What does global warming have to do with educational meltdown in the 21st century?

Global warming, the war in Iraq, hurricanes, earthquakes, and fake educational crises are all ripe with opportunity for government contracts. Government regulation spawns new business opportunity when new interventions are mandated. Never mind that the fix may have no impact on the problem.

The cure is the problem, like leech treatments.

I have no business sense - so I became a teacher. Because I was idealistic, I never saw it, or believed it. But I get it now.

A little un-educational example: Richard Branson wants to save the planet from greenhouse gases, and he’s putting up three billion dollars to do the job. Does anyone believe that three billion dollars will reverse global warming? Marketplace says that Branson could make a lot of money selling clean-burning jet fuel to the airlines once aircraft emissions standards are in place.

Basically, what he’s doing is getting ahead of the curve by finding a solution that he sees to this problem and then investing in it before the solution comes along. My guess is that he’ll be selling this stuff to every major airline in the world if he’s successful.

Reform and regulation in education are a business bonanza. According to Jim Horn, it works like this:

The DOE recruits the true believers in the version of “scientifically-based” literacy that the President’s advisor and enforcer, Reid Lyon, has placed front and center in the intellectually dishonest National Reading Panel Report. The DOE then sponsors studies, recruits academics, issues reports, and funds efforts to advance strategies that advocate the preferred solution.

It’s the same principle.

A few months ago, Susan Ohanian mentioned Success For All’s challenge to conflicts of interest and government bias in promoting the Reading First program for low-performing schools. Again, via Schools Matter: The US Dept. of DOE Office of the Inspector General’s Report confirms the charge. Dirty business in the Dodge City Whitehouse. From this account, the report comes down hard on Chris Doherty, the former Reading First program director.

According to the report, Doherty instructed one staff member regarding the Wright Group: “Beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in a way that will stand up to any level of legal and [whole language] apologist scrutiny. Hit them over and over with definitive evidence that they are not SBRR [based on scientifically based reading research], never have been and never will be. They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags.”

This whole sad affair is evidence that corporate leeches are driving our education system down the drain, and not for ideological reasons - like I wanted to think. No. This bothers me now because I see that it isn’t even about Causes - worthy or otherwise. It’s greed and manipulation. This would be the nail in the coffin for my faith in government if the news hadn’t come from a government report. Small consolation.

Richard Branson may know that global warming is the next big thing, and I’m not saying he’s done anything wrong. Maybe his motives are pure, but spare me from this system. The odds of reversing global meltdown are better than they are for us ever seeing schools get the funding they need to make them work like we wish they would.

With calls for national testing from the likes of Bennet and Paige, is there any chance that teachers themselves would be given grant money to try innovative projects, reduce class size, or fund more early childhood education programs? Forget it. Jim Horn says that Bennet and charter schools stand to benefit from this.

Who gives a damn about reform? We need to talk Resistance. Read Sarah Puglisi’s comment here if a close-up view might convince you.

[photo by Chris Schuster]