Bruce Dixon Profiles Paul Vallas as “Neoliberal Chainsaw Man” on Public Education
Bruce Dixon, the managing editor of The Black Agenda Report, has been consistently insightful about the danger of the privatization of education. His reports for The Black Commentatorwere instrumental more than a decade ago in exposing the far-right agenda of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which funded the astro-turf Black Alliance for Education Options to promote vouchers beyond Cleveland and Milwaukee.
Dixon’s stunning new profile of Paul Vallas is no exception to his tradition of quality reporting. Dixon follows Vallas from 1995, when Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Vallas, a non-educator who was then Daley’s chief of staff, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools to implement corporate school “reform.” Dixon tracks Vallas’s work to bring corporate-portfolio style school reform to Philadelphia, then to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, then to Haiti, and finally to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Vallas was ousted because he had never earned a school administrator’s credential, a state requirement for school superintendents in Connecticut. Now Vallas is Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn’s choice to run for Lieutenant Governor in the upcoming 2014 November election.
Dixon writes: “Democrat Paul Vallas has spent the last two decades dismembering and dismantling public schools, lying about deficits, unjustly blaming and firing public school teachers across the country… If neoliberalism is the economic and social doctrine that all Bruce Dixon Profiles Paul Vallas as “Neoliberal Chainsaw Man” on Public Education | janresseger: