Neoliberalism: The Ideology That Dares Not Speak Its Name

[Warren Dew]

(12-30-2016, 10:49 PM)Odin Wrote: Flint's water crisis was because Flint's REPUBLICAN-appointed "emergency manager" decided to stop paying Detroit for their water in order to save money and switched to getting water from the Flint River, which is naturally acidic due to the local geology and needed to be treated, which the city government under the control of the emergency manager was too cheap to do even though it was supposed to and expected to. The result was lead from the older pipes ending up getting leached into the water, and when people started complaining the problem was covered up as long as they could get away with.

Just goes to show that even Republicans can fail to privatize services when they would be better off doing so.

Quote:As for schools, that is a community responsibility and thus well-funded public schools are a moral obligation for a just and good society. The whole idea of "market solutions" for EDUCATING OUR KIDS is downright evil as far as I'm concerned.

Whether or not it's a moral responsibility, I'd agree that universal schooling is a good idea.  It can be achieved far more effectively by taking the money and issuing a voucher for every school aged child worth what a public education costs.  People who want to stay in public schools can give their vouchers to the schools; people who find a better private school can use the voucher for that.

[Warren Dew]

(12-31-2016, 12:06 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote:

(12-31-2016, 04:11 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 05:45 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 02:32 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: The ideological support for privatization rests largely on the specious premise that the "market knows best."  But we now have much evidence to the contrary when it comes to introducing a profit motive into the delivery of common goods: education, utilities, national defense, and so on.  Think of the bankruptcies of not a few for-profit charter schools and universities; think of the tainted water (lead)scandal in Flint, MI.

That bad private schools go bankrupt rather than sticking around and miseducating more kids as bad public schools do is a good thing, not a bad thing, and illustrates exactly why education is an area where the market would work better.  The Flint water supply was also publicly run; privatization couldn't have made things worse there, and might have made them better.

 
This is the primary advantage of the market over the state.  What the state tends to do is indefinitely subsidize failure. 

What examples of subsidizing "failures" can you cite?  Do we presume that you're referring only to government expenditures on the common welfare?  Let me cite a few in the private sphere that could clearly be labeled failures.  How about we start with the most obvious one: the bailouts that followed the financial crash of 2008--Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, GM, private enterprises all, which according to the strict dictates of the "free market" should have been allowed to fail.

Your examples are in fact also examples of the government subsidizing failure, just as much as failing inner city public schools are.  The failing corporations should absolutely have been allowed to fail rather than bailed out.  The bailouts were an egregious example of undermining of the free market, and did incalculable damage to the economy as a result.

[Warren Dew]

(12-31-2016, 09:29 AM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 07:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Public schools worked well when women were shut out of the vast majority of careers, and were expected to accept being underpaid in those that were available, such as teaching in public schools, so those schools could have their pick of smart women that made good school teachers.

That's no longer true today, and I suspect that you don't advocate going back to shutting women back out of other careers any more than I do.

The benefits of having a market in schooling and the benefits of universal schooling could easily be combined by replacing public schools with voucher systems.

And how will private schools be able to attract quality teachers any more than public schools?

Private schools can make up for that issue through other efficiencies unavailable to public schools.  For example, private schools can easily fire the severely underperforming teachers, which teachers' unions prevent public schools from doing without great difficulty.  More importantly, private schools, since their survival will be at the whim of the parents rather than of the government and the unions, will optimize their operation to serve the interest of the parents rather than those of the government and the unions.  This will result in better schooling because the parents actually care a lot about how well their kids are educated, which is not generally the case of the government or the unions.

The public schooling system spends money very inefficiently.  Total costs have risen by a factor of three, after adjusting for inflation, since 1970 - a factor of 17 before inflation - and head count has doubled.  This is to educate the same number of students, and achieving the same test scores:



Most of the increase in personnel is not an increase in the number of teachers, but an increase in administrative staff.  School vouchers set at the average current cost to educate a student, and adjusted for inflation, would permit private schools to forego the excess administrative staff and either to pay teachers better and thus attract better teachers - at the high school level, for example, they might hire people with actual math and science degrees to teach those subjects, rather than people with education degrees - or at least to improve the teacher/student ratio.

