Two Visions
Posted: 10/20/2013 9:30 am
If you had $50,000 or more to invest in the privatization of public education, you could have been welcome at a recent meeting in Philadelphia of self-described school reformers. But if you're an educator or parent interested in strengthening public education, you'd be out of luck, because that closed-door meeting was limited to deep-pocketed donors and investors--and it wasn't meant to discuss how to restore funding to help children in Philadelphia's resource-starved public schools, or to address the educational and financial failures of the city's charter schools.
Far from it--it focused instead on "education investment strategies" and how to "support rapid charter school growth."
And in Boston last week, Jeb Bush convened the annual summit of his Foundation for Excellence in Education, which an independent monitor calls "a dating service for corporations selling educational products--including virtual schools--to school chiefs responsible for making policies and cutting the checks."
These meetings and their promoters press for school vouchers, franchise charter schools, cybereducation, testing and mass school closures, even though these sanction- and market-based reforms haven't moved the needle--not in the right direction, at least. Dissatisfaction with these approaches has led many parents, educators and policymakers to look for
