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The National – 7 January 2014

John Kerry spent last week testing the waters with the Israelis and the Palestinians over his so-called framework agreement – designed to close the gaps between the two sides. But the issues he is trying to resolve appear more intractable by the day.

As he headed to the region, Israel’s hawkish cabinet ministers gave their blessing to legislation to annex the Jordan Valley, a large swathe of the West Bank that might otherwise be the Palestinian state’s economic backbone and its sole door to the outside world. On Sunday, as Mr Kerry left, the defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, argued that peace was impossible as long as the Palestinians and their schoolbooks “incited” against Israel, even quoting from a government-compiled “Palestinian incitement index”.

The hyperbole overshadowed two Israeli surveys that might one day provide a yardstick by which to judge an equivalent “Israeli incitement index”.

An opinion poll revealed that nearly two-thirds of Israeli Jews believe the conflict’s Palestinian narrative – including the nakba, the great dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 to create Israel – should be taught in schools.

This flies in the face of Mr Netanyahu’s own view. His government passed a law in 2011 banning public institutions from giving a platform to such commemorations.

The other study demonstrated that when Jewish students are exposed to spoken Arabic at an early age, between 10 and 12, they hold far less hostile and stereotypical views of Arabs. Currently, many Jewish students never learn Arabic.

With the experimental programme employing teachers from Israel’s large Palestinian minority, the study noted that for most of the Jewish children it was the first time they had developed a close relationship with an Arab.

The education ministry, however, was reported to have waved aside the findings and is apparently failing to fund the existing, small programme, let alone expand it.

This is no oversight. Successive Israeli governments have carefully engineered the structure of Israeli society to ensure that Jewish and Palestinian citizens are kept in separate linguistic, cultural, educational and emotional worlds.

The reasoning is not hard to discern. The last thing Israeli leaders want is for Jewish and Palestinian citizens to develop shared interests, forge friendships and act in solidarity. That would start to erode the rationale for a Jewish state, especially one premised on the supposed need of the Jews to defend themselves from a hostile world – Israel’s self-image as “the villa in the jungle”.

In short, a Jewish state’s future precisely depends on the anti-Arab stereotypes inculcated in young Israeli minds.

It may not therefore be coincidental that, as Israel has faced increasing pressure over the past 20 years to make peace, the separation of Jews from Palestinians has entrenched.

Today, most Israeli Jews rarely meet a Palestinian, and especially not one from the West Bank or Gaza. It is easy to forget that before the 1993 Oslo accords, many Israeli Jews regularly ventured into Palestinian areas, to shop, eat and fix their cars. Palestinians, meanwhile, were evident in Israeli communities, even if only as builders or waiters. It may have been a very unequal, even colonial, encounter but it made it hard for Israelis to demonise their neighbours.

Such contacts are now a distant memory. And that is precisely how leaders like Mr Netanyahu want to keep it.

Inside Israel, the direction of policy is the same. In recent weeks, the government has insisted on raising the electoral threshold in a barely concealed effort to rid the parliament of Arab parties. Legislation is also being revived to tax into oblivion human rights organisations, those that give a voice to Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

At the weekend, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, argued that a peace agreement must include disappearing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian citizens by transferring their homes to a future, but very circumscribed Palestinian state.

Palestinian legislator Ahmed Tibi’s complaint that Palestinian citizens were viewed by Israel’s leaders as nothing more than “chess pieces” goes to the heart of the matter. It is easy to dehumanise those you know and care little about.

Israel’s separation policy – and its security justifications – requires not only that Jews and Palestinians be kept apart, but that Palestinians be confined to a series of ghettos, whether in the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza or Israel.

These divisions are the cause of endless suffering. A recent study of Gaza, the most isolated of these ghettos, found that a third of Palestinians there were physically separated from a close relative. Israeli-imposed restrictions force Palestinians to forgo marriages, learn of relatives’ deaths from afar, miss college courses, and lose the chance for medical treatment.

The prioritising of Israelis’ security over Palestinians’ freedom was a central weakness of the Oslo process, and the same skewed agenda pollutes the current peace talks.

In a commentary for the Haaretz newspaper last week, Gadi Shamni, a leading general, set out at length the many military reasons – quite apart from political ones – why Israel could never risk allowing the Palestinians a viable state. On the army’s best assessments, he argued, Israel would need to control such a state’s borders and much of its territory, including the Jordan Valley, for a period ranging “from 40 years to forever”.

The reality is that no arrangement on earth can guarantee protection for those in the villa from the beasts lurking outside. Either it is time to abandon the villa, or to start seeing the jungle as a forest to be explored.

Tagged as: anti-democratic, education, Jewish state

Students clash with riot police during a protest to demand Chilean President Sebastian Pinera's government to improve the public education quality, in Santiago, on October 17, 2013. (Photo: AFP Photo/Hector Retamal)More than 50,000 students, unionized teachers, and social activists took to the streets in Santiago, Chile on Thursday to demand dramatic reforms to the nation's education system ahead of next month's presidential elections.

The education reform movement, which demands the return of public control over schools and universities and 'free education,' has been an increasingly important voice in Chilean politics in recent years with large street protests and organized opposition to the ruling conservative government of President Sebastián Piñera.

On Thursday, according to the Santiago Times, the student-led protests came out in force in order to "send a message to the next government" and promised that their revolt would continue until their demands are answered with real policy changes.

“There is no way this social outcry will stop next year,” Moisés Paredes, spokesman for the highschool student association Cones, said.

“The message we want to send to the next government is that it can’t pretend there won’t be demonstrations next year, that this is all settled, that everything can be resolved with discussions of their education programs,” Paredes told The Santiago Times. “On the contrary, it is crucial to understand that next year the movement will be more present than ever.”

The Santiago Times continued:

Education has been central to presidential debates, a state-of-affairs student leaders credit to the success of the movement in forcing a debate on the current system.

While the students’ calls for free education and an end to profit-making have been ignored by the governing right-leaning Alianza coalition, the majority of the nine presidential candidates are in favor of overhauling the current education system to varying degrees.

And Global Post adds:

Leaders of the student movement [...] asked the candidates vying for the presidency in the Nov. 17 election to provide specifics of their education proposals.

The two serious contenders, center-left former President Michelle Bachelet and rightist Evelyn Matthei, have so far limited themselves to vague platitudes, according to Diego Vela, president of the students federation at Universidad Catolica.

Matthei seems to want to "deepen" the current model, Vela said, adding that while Bachelet, who governed from 2006-2010, says some positive things, she has yet to offer concrete proposals.

Regardless of who is president, the students will continue to agitate until they achieve their goals, Vela said.

Pinochet, who led the bloody Sept. 11, 1973, coup that removed elected President Salvador Allende, pursued free-market fundamentalism and privatization during his repressive 17-year rule.

He reshaped Chile's education system in 1981, slashing government support for public schools and giving municipalities control over how to spend the reduced amounts coming from Santiago.

Private schools mushroomed under the military regime and the trend continued after democracy was restored in 1990.

Photos captured the street protests on Thursday and some of the violent confrontations which culminated:

Students protest in Santiago just one month before Chile goes to the polls, insist the movement is the answer to the education crisis, not any one candidate. (Photos: Santiago Times)

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I blame John Amato for getting me hooked on the new Netflix Series, House of Cards. Kevin Spacey is fantastic, the pace is great, but unfortunately, the policy issues they tackle in this first season are predictably corporate.

Nothing screams corporate like the storyline about education reform. After Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) forces his colleague to abandon education reform because he's "too left", Underwood finds himself negotiating a package with union representatives that feels a lot like Reed Hastings' dream "reform package."

Adam Bessie introduces Ms. Reform, Hastings' dream girl of education reform:

Ms. Reform is the Marilyn Monroe of domestic policy. The corporate media – and the President himself – can’t get enough of her.

It’s no surprise she’s become famous. Ms. Reform is sexy and seductive, especially to the powerful: she looks like a philanthropist – kind and nurturing, committed to helping the poor, forgotten black and brown children in the inner-cities. Who in their right mind could be against her plans to help our children – especially our most vulnerable and least privileged – have a fair shot in life? But inside – a side she never shows the camera, and when she does, it’s Photoshopped – Ms.Reform is a cutthroat businesswoman: she’s read Ronald Reagan’s economic advisor Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom from cover to cover, she has complete faith in “free enterprise,” she’s never heard of John Dewey nor deigned to teach a day in her life, and boy, does she friggin’ hate unions. In short, Ms. Reform appeals not just to the bleeding heart social justice Obamaites, but also, to venture capitalists that think Obama is fomenting a socialist take-over of America. The only surprise is that she didn’t become famous sooner.

Now, Ms. Reform is starring once again, this time, along (another) Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey in the NetFlix original seriesHouse of Cards, which explores the sordid underbelly of Washington politics. The protagonist Congressman Frank Underwood – who has no allegiance but to his own power – takes on the education reform bill for the new President, one which looks strikingly similar to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top: the bill increases charter schools, and ties test scores to teacher evaluation, echoing the corporate style, free enterprise reforms both bills have implemented. And of course, as is always the case, Ms. Reform is cast as heroine – and the unions, at best obstructionist and only interested in the needs of the teachers, and not the children (To be fair, though, it’s clear that the real villain in the show is not the unions, but Underwood himself – and as Underwood is supporting the bill, it might cast a negative light on the policies to some viewers).

[...]

To be clear, Ms.Reform’s on-screen portrayal mirrors Hasting’s values and his hefty investments. Hastings – who objectifies and commodifies education by characterizing it as business “space,” devoid of humanity – is invested both in for-profit, non-profit, and lobbying efforts that push for the very reforms reflected in House of Cards.

Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress noticed it too:

Elsewhere in the education fight, the only discussion of policy are facile mentions of charter schools, collective bargaining, and performance standards. A union official appears in one scene to declare that “Charters jeapordize our ability to organize, which is reason enough” to object to Frank’s draft of the bill. Otherwise, the movement is represented only by picketers who melt when Frank and his wife serve them barbeque, and by a paid lobbyist who is manipulated into decking Frank in his office, giving him the advantage he needs to force a settlement to a teacher’s strike and a legislative deadlock. When Frank manipulates Congressman Russo (Corey Stoll) into running for Governor of Pennsylvania, his opposition is largely personified by the head of a shipbuilder’s union decimated by the BRAC process that shutters a local shipyard.

It's true that Hastings didn't write the script, but I can't help thinking he shaped a narrative that lends itself to such a script. The casual treatment and perception of unions as thugs, of teachers as incompetent, of solutions as simply privatizing the effort altogether while using data analysis as the benchmark for nearly everything is characteristic of today's reform discussion.

News broke late tonight that Chicago Public Schools may be closing 50 public schools. FIFTY. There is absolutely no way the school system can absorb that kind of shock. I don't think the number 50 is a coincidence. Back in the days when the Gates Foundation thought charters were the answer to everything, the foundation put millions into the district to create charter schools, including 50 new high schools under their "small high school" initiatve.

In 2012, the Gates Foundation announced they would not put any more funds into CPS, leaving the district with a choice as to which schools to de-fund and which to keep. That wouldn't have anything to do with Chicago teachers going on strike last year, would it?

Shall we take bets on which schools stay open and which ones close? I'm betting on the charters staying open and the public schools closing. You?

It worries me that we're seeing the reformers worm into popular culture without fully exploring all of the issues around education reform. I realize Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos and Michelle Rhee think they have all the answers, but they really don't.

A show like House of Cards is uniquely positioned to honestly explore all facets of an issue like this in a fast-paced and entertaining way. It's disappointing to see the writers reach for the corporate solution without even looking at the other side of things.

The gross slashing of funds for public universities has caused a "surge" in tuition prices, disproportionately impacting low-income students says a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

States are spending an average of 28 percent less this year on public university funding than they did in 2008—a decrease of $2,353 per student. According to CBPP, thirty-six states cut funding by over 20 percent and eleven slashed their budgets by more than one-third. Arizona and New Hampshire have cut their higher education spending in half.

To compensate for this massive gap in funding, the burden of cost has shifted to students in the form of surging tuition which, at four-year public colleges, has grown 27 percent since the 2007-08 year.

"These numbers are a vivid demonstration of why Washington's post-recession path has been so disastrous," said the Atlantic's Jordan Weissman in response to the report.

According to the report:

Average annual tuition at four-year public colleges has grown by $1,850, or 27 percent, since the 2007-08 school year when adjusted for inflation. In seven states — Arizona, California, Florida, Washington, Georgia, Hawaii, and Alabama — average tuition has increased by more than 50 percent. In Arizona and California, tuition has risen by more than 70 percent.

"It's very clear that rising costs dissuade students from attending college, particularly students from low-income families," said CBPP policy analyst Phil Oliff on a call with reporters. Citing a 1995 study by Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, CBPP notes that states that had the largest tuition increases during the 1980’s and early 1990’s “saw the greatest widening of the gaps in enrollment between high- and low-income youth.”

Compounding these rising costs, the rate of growth for public university tuition has outpaced the growth in median household income nearly 159 to 3 percent between 1991 and 2011, leaving students and families beholden to mounting levels of debt to cover the exploding cost of schools.

According to CBPP:

Between the 2007-08 and the 2010-11 school years, the amount of debt incurred by the average bachelor’s degree recipient at a public four-year institution grew from $11,800 to $13,600 (in 2011 dollars), an inflation adjusted increase of $1,800, or 15 percent. The average level of debt incurred had grown from $11,100 to $11,800, an increase of $700, or about 6 percent, over the previous eight years.

"We're going to be living with the effects of these cuts for a long time," added Weissman. "We'll see them in the form of higher student loan bills and students who can't graduate on time, because the classes they needed filled up too quickly."

The report concludes that these disturbing figures will have widespread impacts on an already weak national education system and consequently, states' future economic success. “At the very least," the authors write, "states must avoid shortsighted tax cuts, which would make it much harder for them to invest in higher education, strengthen the skills of their workforce, and compete for the jobs of the future.”

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The gross slashing of funds for public universities has caused a "surge" in tuition prices, disproportionately impacting low-income students says a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

States are spending an average of 28 percent less this year on public university funding than they did in 2008—a decrease of $2,353 per student. According to CBPP, thirty-six states cut funding by over 20 percent and eleven slashed their budgets by more than one-third. Arizona and New Hampshire have cut their higher education spending in half.

To compensate for this massive gap in funding, the burden of cost has shifted to students in the form of surging tuition which, at four-year public colleges, has grown 27 percent since the 2007-08 year.

"These numbers are a vivid demonstration of why Washington's post-recession path has been so disastrous," said the Atlantic's Jordan Weissman in response to the report.

According to the report:

Average annual tuition at four-year public colleges has grown by $1,850, or 27 percent, since the 2007-08 school year when adjusted for inflation. In seven states — Arizona, California, Florida, Washington, Georgia, Hawaii, and Alabama — average tuition has increased by more than 50 percent. In Arizona and California, tuition has risen by more than 70 percent.

"It's very clear that rising costs dissuade students from attending college, particularly students from low-income families," said CBPP policy analyst Phil Oliff on a call with reporters. Citing a 1995 study by Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, CBPP notes that states that had the largest tuition increases during the 1980’s and early 1990’s “saw the greatest widening of the gaps in enrollment between high- and low-income youth.”

Compounding these rising costs, the rate of growth for public university tuition has outpaced the growth in median household income nearly 159 to 3 percent between 1991 and 2011, leaving students and families beholden to mounting levels of debt to cover the exploding cost of schools.

According to CBPP:

Between the 2007-08 and the 2010-11 school years, the amount of debt incurred by the average bachelor’s degree recipient at a public four-year institution grew from $11,800 to $13,600 (in 2011 dollars), an inflation adjusted increase of $1,800, or 15 percent. The average level of debt incurred had grown from $11,100 to $11,800, an increase of $700, or about 6 percent, over the previous eight years.

"We're going to be living with the effects of these cuts for a long time," added Weissman. "We'll see them in the form of higher student loan bills and students who can't graduate on time, because the classes they needed filled up too quickly."

The report concludes that these disturbing figures will have widespread impacts on an already weak national education system and consequently, states' future economic success. “At the very least," the authors write, "states must avoid shortsighted tax cuts, which would make it much harder for them to invest in higher education, strengthen the skills of their workforce, and compete for the jobs of the future.”

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March 8, 2013  |  

The following is Part II of the transcript of a speech Noam Chomsky delivered in February on "The Common Good." Click here to read Part I.

Let’s turn to the assault on education, one element of the general elite reaction to the civilizing effect of the ‘60s. On the right side of the political spectrum, one striking illustration is an influential memorandum written by Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer working for the tobacco industry, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. At the other end of the narrow spectrum, there was an important study by the Trilateral Commission, liberal internationalists from the three major state capitalist industrial systems: the US, Europe and Japan. Both provide good insight into why the assault targets the educational system.

Let's start with the Powell memorandum. Its title is, “The Attack on the American Free-Enterprise System." It is interesting not only for the content, but also for the paranoid tone. For those who take for granted the right to rule, anything that gets out of control means that the world is coming to an end, like a spoiled three-year-old. So the rhetoric tends to be inflated and paranoid.

Powell identifies the leading criminals who are destroying the American free-enterprise system: one was Ralph Nader, with his consumer safety campaigns. The other was Herbert Marcuse, preaching Marxism to the young New Leftists who were on the rampage all over, while their “naive victims” dominated the universities and schools, controlled TV and other media, the educated community and virtually the entire government. If you think I am exaggerating, I urge you to read it yourself (pdf). Their takeover of the country, he said, is a dire threat to freedom.That's what it looks like from the standpoint of the Masters, as the nefarious campaigns of Nader and the ‘60s popular movements chipped away very slightly at total domination. 

Powell drew the obvious conclusion: “The campuses from which much of this criticism emanates are supported by tax funds generated largely from American business, contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees at universities are overwhelmingly composed of men and women who are leaders in the business system and most of the media, including the national TV systems are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend on profits and the enterprise system on which they survive.”

Therefore, the oppressed business people who have lost all influence should organize and defend themselves instead of idly sitting by while fundamental freedoms are destroyed by the Marxist onslaught from the media, universities and the government. Those are the expression of the concerns elicited by '60s activism at the right end of the mainstream spectrum.

More revealing is the reaction from the opposite extreme, the liberal internationalists, those who staffed the Carter administration, in their study called "The Crisis of Democracy." The crisis that they perceived was that there was too much democracy. The system used to work fine when most of the population was silent, passive, apathetic and obedient. The American rapporteur, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard, looked back with nostalgia to the good old days when “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” so that democracy flourished, with no crisis.

But in the ‘60s, something dangerous happened. Special interest groups began to try to enter the political arena and press for their demands. The special interests were women, minorities, young people, old people, farmers, workers. In other words: The population, who are supposed to sit obediently while the intelligent minority runs things in the interest of everyone, according to liberal democratic theory – and this is no exaggeration either. There's one group omitted in the lament of the liberal internationalists: The corporate sector. That's because they don't comprise a special interest; they represent the national Interest. Therefore their dominant influence in what we call democracy is right and proper, and merits no mention or concern.

