In my opinion one of the central cultural trends in the United States is that beginning with the Reagan administration we have transformed from the country that emerged from WWII, recognizing that the fostering wellbeing was the path for the country to take into something very different. From the 1940s to the 1970s we created America’s great middle class and that led us to be the most admired nation in the world. Here for instance is the Republican party platform Dwight Eisenhower ran on:
❋ Assistance to low income communities
❋ Protect social security
❋ Extend minimum wage
❋ Improve unemployment benefits to cover more people
❋ Strengthen labor laws so workers can join unions
❋ Equal pay regardless of sex
Today, we are country in which virtually every major social activity is set up with profit as its first priority, and the MAGAt Republican Party has rigged healthcare, rigged the pharmaceutical industry, rigged the tax structure, and now, as this article lays out, rigged the education of our children with profit as the main consideration. The Republican created culture war has destroyed the cultural commitment to foster wellbeing.
Credit: Alex Bandoni / ProPublica. Source images: monkeybusinessimages and Viorel Kurnosov / Getty
Test scores are plummeting while tens of billions in federal aid flows to schools. A visit to a recent education technology convention provides a glimpse of the frenzy to profit from the recovery efforts.
For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.
“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for Technology […]
