Detroit plans to close more than a quarter of its public schools at a time when private foundations are pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to reshape the Detroit public school system. The foundations are pushing for mayoral control of the school and the opening of dozens of new schools including charter schools. The plan is seen by critics as a move to privatize the city’s school system.
- from
Democracy Now
Is this another example of disaster capitalism?
Another example of conservatives efforts to have "less government in business and more business in government"?
Thomas Frank wrote in the The Wrecking Crew
[C]onservatism has always been an expression of business. Absorbing this fact is a condition to understanding the movement; it is anterior to everything else conservatism has been over the years. To try to understand conservatism without taking into account its grounding in business thought--to depict is as, say, the political style of an unusually pious nation or an extreme dedication to the principle of freedom--is like setting off to war with maps of the wrong country. Yes, there have been exceptions, and yes, the conservative coalition has changed over the years, but through it all a handful of characteristics have remained steadfast: a commitment to the ideal of laissez-faire, meaning minimal government interference in the marketplace, along with hostility to taxation, regulation, organized labor, state ownership, and all the business community's other enemies. Laissez-faire has never described political reality all that well, since conservative governments have intervened in the economy with some regularity, subsidizing railroad construction, putting down strikes, adjusting tariffs, and propping up the gold standard. But as a theory of society, laissez-faire has always been persuasive to the business class. The free-market way was nature's way, conservatism held; the successful succeeded because they damned well deserved to succeed.
[However, when you realize how easily "the public face of conservatism change[s] so radically" that "it [is] difficult sometimes... to understand that it [is] still conservatism" with prominent conservatives railing against a new enemy-of-the-month and hailing some new-found aspect of the free market..] These people all [seem] to change, but their essential political views [do] not.... Their superficial changeability reveals a truth about American conservatism generally: The interests of business are central and defining, while every other aspect or strategy of the movement is mutable and disposable. Indeed, even the cult of the free market, which appears to be such a solid, fixed element of the business mind, is malleable as well, with conservatism whining for bailouts and high tariff walls when those seem like the way to maximize profits. The justifications for laissez-faire have varied more widely still, swinging from the savage philosophy of social Darwinism a hundred years ago to the market populism of our own time, in which business is just a way to empower the noble common people.
...
The needs of business stand like a rock; all else is convenience, opportunism, a bit of bushwah generated by some focus group session and forgotten the instant it is no longer convincing. Fundamentally amoral, capitalism is loyal to no people, no region, no heroes, really, once they have exhausted their usefulness--not even to the nation whose flag the wingers pretend to worship.
From Prof. Chomsky (2000):
There has been a general assault in the last 25 years on solidarity, democracy, social welfare, anything that interferes with private power, and there are many targets. One of the targets is undoubtedly the educational system. In fact, a couple of years ago already, the big investment firms, like Lehman Brothers, and so on, were sending around brochures to their clients saying, "Look, we’ve taken over the health system; we’ve taken over the prison system; the next big target is the educational system. So we can privatize the educational system, make a lot of money out of it."
Also, notice that privatizing it undermines the danger, it’s kind of an ethic that has to be undermined, namely the idea that you care about somebody else. A public education system is based on the principle that you care whether the kid down the street gets an education. And that’s got to be stopped. This is very much like what the workers in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts were worrying about 150 years ago. They were trying to stop what they called the new spirit of the age: "Gain wealth, forgetting all but self." We want to stop that. That’s not what we’re like. We’re human beings. We care about other people. We want to do things together. We care about whether the kid down the street gets an education. We care about whether somebody else has a road, even if I don’t use it. We care about whether there is child slave labor in Thailand. We care about whether some elderly person gets food. That’s social security. We care whether somebody else gets food. There’s a huge effort to try to undermine all of that--to try to privatize aspirations so then you’re totally controlled. Privatize aspirations, you’re completely controlled. Private power goes its own way, everyone else has to subordinate themselves to it.
From the blog Government is Good
Remarkably, some anti-government activists are even against our public schools. For much of our history, public schools have been seen as a vital symbol of our nation’s commitment to equal opportunity for all. But in their zeal to condemn anything and everything governmental, some conservatives have set their sights on greatly reducing or even eliminating public education. As Thomas Johnson of the Future of Freedom Foundation has explained:
Famous supporters of public education include Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao Zedong, Mussolini .... The best possible reform that could ever be affected is eliminating completely politicized socialist government schools and replacing them with private, profit-making, and charitable education businesses that offer course of instruction only to willing customers.
And it not only far-out libertarians like Johnson who express these kind of hostile views of our public schools – these ideas extend into the mainstream of the conservative movement. Conservative luminaries including Milton Friedman, Dinesh D’Souza, Howard Phillips, and Marvin Olasky have publicly endorsed the goal of eliminating public education. A story told by Reed Hundt, head of the Federal Communication Commission in the Clinton administration illustrates just how deep the conservative contempt for public schools can go. He had a meeting with William Bennett, who had been Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, in order to ask him to support a bill in Congress that would have paid for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country.
[Bennett] told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools and other forms of private education.
source
In contrast to these extremely antagonistic attitudes towards public education, most Americans support and even cherish their local public schools. In a recent poll, Americans ranked public schools as "the most important public institution in the community" by at least a five-to-one margin over hospitals, churches and other institutions. And by 69% to 27%, Americans support "reforming the existing public school system" to "finding an alternative."