These articles identify selfish corporate goals in education and point to the need for education for democracy.

 
New Democracy works for democratic revolution.
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(This flyer is an expanded version of an article by Dave Stratman published in the "Leadership News" of the American Association of School Administrators, Feb. 15, 1998.)
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A couple months ago these sample questions from the new MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), given to all Massachusetts students in grades 4, 8, and 10, appeared in the Boston Globe:

MUSIC: Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with a flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat.

BIOLOGY: Create life. Estimate the difference in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system. Prove your thesis.

HEALTH: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of Scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have 15 minutes.

The "sample" was a parody, of course, but it made an important point: the test was impossible. (Massachusetts) Students (grades 4, 8, 10) were subjected from 11 to 13 hours of tests in 17 days—longer than the tests required for college, graduate school, and law school combined. Some
school systems, concerned that young people would not have the stamina to get them through day after day of  test-taking, supplied high-energy snacks and drinks to the kids. Parents were encouraged to get their children to bed early. Teachers were told not to assign homework during the weeks of testing.

These are "high-stakes" tests. When they are fully operational, students in grades 4 and 8 will need to pass the state tests to be promoted; students in grade 10 will have to pass to be eligible to graduate. Teachers will be "held accountable" for their students' grades. (Forty percent are expected to fail.) Schools in which students perform poorly on the tests can be placed in receivership by the state and their faculties dismissed.

The contents of the MCAS are secret: no educators in Massachusetts except certain officials of the Department of Education and the Board of Education have been allowed to examine the tests for their age-appropriateness or their relationship to what is actually taught. The tests were devised by a company which had recently been fired by the state of Kentucky for major errors in the design and marking of tests it had administered there.

In literature circulated to parents and students before the tests, corporate backers of "higher standards" boasted that "These are very, very tough tests—the toughest that most Massachusetts students have ever taken" and that "good attendance and passing grades" no longer entitle a student to a high school diploma. To prepare our students "to compete with children from all over the world," said the corporations, much more is required.

Tests similar to MCAS are being required of young people in state after state. President Clinton is fighting for national assessments along the same lines.

What's behind this rush to testing and "higher standards?"

MAKING SCHOOLS "LEAN AND MEAN"

As is often the case, these developments inside the schools reflect events in the wider society.

In the past two decades, corporations have adopted new management techniques designed to undermine worker solidarity and integrate workers more thoroughly into the company machine. Known variously as "continuous improvement" or "management by stress," or "kaizen," the  Japanese term for it, the technique consists essentially of dividing the workforce into competing "teams" and "stressing" the production system by imposing higher and higher production quotas. As workers work faster and faster to meet the quotas, the company achieves several key goals: production is increased; jobs are eliminated; "weak links" in the system break down and are replaced.

Most important, " continuous improvement" creates great anxiety in workers about their ability to meet the ever-increasing goals, and encourages workers to replace solidarity among themselves with loyalty to the Company Team. It forces workers into constant speed-up. Workers are kept running so fast to meet company goals that they don't have time to think or talk about their own goals or work together to pursue them.

Corporate-led education reforms use similar strategies. They use "School- Based Management" and other techniques to isolate teachers in each school from their colleagues around the system. Teachers are then encouraged to join with management as a "team" to compete for students and survival with other schools. The reforms use testing to keep raising the standards which students and teachers must meet, far beyond what their parents were expected to achieve and beyond anything that would be of value.

The purpose is the same as "continuous improvement" in a factory: raise the anxiety level and keep students and teachers running so fast to meet the goals set by the system that they have no time to think about their own goals for education or for their lives.

These reforms will have terrible effects. Many students who would otherwise graduate from high school will drop out. (In Texas and Florida, where "high-stakes" testing is in place, high school drop-out rates which had been dropping have already begun to rise.) Young people who fail to meet the new standards will be condemned to marginal jobs and told to blame themselves.

The reforms redefine education as a process whereby young people constantly "remake" and sell themselves to the corporations. The reforms attack the self-knowledge and understanding of unsuccessful and successful students alike, as young people are encouraged to redefine themselves—their own goals, their own thoughts and hopes and desires—out of existence, to make themselves acceptable to our corporate masters.

Our children have qualities more important than those desired by corporate Human Resource directors. Education conceived in this way makes economic productivity the goal and measure of human of society and makes the corporations the judges of human worth. It undermines the notion that human beings individually and collectively possess goals which transcend capitalism.

