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Sarah Jaffe has a great new piece up dismantling a bunch of complaints about the Chicago teachers’ union and their strike. The whole thing is well worth reading, but I wanted to piggyback on one particular bit.
Jaffe quotes Times columnist Joe Nocera’s claim that “the status quo, which is what the Chicago teachers want, is clearly unacceptable,” and responds with this:
“Here’s a deep-seated bit of ideology that’s really worth unpacking for a second. This is the image of unions in the American psyche these days. Most people think of them as little-c conservative institutions holding on to a dead past, trying to protect what their members have against a sweeping tide of change.
“It’s wrong, and the CTU couldn’t be a better example of just how wrong it is. Karen Lewis and her union are the ones actually fighting for reforms in the schools, starting with things we know work: smaller class sizes, well-rounded curriculum, support for teachers and school staff. They might legally only be allowed to strike over salary and benefits, but they’ve been out there at every turn arguing for change, not the status quo.”
The problem is obvious, and it’s symptomatic of the biggest problem in debates over American public education (primary, secondary, and higher) more generally right now: The most sensible proposals for reforming public education have been written out of “reasonable” public discourse.
In short, Nocera believes that CTU is fighting for the status quo because their proposals have been rendered invisible.
Just seven months ago, CTU released a comprehensive report on how Chicago’s public schools could be improved. It’s thoughtful, ambitious work, and it turns out that the pricetag on the union’s whole better-schools wishlist amounts to just 15% of the system’s annual budget. That money would buy improvements in everything from facilities to art and music instruction to school lunches, while increasing teacher pay, implementing universal pre-K and full-day kindergarten and dramatically expanding school libraries in the parts of the city that need them most.
If that’s what you get for $713 million, you could get big chunks of it for a lot less, and it’s not like the current impasse is free — not for the city, and not for the city’s taxpayers.
So why aren’t we talking about any of this? For the same reason we’re not talking about cutting tuition at public colleges, or increasing in-state enrollment, or hiring more full-time faculty. Because the dominant narrative of austerity, not the country’s actual financial situation, is driving public discourse.
And that narrative has no room for hope. Or change.
By now you’ve probably seen the report that a new poll out of Ohio found that 15% of very conservative voters said Mitt Romney was more responsible for Osama Bin Laden’s death than President Obama, with another 6% of moderate conservatives agreeing. (More than half of each group said they weren’t sure who should get more credit.)
Cue wringing of hands and mocking of conservatives. But I love their answer, and here’s why.
When Osama Bin Laden was killed, Barack Obama was the commander in chief of the military that killed him. Mitt Romney was adjusting to his new campaign wardrobe of open-collar shirts. And of course it’s not as if he did any of the prep work for the mission in his previous roles as Winter Olympics CEO, Massachusetts governor, or failed Senate candidate.
But here’s the thing. The folks who gave him credit for killing Bin Laden know all this stuff, or at least most of them do. They didn’t give the answer they did because they thought Romney was a member of Seal Team Six.
They gave that answer because it’s an idiotic question.
Romney had nothing to do with the Bin Laden mission. Nobody, even in the fever swamps of conspiracism, has ever claimed otherwise. The only reason to ask the question as framed is to poke at Romney supporters in the hope that they’ll either say something nice about the president or look dumb by refusing to.
Consider this: The folks at PPP could have asked whether Obama or Bush had more to do with the killing of Bin Laden. Or they could have offered “neither” as an answer, to represent folks who believe that the military would have done its thing whoever occupied the Oval Office. They didn’t. Instead they offered “not sure,” a nonsensical option that 31% of the Ohio electorate chose.
That’s right. Faced with a question that’s the political equivalent of “is the sky blue?” nearly a third of Ohioans, and more than ten percent of liberals, said they didn’t know. That’s not ignorance, it’s pollster nullification.
Four percent of non-conservatives polled gave Romney credit for the Bin Laden kill, by the way. I like to think that I’d have been among them.
“In 2008 less than half of all eligible voters between 18 and 24 voted.”
—Scarlett Johansson, last night.
“The youngest voters were the only age group to show a statistically significant increase in turnout.”
—The Census Bureau, 2009.
Pell Grant expenditures by the federal government fell by more than six percent last year, according to new figures from the federal government, despite the fact that they were expected to rise by some $4.4 billion.
The $2.2 billion (or $6.6 billion, depending on how you look at it) savings won’t be fully explained until more detailed numbers are released, but there are likely three overlapping explanations.
The first, and likely largest, factor was the government’s elimination of year-round Pell eligibility last year. Congress zapped summer Pell Grants as a cost-saving measure, and that policy change was expected to reduce outlays by some $4 billion.
Another $1.4 billion of the gap came from declining grant awards to for-profit colleges, which saw Pell enrollment fall by more than a hundred thousand students, or about five percent.
As for the rest? Experts interviewed by Inside Higher Ed suggested that it might have come from a shift from full-time to part-time enrollment, possibly spurred by higher costs of attendance.
The elimination of year-round Pell was obviously a setback for higher ed access, and if students are dropping down to part-time for financial reasons that’s troubling too. But the shrinkage of for-profit enrollment is good news for a few reasons.
For-profit colleges charge students more than publics, and they pass those costs on to the government. Because average Pell outlays to students at for-profits are higher than those to students at the public colleges they’d most likely be attending otherwise, for-profit colleges have for years consumed a disproportionate share of Pell Grant spending. A decline in for-profit colleges — which often engage in predatory enrollment tactics, deliver shoddy instruction, and dump students into loan default after graduation — is good for students, good for the economy, and good for the government’s bottom line.
Tuesday’s provincial election was a pretty good day for the Quebec student movement.
The Parti Québécois, which had opposed the Liberal government’s tuition hikes and its anti-demonstration Loi 78, won a clear, though not overwhelming, victory at the polls. Though they fell far short of winning majority control of the provincial legislature, their party leader — in a post-election call to the head of one of Quebec’s student unions — promised to reverse the tuition increase by decree, a move that would make a legislative vote unnecessary. Action on Loi 78 is expected to follow.
PQ’s margin of victory was smaller than anticipated, with the party winning just 54 seats in the 125-seat legislature. The Liberals won 50, though their better-than-expected showing was dimmed by the defeat of party leader Jean Charest, architect of the tuition hike in his own race. In another election-night surprise, 20-year-old student activist Léo Bureau-Blouin defeated a three-term incumbent on his way to winning a PQ seat in the city of Laval. Bureau-Blouin, whose decision to run was controversial among some activists, will be the youngest ever member of Quebec’s legislature.
But while this was a big battle, the war is still ongoing. The reversal of the hike sets up a new struggle over higher education funding, and PQ has pledged to index tuition to inflation going forward. Though students at several holdout campuses where students had continued to strike returned to classes on Wednesday, neither the issues nor the tactics of the spring have evaporated. For now, Loi 78 remains on the books, and the fate of students already under investigation for violating the act remains unresolved.
And the Maple Spring was never just about short-term tuition policy or a single authoritarian law. The movement has always been bigger than that, and a (promised, approximate) return to the January 2012 status quo hardly fulfills the movement’s larger goals.
So don’t put away your red squares just yet.
studentactivism.net 
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