Insatiable Greed Gutting Public Education

Source: National Priorities Project crunching 2024 data from USASpending.gov, OMB  [emphasis mine]

In my 30's I decided to leave the private sector and become a teacher, and I enrolled in grad school to earn education credits enough for certification. One of my most pragmatic professors shared a fact that seemed doubtful at the time but soon proved to be all too true: most school board directors, he said, are involved because they want to make decisions about school sports.

I think of this when I hear the rationale for 47 and the elongated muskrat firing 50% of the staff at the federal Department of Education: students will benefit from local funding and local control. No, they won't.

In fact, nearly every time I attended a school board meeting in districts where I was employed for 25 years, the insane amount of time spent discussing topics like whether or not the boys basketball team should get new jerseys a year ahead of schedule filled me with dismay. The board would vote to cut a social worker position with NO discussion after spending an hour on sports uniforms, or scoreboards, or coaching positions. And I would drive home thinking, I can't work for these people -- we don't share the same values. I did keep working, though, and mostly I just avoided going to school board meetings.

Here's what I have to say to those who argue that cutting the DOE won't affect teaching positions: you don't know what you're talking about. Yes, Maine pays for about 50% of public school costs via federal/state funds and about 50% locally. This makes the school systems in wealthy areas outperform those in areas with high poverty and unemployment. It's partly about local property values, partly about local poverty levels, and partly about whether or not parents in the community have college degrees. (Standardized testing mostly measures the latter i.e. whether or not your parents are doctors vs. work for minimum wage will largely determine your score.)

Federal funding for education also plays a huge role in equitably educating special needs students. That is a benefit to those students, their peers, and society as a whole. Research suggests the regular ed peers are less likely to turn out like the elongated muskrat, throwing around the slur "r***rd" and citing empathy as a fundamental weakness of Western society.

Federal funding also contributes to improvement plans to shore up schools lagging in reading or math scores. I've helped write and administer three such grants and can attest that some were a boondoggle that wasted taxpayer money e.g. sending a team several thousand miles to study a program they would never faithfully implement, while others funded an entire reading specialist/instructional coach position for several years to support learners in a high poverty area who were struggling with literacy skills.

U.S. federal budget expenditures in 2023 (Koshgarian, Lusuegro, Siddique, 2023)

For context, let's look at the overall federal budget -- as it has been, and as it will be. The temporary funding bill passed by the House this week would cut $13 billion in non-military spending from the levels in the 2024 budget while increasing military spending by $6 billion. To see where we are now, the bar graph at the top of this post shows the first two categories -- contractors who build weapons systems, and Pentagon staff like troops -- dwarfing other categories. According to the National Priorities Project federal budget analysis, "In 2023, the average U.S. taxpayer paid $11 for Musk's SpaceX."

The question of whether a billionaire with extensive federal contracts should be empowered to cut competing federal expenditures is a conflict of interest issue, not an educational issue, so I'll leave that for now. 

FY2023 military spending of $921 billion (easily $1 trillion with hidden budget items like nuclear weapons and CIA black sites) could instead have funded 9.5 million elementary school teachers, or 23.65 million scholarships for university students. Students who might become doctors or teachers themselves. But who needs an educated populace? Not billionaires who will pay to educate their own children privately with other elites while believing that robotics and AI will replace most workers. 

According to NBC News:

Around 3,000 people work in the [DOE]'s Washington headquarters, and roughly 1,000 are in 10 regional offices — making Education one of the smallest Cabinet-level federal departments. Its $268 billion appropriations last year represented 4% of the federal budget.

[Incoming DOE Secretary Linda] McMahon said in an interview Tuesday night that the layoffs were the first step on the road toward shutting down the department.  

Back in Maine, school budgets are being formulated locally to put before voters in late spring. A relatively large, diverse district in South Portland heard from their superintendent this week about how shortfalls in federal funding are likely to affect their school system. Per reporting in the Portland Press Herald:

Matheney unveiled his proposed $73 million budget.., a 5.98% increase over last year. It includes reductions that will impact all seven schools and dozens of other programs and departments. The layoffs include 11 teachers, seven educational technicians and several administrative staff or districtwide employees (including the director of curriculum).. 

In recent years, Matheney said, the district has declined in enrollment but increased in special education students, multilingual learners,.. and homeless students. At the same time, staffing has continued to rise. The district will need to fund more than 10 positions in special education and teaching that were previously supported by outside funding sources. 

