An Abridged Glossary of Corporate Education Reform

Education has been a righteous battlefield for the left since as long as I can remember.  I graduated from the university in 1972.  Reagan was Governor, my starting tuition for a full load quarter was $88 and as you know started skyward thereafter and never stopped.  By June 6th, 1978, nearly two-thirds of California's voters passed Proposition 13 bringing defunding and privatization of public institutions and the financial shit really started to fly.

Given a seemingly impossible mission of promoting anti -teacher propaganda, right wing think tanks and spin doctors achieved the impossible public relations dream in the intervening years.  Public opinion holds schools and teachers to be at fault.  We guzzled the kool-aide.

This is a very brief 10 point primer on the hot button issues, giving facts to dispel myths.  We will need facts now that the alternative-facts President Trump is on the job of putting the final nail in the coffin for public schools. Sample true fact below:

"As New York Times reporter Kate Zernike observed, "The Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids school districts have among the nation's 10 largest shares of students in charters, and the state sends $1 billion in education funding to charters annually. Of those schools, 80 percent are run by for-profit organizations, a far higher share than anywhere else in the nation."

But Michigan's charter schools have not been as successful as DeVos and others claim, Zernike reports. In 2015, a federal review concluded that the number of charter schools on the list of the state's lowest-performing schools was "unreasonably high." And, according to Education Trust-Midwest: "The majority of charter districts statewide (67 percent) perform worse than Detroit Public Schools among African-American students in 8th Grade Math"

An Abridged Glossary of Corporate Education Reform:
Michigan state's system is a right wing model for these folks so read it and weep.  And then get up and tell the truth to power.

Side note while we are on the subject,  I also believe that compulsory schooling in the service of the machinery of industry is problematic at its root, but that is a much larger, esoteric discussion for another time.

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