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The "school reformers" like Bill Gates and Eli Broad have been outed.
I like the comment preceding the piece:
The Business Roundtable (top CEO's including Gates and Broad) doesn't want to destroy public education. They want to make it leaner and meaner, but most of all they want to increase the number of college grads so they can pay them less and legitimize the increasing numbers of drop outs. Business has ALWAYS controlled public education policy in order to use public schools to socialize and sort. Very little education has ever gone on in public schools, or private for that matter. People learn in spite of school.
There is a new public school policy (aka high stakes testing) for the new (service) economy. I highly recommend that every progressive teacher who cares about social justice for all read Jean Anyon's Radical Possibilities. There is a nice blueprint there for thinking about how to use public schools as a basis for organizing the next social movement.
Take a look at this from the article:
The "Tough Choices or Tough Times" report of the National Commission on Skills in the Workplace, funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents, called for a series of measures including:
(a) replacing public schools with what the report called "contract schools", which would be charter schools writ large;
(b) eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards - their role would be to write and sign the authorizing agreements for the "contract schools;
(c) eliminating teacher pensions and slashing health benefits; and
(d) forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed (i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16).
These ignoramuses like Gates, Broad, and the rest are evil bastards. Schools aren't businesses. Charter schools aren't any better than regular public schools, and a lot of them are horrid, but the Business Roundtable and their ilk don't care if their "reforms" are unworkable at best and destructive at worst.
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