post in space: democracy

Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts

grassroots democracy

Geohumus effect tested on growth of grass roots. Public domain image by Achim Hering
(Image is metaphorical only and no endorsement is intended. Info on geohumus is here.)

The wisdom of providing values instead of policies allows citizens like me to try and use the Green Party tools and I do here. I focus on the first of these values as it relates to open moving toward source learning centers, formerly known as schools.

1. GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY
Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives; no one should be subject to the will of another. Therefore we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations that expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decision-making process.

Children and young people are part of the grassroots, too.
Participatory democracy means families choosing educational services rather than be coerced to join a planned social engineering scheme.
Mass coerced schooling has a short history in its current form: we can improve on the Prussian model. It is undemocratic, outdated, and unnecessary.
Grass grows from the roots up. Jobs should, too.
Real, democratic participation by families and students is the best way to strengthen citizen skills and ability to live in a democratic society.
Democracy means choice at every single school: choice of classes and activities and the support needed to understand choices children and families can pursue.
Free educational services are vital to a community’s well-being and strength and should be available to all ages (and from all ages as well). New types of community structures will be needed to support communication and interaction and will grow out of an open structure. Schools were pro
A commons model would allow the development of a participatory and democratic learning services model instead of a coerced factory model that seeks to award a specific degree.
Many homeschooling families of all types have faced down compulsory attendance laws in all 50 states in order to preserve the freedom of all families to decide on the education of their children, including the right to be exempt from the undemocratic and inhumane practices of many schools. These include the public grading and labeling of young children, excessive homework and rote work, the lack of playtime, exercise, quality food, and arts and crafts. These also include crowded schools, unsafe schools, inability to control bullying, testing and ranking vs providing services to strengthen native gifts, and allowing citizens to shape their lives and contribution.
Schools are increasingly used for military recruitment and corporate takeover, both of which subject children and youth to manipulation by groups with vested interests and both are beyond the scope of what schools were intended to do.
Corporate curricular capture removes the control and input of the citizens using schools.
School boards provide a superficial citizen access that is restricted by the administrative design of the school system itself.
Grassroots democracy could mean that schools allow families deep choices and participation in accessing the learning services they need.
The nation-state should work to preserve social stability and honor social structures, working with them in the common interest. Children grow up in a family and the school should not be opposed to families nor trying to manipulate families: the facts of family beliefs can be accepted and this diversity would be an asset if families were able to choose what services they need as they work with their neighbors and retain the ability to make their own choices. Otherwise, we are attempting to brainwash people.
Controversies in content do not have to be addressed at this level. Universities will decide what knowledge/skills they want as will employers.
Compulsory attendance laws undermine families' input and guidance which is precisely the error handling and accountability needed for good system design. Parents should focus on helping their children rather than being forced to coerce their children into a system in which the parent's own input is not seen as relevant. This undermines the parents within the family and it has obliterated the natural checks and balances families could provide to these ostensibly public institutions. The vast majority of citizens involved with the schools -- the parents, have no voice or input and are subject to police action if they listen to their children and become their advocates. Parents and are part of the grassroots, too.
We can see in the US, that the creation of truancy police and the placing of police in schools are natural extensions of compulsory attendance policies meant to override families, policies that have now been extended to many, many years.
Grassroots democracy means communities should replace policing and measuring models with alternatives that are suited to their local needs by reclaiming education as a social service providing learning services.
Learning from homeschooling is key to communities taking charge of their community learning services and moving toward humane, democratic and sustainable forms of providing citizens learning services for their children.
The authoritarian social patterning of children in schools may grossly weaken democratic citizen initiative. The psychological experience of mass, forced schooling in the early 20th century in the US occurred within a social context that greatly mitigated many of the more harmful aspects of schools. That social and economic context has disappeared in great part, from diminished social capital to decreasing soil vitality and food quality, family stress from decreasing wages and rising health care costs, these and other changes have all helped accelerate the harmful psychological impact of forced schooling without the social context that was a support 100 years ago.
The acculturation to invasive and abusive bureaucratic structures may condition even those in the best schools to comfort with authoritarian and undemocratic procedure. Participants may feel a learned helplessness when confronted with corporate gangs or class warfare.
The reverse is also true: brutal competitors feel justified and confirmed by the 12+ years of training in forced labors in schools whose mitigating social context has weakened drastically thereby creating an entitlement attitude on the part of these "winners" instead of a community-minded attitude.

coercion is a core function of schools

A pie chart showing how an Icelandic child’s compulsory education time will be divided over a ten-grade period.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Standardizing Human Ability | DMLcentral: "Here’s a list (in no particular order) of some of the changes in U.S. education, from kindergarten to professional school, either invented or finalized in the Taylorist era (the same era that produced the assembly line, statistics, standard deviation, spreadsheets, blueprints, punch clocks): mandatory public secondary schooling, research universities, majors, minors, divisions, certification, graduate school, collegiate law school, nursing school, graduate school of education, collegiate business school, degree requirements, grades, required courses, electives, distribution requirements, IQ tests, multiple choice tests, item response college entrance exams (SAT), school rankings, class rankings. And learning disabilities."

