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At the risk of bloggy immolation, I'm going to jump into the boiling water of ongoing debates over President Obama's few words on higher education in the 2012 State of the Union Address, wherein he said nothing of Pell Grant awards and yet talked about constructing new policies to make it easier to afford college, especially ones attempting to give institutions incentives to slow down tuition hikes. While I define neoliberalism here in fairly bold strokes, focusing on market rhetoric, public disinvestment, and inconsistencies between rhetoric and reality, this is a tentative judgment for someone who is not an intellectual historian. I am well aware that many terms of political economy are fuzzy or malleable, and my understanding of neoliberalism as a post-WW2 construct is tentative. Yet the term has some core uses in understanding how people talk about and use talk about markets.

"This excerpt from the chapter titled, "Twelve Theses on Education's Future in the Age of Neoliberalism and Terrorism," is taken from the book,  Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues, by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Henry A. Giroux, Kenneth J. Saltman and Sophia A. McClennen and is offered with the kind permission of Paradigm Publishers."

"Neoliberal education reform is plagued by a contradiction in its commitments - schools need autonomy to be responsive to communities, yet most charters are run by non-educators with no stake in these communities. Insulated from public, democratic bodies, charters are operated by "charter management organizations." These organizations often manage multiple schools and are governed by unelected boards in which philanthropists vastly outnumber teachers or parents. Few charter schools are unionized, so educators have little say in the governance of the school. As the public school system is slowly dismantled, school-by-school, charters open in their place. Naturally, this has caused tension between neoliberal reformers and teachers."

In this week's show (Part One of a two part series), Education Radio continues to disrupt the dominant narrative of corporate education reform by investigating the organization Teach for America (TFA). TFA is one of many insidious examples of how the language of social justice and equity is hijacked and appropriated, and instead employed to further the goals of the neoliberal education reform agenda. This agenda includes a firm belief that education should primarily serve the interests of private profit and as with all neoliberal education reformers, TFA is actively intensifying racial and class inequality, and the destruction of education as an essential public good along with the continued decimation of unions - two institutions that are primary determinants of a democratic society.

This paper notes how the theory of disruptive innovation, which arose at Harvard Business School in the late 1990s, and the Tools of Cooperation and Change, a supporting theory that arrived in 2006, together represent the epitome of neoliberal dispossession-based marketization paradigms. The language they bring to debates on policy reform is concise and revealing, the tools practical and effective. Yet in the dozen or so years since their arrival they too have become, to use their own vocabulary, an entrenched interest that serves to perpetuate the status quo of male-dominated capitalism. Education policy makers who understand that "public education is central to the construction of a cosmopolitan moral democracy" (Reid, 2007:292) can at the very least benefit from understanding the language and recognizing the tools. Perhaps they can even turn them to a socially responsible purpose, employing them to help "move the public/private debate past its current impasse" (ibid, 293).

"There's one area where Bezos has been hyper-active, but largely unknown to the general public: education reform. A look at the Bezos Family Foundation, which was founded by Jackie and Mike Bezos but is financed primarily by Jeff Bezos, reveals a fairly aggressive effort in recent years to press forward with a fairly neoliberal education agenda"

"The democratic mission of public education is under assault by a conservative right-wing reform culture in which students are viewed as human capital in schools that are to be administered by market-driven forces."

Striking university students in Québec are well into their 15th week of continuous protests. Their strike, which began primarily in opposition to student debt and the proposed 75% tuition hike, has since expanded to encompass wider critiques of both the university system itself and larger issues of austerity and neoliberal economic reform. Québec's hardline conservative premier, Jean Charest, several days ago pushed through a series of draconian anti-free-speech laws aimed at breaking the strike. Penalties run in the tens of thousands of dollars and up to 10 years in jail for those participating in or even promoting unpermitted protest actions; and even for protest marches that have been approved by the police, the sponsoring organization will be held liable for any and all illegal actions taken at or near the march. In a surprise to absolutely no one but Charest, these laws have not only rekindled student participation in the strike, but sparked an even greater outrage among the general population.

As the DFER veneer for right-wing "parent trigger" laws wears off, and more and more people see the privatization agenda for what it is, charlatans like Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have been scrambling to hide or minimize their ties to right wing extremists. The good news is that it isn't working, and that aside from shills like Andi Rotherham and Alex Russo even mainstream media journalists are starting to see through what the distinguished Professor Diane Ravitch refers to as the "Parent Tricker." Josh Eidelson's "Parent trigger": The latest tactic for fighting teachers' unions is a good example.

"Mic check! MIC CHECK! Let the Puppet show begin! LET THE PUPPET SHOW BEGIN!"   The demonstrators who held the floor at a December 14 meeting at Newtown High School in Corona, Queens, were part of Occupy DOE (Department of Education), a mix of veteran teachers, parents and Occupy Wall Street activists that is bringing the language and tactics of OWS to the grassroots fight against neoliberal education reform.

