Tom Ultican has written many posts about the failure of privatizing public education. In this one, he takes the long view and concludes that what we see today is the culmination of fifty years of attempts to turn education into a business.
He starts from two recent books: Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains and Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All.
These are good lens through which to understand the rightwing plutocratic attack on the public sector.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane This Gates News is just a post-script to the reformer/takeover–the Gates Foundation is upping their investments in private prisons: CBK
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/gates-foundation-trust-invests-in-private-prisons-again/?utm_source=NPQ+Newsletters&utm_campaign=9b59eda278-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_11_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94063a1d17-9b59eda278-12886885&mc_cid=9b59eda278&mc_eid=cc73fe1cff
Catherine King. Thanks for this important link. It has little known facts about who is in charge of the assets in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and how the data, data, data guy offers up excuses for not making decisions about how their wealth is invested. Talk about the swamp!!!! So who is actually managing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation TRUST???
The head of the Gates Foundation is the lead, independent board member at Zuck’s Facebook.
We have been pursuing “Market World” too long. We have an ever increasing income inequality gap that is producing a few super wealthy winners and many, many losers. With billionaire inflicting their biased right wing views on the rest of us, I agree with Ultican.”To me, it looks like a powerful data set that says we need an empowered Government to protect Americans from ravenous billionaires and their self-serving anti-public education and anti-democratic views.”
Fifty years of oligarchy.
Only 50?
From TPM-
A right wing consulting firm goes from state to state slashing budgets when Republican governors are elected. The most recent state budget-slashing, road show (Alaska) was paid for by the Koch’s AFP. Members of the consulting firm are Donna Arduin and the discredited Arthur Laffer, the infamous trickle down cheerleader.
The states identified and the governors at the time-
New York (Pataki), California (Schwarzenegger), Florida (Jeb Bush) Alaska (Dunleavy) Kansas (Brownback) and Illinois (Rauner).
Excellent article by tultican! For the prior 75 years of so of that business influence may I recommend Ray Callahan’s classic 1963 book “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”.
I read Education and the Cult of Efficiency shortly after it was published. Concurrently there was a huge push for teachers to write “instructional objectives” complete with measurable outcomes, distributed by grade levels, and in one memorable project of the era, with cost estimates for the resources needed to accomplish the objective.
That ridiculousness was spawned by “thought leaders”who used the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act to justify the need for more “efficient” programs of study, approximating those used for military training, and in the earliest days of fantasy about computers as the wizards in every classroom.
The newer incarnations of this mindset focus on effectiveness with the efficiency of any method untethered from that end-in-view, meaning roughly does it work ( even if it is a frog or a worm ).
One version of this implicit trust in getting a desired outcome by almost any means (preferably efficient) is the no-nonsense disciplining of students. Another is the National “What Works Clearinghouse” where empirical research is vetted and specific “treatments” or “interventions” deemed educational are recommended as “evidence based.” This to say the cult is alive and arguably made worse by the presumed power of computers as the instruments for achieving efficient and effective delivery of instruction.
Thanks for the “as usual” excellent commentary, Laura!