Compulsory schooling accelerates the process of school acculturation in many communities, as India has learned recently. But once implemented, this mechanism cuts off the development of collaborative work and the responsiveness of the entire system is tremendously reduced. As compulsory attendance has been extended and extended, schools have not built supportive and collaborative ways to work with families and communities since they can rely on a stream of kids. This structure reinforces growing bureaucracies and hurts families. Indeed, enforced attendance has been the primary policy lever of mass schooling in the United States. The school to prison pipeline is one consequence of this approach. This mechanism has created an institutional structure that exploits students and families in dangerous ways since it doesn't allow them any power within the system.

Compulsory attendance part has been extended .... and extended ... to schooling that lasts far longer than what early communities ever expected. The coercion used for a fixed number of years has become the de facto standard. Homeschool activists have had to change laws in almost all 50 US states to allow homeschooling and Europe is now grappling with similar resistance.

Compulsory attendance laws have completely reduced the input of the users of the system. These laws have required that homeschooling families tirelessly fight legal authorities of many kinds, from truancy officers to child protective services to police. And these laws have ensured that our institutions do not have the deep connections to their communities and users that good social services must have in order to be effective. This coercive basis of schools helped schools create zero tolerance policies. These are not entirely just poor judgement calls: they are signs of the deep confusion within schools as to how they approach and handle problems. These laws have enabled schools to remain dedicated to manufacturing skill sets instead of transitioning to supporting learners who choose paths to credentials.

If innovators want to understand how to change our educational institutions, a key structural fact to grasp is the nature and effect of compulsory attendance laws on communities, families and children. It is why schools have not changed and it is why families and parents began homeschooling.

Davidson grasps this when she says:

Standardizing Human Ability | DMLcentral: "... My point in this open-ended meditation, though, is that these are invented things. Like all inventions, they are historically situated, created for a specific time and place, to solve problems of an era and address the possibilities afforded by the society, institutions, wealth, ambitions, and technologies of that time and place. Like statistics and the assembly line, the system of education we have inherited is not “timeless.” It is an industrial age invention. So is the practice of ranking students from best to worst (“one best way”), using standardized forms of testing (extending Galton’s questionnaire form to the one-best-answer or item-response test).

We invented these standardized, regulatory, categorizing, statistical, practices for determining educational success or failure for the Fordist era of the assembly line. We can invent better ones for our own era."

background
homeschooling is the real legacy of holt, kohl, et al and why compulsory attendance laws are limiting our ability to change schools
voluntary attendancereal school reform (and a changing view of attendance)
the compulsory attendance mindset
make public schools truly public
our educational commons
supporting families
blaming parents, blaming the family
undermining the family and the child
make public schools truly public
UN Treaty and the Rights of the Child

the social value of shared resources

Brett Frischmann
Faculty Candidate Talk
(Photo credit: joebeone)

One thing lacking in deep structural change is a vision of where we are going. Schools as learning services centers that provide neighborhood hubs but are also in networks could be managed very differently than how we do it now. If we can transition from credential manufacture to providing services, which in a time of climate change, may well mean having neighborhood centers for communities, schools could be managed as a commons by the people who use them. We ripped out the trolley tracks relying on automobiles, the latest new thing. Do we really want to privatize education and let schools decay while we chase the next new thing? Is this what they are calling innovation?

Will parents and families actually be able to participate in managing a commons that they use?

Oxford University Press: Infrastructure: Brett M. Frischmann (from the Oxford website): "Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy."
...

And these two excerpts are from the Conclusion of the book:

"Shared infrastructures shape our lives, our relationships with each other, the opportunities we enjoy, and the environment we share. Infrastructure commons are ubiquitous and essential to our social and economic systems. Yet we take them for granted, and frankly, we are paying the price for our lack of vision and understanding. Our shared infrastructures -- the lifeblood of our economy and modern society -- are crumbling. The ASCE Report Card for America's Infrastructure is only one of many indicators. Our shortsighted, piecemeal approach to infrastructure policy must change. We need a more systemic, long-term vision that better accounts for how infrastructure commons contribute to social welfare.

