Creating an Urban Legend

So you're an organization hoping to privatize public schools so you can profit from them? What steps do you take to ensure you get your way?

Step 1: Create an urban legend. According to Wikipedia (my students would gasp at a reference to this site), an urban legend "is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true, and often possess horror implications that are believable to their audience." Be sure to ignore or edit out the facts based on years of research.

Here's a sample script: Public schools are bad and are failing the next generation. Look at how hard it is for businesses to find qualified workers in the United States. Look at how many students can't read or perform math skills at grade level. Look how behind we are compared to other nations. The horror is that we dump millions of hard-earned dollars stolen from our working middle class and waste the time of our precious children in a system filled with incompetent, entitled, liberal teachers who are only concerned with protecting their own jobs because they could never survive in any other industry. It is almost impossible to get rid of bad teachers due to their corrupt unions and a tenure system that rewards mediocrity. If you have a child in public school today, be prepared to have that kid living in your basement well into their 40s.

Step 2: Repeat the urban legend over and over again in every means possible until it seems like fact, and get national figures and media to cover it as the "truth."

Step 3: Install charter schools and online programs into the system. They're not going to be successful, but it will make it look like you're sympathetic to choice and will drain money from the mainstream public schools, which will lead to step 4.

Step 4: Don't panic when people don't rush away from their neighborhood public schools to charter, online, and private schools. Instead, install policies to make the schools fail and prove your point. Examples:

• Adopt standardized testing that intentionally demonstrate mediocrity and then tie teacher evaluations to these tests without consideration for diverse learning needs or concepts that can't be tested. 
• Refuse to properly fund the schools. Keep cash in reserves. Don't support mill levy and school bond issues during elections. Don't worry about maintenance on the brick-and-mortar buildings.
• Create standards for teacher evaluations that aren't connected to strong classroom practices and that can be manipulated to prove the failure rates of the schools. 
• Increase class sizes. Insist class size doesn't matter.
• Attack quality programs like Advanced Placement and after-school care, then reduce these programs.
• Diminish collaboration among teachers, including taking away work days and increasing student contact days (parents don't want to find babysitters--they're more expensive than teachers).
• Punish schools for the number of referrals, suspensions, and dropouts, so difficult students are kept in class to make a more disruptive learning environment. 
• Then, have students evaluate their teachers and tie this to performance (even at the elementary levels), so that those students irritated with the disruptions in their packed classrooms will put it in their evaluations.
• Publish the poor test and evaluation results for your districts. Give schools a report card with skewed statistics. Note: This is the same as step 2.

Step 5: Bust the pesky teachers' "unions," so those who understand what is really happening won't have a collective voice.
Step 6: Have the State take over the "failing" schools and convert them to charters. When those fail, institute a voucher program in which tax dollars follow the student to private schools.
Step 7: Allow your buddies to open for-profit private schools that are subsidized with public tax-dollars but--unlike public schools--can segregate, can eliminate high-needs and disadvantaged students, and can bolster the agenda of the elite. There's also money to be had in curriculum, testing, food services, uniforms, and much more. You can negotiate contracts without dealing with government red tape.

Congratulations! You've gutted the great equalizer of America's free education system and created a power structure that leaves out 99% of America's population. And, it wasn't even that hard. --SJ