Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

To date, President Obama has been given a pass for the privatization of public services that has taken place during his term of office, particularly in public education where Arne Duncan has been demonized while the President has been largely unaffected by anti-privatization bloggers and writers. But as his term continues and the recession and unemployment persist, and more and more public employees lose their jobs, and those public employees remaining in the workforce are increasingly targeted by Tea Party types and profiteers to help fuel the ire of the voting public, the President is being called to task. The most strident example of this appeared recently in Michael Brenner’s recent Counterpunch blog post titled “Obama’s Extinction Plan: AmericanPublic Schools RIP.” The post opens with this sentence:

A feature of the Obama presidency has been his campaign against the American public school system, eating way at the foundations of elementary education.

The article describes how the President has played to the narrative of failing public schools, promoted charter schools despite the lack of evidence that they have done any better than their public counterparts, championed more high stakes tests, and stood silently while the Governors of MI, WI, PA, FLA, IN, and virtually the entire south have gutted budgets, teachers rights, and teachers pensions and benefits. Students have done no better during Obama’s term of office than they did during the Bush administration… but someone IS doing better: investors. Brenner describes how the game is played and how Obama has the game rigged against veteran teachers:

A number of start-up companies have jumped onto the charter school bandwagon with little experience in education and with their eyes fixed on the bottom line.  They hire a disproportionately large percentage of young teachers who may be highly motivated but who lack the essential seasoning that makes for quality teaching.  These youngsters of course are given lower salaries that veteran teachers would receive.  This exploitation is encouraged by Arne Duncan who makes much of the opportunities thereby created to tap the market of unemployed recent college graduates.  It supposedly is a good and virtuous thing that they may spend only a few years in the classroom before moving on to other career “experiences” – to be replaced by yet another batch of enthusiastic, underpaid novices…

…The distressing truth of the matter is that, in most states, any group of guys able to present what looks like a “sound business plan” can obtain a certificate to set up a charter school.

I recently completed teaching a course in our regional continuing education program on the Challenges of Public Education Past Present and Future. Those enrolling in the course expressed their heartfelt support for pubic education throughout the course with only one of the 15 students having attended a private or parochial school. To identify the problems of the future I used the first chapter of Diane Ravitch’s latest book, Reign of Error, To my dismay, as we discussed the book, the group had near unanimous antipathy toward teachers in terms of their workload as compared to private sector employees (“EVERYone takes work home nowadays” on class member declared) and their generous benefits as compared to the private sector (“NOBODY I know has pensions” one class member declared and, to underscore this, I asked and learned that only two of the 15 had defined benefit pensions— and all of them are retirement age.) This illustrates the uphill battle faced by the anti-privatization forces, described by Brennan as a “…few outgunned elements (who) fight a rearguard action against a juggernaut that includes Republicans and Democrats, reactionaries and liberals – from Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York to the nativist Christian Right of the Bible Belt.”

The bottom line in the defense of public education: if “the unions” are opposed to privatization many voters are reflexively for it because they believe teachers are compensated too highly for their work…. and neither party is interested in providing the public education system described by Brenner in his concluding paragraph:

Of all the institutions that made the United States into a coherent society, none made a greater contribution than our public schools.  It was they that fashioned a loyal citizenry bound by a core of civic values and a collective identity – regardless of creed, national origin, religion or political preference.  It was they that molded a disparate population into a unified nation. That may not be the case in the future.