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by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Among Obama supporters, the gap between
popular perceptions of the president's policies and the actual content
of those policies is nowhere wider than in public education. While the
president pays lip service to the centrality of public education,
teachers and parent input, his Race To The Top is paving the road to
privatization, closing more public schools and firing more teachers than
any president in US history.
Obama's Race To The Top Drives Nationwide Wave of School Closings, Teacher Firings
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
A nationwide epidemic of school closings
and teacher firings has been underway for some time. It's concentrated
chiefly in poor and minority communities, and the teachers let go are
often experienced and committed classroom instructors, and likely to
live in and near the communities they serve, and disproportionately
black.
It's not an accident, or a reflection of
changing demographics, or more educational choices suddenly becoming
available to families in those areas. It's not due to greedy unionized
teachers or the invisible hand of the marketplace or well-intentioned
educational policies somehow gone awry.
The current wave of school closings is
latest result of bipartisan educational policies which began with No
Child Left Behind in 2001, and have kicked into overdrive under the
Obama administration's Race To The Top. In Chicago, the home town of the
president and his Secretary of Education, the percentage of black
teachers has dropped from 45% in 1995 to 19% today. After winning a
couple skirmishes in federal court over discriminatory firings in a few
schools, teachers have now filed a citywide class action lawsuit
alleging that the city's policy of school “turnarounds” and
“transformations” is racially discriminatory because it's carried out
mainly in black neighborhoods and the fired teachers are
disproportionately black.
How did this happen? Where did those policies come from, and exactly what are they?
Beginning
in the 1980s, deep right pockets like the Bradley and Walton Family
Foundations spent billions to create and fund fake “grassroots
movements.” They churned out academic studies and blizzards of media
hype, first for vouchers, later on for charter schools and what’s become
a whole panoply of privatization-oriented “education reforms” ranging from teacher merit pay to common core curriculum and more.
Those billions paid off with the 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act which
made the right wing corporate agenda of undermining and ultimately
privatizing public education national policy. Though standardized test
scores were long known to prove little aside from student family income,
they suddenly became the gold standard for judging teacher & school performance. School districts were required to purchase & give dozens of costly meaningless tests and to publish lists ranking their own schools and teachers as “failing” when test scores were low, which again, was mostly wherever students were poor.
Amid torrents of “blame the teachers” propaganda, so-called “failing schools” were required to hire expensive contractors with cockeyed “run the school like a business” remedies and more crackpot tests. Thus it was that NCLB spawned almost overnight an entire industry of jackleg educational consultants and
test suppliers guaranteed a market with dollars diverted from already
tight public school budgets. Those industries attracted capital
investors, and began doing what every other industry does in the US ----
make big campaign contributions to politicians to get sweeter contracts
and more favorable regulation. When test scores still didn’t rise, NCLB required many schools to close, making openings for chains of charter schools, often highly profitable charter schools, bringing the blessings of “choice” and free market competition to the educational “marketplace.”
It was an unequal sort of “competition”
though, because charter schools have always been allowed to pick and
choose their students, to turn away those with special needs, and to
hire teachers and principals with little or no relevant training.
Results in the classrooms of poor neighborhoods around the country were devastating. Where in 1987-88 the modal year for teacher experience -- that’s the number of years the largest cohort of teachers had been in the classrooms --- was ten years, by 2008 the biggest block of teachers were in their very first year, by definition --- the least confident, the least experienced and the least effective.
This was the state of public education when President Obama walked into the White House door. What
did he do? Did he turn it around? Or did he double down? The answer is
that in the spirit of corporate bipartisanship, president Obama sided
with the charter school sugar daddies instead of black teachers, black
parents and their children.
President Obama appointed Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan Secretary of Education. A
champion of privatization, Duncan had closed dozens of Chicago schools,
many on short notice, some at the apparent behest of gentrifying real
estate developers. Duncan fired so many veteran black Chicago teachers to , fill their slots
with mostly white rookies, that teachers sued him for racial
discrimination in federal court and won. Duncan even introduced
military charter schools in Chicago, in one case handing a west side
middle school to the US Marine Corps.
No Child Left Behind had been passed by a
Democratic congress in the first days of the Bush administration.
Opposition to its policies was widespread, and much of that opposition
was among Democratic constituencies. So President Obama's signature
education policy initiative, would bypass Congress and the opportunity
for public debate on the disastrous effects of existing
pro-privatization policies.
