First to Worst: LA ,CA, and USA---"Substance" Submission

[Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>]

http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-062006grad,0,3848119.story?coll=la-home-headlines

The Los Angeles school system is ranked as among the worst, if not the 
worst, school district in the US.

Coming from Detroit, I have yet to see anything in California that is as 
bad as my hometown, and I have been in Chicago too, but I don't want to bicker.

On the whole, from what I have seen, the State of California's schools are 
the worst in the US. This is true from a variety of angles: books in 
libraries (see Steven Krashen's work), overcrowding, facilities, 
segregation---and the sheer ignorance that rules classroom life where 
soldiering through the day, tamping down expectations, and demolishing the 
imagination dominates what is called school work.

Conditions have changed a bit since September 11 2001. What once could be 
seen as a fairly passive failure in teaching lies to children using methods 
so incoherent that the lies are nearly impossible to unravel, and thus 
teaching kids not only to be apathetic toward learning, but to learn to not 
like to learn at all, within school conditions where kids are treated like 
Skinner's rats, is now clearly a form of violence: offering those kids up 
to a war machine that urges them to kill the enemies of their enemies, and 
to die in service to the rich.

At some point, one has to ask what is up with the teaching force that is 
centrally positioned to make change inside these schools. And, one also has 
to note where these teachers come from, the California State University 
system for the most part, where racism, ignorance, cowardice, and above 
all, opportunism, dominate the policies and programs of not only the 
liberal studies programs, where students rarely encounter post 1920 
history, but also in colleges of education, where teaching methods are 
rarely criticized with the question: Toward what end?, making methods hollow.

The California university system has followed the path of the entire 
schools system where rising inequality is the motor. The UC system has 
remained an elite system, but the CSU systems policies and programs now 
reflect those of a bad community college, the community colleges are 
post-high school holding pens, and the k12 system is deeply divided in 
every way, depending mostly on the parental incomes and race of the kids in 
the school.

Rich kids' "public" k12 schools enjoy their own foundation grants, have 
swimming pools and science labs---and the teachers often have a lot of 
freedom since the locals realize that the Lexus waiting for the kids in the 
parking lot is probably more powerful than a classroom lesson on fairness. 
Those schools (as in Lajolla) are pre-law, pre-doctor. Poor kids schools 
have shoulder to shoulder kids, no books, and are pre-prison, pre-Walmart: 
Compton, parts of Oakland. Ruling class kids do not go to public schools. 
They have their own school systems where they meet, arrange numerous 
intense sequential marriages, and prepare to rule.

The teaching force in the CA schools themselves are now mostly grads of the 
worst school system in the US---for perhaps two generations. Those 
generations produced faculty in the CSU system, where the policies and 
programs promote hiring faculty with three degrees from the same CSU 
school. Smilar things are going on all over the US---as regimentation of 
what children know, and how they come to know it, deepens---with the full 
complicity of both teacher unions and their rank and file.

I doubt that teachers in the US will take the lead in making social change. 
I am happily surprised that to some extent educators are in fact fighting 
for change en mass in Oaxaca, not that far away, but my guess is that 
teachers in the US, where emerging fascism propels society, will follow 
what most teachers have done in similar historical circumstances: they 
collaborated and, in many cases, they took the lead. In Germany, the first 
sizeable group to ally themselves with the Nazis were teachers.

In California, by far the largest school system in the US, it is probable 
that most teachers and their unions will be silenced, if not purchased, by 
the Schwarzenegger buy-off, the pretense that millions of dollars will be 
delivered to schools in super-exploited areas, and their school workers. 
Those who believe in this kind of change have no understanding of how power 
works. They become instruments of their own oppression. The loot is never 
divided equally in this society.

I have no crystal ball, though. Some teachers somewhere, perhaps LA or 
Compton or Soutwest Chula Vista, could take the lead, shut down a school 
system, set up freedom schools, and spark a general strike that could spill 
into demands not immediately related to the particular needs of school 
workers, but to society, a tax system that targets unearned wealth 
(inheritance, property, and profits), a return to free schooling, health 
care and social services for all, libraries, freedom on jobs, swimming 
pools, opposition to imperialist wars, and so on. And when people 
recognized that capitalism in the US simply cannot provide that anymore, 
such a job action could open up a more real conversation about getting rid 
of capitalism itself, inside the nation which is the chief defendant in the 
charges against capital's crimes.

