Merrow on San Diego: Phooey

[Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>]

> PBS is running a three day Merrow Report on NCLB. Today, the second 
> day, the report focused on San Diego.
>
> While I hope others will chime in, and while it would take a book to 
> refute all the nonsense that Merrow tossed in (right in line with 
> Monday's report which used a muddled middle-school track and field 
> metaphor to investigate NCLB) , here are a few things that come right to mind.
>
> One has to put this report, and what really is National Corporate 
> Broadcasting, in context, that is, rising inequality, the promise of 
> perpetual war, deepening racism and nationalism, and a population 
> still behaving as people usually behave in pacified areas, that is, 
> as voluntary servants. The context, then, is the emergence of 
> fascism. Sometimes I surprise myself with my own naivete, but I 
> expected more from PBS. What I got was the same level of 
> disinformation that I get from the network on Iraq, which may be why 
> the competing Judge Judy is so much more widely watched.
>
> To the program on San Diego:
>
> The ex-superintendent so nicely presented by Merrow, Alan Bersin, is :
>         (a ) liberal Democrat of the Clinton stripe and very close 
> to the Clintons,
>         (b) married to a very wealthy woman who is the daughter of 
> a big local developer
>         (c) the former US Attorney here who took credit for 
> constructing the massive border fence and then went directly to 
> become SD schools boss
>         (d) the promoter of the Blueprint, his project that first 
> caused the dismissal of every classroom aide in SD, thus cutting 
> the only line of communication many teachers had with kids and 
> parents and, later, wiped out nearly everything from the curriculum 
> but math and reading, each topic rigidly structured with scripted 
> formats overseen by low level bosses with clipboards who lorded 
> over classroom teachers making sure the best of them left, and the 
> others were on script
>         (e) poured money into his corrupt out of town pals who made 
> millions from doing bogus training for SD educators, slime like 
> Tony Alvarado, a thief who initiated his work in NYC
>         (f) carried on a phony war with the SDEA teachers union 
> which rolled over and over for him while he carried on a real war 
> with honest school board member Francis Zimmerman, a courageous and 
> persevering woman whose insight was key to maintaining a modicum of 
> sanity in the system---Bersin helped organize a $`1/2 million 
> dollar campaign to drive her off the board (he lost)
>         (G) went on to become the Boss of Education in CA, under 
> the Gropenfuhrer, and later quit to become part of the San Diego 
> Airport Board here which is designed to ram through a new airport 
> on behalf of developers, an airport the mass of citizens rejected 
> in a recent vote by about 2/1.
>
> Alan Bersin is a fascist in every sense of the word. He made his 
> stake in creating borders between people based on nation, wealth, 
> race, and achieved it by heaping one lie on the next, while 
> profiting handsomely. And he is a very hard worker.
>
> Carl Cohn, the new boss of the SD school system, chose not to 
> interview, but he is seen as a good fellow and the union likes him 
> as he opposes charters, talks to them cordially, etc. Cohn, last 
> school year,  was behind a week long "Support Our Troops Surge" in 
> the SD city schools, holding demonstrations, ice-cream parties, and 
> forcing teachers to have kids fill out "support our troops," cards, 
> underwritten by war profiteers. SD teachers delivered thousands of 
> those cards---to my house, somehow lost in the system. Cohn is the 
> velvet glove over the iron fist of fascism. He recently appointed a 
> former Navy boss to run the school system's accounting system, to 
> oversee the lawns and gardeners, to look after the busses---and run 
> special ed.
>
> It is true that Gompers School and Keiller School (now Keiller 
> Leadership Academy) were terrible schools. I visited them both, 
> often, during my time at SDSU (the provider of most teachers in the 
> area, really a mediocre community college as reflected in the 
> policies and programs where racism, ignorance, opportunism, and 
> cowardice guide the devotion of the university to market forces). I 
> met with a lot of teachers in both schools. In addition, I still 
> know people in those schools, and people who have subbed there as 
> well. One very experienced sub said to me, "Keiller is the worst 
> school I have ever entered and I will never go back." That was 
> before the charter.
>
> It is true that some teachers in those two schools were terrible 
> teachers, working just for the paycheck, racist to the core. It is 
> also true that their classes often had 40 plus kids in them, that 
> the schools were completely segregated, the kids living not in what 
> Teach For America calls "Under-resourced Areas," but in 
> super-exploited communities hit by racism and the birthright that 
> produces: no capital. It is true that books and supplies were 
> problems. It is correct to say that fights on the campus of Gompers 
> were routine, that each campus was incredibly overcrowded and kids 
> roamed, hoods up, in what looked like seething masses throughout the day.
>
> Today, with the cooperation of many people in the community, 
> parents, and teachers, those schools are much more highly 
> regimented, uniforms are inspected, kids sometimes march between 
> classes (typical in all of CA's poor schools as far as I have seen), 
> and order is maintained. Test scores went up, a bit, but it is far 
> too early to say, by the measures of elites, that anything has 
> happened at all regarding pedagogy or substance---except that kids 
> and parents are deeply involved in creating their own oppression, 
> and liking it--another aspect of fascism. But Merrow says this is success.
>
> It may be true that the younger teaching force at Gompers and 
> Keiller are more dedicated than their predecessors. We shall see 
> about that in, say, five years. Note that very few teachers in 
> Gompers have taught more than three years. As most of them would be 
> untenured, it would have been very hard, in my experience, for 
> Merrow to find open dissenters. Gompers remains completely 
> segregated, 3 percent white. You can get a good education in a 
> completely segregated school? For what?
>
> It is reasonable to say that the younger Gompers teaching force, 
> many of the SDSU or CSU grads, probably is much less prepared to 
> know their social context than their predecessors. California 
> schools have steadily collapsed for twenty years and more. That 
> means one generation of teachers is likely to be making the next 
> generation dumber.