Quote:Public goods are not like flat screen TVs or iPhones; they benefit all of the public and thus need to be publicly funded.  Do you disagree with that?

There is a category of goods which are natural monopolies and where the consumption cannot easily be traced to the individual consumer; these may thus be most efficiently provided by the government.  Local streets are the most commonly cited example; having two competing street systems is impractical, as is tracking exactly who uses streets how much.  Schools are not in this category; one can easily have competing schools, and it's easy to track which students go to which schools.  For this reason, schools should not be run by the government.

[Eric the Green]

You have a point about parents caring about their children's education. There are such things as PTAs and elected School Boards. People in government and teachers unions also care about how well students are educated.

Having a math or science degree does not make one a good teacher. That is a separate skill.

The data I've seen reported shows no improvement in education as a result of vouchers or charter schools.

Education reform is a big challenge. Conservatives look to market solutions as a result of their ideology. Progressives like me look at the results of free market ideology in general, and do not trust it to work. The free market is an essential part of society, to the extent that it actually exists. To a large extent it doesn't, because government has been stripped of its power to regulate and downsize it. In actual fact it isn't much more than a talking point and an ideal. But the ideology says it is automatically the solution to any problem, since all problems are caused by the government and unions. That approach has failed.

So what would succeed? I don't know. Teaching to the test, no child left behind and common core approaches are also failures, it seems to me. More active involvement by parents and other interested citizens in school boards might work. Holistic and creative approaches that recognize the importance of classroom interaction and independent thinking are needed. There are some schools out there that have moved in this direction, and it may have improved results. Subject for further research and thought. An organized movement toward these ideals is probably the only thing that would work; probably the only thing that has ever worked for social improvements of any kind.

I was the kind of student that liked public school, and it was well done and the teachers were good. I wasn't too diligent about homework, until I took on some specific projects that I enjoyed. I did better in grade school because there were no grades there. I competed in reading contests. But the athletic and more-socially-skilled kids were more respected, and sometimes looked down on me. Education and intellect are not valued by American popular culture, in contrast to other national cultures that do value it. Being cool and having fun is what's valued and promoted. In America, it's the athletic and social skills that are rewarded with popularity. Rather than specific skills, salesmanship is the quintessential American economic value.

I'm not sure that will ever change; American culture is built on an aggressive, competitive, extravert, pleasure-principle value sort. It does have its purpose; self-confidence, physical competitiveness, self-reliance and sociability/popularity are part of the reason American society has succeeded. Education and intellect, however, are increasingly important in a technological society, and America's position in the world is declining in many respects because we don't value either learning nor public institutions very highly.

Happy and prosperous new year to all my friends and adversaries on the T4T forum. Blessings and light to us all. We will all need to be at our best and have lots of luck to get through these coming years.

[pbrower2a]

(12-31-2016, 08:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-31-2016, 09:29 AM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 07:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Public schools worked well when women were shut out of the vast majority of careers, and were expected to accept being underpaid in those that were available, such as teaching in public schools, so those schools could have their pick of smart women that made good school teachers.

That's no longer true today, and I suspect that you don't advocate going back to shutting women back out of other careers any more than I do.

The benefits of having a market in schooling and the benefits of universal schooling could easily be combined by replacing public schools with voucher systems.

And how will private schools be able to attract quality teachers any more than public schools?

Private schools can make up for that issue through other efficiencies unavailable to public schools.  For example, private schools can easily fire the severely underperforming teachers, which teachers' unions prevent public schools from doing without great difficulty.  More importantly, private schools, since their survival will be at the whim of the parents rather than of the government and the unions, will optimize their operation to serve the interest of the parents rather than those of the government and the unions.  This will result in better schooling because the parents actually care a lot about how well their kids are educated, which is not generally the case of the government or the unions.

The public schooling system spends money very inefficiently.  Total costs have risen by a factor of three, after adjusting for inflation, since 1970 - a factor of 17 before inflation - and head count has doubled.  This is to educate the same number of students, and achieving the same test scores:



Most of the increase in personnel is not an increase in the number of teachers, but an increase in administrative staff.  School vouchers set at the average current cost to educate a student, and adjusted for inflation, would permit private schools to forego the excess administrative staff and either to pay teachers better and thus attract better teachers - at the high school level, for example, they might hire people with actual math and science degrees to teach those subjects, rather than people with education degrees - or at least to improve the teacher/student ratio.

