Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In recent years, we have heard and read a lot about the failure of public schools in the United States. “Our schools are failing” has almost become a mantra with members of the media, many of our politicians, and the advocates of school reform. I have seen few people who have questioned the assertions made by the media, elected officials, and school reformers that schools in this country are not adequately educating our youth and that our educational system is a total and abject failure.
Many of those who criticize our public education system offer charter schools and the privatization of public schools as solutions to the “education problem” in this country.
I’m a retired public school educator. I have known and am friends with many current and former public school teachers. I know that there are many fine classroom practitioners working in our public schools today…and many excellent schools where our children receive a quality education. I am aware that there are also many schools where children may not be receiving the highest quality education. (What often go unmentioned in the media are the real reasons—including poverty—why some schools in this country may be failing.)
One problem with the “our schools are failing” mantra—as I see it—is that all our schools are lumped together in one basket labeled “failing.” How did this come to be? Do we Americans really believe that NO public schools in this country provide their students with an adequate education? Do we believe that all schools need to be reformed? If not, do we believe that even the schools which are actually doing an estimable job of educating their students need to be reformed?
I think it is time we start taking a good look at the individuals and organizations that are behind the push to establish thousands of charter schools and to use taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools as the means of raising the quality of education in this country.
ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council)
Last May, education historian Diane Ravitch wrote the following about one group that has been driving the school reform movement:
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.
Ravitch continued:
A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.
ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.
ALEC Exposed provides a wealth of information about how—through ALEC—“corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers’ unions…” (You can find the information in Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers–the ALEC report prepared by The Center for American Democracy.)
Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst
In addition to ALEC, there is another organization called StudentsFirst that has been helping to spearhead the effort to “reform” our public schools. According to Stephanie Simon, Michelle Rhee, founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, has “emerged as the leader of an unlikely coalition of politicians, philanthropists, financiers and entrepreneurs who believe the nation’s $500 billion-a-year public education system needs a massive overhaul.” Simon added that Rhee, the former chancellor of the D.C. public schools, “has vowed to raise $1 billion” for StudentsFirst, and “forever break the hold of teachers unions on education policy.”
Simon continued:
StudentsFirst has its own political action committee (PAC), its own SuperPAC, and a staff of 75, including a cadre of seasoned lobbyists Rhee sends from state to state as political battles heat up. She has flooded the airwaves with TV and radio ads in a half dozen states weighing new policies on charter schools, teacher assessment and other hot-button issues.
To her supporters, Rhee is a once-in-a-generation leader who has the smarts and the star power to make a difference on one of the nation’s most intractable public policy issues.
But critics say Rhee risks destroying the very public schools she aims to save by forging alliances with political conservatives, evangelical groups and business interests that favor turning a large chunk of public education over to the private sector. She won’t disclose her donors, but public records indicate that they include billionaire financiers and wealthy foundations.
In January the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign published its review of Rhee’s StudentsFirst State Policy Report Card for 2013:
Here’s an excerpt from the summary of the campaign’s review:
On Monday, the pro-privatization education group StudentsFirst, led by former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, released a State Policy Report Card, ranking states and giving each a letter grade based on their implementation of a slew of education reform policies. Rather than focus on issues facing students and families, particularly those affected by unequal access to school resources, the policy benchmarks in the new report reveal StudentsFirst’s obsession with charter schools and de-professionalizing the teaching profession. The report pushes policies that are either untested or disproven — but happen to be welcome in the halls of right-wing think tanks and politicians.
The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign listed five reasons why the StudentsFrirst Report Card is “a veritable wish list for privatization advocates and a recipe for failure for everyone else”:
1. Ironically, It Ignores The Needs of Students
2. It Opposes Personalized and Student-Centered Learning
3. It Argues That We Don’t Have Enough Quality Teachers… While Advocating That We Lower the Bar for Teacher Preparation
4. It Continues the Disastrous High-Stakes Testing Drumbeat
5. It Advocates “Equal Funding” and “Equitable Access” for Charter Corporations and Private Schools, Not Students
The DeVos Family
In May of 2011, Rachel Tabachnick wrote an article for AlterNet about the DeVos family, a wealthy family that has “remained largely under the radar, while leading a stealth assault on America’s schools” that has the “potential to do away with public education as we know it.”
Quoting Tabachnick:
Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But “school choice,” as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.
The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.
