Corporatization of our schools
To the editor:
There have been many stories in papers statewide recently about the radical education reforms being imposed on our state by our new, Heritage-Foundation-linked, wide-eyed young education commissioner, Steven Bowen. The latest brouhaha involves his constant over-ruling of local superintendents when they have denied often frivolous requests for students to attend schools in districts where they do not reside.
Hopefully, this will serve as the desperately needed wake-up call to all who treasure public education and local control. Sadly, to this point, the MEA has been largely silent as the corporate takeover of Maine public schools gears up. Reportedly, they are hoping the grassroots will rise up and do their job for them. Let’s hope so!
These radical reforms did not spring fully formed from the mind of our 30-something Education Commissioner, you can be sure of that. Most of what is being done to Maine is a result of major corporations and tax-exempt foundations putting pressure on (and working incestuously with) the educrats in D.C. The goal is total control of education by corporations, for profit, and the dismantling of the last vestiges of local control.
When I interviewed Paul LePage during his last debate at UMPI prior to his election , I got a personal promise from him that he would be 100 percent committed to local control of education. That is why our program endorsed him. We still feel that he has been doing much good in cutting waste and bureaucratic red tape, but unfortunately, in the area of education policy he has been totally out to lunch with the corporatists at Heritage.
The Heritage Foundation is not a truly conservative organization, but instead, a pseudoconservative operation that puts profits before people. The reforms being considered (or already adopted) include ramming through a national curriculum for Maine students (done), bringing in charter schools with no elected school boards to compete with taxpayer dollars — against local schools (done), doing away with proven education methodologies in favor of totally unproven “direct instruction” i.e. computer brainwashing for the worker bees needed on the re-emerging global plantation (implementing soon), and taking away all the control from local folks and erasing district boundaries (the subject of the latest outcry.)
I am not suggesting that public education in Maine is perfect, but the reform needed is largely to do away with reforms and to go back to proven traditional educational methods that work. Our schools have been intentionally made over into social service centers over the past couple decades. Teachers have been intentionally burdened with myriads of responsibilities that interfere with their ability to teach. We test, test, test, without taking time to learn, or to learn anything but what teachers know will be on the test.
Yes, our public schools have declined recently — that has all been on purpose. In order to accept the final destruction of public education and local control, Bowen (and all the “change agents” like him) have been busy destroying our traditional education system to make it look as bad as possible. This then allows them to bring forward their proffered solution. It’s called “crisis management,” or “The Hegelian Dialectic” and it is used all the time by corporatists and globalists who literally want to remake America within their top-down , total-control paradigm.
It is time for local school boards and superintendents and parents to simply rise up and say “no.” Calling for the resignation of Steven Bowen would be a great first step. Getting hearings held on the corporatization of public education in Maine would be a great second step.
You promised us local control, Governor. Time to listen to those who got you elected a bit more, and to those who worked against you in the election and the primary (like the Heritage folks) a lot less!
Steve Martin
Amity
AroostookWatchmen.com
