The Publishing Problem: Reading Between the Lines of Industry Self-Censorship

By Chris Richards

Republished from the author’s substack.

At first I didn’t know what to make of Judd Legum’s piece on what he calls “Scholastic’s Bigot Button.” It raises some interesting ideas about whether or not a publisher should pander to conservative political biases by allowing them to hide liberal titles. It shows how not offending certain kinds of white people continues to be an important cultural priority. It informs readers of a right wing pressure campaign against Scholastic Corporation, spearheaded by a conservative Christian publisher of children’s books called “Brave Books.” What it doesn’t really engage with is who Scholastic Corporation is and why the company has so much power.

This is important because who Scholastic is, what they do, and the power they have is central to the right wing pressure campaign to which Scholastic is capitulating. At the moment, Scholastic is selling at $37.48 a share. As Judd Legum points out in his article, it is a publicly traded company with more than a billion dollars of market capitalization. What that means in plain English is that Scholastic’s division Arthur A. Levine Books is the original US publisher of JK Rowling and Philip Pullman. Levine himself left Scholastic in 2019 to establish his own company, but Scholastic still handles the back catalog. That means Harry Potter and “The Golden Compass” are controlled by Scholastic here in the US. In addition, Scholastic itself is the publisher of Suzanne Collins. That’s a lot of Young Adult literary culture in one place.

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That’s just one of Scholastic’s four main business lines. Children’s and Young Adult publishing is big money as it is, but the media rights for those books is big money too. Which is why Scholastic Entertainment exists, to develop intellectual property from Clifford the Big Red Dog, to Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and the Golden Compass, to Goosebumps. There’s a lot of money in this area too, and a lot of power, but this isn’t why Kirk Cameron’s publisher is going after Scholastic.

You see, Scholastic pretty much controls school book fairs. It turns out that schools don’t just hold book fair themselves using decorations made by teachers and librarians. They pay someone to run the book fair for them. Usually that someone is Scholastic Book Fairs. So nearly every time a public school holds a book fair, Scholastic makes a buck. Scholastic also has book fair packages designed to appeal to different schools as different markets. Here is where Brave Books and their pressure campaign targeting Scholastic comes in.

According to its website, Brave Books was founded by Trent Talbot. Dr. Trent Talbot was a practicing ophthalmologist who was so disgusted by “the inappropriate content being pushed upon children”that he just needed to found a right wing Christian kids’ book and YA publishing company to give parents and schools “a wholesome alternative.” So he naturally decided that Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron were the people he should turn to for help. I think of “wholesome” and I immediately want Kevin Sorbo to teach my kids about masculinity, right?

Because being an obnoxious conservative bigot is a brand in today’s America, Brave Books opened its own book club and book fair divisions to compete with Scholastic and chose an openly confrontational marketing tactic. Brave decided to accuse Scholastic of advancing the LGBTQ+ agenda, because we all know that blatantly accusing your competition of wanting to groom parents’ kids is one way to stake out your own recognizable brand. It also makes it clear that you value the thoughts, feelings, and spending money of the Christian conservative market.

This is the basic background of the specific issue that Legum is writing about. I want to be clear about this background before touching on the specifics of his piece and the core problem left unaddressed by his piece. That core problem, imo, is more important than the immediate specifics of what Scholastic is doing under pressure from Brave. The problem is one of capitalism, and of how the fiduciary responsibilities of corporate officers are seen in the modern business culture.

The specifics of this news are simple. In the face of a marketing offensive from a competitor accusing Scholastic of marketing “inappropriate material” at book fairs, Scholastic has introduced an easy button that school employees planning a book fair can use to eliminate any “objectional content” from their school’s book fairs. Naturally the “objectional content” is all about racial inclusion, the lives of Black people like Ketanji Brown Jackson and John Lewis, and teaching kids that LGBTQ+ families are as valuable as traditional Christian families.

It’s important to keep this in the proper context and look at the material underpinnings of what is happening. This isn’t about Scholastic executives being afraid they will be censored by an out of control state governor like Ron DeSantis. This isn’t even about complaints being made by vigilante parents. This is about a corporate competitor of Scholastic choosing to compete by condemning the morality of Scholastic, as a company, in order to try to sell some schools Christian book fair packages. This is the business of capitalism as usual, with Brave Brooks choosing to brand themselves as the “choice for Christians who want their kids to be safe at the book fair.” It’s a marketing gimmick.

When Scholastic adds a button to their system to exclude liberal content to which conservatives might object, they aren’t knuckling under to any public censorship campaign. They aren’t bowing to the forces of a repressive state. No, it’s much simpler.

They are protecting their market share by giving conservative Christian school employees the easy and quick option to keep liberal material out of the book fair. They don’t want to lose market share because the school districts in Texas and Florida go with the conservative book fair option. So they are making sure their interface allows conservative Christian school employees to feel comfortable with their buying decisions.

There’s a conversation that we should be having about corporate control of our “public” education system that we’re not having.

Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Higher Education

By Beth Mintz

Republished from Marxist Sociology blog.

I recently published an article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology that uses the “student as customer” to help understand why college is so expensive. I explore three factors that contribute to high costs:  1) contemporary understandings of education as a private, rather than a public, good; 2) the ways that schools are funded; and 3) the “marketization” of higher ed.  These processes produce students who are customers, but it is important to point out that this change is rooted in a set of neoliberal assumptions that frame the way that we think about, organize, and fund education, rather than any fundamental change in young people.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of this historical moment. It includes a belief in the following:  the efficiency of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of the public sector that markets require; tax reduction; abandoning the welfare state; and replacing the notion of the public good with a personal responsibility for one’s own welfare.  It has informed public policy in every Democratic and Republican administration since the Reagan years, and it currently structures much of our economic and political lives. This includes the university, where it has shaped institutional practice and individual action.

