William Stroud is the principal of Long Beach High School in New York.
“Our lives have become increasingly commercialized in a modern, global society that everywhere promotes consumerism; surrounding us with images that link glamor and status with possessions. The desire to have more, new, “better” things infiltrates our sub-conscious, influences our daily behaviors, and compromises our value system in remarkable ways. What we have, becomes a substitute for who we are. Buy happiness.
“I often refer to the commercialization of public education, i.e. the contemporary takeover of schooling by a corporate elite that imposes its own paradigm rather than a vision of education as liberation; a system which would develop our full potentials as individuals, strengthen our sense of community with each other, define what it means to be a human being in the grandest sense – values, thoughts, and behaviors. Schools can provide a forum for us to explore how we can make the world a better place.
“Instead, the corporate leaders that guide educational policy, inspired by Milton Friedman’s ‘Freedom and Democracy’ and their own self-interest, have transformed public education into a marketplace. Education becomes synonymous with “achievement” results, and “choice” becomes the reform lever. Students and teachers are measured according to standardized test performance. Significance of data becomes more essential than quality of relationships. Public monies are “freed up” so private service providers can be contracted. And there’s the big money – sales in curriculum and assessment, and educational technology.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Milton Friedman has become the god of greed for many of the 1%, all because he won the Nobel prize in Economics in 1976.
Milton Friedman was awarded the 1976 prize in part for his work on monetarism. Awarding the prize to Friedman caused international protests. Friedman was accused of supporting the military dictatorship in Chile because of the relation of economists of the University of Chicago to Pinochet, and a controversial six-day trip he took to Chile during March 1975 (less than two years after the coup that deposed President Salvador Allende).
The first prize in economics as awarded in 1969. Friedman is only one of many who have won this award. Why isn’t any of the others worshiped by the 1%.
“The experience of the past 15 years, first in Japan and now across the Western world, shows that Keynes was right and Friedman was wrong about the ability of unaided monetary policy to fight depressions. The truth is that we need a more activist government than Friedman was willing to countenance.”
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/08/paul-krugman-milton-friedman-unperson.html
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I would just correct one thing.
The e-con prize is not a real Nobel prize.
“The Economics Prize has nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. But it’s a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation,” Nobel’s great great nephew Peter Nobel told AFP in 2005, adding that “It’s most often awarded to stock market speculators …. There is nothing to indicate that [Alfred Nobel] would have wanted such a prize.”
Members of the Nobel family are among the harshest, most persistent critics of the economics prize, and members of the family have repeatedly called for the prize to be abolished or renamed. In 2001, on the 100th anniversery of the Nobel Prizes, four family members published a letter in the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, arguing that the economics prize degrades and cheapens the real Nobel Prizes. They aren’t the only ones.”
from “There is No Nobel Prize in Economics”
Economist and bank fraud expert William Black has referred to it as a “near beer” version.
Most scientists don’t accept economists as real scientists so economists hold this up like some sort of “certificate of legitimacy”
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But this does not sully the ability and opinions of two of my favorite American economists who speak truth to policy, and have won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Joseph Stiglitz….read his books Freefall, and On Inequality, for a start…and also Paul Krugman
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The econ prize doesn’t detract, just doesn’t add anything to economists’ credibility.
In that regard, it’s just like beards.
“This year [2013], not for the first time, the central bankers decided to hedge their bets – awarding their prize to economists who contradict each other (Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller). The hedge strategy might be thought to ensure that the central bank’s prize winners were right at least half the time (which would be an improvement over the central bankers’ batting average in their awards), but that is a logical error. It is perfectly possible for both of the prize winners to be wrong.”
From Economics could be a science if more economists were scientists (by William Black)
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Would like to discuss all this with you, our FAVE POET…so let’s do it one on one at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
As a woman, I have mixed feelings about the women who run the FED and the SEC. Yellen and White are worrisome in that they reflect more of the same old, same old, of the Greenspan/Geithner school, and recent overseers who follow self-serving free market principles and use their power to mainly protect the 1%, whatever their rationale. Is this a Princeton trait? Does Princeton/Harvard trained attorney, Mrs. Obama, have input? Or do Larry Summers and Robert Rubin have a say in these choices?
Mary Jo White as head of the SEC is an embarrassment, since she is a Wall Street attorney (like the last DoJ leader who did not prosecute any banksters….and yet Blankfein got cancer perhaps as heavenly punishment for all his dirty deeds). Yellen, an academic, still leaves me nonplussed. Would have preferred the more populist positions of Warren who Obama aced out of a Cabinet position (for being too respectful to the 99%). Sheila Bair, a Repub, was a far better overseer of the SEC than White. Again, some Dems show that they can be more rigid than some few Repubs.
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Thank you for the correction and addition.
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I am with you Lloyd as to the Keynsians. Much more rational perspective for the masses, that is most of us, than that of the Austrian School with Von Mises, and the Chicago School monetarists who were motivated by individual and collective (Ayn Rand-shtick) greed.
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To add to this Brave New World in which we live…ruled by corporations and for corporations and the uber wealthy oligarchs who own and run them, here is an article from Counterpunch which is explicit on how US hegemony is described as “democracy” and is foisted on other nations.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/29/orwell-at-the-un-obama-re-defines-democracy-as-a-country-that-supports-u-s-policy/
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This is what “counterpunch” represents:
“CounterPunch is a monthly magazine published in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It has been described as left-wing by both supporters and detractors”
Important Note: It’s own editors describe as muckraking with a radical attitude.
Good luck
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Raj,
And??
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That’s quite an Op-Ed, and I’ve read enough over time to agree with it. The U.S. is not a democracy. It’s a police state fast on its way backwards to a 3rd world nation.
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Raj, thanks for bringing counterpunch to my attention. I will start reading, now.
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Mathvale..Duane…Poet….Lloyd…you guys are terrific and so smart. Made me laugh.
In addition to reading the article on I posted on US non-democracy, you might also read the older Noam Chomsky book Hegemony which is far more academic with many citations. Hugo Chavez held it in his hand years ago as he addressed the UN on these very issues.
I know this comment will have Raz fuming.
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Oooppss…meant Raj will be fuming…and he will probably Raz me.
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Reblogged this on DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing and commented:
Well said by someone I hope to partner with soon.
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Well said William.
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All should read Freire’s work concerning what education could and should be about.
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The Pedagogy of the Oppressed?
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That and Pedagogy of the Heart
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Yes, Duane…Paolo Friere was a prime educator.
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Congratulations to Bill Stroud on being cited on Diane Ravitch’s blog. However I wonder how he squares his anti-capitalism rant with the fact that the school he leads is a slave to the cults of International Baccalaureate (IB) and the College Board’s AP program. At Long Beach High School students are given little choice in their core subjects but to enroll in these programs, which carry high fees and require the purchase of their proprietary textbooks and assessments. Much of the school’s limited professional development budget has been devoted to sending teachers around the globe for IB training. The school buys its other assessments and textbooks from corporate giants Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Students are about to take the costly PSAT exam, which the College Board is now forcing schools to administer during the school day and to enlist their own teachers to proctor. Public education in Long Beach is for the most part no longer local or free.
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Here is an article today from Robert Reich, an economist and non-Nobelist who teaches public policy at U.C. Berkeley. He supports Stroud’s perspective. Clinton kicked him out of his Cabinet for being too much of a populist.
—————————————————–
Why We Must End Upward Pre-Distributions to the Rich
Robert Reich, Video Feature
Political competition is no longer between Republicans and Democrats—it’s between the 99 percent and the economic elite who influence the rules by which the economy runs. Let’s stop the pre-distribution upward.
Read the full story…
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Here is the printout of the Reich artcle on redistribution of wealth.
WHY WE MUST END UPWARD PRE-DISTRIBUTIONS TO THE RICH
You often hear inequality has widened because globalization and technological change have made most people less competitive, while making the best educated more competitive.
There’s some truth to this. The tasks most people used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.
But this common explanation overlooks a critically important phenomenon: the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs.
As I argue in my new book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few” (out this week), this transformation has amounted to a pre-distribution upward.