In this weeks' program we look at the attempt by education reformers to impose value added measures on teacher evaluation as an example of how neoliberal forces have used the economic crisis to blackmail schools into practices that do not serve teaching and learning, but do serve the corporate profiteers as they work to privatize public education and limit the goals of education to vocational training for corporate hegemony. These processes constrict possibilities for educational experiences that are critical, relational and transformative. We see that in naming these processes and taking risks both individually and collectively we can begin to speak back to and overcome these forces. In this program we speak with Sean Feeney, principal from Long Island New York, about the stance he and other principals have taken against the imposition of value added measures in the new Annual Professional Performance Review in New York State. We also speak with Celia Oyler, professor of education at Teachers College Columbia University, and Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, about the impact of value added measures on teacher education and the corporate powers behind these measures.

Russo's underhanded dig is followed up with his suggestion that billionaire funded astroturf groups like StudentsFirst, Stand For Children, and TeachPlus have the potential to correct what he perceives as an "imbalance." For Russo, the corporate education reform astroturf need to step up and post comments under articles, use twitter, blog, and avail themselves of social media. It simply isn't enough to be funded by the likes of the wealthiest one percent including names like Walton, DeVos, Broad, Bradley, Gates, Koch, Hastings, Dell, Powell-Jobs, Scaife, Tilson, et al. It's not enough to have the unwavering support of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus at every level of government including the most anti-public education administration and Department of Education of all time. It isn't sufficient to have the unquestioning editorial support of every mainstream media outlet-not to mention Rupert Murdoch's vast propaganda empire-all of which spew a nonstop stream of privatization propaganda with nary a dissenting note. This last point is of paramount importance, since it's often forgotten that outside the realm of privilege that has regular access to the Internet, there's a majority that obtains their information from more traditional sources.

The idea that our education system should serve the needs of the free market and even be run by private interests is not new. "Those parts of education," wrote the economist Adam Smith in his famous 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, "for the teaching of which there are not public institutions, are generally the best-taught."2 More recently, Milton Friedman introduced the idea of market-driven education in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. With the economic downturn of the early 1970s, Friedman's ultra-right-wing free-market ideas would become guiding principles for the U.S. government and be forced onto states throughout the world. The push toward privatization and deregulation, two of the key tenets of what is known as neoliberalism, haven't just privatized formerly public services; they have unabashedly channeled public money into private coffers. "Philanthropreneurs,"3 corporations, and ideologues are currently using charter schools to accomplish these goals in education.

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than the overstated former Washington D.C. Chancellor of Schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty's term in office Michelle Rhee, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk. This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher's unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education-and the role of public school teachers-in a deeply unequal society.

what better way to capture the Bizarro world of education reform than with a serious work of journalism, disguised as a comic? Our three-part series - published over the next three months - is not intended to be funny, but rather, to pull back the progressive propaganda disguising the neoliberal, corporate nature of education reform. Our goal is to expose the free-market policies that really make up "education reform"; how these policies threaten our public education; who supports these policies; and, ultimately, what we might be able to do about the "Disaster Capitalism Curriculum."

"The U.S. working class was slow to respond to the hard times it faced during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Finally, however, in February, 2011, workers in Wisconsin began the famous uprising that electrified the country, revolting in large numbers against Governor Scott Walker's efforts to destroy the state's public employee labor unions.  A few months later, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which supported many working class efforts, spread from New York City to the rest of the nation and the world. Then, in September 2012, Chicago's public school teachers struck, in defiance of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel's attempt to destroy the teachers' union and put the city's schools firmly on the path of neoliberal austerity and privatization. These three rebellions shared the growing awareness that economic and political power in the United States are firmly in the hands of a tiny minority of fantastically wealthy individuals whose avarice knows no bounds. These titans of finance want to eviscerate working men and women, making them as insecure as possible and wholly dependent on the dog-eat-dog logic of the marketplace, while at the same time converting any and all aspects of life into opportunities for capital accumulation."

"The attack on the spirit of higher education is exemplified in the installation of former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a neoliberal archfiend of public schooling, as president of Purdue University."

Given the rise of neoliberalism over the last twenty years-the extension of the market into every sphere of life-it's no surprise that civil society has begun to receive the same attention. Large parts of politics and government, health care and education, knowledge production and the media have already been overtaken, but civil society, one could argue, is a more important case because it's the ground from which alternatives can grow.

Who should read this book? Anyone who is touched by public education - teachers, administrators, teacher-educators, students, parents, politicians, pundits, and citizens - ought to read this book. It will speak to educators, policymakers and citizens who are concerned about the future of education and its relation to a robust, participatory democracy. The perspectives offered by a wonderfully diverse collection of contributors provide a glimpse into the complex, multilayered factors that shape, and are shaped by, institutions of schooling today. The analyses presented in this text are critical of how globalization and neoliberalism exert increasing levels of control over the public institutions meant to support the common good. Readers of this book will be well prepared to participate in the dialogue that will influence the future of public education in this nation - a dialogue that must seek the kind of change that represents hope for all students.

"Let's be clear. The education of public school students is critical to a democracy and important to resume, even in the wake of a natural disaster. Yet, no public official quoted in the news reports expressed concern about students' education and how it would be situated in any ethic of caring, given what students and teachers endured. No one spoke of the problematic learning environments or the effects of the trauma students would experience when they returned to some of the schools. Instead, their quotes expressed concern about students and teachers doing time, reflecting neoliberalism's ongoing hollow conceptualizations of education. Whether this is a function of the media's errors in reporting or the public officials' limited understanding of education is irrelevant. Their comments, or lack thereof, reflect a broader crisis of public misunderstandings of education in a democratic society."