Quote:Public goods are not like flat screen TVs or iPhones; they benefit all of the public and thus need to be publicly funded.  Do you disagree with that?

There is a category of goods which are natural monopolies and where the consumption cannot easily be traced to the individual consumer; these may thus be most efficiently provided by the government.  Local streets are the most commonly cited example; having two competing street systems is impractical, as is tracking exactly who uses streets how much.  Schools are not in this category; one can easily have competing schools, and it's easy to track which students go to which schools.  For this reason, schools should not be run by the government.

If by 'administrative staff' one means supervisory personnel, public schools have  some of the lowest ratios of management-to-core worker (teachers) in any economic activity. This may reflect that pedagogy has changed little in 200 or more years, so much of the activity of K-12 teachers is extremely stereotyped and predictable. Content may have changed, but teaching has changed far less than, for example, transportation.

Schools have employees who are not teachers and are not administrators-- for example, the people in the school cafeteria, school bus drivers, a school nurse, a school librarian, and maybe a social worker (kids can't avoid bringing problems from home), and in some places security guards. But that hardly reflects inefficiency. Maybe we need to ask ourselves why schools need social workers (teachers are generally not competent as social workers), let alone security guards.

Teachers who are any good are models of efficiency. So are schools. Such is the nature of K-12 education.

[pbrower2a]

(12-31-2016, 08:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-31-2016, 09:29 AM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 07:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Public schools worked well when women were shut out of the vast majority of careers, and were expected to accept being underpaid in those that were available, such as teaching in public schools, so those schools could have their pick of smart women that made good school teachers.

That's no longer true today, and I suspect that you don't advocate going back to shutting women back out of other careers any more than I do.

The benefits of having a market in schooling and the benefits of universal schooling could easily be combined by replacing public schools with voucher systems.

And how will private schools be able to attract quality teachers any more than public schools?

Private schools can make up for that issue through other efficiencies unavailable to public schools.  For example, private schools can easily fire the severely underperforming teachers, which teachers' unions prevent public schools from doing without great difficulty.  More importantly, private schools, since their survival will be at the whim of the parents rather than of the government and the unions, will optimize their operation to serve the interest of the parents rather than those of the government and the unions.  This will result in better schooling because the parents actually care a lot about how well their kids are educated, which is not generally the case of the government or the unions.

The public schooling system spends money very inefficiently.  Total costs have risen by a factor of three, after adjusting for inflation, since 1970 - a factor of 17 before inflation - and head count has doubled.  This is to educate the same number of students, and achieving the same test scores:



Most of the increase in personnel is not an increase in the number of teachers, but an increase in administrative staff.  School vouchers set at the average current cost to educate a student, and adjusted for inflation, would permit private schools to forego the excess administrative staff and either to pay teachers better and thus attract better teachers - at the high school level, for example, they might hire people with actual math and science degrees to teach those subjects, rather than people with education degrees - or at least to improve the teacher/student ratio.

Quote:Public goods are not like flat screen TVs or iPhones; they benefit all of the public and thus need to be publicly funded.  Do you disagree with that?

There is a category of goods which are natural monopolies and where the consumption cannot easily be traced to the individual consumer; these may thus be most efficiently provided by the government.  Local streets are the most commonly cited example; having two competing street systems is impractical, as is tracking exactly who uses streets how much.  Schools are not in this category; one can easily have competing schools, and it's easy to track which students go to which schools.  For this reason, schools should not be run by the government.

If by 'administrative staff' one means supervisory personnel, public schools have  some of the lowest ratios of management-to-core worker (teachers) in any economic activity. This may reflect that pedagogy has changed little in 200 or more years, so much of the activity of K-12 teachers is extremely stereotyped and predictable. Content may have changed, but teaching has changed far less than, for example, transportation.

Schools have employees who are not teachers and are not administrators-- for example, the people in the school cafeteria, school bus drivers, a school nurse, a school librarian, and maybe a social worker (kids can't avoid bringing problems from home), and in some places security guards. But that hardly reflects inefficiency. Maybe we need to ask ourselves why schools need social workers (teachers are generally  not competent as social workers), let alone security guards.  

