This is a Nice Defense of Public Education

although as Lois Weiner would tell us, it is impossible to divorce what is happening in public education with the economy as a whole, and it is impossible to divorce what is happening in American schools with what is happening all over the world, thanks to the World Bank's move to destroy public education worldwide. After all, we can't have an educated workforce for the vast majority of jobs requiring little in the way of education:

If the right-wing educational reforms now being championed by the Obama administration and many state governments continue unchallenged, America will become a society in which a highly trained, largely white elite will continue to command the techno-information revolution, while a vast, low-skilled majority of poor and minority workers will be relegated to filling the McJobs proliferating in the service sector. The children of the rich and privilege will be educated in exclusive private schools and the rest of the population, mostly poor and nonwhite, will be offered bare forms of pedagogy suitable to work in the dead end low skill service sector of society, assuming that these jobs will be available. Teachers will lose most of their rights, protections and dignity and be treated as clerks of the empire. And as more and more young people fail to graduate from high school, they will fill the ranks of those disposable populations now filling up our prisons at a record pace. In contrast to this vision, I strongly believe that genuine, critical education cannot be confused with job training. At the same time, public schools have to be viewed as institutions as crucial to the security and safety of the country as national defense. If educators and others are to prevent this distinction between education and training from becoming blurred, it is crucial to both challenge the ongoing corporatization of public schools, while upholding the promise of the modern social contract in which all youth, guaranteed the necessary protections and opportunities, were a primary source of economic and moral investment, symbolizing the hope for a democratic future. In short, those individuals and groups concerned about the promise of education need to reclaim their commitment to future generations by taking seriously the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's belief that the ultimate test of morality for any democratic society resides in the condition of its children. If public education is to honor this ethical commitment, it will have to not only re-establish its obligation to young people, but reclaim its role as a democratic public sphere and uphold its support for teachers.

This IS the goal of the privatizers, and it is organized.