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    <title>Gaslighting Americans about public schools: The truth about ‘A Nation at Risk’ - The Washington Post</title>
    <dc:date>2024-04-10T16:12:50+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/04/26/how-nationatrisk-report-hurt-public-schools/</link>
    <dc:creator>Taryn</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[the commission had been launched by then Secretary of Education Terrell Bell to fend off the president’s 1980 campaign proposal to abolish the department. In its report, it laid out a strong argument in favor of a vigorous federal presence in education to support vulnerable students, aid higher education and research, and protect civil rights. These suggestions were quickly relegated to the dust bin of history [...]

two successive white papers reflecting on what we had heard from experts on the complexities of the school “system” in the United States. The essence of the two lengthy papers was that American schools had accomplished great things for the United States and were now faced with the joint challenges of (1) successfully educating a more diverse and lower-income population through high school, and (2) improving standards or we risked becoming mired in mediocrity. Virtually every reference to the accomplishments of American schools and the challenges of diversity and poverty disappeared from the succeeding drafts.

At the meeting to discuss my second draft, Holton showed up with a brilliant polemic, a handwritten draft he had developed. He read it aloud to the assembled commissioners. Castigating American public schools for the failures of American society and in particular the nation’s declining economic competitiveness, it became the foundation of “A Nation at Risk.”

[...]  The report, while putting education near the top of the national agenda, has served as an undertow helping undermine confidence in educators and public schools while trashing government generally. The argument of wholesale school failure has been an essential bulwark of the effort to privatize public education by diverting public funds into school vouchers and unaccountable charter schools, particularly the scandal-plagued for-profit charter sector [...]

“A Nation at Risk” also helped lay the foundation for 40 years of gaslighting Americans about the problems our society faces. Distracted by the false argument that most of our economic problems can be laid at the school door, policymakers have been able to ignore major problems including growing inequality, homelessness, drug addiction and the epidemic of gun violence [...]

Had the commission entered the treacherous waters of school finance — which promotes inequity in public education with a system that relies in large part on local property taxes — it would inevitably have had to deal with the troublesome issue of childhood poverty and unequal opportunity, a topic that commission leaders avoided.

In the end, this was a missed opportunity. The report was a product, like the other blunders identified by Stephen Weir, of decisions grounded in ignorance and pride. In this case, commission leaders, isolated from the real problems of the society about which they pontificated and arrogantly convinced that the answers they sought could be found in the faculty lounge, misread the nature of the problem, misinterpreted the cause and misled the American people.]]></description>
<dc:subject>US government 1980s education_reform politics whitepaper history</dc:subject>
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    <title>New study on how governments can fund radical ecological and social policies without GDP growth</title>
    <dc:date>2023-09-27T12:16:29+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://phys.org/news/2023-09-fund-radical-ecological-social-policies.html</link>
    <dc:creator>Taryn</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[It is widely believed that governments can only increase spending if they first grow GDP to increase tax revenue, otherwise they risk inflation or "unsustainable" levels of public debt. This presents a problem, because GDP growth works against ecological objectives. Indeed, a majority of climate scientists is now calling for "degrowth"—a democratically planned, equitable reduction of less necessary forms of production—in high-income countries in order to enable faster decarbonization. Key degrowth measures include the expansion of universal public services and a job guarantee in sustainable sectors.

Degrowth presents governments with the question of how to finance the necessary ecological and social measures during this process of transformation—a question that Olk and his fellow research team members want to answer. They argue that public investment can be increased without GDP growth and that the process of degrowth simultaneously dismantles destructive, less necessary industries and prevents inflation. 

The article draws on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to explain why states with monetary sovereignty are not subject to financial constraints. "Contrary to what conservative economists claim, public spending is not actually constrained by tax revenues, but by the productive capacity of the economy," explains Olk [...]

monetary and fiscal policies to prevent inflation and ensure economic stability during a degrowth transition. These include: stronger regulation of private money creation by banks; progressive taxation of capital income, as well as of energy and resource consumption; targeted price controls; robust public utility systems; and the introduction of an emancipatory, democratically organized job guarantee in sustainable sectors. This holistic policy framework has the potential to build broad democratic support for a transition to a more sustainable future [...]

degrowth requires above all a politically well-organized social base. Concerns about financial feasibility, inflation, and living standards often lead to widespread skepticism about the possibility of a radical social and ecological transformation.

