Tom
Rkmickey at aol.com wrote:
> Lbo listers,
> The following was originally posted on marxism-list where certainly some of
> you have already seen it. I was very impressed by it and thought it would
> be worth reposting here, particularly in light of some of the things
> mentioned in recent posts by Rakesh and Kelley. I repost it here with the
> permission of Jose G Perez.
>
> K. Mickey
>
> Forwarded Message:
> Subj: Heresy: why I support school vouchers
> Date: 7/31/99 9:57:56 PM Central Daylight Time
> From: jgperez at freepcmail.com (Jose G. Perez)
> Sender: owner-marxism at lists.panix.com
> Reply-to: marxism at lists.panix.com
> To: marxism at lists.panix.com (Marxism List)
>
> The CPUSA statement to a meeting of Communist and Workers parties that was
> held recently included the following:
>
> >>The U.S. ruling class has launched a national effort to destroy free
> public education. It is trying to privatize education, create an educated
> elite, and leave millions without learning and training for the new
> millennium This fight against public education is being led by the
> ultra-right and corporations. <<
>
> I have for some time been tempted to write something about this, on which
> the CPUSA, if I understood correctly, does no more than repeat the typical
> position of the U.S. left on school vouchers, which is shared by the SWP and
> many others.
>
> It appears that the Communist Party hasn't noticed that, TODAY, support for
> school vouchers is strongest precisely among the Black and Hispanic
> communities. How could this be, you say, aren't vouchers a dirty ruling
> class plot?
>
> When the school voucher idea was first broached, it was in the context of
> the struggle over school desegregation. It was meant to continue the
> "separate but equal" dual school system in a new disguise. But today the
> context and therefore the content are different.
>
> Contrary to what the CPUSA thinks the ruling class WANTS to do, the truth is
> that the U.S.educational system ALREADY creates an educated elite, and
> leaves millions without learning. The greatest victims of this are the
> Black, Hispanic and poor working class children of the inner cities. Equal
> education through school desegregation has largely failed. And it behooves
> communists to wake up and smell the coffee. American education is JUST as
> segregated and JUST as unequal as it was four decades ago.
>
> Now Black and Hispanic parents are demanding the right to send their
> children to schools of their own choosing, not to whatever soul-destroying
> institution the State would condemn them too. What kind of "communists"
> would not support the right of Blacks and Hispanics --indeed, of all working
> people, of all parents-- to take control of the education of their children
> AWAY from the bourgeois state and into their OWN hands?
>
> Why should the better, private schools be a "right" of the rich and not the
> poor? Why shouldn't families decide which grammar, middle and high schools
> their children attend?
>
> We should demand that the state guarantee an education to all children at
> 100% state expense. But all experience shows that the state has absolutely
> no intention or capacity to actually deliver to all Black children, all
> Hispanic children, all the children of the Native peoples, all the children
> of the poor working class families, just as good an education as society
> seems to have no problem providing to millions of other children.
>
> So I say, vouchers for all, and not a measly thousand dollars or two, but
> vouchers that cover the full, real cost of an education at the BEST schools
> in a given area, including aftercare, including clubs and teams and music
> lessons and ballet recitals. Down with the state monopoly of education,
> which condemns millions of Black, Hispanic and other poor children to
> ignorance!
>
> This is not an attack on free, universal, public education, because today
> that is already a myth. The miserable quality of many city school systems
> drives many of the better-off working families to private education,
> relieving the government of all expense for the education of those children.
> Even if one is tempted to dismiss such families as "privileged" careful
> attention needs to be paid to the defacto social policy. The local city
> fathers, i.e., the bankers and big businessmen, now have a tremendous
> incentive to place a tight lid on the quality of the city school system. The
> big incentive isn't to save the couple of hundred dollars more per student
> that the schools might need. It's to save the $6,000-$10,000/student that
> the 15-25% of the school-age population in private school would cost them if
> they returned to the public system.
>
> The Communist Party is quite right to speak about the bourgeois drive to
> "privatize" education, but it doesn't seem to have a clue that this is
> already going on RIGHT NOW. The thing the bourgeoisie is MOST interested in
> doing is "privatizing" the COST of educating children, throwing it back on
> individual families.
