That Was the Year That Was

Leonine Haimson breaks down the year in education:

Worst education events of 2010:

1. Class sizes increasing in NYC and many other areas of the country, due to budget cuts and wrong-headed priorities.

2. The rapid spread of credit recovery and substandard “virtual” instruction, with the goal of replacing real-life teachers with computers. Meanwhile, Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch wait in the wings, eager to make a buck off online learning and the further degradation of public education.

3. The huge amount of money poured into the political campaigns of candidates who backed the agenda of the privateers, the funding of pseudo-documentaries like Waiting for Superman and The Lottery, the proliferation of fake grassroots groups like Stand for Children and Michelle Rhee’s Students First, the week-long horror show that was NBC’s Education Nation, all singing the same demented tune of privatization and high stakes testing. These political action funds, organizations, and media extravaganzas were financed and promoted by the same small group of powerful billionaires and hedge fund operators who are leveraging their private fortune and exerting outsized political influence in education, similar to the way that hostile corporate raiders took over large, undervalued companies in earlier decades.

What she said. Read the rest.