Rouge Forum Update: Schools, Economic Crises, Wars and More!

Dear Friends,

Educators attending the Rouge Forum Conference (May 15-17, Ypsilanti, Michigan) can now gain Continuing Education Units for attending conference sessions. Please spread the word.

Thanks to Joe Bishop and the Michigan work group for this big step forward. Links to the current issue of the Rouge Forum News.

This week in the schools:

Sacramento holds segregated assemblies to promote racist high-stakes exams: Laguna Creek Principal Doug Craig said dividing the students by race allowed staff to talk about test scores without making any one ethnic group feel singled out in a negative manner.”Is it racist? I don’t believe it is,” Craig said.

Poway AFT Local Leads Southern California in Making Concessions: Concessions don’t save jobs. Like giving blood to sharks, concessions only make bosses want more.  It should be no surprise that the Poway district is represented by the worst union in the USA, the American Federation of Teachers, but it is of little matter now. The Poway union now sets the table for the rest of SoCal and especially San Diego. Nobody should follow their lead.

Controversial Stanford Study on Big Tests, Girls, and Minorities, by Emily Alpert.

This week on the economy:

Joseph Stiglitz – One of the reasons why our economy is weak is that we have growing inequality in our society. That means that people who would spend the money don’t have it. We sustained their consumption by lending but that lending was unsustainable and so unless we do something about the underlying inequalities both within our countries and across the world, it may be difficult to restore the global economy to the kind of prosperity that we would hope.

Reich: We are not at the beginning of the end.

GM and Chrysler Bankruptcy May End Pensions.

Jackknife: The collapse of the Teamsters Union.

Social Inequality and Mental Health.

This week on wars and resistance:

California Towns Defeat Military Recruiters.

Forget Star Wars, It’s Back to the Little Wars.

Democrats and Rockefeller backed CIA Torture.

With sadness, we note the death of Lindy Blake, courageous mutineer and Vietnam war resister.

“The sky is, of course, falling. We are lambs among wolves. The core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded social and economic inequality challenged by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance.”

Thanks to Amber, Adam, Gina, Wayne, Dave, Kevin, Beau, Vanessa, Cheri, Donna, Kelly, Sarah, Marisol, Ernesto, Candace, Sally, Sandy, Ann, Ruthie, Della, Jose, Greg and Katie, Joe B, Paula, Alfie, Steve R and Rick C, Bill,  and Glenn.

See you in Ypsi!

All the best and
good luck to us, every one.

r

Call for manuscripts: Canadian Social Studies

Canadian Social Studies
Open Call for Submissions

Canadian Social Studies, since its inception, has both drawn from and pointed to the multiple historical, sociological, geographical, and philosophical/theoretical/political perspectives that constitute the field of social studies education. Focusing on education’s role in helping to foster a better future, the journal publishes original, peer reviewed conceptual and empirical studies. Its purpose is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and research findings that will further the understanding and development of social studies education. CSS is especially interested in contributions that make strong connections between theory and practice. To this end, and recognizing the many sites in which social studies is practiced, we have several sections for potential contributions:

  • Articles
  • Book reviews and review articles
  • Loose threads: uncommon expressions of thoughtful exploration: art here in all its forms (with artist statements where desired). Recognizing the diverse ways issues affecting social studies (e.g., environment, poverty) can be represented, for this section, editors invite non-textual products from artists, teachers, and students.

Authors should send electronic copies of their submissions to any one of the following co-editors:

Carla Peck: carla.peck@ualberta.ca
George Richardson:  george.richardson@ualberta.ca
Kent den Heyer:  kdenheye@ualberta.ca

All submissions should be accompanied by a statement that the submission has not been sent to another publication nor previously published.

Style Manual – Canadian Social Studies uses APA 5th (2001) Edition

Length of Articles – Articles should be up to 6000 words inclusive of the abstract and documentation. Shorter pieces are also welcomed.

Copyright Clearance – Authors are responsible for obtaining written copyright permission for the use of pictures, tables, maps, diagrams, etc., and longer quotations appearing in their submissions. Any copyright permission must accompany the submission.

Historians Against the War adopt new, broader statement

Historians Against the War

Historians Against the War

Historians Against the War have ratified a new, broader statement of aims that goes beyond criticism of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The new statement condemns US imperialism, and importantly, links US military aggression to global capitalism.

