PHOTO/SARAH JANE RHEE
OAKLAND, CA — A California judge decided in June that teacher tenure laws violate the civil rights of students by keeping “bad teachers” in the classroom. Tenure, however, is simply the guarantee of due process. It means teachers cannot be fired for disagreeing with the principal, or for teaching a controversial subject like evolution. The decision has already spun off similar lawsuits across the country.
The hypocrisy of the decision is astounding. Decades of research have proven that poverty is the major limit to student success. California has underfunded public education for poor students by a trillion dollars in the last 40 years. Schools with poor children have fewer resources, lower pay and high teacher turn over. The Vergara decision will not put a single nurse, librarian, computer or more instructors in the classroom.
The lawsuit was brought by Students First, an organization created by a Silicon Valley billionaire, who will make millions more by selling programs for testing and online education. Corporations are turning public education into a gold rush to exploit the market for profit. TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley online startup news site, drools over the $638 billion the US has spent for public schools since 2009. They estimate the worldwide market for education is more than $6 trillion. The problem is that public schools spend 85% of their money for America’s 3.7 million teachers. Solution: get rid of the teachers.
Silicon Valley billionaires have suddenly become crusaders for “education reform.” Their yearly report, “Silicon Valley Game Changers,” (http://svlg.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Game_Changers_Digital.pdf) openly calls for turning public schools into a market for corporate profits. Billionaire Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, is a funder of charter school corporations like NewSchools.org, Aspire, Green Dot and KIPP. Hastings has called for the end of community elected school boards and for moving 90% of America’s children into charter schools in the next 30 years. The New America Foundation is prominent in the ongoing attack to privatize California’s community colleges. The chairman of the New America Foundation’s board of directors is the CEO of Google.
Rocketship Schools, another charter corporation, was the poster child for privatization, touting a business model that eliminates teachers . . . until test results crashed their glowing promises. But that didn’t stop CEO John Danner from his new venture: an app for smartphones called Zeal that “puts your school on your phone.” Noting the potential market, self-appointed Silicon Valley “education experts” have called for a completely online “school district” of a million students, to become the largest in the country!
The only way to stop this insanity is to nationalize public education in the interests of the public. This demands the highest standards, which are guaranteed locally. Students learn only when other human beings help them through the long process of creation and solving problems. Private schools for the children of capitalists have 15 students to a class, are full of resources (often including several teachers), reject standardized testing and engage in enriching projects, both in and out of the classroom.
Market-based education reduces the publicly guaranteed right to a quality education to a privatized commodity in a pay-as-you-go system. Education is how we determine the future. We cannot allow it to become the private property of corporations.
