After the Education Wars: Someone Needs to Save Us from Our Billionaire Saviors
After failing to prop-up Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagging gubernatorial campaign last June, Michael Bloomberg apparently spent the summer pondering whether it would be wiser for him to personally save the United States rather than waste his time trying to rescue California by proxy. Last week the New York Times reported that Bloomberg was mulling a run for the Presidency as a Democrat because that represented the most viable path to victory. As the Timesstory observed, while Bloomberg has engaged in some good work on guns and the environment, many of his other positions might not be very likely to win over the liberal base of the Democratic Party.
Interestingly, the New York Times piece listed Bloomberg’s more conservative views on criminal justice reform, #MeToo, and bank regulation, but was strangely silent on education, one of the central fronts where Bloomberg has spent millions of dollars promoting largely terrible ideas and candidates that have done far more harm than good to American public education.
As Andrea Gabor, (ironically) the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, writes in her excellent new book After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Bloomberg’s reign in New York hardly represented a golden era for education: “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia—never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined.”
The corporate education reform crusade of the last several decades that folks like Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family have funded and nurtured is a top-down movement of billionaires guided by, Gabor astutely notes, an unquestioned gospel of neoliberal “truths”:
The business reformers came to the education table with their truths: a belief in market competition and quantitative measures. They came with their prejudices—favoring ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in Continue Reading: After the Education Wars: Someone Needs to Save Us from Our Billionaire Saviors
