Something In Me Snapped Today: No More ‘Education Reform’
- Written by Julie Vassilatos
- 08 Apr 2014
EDUCATION POLITICS-Something in me snapped today and I realized that I am finished using the phrase "education reform." That's how folks refer to the constellation of ideas firmly entrenched in the White House right now, upheld by almost every governor of every state, red and blue, and most mayors, notably our own. It includes the tenets that privatizing our schools will improve them, that the Common Core State Standards are the fix for all that ails our failing schools, and that testing our students more and more will raise test scores.
But this, truly, is not "reform." Some of these are ideas that have been implemented for 25 years all over the country to little effect.
This is the status quo.
So I'm not going to call it reform anymore.
I'm going to call it what it is. Corporate control of education.
And here's why. In every instance, every plank in the platform, every element of this effort can be traced back to cash--flowing into the coffers of very rich corporate entities and individuals.
Like Pearson, one of the testing companies that is creating the tests and the test prep materials, all new and improved and Common Core aligned, and who lobbies Congress to mandate more tests.
Like Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, a huge proponent of charters and innovative uses of technology in schools. What kind of technology does he advocate as the best fix for students today? In Learning Lab modules at his Rocketship Charters kids sit at a computer monitor, streaming video content for 100 minutes per day.
Or Rupert Murdoch. He is a cheerleader for what he calls a $500 billion industry of education technology including content and assessment.
Or Bill Gates. His push for the Common Core, the inBloom initiative to harness students' big data, and his vision for the classrooms of the future, which will be heavily dependent on his own technologies.
The proponents of this snake oil have managed to control the rhetoric for so long that we don't even blink when they say that their education plan is "the civil rights issue o