Those Greedy Edufund Sucking Bastards

From Gapers Block:

Those same free market fundamentalists who defend high executive compensation and golden parachutes as the only way to attract and keep talent forget that principle when thinking about how to attract and keep talent at our schools. We'll attract better talent to our schools by hiring inexperienced teachers, slashing their wages, benefits, and pensions, and eliminating their job security? That's how we'll make sure that teacher quality improves?

As a logical argument it fails. It fails on the economics, too, and there is no long-term study that demonstrates it to be the case. No, privatizing the schools is not the only or even one solution to the problem of bad teachers protected by tenure. It is just a way to make more people rich off of our schools.

The contradictions deepen. A leading advocacy group for school privatization, the Alliance for School Choice claims that "the best way to improve education is to put parents in charge." So why don't charter schools have parent government in the form of Local School Councils? I agree that parent involvement is critical to a student's success. Privatizers don't, or they'd be fighting to include LSCs in their privatization program.

School privatization through charter schools and vouchers is built on four fact-free assumptions: first, that teachers unions "protecting bad teachers" is more deleterious than teachers unions protecting professionalism is advantageous; second, that injecting the profit motive into education will make schools more "efficient"; third, that some (undetermined number) of kids are just gonna be failures, so whatever; and fourth, that non-educators could do a better job of educating children than educators. You must believe all of these things to support the charter school movement. If not, you cannot come up with a comprehensible argument for why we should continue to shut down schools in such a ham-fisted way.

h/t FK