"the guilty secret of those screaming, “It’s all about the kids!”

[Hannah Bell]

I. The Fallacy of the Knowledge Economy

One of the most oft repeated fallacies and falsehoods that underlie efforts to privatize the public schools in the US is the claim that we have entered a “knowledge economy” demanding high levels of education and skills, and that (teacher’s) failure to facilitate this will result in the US becoming less “competitive.” This rhetoric is used by proponents of the corporate restructuring of the schools, from Barack Obama and Arne Duncan on down.. The not-very-hidden implication is that the Chinese will have us all eating cat food if we don’t put our children’s noses to the grindstone of longer school days, longer school years and curricula dominated by high-stakes tests. That the people proposing these policies, starting with the President himself, would never in a million years allow their own children to be subjected to them, is news not fit to print.

It sounds sensible - after all, a college education has for decades been a ladder to economic advancement – and is rarely questioned, but is it true? ...In a May, 2010 report the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics said that, “Retail salespersons, cashiers, general office clerks combined with food preparation and serving workers, and registered nurses were among the occupations with the highest employment in 2009…" As for all those high paying, knowledge economy jobs, well, sorry: “Most of the largest occupations are generally low paying. Thirty of the forty occupations in Table 4 had average wages below the US mean of $20.90 per hour or $43,460 annually...”

So in fact, the guilty secret of those screaming, “It’s all about the kids!” is that the occupations which the majority of public school students are being trained for are dead end, low-paying, high-turnover jobs that require little or no education beyond high school. And if you think about it, this is congruent with the education that teachers are increasingly being forced to give them: authoritarian, repetitive, tedious, dull and closed to larger worlds and opportunities...

The truth is that factors other than education (such as investment flows, the relative balance of power between Capital and Labor, and between sectors of Capital itself) have a much greater influence on income and living standards...Mr. Market has spoken, and unless you’re a trader or executive at a Too Big to Fail Bank, or are starting a charter school, he’s going to pay you less, no matter what your educational achievement...The interests of those controlling investment, and those controlling the debate about education, have decoupled from those who perform the work of society, and they are propagating these falsehoods in order to extend their control and enrich themselves by taking over the public schools.


http://nyceducator.com/

[zazen]

1. great to see this argument all in one place--thanks! n/t

[FBaggins]

2. Most of that isn't anything particularly new

(though I would argue that we are in or entering a "knowledge-based" economy" where the ability to learn is at least as important as what you learned in the first 12-16 years of schooling).

When it was the Fords and Rockefellers and Carnegies that were funding much of what became the standard 20th century education model... they were trying to build a workforce tailored to the assembly line.

IMO, many of our current problems in education still echo these priorities. It's pretty evident in society as a whole as well... as we have a significant workforce equipped primarily for jobs that don't exist any longer and the ability to train up to other things is partially "bred" out of them.

[Starry Messenger]

3. k&r

[Reader Rabbit]

4. Thanks for posting this.

I hope everyone with Facebook puts it up on their page. The more we can get this information out to regular people, the more support will get to fight against the corporatization of our public schools.

[txlibdem]

5. Yes! Finally someone willing to stand up against having standards and goals in education

These idle rich elites who want to tell our teachers what they have to do in order to keep their jobs are just trouble makers. Teachers should be guaranteed employment till *they* choose to retire or move on. Tenure should be a right, not something you have to earn.

Teachers know best how much effort they should put into any group of kids. They'll probably all end up working at McDonalds or the mall anyway so why waste the teachers' valuable time?!? The system has worked for the last 100 years. Why change it now.

This stupidity that we need a standard curriculum or tougher standards to pass on to the next grade is simply mind boggling. Any kids who *do* by some miracle end up going to college can just get remedial classes to bring them up to their grade level in reading, math, science, comprehension, critical thinking, etc.

Stop making the teachers miserable by trying to tell them how to do their jobs!!!