I found some emails in my outbox that I guess didn’t generate any responses, but I still think they are interesting so will post them here…
The bait and switch of school “reform”
Behind the new corporate agenda for education lurks the old politics of profit and self-interest
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/09/12/reformmoney/index.html
While I have a difficult time believing that unions are the solution to the education issue (the author makes a very good case that overall poverty and asymmetry of income is the core of the problem, nothing else), it seems quite clear that the real purpose (of which union busting is a small part) is to convert all the money now going toward public education through the pockets of the already fabulously wealthy so they can take their cut (if we are lucky, it will only be 20-25%). I see a parallel with the IC (Intelligence Community) in that teachers will finally get paid handsomely (or at least handsomely enough that there are people clamoring to become teachers) yet only receiving 35-40% of the actual money the government spends for each teacher (the rest, of course, going to ‘overhead’ and profit). Of course I doubt much overall will change education wise if, as the author states, the core of the problem is poverty, but at least the billionaires will have even more money they can use to distort our so-called democratic system.
