We are "in the midst of a bold maneuver by wealthy ideological foes"

[madfloridian]

Deborah Meier is the co-blogger with Diane Ravitch at Education Week's blog called Bridging Differences. She is more of the "reformer" type than Ravitch. I was surprised to see this at her homepage. Maybe she is becoming disillusioned with the "reforms" that really aren't "reforms" at all.

She covers other problems going on in our country right now. I agree with her. Her comment at the start about the ideologues is so very true.

She points out that we are "in the midst of a bold maneuver by wealthy ideological foes to roll back as much if not all of the New Deal/Fair Deal victories: enough so that even if they lose badly two years from now it will have been worth it. We would at best have to spend fulltime just undoing damages."

The billionaire boys club is doing so much damage to public schools so quickly...it may never be undone.

Here is more from her blog.

Looking at the Truth without Flinching

They have essentially created a new rightwing political party with a revolutionary agenda led by a wealthy vanguard. Curtailing democracy and misinformation are often essential parts of revolutionary ideology as they intend to undertake reforms that would not be possible under ordinary democratic procedures.

In short: Public schooling may not in my lifetime be preservable. Something I was sure was untouchable, at the core of our nation. I am prone to short-term thinking these days. It is hard not to at 80. While I am not sure I will live long enough to see the undoing of 80 years of progress I do not regret having been on the other side of the barricades (so to speak). But… it hurts. Of course, actually the reform era I am remembering lasted "merely" 50 years.

She points out how the reforms are supposedly based on civil rights but that they are leading to increased segregation.

Despite Brown vs the Board of Education, we have more segregated schools in the North (at least) than we did in 1954! And if there ever was a reform designed to segregate schools—and not just by race—the charter school movement has the patent on niche schools for aspiring poor non-Whites—note that in NYC at least they may take a lot of the poor—but the target audience are the "reduced" not the "free" lunchers. We are seeing a flourishing new K-12 market for the smart/gifted/mostly White kids in the public sector. (Data from NYC and NYS "Separate and Unequal," from the UFT.)

Matter of fact the very same segregation trend is openly happening in Florida right now. Florida charter schools are are much less diverse than traditional public schools.

She speaks about the great advantages of money and power in undoing what we have had for so long in this country.

But with enough money you can skip slow persuasion and fairly rapidly overwhelm what were once the norms of middle class American ideology. And it can last for longer than I would like to think given the lopsided media, and the enormous cost of running for "public" office.

She also makes a point about what charter schools could have meant before they were taken over by corporations. She is right about the original intent which was put forward by real educators, not just rich people who have no background in teaching and educating.

The promise that charter schools offered us at their start was quickly abandoned as they morphed into large undifferentiated chain stores, ruled not by independent-minded "moms and pops" the way we imagined, but by the most powerful billionaires on earth..

Meier has a very powerful comment at the blog at Education Week this week. It's about Democracy.

I'm worried because democracy is one of those subjects that produce ho-hums; we may be willing to die to support it overseas, but what about at home? It lies behind my distrust of "common core standards," too, Diane, regardless of whether it goes hand in hand with high-stakes testing.

Bridging Differences.

And speaking of the new common core standards...Meier's co-blogger had a lot to say about who is trying to exert control in this area.

From the WP:

Ravitch..way past time to get mad.

Dear Deborah,

It is way past time to get mad. Each week, it is hard to know which of the latest outrages against American public education is the worst.

Perhaps it was the agreement between the Gates Foundation and the Pearson Foundation to write the nation's curriculum. When did we vote to hand over American education to them? Why would we outsource the nation's curriculum to a for-profit publishing and test-making corporation based in London? Does Bill Gates get to write the national curriculum because he is the richest man in America?

Good question. Why would we outsource our education? I doubt we will be hearing an answer.

Of course Meier was speaking of more than just education reform. I noticed Paul Krugman in his post this week called The Unwisdom of Elites has a similarly discouraging view of all that is going on in the country right now.

The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

I feel their discouragement.