In this study, the authors address these concerns, demonstrating how such a transition is macroeconomically feasible, and propose a practical economic policy program that allows for ecological and social goals to be achieved at the same time. ]]></description>
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    <title>Use, Knowledge, Art, and History. Charles Esche and Manuel Borja-Ville</title>
    <dc:date>2017-11-19T03:22:58+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.internationaleonline.org/research/alter_institutionality/70_use_knowledge_art_and_history_a_conversation_between_charles_esche_and_manuel_borja_villel</link>
    <dc:creator>Taryn</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[(CE) ...I am interested in genealogies in general, but only insofar as they inform the present moment, or open up ideas that seem excluded by the current consensus 

what I saw as the 'moment of danger' was and is still failing to significantly reshape the histories that are generally shared and that create a common belief in why society is the way that it is. From my point of view, this misunderstanding of how the world had changed in 1989 was also contributing to how fundamental social realities were subsequently perceived, such as climate change and growing inequality, themselves the result of the globalism heralded by the Internet and the death of communism [...]

It would seem a basic truth, even in modernist terms, that autonomy has to be taken not given and that it cannot be circumscribed within a curriculum. By incorporating such an important social concept as autonomy within the state education system, it is made more or less meaningless, and art itself becomes something without effective social value, or without 'use,' [...] The [final] thing such an understanding of art would need would be for art to matter in society and change not only imagination but concrete conditions on the ground [...]

the idea of utility as a problematic but stimulating term arose, something that countered modernist autonomy but didn't imply full instrumentalization. Utility has a long tradition going back to eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume and his ideas on the relationship between morality and utility. I believe it is worth exploring again through art, as perhaps the most quintessentially non-utilitarian thing [...]

(MBV) we live in a period that is characterized by being a permanent present without historical roots or links. No doubt, this has to do with new technologies and the virtual disappearance of any space/time border or barrier [...] it represents a great change, almost a revolution in the way humans perceive themselves and their position in relation to each other and to time. What we might do as a response is to think in the long term. There are forces that have focused their power and interest on money and material benefits and these have largely been the strongest forces in society. But there have also been a few movements where the important thing is that the human being builds a better society. The irony is that mostly the second, weaker tendency ends up saving the stronger one by helping humanity survive the crises where the focus of money and power usually leads. But, beyond these long-term processes, we can ask what has been happening in the last thirty years that makes it a specific historical period. One thing is obviously the technical revolution that facilitates the infinite present, but also this revolution emphasizes how the author disappears and the receiver or navigator becomes a co-author. Then, it is clear that the forces in the world have global impact but that the nation-state still forms our identity and our means of governmentality [...]

Museums like the Louvre or British Museum were born with the ideals of the Enlightenment and, however dark, colonial, and problematic Enlightenment values proved, they offered a promise of a bourgeois public sphere where values and education could be shared collectively by a limited number of enfranchised people. Now, instead of widening that franchise or recognizing the dark side of Enlightement values and modifying them, they were ignored and undermined. In their place, museums have become sites of total consumption [...]

we are working with tools that are basically no longer ours [...] the most radical art of the last thirty years is kind of anachronistic, perhaps with some exceptions related to art around new technologies. This art and our institutions then exist within a context and a public that are basically consumers who think they know what they want. Most importantly, they are a radically different political subject to the ones artists and museums spoke to during modernism. In modernity, the artistic avant-garde was connected to a political avant-garde and they were both working on the idea of sharing knowledge and education. Artists did this through developing a language that would allow a relative autonomy. The problem was how to create a language that drew on different sources but could still represent oneself. In this way the workers' movement and the avant-garde artists used photography, film, or collage to represent themselves because those used popular media and not the bourgeois language and culture of painting. Today, we don't need to look for a language of our own to represent ourselves. The problem is that language is co-opted almost from the beginning. It is no longer autonomous but rather empty [...] If art is to be anything today it has to create outflows of meanings and favour new forms of understanding and relationships. Being 'useful' is something else [...]

