GUEST POST: Bigger than Sputnik, Christian Z. Goering

February 3, 2017 plthomasedd 2 Comments

GUEST POST

Bigger than Sputnik: How Betsy Devos’ Nomination for Secretary of Education just Saved Public Education

Most people are familiar with American educational history to the point to remember that the Soviet launch of a satellite into space in 1957 before the launch of a US satellite struck great fear that our country was falling behind and thus needed to double down on our efforts, especially those in education. This little blinking light meant the Cold War could be lost and the years after Sputnik were marked by the National Defense of Education Act in 1958 and an onslaught of programs designed to improve teaching and learning and strengthen our system of public schools. A friend who began teaching in 1963 often shared with me the different ways in which he benefited from this urgency—paid summer workshops for teachers, support for graduate degrees, and just plain old-fashioned support for education.

I’m going to be bold in predicting that Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education will be remembered as a watershed moment in educational history, the point in time where public education was saved. I believe Betsy is bigger than Sputnik.

Before you rush to think otherwise, I don’t believe Ms. DeVos has any business leading the US Department of Education. Her religious adherence to the school choice movement, one I believe is designed to tear down (not improve) our system of public education, is single-handedly a disqualifier. The comment about bears and the fact that she has zero experience ever working inside a school of any kind seems like enough further evidence that she has no business setting foot in the Department of Education, much less leading it. When then President-Elect Trump passed on Michelle Rhee—the former Chancellor of the Washington D. C. schools and arguably the most hated educator in America—to instead nominate billionaire DeVos, it seemed apparent that only the most non-logical and most offensive choice was the goal. In this case, President Trump went too far.

While I’d love to tell you that Betsy DeVos is the worst nominee for President Trump’s cabinet and to place all of the blame for this nomination squarely on the President’s shoulders, she’s not and that wouldn’t be fair. Rather, a hefty amount of blame must be placed at the feet of the Democratic party, which over the past twenty years has increasingly drifted towards the school choice movement, interestingly one of the few areas of agreement in our divided country. Following eight treacherous years for public education under President George W. Bush and No Child Left Behind, Barack Obama gave legitimacy and real teeth to the failed policies of his predecessors. The name and shame, test-punish-rinse-repeat cycle did nothing for our education system. What’s worse is that President Obama provided funding for the biggest expansion of school choice in our nation’s history. His picks for Secretary of Education were both unqualified and considered by teachers to be outright attacks on our sensibility of what education actually is and isn’t. So, a hearty “thanks Obama” is in order.

How’s Betsy bigger than Sputnik, one might ask? She has singlehandedly united the Democratic party against the destructive school choice movement, one they almost universally supported previously and she has unified teachers and public education groups for a cause like I’ve never seen. She’s such a bad nominee for this position that she’s taken the place of a satellite blinking across the night sky. As a teacher, I’m looking towards Satellite DeVos with renewed hope and a sort of religious reverence.

Even school choice magnate Eli Broad came out to denounce her nomination. This guy drinks school choice Kool-Aid out of a platinum cup for breakfast and he’s against her? Anyone interested in perpetrating the school choice ruse is likely screaming from their rooftops or smashing their heads against a wall. BB (Before Betsy) everything was sailing through a dark night sky towards unprecedented spreading of vouchers and charters and the opportunity for the greedy to make money off of our nation’s most vulnerable—our school children. The Democrats were shamefully sitting at the same gilded table as the Republicans, no difference in their vision for education. AB (After Betsy), I project a future where public educators are again valued and where programs are initiated to support teaching and learning, a return to doing what is best for all of the students, a vision lost over the last couple of decades. I project a future in which the Democrats are stronger than ever supporters of public schools, unflinching and unwilling to accept anything less than the best for all of our nation’s students, especially not risky and fraudulent school choice schemes.

