Jan Resseger writes here about the importance of honing the message about the importance of public schools. She refers to an article previously posted here by Chris Lubienski and colleagues about the language that reaches the public. You can be sure, she says, that the far-right is working day and night to advance the destruction of public schools. She notes with disappointment that Secretary of Education Cardona has not laid out his vision for public schools (he was even the main speaker for the national charter schools conference, which simultaneously compete with public schools and claim to be public schools). We can’t wait for him to do it.
She writes, in part:
In some states, the new school year has already begun, the COVID Delta Variant is surging, and already everybody is worrying, and legitimately so, about whether and how public schools will reopen. But that is not really the deepest concern for many of us who care about the future of public schools.
Certainly far-right ideologues investing millions of dollars to push corporate school reform and promote school privatization are messaging their own agenda instead of focusing on whether or not schools reopen in person or whether students and/or teachers are required to vaccinate or wear masks. Newspapers, many of which are losing their education reporters to collapsing advertising budgets, have pretty much opted for the obvious topic—school reopening and masking requirements. You can be sure, however, that ALEC is instead doggedly promoting the expansion of vouchers as its members lobby inside state legislatures, and Nina Rees, who leads the National Association of Public Charter Schools, is ignoring the effects of COVID-19 while she loudly demandsthat Congress continue to fund charter schools operated by for-profit charter management companies.
Message discipline is a priority for the far right, and, when Betsy DeVos was Trump’s education secretary, her consistent framing was, in one respect, a plus for public school advocates. She was the perfect foil we could attack week after week as she harangued against “government schools,” rejected the need for a “system” of education, and enthused about serving the needs of individual children and catering to the taste of individual parents. Not once did DeVos acknowledge the benefit of public schooling as the center of the social contract.
We could thank Betsy DeVos for keeping us on message, but Chris Lubienski of Indiana University, Amanda Potterson of the University of Kentucky, and Joel Malin of Miami University in Ohio worry about the longer term impact of the language of the far fight on public education policy. These education policy researchers remind us: “Language shapes the ways we think and feel about ourselves and others, institutions such as our schools, and (more generally) about our world. As applied to education policy, it matters whether our nation’s public schools are described as such, or if instead they are framed as ‘failing government schools,’ like they were by President Trump in his 2020 State of the Union Address. Accepting this truth about the power of language holds many implications. So what happens when language is used to build up narratives that contradict accumulating evidence? Can language reconfigure our perceptions of schools in ways that re-orient their purpose? More specifically, we assert that disparaging language about our schools unhelpfully limits our policy imaginations. Likewise, we show how casting schools as ‘businesses’— and parents as ‘customers’—shapes commonsensical assumptions about the purposes of public schools, but ignores much of the research evidence about how public schools function… Regarding this language and imagery, for educational leaders and community stakeholders, we encourage vigilant critical analysis of the language used regarding education.”
Certainly under President Biden, the situation for public schools has improved. Biden has articulated support for public schools and public school teachers. And apart from the language he uses, he has made a lot more federal funding available through COVID-relief. He has promoted—in his FY22 federal budget proposal—investing in Title I with significantly more money for schools in America’s poorest communities, addressing the federal government’s decades-old failure to fund the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and radically expanding federal investment in wraparound Full Service Community Schools. But Miguel Cardona, Biden’s Education Secretary, has failed to use language to frame a well conceptualized public school agenda. So far, he has chosen not to speak much at all about the past 20 years of corporate, high-stakes-test-based school accountability.
In the absence of vision from Secretary Cardona and with the rapid decline of sufficient exploration of the key issues in the press, it seems important to devote some serious attention to framing a disciplined set of principles. Lubienski, Potterson, and Malin’s article challenged me clearly to name the principles by which I frame this blog. That way, I’ll be able to check back every week or so to be sure I’m staying on-message.
Here are five principles which, I believe, make up the foundation of this blog.
- An equitable and comprehensive system of public schools—publicly operated and regulated by law—is essential for protecting the right of every child to appropriate and equitable services and for ensuring an educated public.
