Demonizing Teachers, Privatizing Schools: The Big Lies
and Big Plans Behind the Atlanta School Cheating Scandal
Submitted
by Bruce A. Dixon on Wed, 04/22/2015 - 14:04
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Should
we be wondering if the prosecution of cheating Atlanta teachers for
racketeering was racist? Or should black parents and educators be leading a
movement against high-stakes standardized testing as the gateway tool to
privatizing public education in black and brown communities across the country?
Demonizing
Teachers, Privatizing Schools: The Big Lies and Big Plans Behind the Atlanta
School Cheating Scandal
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
When drama queen Fulton
County judge Jerry Baxter demanded public post-conviction apologies from
Atlanta teachers already convicted of racketeering lest he hand them double
digit sentences, it struck raw nerves in parts of black America. Black pastors
and community leaders called press conferences. They held rallies and issued
stern statements. They denounced the judge for making “common criminals” out of
black teachers. Inevitably, they wondered whether white teachers would have
been prosecuted or subjected to post-conviction humiliation of this kind.
They're
asking the wrong question. What they ought to ask is why the teacher perp walk
is being served up in the first place. They need to ask who profits from the
continuing crisis in public education in black and brown communities? The
answers are not hard to find.
The
whole thing, from the indictment of Atlanta Public Schools superintendent Beverly Hall,who died
before the trial was complete, to the posturing of public officials and
corporate media about “cheating the children”
is the latest act of a long, long fake crisis. Judge Baxter's histrionics too,
in which he called the cheating scandal “the sickest thing that's ever happened
to Atlanta,” were a great contribution to the story our billionaire-owned media
wants to paint about public education.
The
one-percenters need us to believe public education in our communities is some
new kind of sewer infested with incompetent teachers who are cheating children
and the public every week they draw paychecks. The long, long crisis of public
education has been designed, engineered and provoked by powerful bipartisan
forces to justify their long game, which is the privatization of public
education. That's the Big Plan.
Since
at least 2001, when George W. Bush's conservative Republicans teamed up with
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy's liberal Democrats to pass and implement the No Child Left Behind Act,
it's been the policy of both capitalist parties implemented by the federal
Department of Education to create, to provoke and to exacerbate a phony
educational crisis. This program of crisis-creation has been backed by Wall
Street, by banksters and hedge fund types, by giant corporations like Wal-Mart
and powerful right wing interest groups like the US Chamber of Commerce as well
as the so-called philanthropic tentacles of corporate America like the Gates,
Broad, Heritage and Walton Family Foundations. The solution to the fake crisis
has been the whole industry of testing experts, turnaround consultants, diploma
mills for fake principals, lucrative charter school companies and their
contractors, and the private but government sanctioned agencies that rate school
districts. Even the agencies that rate school districts are staffed
by the same “run the school like a business” experts approved by the US Chamber
of Commerce who were employed to write President Obama's Race to the Topprogram,
which punishes school districts that don't privatize or implement “run the
school like a business 'reforms'” fast enough.
High
stakes standardized testing, like the tests educators cheated on in Atlanta, is
an essential tool in provoking the crisis, but it's a big lie. These kinds of
tests don't reflect student progress or teacher competency. They track to
family income, and family income in the US correlates largely to race. So as Glen Ford put it back
in 2012
“The
standardized tests were bombs, designed to explode the public schools and the
teaching profession. Everyone involved knew that inner city kids would fail the
tests in huge numbers, setting the infernal machine in motion for the closing
of schools and the wholesale firing of teachers...”
The
bombs were planted not just in Atlanta, but in thousands of school districts
across the nation, with predictable results. A 2012 story in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution revealed that the same suspicious patterns
of radical test score improvement seen in Atlanta could be found in more than
200 school districts across the country, from Philly to Portland, and from
Alaska to Alabama. Clearly, cheating teachers and principals in Georgia were
and likely still are doing the same things the same way as their colleagues across
the country.
It's
also very true that Atlanta's teachers were singled out. Other teachers in
other states were merely stripped of their jobs and professional licenses.
Teach For America alums Michelle Rhee and Kayla Henderson both headed
Washington DC's public schools when massive cheating scandals occurred, but
unlike Atlanta's Beverly Hall, neither they nor their subordinates are in any
danger of prosecution. Atlanta on the other hand, is closely associated with
the notion of African Americans running big cities, so making the example of
black educators in Atlanta makes perfect political sense for those
orchestrating the crisis. Still we shouldn't feel too sorry for the Atlanta
teachers. Beverly Hall turned big chunks of Atlanta's public schools over to
privatizers, and even helped divert $140 million a year for more than 20 years away from Atlanta's public school
children to line the pockets of developers and gentrifiers in a
lucrative boondoggle Atlantans know as “the Beltline.”
If the
black political class and black educators really stood for the interests of
their students and communities they would be educating black parents and
students across the country abouttheir right to opt out of tests that
serve no legitimate educational purpose, as teachers in Chicago and Seattle are already
doing.
But
that's problematic too. Opposing standardized testing would place the black
political class in conflict not with the slippery nebulous demons of
institutional racism, but biting some of the very real and easy-to-find hands
in corporate America that feed it. Taking issue with standardized testing,
Common Core and the drive to privatize education would put black educators in
opposition to corporate America, to the Gates, Walton Family (Wal-Mart), Eli
Broad and other foundations, and to Republicans and Democrats including
President Obama and Arne Duncan, his Secretary of Education. This is not an
easy thing to do when national black “civil rights” organizations from the
National Action Network and the National Urban League have
eagerly accepted corporate-engineered school reform with corporate dollars, and
President Obama is deeply beholden to the charter school sugar daddies.
So it
looks like we can count on our black political class to stick to the script on
the Atlanta teachers cheating scandal. They'll talk about whether the prosecution
was racist, and they'll wring self-righteous hands over teachers “cheating the
children.” But they won't question those who set up the rigged game of high
stakes testing or why.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and
serves on the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him at
bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
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