Harkins’ “Strengthening Corporate Control of Schools Act for 2013″
JUNE 4, 2013 BY LEAVE A COMMENT
This new re-write of ESEA is more similar to NCLB than just the 1000+ pages of corporate lawyerese used to maintain and extend the current power structure over schools. Most of the specifics of NCLB stay in place, and where they are changed, they reflect changes found in RTTT. It is, yet, another document written by the corporate foundations and corporate think tanks to push forward another generation of the same failed policies that have now been the priorities of corporate education for 30 years. And they still call it reform, which has come to mean its opposite–antiquarianism.
Big winners: Business Roundtable, Education Mistrust, DFER, testing conglomerates, Gates and the Oligarchs, and the charter industry. Testing every year in grades 3-8 stays in place, with high school, too. Chances at federal grants still depend upon absence of charter caps and requirements for teacher eval by numbers. The “priority and focus” schools remain under the same regime, and “high performing charters” are the mandated choice to conversion of the ever-present bottom five percent of schools. Common Core is mandated, too, or some equivalent standard, for grinding out the “college and career ready.” Same anti-teacher and pro-missionary priorities, with teacher ed based on raising test scores. States that have already made their deal with the Devil for a waiver can waver on, with no changes required. Same smelly shit in new wrapping with a bow.
The only big winner among non-corporate entities: parents in middle class communities, the same ones that have been raising such noise about Seth and Caitlin having to take these