- School privatization threatens our public schools, threatens educational equity, and threatens who we are as a nation. No state can afford to support three education sectors—traditional public schools, charter schools, and publicly funded private schools.
- Rejecting high-stakes, test-based public school accountability is essential for the future of public education. High-stakes testing has narrowed and undermined what our teachers can do in America’s classrooms, undermined the reputation of public schools and public school teachers, driven privatization and public school closures, exacerbated racial and economic segregation, and undermined the future of children and adolescents living in concentrated poverty.
- Our society must ameliorate the effects of past and ongoing racial and economic injustice and aggressively support the public schools that serve our nation’s poorest children.
- Public school funding across America’s schools is urgently important. Taxation ought to be progressive and must raise enough money to pay for essential basic services including small classes and necessities like libraries and music and art programs. State and federal funding must be distributed equitably to compensate for the alarming disparities in local taxing capacity across America’s public school districts.
Please open the link and read the rest of her excellent post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Like I keep saying, people who believe in Universal Free Public Education need to drop all the chatter about Charterbaggers and Corporate (Conflict Of) Interests “failing” at public education, all of which gives them the benefit of doubt they are actually trying to do that job in the first place, and focus entirely on their real agenda, at which they are succeeding insanely, namely, turning education into an Public Funded Private Industry on the model of the defense industry and others over which the People lost control a long time ago. That is the End Game.
YEP!
Yep.
Conservative Christian power brokers have a goal that works in tandem with privatization’s objective- religious schools that teach obedience to the ruling class, the authoritarianism promoted by Paul Weyrich and William Barr.
I’d like to see public school advocates focus on the value of public schools AS public schools- that we’re not yearning to be “reinvented” as private schools or charter schools- that our schools have value as a public system, one of the few remaining public systems in the United States.
One of the echo chamber ed reform groups referred to what ed reform offers as “delivery systems”. The product and service they’re “delivering” is education, I suppose. If public schools follow the echo chamber and start adopting this language the whole concept of public education will vanish.
Ed reform is really reductive. You hear it with DeVos dismissing schools as “buildings” and the whole “Amazon marketplace” ideology they have. Are schools more than a consumer product? Okay then, let’s talk about our schools as more than consumer products.
Public schools should do a full-throated defense of public schools- the value of our schools in communities. If they don’t we’re going to end up with low value vouchers and “delivery systems”.
A an entire ed reform echo chamber corps are out every day promoting and marketing and cheerleading charters and vouchers – the anti public school bias in ed reform informs everything they do.
We can be the advocates for public schools. Not “agnostics”- PRO public schools, just like ed reformers are pro charter and private schools.
This is really important, Chiara:
“The product and service they’re “delivering” is education, I suppose. If public schools follow the echo chamber and start adopting this language the whole concept of public education will vanish.”
Unfortunately, I’ve heard the occasional business-based consumer-model jargon slip into even my local schsupt’s language, in a town with a strong, well-funded schsys fully supported by the public [& no charters here]. This can easily happen at that level; you’re working with state agencies all the times, dealing with people who already slipped into this mode during 8 yrs under Christie, you find yourself borrowing language that is based on a model alien to your principles in order to sort of throw them a bone or get them to see it your way– it’s habit-forming.
I would imagine that this occurs on a regular basis in states with pubsch-unfriendly legislatures– and at the bldg principal level too. Consciousness-raising is required on the ‘messaging’ issue’ for pubsch admin – we need to get those devoted to public schools on the same page.
What has happened is there are two groups of advocates- the full time, paid cheeleaders for charters and vouchers and “the agnostics” who insist it doesn’t matter whether a school is private or public.
You see what’s missing.
Public school students need advocates- people who are FOR public schools. They don’t have any in the echo chamber ed reformers have created. They have the anti-public school voucher/charter cheer squad and the completely ineffective “agnostics”.