Neoliberal thought considers higher education a financial investment for students, and it assumes that colleges and universities should compete for customers, just like any other sector. These beliefs have laid the foundation for formal higher educational policy and internal institutional procedure. They have not made the academy more efficient, however, but instead have contributed to the runaway expenses that we see today.

In the United States, ideas about the funding of education turn on whether it is considered a public good; that is, whether the whole community benefits from an educated population, or if it is an investment made by the individual, yielding a return in the form of future earnings. In recent years, the latter vision, that of a private good, has gained ascendancy and this has had a profound impact on financing. It helps explain why so much need-based financial aid takes the form of loans rather than grants, and why public colleges and universities are being systematically defunded.

Moreover, although theorists have long argued that schools reproduce the class system, the victory of the neoliberal agenda has intensified the role of education in solidifying advantage. That colleges and universities survive on those who can pay the bills translates into the structural requirement of privileging the affluent, with the needs of many low and middle-income students ignored.  It also has a profound effect on student behavior as education becomes a commodity to be used for competitive advantage in the labor market, turning students into customers to be pursued.

To attract students in a highly competitive environment, colleges and universities invest in all sorts of things to distinguish themselves from other institutions. The way markets work, however, everyone adopts successful practices, and this means that many very expensive innovations eventually become commonplace. This includes the fancy dorms, dining halls and cutting-edge classrooms so common on campuses these days. Indeed, academia has gone on a multi-decade building spree, often financed by long-term borrowing. Between 2002 and 2012, interest payments almost doubled, growing from  $6 billion to $11 billion for four-year (nonprofit) schools. The University of Colorado, for example, owed approximately $1.5 billion in 2019, with 3.6.% of its annual operating budget going towards debt servicing.

Expanded student services are also common recruitment vehicles, and although they do not typically require large capital outlays, they fuel the growth of administrators. Defined narrowly, about 8.4% of spending in private (nonprofit) four-year institutions and 4.9% for comparable publics is on student services. This contributes to the decline in instructional spending as a percentage of total expenses in both the public and private (non-profit) sectors which, in 2017-2018, accounted for 27% and 31%  of four-year schools’ budgets, respectively.  Add to this nearly a half a billion dollars spent on advertising each year, and the role of competition and marketization in tuition escalation becomes clearer.

Among upper middle-class families, prestige has become the centerpiece of college aspirations. When education is viewed as a vehicle for competitive advantage in a labor market – as a private good – and attending a prestigious school is believed to distinguish one from the large pool of competitors, students pursue prestige as a rational strategy for investment maximization.

Colleges and universities understand this well, and, thus, increasing one’s prestige rankings is a central part of many a recruitment strategy.  Indeed, this explains the attention that schools pay to the U. S. New and World Report lists. Attentive institutions have figured out ways to raise their scores and a very common — and expensive – tactic is tuition discounting, where merit scholarships are offered to high achieving customers who would contribute to a school’s selectivity profile. Over time, this practice has spread through academia, so much so that few students now pay full freight. On average, private nonprofits collected  55% of published figures in 2018, with nearly 82% of undergraduates receiving discounts.

Public universities, particularly flagships, use merit aid to recruit academically successful out-of-state students, who contribute to institutional prestige and – theoretically — also counter decreases in state funding by paying higher tuition rates than state residents. But, here again, once everyone has incorporated an innovation, it becomes less effective in distinguishing an institution from its competitors, while the practice remains.  Preliminary research  has found this approach is so pervasive, and the competition so intense, that it may lower total tuition revenue, suggesting that state universities have become particularly vulnerable to the market failure of tuition discounting.

Moreover, merit money privileges the wealthy; it has grown at the expense of need-based scholarships and it goes predominately to upper income students, with awards tending to increase with income levels. This has led to  decreases in the proportion of low income and minority undergraduates in college in general, with public sector schools especially hard hit.

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of this historical moment, has contributed to the rise of the “student as customer” with costly ramifications. The contemporary view of education as a private-good, for example, justifies the massive underfunding of higher education and helps explain why we are transferring its cost from the community to the individual. Given the belief in the power of the market, the non-profit world now follows the logic of the private sector, with colleges and universities developing institutional practices to help survive marketization and privatization. Dependence on students who can afford to pay the bills explains many of the strategies that have been widely adopted, but instead of providing advantage in the competition for revenue, they have created very expensive necessities. This contributes to skyrocketing tuition, while affecting the class and racial/ethnic composition of contemporary campuses. When compared to the conventional wisdom of trust the market, then, the conclusion is that corporatization and marketization are important drivers in tuition cost escalation.

Beth Mintz is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont.  Her research interests include occupational segregation, corporate structure, gender, and health care.

To read more, see: Beth Mintz. “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology” in The American Journal of Economic and Sociology 2021.

[Image by Kevin Dooley via Flicker (CC BY 2.0)]

The Desire To Get Back To Normal Post-COVID-19 Ignores Black Girls

(Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times)

By Chetachukwu Agwoeme and Christopher M. Wright

In the past year, we have dealt with a global pandemic as well as the violent murders of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. In response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others, activists, and organizers have rallied people to the streets to protest for justice and awareness to the terrorism Black people face in America, and ultimately a call to defund the police. As a result of these protests, there are calls to adopt an ideology of anti-racism. For example, there have been posts of Black squares in “solidarity” with Black Lives on social media, as well as a surge of corporations suddenly advocating for “Black Lives Matter.” Although institutions, including schools, have pledged a commitment to anti-racism, things have not fundamentally changed, specifically for Black girls.

