Ann Sisko, my former sixth-grade teacher, passes along an important essay from Rethinking Schools magazine that follows up on some of the themes I touched on a few weeks ago in my Dispatches column, i.e., that the school reform movement is pushing public education off a cliff, that public schools and public school teachers have been devalued and that the accountability movement is taking us back to a less effective time of rote learning.
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Hank Kalet 
Sorry for being repetitive but follow the money. Who are the big players behind \”school choice?\” Why surprise, surprise, it's the Waltons, the Gateses, the Dells, many other billionaires, the US Chamber of Commerce, all the right wing think tanks (such as AEI, Heritage & Cato) and hedge fund managers. Once you have this gigantic tsunami of corporate money infused into propagandizing for vouchers and charter schools, the politicians will follow obediently. Most of the politicians (D or R) are on board for this destruction of our public school system. \”Ourfailingschools\” is a phrase that is repeated all over the media every hour of every day. I don't think our public school system is failing but we certainly do have many schools that are showing poor results. We have many public schools that are just as good as any foreign school, we rarely hear about our successful traditional public schools. There's plenty of propaganda about the successful charter schools but very little press coverage of the fact that most charter schools are no better than public schools and very little coverage of the charter school failures. Public school failures are more a function of poverty, broken homes, gangs and violence. How about addressing the problem of poverty in this country rather than beating up on teachers.We are constantly compared to the school systems in the other advanced countries. Most of these other countries have national school systems with national standards. They would not tolerate vouchers, charter schools or home schooling. Home schooling is illegal in Germany. Finland, which always has a highly rated school system, does not have charter schools, vouchers or home schooling. The teachers are unionized in these other countries and teachers are not demonized or swift boated in these other advanced countries.
from schoolsmatter.info:\”It took the Washington Post almost 6 months and the New York Times 10 months to report any news of the national study in 2009 that showed the Obama charter solution as a policy loser even before it got steamrolling. It has rolled on, anyway. It will be interesting to see how long it will take the most recent large-scale research to get reported, another that shows again charters no better than the public schools.[snip] A study of middle school students in charter schools in 15 states has found that they generally performed no better in math and reading than other public school students. . . .[snip]\”We found that the average charter school did not have positive impacts on students' math or reading achievement,\” Mr. Gleason said. . . .