CONFLICT OVER EDUCATIONAL GOALS

There is no more vital issue to understand in education than this: The corporate and political elite who dominate education policy have goals for education which contradict the goals of the people who populate the schools: teachers and students and their families.

Public schools were supported by the industrial elite in America with the explicit intention of strengthening elite control over the working population. In the middle of the nineteenth century Horace Mann, the founder of the "common school," explained the rationale for public schools: "...common schooling would discipline the common people to the point where they would not threaten the sanctity of private property or practice disobedience to their employer."*

Public schools have been used ever since to instill in young people a respectful attitude toward those in power. William Bennett, while Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, explained, "The primordial task of the schools is the transmission of social and political values." In a class society, the values which the schools are designed to transmit are the values of the dominant class—competition, inequality, the sanctity of private property, and the belief that the good things in society trickle down from the elite.

At the heart of the education system, there is a conflict over its goals. On one side stand educators and parents and students, most of whom share democratic values and want to see students educated to the fullest of their ability. On the other side stand the corporate and government elite, the masters of great wealth and power. Their goal is that students be sorted out and persuaded to accept their lot in life, whether that be the executive suite or the unemployment line, as fitting and just, and that social inequality be legitimized and their hold on power reinforced.

This conflict over the goals of schooling is never acknowledged openly, yet it finds its way into every debate over school funding and educational policy and practice, and every debate over education reform.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SCHOOLS?

The corporate critique of the schools has served to cover up what's really wrong with them: the schools promote inequality, competition, and unquestioning acceptance of the social order.

The elite pursue these educational goals in many ways. Shortages in school funding undermine the work of students and teachers and tell them that they are not valued. School-business partnerships promote business values in the schools. Textbooks teach that history is made by presidents and kings; ordinary people are dismissed as passive victims or a dangerous problem.

But many of the means of achieving elite goals for education are far more subtle:

* The schools assume that there are big differences in people's intelligence and that most people are not very smart, and are designed to "prove" these low expectations. Teachers are trained to find supposed differences in children's abilities; standardized, "norm-referenced" tests are designed to sort kids out and produce a range of test scores which match the social hierarchy—in other words, which show that richer people are smarter. Shortages of teachers and textbooks, lack of support
for their work, and countless other devices are means by which students and teachers are set up to fail.

* The schools use competition and ranking to legitimize the social hierarchy. Students reluctant to compete for approval get low marks: what is really a conflict over values is seen as a failure of students' intelligence. For teachers, school life consists more often of an isolated struggle to survive than being encouraged to join with other teachers to nurture students.

* Course content often has no value except as a measure of students' willingness to master it. Much of the content consists of "facts" torn out of their social context, with all the life sucked out of them,
because their life is rooted in the class war the elite seek to obscure.

These and other means are used by schools to prepare most students for working lives spent performing boring tasks with unquestioning obedience in a "democracy" in which the goals of society are not up for discussion and in which the idea of people acting collectively for their own goals is considered subversive.

WHAT'S RIGHT WITH THE SCHOOLS?

Teachers and students and their families share goals which contradict the goals of the elite, and they work to achieve these goals in every way they know how in spite of elite domination. The gigantic effort by corporate and political leaders to impose education reform is necessary precisely because the people in the schools have worked for their goals with enough success to threaten elite control.

When teachers stimulate and challenge; when they encourage all their students to learn and inspire them to think about the world as it really is; when they create a nurturing environment; when they fight for smaller class sizes; when they offer each other words of support: when they do any number of things they do every day, they are opposing elite goals for education and working for the shared goals of ordinary people.

When students help each other, or raise critical questions, or refuse to join in the race for grades and approval; when they exercise their curiosity and intelligence; even when they hang on the phone for hours, talking about "life," they are resisting elite goals and working for a better concept of life.

When parents listen sympathetically to their children, or talk with their friends or each other about the school or raising kids: when people do these things that they do every day, they are resisting elite goals and working for the opposite values of solidarity and equality and democracy.

To the extent that students succeed in real learning and teachers in teaching and parents in raising their children to be thoughtful and considerate, they succeed in spite of the education system, not because of it.

