Tuesday, April 26, 2016

The real story: The scheme to destroy public education


Forget the gossip. The real story is the destruction of public education – comments on a letter to the Chicago Tribune
Letter writer Suzanne M. Gray focused on the name-calling but missed the point ("Where's the respect?"April 23): the scheme to destroy public education. 
Teacher Katie Osgood, quoted at the end of "CTU's Lewis calls Gov. Rauner 'the new ISIS recruit'" (April 21), revealed the cause of the financial crisis in Chicago Public Schools: "We're broke because they're allowing us to be broke … And they want us to be broke, so they can do these things to our system and claim they have no other choice."
This is a perfect example of the standard technique of privatization described by Noam Chomsky: … defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital." (Lecture, University of Toronto, 2011).
Forget the gossip: Focus on the real story.

1 comment:

  1. Don't you get suspicious when you see complaints about "cuts" to school budgets with no numbers attached? NCES 2014 __Digest of Education Statistics__ puts the Chicago school district 2011-2012 (latest numbers) per pupil budget at $11,976.
    It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State (government, generally) provision of History, Economics, and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers and broadcast news media would be.

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