Bosses’ ‘Education Reform’ A Lesson Plan for War

The Progressive Labor Party has repeatedly warned workers of coming wars leading to a major war to decide which imperialist(s) will control the world. We’ve said that the U.S. ruling class will use its state power to prepare and try to mobilize the population for war.
On March 20, 2012, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) Independent Task Force (ITF) on U.S. Education Reform and National Security issued its 96-page report. The CFR is the key U.S. ruling-class think tank directing U.S. imperialism’s foreign policy and influencing government officials who are instrumental in their plans. It’s significant that it appointed a Task Force headed by Condoleezza Rice, former George W. Bush’s Secretary of State (a key figure in both Iraq wars), and Joel Klein, ex-chancellor of New York City’s schools.
U.S. rulers are trying to seize an opportunity created for them by the right-wing “education reform” (ER) movement. It has successfully mobilized some parents and others to attack unionized public school teachers; demanded the use of standardized test scores to produce “data-driven” evaluations of teachers; popularized the call for charter schools and the closing of public schools; and called on state governments to institute a “common core curriculum.” The ER movement is responsible for right-wing superintendents like Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. and Cami Anderson in Newark.
Based on this ER platform, the ITF proposes using the common core curriculum standards to “ensure that students are mastering the skills and knowledge necessary to safeguard the country’s national security,” i.e., military, foreign service and defense industry skills; to push patriotism more sharply in civics classes and other school curricula; to sharpen competition between public, charter and private schools; and to institute a “national security readiness audit” in order to censure those educators not falling in line with the bosses’ plans.
This audit will also inculcate nationalistic and competitive ideas in students’ and teachers’ minds. All this enables the ruling class to institute a higher level of social control in the schools and prepare U.S. youth for major conflicts — imperialist war — with one or more of its main competitors in the world.
Wrapping its rhetoric in the specter of threats to the U.S. “leadership role” in the world, the ITF report gives away its real agenda early on. It says explicitly that the U.S. “Education Crisis Is a National Security Crisis” (page 7). Its “five distinct threats” include U.S. economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, global awareness and unity and cohesion (pp. 7-13). Each of these “threats” signifies an area this ruling class-led group has identified as critical to address in the lead-up to imperialist-led genocide.
The ITF’s citing of these threats reflects the current rise of China and other competing imperialists, whose goal is to replace the U.S. in its current number one position. The ITF says U.S. workers lack the skills necessary to enable U.S. businesses to turn back these challenges by maximizing productivity per worker, bringing the bosses higher profits. They bemoan the reality that 75 percent of U.S. youth (particularly black and Latino youth) are not qualified to join the military. This is mostly because many don’t graduate from high school or are not otherwise prepared to be soldiers in today’s high-tech armed forces.
The report further criticizes U.S. schools for not producing enough graduates proficient in foreign languages who can work as diplomats and/or spies, Special Forces and overseas agents for U.S. corporations. The ITF also cites the growing “education/mobility gap” (really just a product of the bosses’ economic crisis on top of their racist and anti-working-class policies). They believe this growing inequality will impair workers’ loyalty to, and willingness to die for, U.S. imperialism.
The ITF fears that “this trend could cause the United States to turn inward and become less capable of being a stabilizing force in the world.” This view represents the thinking of the most powerful capitalists, for whom “stability” is a codeword for continued U.S. political and economic domination.
PLP forces, both inside and outside the schools, must expose these atrocious profit-driven goals. Just as the “education reform” movement has given the rulers an opportunity they might use for their purposes, communist leadership in the schools can turn the tables on them. A militant left-led mass movement of students, parents and workers against racism, sexism, fascism and imperialist war would be an important component of PLP’s drive towards communist revolution.