According to Tabachnick, the Devoses, who are big contributors to the Republican Party, spent millions of dollars “promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000.” Following that defeat, Tabachnick claims that the family decided to alter its strategy.
Tabachnick:
Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.
Dick DeVos advocates “stealth” strategy, Heritage Foundation, December 3, 2002
Last April, Daniel Denvir wrote an article for City Paper about the push for a school voucher program in the state of Pennsylvania. He said that names on the fliers of “legislative hopefuls” sounded like the names of “homegrown” candidates. He said that a “different picture” emerged when one followed the money:
…that of a statewide campaign, funded by wealthy donors, to stack the Pennsylvania primary battles on April 24 in favor of those supporting school vouchers, which allocate taxpayer funds for private and religious school tuition. The pro-voucher political action committee (PAC) Students First — funded by Pennsylvania hedge-fund managers and American Federation for Children, a Washington, D.C., pro-voucher group headed by Amway heiress and major right-wing donor Betsy DeVos — emerged on the state’s political scene with a bang for the 2010 elections. And they are back to spend big in 2012.
Lawrence Feinberg, co-chairman of the anti-voucher Keystone State Education Coalition, said, “I see a move by essentially a handful of very wealthy people who want to privatize public education for a wide variety of reasons. Not the least of which has to do with crushing labor unions, but they also want tax dollars going to private and religious schools.”
School Reform and The Profit Motive
In his Salon article The Bait and Switch of School “Reform,” David Sirota writes about the profit motive behind some of the reforms being advocated by “Big Money” interests.
Sirota:
As the Texas Observer recently reported in its exposé of one school-focused mega-corporation, “in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom — most of it supplied by private companies.”
A straightforward example of how this part of the profit-making scheme works arose just a few months ago in New York City. There, Rupert Murdoch dumped $1 million into a corporate “reform” movement pushing to both implement more standardized testing and divert money for education fundamentals (hiring teachers, buying textbooks, maintaining school buildings, etc.) into testing-assessment technology. At the same time, Murdoch was buying an educational technology company called Wireless Generation, which had just signed a lucrative contract with New York City’s school system (a sweetheart deal inked by New York City school official Joel Klein, who immediately went to work for Murdoch.
Such shenanigans are increasingly commonplace throughout America, resulting in a revenue jackpot for testing companies and high tech firms, even though many of their products have not objectively improved student achievement.
At the same time, major banks are reaping a windfall from “reformers’” successful efforts to take public money out of public schools and put it into privately administered charter schools. As the New York Daily News recently reported:
“Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years…
“The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation. By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
“No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.”
SOURCES
Ravitch: A primer on the group driving school reform (Washington Post)
Activist targeting schools, backed by big bucks (Reuters)
5 Ways Michelle Rhee’s Report Puts Students Last (National Opportunity to Learn Campaign)
Right-Wing Campaign to Privatize Public Ed Takes Hold in Pennsylvania (AlterNet)
Big corporate money in support of school vouchers hits primary races statewide. Will it tip the scales in Philly? (City Paper)
The bait and switch of school “reform” (Salon)
The Deep Pockets Behind Education Reform (Forbes)
Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers (The Center for American Democracy)
Bron,
What Mike said. I’d add that it’s good to have people challenge our positions on different subjects/issues. It makes us question our own beliefs and positions more carefully.
Nick: Tony, I’m a good man and I don’t need advice or validation from you.
I see, but you have no compunctions whatsoever in repeatedly telling the rest of us to get out and walk, start with a few blocks, the endorphins will do you good. Plus, do not forget you are mind, body, and spirit! Plus, we should not forget, as you told Bron, we are all losers that do not agree with you.
You are a hypocrite, Nick.
JT: Just playing some tit for tat.
Bron,
Also what Mike said.
Take care of that ankle Professor!
I loved the cartoon OS!
Take it easy on that ankle, Prof.
You’ll be back to leaping over tall buildings in no time.
Bron,
I don’t think the key is giving up on changing people’s minds. That a fundamental underlying mechanism of the marketplace of ideas. The key to not making yourself crazy in the process is not caring if they don’t change their mind. It’s their decision. If you don’t change their mind, maybe someone else will. Maybe they won’t ever change. Some people are simply broken and incapable of learning or changing their mind. In the end, you make the arguments and the arguments stand or fall on the merits. How many times in our disagreements over the years have I told you I don’t care if you change your mind? A great many and it is as true today as it was the first time I said it. How many times have I said
agreement is not required? I have always known that your mind is yours to change and the best that can be done is to present options for you to choose from. Sleep in class? Pay attention? Some like Coke, some like Pepsi, but the choice remains yours.
