The false promise of education reform

Bob Braun continues his excellent string of columns on education, reminding his readers that comparing education spending district to district can be a foolish and misleading enterprise just as the assault on public education and the call for massive restructuring of schools is foolish and counterproductive.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

2 thoughts on “The false promise of education reform”

  1. Christie is following the right wing/conservative/libertarian/Randian script by demonizing public school teachers, especially their unions, as the source of all or most of the problems in our schools. Just like right wingers incredibly blamed the UAW for the failures in the auto industry. If your goal is to privatize the schools and to destroy the public school system, you demonize the unions, the teachers and public schools in general. NJ has top rated schools and that's with a unionized work force. Some of the lowest performing school systems in this country have either no teacher unions or very weak unions. The best public school districts in NJ have a unionized teaching staff. So to blame teachers or their unions for the failures in Newark or Camden is ridiculous and just wrong. Unionized teachers are blamed for the failing systems but not praised for the many successful public school systems in NJ. Plus, and it can't be repeated enough times, charter schools are doing no better than public schools, there are many charter school failures and there are more failing charter schools than there are successful ones. But the media, the politicians, the billionaires who are pushing charters and vouchers only ballyhoo the success stories. Who is blowing the trumpets for successful regular public schools? Zip, shhh, we must be quiet about the great public schools here in NJ and they are not the exception, there are tons of them in NJ. Christie is doing so much damage to our public schools that it is truly mind boggling and he has more than 3 years to do additional damage with the help of Corey Booker and Ray Lesniak. Charters and vouchers are a path to the destruction of our traditional public schools.

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  2. From a long article in The Washington Post: What ‘Superman’ [film] got wrong, point by pointby Rick AyersAccording to this piece in The Nation, \”In the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in the world, teachers are – gasp! – unionized and granted tenure, and families benefit from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that includes universal daycare, preschool and health care, all of which are proven to help children achieve better results in school.\”In fact, even student teachers have a union in Finland and, overall, nearly 90% of the Finnish labor force is unionized. The demonization of unions ignores the real evidence.

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