In 2007, then-candidate Barack Obama said that if workers were denied the right to collectively bargain that he, as president of the United States of America, would get a pair of comfortable shoes and walk the picket lines with them. Wisconsin, Ohio and Chicago are still waiting for that presidential stroll for labor. What a difference five years makes … huh?
In Chicago, former White House chief of staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is now threatening to sue the striking teachers and there is no word from the Obama administration regarding their stance on this — nor from the Democratic Party, by and large. When Scott Walker took aim at teachers, there was a response; not to mention the liberal outcry against Kasich, Daniels and other GOP-controlled governorships and state legislatures that took similar stances.
There is a misleading lip-service that is paid to teachers and education by the political leadership on the left, while they, at the same time, are advocating policies and/or abdicating responsibility to challenge policy that would have been condemned if championed by a Republican president.
A private public education
For example, over the years, we have heard a great deal of noise from Democrats about privatization of essential public services including education. Yet, when President Obama appointed Arne Duncan (fierce advocate for a corporate-modeled educational system), former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, the Secretary of Education, there was near-universal silence from the political left.
To understand what teachers and students are grappling with in our educational systems all over this country, the Obama-Duncan educational agenda has to be clearly understood.
What is fundamental to this deconstruction of policy, is that although Secretary Duncan has been the director of educational initiatives and the head of Chicago Public Schools, he has never served as a classroom teacher; he has never had the year-round responsibility of educating students, nor has he ever had to deal, as an educator, with the impact of the policies he now advocates.
When school vouchers and the closing of public schools were being forwarded by the Bush administration the howls about bankrupting the public school system in favor of privatization could be heard from every corner of the progressive world. So what is this administration’s plan in regard to public education? Let’s look to Arne Duncan’s record for details.
In his tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Chicago launched a policy called Renaissance 2010, which was actually designed by the Commercial Club of Chicago in 2003. The Commercial Club is an organization of the biggest CEOs and bankers in the city, essentially. And Arne Duncan pushed through this agenda of closing neighborhood schools, turning them over to private operators and/or expanding charter schools, and increasingly putting more pressure on teachers to respond to high-stakes testing.
And what did that approach yield for the students of Chicago? A study by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research released in October 2009 examined the academic effects of the closings on students as 18 elementary schools shut down between 2001 and 2006 (during Duncan’s watch). The study concluded that the vast majority of students went from one low-performing school to another, with no achievement gains — and, in fact, even saw temporary decreases in test scores during the stressful period when the announcement of their school being slated for closing was made.
This means that at-risk students were put at even greater risk and the achievement gap that they state they are trying to address becomes even wider.
“Chartering” a not so new course
Additionally, the increasing of charter schools strategy, essential to the Obama-Duncan educational policy, has come under scrutiny. A study by Stanford University, looking at data covering some 70 percent of all charter school students nationally, found that ineffective charter schools outnumber effective ones by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1 — and a whopping 83 percent of charter schools were either no better, or worse than, traditional public schools.
So this is the plan for education that has been devised by this current administration; this is the “race to the top” that we are being told will revolutionize education and increase student learning and achievement. Diane Ravitch, who served in both George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations in the Department of Education, had this to say about Duncan and the drive for educational privatization:
“Duncan has required states to create more privately-managed charter schools to be eligible for Race to the Top funding, putting pressure on state governments to privatize public education. In response, state legislatures are authorizing many more such schools, whose budgets are drawn from the funds of local public schools.
“A small proportion of these new charter schools will get high scores, and some will get those scores by skimming the top students in poor communities and by excluding children with disabilities and children who are English language learners. Such practices are harmful to public schools, which will continue to educate the overwhelming majority of students—with fewer resources than before.
“In some states, such as Michigan and Ohio, large numbers of charters are run for profit, which creates additional incentives for them to avoid low-performing and thus expensive to educate students. Although charters vary widely in quality, they do not produce better results on average than regular public schools.”
The few deciding the education of the many
Is there any doubt how this would have been met by the progressive masses if these very same policies were introduced by a secretary of education with an “R” behind their name? President Obama and Arne Duncan have been able to propose and implement an agenda that is nothing short of the corporatization of public education. The president has also, quite skillfully and successfully, been able to deter the vast majority of liberals from opposing policies for which they would have hanged his predecessor in effigy.
This is a continuation and expansion of where wealthy and powerful influences have been taking education for the past two decades. Bill Gates, Eli Broad and others (wealthy philanthropists) whose aims and goals were backed by, first, No Child Left Behind and now by Race to the Top. Ironically, these are also people who would never send their kids to a public school, but can dictate the policies that are implemented in public schools across the country through un-elected school boards, as we see in Chicago and New York.
Conclusion
So the teachers’ strike in Chicago becomes an opportunity for reflection and examination of an aggressive corporatization of our public schools systems that will further widen the student achievement gap and segregate and cement certain populations into a permanent educational underclass.
To give this president and this secretary of education a pass when it comes to accountability regarding their educational agenda, means that rhetoric has been chosen over reality, and party loyalty has overshadowed principles. A moral outrage that is dependent upon which direction the partisan winds are blowing is not worthy of serious consideration.
Whenever we allow our voices to be politicized into silence, our dissent, on any issue, is delegitimized no matter how just that dissent may be. Is any president or policy worth that?