Thanks Betsy for being such an egregious choice for Education Secretary that you’ve united and revitalized the opposition to your broken ideas. If you are somehow confirmed, the unified force of all teachers—not just the Democrats—will have the brightest blinking light to look towards and know immediately what we need to work against.

Capitalism, Kurt Vonnegut, McCarthy Era

U$A: Beware Capitalism as well as Fascism

February 1, 2017 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Often accurately praised as a deft and almost idealizing satire of religion, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle also can serve as a fictional examination of political science.

Central to the politics of the novel is the fabricated tension among military, government (dictatorship), and religion (Bokononism):

“But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.” (pp. 174-175)

The U.S. has existed for much of its history on a similar tension between democracy and capitalism, but other tensions have been incredibly important also, many of which are as fabricated as the one in San Lorenzo: the U.S. versus [insert foreign country/enemy], capitalism versus communism (McCarthy Era, arms race with Soviet Union).

With the election of Trump, many have raised concerns about the creeping threat of fascism, and then, some have countered that with arguments that Trump is not a fascist threat.

Lost in that debate, I think, is a very real and present danger: Trump is the logical consequence of the manufactured tension between corporate America and “government” (here, well represented by Bokononism).

For much of the existence of the U.S., the ruling elites of corporate America have created a public demon, “Big Government,” and used that mischaracterization of the democratic purposes of government to meet the very narrow needs of business leaders.

While fanning the flames of the general public’s hatred of the evil Big Government, corporate America has remained mostly unscathed, and then, as a result, the rise of Trump may be about fascism, or it may not be, but it is clearly about the ultimate triumph of naked capitalism and the end of democracy, even as weak as democracy has always been.

The problem with this is that we are now fully committed to an amoral way of being as a people. The rightful tension between capitalism and democracy, what was essential to our becoming a free and equitable people, depends on the moral imperative of democracy to guide the essentially amoral mechanisms of capitalism.

Government as a moral lever has ended slavery and child labor; has expended voting and marriage to all adults; and has corrected innumerable unethical and abusive elements that were created and sustained by naked capitalism.

Left without a moral barometer, heroine sales would be shaped by market forces to respond to heroine addicts; the same if true of snuff films, and the most abusive forms of pornography.

There is no market that would not be shaped by capitalism in ways that are “right” for that amoral paradigm: heroine priced at the level the market will bear, and so on with snuff films and child pornography.

Without the collective moral imperatives of a people—government—people become mere consumers at the whim of the Invisible Hand—and some become sacrificed along the way (slaves, children, women, etc.).

And here we are: Trump is the embodiment of naked capitalism, in which no moral standards exist, just ratings—the crassest reduction of market forces.

Trump’s administration is not a reality show, but an infomercial on replay, a shitty product that depends on the force of overstated (and false) claims that simply have to convince enough people to buy in to not only survive, but thrive.

But Trump has not caused this ugly erosion of a people; he merely represents who we are.

And who we are is a culture in which millionaire pro athletes enjoy the necessary tension between labor and billionaire owners through unions while the rest of the country sits by after electing Trump who is marshaling in the very real possibility of a national right to work law—a federalization of erasing the necessary tension between labor and owners.

All decent people should fear and work against the rise of fascism, but right now, the U.S. is experiencing the real and horrible consequences of abdicating our moral and ethical boundaries to the naked capitalism that is Trump, that is us.

We have become lost in very garbled ends and have completely ignored the means.

Government is rightfully the collective will of the people, a necessary moral and ethical check to the amoral forces of the free market, in which the “free” is not about liberty but about being free of any ethical concerns.

And thus, I see no need for fascism because there is no resistance; the fall of democracy in the U.S. serves the same interests whether by fascism or the slowly creeping cancer of naked capitalism.

The fall of democracy in the U.$.A. is about a people freely admitting we have no soul, no real concern for anyone except “me.”

The branches of government be damned; we have the Home Shopping Network, the foma of a lost people drunk on crude oil.