Say what you like about public schools, ideological and historical underpinnings of, they are kind of useful institutions. They provide a basis of shared knowledge, and they bring together diverse social classes, ethnicities, and cultures. They allow working class parents to, well, work, and ensure that they don't go bankrupt funding their children's basic education. They're not perfect by any means, but in terms of social policy, they're a move in the right direction.
This seems so apparent to me that I'm always shocked when I have to defend the idea that there's such thing as a right to public education, or explain that there are powerful forces attempting to undermine said public education system, and supposed "compromises" like charter/voucher schools are part of that agenda. If more well-off kids are pulled from the public system, if two tiers or more tiers begin to form, then it's always the poorer children who suffer. One sees this all over the States, where the response to failing schools has been increased privatization, attacking the unions, and mass-firing teachers. Amazingly, this has not improved the public education system in the States. Funny that.
It's also a revelation, apparently, that propaganda films like
Waiting for Superman* are part of the aforementioned agenda, or may have been funded or promoted by interests for whom the education and welfare of poor children is not actually a high priority. It's not difficult to see the links here—an educated, critically thinking working class is not really in the interests of the ruling class. And the education of rich children—the children of policy makers—will never be in any sort of real danger.
But there's a lot of noise and hand-wringing out there. So it's nice to see
articles about the people who are generating this noise. Like—this is totally going to shock you—rich people.
Bill Gates, for example, has been spending quite a bit of money on standardized testing:
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which developed the standards, and Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization coordinating the writing of tests aligned with the standards, have each received millions of dollars.
The Alliance for Excellent Education, another nonprofit organization, was paid $551,000 in 2009 “to grow support for the common core standards initiative,” according to the tax filings. The Fordham Institute got $959,000 to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials.” Scores of newspapers quoted Fordham’s president, Chester E. Finn Jr., praising the standards after their March 2010 release; most, including The New York Times, did not note the Gates connection.
In fact, billionaires seem to be quite active in promoting privatized education:This rapid expansion of voucher programs is not occurring simply because of some grassroots uprising. A small clique of wealthy individuals and their foundations are pushing these pieces of legislation. The most prominent of these individuals are Dick and Betsy DeVos, the power couple who inherited their fortune from billionaire Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, Sr. In a speech before the Heritage Foundation in 2002, Dick DeVos explained that conservatives should start referring to public schools as "government schools" instead to undermine public support for them. The DeVos family has poured millions of dollars into the school choice movement, launching a variety of front groups, including but not limited to Children First America, the Alliance for School Choice (ASC), Kids Hope USA, and the American Federation for Children (AFC). AF C spent $820,000 -- the seventh-largest single PAC spender during the election -- in Wisconsin during the last election, a huge sum which included $40,000 donations to each of several Republicans who were elected and then proceeded to champion radical voucher legislation. Its clout was strong enough to bring Govs. Scott Walker (R-WI) and Tom Corbett (R-PA) together with former D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee together for a school choice event in Washington, D.C.
Needless to say, the "school choice" movement doesn't even do what it claims to do: raise educational standards. The article I linked to above cites statistics that suggest charter schools don't outperform public schools. This, even though they can cherry-pick students to weed out the very poor, the learning disabled, and English Language Learners.
Lots of charter school success stories just so happen to take place in white, affluent communities. In a public school, the right to education for all students is the highest priority—it's incredibly hard to kick a kid out of a school, even when he or she doesn't want to be there, is disruptive, is violent, is failing, and so on. We are obligated to help
everyone, and so, yeah, that drags down standardized test scores a bit. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, or that we can't sometimes turn a struggling student around. Having that mandate, and that freedom, means that we
can help ELL kids write and speak English fluently and help learning disabled kids work around their various challenges, even if they flunk the standardized tests a few times, without fear that if we keep them in our school,
teachers will be fired because our average test scores are too low.
But Canadians just can't resist adopting models that have clearly failed in the U.S.,
so now Toronto is quietly considering bringing in "boutique" schools and even private-public partnerships, a way of quietly undermining public education that looks a bit more palatable to taxpayers. Our public schools are falling apart. There isn't enough money for books or computers. They're closing schools every year. Somehow, though, there's enough money for boys' and girls' academies, sports schools, and vocal music schools?
Thing is, there's an answer to pretty much every educational crisis. Our schools in Ontario never recovered from Harris' cuts in the mid-90s, and, like cuts to welfare, education funding never caught up with the costs. We know what improves education, for both rich and poor kids: smaller class sizes, more resources. It's a simple formula, but there isn't the political will to make it happen, and there are powerful interests hellbent on ensuring that it doesn't.
I feel like I'm stating the obvious here, but otherwise progressive people seem to have a blind spot (and even more so when it comes to wealthy North American philanthropists funding private schools in other countries—who is running those schools, anyway, and what are they teaching the kids there?) where charter schools are concerned, and incapable of asking very basic questions. Who is paying? Who is profiting? If charter schools are so effective, why does Bill Gates need to find AstroTurf organizations to make them palatable to the public? And why, if they aren't so effective, do people want to bring them here?
* Which, I confess, I haven't actually seen. I refuse to give those people money.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Marxist feminists take it a step further to talk about reproductive labour—the domestic work of maintaining the workforce that is not factored into economic analysis because it's unpaid and gendered. It includes cooking, cleaning, childrearing, washing, and so on—activities that are necessary for the worker to produce profit for capitalists. Without this work, the baker can't go to work and bake every day, and his boss eventually won't be able to find new bakers to replace him. The capitalist ideal, for people who like capitalism, is based around the idea that one worker in the family unit receives a family wage, subsidizing the reproductive labour of a partner. This is an aberration, as few jobs supply a family wage and generally speaking, reproductive labour is performed around paid labour, during the (presumed female) worker's "free" time.
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