A mom in Tennesse asks the fundamental questions:
“Why can’t all private industry contracted by the public education system be supportive to make public education better? We should be pursuing ways to create partnerships and increasing teacher quality, not creating hourly teacher tracks, devaluing university study, pushing hostile takeover strategies through charters, vouchers and for-profit charter schemes.
“By law we must educate children.
“Public education is not the post office with Fed_Ex and UPS and Amazon as its competition. I’m not forced by law to use the post office. And post office outcomes are not slanted by poverty of the customers they serve. Education is influenced by a child’s mindset to learn (ELL, disabled, just having a bad day). We are bettering lives with education. It should be our NASA.
“Business models discount the human and the need for childhood stability. When a parent is sick, when a child moves, things can disrupt a child’s learning. The public education system should be the safe haven. Something to count on. Your community should be there to back you up when everything else falls apart. We cannot reduce education to numbers and a free-for-all with choice. Education is the prime example of a government service that must work. Just like the military, roads, or police and fire.
“We are being held hostage by test scores. Our society is being scammed into thinking we don’t need this vital government service. And there are a lot of really smart people with their heads in the sand afraid of being politically active.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why? Consider these reasons:
1. Class Warfare: The rich do not want democracy; they want power. The means to keeping power is to provide a barely functionally literate society for those who are not among the rich, who will vote as they are told through the propaganda of the press and the schools themselves. In one variant, the rich justify this by arguing that their wealth is proof that they are the fittest, and therefore the rest of us are too weak to have power. Noam Chomsky as discussed this in great detail and at length over the years.
2. Profits. This is related to 1. in some ways, but can be independent too. As Rupert Murdoch put it so well, education is a $600-billion-per-year market, and we want to control it. The way to take control of the education “market” is to convince the public that the job can be done better and cheaper using a business model. Of course, we’ve been trying this for over a century, but few know this history (read Raymond Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools to understand this history of abject failure.
3. The Progressive-Modernist World View. Sadly, I’ve come to conclude that the current plague on education is the result the Progressive and Modernist rejection of classical education. For example, John Dewey’s hatred was quite notorious, even to the point of accusing U. Chicago Roberrt Hutchins of being a Nazi, when Hutchins challenged the Progressive model. The broad model (i.e., about the aims of education and not classroom pedagogy) of the Progressives and Modernists is one of using schools as part of a rationally planned society, which neglects the sort of indirect intellectual development of the classical model in favor of “scientific” and “efficient” education, which naturally becomes identified with management and technology.
You don’t have to convince me nor the vast majority of people who write on this blog. To fight against the power structure is of course what is necessary. We must not give up. So many things in our history seemed unattainable but in the long run, the good prevailed but only after immense suffering and hard work.
Paraphrasing: “We have not yet begun to fight”, but “We Shall Overcome”.
I agree. We must continue to fight for democracy. Since the media has been co-opted by the 1%, protesting in the streets the way the civil rights movement did in the ’60s, the women’s movement of the early twentieth century and the aniti-Vietnam war in the ’60s and 70s did. We have to become a visible thorn in the side of the corporatists. The only way to focus attention on the issues harming public education is to peacefully protest to inform the public and get them on our side. We have to organize to get attention so public schools won’t become extinct. Do it for yourself, your children and grandchildren. I am a child of the ’60s; peaceful protests work!
YUP! If we sit by and let it happen, nothing will change!
The movement to privatize the public sector is part of the “shock doctrine” Naomi Klein has written about. Disciples of Friedman’s Chicago School of free-market unfettered capitalism are eager to profit off the belief that our public schools have failed (false) and the solution to this shocking reality is to let the free-market be the solution (wrong) to this problem facing our nation. Businesses involved in this attack on public schools have no motive to work with public school educators or school boards; they want to rake in profits off the taxpayers. Privatizing public programs like the schools is high up on the ALEC agenda.
Dear Tennessee mom, The answer is so simple. as Rick Johnson points out above, . Dumb down the citizens and they elect the chosen voices who will re-write our history. Democracy depends on shared knowledge.
Click to access hirsch.pdf
If you can dictate what is taught, you can keep some people in poverty and thus servile. Cannot have a skilled workforce because they will demand higher pay.
If you can dictate what is taught you can do this — let the Koch bros. write what kids will know
Of course it makes oodles of loot for charter companies, and tech companies and lobbyists.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Thank you Dr. Ravitch for giving my comments a voice. Thanks everyone for your thoughtful comments. – Lyn H. in Nashville with three public school kids.