User:Jon Awbrey/MLIVE

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MLIVE -- Comments

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http://connect.mlive.com/user/JonAwbrey/index.html

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Here's a good update on some of the things that educators, parent activists, and others will be doing over the Summer to protect our system of democratic education from hostile takeover by corporations, ideologues, and other private interests —

Frustrated Educators Aim To Build Grassroots Movement
• http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/06/15/35activists_ep.h30.html

<quote>
Thousands of educators, parent activists, and others are expected to convene in the heat and humidity of Washington next month for a march protesting the current thrust of education policy in the United States, especially the strong emphasis on test-based accountability.

Organizers say the effort aims to galvanize and give voice to those who believe policymakers, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state governors, have gone astray in their remedies for improving American schools.
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Why are we getting all this top-down micro-management of local affairs, personal rights, and professional standards from the very politicians who so loudly advertised themselves in favor of limited government?

Whatever it is they wish to limit, it is certainly not their own power to dictate their corporate and social agendas to us.

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New Detroit charter school report, Atlanta test scandal reveal ineffective education reform
• http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2011/07/new_detroit_charter_school_rep.html

Immeasurable violence was done to our educational system when the Bush Administration infected it with an alien market dynamics. What we are seeing today is a consequence of that violation.

Education is a public resource, a core component of a democratic society, not a private commodity to be merchandised by private interest corporations.

It is obvious from their own position statements that a number of obscenely well-funded forces are striving to inject market psychology into people's hearts and minds for the express purpose of doing away with universal free public education. Other people may be drawn into the game from a lack of information about its ultimate purpose. As with any astroturf pyramid scheme, it is always hard to draw a hard and fast line between the shills and the marks, but I do not believe the great majority of people would be happy with the consequences if they could see where the con is headed.

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