It escaped our notice that the privatization on steroids trend was reaching deeper hooks into public education than we dreamed it might. Yet, the encroachment makes sense within the context of increasing privatization every where. First, we had private food services doing the jobs of lunch ladies in our schools. We have seen a growing number of private corporations managing prison facilities … and some of them are currently extorting money from state governments which failed to live up to their contractual agreement to keep the prisons at least 95% full in order to satisfy the managing corporations’ profit expectations.
Bush and Cheney formed the private mercenary army, Blackwater, which received all of the training and equipment that was denied to direct United States government soldiers also deployed in Iraq.
By not blocking Monsanto, its evil GMO seeds and the evolution of mono-crops, we have even allowed our food supply to become corporatized at its most basic level: the growing process. And now, we have state Departments of Education which have been taken over by staff not government employees, whose salaries are paid for privately by the likes of the public ed destroying Broad Foundation. These private staffers control the monitoring, management and policy making functions that should properly be administered by government employees charged with protecting the public’s interest and our student population.
Save Our Schools NJ shares a report about this alarming phenomenon on their Facebook page:
If you are not concerned about the role that very wealthy individuals and foundations are playing in shaping our public policy, you are not paying attention. This destructive trend is playing out very visibly in education policy.
The role of the Gates Foundation in buying much of the current US education policy agenda has been detailed at length by Mercedes Schneider and others. See, for example, Mercedes’ excellent series about Bill Gates’ purchase of the Common Core.
Locally, Saturday’s NY Times Union detailed how private funding is being used to pay a large group of employees within the NY Department of Education, who are helping to promote an “ed reform” agenda. These individuals are not state employees and are not accountable to the taxpayers, since their salaries are being paid by private wealth. Yet, these private-sector individuals have access to children’s data and are strongly shaping New York State’s “reformy”, unpopular and ineffective education agenda.
We have a similar phenomenon in New Jersey, with the Broad Foundation paying salaries of Department of Education Employees who reflect the Foundation’s “reformy” education agenda.
This is another way that extreme wealth is subverting our democracy. As some very wealthy individuals use their money to lobby for policies that reduce their taxes, they shrink the public dollars available to fund services. Those same wealthy individuals can then fund private employees to provide those government services. The private employees are beholden to their funders’ policy agenda, which they also are positioned to execute. The end result is a government that is owned and controlled by those with the financial resources to do so. That is NOT a democracy.
Please note: references in this post to “ed deform” and “deformy” (terms I dislike) have been replaced with “ed reform” and “reformy”
More food for thought on this issue:
The Malloy/Pryor Education Reform Consultant Full Employment Gravy Train
Schools Matter: Asbury Park NJ Where is the Democracy?
Parent’s Guide to the Broad Foundation