The education “shock doctrine”

[Hannah Bell]

IN A January interview U.S. Secretary of education, Arne Duncan declared, “Let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina... The case of using the disaster as a way to push through the largest and quickest privatization scheme of any public school system ever attempted, was made widely known in Naomi Klein’s best-selling book The Shock Doctrine.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before the storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31. New Orleans teachers used to be represented by a strong union; now the union’s contract had been shredded and its forty-seven hundred members had all been fired... In fact one of the first state actions, taken only three weeks after the storm, was to fire all the unionized teachers, disband the school board and turn the schools over to a state receiver in Baton Rouge, removing community accountability and effectively breaking the United Teachers of New Orleans.

Margaret Spelling, Bush’s secretary of education, poured $24 million into New Orleans, all of which went to charter schools.2 The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education gave control of over one-hundred New Orleans schools to the Chicago-based National Association of Charter School Authorizers, moving the process even further away from New Orleans and putting local educators and grass-roots community groups interested in reopening their local schools at an enormous disadvantage...

http://www.isreview.org/issues/71/feat-disasterschooling.shtml

[ixion]

1. Privatizing public education -- one of the most important of the 'public' institutions -- will not

turn out well.

I pity of poor children of New Orleans. :(

[LWolf]

17. Pity every student in the U.S., since

this is the direction that Obama is taking us.

[maryf]

2. Good workers and citizens...

that's the goal: teach the kids just enough information to be able to do the jobs the corporations want of them (service industries for the poorer kids and so on), and just enough thinking ability to make "good citizens" who don't question the status quo...

What good citizens this private school graduate helped create here, the kids made a profit for their school!!! this is so sick...

"Duncan, who has never taught in a classroom and who attended private schools all his life, has been a leading corporate reformer in education. He worked as the education program coordinator at Ariel Capital Management, where a headline on a brochure for their main school, Ariel Community Academy reads, “We want to make the stock market a topic of dinner table conversation.” First-graders are given $20,000 to invest in a class stock portfolio and each graduating class is supposed to return the original $20,0000 to the entering first grade and donate half the profits to the school with the rest distributed among the graduates.10 Duncan quickly moved on to become an executive of the Chicago Public Schools by age thirty-five and its CEO at thirty-eight."

[blindpig]

10. Oh man

that brochure quote is priceless.

I suppose that if the stocks tank that the 1st graders will have to pony up. Mebbe they can sell their puppy to a research lab....

[maryf]

14. playing the market...

and science to boot! lol...

speaking of playing, I was talking to a pizza maker the other day who fitted two pieces in a box nicely...he said "its like playing legos, you gotta know how to turn things" This got us into a talk about how kids aren't allowed time to play anymore...we wonder their lack of imagination...its all done for them...really sad...

[blindpig]

15. Remember 'Brave New World'?

People were kept in constant activities, games, sports, 'feelies'.....

[maryf]

18. Yep no time

to figure out their own play...I've heard kids don't know what to do if you set them free to play in a park, they ask for directions!!! argh!

[cornermouse]

3. Kick back to the top because this is too good to allow it to drop.

[azul]

7. There were kickbacks to Bush?

Impeachment now!

[Stinky The Clown]

4. Morning kick

[mmonk]

5. Thanks for that.

I'm currently working on an opinion piece on privatizing public education and privatizing and/or cutting social security and medicare. That is useful in my efforts.

[Odin2005]

6. Duncan needs to be run out of town on a rail.

[proud2BlibKansan]

8. First New Orleans, then Chicago, New York

Detroit is on their list too.

And those of us speaking out are accused of defending the status quo.

[20score]

9. K&R!

[Catshrink]

11. K&R

[MichiganVote]

12. If the best thing that happened to NO education was a hurricane...where the fuck were the fed's b/f

that happened? Where was the state?

No, all that hurricane did was wipe away the sins of the assholes who have left the children backward and behind.

AND THAT is not a teacher problem.

[Hannah Bell]

13. oh, you know, they & the hedge fund crowd hadn't yet realized how deeply they cared

about education.

you know.

[MichiganVote]

16. They believe they created and own the federal budget---for their needs.

[Rex]

19. So a disaster that left thousands homeless and a lot of dead poor people

was GREAT for public education...what a LOAD OF SHIT. Duncan is clearly an enemy of the state if not the people of this country. Can we tar and feather him out of office?