Monday, Jun 3, 2013 12:30 PM EDT
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/03/instead_of_a_war_on_teachers_how_about_one_on_poverty/
New data shows school “reformers” are full of it
Poor schools underperform largely because of economic forces, not because teachers have it too easy
Topics:
Michelle Rhee,
Education,
Education Reform,
Teachers,
Poverty,
Teachers Unions,
Rahm Emanuel,
Michael Bloomberg,
Charter schools,
New York City,
Wall Street,
Department of Education,
economic inequality, Politics News
In
the great American debate over education, the education and technology
corporations, bankrolled politicians and activist-profiteers who
collectively comprise the so-called “reform” movement base their
arguments on one central premise: that America should expect public
schools to produce world-class academic achievement regardless of the
negative forces bearing down on a school’s particular students. In
recent days, though, the faults in that premise are being exposed by
unavoidable reality.
Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.
For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.
Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.
For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.
David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist,
magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile
Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
More David Sirota.
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