These people haven’t delivered for public school students. We’re not obligated to continue to hire them and take direction from them. Our kids don’t attend “delivery systems” or the ed reform dream of an unregulated, privatized education market. They atttend public schools. They deserve advocates.
I suspect Cardona is in over his head. He has a thin resume.
Our public schools would win a lot more fans if they ditched the bad ideas coming out of our schools of education. For example, the idea that teaching reading comprehension is a matter of practicing reading skills rather than accumulation of background knowledge. Such bad ideas discredit our schools.
Ditched from education colleges, out of state standards, out of the curriculum. Do you think that trend might simply reflect the govt co-opting what goes on in the classroom for the last 20 yrs? [encouraged/ funded by billionaires & their foundations/ think-tanks] It sounds like a concept back-fitted to suit computer-administered/ scored annual stds-aligned assessments.
Interesting hypothesis: government mandates that reading must improve, so tests of pure reading (not background knowledge) must be devised. Reading must be defined as something testable by reading tests and teachable by reading class. Ergo, reading becomes a set of discrete reading skills, not a vast, messy constellation of multifarious knowledge interfacing with words on a page.
But why didn’t education schools stand up and protest? Because they themselves don’t understand what reading is.
Let’s not forget the resurgence of the debunked and failed methodologies of discovery learning, constructivism, project based learning, and absolutely bogus STEM programs. Factor in the demonization of teaching content knowledge and we have opened the door for all the other choices available. Public Ed’s failure to deal with the small percentage of chronically disruptive students may end up being one of the final nails in our coffin.
Right. Public schools aren’t being forced to do this garbage. It’s intellectual bankruptcy; professional degeneration.
Here’s one of the ed reform mouthpieces, The 74:
https://www.the74million.org/
What’s actually happening in public schools is conservative ed reformers are attacking our schools and starting wars over “CRT” and masks and vaccines. But only in public schools- they don’t start any of this chaos in the charter and private schools they value.
You won’t read a word of it on The 74. The echo chamber members are forbidden to criticize other members.
Ed reform is mostly irrelevant to public schools in any positive sense. It’s been 100% downside for public school students. Why are taking advice from these people? It doesn’t benefit our students. It doesn’t benefit our schools. So why continue? So we can assist this “movement” in their work eradicating the schools in our communities? That’s nuts.
Cardona may be a disapointment because he doesn’t have a real vision of public education, but I have to say it is nice to have a US Department of Education that isn’t anti public education or that dismisses the “public” in public education as semantics, like Bush, then Obama and then Trump did.
The “public” in public education is important and valuable and we should defend it. It will be a real tragedy if ed reform replaces it with consumerism. That’s a huge loss. Don’t make that trade. It’s a bad deal.
Thank you. This comment sounds a lot like AOC, who noted that she would far prefer to lobby Biden’s White House on climate change and other issues than lobby Trump’s White House – which she said when a journalist was desperately trying to help Trump’s election prospects by getting AOC to publicly bash Biden and turn off progressives. AOC wouldn’t play along with the right wing framing.
Cardona is not “anti-public education” and he isn’t a tool of corporate interests. He isn’t Arne Duncan #2 nor is Biden Obama #2. He isn’t anti-charter, but he supports public schools.
I encourage people to read the ed reform echo chamber themselves. It’s not just that they’re anti-public school. Public schools barely exist in it:
Nina Rees
Catch
charteralliance
’s very own
RonaldCRice
on
educationgadfly
’s podcast talking about critical funding for charter schools alongside
MichaelPetrilli
and David Griffith.
All day, every day. Rah rah for charters, rah rah for vouchers. You will never find any of them advocating for a public school or public schools. There’s plenty of criticism for public schools! That’s a good chunk of their workday! But you will find NO positive advocacy for public schools in any ed reform org.
They simply don’t value our schools and what that means as a practical matter is they don’t value our students.
We don’t have to buy into it. We’re permitted to go in a different more positive direction as to our schools.
