Edward Berger, who lives in Arizona, has joined with friends and neighbors to try to save their public schools from the corporate vandals of “reform.”
In this brilliant article, he explains the toxic consequences of reforms that shatter and splinter the community. Their message: Our schools are failing (they are not); our educators are terrible (they are not); we must turn to privatization (we should not).
He writes:
There are forces at work that are so destructive they can shatter the hopes and dreams of our citizens and splinter our communities. Our communities serve the needs of citizens via good schools, good medical facilities, good policing, good and great services in almost every area. However, there are forces of greed and power that have come back to haunt us from the Industrial Age and The Age of Robber Barons when individuals – responsible to no one – ground fellow human beings into dust. Their control of America became a license to rape, rip, and run.
“I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1907)
The cycle is repeating. We see it fracturing our own community as school and community college funding has been systematically cut off. The facts are clear. Our really outstanding schools have been driven into deep financial trouble. These problems are not caused by bad education or bad anything the schools have done. Certainly, the schools need and will always need to keep working to evolve and get better, but that is not why they are in trouble. The majority of parents enroll their children in district schools that have the wide range of expertise, services, and programs they need. If you are a parent of a child in school, you should be outraged and fighting like a wounded mother bear for your child’s school and education future. Our community schools suffer because a political agenda – an ideology – is attempting to starve and destroy them.
The reality is that the forces that control how our tax dollars are distributed have attacked and wounded our community schools. At this time, we cannot expect those who have coordinated these attacks on America’s future to adequately fund public schools. If we are to save our schools and our free society, our Prescott community must commit to adequate funding and insist on quality education for our children. That requires that We The People dig deeper into our pockets and pass the upcoming bond issue and override. If we do not do this, our community will never recover. Area schools will not survive. Our children will be irreparably damaged. We already see the impact of funding cuts and school closures as dollars and students have been siphoned away from public education and the District is being forced to close schools.
What hurts communities the most is the spawned divisiveness that has grouped people around planted lies and destructive ideologies. In our past, people, regardless of religion, political beliefs, or limited understanding, worked together to build local government and collectively provide the services the community needs. There were always disagreements, but they were resolved. There were always fringe individuals and groups that screamed “No New Taxes,” but as demands for more and better services increase and more people are served, every reasonable person knows that these services are necessary and really a great deal….
The attacks on public schools and educated people are increasing in force. An inculcated belief that public education must be killed because it cannot be fixed has become a common mantra. Other schools were formed – partial schools, charter schools – a few developed exemplary programs. All took funds away from the district schools. Hundreds of millions of dollars remain unaccounted for and the entire public education system is weakened and severely damaged. A large percentage of this money went to duplicate facilities and services the public is already providing. Rather than merge new and effective programs into the existing system, as was the original plan, the alternative schools are encouraged to define the district public schools as wrong.
Corporate raiders use the Press to convince American parents that the American education system has failed, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. They base this presumed failure on skewed test scores. They ignore what schools actually do. As they spin these lies continually, people without crap detectors begin to believe them. Those who have taken power use it to bypass or infiltrate elected school boards, privatize schools, and open new schools without public accountability so they can steal money that taxpayers think goes for kids. They use their power to take over elected bodies and financially attack and starve excellent public schools and community programs – kill them – and steal the tax dollars. They use ill-gained political power to allow school operators to build Real Estate empires while supporting Legislators who stop calls for accountability. They call this privatization.
I find it impossible to do this essay justice by excerpting parts of it. It is so thoughtful, so beautifully written, so clear and compelling, that I urge you to open the link and read it all.
Our educational system is the main force preserving our democracy today, far more important than our corporate-corrupted Congress and state legislatures. If education goes, everything goes.
It breaks my heart because I think it’s such a profound mistake to get rid of public schools. There won’t be any accountability once they’re gone either- we’ll get the same “mistakes were made” dodge we always get and they’ll tweak the privatized system(s) with more transfer payments to contractors.
I keep looking for an example of a public system that was privatized and then returned to public control and I’ve only found one- there’s a movement to “re-municipalize” water and power systems in Germany and some other places because it wasn’t a good deal for their citizens and was harming their economy. I think it would be impossible in this country due to our corrupt campaign system- once the public system is gone we won’t get it back.
