Harry Targ
Introduction
In
August, 2015 12 parents in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago launched a
34 day hunger strike to protest the closing of a neighborhood high school.
Their demands, along with its reopening, included the establishment of a green
jobs oriented curriculum that would train young people for the needs of the 21st
century.
In
Seattle, Washington in September, 2015 teachers went on strike to demand fair
wages and working conditions in their new contract.
In
the summer, 2014 again in Chicago, the teachers union went on strike to push
back against school closings, stagnant teacher wages, and closed-door
policymaking to consciously limit the influence of parents in the community.
This strike had the support of teachers, parents, and children.
During
the spring, 2015, parents all around the state of Indiana were keeping their
children home during school days as a mark of their resistance to painful,
frustrating, ill-conceived, and misused batteries of tests that state/federal
policymakers were imposing on young people.
These are just a few examples of rising anger at the
threat to the tradition of public schooling, big corporate efforts to privatize
schools for profit, the denial of communities of parents any influence over educational
policy, and campaigns to destroy teachers unions. A key component of the struggle
to save our schools has been to defend the rights of all children to quality
education not limited by race, class, gender, or ethnicity.
The
neoliberal design
In the 1970s powerful economic and political elites
began a sustained campaign to shift more of the wealth of society from the many
to the few. A new policy agenda, sometimes called neoliberalism or austerity,
was initiated that called for a variety of attacks on government policies that
had been instituted over the prior thirty years.
In general, the neoliberal policies called for
downsizing government (except for the military), cutting public services and
programs to provide for the human needs of the population, deregulating banks
and corporations, and privatizing public institutions. Roads, libraries, parks,
prisons, and particularly schools were being shifted from public ownership and
control to private corporations, mostly to make a profit. While these policies
have encountered public opposition and have not been fully implemented, they
have dramatically affected the quality of our public life and our communities.
The
Threat to Public Schools
Since the dawn of the twentieth century the anchor
of most communities in the United States, has been its public schools. Schools
help raise, nourish, mentor, and educate the youth of America. Parents, as best
they can, participate in supporting school systems and provide input on school
policy. Teachers and school administrators sacrifice time and energy to
stimulate the talents of young people. And teachers through educational
associations and trade unions organize to protect their rights in the
workplace, always mindful of the number one priority; serving the children and
the community.
Beginning in the 1970s, various special interest
groups, many well-funded, began to advocate for the privatization of education.
Looking at aggregate data showing some failing school performance, they argued
that private corporations, charter schools, could educate children better. They
blamed the lack of marketplace competition for waste of taxpayer dollars for
poor performance. The arguments ignored the fact that failing schools were
schools underfunded by state legislatures and were often in communities where
resources were scarce because of inequalities of wealth and income. Most often
under-performing schools were underfunded schools: underfunded because of
racism and patterns of segregation.
The neoliberal answer was to shift public funds,
formerly from public schools, to private corporate charter schools. Along with
the creation of charter schools, voucher systems were established by state
legislatures and school districts allowing parents to place their children in
any school they could find; often difficult to access and sometimes far from
the child’s neighborhood. The introduction of charter schools and vouchers
began the process of shifting resources from public education to private
schools.
Shifting resources from the public to the private sector served to
destroy adequately performing public schools and weakened nearby communities.
The data on the shift from public schools to
charters is shocking. For example in Detroit between 2005 and 2013 public
school enrollment declined by 63% and charter school enrollments rose by 53%;
in Gary the decline in public schools was 47% and the rise in charter school
enrollment rose by 197%; and in
Indianapolis the decline in public school enrollments totaled 27% and the rise
in charter schools was 287%.
This historic transfer of public funds for education
to privatization would often be sped up by local crises. The biggest crisis in
an American community in decades occurred in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina
struck that city in August, 2005. In its aftermath 100,000 citizens were forced
to leave the city because their homes were demolished. Over 100 public schools
were destroyed in the disaster. Subsequently virtually all those schools were
replaced with charter schools, run by private corporations for a profit, devoid
of teachers’ organizations and parental participation in the revitalization of
educational institutions. Commenting on the New Orleans experience Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan suggested that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to
happen to the educational system of New Orleans.
The human tragedy of Katrina was also a metaphor for
what was to follow all across the nation: powerful forces swept away vibrant
publicly controlled and accountable educational institutions, replacing
them with new profit-driven, non-transparent, non-union, corporate schools that
did not serve the needs and desires of the remaining members of the community. Public
education is being uprooted, transformed, and destroyed all across the United
States.
To facilitate the privatization of schools cities
everywhere have begun to close public schools. Detroit, New York, and Chicago
have closed over 100 schools per city in recent years. Several cities have
closed at least 25 schools in recent years. In Philadelphia, municipal funds
for a prison came from the closure of 50 schools. The impacts of school
closings is reflected in the essay “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” produced by the
Journey for Justice Alliance: “Closing a school is one of the most traumatic
things that can happen to a community; it strikes at the very core of community
culture, history, and identity and…produces far-reaching repercussions that
negatively affect every aspect of community life.” www.empowerdc.org/uploads/J4JReport-Death_by_a_Thousand_Cuts
(Future essays
will discuss the impacts of the crisis of public education and rising movement
responses. This essay is informed by ongoing discussions in the Education Committee
of Indiana Moral Mondays).
