Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Nick Anderson, “Recession Could Result in Deep School Staff Layoffs, Larger Class Sizes,” Washington Post (April 21, 2010), p. A02. Frank Rich, “Fight On, Goldman Sachs!” New York Times (April 25, 2010), p. WK12. Chronis Polychroniou, “Greece on Edge of Abyss,” Open Democracy (May 16, 2010). http://www.opendemocracy.net/chronis-polychroniou/greece-on-edge-of-abyss (accessed May 16, 2010). Polychroniou, “Greece on Edge.” Polychroniou, “Greece on Edge.” Stanley Aronowitz and I have been writing about this issue for some time. See Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Amherst: Bergin and Garvey, 2004). See also, Stanley Aronowitz, Against Schooling (Boulder: Paradigm Publishing, 2008); Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Henry A. Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishing, 2005). Cited in Robert Jensen, “Florida's Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking,” CommonDreams.Org (June 17, 2006). http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0717-22.htm (accessed June 1, 2010). Tamar Lewin, “Citing Individualism, Arizona Tries to Rein in Ethnic Studies in School,” New York Times (May 13, 1010), p. A13; Isabel Garcia and Kim Dominguez, “Arizona Students Protest New Law Banning Ethnic Studies Classes,” Democracy Now (May 14, 2010), http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/14/arizona_students_protest_new_law_banning (accessed June 2, 2010); Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Mathews, Doug Nick, a liaison on educational matters for Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction in education, argued that students who read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed are being encouraged to reconquer parts of the southwestern United States. This is not simply a form of idiotic misrepresentation of Freire's work who argued for problem-posing education against what he called banking forms of education; it is a racist discourse that discounts any category that invokes race or ethnicity as part of an effort to engage history, culture, or matters of identity and agency. In this view, cultural, racial, and ethnic differences are more dangerous than bigotry. Paul Jay, “Interview with Gérard Duménil: Greece, a Crisis Born of Neo-liberal Madness,” The Real News (March 10, 2010). http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4883 (accessed June 2, 2010). Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 306. Costas Douzinas, “Greece Can Fight Back Against Neoliberals,” Guardian UK (April 27, 2010). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/27/greece-imf-eu-welfare-state (accessed June 2, 2010). Douzinas, “Greece Can Fight.” Robin Hahnel, “Financial Reform,” Z Space (May 7, 2010). http://www.zcommunications.org/financial-reform-by-robin-hahnel (accessed June 1, 2010). Robert Reich, “Bail Out Our Schools,” TruthOut (March 8, 2010). http://www.truthout.org/robert-reich-bail-out-our-schools57489 (accessed June 1, 2010). Reich, “Bail Out Our Schools.” “National Priorities Project Tallies Cost of War through September 30, 2010,” National Priorities Project (January 11, 2010). http://www.nationalpriorities.org/2009/1/11/Cost-of-war-tallies-through-FY2010 (accessed June 1, 2010). These figures are take from the cost of war calculator. http://www.stwr.org/special-features/cost-of-war-calculator.html (accessed June 1, 2010). Gilbert Mercier, “The US Military Spending Keeps Growing and Growing,” News Junkie Post (February 1, 2010). http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/02/01/the-us-military-spending-keeps-growing-growing (accessed June 1, 2010). Some important sources on American militarism include Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008); Nick Turse, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008); Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Juliet Schor, “A Cure for Consumption,” Boston Globe (May 30, 2010). http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/30/a_cure_for_consumption/?page=2 (accessed July 1, 2010). For an extensive analysis of this issue, see Juliet Schor, Plenitude: The New Economics for True Wealth (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). Anne Frémaux, “The Educational Crisis, Symptom and Crucible of Societal Crisis,” TruthOut (April 5, 2010). http://www.truthout.org/the-educational-crisis-symptom-and-crucible-societal-crisis58505 (accessed July 1, 2010). Les Leopold, “Hey Dad, Why Does This Country Protect Billionaires, and Not Teachers?” AlterNet (May 5, 2010). http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146738 (accessed June 2, 2010). Leopold, “Hey Dad.” Leopold, “Hey Dad.” Leopold, “Hey Dad.” Howard Fischer, “Legislators Take Aim Anew at Ethnic-Studies Programs,” Capital Media Services (April 29, 2010). http://azstarnet.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/article_c1f53405-acab-5f21-a580-a199a68ff76c.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Miriam Jordan, “Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency,” Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2010). http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703572504575213883276427528.