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The Corporate Dream: Teachers as Temps
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
As Democrats hustle to shovel a billion dollars into President Obama’s campaign coffers – making promises to rich people and their corporations every step of the way – America’s billionaires are spending even more money to seize control of the nation’s public schools. Although super-wealthy capitalists like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, fellow computer mogul Michael Dell, real estate magnate Eli Broad, and the rapacious owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton Family, would like people to think of them as philanthropists, they are nothing more than down-and-dirty investors who hope to reap much more than they sow. This mega-buck mafia's goal is to gain access to the $600 billion per year that taxpayers pump into public schools, and then to profit in perpetuity by shaping the nation’s educational system to their corporate needs. The corporate education project has nothing to do with growing new generations of smarter, socially aware, independent-thinking citizens, but is designed to raid public treasuries through wholesale contracting-out of public schooling.
Teachers are the biggest obstacle in the way of the corporate educational coup, which is why the billionaires, eagerly assisted by their servants in the Obama administration, have made demonization and eventual destruction of teachers unions their top priority. Corporations hate collective bargaining, or working people’s power of any kind, but their vision goes way beyond simply neutralizing teachers unions. The billionaires, and the politicians they have purchased, want nothing less than to destroy teaching as a profession. Plutocrats like Bill Gates and politicians like Barack Obama may make noises about respecting teachers' life-long commitment to learning, but their actions prove the opposite. At every opportunity, whenever a real or manufactured educational crisis presents itself, the corporate gang champions charter schools and imports platoons of young, mostly white, inexperienced rookies from programs like Teach for America. Most of these neophytes have no intention of making teaching a career, so they accept low wages, turnover is high, and they have no long term interest in any particular school, or school system, or the profession in general. They are temporary teachers – which is precisely the point.
Just as corporations have revamped the private white collar workforce, replacing full-time, salaried personnel with “temporary” workers – a system in which some managers are officially temps – such are the prospects for teachers in the brave new corporate world of education “reform.”
The billionaires' propaganda machinery claims the corporatization of American education is necessary to make the United States “competitive,” internationally. But teachers in most of the countries that lead the U.S. in learning are highly respected, if not revered, and relatively well compensated. Under the guise of “reform,” the United States is moving in exactly the opposite direction as the rest of the world. The American people are being conned by billionaire hustlers who are stealing the public schools – and the national future – right in front of our eyes.
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43 Comments so far
Show AllIf the corporate predators and parasites could find a way of offshoring teaching at slave wages, they would do it in a heartbeat.
The term "Brainwashing" comes to mind.
Your comment is not far from the true. Besty DeVos, sister of Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater/Xe is behind the full-court press for vouchers.
The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working With the Religious Right to Kill Public Education
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/150868/the_devos_family%3A_meet_the_super-wealthy_right-wingers_working_with_the_religious_right_to_kill_public_education/?page=entire
Already done, ED. It's called online teaching.
I think they are heading towards a system where more and more of the classes in public schools will be on-line, to minimize costs, though I suspect that the classes at the tippy top private schools where the children of the elite will be educated will continue to have teachers, and well-paid ones at that.
Hopefully more and more people will begin to realize that the perceived trend towards social progress over time is in large part an illusion. The so-called "progress" of centuries can be wiped out in a few years if the elites have accumulated the power to do so. The opportunities and quality of life of the common people can slip away at any moment that they lose the power and ability to pressure the elites in order to shape policy and events.
The cost savings of going to on-line education are illusional. The cost of the infrastructure is formidable, plus you need trained technicians to keep it working. And the cost of the infrastructure keeps increasing, as technology improves, and administrators fall in love with the latest "innovative" tools.
The quality provided by on-line courses varies, depending on the thought the course developers put into it. Simply "mapping" a traditional class setting onto on on-line setting does not work well. No one learns much because the atmosphere assocated with facing a teacher every day is not there.
In the end, the total cost of on-line education is greater than putting a teacher in the room with a bunch of kids. Of course, if you are mesmerized by technology and by testing knowledge using standardized tests, you don't really care about what is learned; you just think about test scores and so-called "value-added" factors.
