Stalinizing American Education by Lawrence Baines

 I'm re-posting this 2011 piece as it has (or should have) implications for how we think about education in the U.S. today and how we as a citizen public might want to reimagine an alternative to the current, high-stakes system that we currently have in place. Key quote:

Ubiquitous in American schools, outcomes-based education seems more suited to the goals of communism than the ideals of democracy. “The activity of the [Stalinist] system of education was not oriented toward encouraging creativity, and the development of the personality but rather toward universal leveling, averaging, and the fulfillment of the social mandate” (Borisenkov, 2007, p. 7).

I sense that the current COVID moment is casting our current system into doubt—now more than ever.  How does it make sense at all to test every school kid in multiple grades and make them count for high-stakes decisions when the playing field is so massively uneven—let alone traumatized from emotional and psychological effects of COVID? 

Lest we continue emulating Stalin's approach, now is the time to eliminate high-stakes testing. Plus, this would put us in sync with the movement in higher education to implement "test optional admissions," that are included in the University of Texas students' eight demands of the university in the wake of the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matters movement as follows:

Overall, both the SAT^13[14] and GRE^[15][16] correlates more strongly with family affluence than with any predictor of academic success. Therefore, we call for the university to eliminate the requirement of standardized test scores for admissions, including admission to a student’s desired major(s) and program(s) (see "Student Community Statement: 8 Demands for Transformative Change, University of Texas Austin," June 9, 2020).

We should be encouraged by our students who are well-versed and experienced in this neo-Stalinist experiment, this regime of truth, that is so harmful to children and to the entire teaching and educational enterprise.

-Angela Valenzuela

Stalinizing American Education

Lawrence Baines : September 16, 2011

All three are pushing a totalitarian model for American public education: Left to right (at Chicago's Schurz High School on September 9, 2011): Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel; U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; Chicago Schools Chief Executive Officer Jean-Claude Brizard. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.The similarities between contemporary American educational reform and Soviet educational reform of the 1930s are as striking as they are discomfiting.

Of the following three statements, which refer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and which refer to America today?

1. “Teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs….The stakes are huge—and the time to cling to the status quo has passed.”

2. “We had to have a campaign for 100 percent successful teaching…all students must learn.”

3. “Poor work by the school and poor achievement by the entire class and by individual pupils are the direct result of poor work by the teacher.”

Although all three of the above sentiments could be attributable to current officeholders in Washington, D.C., only the first is American — from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (Duncan 2010, January). The second and third are policy statements which emanated from old Soviet policy papers on educational reform (Ewing, 2001, p. 487).

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union was mired in recession. Poverty and unemployment, especially among the peasant class, were rampant. Although the existing educational system was efficient and progressive, especially considering schools’ negligible funding, most Soviet children did not attend school. The Soviet government, led by Joseph Stalin, instigated a series of educational reforms designed to obliterate the established educational system and to create a new centralized structure that would increase literacy, create “good citizens,” and transform the Soviet Union into a global power, particularly in the areas of science, mathematics, and technology. The similarities of Soviet educational initiatives in the 1930s to American educational reform today are as discomfiting as they are striking.

Trend 1: The move to a nationalized curriculum

The adoption of a new, national curriculum in the United States has proceeded rapidly with little fanfare. Despite the small difficulty that no one is exactly sure what the final standards will look like, 48 states have already accepted the new, improved standards de facto as a national curriculum.

Although the federal government in the United States pays a proportionally small percentage of costs for public K-12 education (as low as 4% of costs for New Jersey schools, for example), states and local school districts are increasingly ceding power to the central government. In the recent past, federal policymakers have mandated the following:

• Students must take standardized tests at frequent intervals,

• Schools must provide “least restrictive environments” for all children (including instruction in the student’s home language)

• Schools must incur all costs associated with providing the “least restrictive environment,”

• Schools must track the achievement levels of all students by ethnicity (and soon, by teacher and teacher preparation program).

 Powerful piece by Chris Hedges on the anticipated crushing of dissent that stands to befall those that challenge the corporate state. 

-Angela

Totalitarianism, American Style

 By Chris Hedges 

 

September 22, 2014  |  AlterNet

 

Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?” The other panelists were Bill McKibben [3], Naomi Klein [4], Kshama Sawant [5] and Sen. Bernie Sanders [6]. The event, moderated by Brian Lehrer [7], occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For a video of some of what the panelists said, click here [8].

We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul [9] calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry [10] points out, enacted any major social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.