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Frank Rich, “If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem,” New York Times (May 2, 2010), p. WK10. The liberal version of this type of argument can be found in Stanley Fish, “Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Going,” New York Times (May 17, 2010). Fish is repulsed by the idea that the classroom could be already implicated in politics and power and assumes that any suggestion of the sort or any pedagogy that describes itself as a moral and political practice is by default a form of indoctrination. What Fish repeatedly misses is that education is always a deliberate attempt to shape the knowledge, values, capacities, and identities of students and that it errs on the side of indoctrination when it is completely unaware of the politics that guides its theory, practice, and mode of socialization. How can pedagogy free itself of the pressures of the politics, policy, economics, inequality, and other forces shaping the larger social world? Needless to say, pedagogy is always political by virtue of the ways in which power is used to shape various elements of classroom identities, desires, values, and social relations, but that is very different from being an act of indoctrination. Fish's notion of depoliticization is so totalizing that it is incapable of making such distinctions or even recognizing that he uses his column as a pulpit and his mass-media power to advance his own political views on the virtues of depoliticization, whether in the classroom or in the larger public sphere. He is so confused about the meaning and role of critical pedagogy that he actually argues in a New York Times Op-Ed that Tim Horne, the racist and ignorant superintendent of schools in Tucson, Arizona, is simply the right-wing counterpart to Paulo Freire's notion of critical pedagogy in that they both politicize the classroom. This is more than a theoretical stretch: It is simply a display of pure ignorance. Moreover, it is a mode of argument that replicates the type of reasoning often used by right-wing Tea Party extremists. This turn toward an obsession with material interests at the expense of the public good is taken up brilliantly in Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010). Zygmunt Bauman, Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citlalj Rovirosa-Madrazo (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 7. For a brilliant analysis of the how the Obama administration's neoliberal education policies are influenced by market-driven venture philanthropists, especially with regard to teacher education, educational leadership, charters, vouchers, and corporate values, see Kenneth J. Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). On the corrosive effects of inequality on all aspects of American life, see Judt, Ill Fares the Land. These issues were taken up brilliantly in the not too distant past by C. Wright Mills, various members of the Frankfurt School, and by advocates of the new sociology of education in the 1980s. See, especially, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). These issues have been explored in Roger Simon, Teaching Against the Grain (Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1992); Henry A. Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005); Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education, 2nd ed. (Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 2001); Joe Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); and Deborah Britzman, Novel Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Stanley Aronowitz, Against Schooling (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. 17. Ibid., Aronowitz, Against Schooling, p. 19. Cited in Isabelle Bruno and Christopher Newfield, “Can the Cognitariat Speak?” E-Flux 14 (March 2010). http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/118 (accessed June 2, 2010). One of the best books written on the charter schools movement is Danny Weil, Charter School Movement: History, Politics, Policies, Economics, and Effectiveness, 2nd ed. (New York: Gray House, 2009). Judt, Ill Fares the Land, p. 216. Kenneth Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007). Michael Roth, “Education for a Democracy,” Tikkun 9:4 (July/August 1994), p. 51. For a discussion of how cheating is endemic to educational privatization, see Kenneth Saltman's exposé of the largest for-profit company managing public schools in Saltman, The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). There is no credible evidence supporting the idea that paying teachers whose students score high on standardized tests makes them better teachers. In fact, given the various scandals that have emerged in Texas and other places regarding teachers who provide fake tests scores or who alter the results of such scores, it would seem that what these schemes really do is promote corruption. These teachers are now being rehired under a new set of hiring procedures. Tatiana Pina, “What it Takes: Central Falls High School Parents Make Sure Their Children Succeed,” Providence Journal (May 16, 2010). http://www.projo.com/education/content/central_fall_parents_05-16-10_2LI9TIQ_v208.8ddf750.html# (accessed June 2, 2010). Bill Moyers, “Interview with William K. Black,” Bill Moyers Journal (April 23, 2010). http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04232010/transcript4.html Moyers, “Interview with William K. Black.” Moyers, “Interview with William K. Black.” I take up these issues in detail in Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Matt Taibbi, “The Lunatics Who Made a Religion Out of Greed and Wrecked the Economy,” AlterNet (April 26, 2010). http://www.alternet.org/story/146611/taibbi:_the_lunatics_who_made_a_religion_out_of_greed_and_wrecked_the_economy (accessed June 2, 2010). Gene R. Nichol, “Public Universities at Risk Abandoning Their Mission,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 31, 2008). http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i30/30a02302.htm (accessed June 2, 2010). I am taking this concept from Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 85–136. John Maggio and Martin Smith, “College Inc.,” Frontline (transcript) (Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation, 2010). http://www.pbsl.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinic/etc/script.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Maggio and Smith, “College Inc.” Maggio and Smith, “College Inc.” Daniel Golden and John Hechinger, “For-Profit N.J. College Halts Recruiting of Homeless,” Businessweek (May 5, 2010). http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-05/for-profit-n-j-college-halts-recruiting-of-homeless-update1-.