education

The Nation reports on the perversion of college athletics into big business: The Smartest—or Dumbest—Tweet an Athlete Ever Sent

Ohio State’s third-string freshman quarterback, Cardale Jones....tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”

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But Jones’s crime wasn’t authoring what the Daily News called a “lame-brained tweet.” It was committing, to paraphrase Michael Kinsley, the greatest sin in sports: he was caught telling the truth.

In These Times reports on the movement to turn public school funding into stockholder profit: The Right-Wing Machine Behind ‘School Choice’

The pro-corporate ideology behind school choice asserts that business style competition will be invariably good for education, and that putting school management and teaching into private (and nonunion) hands will make education less expensive, more efficient and more effective.

The statistics do not bear out their claims. By 2011, test results for the two oldest school voucher programs in the nation–Milwaukee and Cleveland–had reported disappointing results.

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...The multi-billion dollar budget for the nation's schools is a rich prize for those who would profit from the privatization of public schools, and they are joined by equally determined anti-public education ideologues.