StickWithANose

In writing my dissertation, I had the painful privilege of reading scholarly tracts penned by two of the most useful corporate tools in the contemporary American school reform movement: Terry Moe and John Chubb. Written on a middle school reading level so as to ensure both easy consumption and a total lack of intellectual rigor, the tracts penned by these fools [and published by the well-funded marketing machines commonly referred to as 'think-tanks'] are corporate propaganda in the truest sense. Their books are full of blanket statements on such topics as school competition, academic achievement, teacher preparation, and school funding that simply have no basis in empirical research… and I mean that quite literally. In fact checking their claims, I was absolutely shocked as to the degree to which these fools are attempting to create an alternate reality in service of their corporate masters at the Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institute, Brookings Institute, etc.

Well, it appears as though these two fools are at it again. This time they’re pimping the idea of cyberschools as THE answer to our educational woes. [Read: Ensuring that the children of the urban and rural poor receive an inadequate education built upon a foundation of behaviorist logic and the standard economic model] As with all things ‘cyber’, it wise to be suspicious of corporate salesmen fetishizing computer technology as THE solution to any social problem. Computers are tools… nothing more.

What is important for the average consumer of political literature, parents and voters to be cognizant of is who these fools are and what their agenda is all about… They are corporate tools pimping for the education lobby. Plain and simple. The dystopic system of education that would result from the reforms they push are easy to predict and [as usual] would have disproportionate impact on those with the least power in the American system. From Schools Matter:

From cyber charter elementary to cyber college, a new educational caste system has been devised that will offer two very different types of educational experiences, one grounded in the sterile isolation and alienation of the flat screen, and the other based within the warm incandescent community of other middle class minds and bodies exchanging the breaths of privilege and mutual care.

The poor rural and urban students will avail themselves of the former, and the economically privileged will continue their well-heeled traditions with the best teachers, real campuses, and the best apparatus that money can buy. Meanwhile, the poor will have laptops and modems, we may presume, provided by Gates and Dell, and charged off at an exorbitant rate to the taxpayer as part of the new world of the cyber charter and the cyber college…

Moe and Chubb have teamed up once more to promote the Oligarchs’ solution of corporate-run testing factories, the online variety no less, as the way to achieve what the Finns have achieved by honoring the teaching profession, creating world-class standards, funding their school, nurturing their students, and getting rid of high stakes testing. Finland, for instance, does not use test scores to determine how much to pay teachers.

And even though the “reformers” have wasted the past 25 years with a test-til-you-puke strategy that continues to not work, that reality is lost on these fools, who have their eye on a prize that has nothing to do with student learning or quality schools–but on filling the pockets of the ed industry leeches looking to increase their share of tax money intended for education.