Public education from pre-school to higher education is being permanently transformed before our eyes. The massive intrusion of corporate-owned tech platforms into public schools has accelerated the trend towards abolishing the public’s control of public schools. Meanwhile, thousands of teachers and millions of students apparently have left the system.
To abolish means to implement policy to do away with something, whether legally or extra-legally. That’s what it means to say slavery was abolished, and that is exactly what school privatization means today: a coordinated program by corporations and government to abolish public education at every level. Along with everything else, COVID has accelerated and concentrated this political seizure of power.
As society considers what real recovery from the pandemic looks like, it is clear that real broad public education is key to meet the emergencies of these transformative times. America has learned the hard way that the price for ignoring facts and science is paid in human lives. The pandemic is also accelerating the segregation of US schools, drastically reducing education for the majority of people.
Before the pandemic, across the country, schools that were 75 percent white received an amazing $23 billion a year more in state funds than schools that were 75 percent Black-Indigenous-People-of-Color (BIPOC). Regardless of race, poor and rural schools also receive much less funding than schools in wealthy areas. Well-funded schools tend to be in communities with less COVID, where parents can work more easily from home. These schools returned to campuses earlier, with more resources and more flexibility. Pandemic privilege is alive and well.
On the other hand, essential workers, who must risk their lives to work, tend to be heavily BIPOC and female. Their communities have a much higher rate of the virus, suffer much higher job loss, have families where the children must work if they can. Their schools are worse off by design and will open safely with much more difficulty.
Under these conditions, reopening itself is desperately unequal. Affluent families all have broadband access to online education. Schools in these communities will open with far more access, resources, and options. Students in poor communities will go back to the same old racist standardized tests so that schools can determine how much “learning loss” they have suffered. This trope in itself reveals the white supremacist roots in public education guarantee. These views set up schools in poor communities for privatization.
Coinciding with the reopening, a rising fascist political force intends to double-down on the 150-year-old white supremacist foundations of public education. It is not accidental that the same states, controlled by Republican governors, which are criminally trying to suppress the vote, are also passing laws that ban teaching the truth of the USA’s structural racism. The fascist-oriented Heritage Foundation is directing the national campaign to suppress voting. In January, the group’s director of education policy told viewers that the “most important” way to fight “Critical Race Theory” was to support “school choice.” Neo-fascist Steve Bannon proclaimed, “The path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.”
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a university-level discourse that argues that racist structures permeate American law and society. It has never been used at the K12 level. What is characterized as a dispute about academics is a political tactic in the ongoing campaign to privatize public schools, one on hand, and a justification of white supremacy on the other. This is a textbook case of using racism as a weapon to divide our class so corporations can make private profit.
At least 26 states are considering bills that have nearly identical prohibitions about how teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and other social issues. These transgressions are deliberately left vague and general, opening the door to direct attacks on individual teachers by organized forces. In West Virginia, the proposed law calls for teachers to be dismissed for teaching “divisive” concepts.
It’s certainly no coincidence that in many states where there are bills attacking the teaching of “divisive topics” – including Georgia, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Texas – lawmakers are also considering or enacting new “school choice” laws to create or expand programs that give parents vouchers. Vouchers allow people to remove their children from public schools and send them to private schools at taxpayer expense.
West Virginia had no private school choice programs in place at all, but in March, the state created the nation’s first “education savings account program” (really a voucher program) that is open to all children. Indiana, Missouri, and Kentucky also passed their first-ever voucher laws this year. In fact, voucher supporters are crowing that this last school year was the best ever.
One effective strategy for manipulating white families out of public schools is to raise fears that their children are being indoctrinated with values and beliefs that could divide them. Historically, issues of race and school privatization have always been connected. The fascist attacks on CRT are directed at every aspect of equity, our cultural richness, and LGBTQ rights.