Our mission is different than theirs. We’re in the public school business. They’re in the privatizing public schools business, or the “creating education markets” business or the “open as many charters and hand out as many vouchers as possible” business. It shouldn’t suprise us that they haven’t returned any value for our students. Our students are barely mentioned.
Incredible:
https://news.yahoo.com/senate-poised-battle-3-5-223100866.html
A noted “ed reform” US Senator now proposes stripping funding from any public school that uses covid mitigation.
He won’t succeed, but where oh where are the “passionate supporters of public education” in ed reform?
Hundreds of ed reform groups with thousands of employees and NOT ONE of them can defend the public schools that 90% of US children attend.
You know why they on’t defend our schools? Because our schools are PUBLIC, so therefore have no value in this “movement”.
If the Senator was attacking charter schools or private schools every echo chamber member would be up in arms but it’s public schools so it’s “who cares? We’re phasing them out anyway”
The billionaires who spend their 8-digit pocket change on framing public schools as failing do not care one iota about whether anyone lives or dies, and they certainly don’t care what is being taught or how effectively anything is being learned. They smile at, wink at, and otherwise flirt with segregation. They care about privatization and deregulation as part of their annual welfare checks. That is their entire focus, all the time. Socialism for them, rugged individualism for us, an unsustainable system of inequity that should be a relic of the past and would be, if Miguel Cardona were firmly in the corner of students instead of donors.
Miguel Cardona is not “firmly in the corner of students instead of donors”. How is that rhetoric helpful? He certainly needs to be criticized when he supports bad policies by pointing out why they are bad. But just saying “they are bad because he is in the pockets of donors” is exactly why so many parents have no been convinced. Cardona is not in their pocket. But the ed reformers are doing a much better job of pushing their narrative. And accusing someone who isn’t entirely in the corner of corporations of being entirely in their corner is only convincing to that same group of people who thought there was no difference between the candidates in 2016 and got us 3 right wing pro-privatization Supreme Court Justices.
Cardona needs to be criticized, but it is more helpful when that criticism is not a sweeping condemnation of his character and integrity.
^^^correction: my first sentence should read: “Miguel Cardona is not firmly in the corner of donors”
If he cares about students, why did he mandate standardized testing during a pandemic? Right is right and wrong is wrong.
Mandate?
In NYC, not only were students not “mandated” to take state tests by Cardona, but they also didn’t take Regents Exams (which have a long tradition in NY State). So how did Cardona “mandate” them?
If you are concerned with “right” versus “wrong”, it would be more right to say that Cardona wanted states to give state tests but made it very easy not to have students take state tests.
The only reason I care about this is because you seem to believe that a good “message” is to offer exaggerated attacks that parents know are not true. I view this from the perspective of a parent who is very much pro-public education and against ed reform.
And this is exactly the kind of rhetoric and “message” that turns me off. Maybe some other parents don’t care whether the message is true or not, but I don’t think exaggerated attacks on Cardona do anything but help the anti-public school folks by turning off those predisposed to supporting public education.
I like criticism. But the message of “Cardona is firmly in the corner of donors” is neither “sharp” nor likely to help public schools.
nicely said
Thank you, ciedie aech.
The five principles are perfect. Thank you, Jan and Diane. These five principles do make up the foundation of this blog. They make up the foundation of me. Five principles, and ridiculing Michelle Rhee, that’s me. This is the great post of posts.
Excellent post.
In borrowing a play from the far right… as they frame things as “American” or “un-American.” I would say that if you do not support these 5 principals you are un-American and do not care about the public good and the health of our country.
Public school advocates should certainly work on effective messaging that supports our common good. We are definitely in a David and Goliath battle. While the public mostly supports quality pubic education, they are left largely left out of the discussions and policies. While organizations like NPE and the NEPC produce studies that counter the narrative of privatization, these studies gain little attention from the mainstream media. Unlike Goliath that could be brought down by a single well placed stone, the billionaire backed Goliath is like the terminator that reassembles its parts, unites and continuously doubles down on its stealth attacks.
Advocates may sharpen their message,
but actions
will still speak louder than words.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
is for good men to do nothing, but talk about it.