As historically minded activists, scholars, students, and teachers, we stand opposed to wars of aggression, military occupations of foreign lands, and imperial efforts by the United States and other powerful nations to dominate the internal life of other countries.

In particular, we continue to demand a speedy end to US military involvement in Iraq, and we insist on the withdrawal, not the expansion, of US and NATO military forces in Afghanistan. We also call for a sharp reduction of US military bases overseas, and an end to US financial and military support of regimes that repress their people, or that occupy the territories of other peoples. We favor as well a drastic redirection of national resources away from military spending and toward urgently needed domestic programs.

We deplore the secrecy, deception, and distortion of history, the repeated violation of international law, and the attack on civil liberties domestically that have accompanied US policies of war and militarism—policies that became especially belligerent in the aftermath of September 11.

We fear that the current, rapidly escalating crisis of global capitalism, which is creating suffering worldwide, will lead to escalating wars abroad and intensifying repression at home. We support solutions to this crisis that seek to enrich the lives and increase the power of people globally, and protect their fundamental human rights. We are unalterably opposed to any attempts to solve the crisis at their expense.

We are aware that, in the words of the late historian William Appleman Williams, “empire as a way of life” has long characterized the United States and is not easily changed. However, we are mindful as well that the current conjunction of international and domestic crises offers an opportunity to alter longstanding destructive patterns. As historians, we believe that we can and must make a contribution to the broad, international movements for peace, democracy, and environmental and social justice. In pursuing our objectives, we look toward building and joining alliances with a wide variety of intellectual and activist groups that share our concerns.

People who are in substantial agreement (broadly defined) with the statement are invited to go to the web site and become members of HAW.

Rouge Forum Update : Upcoming Actions, Current Conditions, Resources, and FUN

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page is updated.

There you will also find links to the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15 to 17 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and the new Spring Issue of the Rouge Forum News, the only radical education publication in the US. The conference schedule is linked here.

Let’s break this update in parts: Upcoming Action, Current Conditions, and Resources.

Upcoming Actions:

In California and some other states, we are on the brink of test season and, perhaps, boycotts. Opt out of the tests. Tell parents and kids. Walk away. Set up freedom schooling where kids can learn, again, how to learn.

March on Mayday! Mayday, the International Workers’ Holiday, started well over 100 years ago but it was given new life in the US (where the government had declared it “Obedience to Law Day”) three years ago when immigrant rights activists created some of the largest demonstrations in the last 30 years. This year, it is more than likely youths will pour out of schools to join the marches. We should all be on the march, and supporting kids who rightly say that marching on Mayday is more important than the testing drill and kill that goes on in school that day. Here is the Rouge Forum Flyer from last year.

Current Conditions:

You would never know it from the complete silence from the AFL-CIO and NEA on the reality of 650,000 layoffs in the last month, but workers all over the world are fighting back. In Greece, there was a general strike. In France, uprisings sparked by students and teachers, building seizures, bosses kidnapped. In Italy, hundreds of thousands of people marched against the right wing government.
And in Thailand Protestors Smash Rich Folks Meeting.

It is class war. An international war of the rich on the poor with the poor children of each nation fighting poor children of other nations, on behalf of the rich. The core issue of our times is rising color coded inequality vs the potential of mass class conscious resistance.

World Unemployment to Boom in 2009: IL.

Here is Howard Zinn on class in America (video).

States Slash Social Program, but $10.9 trillion went to the banks so far.

DPS to Cut 600 and Close 23 Schools.

The banking crisis deepens as the contradiction between accumulation and consumption sharpens, the banks interested in profits alone and the consumers unable to buy. “Said Frank Pallotta, a former mortgage trader at Morgan Stanley, now a consultant to institutional investors, “if every bank was forced to sell at the market-clearing price, you’d have only five banks left in the market.”

New School Students Seized a Building and the Cops Attacked.

Gutting and Selling the US Manufacturing Base: Quote from the end of the article: Suter was cleaning out a tool shed that might have some resale value to some yuppie who collects such things. He pulled out a bound contract from 2000 between the UAW and The Company. He read from Article V Section 1: “The Union reaffirms its adherence to the principle of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and agrees to use its best efforts toward this end …” “If only everybody would have lived up to their end of the bargain,” he said. And then he tossed the contract in the garbage.

How the “New Labor Movement” Would Mirror GM’s Failed Structure.

The PIRATES! spectacle. We are being lied to again: PIRATES!

