What we are witnessing now is the culmination of the plans of the education entrepreneurs who are driving national education policy at the highest levels. They are not educators. They do not understand how to help or support a school, so their first instinct is to close it down and start over. I think that is called creative destruction.This is exactly right. One sees the paradigm shift unfolding everywhere. Whether it truly represents a regress or not is hard to say, because it would be difficult to conclude that many bureaucratic school overlords of yore were actually much help. So if they now admit that it is their job to destroy schools, at least they are coming clean about it.
Yet the new "reformers" whose aim is to transform our urban school district in market-like ecosystems have their own hypocrisy. However much they admire the market mechanism as a means of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, they do not actually like how the market mechanism works when it comes to schools. They discover that parents and children are not, in their view, sufficiently discerning consumers. The schools that they think should disappear do not disappear. Their favored new schools do not get the massive influx of kids. So they have to make what they call "tough decisions" -- meaning the decisions for others who they believe are incapable of making the right ones themselves. That ugly old school gets closed, leaving the kids nowhere to go but the new one.
The result is a top-down, bureaucracy-driven system no different in any way that matters from the one it is replacing.
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