About this blog

Newsweek, March 15, 2010

A few years ago, I started to notice more and more articles and press about all the "bad teachers" in the U.S. and how we had to do something about this problem soon, or we would slide into irreversible failure as a nation. As a long-time educator, I was offended and disturbed by all this concentrated bad press about my field, and I was not alone.

In the spring of 2010, my local union took a group of building representatives on a field trip to hear Diane Ravich give a speech to the Boston Teachers' Union.  Our state was in the process of applying for Race to the Top, and Ravich had just published her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  I was impressed by her speech and bought the book and began to learn the truth about the corporate reform movement in education.

Being an avid reader who loves to do research on issues and problems that concern me, I began to look more deeply into this issue after reading the book and found ample evidence that underneath the education reformers' idealistic-sounding phrases like "no child left behind" and "students first" are private interests looking to dismantle public education and turn it into a private, for-profit enterprise funded by taxpayers. Unfortunately for them, too many pesky career educators are in the way and are not making it easy. But these "reformers" (AKA "deformers" in some circles) are determined, have lots and lots of money, and it seems as though are making headway towards their goal to privatize education at an alarming rate.

This blog is intended to categorize and organize information pertaining to these efforts to corporatize and privatize our nation's public school system.  My goal is to understand the issue better myself, and hopefully be able to contribute something of value to the fight against it by gathering this information here.

If you have run across this blog and have suggestions for inclusions to any letter of this education reform alphabet, please write me.