Selling Schools Out | Corporate Accountability | The Investigative Fund

Selling Schools Out | Corporate Accountability | The Investigative Fund:

Selling Schools Out

• BY LEE FANG
• THE NATION
• NOVEMBER 17, 2011

• Under the banner of high-tech progress, corporate lobbyists have rammed through legislation privatizing K-12 education across the country.

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  • MICROSOFT

    Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch, two of the tycoons who stand to benefit from a wave of school privatization laws, at a Microsoft CEO Summit in 2009.

If the national movement to "reform" public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of "virtual schools" — charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet — as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.

But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school reformers still seemed far off, even there. With some of the movement's cherished ideas on the table, Florida Republicans, once known for championing extreme education laws, seemed to recoil from the fight. SB 2262, a bill to allow the creation of