Varmits In The Pantry

Here in Michigan Governor Snyder has been meeting to plan out the future of public education (in secret up until a few days ago) with a group of 20 some individuals, most of whom were not educators. The group apparently called themselves the Skunk Works, an allusion to Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs which was born in June of 1943 and brought to life aeronautical innovations like the P38 Lightening, the F-104 Starfighter, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk and the F-22 Raptor, to name a few.  As you may imagine, their work was conducted in secret as well.

Developing strategic and tactical military hardware though, is not the same as improving public education, so I would like to suggested another, more natural allusion for this group and that is Mephitis mephitis, or the common striped skunk, often referred to as a polecat because quite frankly what Snyder is doing stinks. Commenting on the nature of the polecat, Mark Twain once observed:

From the beginning of time the polecats have quite honestly and naively regarded themselves as representing in the animal kingdom what the rose represents in the vegetable kingdom. This is because they do not examine.

Because they do not examine. Nor do these Michigan skunks want to be examined because they are busily at work driving the last nail of commodification in the casket that will house public education. It will then be buried in a grave of bafflespeak about innovation and high achievement over which will be placed a tombstone that reads "Here Lies Public Schools. Many Sacrifice For The Profit Of Few."

Of course in a state where even the Superintendent of Public Instruction can say, in public, with a straight face,  "Education for education’s sake is silly" it shouldn't surprise anyone that the resource Thomas Jefferson looked to "for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man," should be turned into an ATM machine for the connected few. Writing in the Detroit News, Dale Hansen describes the true motives of this Skunk Works precisely:

“Skunk works” was the code name give to secret meetings between the governor and a group of 20 individuals...Not surprisingly, the skunk works project aims to take more money away from public schools and funnel it to private organizations using what smacks of a voucher program.

For a little bit of historical perspective, the last time even a modified voucher proposal was brought before Michigan voters (in 2000) it was turned down by 68% of those casting ballots.

You can see the need for secrecy.

If we could just call an intermission to this little school improvement Kabuki for a moment and look at the facts, it is clear we know what the primary cause of low school performance is. We've known it for over forty years. Mr. Hansen again:

Ironically it is the very capitalism that Republicans hold up as the answer to our lagging test scores that is the problem. Data shows that the biggest problem with education is poverty. If you do an apples to apples comparison using test results from American schools with 10 percent or less impoverished students, the U.S. comes out on top. In schools with a 10-25 percent of the student body living below the poverty line the U.S. is third best in the world.

But poverty is about what people don't have. What's driving this bunch of skunks is about what schools do have, namely money, and they want it. In Governor Snyder's defense though, he doesn't seem concerned about poverty in any regard, not just among school children, so in this he is at least being consistent.

The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works was secret as a matter of national security. I would argue that public schools are also a matter of national security and clandestine groups plotting secretly to dismantle and sell them piece by piece are not different in design from terrorist cells, for they also plot the downfall of the nation. The fact that Snyder's group wants to do it with an accounting ledger rather than a bomb is only a difference of degree.

Civil disobedience was not the problem. The greatest danger was civil obedience*

Democracies are famously bad at coping with change. My own theory is that when you allow citizens to have a voice you set up the potential for a much more responsive government that is closer to the lives of people, yet the institutions created by that very government have a vested interest in the status quo because the status quo conserves their power and as Michel Foucault tells us, institutions have as strong an instinct for self preservation as individuals do. So right off the bat democracies have a built in contradiction, on the one hand valuing the voice of the people, who live close to the unpredictable fires of modernity, while on the other resisting that voice in order to maintain institutional privilege and control.