However, true anger in the light of having your preconceptions and prejudice is always a self-defeating option. Your response to the XCKD cartoon OS posted shows you know this. True anger harms only the self. Does anyone paying attention really think that Louis Black is as angry in person as he appears on stage? He’d catch fire if he was. The mask of anger can have utility in an argument. The mask, however, is not the real thing. Appearance is not always reality and the study of propaganda will reveal that truth if one has not come to that conclusion via other paths. Real anger? Not so much utility. It harms the holder. I know this because Buddha (and Jesus and Confucius and Aristotle, et al.) tells me so. True anger makes people irrational. The only utility in true anger is arousing it in your opponent as it causes them to make mistakes. I know this because Sun Tzu told me so and because I have seen it in action.
nick’s mask slipped and revealed that behind it is simply true anger.
While this makes him infinitely predictable, it does not change that his actions run him afoul of one of the very few rules we do have in this place. Something that has (as you know) eventual consequences. One can illustrate the futility of his persistent ad hominem over substance attacks. One can warn him he’s behaving in a way that is not acceptable to the community and that there are consequences for those choices. The choice of paths is his just as your choice of paths is yours and mine is mine. Absent the fluttering of ego, in the end, that’s all there is: options, choice and consequence.
If someone’s choice is true anger in response to everything and everyone who doesn’t agree with them?
It’s sad and ultimately self-defeating, but it is their choice.
Unless, of course, they are a malignant narcissist or suffering from some other kind of mental defect. There is a difference between, for example, having bad ideas promulgated by sociopaths and actually being a sociopath. One is not a barrier to being part of a community as agreement is not required. The other? Most certainly is. And the proof of that is always in the eating of the pudding.
TONY C:
it depends on how you define theft and slavery. Personally, I am against all kinds at any level of misbegotten gain from any party.
Teach for America’s new partnership with largest for-profit charter network
By Valerie Strauss
3/19/12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/teach-for-americas-new-partnership-with-largest-for-profit-charter-network/2012/03/13/gIQAbsfrLS_blog.html
Excerpt:
Teach for America loves to expand its reach, and so it has again, this time partnering with the controversial Imagine schools, the nation’s largest for-profit charter school network.
That’s an interesting pairing.
Imagine is based in Arlington, Virginia, with some 75 schools in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The for-profit charter operator has been investigated in some states for the way it exercises control over the schools it manages, essentially ignoring the boards of trustees that are supposed to really run the schools.
It has also come under scrutiny for its complicated real estate deals that generate millions of public dollars for Imagine. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, detailed the deals involving six Imagine schools operating with public money in St. Louis. Essentially Imagine opened schools and then sold the buildings in which the schools operated to a company that then leased them back to Imagine at often extremely high rates, which are, of course, paid for out of public money.
Beyond the rent, the paper also reported that Imagine’s charter schools must pay 12 percent of their budget for management costs. Still, it said, some Imagine schools were missing pencils, paper, books and other basic supplies.
As for student outcomes, the standardized test scores in that city’s Imagine schools are below the state and city average, the paper said.
And that’s just what’s going on in one city. There’s trouble in others, too.
Now Imagine is partnering with Teach for America, the organization that takes new college graduates, gives them five weeks of training in a summer institute and — thinking that five weeks is somehow enough preparation — sends these recruits into some of America’s neediest schools to teach troubled kids in a quest to help close the achievement gap.
The press release, naturally, indicates none of the above. I’m publishing it as the best example I’ve seen lately of a public announcement that just makes you shake your head and wonder whether the people involved really believe their own publicity.
Hi everyone. I am sorry to have been missing for a while but I broke my ankle recently. I noticed on this thread a lot of personal stuff that, as you know, we do not allow on this site. We remain committed to our civility rule at this site — something that distinguishes this site from other sites. There is no need to make any of this personal. We can be passionate about these issues without dishing on each other. Now even if you don’t respect the civility rule, for the sake of my ankle, stay civil. Please.
Bron, Thanks for the apology. You’re a standup guy w/ the integrity to apologize. In the scheme of things this was a nothingburger. But, as you see, this miscommunication did not occur in a vacuum. I accept my responsibility using poor grammar and overreacting. Finally, we are sympatico in not wanting a world where we agree w/ everyone. When I’m in Madison, it is an echo chamber and quite stifling. San Diego is much more diverse in every way. We’re cool.
