Teachers for the Los Angeles Unified School System are on
strike. They were offered a paltry cost of living increase, and that was
annoying, but that’s only a small part of the reasons for the strike.
Teachers are standing up for the general disintegration of
the entire primary and secondary education system that they are part of. Class
sizes are way out of hand, with over forty students being the norm; individual
schools do not have a nurse on the premises, they must share one school nurse
among many schools; the same is true for school psychologists, share one among
a group of schools; taxpayer money is being diverted to private “charter”
schools, which lowers the already diminishing budgets for the existing public
schools. The teachers have ringside seats for all of these shocking
developments, and they have decided to stand up and be counted. They deserve
all of our support in this effort.
Charter Schools
Charter schools have only been around for twenty-five
years or so. The idea is to publicly fund a local school that is then given
broad latitude to run its own affairs. The hope is that such schools will thus
be free to innovate new and more efficient methods of educating students. There
will be no tuition charged, because the schools are publicly funded. This is
the idea as it is described in the sales literature anyway.
In reality, charter schools are most often associated
with large education corporations. They are run as profit centers, whether the corporations are nominally for profit or non-profit. They receive
money from the state based upon the number of students, and they economize by
leasing space in government buildings and hiring non-union teachers at lower
than union wages. There are numerous real estate opportunities for the corporations to profit. The salaries of the executives at the school and the
corporate levels can be shockingly large.
Charter schools are expected to justify their existence
by achieving better educational results than the local public schools. The
fiction is that all students in the district have the freedom to choose which
school to attend, but this is not quite true. Usually, the charter schools
enhance their achievement statistics by cherry picking the better students from
the district and washing out low-performing students, sending them back to the
public schools.
Charter schools are a barely disguised excuse to move tax-payer money to private corporations and rich individuals. This is all part of an effort to degrade the American public education system that started way back in the late 1960s.
President Richard Nixon
Ah, the 1960s! The cars were fast, the girls were pretty,
the music was terrific, and love was all around! Right? The actual 1960s were a
lot more complicated than that.
The civil rights movement had been percolating since the
late 1940s, but it didn’t really fill up its sails with wind until the early
1960s. For the record, this was a long overdue good thing, and it should have
been obvious to all of us white devils that our patient and longsuffering black
brothers and sisters had every right, legally, morally, in every conceivable
way, to receive the full value of their rights and privileges as full blooded,
natural born American citizens. A lot of the white devils didn’t see it quite
that way.
Those diametrically opposed to giving black Americans any
kind of break at all included, but were not limited to, self-identified
conservatives, Republicans in general, Richard M. Nixon in particular, most
Democrats, most self-identified liberals, and most of the average white devils
in the street.
Political dissent in the form of protests against the
Vietnam War had also reached critical levels as seen by Nixon and pretty much
all of the above list of anti-black running dogs. Nixon and his gang of criminal
associates came up with several very effective ways of isolating blacks and
dissidents and neutralizing them as threats to the status quo. It all worked
out well for the Nixon Gang.
The idea was to identify the undesired groups and
demonize them; break up their power centers and get as many of them off the
streets as possible; and render both groups incapable of organizing any trouble
in the future. It was all surprisingly simple.
Blacks were identified with heroin, and hippies were identified
with marijuana. All college students and
dissidents were identified as hippies. It was shouted from all of the rooftops
that both substances were rampant in America and would destroy the entire
country if allowed. Drugs, a vast laundry list of drugs, were criminalized to a
degree that had never been seen before. After 1970, drug laws all over the
country were made exponentially more severe. Punishments were like from outer
space, they were numbers of years that exceeded sentences for violent crimes.
One joint could get a college student seven years; ten grams of weed (one third
of one ounce) became possession with intent to distribute, carrying a sentence
of twenty years. Things like that. It was even worse for heroin. This was the
beginning of the mass-incarceration that has by now made America the most
imprisoned nation in the history of the world.
Yes, we have Tricky Dick to thank for all of that.
The Destruction of Education
It was decided by Nixon and the rest of the
aforementioned idiots that education was primarily to blame for political dissent
and anti-war protests. They became convinced that all of those hippies and
draft dodgers had been radicalized by commie professors on various university
campuses. So higher education itself became the enemy of the state.
This started a process where there have been fewer and
fewer tenured professors and more and more gig-economy lecturers. Obtaining a
university education has become more and more difficult for children of parents
of limited means. Laws have been passed at all levels to make it harder for young
Americans to get a good education. (Bankruptcy laws, and others.)
By now, access to a quality university education is a
lost dream for a wide demographic of American students, and for many of those
to make it through on borrowed funds the future is a dark vision of debt-slavery.
What about primary and secondary education? They were
gradually drawn into what became a war on education in general.
First came the standardized tests. As part of the anti-union
fever of the Reagan years, it was suggested that virtually all schools and all
teachers were underperforming. This was blamed on teachers’ unions. The
solution offered was the implementation of a battery of standardized tests to
measure the performance of one school against other schools, and one teacher
against all other teachers. Money would be taken from “underperforming schools,”
and diverted to “high-performing schools.” Quite intentionally, the
underperforming schools were populated by minority children for whom English
was often a second language that had not yet been mastered. Also intentionally,
the high-performing schools were in prosperous white neighborhoods. Permission
was sought to fire the union teachers struggling in already financially
stressed underperforming schools.
Then came the charter schools, further enhancing the
education of students from prosperous, white backgrounds and further degrading
the education of students that may be from various minority or troubled
backgrounds. The charter schools also divert huge sums of money to executives
who may not even be education professionals and corporations and their
shareholders. They also add to the creation of a larger class of non-union
teachers, weakening the solidarity of teachers and reducing the power of
teachers’ unions.
Our Allies in Los Angeles
This is the battle that the L.A.U.S.D. teachers are
fighting. They are fighting it for all of us. They are struggling on behalf of
the entire education system at the primary and secondary levels in every one of
the United States.
Keep the money in the public schools; charter schools are
tools of the devil; keep class sizes manageable, so that teachers can do their
jobs properly and students don’t get lost in the fog towards the back of the
room; put a nurse in every school. (I’ll let greater minds than mine grapple
with the question of the need for school psychologists.) Listen to the
teachers! They are professionals, and they are closer than anyone else to the
problems.
Don’t listen to weird dilatants like Betsy DeVos or Bill
Gates, who have agendas that vary from religious theocracy to unfathomable
evil. There are many people involved in these discussions that believe that the
population of America has gotten so large that it would be best to maintain a
considerable portion of it in ignorance. Three hundred and thirty million people,
and there are those whose boots shake at the idea of that many well informed
voters.
It is worth remembering that the main purpose of the
public school system from its inception through the middle of the 20th
Century was to take an extremely diverse student body and homogenize them into
typical American citizens. The curriculum was standardized over the length and
breadth of this country to turn students from every cultural background into
American citizens who spoke the same cultural language and were prepared to
work, and if necessary, fight, together for common cause.
Put me on record as believing that that public school system
was a good idea.
P.S. I’m a union backer, too.
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