Thursday, April 8, 2010

Free Market Schooling Deborah Meier Homepage

Deborah Meier Homepage

Deborah Meier
Educational Reformer, Writer and Activist



Free Market Schooling

April 2010
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Dear friends,
"This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about....Working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity — its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist." Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, and I, agree. But the public seems just as suspicious—if not more so—about public institutions as the private ones. Thus the relative lack of alarm over the extraordinary shift in "ownership" of our public schools. We are witnessing more federal intervention at virtually all levels of schooling, more power in the hands of private wealth, and more "market-driven" decisions — at the same time! And there is almost no well-funded opposition, except for teacher unions who are then villainized as being anti-reform, self-interested, too protective of their bad apples.

What epitomizes the latest "true reform" is that it cuts off both teacher professional and parent/family judgment about what goes on in publicly-financed schools. Above all in urban areas, but overtime perhaps to rural and suburban communities too.


Even vouchers are creeping back; but there is no need for vouchers if the same interests and ideology can be served without any clear legislative decision to abandon "schooling as we know it." It has been slipped in—first as an experiment to shake off old habits. A charter here and there with a new idea that could appeal across geographic