This is an incredible article. Please read it.
Kristen Steele’s article is titled “Education: the Next Corporate Frontier: Exposing Power and Evil in a Neoliberal World.”
Steele is an environmental activist who realized that the push for corporate profits has invaded education, as it has so many other sectors of the global economy.
She begins:
“I’m no education expert. Having worked in the environmental and new economy fields for the last two decades, my main concern when it comes to schooling has been what children learn. Along with most activists I know, I’d like to see kids get outdoors more, learn about the intricacies of ecosystems, understand the urgency of climate change, experience growing their own food, and acquire the knowledge and understanding essential to becoming environmentally-conscious citizens. I’d like school reform to be a part of rebuilding vibrant local economies and sustainable communities. This is what I thought was at the heart of the struggle for better education. But there’s a battle being waged on a different front. One that will overwhelm and undo any improvements we’ve made if social and environmental activists don’t join in the fight.
“Over the last thirty years or so, private corporations have been steadily taking over school systems all around the world. Going hand in hand with “free” trade and development, the privatization of education is simply another step towards corporate control of the entire economy. If you’re tuned in to education news in the US, you may be familiar with the public school closures in Chicago, the so-called Recovery School District in New Orleans, and the proposed budget cuts in Milwaukee that have brought parents, students and teachers into the streets. But few of us hear about how students in Chile have been protesting for nearly a decade against rampant privatization that has increased economic inequality. Or how the UK government recently passed an education act allowing the conversion of all state schools into privately run “academies”. Or how Structural Adjustment Programs and development aid have paved the way for privatization of schools acrossAfrica, which has resulted in reduced enrollment of girls and exclusion of the poorest children. Or how similar takeovers are happening in Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, India, and many other countries.
“Privatization exists in different forms, including vouchers, public private partnerships, low-fee private schools, and charter schools. Whatever it’s called, it amounts to the same thing: private corporations gaining control of and profiting from an essential public function. In every country, the identical argument is used: public schools are failing, reform is needed and big business will do it best, providing choice and efficiency. If the statistics don’t match the argument, they are concealed or doctored to fit.
“Privatization in education is eerily reminiscent of every other sector that has come under corporate control; many of the justifications and methods are exactly the same. Just as in agriculture, technology is touted as creating “efficiency.” Just as in healthcare, we’re presented with the illusion of “consumer choice.” Just as in global trade, corporations are deregulated and given generous subsidies. Just as in manufacturing, skilled employees are displaced by underpaid workers with no job security. Just as in energy, the profit motive trumps the wellbeing of people and planet. Just as in politics, legislation is influenced by rich private interests. In none of these sectors has corporate control brought about increased wellbeing for any but the richest segment of society. Why will education be any different?”
Read the rest.
Send this article to your friends, your elected officials, members of your state and local school boards, journalists, anyone else you can think of. It is that important.
Groups like Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform Now, Students First, Campbell Brown’s The 74, and foundations like Gates, Walton, Broad, Dell, Arnold, Helmsley, and dozens more are leading this mass takeover of a crucial public institution.
Privatization increasingly assaults our liberties. The corporate interests who have been unable to enact voucher laws are content now to receive so-called Education Scholarship Tax Credits pursuant to laws passed in many states by politicians who have been bought off and who have bought in to the concept of school choice. These “vouchers” which conservative courts have upheld as constitutional in effect divert public tax dollars to private schools while affording the wealthy huge tax breaks. The result. For example, in Philadelphia last week a Catholic school which has received upwards of $200,000 in tax funds pursuant to Pennsylvania’s education tax credit program fired its religious school director and much loved teacher because she is, and has been for many years, married to her same-sex spouse. Despite parent and student protests the firing has been upheld by the Archbishop. If the Constitution applies here, as it should, will the money be returned? Will the legislature repeal the law as contrary to the first amendment? Will the court overturn the law on Constitutional grounds of separation of church and state? Will this teacher regain her job? Probably not as the corporate assault on our liberties continues.
GST,
The privatizers know that the public has NEVER endorsed vouchers so they use euphemisms like “education tax credits” and “opportunity scholarships”
Call it what it is: vouchers
Another rightwinger on the Supreme Court and every state will have vouchers for religious schools
What I was referring to in my post.
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20150713_DN_Editorial__TO_THEIR_TAX_CREDIT____.html
It was impossible for me to read Steele’s article without once again hearing the warning echoes of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” published in 2007. In it, without referring to education specifically, Klein foretells what has and is happening in and to education today. And if there is no actual crisis to exploit for financial gain, create one!
