Public Enemy

There is no question that today’s charter schools are not doing what charters originally, in the 1970s and 1980s, were intended to do. The original idea was that charter schools would be public schools but would not be subject to all of the rules and regulations of the traditional public school bureacracy and therefore free to experiment, hopefully to come up with more effective teaching and learning strategies. They would be generators of true education reform.

It is well known that this lofty goal has not been reached. Charter schools usually have proven to be no better than their public school counterparts, and some are considerably worse. Moreover, lack of accountability has made the charter movement suspect in terms of educational efficacy on any level. They have become, like vouchers, a way to move public money to private corporations. Rather than being a lever to improve public schools, they have become yet another tool with which rightwing conservatives can undermine public education across the nation.

The public schools themselves must share culpability for the movement to privatize public education. Part of the impetus for charters in the first place was the rigidity and unresponsiveness of many public schools to the people of the communities in which they operate. The notion that charters would be freer from bureaucratic constraints should have been a motivating factor for public schools to examine their own assumptions and operational structures. Instead, public school leaders opted out of self-examination and reflection.

No public school system is incapable of reforming itself, rather than turning to an “innovator”—in the case of most charters, at least nowadays—a private corporation that promises big results and delivers, at best, a trickle of difference, often in an elitist setting that ill serves the community public schools for which it purports to provide a model of innovation and educational success.

The issue is one of will. School leaders too often view themselves as vassals of the state rather than as servants of their local community, as cogs in the bureaucracy of government rather than elected local representatives. With many states shunting more and more public money to private enterprises, local school officials need to stop twiddling their collective thumbs and set about the difficult work of improving how local schools respond to local needs and interests.

Ignoring the frustrations of parents and hiding behind rules and regulations will continue to feed the radical conservative movement to privatize public education at the expense of the common good—at the expense, ultimately, of American democracy.

God, Inc.

It’s hard to call oneself a Christian when so many who flaunt that label behave in such unChrist-like ways. Too often Christian is synonymous today with racist and homophobe, which leaves many who actually attempt to live out the principles attributed to Christ feeling as though they are victims of identity theft. I wonder if God feels the same way.

The public context of God has been almost wholly subsumed in the identity of radical right “Christian” hegemony. Political Christianism is a rightwing gimmick. The God of “In God We Trust” is a “Christian” god for a “Christian” nation—both fictions designed to fool unthinking masses with feel-righteous rhetoric.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“How Business Made Us Christian,” March 15, 2015), Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse traced the formulation of God as an advertising ploy. Kruse attributes the mid-20th-century adoption of a decidedly Christianist God as America’s national trademark to the influence of business interests, particularly as stimulated and articulated by a young charismatic evangelist, Billy Graham.

Kruse quotes Graham as saying in 1952, “If I would run for president of the United States today on a platform of calling people back to God, back to Christ, back to the Bible, I’d be elected.” Republican conservatives have been banking on this ploy ever since.

Imagine a decade-earlier version of AMC’s Sixties advertising agency in Mad Men and one may better understand how corporate America began its drive toward oligarchy with the collusion of rightwing politicians. God got big in the 1950s. Government agencies initiated prayer services. In 1954 Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance, and that was the year “In God We Trust” got added to postage stamps. The next year the phrase was added to U.S. currency. And in 1956 it became the official national motto.

In the current national debate about the character of the United States—a debate that affects education, the arts, the sciences, politics, global affairs, and all the rest—it is useful to remember that the public “God,” like the notion of being a “Christian nation,” is a recent invention—at root merely a crass advertising ploy and propaganda with no actual foundation in faith.

This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Back When...

“Back when the United States was a democracy” is not a phrase that most Americans have ever hoped to use, but unfortunately the past thirty years has seen the United States slide down a slippery slope from democratic governance to corporate oligarchy. The oligarchs, both named (such as billionaires David and Charles Koch) and unnamed, have managed to create an America in which, like the old saw, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The wealth gap between rich and poor is now worse in the United States than in most of the developed world. A university study* this year concluded that government policies reflect the desires of the wealthy. The authors believe “that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

Who knew during the Red Scare of the 1950s McCarthy era that the Republican Party would become a far greater danger to American democracy than communism? But now that Republican politicians are openly bought and paid for by corporate oligarchs, the United States is well on its way to being merely a democracy by tradition but not in fact. “Conservative” is a meaningless term in that so-called conservatives actually conserve nothing but are bent on the destruction of democracy by every means, from blatant propaganda paraded as news to a mix of legislative action and strategic inaction (witness the current do-nothing 113th Congress on track to pass the fewest substantive pieces of legislation of any congressional session in the past half-century).

