Marc Tucker Digs Up New Rationale for Public School "Unbuilding"

Marc Tucker is at it again, with a newly-excavated rationale for blowing up public schools and universities.  

My reaction:

Tucker continues to weave a narrative that entirely ignores the systematic formation in the early 20th Century of a racist and classist education system that reflected the prejudices of social efficiency zealots, who threw open the doors to the new education factories they built for exploitation by succeeding generations of snake oil salesmen with a never-ending supply of fake remedies for manufactured problems.

The learning "crisis" of American schools in the 1970s grew from an unacknowledged fear of racial integration and social progress. The rise of testing accountability, which was based on the same racist testing technologies from the eugenics era earlier in the 20th Century, functioned to efficiently label, sort, and segregate students, and to further incentivize the monetization of public education by what has since become the testing-technological complex.

Mr. Tucker's half-baked history lesson and his blinkered rationalizations would clear the way for another generation of capitalist plunderers who know nothing about schooling, learning, or teaching, this time centered in Silicon Valley and backed by another generation venture philanthropists with self-serving solutions. With new schemes in the making for increased monitoring, surveillance, data sharing, neurological reprogramming (SEL), and increased screen time isolation, the paternalist threat to humane learning environments and democratic institutions has never been greater, and the opportunities for social capital investment predators has never been higher.

There is nothing new in Mr. Tucker's tired tirade that we haven't heard before. His suggestion to allow a new generation of "scientific" managers to "unbuild" public schools and public universities expresses an antiquarian faith in the ingenuity of capitalist enterprise in education that is as undeserved as it is irresponsible.