Good Morning 99%'ers. Today's Open Thread topic in another in the series on neo-liberalism. For those who may be interested in previous essays on this subject, here are the links to those essays.

Week 1 - The Curse of Neo-liberalism
Week 2 - Neo-liberalism Part 2
Week 3 - The Neo-liberal Myth of Meritocracy
Week 4 - Characteristics of Neo-liberalism
Week 5 - Neo-liberalism - Obama and the Clintons
Week 6 - Neo-liberalism - The Legacy of Bill Clinton
Week 7 - Neo-liberalism - Lack of Empathy
Week 8 - Overview of the Impacts of Privatization
Week 9 - The Rule of the Market
Week 10 - Effects of the Neo-liberal Push for Deregulation
Week 11- Cutting Expenditures for the Social Safety Net

In one of my first essays in this series on neo-liberalism, I referenced an excellent article titled What is Neoliberalism? This article was written by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia and published by Corp Watch. This article provided an excellent definition of neo-liberalism as well as a listing of the five characteristics of neo-liberalism. Among the five characteristics of neo-liberalism is the cutting of public expenditures for social services and reducing the safety net for the poor.

CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURES FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.

Today's essay will attempt to focus upon the neo-liberal goal of reducing the government's role in public education. This is a subject that I have been avoiding tackling because I am not sure I can do justice to it. I am not nor have ever been an educator, nor is any member of my family. So I hope those who have far more expertise in the educational system than I do will feel free to weigh in and expand upon this essay.

In researching the history of public education in the United States, I found this little nugget that points out how our educational system has been transformed from a system in which teaching children learning skills that they can use for the sake of learning more about the world around them and becoming creative, ciritical thinkers into training children for jobs determined to be necessary for the workforce. Prior to the adoption of this concept, children were taught a wide range of skills that they could apply across a large number of occupations without being specifically trained for specific work force demands. This allowed children to move up through the education system with more flexibility in future career choices or further educational pursuits. It also allowed children to develop their creativity and problem solving skills.

The new concept of education was based upon the idea of students developing what is known as 21st Century Skills. This represented a shift from developing creativity and critical thinking skills to promoting conformity and rote learning. The arts, music, humanities and similar subjects were cut from many school budgets as funding dollars became more scarce.

Beginning in the 1980s, government, educators, and major employers issued a series of reports identifying key skills and implementation strategies to steer students and workers towards meeting the demands of the changing and increasingly digital workplace and society. 21st century skills are a series of higher-order skills, abilities, and learning dispositions that have been identified as being required for success in 21st century society and workplaces by educators, business leaders, academics, and governmental agencies.

In 2010, author Gillian Russom wrote the following in the International Socialist Review regarding Obama's continuing the neo-liberal assault upon public education.

Education should be at the center of a national debate on social priorities, led by a president who promised “change.” Instead, the economic crisis is being used by the White House to dramatically accelerate a neoliberal agenda for education, going far beyond what George W. Bush’s administration was able to do with its No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy. With Arne Duncan, a political operative with no formal training in the field, as education secretary, the administration has aggressively promoted an education program with three principal elements: using test score data to evaluate teachers, shutting down and “reconstituting” schools deemed to be failing, and expanding privately-run, mostly non-union charter schools. Other elements include the standardization of curriculum and the lengthening of the school day. This agenda is supported by a nearly unified front of the powerful—Wall Street, Democrats and Republicans at all levels, and many non-profit organizations.

If we examine the highlighted portion of this excerpt, there are three main components to the Obama administration education plan. Let's examine each of these components and their effects in the real world.

1) An emphasis upon a standardized curriculum and testing, the results of which would be used to evaluate teachers and schools. The emphasis upon testing has become a very controversial topic with parents and teachers often on one side and legislators and private testing corporations on the other. A two year study of schools in big cities showed that the average student is subjected to an average of 112 standardized tests over the course of their school life through the twelfth grade. The time lost taking such tests ranged between 20 and 25 hours per year.

In Florida, standardized tests are used to assign a grade of A through F to schools within the public school system statewide. Those schools that score well are rewarded with additional state funding dollars. Since there is a high correlation between student performance on the tests and their family economic status, schools located in well to do areas get richer while poor schools are often deprived of additional resources necessary to catch up.

2) Closing of "failing" schools which were often located in poorer neighborhoods. According to a report, the most common reasons for closing "failing" public schools are these:

- Move to Smaller Charter Schools - Districts often choose to replace large public high schools that they have closed with small charter schools. The move is meant to benefit students because charter schools often achieve better results on measures of student achievement than large, traditional public schools.
- A Chance to Clear Out Underperforming Teachers - In New York City, the new replacement schools are only required to consider for employment 50 percent of the qualified teachers who lost their jobs in the old school’s closure. Thus, closing a school can be one way for a city to clear out teachers who are not producing adequate results in terms of student achievement.

3) Promotion of charter schools, most of which are privately run and staffed with non-union teachers. Charter schools have been promoted as a solution to all of the problems in education. But are they? Several studies have been done to try to compare the performance of charter schools versus public schools and overall the results are inconclusive.

Some charters do better; the majority do the same or worse. CREDO also moved beyond individual student performance to examine the overall performance of charter schools across multiple subject areas. They found that while some charter schools do better than the traditional public schools that fed them, the majority do the same or worse. Almost one-fifth of charters (17 percent) performed significantly better (at the 95 percent confidence level) than the traditional public school. However, an even larger group of charters (37 percent) performed significantly worse in terms of reading and math. The remainder (46 percent) did not do significantly better or worse.

