Charter schools...another neoliberal scam

Charter schools are another neoliberal scam. These "pseudo-public," for-profit schools show far worse performance than public schools when evaluated on an "apples-to-apples" basis. (Hint: charter schools can select students whereas public schools must accept all kids in that zone.)

It's the same, neoliberal profit scam that businesses use, that is, pay workers (teachers) less, make them do more, funnel more of the income to the top, fraudulently gin up the performance statistics (like the widely used accounting control frauds used by banks and Wall Street) and strip money and resources (equipment, physical space) from public schools (privatizations).

No wonder Wall Streeters here in Manhattan love to send their kids to these schools. It's a private school on the public dime. Carl Icahn and other big hedge fund guys back NY Governor Andrew Cuomo with big $$$ to keep expanding these schools and sucking the NYC public school system dry.

What a fucking scam.

New York's charter school defenders downplay teacher inexperience amid strong performance. http://t.co/H8S0YYVcm8 pic.twitter.com/DMMPAZBrNm
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) March 18, 2015

Yves Smith — Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?

I never dreamed that a class I took in college, The Politics of Popular Education, which covered the nineteenth century in France and England, would prove to be germane in America. I didn’t have any particular interest in the topic; the reason for selecting the course was that the more serious students picked their classes based on the caliber of the instructor, and this professor, Kate Auspitz, got particularly high marks. The course framed both the policy fights and the broader debate over public education in terms of class, regional, and ideological interests. 

The participants in these struggles were acutely aware that the struggle over schooling was to influence the future of society: what sort of citizens would these institutions help create? 

As the post below on the march of school privatization in Wisconsin demonstrates, those concerns are remarkably absent from current debates. The training of children is simply another looting opportunity, like privatizing parking meters and roads. The objective is yet another transfer from some of the remaining members of the middle class, public school teachers, to the promoters. And this process also produces an important side benefit for socially unenlightened capitalists: that of slowly breaking one of the last influential unions. 

And lest you had any doubt, despite the claim that charter schools help children, the evidence is that it doesn’t. Moreover, the pattern in capitalism American style is towards ever-greater crapification. So imagine what private schools, where the operators are on relatively good behavior because the project is still in its demonstration phase, look like in ten years.

Making America more competitive.

Moreover, international comparisons show that higher teacher pay is strongly correlated with better educational outcomes, which should hardly seem surprising. Higher compensation, if nothing else, is a sign that society confers some stature to teachers, which helps in attracting capable people into that role.

The pay incentive apparently only works at the CEO level in the neoliberal concept of motivation.

Naked Capitalism
Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?
Yves Smith

Privatzing US Education

The billioinaire push to privatize education is in full swing.

Daily Kos
Walmart heirs pour more than $1 billion into reshaping American education
Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor

CNBC NetNet
Bad schools are 'eating our young': Blackstone CEO
Lawrence Delevingne

Henry A. Giroux — When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto

Long but important post on education, critical thinking, creativity, and democracy v. neoliberalism and market-based education. I've excerpted the key elements for those who wish to cut to the chase.

Market-driven educational reforms, with their obsession with standardization, high-stakes testing, and punitive policies, also mimic a culture of cruelty that neoliberal policies produce in the wider society. They exhibit contempt for teachers and distrust of parents, repress creative teaching, destroy challenging and imaginative programs of study and treat students as mere inputs on an assembly line. Trust, imagination, creativity, and a respect for critical teaching and learning are thrown to the wind in the pursuit of profits and the proliferation of rigid, death-dealing accountability schemes. As John Tierney points out in his critique of corporate education reforms in The Atlantic, such approaches are not only oppressive - they are destined to fail....

