California schools go back to basics

Long Beach Unified School District [LBUSD], like most California public school districts, is launching the mother of all back-to-basics campaigns. Forget No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top or any other neo-liberal fad du jour in sheep's clothing.

LBUSD is coming close to dismantling its schools giving a rather Victorian meaning to the back-to-basics mantra.

Soon there will be no pretense that our school are just day care for poor children until they are old enough to turn to crime, work at Wal Mart, or Be All a Militarist society wants them to Be.

Grade school teachers, high school instructors, counselors, programs are to be axed.

Thanks to the taxpayers' revolts of the 1970's, the new centrality of Reaganomics, the perpetual invisibleness of our children, and our mediocre president's Race to the Top it is not an understatement to say that California is throwing generations of young into the toilet and flushing it.

When I was a child growing up here, us kids had heard that California was destined to fall off into the ocean after the Big One. Only now this catastrophe is not caused by a great tremor as we thought, but rather by our own hands, or our own complicity, or our own silence ... which is all the same thing.

Obama has horded federal funds and is throwing them like rations into the circus ring for the strongest beast to devour. The weak be damned.

The other day I listened to a "discussion" on national corporate radio, as the guests framed the education debate as a competition between arts and sports funding. This takes real discipline, especially as the station stridently begs for money from its listeners.

What might the public say if the competition were pit between school funding and war funding? Educating our kids' minds, free- and reduced-lunch programs, arts and sports programs against foreign war funding which kills and maims our young and theirs?

I know the answer.

As I have said, it is a disturbing irony that for every one of these 750 school teachers to be fired by LBUSD, how many jobs are being met with the war economy? War is soldiers. War is the police state. War is the excessive security apparatus at our borders and within our airports: functionaries largely, who are forced to rationalize their positions by creating much more mischief than that school bully who will now be under served because his teacher is overburdened and the school psychologists are being dismissed.

The otherwise shallow radio discussion proposed an interesting idea as tax season is upon us: just as we can opt to fund federal campaign coffers on our 1040, the radio guests we opt for funding schools' programs.

I would take this direct democracy much further: fund the war machine or not? Please check the box.

See also: LA Unified plans to fire more non-tenured teachers