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These articles reflect the opinion of the author and are not endorsed by the Greater Milwaukee Green Party.

Gates Foundation Money Part of Reform Con
By Robert Miranda

The publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, much like the publication, of America's Competitive Challenge, a year or two earlier, have helped to pave the way for other reports, most declaring U.S. public education is a disaster, and each proposing "solutions" to the crisis by pressing for reform.

More often than not, the recommendation by the reformers has all to often been a call to privatize the system. Privatization has consistently been the reformers remedy for our "sick public schools."

Indeed, the reformers of MPS remind me of the con-man in "The Music Man," who declares, "We've got trouble, right here in River City..." and the chorus repeats, "trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble..." Fortunately for River City, the con man has the potion to cure all of River City's "troubles."

Milwaukee isn't River City but Howard Fuller, national voucher advocate and director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, and founder of the national education reform group Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a group that was recently given a large grant by the U.S. Department of Education to promote vouchers, and Tim Sheehy of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, have been on the con beating down on public education, as if the system were infected with the Black plague. 

Yup! It goes back to that ol' saying, tell the people a lie over and over again-that lie being that public schools are in chaos-and the public will eventually believe that the entire system is out of control. Indeed, not only will they believe it, they'll believe that the solutions-vouchers and privatization-schemes being peddled by Fuller and Sheehy is the only way to remedy our "troubles."

To be sure, Howard Fuller and Tim Sheehy recently announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave our fair city a handout in the amount of $17 million. This grant by this private foundation is being provided for the purpose of funding efforts to break down several large Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) high schools into smaller, easier-to-manage charter high schools.

Recently, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University (CRP) published a new study of segregation patterns in the nation's charter schools. "Charter Schools And Race: A Lost Opportunity For Integrated Education," points out that instead of "creating schools of diversity, many charter schools across the nation are places of racial isolation, particularly for minority students."

Could Howard Fuller, a strong advocate for an all Black school district, finally be getting his all Black school system? Is Tim Sheehy helping Howard Fuller establish a new segregated public school system under the new privatization smaller schools charter movement? Could it be that in return Sheehy and his cohorts could then establish pockets of all white schools within the city without being charged as racist?

Why are the public schools constantly under attack?

In their book, The Manufactured Crisis, Berliner and Biddle argue that the crisis being promoted by the mainstream media and so-called reformers lack tangible evidence to support the crisis argument. That "the real evidence indicates that the myth of achievement decline is not only false-it is a hysterical fraud."

For example, the claim that U.S. business lost its competitive edge because of the alleged failure of public education is without foundation. If student achievement is in such a crisis, then how could the triumphal progress of American corporations in the world market over the last two decades reap in unprecedented returns on the stock market?

What explains the aggressive effort by corporate and government leaders to discredit public education?

Initiatives pressed by Fuller and Sheehy are nothing more than efforts to create diversion from the real issues that affect American families. It's not that our public schools are failing; it's that America's corporations in the past decades have shifted millions of jobs overseas. In addition, millions of more jobs have been lost to corporate "restructuring" and "downsizing." Advances in technology will eliminate millions of more jobs.

In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin estimates that "In the United States alone, in the years ahead more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines." Rifkin puts it bluntly when he says, "Life as we know it is being altered in fundamental ways."

Now, what does all this have to do with education?

Well, ask yourself, what would happen if the public schools really succeeded? What if our high schools and universities were graduating millions of young people, all of whom had done well?

The reason that public education is under attack is simple: our young have more talent and intelligence and ability than the corporate system can ever use, and higher dreams and aspirations than it can ever fulfill.

Because the economy cannot handle a large pool of talented, intelligent and capable young people public schools must consistently be destabilized. Creating instability in our schools ensures a pool of low skilled workers. So-called reform initiatives are tools of sabotage against a stable public school system.

So the snake oil remedies to improve the system, which need stability, continue to be marketed by an unscrupulous group of profiteers. "We've got trouble, right here in River City..." and the chorus of profiteers behind them repeats, "trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble...

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