Trump parrots public school corporate take over slogans
Trump seems to be actually reading standard corporate-written GOP talking points now.
It's too bad the bad policy he's touting is largely bipartisan with Obama appointing two secretaries of education who backed the privatization of public schools agenda.
A good way to get teachers to vote FOR Clinton/Kaine instead of just against Trumpence, would be to explicitly repudiate this agenda and say hedge fund managers and for profit corporations seeking to divert public education dollars to their own pockets won't dictate education policy in her administration, educators, academics, and parents will.
If these rich folks really were concerned about public education, they would demand what they get for their children in real private schools: small class size, highly educated teachers empowered with the flexibility to teach with materials and methods that meet the needs of kids not vendors selling tests and materials.
And they would demand that rich folks like themselves pay more taxes to provide that kind of experience for all kids.
They do not.
“On education, it is time to have school choice, merit pay for teachers and to end the tenure policies that hurt good teachers and reward bad teachers. We are going to put students and parents first,” Trump said. “Hillary Clinton would rather deny opportunities to millions of young African-American children, just so she can curry favor with the education bureaucracy. I am going to allow charter schools to thrive, and help young kids get on the American ladder of success: a good education and a good-paying job.”
Trump is serving up some charter school Kool-Aid, suggesting, as the multi-billion-dollar charter industry reflexively does, that it offers one-size-fits-all solutions for educating America’s youths. The fact that charter schools, especially those run by branded corporate franchises, have a record of questionable academics, increasingly segregated schools and are structurally prone to fiscal self-dealing—all facts documented in recent years by investigative reporters nationwide—is irrelevant to Trump.
One of the fundamentals of mainstream journalism is having to report what public figures say. That tenet, however, lends them a credibility that may not be deserved. It can be knowingly manipulated, such as Trump’s timing of incitements and outrages that have netted billions in free coverage. In this case, when Trump clearly is reciting charter industry talking points about opening up K-12 public schools to privatization—after saying said next to nothing about public education during the past year—what are we to make of it?
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-recites-charter-school-marketing-slogans-part-his-law-and-order-agenda-americas
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