Los Angeles has become the latest battleground in the contested war over school "reform" as a group of billionaire school-privatization advocates have turned Tuesday's school board election into a national, multi-million dollar "test case" in the fight over the future of education.

UTLA and community members protest a 2009 decision to put 250 schools up for bidding by charter schools and other outside entities. (PHoto: UTLA) According to reports, last month New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $1 million to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Coalition for School Reform. The group is backing candidates who will support current superintendent John Deasey, formerly of the Gates Foundation, who has been pushing such policy changes as expanding charter schools, limiting the power of teachers unions and using student standardized test scores as a means of evaluating teachers.

National school privatization advocate Michelle Rhee's group Students First, donated $250,000 to the same cause, in addition to a host of other titans—which include Walmart heirs and real estate and insurance magnate, Eli Broad.

As the nation's second largest school system, the Los Angeles school system represents a "good investment" for the billionaires who aim to reshape the US education system, writes professor Peter Dreier. He continues:

The corporate big-wigs are part of an effort that they and the media misleadingly call "school reform." What they're really after is not "reform" (improving our schools for the sake of students) but "privatization" (business control of public education). They think public schools should be run like corporations, with teachers as compliant workers, students as products, and the school budget as a source of profitable contracts and subsidies for textbook companies, consultants, and others engaged in the big business of education.

“School board races are a way to take the temperature of whether people like the direction schools are going in,” said President Warren Fletcher of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, which has spent nearly $450,000 in opposing campaigns. “This is a race for Los Angeles, not the school board race of America. It would be really tragic if the voices are drowned out by folks who have no sense of what is going on here to begin with.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, Villaraigosa's group has raised more than $3 million for the upcoming election and the city's ethics commission estimates that total race spending from outside groups, including the teachers’ union, has reached $4.4 million as of Friday.

The candidates receiving the big money backing include current school board President Monica Garcia as well as Kate Anderson (District 4) and Antonio Sanchez (District 6). In the most expensive of the races, Anderson, an attorney, is taking on incumbent and former teacher Steve Zimmer, who is being specifically targeted because of a proposal he made last year to put a hold on creating new charter schools.

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Incisive and provocative analysis first published by Global Research in August 2003.

You might think that reading about a Podunk University’s English teacher’s attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we’ve embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance.

“I don’t read,” says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my “World Literature” class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American, and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it’s just a “distribution” requirement for graduation, and it’s easier than philosophy -she thinks.

The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende’s “Of Love and Shadows,” set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet’s junta’s Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English majors, can write a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is, and I supply it because it’s impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work – which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile’s mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals’ coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.

Geography, history, philosophy, and political science – all missing from their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” pointed out, and that they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, “Why?” Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren’t tragic, it would be funny.

Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are waging – an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder – and a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions.

Let me put it succinctly: I don’t think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work–basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.

This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless–except to the powers and interests that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores, writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the class, American education has something to answer for–especially to our youth.

But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It’s why our media succeeds in telling lies. It’s why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It’s why Picasso’s “Guernica” can be covered up during his preposterous “report” to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects.

Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and cultural refinement. “When I hear the word ‘culture,’” Goebbels said, “I reach for my revolver.” One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university’s role as a source of social criticism and political opposition.

The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and political science, humanities and the arts–areas in which political discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry – vocational training schools, which in reality is what American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass education. Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and political science, or economics.

In fact, our students learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics – a feature the dwindling crowds at the voting booths well illustrate.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial revolution created, people first surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities and market consumers–one more thing in the commercial landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses–official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations.

Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board for all departments in the state – including education.

Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. Please send your comments/feedback/discussion on this article to learningfeedback@marchforjustice.com .

(Note from the Answer Sheet's Valerie Strauss: A coalition of teachers from public and private schools — including the school that Education Secretary Arne Duncan attended as a child and where President Obama’s daughters were enrolled before they moved to Washington — are releasing an open letter to Duncan expressing concerns about department policies that they say promote the overuse of standardized tests. Among the signees are teachers from the Ariel Community Academy, a public school that was founded by a team of people that included Duncan.)Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. (AP file)

Dear Mr. Duncan,

As primary, secondary, and university educators who are passionate about the importance of a liberal arts education in building and maintaining a democratic society, we are very concerned with the impact of standardized testing on humanities curricula. The widespread trend of teaching to the test is undermining primary and secondary education. Social studies, history, the fine arts, the study of literatures and languages, drama and music; these and other subjects not assessed in the standardized tests of “No Child Left Behind” are subjects that are themselves being left behind as administrators pressure teachers to raise narrowly conceived test scores in a few core areas.

We seek to build respect for the democratic process, critical thinking skills, writing skills, and understanding that is not accurately measured in multiple-choice tests.  (see the Fair Test website for a review of the literature: http://www.fairtest.org/k-12/high%20stakes). While we see the Common Core Curriculum as a step in the right direction, we steadfastly reject attempts pushed by testing companies to devise standardized assessments to measure progress in reading, writing, and speaking. Nor do we believe that computer programs currently being developed by major assessment corporations, or any form of outsourcing of essay assessments, are viable solutions.

Put your faith in teachers rather than corporate interests to assess reading, writing, and speaking. Do not allow corporations to control American education.

Instead of relying on standardized tests, we believe that the best way to pursue higher standards in reading, writing, and speaking skills is to develop standardized and widely accepted rubrics for assessment and allow teachers to assess their students with these rubrics.

We are very concerned with the extent to which current educational policies have embraced what John Dewey would call “instrumental rationality” in seeking solutions that can be statistically measured. We are currently seeing a national backlash against such measurements from parents, teachers, and administrators. These statistical measures merely confirm the very real social gaps between the haves and the have-nots in American education.  (For a review of the literature see http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whither%20opportunity%20-%20chapter%205.pdf).

University administrators have known for some time that high SAT scores correlate closely with socioeconomic class. Students who do well on them may succeed more frequently in college than those who do not, but this correlation may be telling us more about the test than about the students. Secondary teachers often see students who are terrific at taking tests, but who choose to avoid tasks requiring difficult thinking.

University educators want students who can write, research, and think: students who are open minded, passionate, and curious. These qualities are snuffed out under the drive for high scores on standardized multiple-choice tests under “No Child Left Behind."

Secondary educators want to prepare students for the challenges that they will face at colleges and universities. This is difficult to do when an overemphasis on discrete item standardized testing prevents them from engaging their students in the meaningful work that best prepares them for the next level.

We know that your office is bombarded with lobbyists from major testing companies, textbook companies, and big donors with big money who seek to shape education reform. State Boards of Education are faced with similar pressures. We feel strongly that big money is far too invested in the current debate, and we are concerned that their influence is determining much of what passes for “reform.” Put your faith in teachers rather than corporate interests to assess reading, writing, and speaking. Do not allow corporations to control American education.

We invite further discussion at your convenience. A delegation from among the signees below will be happy to meet you for hoops and a discussion.

Sincerely yours,

New Trier High School:
Lindsey Arado
Mike Baeb
Kerry Brennan
Ian Duell
David Hjelmgren
Tim Kajfez
Tom Kucharski
Debbie Johnson
Todd Maxman
Dean Pinos
John O’Connor
Alex Zilka

 Northern Illinois University:
Jerome D. Bowers, History Dept.

 University of Illinois-Chicago:
Robert Johnston, History Dept.

 Concord Review:
Will Fitzhugh, Editor and Publisher

 The Report Card:
William Korach, Editor and Publisher

 University of Chicago Laboratory Schools:
Luicija Ambrosini
Allen Ambrosini
Suzanne Baum
Charles Branham
Wayne Brasler
Brad Brickner
David Derbes
Steve Granzyk
Lee Gustafson
Paul Horton
Chris Janus
Bob Kass
Mark Krewatch
Andrea Martonffy
Lisa Miller
Rachel Nielsen
Diane Puklin, Emeritus
Susan Shapiro
Kelly Storm
Brian Wildeman

Ariel Community Academy
Allie Griffin
Shirley Knox
Jake Sklarsky
Willis Niederfrank

 Chicago Teachers Union

(Note from the Answer Sheet's Valerie Strauss: A coalition of teachers from public and private schools — including the school that Education Secretary Arne Duncan attended as a child and where President Obama’s daughters were enrolled before they moved to Washington — are releasing an open letter to Duncan expressing concerns about department policies that they say promote the overuse of standardized tests. Among the signees are teachers from the Ariel Community Academy, a public school that was founded by a team of people that included Duncan.)Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. (AP file)

Dear Mr. Duncan,

As primary, secondary, and university educators who are passionate about the importance of a liberal arts education in building and maintaining a democratic society, we are very concerned with the impact of standardized testing on humanities curricula. The widespread trend of teaching to the test is undermining primary and secondary education. Social studies, history, the fine arts, the study of literatures and languages, drama and music; these and other subjects not assessed in the standardized tests of “No Child Left Behind” are subjects that are themselves being left behind as administrators pressure teachers to raise narrowly conceived test scores in a few core areas.

We seek to build respect for the democratic process, critical thinking skills, writing skills, and understanding that is not accurately measured in multiple-choice tests.  (see the Fair Test website for a review of the literature: http://www.fairtest.org/k-12/high%20stakes). While we see the Common Core Curriculum as a step in the right direction, we steadfastly reject attempts pushed by testing companies to devise standardized assessments to measure progress in reading, writing, and speaking. Nor do we believe that computer programs currently being developed by major assessment corporations, or any form of outsourcing of essay assessments, are viable solutions.

Put your faith in teachers rather than corporate interests to assess reading, writing, and speaking. Do not allow corporations to control American education.

