Photo
©2000
Tom
Benton,
Impact
Visuals
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Across the country, corporations, with the
help of governors and state legislators, are cutting access to
education, narrowing its content, and shifting its cost onto
students and families. The plan is to discredit and dismantle
the public education system and replace it with corporate-run,
for-profit schools from kindergarten through college.
Voucher programs, charter schools, and the
imposition of "high stakes" tests are all part of
the corporate assault on K-12 education. At the college level,
it’s budget cuts, elimination of affirmative action and
tenure, and privatization of as many sectors of the system as
possible. The anti-public education campaign is especially
virulent in California and in New York, where Governor George
Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani are making it
harder for low-income and immigrant students to get into what
had been a free, open institution, City University. The floor
that was supposed to hold people up has turned into a door
closed in their faces.
WORKING PEOPLE WON
THIS
For all its flaws, our current system of
public education represents a series of victories won by
working people over the two hundred years from the
Revolutionary War to the Civil Rights Movement. The period
from the end of World War II until the 1990s saw a major
expansion of public education. In the aftermath of the war,
the GI Bill enabled more than 2 million veterans to attend
college.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Civil Rights
Movement breached the barriers for blacks and Latinos to enter
the system. Title I, Head Start, and other educational access
and enrichment programs offered a toehold to millions of
children from low-income families. As a result, more than 46
million children in the U.S. are currently enrolled in public
schools, 90 percent of the school-age population. They are
taught by more than 3 million mostly unionized teachers and
teaching staff.
EDUCATION FOR PROFIT
Now corporate interests are trying to reverse
this progress. Although attacks on public education aren’t
new, this time there’s a new goal: replacing public
education with for-profit K-12 schools.
The most powerful weapon used in the fight for
privatization is the voucher plan. This wolf is invariably
introduced in the sheep’s garb of "increased
choice" or "education reform." The major forces
behind voucher programs are not parochial school supporters,
but a sector of the business community. They’d like to
establish for-profit K-12 schools such as Edison Schools and
Advantage Schools, financed with voucher programs that tap the
public treasury. Teachers’ unions have been active in
opposing voucher programs, although they have sometimes been
hampered by their ties to Democrats.
SMEAR JOB
To convince parents to transfer their children
from public schools to for-profit K-12 schools, the
privatizers must first discredit and undermine public schools.
That’s where high-stakes standardized tests come in. All
over the country, states are constructing new and rigid
requirements forcing children to pass these often arbitrary
tests, or else fail to pass their grade or graduate. These
fallacious "assessment tools" are used to narrow the
curriculum, control teachers and their teaching, and discredit
public school systems. A Texas court recently found that tens
of thousands of Latinos and African Americans have been denied
diplomas or dropped out of school because of such tests.
The push for "standards" comes in
part from high-level entities like the National Governors
Association’s Center for Best Practices, which develops
educational policy for the nation’s governors. Rather than
tapping educators, its steering committee is composed of
representatives of Pfizer, Proctor and Gamble, Bell Atlantic,
DuPont, FMC, GE, IBM, Lockheed Martin, and Merck.
IN MASSACHUSETTS
In Massachusetts, the effort to undermine
public education started in earnest when former governor
William Weld appointed his former gubernatorial opponent, John
Silber, as chair of the State Board of Education. Silber is a
national leader of the privatization push. Republican Weld and
Democrat Silber purged the Board of progressive and
professional educators and replaced them with a right-wing
cabal.
Both men have since passed the baton to other
privatization zealots. Silber stepped down to insure the
elevation of James Peyser as the new chair of the Board of Ed.
Peyser is executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a
corporate-financed right-wing think tank promoting
privatization of education. Weld’s successor, Governor A.
Paul Cellucci, has appointed a construction-industry union
buster, Steve Tocco, as chair of Higher Education. Tocco, who
has no background in education, wants to eliminate affirmative
action and tenure at the University of Massachusetts. The
Democratic majority in the state legislature has gone along
quietly with all these attacks on education. Meanwhile Weld,
with former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, is promoting
Leeds Equity Partners, a for-profit education company.
The Pioneer-led Board of Education has
aggressively imposed high stakes tests on the state’s public
— but not private — school students. The tests reflect
corporate biases. Knowing the history of the labor or civil
rights movements will not help you pass these exams. The tests
have been devastating for children: More than half the
children in Massachusetts who took the exams this year
received a notice that they had failed or needed improvement.
In the coming years, students who fail will not be allowed to
graduate. Their only option will be to seek a diploma at
private schools, where children aren’t required to take the
test.
Fortunately, the tests are generating popular
resistance of a kind not seen in many decades, with parent and
teacher networks mobilizing in opposition. Last June, 20,000
teachers protested Governor Cellucci’s anti-education
policies at the State House.
LABOR PARTY'S ROLE
The earliest campaigns ever mounted by working
people and their unions were to demand public education and a
shorter work week. The National Molders Union in 1859
campaigned for public education to "educate our children
and qualify them to play their part in the world’s
drama." The New Jersey Labor Party called for taxing
chartered companies so that "schools should be extended
until knowledge shall be as free as the air we breathe."
In 1887, the United Labor Party won power in Rutland, Vermont.
Their first action was to extend free public education to all
children.
Our own Massachusetts State Labor Party
recently held a conference on Quality Public Education for
All. The conference was a first step toward building a
campaign based on the LP’s program, a clear and cogent call
for expanding access to and quality of education.
STATE LP CAMPAIGN
The Massachusetts Labor Party’s Education
Committee is working on expanding the LP education platform
with a state campaign whose planks include:
-
No vouchers or for-profit schools
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No high-stakes tests for promotion or
graduation
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Move from 12 years of free public education
to 20 years. At least 3 years would be for children before the
first grade; the remaining five years would be available any
time
-
Federal financing of the additional years
The Labor Party can play an important role in
helping to clarify who we are really fighting against in the
battle for public education — that is, corporate interests.
And we can move beyond defensive battles to build support for
what we really need: a further expansion of public education.
Ed Bruno is the LP’s New England Organizer;
Diane Dujon is in student support services at U/Mass Boston
and a member of SEIU 509; and Jon King teaches at MIT. All
three are parents of school-age children.
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