Teachers Without Jobs and Education Without Hope: Beyond Bailouts and the Fetish of the Measurement

In the United States and Europe, thousands of demonstrators have organized to protest government cutbacks and austerity measures being enacted upon the most vulnerable members of society. In the United States, students have poured out into the streets of cities on both coasts. In Berkeley, California; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Montclair, New Jersey, they are protesting massive cuts in educational funding for both public and higher education and the laying off of thousands of teachers. The cuts are serious. According to the National Education Association, there are as many as "26,000 teachers in jeopardy of layoffs in California, 20,000 in Illinois, 13,000 in New York, 8,000 in Michigan and 6,000 in New Jersey."<1> The mainstream media coverage of these projected job losses and even the more critical analyses of these events generally reduce soaring job layoff among public schoolteachers to an unhappy consequence of the economic recession. The logic behind this assumption is not without validity, but the issue is often presented as uncomplicated and straightforward. States with dwindling tax revenues are forced to eliminate basic public services and school budgets have become a major casualty of such cuts.Operating in tandem with this simplistic justification is the view that teachers and teacher unions who oppose such layoffs and further cuts are selfish and indifferent to the needs of students.

An exemplary illustration of how a militarized form of market fundamentalism works can be seen in the spate of laws passed in Arizona, Florida, and other states undermining both any vestige of critical teaching, while reducing the protections and benefits of educators. In Florida, former, Gov. Jeb Bush, signed into law a bill stating, "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed." That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as "knowable, teachable and testable."<8> - as if interpretation were a burden in teaching students how to situate, understand and critically engage "facts." Florida's inane law finds its counterpart in another, more ruthless, law banning ethnic studies in Tucson public schools.<9> It gets worse. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he will freeze the salaries of public schoolteachers for the next two years.<10> The move to bailing out the rich to punishing educators is no longer simply a passing thought. Not only are teachers and students under attack in this case, but also being undermined are those institutions and modes of critical education that might provide the basis for both symbolic and material resistance to such racist policies.

Public schools are under attack not because they are failing or are inefficient, but because they are public, an unwanted reminder of a public sphere and set of institutions whose purpose is to serve the common good and promote democratic ends, values and social relations.The forces poised to destroy public schools are ideologically motivated to destroy all vestiges of the common good, just as they are enraptured economically by the possibility of reaping big profits through an ongoing campaign aimed at promoting vouchers, privatization and charters, all of which are intended to slowly and successfully convince the public to disinvest in public schooling and transform it into a private rather than public good.

One of the most startling absences that dominates the Obama administration's emphasis on educational reform is how little it thinks about or advocates the notion that students should be educated for democratic citizenship, engage in debates about public values and ethics and learn the knowledge and skills necessary for economic opportunity. Instead, the public purpose and democratic goals of schools are downplayed, if not undermined, by an emphasis on policies, values and social practices that mimic the market-driven values of the existing mode of casino capitalism. For example, Duncan's "Race to the Top" agenda emphasizes expanding efficiency at the expense of equity, prioritizes testing over critical pedagogical practices, endorses commercial values rather than public values, accentuates competition as a form of social combat over cooperation and shared responsibilities and endorses individual rights over support for the collective good - all of which are values that come out of the neoliberal play book in which the public is a term of opprobrium and self-interest coded as parental choice is the only recognizable motive for engaging in educational reform.<30>

In my view, the reaction of protesters in the United States juxtaposed with the resistance movement in Greece suggests a difference between the two cultures that is not merely incidental, and speaks to an ever widening chasm of political culture and literacy that separates these two societies. Greece reflects a social order in which a vibrant political culture and respect for critical education enable its citizens to think carefully and thoughtfully about both the history of the crisis and the socio-political forces that are causing it. The protests are not simply directed against harsh austerity measures, but also "against a ruling system as the economic and financial crisis has finally brought to the surface all the perversions and deformities of a political culture that thrives on graft and corruption ... and the plundering of the public wealth for the benefit of the domestic economic elite."<5> By contrast, in the United States a good part of the mainstream media and its anti-public intellectuals largely examine the financial crisis through very limited modes of analyses, suggesting not merely a devolution of political insight and critical understanding, but also the refusal to acknowledge the stultifying effects of the decades-long influence of a market-driven cultural apparatus that depoliticizes citizens and robs individuals of opportunities to think critically and to act on their capacities for thoughtful engagement and collective action. In the US, the mainstream media is controlled largely by a few major corporations and lacks the political sophistication one finds in the media in Europe and other parts of the world. In the US, politics spawns a culture of entertainment which trivializes the news and substitutes the spectacle over substance; in the case of "Fox News," certain forms of political illiteracy actually drive what could loosely be called social commentary and reporting. In the US, the only public spheres left where critical analysis and discussion take place are in the alternative media extending from blogs to various online news journals.