one of the problems [with the notion of 'Arte Útil'] is that its advocates don't take into account the materiality of the work of art and what it does in the world. It is important to understand that you can never predict the results of a work of art or whether it will have a use value in the future that is unknown today [...] 

art has to be valueless because the moment it has value you forget its other qualities. Value means that it will be bought and sold, turned into a communicational commodity, and then every political aspect of the work will be totally empty. So I think art has to be useless in the sense that it should have a structure that almost makes it impossible to be absorbed by the industry of communication [eg. James Coleman, Broodthaers, Asher]

[...] I don't think it is possible to persuade people anymore. It's a kind of nostalgia for educational ideas from the past. People are consumers now, you cannot tell them anything

(CE) [...] Being from the absolute core of Western Europe, from the place the United States most needed to have on its side after the Second World War, gave us huge confidence over three generations in our story of the world. That might have been less true in Spain during the same period. Part of what I do today, in an art historical and museological sense, is to try to shake that confidence. One way to do that is to combine contradictory ideas that are used ahistorically or outside art's traditional frame of reference [...] the origins of neoliberalism are Dutch and they are encoded by a certain religious and environmental tradition that has been exported around the world to places that do not necessarily have much instinctive understanding of it. That sense of ownership of capitalism is of course something which also gives Dutch society a very deep, rooted confidence that, in today's world, can seem inappropriate. Arte Útil in this context might be understood differently than in Spain or in Cuba [...] group and subject exhibitions such as the Museum of Arte Útil or Confessions of the Imperfect offer a different kind of resistance to what you find in Coleman and Broodthaers. The works themselves might be commodified later but at that moment they are placed within a narrative that is not easily dismissed [...]

[MVB] an ecology of knowledge can only be based on the fact that all knowledge is always inter-knowledge, a knowledge based on the relationship and antagonism of ideas. It is not just a derivative form of knowledge as it could be just a general pluralism, but a break with Western forms of acting and thinking. To think critically today means to think from the perspective of the other and, therefore, to question our own position, even if this position is plural. It is not only that there are different stories but that there is a chasm between them that makes them irreconcilable [...]

I don't think art needs to work on a large scale. Take a fundamental modern author like Stéphane Mallarmé and his most influential book, Un coup de dés, written in 1897 but only published in 1914. His original constituency, his readers, was a very small group of people. Yet, the book's ultimate influence is so profound that it is considered by many as the starting point of the modern space. Ideas like his may be small but the circles gradually widen. Mallarmé addressed his texts 'à qui veut,' to whoever wants to receive them. That does not mean that he did not want to reach out to other people, but just that he did not want to do it indiscriminately. It's what Mallarmé called restrained actions that slowly gather force [...]

The museum belongs to society and to the public and it is our job to create a space of agony where people can contribute with what they know. When it works, the museum creates not only knowledge, but also a will to learn, a will to have freedom, a will to get together and create a community of affection through learning together. This process should not be about results. It needs to be open but also opaque and complex. I think Arte Útil as an idea misses this element. It can too easily become about sharing communication [...]

(CE) [Apolonija Šušteršič] uses light therapy to create a meeting room inside the museum] One of the great falsehoods of social democracy was that the state is on society's side and we to rely on it rather than be suspicious and interrogate it regularly. We have seen the retreat of the state in the last thirty years, but no real critique of it from the left or on the part of public interest. There is the developing notion of the commons of course but no clear sense of what institutions of the commons will look like and how they can survive economically. I think usefulness, utility, and usership will be crucial terms in developing a museum of the commons for instance. They will not replace your ideas of anachronism, the abyssal, and difficulty, but they will parallel them.]]></description>
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    <title>Cathie Black and the privatisation of education</title>
    <dc:date>2011-04-08T02:32:28+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/07/schools-school-funding</link>
    <dc:creator>Taryn</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[While some of the movement's self-described liberals undoubtedly have good intentions, the strategy is effectively the same as any conservative effort to hobble the public sector: defund government so that it is less effective and then use that ineffectiveness to argue for further privatisation.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/11]]></description>
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