The remarkable thing about the public schools isn't that some teachers become demoralized and "burned out," or that some students drop out or do poorly, but that so many teachers and students achieve so much in the face of a system designed to fail.

EDUCATION AND REVOLUTION

Capitalist society is based on slavery: the enslavement of workers to the wage system and the enslavement of human beings to things. Education worthy of the name must help set us free, not further bind us in chains.

The conflict over the goals of education is part of the class war over the goals of society. Only a movement which challenges the goals and values and power of the elite can change education.

There are a thousand questions about society which elite institutions will never raise but which are critical to our future. The revolutionary movement must consider anew the goals of human society and the measures of human achievement. It must re-examine our relationship to technology
and to Nature. It must enable people to transform work and play into sources of creativity and fulfillment.

We do not have the power at this point to change education, but we can begin to pose these questions. The most liberating and humanly fulfilling education for all of us will come as we take part in the struggle to overthrow elite rule and recreate human society.

*Thanks to Bill Griffen for the H. Mann quote.
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WHY ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS UNDER ATTACK?
A New Democracy Flyer

The official education reform movement is part of a corporate and government attack on public education. Its goal is not to raise the expectations of our young people but to narrow, stifle, and crush them.

THE MYTH OF SCHOOL FAILURE

The campaign to justify the reforms is based on  fraud. Take the "disastrous" decline of  Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. These scores did decline somewhat from 1963 to 1977. But the SAT is a voluntary test, useless as a measure of school quality.

The scores began to fall when the range of young people going to college dramatically expanded.  But was there a lowering of student achievement during this period? Absolutely not. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a representative exam, given each year to sample student populations across the country. PSAT scores held steady during this period in which the children of black and white working families first entered college in large numbers.

Other positive accomplishments go largely ignored: From 1973 to 1995 SAT scores of black  students rose 55 points. In 1995 for the first time the proportion of white and black young people ages 24 to 29 who had completed high school was the same: 87%.

The alleged shortage of skilled personnel is also fraudulent. U.S. schools graduate the highest proportion of scientists and engineers in the world. In spite of the booming economy, these highly-skilled scientific workers are experiencing double-digit unemployment.
(Boston Globe, 3/17/97)

THE CHARACTER OF THE REFORMS

To understand the nature of the corporate attack, look at some typical reforms:

* Charter schools, school vouchers, and school choice attack the idea of a public good.  They undermine the power of  ordinary people by replacing supportive community relationships with isolated individuals competing to get their children into the "right" schools.

* Sharply raising standards while not equalizing resources at dramatically higher levels sets many young people up to fail. Establishing "high stakes" tests for high school graduation legitimizes
their failure.

* Increased reliance on standardized tests, even "open-ended" tests, narrows the curriculum and encourages rote learning. Increased focus on class "rank" attacks solidarity among students and reduces education to a game of winners and losers.

* "School to Work" programs substitute training for education and aim to shape every child to meet the needs of the corporations—for a docile workforce.

Corporate and government leaders couch education reform in terms of one great national purpose: business competition. They hold up corporate success as the source of moral authority and corporate profit as the measure of human achievement.

WHAT IS BEHIND THIS ASSAULT?

In the past two decades, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. Skilled manufacturing jobs have been replaced by low skill service jobs—flipping hamburgers and cleaning offices. Huge numbers of white collar jobs have been "restructured" out of existence.

The lack of skilled jobs is likely to worsen as automation advances. Computerization has greatly reduced the skills required in many jobs, and has wiped out many others. This, after all, is the appeal of computerization to corporations.

Our young people have greater talent than the corporate system can use, and greater dreams than it can fulfill. The purpose of the attack on public education is to crush the self-confidence of millions of young people, so that if they have less fulfilling jobs and less rewarding lives in an increasingly unequal and undemocratic society, they will blame themselves instead of the economic system.

Teachers are under attack not because they have failed but because they have succeeded—in raising expectations which the corporate system dare not fulfill.

Attacking public education is also a way of blaming ordinary people for the increasing inequality in society. Corporate and political leaders are saying, if millions don't have adequate work or housing or much of a future, the fault lies with the people themselves, who could not meet the standards.

