Wednesday, March 20, 2013

One of the Three Rs

Trey Smith


The battle in education right now pits public schools against ones of the for-profit variety. It turns out that many of those pushing the latter only care about one of the proverbial 3 Rs. It's not reading. It's not 'riting. It's the last one: 'rithmetic. The 'rithmetic these folks care most about is how to add millions or billions of dollars to their bottom line!

As David Sirota explains in his recent column, Getting Rich Off of Schoolchildren, a good number of the businessmen pushing various varieties of so-called educational reform have a vested interest in their outcomes. If school districts adopt these reforms, then guess who will be there to sell them the products and services?

This is nothing more than another privatization scheme. Corporations desperately want to get their hands on public resources because it will turn into easy money. They make all sorts of promises about the wonderful services they will provide -- so much more efficiently than "bad" government -- but it is mostly a lie. In case after case, the savings aren't realized and the services and products delivered are inferior or, in some cases, not actually delivered at all.

But what do they care? They don't devise these schemes because they are altruistic; they do it because they are greedy bastards! They want to fatten their already fattened wallets while putting forth minimal effort.

Why can't people see this?

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