Intellectual property rights—patents, trademarks, and copyrights—have been enlarged and extended, for example, creating windfalls for pharmaceutical companies.
Americans now pay the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation.
At the same time, antitrust laws have been relaxed for corporations with significant market power, such as big food companies, cable companies facing little or no broadband competition, big airlines, and the largest Wall Street banks.
As a result, Americans pay more for broadband Internet, food, airline tickets, and banking services than the citizens of any other advanced nation.
Bankruptcy laws have been loosened for large corporations—airlines, automobile manufacturers, even casino magnates like Donald Trump—allowing them to leave workers and communities stranded.
But bankruptcy has not been extended to homeowners burdened by mortgage debt or to graduates laden with student debt. Their debts won’t be forgiven.
The largest banks and auto manufacturers were bailed out in 2008, shifting the risks of economic failure onto the backs of average working people and taxpayers.
Contract laws have been altered to require mandatory arbitration before private judges selected by big corporations. Securities laws have been relaxed to allow insider trading of confidential information.
CEOs now use stock buybacks to boost share prices when they cash in their own stock options.
Tax laws have special loopholes for the partners of hedge funds and private-equity funds, special favors for the oil and gas industry, lower marginal income-tax rates on the highest incomes, and reduced estate taxes on great wealth.
Meanwhile, so-called “free trade” agreements, such as the pending Trans Pacific Partnership, give stronger protection to intellectual property and financial assets but less protection to the labor of average working Americans.
Today, nearly one out of every three working Americans is in a part-time job. Many are consultants, freelancers, and independent contractors. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck.
And employment benefits have shriveled. The portion of workers with any pension connected to their job has fallen from just over half in 1979 to under 35 percent today.
Labor unions have been eviscerated. Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker, backed by a strong union, earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars.
Now America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical entry-level Walmart worker, without a union, earns about $9 an hour.
More states have adopted so-called “right-to-work” laws, designed to bust unions. The National Labor Relations Board, understaffed and overburdened, has barely enforced collective bargaining.
All of these changes have resulted in higher corporate profits, higher returns for shareholders, and higher pay for top corporate executives and Wall Street bankers – and lower pay and higher prices for most other Americans.
They amount to a giant pre-distribution upward to the rich. But we’re not aware of them because they’re hidden inside the market.
The underlying problem, then, is not just globalization and technological changes that have made most American workers less competitive. Nor is it that they lack enough education to be sufficiently productive.
The more basic problem is that the market itself has become tilted ever more in the direction of moneyed interests that have exerted disproportionate influence over it, while average workers have steadily lost bargaining power—both economic and political—to receive as large a portion of the economy’s gains as they commanded in the first three decades after World War II.
Reversing the scourge of widening inequality requires reversing the upward pre-distributions within the rules of the market, and giving average people the bargaining power they need to get a larger share of the gains from growth.
The answer to this problem is not found in economics. It is found in politics. Ultimately, the trend toward widening inequality in America, as elsewhere, can be reversed only if the vast majority join together to demand fundamental change.
The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left, or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground, and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to its growing distress
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Don’t overlook the biggest oney make of all: training and staff development since this is where the consultants all cash in as well as the publishers. I have been thinking that this whole “reformers” movement is a business problem not an education or even citizenship issue. As long as you make money who cares what educators, parents, etc think. If you can co-opt and subvert the business model you can destroy “reform”.
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Believe me wnen I say, “The Middle Class is the enemy of the oligarchy.” This is why our society and government, not to mention public schools are being used to promote the agenda of the 1% = CC$$. It’s all about profits and creating “useful”, non-thinking citizens. The elite send their kids to private schools, which teach the elite how to rule over and manage “the rest of us” for profits. It’s this simple.
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Corporations are run more like North Korea than a democracy. Corporate governance is a dictatorship where you cannot question the supreme leader (CEO) or you are exiled (fired). Why so many supposed freedom loving conservatives can wrap themselves in the flag while preaching the end of democracy though commercialization will be the topic of theses years from now studying the fall of the U.S.
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