>
> Now the most important reason for universal school vouchers is that inner
> city schools suck on purpose. Inner city schools aren't terrible schools by
> accident, by the "difficulty" on educating children with too much melanin in
> their skin, or as a result of the "deprived" background of ghetto kids. And
> it isn't that American teachers and school administrators don't know how to
> run "good" schools, at least by bourgeois standards. American inner-city
> school systems are mediocre by design. The bourgeoisie and their political
> representatives especially at a local level know exactly how to run a good
> school system --by their standards-- and an absolutely mediocre one. They do
> BOTH in virtually every major metropolitan area. It's not that there's a
> different, smarter local ruling class in the suburbs, the SAME bankers and
> businessmen dominate both the city and its suburbs.
>
> The key to making it work is the often unspoken school philosophy or
> ideology. For example, in the City of Atlanta proper, the (nearly all Black)
> public schools are highly regimented. Five year olds are introduced into the
> world of formal education by learning to line up, by being told to keep
> quiet, by being forced into the unnatural and absolutely moronic practice of
> having them sit straight in front of papers and manipulate representations
> of objects --- drawings -- to single out characteristics like one is taller
> than another and three objects are the same as three objects. This they do
> on blue ditto sheets spewed out by the city's central school bureaucracy, an
> apparatus stuffed full of political cronies and appointees that swallows
> between one third and one fourth of the system's budget.
>
> The schools are not lacking in resources. The one I am most acquainted with
> had counselors and principals and assistant principals and teaching resource
> people and a modern, substantial computer lab with an excellent IBM-produced
> program designed to help children acquire reading readiness and initial
> reading skills in a non-regimented, playful way.
>
> It also had no playground, and children were taken for recess to a large
> auditorium where they were required to engage in regimented group exercise
> and running, not in free play. Mind you, there was room on the school
> grounds for a playground, they CHOSE not to build one.
>
> This grammar school had 600 children -- now more, they've built an
> addition -- because anything smaller is inefficient from the point of view
> of the kitchen staff and the school bus routes. Children are run through the
> cafeteria by grades, starting with the youngest, who had lunch at 10:25.
> They were required to line up -- in silence, and in a certain order -- march
> down to the cafeteria together, go through the line together, sit together,
> stay together sitting until the bell rang and march back to class together.
>
> This is a somewhat integrated school about half or more of whose area was
> originally hippie/gay/bohemian, then yuppified, and now has become almost
> bourgeosified. As the socio-economic mix has shifted up, the number of white
> children in the neighborhood has increased, but the percentage of children
> enrolled in the public school from north of the railroad tracks has steadily
> declined.
>
> Moreover, although the kindergarten class may be half white, by the time
> second grade rolls around the enrollment is mostly Black.
>
> My daughter, who is now 9, started at that school four years ago. Her FIRST
> interaction with her teacher, a 20-year-veteran, reputed to be THE BEST
> teacher in this school, supposedly the best of all Atlanta public schools,
> was a scolding for taking a toy out of a cubby hole. This is school, and we
> have rules, she was told.
>
> Her second interaction was being told to sit and be quiet.
>
> Her third interaction, the bell now having been rung, was being handed a
> blue ditto sheet by the teacher, who asked the children if any knew how to
> write their names. Carmen was one of the few who did, and was beaming when
> she raised her hand. The teacher showed her where to put her name and she
> wrote it: CARMEN. When she came home she had the blue ditto sheet with her.
> In red ink, the teacher had crossed out her pencil scrawled CARMEN and
> written Carmen above it. The teacher said she was wrong, Carmen explained.
> It had to be capitals and lower case. One more detail on the ditto sheet.
> The same sheet is used in every kindergarten in every school in the Atlanta
> system on the same day. I was told that this was so if the teacher was sick,
> a substitute could just step right in and do that day's "work."
>
> That was the first day of kindergarten.
>
> The second day I saw the teacher bawl out a five year old boy who wound up
> crying on the floor. The teacher accused him of being tired from not getting
> to bed early enough. In fact, he was just shell-shocked from the constant
> bombardment of abuse, denigration and regimentation from this thug. His
> mother came to get him, and the teacher bawled her out, too.