> After all, CSU liberal studies grads never encounter a history class 
> that takes them beyond 1912 unless they can afford the time and 
> money to take electives. Moreover, SDSU grads operated within a 
> university system that is racist to the core ("Aztecs?" ) and they 
> move through the teacher ed program in segregated blocks where, in 
> the words of one block leader, "we do not allow newcomers as they 
> might interrupt the social norms and trust of our group." The 
> policies and programs of teacher ed look like training for advanced 
> slave overseers, or to stick to a better metaphor, for the nuns and 
> priests of capital. Still, a few current grads land on their feet, 
> maintain some ideals, and try to teach.
>
> Merrow then goes to the question of money and charters, 
> demonstrating that charters take money from "public," schools. But 
> San Diego's charters are public schools, and the public schools of 
> San Diego, while more orderly than Detroit's, are abject failures, 
> even those in rich Lajolla, simply the other side of the segregation 
> coin. Racist schools are terrible schools.
>
> But schools which systematically teach lies to kids (we are all 
> together with common interests in this nation, for example), using 
> methods so obscure that the tactics of learning become impossible to 
> unravel, and hence kids learn not to like to learn, are the norm in 
> San Diego as well as in the US, and that is even worse.
>
> I believe that some charters, like Susan Harmon's now shut down 
> Growing Children, could really do some vital work, but the left, 
> what of it there is, has failed to recognize this likely to be brief 
> opening. In any case, the dispute between San Diego Charters, and 
> the District, is simply a falling out among thieves.
>
> What did Merrow really see at Gompers and Keiller? He saw ORDER. 
> Unless he is incredibly obtuse, he could not possibly suggest that 
> there is better teaching, that scores are up, that kids care more 
> about learning. What he saw was uniforms, an absence of unruliness, 
> less kids expelled or suspended from what are really missions for 
> the system of capital, factories for lies: order with grins. That, he likes.
>
> So, what Merrow saw as progress, for the most part, was the 
> emergence of fascism. What else should I expect from PBS?
>
> On to a new school year, full of hope. No kidding.
>
> best r
> www.rougeforum.org  (what is fascism? 
> http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/fascism.html)