What's at Stake in Public Education
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int Article
Jeff Bryant notes that many in the national media were stunned when the NEA called for Secretary Arne Duncan's resignation. For years, they believed the secretary's press releases instead of investigating the festering discontent against his ill-informed policies. Many journalists are oblivious to the protests by teachers -- like the one at Garfield High school in Seattle -- against the use of student test scores to judge their quality. Many journalists never noticed growing protests by students against obsessive testing in cities like Providence. Many never heard about parents groups objecting to profiteering by test publishers or dismissed them as publicity stunts. Many have been oblivious to the devastating effects of budget cuts by state legislatures that at the same time that they open unsupervised charter schools that impoverish community public schools. With some notable exceptions, like the Detroit Free Press and the Akron Beacon Journal, the mainstream media has simply ignored a widespread assault on the principle of free public education, democratically controlled, open to all. Instead, they print press releases written by corporations about "miracle schools," where every child graduates and goes to college, without bothering to check facts.
Reporters quote spokespeople from right-wing think tanks that support privatization or from groups like Democrats for Education Reform, which represents hedge fund managers even though they are neither teachers nor parents nor have any other claim to authority (DFER recently referred to NEA as "the lunatic fringe" in the New York Times for denouncing Duncan, even though NEA speaks for three million teachers and DFER speaks for a handful of fabulously wealthy equity speculators).
What is most astonishing is to see the almost total indifference or ignorance of the mainstream media to an unprecedented and well-coordinated effort to privatize public education. Reporters don't care that certain individuals and corporations are accumulating millions of dollars in taxpayer funding while schools are cutting their budgets and closing their libraries and increasing class sizes. Reporters don't care that state authorities are allowing schools to open whose founders are not educators and What's at Stake in Public Education | Diane Ravitch: