Borderland

2 weeks into my long summer break, and routines have begun to take shape. Not a lot of time with the computer, but still reading and keeping an eye on the world. I found Democracy Now on a campus radio station while driving to the soccer fields, and heard Amy Goodman’s interview with Antonia Juhasz talking about her book, “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.” Most interesting to me in this discussion was the oil workers’ strike in Iraq that involves hundreds of workers, and is in part motivated by opposition to a US-backed law that will turn Iraq’s oil resources over to foreign oil companies. As Juhasz plainly describes:

It’s a Bush administration, US corporate, very simple attempt to figure out: if you’re going to wage a war for oil, how do you get the oil. Does Exxon come in on a tank with a flag and stick it in the ground, or do you have a more careful process? The careful process is very simply: write a law, get a new Iraqi government in place, have the Iraqis pass the law, and then turn the oil over to US oil corporations.

The Bush administration designed the law. Last January, President Bush announced that it was a benchmark for passage by the Iraqi government. It was the same day that he announced the surge. And in the language of the administration, the surge was meant to provide the political space so that the Iraqis could discuss the oil law and other benchmarks. The Democrats then adopted this language of the benchmarks and said in the supplemental war spending bill, again, that the Iraqis have to pass this benchmark.

Juhasz goes on to say why she believes that, from the US administration’s point of view, the war isn’t going all that badly, and she mentions Bush’s recent reference to the “Korean model” for US foreign intervention. Tom Engelhardt points out that “our present “Korea” moment…is the oldest news of all,” giving a brief historical review of events as they’ve unfolded, and linking to an article about what he describes as our “…massively fortified, $600 million, blast-resistant compound of 20-odd buildings in the heart of Baghdad’s Green Zone,” calling it, the largest “embassy” on the planet.” You can see pictures of what it’s supposed to look like, and another description here.

When I first read Rich Gibson’s and E. Wayne Ross’s Cut the Schools-to-War Pipeline article a while back, I wasn’t ready to grant their “perpetual war on the world” assumption, but now after seeing the Bush administration become more open about their intentions, the colonial agenda doesn’t seem far-fetched at all. Ross and Gibson challenge the administration’s claim that NCLB is a means of promoting equal opportunity for disadvantaged populations, citing a lack of evidence that business interests are committed to doing anything more than cheerlead the effort and stand in support of coercive methods that do little to change the material circumstances for children living in poverty.

The Schools Matter blog pointed to an excellent piece written by James Crawford, NCLB and Civil Rights, that brings the issue of educational equity into sharp focus. Though we all agree that more attention for disadvantaged kids and English Language Learners is a good thing, Crawford questions the kind of attention for kids that a test-driven concern generates. And he points out that civil rights advocates come down on both sides of the NCLB issue, asking how that could happen. He suggests that “The only plausible answer is that there is a growing divide in how educational equity is understood.”

Crawford points out that “Once upon a time, civil rights advocates were united in pursuing the goal of equal educational opportunity,” advocating for things like equal access to programs and quality facilities. He notes that in our current situation the Bush administration took

“…an issue traditionally “owned” by Democrats and [gave] it a “compassionate conservative” spin. By stressing the achievement gap, candidate Bush redefined civil rights in the field of school reform….

….Eliminating achievement gaps is paramount among the law’s goals; equal educational opportunity is not.

NCLB is silent on the subject of segregation, allocation of resources, and fiscal policy. The significance of the shift of focus from “inputs” to “achievement” and educational outcomes is that “It shifts the entire burden of reform from legislators and policymakers to teachers and kids and schools,” Crawford said.

Resistance on the part of teachers is seen as excuse-making, or whining, or a desire to dodge what’s come to be known as “accountability.” No effort or attention is given to the more costly and and intractable social problems that we all know are critical – not only to learning in school, but to living a fulfilling life.

NCLB and the privatization of public schooling is very similar to the colonial project underway in Iraq. Debate in the US Congress even includes some the same terminology. Note that they’re talking about ‘benchmarks,’ and using them to fix blame on Iraqis for not taking charge of the mess…while the Iraqi government is supposed to decide whether Chevron, Exxon, Conoco, BP, Shell, and Marathon will get the oil.

A book I just picked up from the library, Education Research in the Public Interest, is devoted to a social orientation to educational research which might guide policy decisions that further the interests of communities and families rather than studying “schooling” as a generalized concept. Education research has got to talk back to the technocratic notion that schools can somehow function independent of the constraints of history and culture. Looks promising as a focus for the work that needs to be done.

To begin taking steps in a positive direction, I plan to begin writing more about education research that stands a chance of making a difference.

note (June 9): cleaned up some punctuation in this rambling rant.