One nexus of bizarre thinking: American Education

In the clusterf*ck that is American education, the bizarre truth is that privatizing (union-busting charter schools), monetizing (bonuses for good teachers) and looking for "value added" (testing to see who is the good teacher) are all things that make perfect sense to an MBA.

Actual science does not validate any of those tactics as producing better educational outcomes. Yet our plutocrats persist, even funding propaganda films like "Waiting for Superman" that tout such strategies as effective. The film points to the Finnish schools as a model to emulate.

And Finnish schools are very good indeed. Oddly enough WFS omits mention that the Finnish teachers are tenured, well-paid and unionized.

What does actually correlate with better educational outcomes? Answer: Childhood poverty. In Finland 2% of children are poor. In the U.S. it's 23%.

One other bizarre corollary is that Federal funding for higher education has declined 55% since 1972. State funding has declined even more dramatically. This leads to high tuition and student debt. It also means professors thinking of flunking students have to think twice because having fewer students, even if they're unqualified, means their funding is in jeopardy.

To top it off, the founders of our MBA programs, like Frederick Winslow Taylor, were con men. Taylor himself admitted he altered his "experimental" results as much as 220% so they would fit his theories.

I could not make this stuff up.