The idea or question has been bouncing around in my head for a while. The huge push to corporatize public education in this country has been damaging to the overall quality of education as well as to the profession. But perhaps part of the damage has been a lack of resolve, dues to a half hearted effort. After all, if you are going for ideological dogmatism, why not go all the way.
First we would need to have a public offering and see how many investors would pony up significant cash to run a business with a steady stream of raw material of variable quality and a constant demand for high quality output, regardless of the revenues. The apparent first managerial decision would have to be to reduce output and drive up the unit price using the supply and demand market based theory. If far fewer people graduated from public education, then the amount that employers would be willing to pay for such “skilled” workers would increase and the willingness to invest in the enterprise should also rise.
Second, the employers would need individuals who were adept at critical thinking and problem solving. These would be the valued output criteria for the select few who would graduate. As a result, standardized testing would be shelved and the emphasis would shift to professional teachers who demonstrated high skills and talent for producing students with initiative, creativity and ingenuity. These teachers would be highly paid in line with maximizing production of the proper students.
Finally, the basic corporate principle of profit and efficiency would prevail, and schools that were unable to efficiently produce adequate product with available resources and expertise would simply have to close. If the schools were not adequately funded by investors, they would be shut down or “mothballed.”
Memphis, Tennessee has taken a page from this manifesto. The school district has decided that if it does not have the necessary resources from the city to operate the school district; it simply will not open schools. The school year has been delayed indefinitely. More school districts should seriously consider this practical option. If the state and local government do not wish to fund the operation of public education, then schools should simply close their doors until the funding is made available. Instead, school districts routinely open schools with grossly inadequate staffing and resources which means that the chances of producing students that meet the desired quality outputs are negligible. Would any responsible capitalist invest in losing money in order to produce a product that is below standards of accept ability in the market? Of course many parents would be very unhappy to see the great majority of schools closed, and especially if their children do not gain admission to the few remaining “profitable” schools.
If a corporatized educational system is what is really desired, then as the saying goes: “in for a penny, in for a pound!”
Monday, July 25, 2011
Friday, July 01, 2011
SWEET HOME ALABAMA
A recent news article about the recent enactment of legislation called the most restrictive anti-immigration law in the nation showed a group of elderly white males, including Gov. Bentley, standing around in the Capitol congratulating each other. Only from a limited and rather myopic perspective can the enactment of such a law be considered a good thing. Here are a couple of snippets from local news stories regarding what the law entails:
The Alabama law would force schools to ascertain if their students were here legally, make it a crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride — even to a hospital in an emergency — and provide for individuals to report people they think might be in the county illegally to law enforcement agencies.
The new law gives local law enforcement agencies the right to detain suspected illegal immigrants without bail until their status is determined, which could lead to even more strain for the legal system.
Sheriffs of Alabama met with officials of the US Department of Justice [DOJ] seeking an indication or commitment whether the federal law enforcement agency would file suit to challenge the Alabama law. Portions of a similar and less onerous law in Arizona have been challenged and partially invalidated. The Alabama law even requires that a person who believes a law enforcement officer is not responsibly enforcing the law has a duty to report that law enforcement personnel to authorities. It is not a great overstatement to say that such mandates seek to create a public atmosphere similar to Nazi Germany, in which average citizens were obligated to “inform” on anyone suspected of harboring or not persecuting Jews. In the case of Alabama, the anti-immigration law is a pretext for discrimination and persecution of persons of color and Latinos in particular. The sheriffs are very concerned about the way in which the law encourages, if not mandates, racial and ethnic profiling.
While the sheriffs in Alabama and other states facing similar mandates are understandably concerned about the harm such legislation does to law enforcement programs and relationships, and how the necessary training stresses current budgets which are already underfunded, immediate help from the US DOJ is not likely for practical reasons. Unfortunately, it is more advantageous from a legal standpoint to observe how the law is actually implemented in order to have evidence with which to challenge it. In the case of Alabama, there will undoubtedly be case examples in which civil rights are abused or in which it can be shown that local law enforcement agencies are failing and refusing to enforce the law as written because of concerns about Constitutional violations. So the DOJ is likely to let the drama play out a while longer before intervening.
