By Guest Blogger XX,

The New York Times reports that Obama has escalated his attacks on “failing schools.”

The Times outlines a recent speech in which Obama “favored federal rewards for local school districts that fire underperforming teachers and close failing schools, saying educators needed to be held accountable when they failed to fix chronically troubled classrooms and curb the student dropout rate.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/us/02obama.html

Of course, there is nothing new about the attack on “failing schools” as it has been the cornerstone of privatization reform for the past decade as the charter school corporations and the school improvement industry have zeroed in on the inner city schools of America, the UK and other OECD countries. Because the most impoverished schools predictably correlate with low math and/or literacy test scores, the political leaders of pro-privatization reforms make excuses for the poverty and joblessness of such areas by stating that there will be “no excuses” for the “failing schools”. This shifts all of the responsibility away from America’s widening gap between rich and poor, puts it onto the teachers, and gives the government the right to take over the low performing schools, which invariably leads to a wide variety of transfers of power to the private sector.

In the past, Obama has made it clear that he prefers the charter school model of education. He has declared that he wants to turn 1000 schools a year into charters over the next five years.

The recent mass firing of all of the staff of a school in a very impoverished area of Rhode Island is a watershed event, for it was a declaration of war against the rights of the education workers and a bold threat to do the same with teachers who dare to step out of line. Obama’s approval of the mass firings reveals a reckless commitment to privatization without regard for individual employment rights for just dismissal or due process. It was a warning to unions and administrators who support public schools to get out of the way.

The Times states that Obama “singled out Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, where last week the school board voted to dismiss the entire faculty as part of a turnaround plan for the school, which has a 48 percent graduation rate.” While selectively ignoring the school’s improved literacy test scores, Obama also highlighted that “At Central Falls High…just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests.”

Thus, the same factors of math and literacy tests, and graduation rates which are used to “grade” schools in many OECD nations, are now being used to provide the illusion that schools in their entirety and their complexity can neatly be reduced to a few numbers, which can then be used to justify “tough choices” and “innovations” which involve increasing privatization.

The mainstream media has pounced on this story as a warning to unions of what is to come. Because charter school proponents want to make profits by knocking down teachers wages and benefits, the Rhode Island negotiation took the form of either the teachers being forced to accept massive concessions, such as working many extra hours without compensation, or else them being fired.

Mass firing is the latest strategy added to Obama’s arsenal of privatization measures, which also includes increased competition for funding, performance pay for teachers based on test scores, and a variety of intervention strategies for “failing schools”.

Obama’s move aligns him further with the objectives of the American Enterprise Institute, a radical pro-privatization think-tank, considered by many to be the driving force behind Bush’s policies. The Institute’s director, Frederick Hess, commented in the Christian Science Monistor, that the Rhode Island firing “will be a canary in a coal mine.” While most people would find this analogy to be a cause for alarm, Hess cheerfully surmises that the suffocation of one underperforming school will help to inspire “an increasing crop of no-excuses superintendents and state commissioners” who understand that “it’s essential to clean house.” http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0225/All-teachers-fired-at-R.I.-school.-Will-that-happen-elsewhere