We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” [11] By this Wolin means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.
The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform [12] that had protected our banking system from speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane.

By the time Clinton was done the rhetoric of self-professed liberals was a public relations game. This is why there is continuity from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. Obama’s election did nothing to halt the expanding assault on civil liberties—in fact Obama’s assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big banks, the endless imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the hiring of corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government positions, the explosion of drilling and fracking [13], the security and surveillance state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers.

This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out in detail in a new Greenpeace report [14] written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague, titled “The Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report chronicles what it calls “a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of carbon—the coal, the oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of self-interested libertarian billionaires.”

The Obama administration, in return for financial support from these kingpins of carbon, has cynically undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered only because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on those carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon emissions and push through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama administration has overseen a massive expansion of fracking. It is pushing through a series of trade agreements such as the TPP [15] and the TAFTA [16] that will increase fracking along with expanding our exports of coal, oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar sands in Utah and Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone pipeline. It has permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This expansion of offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy.

If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole. And this is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks to perpetuate the facade of democracy. It seeks to make us believe what is no longer real, that if we work within the system we can reform it. And it has put in place a terrifying superstructure to silence all who step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.

The Democratic Party speaks to us “rationally.” The party says it seeks to protect civil liberties, regulate Wall Street, is concerned about the plight of the working class and wants to institute reforms to address climate change. But in all these areas, and many more, it has, like its Republican counterpart, repeatedly sold out the citizenry for corporate power and corporate profits—in much the same manner that Big Green environmental groups such as the Climate Group [17] and the Environmental Defense Fund [18] have sold out the environmental movement.

To assume that Obama, or the Democratic Party, because they acknowledge the reality of climate change, while the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party does not, is better equipped to deal with the crisis is incorrect. Republicans appeal to one constituency. The Democrats appeal to another. But both parties will do nothing to halt the ravaging of the planet.

If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we begin to build mass movements that carry out repeated acts of civil disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes we must do, the corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the way all calcified states react.  It will use the security and surveillance apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all dissent with force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in place to, with the flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under martial law. When acts of mass civil disobedience begin on Monday morning with Flood Wall Street [19] and later with Occupy the U.N. [20], the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the Occupy movement, reveal itself.

If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will have to carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for profit and foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from climate change, will not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they are forced from power. And this means the beginning of a titanic clash between our corporate masters and ourselves.

[21]

 

See more stories tagged with:

chris hedges [22],

climate change [23],

global warming [24],

inverted totalitarianism [25],

PEOPLE'S CLIMATE MARCH [26]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/activism/totalitarianism-american-style

Links:
[1] http://www.truthdig.com/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/chris-hedges
[3] http://www.billmckibben.com/bio.html
[4] http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant
[6] http://www.sanders.senate.gov/about
[7] http://www.wnyc.org/people/brian-lehrer/
[8] http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12414
[9] http://www.johnralstonsaul.com/eng/biography.php
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Curry_%28politician%29
[11] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124
[12] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/glass_steagall_act.asp
[13] http://www.what-is-fracking.com/
[14] http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/Global/usa/planet3/PDFs/Kingpins-of-Carbon.pdf
[15] http://ourfuture.org/20130823/congress-public-waking-up-to-tpp-threat?gclid=Cj0KEQjwy_SgBRCxhsqc3prt8rQBEiQAHI_9GbYjMGBNwCqcXrgZa16ZPcE_ROqpJjBbK-OVQgPQQ-kaAiCt8P8HAQ
[16] http://www.citizen.org/tafta
[17] http://www.theclimategroup.org/
[18] http://www.edf.org/about
[19] http://floodwallstreet.net/
[20] http://www.popularresistance.org/occupy-the-un-from-sunday-until-end-of-summit/
[21] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Totalitarianism, American Style
[22] http://www.alternet.org/tags/chris-hedges
[23] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change
[24] http://www.alternet.org/tags/global-warming
[25] http://www.alternet.org/tags/inverted-totalitarianism
[26] http://www.alternet.org/tags/peoples-climate-march
[27] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Ego, money and false promises: Michelle Rhee’s big secret and the collapse of education “reform”

Ego, money and false promises: Michelle Rhee’s big secret and the collapse of education “reform”



Interesting read in light of a new poll conducted by PDK and Gallup that says, “a majority of Americans (77 percent) continue to trust and have confidence in their public school teachers.”

-Angela