In the interim, what happens to the social and cultural climate of Alabama? Some would argue that the legislation simply demonstrates that the moral psyche of most people of Alabama has not really changed and when the opportunity to roll back civil rights protections against racial and ethnic persecution arose, the good citizens simply claimed a victory for the “Old Southern Resistance.” That is perhaps too cynical, but the virulence of the bigotry that lies beneath the law cannot be easily ignored or justified. Arguments in support of the law as a labor or public service bill have been shown to be false and disingenuous. The asserted “threats” against which the law is purportedly erected are illusory at best and are not effectively addressed by the law in any event.
Study after study by bipartisan researchers show that undocumented immigrants actually contribute more net funding to the income tax and public welfare systems than do poor citizens. They do not obtain tax refunds for withheld wages and are not eligible for grants or tax earned income credits. Many are less likely to use emergency medical services for fear of revealing their status. Moreover, the “jobs” that undocumented immigrants have traditionally taken are jobs that go unfilled when they are removed from the labor market. Georgia farmers are clamoring for a guest worker program to be implemented after legislation against undocumented immigrants removed field workers; and crops lie rotting in the field causing millions of dollars in losses. There is no demonstrable evidence that undocumented Latino immigrants present any greater threat of crime or challenge to national security than citizens.
The argument that the law is "just" simply because the persons are in the country “illegally” is a valid but shallow argument. In this country, there have been many laws that create illegal status that history has shown to be unjust and immoral. Teaching a Black man to read, marriage between a white person and a person of color [miscegenation], having an abortion to save the life of the pregnant woman and other conditions have resulted in “illegal” status in the past. Virtually every expert who has weighed in on the subject acknowledges that the immigration system is flawed and broken, resulting in many injustices and impractical classifications. Under current law an infant who is a US citizen can be orphaned or left destitute by deportation of one or both of her parents. The fear mongering that supported enactment of the law has been exposed as false and pretextual.
Because the law impacts not only persons who are undocumented immigrants, but also people who may be mistaken for undocumented immigrants, the law casts a pall over public behaviors and social relationships. Any person of color may be suspected of being an immigrant despite the fact that his or her great grandparents were born in the US. White persons even if illegally in the US from Canada, Europe or some other countries are not likely to be noticed or impacted by the law. The law also has an indirect damaging impact because it causes whites to be presumptively suspect of racism [supportive of official discrimination] by people of color and required in some ways to justify their opposition to the law. Since it was a law passed by the white dominated legislature elected by the white dominated electorate, it is presumptively the “will” of the people of Alabama. The law justifiably establishes an imprint regarding the moral character of the state. Where mean spirited legislation is enacted that fails to substantively serve any public purpose, and that law encourages the persecution and criminalization of persons because of their ethnicity or color of their skin, the law of the state brands Alabama and its leadership as racist. The implementation of official power of the state to disadvantage a group of people because of their ethnicity through institutionalization of discriminatory forces and pressures is the definition of racism.
Failing invalidation of the law by federal intervention, only a similarly forceful consensus of citizens of Alabama in opposition to the law can bring about countervailing balance and suggest that the majority of Alabama citizens are not in accord with the anti-immigration law as it is written. Moreover, being forced to abandon the measure by the courts will not eliminate the moral taint that attaches to the state because such intervention can be seen as a constraint upon what remains the “will” of the good people of Alabama. How odd that in over 50 years and two generations since the enactment of Civil Right laws the state of Alabama has made so little progress in evolution toward an understanding of social justice, even in the face of an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural world. Sweet home Alabama, indeed.
The Alabama law would force schools to ascertain if their students were here legally, make it a crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride — even to a hospital in an emergency — and provide for individuals to report people they think might be in the county illegally to law enforcement agencies.
The new law gives local law enforcement agencies the right to detain suspected illegal immigrants without bail until their status is determined, which could lead to even more strain for the legal system.
Sheriffs of Alabama met with officials of the US Department of Justice [DOJ] seeking an indication or commitment whether the federal law enforcement agency would file suit to challenge the Alabama law. Portions of a similar and less onerous law in Arizona have been challenged and partially invalidated. The Alabama law even requires that a person who believes a law enforcement officer is not responsibly enforcing the law has a duty to report that law enforcement personnel to authorities. It is not a great overstatement to say that such mandates seek to create a public atmosphere similar to Nazi Germany, in which average citizens were obligated to “inform” on anyone suspected of harboring or not persecuting Jews. In the case of Alabama, the anti-immigration law is a pretext for discrimination and persecution of persons of color and Latinos in particular. The sheriffs are very concerned about the way in which the law encourages, if not mandates, racial and ethnic profiling.