..and this:

"This book develops a more critical, demand-focused theoretic approach. It links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined functionally in terms of the manner in which the resources create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is available to all within a community on nondiscriminatory terms. ... While much of the book's discussion is framed in economics, the book persistently emphasizes the relevance and importance of values not well accounted for by conventional economics. "

And one more quote:

...managing infrastructure as a common good may be a more effective means for supporting the production of public and social goods than targeted subsidies. Commons management is not a direct subsidy to infrastructure users who produce public or social goods, but it effectively creates cross-subsidies and eliminates the need to rely on either the market or the government to "pick winners" --- that is, to prioritize or rank infrastructure-dependent users worthy of access or support." page 111

Symposium at Concurring Opinions

Author Brett Frischmann has posted links to the symposia posts at the Center for Internet and Society. Commentary on Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources | Center for Internet and Society

Posts include all sorts of topics but there is one on education, a topic not addressed within the book. Author of this education post, Devan Desi, points out several things:

"One way to think about any work is whether it helps understand a range of problems. Brett Frischmann’sInfrastructure does precisely that…. As a good theory and framework should do, Frischmann’s work digs into several areas and cries out for future work. One example that comes to mind is education.

"Education has been a crisis issue in the past several decades; Frischmann’s Infrastructure sorts major questions that I believe society misses in this area. An assumption is that education is a public good. Yet, I think we are straying from how we manage such goods. As education seems to be failing, the United States has turned to market solutions. The somewhat standard cry of government mistakes, lack of competition, etc. fit into one model of managing the issue. Yet, as Frischmann explains, education may be understood as a merit good and as such there is a demand side problem: “systematic undervaluation of the merit good in market settings.” (p. 45) I would add that mistakes in proper valuation of education as infrastructure lead to the creation of an education aristocracy that leads to problems of the so-called One Percent type many decry today (but are unwilling to address with tax reform).

Recent evidence from Finland shows that taking an infrastructural approach leads to outcomes that we would want, but currently fail to reach. As the article describes:

"Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity. Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality. … "

This approach strikes me as a good example of how thinking in terms of infrastructure, social goods, and externalities (p. 49) allows us to recognize different ways of managing complex societal issues. Furthermore, this example has data behind it. Finland is persistently in the top of PISA scores on language, math, and science. And if one wishes to say that Finland is homogenous, different than the U.S etc. there is a control. Norway went with the American model and did much less well. As the article points out, education is a state policy in the U.S. Some states are smaller and more homogenous than Finland. I suggest that a truly innovative state program would look at such an investment to allow the state a competitive advantage.

elinor ostrom and our educational commons

related (h/t zemanta)

community organizing: laying a foundation

Second in a series on community organizing and education reform. This post links to resources at the Annenberg Institute .

Honoring Dr. King through Community Organizing for Education Reform to Eliminate the Achievement Gap | Annenberg Institute for School Reform: "Often overlooked and frequently ignored in the school reform discussion is the role of community organizing. Drawing heavily on the lessons of community organizing around housing, neighborhood safety, jobs, and economic development, this approach offers a methodology for parents and community members to effect meaningful change for students poorly served by the public school
system."
... "At its core, organizing is about relationships, and the methodology provides strategies for developing mutually accountable personal relationships. Furthermore, education organizing is an outstanding vehicle for building authentic partnerships between schools’ two central constituencies: families and teachers. Community organizing emphasizes shared, democratic decision making and provides a model for parent relationships in schools on an equal footing with educators." 'via Blog this'

The site has more information and it also provides a PDF Getting Started in Education Organizing . Community organizing as an education reform strategy links to three efforts in the Northeast:

The Pioneer Valley Project
, a coalition of congregations and labor unions representing several thousand families in the metro Springfield region, established a Teacher Home Visit program in partnership with the Springfield Public Schools and the teachers union. Teachers are trained to visit students’ homes to build positive relationships with parents.

Voices for Vermont’s Children
, a statewide organization that organizes individuals as well as agencies that serve young people, successfully organized for legislation expanding services, including education, to 18-22-year-olds in state custody. They are deeply involved in efforts to make school funding in Vermont more equitable and stable.

The Boston Youth Organizing Project
, which has been organizing young people to improve high schools for fourteen years, won a new citywide contract for guidance counselors stipulating that they meet with all students twice a year. BYOP has formed a city-wide coalition with four other youth organizing groups to amplify the voices of young people in decisions about education and other areas that impact their lives.

Laying the Foundation
If parents can truly get involved in deep change within local schools, transformative changes could be made. Homeschoolers have changed laws in most states. Now more parents need to learn, organizem and start asking for services their families need. Schools as community resources could, indeed, partner with families and transform themselves in the process.

Gar Alperovitz’s Green Party Keynote: We Are Laying Groundwork for the "Next Great Revolution":

our educational commons

Press conference with the laureates of the memorial prize in economic sciences 2009 at the KVA: Elinor Ostrom. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The remarkable Elinor Ostrom has passed away. The inability of so-called reform plans to significantly involve families shows that the full implications of Ostrom's work are yet to be widely understood in educational circles where we still think schools must rely on hierarchical organization and professionals. Families are not acknowledged as having any ability to participate in this process except for the fake choice of schools now offered.

