Re: Public vs. private education (reply to José)

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Some comments on José's reply to me, dated July 10 and posted on the list
July 15.

First off, I sympathize entirely with José in the dilemma he faced in the
Atlanta school system, and I think I would have reacted in much the same
way - pulling my kid out of the prison-like inner-city school, putting her
in a private (even mildly religious) school with an ambiance much more
appropriate to learning. There can be few more emotionally wrenching
experiences than the clash of capitalist reality with our principles and
ideals as it affects our kids, and I would be the last to criticize any
parent for personally opting for private schooling in the kind of situation
José describes. Generally speaking, I think José's posts on this issue have
done a lot to acquaint us (at least me) with the horrible reality faced by
many working people, and particularly racial, ethnic and linguistic
minorities, in the North American public school system.

That being said, the underlying issue we are debating here, of course, is
not the appropriateness of individual responses to the problem (although
they certainly help to illuminate it), but rather how we assess such things
as the overall social problem, the role of an education system and public
schools, and - in this concrete instance - what the U.S. Supreme Court
ruling upholding a voucher system indicates about the direction of
"educational reform" under late capitalism.

I don't profess any expertise on these matters, although I have been
involved in a minor way in recent years with a local struggle against
closures of inner-city public schools in Ottawa. In my case the struggle was
a very positive experience in which thousands of mainly working-class
parents mobilized to win community support, petitioned, held mass meetings,
marched to and virtually occupied the school board meetings, prepared dozens
of briefs, wrote articles and made presentations in the local media, etc.,
etc. And we were (so far) largely victorious, reducing the closure list from
about a dozen schools to only two, although now the school board is in a
financial deficit of millions of dollars, is being audited by the provincial
government and may be placed under trusteeship in the near future.

Throughout this experience, no one proposed charter schools, vouchers or a
retreat to private schools - with one exception: in a relatively toney part
of town, some parents (mainly well-heeled professionals) purchased a school
building that had been closed a few years earlier and set up their own
school. But basically the struggle was conducted as a fight to save public
schools, which virtually everyone regarded as a community right. And at the
school board meetings where the issues were debated into the wee small hours
on several evenings, parents' committees from each of the affected schools
presented briefs (and multimedia presentations in some cases) outlining the
vital role of these schools in preserving and enhancing quality of life
within the cities, and in many cases offering innovative suggestions on how
the educational process - curriculum, discipline, extracurricular
activities, language training, special needs for slow and disabled learners,
etc. - could be improved. It was a form of grassroots democracy, with all
the craziness that can accompany such things, but also an occasionally
inspiring demonstration of what ordinary working people can actually do when
they feel strongly about an issue of immediate concern to their lives.

So that's where I was coming from, and why I reacted sharply to José's
original post expressing support for a voucher system as opposed to public
"state monopoly" education.

Now, if José and I sat down to design the kind of public education system we
would favour, I suspect we would agree on most things if not virtually
everything. Yes, 100% state funding, equal access for all, control over
curriculum and internal discipline by the parents and the community (since I
think the broader community, however it is defined, has a stake in the
education system, and not just the parents; more on that below),
arrangements for special needs kids, even attendance at whatever public
school the parents wish to send their kids to (a right that to a large
degree already exists in Ottawa, BTW; a real boon for the bus companies, as
you can imagine). All of it within the general perspective of attempting to
"rescue education from the influence of the [capitalist] ruling class", to
use the felicitous words of the Manifesto.

I think the RSDLP resolution I cited in my July 9 post, which projected
public education as a state monopoly but locally controlled and
administered, reflects this approach: "public education to be administered
by democratically elected organs of local self-government; the central
government not to be allowed to interfere with the arrangement of the school
curriculum, or with the selection of the teaching staffs; teachers to be
elected directly by the population with the right of the latter to remove
undesirable teachers."

The problem, as I see it, is that the voucher system upheld by the U.S.
Supremes does not constitute a step in this direction. The voucher system in
the Cleveland case the court was ruling on covers about 5% of the students,
in a system where 90% of the student body fails to meet basic proficiency
standards. Vouchers may give some kids and their parents some relief from
the repressive public regime, but they do not give parents or the minority
community a substantially greater role in determining the content of the
curriculum; in fact, the Cleveland program specifically provides for state
control over the teaching of beliefs that go far beyond religion; for
example, it requires that no school "advocate or foster unlawful behaviour
or teach hatred of any person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity,
national origin, or religion", and breaches of this rule can result in
revocation of the school's licence. José pointed out that "any measure that
is putatively aimed against WASP fundamentalists is really going to be used
instead against Black Muslims and Hispanic Catholics." The Cleveland voucher
funding condition may prove to be a case in point. As one judge (Breyer)
asked, how will the state respond to funding schools run by religions that
take controversial stands on such issues as the "conflict in the Middle East
or the war on terrorism".

