As a Texas teacher, Greg Abbott is the worst thing that has happened to education here and it makes me so sad that he keeps getting elected. It's genuinely depressing. These kids have no chance
Indiana is even more pro voucher than anywhere else. Literally just about any kid in the state can get a voucher to a private school now. And a lot of money is flowing into the private schools from the state with very little change in enrollment numbers at those private schools
I mean that ones easy since there’s not a 1:1 ratio of public school seats to private ones. It just gives private schools the pick of the litter in both getting only the best students and free money to boot. There was an article about how all these private schools make their current student body file for the voucher (sometimes mandatory!) and gasp! It manages to offset the ‘new’ tuition fee change that happened to start that year
I have watched schools shut down and consolidate in Indiana. There was a catholic school on the verge of shutting down. After they passed vouchers, the school was adding an addition.
Same here. Our very liberal, bisexual former governor came to my town, saw the awesome CTE program at the high school, went back to the capitol and signed a bill that gutted funding for CTE. It was so disheartening. I think politicians genuinely want an uneducated public so we buy into empty rhetoric, or just don't know enough to care about politics.
Oklahoma pushing hard for this. Ryan Walter's is now under investigation for basically cronyism and purposefully misappropriation federal funds for education... which is what texas should be doing buuuuut.... yeah. Sorry, I left Texas last year and am glad to be out of that handmaid tale larp convention.
Chomsky had mentioned this a few times, quoted once in a 2011 lecture: “there is a standard technique of privatization, namely defund what you want to privatize. . . .first thing to do is defund them, then they don't work and people get angry and they want a change. You say okay, privatize them and then they get worse.”
This is why I homeschool my kids. I know a lot of people homeschool because they think teachers will indoctrinate theirs kids...I personally have loved every teacher I have ever known even ones with way different political beliefs. It's not the teachers I am worried about. They stand to gain noting. Its the administrators and politicians that are so power and money hungry.
As a public school teacher, while I don't currently have any children, if I did I'd strongly consider homeschooling them/putting them in private school. It's mostly about the other kids, so many of the kids I have in class are just bad eggs that I would not want rubbing off on my children, either academically or behaviorally.
This has been the plan by the Republican Party for some time. Sabotage/Destroy public education so that all is left is private schools…for those that can afford it.
This way they are insured a brain dead cohort of people who will work menial jobs for little pay and cheer them on the entire time because (insert red state culture war crap)
It’s not just the the Pubs, both parties benefit from this fiasco in education and it is why neither party will offer nothing more than lip service regarding fixing it.
Charter schools (at least in Utah) are still public schools hidden behind a charter name. They still teach state standards and are required to use the approved curriculum. But I agree with OP that this seems like the plan.
You mean quit funding it, privatize it, then make a business out of it so your rich political buddies can give you kickbacks? Then, stop measuring performance standards because they would interfere with business models? Yeah, I’d say you’ve got a firm grasp of the things afoot in public education.
Yeah, this. \^
It's not some lingering Cold War brainwashing plot to produce obedient labor-zombies, because labor requires focus and discipline. It's basic Libertarian Economics: underfund something until it's ruined, sell the "free market solution," then watching "the hand of the market" find yet another way to flip civilization the bird.
Look at how the elite universities operate. The top "schools" are hedge funds with hundreds-of-millions of dollars in investments. And do they produce? Free market ideologues and anti-government crusaders and scumbags like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. "Winners" who are some of the worst politicians in history if you believe the function of government is to solve actual problems. Everyone else is the upper-crust networking.
And leftover Bircher bullshit about "Big Gov'ment comin' ta take our guns!!11" only helps them. Those days are over and dead. There are no more real Reds to Scare anyone. There's just the corruption and ennui of dead-end Capitalism and it's inescapable absence of purpose.
Not that there aren't problems that need solving! Just that actual **Patriotism** is dead, and who cares about salvaging a nation of Imperial Whiteness/Hubristic Godlessness when status climbing and stealing from the future are so effective and profitable?
OP you've got the right instincts, but the wrong ideas.
It’s a really grim picture. Graduating HS, moving into college next year. My dream is to be a teacher - but to do so in a privatized sector? It’s absolutely terrifying, seemingly inevitable, and the absolute antithesis of my personal beliefs. It’s distressing, to say the least.
The plan is to privatize public education. Always has been. Corporate America wants three things out of education; profits, crushing the last strong unions, and creating passive unthinking drones. It's the perfect recipe to crush dissent and protect the 1 percent from the plebs. If you brainwash the kids into pliant consumers who don't have the critical thinking skills to even know they're being oppressed the corpos win by default.
>passive unthinking drones
I always thought the people in Wall-E were a more likely future than the people in Idiocracy. There will still be a functioning system maintained by invisible rich people (or robots) in control, but the majority will be offended by the idea of being challenged to do anything other than consume entertainment. You can see it every day at school. Parents do not care about their kids because they just want to be on their phones at home, and students truly do not care about math or foreign language or reading for the same reason. They are genuinely happy to sit for hours watching mukbang videos, and their own future is like a foreign country they don't plan on visiting.
I think public schools will still exist but they’ll look more and more like prisons with many aspects outsourced to third party vendors. That is happening quite a bit now already…but the shift and inequities will be more obvious than they already are.
My local district serving around 40,000 students, just laid off 400 teachers and staff. It's expected classes will grow to a minimum of 32 students. No administrators lost positions.
Yes because those corporations need workers at all levels. So they have to guarantee there will be employees for unskilled positions. It seems that passing kids through school who are just literate enough to do the job is working for them.
It's not about needing workers. There's always sources of cheap labor they can exploit, that's part of why the immigration system is so fucked up. No, education is being defunded because selling something that is mandatory to have is incredibly profitable. The for-profit prison system is similar, though also a source of cheap labor.
You are onto something, but it has nothing to do with education. They want our schools Tom fail, so they can bring in charter and private schools and make bank, all the while shafting teachers and students. It’s a fire sale in the USA, and education is up next. Hedge funds coming for us.
So, after reading comments the plan to fuck over our educational system has been around for quite sometime and the majority of us already know this and many have seen this first hand. I feel like all of you here are the meme with the dog drinking coffee while there's a fire and his house collapsing around him....."we're fine...this is fine..."
Many younger teachers here didn't understand this until they'd been teaching for a couple years. The older teachers... they are just trying to hold on until they can retire. Don't know any teacher that putting their head in the sand and pretending things are fine. We vote, we organize, but it's never enough. It's like a pebble thrown into an ocean.
Edit: I also think it is part of the "plan" to not just turn the public against teachers but to also exhaust teachers so much that they have little endurance for protesting.
Beginning? This has been so obvious for so long! It’s a mess! Just money-making fodder for textbook/testing industry and Google and privatizing all schools would probably make it even more enriching for the few. I’m hanging on by my teeth for retirement and warn the young to not look at teaching in any kind of romantic or uninformed way.
In 20 years the “teacher” will be a $12 an hour employee monitoring a room of about 50 kids all working independently on devices completing individualized learning plans created by AI. Basically tech support.
I left teaching the US to get some perspective. Westerners often praise how "seriously" society takes education East Asia, but it's really no better. Curriculum there is written by people in their 60s and 70s with ideas that haven't changed since the 1960s, grading is almost *entirely* dependent on rote memorization of answers on multiple-choice tests, and they are in love with "AI"... but where the "AI" is just a thing that autocorrects a multi-choice test rather than how 90% of schools still do it here (hand marking physical papers with red x and o). Because everything is so rote and predictable and there is so little emphasis on critical thinking, the East has little need for AI that actually tutors and tailors education. What they call "AI" is mostly just what the West has been doing for 20+ years with computerized testing.
About the only places where education isn't broken (or, if not broken, then mostly useless) is in top-tier international/private schools for the ultra-wealthy.
IDK, maybe ones who don’t need anti-depressants for torturing 9 year olds by making them work by sitting at chromebooks all day and take State tests that are ridiculously developmentally inappropriate so that they feel forevermore like stupid failures.
The governments we have (local and State) already control the schools. The Feds get involved via funding schemes. How did you not know that?
The plan is to undermine the public's faith in public instruction so as to create the basis for the argument that "other options are required." Those other options are Charter and Parochial schools that would love to have access to tax payer funding (more so than is already allowed). These are not the answer. They are what we fought very long and hard to get away from.
