Friday, September 09, 2011

Obama's jobs and schools proposals: Is this a backdoor to the further destruction of public education?

Jim Horn at Schools Matter has a disturbing post about how President Obama's proposed stimulus plan plus a new House Bill might pave the way for an expansion of charter schools and further corporatization of public education. I'm quoting the first two paragraphs of his post, but please read the whole thing:
As the President warms up his teleprompter for this evening's big speech, the House is talking up H.R. 2218, a bill intended to hasten the corporatization of K12 schools and the further demise of public education, from pre-K through College. The numbers haven't been worked out yet, but hundreds of millions and maybe billions in public school funds will end up diverted to corporate welfare charter schools if this bill becomes law.  The Bill contains grant provisions for charter schools and charter school construction, which no doubt will fit in nicely with Obama's plan to finally fund some school construction.  Could the big announcement this evening provide cover for supporting this bill to fully energize the resegregation of American schools?

Charter schools offer a terrific example of the coalesence of both neoliberal and neconservative goals around a single issue, even though both sides are coming from different angles.  In the case of neolibs like the George Miller (one of  2 Dems co-sponsoring this school corporatization plan), they favor the No Excuses charters as a cheap way to create children who are eager to become adults trained to be complicit in their own subjugation by the corporate state.  This cheapest form of social engineering for disadvantaged children celebrates, in the end, the 40 to 50 percent of kids who work through these corporate reform schools and, thus, are cognitively and behaviorally altered in the KIPP or KIPPist methods to produce transformed, automatistic adolescents.  The ones who wash out are thrown back to the exploded public schools of last resort that have been labeled as failures by a decade of racist and classist testing, where they are allowed to mature enough to be tried in an adult court, and sentenced.  This is the neoliberal method of dealing with the "civil rights issue of our generation," as Arne has called this psychologically abusive and miseducative imposition of a segregated "self-help" protocol on steroids.

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