From the review in the New York Times (September 30, 2007):
“Some readers may see Klein’s findings as evidence of a giant conspiracy, a conclusion she explicitly disavows. It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still, those decisions are guided by larger mind-sets. Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish. Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference. After 500 pages of “The Shock Doctrine,” it’s clear they have their work cut out for them”.
(The author of the review was “Joseph E. Stiglitz, a university professor at Columbia, was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2001.”)
An op ed from the conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks about Hillary’s latest speech laying out her economic priorities, worth a read.
This is an interesting link that introduced me to a new term “neopaleoliberalism.” I wonder if her speech represents an authentic position or one to merely attract interest. Let’s not forget that Obama’s early rhetoric turned out to be a pack of lies.
My dear respected colleague, Retired Teacher…If this Brooks article is a partial eye opener, try this one from al jazeera on her vast lies in foreign affairs. This is why Hillary must be looked at by all of us for total behavior patterns over her lifetime as a public figure, and particularly during her years of service as a Senator and as Sect. of State. Her mendacity, and often poor judgement, reeks of why she does not belong in the WH as America’s President.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/hillary-clinton-honduraslatinamericaforeignpolicy.html
It would be a boon if Randi would tell the rank and file of AFT how she rationalizes all this…same goes for my esteemed colleague Ken Previti who supports Randi and urges we all follow her in lockstep to get this devious and fork tongued candidate elected.
Better to support Bernie Sanders.
Thank you for posting this article. It is funny how Brooks simply repeats, with no explanation or evidence, that “Clinton would make herself unelectable by wandering into the class warfare fever swamps…” The huge crowds coming out for Bernie prove otherwise. The Democrats, if they want to win elections, and not just raise money, would be wise to listen to the people and Bernie instead of blowhards like Brooks. I wish Randi and my leader, Lily, would pay attention as well.
I do support Sanders, but I doubt he will get the nomination. My son follows the news on Aljazeeria where he claims he can find less bias than network news.
My favorite part of the column was this remark from a commentor:
“What, in the name of God, is a neopaleoliberal? Is it a female version of something strong and male? Please help because Mr. Brooks does not.”
The hope and promise. Oh well. “the charter school movement has been “transformed from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts designed to provide alternative approaches for a small number of students, into nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors, and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized school system.” I also remember labs that would solve our most pressing problems and for outcomes that could be replicated. Boy…I’m getting old.
This is the nightmare in which Libertarian ideas about freedom, in particular the idea that the provision of public services–education, roads, garbage pick-up, prison incarceration, health–is best done by small-scale, private, for-profit, enterprises, function as the smiley face of oligopolistic, international corporate managers. Oligopoly then appears as a “mom and pop” small business, run by your neighbors, by people you know, like and trust. People you would leave your children with…Leave your children with Microsoft or Google. Let Exxon raise your children.
A nightmare unfolding before our eyes. The idea of healthy, beneficial, public institutions accountable to elected representatives becomes a wistful memory of the “good ole days.”
Corporate managers=trusted public servants. Now here’s an equation not included in the Common Core Algebra Standards.
This is a great article that exposes some of the dirty manipulations of global corporations. What the article does not highlight are the insidious, secretive moves by corporations. For example, the TPP has been negotiated behind closed doors. Average citizens know very little about its content by design. Corporations have bought the influence of world leaders and local governments that shepherd the destruction of public services while the public is unaware that they are lambs being brought to slaughter. The corporate media’s role is to ensure that people are more interested knowing what happened on “The Bachelor” than how corporations and government are conspiring against them. Refusing to get on the conveyer belt to annihilation is about the only option left to average people.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/14/education-the-next-corporate-frontier/ This is the link to the article. Quite simply, Steele has shown us all, in education and out, the path forwards. We cannot hope to prevail against the vulture edupreneurs without greater numbers, though we have been doing a great job with what we have. We must end the Balkanization by advocacy issue and recognize that we who oppose the neoliberal assault on the citizenry of the world are all fighting battles in the same war. It is time to build coalitions with those outside of the fight against the testing industrial complex of the reformsters. We do after all share a common enemy.
Recently I have been thinking that the leaders behind the education RheeForm movement—all the corporate led RheeForm movements from environment to education to health—are not human.
The takeover of government services and responsibilities has been happening incrementally for a long time. Outsourcing has become the policy of choice for much of our military and for basic bookkeeping and data warehousing, including the data on students, teachers, parents, and schools collected under ESEA and so on. For-profit prison contracts require payment for unfilled beds, and so on.
