the momentum for one in the not too distant future. These factors are first, the worst recession the island has experienced since the 1930s, one that began two years before in the mainland. Second, the reckless political intervention in university affairs by the pro-statehood New Progressive Party administration of Gov. Luis Fortuño. Third, the unrestrained use of force against the protesters.

After a year of instability, the social conflict taking place at the University of Puerto Rico is polarizing this island to such an extent that this United States’ possession, which used to be heralded as the “showcase of democracy” during the Cold War ideological struggles, is now sliding into a system of widespread civil and human rights violations. The University of Puerto Rico, for the first time in decades, is occupied by police: political demonstrations are banned; summary expulsions of student leaders are common; and hundreds of students have been arrested, beaten, and at times sexually assaulted or tortured. On February 9, after the riot squad violently intervened with students painting murals, 28 students were arrested, many were hurt and chaos ensued when pepper gas and batons were used to violently arrest students and bystanders. The police violence was of such magnitude that the faculty organization, the Puerto Rican Association of Professors, and the Brotherhood of Non-Faculty Employees called for a 24-hour strike, which was later extended. The university was closed and the president of the system, Jose Ramon de la Torres, after writing a letter requesting the removal of the police from the campus, announced he was resigning as president.

Presently, Miguel Muñoz, former chancellor of the engineering campus in the western city of Mayaguez is the interim president of the system. While there is a process to name the person who will permanently occupy the position, six of the universities refused to participate in the search. There is a great lack of trust because of decades of partisan intervention in university affairs. The legislature expanded the number of trustees which govern the system so it could have the opportunity of naming people loyal to the governing party. The legislature, under the full control of the New Progressive Party, had also increased the number of judges in the island’s Supreme Court to solidify its control of the institution. They also named a former FBI agent, Jose Figueroa Sancha as superintendent of the island-wide police department. The police force has been militarized and a number of new units, including the Unit for Tactical Operations (UOT), and the Special Arrests Unit (SAU) have been used in response to mostly peaceful student protests. Also surprising is the use of SWAT units with hoods, machine guns, shotguns, and the more widespread use of tazers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, shields by the police. Dr. Jorge Benitez says in his book on citizenship and exclusion that the state does not invest resources unless it feels that the movement challenges the status quo.⁴ The U.S. Department of Justice, in response to a request by both the United States and Puerto Rico’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is investigating the police of Puerto Rico and it is expected that sometime this year some form of consent decree will be implemented because of the widespread violation of human and civil rights. The state of crisis even brought Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill), of Puerto Rican descent to denounce the violations in a session in congress.

Presently, there is a lull in the protests, this retrenchment occurred after an incident where Ana Guadalupe, chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras campus, the largest university in the system, was attacked with water bottles and pushed by students. This incident occurs after a year of police brutality that exacerbated the tension. But even during the most active period of the protests in spring 2010 when students occupied 10 of the eleven universities, U.S. mainstream media coverage of this social movement is scant. Only Al Jazeera and Tele Sur (Venezuela) began to provide some international coverage. In order to break the silence, just as in Egypt, youth created their own media in order to organize and tell the world what is happening in this territory of the United States. They also created a radio station “Radio Huelga” (Strike Radio) managed and controlled by students, to cover the events and dialogue about the issues.

Hidden from the eyes of the world, and especially from the U.S. public, this island with 3.7 million inhabitants is experiencing the most intense struggle for democracy and public education since the 1960s. The leadership of the island-wide movement is provided by the academic community of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus. This is a selective research intensive university and the most prestigious institution of higher education in the Caribbean, the system that provides 95% of the research and development in Puerto Rico. It has 20,000 students and 1,000 faculty. The system historically has produced the intellectual leadership of the island, in the sciences, arts and literature. Because of its selectivity, the system has the brightest and also the most creative and persistent defenders of educational reform and the expansion of public education. Unfortunately, ideology is guiding the government’s response to the educational and social crisis at the university.

