[Marxism] Obama's Betrayal of Public Education?

[David Walsh <davidrail68@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.truthout.org/121708R

Obama's Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of 
Schooling
Wednesday 17 December 2008
by: Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman

  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.

posted by Dave Walsh
www.socialistviewpoint.org



      


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