BushCo's education policy was all about busting the teachers unions and hiding it by pretending to care about closing the achievement gap. To doubt their motives was to believe the bigotry of low expectations. Now it looks like Obama's education policy will be all about busting the teachers unions and hiding it by claiming that what they really want to do is to end poverty. From Truthout: (via Avedon)
Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010
creating the new market in public education as a "movement for social
justice." He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms
explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence on the
other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments
he said, "I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of
600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio." He claimed that
education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism
is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of
educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public
education. "We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the
private," he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform
is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in
terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to
business-led reform. He also insisted that the CTU opposes charter
schools (and, hence, change itself), despite the fact that the CTU runs
ten such schools under Renaissance 2010. Despite the representation in
the popular press of Duncan as conciliatory to the unions, his
statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility
to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters
created under Ren2010 are deunionized). Thus, in Duncan's attempts to
close and transform low-performing schools, he not only reinvents them
as entrepreneurial schools, but, in many cases, frees "them from union
contracts and some state regulations."[9]
Duncan effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of
the Nobel Street charter schools, who openly called for the closing and
reopening of every school in the district precisely to get rid of the
unions. What became clear is that Duncan views Renaissance 2010 as a
national blueprint for educational reform, but what is at stake in this
vision is the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the
discredited and tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives
love to embrace.
Something to watch.
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