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. This holiday, it's worth reading (or re-reading) as we take a closer look at what 2011 will bring to American democracy, America's public schools, and our unions. Leaving aside Reich's boneheaded notion about vouchers (below), a closer look at the national attacks on both k-12 and higher education like the one Reich begins here (Illinois is con uously absent from many of his listings below) is more necessary now than ever. And maybe someone reading this can pull Reich over and fill him in on why vouchers are one of the worst ideas every touted by "economists."
Berkeley professor and former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich (above) favors vouchers but admits that public schools need support. 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." At the time Grapes of Wrath was published (and do ented some of the horrors facing the working class in California, where Reich works today), to urge working class children (white, black, other) to aspire to college was cruel. All the child had to do was harvest a million tons of strawberries while working 36 hours a day in one of those labor camps or canneries in California depicted in John Steinback's novels.
So we're simply getting back to that as a country. 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.
Working class kids don't finish college in four years because, for the first time in about fifty years, the working class, no matter how motivated or talented, has been priced out of higher education. Vouchers and other crazy economists' nostrums won't solve that, because the problem is rooted in the most vicious returns to class warfare (against the working class and poor) in the USA.
How many children were forced to drop out of the University of California at Berkeley, where Reich teaches. the past three years because tuition went through the roof and the family faced financial trouble, or ruin? Reich asks some of the right questions in the discussion below, but misses a lot.
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