The Obamagogue, Torture Enabler, by Ted Rall: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22390.htm

Prove again that you are a good teacher, the New Mexico Model.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Boom Times for Criminal Syndicates.

Resources:

Political Economy For Beginners.

Meszaros on the Great Financial Crisis.

And a quote worth remembering:

“Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again.

Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began–in the ditch of a crisis… The fact that the socialised organisation of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society… The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations.

It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance… For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour power.”

Frederick Engels’s “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” part of Anti Dühring New York: International Publishers, 1935, pages 64-65

Congratulations to Fred Jerome for his new book: Einstein on Israel and Zionism.

With sadness, the death of Mark Fidrych.

Fun:

The Fox Tea Bag Problem.

Song:

The Internationale, for Mayday.

Thanks to Amber, Joe B and the entire committee for the conference, Adam and Gina, Wayne, Perry, Figora, Donnie A., Milt R, Peter M, Steve R, Ricky C, Sue H, Penny, Dan H, Jim3, Phillip, Gordon, Natalia, Harry K, Kathy K, Jim B, Kim B, Pam R, Tony H, Tommie and Bob, and Nereyda.

All the best and good luck to us, every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update—Bailouts and the “anti-war” movement

Dear Friends,

For those teaching or learning about the current depression, here are some more good sources:

Current Developments:

Criticism of “Progressive” Warmongers:

The term “progressive” may have no meaning anymore. If it is Move.on, that means slavish support for the demagogue, Obama. If it is United For Peace and Justice, it means the same thing in shifty terms. UFPJ’s recent Wall Street demos, deliberately set up to counter demands from rank and filers to demonstrate on the anniversary of the war, failed completely. This is nothing to gloat about even though we said, years ago, that following UFPJ would do just this. Still, it is tragic.

Less than 10,000 people demonstrated, down from the one million who hit the streets six years ago. But numbers are not everything. UFPJ trumped that by teaching people nothing at all important about why things are as they are, what to do in order to develop grand strategy (peace, justice, equality, freedom, etc.) or strategy (how to understand specific local circumstances and to seek out choke points where people can use powerful direct action moves) and tactics (particular actions that link these three elements).

Why would that be? Because UFPJ is run by remnants of the Communist Party USA, people who have never sought to build a mass class conscious movement and who have always fought those who try. The current Rouge Forum News has a very fine article by Tom Suber about the wreckage that UFPJ leadership is creating.

Let us be clear. The core issue of our time is accelerating color coded inequality met by the potential of organized mass class conscious resistance. Neither the CP nor UFPJ want any part of that.
Here is a sampling of UFPJ’s failures:

The task at hand is ours. The $10.9 trillion dollars the corporate state just printed for the banks and insurance companies is going to come from the lives and labor of someone. Either it will come from the ruin of hundreds of thousand of poor and working people, or, if we fight back, it can come from the rich. Let them suffer and pay, as they should. The degree of the pain will be determined by the levels of our real resistance in schools, in communities, at work places, and in the military. When they say Cut Back; We should say Fight Back.

This is a critique from Antiwar.com: Progressive Warmongers.

We note with sadness the death of a friend, Janet Jagan.

Thanks to Joe and Charles B., Steve and all the sharp eyes who caught the misspelled word in the last update (argh), Adam, Gina, Greg and Katie, Wayne, Sandra, Colin, Josh and M, Suber (s), the Sally’s, Penny and Rick, Doug and Connie, Betty, Joe C, Susan O and H, Ginny H, Jim S, Ricky C., Chris, Carol Panetta, Sharon A, David, Donnie A, the Breedloves, and the entire RF Steering Committee and folks working on the upcoming conference. http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

All the best and good luck to us, every one.

r

One way NCLB transforms public money into private profit

Today the New York Daily News reports that Champion Learning Center pulled in more than $21 million dollars from the New York City Education Department in the past two years for tutoring NYC students.

The No Child Left Behind Act requires outsourcing of tutoring for students in schools that don’t meet their test score targets.

Champion’s contract with NY Ed Department shows they received $79 per hour for tutoring sessions and that each student could receive up to four hours of tutoring per week—or $320 per student, per week.

Champion paid its part-time tutors an average of $17 an hour—the tutors are mostly college students with no teaching experience. That’s a cool $62 in overhead for Champion for every hour its employees spent tutoring a child.

