By Jerry Waxman
“Well, ya got trouble, my friend right here, I say trouble right here in River City*…..”
In the musical The Music Man, the story’s central character, a con artist, convinces the town in turn of the 20th century Iowa that the local pool hall is turning the town’s youth into lazy, shiftless and irresponsible juveniles who will grow up to be ne’er-do-wells if the townspeople don’t take action now (emphasis on the word now). He proposes a solution, a boys’ band, in order to profit from the situation. Of course, he never actually teaches them to play their instruments, nor does he ever actually present his credentials to the local school board officials, who never seem to agree with each other.
It’s one of the oldest cons in the book; create a non-existent problem and then propose the exact solution. Termite inspectors have successfully done this for years. Even if you don’t have termites you will after they inspect you. Public education has been the target of these con artist reformers for years dating back to the Eisenhower Administration’s failure to beat the Russians into space. The late Dr. Gerald Bracey exposed the myth in his article The Big Engine That Couldn’t. He spent his life battling education reformers and education bamboozlers until his passing a few years ago.
What passes for reform now is actually a privatization swindle set up by former governor Jeb Bush. Florida was the incubator for what passes as school reform today. Jeb, through his foundations pushed school vouchers, charter schools, rigid testing and the word school choice, which is code for segregation. It’s also interesting that his brother’s No Child Left Behind legislation was modeled on standards and rigid testing four years after Jeb became Governor in 1998. Add to that mix David Coleman, current head of the College Board, who went to billionaire Bill Gates to help him develop the common core standards. Gates never met a data outcome he didn’t like so he, Eli Broad and the Walton family opened the flood gates as it were and inundated us with all sorts of reform because “our schools were failing.” There never was any evidence that the allegations were true, but gazillions of dollars in the proper hands buys an awful lot of influence and legislation.