Black girls — who have experienced multiple forms of vanishment, violence, and utter disregard in schools — are now having to face another form of harm in the school building, COVID-19. This crusade to “get back to normal” ignores yet again how harmful our “normal” has been for Black girls in schools. As Black men, we believe it is important to focus on Black girls, because of the multiple forms of violence they face due to their intersecting identities that are overlooked with a “race first” analysis of Blackness.

The desire to get back to normal not only shows how Black girls’ experiences are ignored in what is considered “normal”, but also reveals a lack of attention on how COVID-19 has impacted the Black community. According to the CDC, Black people are 1.1x more likely to catch the virus, 2.9x more likely to be hospitalized by it, and 1.9x more likely to die from it.

The vaccine rollout has also worked to expose inequities in public health. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that in every state in the U.S., Black people are getting vaccinated at rates significantly lower than their white counterparts. The lack of access to the vaccine while schools continue to open presents larger realities of public apathy for Black people by school policy makers. Protection and safety for Black children are not being considered when reopening schools because it was never considered prior to the virus. Therefore, “getting back to normal” as a process means to resume the physical and spiritual violence in the lived experiences of Black girls in schools.

In January of 2021, a Black girl was tased in a high school in Florida by a school resource officer (SRO) in the attempt to break up a fight. In the same week, another Black girl was body slammed head first into the concrete by a school resource officer in a separate Florida school. These examples of violence against Black girls by SROs are unfortunately not new. In 2015, a SRO body slammed a 16-year-old Black girl in a South Carolina high school for refusing to leave the classroom after being accused of classroom disruption by her teacher. In 2019, a 16-year-old Black girl in Chicago was pushed and dragged down a set of stairs by police officers before being punched and shocked with a stun gun multiple times by officers because the girl was accused of being disruptive by her teacher. These instances of violence that have happened pre-and post COVID-19, are not only assaults on the bodies of Black girls, but on their spirits.

Spirit Murdering, a term coined by legal scholar Patricia Williams and expanded to the field of education by Bettina Love, refers to the complete denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance —all things a person needs to be human and to be educated—due to systemic forms of racism undergirded by antiblackness. In schools, SROs participate in the systemic, institutionalized, anti-black state-sanctioned violence that damages the souls of Black girls. With SROs as part of the school environment, this extends the prison state, leaving Black students vulnerable to state sanctioned violence under the guise of student safety. SROs are law enforcement officers who are often not trained to work in school contexts. Because of this unfamiliar environment, SROs force the school environment to adapt to the needs of law enforcement, thus opening a learning space to security cameras, metal detectors, and drug-sniffing dogs.

The forms of violence Black girls face in schools are unique because of the intersecting oppressions they face due to their race and gender. In Monique Morris’s “Pushout,” she found Black girls were punished for displays of Black girlhood and overall agency. Things such as falling asleep, standing up for themselves, asking questions, wearing natural hair, wearing “revealing” clothing, and in some cases engaging in traditional teenage angst resulted in their punishment. When Black girls display behaviors typical of all youth, it is viewed as threatening or disruptive by teachers because of the lack of understanding of Blackness or Black girlhood.

Blacks girls get framed as “loud,” “ghetto,” and “thirsty for attention” by teachers and fellow peers, which trivializes the violences they face in schools, thus positioning Black girls as the problem. When framed as “problems,” Black girls are then adultified. The adultification of Black girls is a form of dehumanization rooted in anti-blackness, intentionally meant to rob them from their girlhood — often leaving them unprotected. When robbed of this crucial milestone of growth, Black girls are vulnerable and unequipped to deal with adult forms of punishment at such a young age.

Overall, we need to be critical during this moment of transition, and ask ourselves what are the non-negotiables that must be attended to in order for us to send our Black girls back into schools? What is “antiracist” about getting back to normal? What does this mean when “under normal circumstances” Black girls experience violence in their schools by SROs, teachers, and fellow students? As we’ve mentioned, schools were already enclosures of anti-blackness through their punitive policies and practices. Is the desire to get back to normal worth the sacrifice of Black girls’ safety? This moment is one for deep reflection, reimagining, and organizing around these questions so that we can chart a path of resistance for Black students and their education. With a path toward resistance against this desire for normalcy, we must center Black girls who are often invisible and ignored. While the rest of the world is looking to rebuild the world they knew, Black people must continue to resist the violence that necessitates this rebuilding.

Chetachukwu U. Agwoeme, MA is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh studying Urban Education. Chetachukwu’s scholarship is dedicated to interrogating our current practices around school safety in regards to Black students. Ideally, he wants to change schools (which have been sites of suffering for most minoritized students) to places where students learn how to free themselves and free each other. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland, College Park respectively.

Christopher M. Wright is a PhD student in the Urban Education program at The University of Pittsburgh. His research centers Black spaces as geographic sights of political struggle and worldmaking. He engages patterns of Black displacement and Black organized struggle. Chris holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from The University of Oklahoma.