Guess which countries fund schools entirely at the local rather than national level?  Not France, not Australia, not China, not Japan, not Russia.. I could go on but you get the picture.

I believe the current administration in the U.S. especially wants to defund schools because teachers unions are powerful. And if there's something that billionaires really hate, it's workers who have organized to bargain collectively for salary, benefits, and working conditions. They are also historically the strongest advocates for student needs. Because nobody goes into teaching as a career to make a bunch of money. Most do it because they care about kids.

Finally, just because I believe in robustly funded schools for everyone doesn't mean that I think all meaningful education takes place in a school setting. When faced with the either-or attitude toward homeschooling often expressed by parents, my question is: Weren't you planning to do both?

Divide & Conquer, Part 1: Higher Edu For You v. For All

Besides beefing up militarized police departments, what else can U.S. oligarchs do to keep the masses from revolting? Divide and conquer! Today I begin a series on some of the many false divisions being actively sown by our corporate overlords.

My first topic is in the news due to promised cancelation of a small fraction of federal student loans. It's hot now because the pandemic pause on loan repayments was set to expire (and has now been kicked down the road to January 1, 2023.)

Supporters of student loan cancelation v. those who think it's unfair

This one pretty much boils down to an argument about whether you believe that higher education benefits individuals or benefits society as a whole. Talk about a false dichotomy! It benefits both, but you might miss that in the harsh exchanges about Biden's promise to cancel student loans if elected.

Lots of real people plus a legion of trolls are attacking those promised a paltry $10-20k of debt relief in an era of predatory student lending with interest rates so high the principal lingers for decades.

And, unlike other forms of debt, there is no relief possible via bankruptcy (thank Senator Biden c.2015 for that one).

One big objection seems to be that being coerced into the military in order to pay for college is no longer working as well as it did. 

So, where's the cannon fodder going to come from?

Such are the concerns of our corporate overlords.

I was once in an emergency room doubled over with pain from diverticulitis. Another woman was sharing loudly that her daughter, a special ed student, had left school in 9th grade because, "they weren't teaching her nothing, and she weren't learning nothing." I was too sick to voice the thought in my head: "Aren't we lucky that the nurses and doctors we're waiting to see didn't feel that way?"

A few years later, the RN at my primary care doctor's office recognized me and introduced herself as a student from my very first year of teaching. She was happily married with two kids and had fond memories of our school year together.

"In a study done by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) in 2017, 50% of nursing graduates said their number one concern was their ability to pay their loans back." Source: StudentLoanPlanner.com

I didn't ask about her student loans but she was from a low-income family and I doubt she got a nursing degree without debt in some form.

I took out federal student loans for a masters degree in education in order to become a teacher, and part of the focus in those years (early 90's) was improving science education at the elementary school level. Not my area of strength, so I put more effort there. I also completed the Ms.Ed at my employers' expense, and paid off the student loans just about as my oldest child entered college.

Who benefited most from education in this situation?

Me? My son? My former student? Or the community she serves as a health care provider and I served as an educator?

Also, right around when a college education started being pushed for everybody in order to benefit wealthy owners who needed high quality workers trained at someone else's expense is when predatory student lending took off. Clueless boomers like me thought going into debt for a college degree was a good investment in yourself and your future ability to feed your family. That's because we were able to pay off our student loans in a decade or so without breaking the bank.

A recent flame war on Twitter was set off when an elder commented that millenials seem "cavalier" about the decision to not have children.

This is a nice segue to the next divide and conquer strategy I'll address: sowing discord between generations.

Support Public Education With More Than Your Smile

We started back to school in Maine this week. 

My students will begin today, but the adults in my district spent almost all of yesterday in state-mandated trainings: suicide prevention in the morning, and child abuse reporting in the afternoon.

I should be careful what I wish for because, with the addition of a long mid-day staff meeting, I was out of time and had to work long after the contract day just to be ready for tomorrow. (Yes, I worked this summer, too, some of it compensated by a school improvement grant, much of it not.)

When I say I wished for those trainings, it's true. For 20+ years now I've been aware that, despite being trained to teach by an excellent post-graduate program at the University of Southern Maine, I was unprepared for the social work aspect of my job.

Yesterday afternoon we practiced looking at photographs of real homes where children were removed in order to practice providing accurate descriptions of what we witness.

