"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain."
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History."

------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Sun, 02 Nov 1997 10:02:56 -0500 Subject: Fwd: interesting article Forwarded by: Martha_McGloin@EDU.YorkU.CA Priority: normal To: flattery@yorku.ca Here's an article I took from an Internet mailing list I subscribe to. I've included the intro. provided by the person who posted it there. The end is a bit abrupt, prompting me to think it may have been cut off at one point or another. This is long, and American, but it is absolutely pertinent to what is happening this week in Ontario and Alberta. Stratman says, "Our young people have more talent and intelligence and ability than the coprorate system can use, and higher dreams and aspirations than it can ever fulfill." It's a conspiracy theory, so take it with a grain of salt, but it is also a perceptive analysis of the attacks on public education.

...I have two propositions I would like to put to you.

The first is that the official education reform movement in Massachusetts and the nation is part of a decades-long corporate and vernment attack on public education and on our children. Its goal is:

--not to increase educational attainment but to reduce it;
--not to raise the hopes and expectations of our young people

but to narrow them, stifle them, and crush them;

--not to improve public education but to destroy it.

My second proposition is that the education reform movement is part of a wider corporate and government plan to undermine democracy and strengthen corporate domination of our society.

What evidence do I have for these assertions?

Let's look first at the long-standing campaign to persuade the American people that public education has failed.

This has been a disinformation campaign based on fraudulent claims, distortions, and outright lies.

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, there have been numerous reports issued, each declaring U.S. public education a disaster, and each proposing "solutions" to our problems. The sponsors of the many reports are a little like the con-man in "The Music Man," who declares, "We've got trouble, right here in River City..." and the chorus repeats, "trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble..." He just happens to be selling the solution to all their troubles. How do you sell radical changes that would have been completely unacceptable to the public a decade or two ago? You tell people over and over that their institutions have failed, and that only the solutions you are peddling offer any way out of their "troubles."

In the past couple of years, several excellent books have been published showing in detail that these claims are false. My purpose in this talk is not to cover the ground that these authors have already explored, but to answer the critical question: Why are the public schools under attack?

But let's look just briefly at a couple of the key pieces of disinformation to which the American public has been subjected.

The supposed dramatic decline of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores was a fraud. These scores did decline somewhat over the period 1963 to 1977. But the SAT is a voluntary test. It is not representative of anything, and it is useless as a measure of student performance or of the quality of the schools. The scores began to fall modestly when the range of young people going into college dramatically expanded in the mid-sixties.

Did this mean that there was a lowering of student achievement during this period? Absolutely not. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a representative exam, given each year to sample student populations across the country. During the period in question, PSAT scores held absolutely steady.

Even more notable is the fact that scores on the College Board Achievement Tests--which test students not on some vaguely-defined "aptitude," but on what they know of specific subjects--did not fall but rose slightly but consistently over the same period in which for the first time in the history of the United States or any other country, the sons and daughters of black and white working families were entering college in massive numbers.

Berliner and Biddle comment in their book, The Manufactured Crisis, "the real evidence indicates that the myth of achievement decline is not only false it is a hysterical fraud."

How different would have been the public's understanding of what was happening in the schools if the media and the politicians had told the truth! How different if they had announced that, during the period of the greatest turmoil in American society since the Civil War, in which a higher proportion of young people were graduating high school and going on to college than ever before, at a rate unparalleled in any other country in the world, representative tests showed that overall aptitude and achievement were holding steady or increasing? How different would have been the history of these last decades for educators and parents and students and for public education?

What about the claim that U.S. business has lost its competitive edge because of the alleged failure of public education? Anyone who has been watching the triumphal progress of American corporations in the world market in the last two decades or has watched the unprecedented returns on the stock market knows that these claims are preposterous. But let me cite a few specific facts here:

U.S. workers are the most productive in the world. Workers in Japan and Germany are only 80% as productive; in France, 76% as productive; in the United Kingdom, 61% as productive.

America leads the world in the percentage of its college graduates who obtain degrees in science or engineering, and this percentage has been steadily rising since 1971.

