Corporatist Ed Reform as Symptom
Two recent pieces came out that insightfully show that the current push of corporatist education reform is actually a symptom of something much more ominous, the destruction of all that is held for the common good, all that is “public.” Both the recent Commonweal review of Diane Ravitch’s important new book, Reign of Error, and the Bill Moyers’ interview with Henry Giroux connect many important dots.
First of all, Reform of the Reform, the review of Ravitch’s book, serves as a primer of the neoliberal movement in and of itself. Jackson Lears starts by grounding his piece in a history of the damage done by “creative destruction.” Lears tells the story of the phrase as it runs from Harvard economist Joseph Schrumpeter, through Schrumpeter’s current and well-known disciple of innovative disruption, Clayton Christensen. Lears writes:
“Policymakers and business gurus have endowed the word ‘disruption’ with
