Sunday, April 10, 2011

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools - ParentAdvocates.org

Parent Advocates - ParentAdvocates.org
Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools Joanne Barkan
Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools
By Joanne Barkan
LINK

To see an MSNBC interview with Barkan about this article, click here.
For resources and further reading suggested by Barkan, click here.

THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for