THE CRISIS OF THE SHOCK DOCTRINE & Main Street USA
First, the monetarist advocates and later the neo-classical schools had dominated business and political news publications and the framing of life and business in the market place. This helped increase stratification of wealth--as even CEO mentality has taken over our schools, especially the new charter schools.
http://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/one-of-the-top-educator%e2%80%99s-interview-of-the-decade/
This topic of the "Shock Doctrine as used in American Education" was discussed last week in an interview on the topic of "Educators push back on Obama's Business Model of Education" on Democracy Now.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/3/educators_push_back_against_obamas_business
The interviewer asked one of the teachers, " But now, what's wrong? The supporters of Arne Duncan, superintendents like Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC, Joel Klein in New York City, and others around the country, are saying, what's wrong with having higher accountability standards for teachers? What's wrong with encouraging experimentation and entrepreneurship, in terms of how you deliver public education to the millions of children who so far have not been served by the public education system? So what's wrong with that?"
One of the educators retorted, "Well, the problem is that the whole idea of the business model doesn't work in education. In the business model, you can select how you want to do something. You have an opportunity to innovate in a way that discriminates. It's very easy to do. Whereas in a public school system, where we do not select our children--we take whoever comes to the door--what we need is actually more resources and more support for the people that are there and the work that's being done. However, again, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein--I don't know about Joel Klein--none of these people are superintendents. You have to have, again, credentials for that. These are business folks. Look, the business model took this country to the brink of Armageddon in 2008. And yet, we want to follow a failed business model and imprint that on top of public education? No. And these things are not innovative. What they are is they're terrorism. They're "my way or the highway." And they're still not producing, quote-unquote, "results.'"
In short, in America, the teacher states,"Nobody disagrees with accountability. That's not the issue. The issue is, what do you use? We still know that high-stakes testing basically tell us more about a student's socioeconomic status than it does anything else. And until we're honest about that and want to deal with the fact that we have neighborhoods in our cities and across the nation that have been under-resourced, have been devalued for decades, and for some reason or other, the schools are supposed to fix all that and change that."
Just as bad social scientists have historically misused or poorly used statistical analysis to support bad think tank desires, schools are being forced to help keep the society stratified by using bad tests.
By the 1970s and 1980s, through the popularization of monetarism and neo-classicalism in media, in government, in schools and in universities, Keynesianism was a dirty word in political administration circles around the globe as well. All of these Chicago-style schools of research were funded by big business and wealthy estates.
At this same time, the Republican and Conservative juggernaut of policy think tanks were being established across America and quietly co-opting college students across America to side and believe in the greed-is-best mentality, i.e. which would open the door to cowboy capitalism--as not seen since the 1890s when robber barons ran the roosts in American capitalism and society.
By the way, "Robber baron is a pejorative term revived in the 19th century United States for businessmen and bankers who dominated respective industries and amassed huge personal fortunes, typically by anti-competitive or unfair business practices. The term may now relate to any businessman or banker who used questionable business practices to become powerful or wealthy."
NOTE: Robber Baron was originally used in Germany on the Rhine River in the middle ages to describe the different toll-taking kingdoms on that river. This is one reason today that during a Rhine River cruise one can see so many castles and fortresses still scattered across the landscape on both banks--and even on islets in the middle of the Rhine.
Now, America (and the world) quite a number of banks, law firms, real estate bosses, investors, and conglomerates today who fit the term Robber Baron, don't we? Meanwhile, many Americans are forced to work for low pay at Walmart because these Robber Barrons have hollowed out the American business and socio-economic landscapes.
If we look at humongous wealth now concentrated in hands of neo-liberal organizations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or in the hands of companies, e.g. Google, we see that the idea of Robber Baron's effect on our society and culture are vast. (Did you see the latest agreements to try and create a stratified access to the internet in America? Google was supportive. Meanwhile, Bill and Melinda Gates are heavily funding the new Washington initiatives for our nation's schools.)
It took the catastrophe of eight years of neo-con capitalism under the W. Bush administration (preceded by many years of neo-liberalism under Clinton and neo-con predecessors) to begin to wake Americans up to the evils of stratification. Now, authors like Naomi Klein, author of THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, are mainstream. This is a good mental shift in America, but the trend and awareness needs to continue.
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