Glancing at a bedroom with a shelf of children's books, a bureau with the drawers missing, and a mattress you wouldn't let your dog sleep on you might be likely to comment: drug addicts live here.

I teach in Somerset County, the largest, poorest county in Maine and the source of more child abuse referrals than any of the other 15 counties.

In 2018 Child Protective Services received nearly 50,000 calls which resulted in around 25,000 documented reports of neglect or abuse in our state.

Drug addiction, depression and other mental health conditions, obesity, suicide: these are the diseases of despair that characterize the poorest parts of our state. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are both the cause and the effect. 

Our next round of professional development will be on creating trauma-sensitive classrooms and schools that support students with high ACEs. Not on how to best teach reading, writing, mathematics or geography. Not on how to engage and motivate students in learning activities.

Rather, how to make school bearable, maybe even productive, for a child suffering from PTSD.

Lots of teachers are found on crowdsourced funding sites pleading for money to do their jobs.

Progressive news site Maine Beacon reported yesterday that teachers in Maine spend millions of dollars out of pocket each year to provide basic supplies to students. That sometimes means paper and books, but it also can mean shoes, snow pants and snacks.

"That teachers subsidize schools should come as no surprise. In some districts, teachers are increasingly called on to serve as first responders when it comes to children's basis needs," wrote Emma García, an economist for EPI. “That generosity extends to filling the gap when schools, districts, and states don’t provide all the needed educational goods. And for teachers in high-poverty schools, filling the gap is costlier.”

Meanwhile, News Center Maine reported that General Dynamics is staffing up to build six more carbon-belching war ships at their Bath Iron Works plant. Maine needs good paying, full-benefit jobs, and BIW is the biggest employer in our state.

Tragically, the money wasted building weapons of mass destruction will hasten climate emergency and produce far fewer jobs than building, say, public transportation would produce.

Congress is still voting for the biggest Pentagon budgets ever, well over 50% of the discretionary budget each and every year.




If embedded video does not work for you, use this link: Back to School 2019 - Thank You from Maine Department of Education.


All of Maine's congressional delegation appeared in this "have a wonderful school year" video produced by our new Commissioner of Education.

Pender Makin and her communications staff no doubt thought that after eight years of teacher bashing by our former governor, an infusion of optimism and support was warranted. 

Too bad those in Congress don't put their money where their smile is. 

They continue to lavishly fund the Pentagon at the expense of education, Medicare for All, or conversion of the military-industrial problem. This is true whether they have R, D or I after their name.

The children in my school don't have much of a voice in government. General Dynamics with its campaign contributions and super PACs does. What's wrong with this picture?

Chronic Absenteeism -- Is School Seen As Free Public Babysitting?

Chronic absenteeism in Maine's schools -- 16% of students are chronically absent according to a new report that shocked many-- was not news to me. As a teacher I've been bugging school administrators for years about pressuring the families of kids who are missing in action for ridiculous reasons.*

I still remember the first superintendent who patiently explained to me why bringing truancy charges was a waste of time and money: the maximum penalty was $50, seldom enforced.

I am one of those idealistic teachers who changed professions and left the private sector knowing that my family was taking a financial hit that we might or might not recover from.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nva8UofZ3fY

Homeschoolers reading this are probably wondering why I think the state has any right to require attendance. I support parental rights to educate your own children in your own way, and I've seen some impressive results. (Also some dismal results, like an 8 year old that couldn't read, or a 10 year old who had never heard of slavery or the Civil War.)

When I hear parents wondering if they should homeschool or send their kids to school my reaction is: Weren't you planning to do both?

But most children kept home from schools where I've worked are not doing educational things. They are playing video games or watching comedy (or worse) on YouTube.



Statistics show that kids have often cited avoiding a bully as a reason for absenteeism, and I don't doubt that. But in the age of cyberbullying, most tweens and teens will experience attacks when they are at home in the privacy of their bedroom. It's one of the things that makes bullying via social media so harrowing. In school there are adults who will confront bullies. Teachers seldom witness bullying for that very reason: bullies know that they are doing something that is not allowed, and that their actions will be addressed.

So many things about public education baffled me after coming from various jobs in corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies.

Why did public education not fund its initiatives? In any marketing job I ever had, a goal undertaken got a budget and a staff assigned to it. 

