A reader from Wisconsin points out that Governor Walker’s reforms are not intended to improve the schools, but to turn schooling into a free-market activity:
Thank you Diane for highlighting yet another unproven attempt to inject free market ideology into Wisconsin public schools.
The recent recall attempt exposed the forces supporting Gov. Walker and how they wish to dismantle public education and fill the void with free market principles. Walker rolled out phase two of his anti-public education plan in his State of the State address with more promises to “transform education” and “expand the number of choices for families in Wisconsin—be it a traditional, a charter, a voucher, a virtual, or a home school environment.”
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute–which provided the first critique you mentioned– is in the same camp (or a suburb) of the MacIver Institute–which sponsored Operation Angry Badger designed to “document the shortcomings of public schools in Wisconsin.”
WPRI, MacIver, Citizens for Responsible Government (CRG), and the Tea Party forces supporting Gov. Walker have no intent to improve public education or provide support for our neediest students. A successful public education system with an extensive support network works against the lassez-faire capitalist ideology of these free marketeers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think it’s helpful to remember that many of these people are “true believers”, who are quite sincere in expecting that creating a “market” for any activity will always produce superior results to activities directed by government. I think the evidence is clear that this is nonsense, but that ‘s not enough to sway those who have been drinking the kool-aid for over three decades now.
Reform gets set back decades when things like this happen:
Bill Ayers keynote speaker @ teachers conference
http://www.ate1.org/pubs/2013_Annual_Meetin_1.cfm
Bill Ayers is a domestic terrorist (bomber) involved in deaths.
Teachers listen to him? Why not Joseph Mengele also?
Are Ayres and Mengele different?
What is the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE)? It sounds
like a cover organization for something nefarious.
Teacher Educators are those who work in colleges of education preparing people to become teachers. (Many are former school teachers themselves.) ATE is one of their professional organizations.
Our Governor has also named this week “School Choice Week” in conjunction with “Celebrate Catholic Schools” week. Not a coincidence. . .
Sent from my iPad
Once again, the end-game is just about as free-market as the defense industry.
Very true, but try explaining that to the true believers. We need to organize and return rationality to government.
Well, for starters, it would help if defenders of public education quite using the attackers own ad copy to describe them.
Perhaps “defenders of public education” should think about educating kids and not start with “public education”. As soon as you preface all discussions with “public education” you have identified yourself as an Ideologe not interested in kids. You have accepted the status quo of yesterday as the correct answer. Do you live in yesteryear?
edit — quit using
Good grief, EGB, you can dunk the same teabag only so many times …
It’s sort of like Obamacare where all that was talked about was the cost of insurance, not actual availability or cost of health care. Here, we talk about solutions and don’t formally acknowledge what problems the solutions address.
I had excellent pub ed, so did my kids. Pub ed is not the issue. When it is, kids are not the focus, but control is. That is plainly obvious just like it was with the Obamacare thing.
I teach in a small rural poor school district in west central Wisconsin. We graduate 60 kids a year. There are NO charter or parochial choices for our kids. The public schools are the only choice. And the funding problems are hitting us hard. The only thing keeping this community going is the public school. Our kids deserve the BEST we can give them. As do all other kids in the state of Wisconsin and the entire USA. I am a public school advocate who thinks every child in America deserves equal access to an equal educatioin. Thanks Diane Ravitch for caring about children and the future of our society!!
The privatizers are targeting teachers in L. A. Help return due process to teacher employment. Whether or not you live in L. A. please check out and sign my petition. “STOP L. A.UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT FROM PERSECUTING TEACHERS AND FIRE JOHN DEASY”. I’m asking you to sign this petition to help us reach our goal of 1,000 signatures. I care deeply about this cause, and I hope you will support our efforts.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/379/874/347/stop-l-aunified-school-district-from-persecuting-teachers-and-fire-john-deasy/
Off-topic, and sorry for the hijack, but I have to share. I’m sure this will be familiar to most of you, but not being a teacher myself, I’m still struggling to get my head around what teaching has become since my days in the hallowed halls of high school. My best friend from high school is a 20 year teacher who’s provided me a lot of my education on education lately. She wrote in an email:
“School is going well right now. I am staying caught up on grading; I am ready to give grade checks tomorrow, in fact, and try to catch up my science kids, where I am having at least 6 absences a day out of 45 students. I am in the middle of a couple of projects so planning isn’t an issue at the moment, but it’s coming. I just got my last long evaluation results–3 Highly Effective, 32 Effective, and 1 Needs Improvement, which is still to get kids started immediately when they walk in the door. And the reason that’s still an issue is that I don’t like to jump right in when the bell rings, so I don’t plan for the kids to, either. But I’ve got to keep thinking about it. So now 4 of my 5 observations are done, and unless things go sour, it looks like I may be an Effective teacher after all. Giving credit where it is due, the principal, Rich, has done a great job learning this new job and is keeping right up with his schedule. The JH principal has too, from what I’ve heard, although I’ve also heard that he’s a nit-picker, but that’s how the state tells us they want the principals to be–we’ve constantly got to hear what we can do better. Ugh. I sure wonder what the next two years will bring, because even as we get used to these evaluations, they are still high-stress, high-maintenance to add to an already full work load.”
Note that she started by saying that school is going “well”. Then she launches into a nightmare world that I can’t fathom – repeated “long” evaluations, having to wonder if she’s “effective”, being told she has to “get kids started immediately”, constantly hearing what you could do better. Her “Ugh” doesn’t begin to describe it. If this is going “well”, I’d hate to see “poorly”.
And she sounds so brainwashed, like she believes this is the way it should be. Last school year she was blindsided by a horrible evaluation from the junior high principal (a different one than the one mentioned) and she was put on probation after 19 years of nothing but positive evaluations. The HS principal she refers to positively here totally threw her under the bus, despite the fact that he’d written most of those positive evaluations before. She went through (and is still partially in) a period where she felt she wouldn’t be able to teach anymore, but didn’t know what else she could do, since she lives in a very rural area where jobs aren’t exactly growing on trees (not that they are anyway).
From what I’ve gathered from reading posts on this blog, her situation is nothing abnormal. I don’t know how teachers are doing it. If it weren’t for the fact that, as I mentioned, there aren’t a lot of other jobs, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the entire profession walk out en masse. My hat is off to you all.
Maine’s Democrats get the virtual charter charade:
http://www.pressherald.com/politics/democrats-take-aim-at-virtual-schools_2013-01-29.html
One bill would put a moratorium on virtual charters until “best practices” can be defined; given the increasing number of investigations of K12, that may take some time. Another bill would ban for-profit virtual charters all together.