New York’s public schools marred by corporate model, police repression

Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, over 400 teachers demonstrated outside Education Department offices in the borough of Queens, protesting rigid restrictions on how they are allowed to teach.

These two events are part of an escalating crisis produced by the growing “corporatization” of the largest public education system in the US. The reorganization of educational policies based on the needs of the corporate world is resulting in new levels of tension in New York City’s schools.

The policies governing the city’s schools are ultimately set by New York’s billionaire Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Department of Education (DOE) Chancellor Joel Klein, the former American CEO of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG. Together they oversee a million students and 80,000 teachers in 1,100 schools.

Central to their plans is the subordination of the schools to the needs of the big business. This requires that teachers be transformed from educators into assembly-line-style workers, transferring lessons developed by private contractors and publishers to students who are to be molded like interchangeable parts. Students, many coming to school with social and family problems arising from pervasive poverty, do not always fit neatly into this lockstep teaching model.

The attempt to enforce this mode of learning through high-stakes testing, accompanied by lucrative payments to the companies that develop and administer these tests, only intensifies difficulties for students and teachers. Finally, in the manner of Henry Ford’s factory model, discontent must be suppressed with stronger police methods.

Only days before his arrest, Principal Michael Soguero of Bronx Guild High School had “complained that cops were overrunning his building” and “police presence has led to hostility between students and staff.” When a cop issued a 16-year-old girl a citation for being unruly in the hallway, she refused to show identification and instead walked into the principal’s office. The principal, an eight-year education veteran, and a school aide, James Burgos, allegedly got between the police officer and the student, resulting in the officer’s claims that he was pushed against a desk and hurt his arm. According to a New York Post reporter, the principal “believed the officer was being too rough and overstepping his bounds.”

The principal and school aide spent the night in jail, charged with assault and obstructing governmental procedure, while the girl was led away in handcuffs, charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. If nothing else, this incident raises the question: who is in charge in New York City’s schools, the principal or the police?

Today, many of the city’s students grow up thinking that the prison model for schools is natural, given that it is the only one they have known. Since 1998, uniformed School Safety Agents have been incorporated into and are trained by the city’s police department. While the agents do not carry guns, regular police officers sometimes roam the schools with their pistols.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/nyc-f10.shtml