Scapegoating the schools protects those who have put us in this situation

In her latest blog post, Diane Ravitch, noted educational scholar and a former top official in the senior Bush's Department of Education, hits the nail right on the head about the reasons why public education has been scapegoated by the moneyed special interests and the potlicians who depend on their contributions:

We know that many regions in our country are economically depressed because they lost the local industries that provided good jobs for high school graduates. Some of those jobs were lost to new technologies, and some were outsourced to low-wage countries. Free trade sounds good, but did the politicians realize how many millions of jobs and thousands of corporations would move to Mexico, China, Bangladesh, and other countries that do not pay what Americans consider a living wage?

Instead of looking in the mirror, our politicians blame the schools. They say that we lost those jobs because our schools were preparing students poorly, not because the “job creators” wanted to export jobs to countries that pay their workers a few dollars a day.

The politicians say we must send everyone to college so we can be “globally competitive,” but how will we compete with nations that pay workers and professionals only a fraction of what Americans expect to be paid and need to be paid to have a middle-class life? How can we expect more students to finish college when states are shifting college costs onto individuals and burdening them with huge debt? How can we motivate students to stay in college when so many new jobs in the next decade–retail clerks, fast-food workers, home health aides, janitors, construction workers, truck drivers, etc.–do not require a college degree? (The only job in the top ten fastest growing occupations that requires a college degree is registered nurse.)

So here we are, with politicians who could not pass an eighth grade math test blaming our teachers, our schools, and our students for economic conditions that they did not create and cannot control.
Ms. Ravitch offers some solutions in her post, which is well worth reading.