Why did public education so poorly supervise workers? In the past my boss had done my job and knew how to support and encourage me to achieve our goals. Over two decades in schools I've received evaluations that rated me from fantastic to meh, often by people who had very little idea what my job actually entailed. I've seen great teachers let go in order to retain desperately bad teachers. I could go on, but I'm straying from my point.

The lens that helped me understand the sorry state of public education in the USA is this: it's actually free public babysitting.

Certainly many parents see it this way. That's why they feel no hesitation at keeping their children out of school for a variety of trivial reasons.*

Certainly many school board directors see it this way. They spend the majority of their time debating sports funding and programs, and will eliminate instructional or social worker positions without even a discussion.

When children miss school for any reason -- including actual illness or family emergency or enriching trip -- it  affects the education of every other child in their class.

The resource in shortest supply in any school is not actually money, it is time.

You can't make more of it, every minute of it is quite expensive when all the overhead has been figured in, and it's almost impossible to plan instruction effectively unless you know how much time is available. 

Here are some of the ways that student absences consume teacher time that could have been spent planning better, more effective ways to create engaging learning experiences for those present: calling to find out why the child has stopped showing up, talking to others seeking information about the missing student, collecting missed work, delivering missed instruction, revising plans for group learning or other activities to accommodate the absence, pulling together packets of work for planned vacations when parents notify in advance (would you be surprised to know that said packets of work are seldom returned completed?).

I set off a twitter storm of disapproval when I observed in the #bc530 early morning edu chat that many see us as providing free public babysitting. But I stand by my analysis. If education were the purpose, then continuity would matter.

If it's just daycare, then keeping your child home all day or routinely sending them two hours late is at parental convenience.

* Ok, here goes with a short list of reasons teachers have heard for why kids missed school when they weren't sick or seeing a doctor or dentist:

• Had a hair/nail/tanning appointment for the prom that night (many districts require attendance on the day of the prom for this reason).

• The family was thinking of buying a cow and went to look at it.

• Child stayed up until 1:00am playing a video game with dad and his girlfriend.

• Child had to accompany dad on a drug run (excuse me, "family emergency").

• They were going to be late anyway so they just stayed home.

• Their aunt claimed they had lice, but they didn't. (Incidentally, this is no longer a reason to miss school in Maine under our newest health protocols from the Dept. of Education.)

• The after school babysitter had an appointment for her own child in another town.

• They overslept (the whole day?).

• Didn't feel like it.

• Teenager was recently told that a man he has known all his life as a family friend is actually his real father.

Some of these activities are potentially educational, like going to see a man about a cow. But why couldn't they occur outside of school time? My broke parents often took us to museums, parks, beaches and libraries, but the time they took us out of school to go to Disneyland in the off-season was a once in a lifetime event.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Is it too late for me to move to Finland?

School Funding Crisis Pits Local Taxpayers Against Neighbors

Last week I attended the second public meeting on the budget for my small, rural school district. The previous public meeting had produced a budget to send to referendum by the slim margin of four votes, and it failed to pass at the polls by three votes. So, we were back for round two.

My school board had labored mightily to juggle the effects of sharp reductions in the state subsidy for K-12 education, but not so mightily that they were willing to take a hard look at what they spend on sports -- about $800,000 out of $10 million by my reckoning.

The budget they sent to voters had hefty increases for the one affluent town in our district that centers on a scenic pond, and moderate increases for the rest of us. My husband figured our property tax bill will rise by about $100 if the current budget makes it.

The revised budget being presented at the meeting had been reduced by a mere $25,000 due to health insurance costs a little below projections thanks to the collective bargaining power of the teachers union versus Anthem.

Photo credit: Town of Chebeaugue (an island in Maine with similar participatory democracy in place).

Our three town selectmen -- really, all women -- were at the public meeting to try and reduce the impact of the school budget on town finances. We sat with them in a row of folding chairs as two of them are old friends of ours. One of their husbands used to be our school board chair during the years when their kids were still in school. He’s the only chair who’s ever had the cojones to propose cutting the sports budget to make ends meet for education.

He was angrily shouted down as most people run for school board for one of two reasons: making sure their children’s sports team receive adequate attention, or trying to keep taxes down. The former group tends to endorse the budget while the latter group always feels it is too high. Two of the current board members actually voted no on their own budget, a protest vote meant to send a message to local taxpayers in their town: don’t blame me.

Getting the little people fighting one another for crumbs from the rich people’s table has been a brilliantly successful strategy in the austerity era of 21^st century USA.

