As a community organizer working amongst so many people dedicated to human rights and social justice, I usually swing on the pendulum back and forth from hope to despair, from really believing in our strategies and our potential, to thinking, "Damn! We've been blindsided! What will they throw at us next?!" When i think about the government's priorities around education, that's exactly how i feel, BLINDSIDED.
When we are looking at the changing nature of classrooms and textbooks, and when we are trying to understand the coming commercialization of our public school system, i think it's good to make like David Byrne and ask, "Well, how did we get here?"
One answer to this complicated question has to do with the incredibly skewed priorities that local, state, and federal governments have shifted to in the last 20 years. In researching those priorities, I decided to take a closer look at numbers put out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Justice Policy Institute, and the National Center for Education Statistics. Now, these folks know what they are doing. And the numbers they give us make me want to scream.
During those last 20 years our society has moved resources, in a massive way, out of public education and into the mass imprisonment system. Just what do I mean by massive, you might ask. Well, during those years, spending on K through 12 education rose just over 33%. This isn't enough to keep up with the 378,000 more kids that were entering high school. The majority of public schools in California, for instance, still need basic infrastructure repairs and aren't getting them. But spending on incarceration went up well over 570%. The job market, of course, has been profoundly effected by this shift. It's just plain hard to make it as a public school teacher. Just ask members of Teachers for Change in San Francisco, who hold protests, demonstrating to morning commuters how insane it is that they have to buy all their own school supplies. Yet if you want to be a guard, your local jail or prison is HANKERING to sign you up. In fact, the number of K through 12 teachers FELL by 8% over the last 20 years, while the number of guards rose by around 250%.
Hearing these numbers makes me ask, "What are we saying to our kids when we spend public money this way?" It is no accident, no weird twist of human nature, that the number of kids graduating high school has dropped 2.7% and there's 400% more people in prison and jail. These things are happening for a REASON. They are happening because people in power at this historical moment actually believe that young people, people of color, and people living in poverty are a menace, and that you can actually solve social problems by not educating people but rather by putting them in cages. They are so afraid of folks different from them, so afraid of social change, that they are willing to trade people's futures, to lock people up and throw away the key. Why can't they see that spending money on education (as well as housing, health care, and jobs) helps make it so you DON'T HAVE TO build more prisons.
Before I said that "our society" has moved resources. But it really isn't "our society" at all, is it? It's particular individuals and institutions with names and addresses and products to sell us. It's executives of corporate media conglomerates, it's government officials on the take - privately or publicly, it's CEO's of the companies that profit from the exploitation of prison labor and the construction of new prisons. This isn't some abstract shrouded conspiracy theory. We can look it up at the public library. The connections are quite direct, actually. These people LOBBY, in broad daylight, for harsher sentencing laws, for new construction of lock ups. This is happening everywhere across the U.S. It's happening in your state capital and your city council and it's hurting us and hurting our kids and WE can stop it.
by eli rosenblatt 2000