Ed Johnson is a passionate advocate for quality education for all. He lives in Atlanta. Ed is a follower of the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, who taught that you don’t blame frontline workers for the failure of the system and its poor leadership. He frequently writes letters to the members of the Atlanta Board of Education, hoping to enlighten them.

Here is the latest:

New-age colonialism in Africa, and in Atlanta public schools

Want to know and understand what new-age colonialism (neocolonialism) in Africa is starting to look like? Then grab a cup of coffee or whatever and read…

Old-age colonialism, of course, went after capturing and controlling African bodies for profit.

Now, new-age colonialism aims to capture and control African minds for profit.

Fortunately, the many African nations operating cooperatively to make Agenda 2063 a reality are not buying new-age colonialism. Why are some African-Americans buying it?

Unfortunately, African-Americans who opt for or support charter schools and “school choice” help to catalyze new-age colonialism here in the U.S. as well as in Africa and worldwide especially in developing countries, perhaps not knowing that is what they do. But why wouldn’t they know that is what they do?

So please understand, for example, no matter how currently serving Atlanta school board members and their superintendent try to influence your thinking to favor “school choice,” there is no such thing as “public charter schools.”

If you want to understand why there is no such thing as “public charter schools,” then grab another cup of coffee or whatever and spend some time with Princeton University’s publication of Paul Starr’s article, The Meaning of Privatization, at…

http://www.princeton.edu/~starr/articles/articles80-89/Starr-MeaningPrivatization-88.htm

A short except:

“The rhetoric of the public choice school is a kind of hard-nosed realism. The theory dismisses as naive civic ideals such as public service; it denies the capacity of voters or politicians to act on the basis of a national interest wider than their own private aggrandizement. Rather like Marxism, public choice theory claims to face up to the self-interested basis of democratic politics and therefore treats all claims of higher purpose as smoke and deception. And also like Marxism, the theory presents itself as a scientific advance over earlier romantic and idealized views of the state. But rather than being an advance of science over intuition, the appeal of the public choice school is precisely to those who are intuitively certain that whatever government does, the private sector can do better. Together, the property rights and public choice schools show only that, if you start by assuming a purely individualistic model of human behavior and treat politics as if it were a pale imitation of the market, democracy will, indeed, make no sense.”

Without question, “school choice” is “a purely individualistic model of human behavior” hence arguably and unavoidably leads to democracy making no sense simply because democracy is about “We …,” not “I,” the individual.

However, contrarily though not surprisingly, the Atlanta superintendent is widely known to praise new-age colonialism’s “choice” of schools as being “appropriate in a country focused on democracy:”

https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/school-choice-appropriate-in-a-country-focused-on-democracy-atlanta-superintendent-says

Accordingly, one might reasonably assume the Atlanta superintendent also praises old-age colonialism’s “choice” of slaves as being “appropriate in a country focused on democracy.”

Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com

Bcc: Various