And there’s no relief on the horizon. The demagogue with bad hair appointed a billionaire Amway heiress with a record of destroying public education in a couple of big states as secretary of edu, and his proposed budget slashes public funding while funneling much of what is left to vouchers and other privatization schemes. Education for profit is about as big an oxymoron as for profit health care and will be a similar large scale disaster. Of course public education in our day is often more about free public babysitting -- the one public service that capitalism consistently provides for workers -- than about actual education.

Blackwater is the mercenary firm founded by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' brother Erik Prince.
The corporation made billions off the Pentagon before changing its name.

The budget that failed at the polls had already achieved savings by cutting a literacy coach position and an ed tech position. Loss of the latter means the end of a program known as study skills at our high school which has been a highly supervised study hall for at risk students, a terrible cut in a district with high poverty and special needs.

As for the former cut, few people really understand what an instructional coach does: oversee professional development that helps teachers and ed techs be more effective at supporting student learning. Research shows that tailored professional development for instructors has a big effect on student learning, but bussing the golf team four hours round trip is seen as a priority in my district. Educators in Finland, France, Germany or Japan would be amazed that running sports programs is part of what our schools consider their mission. Also, strong national support for public education means their teachers spend about half the day with the students and half the day on professional work like collaboration, preparing lessons and evaluating student work. In the U.S., teachers are expected to do that on their own time.

So my husband and I had the odd experience of watching our town’s selectmen trying to cut the education budget via amendments from the floor, and voting no on each and every line of the proposed budget. A few board members glared at them. Our two old friends were apologetic, almost tearful, afterwards. They are the ones who meet with property taxpayers in default and in despair at the prospect of losing their homes because they cannot keep up with local tax increases. (Besides schools, road maintenance is the only other major expense in our town budgets.)

There have been no jobs and continue to be no jobs in our area as one mill after another closes down. And the lack of public transportation means those too poor to keep a car on the road cannot get to other towns where there are jobs.

After voting to pass various parts of the budget by raising the yellow cards that are distributed to registered voters in attendance, we sent the budget to a public meeting secret ballot. Clerks for each town were on hand to gather our slips of blue paper marked yes or no into wooden ballot boxes, and we waited while they counted them. My town’s voters were mostly for sending the budget on to referendum, but there were exactly three votes against. Once your numbers get small enough, there really aren’t many secrets.

Maine’s legislature voted decades ago to fund public education at the 55% level; they have yet to reach even 50%.

A state referendum last fall passed Question 2 which imposed a surtax on the top 3% income bracket and dedicated the funds to shoring up public education. According to the state teacher’s union, more people voted yes on Question 2 than voted for any candidate for president. But the legislature has thus far refused to implement the will of the voters, and if they do the governor has promised to veto the bill.

Will grandma still be able to eat next year while staying in her home? Will reductions in Social Security and Medicare force her to default on her property taxes in order to afford heating the family homestead? These are the tragedies unfolding in my neck of the woods. Stay tuned.

Penny Poll Results: Money For Health And Education, Not For Wars And Occupations

A young busker raising money for a trip to study in Japan took time to do our penny poll.
She put all ten of her pennies in the jar for education, and so did her sister.

As part of our war tax resistance my husband and I tabled with other resisters in central Maine on a blustery spring Saturday. Set up next to the Waterville Opera House where a matinee of The Little Mermaid was being presented, our penny poll drew 51 responses from passersby on the main street of this former mill town now home to two small colleges. 

Each participant had ten pennies to spend representing one year of federal discretionary spending, and ten possible categories to spend them on.

A wide range of ages including children, elders and millenials participated over the course of four hours. A man toting a giant bag of retunables found a bottle under one of the shrubs near our table after stopping to do the poll. He, like the violin students, put all ten of the pennies provided into the jar marked EDUCATION. His explanation: "If you take care of that area, it takes care of all the rest."

Here are the results of our April 8, 2017 penny poll of 51 people in Waterville, Maine:

EDUCATION          26%

HEALTHCARE       19%

ENV / ENERGY      18%

FOOD/FARMS        10%
VETERANS               7 %

HOUSING                  6%

MILITARY                 6%

TRANSPORT.            3%

DEBT                           3%

GOVERNMENT        2%

I compared our results yesterday with a similar poll we helped conduct in 2011 across every county in Maine. As reported in "Mainers Want Their Federal Income Taxes Spent on Education, Health Care" on the National Priorities Project website:

Education, health care, and veterans’ benefits were the top choices for federal spending among the 1,552 Mainers participating in polls conducted in each of Maine's 16 counties. Results showed that education (21%), health care (19%) and veterans’ benefits (12%) were the top choices among the people who participated. Those were followed by environment/science (11%), food/agriculture (9%), both transportation and interest on the national debt (7%), housing (6%), defense (5%), and general government (2%).

