Some Good Reads

America is on a downhill slide, with no end in sight.
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Public ed privatization is the latest scheme for those who want to turn public services into instruments for private gain.
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From last summer is this lengthy piece about neoliberalism and public education:

In the United States, the neoliberal restructuring of education is deeply racialized. It is centered particularly on urban African American, Latino, and other communities of color, where public schools, subject to being closed or privatized, are driven by a minimalist curriculum of preparing for standardized tests. The cultural politics of race is also central to constructing consent for this agenda. As Stephen Haymes argues, the “concepts ‘public’ and ‘private’ are racialized metaphors. Private is equated with being ‘good’ and ‘white’ and public with being ‘bad’ and ‘Black.’”9 Disinvesting in public schools, closing them, and opening privately operated charter schools in African-American and Latino communities is facilitated by a racist discourse that pathologizes these communities and their public institutions. But “failing” schools are the product of a legacy of educational, economic, and social inequities experienced by African Americans, Latinos/as, and Native Americans.10 Schools serving these communities continue to face deeply inequitable opportunities to learn, including unequal funding, curriculum, educational resources, facilities, and teacher experience. High stakes accountability has often compounded these inequities by narrowing the curriculum to test preparation—producing an exodus of some of the strongest teachers from schools in low-income communities of color.11

Neoliberalization of public education is also an ideological project, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, to “change the soul,” redefining the purpose of education and what it means to teach, learn, and participate in schooling. Tensions between democratic purposes of education and education to serve the needs of the workforce are longstanding. But in the neoliberal framework, teaching is driven by standardized tests and performance outcomes; principals are managers, and school superintendents are CEOs; and learning equals performance on the tests with teachers, students, and parents held responsible for “failure.” Education, which is properly seen as a public good, is being converted into a private good, an investment one makes in one’s child or oneself to “add value” in order better to compete in the labor market. It is no longer seen as part of the larger end of promoting individual and social development, but is merely the means to rise above others. Democratic participation in local schools is rearticulated to individual “empowerment” of education consumers—as parents compete for slots in an array of charter and specialty schools. In Chicago, twelve thousand parents and students attended the 2010 “High School Fair” sponsored by Chicago Public Schools, and six thousand attended the “New Schools Expo” of charter and school choice options. The political significance of this neoliberal shift stretches beyond schools to legitimize marketing the public sector, particularly in cities, and to infuse market ideologies into everyday life.