Corporate 'Education Reform': A Moment of National Insanity
By Diane Ravitch
Education Week
March 1, 2011
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
I'm beginning to think we are living in a moment of national
insanity. On the one hand, we hear pious exhortations about
education reform, endlessly uttered by our leaders in high
political office, corporate suites, foundations, and the
media. President Obama says we have to "out-educate" the rest
of the world to "win the future."
Yet the reality on the ground suggests that the corporate
reform movement-embraced by so many of those same leaders,
including the president-will set American education back, by
how many years or decades is anyone's guess. Sometimes I
think we are hurtling back a century or more, to the age of
the Robber Barons and the great corporate trusts.
Consider a few events of the past week:
To read more, go to:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
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From: Marcy Winograd
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2011 4:53 AM
Subject: [PDLA] Winograd Campaign Kick-Off Speech in Old Town Torrance
Friends, it was a beautiful day, not a hint of rain, bright sunshine for the
Winograd for Congress campaign kick-off in Old Town Torrance yesterday.
From there we drove to the labor rally downtown, where I spoke in
solidarity with public workers under assault everywhere, called for
prosecutions on Wall Street (Not one banker has gone to jail!), and talked
of the importance of providing real opportunities for our youth facing
an economic draft. For those of you who were unable to attend the kick-off,
I have included my campaign speech below.
Peace, Marcy (to sign up, visit www.winogradforcongress.com)
Thank you for joining me at Fox Drug in Torrance, where our friend the
Egyptian pharmacist Ahmed Atallah graciously invited us to kick off our
campaign for Congress in the 36th District. Like the Egyptians clamoring
for democracy, we stand here to make our voices heard in the halls of power.
With the Open Primary just three months away, put on your running shoes
because this is a sprint to June.
Many of you participated in my last campaign, in which we mobilized 41% of
the vote. Our platform was clear – to transition from a war economy to a
Green economy, where no one is held hostage to bomb-building because
opportunities abound in aerospace and engineering to build mass transit,
solar cities, new schools and health clinics.
Though our last race was not long ago, only last June – those who would seek
to privatize and loot America have gained unfortunate traction in the
interim.
Multiple wars are tearing America apart. First, the war on public sector
employees, as we see in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and other states where
public sector workers are threatened with the loss of bargaining rights in
order to undermine the power of unions to protect our social contract. By
the same token, we witness the war on the middle class, where homeowners
lose their homes to foreclosure; credit-hungry small businesses close up
shop, and nervous software engineers in the South Bay are told to train
their replacements in India. As a teacher, I note the war on our youth, the
young men and women in my classroom who, when asked about their future
plans, tell me, "I want to join the military, so I'll have a job. What am I
going to do with my life? The military is my best option." And let us not
forget the war on our veterans who come home in wheelchairs, without arms
and limbs, haunted by nightmares of combat, unable to collect on the
benefits promised. Finally, we hear the barrage of attacks on seniors who
desperately need their Social Security checks and Medicare coverage to make
it through the day. The continual assault on these safety nets spawns
untold lies and fear-mongering about deficits that will cripple our country.
We know the truth – the only thing standing in the way of government for the
common good and no government at all is the call to deregulate and
decimate – all in the name of fiscal responsibility, under the umbrella of
inevitable budget cuts in a shock-doctrine approach that capitalizes on the
sub-prime melt down by using the budget crisis to do what the right-wing in
America has been trying to do ever since the New Deal; Gut our social
programs.
We will not sit still for this any longer; we will demand that our leaders
protect and even enhance the hard-won rights we have fought for, and our
mothers and fathers fought, starved, and died for.
I am running for Congress, again, because now is the time for bold
leadership, for someone to stand up and say NO to those would privatize and
loot America, to those who would seize our Social Security checks and deny
us Medicare. Instead, we need someone to say YES to a new progressive
populist agenda that envisions jobs for all, single-payer health care, clean
air and water, world-class schools, secure pensions, and an information
highway where all can travel.
I am a teacher at Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles. At a recent
union meeting, I learned that 5,000 lay-off notices will be issued in the
coming months. In LAUSD, where we have 700,000 students and 40,000
teachers, we can hear the rumblings of a threatened teachers' strike next
year. Where is all the money? Teachers are now expected to purchase student
supplies: pens, paper, and Kleenex, the next school resource sure to be
hoarded in times of scarcity. In the age of technology, when students love
their Kindles, their cell phones, their lap tops, school computers are also
scarce. How sad that in America, one of the richest nations in the world,
we starve our students.
