"So you must think the schools were fine before..."

Every crap situation is just another opportunity to be exploited. And with its own built in backwards rationalization to boot.

It’s a common formula. First, insist that a crisis exists, but misdiagnose the cause. So, in this case, insist that America has an educational crisis that, if solved, would also help to eradicate economic disparity (rather than admitting what we actually have, which is an economic crisis causing educational disparity). Second, insist that the public civic institution at issue is being incompetently run and therefore requires a free-market solution. Then demand little to no oversight or financial transparency as necessary conditions for operating efficiently.

We see this not only with neoliberal reforms to education, but with reforms to other traditionally public civil institutions like prisons and the military as well. Not only does this fake reform charade distract from the real issue—poverty—but it serves as a Trojan Horse for corruption. The efficiency that neoliberal “solutions” boast is simply the means to monetize swaths of largely powerless citizens—students, prisoners, and soldiers. The “reform” itself becomes a larger problem than what it is meant to address.