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Brave New Worldby SIMONE HARRIS I teach English at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, California. I love my school, my amazing colleagues, and the kids who enter my classroom each year. But I hate what is happening to public education.
From the national to the local level, our public schools are under attack, and that means our students are under attack. This attack takes more than one form. The cuts to vital education services are horrifying enough, but they’re only half the picture. The other half is the violation of our public trust by private interests.
It’s not a pretty sight, but we must look squarely at the vultures of privatization that prey on the damage to our schools, from New York to New Orleans to Wisconsin to California. Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, refers to the three big education funders, Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton Family, as the Billionaire Boys Club in her excellent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch has come a long way since her days of working under Bush Sr. I’ve even heard people refer to her as the Noam Chomsky of education, a sure sign of how far to the right our political culture has drifted.
But we were talking about vultures. These corporations are poised to supply the artificial heart of learning to a wounded public school system they fully intend to finish off. But they won’t succeed. No they won’t because our communities are going to fight for our beloved schools, we teachers are going to fight for our students, and our students are going to demand the education they deserve!
There are so many intelligent, talented, compassionate educators who were called to this profession. Teaching was a calling for me. I’m in this for the long haul, and by this I mean public education. I’m going to stand up for the right that all young people have to a quality education.
Education is a right. Education is a human right; it’s not a humiliating race for basic funding, something the Obama administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan would do well to remember. Education is indeed a right, and yet did you know there is more segregation in our schools today than at any time since 1968, the year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination? The corporate obsession with charter schools and high stakes tests has contributed mightily to this segregation while shamefully distracting us from the poverty and income inequality that go hand in hand with it.
I’m not going to lie down while corporations prey on our students. I don’t want to see our nation’s young people at the mercy of a Rupert Murdoch or a Michael Milken. Do you remember Michael Milken, the former felon and Junk Bond King of the eighties? Michael Milkin is co-founder of K-12 Inc., America’s largest provider of online education for kindergarten through 12th grade.
Do you know what an online school is? That’s the one that exists inside of a computer. These days, kids can conduct their entire social lives on a computer and get all their schooling done there too. They never even have to leave the house. It’s very compact, very efficient, but there is one missing link: the human link, the spacious beauty of the human bond.
Online or virtual schools typically have high withdrawal rates, and that’s not surprising. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It must be very tempting to drop out of a “school” when there are no human beings there in person to make you feel connected to a real community, no gym, no playground, no student art on the walls, and no teacher to get to know you, to care, to see who you are and who you might one day become.
The bitter irony is that these online schools are marketed to English learners who need the exact opposite of isolation, who benefit most from cooperative strategies in natural, not virtual, settings.
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