The attack on public education is part of a broader strategy to strengthen corporate domination of society. The 1960s and ‘70s witnessed a worldwide "revolution of rising expectations." Beginning around 1972, capitalist and communist elites undertook a counterrevolution to lower expectations and tighten their control. This counteroffensive has taken many forms, all of them designed to undermine the economic and psychological security of ordinary people. The export of jobs, the
restructuring of corporations, the dismantling of social programs are policies intended to make people more frightened and controllable.

EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY

What changes are needed in public education? The proposed reforms exacerbate the worst thing about the schools: their tendency to reinforce the inequality of society. Real reforms would move in the opposite direction.

If we want to change the schools, we must first ask, "What are we educating our students for?" The choices come down to two. We can either prepare our young people for unrewarding jobs in an unequal and undemocratic society, or we can prepare them to understand their world and to change it. The first is education to meet the needs of the corporate economy. The second is education for democracy.

The goal of real change in the schools must be education for democracy. With this goal we would encourage high expectations, cooperation, and equality rather than competition and inequality, and real commitment to our children rather than fake reforms.

THE LARGER QUESTION

The conflict over the shape and direction of education is part of a larger struggle over the direction of our society.

On one side of this struggle are arrayed the masters of great wealth and power,  for whom schooling is a means of social control and for whom the full development of the talent and abilities of our young people represents a dangerous threat. This powerful elite will use any means at
its command to strengthen its domination of society, no matter what the human cost. On the other side of the conflict stand most people, including parents and teachers and children, who wish to see young people's abilities developed to the fullest. There are few conflicts in society that illustrate so plainly the need for revolution.

For most of the twentieth century, the people of the world have been trapped between capitalism and communism. Our task as we approach the end of the twentieth century is to create human society anew on a truly democratic basis, in which human beings are not reshaped and restructured to fit the needs of the economy, but rather economic and social structures are reshaped to allow our fulfillment as human beings.  Please copy this flyer and pass it on.
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Reduction of Prime Minister’s Powers should be a Federal Democracy Issue Apr/99
By Gary Morton

– Facts gleaned from a recent book detail how Canada is growing increasingly undemocratic. Not only are citizens powerless to speak and vote on issues, but most elected MPs and now even Cabinet Ministers are losing power. Far too much control has been handed over to the Prime Minister and his advisors and staff.
   This is similar to what has happened at the provincial level. An example being the Ontario Government of Mike Harris, which has deteriorated to rule by the Premier and his cabal of unelected advisors, some of which double as lobbyists for large corporate interests. The Toronto Megacity is another level where citizens are ruled -- this time by a dictatorial mayor, council committees and city staff.
   Representative Government is losing its representative nature, and you go through five levels of government -- school board, municipal/megacity, GTA services board, the province, and the federal level without encountering even one open forum for the Citizens’ Daily Voice. Not a single Citizens’ Assembly is provided in this so-called Democratic Nation, and that makes the picket sign the last defense and voice of the people.
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   A new book ‘Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics’ by Donald Savoie concludes that the iron grip that Canadian prime ministers exercise over their governments has transformed even the cabinet into little more than a focus group for the leader. The traditional concept of prime ministers as firsts among equals is a relic of the past, Mr. Savoie observes. Instead, power resides in what he calls a court government that revolves around the prime minister. Cabinet has now joined Parliament as an institution being bypassed.
   The court now in control comprises several key advisers in the Prime Minister's Office, the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Minister of Finance and his deputy minister and a handful of other political advisers, who may or may not be cabinet ministers. No matter the circumstances, the Prime Minister remains the boss.
   The prime minister controls cabinet by controlling appointments in the first place. Cabinets do not vote on issues, they discuss them if the prime minister's officials decide to put them on the cabinet agenda. Consensus means any group of ministers that includes the Prime Minister even if it is a minority.

PRIME MINISTER'S POWERS
Names cabinet ministers
Chairs cabinet meetings
Can dismiss ministers
Writes so-called mandate letters setting out ministerial marching orders before the cabinet is even appointed
Establishes cabinet committees
Appoints all deputy ministers
Decides the cabinet's agenda
Is briefed on ministerial positions before the cabinet meets
Calls the cabinet consensus
Controls patronage appointments
Writes the Speech from the Throne setting out the government's strategic direction
Signs off on budgets
Commands national media attention
Manages relations with foreign leaders
Manages relations with provincial premiers
Has the single largest concentration of political advice in Ottawa -- 80 to 120 people in the Prime Minister's Office -- at his personal disposal.
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