“We received very little training in our orientation,” said one college student hired by Champion. “They just told us to follow the instructions in the test prep workbooks they gave us.”

Champion hired the student and one of her friends at the same time. Both say they were offered only $15 per hour for their work. In addition, they were told they would have to pay transportation costs to each child’s home and they were required to pay a $150 fee each for the cost of fingerprinting and a security check before they could start work.

The Daily News reports that Champion has tutored nearly 9,000 city students this year and is one of dozens of private, for-profit companies with state approval to provide tutoring services under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Yet another example of education deform in the USA. And Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan are only ramping up the emphasis that NCLB puts on test scores and the shift of public money in to private profits.

Rouge Forum News (Issue 13, Spring 2009)

Don’t forget about the upcoming Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan, May 15 to 17 this year. The program is clearly our best yet with Staughton Lynd as keynoter. Please spread the word.

In the mean time check out the Spring 2009 issue of the Rouge Forum News, edited by Adam Renner.

The RF News is the only clear expression of education radicalism in the US.

Contents

From the editor, Adam Renner
What is the Rouge Forum?
Why do you call it the Rouge Forum?
Blame the Schools, Kevin Vinson and E. Wayne Ross
The Obamagogue and Capital vs. the People, Rich Gibson
Whither the Anti-War Movement?, Tom Suber
UAW in a Route: Secrecy and the Sellout, Bob Apter
Math, Democracy and the Arts, Mindy R. Carter and Mary Ann Chacko
The Illusion of Education, Adam Renner
On Optimism, Cynicism, and Realism, Alan Spector
Why we need to blame ourselves [poem], Michael Simpson
Who will fill the cups? [poem], David Centorbi
Upcoming Events – RF conference, RF blog, RF News #14 and #15 call for papers

Download PDF version of The Rouge Forum News (#13)

The political compass and the vanishing political spectrum

The “political spectrum” is a long time topic in high school social studies classes and the parlance of “left-wing/right-wing” is firmly embedded in the minds of most North Americans. However, the left-right dichotomy that is typically used to categorize political views in the media and elsewhere does more obfuscate than illuminate differences in political thought.

In the USA the political spectrum has shrunk to the point that there is effectively no difference between Democrats and Republicans on economics, while there are a few, but only a few, notable differences on social issues. So if you watch Fox News, CNN, etc. you’ll see teleprompter reading pundits making mountains of mole hills when it comes to who’s on the left and who’s on the right—Alan Colms on the left? (At least we don’t have to endure Hannity and Colms any more on FoxNews, although Colms continues to pose on Fox radio).

The terms “Right-wing” and “Left-wing” as applied to politics originated with the French government assemblies in the 18th Century, where the aristocrats sat to the right of the speaker and commoners (the bourgeoisie) to the left.

The oversimplication of political thought to a single scale of left/right is what allows some Americans to actually call Obama a socialist. These folks are sincere in their beliefs about Obama, but the ancient Greeks would have called them called idiots (ἰδιώτης or idiōtēs)—seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters.

Typically jejune public (and pundit) opinions about what constitutes the left and the right makes it difficult for folks to make sense of political positions that fall out of the narrow mainstream—Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul are examples of well known political figures who cannot be accurately characterized on the left/right political binary.

What’s at issue here is not just the accuracy with which we categorize political figures or political views. The left/right binary has the practical effect of forcing political discourse into artificial categories—every political disagreement becomes a two-sided argument, which is the typical cable news or local newspaper paradigm for political news coverage. This strategy works quite well in capitalist democracies, which cultivate the appearance of dissent, choice, and difference on political and social issues, while manufacturing consent amongst the public for policies designed to preserve the interests economic and political elites. The economic bailouts of recent months are a good example of this.

But the left/right binary also alienates, marginalizes, and confuses many people who fail to see a place for their own political views in the “objective” framework of what consitutes politics, so they do not participate (and I’m not talking about voting or elections, but the failure to image themselves as having political agency in the broadest sense of the concept).

Despite a wide variety of models that can provide multidimensional images of political positions, discourse about the political spectrum in the media and many classrooms remains shallow and unidimensional.

While models (and quizzes) like The Political Spectrum, Pournelle Chart, the Nolan Chart, etc. have their limitations, they can be useful pedagogical tools for teachers who want to encourage their students to think about politics beyond the oversimplified right/left divisions that dominate mainstream media (and this provides students with a good starting point for thinking critically about the MSM and the interests they serve).