“…they are framed as ‘failing government schools,’ like they were by President Trump in his 2020 State of the Union Address.”
There is an irony here. Conservatives like Trump loudly proclaim the message of local control. Local people should decide whether to wear a mask to fight covid. Local schools should be the arbiters of various decisions ranging from de-segregation efforts to funding. Thus when they decide that “government schools” have failed, they are essentially admitting that local control does not work. Indeed, conservative attempts to usurp local school boards are so well documented on this blog and its contributors that I need not reiterate these stories.
Of course, we all know that the opposition to local control only extends to the place where a local area opposes something the conservatives desire. They want local control, but they want to legislate exactly what I can and cannot teach in my class based on whether my class feels uncomfortable about it. They want local control until they want to run a gas pipeline across the aquifer supplying my town with water. When it is in their favor, they are all for federalism.
Public Ed blew it when they swallowed the RTTT/NCLB waiver hook, line, and sinker.
The NCLB act was an unconstitutional law that would have been shot down at the SCOTUS level. Statutes cannot require behaviors that are literally impossible to comply with. So instead of fighting the ridiculous notion of 100% proficiency on math and ELA tests, the states folded and allowed test scores to be linked to teacher evaluations. This one aspect of RTTT\NCLBW poisoned the very reason for teaching and learning. It created a system where students had to perform for teachers and school districts. And it produced a K to 8+ system that had an unrelenting focus on just two (2!) subjects and was further constrained by the small handful of CC standards that were actually tested.
So instead of a vibrant and enriching curricula, the best we offered was test prep for a set of mostly useless c standards. Man, that is one tough sell because ESSA didn’t Chang a thing.
Prior to NCLB federal testing was mostly limited to Title 1 services. NCLB greatly expanded federal testing under GW Bush who happened to have become president because his brother’s state had “hanging chads.” NCLB was a gift to Jeb Bush that happened to make a lot of money from advancing the privatization of public education. Public education has been hobbled ever since with test prep. in two subjects. Small, greedy world!
Agreed!
The fact that schools folded so quickly bespeaks shaky intellectual foundations in the profession. Like it or not, the education schools are the leaders of our profession (or are there other nodes of professional power? The unions? They share the same groupthink as far as I can tell, though the AFT American Educator has been a beacon of light). They have failed us.
Fighting the impossible demands of 100% test proficiency would have forced state education departments to debunk the myth that was the very foundation of the NCLB act: “All children can learn [the same material at the same age and at the same pace].”
Off-topic, but to mark the resignation of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, here’s a trip down memory lane.
FLERP!,
I would say that almost everyone who posts here has been far more anti-Cuomo than you for a very long time.
I laughed at this Randy Rainbow parody, despite by own strong dislike of Cuomo and support for his opponents.
I wish Cuomo had stopped being Governor 8 years ago. But that doesn’t mean that the good things he did do didn’t happen. His support for gay marriage and his “straight talk” during the pandemic was a good thing. Another more honest and progressive Governor would have done the same good things, but that doesn’t mean that recognizing Cuomo for doing the right thing is wrong.
I despise Giuliani, but for one brief moment after 9/11 he actually rose to the occasion. Unlike Trump, Giuliani tried to do the right thing instead of trying to get some political mileage out of anti-Muslim sentiment. Certainly later, Giuliani reverted to form and did exactly what he didn’t do after 9/11. But for one brief shining moment Rudy stepped up. I can acknowledge that while still noting how absolutely unsuitable he was for any position, including dog catcher.
Same goes with Cuomo during this brief moment when, like Giuliani right after 9/11 he stepped up. It is okay to recognize that.
And Randy Rainbow, like many people who may have voted for Cuomo in 2018, may not have been aware of the entirety of Cuomo’s corruption. After all, Cuomo did win handily despite many of us on this blog knowing that he should not. I don’t recall you expressing anti-Cuomo sentiment when the rest of us were, FLERP! I’m sorry if you are disappointed he is no longer Governor. I suspect most people here are not
Thanks for the laughs, and you’re welcome for the link.
