Welcome To The Republican Utopia

There really can’t be much of a question anymore as to the real purpose of educational reform in this country. Despite all the lip service paid to the good of the children and the country’s economic competitiveness it should be apparent, even to those with only passing knowledge of what goes on in America’s public schools, we’ve been conned, lied to, sold a pig in a poke as my father used to say.

Of course there were some people who from the beginning  saw through the bafflegab thrown up by supporters of rapacious capitalism looking for new markets. Alfie Kohn for one, Gerald Bracey before he passed away, George Hillocks, Denny Taylor, Elaine Garan, Gerald Coles, all of whom wrote books detailing the real agenda of the corporate pirates who were preparing  to pillage education under the auspices of Competitiveness and The Free Market. Even Diane Ravitch, an early supporter of the neoliberal model eventually saw through the dissembling and has since become one of the most vocal critics of education as a commodity.

They were ignored for the most part, marginalized and like the proverbial prophet in his own country, left talking to the wind. Unfortunately for a whole generation of children they were right and the true agenda of the “reformers” is becoming clearer and clearer with each new revelation.  A good example of that is right here in Michigan where Highland Park Public Schools were taken over by a state appointed Emergency Manager. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, an Emergency Manager is a person accountable only to the Governor who has the authority to suspend contracts, fire, hire, disband locally elected boards and committees and generally do whatever he or she feels like doing to “fix” the struggling district or municipality. In Highland Park the Emergency Manager’s name is Donald Weatherspoon and here’s how his tenure is going so far.

The emergency manager appointed to oversee the Highland Park School District’s finances denied Tuesday that a large collection of black history books, tapes, film strips and other materials were deliberately discarded into Dumpsters last week from the district’s high school library.

Well, mistakes happen, apologists might say. Incompetence can be found in many districts, but some may wonder what workmen were doing taking books off the shelves in the first place.

The recovered materials will be sorted and those that have historical value, Weatherspoon said, would go to a library or a museum that would agree to keep them. He said none of the materials would be sold. Weatherspoon said the district can’t afford to secure the collection. The Leona Group, the charter management company that began operating schools in the district a year ago, was offered the books. Weatherspoon said they took what they wanted.

You read that correctly. The collection was being given away. This in a district that has been accused of violating students’ right to read as described in state law, and where teaching assistants were ordered to falsify student records. If I may offer a bit of advice to Mr. Weatherspoon: it’s going to be a lot harder to convince people reading scores are improving if there are no books for the students to read.

Defenders of the corporate model of school reform would probably argue that this is an isolated case, confined to a local area and in no way does it reflect the values of the movement as a whole—the so called “bad apple” defense. That may be true, but Mr. Weatherspoon is certainly not the only rotten apple in the bushel, nor is he the biggest.

Two Indianapolis Public Schools might never have been taken over by the state if then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett had offered the district the same flexibility he granted a year later to the Christel House Academy charter school. In the case of Christel House, emails unearthed by The Associated Press show Bennett’s staff sprung into action in 2012 when it appeared scores from the recently added grades could sink the highly regarded school’s rating from an A to a C. Ultimately, the high school scores were excluded and the school’s grade remained an A.

Mr. Bennet left Indiana to become superintendent of Florida schools before news of his favoritism became public. He has since been forced to resign. When news of the impropriety reached Governor Mike Pence, he acted immediately.

 Gov. Mike Pence said Wednesday he is standing by Indiana’s system of assigning “A-F” grades to schools based on their performance despite reports that the state’s former schools chief worked to change the grading formula to ensure a top GOP donor’s school received an “A.”

Mike Pence—it will come as no surprise—is a Republican. The real tragedy here is the fact that children’s futures are being stolen from them. Because these free market raiders go after the most vulnerable schools, and because those schools tend to be the ones serving the most disadvantaged populations—populations for whom education is even more crucial to upward mobility—an entire class of children is being consigned to economic destitution.  Thanks to the greatest income disparity since the gilded age, climbing the economic ladder has become difficult even for those who have access to what remains of the benefits of the middle class. Take those few advantages away and these children become a generation born into poverty and sentenced to die there while the Weatherspoons and the Bennetts and the Pences of the world profit from their suffering. Welcome to the Republican utopia.