The Senate's failure to pass even a weak form of gun control legislation in spite of overwhelming support among the public is but the latest example of this inherent democratic contradiction at work. In an earlier time of governmental deafness Howard Zinn asked what is to be done when a representative government stops being representative. His answer crystalized the solution to this political design flaw:

The good things that have been done, the reforms that have been made, the wars that have been stopped, the women's rights that have been won, the racism that has been partly extirpated in society, all of that was not done by government edict, was not done by the three branches of government. It was not done by that structure which we learn about in junior high school, which they say is democracy. It was all done by citizens' movements. And keep in mind that all great movements in the past have risen from small movements, from tiny clusters of people who came together here and there. When a movement is strong enough it doesn't matter who is in the White House; what really matters is what people do, and what people say, and what people demand.

I might quibble a bit with Dr. Zinn here and say that it is government edict that puts the period on the sentence started by citizen discourse, as in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for example, but essentially he is correct. Change in a democracy must make its way from the distant fringes of society to the center of power, a long, arduous and in no way certain journey.

Which brings me to the point of all this, and that is the increasingly loud and numerous voices being raised against the corporatization of public schools. While there have always been those who have warned about the movement from public education to privilege education, their voices were mostly drowned out by the educational-industrial complex. Now however there appears to be a chrous growing. Some examples:

Republicans, of all people, have come out against the Common Core, calling it “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control” education.

People are beginning to notice that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee, once the Emperor and Empress of educational change, have no clothes.

Parents and students are beginning to organize a resistance.

Legislatures are revisiting their assumptions about the efficacy of one size fits all.

So how far along the road from radical idea to institutional policy have we come? I'm not sure. These roads are not straight and they don't always go directly to their destination, plus this situation is a little different because neoliberal forces drove us from a more traditional idea of what public education in a democratic society was and we're trying to get that back.

Still, it's hard not to see that something is changing and a movement is growing. That's the promising news. The reality is that we're still a long way from where we need to be, and quite probably have lost an entire generation of children to the industrialization of education, a mistake for which the price will take years to determine, and even longer to pay.

*Howard Zinn (paraphrased)

Thomas Jefferson Versus The Three Spined Stickleback

I've been trying to figure out why it's suddenly become acceptable amongst our political ruling class (mostly republicans) and their 1% overlords to publicly utter the most vile, bigoted, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and generally misanthropic of comments as if they were common salutations. It is so common and so widespread of a practice it has spawned a new rhetorical device to close the process: the non-apology apology.

Of course I realize there has long been a babbling brook of bile just under the surface, mostly on right wing talk radio, but for it to suddenly go mainstream and be, if not accepted by substantial portions of society, at least tolerated, and to be reported by the media with the same lack of shock and disgust as the weather, is both surprising and a little disheartening.

In my more optimistic moments I like to think of this era of incivility and vicious personal attacks we've entered as an extinction burst. That's a term psychologists use when a behavior in general decline suddenly increases in frequency for a short period before eventually dying out.

Other times I think the fire hose of venom spewing from certain of our fellow citizens is but another example of the growing callousness of the 21st century American social order. From local politicians like Illinois' Joe Walsh, who accused his opponent Tammy Duckworth of not being a "true hero" even though she had lost both her legs in Iraq, to Mitt Romney's  47% comment, callousness seems to run up and down the political totem. Now it is acceptable for state legislatures to seriously consider taking food away from poor children who don't do well in school; to mull over the benefits of requiring criminal background checks for anyone requesting public assistance; and to subject women to painful and unnecessary medical procedures for having the temerity of thinking their bodies belong to them. And callousness is not confined to the state level as witnessed by Congress failing to be moved by the bloody massacre of innocent children, instead holding steadfast to their commitment to the rights of certain citizens to easily purchase weapons designed for war. Even president Obama, a nominal democrat with all that historically entails, desires to take his exacto-knife to the frayed remains of the social safety net.

Of course, the fact that America has been mostly at war for the last 60 years might have something to do with it. Sociologists find that prolonged war affects everyone, whether they be directly involved in the  brutal undertaking, or indirectly associated, it can have the socially detrimental effect of increasing jingoistic feelings while decreasing personal sensitivity to the necessary everyday demands of community.

