‘Educators Spring’ vs. Trump’s Public Education Privatization

In the aftermath of Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about former Obama top aide, Valerie Jarrett, being a “product of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes,” Democrats lambasted her across the board for the racism it conveyed. But they failed to offer the same condemnation of Samantha Bee when she criticized President Trump’s immigration policies by making vile remarks about his daughter, Ivanka, by saying as “… one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt. These actions served to partially negate the Roseanne comments and to further underscore and support Trump’s presentation of himself as a victim.

The ‘Educators Spring’ of protest against the under-funding of public education, teachers’ salaries, working conditions, and benefits, and the growing expansion of publicly-funded voucher and corporate charter schools is being overwhelmed by both Democrats and Republicans alike when they have control of the U.S. presidency, one or both Houses of Congress and state legislatures. Everywhere teachers turn they are surrounded by so-called supporters (Democrats) and real adversaries (Republicans), leaving them in a personal and professional lurch.

For example, the largest increase in voucher and charter schools occurred under the Democratic Obama administration and not the previous Republican presidencies. Therefore, teachers find themselves in a difficult quandary. In addition, the Cartel of private-sector education reformers has been funding a takeover of public education since the 1950s. It has deployed federal, state, county, and city elected officials, and grassroots groups to promote public school privatization with accumulative success. The Cartel is everywhere and has its tentacles deep into the Republican and Democratic Parties.

One of their strategies is to work their will through Democratic governors. In New York, they have backed two-term Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo (currently running for a third term) who has rapidly boosted the number of corporate charter schools in the state’s largest cities: Albany, Buffalo, Mt. Vernon, New York City, Rochester, Syracuse, etc., targeting communities with large minority student populations. Cuomo has been particularly helpful to the Cartel in New York City where a large number of its members are located. He has also mandated that public schools share their most desirable space with corporate charters that operate under limited accountability.

In Wisconsin, the Cartel has worked through Republican and Democratic governors, starting with Tommy Thompson (1986-2000), to establish the first voucher program in the modern era in 1990. Since that time, voucher and charter schools have grown more than a thousand fold and are currently bankrupting the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)–the state’s largest school district. It has suffered a nearly fifty percent reduction in the size of its student population while voucher and charter schools are devouring more than forty percent of its budget.

Thousands of teachers and education support personnel have been terminated under Cartel appointed superintendent after superintendent, with the most recent one departing a week ago shortly before a new deficit budget had to be submitted. To facilitate the additional dismantling of MPS, current Gov. Scott Walker is proposing that the district be broken up into a series of smaller units. Nearly all of these new school zones would be overseen by Milwaukee’s business titans and Cartel allies through charter and/or voucher school management companies, leaving one district to accommodate the remaining public school students who were not selected by the aforementioned companies, paralleling the New Orleans situation.

Participants in the ‘Educators Spring’ of teacher advocacy are also beset by the education violence of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who is attacking teachers’ performance and professionalism and public schools as institutions. She has refused to enforce discrimination statues in K-12 education. In recent weeks, the NAACP has sued DeVos for dismissing civil rights complaints by blind students encountering inaccessible textbooks, alleged sexual assaults by female university students, girls’ basketball teams seeking equal access to gymnasiums, students with disabilities, etc. Her rationale is that many of these complaints placed “an unreasonable burden” on her department.

But the unspoken challenge that is rarely discussed is that the policymakers and would be funders of public education have evidenced a lack of commitment to deliver the necessary financial resources to a public school student population that is increasingly minority in its makeup. In Alabama and North Carolina, legislation has been developed to allow the predominantly white areas of majority-minority school districts to secede and create essentially white charter school districts, a return to the pre-Brown period. Thus, teachers in the ‘Educators Spring’ can expect to be surrounded by their frenemies as they fight for survival of public education and themselves.