Education Reform is Anti-American
In the name of American exceptionalism, the institutions that have actually made us exceptional are under attack. The irony is heartbreaking.
Education reform is one major battleground and the terms of engagement have been largely distorted. "Reformers" would have you believe that the movement is about children and opportunity. It is not about children or opportunity. School reform is part of an ideological campaign to fracture the very nature of our democratic republic.
Opponents of reform often claim, with some real justification, that education reformers intend to privatize schools, thereby opening an estimated $4.4 trillion global market to entrepreneurs. I don't believe that is the primary aim of those behind the reform movement, even if it is a collateral effect. There are certainly profiteers who stand to make a buck. Pearson alone, for example, siphons more than $1 billionfrom the system. Charter management organizations and technology companies are lined up at the trough in droves, but they are the beneficiaries of reform, not the architects.
I needn't document the prime movers. In a recent post, Alan Singer accurately portrayed the real money behind reform. Mercedes Schneider's book, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who's Who in the Implosion of American Public Education, provides even more detailed exposition of characters behind reform. A small group of very wealthy Americans and their sycophants fund nearly all charter and school choice advocacy: Gates, Broad, Walton, Paulson, Loeb and other billionaires, many of them hedge fund managers. I don't believe that these plutocrats press for school choice to make a buck. They are already unimaginably wealthy. They press for school choice as part of a much larger ideological movement.
But, despite the documentation provided by Singer, Schneider, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody and others, charter and school choice propaganda has persuaded millions of Americans that reform is about helping children.
In recent weeks, ads produced by Families for Excellent Schools have been running constantly on network and cable television. The ads show a white boy attending a hypothetical "good school." He is cheerfully described as college bound. The next frames picture a boy of color who supposedly attends a "failing school" and will have no such opportunity. The ad then declares that 500,000 NYC children desperately need "new" schools and that Mayor Bill de Blasio stands in the way. If only the elected government official would stop obstructing progress, the unelected, self-appointed, masters of the universe would provide those wondrous new schools and lift a generation of youngsters out of poverty and despair! Families for Excellent Schools claims to be a "grassroots" movement. Not at all. It is a coalition of intertwined moneyed-interests that have duped a few "families" to front for them. The "families" in Families for Excellent Schools couldn't buy an ad in the school newspaper, much less produce fancy HD videos and buy $3.6 million of airtime.
And, of course, the wealthy interests behind education reform oppose nearly all of the Education Reform is Anti-American | Steve Nelson: