On Why Not Occupy The Schools? The Failures Of Bloomberg's School Reform Agenda
This article sadly misses the point. First of all, Tilson is not a "progressive Democrat" when it comes to the schools. As I pointed out in this letter to NPR, at http://goo.gl/zH3sB, Tilson admitted that he started DFER as an "inside job" because the GOP had already signed onto his radical privatization agenda. Secondly, ideology is secondary to the main point -- that billionaires through their own personal wealth have managed to take seize levers of power and are unaccountable to no one; imposing their wrongheaded solutions on our schools -- men who send their own kids to private schools. whether it be Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Tilson and the other hedge funders , the 1% are pushing policies with no input from those most affected, including
public school parents, teachers or students. This is the reality that Goldstein fails to acknowledge, and the reason that the Occupy Wall St. movement is in perfect alignment with the anger of stakeholders about what is occurring in our schools.
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On How Much Can You Demand?
There is an ignorance here about the operation of mayoral control over our schools that is highly disturbing in this piece; mayoral control has operated without any effective checks and balances, and we have had nine of years of the PEP meetings in which they have rubberstamped corrupt contracts, privatization, and damaging policies, in lockstep, like some 3rd rate Party Congress during the last days of the USSR. It is a disgrace and it would behoove the author to learn a little about what has been occurring in public education before expounding on the subject.
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On Why Not Occupy The Schools? The Failures Of Bloomberg's School Reform Agenda
The reporter writes:
“The hurdle is that the 1-percent education reformers must truly grasp, deep in their bones, that we need to provide every child with a decent education—not just the ones who attend charter schools, or choice schools, or whose parents can afford to move to the suburbs or live in Tribeca. This means we should focus reform efforts on traditional neighborhood schools, which continue to educate over 90 percent of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.”
This ignores the fact that the billionaires and hedgehogs are indeed focused on what they think will “improve” our public schools, to our children's detriment: through imposing wrongheaded measures like teacher merit pay, an end to teacher seniority protections, more testing and the Common Core standards…none of which have ever been shown to work anywhere before being pushed onto our schools.
In fact, they are doing far more damage this way than if they only focused on "choice" and proliferating charter schools.