Instead of relying on standardized tests, we believe that the best way to pursue higher standards in reading, writing, and speaking skills is to develop standardized and widely accepted rubrics for assessment and allow teachers to assess their students with these rubrics.

We are very concerned with the extent to which current educational policies have embraced what John Dewey would call “instrumental rationality” in seeking solutions that can be statistically measured. We are currently seeing a national backlash against such measurements from parents, teachers, and administrators. These statistical measures merely confirm the very real social gaps between the haves and the have-nots in American education.  (For a review of the literature see http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whither%20opportunity%20-%20chapter%205.pdf).

University administrators have known for some time that high SAT scores correlate closely with socioeconomic class. Students who do well on them may succeed more frequently in college than those who do not, but this correlation may be telling us more about the test than about the students. Secondary teachers often see students who are terrific at taking tests, but who choose to avoid tasks requiring difficult thinking.

University educators want students who can write, research, and think: students who are open minded, passionate, and curious. These qualities are snuffed out under the drive for high scores on standardized multiple-choice tests under “No Child Left Behind."

Secondary educators want to prepare students for the challenges that they will face at colleges and universities. This is difficult to do when an overemphasis on discrete item standardized testing prevents them from engaging their students in the meaningful work that best prepares them for the next level.

We know that your office is bombarded with lobbyists from major testing companies, textbook companies, and big donors with big money who seek to shape education reform. State Boards of Education are faced with similar pressures. We feel strongly that big money is far too invested in the current debate, and we are concerned that their influence is determining much of what passes for “reform.” Put your faith in teachers rather than corporate interests to assess reading, writing, and speaking. Do not allow corporations to control American education.

We invite further discussion at your convenience. A delegation from among the signees below will be happy to meet you for hoops and a discussion.

Sincerely yours,

New Trier High School:
Lindsey Arado
Mike Baeb
Kerry Brennan
Ian Duell
David Hjelmgren
Tim Kajfez
Tom Kucharski
Debbie Johnson
Todd Maxman
Dean Pinos
John O’Connor
Alex Zilka

 Northern Illinois University:
Jerome D. Bowers, History Dept.

 University of Illinois-Chicago:
Robert Johnston, History Dept.

 Concord Review:
Will Fitzhugh, Editor and Publisher

 The Report Card:
William Korach, Editor and Publisher

 University of Chicago Laboratory Schools:
Luicija Ambrosini
Allen Ambrosini
Suzanne Baum
Charles Branham
Wayne Brasler
Brad Brickner
David Derbes
Steve Granzyk
Lee Gustafson
Paul Horton
Chris Janus
Bob Kass
Mark Krewatch
Andrea Martonffy
Lisa Miller
Rachel Nielsen
Diane Puklin, Emeritus
Susan Shapiro
Kelly Storm
Brian Wildeman

Ariel Community Academy
Allie Griffin
Shirley Knox
Jake Sklarsky
Willis Niederfrank

 Chicago Teachers Union

WASHINGTON - February 14 - Unless Congress acts, on March 1 automatic and indiscriminate spending cuts will hit key programs, costing our economy more than 1 million jobs and cutting essential services for millions of low- and middle-income families. But a new infographic released today by the Center for American Progress explains how Congress can act to avert these dangerous cuts and protect investments. The infographic, “Tax Loopholes for Corporate Jets or Investments in Jobs and Education?”, illustrates how through a balanced approach to deficit reduction—an approach that eliminates wasteful tax loopholes that only benefit a wealthy few—Congress can protect critical investments that create jobs and lift up the most vulnerable Americans.

“Congress has a choice to make. They can ensure that 600,000 women and children don’t go hungry, that 125,000 American families don’t lose their homes, and that 7,400 teachers and staff who support students with disabilities don’t lose their jobs, or they can protect an irresponsible tax loophole,” said Melissa Boteach, Director of CAP’s Poverty to Prosperity program. “This choice should be easy.”

Just by eliminating a loophole that gives special treatment to corporate jets, for example—at a cost to taxpayers of $3.2 billion over 10 years—Congress could avert cuts that would cost thousands of jobs, hurt millions of disadvantaged students, and force hundreds of thousands of vulnerable families to lose critical nutrition and housing supports this year. Here’s the math:

Congress has some key choices to make in the coming weeks. If they don’t close the loophole for corporate jets:

• 600,000 women and children will lose the critical nutrition assistance they need
• 125,000 families will lose their permanent housing
• More than 100,000 formerly homeless people, including veterans, will be at risk to go back on the streets
• Students with disabilities will lose critical instruction and support from more than 7,400 teachers and staff
• 1 million disadvantaged students will lose critical education funding and 10,500 teachers and staff will be at risk for losing their jobs
• 70,000 poor children will lose their Head Start and Early Head Start slots as the jobs of 14,000 teachers and other staff are put at risk

To speak to CAP experts about this issue, please contact Madeline Meth mmeth@americanprogress.org or 202.741.6277.

Related resources:

• Follow Half in Ten’s #TalkPoverty campaign here.

WASHINGTON - February 14 - Unless Congress acts, on March 1 automatic and indiscriminate spending cuts will hit key programs, costing our economy more than 1 million jobs and cutting essential services for millions of low- and middle-income families. But a new infographic released today by the Center for American Progress explains how Congress can act to avert these dangerous cuts and protect investments. The infographic, “Tax Loopholes for Corporate Jets or Investments in Jobs and Education?”, illustrates how through a balanced approach to deficit reduction—an approach that eliminates wasteful tax loopholes that only benefit a wealthy few—Congress can protect critical investments that create jobs and lift up the most vulnerable Americans.

“Congress has a choice to make. They can ensure that 600,000 women and children don’t go hungry, that 125,000 American families don’t lose their homes, and that 7,400 teachers and staff who support students with disabilities don’t lose their jobs, or they can protect an irresponsible tax loophole,” said Melissa Boteach, Director of CAP’s Poverty to Prosperity program. “This choice should be easy.”

Just by eliminating a loophole that gives special treatment to corporate jets, for example—at a cost to taxpayers of $3.2 billion over 10 years—Congress could avert cuts that would cost thousands of jobs, hurt millions of disadvantaged students, and force hundreds of thousands of vulnerable families to lose critical nutrition and housing supports this year. Here’s the math:

Congress has some key choices to make in the coming weeks. If they don’t close the loophole for corporate jets:

• 600,000 women and children will lose the critical nutrition assistance they need
• 125,000 families will lose their permanent housing
• More than 100,000 formerly homeless people, including veterans, will be at risk to go back on the streets
• Students with disabilities will lose critical instruction and support from more than 7,400 teachers and staff
• 1 million disadvantaged students will lose critical education funding and 10,500 teachers and staff will be at risk for losing their jobs
• 70,000 poor children will lose their Head Start and Early Head Start slots as the jobs of 14,000 teachers and other staff are put at risk

To speak to CAP experts about this issue, please contact Madeline Meth mmeth@americanprogress.org or 202.741.6277.

Related resources:

• Follow Half in Ten’s #TalkPoverty campaign here.

(Photo: Alamy)I envy Thomas Paine’s way with language. I’ve been searching for years for words that would have the impact of those he penned in his 1776 pamphlet, “The Crisis.”

Admittedly, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” and the words that followed, weren’t a howling success. Only about a third of the colonists agreed with Paine’s call for revolution. Another third wanted to stick with England. The remaining third were neutral or apathetic.

What Paine was able to do that I can’t do is sell an idea to at least enough people to make something happen. I need to convince not a third of readers but, say, a tenth, to call their legislators and tell them to dismantle the education “reform” machine assembled in Washington by business leaders and politicians.

Long before corporate America began its assault on public schooling, American education was in trouble. Educators were, however, increasingly aware of the problems and were working on them. When Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, Mike Bloomberg, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and other big name non-educators took over, that worked stopped.

What I want people to understand is that the backbone of education — the familiar math-science-language arts-social studies “core curriculum” — is deeply, fundamentally flawed. No matter the reform initiative, there won’t be significant improvement in American education until curricular problems are understood, admitted, addressed, and solved.

Few want to hear that. Reformers are sure America’s schools would be fine if teachers just worked harder and smarter, and reformers are sure the teachers would do that if merit pay programs made them compete for cash. They seem incapable of understanding that classroom teachers are doing something so complicated and difficult that even the best of them are hanging on by their fingernails. If they knew how to do better, they’d be doing it. Would surgeons operate differently if they were paid more? Would commercial airline pilots make softer landings if they made more money? Would editorial writers write better editorials if their salaries were raised?

Teachers are doing the best they can with the curriculum they’ve been given. Here (in regrettably abstract language) is the curricular problem at the top of my list:

Change is in the nature of things; it is inevitable. Human societies either adapt to change or die. The traditional core curriculum delivers existing knowledge, but adapting to an unknown future requires new knowledge. New knowledge is created as relationships are discovered between parts of reality not previously thought to be related. The arbitrary walls between school subjects, and the practice of studying them in isolation from each other, block the relating process essential to knowledge creation.

Stick with me here. This isn’t complicated, just different from the usual school fare.

(1) Change is in the nature of things; it is inevitable. The earth heats and cools. Seasons come and go. Water tables rise and fall. Human populations increase, decrease, migrate. New tools change the ways societies function. People multiply, resources diminish, and waste builds. Civilizations appear and disappear. This is — or should be — the usual content of the core curriculum.

(2) Human societies either adapt to change or die. Ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome are no more. A century ago, the Elks, Eagles, and Masons were popular organizations. More recently, Kodak, Bethlehem Steel, and Sony dominated whole industries. If we value our way of life, we need to understand the dynamics of change, but it’s not in the core curriculum.

