Boards of education—an endangered species Boards of education provide for the education of youth in their respective communities and thus promote the public good and democracy. Boards stand in the way of the oligarchs that are in the process of privatizing public education, primarily, for the sake of tainted lucre. Hence, the privatizer’s vision is the elimination of boards of education and thus our American way of life. The first step is to advance, through their state executive and legislative accomplices, education policies that cause school districts to be viewed by the public as failures. Then the privatizers “rescue” students, particularly from the districts they have cleverly labeled as failures, only to provide less favorable educational opportunities and results. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, in a presentation to the California Charter Schools Association, openly discussed what a lot of other privatizers are thinking. DEMOCRACY DOLDRUMS: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, a major donor to the education reform movement, offered a provocative view of what ails public education at the California Charter Schools Associations annual conference last week. His diagnosis: democracy. Elected school boards turn over frequently and new members like to shake things up, he said. Districts change course often. But charter schools are run by non-profit boards or for-profit corporations that value stability and excellence, Hastings said. Now, if we go to the general public and we say, Heres an argument why you should get rid of school boards - of course no ones going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years, he said. But with aggressive expansion, the charter movement could take over most of public education within 20 to 30 years and thereby wipe out elected school boards. We are going to do it ... he said, because we are relentless. - Hastings was greeted with enthusiastic applause and said he didnt mean to imply that the people in school districts are bad, just poorly governed. Most of them, he said, we want to pull them into the charter movement where they can see what a great public school is that doesnt have the chaos inflicted by the rapid turnover of an elected school board. His speech: bit.ly/N29Rmi.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:53:39 +0000
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