Neo-Liberalism in Puerto Rico

Since his landslide election in 2008, Governor Luis Fortuño, of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, has implemented a series of neo-liberal measures, which have polarized the island’s population and increased economic inequality. Governor Fortuño is the first Puerto Rican governor who is an avowed member of the National Republican Party, despite the fact that the Republican Party as such does not participate in Puerto Rican elections. Despite his electoral promises, he has fired 17,000 public workers and reduced investments in social services and education. The unemployment rate in January 2011 was 15.7%, which is lower than it was at the beginning of the fiscal year (16.9% in July 2010), but the reason behind this decline is not an increase in jobs but the discouraged worker effect, that is, workers who are dropping out of the work force and either working in the informal economy or participating in social welfare programs. Puerto Rico, moreover, has one of the lowest labor participation rates in the world. The proportion of the able-bodied population that participates in the work force has declined dramatically. In July 1999, 47.8 per cent were in the labor force and in December 2010 it was 41.1 %. In contrast, the labor participation rate in the United States in January was 64.2%.

In the meantime, efforts to privatize segments of public services including education are being made through what the government calls “private-public partnerships.” These are ways of providing the private sector with public assets without the risks involved in the private market. Attempts to create these partnerships include the building of a gas pipeline through some of the most environmentally fragile areas of the island which are close to population centers. There is strong citizen opposition to this project, in light of the gas pipeline explosions in California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, but the government is committed to its construction.

The privatization of higher education has involved another strategy to achieve the same objective. Funds for the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) since 1997 have been cut by $336 million. The university imposed an $800 fee hike (50%) on the students in order to solve the alleged financial deficit of the system. The Office of Financial Aid at the University of Puerto Rico calculates that the annual cost of attending the university $13,932, and a full-time student spends $1,674, now is spending, $2,474. What this increase will mean is that close to 10,000 students will not be able to attend the university. Given that there might be a further reduction in Pell grants, poorer and middle class students will be priced out of a public college education. What is behind the financial gutting of the university is the neo-liberal ideology supported by Governor Fortuño. From the academic year of 2001-02, to 2006-07, there was a dramatic decline in the proportion of public university students in the total university student population. In 2001-02, only 117,714 attended private universities while 73,838 attended the UPR. In 2006-07, 158,031 went to private universities and only 65,939 the UPR. Contrary to the United States, private institutions of higher education pale in comparison to the quality of the education at the University of Puerto Rico system. According to “Integrated Post Secondary Educational Data System” (IPEDS) of the federal department of education, graduation rates (2007-08) for private universities range between 18.15 and 45.3%. In comparison, graduation rates for the eleven universities of the public system range from 61.0% to 36.4%.

Ironically, if the government’s policy of cutting financial support for public education continues an even more economically stratified system of education will develop. Presently, economically disadvantaged students are more likely to attend private universities than public institutions. So in fact, the burden of educating the island’s youth has been and will be further shifted to private universities, relying more on federal Pell Grants. So, by expanding the role of private universities the neo-liberals are transferring Puerto Rico’s economic responsibility on United States’ taxpayers. In an island with a 47% poverty rate and a median family income of $20,425, a third of the United States median family income ($58,526), education is the only avenue toward upward mobility. These policies will further exacerbate the extreme unequal income distribution that already exists.

Poll ratings of Governor Fortuño are extremely low, a recent poll by the daily Nuevo Dia, only 25 per cent of voters would re-elect Gov. Fortuño. Yet he is steadfast in implementing draconian measures and supporting the repressive measures used against the university community. One reason behind his obstinate efforts may be that he is being courted by the National Republican Party as a way of attracting the Latino vote. Governor Fortuño attended a Heritage Foundation briefing in Simi Valley, California and a Koch brothers’ event in Rancho Mirage, California at the beginning of this year. At such venues he has been boasting of how he has established law and order in Puerto Rico. Most recently, on February 11, he was one of the speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2011 meeting in Washington, D.C., where he touted his neo-liberal policies. Toeing the Tea Party line, he spoke about reducing government, emphasizing higher bond ratings, and about reducing the structural deficit of the government. While it was true that the structural deficit was reduced from $3,306 billion to $2,143 billion on the other hand, the island had received $6,800 billion in American Recovery and Re-Investment Act (ARRA) which are non-recurrent funds. These funds, together with bond emissions helped fill the gap. However, the public debt of Puerto Rico in the meantime has increased from $52, 947 billion in 2008 to $63,366 billion in February 2011. An increase of $10,419 billion more or a 19 per cent increase! A tax cut for multinational corporations that was effected 10 years earlier, based on the same ideology of neo-liberalism, cut $3,000 billion in general funds revenue from the island’s coffers. This is the sum of the structural deficit.

