The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss picked up an important piece by Jeff Bryant.
Jeff’s piece first appeared on the Campaign for America’s Future website.
By Jeff Bryant
Events this week revealed how market-driven education policies, deceivingly labeled as “reform,” are revealing their truly destructive effects on the streets and in the corridors of government.
From the streets, we heard from civil rights and social justice activists from urban communities that school turnaround policies mandated by the Obama administration’s education agenda are having disastrous results in the communities they were originally intended to serve.
From the corridors of government, we were presented with irrefutable evidence that leaders driving the reform agenda are influencing public officials to write education laws in a way that benefits corporate interests rather than the interests of students, parents, and schools.
These events, in tandem, reveal an inconvenient truth of education reform that should make anyone who promotes these policies question, “Whose interests are being served here?”
Read Jeff’s full commentary here: The inconvenient truth of education ‘reform.’
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks Diane! Onward…
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Diane, I see progress being made. Yesterday, while eating my breakfast and listening to “Sunday Square-Off”, I heard Graham Resnik reading my letter about having you on his show. I was surprised. Of course, he skipped all I said about how charters and testing are hurting our schools. Arizona will be a difficult state to crack, but if the others begin changing, Arizona will, too.
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How easily deluded the public is! Your observations are spot on and hard to imagine how a fifth grader would miss the obvious! The public has become so enamored by pseudo, self serving experts that they gulp the kool aid and ignore the results!
I feel that after the unrelenting litany of “Bad teachers” being the cause of everything from poverty to prison overcrowding, the public could stomach the most Machiavellian
attacks on teachers and hurray their destruction…if anyone can explain that, I’d love to hear it!
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One needs to go back beyond Bush and Clinton’s NCLB to Gov Clinton’s AMERICA 2000-GOALS 2000 to see the plan at its earlier inception.
To call this only a right wing plan, fails to account for the likes of Gates and myriad other foundations , corporations and institutions of higher learning. All fighting to PROFIT from the multi TRILLION dollar industry that is GLOBAL EDUCATION. Data driven and controlled distance learning.
Charter and choice are merely temporary means to that end. School in a laptop or tablet. IEP,s for every student. Chillingly cold and impersonal and controlling. This wave of the future could drown us.
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Labels, Democrat or GOP don’t have a lot of difference any more, except the GOP will wash us all down the drain on a faster track! They both are arms of the same corporate elite that won’t rest until the 99% of the nation are reduced to the modern form of med evil serfdom! If that sounds extreme, check out the wealth transferal of the past decades! Then to seal the deal, review the GOP’s presidential dog and pony show and their philosophical guru, Ayn Rand and her draconian, heartless philosophy!
When our Leaders follow avidly her theory of “Greed is good; altruism is bad” its no wonder the corporate vultures do what vultures do: pick the bones of the rest of us!
One can’t drive down the streets of any major city and not pass poverty stricken victims betting for a quarter! I only hope the quote, “The past is prolog” isn’t true, or many of us will be joining those pitiful ranks!
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The article states it all correctly. The supposed beneficiaries (minority children) have become the victims. The reformers run roughsod over community will and maximize profits off of the children. I noticed that Stephanopolus highlighted in his interview with Rhee that we’ve had two presidents using these reforms yet no evidence that they are working. It made me think that people are beginnning to see through it all.
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