Obama’s Privatizing Agenda for Education?

Posted on January 26, 2009
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Union-busting, school-privatizing, school-militarizing Arne Duncan is Obama’s pick for Education Secretary

By Betsy Schonitzer

President-elect Obama has appointed Chicago Public School CEO (yes, his title was CEO), Arne Duncan, to the position of Education Secretary in the next White House.  Does this represent “hope” or “change”?  Or, is this a betrayal of public education?

Arne Duncan as CEO of Chicago Public Schools practiced a market-based approach to “reforming” the educational system, including outsourcing and privatizing public schools, militarizing public schools, greatly narrowing the curriculum and use of the “No Child Left Behind Program.”

 

During the time that Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago Public Schools, public schools have been turned over to private operators – usually in the form of charter and contract schools – at a rate of about 20 per year.   Privatizing schools results in union-busting since charter and contract schools operate union-free.  As one of the last major district initiatives under schools chief Duncan, it was announced this month that 6 Chicago public schools will be closed in a move that could affect as many as 25 schools through closings and “turnarounds” (firing all the faculty and privatizing the school).  At a recent public hearing, parents, teachers and community leaders, accused the district of closing schools only to reopen them as schools under private control and without the same accountability as regular district schools.  Parents expressed outrage that now that classroom sizes were smaller, 20 rather than 40 students in a classroom, school authorities want to close the schools.

 

Chicago Public School teacher Jesse Sharkey states, “Duncan has resuscitated some of the worst ‘school reform’ ideas of the 1990’s, like firing all the teachers in low-performing schools (called ‘turnarounds’).  At the same time, he’s eliminated many Local School Councils (LCSs) and made crucial decisions without public input . . . Charter schools and test-score driven school ‘choice’ have been watchwords of Duncan’s rule in Chicago” (Sharkey 2008).

Under Duncan, public school teachers in highly segregated poor Black and Latino neighborhoods were made to feel enormous pressure to gear instruction toward standardized testing.   Schools with poor test scores were characterized as ‘failures’ and suffered budgetary consequences or even closed.  This resulted in instruction being geared toward rote memorization as opposed to democratic or critical thinking.   It encouraged students to follow rules and be docile.  There is an excellent letter written by renowned educator and author Alfie Kohn in the December 29th issue of The Nation on this topic, “Beware School Reformers”, The Nation, December 10, 2008 by Alfie Kohn.

Duncan kept a variety of differentiated programs in the Chicago schools:   a small elite, highly selective program which received better resources and had predominantly white students and another category, which utilized scripted direct instruction with a vocational emphasis, for mostly poor black and Latino students.  This has resulted in racialized educational tracking of students.

Another type of school highly supported by Duncan is the military academy.  Chicago has the most militarized school system in the country with schools representing every branch of the armed services.   These military academies are directly run by the armed forces.   Students learn military tactics, history and military discipline.   There has also been a great extension of Junior ROTC programs to over 50% of the city’s high schools. 
 
The purpose of JROTC is clear, in the words of former Defense Secretary General William Cohen, JROTC is “one of the best recruiting services that we could have.”  Many Chicago schools also offer an after-school “Middle School Cadet Corp” run by military personnel for children age 11-14.  Military personnel in this program ultimately report to the Pentagon.  Under the “No Child Left Behind Act,” all students who do not “opt out” have their records turned over to the military.  These records assist military recruiters with targeting students for recruitment.  These militarized schools serve poor minority students replacing inquiry with fascist discipline and preparing students to be fodder in continuing wars for empire.  Sadly, the militarization of schools is replacing earlier educational philosophy of education as enlightenment and truth.  In short, it turns schools into places for training soldiers.

These policies of privatization and militarization of Chicago schools have been touted as “reform” but the reality is that this has produced a two-tiered educational system with greater inequalities.  The privatization of public schools shows a shift toward the voucher system envisioned by Milton Friedman and neoconservatives.  I’m a teacher and any Chicago public school teacher that I have spoken has told me how bad Duncan has been for the Chicago school system.  When Chicago public schools are privatized, all the teachers are fired.  New teachers are hired and there is no effort to hire minority teachers.  The new teachers are also non-union and young.  Older teachers in the Chicago public school system tend to lose their jobs – they have higher salaries because of the length of time they have been teaching.