How Black Student Civic Agency Impacted the 2020 Elections

By Asha Layne

The years of Trumpism have been marked by relentless assaults on facts and evidence based science leaving an indelible memory on the minds of all Americans. In the final months of his presidency, Trump’s futile efforts along with other Republicans, to cancel out the votes of many Americans, specifically Black voters, in many Democratic states was representative of voter disenfranchisement. True to form, one of his most outrageously alarming act of voting misinformation, was when the former president encouraged his supporters to commit voter fraud, by suggesting that voters should send in a mail-in ballot and to vote in person. When that failed, Trump and his allies quickly began targeting voting ballots with largely Black voter populations in a desperate attempt to discredit Joe Biden’s presidential win. Recently, former Trump lawyer and staunch ally, Mr. Rudy Giuliani was handed a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems accusing him of spreading false claims about the company’s handling of the November 2020 elections. In keeping up with the barrage of viral misinformation and right wing voting conspiracies, we must not overlook the civic agency of young Black student voters that prevented Trump from retaining power despite his unprecedented attempts to disenfranchise Black voters.

In November, Black voters showed up to the polls in record numbers in response to the former President’s appalling, yet unsurprising attempts of racial division and voting suppression, the COVID pandemic, and a nationwide call for racial justice after the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. According to exit poll data, Black voters overwhelmingly voted Democratic and with a surge in turnout among young people of all races. Research conducted by Tufts University, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), reported that Black youths played a critical role in the 2020 election especially in key swing and voter suppression states like Georgia where 90% of young Black youth voted for Joe Biden. In the same report, data also showed that young Black women strongly supported the President-elect Joe Biden by voting slightly higher at 90% compared to 84% for young Black men. This data reflects the significance of Black students who fall under two categories: the Black vote and student vote.

Black student civic agency is nothing new, it has a deep rich history that affirms the tradition Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) play in politics. Historically, HBCUs became known as sites for political activism during a time when White supremacist ideologies prevented Black students from entering White college institutions and mainstream society. These educational institutions would also serve as sites for political activism and agency as tools of empowerment. HBCUs held and still today, possess the unique advantage in increasing political activity among young Black people. Civic engagement and HBCUs have played a critical role in American democracy and democratic politics.

HBCU representation in politics can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century at which this political process produced prominent leaders of that time who lead Black students in political agency activities like sit-ins, boycotts, and voter registration drives that would help shape the legacy of HBCUs for generations to come. What this 2020 election have shown the country is that HBCUs are not only leading institutions of higher educations but the producers of political stalwarts for the Democratic Party such as Spelman alum Stacey Abrams, Morehouse College alum Raphael Warnock, and Howard alum and Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.

The November elections confuted the misconceptions that Black students and Blacks do not vote. The truth is, young Black voter agency propelled the now President, Joe Biden to the White House and Democratic Georgia Senators Jon Osoff and Ralphael Warnock to the Senate affirming the significance of young Black voters. More than ever young Black students at HBCU campuses have become more civically engaged as a result of Trumpism, racial injustice, the pandemic, and desperate need for change. Despite the United States’ long history of voter suppression of people of color, the recent events during the tenure of former President Donald J. Trump will not only empower young voters to critically think but to continue the fight against injustices.

Reopening Schools: We Do Not Have To Descend Into COVID Hell

By Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee and E.B. Shaw

With Corona virus cases spiking across the country, America is on the verge of forcing millions of people into extreme danger. Suddenly, everyone from CEOs, the President, state governors, and the corporate media are calling for schools to open “to save the economy”.

No country has tried to open schools with the virus spreading like here in the US. We are currently in a massive wave of surging cases in 40 states. There are not enough tests or testing. How do you open schools if you can’t test and trace? There’s no way that you can keep a school safe from coronavirus if the virus is raging out of control in the community where the school is located.

Before schools physically re-open, certain principles of public health must be established:

• No re-opening without full scientific best practices. So far, this is seriously lacking.

• No re-opening without dealing with the vast practical hurdles. These steps require more funding, not less. So far, the funding to address these problems does not exist.

• No re-opening without total and complete public transparency. So far, decisions are made behind closed doors. Planning is slapdash and haphazard at best. Teachers, unions and communities must be fully involved as co-equals with politicians in establishing policies.

• Schools should continue to be food centers for the communities, but they should reinstate and expand what government has cut — access to nurses, vision services, mental health and cultural support. Communities need these services now more than ever.

• We cannot fail to hold government accountable for securing public health and public safety. Governments must do what it takes to guarantee childcare in safe ways.. We have no choice here. Public schools are still controlled locally. We must exert our power to protect our children.

We’ve already seen what happens when we use shortcuts and go against public health guidance in reopening. Other countries have been successful in suppressing the level of COVID-19, they have one thing in common — a national coordinated strategy.

The US response to the virus has been fractured, reckless, and incompetent. Rather than the federal government organizing a national coordinated response, it has put corporations in total control.

The government refuses to provide adequate unemployment or health care, thus making families desperate to work.  Many European countries cover 60% to 90% of workers’ wages when they can not work. So do we really have to risk our children and our families so corporations benefit? It really does not have to be this way.

Corporations are demanding their workers return to work so they can make a profit from their investments, but they refuse to provide childcare. So children, teachers and school staff, families and communities, must risk their lives to open schools that could not even guarantee toilet paper before the virus. The only people to benefit from a premature physical opening will be billionaires and politicians of both parties. This is why they tout political reasons to re-open, while ignoring scientific precaution.

These same people, who previously had no trouble closing schools throughout neighborhoods and subjecting children to hours of high-stakes testing at computer screens, now state that keeping children out of school denies them the “emotional, social, and knowledge growth they desperately need.” Suddenly, also, the teachers who were degraded as the worst problem with public schools are now heroic essential fron-tline workers!