Overall, we see similar priorities in 2011 and 2017; education remains at the top of the list along with health care in second place. The environment and energy have a more prominent spot now after six years of climate chaos, while concern with benefits for veterans and servicing the debt dropped a bit. The military -- which actually receives well over half the discretionary budget year after year -- climbed one point from 5% to 6%.

It is also the biggest carbon polluter on the planet so no amount of spending on sustainable energy solutions will halt global warming without addressing the Pentagon's contribution to the problem.

Here's a graph of the actual way our taxes were spent for fiscal year 2015.

Milennials who came to help shared that they avoid war taxes by avoiding income. They can't afford to own a home or start a family, and they worry about the chilling effect this has on relationships. Many work multiple jobs just to pay their student loans and barely get by.

Milennials have been creative about finding ways to not end up in this situation:

Follow up interviews with those polled would be necessary to determine, case by case, why they vote with their pennies as they do. One theory I have about why they allocate so little funding to essential areas like food or housing is that they do not consider feeding or housing people a proper function of national government; whereas education and healthcare are seen as proper functions of national government.

Have central Mainers lived so long without any meaningful public transportation systems that they've forgotten the role of governments in providing this?

The train lines that used to run north from Waterville were torn up in favor of better paved highways a couple of generations ago. Those highways now have potholes the size of small cars mostly caused by the overloaded pulp trucks busily carrying away Maine's forests. Low income people can't get to most jobs because they can't maintain a car in legal working condition what with inspections and insurance costs, and there are no busses they could use to commute.

rural bus service in India  https://c2.staticflickr.com

A family of newly settled refugees near Waterville pays people to drive them to and from their jobs in an indoor tomato farm 20 miles from where they live. In any country I've ever visited -- Canada, Mexico, England, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Afghanistan, India -- there would be bus service even in rural areas. 

But if all you've ever known is the U.S. drunk on exceptionalism and imperial hubris, it can be hard to realize what we're missing in order to fund endless war and obscene profits for weapons manufacturers or "security" providers like Blackwater was in Iraq. The latter's CEO Erik Prince is now said to be a chief advisor to the new regime in the White House. Things are not likely to move in the direction of giving people what they actually want in exchange for their federal taxes anytime soon. 

It's taxation without representation, folks. And you know where that sort of thing leads.

Public Education Saved My Mother From Poverty But Kleptocracy Will Destroy This Promise

My mother and her family circa 1945

I'm going to take a step aside from my usual focus today and write about public education. 

I want to note the rise of kleptocracy which I believe will have dire effects on the engine of uplift that has drawn so many to our shores.

My impoverished grandparents, internally displaced from the Dust Bowl, are rolling in their graves as ignorant billionaire Betsy DeVos prepares to take an ax to public education.

Public education saved their children, and they worked hard to build a house in a California town with a decent high school. As the child of migrant farm workers, my mother had gone to thirteen different schools by the time she was in 8th grade. My grandmother always urged me to do well in school and hoped I might become a doctor. She was a farm girl who firmly nixed any romanticizing of, say, keeping chickens. I don't think she went beyond the 8th grade herself.

As I chart the decline of access to free, high quality schools for all, I find it corresponds closely to the rise of income inequality. Of course the promise "for all" was never kept but there was a time when it hung in the balance and I thought it would fall on the right side of the moral arc of the universe. I was mistaken, and I am sadly disappointed.

I've been to countries where children work from the time they are able to peddle gum on the street corners, or help their mothers beg.

It was my impression that very poor parents would have done just about anything to have their children become literate and numerate. They saw it as the path out of poverty.

Now I've lived long enough to see entire generations in the U.S. impoverished by the dream of college. Decades ago Congress allowed predatory bankers to enslave the young with enormous debts that are immune to bankruptcy filings and that follow former scholars to the grave and even beyond. Any of us who took out loans to attend college did so in the hope that the jobs we could do afterwards would help us repay the loans. For my generation this proved true; for my children's generation, not so much.