Far from having a shortage of trained personnel, there is now in fact a glut of scientists and engineers in the U.S. The Boston Globe reported on 3/17/97 that , "At a time when overall unemployment has fallen to around 5%, high-level scientists have been experiencing double-digit unemployment." The government estimates that America will have a surplus of over 1 million scientists and engineers by 2010, even if the present rate of production does not increase.

So what's going on here? What explains the aggressive effort by corporate and government leaders to discredit public education?

To understand this, I believe we have to look beyond education to developments in the economy and the wider society. In the past decades, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. Millions more have been lost to "restructuring" and "downsizing." This trend is not likely to abate. The U. S. is presently enjoying its lowest official unemployment rate in decades 4.9%, or about 6.2 million unemployed at the peak of a long period of sustained growth. But even this large figure is deceptive, because it does not include the millions of people who have been reduced to temporary or part-time work, without benefits, without job security, and without hope of advancement. The number of "contingent" workers in 1993 was over 34 million.

The future for employment is even more grim. Computerization will eliminate millions of jobs and deskill millions more. This is, after all, the attraction of automation for corporations: it downgrades the skills required of most jobs, and thereby makes employees cheaper and more easily expendable. I was talking recently with a chemist who works at a major hospital in Boston. She expressed dissatisfaction with her job. She said that, when she began the job ten years ago, she actually did chemistry. Now, she says, her job has been reduced to tending a machine which performs chemical analyses. A friend of mine wrote a book on the effect of computerization on work. She interviewed a Vice-President of Chase Manhattan Bank who was a Loan Officer at the bank. He sat there smartly in his three-piece suit and complained that "He doesn't really feel like a loan officer or a vice-president." Why? Because, after he gets the information from the person requesting a loan, he punches it into a computer--which then tells him if he can make the loan or not.

The transformation of work through computers has really just begun. In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin estimates that "In the United States alone, in the years ahead more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines." (p. 5) As Rifkin puts it, "Life as we know it is being altered in fundamental ways."

Now, what does all this have to do with education?

There were two little incidents which happened to me in 1976-77, when I was an Education Policy Fellow working in the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, D.C., which gave me a clue as to how to understand the attack on education. The first was a conversation with a man who was at the time a very highly-placed federal official in education. He put to a few of us this question. He said, "In the coming decade of high unemployment" referring here to the 1980s "in the coming decade of high unemployment, which is better from a policy angle to have? Is it better to have people with a lot of education and more personal flexibility, but with high expectations? Or is it better to have people with less education and less personal flexibility, and with lower expectations?" The answer was that it was better to have people with less education and lower expectations. The reasoning was very simple. If people's expectations are very high when the social reality of the jobs available is low, then there can be a great deal of anger and political turmoil. Better to lower their education and lower their expectations.

A second clue involved a man whom many of you may know. Ron Gister, who was Executive Director of the Connecticut School Boards Association at the time, began a speech in 1977 with this simple question. He said, "Ask yourself, What would happen if the public schools really succeeded?" What if our high schools and universities were graduating millions of young people, all of whom had done well? In an economy with over 6 million unemployed by official count, in which millions more are underemployed or working part-time or in temporary jobs, in which many millions of jobs are being deskilled by computerization and many millions eliminated, and in which wages have fallen to 1958 levels, where would these successful graduates go? What would they do? If they had all graduated with As and Bs, they would have high expectations expectations for satisfying jobs which would use their talents. Expectations for further education. Expectations about their right to participate in society and to have a real voice in its direction.

I think you can see that, for the people at the very top of this society, who have been instrumental in shipping jobs overseas and restructuring the workforce and downsizing the corporations and shifting the tax burden from the rich onto middle-class and working Americans the class of people, in short, who have been planning and reaping the benefits of the restructuring of American society for this class of people at the top, for the schools to succeed would be very dangerous indeed. How much better that the schools not succeed, so that, when young people end up with a boring or low-paying or insecure job or no job at all, they say, "I have only myself to blame." How much better that they blame themselves instead of the system.

The reason that public education is under attack is this: our young people have more talent and intelligence and ability than the corporate system can ever use, and higher dreams and aspirations than it can ever fulfill. To force young people to accept less fulfilling lives in a more unequal, less democratic society, the expectations and self-confidence of millions of them must be crushed. Their expectations must be downsized and their sense of themselves restructured to fit into the new corporate order, in which a relative few reap the rewards of corporate success defined in terms of huge salaries and incredible stock options and the many lead diminished lives of poverty and insecurity.

