The Education Policy Forum was established in response to increasingly overt attacks on public schools, which unfairly discredits the hard-working and under-appreciated public servants who work to educate our children (children who increasingly come from poverty), and which ultimately serves to pave the way for the privatization of the nation’s public schools.
To the layperson (non-educators), this view may seem hyperbolic. Yet the evidence is clear. The nation’s most influential and respected professors of education and leading educational policy experts, including former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch (a President H.W. Bush appointee and a former proponent of major school reform based upon large-scale testing), have provided a wealth of evidence to back up this claim. The evidence, much of it provided on this website and via links to other reputable sites, shows that a cadre of powerful corporate agencies are actively working to discredit public schools. Using a system of standardized tests–which are designed to provide evidence of failure rather than to promote success (i.e., teaching to the test)–the goal is to convince the public that public schooling is an untenable institution. The dissolution of public schools, in turn, would open up a market to private enterprise worth in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year (a market that never goes away).
Members of our group decry this movement. We believe that public schools provide the foundation for democracy, for critical thinking, and provide a means for social transformation (all of which would be hindered if not impossible in an all-for-profit educational sector).