I don’t understand people who are disingenuous, so it is obvious I am not responding in the way that you want.
Would love to talk about Cuomo’s resignation. I have no idea why you think anyone would get “laughs” from linking to a year old parody song expressing rabid pro-Cuomo love, except to somehow make Randy Rainbow look bad.
“Thanks for the laughs”. Are we supposed to be laughing at Randy Rainbow or laughing at people who thought Cuomo was a wonderful guy?
It’s not off topic, by the way. Cuomo, Kasich, Cristie… lots of governors are part of this topic.
Oh m’gosh, Scott Walker.
Of course, I’m now talking only about former governors. Heh heh.
To understand why Cuomo resigned, read Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/andrew-cuomos-war-against-a-federal-prosecutor
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/andrew-cuomos-war-against-a-federal-prosecutor
It wasn’t the groping, it was the bullying and intimidation to prevent scrutiny of Cuomo himself.
He sounds a lot like another bully from Queens.
It must be killing Cuomo that he went down before his even more corrupt and predatory counterpart from Queens.
Thanks for the link. I noticed these quotes:
“Cohen also warned in a call that Cuomo could use the press and the legal community to “make my life very difficult,” Perry recalled.”
“The lawyer said that the Governor’s office had prepared opposition research on Rice, who told Perry that the Governor’s team would “plant bad stories” about her if she defied him.”
“In 2017, after Trump fired Bharara while he was continuing to build cases against Cuomo allies, articles assailing Bharara appeared in the New York Daily News. Cuomo advisers said that they believed those stories had likely been planted on the Governor’s behalf.”
The bullies like Cuomo and Trump have always needed the media to do their bidding against their perceived enemies. The mainstream media – the NYT and the NY Daily News – were used by Cuomo to sic on his enemies. Thus the endless negative stories about de Blasio and others, and the media’s truly outrageous amnesia about all of Cuomo’s in their face misdeeds. Every action of Cuomo’s enemies was perceived with skepticism as if that enemy was patently corrupt, while each new Cuomo action was reported at face value with complete amnesia that they were covering a man with a long history of doing what benefited him. They treated Trump the same way, which explains why the post-election polls showed that the public was convinced that Trump was a truth-teller and the democrat was the dishonest and greedy one in 2016.
The so-called liberal media is very frequently cowed by the powerful, as they bend over backward to enable the corruption of the powerful by presenting those who oppose them as the real corrupt ones and beating that drum over and over again until the public believes it. Cuomo knew that, and so did Trump.
I wholeheartedly agree that we must sharpen the message. Corporate greed is always laser focused and never sleeps a wink. Making this the only topic of the day was a great idea. That said, it’s always good to have a little on-topic art, poetry, and humor:
Miguel, Betsy, Arne, and Rod walk into a bar. It must be happy hour because the place is packed. Betsy orders four martinis and says to the bartender, “If I can guess how many customers are in this bar right now, will you give us our drinks for free?” The bartender nods. Miguel whips out an iPhone 12 Pro from his jacket pocket and begins to surf the NASA website. Simultaneously, Arne uses the GPS satellite to get the exact coordinates of his location. He then feeds that back to Google Earth to capture a high-resolution image of this location. Rod then opens the digital image in Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Langley, Virginia. He accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, Betsy uses an AirPrint printer located in her limo to print out a full-color, 150-page report. She hands the barkeep the report and says, “Sir, you’ll see from the Executive Summary that exactly 186 customers were seen entering thee bar within the last two hours.”
The bartender thinks for a minute and replies, “That’s right, but if I can guess your profession, will you give me a hundred dollars for those beverages?” Betsy nods. “You must be secretaries of education who led the U.S. Department of Education in the 21st century and foisted high stakes, standardized testing on this country. You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want money for an answer I already know; to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars-worth of equipment and data trying to show me how smart you are; and you still don’t know a thing about anyone here. If you did, you’d know that this bar is actually a church. Now give me back the holy water you took and move along.”
