Just before Christmas, on December 23, University of California (Berkeley) economics professor and pundit Robert Reich published an analysis totaling up some of the costs of the recent attacks on public education across the USA...
But one of the most significant things that can be culled already from these data is the simple facts that the USA is simply reverting to the status quo that existed throughout most of history, when k-12 schooling was manual training (remember "grammar school"?) for the working class, and college excluded working class children by means of the "free market..." But since a couple of generations of children have been raised believing that they had the right to a decent k-12 education and higher learning if they worked hard, the propaganda machine has to obliterate economic class and most of U.S. history as a piece of the current debate.
With liberals like Robert Reich preaching vouchers, imagine what the "conservatives" are coming up with? Basically, until the American working class helped out allies around the world win World War II, higher learning in the USA was "pay to play." And most of those of us who were "qualified" for higher learning — even as late at the early 1960s, when I finished high school — couldn't pay and therefore weren't eligible to play. Most of my high school friends didn't get college scholarships, so they were "channeled" into the military via the Draft ("Selective Service"), some to die in the imperialist war in Vietnam (and elsewhere in Southeast Asia) and others to be seriously messed up by the empire's misuse of their talents.
One of the grotesque lies being spread lately by Bill Gates (and others) is that the majority of working class kids in the USA are not "college ready" and therefore not doing college. One of the most ridiculous "data sets", which I heard recently from Advance Illinois, Stand for Children, and CPS officials at the Aurora hearings on Illinois "school reform," is that only a handful of Chicago high school children ever make it through a four-year college.The data were lies when they were first repeated from my Alma Mater (the University of Chicago) in 2002 and repeated over and over by that corporate reformer, Andy Stern, in 2006. And they don't become any more true when spouted by Alicia Winckler of CPS in 2010.
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1864§ion=Article