Public education is under attack.
We are told daily that there is a crisis in the classroom: Bad test scores they say. Bad teachers they say.
But don’t worry. Corporations are coming to our rescue replacing public service with the free market.
BEWARE
When corporations get involved in the learning process everything becomes ‘commoditized’ or assigned a worth in the marketplace. Children become products. Teachers become workers. Parents become consumers. And schools become factories focused on making a profit.
The latest aspect of this is the use of value-added measures to determine a teacher’s competency by his or her students’ test scores. Implicit in this system is that students shouldn’t work for the inherent value of knowledge, but rather do the work for the sole purpose of earning a grade. Furthermore, the unnecessary adversarial relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and other students coupled with school financing disparity due to local wealth or poverty [See post Occupy 101], tend to create schools where students learn to rule or to be ruled and creativity and the love of learning take a distant second place.
How do corporations propose to fix things?
- Privatize as many schools as possible
- Cut costs
- Cut teachers
- Those left must do more with less
How do these changes help improve our children’s education? As Diane Ravitich says: “Teacher’s working conditions are children’s learning conditions.”
Everyone in education should watch her video
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