On June 12, 2012, The New York Review Of Books published an article by Diane Ravitch about Mitt Romney’s education policy entitled A Chance For Every Child.
“The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past 30 years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics –– among them, former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.
“Romney offers full-throated support for using taxpayer money to pay for private-school vouchers, privately-managed charters, for-profit online schools, and almost every other alternative to public schools.
“When it comes to universities, Romney excoriates Obama for the rising cost of higher education. He claims that more federal aid leads to higher tuition, so he offers no new federal funding to help students burdened with debt. His plan does not mention the fact that tuition has increased in public universities (which enroll three-quarters of all students) because states have reduced their investments in higher education and shifted the burden from taxpayers to students. Romney will encourage private-sector involvement in higher education, by having commercial banks again serve as the intermediary for federal student loans –– an approach Obama had eliminated in 2010 as too costly. (Until 2010, banks received guaranteed subsidies from the federal government to make student loans, while the government assumed nearly all the risk. When the program was overhauled by the Obama administration, billions of dollars in bank profits were redirected to support Pell Grants for needy students.) To cut costs, Romney encourages the proliferation of for-profit online universities.
“Romney’s plan, by contrast, is animated by a reverence for the private sector. While little is said about improving or spending more on public education, which is treated as a failed institution, a great deal of enthusiasm is lavished on the innovation and progress that is supposed to occur once parents can take their federal dollars to private institutions or enroll their child in a for-profit online school. Massachusetts attained success by raising standards for new teachers, not by lowering them. Nor did Massachusetts eliminate teacher tenure – that is, the right to a hearing for experienced teachers before they can be fired.
“Romney’s proposal for private-school vouchers is red meat for the rightwing base of the Republican party, especially evangelicals. Vouchers have been the third rail of education politics since Milton Friedman proposed them in 1955; they have been put before the voters in several state referenda and have been consistently rejected. As a general rule, the public does not want public money to support religious schools. And many religious schools are wary about accepting public money and the regulations that eventually are tied to it. But in the past few years, vouchers have been revived by state legislatures in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Louisiana without resorting to a popular vote.
“What Governor Jindal is doing sounds like a template for the Romney plan. With no increase in funding, all the money for vouchers and private vendors and online charters will be deducted from the state’s public education budget. Governor Jindal and Mitt Romney should explain how American education will be improved if taxpayer dollars are used to send more students to sectarian schools and to take their courses from profit-making businesses and online schools.
“In the vision presented by Mitt Romney, public dollars would flow to schools that teach creationism. Anyone could teach, without passing any test of their knowledge and skills and without any professional preparation. Teachers could be fired for any reason, without any protection of their freedom to teach. In some states and regions, teachers will be fearful of teaching evolution or global warming or any controversial issues. Nor will they dare to teach books considered offensive to anyone in their community, like Huckleberry Finn.
“And candidate Romney should explain how privatizing the way we school our children will further his goal of “restoring the promise of American education”. “Restore” suggests a return to the past. When in American history did the for-profit sector run American schools? Which state ever permitted it until the advent in our own time of for-profit charter corporations and for-profit online corporations? Which founding fathers ever railed against public education? John Adams, that crusty conservative, said this:
‘The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.'”
Restoring the promise of American education should mean rejuvenating public schools, not destroying them.
What should be obvious to every American is that we can always manage to allocate trillions of dollars for wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), and hundreds of millions of dollars for the no-fly zones, yet when it comes to the future of our children, and their education, we have to resort to taxpayer supported for profit schooling instead of maintaining and developing our non-profit education system at the public expense, or so it would seem.
According to http://www.cbsnews.com/, “every state in the country is taking hits, 36,000 teachers who could lose their jobs in California; twenty thousand in Illinois; sixteen-thousand six hundred in New York. So many teachers are out of work that districts with one or two openings are inundated with thousands of applications. “We want to stave off an education catastrophe,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “And the cost of inaction for our children and for our country I think is unacceptably high.”
With the amount of cuts currently in place, school districts are not only cutting teachers, but cutting programs, cutting school hours, enlarging classes, closing schools –– all to save money. In many schools, art, music, physical education, even counseling are first on the chopping block. Across the country students and teachers are angry and protesting.
Romney’s blueprint for privatizing American education will provide added advantages to wealthy children with access to expensive private high schools and college counselors. Generally, the outcome will be a layered, hierarchical system of preferences for the children of the privileged, an affirmative action for those with money, which in turn perpetuates elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves at the expense of the majority.