Elinor Ostrom dies at 78; first woman to win Nobel in economics - Los Angeles Times: "By studying diverse groups around the world, including Japanese fishermen and Swiss cheese makers, Ostrom showed that it was wrong-headed and often counterproductive to assume that those who used the resources could not set their own conservation plan. She stressed the importance of working on multiple levels to solve complex problems such as global warming.

"What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington … make a rule," Ostrom said the day her Nobel was announced."

Elinor Ostrom - Telegraph: "In fact, she argued that communities themselves had developed out of the need to come together to work out how to avoid over-exploitation of common resources and ensure fairness. The “Tragedy”, as she saw it, typically occurs when there are one or more “stakeholders” who are outside the community social-economic system, who impose their solutions, exert political power or change the rules to gain an advantage for themselves."

Schools Are Part of the Commons
It isn't hard to see that we can generalize Elinor Ostrom's wonderful work to schools in many ways. Her work supports the idea of decentralization and emphasizes the ability of people to manage resources for themselves. Public schools, the physical infrastructure as well as the staff, can be considered our educational commons and could be managed by families and staff working together. We do not need voucher and charter plans that remain top-down models imposed on communities. Communities and families could make choices and collaborate on the learning process together in their local schools. Schools could network with each other is all sorts of productive exchanges and relationships if families could actually be involved and making choices. In fact, as Ostrom discovered, communities and families can be strengthened by the process.

One of the most common opinions families have about homeschooling is that is strengthens the family because they must work together. A lot of homeschoolers don't expect that. They anticipate the increased workload but they are often surprised at the upside in family relationships. Extending that, families and communities that were working together on learning, working themselves, could be surprised at the many good relationships born from that work. From the same article above:

With her husband, Vincent Ostrom, she developed the concept of “polycentrism”, which vests more authority over regulating the use of common resources to individuals, communities, local authorities and local NGOs. Local small-scale solutions, such as better loft insulation or the installation of solar panels could, cumulatively, make a tremendous difference, she argued, while big changes invariably lead to destabilisation and chaos. “What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule,” she explained.

Communities that were actively involved and supported by schools truly focused on their needs could find ways to make tremendous changes for the better. Crazy top-down models of change are just that: top-down, uniformed models created by people with no structural tie to the children or families involved. Often these people have financial interests in specific outcomes or their large-scale experiments are ideological instead of the thousand small practicalities of a decentralized model.

Closing local public schools reduces our educational commons. This privatization means closing the one center that many communities already have in place, a school that could be managed by families and staff if we saw schools as a social service providing learning resources. And that location could network with others in many ways since there is no reason to only stay in that location, like a prison. It is a base but a neighborhood base. And that's important. Instead, we see schools as educational factories required to turn out credentialed students per specifications. And now they plan to move the factories around and let some choose. There may be a few creative charters and a few that work their past suspension tactics but with 180 days of mandated core courses and loads of testing all locked into college tracks, well, good luck fighting that remote control.

Decentralization
US schools are routinely called decentralized by many education writers. What they mean is the funding is decentralized. And that is a problem, too. But the power or political structure and the administrative structure are centralized and a recent post of mine transcribes Holt's own statement of the necessity of decentralizing this power which means a different relationship with the family.

Decentralization could also mean using neighborhood schools as community hubs and bases from which to network with other schools as well as the neighborhood and wider area.

Reason magazine discusses Ostrom's work on decentralization:

Elinor Ostrom, Scholar Who Argued for Decentralization, RIP - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Landing somewhere between Hayek and Kropotkin, Ostrom advocated "polycentric governance" -- in the words of her husband and frequent collaborator Vincent, a system where "many elements are capable of making mutual adjustments for ordering their relationships with one another within a general system of rules where each element acts with independence of other elements." The Ostroms applied these ideas to areas ranging from local government to climate change, pushing back against the idea that (in Elinor's words) "without a hierarchical government to induce compliance, self-seeking citizens and officials would fail to generate efficient levels of public goods." In fact, they found, a patchwork of private organizations and "multiple governmental units without a clear hierarchy" regularly outperformed centralized systems."

Ostrom's work demonstrates that non-professionals can indeed manage complex resource management issues and though schools may be a somewhat different task, it really shouldn't be hard to see how those principles could apply to families and local schools. John Holts wrote of the closed silos of education, locked away on the many schools in a city, that make it a challenge for someone to get an instrument to play or to participate in some event or get access to tools. And schools sit idle and under-utilized for long stretches of time.

The grand philosopher of the Commons: in memory of Elinor Ostrom: "Ostrom identified key design principles underlying long-term, robust common-pool resource institutions. These principles related to clearly defined boundaries; congruence between rules and local needs and conditions; collective-choice arrangements; monitoring; graduated sanctions; conflict-resolution mechanisms; minimal recognition of rights to organise; and nested enterprises."

