Fast Times At Covid Corporate High

It was hard to miss Saturday night's glitzy Graduate Together show broadcast in primetime over all the commercial TV and cable networks, and live-streamed on Facebook, Youtube and many other social media platforms.

 Its marquee attraction was former President Barack Obama, whose virtual commencement address to the nation's quarantined high school seniors was covered as a major political news event by the corporate media. (It followed a separate address, sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, to graduates of the nation's Historically Black Colleges.)

Obama's performance was augmented by song and dance routines and motivational speeches by students who had entered to win a spot in what might be called the Bootstraps Inspiration Sweepstakes. One girl gushed about her success being the result of a heroic mother working three jobs to pay her college tuition. The lesson this student learned was not that no parent should ever have to work three jobs, or that no student should ever be in onerous college debt, Her message was that it is incumbent upon the youth of America to "demand more" and show up to vote for politicians who will also pay proper verbal respect to hard-working parents like hers.

Although our disrespectful and disrespected current president was never mentioned by name, a distinct anti-Trump current ran right though the High School Musical program. The liberal politics of orchestrated diversity and slick entertainment and inspiring vignettes served to distract the audience from the true, underlying agenda and profit motive of the show.

A joint project of Hollywood's Entertainment Industry Foundation (ETF), the XQ Institute and the LeBron James Family Foundation,, the show's occult purpose was to gin up public enthusiasm for the complete oligarchic control of our public school systems. It was one giant infomercial for school privatization.

As the Jonas Brothers crooned, and activist Malala Yousafsai championed the rights of female students, a scrolling chyron at the bottom of the screen urged viewers to visit a "Rethinking High School" website. One click brought you to the XQ Foundation,  a think tank bankrolled by billionaire Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs and led by former Obama administration officials and investment bankers and hedge fund operators.

It's just another variation on the same old refrain from those smash capitalistic hit jobs on public education and teachers known as No Child Left Behind and Race To the Top. 

Following the neoliberal mantra of never letting a serious crisis go to waste, ETF CEO Nicole Sexton told Variety that Obama's participation in the infomercial was neither the surprise nor the altruistic rare treat that corporate media had been promoting it as:

 "We have a long-standing relationship with XQ Institute, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging traditional education platforms and ways of teaching. This period of time has taken that to a whole other level. But through XQ’s networks, there were a number of students and educators and families across the country who expressed sadness about the missed opportunity to experience the wonderful rites of passage tied to high school graduation. XQ came to us and said, “Let’s talk through what we could do with a telecast,” and we took that to our board.

 We have 11 board members, four of whom are executives for the four major networks. It was instantaneous. They all got so excited. There were a lot of people recognizing that there are going to be seniors who will miss these wonderful rites of passage and asking, “How do we fill that void in a way that really celebrates them?” So our networks at the national level had been exploring different ideas. And then when that opportunity came to them with a formidable partner like XQ, it was literally a no-brainer for them. Within an hour, they came back and said, “Yeah, we want to do this as a roadblock.” And within 24 hours, I had the date.

The CEO of the XQ Institute is Rosslyn Ali, former deputy Obama education secretary for civil rights. Its parent organization, the Emerson Collective, is managed by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, author of Obama's punitive Race To the Top initiative, as well being Rosslyn Ali's current and former boss.

The XQ Institute uses the same obfuscatory vocabulary to hide its for-profit motives as other finance capital-backed school "reform" initiatives run by such billionaire luminaries as Bill and Melinda Gates and the Walton Family Foundations. 

As school privatization critic Diane Ravitch outlined several years ago in her book Reign of Error, common tropes are that public schools are failing, that mainly poor and minority children are "trapped" in these failing schools, that unionized teachers are not up to the challenge of training children for the "jobs of the future," that there exists a "skills gap" in the job marketplace that unionized teachers cannot bridge, and that if only we can bring some of the same good old market-based creative destruction (closures) to schools as private equity brings to business in order to "rescue" them, then all might be well. And be sure to use the word "choice" in every other sentence, as though you actually had one.

To further hide the gross profit motive of placing education of children into the hands of greedy and unqualified venture capitalists and oligarchs, education reform cultists also commonly and cynically frame their agenda as "the civil rights issue of our time." 