Schools are set to open district-by-district across the country while many nail shops, gyms, and bars remain closed. Many schools only use easily contaminated recycled air throughout whole buildings instead of widows that can be opened to bring in fresh air. Taking steps as minimal as social distancing will cost vast amounts. Little things become big problems. Before, a Kindergarten teacher could take the whole class to the bathroom at once. Now a class of 15, that requires 6 feet of spacing, forms a line 90 feet long! And how exactly are bathrooms going to be sanitized?

There are no clear guidelines; planning is confused and hidden from the public; PPE’s are in short supply; school budgets are being slashed even as the costs of adequately dealing with the virus skyrocket. School nurses were virtually eliminated before the virus hit. Now, what exactly is going to happen if a child feels sick?

The gap between school finances, destroyed by the virus, and the greatly increased costs, also caused by the virus, runs into billions. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has estimated the funding required to reopen public schools safely is at least $116.5 billion.

Trey Hollingsworth, Indiana Congressman, stated that people dying from the virus is the lesser of two evils to the economy not opening up. CNN reported that Hollingsworth said: “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.” Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, announced that old people should welcome re-opening, even if that means they would die.

This corporate class also touts the murderous notion of “herd immunity”, meaning that after 3 million people or so die, the virus cannot spread any more. We have watched health care workers sicken, live in their cars so not to infect their families, and wear plastic bags instead of PPEs. What will happen to school staff?

When policies and political choices set up people to die at “acceptable levels”, it is fair to conclude that this is not an accident. Even before the virus, digital technology has been turning jobs into temp work or no work at all. Corporations are simply not going to spend money to support people they cannot use. In this context, physical re-opening is designed to accept a specific amount of death, to establish toleration of death as a new normal.

Can schools physically re-open now? If so, how?

Hawaii has announced that schools will re-open when no one in the state has tested positive for one month. The Florida Education Commissioner, Richard Corcoran, is the former Speaker of the Florida House and a charter school owner. He demands that Florida open its schools 5 days a week even as Florida COVID cases reach record high levels. Precaution is scrapped for pragmatism.

America’s schools do not meet even the most lenient advice for physical re-opening, which are found on the White House website. Teachers advocate no physical re-opening until no new cases arise in the past 14 days, the time for symptoms to appear. Some districts are beginning to scrap immediate physical re-opening.

Once again, as with the George Floyd rebellion, our character as a people will be tested. Will we stand together, or will our passivity make us complicit in sanctioning unnecessary public death?

Yes, the mental, physical and emotional health of children is critical. No, this cannot be achieved by physical re-opening schools like before. That is impossible. We can find ways to bring young people back together again, but it means letting go of the idea that schools can return to normal. This step requires the imagination and agency of the communities schools serve.

The virus proves that no one is safe unless everyone is safe. The same is true for our schools. For a country founded on genocide, slavery and inequality, the challenge once again is to stand up for the right of quality public education for all.

Everyone now can see the critical and vital importance of public schools to our communities. Even before the virus, schools have been the anchor of the community. Closing public schools is a method of gentrification and community dispossession. Now we see once again that healthy schools create healthy communities and healthy communities create healthy schools.

Teacher unions and parents are advocating that public schools, in these times of COVID, should anchor the communities by expanding the public services they offer.

Immediate and Future Challenges

Whether schools physically open or not, the nature of public education has dramatically changed. Through the Spring, public schools offered online distance learning. As students graduated in June, Zoom Video Communications, Inc announced that it was being used by 100,000 schools globally.

Education has gone from being supported by technology to being dependent on technology and from being corporate-supported to becoming corporate-dependent.

Corporations like Pearson and Google tout online education as a way of saving money in tough times, but this just leads to private profits for corporations.

The latest vampire is Turnitin.com. Students turn in their essays. The website checks for plagiarism; then it sends it back to you, marked in red where you copied something out of the encyclopedia. But they also offer school districts more advanced options like: grading every paper… or maybe even student surveillance.

Under corporate control, online learning, distance learning and virtual charter schools are a dismal failure. The California Attorney General is investigating the entire virtual charter industry for putting private profit ahead of quality education. The largest virtual charter corporation, K12 Inc, “educates” 120,000 students, making $900 million in revenue, all from taxpayer money earmarked for public education. Only half of online high school students graduate within four years, compared to 84% nationally. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that students in virtual charters do so poorly in math and English that it’s as if they didn’t attend school at all.

Most teachers estimate that only about 25% of their students do well in online education. The education model is the same drill & kill, test & fail regime that students could not succeed in even before the virus. Most students have trouble learning through screens since the other vital ways that humans learn are eliminated or reduced. And, of course, how does a family provide enough laptops for every child, much less the expense of connecting through Wi-fi?

Government at every level has invited billionaires, tech corporations, and CEOs to determine what public education will look like as the virus rolls on. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invited Bill Gates and Google into the state to “re-imagine public education.” In other words, government is systematically replacing elected officials, who are (theoretically) accountable to the people, with private, unaccountable capitalists in a campaign to defund and privatize public schools and debase the purpose of education.

The ethical and moral implications of this corporate effort to terminate the education our children and communities need are highly disturbing. There is little public discussion about this even as government proclaims online learning as the miracle of the age.

US schools at every level are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. By the time the 2020-2021 school year is over, corporations and governments – if unopposed – will establish a degraded model that works only for the elite and very few others.

When government can bailout billionaires with trillions of dollars, we see that the money exists to build a system of public education that can build the leaders we need to transform the world.

