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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCapitalism vs. education: Why our free-market obsession is wrecking the future
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/capitalism_vs_education_why_our_free_market_obsessions_are_wrecking_the_future/Michelle Rhee, Karl Marx, Michael Bloomberg (Credit: Reuters/Hyungwon Kang/Wikimedia/Jonathan Ernst/Salon)
The 2014 State of the Union address was billed as the speech in which President Obama would finally reveal himself as the progressive champion wed been promised. In the weeks prior, senior administration officials leaked word that the president would use his platform to declare income inequality the defining challenge of our time, a claim hed first made two years prior, in a highly touted speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. Then, in early February, news came that the phrase income inequality had been scrapped from subsequent drafts, replaced by an emphasis on ladders of opportunity.
In Osawatomie, the president decried runaway inequality as a threat to the legitimacy of American democracy. In the State of the Union, he paid lip service to the divergent fortunes of those at the top and of average wage earners, before transitioning into boilerplate calls for improving education and cutting taxes on domestic manufacturers. As the ladders metaphor suggests, the speech framed the crisis facing the vaunted middle class as one of economic mobility, rather than inequality. The word inequality was spoken only three times, opportunity, thirteen.
Even in Osawatomie, after describing in bracing detail how automation and globalization devalued American labor, producing an economy where weak demand is propped up by credit card debt, the president transitioned from diagnosis to prescription. Not with a call for robust income redistribution, or a proposal for aggressive government hiring, but by declaring, We need to meet the moment It starts by making education a national mission.
The point here is less to criticize the Obama administrations timidity than to illustrate the incredible onus our politics places on education. We have an economy in which 46.5 million Americans live in poverty, the real unemployment rate is above 12 percent, and our 400 wealthiest citizens enjoy as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. But a political system designed for gridlock, the grossly disproportionate influence of the rich, and Americans ideological aversion to class politics conspire to make it politically inadvisable for a Democratic president to even speak the words income inequality before a national audience. Absent the political will to explore redistributive structural reforms, were left with ladders of opportunity, and a vision of economic salvation through higher test scores.
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Capitalism vs. education: Why our free-market obsession is wrecking the future (Original Post)
xchrom
Jun 2014
OP
chervilant
(8,267 posts)1. Just another case of ignoring
the elephant under the living room rug.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along...
Of course, I live it every day.
I now live with my annual evaluation based on student test scores and the goals set around those scores. Goals not "rigorous" enough? A poor evaluation. "Rigorous goals" not met, even if you got close? A poor evaluation.
In other words, we can't GET a good evaluation; either the goals are bad, or we didn't meet them. There's no middle ground. And our principals acknowledge this. Their goals are set the same way. It's all about making sure we are labeled as poorly performing. Then we can be taken over.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)2. K&R
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)3. The timidity is an act.
JEB
(4,748 posts)6. This article relates nicely with another I posted about.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025067048
This greedy exploitation by financial and political elites has got to stop or the whole thing comes down. The elite seem to have a remarkable lack of foresight, except for quick profit.
This greedy exploitation by financial and political elites has got to stop or the whole thing comes down. The elite seem to have a remarkable lack of foresight, except for quick profit.