(3) The traditional core curriculum delivers existing knowledge, but adapting to an unknown future requires new knowledge. Obviously, what will need to be known in the future isn’t yet known, from which it follows that it can’t be taught. However, the process by means of which new knowledge is created can be taught.

(4) New knowledge is created as relationships are discovered between parts of reality not previously thought to be related. Levels of respect for elders and rates of societal change are related. Elapsed time since death and level of isotopes in fossil remains are related. Exposure to lead and learning difficulties are related. Discovering and exploring relationships, not mentally storing information, educates.

(5) The arbitrary walls between school subjects, and studying them in isolation from each other, block the relating process essential to knowledge creation. If astronomers only studied the heavens, and oceanographers only studied the ocean, the relationship of moon, sun, and tides would remain unknown. Technological and economic change profoundly impact values, beliefs, and behavior, but study of their connections is missing from the curriculum. Again: Discovering and exploring relationships, not mentally storing information, educates.

(6) What needs to be known in the future can’t yet be taught, but the process by means of which that knowledge is created can-and must-be taught. Traditional instruction places far too much emphasis on content. The problem isn’t just that what students need to know can’t be known. The unreasonable amount of information dumped on them, the brief life in memory of most of it, and easy electronic access to a near-infinite amount of it, make merely delivering information a poor use of time. Focusing on the real world rather than on second-hand textbook versions of reality, and understanding the process by means of which sense is made of that world, are keys to new worlds of performance.

Standardized, high-stakes tests are the single greatest obstacle in the way of curricular improvement. Sold to the public as a necessary club to hold over teachers’ heads, the tests are dumbing down kids at a spectacular rate. The problem isn’t test overuse. The problem is their inability to measure what most needs to be measured.

Standardized tests are to accountability what a finger in the wind is to a weather station. What they measure — information stored in memory — is useful, but for kids facing an unknown future, that’s not nearly enough. They need to know how to create new knowledge. That knowledge will be original, and standardized tests can’t evaluate original, non-standard thought.

Unwilling to trust teacher judgment, we’ve handed their responsibilities to machines incapable of making judgment calls.

Tell business leaders and politicians to put their own houses in order and give education back to educators.

© 2012 The Washington Post

Marion Brady is a veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.

Thomas Friedman may praise the emancipatory potential of online university courses, but are they really capable of producing more than docile workers?

Education is a concept that we confront every day in some way, shape or form, directly or indirectly. It has long been considered to be the “silver bullet” in addressing the greatest injustices pervasive in society; poverty, crime, racism, patriarchy, and socio-economic inequality. Our interaction with education is influenced by and varies based on the tentacles of power relations; class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and life experiences. For some, this interaction manifests itself in questions of best practices and educational philosophy.

For others, it revolves more around access to knowledge and questions of representation. Consequently, our conceptual interaction with education is not free of bias or ideological  calculation. For whom and for what purpose(s) does education serve? What does education actually look like? Will we recognize it when we see it? Or, might we mistake it for something else? As the influential theorist of critical pedagogy Paulo Freire explained:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Famed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote about the expansion of free online courses by institutions such as Stanford and MIT, as well as companies such as Coursera and Udacity. While Friedman hails this phenomenon as a “revolution” he states that “(n)othing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems.” He goes on to sprinkle his column with anecdotes from individuals who have benefited from open online university courses.

Friedman views this technological and educational innovation as one that will allow foreign workers to have the formal training required to compete with First-World workers. The thought process is that this will ultimately be to the benefit multinational corporations, who will have a larger pool of technically skilled workers from which to employ. These private actors, equipped with a greater number of skilled (and relatively cheap) workers, will offer more gainful employment and generate more revenue, ultimately alleviating poverty in the Third World.

Along the same lines was a recent editorial written by Pauline Rose, Director of the Global Monitoring Report on Education published by UNESCO. In her piece, Rose calls for a Bill Gates-like figure to emerge to spark global education funding among private companies and foundations. Corporate philanthropy is deemed the solution to improving global access to education. Following Friedman’s logic, Rose states:

On the face of it, there should be little need to make the business case for education. It is intrinsically tied to all positive development outcomes. Economic growth, health, nutrition and democracy are all boosted by quality schooling. If all children in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills, poverty would fall by 12 percent – and that’s good for business. The private sector benefits directly from an educated, skilled workforce.

Friedman and Rose are essentially calling for the accelerated privatization of global education. This is a trend that has already begun in the US, as we have witnessed the growth of schools run by private corporations, an unflinching emphasis on test scores, and the decimation of teachers unions coupled with the flawed notion that teachers alone are responsible for educational underachievement.

What this privatization enables, and what is furthered by both Friedman and Rose’s pieces, is the disavowal of considering the larger socioeconomic issues related to global capitalism and neoliberalism, issues that are intrinsically conjoined to education. The danger is not the technological advancement enabling greater access to education for the Third World, but rather its implications that we continually fail to critically scrutinize.

Instead of hailing the introduction of free online courses as a revolution in global education that will alleviate poverty and suffering, why do we not question the global system which allowed, if not actively encouraged, the formation of the existing desolate situation to begin with? Pieces like Friedman’s and Rose’s actively assist in paralyzing us from thinking about how we have arrived in a situation where, as Rose states, “(t)here are 61 million children out of school.”

They seem to conveniently forget the fact that IMF structural adjustment programs have severely reduced public education spending by governments, and that the privatization of education has led to an increase in societal segregation, asseen in Chile. When relying on the framework used by Friedman and Rose, we effectively hinder ourselves from asking what kind global economic system exists to allow the situation where the privatization and corporate philanthropy becomes the solutions to address already existing radical inequalities.

In the end, it all comes back to the original question of the purpose of education. For Friedman and Rose, its purpose is to produce worker who will further entrench an unjust economic order that created the problem in the first place. The overarching goal is to convince us that the remedy for our current problems is actually the very pill which caused the sickness to begin with. For Freire, education’s purpose is to enable students to flourish in a manner that critically analyzes how we arrived to this bleak situation and how we can begin to transform it.

Freire or Friedman? The choice is ours to make.

Thousands of teachers, and students with parents, have taken to the streets of the Spanish capital, Madrid, to protest against the government’s planned budget cuts in the education sector.

The Thursday demonstration marked the third day of strikes in public schools. The demonstrators said the Spanish government’s cost-cutting measures were weakening an already unstable education system.

The protesters also said that the harsh cutbacks in the education sector were forcing students to learn in overcrowded and cold classrooms.

“I have classes of 37 pupils with only three and half hours of teaching a week,” said an English teacher participating in the protest.

In 2012, Madrid unveiled a plan that sought to make three billion euros (about four billion dollars) of savings in schools and universities to stabilize public finances.

On Wednesday, students in nearly one hundred cities held a demonstration on the second day of the strikes that the Students’ Union (SE) had called to protest against the cutbacks.

Protesters have called for the resignation of Education Minister Jose Ignacio Wert, saying his policies are ruining the public education system.

“In my university we have spent the winter months without heating,” said another demonstrator who took part in the Wednesday march.

The Spanish government has been sharply criticized over austerity policies that are hitting the middle and working classes the hardest.

According to the Students’ Union, almost 1.6 million students joined the Wednesday demonstration from institutes across the country, including the major cities of Madrid and Valencia, and the autonomous communities of Andalusia, Extremadura, Aragon and Asturias.

Spain’s economy collapsed into recession in the second half of 2008. Millions of jobs have been lost ever since.

MR/HSN

Some thought the irony of a Treasury Secretary who cheated on his taxes was extreme but Germany has gone one better as the nation's Education Minister has just been stripped of her PhD due to plagiarism. As Spiegel Online reports, the University of Düsseldorf has revoked German Education Minister Annette Schavan's degree because "she systematically and deliberately presented intellectual efforts throughout her entire dissertation that were not her own." As such, she was guilty of "intentional deception through plagiarism." Allegations that parts of her dissertation were not consistent with academic standards were first raised last spring and were hardened in October when a blogger released detailed findings of citation shortcomings he had found in the education minister's dissertation. Of course, she has taken the political route to this problem - denial -  admitting merely to "oversights," and adding that "There was no cheating involved." The university voted 12 to 2 to revoke her degree and invalidate her academic title. Schavan is yet to resign from Merkel's Cabinet. What next? A skeet-shooting gun tzar, a job tzar responsible for thousands of jobs losses while in the private sector, or a Nobel Peace Prize winner building a drone army.

Via Spiegel Online,

Merkel's Education Minister Has Ph.D. Title Revoked

German Education Minister Annette Schavan has long been dogged by accusations that she had plagiarized parts of her Ph.D. thesis. Now, the University of Düsseldorf has revoked her degree. She may be forced to resign from Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet.

It was shortly after 8:15 p.m. on Tuesday evening when Bruno Bleckmann, a professor of ancient history at the University of Düsseldorf, stepped in front of the waiting journalists. He quickly strode up to the microphone to deliver his statement. A faculty board, Bleckmann said, had arrived at the decision to declare German Education Minister Annette Schavan's Ph.D. thesis "invalid and to revoke her doctor title."

Based on an internal university analysis of Schavan's doctoral thesis, which she submitted in 1980, and on her own statement regarding her work, the committee voted 12 to 2 to invalidate her academic title, Bleckmann said. There was one abstention. "As a doctoral candidate, she systematically and deliberately presented intellectual efforts throughout her entire dissertation that were not her own," Bleckmann said. Large sections of the work, he continued, had been taken from elsewhere without adequate attribution. As such, she was guilty of "intentional deception through plagiarism."

