Another Business Roundtable Commission--Snap!

In a the best time-tested tradition of corporate media school-bashing stupidity, a breathless Time Magazine has issued the first press release disguised as a news story announciing, alas, a new report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. This CEO-packed commission is out to change everything educational again. The Report, due out later this week, will, for instance, call for a shift in the social studies curriculums of high schools. Tired of the old "fixation" on the history of our democratic republic, "Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are "global trade literate." You know, the flat world, any-wage-is-okay-with-me curriculum.

Time is not telling us too much before the suspense-filled release of the report, but they obviously could not help from gushing this:

Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts? The skills commission will argue that it's possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools.

Apparently the Business Roundtable is planning to go public with their school privatization agenda, rather than hiding behind a bunch of scab politicians to do their bidding, who, themselves, continue to hide behind the biggest of all educational lies, No Child Left Behind?

Can you imagine a national strike by parents, teachers, and students to protest the attempted corporate takeover of our educational system? Can you imagine a million people in the streets of Washington demanding a return to educational sanity and to the core values of democratic living? Can you imagine an America ready to tell the international economic anarchists to go to Hell?