They already do some classes on-line at my son's public high school, and those classes are clearly inferior to classes where teachers are present. I cannot understand why they would do that unless the school district is saving money as it appears to be in response to budget cuts. And that works great for the plutocrats, as they would probably prefer that the level of education provided to the kids in public schools is significantly below that which their children are receiving in elite private schools.
The costs to the teacher and to the student are more. To the teacher because she or he (i.e. me) goes through a huge amount of work (we are not just assigning a few books and so forth, we are writing and illustrating the book and much more) - if I am putting together the class. That doesn't mean they will pay me more. Not as an adjunct, for darn sure (part time, supposedly). They still charge the student the same or more for the "enhanced" online opportunity.
But there is a worse one coming to all districts and already being used by a number of online universities - the idea of courses as pre-packaged commodities and teachers, in effect, as nothing more than class monitors and graders. But the teachers still have to go through the qualifying because that affects the school's accreditation.
Online is not just a replacement for "correspondence" courses (remember those). Online is a way to turn all teachers into cheaply paid replaceable widgets whose product is sold as enhanced and therefore more expensive, even without comparable overhead for room rental, etcetera.
I'd like to know where you got the information that on-line learning is more expensive than on-site (you know, in a room with a teacher present).
My experience teaching partially on-line classes (termed hybrids) at a community college was a disaster. The system used is called Blackboard, and it is highly unreliable. The trained technicians needed to keep it working were conspicuously absent, and it was my responsibility to try to work out the technical glitches. I can't tell you how many students I've had who were retaking the course after flunking a Blackboard version because their instructors didn't believe them when they said they did, indeed, post their papers. That meant they had to pay out again for the class. Some lose their funding for poor grades.
As on-line teaching progresses, you can bet that more and more teaching will disappear altogether (with programs automatically processing grades), and for those courses that require human graders, as in English, the graders will be stationed in India.
Nonetheless, students will take Blackboard classes, they tell me, if it's a required class they don't care about.
BIFF AND BUFFY HATE SITTING WITH THOSE SMELLY MIDDLE CLASS KIDS.
Biff, Buffy, their parents, their "class" in its entirety have to be eliminated. Until this realization sinks in, we continue down the present path. PERIOD.
Slimshady, when you say that an entire class has to be "eliminated" I hear darkness. I take a backseat to no one in advocating for social & economic justice, but we don't need to become murdering Bolsheviks... just give the actual malefactors of great wealth a fair trial before handing down long prison terms...
The rich have figured out that they don't need most of the poor and working class to maintain their lifestyles. With almost 7 billion people in the world, the rich know they only have to exploit a small percentage to do well. In other words, rich people don't care if poor Americans learn to read or write or gain any skills, or whether they live or die. They have private prisons for those who can't make it on their own.
The same people that don't care if the poor live or die, want the poor to keep multiplying to keep their supply of slaves fresh. The rich have their lackeys strip funds from Planned Parenthood and other organizations.
Teaching is tough under the best of circumstances, but if you could see what a substitute teacher is up against you would not want your child in that class.
You mentioned that public schools are 'miniature prisons." One only has to look at the exteriors of the schools constructed during the past 40 years or so to come to that conclusion. The windowless buildings with secured entrances and fenced perimeters can lead a casual observer to think these facilities ARE prisons.
In most cities around the nation the schools that were built in the early to mid 20th century generally had beautiful architectural features that celebrated learning. During the final half of the 20th century under the guise of cost control the schools morphed into their prison-like architecture as a way to condition children to the authoritarian government that wants conformity and fear to be the result of "education" in Amerika.
Education can be quality, whether on-line or face to face. What it takes is resources. As long as our country continues to support war rather than educational and social development domestically, our schools are not the only institutions doomed to fail.
Resources are the sine qua non.
In Ontario Canada, teachers only work at private schools because they couldn't get a job in the public (or Catholic School Board) system. With a tenured K-12 teacher in Ontario, you can earn $93,00 a year ($95,000 USD) with excellent benefits, paid vacation, strong union and respectful management.
In Norway K-12 students have a maximum classroom size of ten students to a class.
In many countries around the world post secondary education is free.
As an American who can teach in any school in the U.S., I have yet to find a school with an attractive salary, benefits, security and environment.
Mmm, that $93,000/yr may be a little high - it appears only after 11 years of steady work and probably with the addition of a headship or assistant headship. Ontario teachers are still doing better than US teachers, that's for sure. When I retired in 2001, with A1 qualifications and 35 years experience, I was earning a bit over $70,000/yr. The benefits and security were also excellent.
Friends of mine, who are similarly qualified, but with slightly less experience, tried to work as teachers in the US. They got stuck in a charter school of some kind, being paid less than half of what they woud have had in Canada, and with limited but overpriced medical coverage and no security. They taught in one of those schools for the underprivileged, that then farmed the kids out to "work off" their education costs in some corporate institution. An unbelievably corrupt setup.
You can't build a properly functioning society on temp and freelance labour, nevermind unpaid internships. Ridiculous.
My friends are back in Canada - nice to have a choice, eh.
There might be some advantages to online classes at the college level but not in the k-12 curriculum. Young people need the contact and interaction with live teachers making an adequate salary and with job security so they impart positive ideas to our youth .
The corporate dream, it seems to me, after being in the classroom for 50 years, is not education as much as it is training brains and bodies for use in their industries. This training is done at taxpayers expense and the corporations don't even pay their fair share of taxes. Parents and administrators are so caught up in the concept of "carreers and jobs" that they have let real education fall by the wayside. The politicians have foolishly spent money that we could be using to educate our upcoming generations on things such as armament and fighting pointless wars to save us from "terrorism" which kills less Americans than our own cars or lack of an adequate health system.
Since our political prostitute's campaigns are mostly financed by corporate dollars, they reinforce this practrice. They don't want well educated people who ask questions and think about their situation. They want worker drones who will do the corporate jobs and bidding at minimum exspense and bother. They will have an abundant supply of these worker drones because of their need to repay huge college loans and the high rate of unemployment that these very same entities have allowed to occur by their inaction and wrong actions in seemingly attempting to get the problem under control. Most of the individuals who are charged with fixing the system are the very ones who created the problem.
AH SHAP: I agree with so much of your post. What it brought to mind for me were the writings from Edgar Cayce as related to Atlantis. According to Cayce, the elites of that time, having broken the genetic codes, wanted to engineer a work force that owned brute strength, but lacked the intelligence to question its "masters." In a sense, when White Europeans began to exploit the Black race duirng the phase of slavery, it was a modern take (minus the genetics) on a very old theme.
In any case, while they haven't mastered the genetics part entirely yet (although what Monsanto is doing, in the way of sterilizing plants by making seeds sterile through its diabolical miscegenation of the plant kingdom, nearly qualifies), they are certainly working their muscle on modifying minds to succumb to authority... it produces the same net effect: a work force that cannot question its "masters."
Yesterday when I opened AOL (or Yahoo, I forget which) there was a headline taken from the Wall Street Journal that read something along the lines of: it pays to spy on your neighbor. I kid you not. It made me realize that if times get desperate enough, and people left hungry, they will more readily play the role of snitch (on their neighbors), in order to be rewarded for nosing around. If one looks hard enough, they're sure to drag up something "worthy" of reporting. So here's the WSJ doing its part to normalize this latest bit of savagery. It might be called Stasi in another land, but it's called "Freedom" here!
SAD SAD SAD times...
Funny. They didn't teach about Atlantis as if it was real at the schools I went too.
They didn't teach it at all.
But then again , my professors used sources other than psychics for course content.
iow, keep your factoids and new age woo out of rational discussions.
Just because your field of education is narrow hardly means others should join you. You are one of the most mean-spirited posters on this site. You aim for the jugular, and have ZERO spiritual consciousness. It may soothe your ego to think you know a thing or two, but as one respected in my field, little girl, and I can sense a twisted sister when I encounter one. Your need to strike out at me, again and again, suggests your war against your higher self. Oh, and in the twist category, you definitely qualify. It's strange how threatened some people are with things they don't understand, and have never bothered to study. Stranger still, how for all their talk about freedom, they would like to forcibly shut up those of us who see further than they do. Kind of like the mentality that murdered alleged heretics centuries ago. You may call me the superstitious one, but you're the one with the need to repeatedly throw poison darts.
