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Edited on Tue Apr-05-11 09:10 PM by madfloridian
Those are the words of DFER, the education reform movement called Democrats for Education Reform. The corporate reformers’ larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization. The opponents of public education are now well-organized. They have their talking points handy to post at forums. Some, mostly bloggers, are still trying to point out the obvious...but it may be too late. So much money and power are behind the drive to get government out of the business of education. There is an excellent article at Common Dreams by Stan Karp. He really gives a clear description of just what they are doing to education in the name of "reform." It's scary stuff. Who’s Bashing Teachers and Public Schools and What Can We Do About It?The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems are broken.
..."In my home state of New Jersey, there’s a man named David Tepper who manages the Appaloosa Hedge Fund. Last year, Tepper made $4 billion as a hedge fund manager. This was equal to the salaries of 60 percent of the state’s teachers, who educate 850,000 students. But Gov. Christie rolled back a millionaire’s tax and cut $1 billion out of the state school budget, so people like Tepper would have lower taxes. It’s not only impossible to sustain a successful public school system with such policies, it’s also impossible to sustain anything resembling a democracy for very long. He says that ultimately what is at stake is "whether the right to a free public education for all children is going to survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions, collectively owned and democratically managed—however imperfectly—by all of us as citizens. Or will they be privatized and commercialized by the corporate interests that increasingly dominate all aspects of our society?
Looks right now like the latter will be happening, but I guess we have to have hope.
The corporate reformers’ larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.
This is not some secret conspiracy. It’s a multisided political campaign funded by wealthy financial interests like hedge fund superstar Whitney Tilson and rich private foundations like Gates, Broad, and Walton. And it’s important to keep this big picture in mind, even as we talk about specifics like merit pay and charters, because these issues are the dynamite charges being put in place to burst the dam.
Exactly right. It is not a conspiracy, it is right out in the open all over the media now.
The merit pay gives more control to the reformers, a way to ultimately keep newer and cheaper teachers coming into the system. The charters...well, they are more and more dominated by management companies and do not have local control.
It's a very long article, but well worth the read. Karp is qualified to speak on the topic.
"Stan Karp is a Rethinking Schools editor and taught English and Journalism to high school students in Paterson, New Jersey for 30 years. He is currently Director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey's Education Law Center."
Actually the policies that Newt Gingrich dreamt about are being put into play right now. Free Market schools. Read this paragraph. Every single thing he lists is being done right now. All of it. Under a Democratic administration.
We should apply the free enterprise system to our education system by introducing competition among schools, administrators, and teachers. Our educators should be paid based on their performance and held accountable based on clear standards with real consequences. These ideas are designed to stimulate thinking beyond the timid “let’s do more of the same” that has greeted every call for rethinking math and science education.
Source: Gingrich Communications website, www.newt.org Dec 1, 2006
Stan Karp is right. Moneyed interests are playing much too big a role in education right now. They do not have the knowledge about teaching and learning to be given this much power, yet it is happening.
There are too many billionaires taking over public education. The Indypendent wrote about many of these wealthy people in 2010.
The Faces of School Reform
Led by a band of billionaires, the school-reform movement has gained increasing momentum during the past decade, spreading its reach into urban communities across the country. But instead of truly transforming public schools, private funders want to restructure them. They insist running schools like a business is the solution. At stake is not only control over hundreds of billions of dollars in local, state and federal funding, but also the future of the next generation of schoolchildren.
Listed are Bill Gates, Spencer Robertson, Eli Broad, The Waltons, Michael Bloomberg, and Michael Milken and Larry Ellison.
In fact Diane Ravitch calls them the Billionaire Boys Club
The Department of Education has closed nearly 100 regular public schools and replaced them with charter schools or new schools. … All such decisions are made without consultation. And the chancellor goes around the country boasting of his success in closing established schools and replacing them with new schools and charter schools.
Most bizarre is when the mayor and chancellor show up at charter school rallies and tell the parents that public schools are no good and that they are lucky to be in a charter. I often wonder at such times if these two have forgotten that they are responsible for the 98 percent of the city’s public school children who are in regular schools. It’s like the president of Macy’s telling his customers to shop at Wal-Mart.
Of course, this course of action has the enthusiastic endorsement of the Billionaire Boys Club, that is, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation. They know what needs to be done, and they don't see the point of listening to such unenlightened types as parents and teachers.
At some point the music and the upheaval will stop. But when it does, will there still be a public school system? Or will the schools all be run by hedge fund managers, dilettantes, and EMOs?
Karp in his article above quotes Governor Chris Christie in one of the most painful comments ever:
Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans to build on the test-and-punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home to me when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying, “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
Yes, it is simply incredible.
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