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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Confronting the Free Marketeers: Will they Plow Through Us? - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

Confronting the Free Marketeers: Will they Plow Through Us? - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:


Confronting the Free Marketeers: Will they Plow Through Us?

Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody
Yesterday I had the strange experience of waking up to a blog post by someone I had never before encountered claiming he had "kicked my ass six ways to Sunday" - in the headline no less! And stranger still, the post made no explicit reference to my work, and provided no link to anything I had written. I left a fairly mild comment indicating that I was interested in dialogue, but this headline left me a bit stunned.
A few hours later I got an apology from the author, Tom Segal, who explained that it was a joke gone awry, and that he had sent it to his editors as a second option never thinking they might use it. The headline has now been changed, and apologies offered and accepted. So now we can return to the substance, and take a look at what Tom Segal is actually saying.
In response to my post, "What Happens when Profits Drive Reform?" Tom Segal has written a full-throated defense of the profit-seeking enterprises in the education sector. I think he overstates their value, and brushes aside legitimate concerns about the dangers our public schools face.
He begins:
You can't have high-quality digital tools without the profit motive (heck, you certainly can't have that