The hottest new financial products are pay-for-performance contracts for social services including the for-profit management of pre-school programs such the contracts in Utah and Chicago arranged by Goldman Sachs, Pritzker, and others. In these cases, the expected minimum return on investment is of 5%. That rate is not guaranteed but a promise made on condition that the current providers of these programs give up their right to manage them and that the management teams (called intermediaries) are paid their customary fees. The flow of money is away from those who provide and receive the service, to the managers (lawyers, independent evaluators, auditors, CFOs) and so on.
The unadvertised wealth transfer is the that of the power of people who care about doing good works to those who care only about “the discipline of the market.” The process is insidious, often a matter of low cost or no-cost incremental appropriation–naming rights to public property, ads on school buses, contracts slipped into nominally public meetings that hide from view who has responsibility and for how long and on what terms. Add the corruption of the voting process by money and by the determination to exclude many from that process by any means that can be arranged.
The unannounced objective is to shrink the public commons and sense of shared obligations for public goods and services, One tactic is demonizing government and making it powerless–witness the posturing in the current Congress and the speeches of candidates for office.
Meanwhile, taxpayers, voters, members of communities–who may have more ample and nuanced values and better information are increasingly excluded from their right to to participate in shaping public services and maintaining institutions for the common good, ranging from public education, to the “infrastructures”” for safe and efficient transportation, the allocation of “spectrum” for communications, add clean air, ample and safe food and water, actions to stem the well-documented threats to planet earth, our shared habitat.
The kicker is that these new financial products (circa 2008) are also marketed as “social impact bonds” with a veneer of virtue or altruism attached to these for-profit schemes. The pitch to investors is the prospect of “doing well while doing good.” The “doing good” signals that the investments are made in anything that is perceived to be virtuous–from saving the whales, to saving children from failing schools, to saving taxpayers a bundle.
This is a brilliant observation. These for profit schemes do not save money, or offer anything new and better. These schemes often shift the money from the bottom to the top. The taxpayer foots the bill while corporations reap profit, tax credits and tax loopholes. All the people get are more low paying jobs without benefits. These vulture capitalists will go after benefits for the elderly next if the voters don’t show up at the polls. In the case of prisons many young black men have been given harsh sentences and sent to private prisons solely to make money off them. In Alabama there was a judge that received kickback for every inmate he sent to the privatized prison. The typical person hears very little about these human rights abuses because they are footnotes in the news.
Adding to the public’s education about outsourcing and corporate takeover, the original first edition of Thomas Friedman’s
World is Flat showed how Toyota created on call factories in Bangelore where workers were on duty 24 hours a day…at very low pay. Toyota only assembled the autos when an order was received, not on spec, and the workers would be called to the factory any time of day or night to fill the order. Wonderful for the corporation’s bottom line but a killer for the workers. Friedman rewrote the book when he saw the error of his ways in lauding this foremat for American workers.
The billionaires who seek to run all things, all the time, believe in the use of endentured slavery for all workers, world wide
addendum….including teachers whon they see as low pay workers.
Excellent analysis as always Laura…thanks.
Consider also the fact that no societal lessons were learned by the banksters after their greed and lies to an ill informed public following the Clinton/Gramm-Bliley-Leach/Summers/Rubin deregulation collusion killing off Glass Steagall, which caused international economic havoc.
Obama, who surrounds himself with the same Clinton Wall Street advisers, put Wall Street lawyer, Eric Holder, in charge of the clean up, to the detriment of We the People. Holder slapped a few wrists, offered no major indictments, and now is on his merry way back to Wall Street. Obama also put Mary Jo White, another Wall Street lawyer, in charge of the SEC…and true to form, she has done nothing to protect the 99% of little guys like us. We are alone, virtually unprotected, adrift on the ice floe heading for the economic Elysian Fields. (Sure, Elizabeth Warren and even Alan Grayson, speak for us…but she chickened out on taking on Hillary in this money machine we call a democratic election .)
The casino-like derivatives market now has expanded to actually sell products whereby an investor can bet on the life expectancy of his parents and others…to make some big bucks. Do not look for any morality in American business…and certainly not in most Dem and Repub candidates.
Now we are mandated by AFT to support another Repub in Dem clothing, Billary Clinton. Run for hills and support Bernie Sanders.
So how does one post a piece like this and call it a must-read, a piece acknowledging the role of Broad in destroying public education, and then remain neutral when the AFT endorses Broad ally and donor recipient Hillary Clinton? Boggles my mind.