Ostrom's Own Education
Ostrom worked her way through college (back when you could) and was in some ways an untraditional student. She is a passionate interdisciplinarian and teamworker. More from Ostrom's autobiographical sketch (link at bottom to more of her work) and her criticism below of universities:

Elinor Ostrom - Biographical: "... The National Research Council created a special committee in the mid-1980s to review the empirical research written about common-pool resources. Scholars began to recognize that much research on this topic had been conducted but was divided by discipline, sector, and region. Consequently, scholars who studied inshore fisheries in Africa did not know about other studies of resources in Africa. If they were sociologists, they did not know any of the work done by economists and vice versa. Participating in the NRC committee, and seeing the immense amount of research that had been done but not synthesized, taught me a major lesson. The way we organize the modern American university fragments our knowledge badly. Not only are we divided by discipline, but we are divided by the methods that scholars use. Economists using nationwide statistical data are critical of economists using the experimental lab to test theory. Scholars who do field research are critical of the use of any other method."

Elinor Ostrom Reading List - NYTimes.com: "For those interested in more information about Professor Ostrom, here’s a brief reading list:"

background posts
ten key values (see decentralization)
amar bhide
centers for continual learning
reforesting the commons
the compulsory attendance mindset

globalized education

The Great Seal of Ohio.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ohio recruits students from China and Kelly Williams-Bolar is jailed for sending her kids to a school in her own father's district two miles away: welcome to globalized ed.

The global middle class is on the move and life is good. It is also a great time to be in educational administration in state schools that once had to focus on their state. No more. Just because you pay your taxes and attend as required doesn't mean you get a job or can attend college.

The educational-industrial complex supports the global middle class and maybe your state, too, can find smart students abroad. US students are just not very smart and they can't afford to pay much either.

in Ohio colleges in record numbers | cleveland.com: "The university, like others in Ohio and across the country, has realized the benefits of recruiting Chinese students -- who usually pay full price and can handle the academic challenges.

The number of Chinese students in undergraduate programs at U.S. colleges increased 43 percent, to 57,000 students, from 2009 to 2010, according to the most recent statistics from the Institute of International Education."...
William Brustein, vice provost for global strategies and international affairs at Ohio State University, has worked in international education for 30 years. He said the sudden increase in undergraduate Chinese students has been a surprise.

"The phenomenon is due to the growth of the professional middle class in China and the emphasis they place on higher education," he said. "The United States is that magnet. The growth wasn't a surprise, but I don't think people expected it to surge so quickly and rapidly."

OSU, in an effort to establish a large global presence, targeted China as its first "global gateway" -- a prime location for faculty research, international student recruitment and opportunities for study abroad.

The university has opened offices in Shanghai, China, and Mumbai, India, and plans others in Brazil and Turkey .... While universities focus on China and India, they are also looking to other countries because as China and India expand their university systems, fewer students will look to the United States, Brustein said.

"There are emerging markets," he said. "Brazil will be one and Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia as well. We have to have plans for that more diverse flow."

A year ago, representatives from 56 universities, including the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Shawnee State University and the University of Findlay, visited Vietnam and Indonesia to explore opportunities for student recruitment there. They were invited by the U.S. Department of Commerce. via Blog this'

School administrators, a growing and prosperous group, are happy they can get kids from the global middle class who can handle the educational challenges. Those kids who slogged through twelve years of compulsory mis-education in Ohio just can't seem to cut it.

Tuition increases at Ohio State are on the way next year. Many students have been protesting the proposed hikes over the past two months, saying they’r e already stretched to the limit. On Wednesday, more than 50 sign-carrying students marched across the College Green chanting “higher education, not a corporation.”

“I’m being crushed by debt,” said Christy Holden, a 19-year-old sociology major. “I understand wanting to maintain the quality of the education at Ohio University, but at what costs?”

Ohio is the same state that has not fairly funded their public schools and the state that used its police arm to charge Kelley Williams-Bolar with felony charges for sending her kids to a better school in her own father's district two miles away. Soaring tuition rates and few jobs for high school grads put pressure on everyone and when some in this system feel fearful, things can get ugly.

Kelley Williams-Bolar
(Photo credit: good hair zine,
licensed image)

Kelley Williams-Bolar’s father dies in prison hospital - Local News: "Williams and Williams-Bolar, 41, went on trial together in 2010 on charges of conspiring to enroll his granddaughters in Copley-Fairlawn schools in 2006. Williams-Bolar, who lived in Akron, was convicted of felony record tampering and served nine days in jail. Gov. John Kasich, after a torrent of international support for the mother, granted her request for a pardon over the objection of Summit County prosecutors."