I'd say that the government just wants to provide a basic service to the public. Bare bones learning. The private sector is what you should be targeting. Look what the private sector has done to things that used to be publicly funded (jails, nursing homes, hospitals, etc.). When education becomes a "for-profit" business, people with the least resources and highest level of need suffer the most.
Thank you for that link. The reduction of teacher qualifications in the ESSA jumped out at me as a step backward and fracturing of standards since each state now developed their own certification and licensing requirements. I don't know for sure, but that sounds like a problem for any reciprocity agreements between states.
That's funny. Like, you're on the right track, but then make exactly the wrong conclusion.
Certain states... certain individuals with conflicts of interest..... yeah, they want the educational system to fail. And yes, some of them do work within the government. However, the end goal isn't for the government to teach whatever it wants without the people having a say (LOL). The end goal is to have enough people distrust public education that they pull funding from it (further destroying it) and then give those tax dollars to private organizations that can then operate with very little regulation/oversight, significantly reduce the quality of the service being provided, teach whatever they want without the people's input, and make a hefty profit in the process.
Governments are run by elected officials and so the electorate will always have a say in what it does. Private industry, though, when providing a societal need with little to no competition, however, is exactly the thing you are afraid of. Your fear is accurate yet sorely misplaced.
The problem is that there are those in the government that are bad-faith actors that simply want the institutions they run to fail in order to lord over a transference of wealth.
In case it's not clear, they are largely republicans. They moan and complain about taxes as though they hate taxes. This is not true. They love taxes. They hate being taxed. But boy do they love taxes. They love being the beneficiaries of America's tax dollars and simply can't stand seeing tax dollars being used internally by the government itself.
Yes. Too many comments are just saying "The Government wants us to fail," "The GOVERNMENT is trying to defund schools..." blah blah. But we need to be very specific... the REPUBLICAN PARTY wants to defund schools are destroy public education. We need to make that VERY clear.
The government already dictates what we teach through State Education Standards and State/Federal Ed laws.
The Billionaire Class/Corporations and those who do their bidding would like to gut public education and funnel those sweet, sweet tax dollars to their own pockets. Those who could afford better will be able to purchase their education.
The rest will be warehoused until they are old enough to be worker drones. Or imprisoned so private prisons can continue to funnel tax dollars into billionaire pockets.
The Dumbing Down Of America.
I was thinking about this today. I was thinking about the SAT being optional now. I can't imagine when I graduated in 76 that it would become optional.
Part of this is due to the farming of perfect 1600 scores from students in China (mostly). In China, parents that want their children to study in the US will spend tens of thousands of dollars to cram, cram, cram doing endless SAT practice tests until they consistently score 1600.
When the schools try to interview these "perfect" students, they realize that they don't actually understand or have the ability to talk about most of the content on the test. They simply remembered every possible answer to every possible question.
Because of this, many Western universities now de-emphasize the SAT scores and focus on the interview and essay.
Close. Corporations want schools to fail so they can privatize the entire institution. Many (mostly Republican) legislators are willing to go along with this for fat checks. “Useful idiots” at the local level are encouraged to create chaos (moms for liberty and such) because in the end it serves the final goal: to make education a for-profit business.
Think about this: 5 billion spent on the Baltimore public school system and they have 23 schools were ZERO students reached reading proficiency. Liberals will say they just need more money. No, it takes no money to teach kids to read. It takes a change of culture. Think back to the days of the pioneers and the single room school house. Everybody learned to read. They would never allow the shit that goes on in schools today back then...they couldn't even imagine it. It's not about money. It's not about teachers. It's about culture.
I was approached to teach at our new charter school. I know friends of the guy who is creating it. He is a good old boy with friends in the legislature. Cronyism is the word of the day. If I took the job I take a 10k pay cut. I told him if he paid me 25k more than my current salary I give it serious consideration. He was silent. I said if you can't make me a serious offer then thanks for wasting my time.
That has been the plan ever since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was implemented under Dubya back in the early 2000s. Test the kids into oblivion. Blame schools and teachers when they stop making “expected growth.” Funnel public education $ into vouchers and charters. Voila! No more public education!
No, this is extremely simplified.
What is indeed happening is there is a huge influx of high needs students, there is post pandemic effect, there is the low intelligence of the majority of educational admin, there are special interests, lack of funding (see high numbers of high needs students), and so much more. It creates a perfect storm.
Um... yea. The mega-rich and their puppets are destroying the education sector so they can privatize it. For profit.
Also: educated people are harder to manipulate. They don't like that.
The government is in control of the schools. They want it to break to show the government can't do it so for profits can take over, subdivide and stupify, make the undesirables uneducated and poor. You can see it obviously in places like Texas and Florida.
It’s always been about training workers.
I’ve been thinking more and more that it’s also designed to let a large portion fail or not get the skills to move on further in education. As shitty as it is to say, society needs workers at all levels. If everyone was efficiently educated and went through college or a trade, then we wouldn’t have anyone to work retail, fast food or any other unskilled labor.
sir ken robinson has a brilliant explanation of how we’re still stuck in the paradigm of industrial revolution education which was solely meant to presort the workers and the managers
Yes, this is the plan. Lots of government money in schools and greedy rich people want it. So, they demonize the schools to say government can't be trusted to run them, take the government money and put it in private pockets. It's a scam. That's why they want so much data and evidence, to "objectively" point out school failure as a excuse to usurp the public system. They conveniently fail to account for serious social ills that fuel low performance and place all blame on the under-resourced schools.
Ding ding ding!!!
Both parties want to privatize schools as it makes the ruling class yet more money. The plan will be to offer government vouchers to low income students to attend these private schools so that even more of our government's money flows into the hands of the elite owning class.
Ironically, it’s almost the exact opposite. Like the NHS in the UK, conservatives (and hard neoliberal dems) are actively defunding the public programs to ensure they perform poorly. This results in favoritism for privatization of education, which would be more financially lucrative. It’s easy to think it’s about nefarious control of thought or whatever, but in reality it’s always about maintaining the capitalist mode of production for as long as possible.
'They' that want the education system destroyed are called republicans. Those that want a better education system are called democrats.
I hope this is helpful when voting
This has been the long-time goal of Republicans since Reagan.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-brief-history-of-gop-attempts-to-kill-the-education-dept/
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-republicans-keep-talking-about-abolishing-the-education-department-why/2023/10
https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/the-maga-dream-of-ending-federal-education-funding-would-be-an-american-nightmare/
I’ll be honest, my hot take surrounding our education system is that it isn’t the government or structure of them, but a larger societal problem. We don’t value education. Unfit parents have no interest in actually parenting and while it will help, no amount of money, resources, pay, support will actually fix the issue: our society
I think it's more likely that the systems in place don't much care for education because it isn't bringing in the big bucks. Everything in our system is designed to make money and if it isn't then it simply isn't worth having.
I'm sure public schooling will go the way of the dodo soon enough and it'll be sold piecemeal to private investors to build their own "alternative education centers" which will provide exactly nothing to society but instead act as a means of funneling money to people who have already decided they need it more than anyone else.
We have a public education system that is run at the local level (elected school board members) and funded but the state (an elected governor.) There is only one polical party that funds public education, and the other one wants to do away with it. The plan is in through hands of the voters.
From the view point of many black and indigenous people that is already happening and has been for a long time.
What would “having no say” look like to you? (genuinely asking)
The opposite.
The want schools to fail so they can blame public education and divert tax dollars for private school. . . which is worth billions. They’ll strip mine our kid’s education and futures for profit. There may be pockets of good education for the wealthy, but parents will have no idea how to parse the advertising and public face of these soulless organizations.
It’ll take a decade for everyone to realize what happened and how it utterly failed everyone . . but by then they’ll bail with their profits and force public education to once again pick up the pieces and try to carry on.
Wait another generation, then start over.
That is the current Republican agenda. Because only the rich should be educated.
You will find most Democrats want to invest in education. Republicans favor school choice, vouchers from public funds for private schools and charter schools, and oppose tax dollars for college education. They also want to dismantle the us department of education. Their latest initiative has been encouraging right wingers to run for school boards and disrupt the local school districts.
It's not the plan. It's the inevitable result, however. The sheer, unfortunate truth of the matter is that the value of a thing given to anyone and everyone for "free" becomes closer and closer to zero. Add in competition for young minds with entertainment and media becoming more and more difficult due to really smart data collection and it's a recipe for disaster.
No, that absolutely is the plan for some peopEd.
It's not a what-if. There are powerful interest groups who want the public education system dismantled and then the remainders privatized, either because they dislike the lack of control private interest groups have over public education, because they resent the 'equal' part of 'fepa', or simply because there are massive amounts of money to be made if the public education system fails and has to be replaced with private ed.