Education is a key tool by which radical rightwing, anti-democratic policies are promoted and set in place. The first major effort in this regard was to undermine public education. That effort can be pinpointed to 1983 and the Reagan era “big lie”: A Nation at Risk. In spite of decades-long debunking of this commissioned government report, the message that America’s public schools are failing has persisted, giving rise to successive, largely ill-conceived waves of school “reform.” The report was the opening salvo of what has become endless war, largely promulgated by radically “conservative” Republicans on public schools. Short of an absolute takeover, it has been sufficient merely to sow chaos, to keep schools, teachers, parents, and students off balance and having to respond to rolling assaults, such as every-changing standards and a seemingly endless barrage of mandated tests. All the while, public money for schools is being siphoned off to line corporate pockets, whether in the testing industry or the charter school industry.

Average citizens have been hoodwinked—intentionally set upon by unscrupulous pundits, politicians, and policy makers, all of whom are robbing them blind, literally, as well as robbing average Americans of a prosperous, forward-looking future in a truly democratic nation. While there is still time, though full recovery will take generations, it is essential for parents and educators to reclaim their schools and for American voters to reclaim their democracy—by whatever means necessary. Currently there is a groundswell of opposition to the vast testing movement that has undermined teaching, damaged students and teachers, and stolen public school funds for private gain. This resistance movement needs to be nurtured and to spread. It is a wakeup call that everyone who cherishes this country must hear.

*Gilens, M., and B.I. Page. (2014, April 9). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Pre-publication. Subsequently published in Perspectives on Politics 12(3): 564-581.

Palliative Security

The Bush Administration’s overreaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, continues to ripple across our increasingly violent and fearful society. The United States leads the world in gun ownership and gun violence. Powerful, largely rightwing forces within our society are determined to keep it that way. It should surprise no one that the election of a black, liberal President saw a corresponding rise in gun purchases.

Those who see gun ownership as a God-given—or at least Constitution-given—right dismiss the alarming statistics: more than 30,000 gun deaths a year (about three every hour), some 70,000-plus non-fatal gunshot wounds a year. They fail to see a problem in the fact that during the 20-year Vietnam War period, between 1955 and 1975, more than 58,000 U.S. service members were killed, slightly less than the number of U.S. civilian gun deaths in any two-year period.

In recent weeks I have visited a number of public schools in Indiana. Most, especially in the wake of the elementary school shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, are instituting new security measures, such as locked entrance doors with cameras. One school I visited had begun locking all interior doors: offices, classrooms, library, and so on. Observers, whether school staff or visitors, were issued a master key to allow them to enter classrooms without interrupting the lesson by knocking for admittance.

Children and educators increasingly work in prison-like conditions in many schools. Ironically, the security measures are largely palliative, designed to provide the illusion of safety rather than true security.

In that school with all the locked doors, every door featured a large glass window. The locked library was behind a wall of glass. The camera-equipped entrance doors to the school: all glass. Any would-be armed assailant determined to enter the school or any room within it could do so with relative ease. Such security measures affect only the law-abiding, not those with criminal intent.

I’m reminded of the wag who commented, “One guy in a plane tries to set his shoe on fire and now millions of passengers every day have to take off their shoes to get through airport security.”

This is not to minimize the devastation that one deranged gunman brought to a small community in Connecticut. But exceptionality should not be used as an excuse for universality. Teachers are routinely taught not to punish the entire class for the transgression of one or two students. Yielding to unreasonable fears and spending money that could be used for teaching and learning on unnecessary and ineffective security apparatus for schools is sad and worrying. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is piquant. Fear is seldom a motivator for good. Roosevelt was talking about the Great Depression, of course, not gun-toting killers. But the sentiment is transferable.

In the same inaugural address Roosevelt also, in the same context, said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” I would suggest that the dark realities of the present moment are not would-be assailants lurking near schools, ready to invade classrooms and gun down children and teachers. Such incidents are exceptions, dreadful, tragic exceptions. The dark realities are our unreasoning fears, which pierce the hearts and minds of parents, educators, and most damagingly, children.

Locked glass doors won’t keep out a determined killer but do send a dangerous and damaging message to children, namely that they live in an uncertain world, a world in which they need to be constantly afraid. What kind of educational message is that?