Teaching today must unleash the marvelous powers and creativity of our collective humanity. Students are the people the world needs today to overcome the challenges of a desperately sick population, a sick society and a sick planet.

Unlike most of the world, where the needs of society were put first, in the US every problem is presented as an individual problem and every solution is presented as an individual solution.

It is the same with public education. Ronald Reagan proclaimed that there was no such thing as “society”, meaning no problems result from society, so you’re on your own. This has been America’s mantra ever since, unless of course it relates to corporate governance.

But now we see, scientifically, that the only solutions that can work must be organized at the national level by government to benefit everyone. Social problems are not individual; the emanate from how society is organized. Social problems require social solutions.

Just as COVID-19 demands a national coordinated strategy, the problems of safely re-opening public schools demand national solutions. Not piecemeal, local, short-term quick fixes. Instead, upgrade our schools by combining a public health approach with a public schools approach.

Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee, and E.B. Shaw are members of the National Public Education Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America

Students, Peasants, and Communism in Colombia: An Interview with Oliver Dodd (Part Two)

By Devon Bowers

This is Part Two of our interview with Oliver Dodd, a PhD student at Nottingham University, where we expand upon his April 2019 article in the online edition of the Morning Star.

What is the current political and economic situation in Colombia?

Since the early 1990s Colombia engaged on a process of neo-liberal restructuring, largely to finance the counter-insurgency war against the powerful Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In return for economic and military aid, the United States and the International Monetary Fund, demanded neoliberal reforms that entailed economic privatisation, liberalisation of foreign trade, financial deregulation, and reduced tariffs. As a result, Colombia's economic model today is largely extractivist and its capitalist accumulation strategy is dependent on those multinational corporations based in the core of the international political economy.

In terms of production of revenue from exports, Colombia's traditional export - coffee - which in the 1980s produced more than half of the country's export revenue, now represents only around 5% of export revenue. Currently, coal, oil and gas, make up more than 60% of export revenue. These economic changes have led to political changes. The multinational corporations invested in extractivism are overwhelmingly based in the capitalist core. The majority of the profits generated in Colombia's economy are put into the pockets of the finance capitalists, based outside Colombia. Furthermore, relative to other sectors - manufacturing (around 10%), services (around 35%), oil, coal and gas generates significantly higher profits. This trend puts multinational corporations in a stronger economic position vis-à-vis Colombia's declining national bourgeoisie. Nationally based companies are increasingly being bought out by multinational corporations, further extending foreign based influence over Colombia's economy and making the country more vulnerable to social forces organised at world order levels.

The peace accord signed with FARC in 2016 is under severe threat. Paramilitary killings of social activists since the signing of the peace agreement have increased, thousands of FARC combatants have either remobilised or refused to demobilise because of what they perceived as betrayal on the part of FARC's leadership, or the danger of paramilitary killings - more than 85 FARC ex-combatants have now been murdered since November 2016. FARC dissident leaders that have taken the hard-line position of refusing to demobilise basically argue that armed struggle is the only path to transform Colombia's political economy. In short, the 2016 peace accord has not brought peace.

However, I would argue that "peoples war" is no longer an applicable strategy in the historically specific conditions of Colombia today. The overwhelming majority of citizens live in urban areas and many of the insurgent social structures formed in the countryside have become corrupted and bureaucratised. The so-called "revolution in military affairs" (RIMA) has allowed the armed forces, notably in the form of air-power, to increasingly put the leftist insurgents on the defensive. Today satellite technology can be employed to detect guerrillas based in the mountains, let alone the countryside - where peasants, especially the youth, are increasingly departing for the towns and cities. This is not to suggest that guerrilla warfare cannot play any useful role as part of an overarching political strategy, but a military-centric strategy is becoming more difficult to implement effectively. Colombia's state, largely due to Plan Colombia and the military technology and intelligence capabilities it provided, has shown a consistent capacity to target even the most protected and important of guerrilla commanders. Until 2008, not a single member of FARC's 7-person secretariat had been killed, but since then, at least four have been successfully targeted and significant numbers of FARC's and ELN's medium level command have been killed. I know of some highly capable and politically educated leaders within the ELN, who were made "High-Valued-Targets" and very swiftly killed. This suggests to me that RIMA is changing the balance of forces in favour of the Colombian military and its main sponsor - the U.S.

There is also a significant shortage of intellectuals within both FARC dissidents' groups and the ELN, largely because they were successfully targeted by the Colombian military. This means that "militias" - those responsible for recruitment and upholding law and order in rural villages and towns, which are usually organised some distance from the more disciplined and politicised structures of the armed guerrilla units - sometimes tend to act without discipline and bring the organisations into disrepute among the civilian population. There is then, the realistic possibility that following another peace accord, these "conflict entrepreneurs" will continue to function as strictly criminal entities, thus leading to no practical end in the conflict.

ELN's strategy however, as already mentioned, does not entail a "military solution" to the conflict. Armed structures are understood by ELN as permanent, unless the conditions of class struggle within Colombia's periphery change to undermine guerrilla struggle completely - this conception of armed struggle is distinct from the more military-centred strategy of people's war, based on surrounding the cities from the countryside. The ELN's strategy implies that armed force has a utility in class struggle, not that political power will necessarily come through the barrel of a gun. This has been one of the fundamental differences in strategy between ELN and FARC for decades.