Teachers who are any good are models of efficiency. So are schools. Such is the nature of K-12 education. I doubt that adding a layer of for-profit ownership or management will make private schools any better.

Psst -- want to know what makes a stronger influence on the quality of educational outcomes than even the quality of teachers? The sort of home that a kid goes to, and attitudes of the parents toward education.

[Warren Dew]

(01-01-2017, 01:08 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-31-2016, 08:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: The public schooling system spends money very inefficiently.  Total costs have risen by a factor of three, after adjusting for inflation, since 1970 - a factor of 17 before inflation - and head count has doubled.  This is to educate the same number of students, and achieving the same test scores:



Most of the increase in personnel is not an increase in the number of teachers, but an increase in administrative staff.  School vouchers set at the average current cost to educate a student, and adjusted for inflation, would permit private schools to forego the excess administrative staff and either to pay teachers better and thus attract better teachers - at the high school level, for example, they might hire people with actual math and science degrees to teach those subjects, rather than people with education degrees - or at least to improve the teacher/student ratio.

Quote:Public goods are not like flat screen TVs or iPhones; they benefit all of the public and thus need to be publicly funded.  Do you disagree with that?

There is a category of goods which are natural monopolies and where the consumption cannot easily be traced to the individual consumer; these may thus be most efficiently provided by the government.  Local streets are the most commonly cited example; having two competing street systems is impractical, as is tracking exactly who uses streets how much.  Schools are not in this category; one can easily have competing schools, and it's easy to track which students go to which schools.  For this reason, schools should not be run by the government.

If by 'administrative staff' one means supervisory personnel, public schools have  some of the lowest ratios of management-to-core worker (teachers) in any economic activity. This may reflect that pedagogy has changed little in 200 or more years, so much of the activity of K-12 teachers is extremely stereotyped and predictable. Content may have changed, but teaching has changed far less than, for example, transportation.

Schools have employees who are not teachers and are not administrators-- for example, the people in the school cafeteria, school bus drivers, a school nurse, a school librarian, and maybe a social worker (kids can't avoid bringing problems from home), and in some places security guards. But that hardly reflects inefficiency. Maybe we need to ask ourselves why schools need social workers (teachers are generally  not competent as social workers), let alone security guards.

Sorry, I meant to include all of those in "administrative staff".  There are also secretaries and such.  I strongly suspect that the growth in administrative staff has been a result of union pressure to reduce teachers' working hours, resulting in offloading tasks to staff.  In our city, for example, public schools have a 6.5 hour school day while the one available charter school has an 8 hour school day.  Teachers do work for an hour or two after the students go home, but given they get summers off, the public school teachers likely work about a 1500 hour year, as opposed to charter school teachers who probably work closer to the private sector standard 2000 hour year.

Quote:Psst -- want to know what makes a stronger influence on the quality of educational outcomes than even the quality of teachers? The sort of home that a kid goes to, and attitudes of the parents toward education.

Yes.  And if the parents and the school work together, the synergies can provide a better education than their each working independently.  Unfortunately, most public school teachers seem to try to minimize parental involvement because it makes their jobs harder to have to coordinate with parents and treat the students as individuals rather than as mass produced products - and, of course, because their jobs depend on keeping the government and the union happy, not on keeping the parents happy.

[Warren Dew]

(12-31-2016, 10:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Teaching to the test, no child left behind and common core approaches are also failures, it seems to me. More active involvement by parents and other interested citizens in school boards might work.

No Child Left Behind has had interesting effects.  It actually has done what it was intended to do:  increase the focus on the weaker students.  I have a kid who is below average in reading and above average in math.  She is in third grade, the first grade level where standardized testing affects teacher pay.  The school and her teacher are very interested in improving her reading, because No Child Left Behind grades them - grades the teacher and school, that is - based on how many people meet the grade level standards, for which she is borderline in reading.

In contrast, the school has shown no interest in helping her work on math, and her current teacher has criticized us parents for spending time at home on helping her continue to improve in math.  A previous teacher explicitly told me she thought it was a bad idea for students to try to exceed grade level.  It's pretty clear what's happening here:  the teachers get no benefit from improving skills that are already above average, and every minute "wasted" on further improving her math is a minute that isn't spent helping them get their raises by improving her reading.  No Child Left Behind has also become No Child Gets Ahead.