History is about power and politics. Now it is supposedly “divisive” to teach that enslaved people were considered 3/5 of a person. Teachers are forced to lie to children and teach that the men who agreed to this horror of slavery were instead all honorable visionaries. Will it be legal to teach that the US Supreme Court decided in 1954 that separate schools can never be equal?’
But divisive for who? “Whose children are we talking about?” asks LaGarrett King, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Education who has developed a new framework for teaching Black history. “Black parents talk to their kids about racism. Asian American parents talk to their kids about racism. Just say that you don’t want white kids to learn about racism.”
Insisting that teachers teach the false myths of US history and the American Dream means abolishing the First Amendment right of freedom of speech in schools, which are public institutions. Such laws aim at criminalizing those who would teach any project that details the structural nature of white supremacy.
The history of this country, a history that we are still fighting out, begins with recognizing the bloody, painful truth that white supremacy pervades every social structure and harms everyone by undermining the united struggle for basic human needs. We are supposed to think that our problems are not systemic but just originate from a few individuals who are “bad apples,” such as killer cops.
The fascist elements in society today want to abolish public schools, abolish parent control of the schools, abolish the First Amendment and abolish an understanding of the true history of the United States. This program is the defense of privilege, both race and class, and abolishes the teacher’s right to teach and the student’s right to learn.
One lesson of the pandemic is that nothing can be done without a nationally-funded and nationally organized system. The campaign against teaching the truth in schools can exist because schools are funded primarily locally and at the state level. The white supremacist notion of states’ rights guarantees massive unequal education funding from state to state. That’s one thing that must be abolished. We can make no real headway against structural racism until education is funded nationally and guarantees it is funded equally and democratically everywhere. Abolishing state inequality in education doesn’t mean abolishing local control of schools. It would strengthen it by guaranteeing genuine and democratic access for all.
This direction cannot be achieved unless we also abolish the official government policy, in place since 1994, that public education is a commodity that can be bought, sold, and speculated on as a source of private profit. It also requires abolishing the notion that education is a private good, only useful so each person can get a job, and abolishing the power structures that allow top/down decision-making, controlled by corporations and dark money. We certainly cannot abolish the school-to-prison pipeline in all its forms if we do not abolish the control of the forces that benefit from it. What needs to be abolished are the private corporations that direct and benefit from school privatization.
What really should be abolished is everything that blocks public education from being a true public good and the best means to solve the gigantic problems now facing humanity. But there can be no abolition without creating education for emancipation. The transformation of education – now well on the way almost two years after the pandemic hit – reflects the reorganization of society as digital technology transforms every institution. The issue is will this transformation be dictated by corporations or people who need public education as a basic human necessity in desperate times. Public schools are essential to produce the leaders society needs to solve the massive problems of a capitalist system that intends to profit from destroying the planet.
Therefore we must abolish the colonial model of teaching that requires constantly memorizing factoids that are measured by high-stakes testing used to sort people to grant social privilege. Education means teaching the big ideas, the really big ideas, the revolutionary ideas, that open the door to the power of the public to control what the public needs.
The pandemic has thrown a light on the interrelated crises and emergencies in our society. Teachers, parents, and students are called to witness to the truth and address the tragedies unfolding before our eyes: public safety and public schools, white supremacy as a structural force in society, and ongoing climate crisis. The battle lines are drawn. Corporate forces use racism to transform public education into private profit; we must expose and reject racism to transform public education and help resolve the crises of our times.
Einstein stated, “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” The purpose of public education is to serve the common good by opening up inquiry and advance human knowledge. Schools must produce life-long learners who learn to develop themselves and apply their powers to what they enjoy. The Internet should be a free public good that all students and everyone else can access. This requires abolishing the corporate control of this critical tool of society.
We have seen the massive social disaster when market forces controlled government’s pandemic response. We, therefore, hold government accountable as the only institution that can abolish school privatization and consolidate the public’s control over public education. Government at every level must reject fascist dog-whistle issues and establish schools that meet the needs of everyone.
Published: July 20, 2021
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