>
> The third day Carmen broke down in the car when I was taking her, pleading
> with me not to make her go. A few days later Carmen was in a private school.
> It meant her mother had to go back to work full time right away, instead of
> being able to mostly stay home with our six-week-old baby as we had planned.
> We weren't the only ones. Two other white kids were also pulled out from
> this kindergarten room. Her original class in the city of Atlanta school was
> 16 children, 8 of them Black. Of those 16, 9 were re-enrolled for first
> grade, 7 of them Black.
>
> If you look at the evolution of major metro areas over the past three
> decades, you can't help but wonder, how did this happen. The whites who
> can -- the majority -- flee to the suburbs, as do the "middle class" blacks.
> They say its the schools but the urban schools often have as much or more
> money per student as many suburban districts. They have the same books. They
> often pay the teachers well. Yet the inner city schools have horrific
> dropout rates, kids who stay are pushed through to graduation on "social
> promotion" and most can't read well enough to understand a newspaper. None
> of it makes any sense until you realize what it is they're trying to do in
> these schools, from day one, for thirteen years.
>
> The teachers will tell you, teaching kids from the ghetto is different,
> they're wild, you have to instill in them the discipline and self-control
> they're going to need to survive as adults, to get a job, to stay out of
> jail. It sounds reasonable, even caring, until you see it applied to your
> 5-year-old-daughter. Then you just try not to go postal while you figure out
> a way to get her as far away from these bastards as possible.
>
> Less than a mile from this school is the City of Decatur. The City of
> Decatur has its own tiny little school system, with six primary schools of
> about 150 students each. They quite cleverly "solved" the cafeteria problem
> that Atlanta found so insurmountable. They have a central kitchen and bus
> the hot lunch to the schools, instead of busing the children. The city of
> Decatur spends about as much per pupil as Atlanta does, but it has no
> central school bureaucracy. They didn't then have the gleaming computer lab
> or the IBM program, or the blue ditto sheets. Every school is surrounded by
> playing fields, with swings and monkey bars and slides. At the time, the
> social composition of the city of Decatur was almost identical to that of
> the contiguous Atlanta neighborhood. Its school property taxes were
> significantly higher, because there is such a higher proportion of families
> with children. A house in the city of Decatur identical to one in Atlanta a
> few blocks away cost half again as much. A friend of mine, a real estate
> agent, explained the difference: The cost is the same, once you add in the
> cost of a private school in Atlanta. He also noted the demographics.
> One-child families might wind up in Atlanta. Two or more children, and
> Decatur was the only choice.
>
> Now in the city of Decatur, principals and teachers run the schools as
> they see fit, and there's a fair bit of variation from one school to the
> next. But you can tell the difference between the city of Atlanta school and
> any city of Decatur school immediately. The walls of the city of Atlanta
> school were covered with battleship gray paint. The walls of the city of
> Decatur schools are covered with the paintings and projects of the children.
> The City of Atlanta grammar schools test low, and spend tons of time
> preparing for the test. The city of Decatur test high.
>
> I''ve gone through my experience in great detail because this little few
> square mile area of Greater Atlanta presents almost laboratory conditions.
> You've got basically continuous neighborhoods on both sides of the tracks
> for a few miles, with a teeny "suburban" enclave (pop: 20,000) in the city
> of Decatur, but one that's about a third or so Black. Of the city of Decatur
> grammar schools, 2 are mostly white, 2 are mixed, 2 are mostly black, going,
> roughly north to south. The difference is in what the schools are trying to
> do. The Atlanta schools are rigid, regimented, authoritarian, the teachers
> consciously understand that their role is to instill in Black kids
> "discipline," i.e.., submissiveness. Even excellent resources, -- like the
> IBM computer lab -- gets turned into instruments for subjugation. The IBM
> program was designed to be used by individual students. The teachers force
> two students to share one computer, while there are many machines unused.
> The children are meant to roam more or less at will within the program, with
> some gentle guidance from the teacher. Instead, the teachers and computer
> lab people use the program to do drills, first on shapes, then on letters.