If my analysis is correct, it means that you public educators, every person in this room, and all the staff and colleagues you have irked with these many years you are under attack not because you have failed which is what the media and the politicians like to tell you. You are under attack because you have succeeded in raising expectations which the corporate system cannot fulfill.

They are also attacking education for a second reason: blaming public education is a way of blaming ordinary people for the increasing inequality in society. It is a way of blaming ordinary people for the terrible things that are happening to them. The corporate leaders and their politician friends are saying that, if our society is becoming more unequal, if millions don't have adequate work or housing or health care, if we are imprisoning more of our population than any other country on earth, it is not because of our brutal and exploitative economic system and our atomized society and our disenfranchised population. No, they say, it is not our leaders or our system who are at fault. The fault lies with the people themselves, who could not make the grade, could not meet the standards. According to the corporate elite, the American people have been weighed in the balance, and they have been found wanting.

Where does the education reform movement fit in this picture?

My first experience with education reform came in September 1977, when I became Washington Director of the National PTA. It so happened that I began my job on the same day that Senators Daniel Moynihan and Robert Packwood and 51 co-sponsors filed the Tuition Tax Credit Act of 1977. The Tuition Tax Credit Act proposed giving the parents of children attending private schools a tax credit of up to $500 to cover tuition costs. The sponsors cited the SAT report as proof that the public schools were failing and that private schools needed support. Like many others in the public school community, I saw tuition tax credits as a real threat. I met with representatives of the NEA, the AFT, AASA, and others, and we formed the National Coalition for Public Education to oppose tuition tax credits. Over the next several months we organized a coalition comprising over 80 organizations with some 70 million members.

The Tuition Tax Credit bill was a serious threat to public education. The entire federal budget for public elementary and secondary education at the time was about $13 billion. The Packwood-Moynihan bill would have taken about $6 billion from the public treasury. At the time, nearly 90% of our young people attended public schools. The Tuition Tax Credit Act proposed to give an amount equal to nearly half of all the federal monies spent on the 90% of children in public school to the parents of the 10% of children attending private school.

Aside from its budgetary impact, the bill would have meant a reversal of the federal role in education. The historic role of the federal government in education has been to equalize educational opportunity. Tuition tax credits, since they are a credit against income and go chiefly to upper-income parents, would disequalize educational opportunity. Federal funding of private education would have established and given official sanction to a two-class system of education, separate and unequal.

The Tuition Tax Credit Act had enormous media and political support. It passed the House in May, 1978. We were able to stop it in the Senate only in August, 1978 with tremendous effort , and then by only one vote.

Like the Tuition Tax Credit Act that started it all, the official education reforms such as school vouchers, charter schools, school choice, school-based management, raising "standards," the increased use of standardized testing, the focus on "School to Work," and other reforms, are calculated to make education more sharply stratified, more intensely competitive, and more unequal, and to lower the educational attainment of the great majority of young people. They are calculated also to fragment communities and undermine the web of social relationships which sustains society, and so to weaken people's political power in every area of life.

Just look at what has been proposed as "education reform."

PRIVATIZATION AND FRAGMENTATION: Public schools have historically been at the center of neighborhhood and community life in the United States. In addition, the schools have been a public good which relies on the whole community for support and in which the whole community participates.

School vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, and school choice attack community connections among people. They attack the idea of a public good and replace it with the competition of isolated individuals competing to achieve their own private interests. In this way, privatizing education or establishing separate charter schools will dramatically undermine the power of ordinary people to affect the direction of society.

Voucher and choice plans also legitimize greater inequality in America's schools, as students with better connections or more self-confidence choose better schools. Who can argue with tracking students into good schools or poor schools when the students themselves have apparently chosen their fate freely?

School-based management is part of this trend. Though school-based management is usually touted as a way of "empowering" parents and teachers at the local level and of cutting back on the costs of central administration, its real purpose--aside from undermining the power of organized teachers--is to fragment school districts and communities, and further to disempower them. School-based management makes every school an island. It encourages people to think only about their own school and their own place within it.