Schools Matter: Privatizers Seek to Breathe Life into Dead DC Voucher Program

[tonysam]

A bad penny always returns:

With the bloom off the segregated corporate charter schools as the ultimate tool for crushing public education, the privatizers are ginning up the old standby option, school vouchers. Right-wing princess, Betsy Devos, daughter of the Amway fortune and sister of Eric Prince (of Blackwater Christian Crusader fame), has launched a new website, the American Federation for Children (get it?), in an effort to breathe life once more into corporate vouchers in DC (again), a program that would give corporations a dollar tax write-off for every dollar given for a voucher.

A clip from the AFC's latest press release aimed to garner support for Lieberman's amendment to a Senate Bill to reauthorize the FAA (you may ignore the Press Release's claim that Lieberman is offering an amendment to an entirely unrelated House Bill):
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The Obama Administration’s own “What Works Clearinghouse” has validated the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) research on the OSP. The evaluation of the program shows that students who were offered vouchers to attend private schools scored higher on reading tests compared to students who were not offered vouchers. These gains were equal to three months of additional learning.
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And on cue, too, is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post, printing their own fabrications this morning about the IES study, whose PI was none other than Patrick Wolf, Endowed Chair of School Choice (no, that's not a misprint or a joke) at the education school that Walmart built at the University of Arkansas. Quoting Wolf:

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[Tansy_Gold]

1. J.F.C.O.A.C. -- can they get any more lying and/or more incestuous?

Isn't this kind of Munchausen by proxy? The corps break it, then they offer to "rescue" it on their own terms?




Tansy Gold, developing a severe cassandra complex. . . . ..

[mbperrin]

2. Yes, this whole approach began to gather steam in the 1970s.

The traditional way for business to prosper before that was to identify a problem area, such as, it's hot in the South and humid, too, so much so that people don't want to live there much. Solution: refrigerated air conditioning, which transformed Houston and Atlanta and many other cities. Pretty straightforward, really, but with a major drawback: solving real problems is hard, and may not be doable for some problems.

Enter disaster capitalists. Create a problem, have the prearranged solution ready. Naomi Klein does a great job of discussing natural disasters like Katrina, where solutions like flat tax enterprise zones and so on are offered as solutions to the crisis. This is fine, but disaster must strike, and they're not terribly dependable, so really "good" disaster capitalists sell you a cell phone, then publish a report about brain cancer and holding the phone to your head. Solution? Bluetooth - available right now, you see, but not on "standard" phones - you've got to pay extra.

Eating food with huge amounts of fat and carbs? No problem: for more money, you can buy foods that are better for you. Could have sold you healthy foods to start with, but you wouldn't pay premium prices unless there was an obesity and health crisis. Speaking of, got new diabetes? Got a whole range of treatment and drugs for ya! Large health costs a problem and can't afford insurance? No problem - we'll make buying insurance mandatory under the guise of "improving" it!

Anyway, since solving real problems is hard, way better to have the canned solution or really a whole array of tiered solutions to manufactured problems. That puts things back in control and profits are far more predictable and fatter as well. Otherwise, unplanned things might happen, and your company might become obsolete. The horror!

This is where the business schools get this inane and insane idea that they create reality, rather than deal with it.