Adam Sanchez is a pro-Humanity American writer (see: http://isreview.org/issue/67/educational-apartheid-america ).
Adam Sanchez on Educational Apartheid in America: “It took the active participation of thousands of Americans in the civil rights and Black Power movements to catapult desegregation forward and to begin realizing the promise of Brown.
Since the 1970s segregation has reestablished itself as part of the backlash against the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emphasis on standardized tests and increasingly standardized curriculums, the encroachment of advertising into public schools, the encouragement of pedagogy that stresses memorization rather than critical thinking, the attack on teachers’ unions, the militarization of schools, and the use of profit motives to motivate both teachers and students are all results of neoliberal efforts to transform schools from a public investment into a private enterprise. All this exacerbates inequality in schools, which stems from the increasing inequality in the general population. In 1973 the average CEO made 35 times what a worker did; now he or she makes 500 times what a worker makes. Inequality has grown to where the richest 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The move away from a welfare state and the transfer of wealth to the top of society was also a conscious shift away from dealing with issues of race and racism. State intervention, whether in the form of education spending, affirmative action, unemployment, or welfare, was replaced with a refusal to acknowledge institutionalized oppression and exploitation. The high point of neoliberal policies in school reform was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB, passed in 2001, created a host of unattainable achievement goals measured through massive amounts of standardized testing. Under these new targets, schools are set up to fail, and when they do the federal government swoops in to “restructure” (i.e. privatize) them. As we enter into what is now commonly acknowledged as the greatest crisis of the “free-market” since the Great Depression, where the government is pouring billions of dollars into the financial system in order to prop up banks that have been deregulated to the point where behavior that would normally be considered gambling is a perfectly legal affair, one would think that the first Black president of the United States might shift course against the privatization of public education and toward desegregation and equity in our public schools. ”. [1].
[1]. Adam Sanchez, “Educational Apartheid in America”, International Socialist Review: http://isreview.org/issue/67/educational-apartheid-america .