Writer Susan Ohanian tried to submit this piece to the Huffington Post, but it was rejected. I wonder why...
Remember disgraced Secretary of Education Rod Paige, George Bush, and the Houston model? Noted education historian Diane Ravitch calls the current Obama/Duncan education policy Bush 3.
Certainly, there are lots of similarities in the misrepresentations, exaggerations, and downright lies offered by both US Secretaries of Education. And there's one huge difference: U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been handed a money pot exceeding all dreams of previous U. S. Secretaries of Education. And of course, money doesn't just talk; it shouts and gains immediate apostles, willing to shake the tambourine for The Way. Certainly state governors and commissioners of education are rushing to jump whichever way Arne says. Local decision making for schools be damned. Just ship in the cash.
Nothing short of a massive uprising of parents and teachers will stop what Henry Giroux and Kenneth Saltman call "the market-based and penal model of pedagogy," which has been in the works ever since Arkansas governor Bill Clinton teamed up with IBM CEO Lou Gerstner to bring home the education standardization bacon for George Bush the Elder. It translates to <'>whatever the Business Roundtable wants, the Business Roundtable gets.
Money suddenly makes those corporate dreams real. The tales Arne spun to the Congressional committee back in 2008, which out and out contradicted the facts of the matter, have served as beacons for school reform in media headlines ever since, proving that much of the media is both gullible and lazy in its coverage of education.
linkA lengthy article Ohanian links to (and was also mentioned by DUer madfloridian a couple of months ago) was published December 2008 warning readers about what Obama's education agenda REALLY is:
Since the 1980s, but particularly under the Bush administration, certain elements of the religious right, corporate culture and Republican right wing have argued that free public education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to transform schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the marketplace. As the educational historian David Labaree rightly argues, public schools have been under attack in the last decade "not just because they are deemed ineffective but because they are public."<1> Right-wing efforts to disinvest in public schools as critical sites of teaching and learning and govern them according to corporate interests is obvious in the emphasis on standardized testing, the use of top-down curricular mandates, the influx of advertising in schools, the use of profit motives to "encourage" student performance, the attack on teacher unions and modes of pedagogy that stress rote learning and memorization. For the Bush administration, testing has become the ultimate accountability measure, belying the complex mechanisms of teaching and learning. The hidden curriculum is that testing be used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by reducing them to mere technicians, that students be similarly reduced to customers in the marketplace rather than as engaged, critical learners and that always underfunded public schools fail so that they can eventually be privatized. But there is an even darker side to the reforms initiated under the Bush administration and now used in a number of school systems throughout the country. As the logic of the market and "the crime complex"<2> frame the field of social relations in schools, students are subjected to three particularly offensive policies, defended by school authorities and politicians under the rubric of school safety. First, students are increasingly subjected to zero-tolerance policies that are used primarily to punish, repress and exclude them. Second, they are increasingly absorbed into a "crime complex" in which security staff, using harsh disciplinary practices, now displace the normative functions teachers once provided both in and outside of the classroom.<3> Third, more and more schools are breaking down the space between education and juvenile delinquency, substituting penal pedagogies for critical learning and replacing a school culture that fosters a discourse of possibility with a culture of fear and social control. Consequently, many youth of color in urban school systems, because of harsh zero-tolerance polices, are not just being suspended or expelled from school. They are being ushered into the dark precincts of juvenile detention centers, adult courts and prison. Surely, the dismantling of this corporatized and militarized model of schooling should be a top priority under the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Obama has appointed as his secretary of education someone who actually embodies this utterly punitive, anti-intellectual, corporatized and test-driven model of schooling.
Barack Obama's selection of Arne Duncan for secretary of education does not bode well either for the political direction of his administration nor for the future of public education. Obama's call for change falls flat with this appointment, not only because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts of the corporation at best or the prison at worse. The first casualty in this scenario is a language of social and political responsibility capable of defending those vital institutions that expand the rights, public goods and services central to a meaningful democracy. This is especially true with respect to the issue of public schooling and the ensuing debate over the purpose of education, the role of teachers as critical intellectuals, the politics of the curriculum and the centrality of pedagogy as a moral and political practice.
Much more
herePublic school teachers are SO screwed. I have come to the conclusion it may be too late to reverse course.
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