Democracy and Education in an Election Year

This is an election year, a crucial one for public education. Republican control of Congress and in many state legislatures has advanced a longstanding assault on democracy, only partially enacted—though devastatingly for our nation’s young people—through a comprehensive war on the public schools. The war began in the Reagan era of the 1980s and despite intervening Democratic administrations has continued largely without significant interruption to the present. The objectives of this war are privatization and corporatization of education, objectives that have nothing to do with the common good.

In their weakened state, in classrooms underfunded and overburdened, in an era when testing is valued more than teaching, the public schools will be hard pressed to teach children, and perhaps through them, their parents, about the electoral processes that are fundamental to life in a free society. Perhaps it is the pessimist in me, but I fear that teaching about American democracy may become history instead of current events unless public school educators take up this challenge. And the rest of us must support them, especially at the ballot box.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a revolutionary period in American history that saw major cultural strides in civil rights and public education. Those strides did not come easily, and the backlash was deadly. We remember the martyrs: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and many more. President Lyndon Johnson persevered, however, and oversaw two vital pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Both have been attacked over the decades, most vigorously in recent years. 

The Bush era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was a reauthorization of ESEA that perverted many of the positive intentions of the original act and promulgated the current era of test mania that is damaging learning for all children and undermining American democracy. The latest reauthorization, Obama's Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), offers little improvement over NCLB, because it is a watered-down piece of legislation passed by a largely do-nothing Republican Congress.

It is clear that the United States desperately needs a new revolution to move forward a progressive agenda on education and civil rights to counter decades of regression on these issues. Free and fair public education, the only sure guarantor of American democracy, is not a topic that springs to the lips of most candidates, whether at the presidential level or lesser offices, and that is unfortunate. But it is an issue embedded in the very ground of all of today’s candidates’ positions. The choice is clear: a hoped for return to social and cultural progress, a movement we envisioned sixty years ago and only partially realized, or a continuation of the current path toward final destruction of the American experiment in democracy.

It is possible that a populist revolution is brewing in this election year. As a child of the Sixties I can only hope that is the case. It will take nothing less to reclaim America for us, its people, and to save American democracy from the destructive corporatist forces led by the monied elites, who form a burgeoning and unwelcome aristocracy in this land of, admittedly fraught, equality.

Postscript: This is my final post on this blog. Many others write on similar topics with eloquence, and I have decided that I must devote my efforts to other matters at this point in my life. Readers may be interested in two other blogs that I will continue to write: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com/) and Living With...A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com/). During the writing of this blog I have appreciated the support and comments from readers both in the United States and abroad. For this I am truly grateful.

Robbing the Poor

Vouchers that send taxpayer money to private schools are a reverse Robin Hood: They rob the poor to benefit the rich. And most of us—the 99 percent—are, in these terms, among the poor.

Education savings accounts (ESAs) are sometimes termed “neovoucher” plans. ESAs, designed to bring Milton Friedman’s voucher concepts into the 21st century, are funded through donor tax credits. Arizona calls theirs Empowerment Savings Accounts, a play on the ESA initials. In The Way of the Future:Education Savings Accounts for Every American Family, Matthew Ladner lauds Arizona’s program. The book was published in September by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project of the National Education Policy Center by Charisse Gulosino of the University of Memphis and Jonah Liebert of Teachers College, Columbia University. The review was published today, October 23, 2012.

It is noteworthy that Ladner also is the co-author of the 17th ALEC Report Card on AmericanEducation, published this year with a foreword by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. ESAs come straight from the ALEC playbook. Here’s how Ladner parses the Arizona Education Savings Account Act in the ALEC report:

In 2006, Arizona’s then-Governor Janet Napolitano became the first Democratic governor to sign a new private choice program into existence. A coalition of groups opposed to private school choice, however, filed suit against the program. The Arizona Supreme Court ultimately ruled that a Blaine Amendment in the Arizona Constitution precluded the operation of a school voucher program. The ESA approach aims to allow parents to customize the education of their children, embracing customization over standardization while overcoming Blaine Amendments. (p. 9)

Gulosino and Liebert are not convinced that ESAs are all they’re cracked up to be, certainly not from a reading of Ladner’s The Way of the Future. These reviewers aver, “While the report claims a better education at lower cost, and a more equitable and democratic provision of education, no evidence is presented to support these claims. In fact, it is more likely that the implementation of ESAs would have exactly the opposite effects.”

With privatization of the public schools at stake, this conclusion is an understatement. Follow the links to the full documents referenced in this post. As ESAs spread, not only those who avail themselves of ESAs but all the rest of us—the demos—will find ourselves robbed of a democratic future in which public education is the tide that lifts all boats.