It doesn't have to be this way.
In the United States, where trillion dollar military budgets deliver guns,
but not butter, where 1% of the population owns a third of the wealth, where
big corporations avoid paying taxes by stashing their loot in offshore tax
havens, where billionaire oil barons like the Coke brothers subsidize think
tanks to tell us, to lie to us, that Social Security, with over two-trillion
dollars in its trust fund, is supposedly bankrupt, where a corrupt US
Supreme Court rules that corporations can spend limitless amounts to buy
Congress, in this United States of America we must fight to save our
democracy, to put the people's voice back in the people's house, to stave
off a dreaded feudalism, and to declare once and for all that America is not
for sale.
And neither am I.
I will not take a dime of corporate money.
Because I work for you, not for big corporations driven by runaway greed.
In Congress I will lead the effort to reclaim our nation for the people, not
for the robber barons, not for the banks sitting on trillions of dollars
they refuse to loan, but for the great American middle class, for the people
of Torrance and the South Bay, for the people of San Pedro and Wilmington,
for the people in Venice, Mar Vista and West Los Angeles who deserve a real
American Dream: public libraries, parks, robust fire departments,
living-wage jobs, and the earnest pursuit of everlasting peace.
I am uniquely qualified to serve you in that I have been active in the labor
and anti-war movements for much of my adult life. In high school I joined
hundreds of thousands in the streets, protesting the Vietnam War, then
volunteered on the Pentagon Papers trial working as a legal researcher.
After college I organized in the fields of Delano with the United Farm
Workers Union, working to improve wages and working conditions in the
sweltering grape fields. Later I became involved in the anti-nuclear
movement, protesting the building of new nuclear power plants, hosting radio
shows to raise money for the alternative energy movement, and calling for a
nuclear weapons freeze. In my work as founder of Progressive Democrats of
America's Los Angeles chapter I organized Out of Iraq community forums,
testified before the FCC for media diversification, not consolidation, and
worked hard to protect the fairness and accuracy of our voting systems.
In Congress I will join the Progressive Caucus and commit myself to working
with the Progressive Caucus in the California Democratic Party, so that we
can be spokes of one wheel, strengthening the grassroots across America. I
will immediately join the Out of Afghanistan Caucus and push for
congressional investigations of covert CIA drone attacks in Yemen and
Somalia; for the release of soldier Bradley Manning, held indefinitely
without trial, without regard to our Bill of Rights or due process. I will
support President Obama's vision for a new middle east policy by leading a
peace delegation to Israel/Palestine to visit the border towns, along with
the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, so that
the United States, no longer beholden to outside special interest groups,
can become an honest impartial broker for peace, be it in the form of a
binational state where everyone is equal, one land, one voice; or a two
state solution, where there really are two independent states.
In Congress, I will make funding public education a top priority, with an
emphasis on infusing our schools with state-of-the-art technology and
relevant career apprenticeship programs. With high school drop out rates
soaring, one of the greatest threats to our national security is
under-funded schools, resource-poor, and unable to meet the needs of
students who must see the connection between school and life in order if
they are to come to class every day and not drop out to become street
orphans or, worse, prisoners.
I am not a career politician, but a life-long community organizer. I am not
looking to jump ship for a better job opportunity; only for an opportunity
to serve you at a critical time in our nation's history that demands bold
leadership.
Thank you for your support. Now, let's caravan to the rally at LA City
Hall, where I will speak in support of public workers battling union-busting
in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and other states.
Unions and the employees they represent are NOT the cause of the financial
mess we find ourselves in – the cause is on Wall Street, with those wealthy
parasites who have yet to be brought to justice. Those robber barons and
banksters who plundered homeowners and stockholders have gotten away – so
far, at least -- with attacking the middle class, and now turn their
antagonism, fed by obscene and often ill-gotten riches, on one middle class
group that has not been decimated by their unmitigated greed -- those
public workers fortunate and resolute enough to form and be represented and
protected by a union and the collective voice it projects.
We will NOT let that voice go silent; we will NOT go quietly into that good
night. NOW is the moment we must rise up and say … We are America and we
are not for sale.
Finally, let us join the global movement for greater democracy, the voices
of reason and rebellion in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, and let us go
forward together with one voice for shared prosperity throughout the world.
We are in this together; this is our struggle; together we can win!
Marcy Winograd, CD36 campaign kick-off speech, 2/26/11, Old Town Torrance
winogradforcongress.com
##
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