The current war on public education in the US, coupled with the ever-rising costs of childcare and housing, is an alarming trend that threatens to permanently impoverish and enslave the next generation. Crumbling safety nets and privatization of government services is accelerating economic stratification into haves and have-nots.
These trends have been happening for the entire 21st century but they seem recently accelerated by the “School Choice” programs in several conservative states, along with an increased push for charter schools from neoliberals. Charters were pushed big by Arne Duncan of the Obama administration. Bill Gates has spent millions of dollars pushing charter schools. All of this has the effect of dismantling public education. Students will have less job skills and worse critical thinking skills. Institutions will not be able to pass along generational knowledge that parents cannot do or refuse to do.
Alongside this, the rising cost of daycare and lack of parental leave is a national crisis that has been shoved under the rug. We haven’t been a one-income county for a long time and that isn’t coming back. As more parents are forced into daycare, the cost goes up and more daycare laborers are needed. This work falls disproportionately on women of color and immigrants and perpetuates that underclass, as even with the high costs it is still a low-paying job with limited room for advancement.
All of these problems are ignored with money. And political lobbying costs money. Children and care workers do not have as much lobbying money as the rich.
I’m not sure that it can be denied that classes are bifurcating in this country. One could debate the rage of decline or intent. I believe the rate of decline is high and will continue to accelerate. I tend to systematically deny that personal intent affects the world to any large degree, but the collective economic and political decisions of a group are measurable and in alignment with their expected incentives. Everyone is doing their own thing but the incentives inevitably nudge them in the same direction as their peers. And right now it seems like all those rich peers want to frig off to their private islands and bunkers and wait out whatever nebulous disaster they fear, while the rest of us keep living hotter, leaner lives. (But at least not stuck in a bunker.)
What do you think, Dopers? Do the rich want to be among the rest of us, or do they want to seal themselves off? (Can they even do that in our increasingly interconnected world?)
I’m not a fan of Charter Schools, but I’m not sure I buy your premise here. In theory, Charter schools could provide a fine education, along with job skills and critical thinking skils.
The history of public schools in America has always been dismal. The elite were sending their children to elite private schools before America was even a country. The public school movement boomed during the 19th century, but the reality is that schools were designed to teach ABCs and not much more to immigrants and farm kids. High schools appeared in a few large cities but didn’t expand until after 1900, with the result that the percentage of high school graduates was in the single digits until about World War I.
How good were schools? Not very. You can search at any time in the 20th century and find people screaming about the faults of the school system. Don’t forget that the southern states spent less total money on schools and carved that into fractions for white schools and black schools. In the Northeast the huge Catholic populations funded their own competitive school systems that were generally considered far better than the public schools.
This changed only after whites fled to the suburbs and started schools there with tons of money and involved parents, leading to suburban schools dominating the ranking of best schools except for the few large city specialized entrance-by-exam schools. This may be the Golden Age that the OP is basing concern on. Obviously, though, these suburban, mostly white, schools are the most class-laden large-scale exercise in American history.
Nothing about charter schools intrinsically is classist or elite. Indeed many of them are created specifically to deal with minority children. All charter schools are public schools and have to follow their states curriculum. They have more flexibility in how they achieve this. For years the real knock against charter schools is that they underperformed compared to state public schools, but apparently new studies have said that they have caught up and surpassed them. Not true everywhere. In my home town, Rochester, the charter schools are ridiculously underfunded and do terribly. In short, I’m not seeing charter schools as elite refuges of the rich. They already have those. They’re called suburbs.
The real villain you want to be aware of is vouchers. Many conservative states are scheming to allow state vouchers to be spent at private religious schools. That will truly create a wall against public schools.
In theory I agree too. And in practice there are successful charter schools. However there are some that are grifts, some that teach different ideology. Some that improve or allow for better specialization that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
Overall in practice I am ideologically opposed to charter schools because the rate of union membership is lower than public schools and I believe that teachers unions are the primary bulwark holding up education.
We need new words for the current times because the old ones don’t hold saliency. People don’t see themselves as having a lord or king so they won’t see themselves as feudal subjects.
True. But they’re not the ones we need to persuade to do something differently to prevent calamity. Until the victims can identify themselves as victims and see their common cause with other victims, they’ll be individuals uselessly following the herd up the chute to the killing station.
That’s a reasonable position to hold. But it seems to be totally lacking in statements like this one.
According to press accounts, the charter schools that Gates funded are not successes. That’s perhaps correlated to his early adoption status; the period from the late 2000s on was, as I mentioned above, was not a great one for charter schools. That seems to have changed, perhaps exactly because the early attempts were primarily geared toward the least advantaged students, a notoriously difficult group to show advancement. I don’t know whether people have learned from this or whether they are focusing on easier targets.
Either way, it’s impossible to square this with billionaires trying to wall themselves off. And putting it on Bill Gates’ shoulders is depressing. His giving ranks among the best of all billionaires. Maybe he was wrong about backing charter schools. That says nothing about wealth and class in the modern world.
…apartheid isn’t a new word. It’s a word that describes something different. The word has already been appropriated by “culture warriors” in their against “woke.” But it doesn’t really fit here. Feudalism is both more accurate and less offensive to those that have or are still living in apartheid regimes.
It’s not offensive to me, FWIW. Not accurate, but not offensive. I’d call it a Randtopia or something else like that, if I were going for a neologism. But I don’t see the need for one when ‘late stage capitalism’ already conveys the same idea to me.
This and maintaining hyper-local funding of schools rather than distributing funding at the state (or at least County) level. In areas where funding is done primarily through property and sales taxes, you can find wide disparities in school funding just by moving a mile or so away within the same county.
Some are taking issue with the word “apartheid” in the OP’s title (and I agree that it is probably the wrong word; but I don’t think “feudalism” fits either). But I would quibble more with “create”. I think “maintain” is a more appropriate word.
What (some) elites want to do is maintain the ability to send their students to the best schools so they can get the best jobs (through either getting a “better” education or just by having better contacts) while everybody else goes to barely-passable schools to get just enough education to work at menial jobs. All the while dangling the carrot of upward mobility so the lower classes don’t go into full revolt.
ETA: I will add that you do have to bound “elite” in some way. Vouchers actually tend to broaden the definition of “elite” because far more wealthy (but not obscenely wealthy) families would send their children to private school with a voucher. The true “elites” don’t really need vouchers - they have more than enough money to send their kids wherever they want to. They also don’t rely as much on a high-prestige name attached to their kids secondary school. Their family name is perfectly good enough to maintain their position in society.
I don’t know if it’s a conscious effort to create class-based apartheid but US parents are at least subliminally aware of the consequences of failure in a toxic capitalist economy.
And while it’s been probably true for all of the country’s history, there’s little doubt in my mind that there are others in the .01% willing to join the likes of Peter Thiel in abolishing democracy and establishing rule by the wealthy few (looking at you, Elon).
A story that may or may not be germane to the topic: a few months ago I was led to a piece by a futurist who had been invited by a group of extremely wealthy individuals to discuss future trends. The conversation soon drifted into preparation for a coming societal collapse and the futurist related that the most intensive and lengthy discussion was about the issue of maintaining power in your personal citadel when money no longer had any value.
I don’t feel this is the plan being carried out by America’s wealthy. (I hesitate to call them the elites.)
The underlying premise of a class system is that individuals strongly identify themselves by membership in a class. And I don’t feel this is true in America. American billionaires see themselves as exemplars of rugged individualism. They don’t look back and see themselves as the product of past generations and therefore don’t look forward to future generations. When an American billionaire thinks about their future legacy, they try to do something big that will get their name written into history books rather than thinking about what conditions their great great grandchildren will live in.
Well, our school money is doled out by the state, and not locally, so vouchers, school of choice, and charter schools are all things I support. Will vouchers and charter schools cause public schools to fail? Maybe. Maybe not. Why worry about it unless we see signs that it’s happening? Then we can throw money at the problem.
And if we do let public schools fail, we have no idea what a 100% privatized system will look like. You can guess, but you’d probably be wrong in half of your guesses. Or not. If it’s not a better system, then use the government monopoly on violence to prop up a public system again.
Why is everyone getting their panties in a knot over things that might not happen?
It’s just like all the knuckleheads who worried about net neutrality. The apocalypse hasn’t come, and if it does, we’re smart enough and rich enough to deal with it.
Do you mind if I ask what state that is? Most states have some sort of revenue sharing formula, but as you can see here (States That Spend the Most (and the Least) on Education 2017) the fraction that comes from local sources can vary from 10% or less to over 50%.
Well one problem is that you are talking about a few years worth of kids being harmed. That is certainly something worth worrying about. That’s not to say that experimentation isn’t worth trying, just that you can’t say “let’s make dramatic changes and see what happens” without considering the real and permanent risks associated with those changes.
You can’t easily make up multiple years of terrible education - I’ve seen just one year of a bad elementary teacher set kids back for multiple years in reading, and some never close the gap with their peers.
IMHO (and I’ve read some literature that supports it) is that a larger is not the uber-wealthy but “mass affluent” upper middle class people like myself.
The mega rich like Elon Musk have enough money to live where they want, do what they want, and educate their children however they please without really any direct impact on the larger society. Even though they have a lot of money, there are comparatively few of them.
Much larger is the “kind of wealthy” upper middle class. People making six figures in finance, law, tech, pharma, medicine, business owners, corporate executives, etc. They tend to congregate in specific towns where they are often very vocal about local and state politics. And there are a lot more of them.
So IOW, it’s really more the millions of Karen the stay at home home with the nanny who watches the kids for $1000 a week so she can sip wine and brunch with her friends and build her online business/hobby while her husband Chad commutes to his law firm in Midtown. They are strongly disincentivized to support any policies that will increase their taxes or create any sort of NIMBY effect in their town which could reduce their property values.