The colonial developmental model did not begin its slide into a crisis in the last few years; many economists date it back to the 1970s when the glowing statistics began to lose their luster. Economist James Dietz says that the economic convergence between the United States and Puerto Rico only lasted between 1950 through 1970s. While there was some improvement in the 1990s, ironically when less federal intervention was taking place in the form of federal exemptions to multinational corporations operating in the island’s enclave economy.⁵ One interesting datum provided by economist Francisco Catalá is that profits to foreign companies in Puerto Rico rose from 7.4 per cent of gross national income in 1970 to 56.5 per cent in 2009.⁶ Obviously, the colonial model had become a hemorrhage of resources away from the island. In 2009, according to the Puerto Rico Planning Board report to the governor, $35, 443 billion dollars were profits transferred out of Puerto Rico. The economy of the island has contracted a bit more than 11 per cent in the last 5 years. Today, 20 per cent of the Puerto Rican population receives 55.3 per cent of all income generated in the island, in the U.S. the top 20 per cent received 50.3. This inequality is higher than that of the United States which has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. But Gov. Luis Fortuño in its messages says that the bond ratings have improved.

Sadly, while the bond ratings have increased somewhat (although still considered risky) Puerto Rico’s social fabric is collapsing. Puerto Rico last year had 1,000 murders; this year, already in February, the homicide number in Puerto Rico reached more than one hundred. And yet the police are at the campus of the University of Puerto Rico, repressing freedom of expression. In the meantime, the population of the island, for the first time in modern history has decreased. It is calculated that more than 400,000 Puerto Ricans have migrated to the United States, the highest number since the great migration in the aftermath of World War II.

They know the risk that they face when they let the imagination run through books, how seditious the fictions become when the reader explores the freedom that makes them possible and that in them is exercised, with the fear and the darkness that lurks in the real world.

– Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

The University of Puerto Rico was placed on probation last year by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. Two of the main critiques were governance and its finances. The academic senate of the Rio Piedras campus submitted an addendum to the university report to the Middle States including the police brutality that occurred on that campus. Chancellor Ana Guadalupe refused to include it so it had to be sent separately. As to the financial health of the system, the government has failed to restore the funds that were taken. Finally, it seems that the space for critical inquiry and freedom of expression the university has historically provided is too threatening for the ideologues at the helm in Puerto Rico. It seems that the only strategy of neo-liberals in Puerto Rico is to shirk the social and public responsibility to provide for the Puerto Rican population by transferring segments of the population to the United States.

1. Stanchich, Maritza “More Violence in Puerto Rico as University Student Fee Is Imposed,” Huffington Post, January 18, 2011.
2. Weldon, S. Laurel. 2011. When Protest Makes Policy: How Social Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
3. Navarro Rivera, Pablo. 2010. “Democratización y autonomía en la Universidad de Puerto Rico: Mito y realidad.” Manuscript.
4. Benitez Nazario, Jorge and Astrid Santiago Orria. 2011. Ciudadanía y exclusión en Puerto Rico. Rio Piedras, P.R.: Centro Para Puerto Rico, Fundación Sila Calderón.
5. Dietz, James L. 2003. Puerto Rico: Negotiating Development and Change. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
6. Catalá, Francisco. “Anosognosia en la colonia.” Conference on April 27, 2010.

With the nation focused upon the union-busting Tea Party-backed Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Corbett has snuck in a plan to mine the state’s resources, increase employment, reduce educational problems, and whack unions upside the head at the same time. Miraculously, the public sector unions, so happy they wouldn’t lose collective bargaining, have even said they didn’t mind being whacked.

In his first budget address, Corbett said he wants to freeze wages for all state employees, almost every one of them part of the middle class. Although the average wage is about $35,000 a year, according to AFSCME, the state’s primary union for public sector workers, families of four should easily be able to still afford the same luxuries as the governor who is paid $165,000 a year and has a mansion, expense account, and house staff.

As a bonus, Corbett plans to freeze wages of all public school teachers. Those are the people whom Laura Bush numerous times while in Washington said were grossly underpaid. But, since she was a teacher and not a Wall Street banker—you know, the kind who make money the old-fashioned way, by stealing from the poor—it’s obvious she was a tax-sucking Big Government, Commie-loving, knee-jerk liberal who worked only a six-hour day for only a half a year, and gorged herself at the public trough. Thus, her views should be dismissed as nothing less than self-aggrandizement at the public’s expense.

