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<DIV class=content><FONT size=4>Chicago School Strike is Against Obama “Race To
The Top” Agenda of School Privatization and Corporate Education
Reform</FONT></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV>
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<DIV class=submitted><FONT size=4>Wed, 09/12/2012 - 19:26 — Bruce A.
Dixon</FONT></DIV></DIV>
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<LI class=vocab-term><A title=""
href="http://blackagendareport.com/category/education-public-education/school-privatizations"
rel=tag><FONT size=4>school privatizations</FONT></A><FONT size=4> | </FONT>
<LI class=vocab-term><A title=""
href="http://blackagendareport.com/category/education-public-education/race-top"
rel=tag><FONT size=4>race to the top</FONT></A></LI></UL></DIV>
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<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">by BAR
managing editor Bruce A. Dixon</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">Polls say
that most Chicagoans support the striking teachers. Mitt Romney says he supports
Rahm Emanuel. But why do so many who say they oppose charters, educational
privatization, the drive to demonize teachers and make them temps fail to
connect these policies with the Democratic president who has been their most
outspoken champion the past four years?</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">Chicago
School Strike is Against Obama “Race To The Top” Agenda of School Privatization
and Corporate Education Reform – Not Against the Republicans</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">by BAR
managing editor Bruce A. Dixon</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4><FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif">Despite what CNN, MSNBC and other national news
outlets, and the Obama re-election campaign want you to believe, Chicago's
public school teachers are not out on strike against Republican education
policies. There have been practically no elected Republican officials in Chicago
in more than sixty years. Chicago's mayor and the US Secretary of
Educatio</FONT> <SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, sans-serif">n are both
Democrats, picked by a Democrat president, also from Chicago. When it gets close
to election time, Barack Obama is known to say a soothing word about respecting
teachers and protecting public education, to keep from driving away traditional
Democratic voters. But four years of Obama's corporate-style school reform speak
louder than a little timely campaign rhetoric.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4></FONT> </P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT
size=4>From day one, the Obama administration joined and has helped co-ordinate
the all-out assault on public education. Obama's campaign pockets are flush with
contributions from what Glen Ford called the “</FONT><A
href="http://blackagendareport.com/content/obama-and-charter-school-sugar-daddies"
target=_blank><FONT size=4>charter school sugar daddies</FONT></A><FONT
size=4>,” at whose behest he and Arne Duncan </FONT></FONT></P>
<P
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: rgb(230,230,230); MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.49in"><FONT
color=#000000><FONT size=4>“<FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>...spent their
first year and a half in office coercing states to expand charters or lose out
on </I></FONT></FONT></FONT><A
href="http://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2010/03/03292010.html"
target=_blank><FONT color=#990000><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>more
than $4 billion</I></FONT></FONT></A><FONT size=4><FONT color=#000000><FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif"><I> </I></FONT></FONT><FONT color=#000000><FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>in federal education moneys. Obama's allies on Wall
Street invest heavily in charter schools, tapping into the public money stream
to build their own vision of </I></FONT></FONT></FONT><A
href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jpmorgan-chase-creates-325-million-funding-initiative-for-high-performing-charter-schools-2010-05-04?reflink=MW_news_stmp"
target=_blank><FONT color=#990000><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>corporate education</I></FONT></FONT></A><FONT
color=#000000><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>.”</I></FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">Obama's
Race to the Top program awards federal funds to states and school districts
based upon how many teachers they fire or replace with Teach For America or
similar temp agencies, how many teacher pensions are eliminated, how many
teachers are subjected to evaluation on test scores and other spurious criteria,
and how many public schools are replaced with charters. The Eli Broad and Walton
Family Foundations, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates and Heritage
Foundations actually wrote Race To The Top, and under President Obama and
Secretary Arne Duncan, school districts and states have felt themselves obliged
to utilize their consultants to help them qualify under its guidelines for
federal education funding. </FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">The first
day of the strike, according to the authoritative Substance News, 50,000
Chicagoans surrounded the downtown city block housing the Chicago Board of
Education. Teachers union leaders have staked their future on aggressively
reaching out for alliances with community and parent groups. They know they've
got no strike fund to fall back on, and no radio or TV stations to combat the
flood of lies and disinformation about them. Polls taken by the Chicago
Sun-Times, a local newspaper vigorously opposed to public school teachers, show
47% of those questioned supporting the teachers at the strike's outset. Across
the country, not just in Chicago, President Obama's education policies are
deeply and widely unpopular among the constituencies he needs to win the
election. But fortunately for the president, corporations have for some time
failed to fund much in the way of journalism, so many Democratic voters don't
necessarily connect him with those policies. </FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT
size=4>Hence Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is able to muddy the water for
his boss by declaring </FONT><A
href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/11/ed_secretary_is_neutral_in_chicago_teachers_strike/"
target=_blank><FONT size=4>his neutrality in the strike</FONT></A><FONT size=4>.
