We are awash in market-based school reform. From virtual schools and profit-generating charters to sort and select evaluation policies for teachers, so-called reformers gleefully push business solutions down onto our schools. The cheerleaders of market-based change believe that only the fierce competition of capitalism can create great teachers and smart kids. Test scores are the bottom line profits. Don’t fix a school; shut it down instead. Let the kids and staff scramble. The school is a bad business deal, nothing more. Losses must be cut.
They will tell you that today’s schools are artifacts of the old factory model ready to be discarded. They forget to mention that the factory itself was once a marketplace reform. Isn’t it market policies that have stretched the gap between rich and poor wider than it has ever been? Yet, we are told that it is the ways of the market that will close the achievement gap.
For the rest of the article, go to Principal: Why I’m marching to ‘save our schools’