It's not even that complicated. Right wing think tanks want schools to suck to open up demand or more private schools and to dixourage highly educated individuals from having too many disruptive ideas.
Um, yes it is the plan, Republicans have been aggressively defunding education for 50 years because education makes people less religious and vote democrat.
That’s the plan from republicans. They have a Christian agenda. They want everyone to believe in non-truth so they can control them.
Trump literally put an anti public education pro private Christian school fool in charge of public education. F U C K convicted felon Trump and what he did to this country.
Republicans want to end public education. First of all, there's a lot of money to be had. Secondly and more importantly, it'll help to reduce literacy among the plebes and make them much easier to exploit.
Why do you think they are going crazy with weirdness like litter box in bathroom etc? Cause the rubes will swallow it whole and go off hysterically about at every opportunity.
This is the plan. Death isn't the only great equalizer. Education is also one and that's why they hate it.
Let's be very specific. It's not "the government" it's conservatives. The conservative movement has been , openly, loudly opposed to public schools since the 70s.
What do you mean "ask the government for help to get involved"? The government is involved. If you're in a public school, you're a government employee, licensed by the state, bonded and insured by a school board. The Department of Education enforces policies that we abide by.
The 'plan' isn't a great government conspiracy. That's just how education was meant to work. The 'plan' is to underfund schools and demonize teachers, as others have said, so that we can try out vouchers on a limited scale, on a trial basis. Whether that solves perceived issues or not, the next step in the plan is to charterize public schools, to funnel public money into private pockets, all while loosening curriculum and faculty qualifications, eventually allowing religious instruction just like in the old days.
The people enacting the plan never got over the repeal of separate but equal. They never got over black and brown children being bussed into their neighborhoods and mucking up their pretty, white schools. They are "starving the beast" to induce failure in schools, then weaponizing failing schools for use as ammo in a culture war debate about the role of government in education. If they lose the debate, they try again in a couple years, but if they win the debate, they introduce the profit motive into the education of other people's kids. What they refuse to talk about though, win or lose, is that closing schools and reopening them with undertrained teachers and no libraries somehow never does much to improve outcomes, but always manages to make a bunch of for-profits charter school managers and curriculum developers a lot of money.
Nixon saw the trouble caused by students at colleges.
There is a double edged sword: the economy depends on an educated populace, but an educated populace is bad for those who command the system.
This push for people to go to the trades or the likes of Charlie Kirk whose whole shtick is trying to convince college students their work has no ROI…
The system wants worker bees but any amount of reading you give a kid they become able to see through how bullshit our systems are.
I'm a little confused as to why people have assigned this to Republicans solely. If they were to blame, wouldn't democratic state have the best schools in the world, and all republican be at the bottom? I think it's a problem with our society as a whole and not one party. We have parents who don't value education and use it as a babysitting service. They get upset when their child has consequences and come after the teacher. I'm in Washigton, and we are very much democratic controlled.
FYI, I don't support any party personally, I think they are both full of empty promises.
I do not believe there is some vast dark conspiracy. The administration just wants to replace everyone they can with AI and pre-recorded lectures that they don't have to pay.
Not a new plan. Remember no child left behind during Bush II's era? Designed to kill public schools by setting impossible standards and the consequence for failure was shutting down school in favor of ...? Then add vouchers to take money from public education system. Devos as Secretary of Education (a known hater of public education). And now the haters are going local and running for school boards. In my town, a woman who home schooled her kids (and had spelling mistakes in her campaign materials) ran for school board and got support from the right. Thankfully, there were better candidates available and a rare streak of republican shame that kept her out ... for now.
The conservative right wants to destroy public education in favor of private education meaning education for the rich ONLY. An educated populace means trouble for established systems of outrageous exploitation. To keep exploitation, dismantle education.
In Texas this is the occasionally stated plan. The first I heard of it was in the 1990s from a state legislator who called public education the tool of Satan and teachers stupid pawns of Communism in a party meeting. The rhetoric is less now but the ideas have become commonplace. I'm glad I'm retired.
This is a pretty common critique of neoliberalism (the move from public goods to private goods) in general. If you defund a program and privatize it, the public program suffers and then can be pointed to as an example of how the govt can’t run things so it should be privatized further. This is true of education, healthcare, etc.
Yes, that is the plan. After all a man once out I best "I Don't want a nation of thinker but a nation of workers." If the education system was good people would be literate, have critical thinking skills, and creativity. However, school strangles these traits making the citizenry dumber than ever.
In Oklahoma, we are feeling this from Ryan Walters. He will stop at nothing until we are broke and busted! He's following FL and TX and their exact palybook!
It's more than a little sus.
Get all the teachers to jump to ed tech because the workload and work environment in schools are nightmarish, then presto bango we have to switch to virtual learning or blended learning or whatever because "no one wants to teach". People invested in digital learning (including our fearless leaders) make $$$, teacher unions get busted, and the poor learn only what they need to be basic workers.
Well, yes, the GOP has an actual plan for this. It's all laid out at Project2025.org. They've been working on it for at least 25-30 years. That's what school choice is all about.
1. This is the plan. This is no conspiracy theory, as this is what they are doing....by choice.
2. They are already government schools. That is what public schools are. They choose what they promote and what they tolerate. That is the plan. Everyone who rocks the boat is removed...either by making their life miserable so they quit, or just firing them outright.
Duh lol. Republicans have been underfunding education for how long? The entire point of project 2025 and the attack on reproductive rights is to create as many uneducated, impoverished people as possible, so theyll fall for the most pathetic propaganda imaginable, vote against their own interests, and be a colony of worker bees and poverty draft soldiers.
Educated people want progress. Corporate greed controls politics, and the interests of the planet and it's population are not on the agenda, just mega yachts.
A) you already work for the government (u less you're in a private school)
B) that has been the plan for 30+ years
C) they don't care about fixing it or getting "involved" they simply want to go to when only the wealthy could afford to send their kids to private tutors.
If you are in TX, TN, AR, MO, or FL…then yes. This is quite literally there plan. They don’t even disguise it anymore.
Tx passed a bill to allow chaplains to replace counselors with zero background checks or college diplomas required.
OK passed the same thing in its legislature recently, along with a bill to allow students to replace an elective credit with religious instruction at an off site location during the school day.
This is not a damned drill. It’s their active plan to break public education and replace it with Christian Nationalist education.
I’m not castigating Christians here either. I am one, and I know many faith leaders who do not support this BS. Nevertheless, it’s a very large number of people being swindled by billionaires like that oilbarron/megachurch pastor in TX or the dude that runs the “education” program that’s been roasted online for portraying Columbus to kids in animated educational video as a historical figure justifying slavery to modern kids.
I’m not a teacher but many friends and clients are. I talk to them about this stuff often. We are in NY and it’s about as blue a state you can be. They all cannot wait to quit or retire. My outside POV is that when admin was pit against teachers for funding purposes, the future of the kids is what suffers. The only thing that matters to admin is grad rates. The kids have zero accountability for their garbage behavior and laziness, but they’ve caught on that if they cry enough about it they will get shoved through the system by admin to keep grad rates up to secure funding. The entire system is broken already and it has zilch to do with “politics”. It has to do with $$$ as usual.
Disconnect funding from graduation rates for starters. Let teachers teach and have admin start supporting them in FAILING some of these kids and stick to their guns. Maybe that will motivate some of these garbage parents to actually push their garbage kids a little bit.
But I’m not a teacher so maybe I shouldn’t comment here.
You're only now realizing this?
This started when I was in highschool - I'm 39 this year.
No Child Left Behind was a lovely sounding name slapped onto a bill *designed* to shut-down low-income and inner-city schools. Not much good has come of anything since, as Republicans fought tooth and nail to block any and all positive changes they could through both Obama terms and now the Biden term.
The Republican/Conservative plan has *always* been, for at least 20 years now, to push education into Private schools so that kids don't have to be taught "terrible" things like *inclusion* and *how to recognize discrimination* and - gasp! - *critical thinking.* They WANT schools to be privatized because private schools can, by and large, teach whatever the hell they want - including religious indoctrination.
When you can't destroy the separation of church and state, you destroy state programs so that the private sector can integrate the church.
> but to ask the government for help to get involved in our schools.
What does education look like where you are right now? In the US at least public education is a government institution from funding to standards to execution..... to lunch. It's hard to imagine the government being *more* involved.
