Is it Research – or Propaganda?
There’s a lot of brand new education research coming out nowadays, and it’s telling our policymakers that privatization is good for education. Class sizes are going up? That’s okay, because research shows that class size has little impact on student learning. Charter schools are competing with your neighborhood schools? Hey, many of them outperform public schools!
And this is good research. Great research. In fact, it’s the best research money can buy. Big money, I mean. Corporate money.
How do they buy it? Through right-wing think tanks. Corporations fund think tanks, and the think tanks employ researchers, and then the researchers wrangle leadership roles in strategically placed research centers, which –