The Sub-Prime Education Crisis Part 2: It’s All About The Bubble
By Terri Michal
Many people are asking themselves, what is happening that would lead elected officials from all over the country to create, and/or vote for, such harmful and anti-public school legislation?
To understand it, I feel we need to take a step back and look at the larger machine at work. For a moment we need to stop debating charters, vouchers, tenure, merit pay, test scores and data collection, and instead look at the current education reform movement as a whole.
In doing so I realized that the same ideals, methods, and hidden agendas that are driving the current education policies have already left a big ugly scar on the American people. We all know it as the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Simply change a few of the player’s names, substitute the word education for housing, and everything becomes clear.
Let’s start with the housing bubble:
In 1977 Lewis Ranieri worked with members of the Federal Government to create a system that would make far more money available for home mortgages, hoping to give every American an opportunity to own a home.
For 30 years, through both Republican and Democrat leadership, the concept put in place by Ranieri and our Federal Government continued to morph. Under influence of the traders, mortgage companies, the banks and our Government, this program went from a well-intentioned thought to one of the worse financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Believing that the ‘housing bubble’ would never pop, these financial entities became increasingly bold in their efforts to amass wealth by granting riskier mortgages and eventually crossing the line into illegal activities. The Government was complicit in the finance world’s actions by creating policies to expand home ownership that had no regard for proper lending principles.
Under these risky loans, made possible by American businesses and our Federal Government, we, the American people, were being set up for failure. No one seemed too concerned however, fortunes were being made and the government looked great under the Badass Teachers Association:
TERRI MICHAL FIGHTING THE FIGHT FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS, EQUITY, AND EQUALITY IN ALABAMA
You can see Part 1 of this series here http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-sub-prime-education-crisis-part-1.html