However, this does teach us something:  the school system responds strongly to the legislated incentives of NCLB.  If we have to work within the constraints of public schooling, the key is to legislate the right incentives.  If instead of incentives that focused on weak students to the exclusion of strong students, we had incentives focused on the student body average, teachers would try to improve all students, wherever they stood.  I strongly suspect that would result in the average student exceeding the common core progression - which in principle is sound, even though the state by state implementations are mostly faulty - by 20-50%.

I'm pretty sure the teacher's unions will managed to gut standards based education entirely, though.  Unions are all about avoiding performance based evaluation.  And in this case, they seem to have managed to ally with the "don't teach my kid evolution" crowd, thus giving them strength on both the left and the right.

[Eric the Green]

Of course, unions do their job in both the private and public sector to protect the interests of their members. Before the neo-liberal era, private unions were stronger. Now, in the neo-liberal era, public unions are much stronger and more common than private ones. Public sector unions are needed to protect public workers' interests, no doubt. But often it is the public whom these unions strike against. They are the only source of the salary increases they want, and poor school boards and other public authorities are caught in the middle.

But there's no essential reason why there can't be private teachers' unions as well as public ones, especially if education is going to become an industry like making cars or rolling steel. So unions may both improve or retard the quality of products and services provided by the institutions they organize. Fair payment for teachers helps both the teachers and the students, and are essential for a good educational "product" and service. But to improve education, a social movement will be needed that's focused on how education is carried out. George Carlin's picture of what education is for, is all too common in practice. Turn out obedient workers who won't ask questions. That serves the neo-liberals well, and placates the Democrats' need to kowtow to the call for "standards." But it's not the model we want for an innovative and creative society that can compete with other nations. It's not what will make America great again.




Neoliberalism, Youth, and Social Justice

[Eric the Green]

Critical Pedagogy:





Paulo Freire is a pioneer, according to Giroux

What we need to make education great again, is to foster students' ability to use critical thinking and imagination, and work together with others. A social movement can bring it about, and it in turn helps foster social movements.

Of course the neo-liberal Establishment doesn't want this, just as George Carlin says.

The neo-liberal forgetting and de-imagination machine:
https://youtu.be/ZgxJJFFYpF4

There is nothing liberating about neo-liberalism. What it has created is a prison-oriented punishment society.

[pbrower2a]

Having been a substitute teacher for about ten years I may have some insights on education that few teachers (who teach only one grade or subject; I have taught practically all of those within K-12 education, both in public and charter schools)... I try to be at school as soon as I can be so that I can read the lesson plans and put stuff on the board. That hour is my planning time... and I use it to the fullest. I will have plenty to do, and I don't want to face away from the students at any time.

What is substitute teaching? It's acting. But if one has Asperger's, everything that one does is an act.

One difference between public and a charter school is that the charter schools do not have playground supervisors; I get to do that in a charter school. That is one cost-saving measure that charter schools can do.

But I do not grade homework, and I never put anything into the teacher's grade book. There's always some chance that I will put the day's grade for "Maria Alvarez" into the space for the grade for "Bobby Allen", or vice-versa, a chance that I will not take. I put it on a paper for the regular teacher to transcribe.

...I also know where the problems are in the classroom -- mostly parents who don't value education, kids not having breakfast (when you have a focus on hunger pangs you might not have a focus on the lesson or the assignment), and the usual drugs and alcohol. Maybe teachers can work miracles, but if Mommy and Daddy are on meth... God help that child. All children need a genuine parent in the home -- and by parent someone who takes an undeniably adult role in life.

[Eric the Green]

Henry A. Giroux: Can Democratic Education Survive in a Neoliberal Society?
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12126...al-society

The democratic mission of public education is under assault by a conservative right-wing reform culture in which students are viewed as human capital in schools that are to be administered by market-driven forces.

