Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Friday, July 17, 2015

What A Real Solution To "Failing Schools" Would Look Like

A commenter named Dutch left this at the Capitol Confidential piece about NYSED announcing 144 schools going into "receivership":

All urban school districts. All in poverty stricken communities. None of the problems are with the schools per se but with the communities which they serve. Solutions must be sought outside of the school districts. Intensive economic redevelopment in the neighborhoods. Massive infusion of community/social services to help struggling families. Mergers between city and suburban school districts. “Receivership” is nonsense. Changes within the schools won’t ameliorate the problems because schools can’t change the underlying social dysfunction.

Dutch is absolutely right, of course, but the receivership program isn't meant to fix any problems - it's meant to exacerbate them.

The ultimate goal of corporate education reform is the privatization of public education.

In order to get to that goal, education reformers look to destabilize the system as much as possible, create as much churn and burn as possible, in order to spread problems as far and wide as possible.

That's why they shoved through radical changes to the state's standards and state's testing regime before they rolled out any curriculum to go with those changes, that's why they shoved through a radical change to the teacher evaluation system at the same time they brought radical changes to the standards and the testing.

The goal was to create chaos, to take schools that had not been "failing" and suddenly declare them "failing" when the new rigorous test scores, rigged for high failure rates, came through on their promise.

The goal of the receivership is the same - spread chaos, privatize what they can, destroy everything else.

You can bet these receiver schools, once they're controlled by an independent entity, will get to cherrypick their students, just as the charter schools do now, so that the "receivership" program can be deemed a "success" and public schools can be branded "failing."

It's all rigged for a pre-determined outcome and that outcome has nothing to do with the public good and everything to do with private gain and power.

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