The "education market is ripe for disruption" Great article in The Nation. A must read.

[greatlaurel]

"Next year, the market size of K-12 education is projected to be $788.7 billion. And currently, much of that money is spent in the public sector. “It’s really the last honeypot for Wall Street,” says Donald Cohen, the executive director of In the Public Interest, a think tank that tracks the privatization of roads, prisons, schools and other parts of the economy."

"K12 Inc.’s lobbyists helped author model legislation to develop sweeping voucher laws through the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that provides state lawmakers with template legislation. Though state by state lobbying figures are difficult to come by, given the patchwork of varying laws, K12 Inc. has hired dozens of local officials to ensure that these voucher laws are quickly passed with few amendments. “We have incurred significant lobbying costs in several states,” K12 Inc. noted in a filing with the SEC.

“The stockholders benefit from those students’ enrollments, but the students get stuck with a lousy education that will follow them the rest of their lives,” says Jeff Bryant, the director of the Education Opportunity Network."

This explains what is happening to our public schools. It is all about making profits by stealing public tax dollars away from public schools.

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.thenation.com/article/181762/venture-capitalists-are-poised-disrupt-everything-about-education-market

[earthside]

1. Progressives against Common Core.

From the article:

James Shelton, the Deputy Secretary, is a longtime education investor and the former co-founder of LearnNow, a charter chain that was sold to Edison Learning, a for-profit charter management company.

In an interview with EdSurge, a trade outlet, Shelton explained that the Common Core standards will allow education companies to produce products that "can scale across many markets," overcoming the "fragmented procurement market" that has plagued investors seeking to enter the K-12 sector.

That is the Deputy Secretary of Education in the Obama administration ... something I might have expected to hear from a bureaucrat during the Bush/Cheney years.

Postmodern capitalism and its marketization and corporatization of all aspects of our lives will be the destruction of democracy and small 'r' republicanism. Common Core, charters, high stakes testing, obsessive data collection, de-professionalization of teachers, etc. -- all part of making us nothing but consumers and making citizenship meaningless.

[blkmusclmachine]

2. Race To The Top is about a lot of things. And none of them are good.

[phantom power]

3. "education market is ripe for disruption" - everything about that phrase is terrifying

[daleanime]

4. Kick....