Nal, Thanks for your comment. It means a lot to me.
Tony, What empathetic advice. Throughout my career I have helped women find deadbeat dads. I started doing it for friends, acquantances, and then by word of mouth it became women I didn’t know. You see, I did this gratis. I did not even charge my expenses. It wasn’t 100% altruistic, I wrote it all off which helped. I still do this but much less because I’m really not working fulltime. I worked a case gratis that’s still active. I was investigating a shitbird for fraud and came upon an old girlfriend of his. I’ll cut to the chase. When this shitbird lived w/ her the daughter from a previous marriage died, ostensibly of SIDS. I did some investigation and got the case reopened. He almost certainly smothered the child because she was crying..mom was in the shower. When the shitbird learned of this case being reopened he fled. I keep tabs as does the homicide detective. He’ll get arrested somewhere. This woman is so grateful she calls me all the time. She’s poorly educated and very low income. I hate talking on the phone..but I’ll alwaays take her call. Tony, I’m a good man and I don’t need advice or validation from you. My volunteering started in high school tutoring low income students. It continued in college working w/ flood victims and I was a “professional” volunteer w/ VISTA right out of college. Got $375/month.
OS, Bron: Think what a boring world it would be if everyone marched in lockstep on philosophy and beliefs.
I think there is a balance to be struck. Don’t 99.9% of us march in lockstep on the prohibitions against murder, slavery, theft, fraud, and rape?
I could go on, but suffice to say I prefer lockstep on some important philosophical points, and would prefer a world in which absolutely everyone agreed with me on those points.
OS:
that is a great cartoon. LMAO.
I think maybe Nick is at that stage in his online discourse.
At some point you have to let go of all the stupidity you see and give up trying to change peoples minds.
I think people are starting to realize that when they argued with someone in meatspace and the other person agreed with them, the other person was just being polite and following social norms. When in reality there was a whole lot more going on.
Politicians had better start realizing that or they are going to be hating life. We will know who the tyrants are by which ones want to control the internet.
Otteray,
Great cartoon. Thanks.
Bron,
Nail. Head. Hit.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I don’t know anyone with whom I agree with on everything. Think what a boring world it would be if everyone marched in lockstep on philosophy and beliefs. That is why Baskin-Robbins makes so many flavors of ice cream. I have dear friends with whom I enjoy spending time, but we all know better than to bring up politics. We do not want a social visit to turn into a barroom brawl.
The internet and a law blog, not so much circumspection.
nick:
Thanks for the information. I cant have a sense of humor? Come on.
This is cyber space, I dont know what these people even look like.
I find this site interesting because I do have very strong ideas about how the world works, in fact I find your ideology more closely aligned with the regulars than I could ever hope to be.
I would hope some of these people consider me a cyber friend but I have no illusions that they agree or ever will agree with my economics or politics. I agree with them on individual rights and disagree with them on much.
I would not want to live in a world populated only by people who think like these people but then I wouldnt want to live in a world populated by people who think only like I do.
I am sorry if I offended you.
I hope you understand that the internet is not very anonymous, its elemental.
“I would hope some of these people consider me a cyber friend but I have no illusions that they agree or ever will agree with my economics or politics. I agree with them on individual rights and disagree with them on much.”
Bron,
I do consider you a cyber friend, but we will never agree on economics, or politics. Our agreement on individual rights though is quite important. Many of my social friends would make you look like a progressive politically and I like them anyway. If we all agreed here it would be a dreary place.
Elaine,
Starving public schools is exactly right. The hell with the facts. They just get in the way of a good business deal.
Blouise:
I was agreeing with Elaine:
“Oh…this is priceless: “The rape thread is a classic example. You remember that, where the grammar schoolteacher was lecturing me about rape victims w/o having ANY experience.”
I have never been raped. Does that mean I can’t have an opinion on the subject?”
ALEC Exposed: Starving Public Schools
by Julie Underwood
Published on Thursday, July 14, 2011 by The Nation
This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy.
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/14-12
Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality” through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this “choice”—and vouchers “scholarships”—but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.
The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985. It was championed by then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member, who once said he “loved” ALEC meetings, “because I always found new ideas, and then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine.”