Cutting an additional $1 billion from public education is bringing Corbett cheers from the tax-burdened masses who have yet to figure out that the cuts will force local school boards to raise taxes to cover essential educational expenses. But, the brilliance of Tom Corbett is that by freezing teacher salaries, he also spares local school boards the sweat of trying to explain why they have to raise taxes, drop programs, and close schools.

Now, let’s look at the State System of Higher Education (SSHE). Corbett plans to reduce the $465 million appropriation to a lean $232 million, roughly what it was in 1983 when the state system was created. That’s the true spirit of conservatism in America—bringing back the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president.

The 14 state-owned universities enroll about 120,000 students. Some classes have only 40 students. That’s highly inefficient. By cutting funding, Corbett helps assure fewer high-paid professors who inflame students with the ideas of left-wing radicals like Socrates, St. Augustine, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Besides, there’s hardly any difference between 40 and 200 students in a class. The prof still has to prepare only one syllabus, one lesson plan, and talks into only one microphone. Besides, testing is more efficient when it’s computer-scored multiple choice questions. If students want to chat with their prof, all they have to do is take a number and wait their turn for their allocated five minutes face time each semester.

Cutting resources also helps the socialization of the students. On at least one campus, all two-student dorm rooms now have three students in them. This is a 50 percent increase in student interaction, allowing for more academic discussions about a wide range of topics, such as ceramics (the proper way to smoke pot), nutrition (light vs. dark brews), and psychology (improving the effect of hazing techniques on freshmen.)

And speaking of psychology, why do all the colleges have to have psych programs? Times are tough, and the luxury of a psych major at all the colleges doesn’t fit into Corbett’s education plan. It would be more cost efficient for only six or seven colleges to teach psych courses, thus cutting excess faculty and resources, while filtering students into the more efficient large sections at fewer colleges.

We also don’t need geography courses at any of the colleges. How many Americans knew where Korea or Viet Nam were before we went to war? Grenada, Iraq, and Afghanistan? All we have to do is keep bombing countries, and Americans learn about them. No wasteful expenses like full-color maps, globes, or professors. End of that problem.

Music, art, and theatre programs can be eliminated since anyone in the creative arts is a liberal hippie who doesn’t earn enough to contribute to political campaigns but can cause trouble, nevertheless. For the same reason, social work programs should be cut. That would result in fewer social workers to record poverty, homelessness, and disabilities, making it seem that the Commonwealth is just chock full of rich people with no problems.

Corbett has also brilliantly solved unemployment. The state appropriation, which will be only about 16 percent of the cost to run the colleges, will force higher tuition. This will yield one of two possibilities. First, it will separate the scum—the students who come from lower- and middle-class households—from the “true” scholars, the “preppies” who will be able to contribute to Republicans’ political campaigns. Second, if the masses wish to receive a college education, they will have to increase their work hours; their parents will have to work four jobs instead of three to afford tuition and the already extraordinarily outrageous fees. But there is light at the end of this tunnel of despair. Box stores and fast food restaurants always have openings. Not only will students not waste time by doing menial chores like studying, they and their families will help reduce the unemployment rate. And, remember, the family that works together for minimum wage suffers together, a true family value.

Students not fortunate enough to afford college would be able to look forward to expelling a lot of gas. By pushing for even more drilling and by not taxing the gas extractors, Corbett, the industry’s mascot, is creating even more jobs. Like the coal, steel, and timber industries, all of which once were unionized, the non-unionized natural gas industry will have to hire thousands. Since we know that the owners believe in social justice and the rights of their workers, they may even build company towns, complete with match-stick houses, stores selling overpriced merchandise and company-paid doctors who may or may not treat green-mulch lung disease, depending upon the company’s cost-to-benefits ratio. If the owners become rich enough in the Commonwealth of No Tax Gassy Pennsylvania, they may even hire a recent lit grad to be the industry’s hazardous materials inspector.

After 20 or 30 years, when the gas is mined out, and the companies move to other states to strip their resources and exploit their workers, Pennsylvanians will be able to proudly say they once worked for a fracking company—all thanks to the vision of Gov. Tom Corbett.