Shawgi Tell: Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness | Dissident Voice

Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness | Dissident Voice

Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness

Charter school promoters have always relied on disinformation and irrationalism to justify the existence of charter schools, but in recent weeks and months it appears that a new, more pernicious, form of self-serving disinformation and irrationalism has reared its head.

This new disinformation and irrationalism seeks to further debase social consciousness and takes the form of casually and repeatedly declaring the exact and complete opposite of what research and experience confirm. The hope is that just by asserting and declaring something repeatedly, people will spontaneously believe it and abandon any conscious act of investigation.

Charter school promoters are increasingly desperate to make their pay-the-rich schemes look and sound like they are harmless and exist for the good of humanity. They have to do this because consciousness of the retrogressive character of privately-operated charter schools keeps steadily growing.

Several forms of this newly concerted strategy of disinformation and irrationalism have emerged.

The main one, however, has to do with school funding. Common sense, CONTINUE READING: Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness | Dissident Voice

Shawgi Tell: Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders” | Dissident Voice

Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders” | Dissident Voice

Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders”

Since day one, advocates of privately-operated charter schools have tried to convince everyone that segregated charter schools “empower parents” and that parents are not only “stakeholders” but the most important “stakeholders” in education. Everything in education is supposedly all about parents first and foremost. Parents are the end-all and be-all. Education apparently serves no one else or 10 other broad functions. Education exists mainly to serve parents. Everyone and everything else is secondary at best. Oddly enough, while the “parent empowerment” theme is central to charter school disinformation it is actually charter schools that choose parents and students, not the other way around.

Such a narrow notion of parents-first-last-and-always deliberately degrades and debases the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic role, significance, and importance of public education in a modern society based on mass industrial production. The days of petty production, small estates,  small farms, and feudal manors are long gone. Humans today are born to a complex modern society in which all production is highly technical, scientific, advanced, large-scale, and cooperative. Everything is interdependent and impossible without millions of skilled working people. The problem is that this modern mass production system is based on outdated relations of production, that is, it is owned and controlled by competing private owners of capital CONTINUE READING: Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders” | Dissident Voice

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation

If you have not read Duke Professor Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, you should. I reviewed it for the New York Review of Books here. It describes in great detail how the Koch brothers created an academic foundation for their extremist libertarian views. In this paper, MacLean goes into new detail about the workings of the Koch network and its efforts to undermine democracy. The Koch network knows that it does not have popular support so it has developed ways to “work around” the will of the majority. Currently, its major project is to block any effort to confront climate change.

The paper is titled “Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy.” The essay appears in a publication called The Disinformation Age, published by Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to “Unkoch My Campus” for bringing this paper to a large audience.

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog