Privitization Subject for League of Women Voters Forum
September 10th Forum: Privatization The panel will include Bob Williams, Evergreen Freedom Foundation; Gary Chamberlain, Seattle University Professor; Don Comstock, Antioch University Faculty; and Saroja Reddy, King County Government Policy Staff Director.
All forums are free and open to the public. For more information contact the League office at 206-329-4848, visit www.seattlelwv.org or info@seattlelwv.org.
7:30 to 9:00 PM
Seattle First Baptist Church
1111 Harvard Ave. (Harvard and Seneca)
Seattle, WA
Who should run our schools, our prisons, our parks and our highways? And who should pay?
This month’s program topic is privatization, the political movement to shift services, functions and assets from government to the private sector. What are the consequences for residents, both as taxpayers and as beneficiaries of these services? The September forum will feature a panel of local experts, presenting their views on the benefits and dangers of privatization, as well as a local perspective on its realities.
All forums are free and open to the public. For more information contact the League office at 206-329-4848, visit www.seattlelwv.org or info@seattlelwv.org.
Comments
there is an article in today's Seattle Times: "Revealing support for ailing schools," wherein we read about "twelve husbands and fathers [who] pose showing lots of skin for a fundraising calendar."
Charlie? Michael? anyone else interested?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009809711_calendarschools05.html?syndication=rss
I'm a Dutch-born New Zealander, who's lived in Asia and Australia before coming to the US... This link is to an audio piece about one of my political heroines - NZ feminist economist Marilyn Waring... my political and economic views incorporate some of her thinking ... she is a leader in the alternative economy movement...
If you want to hear another Kiwi voice, please listen... the second part has some interesting stats on education funding...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Waring
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/7310
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_economics
or using Triple Bottom Line accounting, where businesses/corporations/government institutions' first responsibility is to STAKEHOLDERS rather than SHAREHOLDERS....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line
Sort of like the bag-pipe busker: pay or I play!
Think of this: Are people who subscribe to private security services instead of relying on the police more or less likely to support taxes for the police force? Private schools are not the only example of private versions of the government services.
Think of this: TARP is only the latest example of the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk. There are plenty of others.
Think of this: How does the creation of cul de sac streets constitute the privatization of a public asset?
Think of this: How would the nation be served by the sale of the National Weather Service to private interests? How is the nation served by the sale of the public airwaves? by the sale of mineral resources on public lands? by the private use of public water projects? by the sale of public timber resources? I don't doubt that contributions to commerce are in the public interests, but what is the public getting in return for the actual assets? Are we getting fair value or just enriching a select few cronies? What right could the public demand in return for these below-market prices? If it is intended to spread wealth, then shouldn't it come with requirements of fair wages for workers, fair prices for consumers and reasonable compensation limits for executives and shareholders? Shouldn't it come with requirements of ecological remediation?
I've just finished Paul Krugman's piece in yesterday's NY Times Magazine, "How did economists get it so wrong?"
http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/09/06/magazine/
06Economic-t.html
He contrasts neo-classical macro econ with Keynsian,and in particular looks at the troubles caused as "economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or near-perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly in response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession's failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess."
The similarity I see is that educators (management, even teachers when they believe this and act on it) are proposing a system that is all "rational" with no "sudden, inexplicable change." There are proposed equations: "This text plus this strategy plus this pedagogy plus this student = this knowledge gained" but these equations do not take into account the many variables, some of which are catastrophic while some of them are momentous, all in a classroom, and all impacting individual students and the teacher differently.
In fact, Charlie writes that it is a relatively simple matter to have a curriculum (knowledge and skills) and expect that it be taught, even using various materials and pedagogies. I would suggest that it might be better to expect only that MOST of the curriculum will be taught, some things that aren't on the curriculum will be taught, and there is irrational fluctuation amongst and between students, classrooms and schools.
This is not to say that there should be no curriculum, no evaluation of its delivery, etc, but that we (parents/students/educators/world) should expect the unexpected, prepare for it, recognize it...
The pure model "scripted" and "direct" instruction does no such thing. It's programmed. Everything is a metric, as if it expects all students to be rational, all educators, all parents, indeed the whole world. A purely standardized curriculum, pedagogy and education is probably constructed with the idea that everything is measurable, everything falls into place...
Yet it doesn't.
Reading the piece from Krugman, it is too easy to substitute the education profession, and educators, into the role of economists:
"educators, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Recognition of the Failure of Publics to Teach Everybody, back in the 1940's, most educators clung to a vision of education as a perfect or near-perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass student enrollment of ALL, but as memories of the Great Boom in Teaching ALL Students faded, educators fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an education in which rational individuals interact in perfect classrooms, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized classroom was, to be sure, partly in response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Gates Foundation and job opportunities with Edison and Cliffnotes are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession's failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave educators a chance to show off their mathematical prowess."
Her boss had to call a snap election on the issue and his party lost... Kiwis dont like it when visitors wont come clean on whether they're carrying guns/bombs in their handbags... maybe that's why I am so suspicious of Broad!!!
And so New Zealand got kicked out of ANZUS....
And several years later, the French, who were testing nuclear weapons at Muroroa Atoll in the South Pacific (not in their own back yard of course) and didnt like it that New Zealand had gone nuclear free, sent spies who bombed and sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior which was berthed in Auckland harbour, killing a Dutch crew member...
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/rainbow-warrior-bombing/
I remember saying as soon as I heard the news, to American neighbours on the NZ Air Force base where I was living at the time: "bet you it was the French" ... they pooh-poohed the idea, saying that no western country would violate another's sovereignty like that... yea right, I thought... and voila, it turned out that it was the French...
The American response made me smile, given how often in the past the US has violated other countries' sovereignty, on the flimsiest of excuses...
Why am I writing all this? I read Charlie's description of himself as a pragmatist, and his thoughts about what handing over SPS buildings to the City might mean in lessening maintenance costs and bringing the resulting influx of spare cash into schools, and now his thoughts on privatisation....
I dont think there is any room at all for privatisation in public education... there is no transparency, no accountability... what are the hidden agendas, the neither confirm nor deny issues that are likely to blow up in our faces? And what happens if at some point we dont want to play their game anymore because its not working - at least for us and our kids? Metaphorical bombings of the cumbersome SPS ship that Charlie a few days ago so eloquently spoke about needing to turn and change course, albeit that being a very slow, difficult exercise?