Lance Hill on the way the privatizers have hijacked the word “reform”
See Lance Hill’s insightful comments below. I have long believed that we need to reclaim that word “reform” for ourselves; we at PAA say we support “progressive education reform.” and oppose “corporate reform” based on privatization, competition, and high-stakes testing. The people at the GEM, the Grassroots Education Movement, who made the new film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, call themselves the “real reformers.” . I am starting to use the hashtag #realreform when I tweet, and hope others will as well.
The other day a local paper referred those opposed to school privatization and de-professionalization of teachers as “critics of the school reform movement.” I don’t regard privatizing schools, abolishing local democratic control of schools, or replacing qualified teachers with untrained temporary workers as a “reform movement,” especially give the positive connotations that the word “reform” carries. The dictionary definition of reform is 1. to make better 2. to improve by removing faults and or abuses. School privatization is no more a reform movement than the policy to privatize prisons is a “prison reform movement.” Both share the goal of shifting public assets into the private sector and removing