Introductory note.

This issue of Radical Teacher came together without our having a plan for it. I attended an MLA panel by Vivyan Adair, Renny Christopher, and Sandra Dahlberg, and asked if they would develop their excellent talks into articles for us to consider. That cluster has its own introduction, "The Haves and Have-Nots of Higher Education. "Joseph Entin set out to write a brief editorial piece on academic labor, and then developed it into the article that appears here. Greg Meyerson had earlier agreed to review Derek Bok's book, and this review nicely fit into this growing cluster. So did Renate Bridenthal's commentary on a talk by Jennifer Washburn, which I heard at a conference at the City University of New York, and which Renate graciously turned into a review. Larry Hanley spoke at the same CUNY conference, where I persuaded him to submit a general essay on the neo-liberal university that he had originally given as a talk in Germany. His overview can serve as a general introduction for this now highly coherent issue--talk about serendipity.

Had we set out to plan an issue on privatization and related developments in U.S. education, it would have been about primary and secondary schooling as well as the university scene. Not that public schools have gone through the same processes as higher education, though reductions in public funding and right-wing assaults have driven much change in both sectors. A section on K-12 would perhaps have taken up commercial incursions such as Channel One, contracts with Coke and Pepsi, "free" computers, "partnerships" of all sorts, advertising in school buses, and so on. But pressures on K-12 from business are far more encompassing than such a list suggests. There's the prominence of groups such as the Business Roundtable in shaping a widely accepted critique of U.S. education. Standards-based reforms, replete with high-stakes testing and climaxing in No Child Left Behind, have been driven by the demand that schools prepare workers better to serve American capital in international combat. The concept seems to be of public education as one vast "school-to-work" program. Not to mention the continuing drive toward school choice, eviscerating public schools in the name of competition; and, in the wings, voucher schemes that might clinch the privatization of schooling for our young. These campaigns are up front and in the open, compared to developments in higher education.

We welcome proposals for articles and ideas for whole issues on what's happening to K-12 along these lines. And we welcome comment on this issue.