Noam Chomsky gets it right in arguing that we are now in a general period of regression that extends far beyond impacting education alone. 15 This period of regression is marked by massive inequalities in wealth, income and power that are fueling a poverty and ecological crisis and undermining every basic public sphere central to both democracy and the culture and structures necessary for people to lead a life of dignity and political participation. 16 The burden of cruelty, repression and corruption has broken the back of democracy, however weak, in the United States. America is no longer a democracy, nor is it simply a plutocracy. It has become an authoritarian state steeped in violence and run by the commanding financial, cultural and political agents of corporate power. 17

Corporate sovereignty has replaced political sovereignty, and the state has become largely an adjunct of banking institutions and financial service industries. Addicted to “the political demobilization of the citizenry,” the corporate elite is waging a political backlash against all institutions that serve democracy and foster a culture of questioning, dialogue and dissent. 18 The apostles of neoliberalism are concerned primarily with turning public schools over to casino capitalism in order to transform them into places where all but the privileged children of the 1% can be disciplined and cleansed of any critical impulses. Instead of learning to become independent thinkers, they acquire the debilitating habits of what might be called a moral and political deficit disorder that renders them passive and obedient in the face of a society based on massive inequalities in power, wealth and income. The current powerful corporate-based un-reform movement is wedded to developing modes of governance, ideologies and pedagogies dedicated to constraining and stunting any possibility for developing among students those critical, creative, and collaborative forms of thought and action necessary for participating in a substantive democracy....

Students are taught only to care about themselves and to view any consideration for others as a liability, if not a pathology. Ethical concerns under these circumstances are represented as hindrances to be overcome. Narcissism along with an unchecked notion of individualism is the new normal....

The slavish enthusiasm of the cheerleaders for market-driven educational policies becomes particularly untenable morally and politically in light of the increasing number of scandals that have erupted around inflated test scores and other forms of cheating committed by advocates of high stakes testing and charter schools. 22 ....

Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about power, but also, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,” 26 indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. Critical pedagogy rejects the notion of students as passive containers who simply imbibe dead knowledge. Instead, it embraces forms of teaching that offer students the challenge to transform knowledge rather than simply “processing received knowledges.” 27 Under such circumstances, critical pedagogy becomes directive and intervenes on the side of producing a substantive democratic society. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from training. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical approaches that strip what it means to be educated from its critical and democratic possibilities.28....

As a moral and political project, pedagogy is crucial for creating the agents necessary to live in, govern and struggle for a radical democracy. Moreover, it is important to recognize how education and pedagogy are connected to and implicated in the production not only of specific agents, a particular view of the present and future, but also how knowledge, values and desires, and social relations are always implicated in power. Power and ideology permeate all aspects of education and become a valuable resource when critically engaged around issues that problematize the relationship between authority and freedom, ethics and knowledge, language and experience, reading texts differently, and exploring the dynamics of cultural power. Critical pedagogy address power as a relationship in which conditions are produced that allow students to engage in a culture of questioning, to raise and address urgent, disturbing questions about the society in which they live, and to define in part the questions that can be asked and the disciplinary borders that can be crossed.....

Critical pedagogy is a crucial antidote to the neoliberal attack on public education, but it must be accompanied and informed by radical political and social movements willing to make educational reform central to democratic change. 29 The struggle over public education is inextricably connected to a struggle against poverty, racism, violence, war, bloated defense budgets, a permanent warfare state, state sanctioned assassinations, torture, inequality, and a range of other injustices that reveal a shocking glimpse of what America has become and why it can no longer recognize itself through the moral and political visions and promises of a substantive democracy. And such a struggle demands both a change in consciousness and the building of social movements that are broad-based and global in their reach....

The struggle to reclaim public education as a democratic public sphere needs to challenge the regressive pedagogies, gated communities, and cultural and political war zones that now characterize much of contemporary America. These sites of terminal exclusion demand more than the spectacle of cruelty and violence used to energize the decadent cultural apparatuses of casino capitalism.....

Under neoliberalism, it has become more difficult to respond to the demands of the social contract, public good, and the social state, which have been pushed to the margins of society - viewed as both an encumbrance and a pathology. And yet such a difficulty must be overcome in the drive to reform public education. The struggle over public education is the most important struggle of the 21st century because it is one of the few public spheres left where questions can be asked, pedagogies developed, modes of agency constructed and desires mobilized, in which formative cultures can be developed that nourish critical thinking, dissent, civic literacy and social movements capable of struggling against those antidemocratic forces that are ushering in dark, savage and dire times. We are seeing glimpses of such a struggle in Chicago and other states as well as across the globe and we can only hope that such movements offer up not merely a new understanding of the relationship among pedagogy, politics, and democracy, but also one that infuses both the imagination and hope for a better world.

Truthout | Op-Ed
When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto
Henry A. Giroux