Jajuna

Public schooling is now so thoroughly stratified that parents are searching for any available edge in gaining admission to their “school of choice”. I saw this article today in the New York Times. Essentially, test prep companies are capitalizing on parental anxiety by offering test prep courses for 3 and 4 year olds designed to help them boost their cache for prospective kindergarten admissions committees.

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.

These types of businesses have popped up around the country, but took off in New York City when it made the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, the universal tests for gifted admissions beginning in 2008.

Currently, there is an article at The Nation  by Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher  that questions the viability of a socialist alternative to capitalism at the present juncture. Following this, are a series of responses by Tariq Ali, Immanuel Wallerstein, Bill Mckibbon, and Rebcca Solnit, who each add their two-cents on possibilities for what such a movement could and should look like.

There is little disagreement among the contributers that neoliberal capitalism represents a dead-end for short and long term social and economic sustainability. They cite many of the utterly dire environmental projections we have become accustumed to hearing. As an example, I saw last week that scientists predict an entire collapse of the planet’s ocean life by 2048. I dont think that we are well equiped to understand what such a catastrophe might actually mean for ecological and human life. The contributors also offer various critiques of late capitalism. None forsee its chastening within the current crisis. The various technocratic realignments we are witnessing, while perhaps offering a bit more regulatory sanity, do not address the long term problems and consequences of an endless-growth political economy.       

On the question of developing alternative democratic futures, the contributors are slightly less certain. For Ehrenreich and Fletcher, a more sustainable and equitable blueprint for democratic life will only and can only come from mass social movements. Their’s is a revolutionary mobilization premised on a radical democratic model for power sharing which can ensure civil liberties while co-ordinating various types of social exchange - ala Michael Alperts’ “parecon” model. Mckibbon, Wallerstein, and Ali suggest that the global north has much to learn from Latin America concerning strategic opposition and sustainable movements. Wallerstein suggests three tasks for the left:

1. Promote intellectual clarity about the fundamental choice. Then organize at a thousand levels and in a thousand ways to push things in the right direction. The primary thing to do is to encourage the decommodification of as much as we can decommodify.

2. The second is to experiment with all kinds of new structures that make better sense in terms of global justice and ecological sanity.

3. And the third thing we must do is to encourage sober optimism.

Below, I have included Rebcca Solnit’s response in full. I do so because I think she offers a sense of how these tasks are already being put into practice at a number of scales and contexts. She also insightfully articulates the fundamental tension within these democratic projects: How are we to think about balancing community determination with the neccessity of larger regulatory structures? Her comments rightly point out that older models of state socialism are as undesirable as neoliberalism. She suggests that there are a multitude of examples of locally-based social movements that are pursuing sustainable projects beyond the state and outside the market. The question remains, can such a networked anti-hierarchical schema negotiate the neccessary structural authority to maintain coherence and to ensure sustainability, liberty, and equity?

Here is Solnit’s response in full:

Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher write mournfully that there was supposed to be a revolution–but there was and is a revolution, just not one that looks the way socialists and a lot of ’60s radicals imagined it. The Sandinista revolution thirty years ago may well have been the last of its kind. The revolutions that have mattered since have been less interested in seizing and becoming the state than circumventing it to go straight to becoming other people doing other things without state permission. The fifteen-year-old Zapatista revolution, which never sought state power and (though badgered constantly) was never defeated, is the revolution for our times, or really only the most dramatic of countless thousands involving Native Americans and Indian farmers and South African cooperatives and Argentinian workplaces and European utopian communities.

In the United States the most obvious realm in which this has transpired is food and farming. Organic, urban, community-assisted and guerrilla agriculture are still small parts of the picture, but effective ones–a revolt against what transnational corporate food and capitalism generally produce. This revolt is taking place in the vast open space of Detroit, in the inner-city farms of West Oakland, in the victory gardens and public-housing of Alemany Farm in San Francisco, in Growing Power in Milwaukee and many other places around the country. These are blows against alienation, poor health, hunger and other woes fought with shovels and seeds, not guns. At its best, tending one’s garden leads to tending one’s community and policy, and ultimately becomes a way of entering the public sphere rather than withdrawing from it.

