Geoff Berne & the Privatization of Public Education
In his new piece for CounterPunch, Geoff Berne explains how the privatization of public education was conceived and is actively being helped along by the Obama administration and Arne Duncan.
As with military manufacture, military contracting, and prison management, the federal government's education agenda under the leadership of Sec. of Education Arne Duncan is dead set on a policy of transferring the administration of public schools to private businesses. The Secretary has given evidence that his chosen means for accomplishing this handover is through putting mayors at the helm of entire (mainly urban) school systems, allowing them to replace elected school boards with appointed councils of businessmen and retired military that then go on to bring in for-profit corporations to manage the schools, drawing on budgeted money previously intended for public systems.
Duncan’s Race To The Top, a strategy of having states compete in a horse race for funds for education reform, makes clear that only states making concrete efforts toward privatization will get the coveted funds…
In these initiatives Duncan has set for himself the roles of midwife, epigone, and chief factotum for the privatization doctrines first laid out by the “father of modern school reform,” fellow-Chicago luminary Milton Friedman in a 1955 essay that he later incorporated into his landmark book Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. Friedman called for a wholesale “denationalization” of public education: instead of public funds going to school systems parents would receive vouchers on these funds to pay for “educational services” for their children at for-profit and not-for-profit schools that would be operated by entrepreneurs and managers who’d be free to set teacher compensations as low as a dog-eat-dog market for teaching jobs would bear.
In true survival-of-the-fittest purism, Friedman believed that parents should, if they decide to have children, be prepared to pay for their....continue reading at The Perimeter Primate
WHAT EXPLAINS THE PASSIVITY OF AMERICANS? WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO SHAKE THEM FROM THEIR SLEEP?
And here is Jerry Bracey explaining more of the same.