To understand the tentacles of corporate reform, you must read this post
Here Mercedes Schneider continues her review of the board of the National Council on Teacher Quality. As her research deepens, she uncovers the links among the big-money investors and their plans to privatize education, turn teachers and children into assets, and monetize public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Definitely a very important analysis and review of what’s really going on. But I’d caution that many in this movement–especially those at the top–are true believers. If you read the literature on business and economics education, you’ll find that much of what our future business leaders are taught is indoctrination, not critical thinking; many of our college and business school graduates really believe that “greed is good”, that the “market” is all-seeing and all-knowing (it’s true; read Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market), and anyone getting in their way has to be stupid or evil. These people see themselves on a mission akin to a religious crusade and act just like Bolsheviks when it comes to ruthlessness.
Of course under these conditions there’s plenty of room for charlatans and fraudsters; indeed, these types thrive when working for the true believers.
We need to ask where our schools, especially our colleges and universities, went wrong in producing so many intellectually incompetents. How can we spend so much money on education and yet produce so many anti-intellectuals? How can we tout our great academic “meritocracy” that produces automatons who believe that the rich get to define reality?
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I think it is time to retire the term Corporate Reformer — which sounds almost like someone who wants to reform corporations — and start referring to these operators as what they are, Corporate Raiders of Public Education. They operate no differently than any other brand of corporate raiders we have seen over the years in other spheres.
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These corporate reformers like to use words like, chose, competition, free market. Well we can make a chose also, we can choose where we shop and what we shop for. Maybe it is time we turn this all around back on them. We could do it, Walmart competes with Target, Kmart and pretty much every grocery store out there. Microsoft competes with Apple and whatever else. Since so many teachers are scared to take a stand openly for fear of losing their jobs, maybe this could be away where everyone could help. I don’t mean boycott the test, whitch I admit is a good idea, but not everyone feels they can do that. I mean use the whole free market crap that they keep spewing at us back at them. In other words boycott their goods. It worked when MLK boycotted the buses, and when Cesar Chavez boycotted grapes.
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Agree.
Avoid, as much as possible, any company that actively promotes the destruction of public education.
Imaging if we all did it.
And weather or not it ever changes anything, at least I am not giving my money to the Gates or the Waltons. I sleep better.
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Is this some kinda crazy global pyramid scheme?
I agree with the boycott.
It would be far more effective, if entire school districts would participate. No more Scantrons, no more Dell, no more Microsoft, no more tax dollars feeding ALEC associates.
Could the unions help with this?
There are rules to government contracts, who writes them? Can they be modified?
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Could someone let Mercedes Schneider know that about 20 characters are being clipped off on the right side of the articles on her web page.
If you Select All and copy and paste the articles into a word processor you can see the entire article without clipping.
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