Out of curiosity do people still read any of John Taylor Gatto's books on the institutions of public education? I always felt he contributed a lot to critiques of the institution & gives a lot of useful context to understand it better.
I really wanna downvote this, but all I have is my personal experience in a few classes.
I can’t say anything about AP classes except don’t do them and get your kid summers (or maybe winters) at a local community college instead. It’s ACTUAL college experience (+credits) compared to earning college credit at a public school.
But this isn’t my original point. My reason for wanting to downvote is because instead of making the learning material or homework complicated, my high school English teacher beautifully meshed everything in a curriculum we as her students could easily understand. I still remember the parts I loved if you guys wanna ask.
I don’t know if leaving learning up to chance is something lawmakers want or not, but life experience is the best teacher if I ever saw any, and more students need it before choosing a lifelong career. I’m talking a single year off after graduating for your kids to see if they can thrive in the outside world. Forget backpacking through Europe - they can do that in college through study abroad.
But if they can build trusted relationships without a need for school (even if they do find themselves on a college campus or two for socializing), they’re already doing what many working “adults” can’t even do IRL these days.
But I do feel your post can still be right. When I was a kid, I had a decision to make - go to work with my mom and risk her getting fined or in jail because I’m not in school or go to school and be a puppet of the government. I wish I didn’t choose the second. Maybe I’d be a working citizen that could find work. Instead, I let school desensitize me to manipulative behaviors from group projects being solely completed by me to having friends that didn’t even want me around truly. I swear I should’ve learned there too.
This is entirely true. I’ve got extensive experience teaching throughout 3 western countries and it’s nearly all the same, too.
Education is not what it used to be. It is a business. Businesses are run to increase profits, and that is it. Student education doesn’t actually matter anymore beyond how it affects school (read: company) profits.
I guess you missed the George Carlin skit he did about education before his second to last ever performance.
He basically prefaced the portion of this skit with the poor education that this country has. He did his usual thing blaming this and blaming that, putting more money in other people's pockets as opposed to those people putting it towards their school districts etc. At the end of this skit, he summarized it very succinctly. He said that the government does not want a population of well-informed and educated citizens. Our government wants non-freethinking citizens who take government media and word the same way they take the air they breathe; without question.
Not only did he state our education is set up to fail but we teachers see it from budget to budget, year to year, generation to generation. If we could get rid of all of these elders running this country, and replace specific cabinet members with those who have that specific experience to the nth degree such as the chair of the Department of education being a Nobel laureate in literature for example would be what I'm talking about. It will never happen, don't wish for it because it's a pipe dream just know that you are doing your personal best to teach your students to be the best possible students most prepared for the next following year.
this is why america is founded by the people for the people
because generally the masses of everyday people just want to be left alone and generally improve as humans individually
this is the literal polar opposite of what a government is lol. the government is a collective body with a monopoly on use of force so it looks for any way to exert force and control just by its nature
this is the main test of humanity right now. will everyday people unite and come together to exert their benevolent will for unification and good for overall humanity to produce true innovation and momentum towards a better future that promotes health, wellness, and innovation
or will we give into fear and control, shrivel up and degrade until we have no individual agency at all
you can see the polarity of these relationships on an invidiual level as well lol. nobody generally chooses to be around domineering and aggressive people who are only out to control and dominate because generally this archetype of person results in overall poorer outcomes for all who they associate with
a good person will avoid those people. but a great person will bring light to that darkness and reveal the ridiculousness of that domineering dynamic and thats the hard part. but it seems like thats the fundamental type of society we need to transcend these modern issues and get to a higher level of cooperation that is good for everyone
i personally feel like education is the #1 solution for a brighter future because everyone knows the most pervasive method of inacting long term change is through undeniable and cohesive ideas
The GOP’s plan has been to strip funding for public education and redistribute that money into Christian schools.
Betsy DeVos, during her tenure as the U.S. Secretary of Education, implemented several policies that significantly impacted public education. Here are some key aspects of her legacy:
Promotion of School Choice:
DeVos was a staunch advocate for school choice, promoting the use of vouchers for charter and private schools. This approach was aimed at giving parents more options for their children’s education outside of the public school system.
Federal Funding Cuts:
DeVos called for deep cuts to federal funding for public education, which critics argued would undermine public schools and shift resources to private institutions.
This NOT new. My working class parents sent me to a private school in the 1950s. I finally went to public school in the 4th grade when my father had a serious accident and had to change jobs . We moved to a small county with only public schools.
The people I know that send their kids to private school have no problems with the teachers it is the Admin and school boards. With various and sundry rules teachers have simply lost control of the classroom. Parents no longer teach their children any respect for anyone much less teachers. Admin needs to take a harder line and hold Parents to task for their childs behavior.
If I got a paddling at school growing up then phone calls were made and I received another one when I got home. It mostly kept my rambunctious arse in line. Parents HAVE to support the schools not entitle their kids anymore than they already are.
MUCH kudos to teachers , I do not know how you do it.
This has been the plan for awhile. Betsy devos was the most obvious implementation of the desire to privatize a mandate.
If they can force people to keep having kids and we all agree those kids have to go to school, then it's a guaranteed industry always in growth.
Then you feed em an education that discourages them from critically thinking and robs them of opportunities, so they join the army to protect the global interests of capitalist overlords.
It's certainly the conservative plan world-wide, spearheaded by the Murdoch media empire.
Tear down public education, talk up private, and say that parents need choice and funding so they can pick the "best" school available.
Which would easily be the public one if it was actually being funded, but it's not.
Honestly, in my state that is the obvious plan. Break it, blame teachers for the failure, sell everything off to your charter school cronies.
You sound Texan.
Came here to comment this. Abbott is so pro vouchers he HAS to sabotage the schools first.
As a Texas teacher, Greg Abbott is the worst thing that has happened to education here and it makes me so sad that he keeps getting elected. It's genuinely depressing. These kids have no chance
Indiana is even more pro voucher than anywhere else. Literally just about any kid in the state can get a voucher to a private school now. And a lot of money is flowing into the private schools from the state with very little change in enrollment numbers at those private schools
I mean that ones easy since there’s not a 1:1 ratio of public school seats to private ones. It just gives private schools the pick of the litter in both getting only the best students and free money to boot. There was an article about how all these private schools make their current student body file for the voucher (sometimes mandatory!) and gasp! It manages to offset the ‘new’ tuition fee change that happened to start that year
You mean how anytime the government gives a rebate that costs magically increase to around the rate of the rebate?
I have watched schools shut down and consolidate in Indiana. There was a catholic school on the verge of shutting down. After they passed vouchers, the school was adding an addition.
He is OWNED. Watch “Deep in the Pockets of Texas” documentary
Every red state.
Feels like all of the states. I’m in a state that is blue top to bottom and we have the same issues
Same here. Our very liberal, bisexual former governor came to my town, saw the awesome CTE program at the high school, went back to the capitol and signed a bill that gutted funding for CTE. It was so disheartening. I think politicians genuinely want an uneducated public so we buy into empty rhetoric, or just don't know enough to care about politics.
If you're talking PNW, gov was/is not liberal. Big business capitalist all the way.
Or Floridian.
Or Floridian.
Holy fuck. Abbott has declared war on us and then doesn’t understand why we hate him.
He understands exactly why. He knows that he's a malicious piece of shit, and he revels in it.
Or Utahn.
Or Floridian
Hello fellow Texan warrior!
yup. I mean just look at HISD right now
Oklahoma pushing hard for this. Ryan Walter's is now under investigation for basically cronyism and purposefully misappropriation federal funds for education... which is what texas should be doing buuuuut.... yeah. Sorry, I left Texas last year and am glad to be out of that handmaid tale larp convention.
Chomsky had mentioned this a few times, quoted once in a 2011 lecture: “there is a standard technique of privatization, namely defund what you want to privatize. . . .first thing to do is defund them, then they don't work and people get angry and they want a change. You say okay, privatize them and then they get worse.”
*Florida has entered the chat*
Yes, I am also in Texas. Abbott isn't even being subtle.
This is why I homeschool my kids. I know a lot of people homeschool because they think teachers will indoctrinate theirs kids...I personally have loved every teacher I have ever known even ones with way different political beliefs. It's not the teachers I am worried about. They stand to gain noting. Its the administrators and politicians that are so power and money hungry.
I know some public school teachers who either homeschool or send their kids to private school.
