[Peace-discuss] Good News, Bad News as Post-Obama Fight For Public Education Goes Local

[David Johnson]

 <http://blackagendareport.com/> Description: Black Agenda Report 

 <http://blackagendareport.com/> Black Agenda Report 

News, information and analysis from the black left.

Good News, Bad News as Post-Obama Fight For Public Education Goes Local 

Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on Tue, 03/22/2016 - 23:44

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 <http://blackagendareport.com/public-education-fight-shifts-to-states>
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Barack Obama passed up multiple once in a lifetime opportunities that might
have made him the most popular president since Franklin Roosevelt. Obama
refused to lock up any of the Wall Street crooks that caused the crash of
2007. He made investors whole but not homeowners, he legalized and absolved
Bush-era torturers, and he used the auto industry bankruptcy to slash wages,
eliminate pensions and offload retiree medical care onto workers unions
instead of their bosses. Obama let automakers to go back to making the same
deadly defective climate-destroying products as before, when he could have
redirected the industry's vast army of scientists and engineers to develop
new products and processes to help us transition to a post-fossil fuel
economy.

But the Obama presidency hasn't been all about missed opportunities. Barack
Obama did seize the chance at $4 billion in one-time stimulus funds he could
distribute with no congressional or judicial oversight to further the
bipartisan elite goal of wrecking and privatizing public education. He let
consultants from the Gates, Broad, Walton Family and other pro-privatization
outfits draw up the award guidelines for what the president called his "Race
To The Top." It was really a race to hand over tens of billions in public
assets to a galaxy of shady charter school operators and contractors, a race
to normalize Common Core and other profitable test-and-punish regimes that
provide the excuse to fire hundreds of thousands of teachers. It was a race
to compromise the educational futures of millions.

The Obama administration inflicted incalculable and lasting damage upon
public education in the US, and helped seed the administrations of school
districts, states and the federal government with thousands of
pro-privatization stooges from Teach For America, the corporate foundations,
the US Chamber of Commerce and similar places.

The good news, in the final year of the Obama administration, is that with
the stimulus money all gone, the federal Department of Education has far
fewer means to force privatization and Common Core on states and school
districts. The new Elementary and Secondary Education Act reserve states and
school districts the autonomy to reject some federal initiatives while Race
to the Top and Common Core have spawned grassroots opposition among working
class whites across the country, including many nominal Republicans.

The bad news though, is that enormous damage has been done. The same charter
school sugar daddies and privatizers who bought the allegiance of Obama and
elected Democrats also own Republican governors and state legislatures too.
And that's where the fight is now.

As the sun sets on the Obama era, the battles against school privatization,
charter school corruption, test-and-punish, and
run-the-school-like-a-business schemes are shifting to the states, to state
governors and legislatures, to local school boards, and crucially to the
national movement of parents and educators encouraging parents and students
to opt out of the standardized testing regimes which have always provided
the excuse to classify schools targeted for privatization and replacement.

There's a video of a little black girl weeping because President Obama will
soon have to leave office. If she and her parents knew what the First Black
President had done to education, she wouldn't be crying. It's time for the
organizers of the opt-out movement to double down on getting the case for
opting out before black parents across the land who are perfectly capable of
choosing between allegiance to their nominal leaders, and allegiance to
their own children and the futures of their families. You can find the
National Opt-Out Movement online at unitedoptout.com. That's
unitedoptout.com, and they should be able to hook you up with concerned
parents and teachers near you.

 

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