The whole point of compulsory public education was to strengthen citizen choices and the local and state economy. States provided resources, from land to funding, to build schools that everyone paid for and benefitted from except the rich, of course, who had private schools of their own. Now the so-called public schools themselves are globalized and privatized and helping fund a global middle/upper-class, entitled to whatever they have by test scores. Schooling was designed to end child labor but kids can take high-stakes tests for twelve years and still not get a job or a scholarship. Many have taken on debt trying to get a decent job. And debt levels record the amount of transfer:

Paul Krugman’s Economic Blinders – By Michael Hudson | Steve Keen's Debtwatch: "Blindness to the debt issue results in especial nonsense when applied to analysis of why the U.S. economy has lost its export competitiveness. How on earth can American industry be expected to compete when employees must pay about 40 percent of their wages on debt-leveraged housing, about 10 percent more on student loans, credit cards and other bank debt, 15 percent on FICA, and about 10 to 15 percent more in income and sales taxes? Between 75 and 80 percent of the wage payment is absorbed by the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector even before employees can start buying goods and services! No wonder the economy is shrinking, sales are falling off, and new investment and hiring have followed suit.

Globalization and the growth of corporate power has been a long time coming.

The Demise of Higher Education in the United States « unsettling economics:
"The response to the falling rate of profit also played a role in changing education. Tax reduction had the attraction of partially restoring profits, but it also had an important effect on education. Growing budget deficits would ramp up pressure to privatize what had been previously public responsibilities. By largely defunding education, universities became increasingly dependent on corporate money. Administrators became cautious about allowing expression of ideas that might seem upsetting to business. These factors took an enormous toll on higher education."

related
postsecondary ed: the future (post in space)
A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College (nytimes.com)
Past Meets Present: Education, Housing, and Segregation (everydaysociologyblog.com)
College Access as Social Justice

participatory democracy in schools

OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL CHILDREN. THAT'S WHAT DEMO...

public domain image via Wikipedia* * Author: Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. Bureau of Special Services. (03/09/1943 - 09/15/1945)

AERO' s new site hosts Ron Millers' eloquent essay below (h/t to Lefty Parent for pointing it out to me). I have posted work from Ron Miller before, see educational rights. The US has struggled with democracy and civil rights but a focus on democracy and choice for children and families is a natural outgrowth of that struggle, a topic discussed in Ron Miller's talk on educational rights, at the link.

In the US, compulsory attendance was instituted at a time when the world surrounding schools was entirely different for families, children and communities. The schools themselves were far more limited in time of attendance and the power schooling had over the economic lives of many people. As schooling was extended and industrialization grew, schooling was linked to jobs for more and more people and compulsory attendance ensured jobs for a growing bureaucracy within the public schools. As long as economic growth was strong and widely shared, the structural issue of lack of input and control by families was not experienced as being negative (with the significant exception of racial apartheid in the South).

However, the past 30 years of neoliberal, corporate domination of the economy have stressed many working families to the breaking point and access to the public schools remains problematic for many African-Americans who now face a school-to-prison pipeline, deep inequities of funding, and ongoing racism. All families need and want educational resources for their children so that their children can have good lives. Ensuring that families have rights within the public schools will help transition the system from a top-down relic of central planning to a true provider of learning services that families can access and use as they need.

Toward participatory democracy | Education Revolution | Alternative Education Resource Organization:

"Participatory democracy is not a utopian ideal at odds with human nature, but an expression of attainable values that a society could choose to pursue. It seems that rapid industrialization and then the sudden emergence of technologies for mass communications threw the American democratic experiment off balance for a century or more. Enormous wealth and power became tantalizingly available, and fueled “dominator” cultural patterns at the expense of the partnership vision that inspired early American democracy. But since the rebellions of the 1960s, it appears that we have begun to recognize what we have lost, and millions of citizens are working to reclaim that vision."

Lefty Parent also blogged on this topic and his essay is worth reading:

Thoughts on Participatory Democracy | Lefty Parent: "We progressive people should be raising our kids to question authority (starting with our own) and participate as fully as possible in our family decision-making processes. That rather than treating our young people as semi-functional beings whose lives must be thoroughly stage-managed by their parents and the educational institutions of the state (in loco parentis). We should send our kids to school urging them to stand up for their rights as human beings to a voice and a vote in the institutions that govern them. We should lobby their teachers and principals to implement elements of democratic process in school, towards giving our kids “full citizenship” in their own school."

educating progressives

Homeschooling and unschooling among liberals and progressives. - Slate Magazine:

"Despite our conflicting perspectives, I agree with Taylor that school ought to be more engaging, more intellectually challenging, and less obsessed with testing. But government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. (And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing."

This writer seems unfamiliar with alternative schooling, democracy and children's rights as well as basic homeschooling history. Why isn't there a more widely known progressive position on education?

