Public Schooling in the United States: No place to get an education

The realization that public education is no longer public may challenge the perception of many readers of this essay. But public education has been appropriated as all the commons have by private entities whose main focus is not the education of our children, but the bottom line - profit. Under the guise of new and innovative approaches to teaching our children, who are desperately lagging behind the rest of the industrial and technological world, transnational corporations such as Viacom for example- who owns Simon and Schuster, one of the largest educational book publishers; and Bertelsmann - who runs Pearson/Prentice Hall, the publishers of the current textbook adopted by the very large school district I teach high school English for - are raking in unprecedented profits selling substandard textbooks and educational materials to states, counties, and municipalities. The main selling point for these textbooks and workbooks is that they model and teach the standards of No Child Left Behind and similar state mandated standards through tests that are themselves written and controlled by other educational publishing houses, such as Harcourt Education International (Pearson), which writes the Florida FCAT test. As a sales representative told me at a preschool conference, Florida may be 48th in the nation for monies allocated towards education from state coffers, but it is in the top 4 for monies allocated towards educational materials. Only three other states, New York, Texas, and California, can top that. The Prentice Hall textbook that I work with and our newly adopted reading program Edge from National Geographic/Hampton Brown both proudly show on the covers of their materials the FCAT logo. There are no lack of educational publishing lobbyists at the state government level. This is certainly not the only way that public education has been appropriated by the private sector, but it may be the most harmful.

It is not a new phenomenon. Private publishing houses have always had a hand in the publication and production of public educational materials. But since the early 1970s, the absorption of family owned publishing companies by transnational media corporations has been relentless. Today, the same media companies that produce the vacuous programming of film and television (i.e. News Corp, Viacom, Bertelsman), also generate the educational materials that our children use for the study of language, mathematics, science, the arts, and social science. Robert W. McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy is an invaluable read for a better understanding of these acquisitions.

The cruel irony lies in the fact that under the banner of standards, testing, and accountability is a shallow and inadequate national curriculum that actually masks incomprehensible levels of illiteracy and lack of basic mathematical skills. Innumerable careers have now been built in the public/private sector of education all with the good intention of educating the masses, but the ideology of late capitalism via globalized economic institutions (education being one) and structures has now made these educational professionals part and parcel of the maintenance of consensual hegemony in the Gramscian sense.

That is the thesis. In the following entries will be the support of my argument.