Finance oligarchy captures US government; US government preps for civil unrest

The conventional wisdom, to this point, has been that current economic crisis cannot be as bad as The Great Depression. Conventional wisdom is apparently changing.

Last week, renowned investor George Soros said the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

Soros believes the current economic crisis has created more severe turbulence than the Great Depression and former Fed chairman Paul Volker, speaking at the same conference at Columbia University, agrees: “I don’t remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world,” Volcker said.

Referring to events in Septmeber 2008, when Lehman Brothers went under, Soros said, “We witnessed the collapse of the financial system. It was placed on life support, and it’s still on life support. There’s no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom.”

The bailout money is being abused in a number of ways, all of which recycle bailout cash back to corporate elites and the political class:

  • Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has criticize AIG, not for using bailout cash to give huge bonuses to its executives, but for repaying, in full, its investment banking partners—steering additional federal dollars to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and others when they already were already being propped up by Washington.

“Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels. Citigroup ($25 billion) dished out $29,620, including $2,500 to House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, who also got $10,000 from UBS which, while not a TARP recipient, got $5 billion in bailout funds as an AIG “counterparty.”

But Spitzer and Newsweek are talking small potatoes compared to the Simon Johnson’s assessment of the current economic crisis. In “The Quite Coup” (The Atlantic, March 2009),  Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says that that the finance industry has “effectively captured our government” not through violence or bribes (Abramoff and K Street notwithstanding), but

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

What we have is an ideological coup. The government quite clearly acting as the executive committee of the rich. Johnson explains why we have been been denied the pleasure of of seeing fat cats jumping out of Wall Street skyscrapers—the financial oligarchy remains in control, blocking essential reforms and continuing to push us toward the Greatest Depression.

Johnson’s article is the most clearly reasoned, knowledgeable, and accessible piece I’ve read on root causes of the current crisis and he presents a “tried and true” strategy for solving it too—IMF shock therapy. He likens the U.S. economic and financial crisis to what has been seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets) like South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again).

In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

The financiers who created the crisis with the able assistance of Wall Street alumni in government (particularly ex-Goldman Sachs executives who have been ensconced at the Treasury Department for multiple administrations) are now, according to Johnson, “using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.” Well, the financiers are the government.

For Johnson the two major, interrelated problems are the banking sector “that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate” and  “a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.” On the former, he suggests the IMF’s nationalization approach. On the latter, Johnson suggests replacing our current elites, with a new batch. Hmm.

While Johnson’s analysis is compelling, his solutions, unsurprisingly, aren’t—two scenarios: IMF approach solves the problem or catastrophic global depression smartens up the elites).

Meanwhile the US government moves forward to on plans to use the military to control civil unrest as a result of the collapsing economy, as legislation to establish internment camps on US military bases has been introduced into the House of Representatives.

Doesn’t look to me like the finance oligarchy is planning to step down any time soon.

Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss: Obama’s education policy ignores role of poverty in educational achievement (and evidence that NCLB should be scrapped)

In a Chicago Daily Observer column, which also appeared in the print version of the Chicago Sun-Times, Don Rose gives “Bad Grades for Obama on Education.”

Rose cuts Obama a break and doesn’t “fail” him because of his commitment to early childhood education (the federal stimulus bill he signed last month will provide $5 billion to grow the Early Head Start and Head Start programs nationwide, and expand access to child care for 150,000 more children from working families) and parental involvement. While I agree with Rose’s criticisms, he goes way too easy on Obama, who is betraying his “progressive” base in many areas, but none more so than on education policy where he is intensifying George W. Bush’s disastrous No Child Left Behind scheme.

As I’ve pointed out previously, Obama’s education plan is a continuation of the discredited and destructive No Child Left Behind Act. Rose makes this same point and notes that the rhetoric from Obama, and his education secretary Arne Duncan, is that NCLB just needs to be fixed, but the research evidence is clear that NCLB needs to be scrapped—see, for example, The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment and Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, both published by Teachers College Press, for extended critical analyses of NCLB.

How exactly is Obama failing on education?

First, and most importantly, Obama and Duncan ignore the 800 lbs. gorilla of educational achievement, which is poverty. Poverty is the major factor in the differences in school performance. As Rose points out

“poor education is an economic issue; failure to acknowledge that is the single most egregious omission in their statements. Regardless of what the “bell curve” advocates tell you, or the way Duncan talks about education as a “civil rights” issue, it isn’t race, but class.”