The selection of Arne Duncan as Education Secretary shows a lot about the corporate, conservative direction that Obama is going in. He never voted to repeal the hated “No Child Behind Act” and he never sent his children to a public school in Chicago.  Duncan and Obama are cronies.  They play basketball together.   Duncan is also close friends with one of Obama’s closest friends and sponsors – the investment capitalist John W. Rogers, founder of Ariel Capital Management Inc.  Aside from friendship, Duncan represents the corporate and military friendly agenda of Barack Obama.

SOURCES
 
David Brooks 2008. "Who Will He Choose?" New York Times, December 5, 2008.
 
Catalyst Chicago 2005."First Renaissance Schools," Catalyst Chicago (February 2005).


Chicago Teachers’ Chalkboard 2006, “Militarization of Chicago Public Schools,” February 14, 2008.
 
Elizabeth Duffrin 2006. "Promise of New Schools Not Met" and "Slow Progress Amid Strife," Catalyst Chicago (March 2006). 
 
Thomas Fitzgerald 2007. "Obama Tells Teachers he Supports Merit Pay," Philadelphia Enquirer (July 5, 2007), read at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/8335627.html.
 
Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman 2008. "Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling," Truthout (December 17, 2008), read at http://www.truthout.org/121708R.  
 
Asa Hillard III 2004. Comments in "Beyond Black, White, and Brown," The Nation (May 3, 2004).

Alfie Kohn 2008, “Beware ‘School Reformers’,” The Nation (December 3, 2008).

Jonathan Kozol 2004. "Educational Apartheid Fifty Years After Brown," The Nation (May 3,
2004).
 
Kevin Kumashiro 2008.  "Duncan Wrong Education Choice," Atlanta Journal-Constitution (December 23, 2008).
 
Pauline Lippman 2004. High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).
 
Pauline Lippman 2005. "‘We’re Not Blind.  Just Follow the Dollar Sign.’" Rethinking Schools, volume 18, no. 4 (Summer 2005).
 
Pauline Lippman 2006. "Educational Ethnography and the Politics of Globalization, War, and Resistance," Substance, The Online Edition: The Newspaper of Public Education in Chicago, retrieved October 10, 2006 at www.substancemews.com/mambo/content/view/203/79.
 
Stephen Macek 2006. Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
 
Larissa MacFarquhar 2007. "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?" The New Yorker (May 7, 2007).
 
Don Moore 2003. Crisis (Chicago, IL: Designs for Change, October 2003).
 
Jeremy Mullman and Greg Hinz 2006. "Mayor Daley’s School Plan Falls Behind," Crain’s Chicago Business (February 06, 2006).
 
Gary Orfield, et al. 2004. Losing Our Future: How Minority Children Are Being Left Behind by the Graduate Rate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2004),  Greg Palast 2008. "Obama Slam-Duncans Education" (December 16, 2008) InfoClearingHouse, read at www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21481.htm.
 
Amanda Paulsen 2004.  "Chicago Hopes: ‘Maybe This Will Work," Christian Science Monitor, 21 September 2004.
 
Politico 2008. Interview with Barack Obama by Politico (February 12, 2008), read at http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0B213312-3048-5C12-000E0262A76D6B18.
 
Adolph Reed Jr. 1996. "The Curse of Community," Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York, 2000). 
 
Richard Rothstein 2004.  Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Educational Achievement Gap (Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2004).

Saskia Sassen 2004.  "A Global City," pp. 15-35 in Charles Madigan, ed., Global Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Council of Foreign Relations and University of Illimnois Press, 2004).

Carlos Sadovi 2009.  “16 Chicago schools to be closed, consolidated or relocated,” Chicagotribune.com (January 17, 2009).

Jesse Sharkey 2008. Arne Duncan’s Privatization Agenda," CounterPunch (December 18, 2008), read at www.counterpunch.org/sharkey12182008.html.
 
Paul Street 2002. The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2002).
 
Paul Street 2007.  Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007).
 
Paul Street 2008. "Barack Obama: The Empire’s New Clothes," Black Agenda Report (November 12, 2008), read at www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=879&Itemid=1.
 
Paul Street 2008 A. Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).
 
 Sophia Tareen 2007. "Chicago Leads in Public Military Schools," USA Today, November 2, 2007, read at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-02-2738760309_x.htm.

 

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