A culture of teacher bashing could lead to a corporate takeover of American schools and the destruction of public education, one education expert warns.

Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss quotes former teacher Stan Karp, who now is director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey's Education Law Center and an editor of Rethinking Schools magazine.

Karp said he's spent years criticizing flawed public education policies, "but now I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, it should be blown up."

“The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.

"What's at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.

"Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society?"

Karp believes federal policy toward public education has changed from “a promoter of access and equity through support for things such as school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools and services for students with special needs, and embraced a much less equitable set of mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff and distributing federal funds through 'competitive grants' to 'winners' at the expense of 'losers.'”

Karp said public education is under assault form both sides of the aisle, with the Bush-era No Child Left Behind and President Obama's Race to the Top.

“Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans building on the test and punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying 'This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.'

“Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.”

Karp said the corporations and foundations have been tabbed by the media as education reformers. “If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo.”

He said poverty isn't an excuse for bad teaching, and there should be accountability systems driven by parents. He said “Superman” teachers and good school can make a difference, and ineffective teachers should he shown the door.

But he said there is no evidence that test score gaps are traced to poor teaching, while “there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school. Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too.”

Karp compares increasing emphasis on standardized tests to passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic.

Finally, he has not love for charter schools, saying the schools have gone from “community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.”

“No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of system-wide improvement and equity for the all schools is a plan for privatization not reform.

“It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. And public schools are one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose in this country.”

Karp believes that the the business models do not include all families, do not feature adequate, equitable and sustainable funding ot transparent accountability and do not “address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.”

“We need to reclaim not just our schools, but our political process and our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. We don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.”

The full version of his speech can be found here.

E-mail Dave Murray: dmurray@grpress.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ReporterDMurray