> The IBM materials clearly explain what the program is and how it is meant to
> be used. Some local corporation got a hard-on for improving its "civic"
> image and donated the lab to this and several other schools. Some extremely
> conscious person then sat down and figured out how to make a program
> designed to educate into one used to subjugate.
>
> If more than half the Black community is supporting school vouchers, its not
> because they've forgotten it was an idea thought up by the Klan. They want
> it because the schools their children have access to DON'T WORK. They don't
> work because their primary focus isn't on education, as Carmen's teacher
> quite calmly told me, but on socialization. Ever since that conversation
> I've always thought she missed her true calling in life. She was born to be
> one of those jack-booted ATF thugs who murder children and mothers cradling
> babies in their arms.
>
> The labor "leaders," "progressive" democrats and the ACLU crowd are all
> horrified at the thought that Black and Hispanic parents having vouchers
> because they might choose the "wrong" school, and --horror of horrors-- even
> a religious school. "Separation of church and state," say these hypocrites,
> NOT A SINGLE ONE OF WHOM sends their kids to an inner city school, all of
> whom send their kids to PRIVATE schools, safe in the knowledge that economic
> barriers will keep their children from being contaminated by ghetto kids.
> They're defending their privileged access to a better education for THEIR
> children just as tenaciously as the Ku Klux Klanners did more than a
> generation ago in the South. So their oh-so-principled concern for the
> "sanctity" of the separation of Church and State has a much more earthly and
> immediate implication: their kids get an advantage over those of the rabble.
>
> But on the merits of church and state, first of all, socialists defend the
> right of everyone, and especially of oppressed minorities, to practice their
> own faith and raise their children in the faith of their choosing.
>
> Second, separating the costs associated with general education as opposed to
> those associated with strictly religious instruction is no more an
> insurmountable task than separating the cost of surgery at a Catholic
> hospital from the costs incurred keeping a priest on standby to administer
> last rites in case the surgery fails.
>
> I've even seen some unthinking "socialist" publication saying that this
> would leave poor impressionable kids in the hands of priests and nuns who
> will fill their heads with all sorts of reactionary ideas.
>
> This, of course, instead of the enormously progressive, enlightened
> education black and Hispanic kids receive now in those pre-prison
> institutions that for some quaint reason the real explanation of which has
> been lost in the mists of time, people insist on calling "educational."
>
> Supporting the state's monopoly over the education of working-class children
> on the basis that working people fought for and won free, universal public
> education 100-odd years ago is to make a fetish of the form that a
> particular struggle took, to the detriment of what was really at stake. The
> struggle is still FOR education for our children, but now it is directed
> against the anti-schools the bourgeoisie has imposed.
>
> Now, on a very important point:
>
> Aren't "public" schools more progressive than "private" schools?
>
> Well, are "public" prisons more progressive than "private" ones?
>
> Is Alitalia more "progressive" than Delta, and does its "Progressiveness
> Quotient" decline with every tranche of stock sold to private investors?
>
> Is the post office the "progressive" alternative to the "reactionary" UPS?
>
> Do communists fight for progressive municipal garbage collection, instead of
> reactionary private haulers?
>
> In principle, it makes no difference AT ALL whether the American (or
> British, or French...) bourgeoisie controls an enterprise "privately" or
> through its state. By and large, the capitalists try to organize it so that
> profitable enterprises remain in the private sector while those which play a
> necessary social function (in this case, warehousing ghetto kids until
> they're old enough for prison), but are likely to incur losses are "owned"
> by the "public" which means they are subsidized by the taxes extracted from
> working people.
>
> It's said --as a criticism-- that school vouchers take money away from
> ghetto schools "that need it the most." Yes, that's exactly the point. The
> real purpose is to destroy "Ghetto schools" and inner city school systems as
> they know exist.
>
> That's why the reactionary bourgeois proponents of vouchers raise a limited
> voucher that doesn't cover the full cost of a private school and in very
> limited numbers. THEIR vouchers aim to preserve the ghetto schools by buying
> off the parents that raise a ruckus.
>
> One last point. Those familiar with the usual left arguments against school
> vouchers will notice I've not said anything about the need to defend the
> teachers unions against this capitalist plot to undermine them. I just want
> to say it was not an oversight.
>
> Jose