Secretary Duncan at his side, President Obama introduced Race To The Top, drawn up by the Bill & Melinda Gates, the Eli Broad, Boeing, Walton Family and other foundations. Under Race To The Top states and school districts are forced to bid against each other for
many of the same education dollars they used to receive as a matter of
course. The winning districts are those who apply Race To The Top's four
official solutions to their so-called “failing schools.”
Race To The Top's four federally mandated “solutions,” which are never spelled out by corporate media news outlets, are “school transformations,” “school turnarounds,” “school restarts,” and “school closures.”
Race to the Top defines a “school transformation,” its first remedy, as firing the principal and up to 50% of teachers, replacing them with temps and newbies, hiring expensive consultants, often the same folks who drafted Race To The Top guidelines or their cronies, to redesign curriculum and personnel policies. “Transformed” schools tie teachers jobs to test scores (that’s what caused the national epidemic of cheating scandals) lengthening school days with no extra pay, cutting wages & benefits and of course lots more costly and useless tests.
Race To The Top calls its second remedy “school turnaround.” Turnarounds are exactly the same as school transformations, with
high priced “run the school like a business” consultants, increased
reliance on standardized tests, sanctions for teachers and all new hires
sourced from Teach For America type agencies, except that transformations fire up to 50% of school staff, but to be called a turnaround schools must fire at least 50% of school staff.
“School restarts,” are the third Race To The Top solution. In a “restart” you close the public school and reopen a new school with new staff and the same connected consultants used for transformations and turnarounds, but all under the management of a private corporation. In other words, you close the public school and open a charter school in the same building. Charters of course can use public money to hire even less qualified teachers, pick and choose the students it serves, and often to generate handsome private profits.
Race To The Top's fourth remedy is “school closure.” You
fire the staff, padlock the school doors and let families take their
chances on the free market, or find another public school if they can.
The states
and school districts quickest to carry out the most transformations,
turnarounds, restarts and school closings are the ones who get to keep or increase their levels of federal funding. Those who drag their feet lose federal education dollars. That's why it's a race, but not exactly to the top.
Clearly there's no broad support for these insanely destructive educational policies. But since news
media never report what Race To The Top's actual requirements are, or
even that a nationwide wave of school closings and teacher firings is
underway, much of the public, and even many teachers and their unions are
unable to make the connection between federal policies and their local
school crises. Corporate media point helpfully instead to corrupt local
officials, greedy organized teachers insufficient reliance on the
invisible hand of the free market. News
reports in many areas are full of stories about school districts whose
certification is imperiled because of looming loss of federal funds, but
the public is offered few clues as to exactly WHY the funds are lacking
or WHAT measures the district will have to take to get them restored.
The fact is, Race To The Top is consciously designed to punish school
districts that try to protect their educational assets, and rewards
those who eviscerate and sell them off.
President Obama's Race To The Top then, is the direct cause of our national wave of school closings and mass teacher firings from Philly to Atlanta and Los
Angeles to Rhode Island. It was local implementation of Obama's Race To
The Top mandates that forced Chicago teachers out on strike last fall, and it's reluctance to carry out these measures that now imperils education funding in cities as large as Las Vegas.
The Chicago teachers class action
lawsuit is a good thing. But the courts have been captive to the far
right wing for a long time now, and are not likely to issue quick and
sweeping rulings that upset things as they are. In the end, the only
thing that will begin to save public education, that will halt the wave
of school closings and teacher firings is mass mobilization on a scale
not seen in fifty years. Right now, that seems almost as unlikely as
corporate school reform being reversed or halted by the federal court.
What passes for black leadership these
days, the descendants of the old line “civil rights” organizations are
firmly on the corporate education reform bandwagon. Bill Gates, for
example, delivered the 2011 keynote at the National Urban League's
annual meeting. The NAACP and similar outfits are no better, all
preferring to do the bidding of their funders and their president, over
the interests of ordinary black families and their children. Even
teachers unions are handicapped. Unlike the Chicago Teachers Union most
haven't spent the last few years forging deep ties with organized forces
in their school communities, and lack even a tradition of standing up
for their own members they way labor unions ought to.
In human history, the notion that
everybody is entitled to a quality public education is still relatively
new, and has powerful enemies. President Obama is one of these. It was
the insistence of newly freed slaves that led to the first universal
public education laws in the South. African American leaders till now
have always been stalwart champions of public education. Until we raise
up a new crop of leaders and movements not beholden to corporate
funding, not disposed to uncritical worship of corporate power wielded
by a black face, public education will continue to wither and die.
Bruce
A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the
state committee of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him via this site's
contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
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