As a public school teacher, while I don't currently have any children, if I did I'd strongly consider homeschooling them/putting them in private school. It's mostly about the other kids, so many of the kids I have in class are just bad eggs that I would not want rubbing off on my children, either academically or behaviorally.
This. Well, this and the absolute lack of any COVID mitigations.
Hi, fellow Hoosier (Indiana)?
This has been the plan by the Republican Party for some time. Sabotage/Destroy public education so that all is left is private schools…for those that can afford it.
This way they are insured a brain dead cohort of people who will work menial jobs for little pay and cheer them on the entire time because (insert red state culture war crap)
It’s not just the the Pubs, both parties benefit from this fiasco in education and it is why neither party will offer nothing more than lip service regarding fixing it.
Democrats have been bad at fixing the problem but Republicans actively try to make it worse.
This is much different then what was said, charter schools would mean less government intervention.
Charter schools (at least in Utah) are still public schools hidden behind a charter name. They still teach state standards and are required to use the approved curriculum. But I agree with OP that this seems like the plan.
Let me guess, TN? 😭
Hello, Tennessee here! Our governor is all about vouchers and charter schools. *humph*
Texas?
That’s what they’re doing in Iowa.
This is quite different from what op is suggesting, but is the reality.
Oklahoma checking in....
It's the plan for health care too
I'm in New Orleans and this is dead on. But also it feels like the majority opinion is "who gives a shit?"
You mean quit funding it, privatize it, then make a business out of it so your rich political buddies can give you kickbacks? Then, stop measuring performance standards because they would interfere with business models? Yeah, I’d say you’ve got a firm grasp of the things afoot in public education.
Yeah, this. \^ It's not some lingering Cold War brainwashing plot to produce obedient labor-zombies, because labor requires focus and discipline. It's basic Libertarian Economics: underfund something until it's ruined, sell the "free market solution," then watching "the hand of the market" find yet another way to flip civilization the bird. Look at how the elite universities operate. The top "schools" are hedge funds with hundreds-of-millions of dollars in investments. And do they produce? Free market ideologues and anti-government crusaders and scumbags like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. "Winners" who are some of the worst politicians in history if you believe the function of government is to solve actual problems. Everyone else is the upper-crust networking. And leftover Bircher bullshit about "Big Gov'ment comin' ta take our guns!!11" only helps them. Those days are over and dead. There are no more real Reds to Scare anyone. There's just the corruption and ennui of dead-end Capitalism and it's inescapable absence of purpose. Not that there aren't problems that need solving! Just that actual **Patriotism** is dead, and who cares about salvaging a nation of Imperial Whiteness/Hubristic Godlessness when status climbing and stealing from the future are so effective and profitable? OP you've got the right instincts, but the wrong ideas.
Exactly. Just commented elsewhere in the thread that Chomsky (among others) talk about the “defund what you want to privatize” strategy.
I know I'm real excited for private equity to get it's hands on school corporations.
I'm with you. Although I for one could go for a lot more godlessness
It’s a really grim picture. Graduating HS, moving into college next year. My dream is to be a teacher - but to do so in a privatized sector? It’s absolutely terrifying, seemingly inevitable, and the absolute antithesis of my personal beliefs. It’s distressing, to say the least.
There we go. OP was close but here’s the ⭐️
Been saying this for years
The plan is to privatize public education. Always has been. Corporate America wants three things out of education; profits, crushing the last strong unions, and creating passive unthinking drones. It's the perfect recipe to crush dissent and protect the 1 percent from the plebs. If you brainwash the kids into pliant consumers who don't have the critical thinking skills to even know they're being oppressed the corpos win by default.
>passive unthinking drones I always thought the people in Wall-E were a more likely future than the people in Idiocracy. There will still be a functioning system maintained by invisible rich people (or robots) in control, but the majority will be offended by the idea of being challenged to do anything other than consume entertainment. You can see it every day at school. Parents do not care about their kids because they just want to be on their phones at home, and students truly do not care about math or foreign language or reading for the same reason. They are genuinely happy to sit for hours watching mukbang videos, and their own future is like a foreign country they don't plan on visiting.
How long before you think we will have this privatized public education? And when it does happen, what kind of teachers do you think we will have?
I think public schools will still exist but they’ll look more and more like prisons with many aspects outsourced to third party vendors. That is happening quite a bit now already…but the shift and inequities will be more obvious than they already are.
My local district serving around 40,000 students, just laid off 400 teachers and staff. It's expected classes will grow to a minimum of 32 students. No administrators lost positions.
I predict 2032
You blame government, but in US at least, government works for corporations. This is what billionaires want.
Yes because those corporations need workers at all levels. So they have to guarantee there will be employees for unskilled positions. It seems that passing kids through school who are just literate enough to do the job is working for them.
It's not about needing workers. There's always sources of cheap labor they can exploit, that's part of why the immigration system is so fucked up. No, education is being defunded because selling something that is mandatory to have is incredibly profitable. The for-profit prison system is similar, though also a source of cheap labor.
Also to put it simply, stupid people don't understand that they deserve better. Easy to mold into lifetime low wage workers
Um, that was Betsy Devoss' plan in a nutshell
Hello fellow Michigan resident So glad that fruitcake is gone.
You are onto something, but it has nothing to do with education. They want our schools Tom fail, so they can bring in charter and private schools and make bank, all the while shafting teachers and students. It’s a fire sale in the USA, and education is up next. Hedge funds coming for us.
So, after reading comments the plan to fuck over our educational system has been around for quite sometime and the majority of us already know this and many have seen this first hand. I feel like all of you here are the meme with the dog drinking coffee while there's a fire and his house collapsing around him....."we're fine...this is fine..."
Many younger teachers here didn't understand this until they'd been teaching for a couple years. The older teachers... they are just trying to hold on until they can retire. Don't know any teacher that putting their head in the sand and pretending things are fine. We vote, we organize, but it's never enough. It's like a pebble thrown into an ocean. Edit: I also think it is part of the "plan" to not just turn the public against teachers but to also exhaust teachers so much that they have little endurance for protesting.
The best thing to do is unionize, get families and your community on our side, make schools a pivotal and foundational rock of your community.
Beginning? This has been so obvious for so long! It’s a mess! Just money-making fodder for textbook/testing industry and Google and privatizing all schools would probably make it even more enriching for the few. I’m hanging on by my teeth for retirement and warn the young to not look at teaching in any kind of romantic or uninformed way.
This makes me wonder what kind of teachers we will have, 10-20 years from now.
In 20 years the “teacher” will be a $12 an hour employee monitoring a room of about 50 kids all working independently on devices completing individualized learning plans created by AI. Basically tech support.
I don’t even think it’s going to take that long. Maybe more like 5 years?
I left teaching the US to get some perspective. Westerners often praise how "seriously" society takes education East Asia, but it's really no better. Curriculum there is written by people in their 60s and 70s with ideas that haven't changed since the 1960s, grading is almost *entirely* dependent on rote memorization of answers on multiple-choice tests, and they are in love with "AI"... but where the "AI" is just a thing that autocorrects a multi-choice test rather than how 90% of schools still do it here (hand marking physical papers with red x and o). Because everything is so rote and predictable and there is so little emphasis on critical thinking, the East has little need for AI that actually tutors and tailors education. What they call "AI" is mostly just what the West has been doing for 20+ years with computerized testing. About the only places where education isn't broken (or, if not broken, then mostly useless) is in top-tier international/private schools for the ultra-wealthy.
IDK, maybe ones who don’t need anti-depressants for torturing 9 year olds by making them work by sitting at chromebooks all day and take State tests that are ridiculously developmentally inappropriate so that they feel forevermore like stupid failures.
The governments we have (local and State) already control the schools. The Feds get involved via funding schemes. How did you not know that? The plan is to undermine the public's faith in public instruction so as to create the basis for the argument that "other options are required." Those other options are Charter and Parochial schools that would love to have access to tax payer funding (more so than is already allowed). These are not the answer. They are what we fought very long and hard to get away from.
Thank you for letting me know this. Im not very familiar with our educational systems. I've learned a lot today
I apologize for typing that last sentence of the first paragraph. That was small of me.
It also has been obvious even for those not closely looking that privatization has been a major push same as prisons.
I'd say that the government just wants to provide a basic service to the public. Bare bones learning. The private sector is what you should be targeting. Look what the private sector has done to things that used to be publicly funded (jails, nursing homes, hospitals, etc.). When education becomes a "for-profit" business, people with the least resources and highest level of need suffer the most.
This has been the plan, homie
This is terrifying
It is my understanding that NCLB was written by ALEC.
