Diane Ravitch’s blog, and the attached .PDF file, deserve to be widely read and understood: the handbook of the “for profit” education “reform” industry. Of course, “reform” is less the interest here so much as DEFORM. These corporate mutilators would have you believe that education is a commodity, students are consumer/customers, and teachers are disposable instruments only. For some thoughts that might wash the taste of bile from your mouth that you’ll get from the .PDF that Ravitch has provided, you might look at Dewey’s wonderful Democracy and Education. While Dewey’s language suffers in places from a Eurocentric complacency that tips into “white man’s burden” tripe, his larger ideas remain cogent and worthy of thought.

Diane Ravitch's blog

Here is the handbook of the for-profit education industry (although it does advise you to drop the label “for-profit”).

Here are some basic facts that it recites. The world spends many billions on education. The United States spends close to $2 trillion on education, nearly $900 billion on K-12.

This is a huge market for investors seeking to make a profit.

And then it launches into spin about how terrible the American public education system is, never mentioning that our students (white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian) now have the highest test scores ever on NAEP, the highest graduation rates in history (for all groups), and the lowest dropout rates (for all groups). It is the usual “sky-is-falling” hokum, all intended to persuade the public to turn their public schools over to hedge fund managers and equity investors and hucksters who know nothing at all about education.

There is also no mention of…

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