Jeb Bush's Education Agenda is a Privatization Nightmare (Will Dem Candidate Do Otherwise?)
The great tragedy of this is that Hillary and any other DLC Dem will likely pursue the same privatization agenda albeit with better funding for the current system they are helping kill. But that is roughly like Pol Pot giving you a double rice ration while he decides if you are too educated to live.
Our K-12 education policy has been bought and is being dictated by hedge fund managers and hyper-wealthy individuals who see it as a potential source of profit like the Pentagon. Politicians in both major parties have sold our kids future like chattel.
We need a national candidate who will call bullshit on this and put education policy back in the hands of educators and academics who are called greedy for wanting to make a middle class standard of living--unlike the "reformers" who see this as a way to make their next billion.
“There’s nothing else as large in all of society. Not the military—nothing—is bigger.”
That’s how Randy Best, Jeb Bush’s business partner, sees public education, as an untapped market where untold billions are to be made when kids and their families become educational customers. Touting his impressive assault on public education while Florida governor in yesterday’s announcement of his 2016 candidacy, Bush may become the loudest proponent yet of turning public education into a for-profit enterprise.
Before getting into Bush’s record and financial interests in for-profit education, a full understanding of the dystopian horrors of for-profit, privatized education is necessary. Bush offers it with a handful of Milton Friedman-esque catchwords and focus-grouped slogans, and it may be that the proposals sound innocuous and vaguely innovative until the slightest scrutiny is applied to the ideas — at which point, it’s difficult to imagine much worse than public education turned into a for-profit market. Because the most basic and collectively understood truisms about markets, when applied to children, take on a horrifying character.
First off, most businesses close. Something like 8 in 10 businesses close within 18 months. It’s an inconvenience when I drive up to a business to find it’s closed its doors. It’s a whole different situation if I’m an eight-year-old with my backpack on and that’s my school—and it’s the middle of the school year, like it was for students of a Dallas charter school in January of this year.
http://www.alternet.org/education/jeb-bushs-education-agenda-privatization-nightmare-heres-what-you-need-know
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Enough is enough.
JEB! = Just Elect Bernie!
K & R