Ravitch continues:

"Their policies, they say, will make our children into 'global competitors.' They will protect our national security. They will make America strong again. The corporate reformers play to our anxieties, even rekindling dormant Cold War fears that we may be in for jeopardy as a nation of we don't buy what they are selling. The critics want the public to believe that our public schools are a clear and present danger to our society. Unless there is radical change, they say, our society will fall apart. Our economy will collapse. Our national security is in danger."

And these are the people who complain that Donald Trump is the guy who brought fascism to the country. How convenient. What a gift both Trump and the coronavirus pandemic are giving to the school privatization movement. 

Due to the pandemic, there's been been a slight change in plans and a tweak in the propaganda delivery. Since society has already failed and the economy has already collapsed right before our eyes, the new message to investors is that Remote Learning Is Fun and Profitable. 

All that America's education policy makers have to do is dream and imagine the possibilities. And the XQ Institute is here to help with its pharmacopoeia of hallucinatory drugs.

One of the first steps is to do away with democratically elected local school boards - or at least, to seed them with XQ-funded candidates. This is euphemized on their website as " empowering local communities." Their accompanying illustration is thus one of clenched fists rising in protest against traditional schools.

Speaking directly to local and state legislators and governors, XQ waves wads of money to legions of innovators in contests to redesign their local high schools to neoliberal expectations. A big part of freeing students from the schools they are trapped in is in getting them unpaid internships for the jobs of the future - or "Innovation Schools."

What could be more radical and innovative than never re-opening the shuttered schools at all in favor of remote learning and de facto serfdom - or opening them at vastly reduced physical capacity? Think of the real estate. Not for nothing are the boards of directors of reform organizations rife with property developers and real estate magnates. 

If you watched Saturday's graduation show and clicked on the incessant advertisement link to XQ, you were treated to an avalanche of reform Newspeak that would bury even George Orwell. The language is that turgid and uninformative. You will be led down endless alleys and mazes in search of the perfect Covid Academy merchandise and tips.

One such link is to an outfit called Envision Learning Partners. The essence of this experience begins a mission statement in ALL CAPS. Because, let's face it, by the time you find your way to this site via the long and windy road that XQ has provided for you via the gala star-studded TV graduation special, your eyes are already glazed over. An example of school reform Newspeak:

ENVISION LEARNING PARTNERS (ELP) EMPOWERS SCHOOL AND DISTRICT LEADERS TO BUILD A SUPPORTIVE CULTURE OF LEARNING BY DESIGNING SYSTEMS OF PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT THAT ENCOURAGE STUDENTS AND TEACHERS TO LEARN AND GROW TOGETHER. WE BELIEVE THIS APPROACH CONTRIBUTES TO GREATER EQUITY IN EDUCATION—MAKING SURE EVERY STUDENT HAS REAL CHOICES AND POWER OVER THEIR OWN FUTURE

In other words, Teach to the Test. Pandemic or no pandemic, keep rating teachers as failures if their students from poverty stricken neighborhoods don't score well. And with Zoom replacing the classroom, they are guaranteed not to do well. In the small print at the bottom of the page  Envision finally sees fit to divulge that it is a for-profit charter school conglomerate in the business of selling test-taking kits to teachers and school districts who must buy them if they are to succeed in the Education Marketplace. They need a lot of 'elp.

For as Barack Obama advised graduating seniors in the keynote address of Disaster Capitalism's gala graduation party:

Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy — that’s how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way — which is why things are so screwed up.... >When you need help, Michelle and I have made it the mission of our Foundation to give young people like you the skills and support to lead in your own communities, and to connect you with other young leaders around the country and around the globe.

He might as well have been speaking his empowering message into the un-monetized wind. Before Covid-19 struck, socialism was just as popular as capitalism among the young adults surveyed. People both young and old still have their brains and they still have their eyes to envision what myriad and deliberate screw-ups that the lords of unfettered capitalism truly are.

Here's the commencement address that should be broadcast far and wide. As Marxist economist Richard Wolff argues, what we need is not a glitzy graduation show or remote learning-by-oligarch. During this national lockdown, what we need is an education reform program that would pair millions of jobless but eminently skilled and qualified professionals from many fields with millions of quarantined students. The sessions would be one-on-one, the teachers would be paid by the government, and the students would not be indebted for life.

That's how reimagining and rethinking high school - or any school or functional democracy, for that matter - would ideally sound.