Let the Billionaires Run Our Schools?

Get out of the way students, parents, teachers and local elected school boards -- the educrats employed by the billionaire foundations of Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Wal-Mart family know what is best for your child's education.

That is the unspoken but genuine theme we are hearing from the editorial page of the Denver Post and education 'leaders' in Colorado and across the nation.

They call themselves "reformers, but let's be clear about what the truth is: the corporatization of our public education system is the status quo -- they masquerade as "reformers", but in Colorado, for instance, this philosophy has been in place since Roy Romer was governor, over fifteen years ago.

The charter 'movement' is in large measure now a scheme to create so-called public-private partnerships out of our schools, that is, you pay and a non-profit corporation comes in and runs the classroom. The 'Race to the Top' lottery set-up by Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is a way to impose low-wage teachers, a national curriculum, national standards, and national student records data collection on all of our schools. Make no mistake, these are essentially the same policies that the so-called 'accountability' reforms started in the mid-1990s and that were institutionalized in Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' law in 2001.

The 'reform' has been in the process of being implemented for over a decade and still the education of our young people lags and stagnates -- it is time to boot this failing 'reform' philosophy and try something new.

But ... the educrats and politicians are predictably under the mesmerizing sway of much, much money, courtesy of a gang of billionaires and their ideologically corporate philanthropic foundations.

The article link below is a 'must read' for anyone attempting a greater understanding of what is going wrong in our public schools.

We desperately need more decentralization of decision-making in education, more local control, more empowerment of parents, more listening to our children as students, more freedom for teachers to teach, and more emphasis on learning as a joyful and meaningful experience. And we also need less obsession with money as the only solution to all problems, less high stakes testing, less tyrannical administrators, less invasive data collection on students, and less brow-beating from Washington, D.C. and the penthouse suites of billionaire philanthropists telling us that we don't know how to best educate our own children.

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools | Joanne Barkan/DissentMagazine.org

Comments

[Evie Hudak]

See SB 11-69, which is an attempt to put some controls on this.

[chris H]

as with many other things, when you control the system of education, you can censure thought and ideas and speech by leaving out things many would consider necessary for a complete education. Already the elimination of music and physical education programs and the inclusion of a more conservative non-secular slant in history and politics.

[Alice]

ather, a bill is needed which states: Under the bill, NO private corporation or foundation (including educational management organizations (EMOs)) or individual shall contract with a school district, a board of cooperative services, or a charter school (a local education provider) to operate a public school (defined as any educational institution within the state of Colorado that receives funding from taxation) nor shall any tax revenues be used for the payment of tuition, fees, or other services provided by such corporations, foundations, or individuals.

To quote the article:"The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three." Teachers in my family have been saying this for over thirty years!

Allowing private entities to determine educational policy profits the few and ignores the imperative for social justice.