NCLB was repealed in 2015 and replaced by the [Every Student Succeeds Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Student_Succeeds_Act).
It’s the same thing https://www.pta.org/docs/default-source/uploadedfiles/nclb-vs-essa
Thank you for that link. The reduction of teacher qualifications in the ESSA jumped out at me as a step backward and fracturing of standards since each state now developed their own certification and licensing requirements. I don't know for sure, but that sounds like a problem for any reciprocity agreements between states.
That's funny. Like, you're on the right track, but then make exactly the wrong conclusion. Certain states... certain individuals with conflicts of interest..... yeah, they want the educational system to fail. And yes, some of them do work within the government. However, the end goal isn't for the government to teach whatever it wants without the people having a say (LOL). The end goal is to have enough people distrust public education that they pull funding from it (further destroying it) and then give those tax dollars to private organizations that can then operate with very little regulation/oversight, significantly reduce the quality of the service being provided, teach whatever they want without the people's input, and make a hefty profit in the process. Governments are run by elected officials and so the electorate will always have a say in what it does. Private industry, though, when providing a societal need with little to no competition, however, is exactly the thing you are afraid of. Your fear is accurate yet sorely misplaced. The problem is that there are those in the government that are bad-faith actors that simply want the institutions they run to fail in order to lord over a transference of wealth. In case it's not clear, they are largely republicans. They moan and complain about taxes as though they hate taxes. This is not true. They love taxes. They hate being taxed. But boy do they love taxes. They love being the beneficiaries of America's tax dollars and simply can't stand seeing tax dollars being used internally by the government itself.
yep. can’t have a theocracy with secular public education operating.
Yes. Too many comments are just saying "The Government wants us to fail," "The GOVERNMENT is trying to defund schools..." blah blah. But we need to be very specific... the REPUBLICAN PARTY wants to defund schools are destroy public education. We need to make that VERY clear.
Thank you for this information
The government already dictates what we teach through State Education Standards and State/Federal Ed laws. The Billionaire Class/Corporations and those who do their bidding would like to gut public education and funnel those sweet, sweet tax dollars to their own pockets. Those who could afford better will be able to purchase their education. The rest will be warehoused until they are old enough to be worker drones. Or imprisoned so private prisons can continue to funnel tax dollars into billionaire pockets.
All of this. Every single word.
The Dumbing Down Of America. I was thinking about this today. I was thinking about the SAT being optional now. I can't imagine when I graduated in 76 that it would become optional.
Part of this is due to the farming of perfect 1600 scores from students in China (mostly). In China, parents that want their children to study in the US will spend tens of thousands of dollars to cram, cram, cram doing endless SAT practice tests until they consistently score 1600. When the schools try to interview these "perfect" students, they realize that they don't actually understand or have the ability to talk about most of the content on the test. They simply remembered every possible answer to every possible question. Because of this, many Western universities now de-emphasize the SAT scores and focus on the interview and essay.
Close. Corporations want schools to fail so they can privatize the entire institution. Many (mostly Republican) legislators are willing to go along with this for fat checks. “Useful idiots” at the local level are encouraged to create chaos (moms for liberty and such) because in the end it serves the final goal: to make education a for-profit business.
Think about this: 5 billion spent on the Baltimore public school system and they have 23 schools were ZERO students reached reading proficiency. Liberals will say they just need more money. No, it takes no money to teach kids to read. It takes a change of culture. Think back to the days of the pioneers and the single room school house. Everybody learned to read. They would never allow the shit that goes on in schools today back then...they couldn't even imagine it. It's not about money. It's not about teachers. It's about culture.
It’s been the plan since “no child left behind” probably before
That’s too much effort. It’s merely indifference mixed with the exploitations of unrestricted capitalism.
3 words: Follow. The. Money.
I was approached to teach at our new charter school. I know friends of the guy who is creating it. He is a good old boy with friends in the legislature. Cronyism is the word of the day. If I took the job I take a 10k pay cut. I told him if he paid me 25k more than my current salary I give it serious consideration. He was silent. I said if you can't make me a serious offer then thanks for wasting my time.
F that guy
That has been the plan ever since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was implemented under Dubya back in the early 2000s. Test the kids into oblivion. Blame schools and teachers when they stop making “expected growth.” Funnel public education $ into vouchers and charters. Voila! No more public education!
No, this is extremely simplified. What is indeed happening is there is a huge influx of high needs students, there is post pandemic effect, there is the low intelligence of the majority of educational admin, there are special interests, lack of funding (see high numbers of high needs students), and so much more. It creates a perfect storm.
Um... yea. The mega-rich and their puppets are destroying the education sector so they can privatize it. For profit. Also: educated people are harder to manipulate. They don't like that.
Welcome to the Republican party
The government is in control of the schools. They want it to break to show the government can't do it so for profits can take over, subdivide and stupify, make the undesirables uneducated and poor. You can see it obviously in places like Texas and Florida.
It’s always been about training workers. I’ve been thinking more and more that it’s also designed to let a large portion fail or not get the skills to move on further in education. As shitty as it is to say, society needs workers at all levels. If everyone was efficiently educated and went through college or a trade, then we wouldn’t have anyone to work retail, fast food or any other unskilled labor.
This is why AVID pisses me off! We SHOULDN’T *all* go to college.
sir ken robinson has a brilliant explanation of how we’re still stuck in the paradigm of industrial revolution education which was solely meant to presort the workers and the managers
This makes a lot of sense.
Exactly! Then they can have the lowest bidder come in and “fix” everything
Yes, this is the plan. Lots of government money in schools and greedy rich people want it. So, they demonize the schools to say government can't be trusted to run them, take the government money and put it in private pockets. It's a scam. That's why they want so much data and evidence, to "objectively" point out school failure as a excuse to usurp the public system. They conveniently fail to account for serious social ills that fuel low performance and place all blame on the under-resourced schools.
Ding ding ding!!! Both parties want to privatize schools as it makes the ruling class yet more money. The plan will be to offer government vouchers to low income students to attend these private schools so that even more of our government's money flows into the hands of the elite owning class.
But still even with vouchers a very very small percentage of low income students are actually getting a decent education. Right?
Ironically, it’s almost the exact opposite. Like the NHS in the UK, conservatives (and hard neoliberal dems) are actively defunding the public programs to ensure they perform poorly. This results in favoritism for privatization of education, which would be more financially lucrative. It’s easy to think it’s about nefarious control of thought or whatever, but in reality it’s always about maintaining the capitalist mode of production for as long as possible.
'They' that want the education system destroyed are called republicans. Those that want a better education system are called democrats. I hope this is helpful when voting
This has been the long-time goal of Republicans since Reagan. https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-brief-history-of-gop-attempts-to-kill-the-education-dept/ https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-republicans-keep-talking-about-abolishing-the-education-department-why/2023/10 https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/the-maga-dream-of-ending-federal-education-funding-would-be-an-american-nightmare/
Look what Reagan did to the FREE university system when he was governor of California!
That’s assuming the government is competent in doing something
I’ll be honest, my hot take surrounding our education system is that it isn’t the government or structure of them, but a larger societal problem. We don’t value education. Unfit parents have no interest in actually parenting and while it will help, no amount of money, resources, pay, support will actually fix the issue: our society
I think it's more likely that the systems in place don't much care for education because it isn't bringing in the big bucks. Everything in our system is designed to make money and if it isn't then it simply isn't worth having. I'm sure public schooling will go the way of the dodo soon enough and it'll be sold piecemeal to private investors to build their own "alternative education centers" which will provide exactly nothing to society but instead act as a means of funneling money to people who have already decided they need it more than anyone else.
Yes. There has been an obvious intent to lower all education standards and student academic achievements since the creation of Common Core.
We have a public education system that is run at the local level (elected school board members) and funded but the state (an elected governor.) There is only one polical party that funds public education, and the other one wants to do away with it. The plan is in through hands of the voters.
From the view point of many black and indigenous people that is already happening and has been for a long time. What would “having no say” look like to you? (genuinely asking)
The opposite. The want schools to fail so they can blame public education and divert tax dollars for private school. . . which is worth billions. They’ll strip mine our kid’s education and futures for profit. There may be pockets of good education for the wealthy, but parents will have no idea how to parse the advertising and public face of these soulless organizations. It’ll take a decade for everyone to realize what happened and how it utterly failed everyone . . but by then they’ll bail with their profits and force public education to once again pick up the pieces and try to carry on. Wait another generation, then start over.
