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This is the third and final installment of Dan Archer and Adam Bessie’s “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum.”
In our first two episodes of “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum,” we took readers to Washington, DC, and post-Katrina New Orleans, tracking how the spread of GERM – the Global Education Reform Movement – is transforming public education into private enterprise. Once born of neoconservative economic philosophy, GERM is now fully bipartisan, and, thus, because there is so little public debate between Democrats and Republicans, the corporate media portrays competition, testing and school choice as our only choice for school improvement.
But there is another way.
In our concluding episode, we take readers to Finland, in an extensive original interview with world-renowned education expert Pasi Sahlberg, director general of Centre of International Mobility and Cooperation in Helsinki. The following report is based on an extensive original interview with Dr. Sahlberg, his book “Finnish Lessons” and a small selection of his many published essays (see a selection of his works below). Here, he provides an alternative vision for empowering public education, a way to improve schools that few Americans have been exposed … though one which isn’t so foreign as it first seems.
Run your cursor over the comic to bring up black circles, which tell you that there is interactive content underneath. Simply click on them to be taken to relevant source materials.
You can pre-order the complete print copy of “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price of Education Reform” – including all three episodes in full-color – here, through Chip-In.
Related Content:
Ana Partanen, “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success,” The Atlantic. December 29, 2011.
Pasi Sahlberg, “How GERM is infecting schools around the world?” Pasi Sahlberg Blog. June 30, 2012.
Pasi Sahlberg, “Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?” (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2011).
Pasi Sahlberg, “What the US can’t learn from Finland about ed reform.” The Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet. April 17, 2012.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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