Similarly Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan (who, might I add, has no experience in the teaching profession,) have long lauded the push towards charter schools and merit pay schemes as a solution to the inadequate education system in the United States. This push is all part of a shameless attempt to discipline teachers. Charters and other reformist schemes have been a strategy to eliminate hard-won job security and put teaching professionals in a position of desperate servitude to management. As a recent Socialist Worker article by Lee Sustar points out, vision of the Obama administration and its allies like Microsoft monopolist Bill Gates,
"...is a public school system in which an elite group of highly trained and well-paid teachers are aligned with administrators to recruit the alleged best and brightest teachers for promotion, while the majority live in constant fear of termination. That's the way almost all charter schools run now, and the Obama administration is pushing public education as far in this direction as possible."The burning question in many observers' minds is "why is a Democratic President going after teachers unions?" By alienating and, in fact, damaging some of the Democratic Party's most fervent supporters, isn't he shooting himself in the foot? My humble theory is that Obama is playing this neoliberal "third way" game that was so popular with people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990's. Like it took Clinton to pass NAFTA and "welfare reform," two long fought-for conservative initiatives, it might take the "socialist" Obama to finally bust the teachers unions.
One more note:
Please consider reading these excellent two articles by Gillian Russom on education from the last issue of International Socialist Review.
http://www.isreview.org/issues/71/feat-neoliberaleducation.shtml
http://www.isreview.org/issues/71/feat-charterschools.shtml
Russom goes into great length about the Obama Administration's neoliberal dream for education in America. Also check out this ISR article (http://www.isreview.org/issues/71/feat-disasterschooling.shtml) by Adam Sanchez. This quote from Arne Duncan is very telling:
“I am not a manager of 600 schools. I’m a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I’m trying to improve my portfolio.”