Today is national #blog4reform day, a day for real reform, that is. Today is personal. Lowell has written with passion about Brian Moran’s “day job.” I write with equal passion. With our anger over Wall Street’s undoing of the US economy; two unending needless wars; and the assault on the New Deal, it is sometimes hard to find a place for the outrage we would appropriately feel. So, privatization and profiteering from education is one of those issues which flies under the radar for many. However, education is not only a right. It is a public trust.
Let us not mince words. To sell off our educational resources (including federal taxpayer dollars) to privateers is betrayal of America’s citizens. But there is nothing sacred anymore. Our children and our youth are now seen by Brian Moran and Harris Miller as fodder for diploma mills. It is bad enough that K-12 educational systems are under attack by faux reformers under the guise of “Waiting for Superman.” (Notice the insurmountably false standard. No real world teacher, a mere mortal, can measure up.) But that doesn’t matter for opportunists searching to profit from education. Their sights are set even beyond that. And so I weigh in, on DPVA’s controversy: Should it be “led” by someone who so clearly works against our values?
Education is the linchpin of a democratic society. Demolish it and there is nothing left, only a an empty shell of a democracy (or republic); a corporate state; a generally unenlightened populace, forced into glaringly impoverished subservience; and 1-2% of our country laughing all the way to the bank. Into such a tragi-comedy of national errors, comes these predators some once thought would care enough about people and their circumstances to look out for the little guy.
Two of them ran for statewide office: Harris Miller and Brian Moran. Now they work against democratic institutions. Moran now works with a man who helped sell our jobs overseas and now diverts federal education monies into the hands of corporations and hedge fund managers. And now he also works to reduce schools to online courses with those privateer hedge fund managers and corporations collecting the salaries teachers once did. This movement seeks to give nothing, or little, back –only a shell of an educational infrastructure.