While the sheriffs in Alabama and other states facing similar mandates are understandably concerned about the harm such legislation does to law enforcement programs and relationships, and how the necessary training stresses current budgets which are already underfunded, immediate help from the US DOJ is not likely for practical reasons. Unfortunately, it is more advantageous from a legal standpoint to observe how the law is actually implemented in order to have evidence with which to challenge it. In the case of Alabama, there will undoubtedly be case examples in which civil rights are abused or in which it can be shown that local law enforcement agencies are failing and refusing to enforce the law as written because of concerns about Constitutional violations. So the DOJ is likely to let the drama play out a while longer before intervening.
In the interim, what happens to the social and cultural climate of Alabama? Some would argue that the legislation simply demonstrates that the moral psyche of most people of Alabama has not really changed and when the opportunity to roll back civil rights protections against racial and ethnic persecution arose, the good citizens simply claimed a victory for the “Old Southern Resistance.” That is perhaps too cynical, but the virulence of the bigotry that lies beneath the law cannot be easily ignored or justified. Arguments in support of the law as a labor or public service bill have been shown to be false and disingenuous. The asserted “threats” against which the law is purportedly erected are illusory at best and are not effectively addressed by the law in any event.
Study after study by bipartisan researchers show that undocumented immigrants actually contribute more net funding to the income tax and public welfare systems than do poor citizens. They do not obtain tax refunds for withheld wages and are not eligible for grants or tax earned income credits. Many are less likely to use emergency medical services for fear of revealing their status. Moreover, the “jobs” that undocumented immigrants have traditionally taken are jobs that go unfilled when they are removed from the labor market. Georgia farmers are clamoring for a guest worker program to be implemented after legislation against undocumented immigrants removed field workers; and crops lie rotting in the field causing millions of dollars in losses. There is no demonstrable evidence that undocumented Latino immigrants present any greater threat of crime or challenge to national security than citizens.
The argument that the law is "just" simply because the persons are in the country “illegally” is a valid but shallow argument. In this country, there have been many laws that create illegal status that history has shown to be unjust and immoral. Teaching a Black man to read, marriage between a white person and a person of color [miscegenation], having an abortion to save the life of the pregnant woman and other conditions have resulted in “illegal” status in the past. Virtually every expert who has weighed in on the subject acknowledges that the immigration system is flawed and broken, resulting in many injustices and impractical classifications. Under current law an infant who is a US citizen can be orphaned or left destitute by deportation of one or both of her parents. The fear mongering that supported enactment of the law has been exposed as false and pretextual.
Because the law impacts not only persons who are undocumented immigrants, but also people who may be mistaken for undocumented immigrants, the law casts a pall over public behaviors and social relationships. Any person of color may be suspected of being an immigrant despite the fact that his or her great grandparents were born in the US. White persons even if illegally in the US from Canada, Europe or some other countries are not likely to be noticed or impacted by the law. The law also has an indirect damaging impact because it causes whites to be presumptively suspect of racism [supportive of official discrimination] by people of color and required in some ways to justify their opposition to the law. Since it was a law passed by the white dominated legislature elected by the white dominated electorate, it is presumptively the “will” of the people of Alabama. The law justifiably establishes an imprint regarding the moral character of the state. Where mean spirited legislation is enacted that fails to substantively serve any public purpose, and that law encourages the persecution and criminalization of persons because of their ethnicity or color of their skin, the law of the state brands Alabama and its leadership as racist. The implementation of official power of the state to disadvantage a group of people because of their ethnicity through institutionalization of discriminatory forces and pressures is the definition of racism.
Failing invalidation of the law by federal intervention, only a similarly forceful consensus of citizens of Alabama in opposition to the law can bring about countervailing balance and suggest that the majority of Alabama citizens are not in accord with the anti-immigration law as it is written. Moreover, being forced to abandon the measure by the courts will not eliminate the moral taint that attaches to the state because such intervention can be seen as a constraint upon what remains the “will” of the good people of Alabama. How odd that in over 50 years and two generations since the enactment of Civil Right laws the state of Alabama has made so little progress in evolution toward an understanding of social justice, even in the face of an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural world. Sweet home Alabama, indeed.
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