Other voucher systems are similarly suspect. And as many on this list have
pointed out, there are good reasons why vouchers are so popular with so
many, up to and including Bush II, who are anything but friends of
minorities. Their program is privatization of education, spearheaded by
vouchers and charter schools. They want to remove education from any
semblance or possibility of grassroots control. Their program is the
opposite of rescuing education from the influence of the ruling class.

State funding through voucher schemes never covers anywhere near the real
cost of private or parochial education, of course. The real role of vouchers
and charter schools and the like is to subject the education system to
market forces, smash teachers' unions and make further cuts in the public
system which the vast majority of low-income students are still going to be
attending, at least for the foreseeable future. And what guarantees are
there that private schools will be more willing or able to provide
relatively costly care for special-needs kids? Many of these will be left in
the now increasingly underfunded public system. In any case, there is little
to stop privately-run schools from screening applicants and rejecting
students they consider inappropriate for whatever reason.

Dave Altman noted in an earlier post, "In spite of being the oldest and
biggest voucher program in the U.S., no  credible research has shown that
voucher students in Milwaukee fare any  better than those who stay in the
public schools.  Voucher schools are not  required to hire accredited
teachers or regularly test their students, as  are public schools.  Indeed,
several voucher schools have failed in the  middle of the school year,
leaving their students high and dry."

A research study for the Ontario secondary school teachers' union notes: "A
U.S. government report concluded that despite private management efforts,
one measure of student outcome -  scores on standardized achievement tests -
did not substantially improve in Baltimore, Hartford or Minneapolis." These
are some of the major voucher testing grounds.

So what can be done?  José is adamant that, as far as minorities are
concerned, there is no hope of reform within the public school system in the
United States. But his proposed alternative - a mixed public-private or
exclusively private voucher system based on full payment of all fees by the
state, etc. - is frankly highly unlikely as a realistic, i.e. achievable
reform, independently of how desirable it may be for some. I am not fully
convinced about the accuracy of one of his central tenets: that (as he says
over and over) the ruling class has deliberately set out to make minority,
inner-city schooling a soul-crushing experience for racial and linguistic
minorities. That is the result, as he describes it. Of course, within
capitalist society the role of the schools is, in the most basic sense,
precisely to reproduce the social classes by achieving a selection among
students, consciously separating out the future exploited from the future
exploiters. But the ruling class can also be very stupid, and if you think
about it, a widespread or universal system of education with the
characteristics and results José describes is not an intelligent way to
proceed, because down the road (and even today) they are going to reap the
results in a social fabric that is so torn by conflict and instability that
the regime itself loses legitimacy.

While one may find educational experts, school boards and other officials
who actually do have in mind the objective José attributes to them, there
are a host of factors behind the deterioration of public education and the
catastrophic condition of the inner-city schools. A conscious policy to
create those conditions in a segment of the schools, if it exists, is not
the most important one. The United States has some of the most extreme
disparities in income and living standards within its population of any
advanced capitalist country. While the education system is clearly a factor
in this, it is also a result more generally of the operation of objective
laws of capital accumulation in the world's major imperialist state.

It may well be that in the immediate context, no serious viable reform of
the public education system is possible. But more than anything, that
conclusion speaks to the general level of politics and political
consciousness in the USA. José says, in discussing the prospects for school
reform, "Very, very rarely is there something like a popularly based
political movement by working people, either in the guise of parents or a
community control movement or whatever."

That will change. And when significant layers of the working class, in all
its variegated forms and expressions, begin to move, educational reform will
be high on the agenda. I doubt very much that a resurgent workers movement
will go for vouchers, charter schools or individual parental "choice" as the
preferred option. What we will probably see is a vast "débat de société", a
debate within the society, focussed on making the public system responsive
to the needs of working people. In that debate, minorities will press their
case, probably within the context of the public system and not for
generalization of the voucher system or some variant thereof as José
advocates.

One of the major reasons for preferring a public education system is
precisely that the debate over the role and function of education then has
to be seen as a responsibility of society, not just the parents, the
students and the teaching staff and other professionals. In fact, that
debate is already taking place, throughout North America as elsewhere. It
has to be one of the major political debates today because so many people
are intimately affected by these issues. What it lacks is a political
vehicle capable of generalizing the many local struggles and working out a
coherent alternative to the public system as currently constituted.

I'm not convinced, either, that "craft-minded" teachers are so integrally a
part of the problem. A revolutionary strategy for education would look for
ways to draw these workers into the reform effort.