Studies have repeatedly shown that socio-economic factors have the highest correlations with student test scores.

Randy Hoover, a professor at Youngstown State University, has conducted a number of studies that show that tests scores are primarily predictors of class and race. In Hoover’s latest study, the three factors he found were most likely to predict test performance were the percentage of single parent wage earners, the percentage of poor children and the median family income in a school district. When Hoover combined those factors into what he calls the “lived experience index” He found they were responsible for at least 61 percent of a district’s test performance. (Hoover studied about 60 variables to see which correlated best with test performance and “on most of them I got no correlation whatsoever,” he said.)

The US has made “closing the achievement gap” among racial and ethnic groups a key goal. This is the one of the main purposes of No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB uses student testing as the primary strategy for promoting changes within schools to accomplish that goal. The problem, of course, is analogous to the old saying “you don’t make the pig grow by weighing it,” and as many educators have pointed out you don’t improve educational achievement by giving tests.

A recent policy brief by David C. Berliner, Regents Professor at Arizona State University, makes this point crystal clear. Berliner’s report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, details six out-of-school factors (OSFs) common among the poor that “significantly affect the health and learning opportunities of children, and accordingly limit what schools can accomplish on their own”:

  • low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children;
  • inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance;
  • food insecurity;
  • environmental pollutants;
  • family relations and family stress; and
  • neighborhood characteristics.

Berliner also discusses is a seventh OSF, extended learning opportunities, such as preschool, after school, and summer school programs.

Because America’s schools are so highly segregated by income, race, and ethnicity, problems related to poverty occur simultaneously, with greater frequency, and act cumulatively in schools serving disadvantaged communities. These schools therefore face significantly greater challenges than schools serving wealthier children, and their limited resources are often overwhelmed. Efforts to improve educational outcomes in these schools, attempting to drive change through test-based accountability, are thus unlikely to succeed unless accompanied by policies to address the OSFs that negatively affect large numbers of our nations’ students.

One has to wonder how a supposed “progressive” president who, because of his own personal background, is sensitive to issues of poverty and its connections to race and ethnicity doesn’t see the connection between what goes on inside of schools and the social and economic conditions that affect students’ lives outside of schools. The simple answer is that Obama’s “progressivism” is a chimera and his education policy is not oriented to serving the needs of students, but rather interests of the corporate-capitalist class.

There is really no other logic to Obama’s pronouncements on education.

Obama wants give teachers pay for student test scores, ignoring the fact that history has proven such schemes to be debacles.

Obama praises charter schools for creativity and innovation, ignoring the fact that charter schools perform no better and often worse than public schools, pave the way for privatization, and allow teacher unions to be sidestepped. As Gerald Bracey says “you can’t bash the public schools on test scores then praise the charters which have lower scores.”

Like his predecessors, Obama misrepresents public education performance as a scare tactic and to open the door for the privatization. Obama claims that graduation rates have fallen from 77% to 67%, but the U. S. Department of Education says the best method for estimating it puts it at 74.5% nationally. Obama says dropout rates have tripled over the past 30 years. But how does a 10% decline in graduation rate equal a 300% increase in dropout rate?

Obama claims “Just a third of our 13- and 14-year-olds can read as well as they should.” Gerald Bracey calls this claim “outright garbage.”

Obama has “raved about South Korean schools but neglected to say that thousands of South Korean families sell their children–yes, sell–to American families so their kids can a) learn English and b) avoid the horrible rigidity of Korean schools. And while the US trails Korea on average test scores, it has a higher proportion of students scoring at the highest level on the Program of International Student Achievement (PISA). Moreover, it has the highest number of high scorers (67,000) of any country. No one else even comes close.”

Obama’s education stimulus package continues the regimentation of curriculum and test-driven approach to education by bribing states and school districts to apply for $5 billion in grants largely aimed at boosting student test scores. These grants, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, are known as the “Race to the Top Fund.”

Obama, Duncan, and the rest do this because that is what they must do in the social context they are in, and because they have chosen sides in what is the class war, the international war of the rich on the poor, which the rich recognize and the poor, at least in the US, do not—yet.

The core issue of our time is the interaction of rising inequality and mass, class-conscious, resistance. That is why the education agenda is a war agenda.