The announcement is the worst possible outcome for Schavan. The very suspicion that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation had "hit her hard," as she said last year. Allegations that parts of her dissertation were not consistent with academic standards were first raised last spring and were hardened in October when a blogger released detailed findings of citation shortcomings he had found in the education minister's dissertation. She has consistently denied the charges, admitting merely to "oversights." Immediately after Bleckmann finished delivering his statement, Schavan's lawyer released a statement indicating that the minister planned to file a legal challenge to the revocation of her dissertation at a Düsseldorf court. "There was no cheating involved," the statement read.

...

'Accepted Guidelines'

Bleckmann also rejected Schavan's argument that conventions regarding citations were different at the time when she wrote her dissertation. He said that the board's decision was not a "projection of today's standards back in time." He pointed out that even at the time there were "accepted guidelines" that explained how to correctly cite passages taken from secondary sources. One version of those guidelines had even been published by her Ph.D. advisor, it was recently revealed.

...

Schavan is now faced with the prospect of losing her position on Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet. It wouldn't be the first time that a German cabinet minister was forced to resign after losing a doctor title. Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg stepped down in the spring of 2011 after it was determined that he had plagiarized large sections of his Ph.D. thesis. Already, demands have been made for Schavan to resign from her party by the Greens, the Left Party and the Pirate Party.

...

Education secretary Michael Gove could be facing an investigation over allegations that his advisers sent abuse to journalists on Twitter.

The row, which was investigated by the Observer, was sparked after an anonymous twitter account @toryeducation attacked the paper's political editor Toby Helm.

Michael Gove has come under fire for the alleged conduct of two of his special advisers

Labour's Shadow Education Secretary, Stephen Twigg has written to Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood requesting an investigation be launched into the conduct of two of Gove's Special Advisers following the smear allegations contained in the Observer.

The account also apparently attacked the Financial Times' education correspondent, Chris Cook, suggesting he is a "stalker" and accused Helm of being "a Labour stooge" and promoting Britain's entry to the Euro while he worked at the Daily Telegraph, calling him "an activist, not a professional hack".

The Observer alleged that two of Gove's special advisers Dominic Cummings and Henry de Zoete contibuted to the Twitter feed, and had been asked to tone down the feed's output in 2011 by Henry Macrory, then Tory party head of press.

Both advisers, whose salaries are paid by the taxpayer, have denied contributing to the feed.

After Twitter speculation about the Observer story, Ladbrokes reported a rush of money on Gove to be next Cabinet exit, slashing odds from 25/1 to 8/1.

After the story's publication, the Twitter account @toryeducation, retweeted an attack on the Observer's Helm, written a year ago by fellow journalist Sarah Vine, Gove's wife.

Ministers are held responsible for the conduct of their advisers, under new rules devised following the Labour party scandal where a spin doctor, Damian McBride was found to be planning to spread flase rumours about high-profile Tories.

According to the code, advisers "should avoid anything which might reasonably lead to the criticism that people paid from public funds are being used for party political purposes… the preparation or dissemination of inappropriate material or personal attacks has no part to play in the job of being a special adviser as it has no part to play in the conduct of public life.

"Any special adviser ever found to be disseminating inappropriate material will automatically be dismissed by their appointing minister."

Consequences of evolution

Four US states have put forward bills encouraging the teaching of theories of the origins of life other than evolution. Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Colorado are advancing curricula that have been dubbed a creationist plot by many scientists.

Six so-called ‘anti-evolution’ bills have been introduced in the four states since the beginning of the year, reported the National Center for Science Education, a group monitoring the teaching of science in the US.

One of the bills presented to the Missouri House of Representatives suggested that evolution and Intelligent Design should be treated equally in Missouri's public elementary and secondary schools, as well as in introductory science courses in public institutions of higher education.

The theory of Intelligent Design is a form of creationism that implies that certain features of the universe are best explained by a creator or higher power. The term was adopted as a replacement for ‘creation science,’ which was ruled by the Supreme Court in 1987 to represent a particular religious belief after it outlawed creationism.

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) asserts that “creationism isn't science,” and strongly defends the teaching of evolution as the only theory of the origins of life. Although the so-called ‘Academic Freedom’ bills do not emphasize religion, NCSE scientists believe that it is a disguised attempt by creationists to insert their beliefs into school curricula.

The Missouri bill features a glossary defining the legislation’s main terms, such as ‘analogous naturalistic processes,’ ‘biological evolution’ and ‘biological intelligent design.’ This part of the bill closely resembles a bill authored in 2004 that also called for the equal treatment of evolution and Intelligent Design in public schools. The 2004 legislation was widely criticized by scientists, and did not pass.

Another bill written in Missouri has dubbed biological and chemical evolution ‘controversial,’ stating that no education administrative staff should prohibit public school instructors from teaching students objectively about the supposed scientific strengths and weaknesses of the competing theories.

Oklahoma legislators have also authored two bills challenging the teaching of evolution in schools. One bill, pre-filed with the state senate, encourages teachers to "find more effective ways to represent the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies." Another, pre-filed with the state house, specifically cites “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” as being scientifically controversial.

A Colorado bill mentions “biological and chemical evolution, global warming, and human cloning” as alleged controversies, which need to be approached “intelligently and respectfully.”

Montana, the last state of those considering so-called ‘Academic Freedom Acts,’ is drafting a bill which will require the teaching of ‘Biological Intelligent Design’ alongside evolution in public schools.

The battle between creationists and those who support Darwinian evolution has a long history in the US. Private schools have no restrictions in how they teach science, while public schools must follow state-defined curriculum.

A June 2012 Gallup poll asked some 1,000 Americans nationwide about their thoughts on the origin of human life. The survey revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe God created human beings. Numerous creation science advocates continue to hope that the Intelligent Design theory will make its way into US public schools, though they have not been very successful so far.

Controversy erupted in 2011 when the state of Texas said it would discourage the teaching of evolution in classrooms, following the 2009 approval of new education standards ordering schools to consider ‘all sides’ of the debate. However, the state’s Board of Education approved school material favoring Darwinian evolution.

In 2004, Intelligent Design was taught alongside Darwinian evolution in one school in Pennsylvania, but the district court ruled the ‘ID policy’ unconstitutional, and ordered the school not to teach it in science classes.

Over 200 activists, community organizers, parents and students from cities across the U.S. gathered in Washington Tuesday to tell U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that Obama's signature 'Race to the Top' education policy—which has lead to widespread public school closures—is wreaking havoc on public education.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (AP Photo) "The voices of the people directly impacted can no longer be ignored," said Jitu Brown, an organizer from the South Side of Chicago at the meeting that included both Duncan and Obama education adviser Roberto Rodriguez. The groups urged that the the Education Department's School Improvement Grant, among other programs, increases unnecessary school closures. The grant program awards school districts with grant money, but only to those who enforce cut-backs and "shake-ups" including mass school closures—leaving many communities without neighborhood schools.

Brown called the policies "a violation of our human rights."

The activists, who belong to the group Journey for Justice Movement, argued that such policies specifically hurt minority students. The group has filed multiple Title VI civil rights complaints with the Education Department Office of Civil Rights, the Huffington Post reports.

Duncan left the meeting after only 45 minutes, reportedly due to his schedule. The activists promptly responded by chanting: "Where is Duncan? Where is Duncan?"

On the widespread school closures proposed in Philadelphia, Helen Gym, co-founder of Parents United for Public Education, recently stated:

Whatever your opinion may be of [charter schools], there’s no question that the District has failed to explain its inconsistent approach of allowing charter expansion without regard to expense or academic quality while insisting on draconian and widespread sacrifice among District schools. This despite the fact that many of the District schools targeted for closure outperform some of the charters that the SRC renewed and expanded last spring.

Among the cities most affected by such policies, Philadelphia is slated to close 37 schools by June.

Meanwhile, at a Public Schools hearing in Chicago Monday parents and teachers expressed outrage over recent steps towards mass closings within the city. Shouts and chants from the nearly 200 attendees drowned out school officials who attempted to pitch "under-used" school closures.

The Education Department is currently probing complaints that school closings in six cities — D.C., Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York City and Chicago — violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The National Schools Board Association criticized the Obama administration’s education policies, in a statement released Tuesday, saying Duncan has pushed “unnecessary and counter-productive federal intrusion” onto local school districts, and urged members of Congress to co-sponsor legislation, developed by NSBA, to protect local school district governance from over-reaching federal policies.

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The new Center for Ethics, Law, and Society at Sonoma State University in Northern California caused quite a stir among colleagues, students and community members during the first week of classes in 2013. Of central concern was its funding, and the further corporatization of public higher education.

The notorious insurance monolith AIG gave two-thirds of the Ethics Center’s $16,000 first year budget. What might AIG’s intentions have been for funding the Center? AIG has not been known for its ethics. In fact, the insurer’s risky bets on derivatives were central to the 2008 economic crash. They received a $182 billion bailout. Yes, billion.

Retired SSU Professor Robert Plantz reminded the university community on the faculty email list that AIG is “talking about suing our government for what they think is a lousy deal in the bailout.” So much for gratitude and ethics. AIG is one more mega-corporation jumping on the bandwagon to further privatize SSU and influence the education it offers students.

“If we allow economic entities to control our culture, to create the assumptions that underlie our lives, there can be no possibility of individual human freedom,” according to Abraham Entin of Move to Amend Sonoma County. “Economic entities need orderly access to resources and markets. They need docile workers and striving consumers. The last thing they desire are free human individuals. When they ‘support’ education it is for these ends and no others. We are fools when we allow them access to our children and our schools.”

