Eshu's Blues: charter schools and the rest of us
by michael hureaux
"Comprehensive education is a right."
The third joust between Obama and McCain came around, and I'll be damned if the evening didn't come and go without so much as a consistent ten minute exchange on what the current state of the world economy actually might mean. The market cult has fallen on its ass in a big way, everything we've been taught for the last thirty years is profoundly mistaken, but what do we get treated to in the final parlays between people who are allegedly our Best and Brightest? Yet another helping of market cult manure, seasoned according to public interest. The third presidential debate between Senators McCain and Obama ended on the public education question, with Senator John McCain declaring without caveat that the record of charter schools, as one of "choice" and "competition" is one which proves their superiority to the public school model.
Senator McCain is a bloody-jawed wolf who "made his bones" for his imperial capo years ago, and has since, in his autobiography, glorified his role in the bombing of the civilian population of Vietnam, so I don't expect anything approximating truth to pass through his lips. But Senator Barack Obama's political chicanery is a new style in disgusting. He sat across the table from Senator McCain, and allowed McCain his nonsense about markets or competition as a key factor in a solution to the public school crisis.
"Obama has underscored all of McCain's market nostrums for education reform, from charter schools to merit pay to the test mania of No Child Left Behind."
In fact, in the recent period, Obama has underscored all of McCain's market nostrums for education reform, from charter schools to merit pay to the test mania of No Child Left Behind. Despite all, however, Senator Obama has received the endorsement of this country's two largest education unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. I'd go into this but the political lazy-mindedness (Shankerism) of our labor leadership in the education profession is a thing of both legend and embarrassment among teachers that will be addressed by our rank and file sooner or later, and the current financial crisis is going to force that discussion a lot sooner than the NEA and AFT heads want to have it. I can wait.
But as regards John McCain and the "proof" of charter school success, this:
The only thing that charter schools actually have proven is that the solution to the crisis of public education is to invest in public education, and that is exactly the argument that rank and file public school unionists, students and parents have been making all along.
To clarify: if you have built a student enrollment within a target population, establish a clean and operative physical plant, staff it with teachers with a commitment to working with students whose lives are in crisis, compensate those educators and their staffs for the work they actually perform over the course of a day, allow that learning community to set its own caps on numbers of kids in the classroom, supply those students with every resource they need inside the school and ensure that they have family support and aid to every conceivable health need outside of school, most students will achieve academically. It's not rocket science. What Charter schools have proven is that if resource is expended and covers all areas of individual student need, most students succeed. In short, when the human need factor is addressed, academic achievement is vastly improved. People who can afford to send their kids to private schools have always understood this, and that's why their kids are in private schools. They believe their children should receive a comprehensive education, and they're absolutely right. Selfish though such parents are, comprehensive education is essential to the well-being of their children.
But comprehensive education, which imparts the ability to understand the deeper dimensions of opportunity, and which seeks to instill in the individual mind not only technical grasp and material accomplishment, but also empathy, nuance, and a sense of active and curious reason in performance, is a right. It is not a privilege. Moreover, it is only a society that is undergoing the sort of mass pathology the late Dr. Erich Fromm spoke about in his classic study of totalitarian tendencies Escape from Freedom which would continue to insist comprehensive education should be a privilege.
"When the human need factor is addressed, academic achievement is vastly improved."
Charter schools are a scam because they continue to uphold a model in which the so-called "gifted" student is allowed a comprehensive education, but the "less then gifted" students who are denied enrollment to their pristine halls remain behind in what's left of the public schools where they must make do with test prep classes for high stakes tests at the expense of elective classes and every other sort of academic magnet. Charter schools are a fraud because support for them is rooted in concern for something which is called the "achievement gap" in popular parlance. But the "achievement gap" - or the discrepancy between the test scores of students of color and the children of the working poor, and students from more affluent neighborhoods - is a direct reflection of a system of political economy under which it makes sense to starve out community health centers and then bail out real estate speculators who've bankrupted the world economy. The "achievement gap" is the direct reflection of a system which has the audacity to speak of the lawlessness and immorality of the young, but which extols the venality of a political culture wherein one powerful state entity (the United States) can ignite fratricidal warfare within the borders of a weaker state entity (Iraq) in the name of dignity and human progress. The "achievement gap" is a creation of minds that justify turning the planet into an industrial shit hole for the sake of something called the consumer market.
The "achievement gap" is in actuality a direct reflection of the distance between the kleptocracy world capitalism has chosen to celebrate at its moment of "highest" victory, and the actual needs of the individual soul. Charter schools, and the attendant test mania that serve them, are a negation of the mission of comprehensive education, and comprehensive education is the aim of public education in a society which professes democracy. Nothing less can serve the education needs of black people or any other. It's an old, old fact, one that Dr. WEB DuBois clarified in his papers on the education of black people over half a century ago:
"The normal human being must work and work regularly to supply his wants, such legitimate wants as food, clothes and shelter. In addition, there must be creative activities such as we understand under art and literature and then there must be systematic recreation for health, for normal satisfying of the sexual instinct, for social contact, for sympathy, friendship, love and sacrifice (from "Whither Now and Why", The Education of Black People, WEB DuBois, Monthly Review Press).
As the essential fraudulence of late capitalism grows more and more blatant, through imperial warfare, and the continued "balancing" of the budget on the backs of the working poor, educators are going to have to place ourselves among those ranks of the workforce that are going to be raising some hell about our brave new company store world, and work to build a new, independent leadership of labor to take charge of this comprehensive public education question and every other question of any societal importance.
"Educators are going to have to place ourselves among those ranks of the workforce that are going to be raising some hell."
How are we going to do this? I don't know, but I'd say one really good place to start would be working in our factional organizations like the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and the A. Phillip Randolph Institute to redirect use of the better part of that three hundred million dollars the labor movement as a whole drops on the god damn "Democratic" party every election year, redirect it to a rigorous community education effort led by organized labor for its own sake as a political entity. And Dr. Adolph Reed Jr. not so long ago was suggesting a G.I. Bill for higher education for anyone who wishes to apply, which is a very concrete demand that got lost in the sinkholes between active democracy and the spectaclist garbage of the "Democratic" party quite awhile back.
I'm sure what I'm talking about here will be called socialism by our little drifters from the right wing blogosphere who've been showing up here at BAR lately, but there's nothing I can do about that. Nor do I care to discuss something as complex as socialism with people whose understanding of socialism begins with the 1960s sect Weatherman and ends with body counts, i.e., the right's popular theory that capitalism is more humane than socialism just because the ideologues of capital consciously choose to ignore the mangled lives and piles of corpses their ideas generate in practice. The most dogmatic Stalinist has nothing on these liars. If the coming compromise of the futures of hundreds of millions of children is the price of such "market adjustment" religion, then let the system perish. Let it perish, charter schools and all. It shan't be missed.
michael hureaux is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: tricksterbirdboy@yahoo.com
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