ALEC’s most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state. That year Georgia passed a version of ALEC’s Special Needs Scholarship Program Act. Most disability organizations strongly oppose special education vouchers—and decades of evidence suggest that such students are better off receiving additional support in public schools. Nonetheless, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Indiana have passed versions of their own. Louisiana also passed a version of ALEC’s Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (renaming it Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence), along with ALEC’s Family Education Tax Credit Program (renamed Tax Deductions for Tuition), which has also been passed by Arizona and Indiana. ALEC’s so-called Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act has been passed by Arizona, Indiana and Oklahoma.
ALEC’s 2010 Report Card on American Education called on members and allies to “Transform the system, don’t tweak it,” likening the group’s current legislative strategy to a game of whack-a-mole: introduce so many pieces of model legislation that there is “no way the person with the mallet [teachers’ unions] can get them all.” ALEC’s agenda includes:
§ Introducing market factors into teaching, through bills like the National Teacher Certification Fairness Act.
§ Privatizing education through vouchers, charters and tax incentives, especially through the Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act and Special Needs Scholarship Program Act, whose many spinoffs encourage the creation of private schools for specific populations: children with autism, children in military families, etc.
§ Increasing student testing and reporting, through more “accountability,” as seen in the Education Accountability Act, Longitudinal Student Growth Act, One-to-One Reading Improvement Act and the Resolution Supporting the Principles of No Child Left Behind.
§ Chipping away at local school districts and school boards, through its 2009 Innovation Schools and School Districts Act and more. Proposals like the Public School Financial Transparency Act and School Board Freedom to Contract Act would allow school districts to outsource auxiliary services.
ALEC is also invested in influencing the educational curriculum. Its 2010 Founding Principles Act would require high school students to take “a semester-long course on the philosophical understandings and the founders’ principles.”
Perhaps the Brookings Institute states the mission most clearly: “Taken seriously, choice is not a system-preserving reform. It is a revolutionary reform that introduces a new system of public education.”
ALEC’s real motivation for dismantling the public education system is ideological—creating a system where schools do not provide for everyone—and profit-driven. The corporate members on its education task force include the Friedman Foundation, Goldwater Institute, Washington Policy Center, National Association of Charter School Authorizers and corporations providing education services, such as Sylvan Learning and the Connections Academy.
From Milton Friedman on, proponents of vouchers have argued that they foster competition and improve students’ learning. But years of research reveal this to be false. Today, students in Milwaukee’s public schools perform as well as or better than those in voucher schools. This is true even though voucher schools have advantages that in theory should make it easier to educate children: fewer students with disabilities; broader rights to select, reject and expel students; and parents who are engaged in their children’s education (at least enough to have actively moved them to the private system). Voucher schools clearly should outperform public schools, but they do not. Nor are they less expensive; often private costs are shifted to taxpayers; a local school district typically pays for transportation, additional education services and administrative expenses. In programs like Milwaukee’s, the actual cost drains funds from the public schools and creates additional charges to taxpayers.
But a deeper crisis emerges when we privatize education. As Benjamin Barber has argued, “public schools are not merely schools for the public, but schools of publicness: institutions where we learn what it means to be a public and start down the road toward common national and civic identity.” What happens to our democracy when we return to an educational system whose access is defined by corporate interests and divided by class, language, ability, race and religion? In a push to free-market education, who pays in the end?
Nick: Ahhh, now we are all “losers”. Is that a label you attach to anybody that disagrees with you? Or are we losers because we believe there is a positive role for community and public action that cannot ever be met by free enterprise?
You are the loser, Nick, after your hundreds of miles of self-congratulatory navel gazing, you have learned nothing; your only conclusions are those of a child, that you are right and everybody else is wrong, and logic doesn’t matter, and reasoning doesn’t matter, statistics, science, and psychology do not matter because if they disagree with what you think they are wrong.
Is this really your purpose in life now, to walk alone for 12 hours a day so you can brag about how far you walk? To each his own, but that seems like an excessive amount of self-indulgence in endorphin production to me.
Perhaps you should spend that energy volunteering at the local women’s shelter to help prosecute wife beaters, secure protective orders and ensure violators of protective orders get jailed, to help secure fair divorce and child support deals for their victims.
Have no fear, people like me will pony up any and all court costs. It would be a good place to focus some of your internal rage, to apply it to people that truly deserve it, and your victories will have all the endorphin punch you crave with real effect in making the lives of victims better.
Don’t be a loser living your empty life of walking in circles, Nick, go be a hero. Have an impact on the world.
I see nick still refuses to add anything of substance to the discussion about corporate-led school reform in this country.