by wildrose » Mon Jun 10, 2019 7:53 am
It's not that education is a scam, but that education is a target for scammers. Here are a few examples:
1) Companies that sell textbooks - Often they lobby at the state level to force local school districts to only use their texts. They justify this by paying for "scientific" studies which prove that their materials facilitate learning better than other curricular materials. Politicians are easily duped by fake science and campaign contributions don't hurt either.
2) Educational technology - Administrators want to be on the "cutting edge" and pay exorbitant fees to companies that promise to get them there. Not only is educational software often overpriced, but also often equipment is also often overpriced. However, sometimes large companies offer great deals in order to hook students as future customers and to collect data. Over-pricing was more common in the 1990s and free (but with a hidden agenda) has been the trend since around 2008 or so.
3) Charter schools - Exempted from restrictions and regulations in order to make them thrive turned them into a wonderful opportunity for scam artists.
4) Testing - Big money in testing and companies (often the same ones that sell books) use fake science to justify various trends that exclude competitors. Testing is mostly a scam and many of the tests contain material which is agenda driven and doesn't actually provide any useful information about student learning.
5) Liberal agenda - Libtards have a stranglehold at the state level in most states, but especially in California and so we get all sorts of "inclusionary" course content which contradicts traditional values. However, much of this is camouflaged in various ways to be more palatable or to escape detection.
There are probably other scammers that I haven't included on this list, but you can't blame the teachers.... at least not all of them!