CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: The Good: The Koch network says it wants to remake public education. That means destroying it.  Wed Oct 16, 2019 9:38 pm | |
| Early this year, the Koch network committed to starting an effort to transform public education. What would that look like?
The author of a new book on the billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother, David, says it would amount to the destruction of public education as we know it.
The Koch network is the influential assemblage of groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and more than 600 wealthy individuals who share his pro-business, anti-regulation view of economics and positions on social policy, such as climate change denial.
The focus on K-12 education follows long involvement by the Koch brothers in higher education. As leaders of a conservative movement that believes U.S. higher education is controlled by liberals who indoctrinate young people, they spent as much as an estimated $100 million on programs at hundreds of colleges and universities that support their views.
Now the network says it is going to try to transform K-12 education, though the details are unclear. The Kochs and their allies have long supported the school choice movement — which seeks alternatives to traditional public school districts — as well as the use of public funds for private and religious school education, as does Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
In June, two Koch-related education initiatives were announced. One is a group called “Yes Every Kid,” which, its creators say, will bring together partisans in the education labor and funding debates to try to find solutions. The other is a project called 4.0 that commits the Charles Koch Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation to pledge $5 million each — along with $5 million from other donors — to support, according to a statement, “600 education entrepreneurs in incubating, testing and launching innovative approaches to education.” (The Walton foundation has long supported charter schools and other parts of the school choice movement.)
Informing the Koch view of change is a 704-page book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” by Christopher Leonard, which shows readers how the Koch brothers built their empire and the impact their philanthropy has had on the country. Below is an interview with Leonard by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider for their “Have You Heard” podcast about the Koch view of education in America and why it matters to the future of publicly funded and operated schools.
As Leonard sees it, this is the Koch vision’s bottom line for education reform:
- Quote :
- Here’s the actual political philosophy. Government is bad. Public education must be destroyed for the good of all American citizens in this view.
So the ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system, which the operatives in this group believe in a sincere way is better for everybody. Now, whether you agree with that or not as the big question, but we cannot have any doubt, there’s going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, efficiency. At its core though the network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different. Berkshire is a teacher and a writer now working on a book about the dismantling of public education. Schneider is a scholar of education history and policy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and the author of several books, including “Beyond Test Scores.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/10/16/koch-network-says-it-wants-remake-public-education-that-means-destroying-it-says-author-new-book-billionaire-brothers/
 |
|
