World News Korner

The propaganda against public education.

Courtesy of HuffPo and written by Diane Ravitch:

A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.

This insight inspired me to write Reign of Error to show that the "reform" narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation's most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The "miracle school" usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some "miracle schools" have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn't stop the claims and boasting.

There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.

There is nothing that angers me quite as much as watching this undermining of our education system and the attacks on our teachers.

The assault has come from numerous points of attack. Reducing taxes that fund education, promoting charter schools, insults leveled at the teaching profession, and of course NCLB and standardized testing, which has nothing to do with improving education, and everything to do with sabotaging and ultimately ending government run public education.

The only thing that will stop this, and it has been going on for decades now, is to provide our teachers with the freedom to actually teach. We need to provide the materials, and the training, and then sit back and watch the magic.

Some of the best teaching I have every witnessed was provided by teachers who were excited about their jobs, and could perform it without the administration breathing down their necks, and without the pendulum of constant, unnecessary testing hanging over their heads.

Public education was not broken, until those who claimed to be trying to fix it, broke it.

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