I pity people like you.
In case Glen is busy...Arne Duncan. You are the most disingenuous commenter I have ever seen.
Good question, Mark. The teacher's unions will almost certainly endorse the reelection of Barack Obama: who, nonetheless is, without question, out to destroy them. But all that proves is that the American political system is absolutely illegitimate and unrepresentative.
Such are the choices "lesser-evilism" leaves one, if one chooses to continue to participate in the charade. It only gets worse.
Merkans were taught to love Bill Gates. Antitrust lawsuit bounced off them. They still think philanthropy is great. Though in the past two years progressive writers have started to call a spade a spade regarding philanthropists, before that they too supported philanthropy with their choice to refrain from identifying it for what it is. Things are getting better in terms of progressive voices resonating better with reality today than yesterday but it should have happened decades sooner. Shall we excuse them? I think not. The far left is our destiny, so please don't be late arriving.
in massachusetts the increase in healthcare costs for school budgets from 2000 to 2007 grew by $1 billion while state aid for schools grew by only $700 million
-reported in boston globe dec 9 2010
"Health costs sap state aid for schools"
Before I read any comments, I just wish to applaud Mr. Ford. This is one of the most concise, in your face, truthful analyses of the motives behind alleged school reform (added to the demonization of teachers via the illusory grading/accounting system) that I've ever read.
Thank you for not entertaining any bull-shit, and telling it like it is! You are a credit to the cause of not corrupting young minds, or endorsing they're being lined up like so many products on so many uniform assembly lines. What is being done to children, citizens, nature, the economy, and efforts towards genuine ecological sustainability is criminal.
So long as the corporations own the judges, the media, and the politicians, the true state of 95% of policies being instituted (or yet on the drawing board) is anathema to life, public health, and most people's pursuit of happiness, as well as constitutionally-granted liberties.
The corporate rulers want to privatize schools with a voucher system so children can be brainwashed by Catholic school teachers to believe that contraception and abortion are intrinsically evil. This will keep women in their place and overpopulate the nation like the third world nations under Catholic influence. Citizens will be begging for jobs even slave wage jobs or joining the military service.
Turning over our schools to charters or letting private management firms is even worse than most people think. The major problem isn't one of substandard education, nor is it the busting of teachers unions - although both are huge problems.
The biggest problem is that the public tax money to fund these schools is FIRST handed over to the non public entity - either a for-profit company or even a non-profit organization - BEFORE it finds its way to the school.
What this really means is that from that point on, EVERYTHING that this money purchases - equipment, textbooks, audiovisual aids, sports equipment, etc. becomes the property of the organization running the school and NOT the public. In the eyes of the law, and supported by several lawsuits, from the moment money is given to the management company it becomes theirs and anything the buy with it becomes theirs.
Image after a year or two when a local school board gets fed up with a company's mismanagement or poor student performance and they discover that now they also have to buy all new equipment and supplies because the school district doesn't own these things anymore.
We aren't just turning over the education of our children to profiteers or people with a political agenda, were PERMANENTLY handing over our public schools physical infrastructure. Remember, the true infrastructure of a school isn't its buildings - its the teaching and support staff and all the equipment and materials that support student education.
Both of which get dismantled by this outsourcing movement. Teaching and support staff due to lowering qualifications, salaries, and job security. Teaching materials and equipment by no longer directly purchasing it through public agencies.
From a Propublica article on private management of public schools.
