Imbalance Sheet: What we lose when we privatize public education
This summer issue of Our Schools/Our Selves focuses on how the privatization of our public schools has become normalized.
As several of the authors in this issue illustrate, the market-based, neoliberal approach to public education, to civic engagement, to progress is pervasive. But it’s also fundamentally flawed because it’s about lowering expectations and reducing the limitless palette of our collective potential to an individualized and standardized multiple choice test taken in isolation.
And as other contributors show us, there is so much to be gained from a system that learns from its history and from others, that centres compassion and empathy, and that strives to do better for itself and each other.
Attachments
CCPA Monitor July August 2022 OSOS WEB.pdf
About the author
Erika (she/her) became Director of the National Office in 2020, but began her career at the CCPA in 1997 as director of the Education Project. Originally established to monitor corporate intrusion in public education, the project broadened its focus to include standardized testing, social justice and anti-racism education in schools, educational equity, school finance, child care and early childhood education, tuition and user fees, technology, surveillance and privacy, the arts, and community-based education. In 2000 she also became editor of Our Schools/Our Selves, the popular education journal founded in 1988. It provides commentary and analysis on a wide variety of education-related topics. Erika has a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in English (critical literary analysis) from the University of Guelph. Prior to coming to the CCPA, she worked in Washington DC researching the corporatization of childhood, and was one of the founders of UNPLUG (which became the now-defunct Center for Commercial-Free Public Education). She spends far too much time on social media.