Mitt Romney on the other hand is free to paint some imaginary distance between
the two parties by embracing Rahm Emanuel and accusing Obama of siding with
Chicago teachers. But it's all campaign smoke and mirrors. Chicago Democrat Rahm
Emanuel isn't coloring outside the lines of his president's policies on public
education. He's been carrying them out to the letter, trying his level best to
make Chicago into Providence Rhode Island, </FONT><A
href="http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/providence-ri-fires-all-its-public-sc"
target=_blank><FONT size=4>where school officials simply fired ALL the
teachers</FONT></A><FONT size=4>, or Detroit, which largely dismantled its
public schools, or New Orleans, where Arne Duncan's predecessor as Chicago
schools CEO Paul Vallas closed more than a hundred public schools after laying
waste to public education in </FONT><A
href="http://blackagendareport.com/content/why-isnt-closing-40-philadelphia-public-schools-national-news-where-black-political-class"
target=_blank><FONT size=4>Philadelphia</FONT></A><FONT size=4>.
</FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT size=4>The
truth might be hard to face, but it's not hard to understand. Many of Chicago's
twenty thousand plus teachers are beginning to realize this, and so are many
more of their supporters among parents, Chicago residents, and large numbers of
observers around the country. The Chicago school strike is, Rick Perlstein
observers in a Salon.com article titled “</FONT><A
href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/11/stand_against_rahm/" target=_blank><FONT
size=4>Stand Up To Rahm,</FONT></A><FONT size=4>” is the biggest US mass actions
since Wisconsin and the Occupy Movement, and at least as deeply threatening to
the authorities as either of these. But Perlstein too succumbs to a delusional
attachment to the president, who along with Arne Duncan, also from Chicago, he
manages never to mention. Another Salon.com author, David Sirota remembers to
say Obama's name a few times </FONT><A
href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/12/four_key_chicago_teachers_strike_questions/"
target=_blank><FONT size=4>in his article about the Chicago
strike</FONT></A><FONT size=4>, and blasts the policies of privatization and
charters, but fails to attribute any of Obama's dis-education policies to the
president. Amazing.</FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">Sure,
Rahm is a reprehensible liar and bully. Soon after assuming office, he told
teachers union president Karen Lewis that a quarter of the city's public school
children would never amount to anything, and that he was determined not to throw
money at them. Rahm is only the mayor. His education policies are those of Arne
Duncan, and of the Democratic president to whom they both owe their current
jobs. Perlstein, Sirota and many others are still too stoned on Obama-laid, or
too invested in passing the stuff out, to admit this. Their delusion is useful.
With millions of likely Democratic voters kept away from the polls by a wave of
voter ID laws, and the known selective reliability of our voting system, the
November election may depend on keeping the illusion of difference between
Democrats and Republicans on this issue intact. But it is just that. An
illusion.</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">The truth
is that everything Chicago's mayor is doing today was set in motion under the
regimes of Arne Duncan and his predecessor, and continues around the country
with the blessings of President Obama. Four years of action, key appointments
and programs speak louder than a few coy words. Everything Rahm Emanuel does to
destroy public education in Chicago has the absolute bipartisan backing of
Republican Mitt Romney as well as Democrat Barack Obama. And whenever corporate
Republicans and corporate Democrats agree on something, it's bad news for the
rest of us.</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">In the
end, as Depression-era novelist B. Traven once said, all strikes are against the
state. In capitalist society, employers hold all the legal cards. The rest of us
are obliged to sell our labor or starve and freeze by the roadside. Workplaces
are never democracies, even when your working conditions are our childrens'
learning conditions, even when your employer is the city or the state, the
supposed small-d democratic public itself. The only power ordinary people have,
when they have it at all, is to organize and combine and withhold their labor
and their cooperation until somebody comes to the table and promises things will
change starting right now. That's what a strike is --- the first and last
vestige of real democratic peoples power in action. </FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif">Whether
they know it or not, and many more do than declare it openly, Chicago's teachers
and parents are defending their children and their communities against the
coordinated assault on public education, coming from both parties, but mainly
from the one in power locally and nationally right now ---- the Democrats ---
with Barack Obama large, in charge and carrying the spear for his charter school
sugar daddies.</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.08in"><FONT color=#800000><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda
Report and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. He can be
reached via this site's contact page or at
bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.</I></FONT></FONT></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>