Corporations are pumping an increasing amount of their ill-earned big money into public education throughout the United States, trying to bend it to meet their corporate goals. This threatens academic freedom and free speech.

It is bad enough when one is censored. But self-censorship can be even worse: when one holds back communicating what one really believes out of fear of repercussions. Humanities faculty are supposed to teach critical thinking. Instead, when corporations and millionaires buy their way into universities, receive unearned honorary doctorates, and fund research, their biases prevail and dissent is diminished. Students tend to fear challenging corporate power and policies and become obedient, partly so they can get jobs in an employment-scarce climate.

Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill -- who was instrumental in helping to dismantle the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial from investment banking -- gave $12 million to SSU’s controversial Green Music Center last year, for which he was rewarded with an honorary doctorate. Time magazine describes Weill as one of the “25 people to blame for the financial crisis.”

MasterCard then gave a few more million dollars to the GMC, in exchange for special access to students to sell its products. One wonders which other millionaires and corporations might already, or will soon, be knocking on SSU’s door to help direct education at the public university.

“The funding of SSU's Ethics Center is one more example of the privatization of education,” said SSU alumnus Susan Lamont of the Peace and Justice Center, and a key organizer of the ShameOnSSU protest against Weill’s honorary doctorate at last year’s graduation.

“The wealthy and corporations make sure they pay little or no taxes, public institutions become financially stressed, bonds are sold and the wealthy profit at both ends of the deal,” said Lamont. “‘Philanthropists’ or corporations come in as saviors with wads of cash, the public is grateful, and academic freedoms are chipped away slowly, but surely.”

The public first heard about the Ethics Center in an article headlined “Some Topics Too Close to Home for SSU Ethics Center.” The sub-head of the Jan. 17 article in the daily Press Democrat was “Director of new venture opts not to weigh in on donor AIG’s role in economic crisis.”

When asked by PD reporter Jeremy Hay if the Center would deal with the controversy of financier Sandy Weill receiving an honorary doctorate for his gift to the Green Music Center, the Center’s director, philosophy lecturer Joshua Glasgow, responded, “I don’t think I can comment.” What happened to free speech and academic freedom at SSU?

“I’ve learned to zip it here,” a long-time SSU staff member commented, drawing her fingers across her lips, when asked about the Ethics Center. Such fear of reprisal for having an opinion is not conducive to educating students to be good citizens, which is allegedly part of SSU’s mission.

Many have expressed ethical reservations about the AIG funding, but Glasgow apparently has no qualms about it. “That’s just the way it flows,” he said.

This contention “has no standing as a moral argument; witness slavery, smoking, nuclear arms, human trafficking, etc,” writes retired Professor Philip Beard. He asserts that such a “shoulder shrug should itself be the target of an ethical investigation.”

“The Ethics Center has a basic challenge to speak to the ethics of taking money from AIG,” noted retired Political Science Professor John Kramer. “The goal of conservatives is to so starve the public-caring institutions of funding that they are overwhelmingly beholden to private and corporate interests. Now they are often intimidated about speaking their truth.”

“Any entity designated an ‘Ethics Center’ has a special responsibility to scrutinize the moral and ethical correlates of its own supporting foundation, structure, and functioning, especially its filtering of acceptable and unacceptable issues,” noted Sociology Professor Noel Byrne. “Such filtering merits close scrutiny. Hay's [newspaper] story suggests that this issue is lost in the fog of myopic oversight.”

Tim Nonn, who has a doctorate in ethics, wrote in an unpublished letter to the same newspaper:

“The implications of sacrificing academic freedom in the name of ethics are mindboggling. What if a corporation based in the South had provided a grant to a university’s history department, but forbade teaching the history of slavery in America? Would the grant make the surrender of academic freedom acceptable?

“I had always assumed that a university existed to free, not enslave, minds. In this case, I was wrong. The popular motto on the walls of many universities throughout the world, veritas vos liberabit (the truth shall set you free), will never adorn the walls of SSU,” Nonn added.

“What good is an Ethics Center that won't discuss it's own ethics?” asked Thomas Morabito of Occupy Sebastopol. “They want to discuss your ethics, but not their own. They preach ‘do as I say, not as I do.’”

The Ethics Center plans to deal with issues such as immigration, water use, food ethics, clean technology, and income inequality, according to director Glasgow. “I look forward to many years of hard-nosed, sometimes gut-wrenching discussion of thorny issues,” Prof. Beard writes. We shall see.

The Center’s first event will be held on Feb. 6. While the talk is free, SSU has doubled its parking fees this semester to $5 - an increase that sends a clear message to the public that it is less welcome, although the university is funded primarily by taxpayer dollars.

What corporation or millionaire might be next at SSU? Wal-Mart? Monsanto, which funds the University of California at Irvine’s agriculture department?

May the the Center for Ethics, Law, and Society provide forums to discuss controversial issues and encourage critical thinking. Because right now, the take-over of public higher education by corporations is a serious threat.

We need your help to sustain grassroots, groundbreaking journalism. Make a tax-deductible contribution to Truthout now by clicking here.

The new Center for Ethics, Law, and Society at Sonoma State University in Northern California caused quite a stir among colleagues, students and community members during the first week of classes in 2013. Of central concern was its funding, and the further corporatization of public higher education.

The notorious insurance monolith AIG gave two-thirds of the Ethics Center’s $16,000 first year budget. What might AIG’s intentions have been for funding the Center? AIG has not been known for its ethics. In fact, the insurer’s risky bets on derivatives were central to the 2008 economic crash. They received a $182 billion bailout. Yes, billion.

Retired SSU Professor Robert Plantz reminded the university community on the faculty email list that AIG is “talking about suing our government for what they think is a lousy deal in the bailout.” So much for gratitude and ethics. AIG is one more mega-corporation jumping on the bandwagon to further privatize SSU and influence the education it offers students.

“If we allow economic entities to control our culture, to create the assumptions that underlie our lives, there can be no possibility of individual human freedom,” according to Abraham Entin of Move to Amend Sonoma County. “Economic entities need orderly access to resources and markets. They need docile workers and striving consumers. The last thing they desire are free human individuals. When they ‘support’ education it is for these ends and no others. We are fools when we allow them access to our children and our schools.”

Corporations are pumping an increasing amount of their ill-earned big money into public education throughout the United States, trying to bend it to meet their corporate goals. This threatens academic freedom and free speech.

It is bad enough when one is censored. But self-censorship can be even worse: when one holds back communicating what one really believes out of fear of repercussions. Humanities faculty are supposed to teach critical thinking. Instead, when corporations and millionaires buy their way into universities, receive unearned honorary doctorates, and fund research, their biases prevail and dissent is diminished. Students tend to fear challenging corporate power and policies and become obedient, partly so they can get jobs in an employment-scarce climate.

Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill -- who was instrumental in helping to dismantle the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial from investment banking -- gave $12 million to SSU’s controversial Green Music Center last year, for which he was rewarded with an honorary doctorate. Time magazine describes Weill as one of the “25 people to blame for the financial crisis.”

MasterCard then gave a few more million dollars to the GMC, in exchange for special access to students to sell its products. One wonders which other millionaires and corporations might already, or will soon, be knocking on SSU’s door to help direct education at the public university.

“The funding of SSU's Ethics Center is one more example of the privatization of education,” said SSU alumnus Susan Lamont of the Peace and Justice Center, and a key organizer of the ShameOnSSU protest against Weill’s honorary doctorate at last year’s graduation.

“The wealthy and corporations make sure they pay little or no taxes, public institutions become financially stressed, bonds are sold and the wealthy profit at both ends of the deal,” said Lamont. “‘Philanthropists’ or corporations come in as saviors with wads of cash, the public is grateful, and academic freedoms are chipped away slowly, but surely.”

The public first heard about the Ethics Center in an article headlined “Some Topics Too Close to Home for SSU Ethics Center.” The sub-head of the Jan. 17 article in the daily Press Democrat was “Director of new venture opts not to weigh in on donor AIG’s role in economic crisis.”

When asked by PD reporter Jeremy Hay if the Center would deal with the controversy of financier Sandy Weill receiving an honorary doctorate for his gift to the Green Music Center, the Center’s director, philosophy lecturer Joshua Glasgow, responded, “I don’t think I can comment.” What happened to free speech and academic freedom at SSU?

“I’ve learned to zip it here,” a long-time SSU staff member commented, drawing her fingers across her lips, when asked about the Ethics Center. Such fear of reprisal for having an opinion is not conducive to educating students to be good citizens, which is allegedly part of SSU’s mission.

Many have expressed ethical reservations about the AIG funding, but Glasgow apparently has no qualms about it. “That’s just the way it flows,” he said.

This contention “has no standing as a moral argument; witness slavery, smoking, nuclear arms, human trafficking, etc,” writes retired Professor Philip Beard. He asserts that such a “shoulder shrug should itself be the target of an ethical investigation.”

“The Ethics Center has a basic challenge to speak to the ethics of taking money from AIG,” noted retired Political Science Professor John Kramer. “The goal of conservatives is to so starve the public-caring institutions of funding that they are overwhelmingly beholden to private and corporate interests. Now they are often intimidated about speaking their truth.”

“Any entity designated an ‘Ethics Center’ has a special responsibility to scrutinize the moral and ethical correlates of its own supporting foundation, structure, and functioning, especially its filtering of acceptable and unacceptable issues,” noted Sociology Professor Noel Byrne. “Such filtering merits close scrutiny. Hay's [newspaper] story suggests that this issue is lost in the fog of myopic oversight.”

