Maybe I'm a wide-eyed optimist, but I want to believe that the billionaires who have grabbed up the banner of education reform are genuinely altruistic at their core. Perhaps it is just my innate stubbornness that I don't want to imagine that anyone could have ulterior motives when it concerns children. But then I awaken to the realization that, after twenty plus years in an urban classroom, that children are the easiest targets for the self-serving.
When I hear that voice of reality speaking I wonder; just what do billionaires have to gain by controlling education? I cannot even conceive of these power brokers sending their own children to the schools they are planning to create. This all too familiar scenario is the politicians who send other people's children to fight and die in wars while their own children are shielded by their privilege.
I am suddenly drawn back to a passionate plea about the need to teach civics to insure the core principals of the United States. It comes from Richard Dreyfuss via Bill Maher's Real Time.
He makes a point about us not teaching children what we don't want them to know and I am reminded of the 'literature' that I am mandated to teach my students of the "huddled masses". I am quite certain that the children of these billionaires will ever be forced to sit through these stories once, let alone for a week or more of instruction. I think about the vintage computers that will glitch while running programs I have managed to keep viable for a decade while the billionaires' children will have all the latest technology.
The education system the billionaires provide will label my students according to their test scores and judge their potential on a number that reflects seven hours in an entire year. And while the billionaires' children may also be judged by a number, it will likely be the size of the endowment their parents provide.
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