Why Corporate Education Reform Will Fail (Eventually)
In my post on Monday I explored the work of historian and social theorist, Michael Katz, especially his 1968 book The Irony of Early Education Reform, which so uncannily presaged the current education reform movement. One line I read from Katz’s updated introduction to the 2003 edition of that book is staying with me. Katz said that the book “‘highlights how education has been used in America as a way out of public dilemmas—as a painless substitution for the redistribution of wealth—and how and why that gambit always fails.”
History will tell us if the reforms touted by the corporate education reformers will take firm root in the country. Perhaps the reformers will be successful in getting their laundry list of reforms in place. After all they are very well financed and they have powerful political support on the federal and state government level. Bill Gates and other plutocrats are spending millions to have their way with public education. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has used his office and power of the purse to bribe states into his favored reforms. Governors in Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and New Jersey have seized on the education reform mantras of “choice” and union bashing to extend the agenda in their states. The court in California has at least temporarily struck down tenure and highly publicized campaigns to do the same in New York and other states are well under way.
It may very well be that in some time in the future, we will see the installation of the Common Core nationwide, the reduction of teacher unions to toothless tigers, the extension of charter schools to the point where no urban district has a public school system, voucher programs proliferating and robbing school districts of funds, and teachers being reduced to “at will” employees at the mercy of evaluations based on student test scores.
This could well happen; we don’t know. There is one thing we do know, however. If every single reform cherished by the corporate education Russ on Reading: Why Corporate Education Reform Will Fail (Eventually):