The progressive vision America needs - Salon.com:

"Economic vision and economic realities do not arise out of thin air. Rather, they depend on the efforts of activists, thinkers and citizens to be articulated, developed, refined — and attempted. The current economic crisis caught progressives off guard. After decades of willfully absorbing conservative criticisms of the welfare state and defenses of free markets, progressives had let their own alternative values and vision atrophy. Until it remedies that failure, progressive politics will continue to fall short, despite particular electoral or policy victories. If progressives succeed in doing so in 2012, then the repercussions will last well beyond this one election."

There is a progressive position on education.

The counter to right-wing calls to close the government schools is not "less testing" but a fully public system that is under citizen control providing learning services instead of semi-public factories attempting to manufacture human beings with a set of skills to specifications of corporations. Our current system uses police to ensure that parents send their children to school and that design mistake has created a system that does not allow input from its users. Public schools in a democracy should not use police but should offer services and support in a democratic and humane way to families. In many cases, this means an expansion of service. We were headed that way 30 years ago before neoliberalism came to the fore.

Humane education would not rely on grading and testing but on relationships. Young people can work toward career goals and credentials by building a portfolio as homeschooling families have done for years. A progressive position means providing a free path to a college education or rolling back requirements for a BA in government jobs since there is no free path available and we do not want to exclude citizens from their own government.

As an activist who left the system, I now see school reform as building on the knowledge gained by many of us outside of mass coerced schooling.

Homeschooling was started by progressive education activists though this article shows that after 30 years of neoliberalism, few know much about progressive homeschool activists like John Holt or John Gatto, and the many voices of the historically strong alternative education movement. Activist progressives have been on the ground in homeschooling since the 1970s.
Progressives raised within the school system may not be able to imagine new ways forward if they do not get involved in some sort of progressive education change movement.
The public schools are not controlled by the public in any meaningful way nor do they provide a strong support for working-class families. The use of police on families is rampant and the entire system relies on coercion. The schools have never built the habit of working with the users of the system.
Change that does not address this fundamental misallocation of power will never work. Schools cannot be in charge of education: families and kids must be the ones making choices. Schools can only provide a service.
Education won't fix income inequality and the schools themselves ensure that power flows upward away from people and communities.
The public schools have a long history of corporate ties to questionable programs and we have yet to free our schools from anti-democratic and coercive control.
It has been critically important to build a group of people outside the education system in order to affect real change by having people with real experience that can actually counter the pervasive influence of mass schooling in our own lives.
In order to step outside the system, homeschoolers have changed compulsory attendance laws in most of the 50 states. This has grown a large base of citizens who understand the disenfranchisement of families is at the core of a progressive position on education. The family in the US often lacks healthcare, time off, and a living wage.
It is not that families should replace schools but that families should be the involved in deep ways that compulsory attendance laws made impossible. Schools have grown without learning the skills of deep democracy. Schools have not evolved into democratic and citizen-based institutions as public libraries have done because of the guaranteed income stream generated for administration and increasingly corporations. This private sector coalition prevents grassroots change because the grassroots have no voice at all.
Wealthy families may want schooling to be privatized but the majority of families in schools would want services even if they could choose not to have any. I think the majority would want flexible services but they have never been given this choice.
If schools could become learning service providers, whole communities could change. Instead of working against mass socialization pressures, schools as learning centers could help provide more positive social encounters while minimizing the negative.
Families with choice can begin altering their social experiences, ensuring that kids avoid stress and stay healthy as well as fundamentally changing the social experience within schools. The social experience within schools is one of the most negative parts of the whole system: from acculturation to authoritarian practices to peer-dependency as many communities and families have changed their way of life from 100 years ago. Using a user-driven model of providing services will allow kids and families to control this social process and transform it at the grassroots level.
The current structure of mass coerced schooling has created a guaranteed income stream in a system that has no mechanism for accountability and so all change is about capturing that income stream. Only by changing this fundamental structure can real change be done.
An equitably-funded, fully public system would focus on providing all families with learning resources that families could choose and use as they need since citizens in a democracy have no need of militaristic system of education. Working families should have as many services as they want and all families should be allowed to tailor their schedules, courses, and activities as they see fit.
The factory model that manufactures credentials is a relic: we can provide learning services and allow children and parents to work toward credentials they choose.

