Saturday, October 01, 2005

The Real Republican Agenda: Destruction of the Public Schools

Reed Hundt at TPM recounts this stunning admission from repulsive right-wing gambling addict Bill Bennett: the Republicans want the public schools to fail so they can be broken up into charter, religious, and other forms of private education. By the way, make sure you read the comments section so you can see other instances of Republican hostility toward public education. The best comment is a lengthy one by a reader named Jim Horn. He deftly eviscerates the so-called No Child Left Behind Act by revealing its genuine motive:

No Child Left Behind is different from all the other educational reforms that have preceded it—this time the reformers are assured of a win, regardless of the outcome. If schools are able to achieve the impossible and attain the 100 percent math and reading proficiency by 2014 that the legislation requires, then the reformers will have threatened, bullied, and shamed their way to educational success by having rendered our schools into scripted testing factories. If the more probable scenario develops (psychometricians say certain), however, and a large majority of American schools are clear failures or on the “Federal watch-list” before or by 2014, then the road to school privatization will be clear sailing. By then, American parents will be shell-shocked and willing to try anything to avoid another one of those Federally-mandated letters telling them that their children are failing because their schools are failing. And state legislatures, broken financially and in spirit by then from the under-funded burdens of NCLB implementation, will be desperate enough to turn the whole effort over to the EMOs of an education industry that will be ramped up, ready, and waiting to pounce.

I have said this right from the start of NCLB: its real purpose is to declare the public schools to be failures so that the public school system itself can be destroyed.

The Republican Party: working to destroy America's foundations 24/7.

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