HUFFINGTON POST: … Thus, for example, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to get the support of hedge fund managers for his run for governor of New York, he was told to talk to Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group set up to lobby liberals on privatization. Cuomo is now a champion of charter schools. As Joanne Barkan noted in a Dissent Magazine report, privatizers are even targeting school board elections, in one case spending over $630,000 to elect two members in a local school board race last year in Colorado.
Wall Street’s involvement in the charter school movement — when the media acknowledges it — is presented as an act of philanthropy. Perhaps, as critics claim, hedge funders are meddling in an area they know nothing about. But their motives are worthy. Indeed, since they send their own children to the best private schools, their concern for other people’s children seems remarkably altruistic. “Wall Street has always put its money where its interests of beliefs lie,” observed this New York Times article, “But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laser like focus in the political realm.”… …
The Times‘ other guess about Wall Street’s motives was that hedge funders are attracted to the anti-union character of the charter schools. This is undoubtedly true; the attack on the pubic schools is clearly a part of the broad conservative campaign to discredit government. … (more)
The above is an article which I think is on the mark with its skepticism about the privatization of urban public schools.
I know first hand about much of what the author speaks.
This is a major issue and both parties are complicit. It is was an underlying issue in the Chicago teacher’s strike where they have put in place a corporate panel that plays more of a role in education than the Board of Education and where they are closing public schools and replacing them with charter schools (which may as well be called corporate schools).
he testing approach to evaluating schools has evolved into more of a tool to close public schools and replace them with charter schools rather than to save schools.
Charter schools, which actually started out as a new approach from teachers unions, have evolved into corporate run schools with tax payer dollars sometimes corporations are helping to fund them, but usually it is a way to transfer public dollars to private profit at the expense of education. Here’s a good website: nhttp://www.rethinkingschools.org.
Margaret Flowers and I did our last radio show on this issue. You can listen at: http://www.mixcloud.com/ClearingtheFOG/show-29-with-guests-stan-karp-of-rethinkingschoolswordpresscom-and-dr-erica-meiners-on-education/
KZ
What? Wall street profiteering? What has higher education been doing
to us? After adjusting for inflation it surpasses even healthcare? We need school choice like they do in the Netherlands.