Arne Duncan has set off a furious response with his tweet,
"What if every district committed both to identifying what made their 5
best schools successful & providing those opps to all their
students?"
I have a few what ifs of my own.
What if:
- the federal government incentivized integrated public education, rather than segregated corporate reform schools?
- corporate foundations committed funds to ending childhood poverty?
- CEOs recognized that capitalism is amoral and public institutions are not?
- Arne Duncan woke up one day as a human being, instead of a cockroach?
- we accepted the idea that poverty is not due to character flaws that can be fixed by changing children's brain functions?
- Bill Gates discovered that he is, indeed, the self-serving sonofabitch that the majority of people know him to be?
- Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody committed as much energy to resisting CorpEd as they do to building their fan base?
- Wendy Kopp insisted her clueless troops wear armbands and lapel pins with PP for Positive Pedagogy?
- FairTest did something other than beg for money and post all the work that others are doing?
- Congress passed laws to enforce the Fair Housing Act and, thus, enable integrated living?
- our leaders took global warming seriously, rather than preparing for the police state to contain the eventual mayhem that will come from pursuing the status quo?
- the citizenry acted more out of hope than fear?
- schools got so repressive that children stopped going and parents stopped sending them?
- hackers brought down the Common Core data collection system on test days?
- parents kept their children home on test days because they were sick of testing?
- we stopped pretending that educational equality can be accomplished without human equality?
- businesses got out of the education field and focused on new products and services that make us healthy and whole?
- Arne Duncan stopped pretending that context is irrelevant and that everyone can do the same thing the same way and get the same result?
What's your What If?
well said
ReplyDelete"[What if] schools got so repressive that children stopped going and parents stopped sending them?"
ReplyDeleteGiven that bank owned governments are determined to ensure permanent austerity within le social commun, not far off in the future the undumb parents will pull their kids from such repressed schools. But only if they themselves are not among the purposefully marginalized. Many parents possess the means to whisk their kids off to alternative schools. Those without means don't.
The families among us of the least of means will be most critically afflicted by our governments' local protectors, a militarized police. That is, many of these families will lose what little government support they might receive if their children are truant from approved schools or captured by our un-justice system and adjudicated to juvenile court schools where even further repression is assured.
Those alternative schoolers with the money will have access to higher education (at least until secondary school Common Core curriculum becomes prerequisite to college entrance). When billionaire and government money further increase endowments to higher education such that they control the curriculum content 'sine querella,' what if, without any promise of the good 'ol American Dream engendered in access to higher education, a new education bubble is burst?
What if the dormancy of the disassociated and uninterested becomes the new traunch of toxic assets that bankrupts all of education as it wakes up and revolts against the enforced tyranny of elitist social constructs? The departure, the end of schools due to the fraudulent public-private coercions of group think? Where a place where education is enriching as it is equitable is nothing more than a picture of a gone world.