Gino Napoli 491 31st Ave #204 San Francisco, Cal. 94121 H: 415 751 1499 A Power Struggle I read a Paul Krugman article in the NY Times recently that spoke of two national impulses moving towards an inherent crisis. Mr. Krugman spoke of the conflict between conservative small government ideologues and the belief in affordable health care. Expand this piece of the national puzzle into education and you see further evidence of the same struggle between the self-proclaimed conservative movement and what Americans have come to take for granted since World War Two. The struggle for the schools is largely an ideological war, fueled by the reality of decreasing availability of funds and the often concomitant result, a poor system of education for the children. However, the ideologues are ill-prepared to comprehend the practicality of what is really involved when running schools and educating children because the conservative movement is based on dubious presumptions. Understanding these presumptions is a good clue to the nature of the conservative movement. One assumption is that private enterprise is better and undeniably preferable to government. Any body resembling government is perceived and tainted with cronyism and corruption; whereas a business is the symbol of a hard working person in pursuit of a glorious dream. Yet, there is abundant evidence of unlawful and tyrannical practices by unregulated businesses manipulating social power for selfish ends that is equal to any collected about government. Indeed government is the evolution of a struggle to control the whimsy of individuals for the good of the state. When government is perceived as corrupt, this is because a private enterprise was the root of the corruption, not because government corrupted private enterprise. Government is simply the body that does for society what it should but cannot collectively do for itself. To paint another picture distorts the social arena into a struggle of free enterprise versus the power of the government, when the struggle is actually more broad. Another assumption is that taxes take money away that could be invested. This is another distortion that is based on a misconception. Money taken out in taxes does not disappear; it gets spent and recirculates into the social networks we call the economy. The purpose of government is to circulate some of the money supply in a way that supports the society as a whole for the greater good of all the people. There is abundant evidence that private enterprise is not guaranteed to care about the long term good when there is a short term bundle of cash to earn. Control of the market occurs when small groups of individuals collude to restrict the market. The government is the pawn of power, not the maker. Business does not always invest with the greater good in mind, nor can people be expected to spend their money wisely. There would be no interstate highway system, national railroad, or Aviation network had their been no government direction. The argument about taxes, that the government is taking the people's money, seems to be unaware of what the purpose of taxes and government means. These two presumptions underlay the strategies of the conservative movement. The insistence on rigid standards and national testing is often support with an argument that private industry has standards and testing. The needs of the schools are easily papered with the simplicity of merely testing when a perusal of the statistics would indicate more pressing matters. Average class sizes are high and increasing. GUn-hired staff days (when schools cannot find a teacher) go up every year. Teacher turnover percentages are high. Teacher salaries are low. The time to get a teacher certificate is in between the time to get a law and a medical degree, yet the salary is negligible even though the stress and employment hours are longer. All the insistence on teacher training is not going to address the already undesirable attractions of being a teacher. Schools have been suffering decreasing rates of revenue for the last 30 years. The testing and rigid standards agenda does not even address these known problems. Instead there is banter, a situation when one notion is not equivalent to another notion because the presumptions do not see the problems. Instead the presumptions assume that the problems are the symptoms of the preconceived paradigm, symptoms of the illusory disease referred to as the greedy, tax grubbing gumma'ment. Sadly, the people are being manipulated by rogues who are really pursuing a different agenda. Many persons who are self-proclaimed conservatives (Phil Gramm et al) are merely wards of the power struggle that exists in Washington D.C between the network of business political initiatives, and the jackals who live in that realm of society, the many inner circles of economics and politics. There are millionaires who spend 30 million dollars to have a proposition pass that would have allowed charter schools from a man who thinks public schools are run by "communists." There are putative Christian groups who take over the local school boards and begin by firing staff for reasons of politics, and who censor textbooks to make sure they convey a "proper sense" of America. There are Presidents who have photo ops with Black inner city school children and then pursue budgets that slash funds to the same inner city school districts. In all this, no one listens to the school teachers. It's a shame, because the school teachers are the only ones who have any clue where to begin on the path of solutions to this whole mess.