Chiara: your comments reminded me of—
BIG YELLOW TAXI, Joni Mitchell. First two verses:
[start]
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half to see ’em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And they put up a parking lot
[end]
*Note to the shills and trolls that haunt this blog: no, I am not implying that public education is “paradise” but rather that—in the spirit of the song—we should beware of giving up what has proven to be better (and better amenable to fixing) for what is worse (and increasingly difficult to set right). It would help if you gave up your treasured CC ‘closet reading’ or at least got yourselves some more batteries so you don’t have to sit in the dark for long hours making up stuff.*
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Our series of case studies – in collaboration with Reclaiming Public Water, Transnational Institute, Corporate Europe Observatory and PSIRU – reveals that the reasons for water remunicipalization differ but that similar problems with private water management have persuaded many communities and policy makers that the public sector is better placed to provide quality services to citizens. These problems include: poor performance of private companies (e.g. Accra, Dar es Salaam, Maputo), under-investment (e.g. Berlin, Buenos Aires), disputes over operational costs and price increases (e.g. Almaty, Maputo, Indianapolis), soaring water bills (e.g. Berlin, Kuala Lumpur), difficulties in monitoring private operators (e.g. Atlanta), lack of financial transparency (e.g. Grenoble, Paris, Berlin), and workforce cuts and poor service quality (e.g. Atlanta, Indianapolis).
Labour involvement appears critical for the success of remunicipalization because frontline workers have important insights into operational challenges and opportunities.
– See more at: http://www.municipalservicesproject.org/remunicipalization#sthash.kgKVwLcm.dpuf
While I was visiting my daughter in Texas recently, I saw a story on the news about a small town with a privatized water system. It was on the news because hook worms were coming out of faucets!
retired teacher, you can google “privatization” and add virtually any public service, including police, libraries, firefighting, water, etc. and you will be amazed at how much is going on.
Berger’s thoughtful essay covers the essence of what corporate America is doing to Americans and to our former democratic republic. With the privatizing of all elements of our society, we are left with only this overclass of supreme wealth ruling all the rest of us.
In LA today, we see the rationale for yesterday’s firing of Austin Beutner as CEO/Publisher of the LA Times. Beutner claims that his goal was to make this once great print newspaper, now digitized as well, into a ‘local’ paper…and his Trib boss, Griffin, who fired him yesterday and forced him to unceremoniously leave the building immediately, has appointed Tim Ryan, a 30 year East Coast newspaperman, to take over his role.
Reading all of this today, once again, it is Eli Broad who seems to be the core instigator of this chaos. Once again Broad is seeking bifurcation of the Times and the San Diego paper which it recently bought, to be broken off from the Trib. Broad is again trying to buy these two major California media sources According to the Times, Broad can easily buy the entire Trib Corp. since their stock has dropped so low that it is only worth about $256 Million…and Broad is worth over $7 Billion.
The probable hyperbole blames a difference over advertising which the Trib claims has fallen off in the past year. As a lifetime reader of the Times, I can attest that it is now at least 3/4 advertising. How can they increase this and still have any column room for actual news?
In addition, the Chicago Trib seems to feel that Beutner was using the Times as a vehicle for his own ambition to run for Governor of California. Whatever the fallout shows, the main theme is exactly what Berger writes about with insight, the Grand Takeover of America by the oligarchs. I suggest also reading Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony,written some years ago on this same theme, but focused on American oligarchs desire for world domination.
Splintering America is what it’s all about.
“Splinterism”
Divide and conquer
Split and splinter
Deride and squander
Successful sinter
A few very powerful individuals and corporations have managed to cause undue harm to our communities and people. They have bought influence and inserted themselves in many formerly public services. Their goal is to control our future, one that will be profitable for them and harmful to everyone else. Their insidious MO is to starve the service, make it vulnerable to takeover, shift public assets into private equity, and destroy middle class jobs and replace them low paying jobs. Using complicit elected officials to clear the way for them, they garner tax credits, deductions, loopholes and profit while the public is largely unaware of what is happening. The goal is to get the American taxpayer to underwrite their profit while we lose middle class jobs, community ties and get a service that is less efficient while we pay more. In fact, one study finds we pay 1.8 times more for less. In public education the harm is especially harmful as the loss of a public school signals a loss of a comprehensive school, community hub and a loss of democracy.