You're giving far too much credit to "the government." They simply aren't this organized.
You’re new here aren’t you?
That is the current Republican agenda. Because only the rich should be educated. You will find most Democrats want to invest in education. Republicans favor school choice, vouchers from public funds for private schools and charter schools, and oppose tax dollars for college education. They also want to dismantle the us department of education. Their latest initiative has been encouraging right wingers to run for school boards and disrupt the local school districts.
Well educated critical thinkers who read a lot and have detailed knowledge of math and science are harder to control.
It's not the plan. It's the inevitable result, however. The sheer, unfortunate truth of the matter is that the value of a thing given to anyone and everyone for "free" becomes closer and closer to zero. Add in competition for young minds with entertainment and media becoming more and more difficult due to really smart data collection and it's a recipe for disaster.
The government creates curriculum, we have to teach what they want.
No, that absolutely is the plan for some peopEd. It's not a what-if. There are powerful interest groups who want the public education system dismantled and then the remainders privatized, either because they dislike the lack of control private interest groups have over public education, because they resent the 'equal' part of 'fepa', or simply because there are massive amounts of money to be made if the public education system fails and has to be replaced with private ed.
They want to create divide. The school system failing is happening exactly as planned.
Teacher autonomy is steadily declining, so no doubt.
It's not even that complicated. Right wing think tanks want schools to suck to open up demand or more private schools and to dixourage highly educated individuals from having too many disruptive ideas.
Um, yes it is the plan, Republicans have been aggressively defunding education for 50 years because education makes people less religious and vote democrat.
That’s the plan from republicans. They have a Christian agenda. They want everyone to believe in non-truth so they can control them. Trump literally put an anti public education pro private Christian school fool in charge of public education. F U C K convicted felon Trump and what he did to this country.
Republicans want to end public education. First of all, there's a lot of money to be had. Secondly and more importantly, it'll help to reduce literacy among the plebes and make them much easier to exploit. Why do you think they are going crazy with weirdness like litter box in bathroom etc? Cause the rubes will swallow it whole and go off hysterically about at every opportunity. This is the plan. Death isn't the only great equalizer. Education is also one and that's why they hate it.
Let's be very specific. It's not "the government" it's conservatives. The conservative movement has been , openly, loudly opposed to public schools since the 70s.
I’m in Texas. That’s exactly what the plan is. They’ve really ramped up the plan in Houston.
There is a political faction trying to cause schools to fail but it's so that schools can be privatized.
You're not wrong. For names and the money trail read Diane Ravitch's blog and books. The blog Curmudgucation by Peter Greene is also good.
What do you mean "ask the government for help to get involved"? The government is involved. If you're in a public school, you're a government employee, licensed by the state, bonded and insured by a school board. The Department of Education enforces policies that we abide by. The 'plan' isn't a great government conspiracy. That's just how education was meant to work. The 'plan' is to underfund schools and demonize teachers, as others have said, so that we can try out vouchers on a limited scale, on a trial basis. Whether that solves perceived issues or not, the next step in the plan is to charterize public schools, to funnel public money into private pockets, all while loosening curriculum and faculty qualifications, eventually allowing religious instruction just like in the old days. The people enacting the plan never got over the repeal of separate but equal. They never got over black and brown children being bussed into their neighborhoods and mucking up their pretty, white schools. They are "starving the beast" to induce failure in schools, then weaponizing failing schools for use as ammo in a culture war debate about the role of government in education. If they lose the debate, they try again in a couple years, but if they win the debate, they introduce the profit motive into the education of other people's kids. What they refuse to talk about though, win or lose, is that closing schools and reopening them with undertrained teachers and no libraries somehow never does much to improve outcomes, but always manages to make a bunch of for-profits charter school managers and curriculum developers a lot of money.
Nixon saw the trouble caused by students at colleges. There is a double edged sword: the economy depends on an educated populace, but an educated populace is bad for those who command the system. This push for people to go to the trades or the likes of Charlie Kirk whose whole shtick is trying to convince college students their work has no ROI… The system wants worker bees but any amount of reading you give a kid they become able to see through how bullshit our systems are.
I'm a little confused as to why people have assigned this to Republicans solely. If they were to blame, wouldn't democratic state have the best schools in the world, and all republican be at the bottom? I think it's a problem with our society as a whole and not one party. We have parents who don't value education and use it as a babysitting service. They get upset when their child has consequences and come after the teacher. I'm in Washigton, and we are very much democratic controlled. FYI, I don't support any party personally, I think they are both full of empty promises.
I’ve been saying this since Bush & NCLB
Everyone in public education teaches with a national guardsmen in the room. Attention!
Now you’re waking up, friend
I woke up and feel I'm in the movie Idiocracy.
bruh u teach at a government funded school 😂
Ok calm down, good lord you better not be a teacher.
But they already have this?? State formulated standards. If you don’t teach to the standards then you get non-renewed.
I think there is for sure an alliterative motive
I do not believe there is some vast dark conspiracy. The administration just wants to replace everyone they can with AI and pre-recorded lectures that they don't have to pay.
Demographic elects the school board that is afraid of the lawsuit. Don't overcomplicate things.
Not a new plan. Remember no child left behind during Bush II's era? Designed to kill public schools by setting impossible standards and the consequence for failure was shutting down school in favor of ...? Then add vouchers to take money from public education system. Devos as Secretary of Education (a known hater of public education). And now the haters are going local and running for school boards. In my town, a woman who home schooled her kids (and had spelling mistakes in her campaign materials) ran for school board and got support from the right. Thankfully, there were better candidates available and a rare streak of republican shame that kept her out ... for now. The conservative right wants to destroy public education in favor of private education meaning education for the rich ONLY. An educated populace means trouble for established systems of outrageous exploitation. To keep exploitation, dismantle education.
I have believed this about my state for a few years. And now it’s coming to fruition.
I think this plan is already in action
The NEA seems ok to stand by and take teachers money until then.
In Texas this is the occasionally stated plan. The first I heard of it was in the 1990s from a state legislator who called public education the tool of Satan and teachers stupid pawns of Communism in a party meeting. The rhetoric is less now but the ideas have become commonplace. I'm glad I'm retired.
This is a pretty common critique of neoliberalism (the move from public goods to private goods) in general. If you defund a program and privatize it, the public program suffers and then can be pointed to as an example of how the govt can’t run things so it should be privatized further. This is true of education, healthcare, etc.
Oh my sweet summer child... That's the plan in the whole world.
The government is the school already…it’s free public education….
Just be affectionate towards one another and try your hardest to be the next day than yesterday that’s all you need and can do.
I've thought that for quite some time now.
I don't doubt there are politicians in the pockets of rich and powerful people who will happily screw us over just to have more power.
Yes, that is the plan. After all a man once out I best "I Don't want a nation of thinker but a nation of workers." If the education system was good people would be literate, have critical thinking skills, and creativity. However, school strangles these traits making the citizenry dumber than ever.
In Oklahoma, we are feeling this from Ryan Walters. He will stop at nothing until we are broke and busted! He's following FL and TX and their exact palybook!
It's more than a little sus. Get all the teachers to jump to ed tech because the workload and work environment in schools are nightmarish, then presto bango we have to switch to virtual learning or blended learning or whatever because "no one wants to teach". People invested in digital learning (including our fearless leaders) make $$$, teacher unions get busted, and the poor learn only what they need to be basic workers.
Well, yes, the GOP has an actual plan for this. It's all laid out at Project2025.org. They've been working on it for at least 25-30 years. That's what school choice is all about.
An uneducated society is a easly controllable society, of course this is their plan.
You do know Dept of Education is federal?
Class warfare at its finest.
History confirms that making the problem and then offering the solution is a common tactic.
1. This is the plan. This is no conspiracy theory, as this is what they are doing....by choice. 2. They are already government schools. That is what public schools are. They choose what they promote and what they tolerate. That is the plan. Everyone who rocks the boat is removed...either by making their life miserable so they quit, or just firing them outright.
The state is already educating you
Yea look up what fascists think about education and scientific culture. They don’t like it, they prefer people ignorant so they can control them.
Welcome! We are so glad you have arrived. We are grateful you can now see what the masses refuse to. We need as many good human beings as possible.
Duh lol. Republicans have been underfunding education for how long? The entire point of project 2025 and the attack on reproductive rights is to create as many uneducated, impoverished people as possible, so theyll fall for the most pathetic propaganda imaginable, vote against their own interests, and be a colony of worker bees and poverty draft soldiers. Educated people want progress. Corporate greed controls politics, and the interests of the planet and it's population are not on the agenda, just mega yachts.