Ha ha! Thanks.
Messages that work are tailored to specific audiences.
This ed reform summit gives you an idea of what pro-public school people are up against:
https://www.asugsvsummit.com/
It’s an echo chamber convention. All the leaders and most of the speakers are the same ed reformers who public schools have been directed to follow for the last 20 years.
They’re leveraging the pandemic to privatize public systems and replace them with private contractors. Oh, and they’re selling ed tech. Lots and lots and lots of ed tech. The future of “public education” is apparently privatized systems that buy lots and lots of ed tech product.
Public schools have choices. They don’t have to buy what these folks are selling. The ed reform agenda is not, actually, the one and only “answer” or “solution”.
If they don’t value your schools or students- and they don’t, not even enough to allow public school advocates or supporters at their summits- don’t buy their products.
In case anyone was still wondering whether the ed reform vow that their privatized systems would be nonprofits was sincere, wonder no more:
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article253321418.html
The whole echo chamber are now lobbying on behalf of federal funding for for profit charter school management companies.
Another lurch Right for the “movement”. The K-12 system won’t be just privatized, it will be a for profit enterprise.
Just in the last year the ed reform echo chamber have lockstep supported huge voucher initiatives and now they’re all supporting for profit charter chains.
There is nothing they’ll reject or even express dissent on- if Jeb Bush announced that all public schools should be shuttered by 2025 the entire ed reform echo chamber would back it. It would be folded into the “movement” within a week and they’d all be penning identical op eds insisting it’s the only “solution”.
After the absolute disaster of for-profit colleges, where millions of mostly low income students were ripped off and cheated, ed reformers are NOW promoting for profit charters?
It’ll work exactly as well as the for profit college experiment they conducted worked- it will be a disaster.
Now we’re not just franctically privatizing the K-12 education system, we’re monetizing it and the whole echo chamber will march compliantly and obediently along? No dissenters?
I feel sorry for students in the US. Their schools are being turned into businesses. Their whole education system is being reduced to a consumer product. No more public mission or duty at all- it’s 100% market. The adults who engineered this should be held responsible for the privatized systems that results. They did this.
We’re gettinmg ready to conduct a huge privatization experiment in the US with the ed reform promotion and lobbying of private school vouchers.
If it doesn’t work out well for public school students or public systems will any of the engineers be held responsible, or even questioned about their decisions?
Of course not. The echo chamber will roll on to the next project.
Public schools, teachers, and unions were delivered a potentially fatal blow during the pandemic dilemma. Teachers lost the one constituency they could not afford to lose: suburban parents. Good luck getting them back now that we’re facing the Delta surge.
Also lost was the next generation of teachers; this is a disaster for public schools and godsend for the privatizers. Cardona must be thinking, stuck in the federal ESSA testing rut, constrained, two (2!) subjects that count curricula, experienced teachers jumping the sinking ship, more parental choice than ever, and the specter of Covid still haunting our schools – what message do they expect me to fine tune? Time to start looking at Bain Capital Miggy!
Intercept posted about a guy who Wikipedia describes as starting out as a “fellow” with AEI and the Koch network. The guy’s current efforts are with other libertarian think tanks. Intercept posted info about a letter the guy sent to an industry sector’s attorneys offering $2,000, “for their time”. The guy wanted signees- regular everyday people-for ghost written letters that opposed legislation, in this case, the Fair Act.
The guy wrote, “I’m a columnist and a scholar at several public policy think tanks in Washington. I’m currently working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” After the PR firm trying to obtain the signatures was contacted by Intercept, the PR firm’s spokesperson reportedly said the guy’s statement was “poor wording”. And, the distancing began.
IMO, there are no columnists nor scholars at right wing and DINO think tanks. The staff at spin tanks commit despicable transgressions against the American people.
Avoiding taxes by funding the types of non-profits like the ones listed above robs Americans.
I posted this at OEN https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2021/08/06/31060/