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posted by n1 on Sunday June 18 2017, @11:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the telling-half-the-story dept.

Diane Ravitch, a top public education advocate, reports via AlterNet:

This month, the Public Broadcasting System is broadcasting a "documentary" that tells a one-sided story, the story that [Trump's Secretary of Education] Betsy DeVos herself would tell, based on the work of free-market advocate Andrew Coulson. Author of "Market Education", Coulson narrates "School, Inc.", a three-hour program, which airs this month nationwide in three weekly broadcasts on PBS.

Uninformed viewers who see this slickly produced program will learn about the glories of unregulated schooling, for-profit schools, teachers selling their lessons to students on the Internet. They will learn about the "success" of the free market in schooling in Chile, Sweden, and New Orleans. They will hear about the miraculous charter schools across America, and how public school officials selfishly refuse to encourage the transfer of public funds to private institutions. They will see a glowing portrait of South Korea, where students compete to get the highest possible scores on a college entry test that will define the rest of their lives and where families gladly pay for after-school tutoring programs and online lessons to boost test scores. They will hear that the free market is more innovative than public schools.

What they will not see or hear is the other side of the story. They will not hear scholars discuss the high levels of social segregation in Chile, nor will they learn that the students protesting the free-market schools in the streets are not all "Communists", as Coulson suggests. They will not hear from scholars who blame Sweden's choice system for the collapse of its international test scores. They will not see any reference to Finland, which far outperforms any other European nation on international tests yet has neither vouchers nor charter schools. They may not notice the absence of any students in wheelchairs or any other evidence of students with disabilities in the highly regarded KIPP charter schools. They will not learn that the acclaimed American Indian Model Charter Schools in Oakland does not enroll any American Indians, but has a student body that is 60 percent Asian American in a city where that group is 12.8 percent of the student population. Nor will they see any evidence of greater innovation in voucher schools or charter schools than in properly funded public schools.

[...] This program is paid propaganda. It does not search for the truth. It does not present opposing points of view. It is an advertisement for the demolition of public education and for an unregulated free market in education. PBS might have aired a program that debates these issues, but "School Inc." does not.

It is puzzling that PBS would accept millions of dollars for this lavish and one-sided production from a group of foundations with a singular devotion to the privatization of public services. The decision to air this series is even stranger when you stop to consider that these kinds of anti-government political foundations are likely to advocate for the elimination of public funding for PBS. After all, in a free market of television, where there are so many choices available, why should the federal government pay for a television channel?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @01:22PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @01:22PM (#527884)

    OK, so let's unwrap this a bit.

    The states of *insert list here* want to do things that you don't like. Presumably, these states have voters that are quite often parents. I suppose it's possible that a sinister conspiracy of shadow government social architects from the secret american reactionary society are going to somehow pull a fast one and enforce plans that nobody wants, but I'm going to bet that parents will, when possible, vote in the perceived interests of their children and, when that doesn't work, move to more apparently desirable districts. You know, what they do now.

    Enforcing a view on what constitutes a good education has a history of being unpopular, and in fact widely reviled. In fact, it has become less popular, not more, over time. So I don't think that your plan for a federally mandated educational standard has a lot of legs. You do realise that people are giving up all sorts of things to homeschool, and that's a growing trend, right?

    But, you know, best of luck with that.

    As for teacher retention issues, I fully agree with you, which is another reason I don't think that the federally enforced education thing is working out all that great.

    We've been doing it a while, you know. There's a track record - not a good one, but there is one.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:00PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:00PM (#529069)

    It's not just that I don't like them. What I'm opposed to is:
    1. Public money that is intended for the education of students going to line the pockets of politically connected people instead. Corruption is always a bad way to spend public money, since the public has nothing to show for it.
    2. The re-introduction of Christian religious practices into publicly funded schools. This was found repeatedly to be unconstitutional back in 1963.

    Both of these are happening right now in the states I mentioned.

    "Just move elsewhere" isn't always a viable option, either, for two reasons: 1. A lot of people live in the districts they live in because that's where they can afford to live, and they might not even be able to afford to move if they wanted to. 2. If everywhere else is doing the same kinds of things, then there's no way to get away from the improper behavior.

    Lastly, I don't care about federal educational standards being popular, so much as I care about them being effective and teach the truth. There are numerous questions of fact in which majority opinion is strongly opposed to what all experts in the field have long known to be true, and in those cases majority opinion should not matter one bit. For example, I don't care that lots of Americans would like to keep kids ignorant of the theory of evolution, what the Confederacy was fighting for in the Civil War, or the basic beliefs of Islam, because ignorance is never a proper goal of an educational institution of any kind.

    As far as the home-school trend goes, a lot of that is being driven by a goal of including religious belief systems and other unproven dogmas into education and keeping kids ignorant of that which opposes those beliefs. Which again, I do not support, especially with government funding, because ignorance should not be a goal of education.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:27AM (#529362)

      I don't think anybody here is arguing for corruption. If you know of corruption, please alert the appropriate authorities, and campaign against the corrupt. Thank you.

      I don't think that anybody here is arguing for christian religious practices in schools. If you know of such practices, please alert the appropriate social pressure groups and bring them the evidence so that they can fight it in court. Thank you.

      If there are people who are saddened by these developments, you should be able to make them your political allies if they cannot move elsewhere. Use this alliance to improve education, and we shall all ultimately benefit. Thank you.

      The problem you have with federal educational standards is rather more complex, because of certain assumptions that have not been proven to be correct by lived experience. Federal educational standards have not actually developed a great track record of being effective (rather the reverse, in some notorious recent cases), and analysis of expert opinion for the purposes of creating a curriculum (something with which I have plenty of experience in the real world) is a lot more fraught than you seem to think. On top of that, who do you think controls the federal level of this sort of thing, other than politicians and bureaucrats? Not only that, but they are the worst kind because they are very, very far removed from the people affected by their decisions. Arguing for federal control of education is like arguing for federal control of parking fines; a distant, largely unaccountable elite make choices that directly affect local concerns. Again, the more it happens the more you find pressure groups fighting back against it, with every tool in their arsenal including parochial schools, charter schools, private schools, homeschooling and in the case of immigrants, sending their kids overseas to get a better education in boarding schools.

      When people in their hundreds of thousands are doing their damndest to undo what the feds dictate, at great personal expense and sacrifice, you're looking at a failed public policy and you need to stop it and figure out something more likely to work.

      I know one homeschooler with a religious background. The guy's jewish, and he lives in a community without a jewish school or anything similar. That's it.

      I do however know a bunch of homeschoolers who are professors, professionals and otherwise surprisingly left-leaning suburbanites. Many of them are in the tech industry. They're teaching their kids as fast and hard as they can. Their collective's math expert is an actual professor of mathematics, for example. So your cliche needs some updating.

      And, just to add some spice to that particular sauce, homeschooling has won in the courts. Repeatedly. It's here to stay, and the worse the federal influence, the more it's likely to develop.

      But hey, best of luck turning that clock back.