Even if we can forget the economic meltdown of 2008, corporations are stronger than ever, and they are swallowing each other up to create mega-corporations. This is terrible news for consumers. There are talks of mergers of the major health care companies uniting into three major providers. This will encourage price fixing rather than competition. The DOJ is asleep because they fail to pursue anti-trust suits. Our drug prices are unregulated and out of control. One main motive for the TPP is a push for drug companies to price fix around the globe, which, of course, they claim is needed for “research.” Corporations’ main interest is immediate profit, They are not interested in building a better America, nor do they care about the welfare or opportunities of its citizens.http://www.projectcensored.org/privatization-of-free-market-industry-costs-billions-more-than-public-services/
Excellent comment Retired Teacher…and the link is telling. Austin Beutner, the just fired CEO/Publisher of the LA Times, led Blackstone Group and made much of his investment banker fortune there. The key figures in this takeover are all interrelated.
Last night on the new Colbert show, Jeb Bush reiterated that Government must shrink. Colbert kept repeating that Bush was THE Repub candidate, not Trump. And Bush parrots Grover Norquist. Today there is an article on Alternet of how Bush killed Florida education with his imposition of charter schools. One more coffin nail for our public schools.
The billionaire boys’ club is like a bunch of legal thugs organizing crimes against citizens and democratic principles. Since none of this is ever covered on mainstream media, most people are in the dark.
There’s a good article today in the NY Times about housing, segregation and poverty:
It includes this quote from the Supreme Court:
“No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of public schools; local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to quality of the educational process.”
That statement by Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a 1974 decision, was used to stop busing. The case arose because suburban (mostly white) neighborhoods wanted to control their schools and keep them separate.
Civil Rights leaders of today need to recognize that many school reform efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, are worsening segregation. They’re creating a separate and unequal system of schooling, where:
* students from impoverished backgrounds (mostly minorities) are subjected to a low-level, machine- and test-driven “no excuses” form of instruction.
* students from more privileged backgrounds get a rich and varied educational experience which makes them truly college and career ready—that is, if career means 21th century jobs.
Besides the difference in educational experiences, how can anyone accept the loss of control? How far we’ve come since 1974! That’s when the Supreme Court justified segregation on those grounds. Now even control is taken away from poorer communities, where neighborhood schools, board elections, financial oversight, and locally-hired teachers are replaced with corporate-owned schools (non-profit or for-profit, it makes no difference), unaccountable managers, and inexperienced teachers who don’t stick around. (Of course I’m referring to TFA, whose corps are really staffers not teachers.)
All Americans, not just civil rights leaders, need to understand where this is headed—toward less social justice and more inequality. The so-called reform movement is hurting, not helping. It is not only failing to lift people out of poverty, it’s taking away dignity and autonomy. And this is not just an argument for soft-hearted liberals. Conservatives should be alarmed. This grand, government backed social experiment has unintended consequences (less equal, more separate schools) and it’s an assault on self-governance.
These are the publicly-paid employees of Kasich’s state education agency in Ohio talking about the public schools that 93% of the kids in the state attend:
“Hansen responded: “Well, I’d like to first feel secure in being able to do what I do for just charters. The last thing I want is for the process to end up sinking our little bit of autonomy from the edu-blob because someone sees it and thinks that someone would oppose what we’re trying to do.”
Hansen wrote in an email to a Cleveland charter-school leader on Dec. 26, 2013, saying, “I’ve been at (the Ohio Department of Education) for just 3 months but have a personal goal of protecting, if not growing, the autonomy to which charters are entitled and need in order to succeed.”
Responding to her complaint about a negative designation, he added that he’s hoping “we can get the people involved to spend more time on traditional public schools and leave charters alone.”
http://www.jointhefuture.org/1710-charter-scandal-proves-necessity-of-directly-funding-choice-schools
Did you know that many business leaders in the private sector study Sun Tzu’s Art of War and one of his quotes says to divide your enemy?
In this war to exterminate transparent, non-profit, democratic public education by the autocrats, the exterminators are hard at work to divide and conquer 99% of the population as they systematically dismantle the Founding Fathers republic and its democracy.