[lbo-talk] Lay Off the Schools was education bubble

[Alan Rudy]

All I can say, Carrol, is that it appears you know very very little about
how libraries, public works, local and county parks, environmental
regulatory agencies, social work and beyond actually work - all of which are
under myriad layers of regulatory surveillance, are the perpetual brunt of
public attacks at township, city, county, state and federal hearings, are
managed capriciously - and very politically - by immediate and proximate
superiors, are wildly differentiated in terms of wages and benefits relative
to the importance of seniority and mediated by which contract regime they
were hired under, and are increasingly threatened with privatization.  If
you need a parallel for the PTA, try the Michigan United Conservation Clubs,
local groups affiliated with the Farm Bureau, local neighborhood
associations, county and state-wide developers' associations, etc., etc.,
etc.  You need to find me a layer, below management, in any of these areas
where folks are not overworked and underpaid - particularly relative to
workloads and payscales tied to the time when public school and university
students had greater free time.
And for a person who keeps on insisting - based on absolutely no evidence
whatsoever - that I am being utopian, your account of educational quality =
free time to be discontented in the 1950s and 60s so completely fails to
mesh with staggeringly small numbers of discontented folks of the era I
can't make sense of it.  Most importantly, it completely and utterly ignores
the deep delegitimation of social movements and state agencies tied to
ever-deepening impact of seemingly ever-tighter rounds of economic and
fiscal crisis since that time.  My students are unbelievably discontented
and the vast majority of them spent a great deal less time doing school work
than I saw in the 70s - when we had more free time.  Perhaps the fact that
many of them are overscheduled or distracted by various and sundry
apolitical pursuits undergirds this, but I don't think so.  I think they
have every bit as much consciousness of the alienated and screwed up state
of the world but, very accurately, see fewer places to plug in to
progressive change activities than in the 60s and 70s.  It is not that they
aren't discontented, its that their discontent doesn't generate motivation
to change anything - 99 times out of a hundred, for those with any
motivation at all, it leads them to change purchasing patterns or
intensifying their personal self-dscipline) (from wearing punk-y outfits to
recycling every peice of packaging they buy or doubling down on networking
for success that they don't want but see as the only way to protect
themselves from the omnipresent dangers in the contemporary world.)
This is just like the discussion of collaboration in the education thread -
you can't reify collaboration any more than you can reify free time - as if
one taught people to work together - not matter its form, content or purpose
- and the other fostered discontent - no matter its context, alternative
expressions and commodification.
By the way, where do you get the idea that social workers, parole agents,
environmental regulators, public health inspectors, urban planners, public
librarians, park service employees, building inspectors, tax assessors, etc.
don't interact, daily and intensely, with the public?  It is very possible
that they interact with the public MORE often, its just different sectors of
the public and not about children.

