Robert Reich joins the attack on American public education while documenting the attack on education

[Hannah Bell]

Just before Christmas, on December 23, University of California (Berkeley) economics professor and pundit Robert Reich published an analysis totaling up some of the costs of the recent attacks on public education across the USA...

But one of the most significant things that can be culled already from these data is the simple facts that the USA is simply reverting to the status quo that existed throughout most of history, when k-12 schooling was manual training (remember "grammar school"?) for the working class, and college excluded working class children by means of the "free market..."

But since a couple of generations of children have been raised believing that they had the right to a decent k-12 education and higher learning if they worked hard, the propaganda machine has to obliterate economic class and most of U.S. history as a piece of the current debate.

With liberals like Robert Reich preaching vouchers, imagine what the "conservatives" are coming up with?

Basically, until the American working class helped out allies around the world win World War II, higher learning in the USA was "pay to play." And most of those of us who were "qualified" for higher learning — even as late at the early 1960s, when I finished high school — couldn't pay and therefore weren't eligible to play. Most of my high school friends didn't get college scholarships, so they were "channeled" into the military via the Draft ("Selective Service"), some to die in the imperialist war in Vietnam (and elsewhere in Southeast Asia) and others to be seriously messed up by the empire's misuse of their talents.

One of the grotesque lies being spread lately by Bill Gates (and others) is that the majority of working class kids in the USA are not "college ready" and therefore not doing college. One of the most ridiculous "data sets", which I heard recently from Advance Illinois, Stand for Children, and CPS officials at the Aurora hearings on Illinois "school reform," is that only a handful of Chicago high school children ever make it through a four-year college.

The data were lies when they were first repeated from my Alma Mater (the University of Chicago) in 2002 and repeated over and over by that corporate reformer, Andy Stern, in 2006. And they don't become any more true when spouted by Alicia Winckler of CPS in 2010.

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1864§ion=Article

[cali]

1. where and when has Reich "preached" vouchers?

[Hannah Bell]

2. in the piece included at the link. for starters.

[cali]

3. I would hardly call his saying that we should experiment with vouchers

"preaching" vouchers- particularly when taken in context with the rest of what he wrote.

[bread_and_roses]

5. You don't like the word "preaching?" Then how about "advocating?"

I can't see how that's any better? He brings up vouchers in the context of addressing serious funding problems in education - odd, since vouchers take money directly out of "public" education. He also brings up vouchers - which are inherently elitist - in the context of "fixing" "public" (inherently democratic) education, in the same breath as a sop disclaimer about not "throwing money" (right wing framing if I ever saw it) at the schools. Which is odd also, in a piece talking about the general under-funding of public education.

Both statements affirm exactly the policies and philosophies that have created and are worsening the very problem he decries. They are also part of the assault on teachers' unions. Trying to be "centrist" in the face of the all-out assault on working people of which the destruction of public education is a part is so typically "liberal" - and results in this sort of lack of clarity and ideological muddle.

[NNN0LHI]

4. Very few of the kids I graduated with in 1973 went to college right out of high school

By then the draft had ended. Most of those graduates, myself included, went to work in our factories. We used to have factories everywhere. Didn't like working at one you could quit and walk across the street and get a job at another factory. And these factory jobs were real work. Hot, noisy and dangerous work. But they paid well and had great benefits. Made enough from that single paycheck from that one job to support an entire family comfortably.

Only high school grads I can remember back then going right on to college after high school were the ones who were going into professions such as doctors, lawyers, CPAs, etc. Rest of us got factory jobs right out of high school. Representatives from the factories would come to our schools to recruit us before we made the mistake of enlisting in the army so I started working at Ford 2 months before I graduated high school. I was driving a brand new car to high school and living in my own house with my wife before I graduated.

I ended up going to college for a skilled trades apprenticeship program I qualified for at my job but I didn't pay for it or go in debt to do it. My employer paid for it. Even our books were paid for. And we received our same hourly rate as we were making on the job for every hour we spent in the classroom. That is the way is is supposed to be.

Kids that were going to become teachers pretty much did the same thing as me. They would get a union job as a cashier at one of the local grocery store chains and work themselves through college. They made good money right out of high school as union cashiers too. About the same pay and benefits as I was getting in a factory. They would get their degree and be debt free when they were finished. Some had money in the bank. They didn't have to take the first teaching job that came along either. They could afford to be picky with that good union cashier job to back them up.

Don

[Gman]

6. More horse manure