Tim Nonn, who has a doctorate in ethics, wrote in an unpublished letter to the same newspaper:

“The implications of sacrificing academic freedom in the name of ethics are mindboggling. What if a corporation based in the South had provided a grant to a university’s history department, but forbade teaching the history of slavery in America? Would the grant make the surrender of academic freedom acceptable?

“I had always assumed that a university existed to free, not enslave, minds. In this case, I was wrong. The popular motto on the walls of many universities throughout the world, veritas vos liberabit (the truth shall set you free), will never adorn the walls of SSU,” Nonn added.

“What good is an Ethics Center that won't discuss it's own ethics?” asked Thomas Morabito of Occupy Sebastopol. “They want to discuss your ethics, but not their own. They preach ‘do as I say, not as I do.’”

The Ethics Center plans to deal with issues such as immigration, water use, food ethics, clean technology, and income inequality, according to director Glasgow. “I look forward to many years of hard-nosed, sometimes gut-wrenching discussion of thorny issues,” Prof. Beard writes. We shall see.

The Center’s first event will be held on Feb. 6. While the talk is free, SSU has doubled its parking fees this semester to $5 - an increase that sends a clear message to the public that it is less welcome, although the university is funded primarily by taxpayer dollars.

What corporation or millionaire might be next at SSU? Wal-Mart? Monsanto, which funds the University of California at Irvine’s agriculture department?

May the the Center for Ethics, Law, and Society provide forums to discuss controversial issues and encourage critical thinking. Because right now, the take-over of public higher education by corporations is a serious threat.

Teachers in France have walked out, resulting in the closure of most primary schools across the country, over plans for a five-day working week.

Children in primary schools had a day off on Tuesday as their teachers decided to protest against the government’s proposal to make children attend a half-day class on Wednesdays, which would go into effect in September.

Hundreds of teachers in Paris on Tuesday staged a rally that will end at Paris City Hall.

Teachers complain of the excessive working hours and that the addition of the extra day to their four-day working week, would have no financial gain.

Jerome Lambert of the National Union of Primary and Secondary School Teachers (SNUipp-FSU) said the teachers, most of whom supported President Francois Hollande’s election, have expressed disappointment in the Socialist government’s approach to improving education.

“What the Socialist government is offering has nothing to do with the big promises that were made. Nothing they’re offering is good,” said a teacher in Paris taking part in the strike.

Teachers said the education reform “neglects the real problems” of overcrowded classrooms with “not enough teachers with specialized training to deal with the kids with learning difficulties.”

Teachers overwhelmingly voted in favor of Hollande in the May 6, 2012 presidential election, as the president had promised to improve the school system across the nation and to provide additional spending on education.

GVN/PKH

Up until November 6th, Washington was one of eight states that did not have a charter school within its borders, and by all accounts it didn't seem like that was going to change anytime soon. Voters had rejected charter initiatives three times - in 1996, 2000 and 2004.

But that was before millionaire donors like Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Alice Walton of Walmart fame poured millions of dollars into Ballot Initiative 1240, opening the state up to charter schools for the first time.

In the case of Washington State, a coalition that included well-known education reform groups like Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform hired people to gather enough signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, bought TV air time and sent canvassers door-to-door urging residents to vote yes on 1240.

When 1240 passed, despite opposition from the governor, many lawmakers and the teachers union, it was the closest vote among state initiatives in the 2012 election.

Big Money, Big Plans

The story of Washington is symbolic of where the fight for public education is playing out - with shrinking funds at the local level and big money coming in from the outside.

After the third failure to pass legislation on an initiative that would allow charter schools into Washington,  the well-funded education reform groups decided to take matters into their own hands.

The group behind the initiative called itself Yes on 1240 - now The Washington Coalition for Public Charter Schools. The initiative will bring as many as 40 new charter schools into Washington over the next five years.

It took only 18 days from the time the group got the go-ahead from a judge to collect signatures for a ballot initiative, to when they had exceeded the minimum 250,000 signatures.

(Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture / Flickr)Washington is one of few states that allows paid signature-collectors, and by July 2012 the group had signed up 350,000 people in favor of the ballot.

"We really looked at what are the different ways in which we can bring charter schools to Washington," said Jana Carlisle, executive director of Partnership for Learning, a Washington-based education nonprofit that worked with Yes on 1240. "There was a general consensus that doing it during a general election made a lot of sense. That is kind of the genesis of the initiative - it was an outgrowth of prior legislative attempts to provide innovative schools for struggling kids in particular."

As in many school districts around the country, Washington's low-income population is disproportionately minority. According to data from the American Community Survey, 28 percent of the state's white children under the age of18 were living in poverty, while 60 percent of African-American children were living at or below the poverty line. A majority of American Indian and Hispanic children were also in poverty.

The statewide high school drop-out rate was 4.4 percent, according to Washington's Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, while for American Indians it was 10.7 percent; 6.9 percent for African-American students and 5.9 percent for Hispanic students in the 2010-2011 school year.

By the time Yes on 1240 had turned in their signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, they also had amassed a large portion of their donations. According to a Truthout analysis of financial disclosure records, between June 5, 2012, and July 6, 2012, Yes on 1240 had raised more than $2 million.

In total, the group raised more than $10.8 million in just under five months, from 181 donors. Donors included Bill Gates, who gave $3 million; Walmart heiress Alice Walton gave $1.7 million; Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, gave $1.6 million and Connie Ballmer, wife of the CEO of Microsoft, gave $500,000.

The money from the No on 1240 campaign, collected over four months, totaled a little more than $15,000, from 86 donors.

"It was a very clear picture of education reform and business versus parents and community," said Melissa Westbrook, a public education activist and chair of the No on 1240 campaign. "Because of the amount of money they have, they get to dominate the conversation. There might be other things that have to get done, but people follow the money."

Glenn Anderson, a Washington State representative listed on the Yes on 1240 web site as in favor the measure, did not respond to a request for comment.

As the donations rushed in for the Yes on 1240 campaign, Washington was embroiled in a state supreme court case about school funding. In January 2012, the court ruled that Washington was failing to do its duty in funding K-12 education. Nearly a year later, in December, the court said too little progress had been made in putting more funding toward education.

"Steady progress requires forward movement. Slowing the pace of funding cuts is necessary, but it does not equate to forward progress," said Chief Justice Barbara Madsen in the court's December opinion.

In the past ten years, according to the Associated Press, education spending has gone from nearly 50 percent, to just above 40 percent of the state budget. In the 2009-2011 state budget, investments in early learning were cut by $12 million (8.8 percent) and the budget for K-12 was cut by $1.6 billion (10.3 percent).

Lawmakers need an estimated $1 billion to $1.5 billion to fulfill their obligations in the court case.

Opponents of 1240 have said the new initiative will drain public schools of even more resources, which they argue could better be used for arts, music and new technology.

This also was a concern that Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire had expressed.

“The governor's main concern was that we don't have the funding right now to support charter schools,” said Karina Shagren, a spokeswoman for the governor's office. “We have a proven record with other alternative schools here that have had success, so the governor didn't see the need right now to encourage new charter schools, especially when there is no record to prove that they are highly successful.”

Shannon Campion, spokesperson for Yes on 1240 and the executive director of Stand for Children in Washington, told The Nation that funding will not be an issue, because funding follows a student when they move from one public school to another.

“Public charter schools are cracking the code in how to serve at-risk and struggling students,” she said.

The Washington Charter School Commission has been created as an independent state agency to oversee the initiative.

The state teachers union also has filed a lawsuit against the charter measure, and speculation continues in Washington as to whether the state schools superintendent also will sue.

Conservative donor and venture capitalist John Nash has been appointed a minister in the Department for Education.

Mr Nash, who will be made a life peer in order to take up his post, was appointed a non-executive director of the Department by Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2010.

Mr Gove said today that his "vast knowledge of the education sector" made him the best person to be junior minister for schools, replacing Lord Hill of Oareford, who was appointed Conservative Leader in the Lords earlier this week.

The new Lord Nash and his wife Caroline have donated a total of £182,000 to the Conservatives since 2006.

Lord Nash is the founder of the education charity Future, which sponsors academy schools, including Pimlico Academy and Millbank Academy in London.

Downing Street said that, in his new role, he will not take any decisions on Government policies with an impact on the charity.

He will also step away from all relevant business interests while serving as a minister and will not take a ministerial salary.
David Cameron's official spokesman said: "What qualifies him for the job is his extensive knowledge of the education sector.

"He has had a role in an educational charity, but as part of his appointment, the (Education Department) permanent secretary and the Cabinet Office have agreed how to handle any areas in which there might be a perceived conflict or a conflict of interest, and of course he will not be taking any decisions where that might be the case.

"He will not take any general policy decisions in which Future the charity are referred to, may be involved or are perceived to be involved."

Mr Gove said: "I'm delighted that John has joined the education team. He has vast knowledge of the education sector and is the best person to drive through reform started by Lord Hill and continue to raise standards.

"Jonathan Hill has been a fantastic minister whose energy and passion has ensured that the academies and free schools policy has been a great success. I am hugely in his debt for the work he has done since the coalition was formed."

And Lord Nash said: "I have greatly enjoyed working in my capacity as a non-executive director with ministers and officials in the Department over the past two years.

"The Department is full of highly talented people and I greatly look forward to working even more closely with them.

"I believe that every child and young person should have the right to a really good education and that education is the key to the future success of our country."

Labour vice-chair Michael Dugher said: "David Cameron is much better at creating jobs for his big-money donors than he is at providing jobs for the millions of young and long-term unemployed.

"This looks like jobs for the boys from an out-of-touch Prime Minister.

"With yesterday's promotion of Lord Popat and now John Nash handed a peerage and a new post, two major Tory donors have been given ministerial jobs in just two days.

"Nice work if you can get it."