Mine too…
Again, what’s the answer? If not privatization or government, what? Somewhere hidden among all the anti’s (charters, standardized and high-stakes testing, teacher mills, federal and state influence/manipulation, and common core), are some great positive ideas that just never seem to get expressed in the many blogs and comments. Oh, and as an aside (or is it a part?), teachers unions don’t seem to be doing teachers any favors. From grunt worker to rather senior manager/administrator, I have experienced three lengthy disparate careers in government, private industry, and education. I can antidotally attest that teachers and professors, in general, are by far the more educated, broad-minded, deep-thinking, creative and dare I say, intelligent. Due the nature of the profession–alone with 20+ children–they lack that small unit organization opportunity that can be the catalyst to larger group action. While I have witnessed a number of mostly only partially successful union organized strikes, they appeared to be not so much ground swells as get-out-the-vote efforts with union-directed focus. Collaborative efforts to put forth well-conceived positive options to negative reforms are needed. When teachers lead, parents will follow and politicians will listen.Social networks and the Internet are ideal marketing tools. Maybe make use of pre-established teacher learning communities. Someone with a built-in platform and audience could get the ball rolling (hint-hint).
“Again, what’s the answer?”
There is no “the answer”. There are many questions which need to be clarified before getting to an answer, for without clear understanding of the problems confronting public education no “answers” can legitimately be made. Not having a clear understanding of the many, varied problems encountered in public education, the edudeformers blindly fling arrows/answers at an unknown target.
It is up to each individual district to ascertain their own distinct needs, problems, wants and desires as a community and come up with solutions. It is the height of hubristic thinking to propose “What’s the answer?” if one is not a part of that community. The closer the decision making process is to those most effected by the public schools the better (usually, but not always, see separate but equal, not providing for sped, discrimination of various sorts).
But the main problem right now in public education debates is the mis-identification of supposed problems, for example, low test scores as a determinant of the teaching and learning process and by (false) extension the teachers, school and district by those whose idiology* blinds them to correctly ascertaining a truer, less false view of reality.
*purposely misspelled as it’s a neologism to name the beliefs by ignorants/idiots (yes both) who believe idiocies/false ideas to be true.
OK, then, what are the questions and where is the dialogue?
“It is up to each individual district to ascertain their own distinct needs, problems, wants and desires as a community and come up with solutions.”
Agreed, in an ideal world. As is, however, wealthy districts can readily satisfy their wants and desires while poorer districts will plead poverty and request state and federal funding thus relinquishing control for dollars. And once government gets involved. . . . Whoops, that’s where we are now.
Indeed, there are answers. Start by redistributing wealth downward to effect some equity.
1. Raised the limit for contributing to FICA, Social Security, from $118,000 to At least $1 Million. This will assure that SS will be funded in perpetuity.
2. Stop raising the limit on estate tax, now at a FREE %$5 Million, before very rich inheritors have to pay a cent of tax.
3. Make all income subject to the same 38% we common folks must pay on earned income. The rich dudes pay on 15% in passive income from interest on their massive investments. And they generally have overseas bank accounts to shelter even that.
4. Institute single payer universal health care which would cost taxpayers only 3%, not the 35 plus % we pay for currently. This is NOT socialized medicine. We choose our own docs, and the govt. uses our money to pay the bills….this is how Medicare works…so it would be Medicare for All.
5. Charge the oil companies tax and fees. This corrupt industry takes money back from the IRS on the backs of We the People, while they pay virtually not a cent in taxes. In California they do not even pay drilling fees, only state in the union where they are allowed this perk, as the frack and pollute our skimpy water supply.
6. NO MORE letting Big Pharma, and Monsanto, call all the shots. Do away with Medicare Part D, a monumental gift to both Big Pharma and the crooked Insurance Industry. Price meds a fair value, and not what the traffic will bear.
This is just for starters. Obama promised to fix some of this…LIES. He made it all far worse.
If these things were done tomorrow, we rapidly would have a healthy economy and could pay the war costs of the deficit, and then the payoff to China of our Treasuy paper to reduce the debt.
Go read up on the difference between the deficit and the debt.
3
Please excuse all the typos…I am fuming with smoke flowing from my ears…and I did not take the time to proof this.
I forgot about the crooked banks too big to fail. They should fail…but first they should return the public money Obama handed out to them , most of which they are still getting interest on, with our float. And make them pay back all that cash that they used to buy up failing banks to offset their taxes.
Also have a real liberal economist run the FED. No more churning our fiat paper which has no value…like the last three heads of the FED have done. No more Wall Streeters like Geithner as head of the FED. No more Ayn Rand whackos in charge of public money.
