Red or Blue Pill?: Broad Latino Collaborator Responds to Co-opt Post (Fishburne theme)
A Broad Latino collaborator recently responded to my critique of billionaire reformers and their corroborators of color. In the piece Billionaires co-opt minority groups into campaign for education reform I posited that civil rights advocates and billionaires have different goals for school “reform” (equity versus profit, respectively).
Dr. Monty J. Thornburg’s (the top commenter on Cloaking Inequity— to date he has commented on 136 posts!) response to the billionaire post was:
There’s both a “direct” influence from the billionaires themselves and an equally, and more insidious and “indirect” effect that has grown using the language of “reform” that’s too often found in the board, and administrative meeting rooms of public schools.This language and “attitude” too often blocks or “silences” honest “critique” with respect to the vision, mission and goals of public schools and their relationship to the larger society.The direct financial assistance of mega foundations to influence state charter school associations for example, such as here in CA, has effectively silenced even the most ardent supporters of minority rights and public schools when it comes to examining the role of using tax dollars for privatized educational schemes.
The question that comes to mind is do civil rights advocates believe that they have been bamboozled? I recently asked a Broad collaborator if she was interested in taking the blue pill or the red pill. A summary of our Facebook