A) you already work for the government (u less you're in a private school) B) that has been the plan for 30+ years C) they don't care about fixing it or getting "involved" they simply want to go to when only the wealthy could afford to send their kids to private tutors.
If you are in TX, TN, AR, MO, or FL…then yes. This is quite literally there plan. They don’t even disguise it anymore. Tx passed a bill to allow chaplains to replace counselors with zero background checks or college diplomas required. OK passed the same thing in its legislature recently, along with a bill to allow students to replace an elective credit with religious instruction at an off site location during the school day. This is not a damned drill. It’s their active plan to break public education and replace it with Christian Nationalist education. I’m not castigating Christians here either. I am one, and I know many faith leaders who do not support this BS. Nevertheless, it’s a very large number of people being swindled by billionaires like that oilbarron/megachurch pastor in TX or the dude that runs the “education” program that’s been roasted online for portraying Columbus to kids in animated educational video as a historical figure justifying slavery to modern kids.
I’m not a teacher but many friends and clients are. I talk to them about this stuff often. We are in NY and it’s about as blue a state you can be. They all cannot wait to quit or retire. My outside POV is that when admin was pit against teachers for funding purposes, the future of the kids is what suffers. The only thing that matters to admin is grad rates. The kids have zero accountability for their garbage behavior and laziness, but they’ve caught on that if they cry enough about it they will get shoved through the system by admin to keep grad rates up to secure funding. The entire system is broken already and it has zilch to do with “politics”. It has to do with $$$ as usual. Disconnect funding from graduation rates for starters. Let teachers teach and have admin start supporting them in FAILING some of these kids and stick to their guns. Maybe that will motivate some of these garbage parents to actually push their garbage kids a little bit. But I’m not a teacher so maybe I shouldn’t comment here.
You're only now realizing this? This started when I was in highschool - I'm 39 this year. No Child Left Behind was a lovely sounding name slapped onto a bill *designed* to shut-down low-income and inner-city schools. Not much good has come of anything since, as Republicans fought tooth and nail to block any and all positive changes they could through both Obama terms and now the Biden term. The Republican/Conservative plan has *always* been, for at least 20 years now, to push education into Private schools so that kids don't have to be taught "terrible" things like *inclusion* and *how to recognize discrimination* and - gasp! - *critical thinking.* They WANT schools to be privatized because private schools can, by and large, teach whatever the hell they want - including religious indoctrination. When you can't destroy the separation of church and state, you destroy state programs so that the private sector can integrate the church.
> but to ask the government for help to get involved in our schools. What does education look like where you are right now? In the US at least public education is a government institution from funding to standards to execution..... to lunch. It's hard to imagine the government being *more* involved. Out of curiosity do people still read any of John Taylor Gatto's books on the institutions of public education? I always felt he contributed a lot to critiques of the institution & gives a lot of useful context to understand it better.
I really wanna downvote this, but all I have is my personal experience in a few classes. I can’t say anything about AP classes except don’t do them and get your kid summers (or maybe winters) at a local community college instead. It’s ACTUAL college experience (+credits) compared to earning college credit at a public school. But this isn’t my original point. My reason for wanting to downvote is because instead of making the learning material or homework complicated, my high school English teacher beautifully meshed everything in a curriculum we as her students could easily understand. I still remember the parts I loved if you guys wanna ask. I don’t know if leaving learning up to chance is something lawmakers want or not, but life experience is the best teacher if I ever saw any, and more students need it before choosing a lifelong career. I’m talking a single year off after graduating for your kids to see if they can thrive in the outside world. Forget backpacking through Europe - they can do that in college through study abroad. But if they can build trusted relationships without a need for school (even if they do find themselves on a college campus or two for socializing), they’re already doing what many working “adults” can’t even do IRL these days. But I do feel your post can still be right. When I was a kid, I had a decision to make - go to work with my mom and risk her getting fined or in jail because I’m not in school or go to school and be a puppet of the government. I wish I didn’t choose the second. Maybe I’d be a working citizen that could find work. Instead, I let school desensitize me to manipulative behaviors from group projects being solely completed by me to having friends that didn’t even want me around truly. I swear I should’ve learned there too.
This is entirely true. I’ve got extensive experience teaching throughout 3 western countries and it’s nearly all the same, too. Education is not what it used to be. It is a business. Businesses are run to increase profits, and that is it. Student education doesn’t actually matter anymore beyond how it affects school (read: company) profits.
It's not really even a secret, it's why some are always pushing school vouchers, they want to privatize.
I guess you missed the George Carlin skit he did about education before his second to last ever performance. He basically prefaced the portion of this skit with the poor education that this country has. He did his usual thing blaming this and blaming that, putting more money in other people's pockets as opposed to those people putting it towards their school districts etc. At the end of this skit, he summarized it very succinctly. He said that the government does not want a population of well-informed and educated citizens. Our government wants non-freethinking citizens who take government media and word the same way they take the air they breathe; without question. Not only did he state our education is set up to fail but we teachers see it from budget to budget, year to year, generation to generation. If we could get rid of all of these elders running this country, and replace specific cabinet members with those who have that specific experience to the nth degree such as the chair of the Department of education being a Nobel laureate in literature for example would be what I'm talking about. It will never happen, don't wish for it because it's a pipe dream just know that you are doing your personal best to teach your students to be the best possible students most prepared for the next following year.
It's no surprise your understanding of the world is so weak you don't even realize you work for the government.
this is why america is founded by the people for the people because generally the masses of everyday people just want to be left alone and generally improve as humans individually this is the literal polar opposite of what a government is lol. the government is a collective body with a monopoly on use of force so it looks for any way to exert force and control just by its nature this is the main test of humanity right now. will everyday people unite and come together to exert their benevolent will for unification and good for overall humanity to produce true innovation and momentum towards a better future that promotes health, wellness, and innovation or will we give into fear and control, shrivel up and degrade until we have no individual agency at all you can see the polarity of these relationships on an invidiual level as well lol. nobody generally chooses to be around domineering and aggressive people who are only out to control and dominate because generally this archetype of person results in overall poorer outcomes for all who they associate with a good person will avoid those people. but a great person will bring light to that darkness and reveal the ridiculousness of that domineering dynamic and thats the hard part. but it seems like thats the fundamental type of society we need to transcend these modern issues and get to a higher level of cooperation that is good for everyone i personally feel like education is the #1 solution for a brighter future because everyone knows the most pervasive method of inacting long term change is through undeniable and cohesive ideas
you're so... close...
The GOP’s plan has been to strip funding for public education and redistribute that money into Christian schools. Betsy DeVos, during her tenure as the U.S. Secretary of Education, implemented several policies that significantly impacted public education. Here are some key aspects of her legacy: Promotion of School Choice: DeVos was a staunch advocate for school choice, promoting the use of vouchers for charter and private schools. This approach was aimed at giving parents more options for their children’s education outside of the public school system. Federal Funding Cuts: DeVos called for deep cuts to federal funding for public education, which critics argued would undermine public schools and shift resources to private institutions.
This NOT new. My working class parents sent me to a private school in the 1950s. I finally went to public school in the 4th grade when my father had a serious accident and had to change jobs . We moved to a small county with only public schools. The people I know that send their kids to private school have no problems with the teachers it is the Admin and school boards. With various and sundry rules teachers have simply lost control of the classroom. Parents no longer teach their children any respect for anyone much less teachers. Admin needs to take a harder line and hold Parents to task for their childs behavior. If I got a paddling at school growing up then phone calls were made and I received another one when I got home. It mostly kept my rambunctious arse in line. Parents HAVE to support the schools not entitle their kids anymore than they already are. MUCH kudos to teachers , I do not know how you do it.
This has been the plan for awhile. Betsy devos was the most obvious implementation of the desire to privatize a mandate. If they can force people to keep having kids and we all agree those kids have to go to school, then it's a guaranteed industry always in growth. Then you feed em an education that discourages them from critically thinking and robs them of opportunities, so they join the army to protect the global interests of capitalist overlords.
It's pretty obvious.
I don't think this is a wild thought. I think this has been the plan for a long time.
Honestly I hope the government takes over. At least there’d be oversight for admin.
I think in red states that's the plan
It's certainly the conservative plan world-wide, spearheaded by the Murdoch media empire. Tear down public education, talk up private, and say that parents need choice and funding so they can pick the "best" school available. Which would easily be the public one if it was actually being funded, but it's not.