ABSTRACT
The “combat” to which Hofstadter refers turned out to be a civil, rather than foreign, war, one in which public school teachers and professors of education were soundly defeated by a coalition of liberal and conservative politicians dedicated to business models of education. “[S]ince the 1960s,” Richard Elmore (1993, 39) summarizes, “reformers usually agree that educators are not to be trusted, any more than another parochial special interest group, with major decisions about the direction or content of public education.” Today, multiple “stakeholders” (not the least among them politicians, textbook publishers, and commercial rms promising higher test scores) have replaced public schools with cram schools. These are increasingly privatized, meaning that public budgets are now plundered by commercial rms (Molnar 2002; Taubman 2009). How did this happen?
