© 2012 Lois Weiner
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To George and Gladys Weiner, my first teachers, from whom I learned to speak out for social justice
Part
One
1.
Understanding the Assault on Public Education
Throughout the world, teachers, parents, and students are experiencing wrenching changes in how schools are run, who teaches, and what may be taught. Students are being robbed of meaningful learning, of time for play or creativity—for anything that’s not tested. Hostile politicians blame teachers for an astounding list of social and economic problems ranging from unemployment to moral decline. In all but the wealthiest school systems, academic accomplishment has been reduced to scores on standardized tests that for-profit companies develop and evaluate. Parents, citizens, teachers, and students—education’s most important stakeholders—have little say about what is taught, while corporate chiefs, politicians in their thrall, and foundations that receive funding from billionaires who profit from pro-business education policies determine who teaches and how. Children from affluent families face intensified competition for high grades, high SAT scores, a resume that will ease passage into a prestigious college and a well-paid career. Children whose parents have little formal education and who attend under-resourced schools experience intense pressures to succeed on standardized tests and school days that consist mostly of test preparation. I’ve written this book for teachers who are committed to social justice and democracy, in our society and in our schools. From my work with teachers and college students who want to teach, I see the hope and idealism this new generation brings. Most teachers I work with focus on making change through their teaching. They consider what they do in the classroom the way to change the world. Another group of teachers and school professionals, often those who work with immigrant students and teachers of color who have gone into teaching to be of service to the communities in which they live, see themselves as advocates for students, families, and communities that experience prejudice and limited social opportunity. And I’m seeing more and more teachers who want to make their unions more democratic, proactive, and militant. I’ve also observed that these three groups of teachers often don’t collaborate and may not see one another as allies. One goal of this book is to explain why it’s essential to create a movement that brings these groups together and how that might be done.
While we have to understand the powerful forces arrayed against us, we also need to keep in mind that every major improvement to education occurred because social movements—ordinary people banding together to make change—made others see issues differently. We can reverse the assault on public education if we create a new social movement of teachers that knows how to learn from and work with parents, communities, activists on other social issues, and other labor unions.
A Global Project Transforming Public Education in Ways the Rich and Powerful Dictate
It may seem as though many policies, like closing schools that have low test scores, are irrational or just ignorant. Politicians’ lack of knowledge about education and animus toward teachers are both factors, but a far more onerous, chilling agenda drives the collection of policies destroying public education as it has existed for more than a century. The rhetoric of improving educational opportunity for those who have been excluded from prosperity has been used throughout the world to defend transformation of schooling that amounts to destroying what has existed for a century, to make drastic alterations in what is taught, how schools are funded and run, and who teaches.
We need—always—to introduce criticisms of the current reforms by affirming an unequivocal recognition of inequality, current and historic, and of our commitment to providing all children with a high-quality education. At the same time, we confront the reality that policies that are touted to “put children first” and “make services work for poor people” actually increase inequality for the vast majority of children who most need improved schools. Sometimes I am told that such a vast, well-organized project could not exist without the US public knowing more about it and that what I am describing sounds like a conspiracy.1 Conspiracies are, by definition, secret. Yet the global project of wealthy, powerful elites to transform education has been quite public for more than a quarter century. Alas, we in the global North have been wearing blinders for decades. Evidence about the real aims and actual effects of “free market” reforms has been available for decades—if we looked in the right places, that is, at prospectuses from corporations developing new products and reports from the World Bank. The record is quite clear that lofty-sounding slogans mask the drive of transnational corporations to refashion education to fit their vision of a new global economy. For the elites who control corporations, media, and government, public expenditure on educating workers beyond the skill level needed for low-paying jobs is wasted. Since most jobs being created require no more than an eighth-grade education (think of Walmart’s “associates”), only a handful of people need to acquire the sophisticated thinking and skills to manage and control the world’s productive resources. Minimally educated workers need only minimally educated teachers. Oversight of lowered expectations for educational outcomes can be achieved through the use of standardized testing. Therefore, a well-educated (and well-paid) teaching force, it is argued by elites establishing educational policy, is a waste of scarce public money.2
Financial and political elites, working through international organizations, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, began this project forty years ago when they imposed school reform on countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia as a quid pro quo for economic aid. The project was first introduced in Chile, under Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship (supported by the United States), when schooling was privatized under the tutelage of Milton Friedman.3 The project has emerged differently in the more industrially developed nations and though specifics of this social engineering differ in significant ways from one country to another, the same footprint is recognizable. Make public education a “free market” open to entrepreneurs; create a revolving door of minimally trained teachers; reduce the curriculum to basic math and literacy content that workers will need to compete for low-paid jobs; control teachers and students with standardized testing; and weaken public oversight by breaking up school systems and replacing them with privately operated schools.
In much of the world this framework of “free market” policies is called “neoliberalism,” a term unfamiliar in the United States. This new term signifies a key shift in the thinking of elites that control the world’s resources—and governments. In the United States, “liberalism” is associated with development of the welfare state, government policies like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The term “neoliberalism” refers to quite a different political stance, drawing on the ideas of the first liberals (like Adam Smith), who developed theories about how “free