Arthur Camins retired after a career as a teacher, aprofessor, a scientist, and director of a lab in charge of innovation.
In this post, he lays out the great mission of our era: take back our government, restore our democracy of the people. Start with public schools.
An excerpt:
Public schools are the bedrocks of democracy and equity. They are a great place to start reclaiming government because they are under assault by market enthusiasts who promote charter schools.
At best, charter schools–publicly funded but privately governed–benefit a few at the expense of the many. The evidence is in. At worst, they drain funds from public school districts, exacerbate segregation, facilitate corruption, and promote competition rather than solidarity among diverse constituencies for education quality and equity. It is time to hammer the nails in the charter school coffin.
In a dramatic and welcome shift for presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrenhave announced their opposition to continued federal support for charter schools. However, don’t make plans for the Democratic funeral just yet. The charter school lobby has deep pockets for legislative and electoral influence. However, we are seeing a political shift in response to changing public opinion, possibly a reaction to Betsy DeVos’s flagrant distain for public schools and recurring charter school corruption.
Since Albert Shankar abandoned his flirtation with charter schools as an end run around stultifying bureaucracy, advocacy for so-called school choice has been primarily about undermining unions, avoiding systemic solutions to poverty, and promoting unregulated markets in opposition to government responsibility. Public acceptance of charter schools reflects a desperate response to years of abandonment and bipartisan support for and bashing of public schools. I don’t blame parents for choosing charter schools or the teacher who work in them. The responsibility falls on the politicians who allowed schools to deteriorate and poverty to continue, and with the profiteers who seek to make a buck at children’s expense. We will need to find a responsible way to reintegrate current charter school students into the public school system.
The market notion is that when schools compete for students and parent compete for their children’s entry into charter school equity and quality will improve. That is a zombie idea. The absence of evidence notwithstanding, it just will not die. With billionaire funding it just keeps coming back to life.
Just for fun, I did a search on the term, “How to kill a zombie.” It appears that the only way to kill off zombies is to attack their brains. We need to attack the brainchild of markets-fix-everything limited government enthusiasts The American majority needs to take back the role of government as an essential support of a decent life for everyone. We need to take back the idea of social responsibility. The education of our children– all of them –could be the vanguard of that struggle.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The term zombie came from writings about Haiti in the twenties and thirties. Slaves in Santo Domingue had little hope for self control and so worked without emotion until they died, an average of three years. Like the slaves, teachers are being asked to work in a specific way without thinking. The strikes you see rising throughout the country parallel the violence that ended Slavery in the French colony, though much less violent. Perhaps the pressure cooker that is the exploitation of teachers might be released a bit by the social unrest that is beneath the surface.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Teachers are not only reclaiming their profession by striking, they are changing the national narrative about “bad” teachers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
a narrative which must be intentionally and forcefully eschewed by political hopefuls and union leaders alike
LikeLike
A superb analogy, RT. Turning the teacher into a zombie or gollum seems to be precisely what Deformers aim for. Deformers love invariant standards and high-stakes testing and VAM and school grading and merit pay and omnipresent evaluation and scripted, computerized curricula and pedagogy because these are all command and control mechanisms. But here’s the problem: people doing mental, as opposed to physical, work perform best in conditions of relative autonomy, where there is bottom-up control. And for cognitive tasks, like teaching and learning, extrinsic punishments and rewards are DEMOTIVATING. Ironically, the Deformers claim to want to apply business principles to education, but they clearly haven’t learned this key idea learned by manufacturers as part of the quality revolution. You get continuous improvement by empowering people on the line to make decisions and significant determinations about how things are run.
I worked as a teacher in the 1980s, had a career in publishing, and then returned to teaching. WOW. This was eye-opening. While I was gone, ALL AUTHORITY AND AUTONOMY WAS WRESTED FROM TEACHERS. They no longer have any power over what goes on in their classrooms except that which they steal under the noses of the long list of others–building and district administrators, state and federal officials, and self-appointed deciders for the rest of us like Grand Master Gates and his minion Lord Coleman. It was truly shocking to see what has happened to the profession. In the old days, teachers, in a department meeting, would make decisions about textbooks, curricula, pedagogical approaches, and so on, and these meetings were animated, lively. Now they listen to read-outs of directives, and everyone looks like the walking dead. And if the Deformers/Distruptors had their way, this scripting, this micromanagement, would, via technology, be made total.
LikeLike
“The proper role of government is not to broker the wellbeing of its people in the context of the primacy of private profit or to protect the privileges of the few. It is to ensure the human rights of everyone. Unfortunately, inequity is the status quo in education.”
We need to return to governance of, by and for the people. We have drifted far from this value. Government has served the wealthy and corporations at the expense of working families. We have intense income in equality as a result. We need to change our government so that it works for everyone.
The free market acolytes have brainwashed many people. Certainly, the media have promoted the worship of the wealthy. I also blame the the business schools that have promoted market based solutions to everything. It has resulted in an army of ethically challenged business leaders that have used their wealth to get the government to do their bidding. Government is viewed as a giant dragon that must be slayed. Small government that cannot regulate or function well serves the corporate elites. not working families. We need to restore trust in government by getting the money out of politics so that democracy and human rights can thrive. A key element of democracy is well funded and government supported public education.
LikeLike
Capitalism has an end game — it applies across the board on all the fronts we are watching today where corporations and their political minions are raiding and destroying the public sphere.
The name of the game is CATPOT —
Corporations Acquiring The Power Of Taxation
The one thing capitalists envy about democratic government is the power to tax. They can’t get that power directly, just yet, so what they do is buy politicians who give them the power by proxy.
LikeLike
Great essay, Arthur! Thank you!
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
LikeLike
All meritocracy must go. It makes no sense to deregulate businesses or incentivize privatization, robbing the people to reward the wealthy. Meritocracy will destroy democracy, the climate, public health and welfare, and the futures of the youth. Time is running out before it will be too late. We need more unions, we need more strikes, and we need more of other acts of peaceful civil disobedience. We need progressive taxation, strong regulation, fully funded public schools with public boards, public health care, a streamlined military, and a Green New Deal. We cannot afford to continue the failed ideas of Reaganomics and neoliberalism, not for another moment. We cannot wait. Oligarchic meritocracy must go.
LikeLike