by Michael Friedman
The U.S. ruling class and its political representatives at all levels have launched an all-out assault on public education. While disparate elements of this campaign have been in place for the past three or four decades, we are today seeing a confluence and culmination of these trends, orchestrated by President Obama and his Education secretary Arne Duncan, under their "Race to the Top" (previously "No Child Left Behind") program. Cutbacks, school closings, tuition increases, the "business model," high-stakes testing, school closings, and privatizations/charterizations are all aimed at discrediting, fragmenting, and, ultimately, eliminating public education.
Disingenuous enemies of public education make the claim that charters -- independent schools owned and run by corporations, foundations, or other organizations, and ostensibly regulated by state and municipal governments -- are not private schools. Charters are housed in public school buildings and provided with tax money that should go to resource-starved public schools. Make no mistake: the goal of the push for charters is privatization. In a market economy, fragmented "quasi-private" charter schools will give way to for-profit corporations running chains of schools on economies of scale. In New York City, for example, several for-profit charter schools are already absorbing public resources, while others have been established with hedge funds which have no other purpose, ultimately, than to guarantee high rates of return for investors. And, in New York City, at least, the proliferating charter schools largely accept only students that score in the highest percentiles in standardized tests.
Public schools -- particularly urban public schools -- have deteriorated over the past decades as a result of waves of cutbacks, bureaucratic mismanagement, re-segregation, and marginalization of schools serving low-income communities – all of which served to create the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure conducive to the current onslaught. The response by the public education authorities has been increasingly to label such schools as "under-performing" and close them down, rather than providing the resources and assistance necessary to improve
