Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (24 page)

In Georgia—a state that went all-electronic just in time for the 2002 elections—the defeat of Democrat Senator Max Cleland raised eyebrows. On November 2, 3003, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported that "Cleland leads [Republican Rep. Saxby] Chambliss 49 percent to 44 percent among likely voters."
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Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election that "pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent."
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The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them. Nearly every vote in the state was made on an electronic machine with no audit trail.

After these and similar stories, Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey introduced a bill into Congress requiring that a voter-verified paper ballot be produced by all electronic voting machines, co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. Republican leaders Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay successfully fought to keep it from coming to a vote, thus ensuring that there could be no possible audit of the votes of the 2004 electorate.

The rallying cry of the emerging "honest vote" movement must become:
Get corporations out of our vote!

Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote—and in a secret and
totally invisible way? One such private corporation was founded by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution, another is run by one of Ohio's top Republicans, and yet another is partly owned by Saudi and Venezuelan investors.

Of all the violations of the commons—all of the crimes against We the People and against democracy in our great and historic republic—this is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to private corporations.

It's time that the USA—like most of the rest of the world—returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our employees) under the watchful eyes of the party faithful—even if it takes two weeks to count the vote and we have to go, until then, with the exit polls of the news agencies. It worked just fine for nearly two hundred years in the USA, and it can work again.

When I lived in Germany, they took the vote in the same way most of the world does—people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean and easily audited. And even though it takes a few days to completely count the vote (and costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off.

We could have saved billions of dollars that have instead been handed over to Diebold, ES&S, and other private corporations.

If we must have machines, let's have them owned by local governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable to We the People, using open-source code and disconnected from modems, that produce a voter-verified printed ballot, with all results published on a precinct-by-precinct basis, and with random audits mandated.

As Thomas Paine wrote at this nation's founding, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other
rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."

Only when We the People reclaim the commons of our vote can we again be confident in the integrity of our electoral process in the world's oldest and most powerful democratic republic.

One of the primary elements of a true, functioning, representative democratic republic, like we aim for here in the United States, is that its citizens be well informed.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his friend J. Correa de Serra on January 28, 1786, and said, "Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost," he was assuming that Americans knew how to read their daily newspapers.

Not anymore. A 2005 study by the National Center for Education Statistics revealed that about 5 percent of the adults in the United States are not literate in English, meaning 11 million people lack the skills to handle many everyday tasks. Some 30 million adults, or 14 percent of the population, have "below basic" skills in prose. Their ability is so limited that they may not be able to make sense of a simple pamphlet, for example. Another 95 million adults, or 44 percent of the population, have intermediate prose skills, meaning they can do only moderately challenging activities. An example would be consulting a reference book to determine which foods contain a certain vitamin.
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The cons' solution, as usual, is to privatize education. They say the public school system is too broken to fix. And just to make sure it stays broken, they passed the No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB), which will cost the states more in property taxes and other taxes than they are going to get out of it.

The solution is not to go in with a hammer and destroy the schools. It is not to privatize the schools. It's to change the way we are teaching.

There is a growing consensus that something is melting down in our schools, but the solution is not to abolish free public education. The solution is to make free public education better.

All the issues around education come down to one question: investment or expense? The conservatives would have you think that any kind of social programs are expenses. It's really important to reframe the conversation in terms of investment.

We know that the investment in a preschool program like Head Start yields substantial returns down the road in terms of reduced crime, reduced expenses associated with the detention of people, and increases in the tax base. For every $1 you invest in Head Start, you get $9 back. The child is far healthier, less likely to end up in special education or the criminal justice system, and more likely to go to college. Preschool is an investment, not an expense.

The cons, however, don't get it. The whole con agenda seems to be, "Let's go back to a caste system." They are hearkening back to men like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who believed we should have a ruling class and a working class and that the ruling class should be literate and the working class should just know enough to make change when they buy something.

They are doing their best to destroy public education. They are trying to destroy the teachers' unions and starve the schools.

Traditionally, we've determined the success or failure of the U.S. public education system by how competent our citizens are at being part of the workforce, participating in our democracy, and
having social mobility. Those are all things that you can measure, and in many ways they all relate back to building critical-thinking skills—seeing the big picture, being able to challenge conventional wisdom, thinking outside the box to use the old cliché—as much as they do to the actual imparting of information. We've historically seen education as an essential and organic part of our democracy and considered access to higher education—regardless of the parents' income level—to be one of the keys to building a strong middle class, a strong economy, and a strong nation.

The cons, however, see education as just another commodity. And if it's just a commodity, like shoes or carrots, there must be a simple way to measure it. So instead of measuring its impact on society, they say, "Let's just see how well our kids are doing at memorizing some of the things that we think are important."

The tragedy of treating education as a commodity is twofold. First, the things the cons are measuring in their one-size-fits-all tests don't include the basic issues of democracy, freedom, liberty, and the history of this nation.

Standardized tests don't let us know if our kids know the difference between the worldviews of Paine versus Burke or the differences in the vision of democracy between Plato and Jefferson. They don't test if our kids understand why the Boston Tea Party happened or what differentiated the Founders from the Royalists of 1776. And the tests the cons devise are not designed to teach kids a thing about the populist and progressive movements in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Wobblies and the history of organized labor, or the history of Roosevelt's and Truman's battles with cons over programs like labor policy, national health insurance, and Social Security.

The second tragedy for us and our children is that the cons—in their effort to commodify education—have turned the
testing over to a few large corporations. Back when I was in school in the 1950s and 1960s, our teachers would write up their own tests, sometimes even in longhand, and make copies of them on the mimeograph machine. The cost was just a few cents—basically the cost of the paper and the mimeo machine's amortization. But the testing companies can charge $5, $10, $20 or more for 5 cents worth of paper. And the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to buy these tests from specific large, politically active testing companies.

Testing has gone from being insignificant—basically just IQ tests—during the Golden Age of the middle class to being a million-dollar-a-year industry in the Reagan eighties to a multi-billion-dollar annual industry after the passage of NCLB. They've used it as a way to privatize another part of education.

Combine that with the relentless pressure for school vouchers, the federal aid programs to religious schools, and the ongoing conservative assaults on every teachers' union contract that comes up for renewal and you get it that they want to destroy public education by completely privatizing it. The result will be that the rich won't see any difference (they're already sending their kids to private prep schools like Andover, where both George Bushes went), the poor will be left with a few token dregs of education, and the middle class will be squeezed even harder.

No Child Left Behind has really sped up this process. Once a school district accepts the federal money for NCLB, it has to agree to the federally mandated and corporate-run scoring system. And if your school fails the test twice in a row, you have to give kids the option of going to another school and then pay for their transportation. But there is no money budgeted to pay for that transportation. And every kid a school loses means fewer state and federal dollars for that school.

What school districts are finding is that they are getting screwed. The state of Utah, for example, one of the most conservative
states in the Union, has refused to abide by the requirements of the law. And other states may soon follow.

The real problem with NCLB, however, is not that it is under-funded. The problem is the assumption that you can commodify education at all. You can't.

The No Child Left Behind Act, and other school-privatizing schemes, is really a blowback to a nineteenth-century "create kids for the factories" model of education. Teaching for the test is the worst thing you can do. Want to teach a child to hate learning? Drill them and you'll do that.

Different kids learn in different ways.
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The most powerful thing a teacher can do is not to make sure that a child has memorized a test but rather to ignite in that child a passion for learning, a love of knowledge. It's to bring back their natural curiosity.

Children love to learn. In just their first few years, they learn a language, how to interact in a family, and a million details. Kids don't fail—schools fail. And part of that failure is the result of the cons' meddling with our schools in an effort to break them so that they can say, "See? We told you public education isn't any good. Now let's hand it over to the business sector." And then we're back to the old rigid caste system in which the only people who get a good education are the children of the wealthy and the corporate elite.

Education is not a consumer product. Schools are not a commercial activity. They are part of the commons and essential to a functioning democracy. We have an obligation to make education work because we are creating the future of our country in our schools.

Andy Stephenson was an activist, a vigilant worker on behalf of clean voting in America. He worked tirelessly to help uncover details of electronic voting fraud in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections. He devoted years of his life to making America a more democratic nation.

But in 2005 his friends had to pass the hat to help pay for surgery to save him from pancreatic cancer. The surgery cost about $50,000, but the hospital wanted $25,000 upfront, and Andy was uninsured.

We are the only developed democracy in the world where such a spectacle could take place.

Dickens wrote about such horrors in Victorian England—Bob Cratchit's son, Tiny Tim, in need of medical care that was unavailable without a wealthy patron like Ebenezer Scrooge—but the United Kingdom has since awakened and become civilized.