Schools do not do a good job of providing daycare for working families which are often single-parent. Most working families struggle to find ways to coordinate the transportation and activities needed for kids in a system that doesn't allow parents to request services like extended classes or activities.
Schools do not provide early childhood services nor do they even track data about what the people in their districts want or need. School schedules are not correlated with work schedules nor do working parents have choices in scheduling or access to transportation services. All of this is considered outside the factory model that does not require schools to listen and serve their district.
Food services are repellent and kids often have scant time to eat or they are not allowed to talk.
Schools do not provide meaningful counseling for college and careers and these services should be exponentially expanded to include credential and job training resource nights for families to understand the choices out there. Also, in school mediation and counseling services to facilitate usage should be large since schools should be people-centric organizations.
Schools charge escalating fees that are a growing and real burden to the working class. These fees along with district manipulation of funding show the disintegration of the system and only by understanding how compulsory attendance has tied funding to the child can we move toward a system that is fairly funded and provides resources that allow working and lower class families the same dignity of choice and control over their children that upper-class families have now.
Schools bully and threaten parents with increasing truancy fines. Schools do not allow much sick time and many kids return to class when still ill. This is because of funding tied to attendance and the lack of childcare services.
Parents are required to provide extensive homework time instead of having family time, a practice that impacts poorer families harder than many others, and another way schools override families and their needs. Families that need more classes and more activities cannot get them, however, as they are supposed to substitute for that themselves. Plenty of working-class families would choose extended services if they were given any choices.
Community colleges and large numbers of state colleges cannot graduate students at a rate of 90% or more but still increase tuition and increasingly, cater to out-of-state and foreign students who can pay more. Schools survive on the money that families spend for remediation services for kids whom the schools themselves have caused to need remediation.
Putting your kids in public schools in order to work does help some families get a second income and depending on the school journey, may also benefit the kids, but it does not make anyone a progressive.
Income disparities in my local high school ensure that the more affluent kids pack into IB and AP programs which kids must test into. Often these families could afford to pay for private schooling (though some would feel as strapped as the working class does in public schools) but they maintain they are progressive in attending public schools.
Those who benefit from high test scores or stronger local funding, also benefit from a system that oppresses others with those same tools: testing, sorting, and funding.
The intense peer-orientation of mass schooling harms poor families the most, creating kids with less strong family ties. Families with more resources can handle that easier but all mass schooling for extended periods is running into this problem.
Democratic values are non-existent in our schools since compulsory attendance laws ensure that families comply by using police, a common tactic in less well-off schools. This use of policing and coercion affect even well-off kids in nice schools who become more accepting of authoritarian methods.
Just as copyright and patent laws were originally about ensuring a strong public domain after a brief period of compensation for a creator, so schools were originally had a brief period of required attendance and the strong provision of resources for the public good. The strong provision for the common good means viewing schools as places that could have strong social and community impact if they were run as a social services that treated families with dignity.
The school-to-prison pipeline has been well documented and the role of mass coerced schooling in creating the institutional mindset is underrated. Schools are a part of this mass system that does not adjust or listen to the needs and concerns of kids or young people and their families.
Those who maintain that we must compete to win support an education-industrial complex that grows the institution itself instead of happy families, communities and sustainable work. Just as the military-industrial complex has managed to generate war after war, so the educational-industrial complex generates credentials and programs, from the remediation windfall to stackable credentials to the textbooks Pearson provides to schools as well as prisons. But education, kids, relationships and communities are diminished: they are required to be part of guaranteed income stream that has no voice.
The public schools and public universities that were once provided for the working class are now too expensive for the working class. Growing numbers of citizens cannot work in our millionaires-only government since the required BA is now unaffordable to the majority of working people. When the high school degree began to be required, a free and public path was provided. Not for the BA: it may be required for most government jobs but there is no free and public route.
The so-called public system allows funding for schools is a hybrid system, part local money allowed to piggyback on public money to create upscale districts that use their police to prevent the theft of education while expanding the use of police in school districts where funding has been cut.
Corporate money seeds charters which, along with vouchers, provide few citizens real choice or involvement. The case of Kelley Williams-Bolar provides a horrifying example of a so-called public system that is in fact acting more like an adjunct to a growing prison system. Williams-Bolar shows the limits of the current funding model.

There really is a progressive position on education but, like organic farming twenty years ago, many cannot believe you can grow smart children and happy workers without coercion, sorting, grading, testing, and punishment. But families of all sorts have done this and we can do this in our communities, too.

And we are not all rich.

Oh, that’s rich. « The Bitter Homeschooler:

"Regardless of what else you think of homeschoolers, please keep in mind that we’re not any more likely to be rich than any other group. We just don’t mind being broke for a good cause. "

background posts

giroux on occupy wall street

public domain image via WikipediaAn Interview With Henry Giroux: Youth Movement in a Culture of Hopelessness | Truthout:

As the social state disintigrates, what we see here is the rise of a punishing state in which the behaviour of young people is increasingly criminalised. We're filling up jails, we're filling up detention centres, we're filling up prisons with young people. They go right from schools to the jails, and I think that college graduates are realising that, while they may have separated themselves from, basically, kids who are marginalised by class and race, all of a sudden they are feeling the same kind of pressures, and while they may not be going to jail, they are actually being set up for a future in which there is no hope for them. The gap between the rich and the poor is so wide, is so overwhelming, that all the myths that depoliticised them in the past have now come home to roost. They're naked. They're visible. The ultimate toll of class warfare in the United States is not just a matter of what it does to working class people - when you look at what it does to young people, it just cuts off the future. There's no concern with long term investments.

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