The real reform agenda: cheapen the cost of public education

Politicians still play to the middle class despite its shrinking numbers, and much of what's being played in the name of education reform is really simply a call to reduce costs for public services primarily due, as Gene Glass puts it, to growing personal debt and financial crisis hitting that sector of the population hard.

"The crisis in elementary and secondary education is not a crisis in achievement, but rather a crisis in cost, or more properly, a crisis in the willingness of the middle class to support a long-standing institution. The reforms proposed in the name of making education better and the nation's children more competitive internationally are in reality proposals to cheapen education for the poor and privatize it for the White middle class."

From Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America, 2008