As a 30-something in my family described his grad school classmates' fruitless search for jobs that weren't there after the '08 crash, "They never got that first thing, and so they could never get that second and third thing."

Occupy Milwaukee

During Occupy I remember a recent college grad speaking about how many job applications he had filled out, noting his dean's list grades at the local university and saying, "I can't even get a call back from Friendly's Restaurant."

It has been interesting teaching among the rural poor these past twenty years. Many of them would have dropped out of school in previous generations as they are not interested in scholarly things but are good at logging or farming or fixing up their trucks and snowmobiles. (Need I say that their families voted for the demagogue with bad hair? They did, while flying the Confederate flag in their front yards.) Many of them view school as burdensome and hateful, an oppression. Many of their parents view school as free public babysitting.

Despite low funding levels that depend on failing property values, the schools around here are better than some I attended in Los Angeles at the tail end of the baby boom. New England has a solid heritage of literacy and, when I moved from California to Maine with my own children in the 1980's, I was delighted to find them reading real books rather than filling out worksheets. In many ways the great curricula offered by their teachers inspired me to consider changing my career to teaching. Volunteering in classrooms was often the time I felt most happy which was not too surprising as I was always drawn to education like a moth to a flame.

Mom graduating from San Francisco State in 1974 as her youngest helps adjust her cap

My own mother finally made it to college while I was in high school. Buoyed by white privilege that made raising a family feasible on just my father's income, she attended community college for two years, and then transferred to a state university. Tuition in those days was quite reasonable; community college was virtually free. 

The reason public education is so important is that many families lack the resources to exercise choice about where to live or where to send their children to school.

The "savage inequalities" Jonathan Kozol mapped out in 1991 are still with us, more terrible than ever. If you map the test scores of reading and math learning achieved in Maine, they are highly correlated with property values. The wealthy coastal towns with their educated, professional parents have the highest scores. The interior towns of northern Appalachia have the lowest. 

When a child is hungry and cold at home, they deserve the very best schools wouldn't you think? Well now that you have the first secretary of education whose family money bought her the title, you can kiss that promise goodbye. Vouchers for religious schools that teach nonsense instead of science are on the horizon to funnel tax revenues away from the most impoverished to for-profit corporations. 

Standardized test companies already made a windfall off the No Child Left Behind assess-and-punish regime for which you could blame the Bush administration. But, you'd need to include Senate majority leader Ted Kennedy and the other Democrats who rolled over to vote for it.

Education, like health care, is a human right and has no business being marketed as a commodity.

In an egalitarian society parents could choose to unschool, home school, or send their children to high quality public schools in their area. These are all good choices for various people.

Under the current regime parents will choose to unschool, home school, or send their children to mediocre free public babysitting where they will learn that climate change is a hoax and that the Bowling Green Massacre was led by Frederick Douglass. 

Most parents I know don't feel they can afford to unschool or home school entirely, because they need to work to keep a roof over the family. Most parents understand that school vs. home school is a false dichotomy anyway.  You're probably going to do both, with the time and resources available.

Cass Technical High School, once the pride of the Detroit Public Schools. Image: Detroit-ish.com

The rise of an openly white supremacist regime that wants to privatize schools is entirely consistent with the racism at the heart of school inequality. Black and brown children already disproportionately attend schools that are literally broken and failing to provide even a healthy venue in which to learn. The current regime has no intention of fixing that problem. Instead, it plans to profit from the problem, dispensing vouchers and preying on desperate families hoping a for-profit charter will prove better than what they have (based on many studies of charters, it won't).

I doubt that I will be able to work for the empire's schools much longer. I'm upholding an abhorrent system; the little good I do teaching students to write grant applications to reduce plastic water bottles at school or conduct research on topics they care about will likely be less possible in the future.

Perhaps the silver lining will be tax funded religious schools where I can teach the Pagan values many around me hold dear: love Mother Earth, respect her needs, live in harmony with nature including other humans, grow food, and participate in the local economy. 

Health care providers might barter with me to seek their own educational solutions. Farmers might, too. We must all start withholding our labor from corrupt systems, to help one another survive. I don't know what children born today will need to know, but I can probably still help them learn how to become flexible, adept learners. 

My faith in education will never die, but my faith in public education is in its death throes. The wealthy will send their children to elite private schools as they have always done. The rest of us will need to band together and fend for ourselves.