Public education is under assault by a host of religious, economic, ideological and political fundamentalists. The most serious attack is being waged by advocates of neoliberalism, whose reform efforts focus narrowly on high-stakes testing, traditional texts and memorization drills. At the heart of this approach is an aggressive attempt to disinvest in public schools, replace them with charter schools, and remove state and federal governments completely from public education in order to allow education to be organized and administered by market-driven forces.1 Schools would "become simply another corporate asset bundled in credit default swaps," valuable for their rate of exchange and trade value on the open market.2 It would be an understatement to suggest that there is something very wrong with American public education. For a start, this counter-revolution is giving rise to punitive evaluation schemes, harsh disciplinary measures, and the ongoing deskilling of many teachers that together are reducing many excellent educators to the debased status of technicians and security personnel. Additionally, as more and more wealth is distributed to the richest Americans and corporations, states are drained of resources and are shifting the burden of such deficits on to public schools and other vital public services. With 40 percent of wealth going to the top 1 percent, public services are drying up from lack of revenue and more and more young people find themselves locked out of the dream of getting a decent education or a job while being robbed of any hope for the future.

As the nation's schools and infrastructure suffer from a lack of resources, right-wing politicians are enacting policies that lower the taxes of the rich and mega corporations. For the elite, taxes constitute a form of class warfare waged by the state against the rich, who view the collection of taxes as a form of state coercion. What is ironic in this argument is the startling fact that not only are the rich not taxed fairly, but they also receive over $92 billion in corporate subsidies. But there is more at stake here than untaxed wealth and revenue, there is also the fact that wealth corrupts and buys power. And this poisonous mix of wealth, politics and power translates into an array of anti-democratic practices that creates an unhealthy society in every major index, ranging from infant mortality rates, to a dysfunctional political system.3

What is hidden in this empty outrage by the wealthy is that the real enemy here is any form of government that believes it needs to raise revenue in order to build infrastructures, provide basic services for those who need them, and develop investments such as a transportation system and schools that are not tied to the logic of the market. One consequence of this vile form of class warfare is a battle over crucial resources, a battle that has dire political and educational consequences especially for the poor and middle classes, if not democracy itself.

Money no longer simply controls elections; it also controls policies that shape public education. One indicator of such corruption is that hedge fund managers now sit on school boards across the country doing everything in their power to eliminate public schools and punish unionized teachers who do not support charter schools. In New Jersey, hundreds of teachers have been sacked because of alleged budget deficits. Not only is Governor Christie using the deficit argument to fire teachers, he also uses it to break unions and balance the budget on the backs of students and teachers. How else to explain Christie's refusal to oppose reinstituting the "millionaires taxes," or his cravenly support for lowering taxes for the top 25 hedge fund officers, who in 2009 raked in $25 billion, enough to fund 658,000 entry-level teachers.4

In this conservative right-wing reform culture, the role of public education, if we are to believe the Heritage Foundation and the likes of Bill Gates-type billionaires, is to produce students who laud conformity, believe job training is more important than education, and view public values as irrelevant. Students in this view are no longer educated for democratic citizenship. On the contrary, they are now being trained to fulfill the need for human capital.5 What is lost in this approach to schooling is what Noam Chomsky calls "creating creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring new horizons and forgetting external constraints."6 At the same time, public schools are under assault not because they are failing (though some are) but because they are one of the few public spheres left where people can learn the knowledge and skills necessary to allow them to think critically and hold power and authority accountable. Not only are the lines between the corporate world and public education blurring, but public schooling is being reduced to what Peter Seybold calls a "corporate service station," in which the democratic ideals at the heart of public education are now up for sale.7 At the heart of this crisis of education are larger questions about the formative culture necessary for a democracy to survive, the nature of civic education and teaching in dark times, the role of educators as civic intellectuals and what it means to understand the purpose and meaning of education as a site of individual and collective empowerment.

This current right-wing emphasis on low-level skills removes the American public from examining the broader economic, political, and cultural forces that bear down on the school. Matters concerning the influence on schools of corporations, text book publishers, commercial industries and the national security state are rendered invisible, as if schools and the practices they promote exist in a bubble. At work here is a pedagogy that displaces, infantilizes and depoliticizes both students and large segments of the American public. Under the current regime of neoliberalism, schools have been transformed into a private right rather than a public good. Students are now being educated to become consumers rather than thoughtful, critical citizens. Increasingly as public schools are put in the hands of for-profit corporations, hedge fund elites, and other market driven sources, their value is derived for their ability to turn a profit and produce compliant students eager to join the workforce.8

