Earlier this month United States Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had a private give-and-take with teachers who were selected as 2018 Teacher of the Year in their home states. At least one teacher, Jon Hazell, who teaches science in Oklahoma, confronted DeVos for supporting “school choice” plans like charters and private school vouchers that are draining public schools of needed funds. When DeVos defended the right of parents to pull their children out of what she called poorly performing schools, Hazell is reported to have accused her of promoting the policies that create the “bad schools.” Hazell is a Republican who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, but apparently he is fed up with the administration’s attacks on public education.
While meeting resistance in the United States, privatization advocates are active in Third World countries experimenting with different approaches to maximize profit while undermining public education. Once their models for miseducation are developed, cheap, scripted, test-driven, curricula delivered by unqualified teachers to select students, they hope to market them in the rest of the world, including in the United States. A major battleground today is Kenya, where Bridge International Academies, a for-profit primary school company operated by American entrepreneurs who met at Harvard University, is being challenged by education officials and teachers. Officials in Kenya and Uganda want to close Bridge schools for violating of local regulations for teacher qualifications and student safety and hygiene.
On Friday May 4, activists, teachers’ union members and members of the Kenyan Parliament travelled to London, UK to protest at the Pearson Education annual shareholders’ meeting against Pearson’s investment in Bridge. Pearson, one of the world’s leading for-profit education companies, helps bankroll Bridge through its investments in LearnCapital, a venture capitalist company.
For the campaign against Bridge, Educational International, one of the leaders of the protest, prepared a video “Message to Pearson” featuring angry parents and substandard facilities Bridge operates as schools. Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of Great Britain’s National Education Union, another protest leader, condemned Bridges and charged, “Every child has the right to a free, high quality education, with trained teachers and a safe learning environment. Bridge exploits this right for profit, and in the process delivers a sub-standard education that deepens inequality in the communities it ‘serves’. Pearson’s investment in this exploitative business model is wholly indefensible.”
Bridge, which also receives funding from the World Bank, the British government’s Commonwealth Development Corporation, U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, has fought to block its critics. In 2016, the company fabricated charges leading to the arrest of an investigative researcher in Uganda and in 2017 it started legal proceedings designed to silence the Kenyan National Union of Teachers and its General Secretary.
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