In Canada, in a period of relative political ferment, we have had some
interesting albeit limited examples of such debates and their repercussions,
even within the last few decades. To cite only a few: in Quebec, the mass
teachers union, the Centrale de l'enseignement du Québec (CEQ), produced a
number of radical critiques of bourgeois education in the early 1970s. One,
a manifesto debated at its 1972 convention (I don't know if it was formally
adopted) was entitled "L'école au service de la classe dominante", the state
in the service of the ruling class, and constitutes one of the most detailed
analyses of how, as the document puts it, the school transmits the dominant
ideology. The manifesto advances a program of reform that parallels in most
respects the kinds of things José and others in this discussion have
advocated - but within the framework of building a truly public system of
education, not turning the system over to market forces.

The CEQ did not just talk this line, for a number of years they worked to
implement it. For example, in 1979-80, immediately after the victory of the
Sandinistas, they conducted a wide-ranging program of solidarity directed to
the students in Quebec's public schools, complete with attractive brochures,
stickers, etc. collecting school supplies and raising tens of thousands of
dollars to send to Nicaragua in support of the revolution. It is hard to
imagine debates and campaigns of this scope within any school system other
than a public (and unionized) one.

Likewise, in English Canada radical teachers centered in Toronto in the late
1960s organized around a magazine, This Magazine is About Schools, which for
many years led the public debate over anticapitalist reform of the
curriculum and teaching methods, often in conjunction with the unions,
parents' groups, student activists, etc.

In the early 1980s the teachers unions in Quebec and Ontario were in the
forefront of the campaign to reduce the role of organized religion in the
schools: in Quebec, through the struggle to create a secular language-based
(French/English) public system in place of the historically inherited
religion-based (Catholic/Protestant) system; in Ontario, through the fight
against expansion of the Catholic separate school system (itself a public
system). Both struggles necessitated changes in the country's Constitution,
and a mutually coordinated struggle by the unions in both provinces would
have enormously strengthened both campaigns and done a lot to build
binational labour solidarity. It didn't happen. The Quebec struggle
ultimately triumphed because broader forces were involved there, while in
Ontario the teachers lost. But that's another story. (And BTW, José, I for
one would like to hear your take on bilingual education in the USA.)

To conclude, on a couple of relatively minor matters.

When I raised nationalization of private schools, citing Cuba, I was being
somewhat facetious. It was not a serious proposal for immediate action! I
was simply trying to imagine what a truly "public" educational system could
and should be, in the spirit of the Communist Manifesto's discussion, if you
will.

José obviously misunderstood my point when I noted that secular public
education can in some instances (not all!) be a vehicle for exposing
children to ideas they would not otherwise get from their own parents or
even some limited communities. The obvious example, of course, is the
creationism vs. evolution debate. I don't even mind kids being exposed to
creationist ideology (they will hear about it somehow, anyway), so long as
there is provision for giving them access to the scientific approach and
having it taught in a serious way. (Will kids get that in parochial
schools?) I don't think this means urging "the bourgeois state to moderate
the nonsense parents try to stuff into their children's heads", as José
alleges. And I don't know where he got the idea that my "thinking right now
seems to be dominated by the ... consideration: rescue education from the
influence of the parents." I don't think the parents should be the sole
arbiters of what is taught in the schools. But that in itself does not mean
that the state should be the sole arbiter, either. There must be a public
debate over these questions of curriculum, not an attempt to insulate the
schools, and the kids, from these questions.

I guess I am in some ways urging a conceptual distinction between society
and state, a distinction that tends to get lost in some of José's musings,
not just on education but on such things as nationalization. But that is
another debate. Suffice it to say that most working people, faced day to day
with private corporate anarchy and avarice, have a relatively benign
attitude to state action, which they associate, rightly or wrongly depending
on the circumstances, with attempts to fetter their direct exploiters in the
interests of some broader "society". As we know from the history of social
reforms, this is not entirely false consciousness. For those of us with an
understanding of the role of the capitalist state as a rampart and integral
instrument of capital, however, it can be an awkward belief to confront. (I
think this is a more concrete way of expressing Jurriaan's description of
the "basic tension" in far-left politics.) When we fight alongside our
coworkers in such struggles as the fight against school closures I mentioned
above, we are constantly looking for ways to direct their progressive sense
of solidarity and social action in an anticapitalist direction that will
help point the way ultimately to the need to transform the state and the
class relations it upholds. This is not an easy task. But it is the essence
of politics. In the last analysis, I can't see how support for vouchers and
individual school-shopping contributes to this process.

Richard Fidler
rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx




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