Rather than trying to fix the schools which have poor students who are performing poorly, Reformers believe it’s better to close the doors and shove all those kids into higher performing schools, no matter how high the class size gets. Just this past week Rahm Emmanuel closes 54 schools in Chicago and shuffled all those kids to other schools. I have not seen any studies that show this strategy works. I have seen some that show these students are more likely to feel disaffected by school, by the longer bus rides, the cramped classrooms, by the loss of all their friends and teachers, and tend to perform worse the next year and even drop out. You won’t see any studies showing this is effective, because it’s not. What you will see is “school” scores which Reformers point to and say things are going swell. What they don’t tell you is they routinely change these formula from year to year to make them say whatever they want to say. Pre-school closing and privatizing they say how horrible the scores are. After a few years of destructive policies they boost the scores by adding points or changing the test and say all is going well and pat themselves on the back. For the schools that even the most generous boosts are insufficient they simply exclude from the rankings. You can’t be disappointed by what you can’t see. To make sure you can’t see it they usually stop providing data to researchers and remove all traces of historical or current school data from their websites, as Louisiana has done.
So what’s my point do you ask?
I could go on, and maybe I will later when the fancy strikes me, but I hope this is enough for you to start seeing the picture I am.
What I am seeing is a purposeful plot to destroy public schools, and to profit from the destruction. These folks say they are data conscious and want to rely on “data driven decisions” but if that were true the data already readily available shows that everything they are doing is having the opposite effect of what they are purporting to provide. There is too much coordination for this to be accidental, and they are too successful for me to believe they are simply not competent enough to understand the data that disproves everything they claim. These groups have gone out of their way to spin the data, falsify the data, or simply hide or destroy the data to prevent people from seeing what is going on. These groups are fully aware of what they are doing – destroying public education in our country. Some of them are doing it purely for profit driven motives, but there is more going on here. These are some of the puzzle pieces I have and what I see. Now if we allow this to continue, what do you see?
A confederacy of reformers
All of this so-called ‘reform’, in prisons, in schools, in our public utilities, in the military, in Social Security, in Medicare, etc, is driven by the profit motive. These people–the Capitalist reformers—want to guarantee themselves a profit in whatever activity they undertake. Getting federal dollars—taxes—to fund their projects is the best way to assure that profit. Especially if one is able to obtain a ‘cost plus’ contract from the government. The Emmanuel’s, Obama’s, Clinton’s, Bush’s, and the rest of the politicians are Capitalists first. They are in it for the money. If they can also improve the lives of the 99% while they themselves get rich so much the better. But more often than not that improvement in the lives of the 99% is a complete accident.