Re-reporting, edited excerpts for Today’s Insight News by Carolyn Bennett
If Americans care about nothing more than economic competitiveness and job creation and economic recovery, they must pay attention to current trends disestablishing public education and denying access to quality education. Many of us care about much more: We care about social justice. We care about equality of opportunity. If we care about these issues, we must pay attention to who is able to get into college ─ whether education has become a privilege for a minority, or whether education is a widely held right.
University of California-Berkeley Professor Ananya Roy and UC Berkeley student organizer Ricardo Gomez spoke today with Democracy Now.
Gomez pointed out that the battle is to ban privatization. “Our institutions teeter all along the line of privatization,” he said; and public institutions becoming privatized is not the trajectory students want to see for public institutions. “As much as this is a battle over fee increases or a battle about K through 12, it is a battle about fighting against privatization and reaffirming and reasserting the public good.”
Choosing between penitentiaries and public schooling does not solve the problem of education for the good of all. “We reject these various tradeoffs ─ the privatization of prisons in order to stop cuts to [K-12 and post secondary education] is not a progressive social agenda,” Professor Roy said. “We must unite across social sectors to say that we have to find a way to invest in the collective future, which means thinking about investing; rather than simply thinking about shuffling resources from one set of cuts to another.”
The UC Berkeley professor and student were talking about education in California and the demonstrations to preserve and improve education there; but the same and even worse problems in education exist throughout the United States. Moreover, the current U.S. president’s race for the top euphemism for no child left behind (charters, competitive schools, business models and marketers) inherited from his predecessor bears watching as another education-as-private-enterprise furthering the destruction of public education scheme. In Rochester, New York, a former police chief turned mayor, an overtly religious man, is trying to take over the public school system.
We are looking “at a systematic destruction of the system of public education in California and we are feeling the effects,” Roy said. K-through-12 cuts have a huge impact on whether or not students are able to get into colleges. California is 49th among the 50 states in the number of adults with a high school education. Far fewer students today are able to join community college systems or enter the University of California system. This year community colleges turned away 40,000 students. California’s position in the number of adults with a college education continues to slip. Nationally and internationally, “there has been a horrible slide in California’s position in education.”
Today is a historic day, she said. It is a historic day because in California all sectors of public education—K through 12, community colleges, state universities, the University of California system—have come together to stand up against the defunding of public education, “to say that we have had enough.…
“Today is not a day of fear. It is a day of hope ─ hope expressed in how this day has become a national, even an international day for taking action to defend public education ─ elementary schools to community colleges to students in colleges around the world.”
Whether our concerns for the future are limited to economic competitiveness, job creation and economic recovery or these in addition to issues of social justice, excellence in education, and equality of opportunity – Roy correctly says, we must pay close attention to current trends and whether education has become a privilege for a minority or is a widely held right.
Source
“Thousands of Students Taking Part in National Day of Action to Defend Public Education,” February 4, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/4/students
Ananya Roy is a University of California-Berkeley professor in urban studies and international development; Ricardo Gomez is a UC Berkeley student organizer
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