RAVITCH: Top Lawyer for Dems in Senate from Public Ed Destroying Gates Foundation

[yurbud]

Millions of parents and teachers watch and hope that Congress will scrap the failed policies of the Bush administration called NCLB.

It is this worrisome that the chief counsel for the Democrats on the Senate HELP committee was a senior policy person at the Gates Foundation.

Gates is infamous for its religious devotion to measurement. "What cannot be measured cannot be controlled" is the line we hear again and again, as children are reduced to data points and their lives are measured out in teaspoons and centimeters on a scale.

Maybe she is different. Let us hope.

http://wp.me/p2odLa-5iO

[iemitsu]

1. In the northwest, the Gate's Foundation has been

the primary agent in the war on public education but there are other foundations in on the act too.
It is extremely disheartening to be a public educator and to watch how President Obama has embraced the privatization scheme these corporate entities propose.
I just hope we can wake the nation up before the whole system is sold out from under us and cannot be retrieved.

[yurbud]

4. as a public college instructor married to a public school teacher, I feel the same way

the very concept of public education is being dismantled, apart from as a way to funnel federal money into the pockets of the already wealthy.

With both parties on the same page, it's just another issue that underscores that we need more profound change than an election that puts one party or the other on top.

We need to go back to the drawing board on our democracy.

[iemitsu]

8. I guess we feel the same because I'm a

public school teacher married to a professor at a public university.
We might have some interests in common.
Now that we have other modern democracies to examine, besides our own prototype model, we need to look at what works to promote democratic participation and institutions. Clearly our model does not work to accomplish these ends.

[Igel]

2. For many it is about control.

They have all the solutions. They will save all the kids and their futures. They will save the US workforce's reputation and education level.


Nobody else can be trusted. Esp. those people who are "local." All trust must ultimately be placed not in citizens and their local and state reps, but in experts appointed in the central government.

How people who supposed like "democracy" can have such contempt for the vast majority of people is beyond me. But I see it all the time. It's one of the few bits of truly bipartisan --heck, multipartisan--cooperation that's out there.


What can't be measured can't be controlled. It's all about control.

[bemildred]

3. Yep.

See my sig line. Some people get measured and judged, possibly discarded or directed somewhere else, and some people get to do the measuring and the judging. And, bingo just like that you have a class system.

[yurbud]

6. and when the people doing the measuring never did the work they are measuring

that's not even a merit based class system. It's just a return to the divine right of kings.

[bemildred]

7. Pretty much.

Although you will be told that it makes them objective. And it borders on dogma in business schools that one can and should manage things about the substance of which one knows little or nothing. It's really better that way, you can focus on the bottom line and taking care of "shareholders".

[yurbud]

5. I think it's more cynical than that--it's about the money.

If the government is going to spend money, it is intolerable to some of the very wealthy that it end up anywhere other than their pocket, hence the privatization of the military, public education, and the attempted privatization of Social Security.

It makes no difference whether the existing non-profit government program works or not. If it doesn't put money in the pocket of the wealthy, it must be starved of funds and regulated to death.

That is also the easiest way to figure out politicians priorities: what they love, they deregulate and lavish money on. What they hate, the regulate and stave of funds.

And in the education sector, they manage to do both at the same time, lavishing their love on for-profit charters, ed management companies, software and testing companies with little accountability, and cracking the whip on regular public schools while giving them less to meet the ever higher standards.