Then I read that Americans are the most charitable people on the planet, giving more of their time and money to altruistic causes than any other country. This makes me think of another term. It's one biologists use, called speciation. It is the process by which a sub group becomes isolated from the parent colony and over time develops into an entirely new species. It's not hard to see elements of speciation in American society today. Almost everywhere you look you see people isolating themselves into exclusive groups, from the 1% to the Tea party.

Speciation may have been good for the three spined stickleback, but for a democratic society based on commonalities and operating through compromise and consensus, not so much. So do we get to keep our democracy, or will it evolve into something unrecognizable by those who came before us? Hard to say. Truth is, democracies are never done, they are always works in progress, always evolving. Just ask the people who now live in states allowing gay marriage. The real challenge comes in determining the difference between building on, and  tearing down.

EAA: Eminent Domain For Public Schools

In a 2005 book titled The Fox In The Henhouse, authors Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich detailed how private, for profit interests move against publicly owned institutions. One of their primary strategies is called disinvestment which means--usually through the cooperation of complacent legislatures--pulling public money out of the institution until it can no longer operate without relying on private funds, or it collapses and is taken over completely.

Here in Michigan we have seen the state steadily fall through the rankings of support for public schools coming in at 31st last year according to a study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And it doesn't look like things are going to change any time soon as the state reduced funding by 4.4% between FY 2011 and FY2012. This reduction of support has pushed schools into partnerships with private, for profit businesses, and hence the rise of exclusive contracts with beverage companies and privatization of things like janitorial and food services. And while this was going on the legislature took the limit off the number of charter schools that could be opened forcing public schools to divert scarce resources to advertising because competition in the market place makes everything better.

Apparently the piecemeal dismantling of the public school system wasn't fast enough for some and the Synder administration created the Education Achievement Authority, an innocuous enough sounding name for an organization that, under the guise of student improvement, essentially privatizes entire school districts in one fell swoop, disenfranchising elected school boards and replacing them with a Chancellor, in this case a fellow named John Covington, ex superintendent of Kansas City schools who comes with a fair amount of baggage and some ethical questions.

It probably won't surprise you the the EAA set up shop in the Detroit area, taking over 15 schools in poor and minority areas of the city. Certainly those schools were hurting and those children under served, but it wasn't because the state had failed to provide an outsider with the power to suspend democracy, abrogate contracts and just generally remove people's ability to participate in the education of their sons and daughters. Now there are Bills in the legislature to take the EAA idea statewide in order to, as one article put it:

...[A]llow new forms of schools, expand on-line options and expand opportunities for for-profit ventures – all of which makes many within traditional K-12 public schools nervous.

 It should make all of us nervous. I titled this post Eminent Domain For Public Schools because that's essentially what it is, local public schools being taken by the state and their operation delegated to third parties--third parties whose concern is not education as a public good, but as a profit center.

Children long ago became the target of corporations. Channel One invaded classrooms back in 1989 bringing advertising right into the school house. According to Michael Sandel, writing in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits Of The Market in 1983 Companies spent $100 million on advertising to children. By 2005 that had grown to $16.8 billion. The EAA is just consolidating the market.

There are problems when education is taken out of the realm of public good and turned into a commodity though, and Sandel lists several of them in his book, not the least of which is that when children grow up in a system that has profit as the highest determinant of value; a system that rates a person's worth on his or her ability to contribute to someone's bottom line; they conflate consumer and citizen, replacing democratic values like equality, justice and fairness with market values like standardization, efficiency and profitability.

We are facing that quintessential choice our Civics teachers challenged us with, back when there were Civics classes: As a citizen in a democratic society, what do you want on your tombstone, Here Lies John Smith. He Made A Million, or Here Lies John Smith. He Made A Difference?

By educating children in a system where everything of value can be measured in dollars and cents we are teaching them there is no such thing as a legacy, no need to think about the future beyond the next profit and loss statement, and certainly no need to concern themselves with those who are less well off.

This is not the value system that brought us the Civil Rights Act, or helped end the war in Vietnam, it's the value system that brought us Citizens United and Voter ID laws aimed at disenfranchising minorities.