Today's Dismal-ness

For all the time we spend blathering on about how rotten the schools are; and for all the inked up dead trees that eventually serve no purpose except to keep our Christmas decorations safe - for all of that over-stated and under-informed rhetoric, we still seem not to have any good ideas about what we might do to keep 'our precious youth' from rising up and slaughtering us in our beds one night when they finally get hip to how bad we're fuckin' 'em over.

From Salon, by David Sirota (hat tip = Facebook friend DC):

Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.

For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.

It's a big hot gnarly mess that doesn't get any better any time soon if we just continue to beat a starving mule, and while there is no solution for a big hot gnarly mess that fits neatly on a bumper sticker, this one thing is certain: you can't fix the schools if you don't fix the neighborhoods.