Tag Archives: neoliberalism

Kindergarten as workforce training?

Both of Vancouver’s daily papers ran a story earlier this week (on their business pages) under the headline “Unprepared schoolkids cost B.C. $400 billion.” The stories reported on a BC Business Council funded report that argues “B.C. loses $400 billion in lost potential because it sends one in three children to kindergarten unprepared.”

Why would the Business Council care about kindergarteners?

Well, what we’re seeing is an intensification of the “school as workforce training” rationale pushed down from the secondary and post-secondary levels of education to kindergarten and preschool. “If children are not ready for school, they won’t be ready for the working world,” says one the report’s authors, who is a professor in Human Early Learning Partnership at UBC.

The master logic of “schools as workforce preparation” has been captured in the New Commission on the American Workforce report, “Tough Choices for Tough Times”. Tough-Tough was authored by such educational experts as the director of the militarized Lockheed-Martin, and university presidents whose incomes are frequently dependant on grants from the military, earmarked for “research.” Tough-Tough calls for national curriculum standards as a means of recapturing the witless patriotism necessary to get people to work, and eagerly fight and die, for what is abundantly easy to see are the interests of their own rulers.

Here’s a letter I sent to The Province newspaper, which was not published:

From: E Wayne Ross
Subject: BC Business Council report on kindergarten
Date: September 18, 2009 4:39:02 PM PDT
To: provletters@theprovince.com

Kindergarten as workforce training? This absurdity, found in a recent BC Business Council study, illustrates what is wrong with educational reform across North America: education for corporate profits instead of in the public interest.

The first principle of the Business Council, and the provincial government, which serves at its beck and call, is that the market rules, no matter the social damage from cutting public expenditures for social services, deregulation, and privatization. The BC Council report conceives of young students as “human capital” and reduces learning to bits of information and skill to be taught and tested.

If we leave kindergarten to these folks it will be transformed from a space of creative play and social interaction to one where the next generation of low-wage workers learn to do what they’re told.

E. Wayne Ross
Professor
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia

Call for Papers: Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

Call for Papers
Special Issue for Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

The neo-liberal restructuring of national education systems is a global phenomenon and represents a major threat to the possibility of a democratic, public education committed to meeting the needs of working class and oppressed groups. Teacher unions, across the world, despite all the attacks on them, represent perhaps the most formidable obstacle to neo-liberal restructuring. Teachers remain highly unionized and although they have suffered many setbacks in recent years, their collective organizations generally remain robust.

Despite the significance and importance of teacher unions they remain largely under-researched. Mainstream academic literature on school sector education policy often ignores teacher unions, even in cases where scholars are critical of the market orientation of neo-liberal reforms. Two recent exceptions to this tradition are the contributions of Compton and Weiner (2008) and Stevenson et al (2007). The strength of Compton and Weiner’s excellent volume is the breadth of international perspectives. However, individual chapters are largely short ‘vignettes’, and the aim is to offer fairly brief and readable accounts, rather than detailed and scholarly analysis. Stevenson et al offer a series of traditional scholarly articles, although the emphasis is largely on the Anglophone nations (UK, North America, Australasia), and the collection fails to capture the full breadth required of an international perspective. In both cases, and quite understandably, these contributions were not able to take account of the seismic developments in the world capitalist economy since Autumn 08 in particular. These developments have significant implications for the future of neo-liberalism, for the development of education policy in nation states and for the policies and practices of teacher unions. There is now a strong case for an analysis of teacher unionism that is detailed, scholarly, international and able to take account of current developments.

This special section of Workplace will focus on the ways in which teacher unions in the K-12 sector are challenging the neo-liberal restructuring of school education systems in a range of global contexts. Neo-liberalism’s reach is global. Its impact on the restructuring of public education systems shares many common characteristics wherever it manifests itself. That said, it also plays out differently in different national and local contexts. This collection of papers will seek to assess how teacher unions are challenging the trajectory of neo-liberal reform in a number of different national contexts. By drawing on contributors from all the major world continents it will seek to highlight the points of contact and departure in the apparently different ways in which teacher unions interface with the neo-liberal agenda. It will also ensure that analyses seek to reflect recent developments in the global capitalist economy, and the extent to which this represents threat or opportunity for organized teacher movements.

Compton, M. and Weiner, L. (2008) The Global Assault on Teachers, Teaching and their Unions, London: Palgrave.

Stevenson, H. et al (2007) Changes in Teachers’ Work and the Challengs Facing Teacher Unions. International Electronic Journal of Leadership for Learning. Volume 11.

Submissions
Contributions to Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to MLA style. If you are interested, please submit an abstract via Word attachment to Howard Stevenson (hstevenson@lincoln.ac.uk) by 31st July 2009. Completed articles will be due via email on 28th December 2009. All papers will be blind peer-reviewed.

Student Protests Sweep Italy

While Americans waste their time discussing what position they’ll be in as they continued to get screwed by the bank bailouts and/or tweaking the reactionary education reform mess of No Child Left Behind students in Italy are saying “NO” to the Berlusconi government’s plan to impose business models on public services such as schools and universities that will see the disappearance of nearly 100,000 teaching positions in the next three years:

This “euthanasia of the universities”, as Gaetano Azzariti, professor of constitutional law at Rome university, calls it, was a political decision, sacrificing teaching and research to sectors of the economy. It means that for a university to hire a new lecturer now, two others have to leave its payroll. And it means more private sector funding in universities and higher tuition fees, leading to increased levels of debt for the poorest students. And on August 28, education minister Mariastella Gelmini presented another executive order, setting out budget cuts and plans to return to single teachers in primary schools (each class is normally taught by several different teachers), meaning a shorter school day for children (and reducing parents’ ability to go out to work). Other measures aimed to revive old practices, such as marks for behavior up to secondary level.

Since the start of the school year in September 2008, a national movement of parents, teachers and students resisting the neoliberal reforms of the Berlusconi government formed under the banner of “Non rubateci il futuro” (Don’t steal our future) and have spawned huge demonstrations and university occupations and general strikes.

“What’s developing is the self-organization of university students and casual workers,” explained Aliocha, a literature student at La Sapienza university who is also a casual in a bank. “Some people combine being casual workers and students or researchers, others are just casual workers. Together with the rank and file unions, we started the October 17 strike, and organized it in workplaces where job insecurity is an everyday reality.”

See Serge Quadruppani’s article at CounterPunch.