There’s a great piece on Calitics about the fate of public education. It’s not alarminst or conspiratorial, just an accurate assessment of how the radical right wants to destroy public schools (and has ever since the 1950s and the era of desegregation) and how the other arm of the Republican Party, big business, is playing its role. A key passage:
Corporate interests want public education that they don’t have to pay for. They also would love to see the entire education sector privatized and paid for through tax revenue-the only way that supposedly anti-socialist entrepreneurs have made any money in the last decade, the way Blackwater made money, the way the banks made their money, the way private prisons have made theirs. Privatized and milked, yes, but not destroyed.
Therefore, we have reached the point where the interests will part between the two sides of the right. The grand strategy to destroy public education by making people hate it achieves a D-Day size victory every year the teachers’ unions are broken-those silly teachers paying money to lobby for actual good education policy while they’re at it! Because there is no one else that wants to make the public schools something worth saving in the public’s eyes. You’ve heard the criticisms. The teachers that can’t be fired for anything. No “God in school.” The assault on science, which both works to antagonize religious parents and the parents of children who want science education. They want to keep pushing it to the tipping point.
Pretty soon, parents start wanting to send their kids to the charter school funded by big corporate money or the private school that teaches that dinosaurs are 5,000 years old. A whole new segregation appears. The grand strategy succeeds.
Big Business has a choice. They can realize that public sector workers are no threat to them since they don’t employ them and they keep the infrastructure running that gives them a country where they can make money and live a big life, or they can watch it burn.
Worth reading. Check it out.