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> Government agencies are all responsible to the President of the U.S.
> Except in an abstract way (which bothers radical rightists but not
> others) government agencies do no constantly interact with the public,
> nor the public with government agencies, in the way the local schols do.
> Schools, moreover, have no one center of control: they are responsible
> to federal, state, and local authorities simultaneously, and all these
> intersectins are complicated by the direct relations they have with the
> community (including not only parent-teacher conferences but
> schoolboard  meetings and enraged parents claimng the earth was flat: my
> father actually encountered such a parent). Teachers are not
> civil-service and their wages vary tremendously from year to year, from
> school to school, etc. The teaching staff is lorded over by a
> non-entitiy called a Principal, who is primarily concerned with his/her
> relations to the school board, the superintendent, and various important
> parents and other elements in the community. All of this is constantly
> subject to the most  weird interferences from populace, from officals,
> from city-governments, from legislatures,etc.
>
> Teachers at _all_ levels and at all schools are underpaid (if you
> started to say what about Harvard, etc, tell me what the adjucts get
> paid there: and the adjuncts are maikng up an increasing proportion of
> university faculty). One exception are public school teachers in a few
> dozen rich suburbs. My sister-in-law teaches at Northbrook and draws a
> truly magnificent salary, and teaches with the aid of a whole fucking
> army of specialists plus a full-time teacher's aid. Of course schools
> _ought_ to be funded from the state or federal level, not the local
> level, but let's not engage in utopian fantasues right off the bat.
> Even Northbrook teachers are under pressure however: the pension system
> in Illinois is under serious attack, especially its medical insurance.
>
> At the university level actual excellence can be measured quite prec
> isely: how man hours of free time students have during the week. It was
> this leisure (for faculty and students) that was at the root of the
> school system in the '50s and '60s, which ha much to do with the student
> outburst of those years. Their schooling was so excellent that they of
> course were discontented, getting a glimpse of how much better it could
> be. Their complaints were o.k. because they were internal to the system;
> it's outside whiners that I object to; no matter their intentions,
> outside attacks on schools add up to supporting attacks on tteachers as
> a whole, and such attacks are slowly or rapidly destroying public
> educztion in America.
>
> At the present time, we are really faced with a exhaustive either/or:
> defend the schols as they are or see them get worse.
>
> And their is a matter of class solidarity: a mass movement uniting
> teachers and part of the public could be very powerful. But not if
> teachers are made pariahs.
>
> Carrol
>
>
> Alan Rudy wrote:
> >
> > I'll rethink that about the time you go back and put any number of
> > government agencies that performed pretty darned well - bracking the same
> > kinds of utopianism you reject as a standard for schools - for not
> > insignificant periods of time before perpetual rounds of budget cuts and
> > increasingly ratcheted up attacks on government workers.  Think
> departments
> > of natural resources/environmental protection/public works, if it helps.
> > Think public libraries if you'd like.  Think county, state and federal
> > transportation agencies or public health programs or...
> >
> > I can be as critical as I want of Progressivism but the growth of the
> > twentieth century liberal/social democratic state - from education to the
> > environment, from big science to social work, and from labor law to land
> > management - fundamentally mediated capital's access to, treatment of and
> > externalization of costs into the ecological, human and infrastructural
> > conditions necessary for the expanded reproduction of capital.  The state
> > did it in a manner intensely constrained by pro-capital ideologies and,
> in
> > many instances, utterly captured by various sectors of capital.  But for
> all
> > that state agencies are formally undemocratic, the expansion of the state
> in
> > the 20th century - far far far beyond education - generated opportunities
> > for social movements to mediate capitalist development.  It coopted
> > movements, it repressed resistance, it forestalled revolution, it bought
> off
> > many and forestalled the hopes of others, sure, but it is under attack
> > infinitely more widely than in education and, just like in education, the
> > majority of the folks working for the state do so - however ideologically
> > and to whatever contradictory extent - in the name of fostering
> > environmental sustainability, extending public health and building
> livable
> > communities.  The majority of the folks working in public education and
> > higher education dream of doing their job better, resist cost cutting in
> a
> > million ways, and still teach as if the neoliberal mainstream was beyond
> > critique, still teach as if schooling was about job skills, still teach
> > inflexibly, are still blind to the difference between themselves and
> their
> > students and still they deserve our support - but not uncritically, and
> not
> > silently.
> >
> > Public and higher education needs more money, not because they do a great
> > job but in order to do a better job but the goal is not the education my
> > parents got in the 40s and 50s or the one I got in the 60s and 70s, the
> goal
> > is to generate a situation where faculty and students collaborate to
> > generate one that students have never received.  I don't stop my
> arguments -
> > in public or in the classroom - with criticisms of public and higher
> > education and it's a sign that you'd rather rant at us in the most
> > patriarchal ways than respect us that you assume it's possible that I'd
> be
> > so apolitical as to do so.
> >
> > You want me to lay off education, you have to give me a reason not to lay
> > off all public sector employees... I know who signed your paychecks and
> who
> > signs mine and w/r/t mine its the same institution who pays my wife the
> > librarian, my friends in the public health sector, the closeted radical
> > social workers I know and the road crews I drive by en route to Mount
> > Pleasant on Tues and Thurs each week.
> >
> > My students NEVER come away from my discussions of the role of public
> > education in society and its changing characteristics, relationships and
> > dynamics with anything other than the idea the problems do not lie with
> the
> > state workers and that the more widely accepted it is that state workers
> are
> > the fount of the problems, and the more they are disciplined, underfunded
> > and fired, the worse its going to get for just about everybody.  You
> gotta
> > tell me how that fits with the under-fund, over-test, super-supervise and
> > crush creativity programs of NCLB and RttT.
> >
> > On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 9:15 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > Alan Rudy wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Well, hell, I guess if I shouldn't make negative remarks about
> schools
> > > then
> > > > I shouldn't make negative remarks about government agencies
> > >
> > > I don't have time now for a careful response -- but I suggest you
> > > rethink your  identifcaion of "schools" with "government agencies."
> > >
> > > Carrol
> > > ___________________________________
> > > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> > >
> >
> > --
> > *********************************************************
> > Alan P. Rudy
> > Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
> > Central Michigan University
> > 124 Anspach Hall
> > Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
> > 517-881-6319
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319