(This in Ohio)
"We give the management company 96 percent of the revenues from the state, and they do not have a transparent means for us to see what’s happening with the money,”
(And this in Florida)
"The schools counter-sued, arguing that Leona “failed or refused” to produce a range of documents, including staff and teacher contracts, and bank account statements. Leona ignored requests to return their property, including “the master key for the school facilities and all electronic and hard-copy school records and documentation,” according to the schools’ complaint."
http://www.propublica.org/topic/for-profit-schools/
Probublica has an entire section devoted to this topic consisting of 15 articles although most are on for profit colleges. You can find it by clicking the "Our investigations" tab at the top of their home page or following the following the link I provided as all the stories are listed at the end of the article.
While legal, what we're doing to our public school systems is patently criminal. A crime against our children and grandchildren. One perpetrated by exploiting parents' justified concerns over the substandard public schools system. A problem created by our failure to actually FUND our public school system.
For more on the corporate agenda for education from a high-minded left perspective, check out the second half of this Saturday's "Behind the News" program on KPFA. Doug Henwood's radio show, covering economics, politics, and beyond, is surely one of the most intelligent hours available on the air anywhere. Doug is based in NYC, but was on the west coast this past week doing a media fellowship at the right-wing Hoover Institute. He interviews one of its denizens, essentially a professional promoter of corporatized education, and it's a thoroughly frightening (as well as, thanks to Doug, enlightening) half hour. Enjoy.
Thanks for the tip. I went and listened. The first interview on current issues in Russia was also very interesting
Seems like everyone has forgotten the Doha Round of the WTO - the one that includes globalization of services! What services can be globalized better than your local school teachers? That round was almost dead but has been resuscitated and may live to walk again like the zombi that it is. I am surprised that Glen didn't mention it. It's all connected and we need to remember that.
I always try to remember that it is a 'natural' conspiracy... there are no Boards sitting around thinking 'how do we turn these kids into robots?"'. Standardized testing and other similar tools make evelauation easier (quatitative is much more straightforward to manage than qualitative) and all those companies, following current corporate models, are all looking for a piece of the pie- think of everything bought and sold in and for schools. Saying 'billionares' is convienient, but the players are much more diverse.
There are also other kinds of charter schools being lumped in here that should be excepted- these are charter schools performing as they were originally intended- as test labs for new teaching and administration methods, then implementing success into the broader school systems. Not all charter schools are bad. Privatizing public schools is.
Online education is very vauable- but alas most schools and teachers are short-sighted. The key is collaboration and decentralization. You do not need your kids to all be in a room, at a specific time, to do projects. Most of the teaching and learning can now break free of the current industrial model. Studies can be relative- meaning that you don't have to follow 6 course curriculums in such a specific order, but can jump around all curriculum in a path that fits each student. And you are not contrained by time or location. We now can manage education completely differently.
It really is exciting, and I could go on and on, but what I see probably happening is that the education people won't get it (or won't change- teachers seem to be the hardest to teach) and the only people who get anything are the business people, and the idea will happen where you can give the same lecture now to not 30 students but 30,000 or whatever, so you will only need 1 teacher 1000 class room babysitter, um monitors. If all we are doing is teaching to the test, then this is the most cost-efficient way. (and despicable, imo)
There are many new educational models and theories out there. And many billionares help fund them because it makes them look better. I disagree that they are trying to make their own school system by privatizing public schools. I lean more towards Republicans trying to get reelected by destroying the main (non-corporate) contributors to their competition, and Democrats trying to get reelected by not offending their anti-union corporate funders. I believe it is important to seperate the election and corporate goals.
Now one of the best available options we have going for us is to convice Gates et al (and they are already convinced) that really educated (not test educated) are better for their bottom line (though I would like to see a study of how much it costs to bring in a foreigner with a quality education vs. the tax cost of a domestic with a comparable quality education) (i would also like to see something impressive that doesn't use money as an evaluation.)
I am a Teacher in Texas. I teach in the public school system. I do not know why but the kids have drank the corporate Cool-aid. I tried to teach the students to have an open mind with the classical method for distilling the truth and I received decent from parents and students screaming "This is not us." "This is not what we learn in church." "This is for the rich kids not us." "we want to watch cartoons not the news.". Parents must reshape their personal image of their children away from fitting in to being outstanding. A teacher can change many of the students, but asking them to change the overwhelming majority without parent support is too daunting a task to expect of a teacher.