American Education: The Pirates' Next Target

Image via WikipediaThe story starts in 1981.  Ronald Reagan is elected president.  He bust the air traffic controllers union, signaling that union-busting is an acceptable tactic in America.  Deregulation was the watchword of the new era.  Acquisition and Merger Practices became the dominant departments int he big law firms.  Corporate raider were lionized, ala the movie "Wall Street."

The first major debacle to result from this new way of doing business in America was the Savings & Loan meltdown in the early 1990s.  S&Ls, freed to play fast and loose with their customers' mortgage payments, soon crashed and burned.  Uncle Sam and, of course, the average tax payer had to step in and bail out the bankers.

Next came the dot.com debacle at the start of the new century.  Idiot-investors speculated wildly on Internet companies that had no apparent sources of income or cash flow... driving stocks through the ceiling... only to see them come crashing to earth.  Of corse, entrepreneurs, who took these stock public and then cashed out after the IPOs did just fine.

But the S&L and dot.com disasters pale in comparison tot he recent Great Recession,  Sub-prime mortgages, bundled as derivatives nearly brought the world economy to its knees.  But even as major Wall Street firms, such as Lehman Brothers, stumbled and fell, individual executives and traders banked hundreds of millions in incentive pay and bonuses.  Everyone else learned once again what we were all taught in first grade arithmetic:  0 + 0 + 0 = 0.  What a surprise!

What would the original Lehman brothers think, were they alive today?


So, now where do the pirates turn next?  Well, how about education?  How does this work?

1.  Starve public K-12 education, while critiquing it relentlessly.

2.  Divert the saved money to charter schools, while leaving the dregs of the younger generation --- the autistic, the disabled, the psychologically troubled, and the just-plain-dumb --- to the "No Child Left Behind" public-school classrooms.

3.  Also starve public higher education.

4.  Meanwhile, permit the for-profit higher-ed companies to entice "customers" with unrealistic promises and unlimited student loans that many will never be able to repay. (As prior posts on this Blog have reported, the student load bubble has expanded to nearly a trillion dollars.)

And, so, the rapacious pirates, who posture as entrepreneurs, sail from one sector of the AMerican economy to the next, pillaging and looting.

We should not allow American education to be the their next victim.