. . . except in Washington State, where a really awful Charter School ballot measure won by a very narrow margin. (GERM = Global Education Reform Movement, which is essentially a neoliberal program to privatize public education. The Gates Foundation, which was a huge funder behind this ballot measure, is one of the chief purveyors of GERM. )
David Sirota talks about it here:
If your only source of news about American education came from docu-propaganda like “Waiting for Superman,” Hollywood politi-schlock like “Won’t Back Down” and elite-focused national news outlets in Washington, D.C., and New York City, you might think that the so-called education “reform” (read: privatization) movement was a spontaneous grass-roots uprising of good-old-fashioned heartlanders generating ever more mass support throughout the country. You would have no reason to believe it was a top-down, corporate-driven coalition of conservative coastal elites trying to both generally undermine organized labor and specifically wring private profit out of public schools, and you would similarly have no reason to believe it was anything but wildly popular in an America clamoring for a better education system.
In other words, you would be utterly misinformed — especially after last week’s explosive election results in three key states. (Read on)
GERM is a classic example of poorly informed thinking that is about ten or fifteen years behind the curve. Charter Schools are an 80s idea that have done nothing on a scalable level to improve educational outcomes for kids in poverty. Some are ok; a lot more are pretty bad. They are a false, simplistic solution for a far more complex problem.
They are attractive as a public policy option only for those who think the market will solve anything. There are far more effective ways to deliver innovation and greater levels of freedom to educators in the trenches. GERM and its various programs are solutions created by technocrats who don't understand the least thing about how kids learn and how teachers teach. It's a public policy disaster that is embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike
I think that's what makes the Washington State bill particularly galling. Just as the rest of the country is catching on to how "reform" is really about privatization, Washington finally caves after resisting now for so many years, and it's largely because so many people think that Charter Schools are only about giving parents more choice. No–they cannot be understand in a political vacuum. They have to be understood as one of the weapons in this larger privatization agenda.
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