Bruce Baker of Rutgers is one of the wisest and sharpest critics of the privatization movement (aka “reform”).
In this post, he analyzes two favorite terms of the privatizers: “relinquishment,” which means “give up,” abandon your antique belief in public education, turn your school over to private management and get over it. The other is “sector agnosticism,” which means pretty much the same thing as relinquishment.
You have to wonder where these guys get this jargon. Do they make it up all by themselves? Or do they hire Republican pollster-linguist Frank Luntz to help them figure out words and terms that will make them sound high-minded, thoughtful, and important as they scheme to dismantle and hand off the public schools?
Then there is that term that Baker refers to here: The privatizers want “not a great school system,” but “a system of great schools.”
I first heard Joel Klein use that term about a decade ago, and I didn’t fully understand what he meant by it.
Now I understand.
It means that the privatizers have no idea how to improve low-performing schools, so they close them. Then they hope that some entrepreneur will step up and offer to take some of the students and start over. The others, well, they are out of luck; they will be bounced around from school to school. If the new school doesn’t work out, then the privatizers close that too.
At some distant point in the future (or never), the city will have only “great” schools because all the “bad” schools were closed. But that point never arrives, as we have learned in New York City. Instead, the Mayor just keeps closing schools every year, the schools that enroll the kids that no one wants.
The bottom line: the privatizers will keep trying to persuade you to give up (relinquish) as they hand off the students, the buildings, and the funding to private operators. The private operators won’t do any better, if they take the same students, but that doesn’t matter. The victory (for them) comes as a result of the dissolution of public education. Once gone, can it be reassembled? The loss (for us) comes as a result of the destruction of one of our great institutions of democracy.
If I may correct your statement: “The victory (for them) comes as a result of the dissolution of public education.” to “The victory (for them) comes when they can make the kind of dollars that the military industrial complex makes”. You know “cost plus” where the costs always rise and the plus ($$) gets bigger and bigger.
Eisenhower warned of the MIC and many of us have been warning about the PEIC (Public education industry complex) apparently to not much avail. Is it too late? I hope not.
a name and a non-local habitation …
I begin to think that Regressive Education is the best sum-up of what this retrograde movement is all about.
We could call it Hedgucation but I’m not sure that would catch on …
Jon, I LOVE Hedgucation!! It goes well with villainthropy!
If you like acronyms as much as I do, you might like this one —
Despoilers Of Public Education (DOPEs)
Diane’s final line is the most important: it is about democracy. Yes!
🙂
Duane Swacker & Jon Awbrey: good points.
How about calling it “Widgetized Education”? As currently promoted, it is to be mandated for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN who are regarded as widgets that need to be mass produced in such a way that edupreneurs get a hefty ROI and employers get standardized compliant employees with low-level skills. The enriched curricula for THEIR OWN CHILDREN [including music and the arts, foreign languages and study abroad, low teacher-to-student rations]—now that’s another matter altogether…
Not too much off topic: do either of you recommend, or have an opinion about, Charles Seife’s PROOFINESS: THE DARK ARTS OF MATHEMATICAL DECEPTION?
Thank you both for your postings.
🙂
Privatized prisons are the model being followed.
BTW, anyone really looked at the test-makers, curriculum-developers, and other leeches?