“Do we have a plan, people?” Ehrenreich and Fletcher ask. We have thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate capitalist, but something humane, local and accountable–anarchist, basically, as in direct democracy. The revolution exists in little bits everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities. But we need to start from the confidence that the revolution has been with us for a while and is succeeding in bits and pieces. Enlarged and clarified, it could answer a lot of the urgent needs the depression brings.

If anarchists and neoliberals had one thing in common, it was an interest in shrinking the state that socialists hoped would solve things. Right now nothing but that state exists on a scale to drag us back out of what the corporations and international markets dragged us into, but one of the questions for the long term is about scale. Small isn’t always beautiful, but big beyond accountability or comprehension got crazy as well as ugly.

Just caught this article “Women’s Liberation through Submission” that describes the rise of a new “patriarchy movement” afoot in the United States. Recently, for example, 6,000 women gathered in Chicago for “The True Woman Conference” in order to draft and sign what they are calling the “True Woman Manifesto”. Highlights include a pledge to affirm and submit to “godly masculinity”, to admit that the “selfish insistence on personal rights is contrary to the spirit of christ”, and to honor and submit to the male leadership of their churchs and homes. As one can imagine the group views itself as a counter-cultural movement intent on opposing what they view as the deleterious influence of feminism on American life. They appear ready to reject the right to vote, legal protections for women, anti-sexual harrasment legistlation, not to mention equal rights to education and greater freedom for women to pursue their interests and talents. 

With the economic crisis and Obama’s victory its going to be interesting to observe how the right organizes and mobilizes itself over the next few years. While the “True Woman’s Movement” will hopefully remain a crazy-insano fringe movement it will be important to observe how their ideas become re-packaged and branded at the national level by GOP leaders. Ann Coulter’s new book is a case in point, where practically every economic and social problem on the planet is blamed on single women with children.

In the newest edition of Rethinking Schools Fred McKissack reminds us that while Obama’s election marks an historic moment for racial justice in America it far from signals the achievement of a post-racial society.

From his article:

Exactly how can we be in post-racial America when nearly 40 percent of black children under the age of 5 live at or below the poverty line? How are we in post-racial America when the level of school segregation for Latinos is the highest in 40 years and segregation of blacks is back to levels not seen since the late 1960s? How are we in post-racial America when the gaps in wealth, income, education, and health care have widened over the last eight years? In 2006, 20.3 percent of blacks were not covered by health insurance, compared to only 10.8 percent of whites. For Latinos, a whopping 34.1 percent were not covered. In 2007, the unemployment rate for blacks was twice as high as that for whites. We are all Americans, but the pain of poverty is disproportionately cracking the backs of minorities. There are those who insist that the gap in wealth, income, health care and education is due to an inherent culture of victimization. If people of color only worked harder, they’d be fine, we are told. But it’s a flawed premise. This economy has never provided enough jobs for everyone. The funding of education gives a leg up to those who grow up in wealthy districts. Lack of health insurance is a necessity for those without the means. And institutional racism persists. Now is not the time to avert our eyes from the prize. Indeed, the nation needs to refocus its attention on tearing down the walls that keep us from living in a truly post-racial America.

If we are to “tear down the walls that keep us from living in a truly post-racial America” then we will have to radically recommit to the ideals of public education in a democratic society. This is why Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan marks such a dangerous moment for the future of race, education, and democracy in America. Which path will the new ed secretary follow? The path of privatization, high-stakes tests, and zero-tolerance instituted in Chicago? Now is not the time for more market driven solutions to social problems. If we are to realize the promise of a more egalitarian multicultural society where all children are afforded the same life chances regardless of race, class, and gender then foremost on the politcal agenda must be to institute broad-based progressive reforms for public education. Its up to us to push Obama and Duncan down this path.