National

It's interesting how the biggest proponents of Choice! are the ones now against it. Then again, anyone who understands how Choice came to be and the reasons behind it knows it never had anything to do with giving parents options. Choice was simply the stepping stone to privatizing our public schools. Choice is what has hurt our public schools; it's what opened the door to charters and privatization (as well as magnet schools). What we're dealing with now in education wouldn't be possible if we hadn't implemented a system designed to create high poverty schools - schools no one has seriously tried to help. But the point has never been to help high poverty, struggling schools. The point, and one I've been making for over a decade, is to privatize/charterize our public schools. It's no coincidence that the privateers started with the poorest among us - the ones with the least influence and voice. It's how they got their foot in the door. Take a good long look at the city of Wilmington. That's the plan for everyone. Yep, all this will spread outward (and is spreading) to suburbia. No one actually thinks that Ed Reformers are going to let all that education money slip through their hands, do they? Of course not. What they've done/are doing to our struggling schools sets the precedent. And once that precedent is set it will spread like wildfire. Which brings me to the point of this post and Mike Matthews' Delaware Voice column. The Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA) is the tool to implement this agenda. This test isn't about helping children learn; it's about labeling schools and teachers as failing so the next step in the Ed reformer's agenda can be implemented. Remember Priority Schools? Remember how ALL roads in that plan led to privatization and charterizatiion? Out of everything in that plan only private/charter conversion was carved in stone. The reason it was carved in stone was because it was the end game.