As schools struggle to get better, is selling out to big money the answer?
The price of change
By CHRIS FARAONE AND MATT MCQUAID | June 20, 2012, The Boston Phoenix
The idea of education reform has become so much of a universal social imperative that even hard-nosed liberals mindlessly dance to its alluring tune without considering the consequences of their gallivanting. For proof of this phenomenon, one simply needs to read the Boston Globe’s op-ed rants against teachers unions, or to examine the Obama administration’s cheerleading for charter schools.
Yet the big picture should be daunting to progressives. As inconvenient as it is to consider, there is a mounting body of evidence that suggests much of the so-called school-reform movement is a stalking horse for the for-profit education industry. Simply put, the same free-market-cowboy values that fueled the economic meltdown of 2008 are now occupying box seats at the school-board roundtable.
