Why Are the Rich So Interested in Public-School Reform?

[proud2BlibKansan]

It was perhaps inevitable that the political moment that has given birth to the Occupy movement, pitting Main Street against Wall Street and the 99% against the financial elite, would eventually succeed in making some chinks in the armor of the 1%’s favorite feel-good hobby: the school reform movement.

It’s been a good decade now that the direction of school reform has been greatly influenced by a number of highly effective Master (and Mistress) of the Universe types: men and women like Princeton grad Wendy Kopp, the founder of the Teach for America program, her husband, Harvard graduate Richard Barth, who heads up the charter school Knowledge Is Power Program, the hard-charging former D.C. schools chancellor (and Cornell and Harvard grad) Michelle Rhee and the many hedge fund founders who are now investing significant resources in the cause of expanding charter schools. Excoriating the state of America’s union-protected teaching profession and allegedly ossified education schools, they’ve prided themselves upon attracting “the best and the brightest” to the education reform cause, whether by luring recent top college graduates into challenging classrooms or by seducing Harvard Business School or McKinsey-trained numbers-crunchers away from Wall Street to newly lucrative executive positions in educationally themed social entrepreneurship.

The chief promise of their brand of reform — the results of which have been mixed, at best — seems to be that they can remake America’s students in their own high-achieving image. By evaluating all students according to the same sort of testable rubrics that, when aced, propelled the reformers into the Ivy League and beyond, society’s winners seem to believe they can inspire and guide society’s losers, inoculating them against failure with their own habits of success, and forever disproving the depressingly fatalistic ’70s-style liberal idea that things like poverty and poor health care and hunger and a chaotic family life can, indeed, condemn children to school failure.

And yet as schools scramble to keep up with these narrow demands, voices are emerging to suggest that perhaps the rubric-obsessed school reform game, as it’s been played in the Bush and Obama years and funded and dressed-up by the well-heeled Organization Kids, is itself perhaps due for a philosophical shake-up.



Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/09/why-are-the-rich-so-interested-in-public-school-reform/#ixzz1gAPGDBLY

[Angry Dragon]

2. FOLLOW >>> THE >>> MONEY

a tremendous amount of money flows thru the education system and they want a piece of it or all of it.........

[scentopine]

3. Because they want fire the professionals, install low paid, low skill workers and pocket the profit

The motivation for privatizing schools is money. Just like prison system.

When your kids graduate, all the jobs will be in low skill, unregulated labor markets in Asia.

Democrats are in love with this model. I can't figure out why.

Public schools educated the the most innovated generation in world history in USA.

From nuclear powered submarines to electronics to rocket ships to moon, sky scrappers, medical advances, public schools got it done.

Now, economic conditions means that children get little help from parents sicne both are working. Parents expect schools to do everything. Religious and other right wingers have mixed in politics.

Texas School board mandates education textbooks for rest of country.

Homework and endless testing is killing my kids. Hard to know where to start, things are so fucked up.

[rocktivity]

4. Oooh, oooh! I know the answer -- PLEASE call on me!!!

[font size="4"]Because it will make them even RICHER!!! [/font]

Do I get a gold star?


rocktivity

[Starry Messenger]

5. +$ !

[FBaggins]

6. They always have been.

Large portions of the current structure of the public education system owe their existence to the earlier generations of wealthy "philanthropy".

Those barons were most interested in creating a demographic suited for their new assembly lines (and buying their products). This version no doubt has their own priorities.

But it isn't new.

[snot]

7. Like Pink Floyd suggested, it's not edu they want, it's thought control.

"A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking."
– U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, On the Poverty of Student Life (1966).

[muddrunner17]

8. As others have said, it's about profit.

You know they don't want true reform that will better students because they scapegoat teachers, who have virtually no control over the curriculum that they teach. If all of these non-educator reformers were serious about helping students, they'd be asking teachers, "What can we do to help you and your students be more successful." Instead, they come in and say I have all the answers, so do it this way, even though I've never been a teacher.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. It makes them look like public-minded do-gooders, which shields them from opprobrium.

i.e. charity as camouflage.

[Fearless]

10. They are interested in running education like a business...

Less cost for them and minimally educated people capable of being obedient. People who don't realize how badly corporations are screwing them out of benefits and pay in the workplace.

[Duct Tape]

11. Ding ding ding!

Education may be the final frontier.

[lindysalsagal]

12. 1. Savings n loan, 2. Airlines, 3. Wall Street, 4. Mortgages, 5. Post Office, 6. Medicare/healthcare

7. Environment 8. Human rights 9. The schools are next on the list. Gotta empty those coffers, too. No sacred cows left: Not even your own children.

[LWolf]

13. 1. They see an opportunity for profit.

2. They benefit from maintaining a large pool of cheap labor.