The hard spin that investors put on their own charter corporations is that they do education better, and for cheaper than those bad public schools. But, with some years of experience behind us now, it is clear that charters do neither.
Continue reading Charter’s Don’t Do It Better or Cheaper
Plans are under way for investment corporations to execute the biggest conversion – some call it theft – of public schools property in U.S. history.
That is not hyperbole. Investment bankers themselves estimate that their taking over public schools is going to result in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, if they can pull it off. Continue reading Investors Ready to Liquidate Public Schools
Recent spontaneous and unprecedented high school student protest movements are causing a growing panic among the wealthy investor class who want to convert much of American education from public, democratic control to corporate investor control for their profits. It is showing that high school students are finding their own voice distinct from just joining in with adult protests.
Continue reading High School Student Protests Create Headaches for Some, Hope for Others
Part 1 of this series focused on New Orleans and the radical experiment there with ALL charter schools serving the city this year. I showed that New Orleans is an example of how investors and hedge fund managers see “reform” experiments as an option only for the poor. We really don’t see much, if any experimentation being proposed in the upper economic sectors of this country right now.
Next, let’s look at another example of the callous disregard for the future of poor children to serve the business desires of investors and edu-corporations.
Continue reading The Poor Pay the Highest Price for Charter School Experiments — Part 2 — Detroit
Never really getting true reform, Michelle Rhee has stepped down from her role as the leading spokesperson for the corporation schools front organization Students First.
She held fast to an ideology – yes, ideology and not data – that denies the power of poverty in interrupting poor students’ education. Instead, she focused on schools and teachers that serve those areas of high poverty. She placed blame liberally on teachers, insisting that with better teaching, poor students could succeed in spite of their poverty.
Continue reading Poverty Is Still a Huge Issue for Students – Michelle Rhee Is Still Wrong
Senate Bill 573 that would have made radical changes to the process of establishing charter schools under an appointed state-wide commission was defeated this evening. Nearly all Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans ended up being against the bill.
Two earlier posts in this blog, one from April 10th and another on the 14th, warned of the dangers with SB 573 that was indistinguishable from model legislation created by a national organization created to promote wide-open charter creation in all states.
More and more teachers, legislators, and parents, started to realize that the charter school bill, drafted and lobbied from outside of the state, had nothing to do with what was best for kids in Oklahoma, and everything to do with potential profits of for-profit corporations based outside of the state. Governor Mary Fallin continued to strongly promote the bill to the end.
Skepticism has grown recently even among those on the political right about State Superintendent Janet Barresi and her installing of top-level staffers from outside of the state who have a history of moving from one state to another to promote the agenda of for-profit education corporations.