Regarding Colombia's trade-union structures, neoliberalism is making it more difficult for the labour movement to organise. On top of having a significant and dispersed informal sector in Colombia, repeated right-wing governments (I include the Santos administration here) have favoured economic growth along neoliberal lines rather than extending the political and economic rights of workers; this has amounted to government policies and a political economy that makes it harder for the trade-unions to organise, in the midst of paramilitary violence. At the same time, recent changes to agricultural economic policies have made it more difficult for peasants to earn a living, thereby increasing displacement and opening up land for capitalist investment. It is important to note that such rural-to-urban migration, of the constant supply of formerly rural labours desperately looking for work in the cities, enables urban based capitalists to benefit from the increased competition for work and therefore to keep wages low.

Even the peace agreement seems to have been conceived, to a large extent, as part of a neoliberal economic growth strategy. By signing the peace accord with FARC, multinational corporations have been able to access territories, wealthy in natural resources, which were previously governed by the FARC. Indeed, a key motivation for the accord, unveiled by the former President, Juan Manuel Santos, was that "A Colombia in peace will attract more investments that will create more and better jobs" - in other words, the neoliberal capitalist accumulation model will be strengthened because there will be no leftist insurgent forces to put pressure on international investors.

Still, the fact that Gustavo Petro placed second in the 2018 presidential elections is significant. The last time a leftist candidate in Colombia's political system challenged for president, he was assassinated - Jorge Gaitán in 1948. As such, we have seen the rise of a left-wing surge in Colombia, like in other countries - Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos and Syriza in Spain and Greece respectfully. The current right-wing president, Iván Duque, who employed populist discourse to get elected, is being unmasked as no different from the establishment. This may create some opening for the left in the next elections, enabling it to open up some political space for the labour movement to organise a fight-back.

In what ways does the US supporting anti-guerilla efforts in Colombia linked to a larger, regional strategy push back against leftist movements in Latin America?

U.S. support for the Colombian state goes back many decades. Colombia borders five countries and, with ten U.S. military bases, permits the U.S. to effectively project its military power into Central and South American countries. Also, Colombia's economy is potentially very balanced, and benefits from several natural resources and has very fertile land for agriculture. There exist the resources to develop powerful industrial and manufacturing sectors, moving away from what is currently an economic strategy of extractivism.

A socialist state in Colombia, supported by a powerful labour movement, could have a transformative impact on Latin America and change the correlation of social class forces in favour of the socialist movement. It would be possible for a socialist government in Colombia to pursue a relatively independent political economic strategy, while focusing on economic and political independence for the region as a whole. The experience of the small and economically impoverished island of socialist Cuba on Latin America's left and labour movement - situated only ninety miles from the U.S - is an example of what a revolutionary state in the much wealthier Colombia could achieve, in terms of potentially shaping the future of the region. In other words, a left-wing or socialist-led Colombia could represent a major defeat for U.S. imperialism.

Additionally, Colombia's capitalist system is difficult to transform constitutionally, and the country boasts of having one of the longest surviving liberal-democratic systems in Latin America, although state terrorism employed against workers and peasants has remained constant throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Historically, the two dominant political parties, the Liberal and Conservative party, solidly represented capitalist interests, and rarely disagreed over fundamental questions relating to economic change. These trends make Colombia a reliable ally for the U.S. in its "backyard".

For these reasons, the Colombian state has been a consistently reliable ally of the U.S. Having only ever had pro-capitalist governments, a free-trade agreement is in place, Colombia's economy is dominated by U.S. multinationals, and the state has loyally followed the U.S. government's policy of open hostility to the so-called "Pink-tide" - the surge of South American based, left-wing, anti-imperialist influence over the last two decades. In its fight against the leftist rebels, Colombia opened up its economy to U.S. corporations in return for economic and military aid. And currently, Colombia is being used as the main proxy to further aggravate the political and economic crisis in Venezuela. The dominant capitalist classes in Colombia will benefit enormously from regime change in Venezuela.

Initially, the U.S. drew on the pretext of combating drugs to justify intervention into Colombia. The U.S. State Department insisted that Plan Colombia, the U.S. military and economic initiative implemented at the start of the 1999-2002 peace negotiations with FARC, was about tackling the drug-trade. In reality, Plan Colombia was employed as a counter-insurgency measure that upgraded and restructured Colombia's armed forces and was used largely to target the leftist rebels, as opposed to the drug-cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. It also led to the major expansion of U.S. military influence in Colombian society, including the building of several U.S. military bases. In other words, the pretext of anti-drug activity, and then anti-guerrilla activity, was exploited by the U.S. to establish a base of political, military and economic influence in a strategically located country of South America.

Where can people learn more about ELN and your own work?

There is a momentous amount of work on the armed conflict and the insurgent groups published in Colombia. Unfortunately, very little of this work has been translated from Spanish into English. This needs to be rectified, and I am surprised that so little effort has been put into this process of translation, as it would allow international audiences to learn about Colombia's complicated history - Colombia is understood as an "outlier" in politics and international relations scholarship. Indeed, the depth of Colombian scholarship on the armed conflict is strong.

Regarding the ELN in the Spanish language, "La Guerrilla Por Dentro" by Jaime Arenas, a former ELN guerrilla gives an insider perspective on the first stages of the movements' formation. Darío Villamizar has also published, in Spanish, one of the key histories of the several insurgent movements in Colombia. Carlos Medina, in addition to other important works on the ELN, has just written a history of ELN's ideas from 1958 to 2018, in Spanish, where he talks about the worker-peasant-student alliance. Carlos Medina's works are very detailed and significant; relatively little has been written on the ELN in any language. I haven't come across a book dedicated to understanding the ELN's trajectory in English, but the journal article by Gruber and Pospisil, entitled "'Ser Eleno': Insurgent identity formation in the ELN", vigorously contests some of the significant misconceptions about the movement.

