Let me tell you a story.

Long ago, or maybe not so long ago, there was a land where the leaders decided they wanted to ensure their continued success and ability to lord over their state. They conceived a magnificent (in their minds) plan.

It began by cutting funding to education.

Then they greatly assisted the development of a private alternative to public education. They offered incentives for people to leave the public schools which due to the cuts were laboring under severe financial and programmatic restrictions. These same restrictions were not extended into the private sector.

They made available new rules that allowed people to efficiently leave the struggling public schools. You would have to admire the chutzpah of a group of individuals that significantly underfund education in their state and then offer an ‘out’ to people who are not satisfied with the numbers in the classes to go to a private provider for the service. It was almost as if they had a vested interest in the private schools and felt that the public schools existed for the poor and special needs students alone.

In such a land there could develop a view of public school; one that says it is adequate for those who can’t do any better but they (you know who ‘they’ are) wouldn’t want to be seen there. Besides if education can be remade as a money making venture for those individuals who support their agenda; you talk about a win-win opportunity!

In the meantime they launched diversionary attacks. Attacks on the professional educational associations and others on the public school curriculum.

Attacking teacher associations served the two-fold purpose of weakening the structure of such organizations, damaging their ability to bargain for their members, thereby decreasing the amount of money paid out and the attack significantly lessened the possibility that there would be outrage over their actions as that same association was one of their strongest political opponents.

Attacking curriculum made the public schools appear inadequate and mismanaged; if not dangerous and it decreased the public confidence in that organization which also resulted in attention being focused away from the leaders’ true plan.

What was that plan? Free public education had long been a hallmark of this land, indeed it was one of the things that strengthened the populace as a whole by offering an equal opportunity to all regardless of race, creed or financial status.

Destroying such an institution would not be easy. But in doing so, a small group could better control who had the real knowledge, power and wealth. Class could more clearly defined and mobility carefully orchestrated and rigidly stratified. It would shift the focus of the society from a large prosperous middle class to a smaller, more powerful upper class and a large mass of less educated poor.

This was their plan.

I’m glad this is just a story.