PUBLIC EDUCATION v. STATE
INDOCTRINATION IN CHICAGO
September 11, 2012
The
political fates are with us. At the very
moment that Chicago’s son is scrambling to hold onto his presidency by holding
onto labor support, his former chief of staff and now Chicago mayor is trying
to continue the process begun by a Democratic mayor’s appointee to be “CEO” of
the Chicago school board—who as CEO was appointed to become US Secretary of
Education, where the Chicago school privatization initiative has become the
“Rise to the Top” standard for federal funding of public education including
“public” charter schools…standards for hiring and firing public school teachers
and for replacing “failing” neighborhood public schools with publicly funded
private (generally for-profit) “magnet” schools for “gifted” children.
Got it?
Chicago happens to be the
third-largest school district in the country.
It is reported that the Chicago public teachers’ strike against state
imposition of these educational standards reflects mounting resistance by
public school teachers and parents to having these standards imposed upon them.
“Rise to the Top” is essentially an
outgrowth of federal policy that President Clinton brought to the White House
in 1993 (for this history in a government report, see
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/edpolicy/research/res_essay_clinton_goals2000.shtml),
The heart of the policy is to set nationally
comparable statewide student test performance standards for teacher hiring,
firing and pay, and which public schools that “fail” can be replaced by charter
schools as they are in Chicago.
And the
standards for determining satisfactory performance at “grade level” (now
beginning in Ohio at the 3
rd grade) are heavily based on textbooks
whose content in turn is heavily determined by the Texas school board’s
decision as to what schoolchildren will be required to be studied and learned
across that state.
By now, all states
but one or two accept substantial federal funds for education by promising to
base student, teacher and school “merit” on getting the right answers on state “high
stakes” tests.
One Chicago chemistry
teacher told Amy Goodman yesterday on Democracy Now that his schedule requires
him to give his students 5 tests over the course of the semester, in part to as
a base for retesting in the spring to see how much better they score after
taking his class.
Never mind that
teachers across the country keep doing stuff like expelling, suspending or “withdrawing”
kids before test day or changing answers afterwards.
The fact remains that successful schools,
teachers and students will sit in their seats and do their homework exercises
to figure out the right answers on the next test, from where they can master
getting the next test right… The more “grit” students and teachers show in
doing the hard work of preparing to be tested takes precedence over curiosity
and diversion from the 3 Rs.
Our habit
of equating education with learning what you are told to know when you are told
to learn it is ageless, but when it becomes a matter of repeating back what you
are told to know and do when you are told to do so throughout the country, that
literally amounts to state socialism, where to paraphrase Mussolini, citizens
learn to make the trains run on time, especially when it goes hand in hand with
the pledge of allegiance.
I used to lead
off my “alternative social control systems” class by telling students that
while I didn’t know them yet, I presumed that they were victims of their formal
education, where they had been taught that outside of what they were taught,
they were left “only” with their “feelings and opinions”—that in this criminal
justice class I considered them victims of their educational systems.
And that I hoped that if they did not already
do so, their own feelings and opinions WOULD matter to them by the end of the
semester, which to me is the foundation of real “democracy.”
In a larger sense, I keep finding myself
saying in professional life, “If you think I’m an expert who knows more than
you do, how come you don’t agree with me?” or “How come you don’t believe me
when I say I don’t know more than you?”
And among senior colleagues until I got promoted, as one put it to me, I
like them had no business teaching a class unless I knew what students needed
to know.
Regardless of substance,
top-down imposition of “knowledge” feeds habits of social passivity and
obedience, where questioning authority is a luxury there isn’t even time for.
Such an order is the hallmark of every
militarized order.
I join their community supporters
and defenders in thanking the schoolteachers of Chicago in dedication to giving
our children the means and will to learn in their own right, in their own
sequences, at their own pace, what empowers and enriches their own unique
lives, and in turn is passed on, in an atmosphere where above all, education
replaces indoctrination and the political clichés that go with it. Love and peace--hal