I am in the first year of my PhD at Nottingham University working on Colombia's 2016 peace agreement with FARC, which analyses the underlying dynamics from a historical materialist perspective. My MA dissertation, slightly modified, was published in the Midlands Historical Review and can be found online. I have also written two journalistic pieces on the ELN in the Morning Star newspaper. I am currently working on a journal article relating to the "political" inside the ELN - challenging the narrative that the ELN has "lost its way" and merely become a criminal entity - based on my five months of ethnographic research in 2015. My blog about armed conflict in Colombia can be found online at http://www.colombianconflict.com

My Students Are Terrified: Teaching in the Days After Trump

By Bryant William Sculos

Teaching today, November 9th at 11 am - as neoliberal Democratic Party candidate and likely popular vote winner, Hillary Clinton, delivered her concession speech to her supporters and vicariously to President-Elect and neo-fascist Donald Trump, who, with a message of anti-immigration, anti-free trade, hyper-capitalism, anti-climate justice, sexism, and nationalism, was able to turn reliably Democratic states red -- was torturous.

For me personally, I have been terrified of both candidates for months and months now. Thinking of choosing between largely domestically-palatable liberal identity politics, irredeemable corporate capitalism, and criminal imperial hyper-militancy and the unpredictable bigoted narcissism of Donald the Orange's neo-fascism, was never one that left me sleeping very well. I chose Jill Stein, but it didn't really matter in the end.

Bernie gave me hope. He gave the Left hope. If he had been the nominee of the Democratic Party, my students-and the world-would be less terrified today. Yesterday, the morning of November 8th, I was planning my lecture for today and I was struggling to find the right way to encourage my first-year writing students to push the impending President-Elect Hillary Clinton to live up to her progressive agenda, which was much more popular with college-age people than it was with the general electorate.

I didn't need those notes today. I needed something different. Waking up after three restless hours of sleep, I had nothing. After forty-five minutes of traffic, I still had nothing. After the walk from my car to my classroom, I still had nothing. I didn't know what to expect from my students or myself. Typically still quiet and half-awake when I walk in, my students were talking a lot today-and no one looked very happy. As I would come to find out, they were-and are-terrified.

My students are black and white; they are women and men and transgender; they are gay and straight; they are largely first or second generation immigrants; some are citizens and some are not; some have children; some care for elderly relatives; most work part or full-time jobs while going to school full-time. I am terrified for them. In truth, I would have been terrified for them, and people in other countries even more so, if Hillary Clinton would have won, but they probably wouldn't have been-for better or worse.

I sat on the table in the front of the classroom and we had an open conversation. Since this is a freshman writing course, I decided to then give them a free-writing exercise to explore their thoughts and feelings a bit more. Anonymized and with their permission, here is some of what they wrote-and I wish I could say I was surprised:

"…I am afraid of what's to come. Will there be more social chaos throughout the states? Is he [Trump] truly fit to govern decisions for millions of people with [his] racist and misogynistic mentality[?] I am petrified of what will occur in the upcoming months."

"…I am afraid of the message that his [Trump's] election sends out to the society. If the President is disrespectful to women and is a racist, others might feel that's okay."

"…I'm worried about all the minority groups being affected because of Trump's win. [With] Many of the things he claimed to [do]: building the wall, deporting illegal residents, imprisoning LGBT couples, as said by Vice President [-elect] Mike Pence….people will have their lives changed by Trump's presidency."

"I am afraid that with the stances Republicans hold, my parents will be forced to work their stressful menial jobs well past their retirement date. I am also concerned that with Trump's unwillingness to support climate change reform and renewable energy, we will begin to see the effects of our dying planet much sooner than anticipated. I am scared for a nation that I no longer feel at home in."

These responses are partial, but generally representative of the rest of the responses. Only three of my twenty-two students were even somewhat optimistic, hopeful, or excited for potential changes to the US political system they think Trump's presidency could bring. The rest are completely terrified.

Now the question remains: what am I supposed to do next week when we have our next class? Next month? Next year? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure yet.

I do know something that I will do moving forward, something I did today after seeing their fear, something that I should have been doing a better job of all along: I will remind my students to take care of one another, to take care of those who are most vulnerable in their universes, and when the politics of the day presents them with increasingly unpalatable options, to speak out, to organize with one another, and to exercise their rights in ways that make sense to them.

For my part, I will continue to be more aggressively political in my scholarship and engagement with political struggle beyond academia. I owe this to myself, to my students, and to future generations alike. This isn't a strategy per se, but it's the start of one-I hope.

I want to end this with a message written and posted on social media by my younger sister, a freshman undergraduate at Lesley University, which speaks to the kind of disposition we need (and still would have needed if Clinton were elected, but in battling neo-fascism, the need is more urgent that ever):

"[T]o my fellow women, the LGBTQIA+ community, the disabled, abuse survivors, [people of color], immigrants, the mentally ill-my hand is in yours, and no matter what, I love you. [Y]our life is important. [Y]our existence is fundamentally necessary. [I] will welcome you with open arms forever and ever. [W]e will fight through this fire together and we will (somehow) come out on the other side."

*A special thanks is owed to my Fall 2016 ECN 1101 students for their openness and willingness to allow me to share their thoughts here. This piece is dedicated to them.

This piece was originally published in Class, Race and Corporate Power.