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Maggio and Smith, “College Inc.” Maggio and Smith, “College Inc.” Cited in Andrea Fuller, “Duncan Says For-Profit Colleges Are Important to Obama's 2020 Goal,” Chronicle of Higher Education (May 11, 2010). http://chronicle.com/article/Duncan-Says-For-Profit/65477/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en (accessed June 2, 2010). Maggio and Smith, “College Inc.” Golden and Hechinger, “For-Profit N. J. College.” Maggio and Smith, “College Inc.” Maggio and Smith, “College Inc.” Trip Gabriel, “Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed,” New York Times (May 1, 2010), p. A1. Diane Ravitch, Death and Life of the Great American School System (New York: Basic, 2010), p. 134. Ravitch cited in Amy Goodman, “Leading Education Scholar Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind Has Left U.S. Schools with Legacy of ‘Institutionalized Fraud,‘” Democracy Now! (March 5, 2010) http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/5/protests (accessed June 2, 2010); While Ravitch criticizes venture philanthropists such as Gates, Broad, and Walton for promoting neoliberal educational policies, she does so in defense of a larger conservative attempt to restore Western-based curricula marked by fixed disciplines and traditional core knowledge. A much more insightful and critical argument against these casino capitalist philanthropists can be found in Kenneth Saltman's work. Unlike Ravitch, he does not blame progressive education for the system's current failings, and he takes up the current reform movement now bankrolled by “the billionaires club” as part of the neoliberal assault on both schools and democracy itself. See Saltman, The Gift of Education. Juan Gonzalez, “Albany Charter Cash Cow: Big Banks Making a Bundle On New Construction as Schools Bear the Cost,” New York Daily News (May 7, 2010). http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/05/07/2010-05-07_albany_charter_cash_cow_big_banks_making_a_bundle_on_new_construction_as_schools.html (accessed June 2, 2010). This is excerpted from the transcript of the following interview: Amy Goodman, “Juan Gonzalez: Big Banks Making a Bundle On New Construction as Schools Bear the Cost,” Democracy Now! (May 7, 2010). http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/7/juan_gonzalez_big_banks_making_a (accessed June 2, 2010). Charles Murray, “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test,” New York Times (May 5, 2010), p. A31. Murray, “Why Charter Schools Fail.” This theme has been taken up by a number of authors recently. See, for instance, Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006); Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008); and Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). This issue is taken up brilliantly in Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (London: Polity, 2007). See, for example, “A Call to Teaching: Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at The Rotunda at the University of Virginia,” ED.gov (October 9, 2009), http://www2.ed.gov/news/speeches/2009/10/10092009.html (accessed June 2, 2010); “Teacher Preparation: Reforming the Uncertain Profession–Remarks of Secretary Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University,” ED.gov (October 22, 2009), http://www2.ed.gov/news/speeches/2009/10/10222009.html (accessed June 2, 2010) and Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan, “Duncan Prescribes Drastic Measures For Schools,” National Public Radio (April 19, 2010), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126111829 (accessed June 2, 2010). David H. Price, “Outcome-Based Tyranny: Teaching Compliance While Testing Like A State,” Anthropological Quarterly, 76:4 (Autumn, 2003), p. 717. See Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Christopher Robbins, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008); and Kenneth Saltman and David Gabbard, eds., Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010). “Teacher Preparation,” http://www2.ed.gov/news/speeches/2009/10/10222009.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Elizabeth Sullivan and Damekia Morgan, Pushed Out: Harsh Discipline in Louisiana Schools Denies the Right to Education (New Orleans, LA: National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, 2010). http://www.nesri.org/fact_sheets_pubs/Pushed_Out_Report.pdf (accessed June 2, 2010). Andy Kroll, “Will Public Education Be Militarized?” Mother Jones (January 19, 2009). http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/2009/01/wil-public-education-be-militarized.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Martha C. Nussbaum, “Education for Profit, Education for Freedom,” Liberal Education (Summer 2009), p. 6. Lisa W. Foderaro, “Alternate Path for Teachers Gains Ground,” New York Times (April 18, 2010), p. A19. Stuart Hall and Les Back, “In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home,” Cultural Studies 23:4 (July 2009), pp. 664–665. Horne's ignorant views are amply displayed in a debate with Michael Dyson on the Anderson Cooper Show. http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2010/05/12/ac.ethics.study.ban.cnn.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Tony Penna and I wrote about the hidden curriculum over thirty years ago. See Henry A. Giroux and Anthony Penna, “Social Relations in the Classroom: The Dialectics of the Hidden Curriculum,” Edcentric (Spring 1977), pp. 39–47. I have written a number of books on the school-to-prison pipeline. See, for example, Henry A. Giroux, The Abandoned Generation (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Foderaro, “Alternate Path for Teachers,” p. A1. His co-authored article with Susan Rozen appears in Frederick Hess, Andrew Rotherham, and Kate Walsh, eds., A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom (New York: American Enterprise Institute, 2004). His defense of the piece appeared in the conservative educational journal, Education Next. See David Steiner, “Skewed Perspective,” Education Next 5:1 (Winter 2005). http://educationnext.org/skewedperspective/ (accessed June 2, 2010).