Education in America is in crisis. Teachers in states across the country are staging strikes and walkouts for higher wages and improved conditions in schools. Politicians have continuously slashed education funding for years and now we are seeing the disastrous effects of these decisions. It does not help that under Donald Trump, we now have a secretary of education who knows nothing about education, nor values public education and believes that charter and private schools are the way to go—not because this is best for students but instead because it lines the pockets of the wealthy.
This catastrophe has also reached the shores of Puerto Rico, where disaster capitalists have descended in order to bring privatization and charter schools to the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria. As Mother Jones reports, the Puerto Rican government is moving forward to close hundreds of schools which will have a devastating impact on teachers and students alike.
The Puerto Rico Department of Education announced late Thursday that it would close 283 public schools next school year, citing a decline in enrollment of nearly 39,000 students and the island’s ongoing budget crisis. [...]
In early February, [Julia Keleher, secretary of education] and Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló introduced a sweeping education reform plan that called for closing several hundred schools over the next several years and introducing charter schools to the island. The governor estimates the plan will help save $466 million per year by 2022, according to figures in his most recent fiscal plan meant to address the island’s staggering $120 billion in outstanding debts and obligations. Those figures do not take into account the estimated $95 billion in damage caused by Hurricane Maria.
It is important to note that all of these plans have been developed without any transparency nor in consultation with the local teachers union or parents. It is also significant that Betsy DeVos’s office has been actively involved in these efforts—in fact, her deputy assistant secretary has been in “close communication” with Puerto Rico’s secretary of education since Maria hit. For an administration that has pretty much ignored getting the people of the island the help that they need for six months, they’ve done a very good job trying to actively decimate its public school system, which was already in crisis due to the years-long economic crisis. Over one hundred schools had been closed in the last year and the situation has only worsened since the storm.
As Mother Jones reports:
The government had already closed roughly 170 of its 1,270 schools after the 2017 school year. Officials estimate roughly 26,000 students did not come back after Hurricane Maria. Many teachers on the island say that Keleher and Rosselló are using the devastation of the hurricane to implement privatization efforts that have been proposed for years.
Still, Puerto Ricans will not accept privatization quietly, especially given that they see this exactly for what it is—a greedy attempt for the rich to get richer while children go uneducated and public school teachers become unemployed. While private schools and charters certainly offer alternatives to students, they do so at the expensive of fixing the broken public school system. And in certain cases, they force the closure of the only school options that families have.
According to the island’s Association of Teachers, the school closure plans announced Thursday would force the transfer of 60,000 students and 6,000 teachers. Aida Diaz, the president of the Association of Teachers, told El Nuevo Dia that the situation was a “massacre [and] a death blow for education.”
Diaz said that the Department of Education was not transparent about its criteria for selecting schools to close, and noted that some small towns will see seven or eight schools shuttered—or nearly half of their schools—according to a preliminary analysis conduced by the association. According the association, 45 schools slated for closure have been formally recognized as high performing “schools of excellence.”
This only makes sense from the perspective of capitalists that care more about making money than they do about individuals, the greater good or humanity in general. In the richest, supposedly most advanced country in the world, we cannot seem to get it together enough to prioritize and provide a good public education for our children. It is a disgrace. But it’s also quite telling. We’ve got crappy public education, no racial and social justice, massive amounts of poverty, the most guns per person and the highest incarceration rate in the world. Perhaps that’s why millions of people elected a reality star as president. Only in America can people be this ridiculous, greedy and heartless and still think they live in the greatest country in the world.