No more austerity in the US. Follow Stiglitz, Reich, Krugman, Black…Keynsians all, who understand that money must be kept in circulation to have a healthy economy…not saved in shadow bank accounts in the Caymans. If the 99% had decent and consistent wages to buy things, the economy would grow.
counter punch . org should be a staple of reading by all here. Although they don’t usually deal with public education very much, to better understand the world at large it is an indispensable site.
And again, to call it a “corporate assault on education” is to believe in an idiology* that would have one believe that “corporate” stands for one monolithic organization of sorts. The term corporate is way too broad to have any substantial meaning in this debate as corporate includes anyone/thing from mom & pop operations to large multi-national corporations. To insist that any and everything corporate is the cause, the “thing” doing the very real assaulting of public education is to relieve those individuals who are doing the actual harm of responsibility, masking, obfuscating their very personal involvement and theft of public resources.
Folks, we lose many allies, who think we must be dirt stupid to attempt to throw all the deformers, deforms, and privatizations occurring under the misnomer “corporate”.
We need to cease using corporate as the term of choice. Plain and simple!
*see above post for definition
Agree with you Wayne…how about let’s call it an…. ALEC assault on the great socio economic modifier of the free public education system in America.
Agree with what you have outlined Ellen. thanks for spelling it out for those who perhaps haven’t understood what has been happening since the 80s.
Duane…unless one understands economics, a person cannot understand school district budgets, and the laissez faire way most districts are run, allowing for bad apples to commit fraud and theft among other things.. It is a golden opportunity for the insurgence of the Broad/Walton/Gates, etc. cabal. Their interpretation of a free market (not the “invisible hand”) economy has brought about worldwide oligarchy…worst right here in the US. And when school districts go into bankruptcy, they will be right there to buy up property at fire sale prices. See how Rahm did some of this in Chicago…closing public schools to sell the property to private investors.
Teachers need to understand how austerity brought down Greece, and how Christine LaGarde, head of the IMF warned about this some years ago. Then Obama and his henchmen (the left over Clinton deregulators) pretended to hand out billions of our dollars as STIMULUS…and the banks grabbed the free money and used it to their own advantage…a few paid some of it back, but the bulk is still in the coffers of the banksters. This is our money. Obama also allowed, urged, the law to change so we get the shaft again, since now the banksters are held harmless for their risky gambling, and all the casino investments, and resultant losses, are paid for the FDIC…our money pays these crooks coming and going.
Every teacher, from pre K – university must learn how this wool was pulled over all our eyes by this arrogant ruling class (which the Clintons are a part of). It will ever be so if the populace is ignorant of how our world works. No more trickle down, no more supply side. Tenure, unions, teacher jail, is all part of this WHOLE and teachers are self defeating if they continue to wear blinders and whine only about themselves.
I have been an educator for over 45 years…and this is my opinion as one who teaches public policy and some economics in higher ed.
Although TARP money continued to flow to the banks after Obama became president, it was G.W. Bush who started giving that money away in the first place. In fact, from what I’ve read, Bush gave it away with no oversight and it was just a blank check that let the banks do whatever they wanted with the money they got.
Any rules of how to spend it and pay it back came after Obama was president.
The TARP program originally authorized expenditures of $700 billion and Bush signed it into law on October 3, 2008.
If you click on the link and scroll down to the chart, you will discover that most of the TARP money has been paid back one way or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
Yes, Lloyd…it did start with Bush and Paulson in 2007. Paulson was another Goldman Sachs boy and as Treasury Sect. had to put his huge wealth into a blind trust. These two came to Congress with a piece of paper demanding billions to save the banks after the stock market dropped 500 points in a day. At least Congress functioned better than today, and they at first refused to sign off on this gift to Goldman Sachs and the too big to fail banks. Then there was the stock market crash and the fiasco of Lehman Bros and of Bear Stearns. Makes exciting reading, like a Tom Clancy novel. Who would believe there could be so many crooks running our govt.?
Naomi Klein spells it out in Shock Doctrine, but there are now a plethora of books by insiders which spill the beans. Joe Stiglitz and his book Freefall is my fav. And not only does Bush and his gang come off looking horrible, but so do the Clintons who started it all by colluding with Phil Gramm, and following the advice of Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, helping Congress to kill Glass Steagall.
FDR knew in 1934 that investment and commercial banks MUST be kept separate to protect the populace from the “casino” investments like the phony bundled derivatives, credit default swaps,
collateral debt obligations, that thereafter, in our lives, brought down the economy. The robber baron mentality still prevails. Follow the deeds and the money, not the parsed words of political candidates.
I think that G. W. Bush + Obama equals the same president. Did they download Bush into Obama before he was sworn in as president?