You have twenty?!!! I guess after you betray socialism, you get knocked down to ten like me. {-;
> I am very suspicious of any promise by Gore to increase some component of
> discretionary spending. This part of the budget has suffered the most since
> 1981. It's the easiest stuff to either cut or allow to atrophy with
> inflation. An increase in one place is liable to be associated with
> unheralded cuts
> elsewhere.
>
> The Clinton budgets have been especially misleading with respect to new
> spending initiatives. The commitment to massive surpluses puts the
> discretionary budget in all the more danger.
>
> Gore deserves some credit for raising the issue of class size. It seemed
> like the Administration was using their reinventing government campaign to
> affirm the worth of public sector, but they never put a great emphasis on
> this, and now they piss away whatever good effects they have generated by
> bragging (untruthfully) about cutting the size of government.
As a general principle to questions of budgetary spending, I think this is a very sound approach. There are some reasons why Gore's feet could be more readily held to the fire on questions of education. (1) His proposals are very specific, and in areas where the federal government has no prior role -- funding for school buildings, for more teachers, for lower class size. The greater danger here, given the fungibility of education funds, is more that state and local governments will use those funds to replace funds they now use for that purpose -- leading to no net increase in this underfunded, under-resourced area. State after state has used the argument that the proceeds of lotteries would go to education to gain public acceptance of them, only to cut down proportionately the amount of money from general tax revenues they put into schools once the lotteries began. (2) The NEA and the AFT have strong lobbying presences in Washington, and if elected, Gore will owe both big time. Public sector unions are the core of his support in the trade union movement, and no section of the workforce is even remotely as well-organized as teachers, so I think he would be much more reluctant to piss off folks here than on trade issues where he already is damaged. Although I do not need to make the case here, I could show how increased spending on education is quite compatible with a certain DLC new economy ideology.
I am not so sure I would give Gore that much credit on class size. Lowering class size is very popular among parents as well as teachers, as it now seen properly as an educational issue -- and not just a work load issue for teachers. It is hard to go wrong politically on the issue: who is going to argue for larger class size? [It is a different matter, as California's hasty experiment shows, to lower class size on a massive scale in ways that are helpful. As Richard Rothstein has shown, there are all sorts of negative unintended consequences to doing that in isolation.]
> Gore's main saving grace re: education is his hostility to vouchers.
> Meanwhile, charter schools are booming, not without a little help from the
> Administration. Clinton also lent some moral support to awful educational
> contractors like
> John Golle. I think the danger of vouchers is overstated. They are more
> dangerous as propaganda than as policy. But Gore does deserve a point for
> his position.
Here is where we differ. I think that vouchers are a much serious danger than you imagine. There is big time money, billions and billions of dollars, in venture capital moving into the field of education, and the propaganda efforts are direct investments designed to produce future returns. Education is in their sights just like health care was twenty years ago. A few years ago, we thought that we were relatively secure in NYC against such efforts; they might gain a foothold in places like Milwaukee and Cleveland, but it would be along time before they reached NYC. Well, they became a very real and big threat here a whole lot sooner than anyone expected. Do not take too much stock in our ability to turn back efforts such as the California resolution: it was very poorly crafted, and the NEA and AFT have mounted massive campaigns in response. These are isolated battles in a very long war: voucher advocates do not disappear after one isolated defeat -- they come back for more, because they are far from defeated in a more strategic sense. That is why I think that the credit you give Gore on this point is more important than you allow.
> On the other hand, as noted below, Gore echoes the conservative line of
> Chester Finn that "charter schools are public schools." By this reasoning,
> vouchers are
> public schools too. Here you can see how a concession on principle opens
> the way to bad program.
There is a fundamental difference between vouchers and charter schools, and charters -- for all of their faults -- remain public schools. No doubt that Checker Finn and his ilk want to make charters the thin wedge of vouchers and educational privatization, and their efforts must be watched and fought very vigorously. But there are also many educational progressives -- parents, community activists and teachers -- who see in charter schools the opportunity to create new types of public schools, free of bureaucratic restraint and more responsive to the needs of students. If you simply take a position of opposition to charters, you write those people off, and basically cede that ground to the Finns of the worlds. I examine these questions, and the complexity of the charter school terrain at some length in an article I published in _Rethinking Schools_ earlier this year; if it would be useful, I would be happy to post it here.
> In a related vein is the extent to which a failure to criticize
> commercialization of social life leads inevitably to privatization
> pressure. If everything is for sale, why
> not schooling? In this sense, Gore is reminiscent of Dukakis, for whom
> competence trumped ideology. Problem is, competence is hard to verify at
> long distance. Bush's ideology is plain and popular enough to outshine
> Gore's evasion of basic principles. Gore et al. are clever in the small but
>
Without question, Gore will be of very little help in challenging and transforming the current "common sense" of the culture around questions of privatization, market ideology and the need to promote the common good. But why would anyone expect that any president could/would perform that role? If he gives us some breathing space, puts us in a less constantly embattled position vis-a-vis such privatization efforts, provides some of the opportunities to take up those questions on other terrains, that seems a far more desirable option than confronting a nit-wit true believer in privatization.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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