In this editorial, Phyllis makes some really good points as a former teacher. As a retired teacher, she’s now involved in a leadership role, and does a fine job not wanting to be confrontational.
The problem is Mr. Bill Gates and the Bush family have invested time and money in Indianapolis preparing Indiana for a charter school push. There are hedge fund managers poised to invest more money so Wall Street can suck away what’s left of state public education dollars.
Even though Hoosiers overwhelmingly elected Glenda Ritz to become our State Education Superintendent, Mike Pence has made sure that Daniel Elsener, President of Marian College, has usurped her authority on the State Board of Education to run Pence’s agenda, or should I say, Bush families agenda.
The republican party who works for monied interests has already determined that there is plenty of profit to be made from taxpayer dollars flowing toward education, and they want it – it’s a simple annuity payment. Derivative guys love annuity payments!
This isn’t about educating the minds of our kids, it’s about making money – a return on investment where student headcount is gross revenue.
As we learned here in Muncie, if we close one of our high schools, we can’t sell it to Ball State and use those funds to help educate our kids. No, we have to sell the building to a charter school for either a $1.00, or a 10 year lease for $1.00 per year lease. Where else in the world could you negotiate such a great deal?
The good people of Indiana have been hoodwinked, or basically been lied to by republicans who represent “Hoosier values”. Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, Luke Messer, Tony Bennett, Daniel Elsener – con men who will tell voters whatever they want to hear in order to get their vote. Once elected, they will go to work on pushing the Bush Education agenda in Indiana.
They want you to think they are “reforming schools”, but they are not. As we have already learned through Tony Bennett’s fraudulent behavior as State Superintendent, Charter schools don’t outperform public schools at all. In many cases, they are mediocre performers, but with a little help from money puppets like Bennett, they can be ‘A’ performers with a stroke of a pen.
If they were truly wanting to reform public education, why not sit down with teachers? Why not empower teachers to make the reforms needed?
Why are men and women in suits, who have never taught in a classroom, leading education reform?
If the truth be known, they are not leading the reformation process, they are intermediaries for families like the Bush’s, Gates, etc. They have decided that teachers and their unions are the problem, so they will circumvent them to create “low cost” alternatives, but the only way their alternative makes financial sense is stealing school buildings from communities, receiving large private donations, and of course, diverting tax dollars away from less mobile families and neighborhoods.
This is nothing new – it’s the same model used to create the gross income inequality in this country, whereby the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
The very same group complains that we have too many people on taxpayer funded social safety nets – their policies put them there.
Check out Phyllis’s editorial at: Education dialogue seeks common good | The Journal Gazette.
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