News for Educational Workers

The Occupy Movement

Students have been an integral part of Occupy Wall Street and its overflows into numerous U.S and international cities. Young people and students have been pepper-sprayed in New York City and at University of California Davis (UC Davis), videos of police violence against students have shocked the world, scandals have exposed FBI links between Penn State and UC Davis, education panels have been disrupted by Occupy protesters, student supporters of Occupy Wall Street have walked out of class in solidarity, former poet laureate of the United States and Professor of Poetry at UC Berkeley Robert Hass was thrown down and hit by campus police as he defended students, and Occupy college students have been hailed by Henry Giroux as the "New Public Intellectuals." For details on all the above, go to: www.truth-out.org, November 22 and 24, 2011; www.ny1.com, October 25, 2011; Huffington Post, November 17, 2011; The New York Times, November 19, 2011; and www.truth-out.org, November 21, 2011.

Privatizing Education

The U. S. Justice Department filed suit in August 2011 against the Education Management Corporation (EMC), the nation's second largest for-profit college company, for fraudulently collecting $11 billion in federal student financial aid from 2003 through 2011. EMC enrolls 150,000 students in more than 100 schools (The New York Times, August 15, 2011).

Pearson, a London-based mega-corporation and one of the leaders of the for-profit industry privatizing public education, "produces just about every product a student, teacher or school administrator in Texas might need": textbooks, data management, professional development programs, and testing systems for the price of $500 million for creating and administering exams (www.CommonDreams.org from Texas Observer, September 8, 2011).

Student Debt

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, student debt has increased from $80 billion in 1999 to $500 billion in 2011, a nearly sevenfold rise. The Department of Education has put outstanding student loans as high as $805 billion. This steep rise in student loan delinquencies is being compared to the subprime housing crisis (Financial Times, October 16, 2011).

When the housing bubble burst, Black and Latino families suffered such financial disaster that the resulting racial wealth gap gave white households approximately 20 times as much wealth as Black and Latino households. According to the LA Progressive (August 19, 2011), "There is every indication that the bursting of the student debt bubble, like the housing bubble before it, is imminent," which would make people of color even more vulnerable.

In Rainbow PUSH Coalition's Weekly Commentary (October 25, 2011), Jesse Jackson describes the role of the banking industry in the student debt crisis: "The banking industry has used its clout to make these loans the harshest of all debt. They survive bankruptcy. The lenders have broad collection powers, far greater than with a mortgage or credit card. They can garnish wages or even Social Security payments. When payments are missed, penalties are brutal."

Poverty and Education

Corporations like Bank of America, Boeing, Exxon-Mobil, Wells Fargo, Google, Pfizer, and General Electric paid little or no federal taxes in 2009, thus keeping $222.7 billion out of the federal coffers. According to a report by the National Education Association, $9.8 billion of these lost revenues would have gone to public colleges and schools, adding 100,000 jobs in public education and giving 400,000 poor children the chance to enroll in preschool (www.nation-of-change.org/print/3564).

In the largest single-agency layoff in the history of Michael Bloomberg's nine years as mayor of New York City, 672 NYC school employees lost their jobs, mostly school aids, parent coordinators, family workers and other support jobs employees (The New York Times, October 7, 2011). "What College Can Mean to the Other America" by Mike Rose (The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2011) compares what Michael Harrington saw 50 years ago as "invisible poverty" to what today has become blatant poverty. "In fact, the poor are drifting further into the dark underbelly of American capitalism." With few current policy initiatives to help the poor gain...