Beware: Opponents of Elizabeth Warren’s Education Plan Have a Vested Interest in Expanding School Privatization
In October, Elizabeth Warren released an exemplary plan for public education. As she campaigns across the country to be chosen as the Democratic candidate for President in 2020, I hope she will continue to advocate for the important principles in her public education plan.
In the past decade public schools in many places have been beleaguered by dropping state revenue in the 2008 recession and politicians further cutting taxes. And over several decades, a new philosophy of education has been acted into law by ideologues who promote corporate accountability driven by evaluating schools and teachers by students’ standardized test scores and punishing schools that fall behind in a system based on competition. Because aggregate test scores in any school have been shown by a half century of research to correlate with the family income of the students in the school, and because our society has become highly segregated by income, this system has shut down public schools in the poorest neighborhoods, produced state takeover of struggling big city schools and school districts, and prescribed school privatization—more charter schools and vouchers—as though it is a solution.
Warren’s plan turns away from corporate, test-and-punish school reform and calls for strengthening America’s public schools. The plan demands that Congress quadruple the federal investment in Title I, the 1965 Great Society program to support public schools serving concentrations of children in poverty. Warren’s plan calls on Congress fully to fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a federal program which mandates that schools provide specialized services for disabled students. In 1975, Congress promised to fund 40 percent of IDEA’s cost, but last year Congress continued years of underfunding when it chose to fund only 15 percent of the IDEA’s mandated programming. Warren calls for adding 25,000 Community Schools, making these public schools into neighborhood centers for families in impoverished neighborhoods—with schools housing wraparound health, social service, and after school and summer programs right in the school building. Warren calls for CONTINUE READING: Beware: Opponents of Elizabeth Warren’s Education Plan Have a Vested Interest in Expanding School Privatization | janresseger