What is truly shocking about the current dismantling and disinvestment in public schooling is that those who advocate such changes are called the new educational reformers. They are not reformers at all. In fact, they are reactionaries and financial mercenaries who are turning teaching into the practice of conformity and creating curricula driven by an anti-intellectual obsession with student test scores, while simultaneously turning students into compliant subjects, increasingly unable to think critically about themselves and their relationship to the larger world. This poisonous virus of repression, conformity and instrumentalism is turning public education into a repressive site of containment, a site devoid of poetry, critical learning and soaring acts of curiosity and imagination. As Diane Ravitch has pointed out, what is driving the current school reform movement is a profoundly anti-intellectual project that promotes "more testing, more privately managed schools, more deregulation, more firing of teachers [and] more school closings."9 There are no powerful and profound intellectual dramas in this view of schooling, just the muted rush to make schools another source of profit for finance capital with its growing legion of bankers, billionaires and hedge fund scoundrels..............

[Eric the Green]

(01-01-2017, 01:23 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: Yes.  And if the parents and the school work together, the synergies can provide a better education than their each working independently.  Unfortunately, most public school teachers seem to try to minimize parental involvement because it makes their jobs harder to have to coordinate with parents and treat the students as individuals rather than as mass produced products - and, of course, because their jobs depend on keeping the government and the union happy, not on keeping the parents happy.

Yes, parents and the school working together improves education, and citizen involvement in the governance of the schools might help, if those citizens are of a progressive mindset, rather than social conservative Bible thumpers or angry taxpayers who think public schools are theft to finance freeloaders. But if the citizens are involved in a social movement to liberate education and make it holistic and cooperative, then it would be constructive.

The government is the people, and the people get the government and the schools that they deserve. If we want better, then we'll need to act up to make it better. Public schools belong to the public. Private schools belong to some financial gambler. Teachers' jobs should indeed depend on making the public happy.

Teacher's jobs don't depend on unions; their salaries do, in so far as unions advocate for it.

[Warren Dew]

(01-01-2017, 02:38 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Of course, unions do their job in both the private and public sector to protect the interests of their members. Before the neo-liberal era, private unions were stronger. Now, in the neo-liberal era, public unions are much stronger and more common than private ones. Public sector unions are needed to protect public workers' interests, no doubt. But often it is the public whom these unions strike against. They are the only source of the salary increases they want, and poor school boards and other public authorities are caught in the middle.

But there's no essential reason why there can't be private teachers' unions as well as public ones, especially if education is going to become an industry like making cars or rolling steel. So unions may both improve or retard the quality of products and services provided by the institutions they organize. Fair payment for teachers helps both the teachers and the students, and are essential for a good educational "product" and service.

Sure.  But there's a key difference that makes public unions more pernicious than private unions.  Specifically, public unions often control both sides of the negotiating table, because the unions can lobby for their supporters to be on those school boards and public authorities.  In many places, the school board is elected on a different day than other representatives, so that the average parent won't even know the election is occurring.  But rest assured the union will be turning out its supporters.

With a private school, if there is a union, it is at least negotiating against a management team that has been independently selected and has an interest in extracting the best value for the money.

Quote:Teachers' jobs should indeed depend on making the public happy.

Actually this is not necessarily so great.  Where I live, a lot of the public is childless by choice; they have no idea what is involved in bringing up kids, so what makes them happy is often a far cry from what's good for the kids.  And once they get to a certain age, they couldn't care less whether the kids are well educated, because by the time that education pays off in higher productivity, they'll be dead.

Quote:Teacher's jobs don't depend on unions

Bad teachers' jobs do.

[Odin]

The problem with performance-based evaluation is that a lot of things that go into kids' academic performance is completely outside of teacher's control. It's not the teachers' fault for a student having a poor home life or for a student having parents who are dullards or anti-intellectual. Performance-based evaluation leads to teachers trying to avoid teaching in low-income, underprivileged communities.

You need to quit believing all the right-wing propaganda about teachers' unions, Warren. It makes you look pathetic.

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-01-2017, 10:02 AM)Odin Wrote: The problem with performance-based evaluation is that a lot of things that go into kids' academic performance is completely outside of teacher's control. It's not the teachers' fault for a student having a poor home life or for a student having parents who are dullards or anti-intellectual. Performance-based evaluation leads to teachers trying to avoid teaching in low-income, underprivileged communities.

You need to quit believing all the right-wing propaganda about teachers' unions, Warren. It makes you look pathetic.

My sister taught first grade in a wealthy seacoast Boston suburb, and was for a time a low level union person.  She always said the politicians promised easy answers that didn't help.  Time spent doing politically mandated stuff could instead be spent teaching.  The politicians were generally more interested in votes than the kids.  At least in her school system, which admittedly featured decent funding a lot of good parents, the locals were trying to do the best they could in spite of stated and federal government interference.  The dynamic could be different elsewhere.

So, agreed, the stuff Warren is parroting has nothing to do with what I've heard from a professional.  He seems locked in Propagandaville.

This whole thing seems be a reverse on the usual Republican perspective.  In most issues, Republicans aren't into regulations and interference in local affairs.  You let the locals make their own decisions.  It got flipped around somehow.  I suspect it was the Democratic support for unions and education.  Anything the Democrats are for they have to be against.

[Warren Dew]

(01-01-2017, 02:57 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(01-01-2017, 10:02 AM)Odin Wrote: The problem with performance-based evaluation is that a lot of things that go into kids' academic performance is completely outside of teacher's control. It's not the teachers' fault for a student having a poor home life or for a student having parents who are dullards or anti-intellectual. Performance-based evaluation leads to teachers trying to avoid teaching in low-income, underprivileged communities.

You need to quit believing all the right-wing propaganda about teachers' unions, Warren. It makes you look pathetic.

My sister taught first grade in a wealthy seacoast Boston suburb, and was for a time a low level union person.  She always said the politicians promised easy answers that didn't help.  Time spent doing politically mandated stuff could instead be spent teaching.  The politicians were generally more interested in votes than the kids.  At least in her school system, which admittedly featured decent funding a lot of good parents, the locals were trying to do the best they could in spite of stated and federal government interference.  The dynamic could be different elsewhere.

So, agreed, the stuff Warren is parroting has nothing to do with what I've heard from a professional.  He seems locked in Propagandaville.

Actually, what your sister apparently said supports my original point perfectly:  public schools can't teach efficiently, because teachers in public schools have to keep the government happy.  Switch to vouchers that parents can use for private schooling, and the time can be spent teaching instead of pleasing politicians.

[Odin]

(01-01-2017, 06:57 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Actually, what your sister apparently said supports my original point perfectly:  public schools can't teach efficiently, because teachers in public schools have to keep the government happy.  Switch to vouchers that parents can use for private schooling, and the time can be spent teaching instead of pleasing politicians.

You have fallen for the propaganda, here, Warren. A lot of us on the Left have been opposed to that sort of stuff for a long time and the Right likes to push that crap in order to intentionally sabotage public schools and so then gives the Right an excuse to privatize the school system.

The Left's position is "Let's teachers teach, not politicians".

[Warren Dew]

(01-01-2017, 08:05 PM)Odin Wrote:

(01-01-2017, 06:57 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Actually, what your sister apparently said supports my original point perfectly:  public schools can't teach efficiently, because teachers in public schools have to keep the government happy.  Switch to vouchers that parents can use for private schooling, and the time can be spent teaching instead of pleasing politicians.

You have fallen for the propaganda, here, Warren. A lot of us on the Left have been opposed to that sort of stuff for a long time and the Right likes to push that crap in order to intentionally sabotage public schools and so then gives the Right an excuse to privatize the school system.

The Left's position is "Let's teachers teach, not politicians".

The left says a lot of things that don't actually work.  Unless you eliminate the politicians entirely, which the left doesn't propose to do, public school teachers will always need to please the politicians.

[The Wonkette]

One of the issues with public schools is that they have to educate everyone -- the disruptive child, the child with autism, the deaf child, the child with Down's syndrome, the child who doesn't speak English. Warren, when you and I were growing up, it was not mandatory. The need for education for all these children is one area which I suspect is responsible for public school expenditures outpacing inflation + population growth. Another factor might be more kids graduating from high school, which equals more kids in school.

Under a voucher system, those children, who need more attention than the typical child, will be shortchanged, because a voucher, designed to meet the needs of the "average" child, won't cover special needs. That could be remedied if the voucher was larger for special needs.