And is it even about improving our education system at all or is it just another way for neo-liberalism to suck more money from the taxpayers?

Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public sector to capital accumulation. The roughly $2.5 trillion global market in education is a rich new arena for capital investment.5

In the United States, charter schools are a vehicle to commodify and marketize education. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated. They eliminate democratic governance, and, although they may be run by nonprofit community organizations or groups of teachers or parents, the market favors scaling up franchises of charter school management organizations or contracting out to for-profit education management organizations that get management fees to run schools and education programs.

Not one of these features of the Obama administration's Race to the Top education program takes in to consideration the needs of individual students. Instead, it sees education as a series of inputs and outputs which must be measured and tested. Commoditization of education devalues its role in humanizing our society which is brilliantly summarized in this essay titled The Destruction of Education. The author draws out a great analogy between the results of commoditization of our education system and the characteristics of corporate capitalism.

In short, when education is commoditised, it ceases to play the role of making students curious, or inquisitive or excited by the exposure to the grand world of ideas. It makes them look upon education as a capsule which they must imbibe so that they can command a better value on the job market. Commoditisation of education destroys creativity, originality, and any desire to go beyond the given, among the students. Since going beyond the given is the hallmark of creative thought, commoditisation of education destroys creative thought. And interestingly, such commoditiSation proceeds at a much faster pace, with far greater virulence in the so-called “newly-emerging” countries like India than even in the traditional bastions of capitalism, the metropolitan countries. This is partly because the former are characterised by a much more aggressive, socially climbing, and politically weighty urban middle class, and partly because, the slate being “cleaner” in the former, new “characters” can be written with much greater ease upon them.

The other implication of commoditisation of education is to make its products, the “educated”, into socially insensitive and completely self-absorbed entities, incapable of any sympathy for the toiling masses. This characteristic in fact comes particularly easily to the “educated” in a society like ours which has been marked by millennia of caste oppression and institutionalised inequality, and where looking upon the toiling masses as “inferior” is almost a habit acquired from birth.

Children and their teachers are simply cogs in a corporatized education system. A commoditized education system is not one that fosters lifelong love of learning nor a quest for great enlightenment.

Renowned educator, Diane Ravitch weighs in.

As we have seen again and again, the corporate education industry is eager to break into the U.S. public education and turn it into a free marketplace, where they can monetize the schools and be assured of government subsidization. On the whole, these privatized institutions do not produce higher test scores than regular public schools, except for those that cherrypick their students and exclude the neediest and lowest performing students. The promotion of privatization by philanthropies, by the U.S. Department of Education, by rightwing governors (and a few Democratic governors like Cuomo of New York and Malloy of Connecticut), by the hedge fund industry, and by a burgeoning education equity industry poses a danger to our democracy. In some communities, public schools verge on bankruptcy as charters drain their resources and their best students. Nationwide, charter schools have paved the way for vouchers by making “school choice” non-controversial

In 2012, the always quotable Henry Giroux wrote an op-ed in Truthout titled Can Democratic Education Survive in a Neoliberal Society? I have plucked just one powerful paragraph from Giroux's op-ed, but I highly recommend that everyone go to the link above and take the time to read it.

In this conservative right-wing reform culture, the role of public education, if we are to believe the Heritage Foundation and the likes of Bill Gates-type billionaires, is to produce students who laud conformity, believe job training is more important than education, and view public values as irrelevant. Students in this view are no longer educated for democratic citizenship. On the contrary, they are now being trained to fulfill the need for human capital. What is lost in this approach to schooling is what Noam Chomsky calls "creating creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring new horizons and forgetting external constraints." At the same time, public schools are under assault not because they are failing (though some are) but because they are one of the few public spheres left where people can learn the knowledge and skills necessary to allow them to think critically and hold power and authority accountable. Not only are the lines between the corporate world and public education blurring, but public schooling is being reduced to what Peter Seybold calls a "corporate service station," in which the democratic ideals at the heart of public education are now up for sale. At the heart of this crisis of education are larger questions about the formative culture necessary for a democracy to survive, the nature of civic education and teaching in dark times, the role of educators as civic intellectuals and what it means to understand the purpose and meaning of education as a site of individual and collective empowerment.

What I see from all of this is the same ideology that permeates all neo-liberal thinking. It is all about competition in the marketplace. Sadly, in the case of education, our children and their futures should not been treated as commodities.

The neo-liberal states, through the use of standards, assessments, and accountability, aims to restrict educators to particular kinds of thinking, thinking that conceptualizes education in terms of producing individuals who are economically productive. Education is no longer valued for its role in developing political, ethical, and aesthetic citizens. Instead, the goal has become promoting knowledge that contributes to economic productivity and producing students who are compliant and productive. Blackmore summarizes that "educational policy has shifted emphasis from input and process to outcomes, from the liberal to the vocational, from education's intrinsic to its instrumental value, and from qualitative to quantitative measures of success"

The idea that the marketplace staffed with de-skilled teachers teaching the test so that students become competitive little cogs increasing the output to score well is dehumanizing and fails to address the social growth that our schools have helped to provide for our children. It also fails to promote a vibrant, diverse, and individualized way of educating our children instead of just creating little bots tailored to fit into the labor market demands of the neo-liberal oligarchy. Our children are human beings and individuals, not commodities. And they deserve better.

As always, this is an Open Thread, so feel free to comment on whatever is on your mind today.