There is nothing whatsoever wrong, or barbaric, about wanting to shut down 
segregated schools and to replace them with freedom schools in the midst of 
social uprisings. Indeed, it is barbaric to blindly support, "public" 
schooling, which is not "public" but inequitable. And, more deeply, it is 
wrong to support not-public schools when it means, necessarily, to support 
the vile social conditions that create those not-public schools, that is, 
elites' demands for more racism, more resource wars, sharper exploitation, 
and more religious irrationalism. In these circumstances; it is right to 
rebel.

I do not think the overwhelming majority of teachers in the US are anywhere 
close to doing that, but there is always the possibility that a 
once-in-a-thousand-years flower will blossom.

Some teachers, however, will matter---perhaps people on this list. These 
teachers will need to recognize that they are centripetally positioned in 
one of the four key choke points for social change in the US: schools, 
prisons, the military, and to some extent the health care system. They will 
need to see that their traditional organizations, professional 
organizations or unions, are simply unfit to address the many crises at 
hand, and that to make gains they must act in solidarity with people who 
really are poised to lead the way, the people at the short end of the stick 
who probably best understand the stick: parents, kids, and students in poor 
areas, black and immigrant communities.

We have already seen the potential power of those communities in the 
massive May Day marches this year, what were likely to be the largest 
gatherings of people opposed to an imperialist war in the last 100 years. 
Schools and workplaces closed on May Day, and millions of people engaged in 
a huge lesson that was far more important than anything that was going on 
in any school, or at any work site. That, though, was only one day. Imagine 
a week of it, in every big city and rural areas as well. Imagine a month.

Where is hope in this context? I think it is partly in recognizing that we 
really do not know what is next. Who, in 1958, would have predicted 1968? 
It is reasonable to make projections, easy to see an oil war coming in 1997 
(but not this oil war) and equally reasonable to know that history is 
humbling. As long as work sucks, and all wage work sucks, people will fight 
back in one way or another.

More important than relying on the luck of the draw though, is the fact 
that small things can turn into big things, and big things can turn into 
their opposite: handing out one leaflet at a time, having one friendly 
conversation after another, over years, can create a mass social movement, 
as the civil rights and anti-war movements of the past show. Huge, 
horrific, imperialist wars can become revolutions, as the Russian and 
Chinese revolutions demonstrate. At base, what we do counts.

In addition, constructing reason, and deftly linking that to power, can in 
itself fan the flames. Doing research on the conduct of schooling and work 
can help (assaults on creationism are important now, sad to say), but we 
are at a stage when writing one more paper will probably not have the 
impact that we may hope it will have.

More important, I think, is handing out the well-done leaflet, 
participating in the demonstration, building principled close personal 
relationships, ridiculing illicit power, attacking the racism of the 
colleague next door, storming the troop ship, or opening the anti-war GI 
coffee shop, building a base to shut down a school system and to open a 
freedom school. Direct action is key.

It is time to overcome being afraid of losing jobs, going to jail, and 
sacrificing to fight fascism. We should look to the courage of millions of 
people before us who made much greater sacrifices and halted the dual 
German and Japanese fascists with the measures it took to stop them. There 
is not a limitless amount of time available to make social change.

And we should recognize that they are every bit as afraid of us as we are 
of them--even more. They require us. We do not need them.

Still, change and social justice demand organization. The opposition, those 
representatives of capitalism, is well organized and ruthless.

Several organizations working in and around schools seek to address the 
clear linkage of the government (not democracy but the rule of the rich), 
the role of capital (profits, cheap labor, raw materials, 
markets),  capitalist schooling, and social change. Those organizations 
which do not now make these links, out of fear or opportunism, must either 
be seen as incredibly stupid, or dishonest. Indeed, they pave the way for 
emergence of fascism by disarming people of both knowledge and power.

Everything now exists for all the people in the world to live reasonably 
well. But today the near majority of people in the world live in favellas, 
shantytowns, without clean water, many rightly without hope. The reason for 
this is capitalism, which has given us the technology, systems of 
production, exchange, transportation, and communication that we could use 
for all---if we decided to share and took the actions that made sharing 
possible.

We could, imagine it, win. And school workers could be proud of what we did.

best r