StickWithANose

Within the much heralded stimulus bill passed this year, Obama’s basketball buddy [aka. Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan was given what is, in effect, $5 billion dollars in bribe money to advance the corporate take-over of public schooling. The idea is that states willing to expand the number of charter schools are rewarded with “stimulus dollars.” With so many states suffering budgetary nightmares, Obama’s ode to the Disaster Capitalism model of education reform will surely pay off for the Business Rountable, but there is some twinkle of resistance on the horizon.

In Tennessee, the Democratic minority successfully defeated a bill in the House Education Committee this week to expand the number of charter schools in the state. The Tennessean responded on cue with the predictable headline:

Tennessee Schools Could Lose $100 Million

Tennessee could lose more than $100 million in stimulus money because of a failed legislative effort to allow more students to attend charter schools.

Democrats blocked a bill last week that would have made thousands of impoverished students in the state’s 11 largest school districts eligible to enroll in charter schools. Lawmakers said they felt the expansion was too much too soon.

But the Obama administration disagrees. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Thursday that Tennessee’s stance could jeopardize the state’s shot at millions of dollars set aside to encourage school innovation.

“We want to reward those states that are willing to lead the country where we need to go and are willing to push this reform agenda very, very hard,” Duncan told The Associated Press. “And the states that don’t have the stomach or the political will, unfortunately, they’re going to lose out.”

First off, Arne is quite fond of parroting his corporate masters with the “encourage school innovation” line, but there is no evidence that charter schools produce education innovation nor is there evidence that they raise average academic achievement. However, what is perhaps most distressing about our current state of affairs is the degree to which both political parties are succumbing to cognitive capture by the education lobby and the degree to which both parties utilize “crises” [whether they be the manufactured crises of NCLB or the very real budget crises states currently face] to ram through policies that undermine the very ideal of public education. As Jim Horn notes: The squeeze is on…

With the Feds now acting as front men for the Oligarchs (Gates, Broad, Waltons, etc.), the decision to be faced by state and local governments alone is simply this: to reenergize the public responsibility to offer humane public schools to all children or to turn the education of poor children over to corporate welfare schools that offer two tracks: test prep chain gangs or prison prep chain gangs.

I am not optimistic as to which path most states will take, but I am determined to do my part to try and slow down this train before it runs off the rails. To that end, I will begin a series in the next few weeks based on my newly minted dissertation that examines the efficacy of the market-based education reforms now en vogue. Keep an eye out!